Danse Macabre (20 page)

Radio avoided the open-door/closed-door question, I think, because radio deposited to that bank of imagination rather than making withdrawals in the name of "state of the art." Radio made it real.

2

My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury—it was an adaptation of his story "Mars Is Heaven!" on
Dimension X
. This would have been broadcast around 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. "It's on too late," she said, "and it would be much too upsetting for a little boy your age."

At some other time Mom told me that one of her sisters almost cut her wrists in the bathtub during the Orson Welles
War of the Worlds
broadcast. My aunt was not going about it hastily; she could look out the bathroom window and had, she said later, no plans at all to make the cuts until she saw the Martian death machines looming on the horizon. I guess you could say my aunt had found the Welles broadcast too upsetting . . . and my mother's words echo down to me over the years like a voice in an uneasy dream that has never really ended: "Too upsetting . . . upsetting . . . upsetting . . ."

I crept down to the door to listen anyway, and she was right: it was plenty upsetting. Space travelers land on Mars—only it isn't Mars at all. It's good old Greentown, Illinois, and it's inhabited by all the voyagers' dead friends and relatives. Their mothers are here, their sweethearts, good old Clancey the patrolman, Miss Henreys from the second grade. On Mars, Lou Gehrig is still pounding them over the fences for the Yankees.

Mars is heaven, the space travelers decide. The locals take the crew of the spaceship into their homes, where they sleep the sleep of those perfectly at peace, full of hamburgers and hotdogs and Mom's apple pie. Only one member of the crew suspects the unspeakable obscenity, and he's right. Boy, is he right! And yet even he has awakened to the realization of this deadly illusion too late . . . because in the night, these well-loved faces begin to drip and run and change. Kind, wise eyes become black tar pits of murderous hate. The rosy apple cheeks of Grandma and Grandpa lengthen and turn yellow. Noses elongate into wrinkled trunks. Mouths become gaping maws. It is a night of creeping horror, a night of hopeless screams and belated terror, because Mars isn't heaven after all. Mars is a hell of hate and deception and murder.

I didn't sleep in my bed that night; that night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face. That was the power of radio at its height. The Shadow, we were assured at the beginning of each episode, had "the power to cloud men's minds." It strikes me that, when it comes to fiction in the media, it is television and movies which so often cloud that part of our minds where the imagination moves most fruitfully; they do so by imposing the dictatorship of the visual set.

If you view imagination as a mental creature of a hundred different possible forms (imagine, if you will, Larry Talbot not just condemned to turn into a wolf man at the full of the moon but into an entire bestiary on successive nights; everything from a wereshark to a wereflea), then one of the forms is that of a rampaging gorilla, a creature that is dangerous and totally out of control.

If this seems fanciful or melodramatic, think of your own children or the children of close friends (never mind your own childhood; you may remember events that took place then with some fidelity, but most of your memories of how the emotional weather was then will be utterly false), and of the times when they simply find themselves unable to turn off the second-floor light or go down into the cellar or maybe even bring a coat from the closet because they saw or heard something that frightened them—and not necessarily a movie or a TV program, either. I've mentioned the fearsome twi-night double-header already; John D. MacDonald tells the story of how for weeks his son was terrified of something he called "the green ripper." MacDonald and his wife finally figured it out—at a dinner party, a friend had mentioned the Grim Reaper. What their son had heard was
green ripper
, and later it became the title of one of MacDonald's Travis McGee stories.

A child may be frightened by such a wide sweep of things that adults generally understand that to worry about this overmuch is to endanger all relations with the child; you begin to feel like a soldier in the middle of a minefield. Added to this is another complicating factor: sometimes we frighten our kids on purpose.
Someday
, we say,
a man in a black car may stop
and offer you a sweet to take a ride with him. And that is a Bad Man
(read: the Boogeyman),
and if he stops for you, you must never, never, never . . .

Or:
Instead of giving that tooth to the Tooth Fairy, Ginny, let's put it in this glass of Coke.
Tomorrow morning that tooth will be all gone. The Coke will dissolve it. So think about it the
next time you have a quarter and . . .

