Danse Macabre

by Стивен Кинг

  "Russ," she ask him, "will they ever come back?” Marlowe looks sagely up at the sky, then back at his wife. "Not on such a pretty day," he say comfortingly. "And not to such a nice world.” They run hand in hand into the surf, and the end credits roll.

  For a moment-just for a moment-the paradoxical trick has worked. We have taken horror in hand and used it to destroy itself, a trick akin to pulling one's self up by one's own bootstraps. For a little while the deeper fear-the reality of the Russian Sputnik and what it means-has been excised.

  It will grow back again, but that is for later. For now, the worst has been faced and it wasn't so bad after all. There was that magic moment of reintegration and safety at the end, that same feeling that comes when the roller coaster stops at the end of its run and you get off with your best girl, both of you whole and unhurt.

  I believe it's this feeling of reintegration, arising from a field specializing in death, fear, and monstrosity, that make the danse macabre so rewarding and magical . . . that, and the boundless ability of the human imagination to create endless dreamworlds and then put them to work. It is a world which a fine poet such as Anne Sexton was able to use to "write herself sane." From her poems expressing and delineating her descent into the maelstrom of insanity, her own ability to cope with the world eventually returned, at least for awhile . . . and perhaps others have been able to use her poems in their turn. This is not to suggest that writing must be justified on the basis of its usefulness; to simply delight the reader is enough, isn't it?

  This is a world I've lived in of my own choosing since I was a kid, since long before the Stratford Theater and Sputnik I. I am certainly not trying to tell you that the Russians traumatized me into an interest in horror fiction, but am simply pointing out that instant when I began to sense a useful connection between the world of fantasy and that of what My Weekly Reader used to call Current Events. This book is only my ramble through that world, through all the worlds of fantasy and horror that have delighted and terrified me. It comes with very little plan or order, and if you are sometimes reminded of a hunting dog with a substandard nose casting back and forth and following any trace of interesting scent it happens to come across, that is fine with me.

  But it's not a hunt. It's a dance. And sometimes they turn off the lights in this ballroom.

  But we'll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark.

  May I have the pleasure?

  CHAPTER II

  Tales of the Hook

  THE FIRST ISSUE of Forrest Ackerman's gruesomely jovial magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland that I ever bought contained a long, almost scholarly article by Robert Bloch on the difference between science fiction films and horror films. It was an interesting piece of work, and while I do not recall all of it after eighteen years, I do remember Bloch saying that the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby collaboration on The Thing (based on John W. Campbell's classic science fiction novella "Who Goes There?") was science fiction to the core in spite of its scary elements, and that the later film Them!, about giant ants spawned in the New Mexico desert (as the result of A-bomb tests, naturally), was a pure horror film in spite of its science fiction trappings.

  This dividing line between fantasy and science fiction (for properly speaking, fantasy is what it is; the horror genre is only a subset of the larger genre) is a subject that comes up at some point at almost every fantasy or science fiction convention held (and for those of you unaware of the subculture, there are literally hundreds each year). If I had a nickel for every letter printed on the fantasy/sf dichotomy in the columns of the amateur magazines and the prozines of both fields, I could buy the island of Bermuda.

  It's a trap, this matter of definition, and I can't think of a more boring academic subject. Like endless discussions of breath units in modern poetry or the possible intrusiveness of some punctuation in the short story, it is really a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and not really interesting unless those involved in the discussion are drunk or graduate students-two states of roughly similar incompetence. I'll content myself with stating the obvious inarguables: both are works of the imagination, and both try to create worlds which do not exist, cannot exist, or do not exist yet. There is a difference, of course, but you can draw your own borderline, if you want-and if you try, you may find that it's a very squiggly border indeed. Alien, for instance, is a horror movie even though it is more firmly grounded in scientific projection than Star Wars. Star Wars is a science fiction film, although we must recognize the fact that it's sf of the E. E. "Doc" Smith/Murray Leinster whack-and-slash school: an outer space western just overflowing with PIONEER SPIRIT.

