It does mention a darker place in the countryside which is called Packers End. When the children were young they believed that witches and wolves lived there.
“When they were small, six and seven and eight, they’d been scared stiff of Packers End. Then, they hadn’t known about the german plane. It was different things then; witches and wolves and tigers.”
As they got older rumours went around that somebody got raped at Packers End. Mrs Rutter comes across as a typical nice old lady. She treats the two children well. She offers them biscuits. Then Mrs Rutter tells the children about when a german plane crashed down at Packers End. She went down to look and found one of the pilots still alive. She didn’t help him though. Everyday she would go down to see if the pilot was still alive. She didn’t help the pilot because her husband had been killed in the war. She felt as if she had done nothing wrong. The children were absolutely shocked by her story. They couldn’t believe a nice old lady like herself could have done a thing like this.
In The Signalman the visitor want’s to know more about the ghost sightings. The signalman tells him that he thinks the ghost’s are warning him about a disaster on the line. He goes on to say that he has seen ghost’s before and that there was a disaster after each sighting. He mentions about a crash on the line. There was also a death on a train. The signalman is haunted by the thought of another disaster. The ghost is warning him of something. The visitor returns to check out the ghost and see if it is there. The visitor is concerned about the signalman. He thinks he should report the sightings. The visitor is scared the signalman might loose his job. The story progresses with the visitor returning a few times to see the signalman. Then at the end of the story, the visitor goes down to see the signalman but then learns that he has just been run down a train. The signalman had been killed.
The first words in The Signalman are “Halloa! Below there!” That is unusual language. The signalman is a ghost story so it is supposed to be a bit strange or weird. This creats some tension. The place is scary.
“The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went down.”
The signalman sounds like a mysterious man.
“,and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows.”
This all creates tension aswell. The threat of disaster adds some tension.
The Darkness Out There seems to be a nice, sort of fairy story with the idyllic countryside. But it then mentions a darker place called Packers End. The tension here is not obvious. It is hidden away a bit. The story progresses and the children start talking to Mrs Rutter. She then tells them a story. This changes everything around. She mentions the war, death and pain. This is completely different to how the story started. The children then realise that life is not as simple as they first thought. There is a hidden darkness.
In these two stories the tension is built up differently. The Signalman is a ghost story so there is tension and confusion throughout the story. The Darkness Out There starts as any other nice story would. The tension is hidden behind this. I like the way the story does this.