Or:
Little boys who play with matches wet the bed, they just can't help it, so don't you . . .
Or that all-time favorite:
Don't put that in your mouth, you don't know where it's been.
Most children deal with their fears quite well . . . most of the time, anyway. The shape-changing of their imaginations is so wide, so marvelously varied, that the gorilla pops out of the deck only infrequently. Besides worrying about what might be in the closet or under the bed, they have to imagine themselves as firefighters and policemen (imagination as the Very Gentle Perfect Knight), as mothers and nurses, as superheroes of various stripes and types, as their own parents, dressed up in attic clothes and giggling hand in hand before a mirror which shows them the future in the most unthreatening way. They need to experience a whole range of emotions from love to boredom, to try them out like new shoes. But every now and then the gorilla gets out. Children understand that this face of their imagination must be caged ("It's only a movie, that couldn't really happen, could it?" . . . Or as Judith Viorst writes in one of her fine children's books, "My mom says there are no ghosts, vampires, and zombies . . .
but
. . ." ) . But their cages are of necessity more flimsy than those their elders build. I do not believe there are people out there with no imagination at all-although I have come to believe that there are a few who lack even the most rudimentary sense of humor-but it sometimes seems that way . . . perhaps because some people seem to build not just cages for the gorilla but Chase Manhattan Bank-type safes. Complete with time locks. I remarked to an interviewer once that most great writers have a curious childish louk to their faces, and that this seems even more pronounced in the faces of those who write fantasy. It is perhaps most noticeable in the face of Ray Bradbury, who retains very strongly the look of the boy he was in Illinois—his face retains this indefinable look in spite of his sixty-plus years, his graying hair, his heavy glasses. Robert Bloch has the face of a sixth-grade cutup, the Klass Klown, don't you know, although he is past sixty (just how far past I would not venture to guess; he might send Norman Bates after me); it is the face of the kid who sits in the back of the classroom—at least until the teacher assigns him a place up front, which usually doesn't take long—and makes screeching sounds on the top of his desk with the palms of his hands. Harlan Ellison has the face of a tough inner-city kid, confident enough in himself to be kind in most cases, but more than able to fuck you over royally if you give him any shit. But perhaps the look I'm trying to describe (or indicate; actual description is really impossible) is most visible on the face of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, while regarded as a "straight" writer of literature by the critical establishment, has nonetheless made the cataloguing of devils, angels, demons, and
dybbuks
a good part of his career. Grab a Singer book and take a good look at the author photo (you can read the book, too, when you're done looking at Singer's picture, okay?). It is the face of an old man, but that is a surface so thin you could read a newspaper through it. The boy is beneath, stamped very clearly on his features. It's in his eyes, mostly; they are young and clear.

One of the reasons for these "young faces" may be that writers of fantasy rather like the gorilla. They have never taken the trouble to strengthen the cage, and as a result, part of them has never accomplished the imaginative going-away that is so much a part of growing up, of establishing the tunnel vision so necessary for a successful career as an adult. One of the paradoxes of fantasy/horror is that the writer of this stuff is like the lazy pigs who built their houses of straw and sticks—but instead of learning their lesson and building sensible brick houses like their oh-so-adult elder brother (memorialized in his engineer's cap forever in my memory by the Disney cartoon), the writer of fantasy/ horror simply rebuilds with sticks and straw again. Because, in a crazy kind of way, he or she
likes
it when the wolf comes and blows it all down, just as he or she sorta likes it when the gorilla escapes from its cage. Most people aren't fantasy writers, of course, but almost all of us recognize the need to feed the imagination some of the stuff from time to time. People seem to recognize that the imagination somehow needs a dose of it, like vitamins or iodized salt to avoid goiter. Fantasy is salt for the mind.

Earlier on I talked about the suspension of disbelief, Coleridge's classic definition of what the reader must provide when seeking a hot shot from a fantasy story, novel, or poem. Another way of putting this is that the reader must agree to let the gorilla out of its cage for a while, and when we see the zipper running up the monster's back, the gorilla goes promptly back into its cage. After all, by the time we get to be forty or so, it's been in there for a long time, and perhaps it's developed a bit of the old "institutional mentality." Sometimes it has to be prodded out with a stick. And sometimes it won't go at all.

