TERROR IN THE MODERN VEIN
Edited by
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
Startling Tales of the Macabre!
DIGIT BOOKS R460
First published in volume form by Hanover House,
New York
For my mother-
In a turbulent world:
a Rose and a rock.
© by Donald A. Wollheim, 1955
Digit Books are published by Brown, Watson Ltd..
Digit House, Harlesden Road, London, N.W.10.
INTRODUCTION
GHOST stories today have achieved a pattern almost as stylized as the sonnet. Derived as these tales are from the legends and superstitions of an older, more primitive world, they are based upon a type of fear induction which was the outgrowth of a form of existence mankind has grown away from. This is the fear of the single individual alone in a world whose natural forces were unknown and unpredictable, whose geography was not mapped, whose beliefs, religious and social, were still heavily steeped in the ancient animism of the original savages.
In such a world, sparsely populated by modern standards, the roads and streets were unlit at night (or lit but poorly), the rural countryside was replete with wolves, bears, and the sounds of prowlers in the darkness, the landscape dominated by huge ugly piles of stone set in the most inaccessible places. In these forbidding gray structures, unheated and almost windowless, either dwelled or once dwelled cruel men, men who set themselves apart and above the plodders in the fields, men who, as lords, exacted tribute, sat in cold judgment, and fended forth in frightening armour to beat off the attacks of marauders from over the mountains. In the cellars of these awesome castles were evil holes wherein many a wretched man or woman had screamed their lives away. In the castle halls, murder and bloodshed were regular happenings.
Even after these castles had fallen into ruin, after the last bear and wolf had been cornered and torn to bits, the natives of the region never forgot the terrors that had been once realities. Their land was much the same, their nights as dark, their rulers as fickle and dangerous. To these people, it was easy and natural to believe that the inherent spirits of stone and wood still lingered, that they took on the shapes of ghosts howling their pain in the night, of malignant barons, dead but still athirst for blood. That in the darkness of the unlit roads and fields still roamed, if not wolves, then werewolves and vampires and other night-gaunts. Witchcraft and wizardry, fairy and gnome, zombie and ghoul, all were credible because all the borders were still not charted, fear of the foreigner still prevailed, and there was illiteracy and ignorance of the growing but cloistered world of science; all were still primarily the predominant facts of the average life.
Out of this mass of lore, out of the folktales and old wives' stories, out of fragmentary memories of outlawed paganism, out of garbled versions of semi-forgotten history, out of misunderstood natural phenomena, grew the entire pattern of ghost fiction. And as our cities grew, as our civilization began to emerge into the industrial pattern, much of this lore was translated into literature, worked into a storytelling formula laid against the kind of surroundings the new listeners could picture.
From haunted castles to haunted country estates is an easy transition. From the bloody ducal dungeon to the mysterious stain in a deserted London residence is a short step. The vampire that frightened the Transylvanian peasant became the blood-seeking spectre of a British seaside tavern. Because men still felt alone and their streets were still ill lit and their knowledge still sketchy, these fear patterns held their validity.
The ghost story in all its stylized variety has been with us in a finished form since the end of the nineteenth century. Dozens of thick volumes of these tales have been assembled, and they have featured the by-lines of many skilled authors, yet, in all things, they are limited to the lore of a bygone era. They follow timeworn footsteps in their format, they must make you believe in that which science, modern society, and the modern practice of religion have rejected. That they succeed so often is a tribute to the skill of the writers.
In all truth, these stories are obsolete. Though we may find some pleasure in them, we cannot truly believe. Shall we cringe before the whining anger of some duke three hundred years dead because he was, let us suppose, murdered and unavenged, when today unavenged murder is a commonplace? How can we who have lived through a recent decade wherein six million people were cold-bloodedly tortured and slaughtered, without trial or guilt, at the whim of a tyrannical bigot - how can we take seriously the petty ire of one ancient and forgotten ghost? How can we who live in a world where dozens of great cities were bombed and burned by remote killers in a midnight sky seriously acknowledge the night-time shenanigans of a headless horseman? How can we whose streets are aprowl with psychotics, thrill slayers, and drug addicts whose actions fill the police records daily with new lists of unmotivated malignancies, take fright at the antics of a witch's curse? How can we condone the personal thirst of a Dracula when everywhere there are growing blood banks against expected future calamities?
No, the ghost story is obsolete, out of date, dead for serious consumption. But the fear of the unknown, the terror of the world about us, that is not dead. We have made a new sort of world, different from the old, and in this new world there are terrors, too. We accept the slaughter of millions by government fiat, we shrug off the death of cities overnight, we frown upon but admit the inevitability of warfare by pestilence and radioactive dust. We walk about our business, knowing that we are doomed in the light of A- and H- bombs to come. This is part of our everyday life, and against it we project our personal dreams, our family affairs, and our daily bread-winning.
