The Architecture of Fear (41 page)

"Ah, boy, what you want to go and hurt your Grandpa Nathan that way for?"

How could he answer that? He didn't want to hurt his grandpa. He scooted down the steps one at a time, getting years of dust on the butt of his best suit, and when he reached the bottom he moved the row of little bells aside and let Grandpa push the door open.

"Nona," Donald said, as he staggered into the hallway from the dark stairwell.

"Good lord, Donald, why are you up here?
Donald!"
She moved forward, loose nitrite pills in her hand.

Donny rushed into his Grandpa Nathan's arms. "It's okay, boy. Ain't nobody going to hurt you now."

"Donald, open your mouth! Damn you, Donald, open your mouth!" He had fallen to his knees, and Nona was pulling at his lips, pinching at the hinge of his jaw, trying to get him to take a pill.

"I'm sorry, Nona," he said, and the pill was in at once. He didn't try to spit it out. He knew it was too late to help. The heart attack had started more than half an hour before. "I'm leaving, Nona. I'm going to miss you, but I'll be all right, and you'll be all right too."

"Donald!"

"Donny!" His mother stalked up the stairs and down the hall. Her bright red lipstick showed right through her black veil. Even in mourning she looked like a whore. "Donny! Come here to mother, Donny."

Guilt. Fear. Hatred. Love. He hadn't seen her in a long time. He forced himself to let go of Grandpa Nathan's trousers and went to greet his mother. She lifted her veil and placed a red smear on his face. "Let's you and me go say good-bye to Granny Bess, okay, Donny? She left you a lot of money, you should know. And your mommy's come to take you home."

"Home," said Donny, walking with his mother through the flower-scented house, the color drained from his complexion. "Home."

Horror fiction should not so much scare the reader as allow the reader to be scared, releasing tensions caused by any number of things in the real world. By invoking the fantastic, horror allows us access to hordes of things that are too painful to perceive directly, things that would only leave us numb rather than evoke an authentic response if represented in the ordinary light of realistic fiction.

By this point in the book, you have read about old houses, new houses, barns, bathrooms and basements, a hospital, a mortuary, a round house, and a ghostly house that disappears—each house different. In these stories, particularly in Ramsey Campbell's "Where the Heart Is," the architectural details of a house form a structure—literally a building—whose parts have a physical and mechanical relationship, and so the meaning of these individual architectural details—the stain on the wall, the peeling paint in the back of the closet—related through the physical structure of the house, form a structure of metaphor which, in comparison to simpler metaphors, is capable of much more elaborate meaning.

Horror fiction is about fear, and so as contemporary life becomes more complex, the things we fear are also more complex and sometimes are identifiable only as systems. From Nazism to nuclear weaponry, the cause and effect relationships within contemporary evil become increasingly difficult to discern. So although many of the traditional thing motifs—the witches, the werewolves, the occasional slug—continue to be used to good effect, in order to understand the dark issues of the twentieth century, which we ultimately must to survive our newfound technological capabilities, we must come to an understanding of systems, perhaps through systemic metaphor, and perhaps even through contemplation of the house.

In this book there are stories on a number of complex themes. Karl Wagner's "Endless Night" addresses the psychology of blame: what does it mean to hate someone for doing a job? Gene Wolfe's "In the House of Gingerbread" raises questions about the source of evil. Does evil reside in people or in the crazy and malign structure of a situation? Wolfe weaves a familiar fairy tale into his story, a technique often used by contemporary German authors when writing about Germany's dark history. Robert Aickman takes on the vast question of determinism, showing us with painful clarity a man unable to escape a destiny dictated by his peculiar childhood. "The Fetch" is thematically similar to H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Wall," giving words to fear of losing control, fear of being taken over by dark and primal forces from within, fear of reverting to barbarism or worse. But unlike Lovecraft, Aickman handles it with the gentlest of touches.

In "Tales from the Original Gothic," by John M. Ford, the narrator is absorbed by the bed, becoming part of the furnishings of the house, becoming a passive observer deprived of all freedom to take action. This story is reminiscent of Charles Loring Jackson's "An Uncomfortable Night," a tale about a young man who stays overnight in a house haunted by the ghost of a passionate woman who tries to make love to him through the furniture. And there are other stories in this book about the fear of being corrupted, consumed, or enslaved by evil in the form of a house. Scott Baker's "Nesting Instinct" and Dean Koontz's "Down in the Darkness" both come to mind. John Skipp and Craig Spector's "Gentlemen" is another example, using architecture to examine the structure of contemporary sexual politics. In Joyce Carol Oates's "Haunted," abandoned houses are the locus of forbidden and potentially lethal sexual knowledge. In Jack Dann's "Visitors" the stage after adolescence
is
death. Both stories express an adolescent's battle to keep hold of identity in the face of hormonal changes and adult pressures.

