by Anthology
THE DOLL-HOUSE
Introduction
The act of compiling most anthologies (I observed, prior to starting work on the volume before you) is ludicrously easy. There are men and women who have made whole careers of the act. An act about as complicated as clearing one’s throat. I will not for a moment minimize the distillation of taste and selectivity that must be present in the editor for an anthology to be enjoyable and well rounded; it is the sole quality a reader needs to make him an anthologist. (And when even that is absent, why, of course, the book that results is not fit to be purchased.) But essentially, even at its best, the assembling of other men’s work into a coherent, or “themed,” grouping is not a particularly laboring labor. It merely requires a complete backlog of old pulp magazines, a number of friends with eidetic memories, and a clear line to the copyright office to ascertain what is in the public domain.
The book in your hands is rather another matter. I don’t intend to make any great claims for myself as an anthologist, or suggest that some special kind of bravery was necessary to take on the job (only a special kind of stupidity). But this book entailed the actual prodding and pushing of specific writers to unleash themselves, to open up fully and write stories they had perhaps always wanted to write, but had never felt they could sell. It took the laborious months of sifting through manuscript after manuscript to find stories that were offbeat and compelling enough to live up to the advance publicity this book has received, and be as rich and explosive as I felt they had to be to justify the existence of DANGEROUS VISIONS. Not just “another anthology” was good enough. It was, then, not simply the collecting of crumbling pulp-paper tearsheets or mildewed carbons from scriveners’ trunks, but the creation of almost an entity, a living thing.
The initial list of contributors I hoped would appear in the final version to be published was constantly revised. One writer was desperately ill, another was in a two-year slump, a third was so shackled by his wife’s doctor’s bills he had contracted to do a garbage novel under another man’s more famous by-line, and still another had left the country on assignment from a major slick publication. Revise, revise, grope and revise. And when it seemed impossible to build the meat of the book as I wanted it—in the early stages I panicked more readily than now—I contacted the literary agents and sent them the prospectus for the book, asking them to select submissions carefully.
From one agent I received string-bundled stacks of refuse dredged out of reject drawers. (One ms. in one batch had a reject note from Dorothy McIlwraith, editor of the long-defunct Weird Tales, stuck inside. I hesitated to think how long that one had been kicking around.) From another agent I received incredibly inferior work by a top-name professional in the mainstream. From a third I received a story so blatantly licentious it must certainly have been written for one of those “private printings” we hear about. That it was dreadfully bad must have been the reason for its not having been sold, for the sexual explications in it were sufficient to get it in print at least in Eros. But from my own agent, Robert P. Mills (a very good agent indeed), I received only two submissions. Both of which I bought. One was by John Sladek, elsewhere in this volume; the second was “The Doll-House” by James Cross.
I confess I had never heard of James Cross before receiving this story. He was not known to me as a science fiction writer, which isn’t odd because ordinarily he isn’t one. In point of fact, there is no such person as “James Cross”. He is a pseudonym. He has asked that his true name be kept privileged information, and so it shall be, here at least. Thus it is no wonder I looked upon this manuscript as perhaps just another quickie submission, one of the scatter-gun offerings I had been getting from the agents. I should have known better. Bob Mills does not work that way. “The Doll-House” is a bravura effort. It is as singular and effective a story as John Collier’s “Evening Primrose” or Richard Matheson’s ‘‘Born of Man and Woman” or Charles Beaumont’s “Miss Gentibelle”. It is a one-time happening. It is part science fiction and almost entirely fantasy and completely chilling.
Of “Cross”, the author writes the following:
“For a year now I have been both professor of sociology at George Washington University and associate director of the university’s Social Research Group, where my current assignment is directing a national study on the incidence of various psychosomatic symptoms and the use of psychotropic drugs among the adult population of the United States.
“Before that, for more than a decade, I was involved in specialized foreign research for the U.S. Information Agency and other branches of the government—work dealing with the collection of sociological and psychological intelligence and with the measurement of propaganda effectiveness. This particular type of research was my field since the beginning of World War II. Earlier, I was a newspaperman. I have degrees from Yale, Columbia and Southern California.
“I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. I am happily married and have four interesting (if sometimes deplorable) children, ranging down from eighteen to two. My wife is a very good public relations consultant. In my spare time, when I am not writing, I am reading, sleeping, eating, traveling, playing golf or tennis, or watching ball games on TV. In the course of my life I have: been a theatrical press agent; taught at three universities; played semi-pro ball (left-handed knuckle ball and “junk” pitcher); been a naval officer and later a foreign service officer; written and acted in an abortive educational TV show.
“ ‘James Cross’ is a pen name. I started using it because: a) I publish articles in various professional journals under my given name, and I did not want to get the two entities mixed up or give reviewers a chance at the easy jibe that as a writer of suspense novels I was a good sociologist and as a sociologist a good writer of suspense novels; (b) most of my writing was done while I worked for the government and had to be cleared in advance—even fiction. ‘James Gross’ was a way of making me unofficial.
