I’ve never been sure what I thought of old Humphrey Vance: well, I’m sure now, but I wasn’t before. He was often in the Club, but I tended to steer away from him as I didn’t share his taste for esoteric and recondite knowledge which formed the basis of his conversation. There was also the fact that I had, two decades previously, enjoyed an eight-year affair with his wife.

I never knew if she had told him about this, nor if he had discovered it by other means. People make all kinds of admissions, often years later, for reasons of expiation, revenge, malice or even boredom. Claire was living somewhere in South America the last I’d heard and I had no means of asking her.

Sometimes I was sure he was studying me with an intensity that went beyond mere curiosity. In turn, I took to watching him: and was gradually to learn he subjected others to similar scrutiny. Thus I found myself becoming interested in him, and perhaps something more. Certainly, and by slow degrees, I found myself being drawn into his orbit.

I say “old” Humphrey Vance, but he was at most only a few years older than me. However, he conveyed a sense of age: less through appearance or mannerisms than by the impression of knowledge that seemed the product of a long lifetime’s study. He did not wear his erudition lightly. There were few matters in which he would accept even the mildest contradiction. If the conversation strayed from the channel he had selected, he would affect a sardonic expression, which often put the speaker completely off their stroke, before weighing in with a withering comment.

“Well, that was what some people believed fifty years ago,” he said last week, after a discussion – ‘monologue’ would be more accurate – about the afterlife which one of the company had briefly been diverted towards the early Crusades.

“The righteous have ever believed that their souls would be rewarded,” he informed us. “Which was not a concept initiated by Pope Urban” – this with a pitying glance towards the conversational rebel. “But what of the unrighteous, however defined? Was there not the means for them to achieve paradise?” To this question , it seemed, none save Humphrey Vance had the answer.

His interest in the afterlife was starting to intrigue me, as it did others. When prompted to be more specific he shied away from the G-word, despite hinting at an intimate and immediate knowledge of them.

Ghosts. Without being so named, the conversation had again turned to this subject the evening before. “Surely,” Dr Gload opined from his seat opposite the fireplace, “if you accept the afterlife, you must accept some…crossover, if you will, between the two planes, however inadvertent. Yes,” he added, boldly looking at Humphrey Vance, “I mean ghosts. After all, Jesus himself transitioned from one to the other, or so we’re taught.”

This last remark had over-cooked what had otherwise been a reasonably good point. Vance thought so too.

“Hardly a comparable case,” he said with a saturnine finality. “If you accept a deity, you must accept some degree of unique omnipotence. However,” he paused menacingly, “that was not my point. If you recall…”

After one too many glasses of wine, I found my attention wandering. I was thinking of my grandmother, the only person I’ve ever known with any credible claim to psychic awareness. She treated such tales as calmly as if describing a chance encounter with someone on a bus, which made them all the more believable.

Her precepts were equally matter-of-fact. Ghosts, she said, were not always what they first seemed and often you didn’t recognise them as such until afterwards. You needed to let them in to yourself for them to reveal their true purpose and nature. Above all, you had to accept them for what they were and on their own terms, not yours. Their existence was stretched; ours was concentrated. They had the broader view and were vastly less interested in our preoccupations than we were in theirs.

Vance indicated that he had said all he was prepared to that evening, and the gathering broke up.

I’m rarely in the Club at lunchtime, but a few days later I had a meeting nearby which had prolonged itself. I took my time over a frugal and solitary meal, then strolled into the Members’ Room for coffee. I was vaguely aware there were only half-a-dozen others there. Ten minutes later, I realised that this had shrunk to one. It was as if the scene had been cleared for us.

Vance made a casual but imperious gesture and I obediently crossed the room to join him.

For a while he said nothing, but appraised me with a mordant gaze I returned with a bland smile.

“We’ve never been exactly simpatico, have we?” he asked rhetorically. “Perhaps in some ways we have too much in common.”

It was impossible to know what he meant. Again I steeled myself not to react.

“None the less,” he went on, after taking the smallest sip of port, “we’ve had some interesting discussions recently.”

‘I have listened to you talk’, I could have replied. Instead, I merely inclined my head.

“I have a fascinating story to tell you. I have observed you are interested in matters which many call ‘the supernatural’, though more accurate terms exist.”

I have no clear recollection of what then unfolded. In my few lucid moments since, I can recall only the sense of a gossamer thread being woven around me and draped across my senses. This comes as if from a dream: I cannot say if it more accurately describes what happened then or what I realised afterwards had happened. Incidents tinged with such mysteries have a way of annihilating, or at least confusing, the perception of time. This was my first experience of it, though not the last.

The next thing I remember, we were walking across Green Park towards his house in South Audley Street. It was a beautiful afternoon at the very end of October: the last day, the last afternoon, of that part of my life.

“Many think,” he said, as he paused while opening his front door, “that…’ghosts’, if you will” – he offered a surprisingly warm smile to humour my inferred description – “are malicious. ‘A sudden drop in temperature’, is that not the phrase? ‘A sense of deep foreboding’? Let me show you something.”

He pushed open the door and I was transported into a place of delight.

Shimmerings of warm energy engulfed me. I was aware of small bursts of colour and musical tones that harmonised perfectly, wrapping me in something that approached ecstasy. My other senses were ravished too, with the taste of sweet almonds, spices and a wholesome tang of citrus. My nostrils filled with the aroma of soft woodsmoke and violets. Everything I touched seemed soft and yielding, as corporeal as Claire’s half-remembered body and yet rich with the promise of something eternal, satisfying a longing that, even during the best of times we had shared together, had been only hinted at.

This was, perhaps, paradise. I wonder still if that brief glimpse might have been worth everything that followed.

From the far corner of the room, Humphrey Vance was missing nothing. “This is my apparition,” he said. “This is my truth. Do you welcome it?”

The question seemed absurd, the answer self-evident. I was in so many ways not myself. “Yes.”

“Will you let it in?”

“Yes, I will.”

With these words, my world collapsed.

It was as if the floor had vanished and I was falling into a place where my heightened senses were experiencing the opposite of the recent bliss. Discord, disgust and pain were all around me, and also within me: for I had been invaded by a force I had not the skill to repel. My last sensation that day was of a dark laugh from far above: then, for an all-too-temporary moment, oblivion claimed me.

Since then I have lived a life undead, tormented by a presence within me that I can neither control nor expel. There are, as with a fatal disease, good days and bad days, but no promise of escape. Eight years have passed, during which I have been prey to something of such piteous and unchanging malevolence that I fear the condition might be eternal with death offering no respite.

In my few moments of calm, I recall my past life and yearn for its unremarkable and pale hues, enlivened by its one great indiscretion. Far more rarely, I am afforded a tantalising glimpse of the brief paradise I experienced before my fall. This normally presages a particularly brutal descent into the abyss, in which seconds pass as if hours.

Humphrey Vance died shortly afterwards, so I shall never know by what terrible spiritual alchemy he created the illusion of perfection only to cheat me into accepting his offer. Nor will I ever know whether his motives were personal or objective. So: what have I learned?

In my lucid moments, I reflect that my transcendence took place on All Hallows’ Eve at the very end of October, although my misery has now put me far beyond superstition. I also now know that my grandmother had been right: you don’t always know what you’re dealing with until afterwards.

Her advice about letting them in, however, was less good. Having briefly worshipped at the false shrine of this demon, I had then insouciantly done just that. The problem was that I knew of no way of letting him out again.

Brian Quinn

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