Danse Macabre Read online

  They . . . hid in old garages, they . . . hid in old barns . . . in the highest trees they could climb and got bored and boredom was worse than fear so they came down and reported in to the Police Chief and had a fine chat which gave them twenty safe minutes right in the station and Will got the idea of touring churches and they climbed all the steeples in town and scared pigeons off the belfries. . . . But there again they began to get starchy with boredom and fatigued with sameness, and were almost on the point of giving themselves up to the carnival in order to have something to do, when quite fortunately the sun went down.

  The only effective foil for Bradbury's dream-children is Charles Halloway, the dream-father. In the character of Charles Halloway we find attractions which only fantasy, with its strong myth-making abilities, can give us. Three points about him are worth mentioning, I think.

  First, Charles Halloway understands the myth of childhood the two boys are living; for all of us who grew up and parted with some bitterness from our parents because we felt they didn't understand our youth, Bradbury gives us a portrait of the sort of parent we felt we deserved. His reactions are those which few real parents can ever afford to have. His parenting instincts are apparently supernaturally alert. Early on, he sees the boys running home from watching the carnival set up, and calls their names softly under his breath . . . but does no more. Nor does he mention it to Will later, although the two boys have been out at three o'clock in the morning. He's not worried that they've been out scoring dope or mugging old ladies or shtupping their girlfriends. He knows they have been out on boys' business, walking the night as boys sometimes will . . . and he lets it go.

  Second, Charles Halloway comes by his understanding legitimately; he is still living the myth himself. Your father cannot be your pal very successfully, the psychology texts tell us, but there are few fathers, I think, who have not longed to be buddies with their sons, and few sons who have not wished for a buddy in their fathers. When Charles Halloway discovers that Jim and Will have nailed rungs under the climbing ivy on their respective houses so they can escape and reenter their bedrooms after bedtime, he does not demand that the rungs be torn down; his response is admiring laughter and an admonition that the boys not use the rungs unless they really have to. When Will tells his father in agony that no one will believe them if they try to explain what really happened in Miss Foley's house, where the evil nephew Robert (who is really Mr. Cooger, looking much younger since he has been reissued) framed them for a robbery, Halloway says simply, "I'll believe." He will believe because he is really just one of the boys and the sense of wonder has not died within him. Much later, while rummaging through his pockets, Charles Halloway almost seems like the world's oldest Tom Sawyer:

  And Will's father stood up, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, rummaged his pockets for matches, brought out a battered harmonica, a penknife, a cigarette lighter that wouldn't work, and a memo pad he had always meant to write great thoughts down on but had never got around to. . . .

  Almost everything, in fact, except a dead rat and a string to swing it on.

  Third, Charles Halloway is the dream-father because he is, in the end, accountable. He can switch hats, in the blink of an eye, from that of the child to that of the adult. He proves his accountability and responsibility by a simple symbolic act: when Mr. Dark asks, Halloway gives him his name.

  "A fine day to you, sir!"

  No. Dad! thought Will.

  The Illustrated Man came back.

  "Your name, sir?" he asked directly.

  Don't tell him! thought Will.

  Will's father debated a moment, took the cigar from his mouth, tapped ash and said quietly:

  "Halloway. Work in the library. Drop by sometime."

  "You can be sure, Mr. Halloway. I win."

  . . . [Halloway] was also gazing with surprise at himself, accepting the surprise, the new purpose, which was half despair, half serenity, now that the incredible deed was done. Let no one ask why he had given his true name; even he could not assay and give its real weight. . . .

  But isn't it most likely that he has given his true name because the boys cannot? He must front for them--which he does admirably. And when Jim's dark wishes finally lead him into what seems utter ruin, it is Halloway who emerges, first destroying the fearsome Dust Witch, then Mr. Dark himself, and finally leading the fight for Jim's life and soul.

  Something Wicked This Way Comes is probably not Bradbury's best work overall--I believe he has always found the novel a difficult form to work in--but its mythic interests are so well suited to Bradbury's dreamy, semipoetic prose that it succeeds wonderfully and becomes one of those books about childhood (like Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, Stevenson's Treasure Island, Cormier's The Chocolate War, and Thomas Williams's Tsuga's Children, to name just a few) that adults should take down once in awhile . . . not just to give to their own children, but in order to touch base again themselves with childhood's brighter perspectives and darker dreams. Bradbury has introduced his novel with a quotation from Yeats: "Man is in love, and loves what vanishes." He adds others, but we will perhaps agree that the line from Yeats is text enough . . . but let Bradbury himself have the final word, concerning one of Green Town's fascinations for the two dream-children of whom he has written:

  "As for my gravestone? I would like to borrow that great barber-pole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello. And there the old barber-pole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever. And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts."

  An apple . . . or maybe a dead rat and a string to swing it on.

  7

  Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in reality--and this mislabeling of the book has continued right up to the present, for no good reason other than this is how publishers do things. "One of the most incredible Science Fiction classics of all time!" booms the cover of the recent Berkley reissue, ignoring the fact that a story in which a man shrinks at the steady rate of one-seventh of an inch a day has really gone beyond even the furthest realms of science fiction.

