One of the longest, and by far the best, of Machen’s stories of the war period is one that made no appeal whatever to the legend-loving instincts of a people at war but which contained, as we may see in this post-war year of ’48, something of the nature of prophecy.
The Terror was first published in 1917. It was obviously inspired by the reception accorded the tale of the Bowmen combined with more of Machen’s creative magic. In the opening chapter Machen refers to the rumours and legends current in the early years of the war—the Bowmen, and the Russians who traveled through Britain by night on their way to some great push or other. These absurdities, Machen points out, depended upon the newspaper for their dissemination. The events described in The Terror had been held in strictest secrecy and no word had been given to the Press. For reasons of security all events connected with the Terror had been hushed up.
However, continued Machen, in a “now-it-can-be-told manner,” these were the reasons why “almost two years of war had been completed before the motionless English line began to stir.” The story of the Terror is, then, purported to be the secret of the long inactivity of the British Army.
Things were happening all over England ... very strange things. An airman had been killed under mysterious circumstances. The circumstances appeared to have been obvious enough—he seemed to have been attacked by a flock of birds, a rather mysterious matter in itself. There were other happenings here and there, and rumors of many more. After a few strange events had been reported in local papers there were no further accounts, and sometimes there was no local paper thereafter. Few people would have connected these events in any case. An airman is killed. A child chases a butterfly and is seen alive no more. There are strange stories about munitions works and fiery clouds and bees and horses and dogs. But none of these may be written up in the papers.
Well, at long last and with Machen’s usual circumambience and magic the story reveals that the mysterious deaths and strange events are being caused by animals—by cows and sheep and dogs and horses and bees and birds and moths. The explanation? Machen writes—
“... The source of the great revolt of the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of inquiry. I believe that the subjects revolted because the king abdicated. Man has dominated beasts throughout the ages, the spiritual has reigned over the rational through the peculiar quality and grace of spirituality that men possess, that makes a man to be that which he is. And while he maintained this power and grace, I think it is pretty clear that between him and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance. There was supremacy on the one hand, and submission on the other.... ‘Spiritual’ signifies the royal prerogative of man, differentiating him from the beast. For long ages he had been putting off this royal robe ... he had declared, again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that he is not Orpheus but Caliban. But the beasts ... perceived that the throne was vacant—not even friendship was possible between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was a sham, an impostor, a thing to be destroyed.”
But before these mysteries are resolved there is much talk of German spies, of mysterious rays, of all sorts of things that attempt to link the chain of horrors with the Germans. And in the course of these attempts to implicate the Germans in the Terror, Machen creates several hypotheses which seemed the very stuff of fiction in 1917—but which in our time must seem like prophecy.
It was in 1944 that the Viking Press issued a volume of its Portable Library devoted to Six Novels of the Supernatural. Machen’s tale of The Terror was one of the six. Thus it happens that I re-read The Terror at about the time our forces were capturing the platforms from which the robot bombs were launched at London. Now The Terror has always pleased me as a tale, a diversion and, as with most of Machen’s magic, something to think about when the world is quiet and mysterious—say a midnight in October, or three o’clock of an August afternoon. Nothing is inconceivable at such times, I think, and anything can happen—or seem to happen. A long, long look at a tree or a hedge or a hillside might give rise to disturbing thoughts—and one often finds oneself looking hastily away before something actually does happen.
But to return to The Terror. I had read it several times before and I thought I knew it quite well. But reading it in 1944 it seemed quite new. I had not remembered some things, perhaps because they seemed only incidental to the plot. They were the sort of thing one skipped over rapidly to see what would happen next, or when and where the Terror would strike again.
Well along into the story a Mr. Merrit, one of Machen’s more talkative characters, is explaining to a group of friends that “the Terror” is all part of a German plot, that there are, indeed, Germans established in England who are doing these things. And this, according to Merrit, is how it was done: