by Laird Hunt
AMERICAN MIDNIGHT
Tales of the Dark
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY LAIRD HUNT
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
INTRODUCTION
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
Edgar Allan Poe
YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN
Nathaniel Hawthorne
THE EYES
Edith Wharton
THE MASK
Robert W. Chambers
HOME
Shirley Jackson
A GHOST STORY
Mark Twain
SPUNK
Zora Neale Hurston
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
AN ITINERANT HOUSE
Emma Frances Dawson
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
“Shiver by shiver, we gain insight.”
Guillermo del Toro, Foreword to Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories of Ray Russell
SOMEWHERE AROUND MIDNIGHT, when I was six or seven and staying with my family on my grandmother’s Indiana farm, as I lay in a creaky bed in a small bedroom at the back of the old house, I saw the ghost of a baby floating above me. The baby was life-sized and dressed in a stiff white gown. It was glowing. And weeping. They were not tears of joy. I couldn’t move. The wailing grew louder, almost siren-like, and this eventually released me. I sprang out of bed, threw off my covers. Howls were coming from the room down the hall where my younger cousin was staying. By and by, I could hear her parents telling her she’d had a nightmare and should go back to sleep. I went back to sleep too.
In the morning when I told my parents about the ghost, they said that clearly I’d heard my cousin, who was not much more than a baby herself, and so had dreamed up this visitor. I did not believe them. I said that the sad little ghost had been summoned by my cousin’s crying, that it had slipped in under the cover of her tears. In an investigative spirit, I asked my grandmother if any babies had ever died on the farm. My grandmother said something to the effect that in fact she herself had been in that inconvenient condition on the farm when she was first born, and that if a doctor’s assistant hadn’t pumped icy water on her at the kitchen sink while the attending doctor took care of her mother, she would be in that inconvenient condition still. My parents—ever eager to rationalize and no doubt not yet far into their first cups of coffee—then said that probably I had already heard this story about my grandmother’s still birth and revival without realizing it, and that my cousin’s crying had helped craft the submerged memory into a nightmare.
“But I was awake the whole time! It was Grandma’s ghost! She sounded angry!” I said.
“Grandma is right here,” they said.
“But she died, she said so!” I said.
“Go out and play,” they said.
And that is what I did.
The ghost didn’t return that night or any other, but I remembered. So that when, many years later, I came across Edith Wharton’s chilling ‘The Eyes’, a classic of a fireside frame story if ever there was one—“We had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s…”—I experienced the deep-night bedside appearance of the awful titular eyes as a disturbing echo. Wharton may well have meant to impart a moral lesson by positing their repeated appearance (Culwin is more than moderately a jerk), but to me they rhymed quite viscerally with my own earliest horror in the dark. A memory that to this day—along with the implication of my grandmother’s remarks: that the baby ghost could very well have been her—gives me chills.
Scary stories bang at our deep bells, the ones that live in the pit of our stomachs, at the base of our spines. They take different shapes, do it in different ways. Indeed, each of the nine tales gathered here glitters with a particular malevolence all its own. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’, long a personal favourite, blends familiar tropes of the genre—distant past, dark night, deep woods—with the awful anxiety of uncertainty and the unmooring terrors, especially in a religious age, of wavering faith. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ centres on oppressive isolation and the slow but steady unmaking of a mind, while Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Spunk’, a tale of blatant guilt and gruesome comeuppance, is a reminder that if too often in real life Goliath clubs him down, ghostly David, armed with a sling of righteous spite, may yet come for him and take revenge. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, not the only one of these American tales to cast its gaze across the Atlantic, drops its hammer of judgement not on one or two people but on a thousand.
Poe was writing in 1842, but the apocalyptic premise continues to ring true (I for one now have Prince’s ‘1999’ in my head: “2000 zero zero party over oops out of time…”). I would wager that most reading this have been invited recently—whether in the pages of a book or on television or movie screens—to at least one haunting contemporary equivalent of Poe’s “masked ball of the most unusual magnificence”. The other stories here, which range from frightening resurrections following scientific experiments gone hideously wrong to encounters with mournful ghosts holding vigil over the wrong bones, feel to me similarly fresh and frightening, as if they had been written not last night but no more than a few months ago. Recently, in fact, when I was rewatching Jordan Peele’s extraordinary 2017 film Get Out, which folds layers of humour in with its horror, I thought of Mark Twain’s ‘A Ghost Story’, which is scary, sad and very funny in turn.
I said at the start that Edith Wharton’s ghostly eyes yanked me back to that creaking bed of my childhood, and so Emma Frances Dawson’s weird and relatively little-known ‘An Itinerant House’ (recommended to me by the excellent writer of contemporary dark tales Brian Evenson) also brought back memories of that time. The story is set in a San Francisco that Ambrose Bierce, in discussing Dawson’s work, characterized as “a city of wraiths and things forbidden to the senses”. There are no bedside spectres here, but by exploring the activated agency of a person who is no longer dead, the tale reminded me of my grandmother’s return from death. Unlike Felipa, my grandmother used her own early step back from the brink as motivation to build a long, good life as a Latin teacher and greenhouse-business owner, not to toss terrible curses, but the bell got rung for me nonetheless, and the ghost of a baby my grandmother either was or wasn’t floated up once again.
While I certainly wouldn’t wish a remembered apparition like that one on anybody, I do hope these stories, culled from a century of shiver-inducing American output, will work their magic on you as they have on me. And, just in case, if you read them at night, I’d suggest keeping the lights on for a while after you’ve put the book down.
LAIRD HUNT, 2019
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
Edgar Allan Poe
THE “RED DEATH” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from am
ong the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death”.
It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. These were seven—an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different, as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose colour varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue—and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange—the fifth with white—the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the colour of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood colour. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.
It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to harken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.
But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colours and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.
He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been since seen in Hernani. There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-coloured panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulged in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.
In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chor
ds in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
When the eyes of the Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.
“Who dares,”—he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him—“who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him—that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!”
It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly, for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand.
It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple—through the purple to the green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white—and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.