  Somewhere in between these two, in a buffer zone that has been little used by the movies, are works that seem to combine science fiction and fantasy in a nonthreatening way-Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance.

  With such a number of divisions (and any dedicated science fiction or fantasy fan could offer a dozen more, ranging from Utopian Fiction, Negative Utopian Fiction, Sword and Sorcery, Heroic Fantasy, Future History, and on into the sunset), you can see why I don't want to open this particular door any wider than I have to.

  Let me, instead of defining, offer a couple of examples, and then we'll move along-and what better example than Donovan's Brain?

  Horror fiction doesn't necessarily have to be nonscientific. Curt Siodmak's novel Donovan's Brain moves from a scientific basis to outright horror (as did Alien). It was adapted twice for the screen, and both versions enjoyed fair popular success. Both the novel and the films focus on a scientist who, if not quite mad, is certainly operating at the far borders of rationality. Thus we can place him in a direct line of descent from the original Mad Labs proprietor, Victor Frankenstein.* This scientist has been experimenting with a technique designed to keep the brain alive after the body has died-specifically, in a tank filled with an electrically charged saline solution.

  *And on back to Faust? Daedalus? Prometheus? Pandora? A genealogy leading straight back into the mouth of hell if ever there was one!

  In the course of the novel, the private plane of W. D. Donovan, a rich and domineering millionaire, crashes near the scientist's desert lab. Recognizing the knock of opportunity, the scientist removes the dying millionaire's skull and pops Donovan's brain into his tank.

  So far, so good. This story has elements of both horror and science fiction; at this point it could go either way, depending on Siodmak's handling of the subject. The earlier version of the film tips its hand almost at once: the removal operation takes place in a howling thunderstorm and the scientist's Arizona laboratory looks more like Baskerville Hall. And neither film version is up to the tale of mounting terror Siodmak tells in his careful, rational prose. The operation is a success. The brain is alive and possibly even thinking in its tank of cloudy liquid. The problem now becomes one of communication. The scientists begins trying to contact the brain by means of telepathy . . . and finally succeeds. In a half-trance, he writes the name W. D. Donovan three or four times on a scrap of paper, and comparison shows that his signature is interchangeable with that of the millionaire.

  In its tank, Donovan's brain begins to change and mutate. It grows stronger, more able to dominate our young hero. He begins to do Donovan's bidding, said bidding all revolving around Donovan's psychopathic determination to make sure the right person inherits his fortune. The scientist begins to experience the frailties of Donovan's physical body (now moldering in an unmarked grave): low back pain, a decided limp. As the story builds to its climax, Donovan tries to use the scientist to run down a little girl who stands in the way of his implacable, monstrous will.

  In one of its film incarnations, the Beautiful Young Wife (no comparable creature exists in Siodmak's novel) rigs up lightning rods, which zap the brain in its tank. At the end of the book, the scientist attacks the tank with an ax, resisting the endless undertow of Donovan's will by reciting a simple yet haunting mnemonic phrase-He thrusts
his fists against the posts and still insists he seer the ghosts. The glass shatters, the saline solution pours out, and the loathsome, pulsing brain is left to die like a slug on the laboratory floor.

  Siodmak is a fine thinker and an okay writer. The flow of his speculative ideas in Donovan's Brain is as exciting to follow as the flow of ideas in a novel by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or my personal favorite in the field, the late John Wyndham. But none of those esteemed gentlemen has ever written a novel quite like Donovan's Brain . . . in fact, no one has.

  The final tip-off comes at the very end of the book, when Donovan's nephew (or perhaps it was his bastard son, I'll be damned if I can remember which) is hanged for murder. * Three times the scaffold's trapdoor refuses to open when the switch is thrown, and the narrator speculates that Donovan's spirit still remains, indomitable, implacable . . . and hungry.

  *You can see why Donovan liked the kid enough to want to leave him his money, I think. Just a chip off the old block.