We are as human as our ancestors. In our hearts the primitive animism still lingers. We create new forms of terror, we build up a whole new demonology derived from science and quasi-science, we propound new witchcrafts derived from political soothsaying, we shudder in our souls at the very monstrosities we have found protection in.
In the field of literature, in the ranks of storytelling, there has been a slow awareness of this new demonology. Restricted by the fixed patterns of the ghost story, this has had considerable difficulty breaking through. The view was obscured by old premises. Nonetheless it manifested itself. One of the first breakthroughs in the effort to create a terror story proper to our times resulted in the whole field of science-fiction, the subsequent development of which has quite outgrown and mainly shed this early facet of its creation. In the writings of H.G. Wells at the dawn of our century, although the premise might be scientific prognostication, the atmosphere and effect was the creation of terror, as in the inhuman clanking, bellowing world of The Sleeper Awakes, or the throaty cries on Dr. Moreau's vivisectional island. That the groundwork for a new demonology was being laid is overshadowed by the towering mushroom of space-time derring-do that also grew from these Wellsian roots. But the new century called forth the new fear patterns, and they found their way into the writings of others.
Arthur Machen achieved a partial synthesis of the old form and the new in his long stories of London. Against the background of a modern city with its buses and plumbing, Machen whispered of the survival of the forgotten mythology. The remnants and shreds of the little people, the witches and the curses, still lingered on, tucked away among the stones and cellars of our new civilization. But even Machen revealed an awareness of what a losing battle these all-but-forgotten holdovers were having. There had always to be a relic, something tangible from the days before there was a London, before they could manifest themselves. They could not, and in Machen, they did not manifest themselves in new things.
Here and there, after Machen, stories popped up based upon the new things
, upon the terrors of psychology, the terrors of the new monsters of machine and gas, of state and society, of smoke and dust, of radio wave and telescope, of the ever more menacing future. Here at last were the origins of the new fear-story pattern, the abandonment of the foolish ghost for the evocation of far subtler modern menaces.
I first became conscious of this new form of fear fiction back in 1937 when I first read Wells's The Croquet Player. Against the booming mania of the war drums, Wells struck a responsive note. Here, he wrote, is a new and real ghost, derived from that which haunts us today rather than that which haunted our great-grandfathers'. The eerie atmosphere of this short novel, one of Wells's last great imaginative works, rang true. But it could never be correlated to accepted ghost-story formulae. From that point on, as a collector and connoisseur of fantasy fiction, I earmarked similar stories, tales that reflected terror in the modern vein.
Here was Franz Kafka, writing his novels of the little man being torn asunder by torturers and forces he could not even glimpse. Here, on a different level, was H. P. Lovecraft, writing stories seemingly in the ghost tradition yet insistently deriving his demons from the marginalia of astronomy and geology, dressing them in robes woven from science-fiction. Here were Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury and Philip M. Fisher moving through modern scenes and finding terrors growing there that had never grown on earth before.
In fact, here were stories that belonged to our own times, not to bygone scenes. These terrors are different from those that had once been known. Rather than the physical entities of superstitious peasantry, there are far more likely to be psychological subtleties, wrongnesses of thought and being, rather than substances. No one can yet fix and systematize the new demonology, for it is still evolving and its forms are unlike all others. It may be manifested by an absence rather than a presence, by a shadow instead of a substance, by a darkness instead of a dawn.
We are living in a most strange world, a world we made ourselves. No ancestors ever shared this modern scene. In it we must continue to plunge headlong forwards because we are no longer capable of turning back. Our peace is more tense than any peace ever before, our wars more inconceivably horrible, our cities more deadly than the most trackless jungle, our homes more luxurious than the most fabled palaces, and our future more explosively uncertain than all those our ancestors faced.
In this we create new ghosts, we find new terrors, not to outshout the realities of our terrible days, but to whisper of subtler madness. In this book, I have sought to gather together for the first time some of these stories of Terror in the Modern Vein. You will not find a single ghost, werewolf, or vampire in these pages. Instead you will find something of that which haunts our times now. You will meet the unnamed which is among us today.
-DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
THEY
by Robert Heinlein
Who is there among us who has not occasionally entertained the suspicion that everything, save one's own self, is other than what it seems? And how, if once we begin to suspect that the world is merely an elaborate play put on for personal benefit for some inexplicably dark reason, can we ever hope to prove it? Robert Heinlein tells the story of a suspicious man who set out to check the matter for himself.
THEY would not let him alone.
They never would let him alone. He realized that that was part of the plot against him never to leave him in peace, never to give him a chance to mull over the lies they had told him, time enough to pick out the flaws, and to figure out the truth for himself.
That damned attendant this morning! He had come busting in with his breakfast tray, waking him, and causing him to forget his dream. If only he could remember that dream
Someone was unlocking the door. He ignored it.
"Howdy, old boy. They tell me you refused your breakfast?" Dr. Hayward's professionally kindly mask hung over his bed.
"I wasn't hungry."
"But we can't have that. You'll get weak, and then I won't be able to get you well completely.
