Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  To make matters worse, two kids are now standing by and watching Nathan change the tire, two kids who look like they recently popped up from a bottomless ash pit. Nathan tries to ignore them, but he succeeds a little too well in this. Unseen by him, one of the kids edges toward the car and opens the front door. Worst luck, Nathan forgot to lock it. The kid lays his hands on Nathan’s father’s coat, and then both kids disappear into a rundown apartment house.

  Very quickly now. Nathan chases the kids into what turns out to be a condemned building, and he falls down the stairs leading to a lightless basement. It’s not that the stairs were rotten, no. It is that Nathan’s legs have finally given out; they just won’t work anywhere. They are very stiff and feel funnier than ever. And not only his legs, but his entire body below the waist . . . except, for some reason, his ankles and feet. They’re fine. For the problem is not with Nathan himself. It’s with those pants of his. The following is why. A few days before Nathan purchased the pants, they were returned to the store for a cash refund. The woman returning them claimed that her husband didn’t like the way they felt. She lied. Actually, her husband couldn’t have cared less how the pants felt, since he’d collapsed from a long-standing heart ailment not long after trying them on. And with no one home to offer him aid, he died. It was only after he had lain several hours dead in those beautiful trousers that his unloving wife came home and, trying to salvage what she could from the tragedy, put her husband into a pair of old dungarees before making another move. Poor Nathan, of course, was not informed of his pants’ sordid past. And when the kids see that he is lying helpless in the dust of that basement, they decide to take advantage of the situation and strip this man of his valuables . . . starting with those expensive-looking slacks and whatever treasures they may contain. But after they relieve a protesting, though paralyzed Nathan of his pants, they do not pursue their pillagery any further. Not after they see Nathan’s legs, which are the putrid members of a man many days dead. With the lower half of Nathan rapidly rotting away, the upper must also die among the countless shadows of that condemned building. And mingled with the pain and madness of his untimely demise, Nathan abhors and grieves over the thought that, for a while anyway, Miss McFickel will think he has stood her up on the first date of what was supposed to be a long line of dates destined to evolve into a magic and timeless and profound affair of two hearts . . .

  Incidentally, this story was originally intended for publication under my perennial pen name, G. K. Riggers, and entitled: “Romance of a Dead Man.”

  The Styles

  There is more than one way to write a horror story, so much one expects to be told at this point. And such a statement, true or false, is easily demonstrated. In this section we will examine what may be termed three primary techniques of terror. They are: The realistic technique, the traditional Gothic technique, and the experimental technique. Each serves its user in different ways and realizes different ends, there’s no question about that. After a little soul-searching, the prospective horror writer may awaken to exactly what his ends are and arrive at the most efficient technique for handling them. Thus . . .

  The realistic technique. Since the cracking dawn of consciousness, restless tongues have asked: is the world, and are its people, real? Yes, answers realistic fiction, but only when it is, and they are, normal. The supernatural, and all it represents, is profoundly abnormal, and therefore unreal, few would argue with these conclusions. Fine. Now the highest aim of the realistic horror writer is to prove, in realistic terms, that the unreal is real. The question is, can this be done? the answer is, of course not: one would look silly attempting such a thing. Consequently the realistic horror writer, wielding the hollow proofs and premises of his art, must settle for merely seeming to smooth out the ultimate paradox. In order to achieve this effect, the supernatural realist must really know the normal world, and deeply take for granted its reality. (It helps if he himself is normal and real.) Only then can the unreal, the abnormal, the supernatural be smuggled in as a plain brown package marked Hope, Love, or Fortune Cookies, and postmarked: the Edge of the Unknown. And of the dear reader’s seat. Ultimately, of course, the supernatural explanation of a given story depends entirely on some irrational principle which in the real, normal world looks as awkward and stupid as a rosy-cheeked farmlad in a den of reeking degenerates. (Amend this, possibly, to rosy-cheeked degenerate . . . reeking farmlads.) Nevertheless, the hoax can be pulled off with varying degrees of success, that much is obvious. Just remember to assure the reader, at certain points in the tale and by way of certain signals, that it’s now all right to believe the unbelievable. Here’s how Nathan’s story might be told using the realistic technique. Fast forward.