Seen in these terms, the set of reality-becomes a very difficult thing to manipulate. Of course it leas been done in the movies; if it had not been, this book would be shorter by a third or more. But by detouring around the visual part of the set of reality, radio developed an awesome tool (perhaps even a dangerous one; the riot and national hysteria following
The
War of the Worlds
broadcast suggests that it could have been so) * for picking the lock on the gorilla's cage. But in spite of all the nostalgia we might want to feel, it is impossible to go back and reexperience the creative essence of radio terror; that particular lock pick has been broken by the simple fact that, for better or worse, -,ve now demand believable visual input as part of the set of reality. Like it or lump it, we seem to be stuck with it.

3

We're almost done with our brief discussion of radio now—I think that to do much more would be to risk droning along like one of those tiresome cinema buffs who want to spend the night telling you how Charlie Chaplin was the greatest screen actor who ever lived or that the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns stand at the apex of the Existential/Absurdist movement—but no discussion of the phenomenon of radio terror, no matter low brief, would be complete without some mention of the genre's prime
auteur
—not Orson Welles, but Arch Oboler, the first playright to have his own national radio series, the chilling
Lights Out
.
Lights Out
was actually broadcast in the forties, but enough of the programs were rebroadcast in the fifties (and even in the sixties) for me to feel I can justify their inclusion here. The one I remember most vividly from its rebroadcast on
Dimension X
was "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World." Oboler, like so many people in the horror field—Alfred Hitchcock is another prime example—are extremely alert to the humor implicit in horror, and this alertness was never on better view than in the Chicken Heart story, which made you giggle at its very absurdity even as the gooseflesh raced up and down your arms.

"You remember that only a few days ago you asked me my opinion on how the world would end?" the scholarly scientist who has un *Or what about Hitler? Most of us associate him now with newsreel footage and forget that in the pretelevision thirties, Hitler used radio with a kind of malevolent brilliance. My guess is that two or three appearances on
Meet
the Press
or maybe one you're-on-the-griddle
60 Minutes
segment with Mike Wallace would have cooked Hitler's goose quite effectively.

wittingly perpetrated the horror on an unsuspecting world solemnly tells his young protégé as they fly at 5,000 feet in a light plane over the ever-growing chicken heart. "You remember my answer? Oh, such a scholarly prophecy! Mighty-sounding theories about cessation of earth rotation . . . entropy . . . but now, this is reality, Louis! The end has come for humanity! Not in the red of atomic fusion . . . not in the glory of interstellar combustion . . . not in the peace of white, cold silence . . . but with
that!
That creeping, grasping flesh below us. It is a joke, eh, Louis? The joke of the cosmos! The end of mankind . . . because of a chicken heart."

"No," Louis gibbers. "No, I can't die. I'll find a safe landing place—" But then, perfectly on cue, the comforting drone of the plane's engine in the background becomes a coughing stutter. "We're in a spin!" Louis screams.

"The end of all mankind," the doctor proclaims in stentorian tones, and the two of them fall directly into the chicken heart. We hear its steady beat . . . louder . . . louder . . . and then the sickly splash that ends the play. Part of Oboler's real genius was that when "Chicken Heart" ended, you felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time.

"Cue the bombers," an old ad for radio used to run (drone of bombers in the background; the mind's eye visualizes a sky black with Flying Forts). "Drop the ice cream into Puget Sound," the voice continues (whining, hydraulic sound of bomb bays opening, a rising whistle followed by a gigantic splash). "All right . . . cue the chocolate syrup . . . the whipped cream . . . and . . .
drop the maraschino cherries!
" We hear a great liquid squishing sound as the chocolate syrup goes, then a huge hissing as the whipped cream follows. These sounds are followed by a heavy
plop
. . .
plop
. . .
plop
in the background. And, absurd as it may be, the mind responds to these cues; that interior eye actually sees a series of gigantic ice cream sundaes rising out of Puget Sound like strange volcanic cones—each with a maraschino cherry the size of Seattle's Kingdome on top of it. In fact we see those disgustingly red cocktail cherries raining down, plopping into all that whipped cream and leaving craters nearly the size of Great Tycho. Thank the genius of Stan Freberg.