Danse Macabre

by Стивен Кинг

  We know that ghosts aren't inherently evil-in fact, most of us have heard or read of a case or cases where ghosts have been rather helpful; the shade who told Auntie Clarissa not to take that plane or who warned Grampy Vic to go home fast because the house was catching on fire. My mother told me that after suffering a near -fatal heart attack, a close friend of hers had a visit from Jesus Christ in his hospital room. Jesus just opened the door of Emil's I.C. room and asked him how he was doing. Emil allowed as how he was afraid he was a goner, and asked Jesus if He had come to take him. "Not yet,” Jesus said, leaning casually against the door. "You've got another six years in you. Relax." He then left. Emil recovered. That was in 1953; I heard the story from my mother around 1957.

  *At one point, while under strain, Don gives a long, rambling lecture to an undergraduate class on the subject of Stephen Crane. In the course of his talk he describes The Red Badge of Courage as "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." Considering the book's moody approach to the subjects of cowardice and bravery, it is an oddly apt description of that novel.

  Emil died in 1959-six years after his heart attack.

  I have even had some truckle with "good ghosts" in my own work; near the end of The Stand, Nick Andros, a character who has been killed earlier in an explosion, returns to tell half-witted but good-hearted Tom Cullen how to care for the novel's hero, Stu Redman, after Stu has fallen gravely ill with pneumonia. But for the purposes of the horror novel the ghosts must be evil, and as a result we find ourselves back in a familiar place: examining the Apollonian/ Dionysian conflict and watching for the mutant.

  In Ghost Story, Don Wanderley is summoned by four old men who call themselves the Chowder Society. Don's uncle, the fifth member, died of an apparent heart attack the year before while attending a party thrown for the mysterious actress Ann-Veronica Moore. As with all good gothics, a summary of the plot beyond this basic situation would be unfair-not because the veteran reader of this material will find much that is new in the plot (it would be surprising if he, she, or we did, in light of Straub's intention to fuse as many of the classic ghost story elements as possible), but because a bare summary of any gothic makes the book look absurdly complex and labored. Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

  Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel's machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothic- it's PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!). The writing itself is beautifully tuned and balanced.

  The bare situation is enough to delineate the conflict in Ghost Story; in its way it is as clearly a conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian as Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and its moral stance, like that of most horror fiction, is firmly reactionary. Its politics are the politics of the four old men who make up the Chowder Society-Sears James and John Jaffrey are staunch Republicans, Lewis Benedikt owns what amounts to a medieval fiefdom in the woods, and while we are told that Ricky Hawthorne was at one time a socialist, he may be the only socialist in history who is so entranced by new ties that he feels an urge, we are told, to wear them to bed. All of these men-as well as Don Wanderley and young Peter Barnes-are perceived by Straub as beings of courage and love and generosity (and as Straub himself has pointed out in a later letter to me, none of these qualities run counter to the idea of reactionism; in fact, they way well define it). In contrast, the female revenant (all of Straub's evil ghosts are female) is cold and destructive, living only for revenge. When Don makes love to this creature in its Alma Mobley incarnation, he touches her in the night and feels "a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsion-as though I had touched a slug." And during a weekend spent with her, Don wakes up and sees Alma standing at the window and looking blankly out at the fog. He asks her if anything is wrong, and she replies. At first he persuades himself that her reply has been "I saw a ghost." A later truth forces him to admit she may have said "I am a ghost." A final act of memory retrieval convinces him that she has said something far more telling: "You are a ghost.” The battle for Milburn, New York-and for the lives of the last three members of the Chowder Society-commences. The lines are clearly and simply drawn for all the complexities of plot and the novel's shifting voices. We have three old men, one young man, and one teenage boy watching for the mutant. The mutant arrives. In the end, a victor emerges. This is standard enough stuff. What distinguishes it-what "brings it up"-is Straub's mirroring effect.

  Which Alma is the real Alma? Which evil is the real evil? As previously noted, it is usually easy to divide horror novels in another way-those that deal with "inside evil" (as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and those that deal with "outside" or predestinate evil (as in Dracula). But occasionally a book comes along where it is impossible to discover exactly where that line is. The Haunting of Hill House is such a book; Ghost Story is another. A great many writers who have attempted the horror story have also realized that it is exactly this blurring about where the evil is coming from that differentiates the good or the merely effective from the great, but realization and execution are two different things, and in attempting to produce the paradox, most succeed only in producing a muddle . . . . Lovers Living, Lovers Dead by Richard Lutz is one example.

  This is a case where you either hit the target dead-bang or miss it altogether. Straub hits it.