  Nathan is a normal and real character, sure. Perhaps not as normal and real as he would like to be, but he does have his sights set on just this goal. He might even be a little too intent on it, though without passing beyond the limits of the normal and the real. His fetish for things “magic, timeless, and profound” may be somewhat unusual, but certainly not abnormal, not unreal. (And to make him a bit more real, one could supply his coat, his car, and grandfather’s wristwatch with specific brand names, perhaps autobiographically borrowed from one’s own closet, garage, and wrist.) The triple epithet which haunts Nathan’s life—similar to the Latinical slogans on family coats-of-arms—also haunts the text of the tale like a song’s refrain, possibly in italics as the submerged chanting of Nathan’s undermind, possibly not. (Try not to be too artificial, one recalls this is realism.) Nathan wants his romance with Lorna McFickel, along with everything else he considers of value in existence, to be magic, timeless, and the other thing. For, to Nathan, these are attributes that are really normal and really real in an existence ever threatening to go abnormal and unreal on one, anyone, not just him.

  Okay. Now Lorna McFickel represents all the virtues of normalcy and reality. She could be played up in the realistic version of the story as much more normal and real than Nathan. Maybe Nathan is just a little neurotic, maybe he needs normal and real things too much, I don’t know. Whatever, Nathan wants to win a normal, real love, but he doesn’t. He loses, even before he has a chance to play. He loses badly. Why? For the answer we can appeal to a very prominent theme in the story: Luck. Nathan is just unlucky. He had the misfortune to brush up against certain outside supernatural forces and they devastated him body and soul. But how did they devastate him, this is really what a supernatural horror story, even a realistic one, is all about.

  Just how, amid all the realism of Nathan’s life, does the supernatural sneak past Inspectors Normal and Real standing guard at the gate? Well, sometimes it goes in disguise. In realistic stories it is often seen impersonating two inseparable figures of impeccable reputation. I’m talking about Dr. Cause and Prof. Effect. Imitating the habits and mannerisms of these two, not to mention taking advantage of their past record of reliability, the supernatural can be accepted in the best of places, be unsuspiciously abandoned on almost any doorstep—not the bastard child of reality but its legitimized heir. Now in Nathan’s story the source of the supernatural is somewhere inside those mysterious trousers. They are woven of some fabric which Nathan has never seen the like of; they have no labels to indicate their maker; there is something indefinably alluring in their make-up. When Nathan asks the salesman about them, we introduce our first cause: the trousers were made in a foreign land—South America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia—which fact clarifies many mysteries, while also making them even more mysterious. The realistic horror writer may also allude to well worn instances of sartorial magic (enchanted slippers, invisible-making jackets), though one probably doesn’t want the details of this tale to be overly explicit. Don’t risk insulting your gentle reader.

  At this point the alert student may ask: but even if the trousers are acknowledged as magic, why do they have the particular effect they eventually have, causing Nathan to rot away below the waist? To answer this question we need to introdu
ce our second cause: the trousers were worn, for several hours, by a dead man. But these “facts” explain nothing, right? Of course they don’t. However, they may seem to explain everything it they are revealed in the right manner. All one has to do is link up the first and second causes (there may even be more) within the scheme of a realistic narrative. For example, Nathan might find something in the trousers leading him to deduce that he is not their original owner. Perhaps he finds a winning lottery ticket of significant, though not too tempting, amount. (This also fits in nicely with the theme of luck.) Being a normally honest type of person, Nathan calls the clothes store, explains the situation, and they give him the name and phone number of the gentleman who originally put those pants on his charge account and, afterward, returned them. Nathan puts in the phone call and finds out that the pants were returned not by a man, but by a woman. The very same woman who explains to Nathan that since her husband has passed on, rest his soul, she could really use the modest winnings from that lottery ticket. By now Nathan’s mind, and the reader’s, is no longer on the lottery ticket at all, but on the revealed fact that Nathan is the owner and future wearer of a pair of pants once owned (and worn? it is interrogatively hinted) by a dead man. After a momentary bout with superstitious repellance, Nathan forgets all about the irregular background of his beautiful, almost new trousers. The reader, however, doesn’t forget. And so when almost-real, almost-normal Nathan loses all hope of achieving full normalcy and reality, the reader knows why, and in more ways than one.

