The Haunted Cottage
The writer of horror tales, by way of his occupation and his preferred subject matter, ought to be alive to the dangers of psychic possession by another spirit.
You’d be surprised though how many of them find themselves in extremely unusual situations simply because they haven’t taken the time to put up barriers between them and the spirit world.
Say a writer fellow has rented a cottage, out in the country somewhere, isolated but perfectly nice in layout, décor, quiet, and generally all the items that go to make up a comfortable accommodation for someone who intends to clack away on a typewriter all his waking minutes.
He has taken the step of renting this cottage for a short time because he is up against a deadline and needs to complete his latest collection of horror stories, Unspeakable Tales of Terror in the Oral Tradition.
Some of these fine stories have to do with this race of monumental heaps of evil energy living under the earth who manipulate mankind through the ages and whose motives in all this manipulation are unclear, but which can be said squarely to not be anything nice.
Other stories are more traditional and have to do with scarecrows who make a habit of unfastening themselves from their posts in the fields and walking – no, stalking, that is better the writer thinks to himself – stalking towards the farmhouse, swinging a scythe they handily found among the rows of harvested wheat, with the intent of asking the resident humans what exactly they meant by stringing him up that way.
Another character might be a beast that rises from a well at certain times of certain nights, another might be a headless watchman still attending to business at his accustomed place along a now-abandoned stretch of railroad, using for a lantern his head which has somehow in a thoughtless moment been detached from the rest of his body and which now, again, for some reason or another, is lit up and provides sufficient illumination for the purpose.
These and many more along the same line.
Good stuff, all in all, but each of the stories need to be viewed with a pitiless eye, and edited down to fighting weight to gain their best effect before publication proper.
Not the favorite activity of most writers, but this fellow relishes the task, taking pleasure in first taking a comma out of the sentences that goes:
“and rising gibbering from the well I beheld a being that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”
…and then putting it back in.
He muses for a second on the momentous question of whether to go all out and insert a semi-colon somewhere, the usual wresting with the language that writers are far too familiar with, and continues working his way through the thickets of words.
He is hard at it, when he notices something strange.
As he has retyped the gripping paragraph above setting the scene for the deadly gaze that the main character in The Beast of the Well lays upon anyone who dares to look at him directly, he notices that for some reason as his fingers have flown over the keys he has included a rather detailed summary of what he, this Beast himself, is suddenly feeling, in the following manner:
“Suddenly he paused in his murderous rampage as if struck by a thought. He tilted his pulpy, tentacled head to one side and gazed into the middle distance, like someone lost in bittersweet recollection. Do we have to ask what brought on this reverie? Dear reader, isn’t it obvious? Is he not thinking – he cannot help but think it seems! – of Violet de Rose, only daughter of the Brookshire clan, inheritor of all the lands of the family estate. Oh, Violet! How to describer her? Her cool elegant style offset by the passion flashing in her eyes. Oh, those eyes, those eyes! It is as though she is lit from within with some unspent and unawakened passion. He put a tentacle to one of his forty-eight eyes, which glistened with unspoken emotion.”
Speaking of eyes, our novelist is rubbing his about now.
Nowhere in his outline does he have The Beast of the Well pausing in his rampaging for a spell of romantic longing. This is contrary to the nature of the character entirely, and will only confuse the reader who, understandably, wants loathsome monsters to behave like loathsome monsters more or less all the time, 24/7, and not step out of the role nor pause the action right when the plot is gearing up. There are countless helpless citizens to kill, after all.
Baffled, he puts The Beast of the Well to one side, making a note to come back to it later when he is thinking more clearly. There are other stories to finalize, like The Demented Chef of Broder Street.
Now this is more like it! This chef fellow has the habit, more than a hobby but less than a full time job, of luring victims into the back reaches of his Five Star restaurant, killing them in several interesting ways for wrongs they have laid upon the Demented Chef himself, various insults and slights as he was making his way up and so on, and then baking them in a pie. It just seemed like the thing to do, and he does it many a time over the course of 16 pages of fine print.
Now you’re talking! thinks the novelist to himself, here is the real deal in horror fiction, the nutty protagonist, the bloody climaxes, the speeches that the character delivers when he lets loose to the audience what his thinking is on these matters. Here comes one of those speeches now, as he sweeps his butcher’s knife through the air.
“Blackberry, Apple, Marzipan Crumble
When making a crisp, the British will often sauté their apples before baking them. I find this step makes particular sense when working with Bramley apples, the English variety often used in cooking. Tart and rather hard, they need that bit of additional softening. American Granny Smiths, while every bit as tart, will relax quite enough in the baking of this crisp minus the sauté. Still, if there’s anything a Nigel Slater recipe affirms, it’s the small pleasures reserved for the cook alone. In this case, the smell of apples caramelizing in a pan of sizzling butter is reason enough to declare this step essential.”
And then he lists the ingredients, total time to prepare, how many it will serve and so on.
Well, the novelist is dumbfounded. This isn’t the crazed rationale of a fellow who has found an interesting way to knock off his rivals and recycle them through the Great Circle of Life. This sounds more like a cooking class. The writer has taken care to place the action right in the middle of The Demented Chef’s territory, the depths of his kitchen, but that is the only thing that has remained the same as he typed. It is as though his characters have been taken over.
And as he types so it goes with each of his stories. The Headless Watchman of Track #29 breaks off his interesting explanation of what he is doing out here in the boonies swinging his head which glows like a lantern for some reason, to tell the reader what on his bookshelf he is reading right now, taking care to advise the reader to read Proust in the original French — please, my friend, I beg of you! he says — as the English translations just can’t get it across like the home language can, and this ghostly couple down the hallway in this big castle over in Europe somewhere who reenact a bloody crime from the Middle Ages over and over again take time out from their busy schedule to hold forth on the underlying mood of the electorate and place odds on which political candidates will move to the next round after each debate. “I’m afraid she’s lost some momentum here, Bob, as I just don’t get a sense of a fire in her belly on these issues.”
Again it seems as though they each, and all the others as well, have been taken over somehow, as if they have become possessed by…
A thought strikes him, and a moment later he is on the phone to the real estate agent.
And here we get to the danger that the writer has placed himself in.
In a hurry to get on with his task, he has not adequately investigated the history of this cottage in the woods.
The call reveals his worst fears. He is not the only writer to whom the cottage has appealed.
Its isolation, the quiet of its surroundings, the general ease with which it hastens the writer’s task, means that more than one author has taken the place for some length of time.
In the ordinary nature of things, in horror novels at least, the very walls of the rooms have soaked up the mental vibrations of all this imaginative activity and any time they hear the clacking of the typewriter, are in the habit of exhaling it back out whenever they sense that creative work of the highest order is underway.
These psychic vibrations roll through the room and take it over, immediately hijacking whatever imaginative endeavor is underway.
And so it is that the romance writer, and the food critic, and the book review editor, and the political correspondent, all are surging forward from the spirit world to have their say.
They are the type of individuals – they are writers after all – who are certain that people here on Our Side are still dying to hear what they have to say – so they jostle forward, competing to see which one can soonest find its way into the writer’s mind and take over his characters.
It is only a matter of moments before the horror writer has packed up his typewriter, collected his manuscripts, and bound out the door as though pursued by a pack of wolves. He has finally identified the danger.
Demented chefs and Beasts of the Well and Headless Watchmen are all well and good when it comes the blood-chilling effects they will have on the reader.
But they can’t hold a candle to the perils of romance novel prose.
