W.F. HARVEY article by Matt Cowan

William Fryer Harvey was born in 1885, in Yorkshire, England to a well-to-do Quaker family.  He was educated at Balliol College Oxford and eventually obtained a medical degree.  After traveling abroad to recover from ill health, he published his first book of short stories entitled Midnight House (1910).  He served as a surgeon-lieutenant in World War I.  There he was awarded The Albert Medal for Gallantry for saving the life of an officer from a boiler room.  Unfortunately his lungs were badly damaged during the rescue, which would plague his health from then on.  He died in 1937, at age 52.  An altered version of his short story  “The Beast with Five Fingers” was turned into a feature film in 1946, staring Peter Lorre.
 
1- "Across the Moors” (1909) – A servant is sent on a four-mile walk to fetch a doctor staying at a nearby farm to attend a child’s appendicitis attack.  She must cross the moors that have the reputation of being haunted to reach her destination.  When she arrives she finds that the doctor has already left and cannot be reached.  She is forced to make the return trip alone until a traveling clergyman meets her on the way.  He walks with her and tells an unsettling tale about his last trek though the moors.
 
2-"August Heat” (1910) An artist draws the image of a despondent fat man receiving sentence by a judge.  Later the artist goes for a walk.  The intense heat of the day causes him to stop in at a place where a tombstone carver is at work on a marble slab to use in an exhibition.  The carver looks exactly like the man he had drawn.  To add to the strangeness, the name on the tombstone is the artist’s.  The stone also contains his correct birth date.  The chiseled death date is that very day.  The carver says he just carved the first name that came into his mind.  The two strangers try and work through the mystery they have become entangled in.
 
3- “The Beast With Five Fingers” (1919) - Adrian Borlsover was a kind well-liked man, who although blind, was unusually adept with his hands.  He could do amazing things by simply running his fingers over items, such as tell what color ribbons were and identify the type of a flower by running his fingers over them.  Two years before Adrian’s death he developed the ability of automatic writing.  When he would fall asleep his hand would grasp a pen and start writing things that were odd and unlike anything the man himself would write.  His nephew Eustace Borlsover stayed with him off and on to help the old man.  Upon one visit, his uncle seemed different, older and perhaps fearful of his own hand.  One evening Eustace placed a pencil and blank notepad beside his Uncle Adrian’s right hand.  The hand snatched the pencil and started writing.  The scene that follows is among my favorites in horror literature.  It is as follows:
 
(The hand writes) “Blundering Borlsovers, unnecessary unnatural, extraordinarily eccentric, culpably curious.”
“Who are you?” asked Eustace in a low voice.
“Never you mind,” wrote the hand of Adrian.
“Is it my uncle who is writing?”
“O my prophetic soul, mine uncle!”
“Is it anyone I know?”
“Silly Eustace, you’ll know me soon.”
“When shall I see you?”
“When poor Adrian is dead.”
“Where shall I see you?”
“Where shall you not?”
 
Later Adrian dies, and Eustace receives a box containing the severed hand of Adrian along with a letter from the people in charge of Adrian’s burial.  The letter says they received a letter reversing Adrian’s desire to be cremated, instead asking that it be embalmed, and the hand cut off and sent to Eustace per his request.  The hand has an unnatural life of its own, able to scuttle about, climb things, write messages and even kill.  This is a great story about the evil vengeance of a possessed, severed hand that is elusive, cunning and evil.
 
4-"Ankardyne Pew” (1928) – Some clergymen go to stay at a secluded old gentlemen’s residence that is attached to a church by way of a secret passage.  The house and church are being renovated to become their new residence and parsonage.  The place seems to be haunted however, as the sounds of a strange bird-like squalling is often heard, ghostly images of a man defacing one of the church’s monuments is seen sometimes at night, and a burning sensations occurs upon the tongue of the residents.  It takes one of the clergymen some investigation to solve the mystery behind the haunting of Ankardyne Pew.

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