Almost everyone lives in a house or apartment building during the formative years of childhood, and architecture, unlike ghosts, goblins and vampires, is all around us. Events are lost in time, but we preserve their memory by associating them with their settings, sometimes so much so that the events come to dominate: Woodstock, Watergate, Waterloo, Hiroshima, the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, Viet Nam. One event can haunt our perception of a place for a long time. In Campbell's "Where the Heart Is," memory and the house are so intertwined that the character's memories can be altered by remodeling the house. In Charles L. Grant's "Ellen, In Her Time" the presence of a dead woman prevails within her widower's house. In Jessica Amanda Salmonson's "The House That Knew No Hate," a story firmly within the tradition of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," the protagonist ultimately loses himself within the house's overwhelming past.

Three stories in this book—Michael Bishop's "In the Memory Room," Joseph Lyons's "Trust Me," and Ramsey Campbell's "Where the Heart Is"—question our notions of the very nature of reality. "In the Memory Room" employs one of the more subtle properties of architecture and one of the most firmly entrenched in the metaphors of ordinary speech: containment relations. The story features a talking corpse a la William Faulkner's
As I Lay Dying
and is carefully balanced between the viewpoints of living and dead. There is an implied ultimate viewpoint in the language of fiction, and by grasping architectural metaphor and using it consciously as a tool, Bishop calls the viewpoint of the live characters into question, suggesting that perhaps we are all here for the benefit of the dead, a most unsettling idea, especially when considered from a genetic point of view. "Trust Me" shows, through the language of metaphor, that the absurd fears raised by tales of terror are in some sense real, a notion that might be considered one of the axioms of this anthology. In Campbell's story, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between sanity and insanity, is blurred by twisting our comfortable notions of causality and the possible into Escheresque, impossible objects that must then be rejected in favor of radical doubt.

The architecture of fear is indeed the central horror of life in the twentieth century, an Escheresque castle in which evil has been loosed repeatedly, uncontained, has invaded our secure places and left us emotionally deadened and in doubt of both the reality and the nature of the actual horrors. Horror fiction can provide insight into nonfictional horrors and, more important perhaps, awaken emotional response through the mirror of art.

The following list of stories, covering more than two centuries, is meant to give the reader some idea of the extensive range of works related to architectural horror. This list is by no means comprehensive, but indicates the variety of structures involved, from single rooms, to houses and monasteries, to landscapes.

"The Hospice" by Robert Aickman

"Meeting Mr. Miller" by Robert Aickman

"The Empty House" by Algernon Blackwood

"The Hungry House" by Robert Bloch

"The Haunters and the Haunted, Or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The Doll Who Ate His Mother
by Ramsey Campbell

The Incarnate
by Ramsey Campbell

The Nameless
by Ramsey Campbell

"The Haunting" by Susan Casper

Dorothea Dreams
by Suzy McKee Charnas

"The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad

"House Taken Over" by Julio Cortazar

"Camps" by Jack Dann

The House of the Seven Gables
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James

The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson

The Sundial
by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson

Salem's Lot
by Stephen King

The Shining
by Stephen King

Phantoms
by Dean R. Koontz

The House by the Churchyard
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Our Lady of Darkness
by Fritz Leiber

Gad's Hall
by Norah Lofts

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
by H. P. Lovecraft

"The Rats in the Walls" by H. P. Lovecraft

"No Way Home" by Brian Lumley

Burnt Offerings
by Robert Marasco

Fevre Dream
by George R. R. Martin

Hell House
by Richard Matheson

Blackwater
by Michael McDowell

The Elementals
by Michael McDowell

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Tell-tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Miraculous Cairn" by Christopher Priest

Maynard's House
by Herman Raucher

The Uninhabited House
by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

"Valie" (or "The House of Sounds") by M. P. Shiel

The House Next Door
by Anne Rivers Siddons

Shadowland
by Peter Straub

"Shottle Bop" by Theodore Sturgeon

Sweetheart, Sweetheart
by Bernard Taylor

Finishing Touches
by Thomas Tessier

The Black House
by Paul Theroux

The Other
by Thomas Tryon

"Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner

The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole

Peace
by Gene Wolfe

Hotel Transylvania
by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro