The Architecture of Fear

AVON BOOKS

A division of

The Hearst Corporation

105 Madison Avenue

New York, New York 10016

Introduction copyright © 1987 by Peter D. Pautz

"In the House of Gingerbread" copyright © 1987 by Gene Wolfe

"Where the Heart Is" copyright © 1987 by Ramsey Campbell

"Ellen, In Her Time" copyright © 1987 by Charles L. Grant

"Nesting Instinct" copyright © 1987 by Scott Baker

"Endless Night" copyright © 1987 by Karl Edward Wagner

"Trust Me" copyright © 1987 by Joseph Lyons

"The Fetch" copyright © 1980 by Robert Aickman (First published in
Intrusions)

"Visitors" copyright © 1987 by Jack Dann

"Gentlemen" copyright © 1987 by John Skipp and Craig Spector

"Down in the Darkness" copyright © 1986 Nkui Inc. First published in
The Horror Show,
Summer 1986; Reprinted by permission of Nkui, Inc.

"Haunted" copyright © 1987 by The Ontario Review, Inc.

"In the Memory Room" copyright © 1987 by Michael Bishop

"Tales from the Original Gothic" copyright © 1987 by John M. Ford

"The House That Knew No Hate" copyright © 1987 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Afterword: "House of the Mind" copyright © 1987 by Kathryn Cramer

Copyright © 1987 by Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz

Front cover illustration by Tim O'Brien

Published by arrangement with Arbor House/William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-11492

ISBN: 0-380-70553-2

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Permissions Department, Arbor House, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

First Avon Books Printing: January 1989

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

K-R 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Affectionately Dedicated To

David G. Hartwell,

for acting as godfather one more once

K.E.C. and P.D.P.

And

Mary E. Vahlkamp,

for keeping me alive and moving

during the most trying time of my life

P.D.P.

Acknowledgments

Publishing any book these days is a committee effort, and an anthology even more so. Without exaggeration this volume would not have been possible without the following good people's advice, care, concern, and patience: Michael Bishop, Lloyd Currey, Bruce & Debbie Dalland, Jack Dann, Patrick X. Gallagher, Charles L. Grant, Kirby McCauley, Marta Randall, Karl Edward Wagner, Gene Wolfe, and the entire Arbor House staff.

I want to talk a little about horror as an emotional experience. Not shock, not fear, but horror.

As I wrote this, it is a week after the Eleventh World Fantasy Convention held in Providence, Rhode Island. Guests of Honor were Ramsey Campbell, Charles L. Grant, and J. K. Potter. The Master of Ceremonies was Douglas E. Winter, who, in his introductions and opening remarks to the awards banquet, brought up the archetypal interviewer who asks: "Just why is horror so popular?" We who knew it was unanswerable could be amused.

Pain, fear, and horror. This is not the stuff of ordinary literary discussion. These are the warning signs of human existence. Without pain we would never learn to avoid fire, sharp instruments, physical confrontation. Without fear we would be unconscionably reckless, following (and worse, leading) with blind abandon instead of reasoned caution. And without horror—what?

Complacency. The grand killer of justice, the mangler of innocence. The television viewer munching a TV dinner over a Beirut execution, an infant's remains in a New York garbage can, a fish-eyed, famished eight-year-old singing "Jesus loves me, this I know."

Horror is what Harlan Ellison wrote about so terrifyingly in "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs." Kitty Genovese experienced the fear, the shock, but it was the reader who felt the horror as Ellison made us watch that eternity of suffering once again. Horror is what Stephen King wrote about in
The Shining,
as we watched a marriage and a mind dissolve from overwork and failure.

Religious ferocity, betrayal, callousness. We're forced to watch them all, to feel the horror of sitting in a comfortable chair or bouncing along Forty-Second Street in a crosstown bus. Forced to watch and
to do nothing.
It is, after all, only a book, a story, a movie; the news.

Horror is an experience of the "out there." It is not participatory; it's a voyeur's reaction. We watch, we are drawn in, we are repulsed by the horror of what is happening to another, even if that other is unaware of the surrounding events.

And what can we do to avoid the horror? Where do we hide? In our houses, our private offices and hospital rooms, our churches and toilet stalls. But even there the horror invades. In fact, it is only in these safe, strangling confines that it begins to touch us, to finally become personalized.

Yi-Fu Tuan's insightful work
Landscapes of Fear
brings this home: "We draw boundaries and protect their apertures. Nonetheless security is not absolute. Horror is the sudden awareness of betrayal and death in the inner sanctum of our refuge."

We come back to the stories. Always the stories. I hope they horrify you. I hope they awaken you, help you do something about the horror. Call a cop, protect a child, vote, read another book.
But do something!
For without action, and the thought that gives birth to action, we become part of the evil ourselves—and in the end, lie helpless and broken like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
(or Coppola's
Apocalypse Now),
muttering on our deathbeds, "the horror, the horror." And it will go on.