  Matheson, like Bradbury, has no real interest in hard science fiction. He brings forth an obligatory amount of mumbo-jumbo (my favorite is when a doctor exclaims over Scott Carey's "incredible catabolism") and then drops it. We know that the process which eventually results in Scott Carey's being chased through his own basement by a black widow spider begins when he is doused by a curtain of sparkling radioactive spray; the radioactivity interacts with some bug spray he had ingested into his system a few days earlier. It is this double play that has caused the shrinking process to begin. It is the most minimal nod at rationality, a mid-twentieth-century version of pentagrams, mystic passes, and evil spells. Luckily for us, Matheson, like Bradbury, is more interested in Scott Carey's heart and mind than in his incredible catabolism.

  It's worth noting that in The Shrinking Man we're back to the old radioactive blues again, and to the idea that horror fiction helps us to externalize in symbolic form whatever is really troubling us. It is impossible to see The Shrinking Man separated from its background of A-bomb tests, ICBMs, the "missile gap," and strontium-90 in the milk. If we look at it this way, Matheson's novel (his second published book, according to John Brosnan and John Clute, who collaborated on Matheson's entry in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, citing Matheson's I Am Legend as the first; I believe they may have overlooked two other Richard Matheson novels, Someone Is Bleeding and Fury on Sunday), is no more science fiction than such Big Bug movies as The Deadly Mantis or Beginning of the End. But Matheson is doing more in The Shrinking Man than having radioactive nightmares; the title of Matheson's novel alone suggests bad dreams of a more Freudian nature. Concerning The Body Snatchers, we'll remember Richard Gid Powers saying th
at Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is a direct result of Miles's resistance against depersonalization, his fierce individualism, and his defense of more traditional America values. These same things can be said about the Matheson novel,16 with one important variation. It seems to me that while Powers is right in suggesting that The Body Snatchers is in large part about the depersonalization, even the annihilation of the free personality in our society, The Shrinking Man is story about the free personality's loss of power and growing impotency in a world increasingly controlled by machines, red tape, and a balance of terror where future wars are planned with one eye always cocked toward an "acceptable kill ratio." In Scott Carey we see one of the most inspired and original symbols of this modern devaluation of human currency ever created. Carey muses at one point that he is not shrinking at all; that instead, the world is growing larger. But seen either way--devaluation of the individual or inflation of the environment--the result is the same: as Scott shrinks, he retains his essential individuality but gradually loses more and more control over his world anyway. Also like Finney, Matheson sees his work as "just a story," and one he is not even particularly in touch with anymore. His comments:

  "I started working on the book in 1955. It was the only book I ever wrote back east--if you exclude a novel I wrote when I was sixteen and living in Brooklyn. Things had been going badly out here [in California] and I thought it might be a good idea to be back east and close to editors for the sake of my career; I had given up on the idea of getting into movies. Actually, there was nothing rational in the move. I was just fed up out here on the coast and talked myself into going back east. My family was there. My brother had a business there and I knew I could get some work for us to live on if I couldn't sell any writing.17 So we went. We were renting a house at Sound Beach on Long Island when I wrote the book. I had gotten the idea several years earlier while attending a movie in a Redondo Beach theater. It was a silly comedy with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman and Aldo Ray and, in this particular scene, Ray Milland, leaving Jane's apartment in a huff, accidentally put on Aldo Ray's hat, which sank down around his ears. Something in me asked, 'What would happen if a man put on a hat which he knew was his and the same thing happened?' Thus the notion came.

  "The entire novel was written in the cellar of the rented house on Long Island. I did a shrewd thing in that. I didn't alter the cellar at all. There was a rocking chair down there and, every morning, I would go down into the cellar with my pad and pencil and I would imagine what my hero was up to that day.18 I didn't have to keep the environment in my mind or keep notes. I had it all there, frozen. It was intriguing, when I watched them shoot the film, to see the cellar set because it reminded me a good deal of the cellar in Sound Beach and I had a momentary, enjoyable sense of deja vu.

  "It took me about two and a half months to write the novel. I originally used the structure the movie did, starting with the beginning of the shrinking process. This didn't work as it took too long to get to 'the good stuff.' So I recast the storyline to get the reader into the cellar immediately. Recently, when I thought they were going to do a remake of the film and I thought they wanted me to do it, I decided I would revert to the original structure because, in [the film], as in my original manuscript, 'the good stuff' took awhile to get to. But it turned out they were going to make it into a comedy with Lily Tomlin and I wasn't going to write it anyway. John Landis was going to direct it at the time and he wanted all the science-fantasy people out here to play minor parts in the film. He wanted me to play a pharmacist who . . . won't give a prescription to Lily Tomlin who is so small at the time that she is sitting on the shoulder of an intelligent gorilla (shows you how they changed the original idea). I demurred. As a matter of fact, the opening of the script is almost like my original one to the point of actual dialogue. Later, it deviates wildly. . . .