  "I really wanted to expand things much more than I ever had before," Straub says. "I wanted to work on a large canvas. 'Salem's Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters. Besides the large canvas, I also wanted a certain largeness of effect . . . . I had been imbued with the notion that horror stories are best when they are ambiguous and low key and restrained. Reading ['Salem's Lot], I realized that idea was self-defeating. Horror stories were best when they were big and gaudy, when the natural operatic quality in them was let loose. So part of the 'expansion' was an expansion of effect-I wanted to work up to big climaxes, create more tension than I ever had, build in big big scares. What all this means is that my ambition was geared up very high. Very much on my mind was doing something which would be very literary, and at the same time take on every kind of ghost situation I could think of. Also I wanted to play around with reality, to make the characters confused about what was actually real. So: I built in situations in which they feel they are 1.) acting out roles in a book; 2.) watching a film; 3.) hallucinating; 4. ) dreaming; 5.) transported into a private fantasy. * This kind of thing, I think, is what our kind of book can do very well, what it is naturally suited to do.

  The material is sort of naturally absurd and unbelievable, and therefore suits a narrative in which the characters are bounced around a whole set of situations, some of which they know rationally to be false. And it seemed fitting to me that this kind of plot would emerge from a group of men telling stories-it was self-referring, which always pleases me very deeply in novels. If the structure had a relationship to the events, the book has more resonance.” He offers a final anecdote about writing the book: "There was one very happy accident . . . . Just when I was going to start the second part, two Jehovah's Witnesses showed up on the doorstep, and I bought three or four pamphlets from them. One . . . had a headline about Dr. Rabbitfoot-this was for a story written by a trombonist named Trummy Young, who once played with Louis Armstrong. Dr. Rabbitfoot was a minstrel trombonist he saw as a child. So I immediately fastened on the name, and started Book Two with the character.” In the course of the novel, young Peter Barnes is picked up either by Alma Mobley or another so-called "nightwatcher" while hitching a ride. In this shape, the supernatural creature is a small, tubby man in a blue car-a Jehovah's Witness. He gives Peter a copy of The Watchtower, which is forgotten by the reader in the explosive course of events over the next forty pages or so. Straub has not forgotten, though. Later, after telling his story to Don Wanderley, Peter is able to produce the
pamphlet the Jehovah's Witness has given him. The headline reads: DR. RABBITFOOT LED ME TO SIN.

  One wonders if this was the headline of the actual copy of The Watchtower which the Jehovah's Witness sold to Straub in his London home as he worked out the first draft of Ghost Story.

  *The best of these occurs when Lewis Benedikt goes to his death. He sees a bedroom door formed by an interlocking spray of pine needles while hunting in the woods. He goes through the door and into a deadly fantasyland.

  3

  Let us move now from ghosts to the natural (or unnatural, if you prefer) habitat of ghosts: the haunted house. There are haunted-house stories beyond numbering, most of them not very good (The Cellar, by Richard Laymon, is one example of the less successful breed). But this little subgenre has also produced a number of excellent books.

  I'll not credit the haunted house as a genuine card in the Tarot hand of the supernatural myth, but I will suggest that we might widen our field of enquiry a bit and find that we have discovered another of those springs which feed the myth-pool. For want of a better name, we might call this particular archetype the Bad Place, a term which encompasses much more than the fallen-down house at the end of Maple Street with the weedy lawn, the broken windows, and the moldering FOR SALE sign.

  It is neither my purpose nor my place here to discuss my own work, but readers of it will know that I've dealt with the archetype of the Bad Place at least twice, once obliquely (in 'Salem's Lot) and once directly (in The Shining). My interest in the subject began when a friend and I took it into our heads to explore the local "haunted house"-a decrepit manse on the Deep Cut Road in my home town of Durham, Maine. This place, in the manner of deserted dwellings, was called after the name of the last residents. So in town it was just the Marsten House.

  This ramshackle abode stood on a hill high enough to overlook a good part of our section of town-a section known as Methodist Corners. It was full of fascinating junk-medicine bottles with no labels which still had odd and vile-smelling liquids in them, stacks of moldy magazines (JAPS COME OUT OF THEIR RAT-HOLES ON IWO! proclaimed the blurb on one yellowed issue of Argosy), a piano with at least twenty-five dead keys, paintings of long-dead people whose eyes seemed to follow you, rusty silverware, a few pieces of furniture.

  The door was locked and there was a No TRESPASSING sign nailed to it (so old and faded it was barely legible), but this did not stop us; such signs rarely stop self-respecting ten-year-olds. We simply went in through an unlocked window.

  After having explored the downstairs thoroughly (and ascertained to our satisfaction that the old-fashioned sulphur matches we had found in the kitchen would no longer light but only produce a foul smell), we went upstairs. Unknown to us, my brother and cousin, two and four years older than my friend and I, had crept in after us. As the two of us poked through the upstairs bedrooms, they began to play horrible, jagged chords on the piano down in the living room.

  My buddy and I screamed and clutched each other-for a moment the terror was complete.