  The realistic technique.

  It’s easy. Now try it yourself.

  The traditional Gothic technique. Certain kinds of people, and a fortiori certain kinds of writers, have always experienced the world around them in the Gothic manner, I’m almost positive. Perhaps there was even some little stump of an apeman who witnessed prehistoric lightning as it parried with prehistoric blackness in a night without rain, and felt his soul rise and fall at the same time to behold this cosmic conflict. Perhaps such displays provided inspiration for those very first imaginings that were not born of the daily life of crude survival, who knows? Could this be why all our primal mythologies are Gothic? I only pose the question, you see. Perhaps the labyrinthine events of triple-volumed shockers passed, in abstract, through the brains of hairy, waddling things as they moved around in moon-trimmed shadows during their angular migrations across lunar landscapes of craggy rock or skeletal wastelands of jagged ice. These ones needed no convincing, for nothing needed to seem real to their little minds as long as it felt real to their blood. A gullible bunch of creatures, these. And to this day the fantastic, the unbelievable, remains potent and unchallenged by logic when it walks amid the gloom and grandeur of a Gothic world. So much goes without saying, really.

  Therefore, the advantages of the traditional Gothic technique, even for the contemporary writer, are two. One, isolated supernatural incidents don’t look as silly in a Gothic tale as they do in a realistic one, since the latter obeys the hard-knocking school of reality while the former recognizes only the University of Dreams. (Of course the entire Gothic tale itself may look silly to a given reader, but this is a matter of temperament, not technical execution.) Two, a Gothic tale gets under a reader’s skin and stays there far more insistently than other kinds of stories. Of course it has to be done right, whatever you take the words done right to mean. Do they mean that Nathan has to function within the massive incarceration of a castle in the mysterious fifteenth century? No, but he may function within the massive incarceration of a castlelike skyscraper in the just-as-mysterious twentieth. Do they mean that Nathan must be a brooding Gothic hero and Miss McFickel and ethereal Gothic heroine? No, but it may mean an extra dose of obsessiveness in Nathan’s psychology, and Miss McFickel may seem to him less the ideal of normalcy and reality than the pure Ideal itself. Contrary to the realistic story’s allegiance to the normal and the real, the world of the Gothic tale is fundamentally unreal and abnormal, harboring essences which are magic, timeless, and profound in a way the realistic Nathan never dreamed. So, to rightly do a Gothic tale requires, let’s be frank, that the author be a bit of a lunatic, at least while he’s authoring, if not at all times. Hence, the well-known inflated rhetoric of the Gothic tale can be understood as more than an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon the waves of bombast. It is actually the sails of the Gothic artist’s soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. And these winds just won’t blow in a soul whose climate is controlled by central air-conditioning. So it’s hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. The most one can do is offer a pertinent example: a Gothic scene from “Romance of a Dead Man,” translated from the original Italian of Geraldo Riggerini. This chapter is entitled “The Last Death of Nathan.”