  For all its scientific trappings, Donovan's Brain is as much a horror story as M. R. James's "Casting the Runes" or H. P. Lovecraft's nominal science fiction tale, "The Colour Out of Space.” Now let's take another story, this one an oral tale of the sort that never has to be written down. It is simply passed mouth to mouth, usually around Boy Scout or Girl Scout campfires after the sun has gone down and marshmallows have been poked onto green sticks to roast above the coals. You've heard it, I guess, but instead of summarizing it, I'd like to tell it as I originally heard it, gape-mouthed with terror, as the sun went down behind the vacant lot in Stratford where we used to play scratch baseball when there were enough guys around to make up two teams. Here is the most basic horror story I know: "This guy and his girl go out on a date, you know? And they go parking up on Lover's Lane. So anyway, while they're driving up there, the radio breaks in with this bulletin. The guy says this dangerous homicidal maniac named The Hook has just escaped from the Sunnydale Asylum for the Criminally Insane. They call him The Hook because that's what he's got instead o f a right hand, this razor-sharp hook, and he used to hang around these lover's lanes, you know, and he'd catch these people making out and cut their heads off with the hook. He could do that 'cause it was so sharp, you know, and when they caught him they found like about fifteen or twenty heads in his refrigerator. So the news guy says to be on the lookout for any guy with a hook instead o f a hand, and to stay away from any dark, lonely sots where people go to, you know, get it on.

  "So the girl says, Let's go home, okay? And the guy-he's this real big guy, you know, with muscles on his muscles-he says, I'm not scared of that guy, and he's probably miles from here anyway. So she goes, Come on, Louie, I'm scared, Sunnydale Asylum isn't that far from here. Let's go back to my house. I'll make popcorn and we can watch TV, "But the guy won't listen to her and pretty soon they're up on The Outlook, parked at the end o f the road, makin' out like bandidos. Bart she keeps sayin' she wants to go home because they're the only car there, you know. That stuff about The Hook scared away everybody else. But he keeps sayin', Come on, don't be such a chicken, there's nothin' to be afraid of, and if there was I'd protectcha, stuff like that.

  "So they keep makin' out for awhile and then she hears a noise-like a breakin' branch or something. Like someone is out there in the woods, creepin' up on them. So then she gets real upset, hysterical, trine and everything. like girls do. She's beggin' the guy to take her home. The guy keeps sayin' he doesn't hear anything at all, but she looks up in the rearview mirror and thinks she sees someone all hunkered down at the back o f the car, just peekin' in at them, and grinnin'. She says if he doesn't take her home she's never gonna go out parkin' with him again and all that happy crappy.

  So finally he starts up the car and really peels out cause he's so jacked-off at her. In fact, he just about cracks them up.

  "So anyway, they get home, you know, and the guy goes around to open her door for her, and when he gets there he just stands there, turnin' as white as a sheet, and his eyes are gettin' so big you'd think they was gonna fall out on his shoes. She says Louie, what's wrong? And he just faints dead away, right there on the sidewalk.

  "She gets out to see what's wrong, and when she slams the car door she hears this funny clinking sound and turns around to see what it is. And there, hanging from the doorhandle, is this razor-sharp hook.” The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit. To find these things we must go to "literature"-perhaps to Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is very much like the story of The Hook in its plot and construction.

  No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down.

  One could jigger the story of The Hook to make him-it-a creature from outer space, and you could attribute this creature's ability to travel across the parsecs to a photon drive or a warp drive; you could make it a creature from an alternate earth a la Clifford D. Simak. But none of these sf conventions would turn the story of The Hook into science fiction. It's a flesh-crawler pure and simple, and in its direct point-to-point progress, its brevity, and its use of story only as a means to get to the effect in the last sentence, it is remarkably similar to John Carpenter's Halloween ( "It was the boogeyman," Jamie Lee Curtis says at the end of that film. "Yes," Donald Pleasance agrees softly.

  "As a matter of fact, it was.") or The Fog. Both of these movies are extremely frightening, but the story of The Hook was there first.

