The Portent

From boyhood, the Highlander Duncan Campbell is subject to a strange “second hearing”: at moments of crisis he hears, out of the empty air, the galloping hoofbeats of a phantom horse with one loose, clanking shoe — an omen that, an old family legend says, betokens some ill to one of his blood. So begins George MacDonald's The Portent (1864), an early and haunting experiment in the Scottish Gothic by the writer who would go on to father modern fantasy.

To put distance between himself and his haunted hills, Duncan takes a post as tutor in a great house in the north of England. There he meets Lady Alice, whose waking life is curiously vacant but who, walking and speaking in her sleep, becomes a vivid, clairvoyant, wholly different creature — her hidden soul awake only when her body slumbers. Between the man marked by his uncanny hearing and the woman divided between her two selves, an involuntary sympathy springs up: a psychic bond that draws them together across the dark of the house and across the boundary of sleep itself.

Told entirely in the first person, the novel gives the supernatural exactly as Duncan suffers it — sensation before explanation, the sound in the dark before any thought of its meaning. MacDonald never settles whether the second hearing is a real visitation or an affliction of the nerves, whether Alice's somnambulism is a disorder or a doorway; and that withheld certainty is the source of the book's spell.

Beneath its Gothic surface, The Portent is a meditation on inheritance and the reach of the unseen — on whether a man is bound by what his fathers did, and on a love that runs underneath consciousness, soul reaching to soul through trance and the dark. Slighter than Phantastes or Lilith, it carries the same faith in miniature, and a young writer's raw nerve in the telling.