Who Goes There?

Tanith Lee was one of the most prolific writers of the macabre and the weird of the past half-century, up until her somewhat recent death. I should check out more Lee at this point but she wrote a truly staggering number of novels across several series and I have commitment issues. She’s one of the codifying voicess of what we now call dark fantasy. She’s also, if memory serves me right, the only person to get more than one issue of Weird Tales (its ’80s/’90s revival) dedicated to her. Lee is one of two authors I’m covering this month who were also part of last year’s spooktacular, and I’ll be honest, my first taste of her fiction left me less than satisfied. The good news is that second chances sometimes pay off and this is one of them, with today’s story being a winner, if also hard to categorize.

Despite what the title may suggest, “Jedella Ghost” is not a horror story—except maybe by way of implication; it’s also not a tale of the supernatural, despite what the title would lead you to believe. Indeed, one could argue this story is not SFF, but I would wager it falls under the banner of science fiction, or at least speculative fiction. Explaining this will involve spoilers, so I’ll hold my tongue on that, but I’ll say now that this is a haunting character study that had a surprisingly tight grip on my imagination after I had finished reading it. If my first encounter with Lee didn’t seem promising then this is—at least for me—a much finer impression of her talents.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1998 issue of Interzone, which is on the Archive. It has since been reprinted three times, first in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), which was what tipped me off that this story is more than what it seems. Then there are the collections Tanith by Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee and the more comprehensive Tanith Lee A-Z. Worth mentioning that both of the Lee collections were published only after her death.

Enhancing Image

John Cross is not a savior, despite what the obvious symbolism of his name would imply (it’s a trick Lee plays on us), but he is a writer, which might be the next best thing. He’s a minor celebrity who lives in a quiet little town… somewhere. It’s unclear when or where we are, but John’s mannered style of narration and the wooded location lead me to believe we’re in the US—maybe New England—in the first half of the 20th century. Lee puts a good deal of effort into making this story, which was published 25 years ago (not a long time ago in literary terms), read as older than it is—one could say aged, which is not to say dated. Anyway, things have been going normal, until one day when the town gets an unusual visitor in the form of Jedella, a young woman who claims to have come from the pines.

She’s polite with people, and John admits to finding her attractive, but there are a few eerie things about Jedella: for one, she’s wearing what appear to be glass slippers (like it’s The Wizard of Oz), although she says she doesn’t know what they’re made of. She also claims to have lived in a house with people in it, except these people are not part of a family unit, and that for reasons unbeknownst to Jedella the house has been abandoned. When Jedella sees a few village elders on a bench she stands there staring at them, as if transfixed, and more tellingly she later confesses to not knowing what a funeral is. She seems to have no conception of aging or death. Most troublingly of all, she claims to be 65 years old despite her looks.

Lee does something clever here is that she makes us think, repeatedly, that something malicious is brewing with Jedella. We’re led to believe, through her bizarre interactions with people and the inexplicableness of her life, that surely there’s something going on behind the scenes—that Jedella, despite her innocence, is planning something. Either she is the perpetrator of some crime yet unseen, or she is the victim of some very unusual circumstances. Should we be wary around Jedella or should we pity her? Both we and John are drawn to her specifically because she seems unreachable, even maybe impossible to rationalize. As John says at one point, “The woman you can’t have is always fascinating.” Worth mentioning that John is telling this story a few decades after having first met Jedella, and he’s quite an old man now. The passage of time works in very funny ways in this story. We get a sense of the eerie and even the uncanny, but not suspense, since the events of this story happened long ago and have long since been resolved.

A different writer—maybe a male writer—might’ve turned John and his younger friend Luke’s shared infatuation with Jedella into a full-on love triangle, but Lee makes the wise decision to push any pretense of romance to the sidelines. Jedella is so disconnected from normal human life (for a reason that will be given later) that something as irrational and multifaceted as romance would be likely impossible—even ill-advised. Instead we focus on the implications of Jedella’s existence and how she sees the world, and what—assuming we exclude the supernatural—could’ve produced such a character. The fact that it was published in Interzone and that it was later reprinted in an SF anthology lead us to think the explanation is something that can be rationalized; but the title, the archaisms of the setting, and Jedella’s ghostly nature make us doubt ourselves. After all, we as readers tend to be materialists, unless something even hinting at the supernatural points to the contrary, at which point we become superstitious.

