The Architecture of Fear (29 page)

I turned from him and climbed the steps. I did not stop or look back. I left the flashlight with him because I wanted him to see the thing that came for him.

(Darkness dwells within us all.)

"Wait!" he called after me.

I did not pause.

"W-w-what's that sound?" he asked.

I kept climbing.

"What's going to h-happen to me?"

"I don't know," I told him. "But whatever it is... it'll be what you deserve."

Anger finally stirred in him. He said, "You're not my judge!"

"Oh, yes, I am."

At the top, I stepped into the kitchen, and closed the door behind me. It had no lock. I leaned against it, trembling.

Apparently Phu saw something ascending from the stairwell below him, for he wailed in terror and clambered up the steps with much thumping and clattering.

Hearing him approach, I leaned hard against the door.

He pounded on the other side. "Please. Please, no. Please, for God's sake, no, for God's sake, please!"

I had heard my army buddies begging with that same desperation when the merciless torture master had forced rusty needles under their fingernails and through their clamp-held tongues. I dwelt on those images of horror that I had thought I had put behind me, and they gave me the will to resist Phu's pathetic pleas.

In addition to his voice, I heard the sludge-thick darkness rising behind him, cold lava flowing uphill: wet sounds, and that sinister whispering...

The torture master stopped pounding on the door and let out a scream that told me the darkness had seized him.

A great weight fell against the door for a moment, then was withdrawn.

The torture master's shrill cries rose and fell and rose again, and with each blood-curdling cycle of screams, his terror was more acute. From the sound of his voice, from the hollow booming of his feet striking the steps and kicking the walls, I could tell that he was being dragged down.

I had broken into a sweat.

I could not get my breath.

Suddenly I tore open the door and plunged across the threshold, onto the landing. I think I intended to pull him into the kitchen, to save him after all. I can't say for sure. What I saw in the stairwell, only a few steps below, was so shocking that I froze—and did nothing.

The torture master had not been seized by the darkness itself but by the hands of skeletally thin men who reached out from that ceaselessly churning mass of blackness. Dead men. I recognized them. They were American soldiers who had died in the camp, at the hands of the torture master, while I had been there. Neither of them had been friends of mine, and in fact they had both been hard cases themselves, bad men who had
enjoyed
the war before they had been captured and imprisoned by the Vietcong, the rare and hateful kind who liked killing and who engaged in black-market profiteering during their off-duty hours. Their eyes were icy, opaque. When they opened their mouths to speak to me, no words came forth, only a soft hissing and a faraway whimpering that made me think the noises were coming not from their bodies but from their souls, which were chained in the cellar far below. They were straining out of the oozing distillate of darkness, unable to escape it entirely, revealed only to the extent required to grasp Nguyen Quang Phu by both arms and legs.

As I watched, they drew him, screaming, into that thick decoction of night that had become their eternal home. When the three of them vanished into the throbbing gloom, that rippling tarry mass flowed backward away from me. Steps came into sight like sections of a beach appearing as the tide withdraws.

I stumbled out of the stairwell, across the kitchen, to the sink. I hung my head and vomited. Ran the water. Splashed my face. Rinsed my mouth. Leaned against the counter, gasping.

When at last I turned, I found that the cellar door had vanished. It had wanted the torture master. That's why the door had appeared, why a way had opened into... into the place below. It had wanted the torture master so badly, so intensely, that it could not wait to claim him in the natural course of events, upon his predestined death, so it had opened a door into this world and had swallowed him. Now it had him, and my encounter with the supernatural was surely at an end.

That's what I thought.

I just did not understand.

God help me, I did not understand.

***

Nguyen Quang Phu's car—a new white Mercedes—was parked in the driveway, which is rather secluded. I got in without being observed and drove the car away, abandoning it in a parking lot that served a public beach. I walked the few miles back to the house and later, when Phu's disappearance became a matter for the police, I claimed that he had never kept our appointment. I was believed. They were not in the least suspicious of me, for I am a leading citizen, a man of some success, and in possession of a fine reputation.

