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.