Fantastic Metropolis

1.

My first haunted house — maybe the one that matters the most — stood just west of the courthouse in the small southern town where I grew up. By the standards we’ll outline in the chapters which follow, it was wholly atypical. It boasted no ill history. No murdered children lamented from its windows by the light of the harvest moon, and it overlooked one of the more prosperous sections of town, not some desolate plot where mutant vegetation sprang from a suicide’s grave. I never dragged a stick along its splintering picket fence, or crept the length of its broken sidewalk to press a fearful hand to its warped and peeling door. Indeed, before that unforgettable October night in the mid-’70s that led by labyrinthine ways to this very book, I never gave the place a second glance.

In fact, it wasn’t a house at all.

It was, rather, a Depression-era commercial structure. The lower floor housed some since-forgotten small-town bureaucracy, a lazy office run by genial women who packed their lunches in grease-stained paper sacks, purchased thirty-cent Coca-Colas from the machine by the door, and called all petitioners “honey.” The upper floors were empty. Therein lay the magic of the place. For once a year during that long tasteless decade of disco excess, another, gothic kind of immoderation ruled in the sagging old second story; every October, using hammers, pancake make-up, and gallons upon gallons of red-dyed Karo syrup, the local Jaycees transformed that abandoned cluster of upstairs rooms into a funhouse of inexpertly staged narratives cribbed in part from Universal’s classic horror films of the 1930s and 40s, in part from more contemporary assays in the form.

I can’t recall exactly when I first walked through our community horror show, but I still remember how it felt to stand in line with my friends for the first time, clutching a single crumpled dollar. At the time, my experience of gothic was limited to playground rumors of Rosemary’s Baby and re-runs of “The Addams Family,” so I approached the Jaycee’s haunted house with a strange amalgam of delight and dread which I have since come to recognize as the unique emotional frisson of horror. The line — a mixture of nervous young children, frustrated parents, and swaggering adolescents — snaked down the sidewalk, through a metal fire door, and up a narrow staircase. On the landing, a man with a hatchet imbedded in his skull collected admission, making change and laughing ghoulishly as each batch of victims stepped past him and disappeared beyond a black curtain to face the horrors beyond. The worst part came once I started climbing that claustrophobic stairwell. The thick air fairly hummed with anxiety, and screams echoed from the rooms beyond with nerve-jarring regularity. Most distressing of all, once you started up the worn risers, flight became impossible unless you were willing to thrust your way through the masses behind you, enduring the catcalls of dozens of kids and risking a potentially fatal case of humiliation. No way was I willing to face that.

So I did what we always do:

I surrendered my dollar and pushed past the black curtain into the funhouse beyond.

2.

What followed was a forcible immersion in the tropes and techniques of gothic. Led by a Grim Reaper type decked out in flowing sable robes and clutching a gore-streaked scythe, my group wound through a dim labyrinth, emerging every now and then into monstrous tableaus. At each stop the Grim Reaper would set the scene: “In the dank catacombs of a Transylvania castle, famed vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing approaches the resting place of Count Dracula…” And then the actors would start into motion: Van Helsing would strain to throw back the granite lid of Dracula’s tomb, the Mummy would stumble from his sarcophagus, the Wolf Man would lift his face to the moon. Each scene culminated as the gothic fiend lurched menacingly toward the little coterie of onlookers standing transfixed in the wings.

Flight followed, a wild career through black passages festooned with cobwebs, pursued by a chorus of ghostly moans. They were all there, the thrones and dominions of the gothic pantheon — Dr. Jekyll, draining a bubbling concoction from a laboratory beaker; Father Karras and little Regan, projectile vomiting a can of pea soup; even dear old Roderick Usher himself, shrinking in terror as Madeline stumbled across his threshold, freshly risen from the cursed sepulcher of her fathers.

I was in a state of near paralytic horror by the time the Grim Reaper led us into the final chamber. Many years later, watching a video of James Whale’s 1935 expressionistic masterpiece, The Bride of Frankenstein, I felt a shiver of that same horror as I realized that the last room of the Jaycee haunted house had been nothing less than an ingenious simulacrum of Whale’s famous laboratory set. The Grim Reaper assured us that the enormous creature strapped to the good doctor’s table was restrained by unbreakable bonds, but by that time, I had arrived at a visceral, if inarticulate understanding of gothic’s central truth and attraction: nothing, not bonds of steel or prayer, can restrain the Dionysian forces that lurk just beneath the placid surface of everyday life. We’re all in terminal rehearsals for our final curtain call.

Sure enough, Frankenstein threw his switch. Electricity sizzled, sparks flew, and the creature roared as he threw off his chains and staggered to life (I’m happy to report that the frizzy-hired Jaycee inside Doctor Frankenstein’s lab coat screamed, “It’s alive!” with a maniacal gusto Colin Clive might have envied). As for me, I’d had quite enough, thank you very much. I darted by the Grim Reaper, stumbled for a single terrifying moment into the rampaging creature (who, I must note, gently set me back on my feet), and darted down a second set of stairs into the crisp October night beyond.

I stood for a long time gazing up at the dark sky and waiting for my blood to stop pounding through my temples. And then I did a very strange thing. I dug through the pockets of my jeans for another crumpled dollar and stepped back in line for another trip through the funhouse.

Turned out I’d left a piece of my heart inside.

At least one contemporary haunted house novel, Lisa Cantrell’s The Manse (1987) has been set in such a venue. Richard Laymon’s nihilistic The Cellar (1980) and its sequel, The Beast House (1986) — borderline haunted house tales — are set in the eponymous locale of the second novel, formerly the site of a sequence of violent murders, since refashioned as a tourist trap (in quite a literal sense), complete with ticket booths and guided tours.

Copyright © 2002 by Dale Bailey.