  Through a partially shattered window, its surface streaked with a blue film of dust and age, the diluted glow of twilight seeped down onto the basement floor where Nathan lay without hope of mobility. In the dark you’re not anywhere, he had thought as a child at each and every bedtime; and, in the bluish semiluminescence of that stone cellar, Nathan was truly not anywhere. He raised himself up on one elbow, squinting through tears of confusion into the filthy azure dimness. His grotesque posture resembled the half-anesthetized efforts of a patient who has been left alone for a moment while awaiting surgery, anxiously looking around to see if he’s simply been forgotten on that frigid operating table. If only his legs would move, if only that paralyzing pain would suddenly become cured. Where were those wretched doctors, he asked himself dreamily. Oh, there they were, standing behind the turquoise haze of the surgery lamps. “He’s out of it, man,” said one of them to his colleague. “We can take everything he’s got on him.” But after they removed Nathan’s trousers, the operation was abruptly terminated and the patient abandoned in the blue shadows of silence. “Jesus, look at his legs, look,” they had screamed. Oh, if only he could now scream like that, Nathan thought among all the fatal chaos of his other thoughts. If only he could scream loud enough to be heard by that girl, by way of apologizing for his permanent absence from their magic, timeless, and profound future, which was in fact as defunct as the two legs that now seemed to be glowing glaucous with putrefaction before his eyes. Couldn’t he now emit such a scream, now that the tingling agony of his liquifying legs was beginning to spread upwards throughout his whole body and being? But no. It was impossible—to scream that loudly—though he did manage, in no time at all, to scream himself straight to death.

  The traditional Gothic technique.

  It’s easy. Now try it yourself.

  The experimental technique. Every story, even a true one, wants to be told in only one single way by its writer, yes? So, really, there’s no such thing as experimentalism in its trial-and-error sense. A story is not an experiment, an experiment is an experiment. True. The “experimental” writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept, and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him. Either way, literary experimentalism is simply the writer’s imagination, or lack of it, and feeling, or absence of same, thrashing their chains around in the escape-proof dungeon of the words of the story. One writer is trying to get the whole breathing world into the two dimensions of his airless cell, while the other is adding layers of bricks to keep that world the hell out. But despite the most sincere efforts of each prisoner, the sentence remains the same: to stay exactly where they are, which is where the story is. It’s a condition not unlike the world itself, except it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t help either, but who cares?

  The question we now must ask is: is Nathan’s the kind of horror story that
demands treatment outside the conventional realistic or Gothic techniques? Well, it may be, depending on whom this story occurred to. Since it occurred to me (and not too many days ago), and since I’ve pretty much given up on it, I guess there’s no harm in giving this narrative screw another turn, even if it’s in the wrong direction. Here’s the way mad Dr. Riggers would experiment, blasphemously, with his man-made Nathanstein. The secret of life, my ugly Igors, is time . . . time . . . time.

  The experimental version of this story could actually be told as two stories happening “simultaneously,” each narrated in alternating sections which take place in parallel chronologies. One section begins with the death of Nathan and moves backward in time, while its counterpart story begins with the death of the original owner of the magic pants and moves forward. Needless to say, the facts in the case of Nathan must be juggled around so as to be comprehensible from the beginning, that is to say from the end. (Don’t risk confusing your worthy readers.) The stories converge at the crossroads of the final section where the destinies of their characters also converge, this being the clothes store where Nathan purchases the fateful trousers. On his way into the store he bumps into a woman who is preoccupied with counting a handful of cash, this being the woman who has just returned the trousers.

  “Excuse me,” says Nathan.

  “Look where you’re going,” says the woman at the same instant.

  Of course at this point we have already seen where Nathan is going and, in a way too spooky to explain right now, so has he.

  The experimental technique. It’s easy, now try it yourself.

  Another Style

  All the styles we have just examined have been simplified for the purposes of instruction, haven’t they? Each is a purified example of its kind, let’s not kid ourselves. In the real world of horror fiction, however, the above three techniques often get entangled with one another in hopelessly mysterious ways, almost to the point where all previous talk about them is useless for all practical purposes. But an ulterior purpose, which I’m saving for later, may thus be better served. Before we get there, though, I’d like, briefly, to propose still another style.