'The Sand-walker ' Fergus Hume (1859 - 1932 )

                                     Short horror story -England 1896 

                                Ferguson Wright Hume  (Fergus Hume) was born in, Powick, Worcestershire, in 1859, and emigrated with his family to New Zealand aged three. Hume remained there and trained as a barrister, qualifying in 1885, then left for Melbourne in 1886 to become a barrister's clerk and unsuccessful playwright. His first novel The Mystery of the Hansom Cab, was self published in 1886 and started selling well. Hume sold all the rights to the book, including to the British and American markets, and lost out when it  became a bestseller. Detective fiction was still in its infancy. The Mystery of the Hansom Cab is sensational, with a murder, disputed inheritance, a family secret that desperately needs to be suppressed, courtroom drama, suicide, prostitution, alcoholism, portrayal of slum dwelling. And an unpredictable story line with a series of plot  twists. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by this novel to write A Study in Scarlet introducing the world to Sherlock Holmes. 

Fergus Hume moved to Britain in 1888, and went on to write some 130 novels, along with plenty of  short stories. The Sand-walker may have already  been published at the very end of the 19th century in a periodical, but certainly appeared in  Hume's short story collection The Dancer in Red and Other Stories from 1906. The theme of quicksand becomes crucial. 

A commercial traveller visits an isolated village called Gartholm, near the German Ocean, located in either Lincolnshire or Norfolk.  He and his horse are extremely tired. The villagers are not welcoming to outsiders but a one eyed school teacher suggests he lodges at Mrs Jarzil's farm nearby.  Mrs Jarzil is pious and bitter, both her daughter who lived with her and her last lodger vanished at the same time. The former lodger re-appeared and then perished on the shoreline shortly after his return, tumbling into quicksand.Only his hat was found. The Sand-walker is a likely suspect. 

Perhaps Fergus Hume drew on the Shivering Sands, lurking in the ugly little bay featured in The Moonstone. The unfortunate servant girl Rosanna is strangely attracted to them,

The sand-hills here down to the sea, and end in two spits of rock jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, somethings goes on in the unknown depths below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the people in our parts, the name of the Shivering Sands. 

The ' Sands become a dismal and dangerous force of nature, without any pity. But in his story, Hume forges his own entity, Sand-walker, whose presence is most likely to be felt at the first hour of dusk. Of course the lead character ventures on to the beaches at dusk. The sense of the Summer sun abandoning the shoreline is conveyed so well.

The beach was very dreary. All was still, save for the gentle swash of the wavelets breaking in upon the ribbed sand. To (the) right and left of me there stretched an interminable vista of sand, vanishing only to blend itself in the distance with heavy mists......I felt an awful sense of desolation as I say there in the dip of a sand-hill watching the departing sun rings its changes in the spectrum. The crimson merged to amethyst to pearl, until the light shutdown upon the lonely shore. 

The traveller gets trapped in the mists and and loses his way, 

With awful assistance it was borne upon me. I was in the presence of the dead. On and on I went, following that melting receding thing. 

The Sand-walker guides the traveller to firmer ground, taking on the shape of a man. As the tale develops, one realises that the Sand-walker is not embodying some hostile inhuman force but in fact is there to dispense Justice, albeit in a ruthless fashion. Mrs Jarzil fears the Sand-walker because she is not the righteous woman that she claims to be , even though she can mechanically repeat Bible verses. The Sand-walker comes knocking at the door, and her display of religious devotion can not save her. 

The story peaks with the return of Mrs Jarzil's daughter, and the old woman realises that she has made a terrible error of judgement, falsely driving her former lodger to his death.  She had falsely accused him of abducting her daughter.The Sand-walker, in the form of a column of light,lures Mrs Jarvis to the shoreline.The tale ends with the lines. 

Slowly she sank in to the sand,deeper and deeper. One last moan reached us where we were, then she disappeared. For the moment the storm seemed to hush. Then all was darkness.

Mrs Jarzil does not seem to struggle, in fact is resigned to what is essentially a death sentence carried out by a ghostly entity. The Sand-walker is a brutal tale of revenge and retribution. As if some law of fate is in operation, but nevertheless a well crafted piece of writing. The fact it is a short story rather than spun out into a full blown novel adds to its potency. 

Picture Credit 

Caspar David Friedrich, 'Der Monch am Meer' ( 'Monk by the Sea') 

Links 

Bite Sized Audio version of 'The Sand-walker'  read by Simon Stanhope. 

Classic Ghost Stories Audio version read by Tony Walker -with a ten minute biography of Fergus Hume..

Fantastic Fiction Guide to Fergus Hume and list of his works. 

Haunted Ohio Books  webpage on 'The Sand-walker'  and text of the story. 

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