Now get up and get your clothes on and I'll order an eggnog for you. Come on, that's a good fellow!"
Unwillingly, but still less willing at that moment to enter into any conflict of wills, he got out of bed and slipped on his bathrobe. "That's better," Hayward approved. "Have a cigarette?"
"No, thank you."
The doctor shook his head in a puzzled fashion. "Darned if I can figure you out. Loss of interest in physical pleasures does not fit your type of case."
"What is my type of case?" he inquired in flat tones.
"Tut! Tut!" Hayward tried to appear roguish. "If medicos told their professional secrets, they might have to work for a living."
"What is my type of case?"
"Well - the label doesn't matter, does it? Suppose you tell me. I really know nothing about your case as yet. Don't you think it is about time you talked?"
"I'll play chess with you."
"All right, all right. Hayward made a gesture of impatient concession. "We've played chess every day for a week. If you will talk, I'll play chess."
What could it matter? If he was right, they already understood perfectly that he had discovered their plot; there was nothing to be gained by concealing the obvious. Let them try to argue him out of it. Let the tail go with the hide! To hell with it!
He got out the chessmen and commenced setting them up. "What do you know of my case so far?"
"Very little. Physical examination negative. Past history, negative. High intelligence, as shown by your record in school and your success in your profession. Occasional fits of moodiness, but nothing exceptional. The only positive information was the incident that caused you to come here for treatment."
"To be brought here, you mean. Why should it cause comment?"
"Well, good gracious, man - if you barricade yourself in your room and insist that your wife is plotting against you, don't you expect people to notice?"
"But she was plotting against me - and so are you. White, or black?"
"Black - it's your turn to attack. Why do you think we are 'plotting against you'?"
"It's an involved story, and goes way back into my early child-hood. There was an immediate incident, however -" He opened by advancing the white king's knight to KB3. Haywaid's eyebrows raised.
"You make a piano attack?"
"Why not? You know that it'is not safe for me to risk a gambit with you."
The doctor shrugged his shoulders and answered the opening. "Suppose we start with your early childhood. It may shed more light than more recent incidents. Did you feel that you were being persecuted as a child?"
"No!" He half rose from his chair. "When I was a child I was sure of myself. I knew then, I tell you; I knew! Life was worth while, and I knew it. I was at peace with myself and my surroundings. Life was good and I was good, and I assumed that the creatures around me were like myself."
"And weren't they?"
"Not at all! Particularly the children. I didn't know what viciousness was until I was turned loose with other 'children.' The little devils! And I was expected to be like them and play with them."
The doctor nodded. "I know. The herd compulsion. Children can be pretty savage at times."
"You've missed the point. This wasn't any healthy roughness; these creatures were different - not like myself at all. They looked like me, but they were not like me. If I tried to say anything to one of them about anything that mattered to me, all I could get was a stare and a scornful laugh. Then they would find some way to punish me for having said it."
Hayward nodded. "I see what you mean. How about grownups?"
"That is somewhat different. Adults don't matter to children at first - or, rather, they did not matter to me. They were too big, and they did not bother me, and they were busy with things that did not enter into my considerations. It was only when I noticed that my presence affected them that I began to wonder about them."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, they never did the things when
I was around that they did when I was not around."
Hayward looked at him carefully. "Won't that statement take quite a lot of justifying? How do you know what they did when you weren't around?"
He acknowledged the point. "But I used to catch them just stopping. If I came into a room, the conversation would stop suddenly, and then it would pick up about the weather or something equally inane. Then I took to hiding and listening and looking. Adults did not behave the same way in my presence as out of it."
"Your move, I believe. But see here, old man - that was when you were a child. Every child passes through that phase. Now that you are a man, you must see the adult point of view. Children are strange creatures and have to be protected - at least, we do protect them - from many adult interests. There is a whole code of conventions in the matter that -"
"Yes, yes," he interrupted impatiently, "I know all that. Nevertheless, I noticed enough and remembered enough that was never clear to me later. And it put me on my guard to notice the next thing."
"Which was?" He noticed that the doctor's eyes were averted as he adjusted a castle's position.
"The things I saw people doing and heard them talking about were never of any importance. They must be doing something else."
"I don't follow you."
"You don't choose to follow me. I'm telling this to you in exchange for a game of chess."
"Why do you like to play chess so well?"
"Because it is the only thing in the world where I can see all the factors and understand all the rules. Never mind - I saw all around me this enormous plant, cities, farms, factories, churches, schools, homes, railroads, luggage, roller coasters, trees, saxophones, libraries, people and animals. People that looked like me and who should have felt very much like me, if what I was told was the truth. But what did they appear to be doing? 'They went to work to earn the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to earn the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to get the strength to buy the food to earn the money to go -' until they fell over dead. Any slight variation in the basic pattern did not matter, for they always fell over dead. And everybody tried to tell me that I should be doing the same thing. I knew better!"
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