The Haunted And The Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1859
The magic trick:
Analyzing the seemingly supernatural with a logical, scientific approach
Happy Halloween!
I read in a Library of America Story of the Week essay that Henry James considered this, “The Haunted And The Haunters,” to be the finest ghost story ever written.
Well, of course I had to check it out. Best ghost story ever might be overstating it a bit, but it’s an excellent, fascinating story – and supremely modern in its scares.
The story actually feels more to me like a template for the future Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle than it does for Henry James’ work. The structure is pure Sherlock. Establish something weird and mysterious early in the story. Make it so crazy that it almost seems supernatural. But instead of writing it off as ghostly, attack the situation with science. Look for the logical solution.
Where the story goes from there, I won’t spoil. It really is excellent stuff.
But the mere idea of approaching supernatural with scientific analysis makes for an interesting philosophical consideration of human existence – and makes the whole thing that much scarier.
And that’s quite a trick on Bulwer-Lytton’s part.
The selection:
The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the aperture there came the form of an aged woman. In her hand she held letters,—the very letters over which I had seen the Hand close; and behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen, and then she opened the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned,—bloated, bleached, seaweed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a corpse; and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable, squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked in the old woman’s face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a face of youth,—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow darted forth, and darkened over these phantoms as it had darkened over the last.
Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow,—malignant, serpent eyes. And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them: larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water,—things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each, other; forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentred all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in nought else around me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of intense, creative, working evil, which might crush down my own.
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