  "I don't think the book means anything to me at this time. None of my work does from this distant past. I think I prefer I Am Legend if I had to choose but they are both too far from me to have any significance in particular. . . . Accordingly, I wouldn't change anything about The Shrinking Man. It is a part of my history. I have no reason to change it, only to look at it without much interest and be pleased at whatever stir it made. I just read the first story I ever sold the other day--'Born of Man and Woman'--[and] I cannot relate to the story at all. I remember writing certain phrases but it was someone else who wrote them. I'm sure you feel that way about the early stuff you wrote.19

  "The Shrinking Man only recently had a hardcover edition. Now it is being printed by the Science Fiction Book Club too. Up to then it was strictly softcover. . . . Actually, I Am Legend is much more science fiction than The Shrinking Man. It has a lot of research in it. The science in The Shrinking Man is strictly gobbledegook. Well, I did some asking around and reading but I hardly had a great rationale for Scott Carey's shrinking. And I wince daily . . . that I made him shrink 1/7" a day instead of geometrically and that I had him worry about falling from heights when it wouldn't have hurt him. Well, to hell with it. I wouldn't have written 'Born of Man and Woman' a few years later either because it is so illogical. What difference does it make really?

  "As I said, I enjoyed writing the book . . . because I was like Scott Carey's Boswell, watching him each day as he made his way around the cellar. I had a piece of cake with my coffee the first few days of writing and I laid it on the shelf and soon it became a part of the story. I think that some of the incidents during his shrinking period are pretty good--the man who picks him up when he hitchhikes, the midget, the boys chasing him, his deteriorating marriage relationship."

  A summary of The Shrinking Man is easy to render if we view it in the linear fashion Matheson suggests. After going through the sparkling cloud of radioactivity, Cary begins to lose a seventh of an inch a day, or roughly one foot per season. As Matheson suggests, this smacks of expediency, but as he also suggests, what does it matter as long as we realize that this is not hard science fiction and that it bears no resemblance to novels and stories by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Larry Niven? It is not exactly sensible that the children in the C. S. Lewis tale should be able to reach another world by going through a bedroom closet, either, but that is exactly what happens in the Narnia stories. It is not the techicalities of shrinking that we are interested in, and the inch-per-week pattern at least enables us to keep our own mental yardstick on Scott Carey.

  We are given Scott's adventures in flashbacks as he shrinks; the main action takes place in what Scott assumes is his last week of life, as he shrinks from one inch down to nothing. He has gotten trapped in the cellar while trying to escape his own housecat and a garden sparrow. There's something particularly chilling in Scott's desperate duel with Puss; does anyone have the slightest doubt about what would happen if we were suddenly changed to a height of seven inches tall by malign magic and yon kitty curled up by the fire woke up and happened to see us skittering across the floor? Cats, those amoral gunslingers of the animal world, are maybe the scariest mammals going. I wouldn't want to be up against one in a situation like that.

  Perhaps above all else, Matheson excels at the depiction of one man alone, locked in a desperate struggle against a force or forces bigger than himself. Here is the conclusion of Scott's battle with the bird that knocks him into his cellar prison:

  He stood up, flinging more snow at the bird, seeing the snow splatter off its dark, flaring beak. The bird flapped back. Scott turned and struggled a few more strides, then the bird was on him again, wet wings pounding at his head. He slapped wildly at it and felt his hands strike the bony sides of its beak. It flew off again. . . .

  Until, finally, cold and dripping, he stood with his back to the cellar window, hurling snow at the bird in the desperate hope that it would give up and he wouldn't have to jump into the imprisoning cellar.

  But the bird kept coming, diving at him, hovering before him, the sound of its wings like wet sheets flapping in a heavy wind. Suddenly
the jabbing beak was hammering at his skull, slashing skin, knocking him back against the house. . . . He picked up snow and threw it, missing. The wings were still beating at his face; the beak gashed his face again.

  With a stricken cry, Scott whirled and leaped for the open square. He crawled across it dizzily. The leaping bird knocked him through.

  When the bird knocks Scott into the cellar, the man is seven inches tall. Matheson has made it clear that the novel is, to a large extent, a simple comparison of the macrocosm and the microcosm, and his hero's seven weeks in this lower world are a tiny capsule of experience which exactly mimes what he has already been through in a larger world. When he falls into the cellar, he is its king; he is able to exert his own human power over the environment with no real trouble. But as he continues to shrink, his power begins to wane once again . . . and the Nemesis appears.

  The spider rushed at him across the shadowed sands, scrabbling wildly on its stalklike legs. Its body was a giant, glossy egg that trembled blackly as it charged across the windless mounds, its wake a score of sand-trickling scratches . . . the spider was gaining on him, its pulsing egg of a body perched on running legs--an egg whose yolk swam with killing poisons. He raced on, breathless, terror in his veins.

  In Matheson's view, macrocosm and microcosm are terms which are ultimately interchangeable, and all of Scott's problems throughout the shrinking process become symbolized in the black widow spider which also shares Scott's cellar world. When Scott discovers the one thing in his life which has not shrunk, his ability to think and plan, he also discovers a source of power which is immutable no matter which -cosm it happens to exist in. His escape from a cellar, which Matheson succeeds in making as strange and frightening as any alien world, follows . . . and his final heartening discovery "that to nature there was no zero," and that there is a place where the macrocosm and the microcosm eventually meet.