There Be Spoilers Here

Eventually John decides to retrace Jedella’s steps and try to find out where she came from, which is what leads us to the big reveal. In the wood, in a house which stands as if made of cubes, something “a child had made, but without a child’s fantasies,” we meet Jedediah Goëste, a man who at this point would be at least ninety years old but who is still active and sound enough of mind to let us know what had happened. Jedella claims she’s 65 and this is correct, because about six decades ago Jedediah—when he was in his 20s—adopted a very young Jedellah, who was an orphan. With the cooperation of his servants and with a whole house as his laboratory, Jedediah got the bright idea to answer a pretty esoteric question: “What would happen if you raised someone in a controlled environment for decades, in which they never discovered death, illness, or even old age?” The answer, Jedediah supposes, is that the person would stop aging past a point.

The ethical problems are obvious, and John is quick to point these out. At the same time, can it be considered abuse? It’s certainly unlike any kind of abuse you’d find in the real world. Jedella was apparently never beaten or scolded, and eventually she was allowed to run off the plantation, so to speak. Rather, Jedediah and his successors (since he himself left once he got too old) set up a system so as to shield Jedella—not so much from the sufferings of the world as the passage of time itself. Nothing dies or decays, or rather nothing is allowed to appear that way. Jedella recalls a childhood memory wherein she saw a squirrel get “stunned” and then revived by one of the house servants, when in reality the squirrel had died and was replaced with a different one. The experiment, however, has been taken about as far as it can go, and now it’s up to John and the townsfolk to take care of Jedella for the last years of her life—assuming she ever dies. The ending, which is pretty powerful for how it blurs the line between real life and something like magic realism, implies that she has started to age, now having lived outside her controlled environment for a few decades (she would be probably a century old at story’s end), and incredibly this revelation does not destroy her. No, time finally continuing is taken as a kind of victory.

Finally, I wanna try to answer a question of my own: What is this story? It’s not horror, nor is it a ghost story in the classic sense. My argument is that it’s science fiction, for the simple reason that it asks a what-if question that could, theoretically, apply to the real world as we might understand it. Sure, we don’t have goblins or elves, nor are these things possible, but it is possible (albeit incredibly protracted and convoluted) to run an extended experiment in which you take a person at an age where they wouldn’t understand basic concepts like death and aging, and you put them in an environment where they aren’t exposed to these things for however many years. What would be the result? It’s scientific, and it’s fiction, not to mention that the ending hints at something that is out of the ordinary.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read three or four Lee stories at this point, and I do think “Jedella Ghost” is easily the most impressive of the ones I’ve read. Then again, it’s not really a horror story; there’s a bit of the eerie about it, with Jedella’s characterization and her backstory, but there are no scares to speak of. It’s arguably not even science fiction (although I would argue it is), which makes its publication (not to mention getting the cover) in Interzone a little hard to explain. The Lee stories I’ve read have put new spins on old archetypes, like vampires and werewolves, and with “Jedella Ghost” she managed to write a ghost story that conveys a supernatural eeriness without containing anything supernatural, even if the ending challenges one’s notion of time.

Now, rather than continue to act as a series of disembodied text blocks, I’ll be upfront with you about how my life’s been going. Not good. I’m at a bit of a low point and I’ve struggled to enjoy reading for the past couple weeks, and I have to admit I’ve enjoyed writing about what I’ve been reading even less. You might notice there was no editorial post on the 15th this month; sorry about that. I might be able to write up a belated editorial in a few days, before the month is out, but I can’t guarantee it. I’m taking a couple steps to improve my Mental Health™, and while it might be advisable to take a break from writing, I’ve long been of the opinion that the show must go on.

See you next time.