“I have had four novels published to date: Root of Evil, The Dark Road, The Grave of Heroes, and in February 1967 Random House brought out To Hell for Half-a-Crown, a suspense novel with an international setting. All have appeared in hardcover and paperback reprint and have been translated into such languages as French, Italian, Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian. The Dark Road was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. I have had two book club sales, but since they were Swedish and Dutch, the circulation was relatively limited and did not make me rich. Pity.”
Ellison again. Thus “James Cross” prepares us for that for which there is no preparation: a genuine experience. “The Doll-House” is a marvelous story.
Those of you with tiny daughters will never again, after reading this story, be able to watch them playing on the floor with their Barbie dolls in their playhouses, without a chill quiver of memory.
The Doll-House
“Two hundred and fifty dollars for your lousy Alumnae Fund,” Jim Eliot said, holding the canceled check in his hand. “What the hell do you think they’re going to do with it—name some building after you, the Julia Wardell Eliot memorial gateway?”
His wife looked at him coldly.
“Just because you went to the sort of place that gets its money from the state legislature, and all the professors are under civil service . . .”
“All right, all right, knock it off—only next time try balancing the checkbook first; you’re lucky it didn’t bounce. How the hell much do you think we have in the account?”
“How do I know? You’re the great brain, you check the balance.”
“About twenty-five dollars, plus my pay check tomorrow—$461.29 exactly, after deductions. And next week the mortgage, and the gas and electricity, and oil, and the doctor and the dentist and the car payments, and any bills you’ve run up for clothes.”
“I’ve run up! Like the $250 cashmere suit you had to have last month. And the new golf clubs, and the credit card lunches—why don’t you get on an expense account like everyone else?”
“All right,” Eliot
said wearily, “just let me balance the goddam account. If something’s going to bounce I want to know about it.”
“You just do that, lover,” Julia said. “I’m going to bed—and don’t wake me when you come up.”
She swung around toward the door, the silk taffeta of her red housecoat rustling like a swarm of cicada—$99.75, Eliot thought savagely, Saks-Fifth Avenue. But the anger left him slowly as he thought of the bills, his as much as Julia’s, the children’s, the American way of life. Mortgage; country club; schools; lessons—for Christ’s sake, dancing, and swimming and golf and tennis and ballet and the slide trombone; Dr. Smedley, the orthodontist, twenty-five bucks every time he tightened a screw on Pamela’s braces; Michael at prep school and his J. Press sport jackets that seemed to average four a year; Julia’s charge accounts and Dr. Himmelfarb at thirty dollars an hour because she was bored and scared, and pretty soon he’d be a candidate for the good doctor’s couch himself; and, he forced himself to admit, his own clothes, his bar bills, the golf clubs, the expensive women he took out from time to time when he called Julia and told her he’d have to stay over in town. And above all, he thought, above all, me, myself, for allowing any of us to live this way, when I make $15,000 a year. But what can I do? he thought. In a couple or three years there’ll be the vice-presidency open when old Calder retires; and I have to live as if I already had it, and if I don’t they won’t consider me—“not real executive timber”—and I’ll end up like Charlie Wainwright—good old Charlie—chief cashier, with the small gold watch and the smaller pension.
There was a storm blowing up, the wind was rising, he could feel the too large house, with its second mortgage, creaking in the wind and calling out for money and more money, not just the extra personal loan he was paying off at usurious rates, but big money, a bundle, the long green.
He sat down wearily at the desk and began to figure it out. But even with the hypothetical Christmas bonus, he would still be in the red. For a while he could juggle bills, forget the doctor and dentist, stave off creditors, but sooner or later they would get nasty (while the new bills kept pouring in) and garnishee his salary, and that would be the end of him at the bank. It was two before he crawled into bed.
The next day was Saturday and he was up early, still groggy with fatigue, while the rest of the house slept. He left a note for Julia, saying he would be back in the afternoon, and then he drove north, toward his last hope.
It was not much of a hope. John Wardell, Julia’s uncle, had never liked him and had never hidden his feelings. He had always let Eliot know he considered him a provincial arriviste who had had the insolence to marry into a fine old New England family. With his endowed Harvard chair, with his world-wide reputation as an authority on classical civilization, he made Eliot feel like some sort of trousered and bearded Goth trespassing in the Roman Senate. But Uncle John was retired now; he lived well in an old farmhouse upstate; he traveled to Greece and Italy every summer; he wintered in the West Indies. He should have a lot to leave Julia, his only relative, and Jim Eliot wanted to get some of it now, when they needed it, not later when it would just be extra income.