***

During the next three weeks, the cellar door did not reappear. I didn't think I would ever be entirely comfortable in our new dream house, but gradually the worst of my dread faded and I no longer avoided entering the kitchen.

I'd had a head-on collision with the supernatural, but there was little or no chance of another such encounter. A lot of people see one ghost sometime in their lives, are caught up in one paranormal event that leaves them shaken in doubt about the true nature of reality, but they have no further occult experiences. I doubted that I would ever see the cellar door again.

Then, Horace Dalcoe, holder of our restaurant's lease, discovered that I was secretly negotiating to buy the property that
he
had leased for his shopping center, and he struck back. Hard. He has political connections. I suppose he encountered little difficulty getting the health inspector to slap us with citations for nonexistent violations of the public code. We have always run an immaculate restaurant; our own standards for food-handling and cleanliness have always exceeded every one of the Health Department's requirements. Therefore, Carmen and I decided to take the matter to court rather than pay the fines—which was when we got hit with a citation for fire code violations. And when we announced our intention of seeking a retraction of those unjust charges, someone broke into the restaurant at three o'clock on a Thursday morning and vandalized the place, doing over fifty thousand dollars worth of damage.

I realized that I might win one or all of these battles but still lose the war. If I had been able to adopt Horace Dalcoe's scurrilous techniques, if I had been able to resort to bribing public officials and hiring thugs, I could have fought back in a way that Dalcoe would have understood, and he would no doubt have called a truce. However, although I was not without the stain of sin on my soul, I could not lower myself to Dalcoe's level.

Maybe my reluctance to play rough and dirty was more a matter of pride than genuine honesty or honor, though I would prefer to believe better of myself.

Yesterday morning (as I wrote this in the diary of damnation that I have begun to keep), I went to see Dalcoe at his plush office. I humbled myself before him and agreed to abandon my efforts to buy the leased property on which his small shopping center stands. I also agreed to pay him three thousand in cash, under the table, for being permitted to erect a larger, more attractive sign for the restaurant.

He was smug, condescending, infuriating. He kept me there for more than an hour, though our business could have been concluded in ten minutes, for he relished my humiliation.

Last night, I could not sleep. The bed was comfortable, and the house was silent, and the air was pleasantly cool—all conditions for easy, deep sleep—but I could not stop brooding about Horace Dalcoe. The thought of being under his thumb for the foreseeable future was more than I could bear. I kept turning the situation over in my mind, looking for a handle, for a way to get an advantage over him before he knew what I was doing, but no brilliant ploys occurred to me.

Finally, I slipped out of bed without waking Carmen, and I went downstairs to get a glass of milk, hopeful that a calcium fix would sedate me. When I entered the kitchen, still thinking about Dalcoe, the cellar door was there.

Staring at it, I was very much afraid, for I knew what its timely reappearance meant. I needed to deal with Horace Dalcoe, and I was being provided with a final solution to the problem. Invite Dalcoe to the house on one pretext or another. Show him the cellar. And let the darkness have him.

I opened the door.

I looked down the steps at the blackness below.

Long-dead prisoners, victims of torture, had been waiting for Nguyen Quang Phu. What would be waiting down there to seize Dalcoe?

I shuddered.

Not for Dalcoe.

I shuddered for me.

Suddenly I understood that the darkness below wanted
me
more than it wanted Phu the torture master or Horace Dalcoe. Neither of those men was much of a prize. They were destined for hell, anyway. If I had not escorted Phu into the cellar, the darkness would have had him sooner or later, when at last death visited him. Likewise, Dalcoe would wind up in the depths of Gehenna upon his own death. But by hurrying them along to their ultimate destination, I would be giving myself to the dark impulses within me and would, thereby, be putting my own soul in jeopardy.

Staring down the cellar stairs, I heard the darkness calling my name, welcoming me, offering me eternal communication. Its whispery voice was seductive, its promises sweet. The fate of my soul was still undecided, and the darkness saw the possibility of a small triumph in claiming me.

I sensed that I was not as yet sufficiently corrupted to
belong
down in the darkness. What I had done to Phu might be seen as the mere enactment of long-overdue justice, for he was a man who deserved no rewards in either this world or the next. And allowing Dalcoe to proceed to his predestined doom ahead of schedule would probably not condemn me to perdition, either.

But who might I be tempted to lure into the cellar after Horace Dalcoe? How many and how often? It would get easier each time. Sooner or later, I would find myself using the cellar to rid myself of people who were minor nuisances. Some of them might be borderline cases, people deserving of hell but with a chance of salvation, and by hurrying them along, I would be denying them the opportunity to mend their ways and remake their lives. Their damnation would be partly my responsibility. Then, I too would be lost... and the darkness would rise up the stairs and come into the house and take me when it wished.

Below, that sludge-thick distillation of a billion moonless nights whispered to me, whispered.

I stepped back. I closed the door.

It did not vanish.

Dalcoe, I thought, desperately, why have you been such a bastard? Why have you made me hate you?

***

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reigns.

I am a good man. A hard worker. A loving and faithful husband. A stern but doting father. A good man.

Yet I have human failings—not the least of which is a taste for vengeance. Part of the price I have paid is the death of my innocence in Nam. There, I learned that great evil exists in the world, not in the abstract but in the flesh, and when evil men tortured me, I was contaminated by that contact. I developed a thirst for vengeance.

I tell myself that I dare not succumb to the easy solutions offered by the cellar. Where would it stop? Some day, after sending a score of men and women into the lightless chamber below, I would be so thoroughly corrupted that it would be easy to use the cellar for what had previously seemed unthinkable. For instance, what if Carmen and I had an argument? Would I devolve to the point where I could ask her to explore those lower regions with me? What if my children displeased me as, God knows, children frequently do? Where would I draw the line? And would the line be constantly
re
drawn?

I am a good man.

Although occasionally providing darkness with a habitat, I have never provided it with a kingdom.

I am a good man.

But the temptation is great.

I have begun to make a list of people who have, at one time or another, made my life difficult. I don't intend to do anything about them, of course. The list is merely a game. I will make it and then tear it to pieces and flush it down the toilet.

I am a good man.

The list means nothing.

The cellar door will stay closed forever.

I will not open it again.

I swear by all that's holy.

I am a good man.

The list is longer than I had expected.

Joyce Carol Oates is a two-time recipient of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement in the short story, winner of the National Book Award for her novel
Them,
and has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lotos Club, and the National Institute of Arts; and with all this she is a writer not afraid of genre. Her work is often described as being in the Gothic mode, and here is a story in the central tradition of houses of horror.

Haunted houses, forbidden houses. The old Medlock farm. The Erlich farm. The Minton farm on Elk Creek.
No Trespassing
the signs said, but we trespassed at will.
No Trespassing No Hunting No Fishing Under Penalty of Law
but we did what we pleased because who was there to stop us?

Our parents warned us against exploring these abandoned properties: the old houses and barns were dangerous, they said. We could get hurt, they said. I asked my mother if the houses were haunted and she said, Of course not, there aren't such things as ghosts, you know that. She was irritated with me; she guessed how I pretended to believe things I didn't believe, things I'd grown out of years before. It was a habit of childhood—pretending I was younger, more childish, than in fact I was. Opening my eyes wide and looking puzzled, worried. Girls are prone to such trickery; it's a form of camouflage when every other thought you think is a forbidden thought and with your eyes open staring sightless you can sink into dreams that leave your skin clammy and your heart pounding—dreams that don't seem to belong to you that must have come to you from somewhere else from someone you don't know who knows
you.