In Days of Auld De’il: Catherine Cavendish’s The Haunting of Henderson Close

Although it is nowhere near as famous as France’s catacombs, Edinburgh has an underground city. It wasn’t always so, of course, getting buried over time by newer developments. However, the Old Town’s buildings are still there, tucked away beneath the cleaner, modern surface streets. The place has quite the history, and of course it is tethered with economic disparity. In the late 1800s, the folks who lived in that stretch of the city’s Old Town were the poor, the desperate, the needy, and the criminal. Those who lived in the city’s New Town were privileged with wealth, resources, and more than a little intolerance against the downtrodden.

Back in the late nineteenth century, Miss Carmichael was a New Town resident who saw past the prejudices of her time and extended assistance to the needy in the Old Town. For her troubles, she was murdered in 1881. Several of the killers were caught, tried, and hanged. One was rumored to have escaped … though to do so, he must’ve had the luck of the devil. To this day, however, the woman’s bloodstains are still visible on one of the stones in that subterranean street—a corner not far from Henderson’s Close (aka the alley or street attached to Henderson’s home). That spot and the corner it adorns is now known as Carmichael’s Corner. The murdered woman’s spirit is said to haunt the location even now …

This is one of the stories told by the tour guides who lead parties of twenty-first century tourists through that series of underground closes. The tours are delightfully kitschy things, featuring guides dressed in period costumes relating the stories. There are plenty of stops along the way of historical interest, from Mr. Murdoch Maclean’s printing shop to the close named for eighteenth century banker Sir William Henderson’s home and other locales along the way. The business seems to be doing well. After all, the leader of this particular enterprise, a canny young woman names Ailsa, has been having work done on another of the closes, one connected to the home of eighteenth century industrialist James Farquhar. Unfortunately, that work may well have unleashed something strange into the world.

When Hannah takes the job of tour guide, it seems like her dream job. She is divorced and looking for a change from teaching and a fresh start. The mix of history and performance speaks to something deep down, and the location resonates with her … However, the spirits are restless down there and trouble is in the wings. Setups are disturbed, graffiti appears without any signs of forced entry, sensitive tourists claim to have seen faceless specters where no wax figures should be … Has the work on Farquhar’s Close unleashed an old legend, like that of the demonic Auld De’il? Or has Hannah’s arrival somehow triggered these events?

Ailsa does not believe in such stuff. However, a couple of the other guides have noted an increase in frequency and potency of strangeness recently. Some of those baffling events even involve guides enduing a brief shift in time and space, returning to the place’s nineteenth century past when Miss Carmichael met her terrible end. An ancient evil seems to be rousing from its prison; given enough time, it may well be loosed once more upon an unsuspecting world. Can Hannah and her friends figure out what is happening before they become the latest victims of an age old horror?

Catherine Cavendish’s The Haunting of Henderson Close is a fun and twisty yarn that starts out as a ghost story and grows into something quite different by the finale. The author blends the occult, a ghostly mystery, and even touches of science fiction to deliver a supernatural thriller that blurs the barriers of time and space, bouncing her characters between the present and the past while a malevolent presence once more gains power.

The book is every bit as engaging as her recent thriller, Dark Observation. While The Haunting of Henderson Close touches on some of the themes present in that book (the author enjoys both the ways the past imprints upon the present as well as the folk horror trope of a buried ancient evil reemerging in the modern day), this earlier novel handles the material in a different way than the later one does, giving us a very different protagonist and overall experience.

Hannah is an older character than the two protagonists in that later book. She is a divorcee (following twenty-five years of marriage) who is looking for something good to elevate her life. Hannah has experience she can call upon, and she does. She has familial ties, though nothing pressing since the closest of these, her daughter, lives in Brisbane, Australia. At heart, she is an investigator drawn to understanding what is going on in the strange situation. However, she also discovers there may be a connection to this place and its history that she never counted on. That connection is what allows the place to draw her across time, and it ultimately charges this curious investigator with a more concrete mission to get directly involved.

One of the interesting touches is how deftly the book avoids the sorts of romantic entanglements some readers associate with the gothic part of gothic horror. Hannah and her fellow guides George and Mairead are content being good friends who help one another. There’s no need to add a romantic angle or a sexual relationship to raise the stakes. Cavendish has plenty of material to work with without such stuff, and I for one enjoy seeing friends pushed to the breaking point as much as I do lovers.

Some readers may find the melting pot of ideas for the book to be perhaps a little too ambitious for its modest length. In addition to the ghostly encounters and the mystery of who killed Miss Carmichael, there are recurring threads tied to the legends of the Auld De’il who may have been trapped in recently demolished stonework, as well time itself is liquid allowing characters to propel back into history. If that weren’t enough, the novel contains a sort of Jack the Ripper type series of slayings plaguing that bygone era.

I found the blend to be just about right for a page turner of this size. So many angles and elements kept me on my toes, wondering how they might come together. Cavendish resolves much of this quite nicely, though a few things remain enigmas. Of course, I would welcome more information and plotting to expand upon any of these avenues.

Cavendish regularly offers a wealth of material in her slim books. This time, she plays around with psychological suspense as well as folk horror and ghost stories, and the result is a rich novel with a lot of moving parts that could easily expand to fill a doorstop novel. The author’s skill (aided by editor Don D’Auria, I imagine) is in paring away inessential elements while still maintaining this rich blend.

The Haunting of Henderson Close is a supernatural thriller with plenty of strangeness to draw our interest and some twists we might not expect to find in a pure ghost story. It’s a thrilling read that shows the author’s knack for blurring the lines between folk horror, occult suspense, and historical fiction while never failing to entertain the hell out of us.

#

The Haunting of Henderson Close is available in eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook editions.

This Thursday, we will take a look at Gar Anthony Haywood’s second comic mystery featuring the traveling Loudermilk family. Bad News Travels Fast is available in an eBook edition.

WORKS CITED

Cavendish, Catherine. The Haunting of Henderson Close. Flame Tree Publishing. London: 2019.

“In Days of Auld De’il: Catherine Cavendish’s The Haunting of Henderson Close” is copyright © 2023 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Flame Tree Publishing eBook edition, released in 2019.

Disclosure: Considering Stories is a member of the Amazon Associates. Under that program, purchases made using the Amazon.com product links in our articles can qualify the Considering Stories site for a payment. This takes the form of a percentage of the purchase price, and it is made at no additional cost to the customer.