The huge black dog who began barking at him savagely, straining at its chain-link leash, reminded Eliot of the Roman hound from the Pompeian mural. Cave canem, he thought, standing back nervously, stretching out a carefully placating hand and waiting for someone to call the beast off. In a minute or two the front door opened and John Wardell stood there in corduroys and a red flannel shirt.
“Down, Brennus,” he said, “quiet, boy.”
The hound sat back impassively and Eliot walked by him nervously, with his hand outstretched.
“Well, Jim,” John Wardell said, giving him a perfunctory handshake, “I don’t see you here often; you must be in trouble. Come in and have a drink.”
It took a long time to get it out—three drinks, in fact—but in the end Eliot told it all to the old man who hated him.
“It’s not for myself, it’s for Julia and the kids. If I don’t get some help, we’re dead.”
“Of course, of course, Jim,” the old man said, “I know you’re not thinking about yourself. But just the same,” he said, smiling maliciously, “I don’t see any way out of it—unless you start embezzling from the bank.”
Eliot jerked his head nervously, as if the old man were reading his mind. Then he forced a smile.
“I was thinking you might be able to tide us over for a while . . . Uncle John,” he added, gravely and sincerely.
John Wardell began to laugh.
“You think I have money, Jim? You think Julia has expectations? You’re waiting for dead men’s shoes? Good God, all I have is my pension, and not much of that, and the big annuity I bought years ago. That takes care of it all. There’s enough for me to live on, and it ends when I die.”
Eliot looked at him hopelessly and extended his glass for a refill. Oblivious of the old man’s clinical, detached amusement.
“The hell of it is,” he said loudly, “if I had a bit of money, I couldn’t lose. I could spread the risks. The trend is up. I could be rich.”
“But you have even less than nothing, Jim,” the old man said, “you owe more than you possess. Even if you could know the future, you couldn’t raise enough to make it worth while.”
“If I knew the future,” Eliot said, “I could get hold of the money somehow.”
“Is that all you want, Jim? That’s really pretty simple. All you need is an oracle to consult—or a sibyl, as the Romans called it. You ask the questions, and the god gives you the answer through his priestess. No house should be without one.”
For a while Eliot had thought that the old man had softened to him. Now, looking at the over-red cynical lips below the hawk nose and the white halo of hair, he knew that the fires were only banked.
“How would you like your own oracle, Jim?”
“If you’re not going to help, don’t needle me.”
“There’s a story in Petronius about an oracle in a bottle in Cumae. You just feed her regularly and she lives forever. Could you use something like that?”
“I’m going,” Eliot said, struggling to his feet unsteadily.
“This is no joke, Jim. I’ve owed you a wedding present for eighteen years, and now I think I’ll give you one. Just sit down.”
John Wardell left the room, and in two minutes returned carrying a small doll-house. He put it carefully on the table. Eliot looked at it curiously. It was not the standard Victorian-mansion doll-house but strangely reminiscent of something he had seen ten years ago, on his one trip to Europe, at Pompeii.
The old man looked at him carefully.
“You recognize it? The house of the Vettii at Pompeii. In perfect scale. Look at the atrium and the pool, the rooms to the sides. I bought it there.”
Eliot lowered his head to gaze through the gate into the atrium and the pool. From that position he could see nothing else; but he remembered that with most doll-houses the roof was hinged and could be lifted so as to give a bird’s-eye view of the interior. He fumbled around the side of the model looking for a hook to unfasten. For a moment he thought he heard a scurrying noise inside the doll-house. He drew back his hand sharply, brushing against the structure and almost knocking it off the table.
“Leave it alone,” John Wardell said, suddenly and sharply. “Don’t look at the Oracle, she doesn’t like it. Never do it, on your life.”
“Are you trying to say there’s something inside?”
“I don’t need to, you heard her move. But don’t open it, ever.”
“How does it operate, then?” Eliot asked, humoring the old man.
“Do you see that empty pool past the atrium? Well, write your question on a slip of paper, fold it up and put it in the pool. Get a tiny bowl and fill it with milk sweetened with honey and push it inside the gateway. Then go away and the next morning take the piece of paper from the pool. There will be an answer written on it.”
“Can you make it
work faster?”
“Sometimes it can be done, but I wouldn’t advise you to try. It stirs things up.”
“Can’t you make it work right now? Show me.”
John Wardell shrugged his shoulders. Then he went to the kitchen and returned with a dried bay leaf. He lit it, holding it until it smoked aromatically. Then he pushed it into the doll-house, watching the pungent vapor curl through it.
“Now,” he said, “what you want to know. Anything. Write it down quickly.”
Eliot tore off a slip of paper and wrote on one side of it, “Who will win the World Series?” Then he folded it and slipped it into the empty pool.
“All right,” John Wardell said, “we have to leave. Bring the bottle.”
When they returned in half an hour, the pungent bay-leaf vapor had died out. Wardell leaned down and reached into the doll-house. In his hand was a folded piece of paper which he handed to Eliot.