  Then we heard those two dorks laughing downstairs and we grinned at each other shamefacedly. Nothing really of which to be afraid; just a couple of older boys scaring the old Irish bejaysus out of a couple of younger ones. No, nothing really of which to be afraid, but I don't recall that we ever returned there. Certainly not after dark. There might have been . . . things. And that was not even a really Bad Place.

  Years later I read a speculative article which suggested that so-called "haunted houses” might actually be psychic batteries, absorbing the emotions that had been spent there, absorbing them much as a car battery will store an electric charge. Thus, the article went on, the psychic phenomena we call "hauntings" might really be a kind of paranormal movie show- the broadcasting back of old voices and images which might be parts of old events. And the fact that many haunted houses are shunned and get the reputation of being Bad Places might be due to the fact that the strongest emotions are the primitive ones-rage and hate and fear.

  I did not accept the ideas in this article as gospel truth-it seems to me that the writer who deals with psychic phenomena in his or her fiction has a responsibility to deal with such phenomena respectfully but not in a state of utter, worshipful belief-but I did find the idea interesting, both for the idea itself and because it suggested a vague but intriguing referent in my own experience: that the past is a ghost which haunts our present lives constantly. And with my rigorous Methodist upbringing, I began to wonder if the haunted house could not be turned into a kind of symbol of unexpiated sin . . . an idea which turned out to be pivotal in the novel The Shining.

  I guess I liked the idea itself--as divorced from any symbolism or moral reference--because it's always been difficult for me to understand why the dead would want to hang around old deserted houses, clanking chains and groaning spectrally to frighten the passerby . . . if they could go elsewhere. It sounds like a drag to me. The theory suggested that the inhabitants might indeed have gone on, leaving only a psychic residue behind. But even so (as Kenneth Patchen says), that did not rule out the possibility that the residue might be extremely harmful, as lead-based paint can be harmful to children who eat flakes of it years after it has been applied.

  My experience in the Marsten House with my friend crosspatched with this article and with a third element-teaching Stoker's Dracula-create the fictional Marsten House, which stands overlooking the little town of Jerusalem's Lot from its eminence not far from the Harmony Hill Cemetery. But 'Salem's Lot is a book about vampires, not hauntings; the Marsten House is really only a curlicue, the gothic equivalent of an appendix. It was there, but it wasn't doing much except lending atmosphere (it becomes a little more important in Tobe Hooper's TV-film version, but its major function still seems to be to stand up there on that hill and look broody).

  So I went back to the house-as-psychic-battery idea and tried to write a story in which that concept would take center stage. The Shining is set in the apotheosis of the Bad Place: not a haunted house but a haunted hotel, with a different "real" horror movie playing in almost every one of its guest room and suites.

  I needn't point out that the list of possible Bad Places does not begin with haunted houses and end with haunted hotels; there have been horror stories written about haunted railroad stations, automobiles, meadows, office buildings. The list is endless, and probably all of it goes back to the caveman who had to move out of his hole in the rock because he heard what sounded like voices back there in the shadows. Whether they were actual voices or the voices of the wind is a question we still ask ourselves on dark nights.

  I want to talk here about two stories dealing with the archetype of the Bad Place, one good, one great. As it happens, both deal with haunted houses. Fair enough, I think; haunted cars and railway stations are nasty, but your house is the place where you're supposed to be able to unbutton your armor and put your shield away. Our homes are the places where we allow ourselves the ultimate vulnerability: they are the places where we take off our clothes and go to sleep with no guard on watch (except perhaps for those ever more popular drones of modern society, the smoke-detector and the burglar alarm). Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. The old aphorisms say that home is where the heart is, there's no place like home, that a heap of lovin' can make a house a home.

  We are abjured to keep the home fires burning, and when fighter pilots finish their missions they radio that they are "coming home." And even if you are a stranger in a strange land, you can usually find a restaurant that will temporarily assuage your homesickness as well as your hunger with a big plate of home-cooked home fries.

  It doesn't hurt to emphasize again that horror fiction is a cold touch in the midst of the familiar, and good horror fiction applies this cold touch with sudden, unexpected pressure.

  When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we're locking trouble out.

  The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that
we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them.

  Both of these tales adhere quite stringently to the conventional haunted-house formula; we are allowed to see a chain of hauntings, working together to reinforce the concept of the house as a Bad Place. One might even say that the truest definition of the haunted house would be "a house with an unsavory history." The author must do more than simply bring on a repertory company of ghosts, complete with clanking chains, doors that bang open or shut in the middle of the night, and strange noises in the attic or the cellar (the attic's especially good for a bit of low, throbbing terror-when was the last time you explored yours with a candle during a power failure while a strong autumn wind blew outside?); the haunted-house tale demands a historical context.

  Both The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978), and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959) , provide this historical context. Jackson establishes it immediately in the first paragraph of her novel, stating her tale's argument in lovely, dreamlike prose: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

  I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a paragraph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should almost always be left to college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful . . . and just as dead as horseshit.