November 1986

Gene Wolfe, author of the extraordinary four-volume
The Book of the New Sun,
went to Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School in Houston, Texas, and claims that the experience has influenced all his work since. He is one of the most interesting, complex, and admired writers in the science fiction and fantasy field. Much of his work has horrific overtones, drawing upon the myth structures of Western civilization, an engineer's technical know-how, and a facility for frighteningly accurate psychological observation. "In the House of Gingerbread," one of his rare stories entirely within the horror genre, is a middle-class fairy tale in the brutal tradition of the Brothers Grimm.

The woodcutter came up the walk, and the ornate old house watched him through venetian-blinded eyes. He wore a red-brown tweed suit; his unmarked car was at the curb. The house felt his feet on its porch, his quick knock at its door. It wondered how he had driven along the path through the trees. The witch would split his bones to get the marrow; it would tell the witch.

It rang its bell.

***

Tina Heim opened the door, keeping it on the chain but more or less expecting a neighbor with coleslaw. She had heard you were supposed to bring chicken soup for Death; here it seemed to be slaw, though someone had brought Waldorf salad for Jerry.

"I'm Lieutenant Price," the woodcutter said, unsmiling. He held out a badge in a black leather case. "You're Mrs. Heim? I'd like to talk to you."

She began, "Have the children—"

"I'd like to talk to you," he repeated. "It might be nicer if we did it in the house and sitting down."

"All right." She unhooked the chain and opened the door.

He stepped inside. "You were busy in the kitchen."

She had not seen him glance at her apron, but apparently he had. "I was making gingerbread men for school lunches," she explained. "I like to put a few cookies in their lunches every day."

He nodded, still unsmiling. "Smells good. We can talk in there, and you can watch them so they don't burn."

"They're out already, it only takes a few minutes in the microwave. Can you—" It was too late; he had slipped by her and was out of sight. She hurried through the dark foyer and shadowy dining room, and found him sitting on a dinette chair in her kitchen. "Can you just barge into someone's home this way?"

He shook his head. "You know, I didn't think you could bake in a microwave oven."

"It's hard to get cakes to rise, but nice for cookies." She wavered between hospitality and anger, and decided on the former. It seemed safer, and she could always get angry later. "Would you care for one?"

He nodded.

"And some coffee? Or we have milk if you'd prefer that."

"Coffee will be okay," he told her. "No, Mrs. Heim, we can't just barge into somebody's house; we have to get a search warrant. But once you let us in, you can't stop us from going wherever we want to. I could go up to your bedroom now, for example, and search your bureau."

"You're not—"

He shook his head. "I was just giving you an example. That's the way the law is, in this state."

She stared down uncomprehendingly at the little mug with the smiley face on its side. It was full of black coffee. She had poured it without thinking, like an automaton. "Do you want cream? Sugar?"

"No, thanks. Sit down, Mrs. Heim."

Tina sat. He had taken the chair she usually used. She took the one across from him, Jerry's chair, positioning it carefully and feeling as though she had gone somewhere for a job interview.

"Now then," he said. He made a steeple of his fingers. It seemed an old man's gesture, though he looked no older than she. This is
my
house, she thought. If this is an interview, then
I'm
interviewing
him.
She knew it was not true.

"Mrs. Heim, your husband died last year. In November."

She nodded guardedly.

"And the cause of death was—?"

"Lung cancer. It's on the death certificate." The covers of a thousand paperbacks flashed past in her imagination:
Murder on the Orient Express, Fletch, The Roman Hat Mystery.
"You said you were a lieutenant—are you on the Homicide Squad? My god, I'm in a mystery novel!"

"No," he said again. "This isn't fiction, Mrs. Heim. Just a little inquiry. Your late husband was a heavy smoker?"

She shook her head. "Jerry didn't smoke."

"Maybe he'd been a heavy smoker, and quit?"

"No," she said. "Jerry never smoked at all."

Price nodded as though to himself. "I've read that side-wise smoke gets people sometimes." He sipped his coffee. "Are you a smoker, Mrs. Heim? I didn't see any ashtrays."

"No. No, I don't smoke, Lieutenant. I never have."

"Uh huh." His right hand left the handle of the smiley mug and went to his shirt pocket. "As it happens I smoke, Mrs. Heim. Would it bother you?"

"Of course not," she lied. The ashtrays for guests were put away in the cabinet. She brought him one.

He got out a cigarette and lit it with a disposable plastic lighter. "I'm trying to quit," he told her. He drew smoke into his lungs. "Was your husband a chemist, Mrs. Heim? Did he work in a chemical plant?"

She shook her head. "Jerry was an attorney." Surely Price knew all this.

"And his age at death was—?"

"Forty-one."

"That's very young for a nonsmoker to die of lung cancer, Mrs. Heim."

"That's what Jerry's doctor said." Not wanting to cry again, Tina poured coffee for herself, adding milk and diet sweetener, stirring until time enough had passed for her to get her feelings once more under control.

When she sat down again he said, "People must have wondered. My wife died about three years ago, and I know I got a lot of questions."

She nodded absently, looking at the little plate on the other side of the dinette table. The gingerbread man had lain there, untouched. Now it was gone. She said, "They X-rayed Jerry's lungs, Lieutenant. The X-rays showed cancer. That's what we were told."

"I know," he said.

"But you don't believe Jerry died of cancer?"

He shrugged. "And now your little boy. What was his name?"