  The point seems to be that horror simply is, exclusive of definition or rationalization. In a Newsweek cover story titled "Hollywood's Scary Summer" (referring to the summer of 1979-the summer of Phantasm, Prophecy, Dawn o f the Dead, Nightwing, and Alien) the writer said that, during Alien's big, scary scenes, the audience seemed more apt to moan with revulsion than to scream with terror. The truth of this can't be argued; it's bad enough to see a gelatinous crab-thing spread over some fellow's face, but the infamous "chest-burster" scene which follows is a quantum leap in grue . . . and it happens at the dinner table, yet. It's enough to put you off your popcorn.

  The closest I want to come to definition or rationalization is to suggest that the genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it. The finest emotion is terror, that emotion which is called up in the tale of The Hook and also in that hoary old classic, "The Monkey's Paw." We actually see nothing outright nasty in either story; in one we have the hook and in the other there is the paw, which, dried and mummified, can surely be no worse than those plastic dogturds on sale at any novelty shop. It's what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of terror. It is the unpleasant speculation called to mind when the knocking on the door begins in the latter story and the grief-stricken old woman rushes to answer it. Nothing is there but the wind when she finally throws the door open . . . but what, the mind wonders, might have been there if her husband had been a little slower on the draw with that third wish?

  As a kid, I cut my teeth on William B. Gainer's horror comics-Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Vault-plus all the Gaines imitators (but like a good Elvis record, the Gaines magazines were often imitated, never duplicated). These horror comics of the fifties still sum up for me the epitome of horror, that emotion of fear that underlies terror, an emotion which is slightly less fine, because it is not entirely of the mind. Horror also invites a physical reaction by showing us something which is physically wrong.

  One typical E.C. screamer goes like this: The hero's wife and her boyfriend determine to do away with the hero so they can run away together and get married. In almost all the weird comics of the '50s, the women are seen as slightly overripe, enticingly fleshy and sexual, but ultimately evil: castrating, murdering bitches who, like the trapdoor spider, feel an almost instin
ctual need to follow intercourse with cannibalism. These two heels, who might have stepped whole and breathing from a James M. Cain novel, take the poor slob of a husband for a ride and the boyfriend puts a bullet between his eyes. They wire a cement block to the corpse's leg and toss him over a bridge into the river.

  Two or three weeks later, our hero, a living corpse, emerges from the river, rotted and eaten by the fish. He shambles after wifey and her friend . . . and not to invite them back to his place for a few drinks, either, one feels. One piece of dialogue from this story which I've never forgotten is, "I am coming, Marie, but I have to come slowly . . . because little pieces of me keep falling off . . .” In "The Monkey's Paw," the imagination alone is stimulated. The reader does the job on himself. In the horror comics (as well as the horror pulps of the years 1930-1955) , the viscera are also engaged.

  As we have already pointed out, the old man in "The Monkey's Paw" is able to wish the dreadful apparition away before his frenzied wife can get the door open. In Tales from the Crypt, the Thing from Beyond the Grave is still there when the door is thrown wide, big as life and twice as ugly.

  Terror is the sound of the old man's continuing pulsebeat in "The Tell-Tale Heart"-a quick sound, "like a watch wrapped in cotton." Horror is the amorphous but very physical "thing" in Joseph Payne Brennan's wonderful novella "Slime" as it enfolds itself over the body of a screaming dog.*

  *No less a writer than Kate Wilhelm, the acclaimed mainstream and science fiction novelist (author of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and The Clewiston Test, among others), began her career with a short but gruesomely effective horror novel-a paperback original called The Clone, written in collaboration with Ted Thomas. In this story, an amorphous creature made of almost pure protein (more blob than clone, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia rightly points out) forms in the sewer system of a major city . . . around a nucleus of halfrotted hamburger, yet. It begins to grow, swallowing hundreds of people into its noxious self as it does. In one memorable scene, a little kid is yanked arm-first into the drain of the kitchen sink.