Confronting the nightmare on a daily basis and on a conscious level is just not something people are wont to do as a rule. A small number of us, however, have become devout researchers of all types of nightmares and, perhaps due to some fluke or flaw of character, wish to release our findings in the form of what have become casually known as horror stories. The following observations are drawn from my own studies in this area of human experience.
However frightening nightmares may be, plain old horror is not the entirety of their essence, nor is it that of the horror story. Of course, there must be something horrific about them, whether it is being stalked by someone through dark streets or groping your way through an ever-narrowing tunnel or finding yourself receiving a ghostly visitation as mentioned earlier. Yet the quality of a nightmare lies neither in these nor in any other hypothetical horrors as such. What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.
To give a relatively common example, we might consider the plot of a traffic accident, an event that is commonly experienced as dreamlike in the beginning, as you find yourself suddenly moving along a track of time quite different from the one you knew before the accident began. You may be traveling along slippery roads and then, without warning, find yourself sliding across several lanes of oncoming traffic. You know in principle that such things can easily happen. They may even have happened to you on a prior occasion. You know that they happen to other people all the time. Nevertheless, this accident was not in your plans, which is why it is called an accident. It seems like a mistake, even if it could be explained by a cause-and-effect confluence of circumstances. It was a mistake because you had an idea of how things were supposed to be that day, as you do every day, and spinning helplessly in your car while others try to avoid a collision with you, perhaps unsuccessfully, was not part of your schedule. One moment you had a firm grip on things; the next moment you are careening toward who knows where. You are not filled with horror, not yet at least, as you spin along the pavement that is slick with rain or snow. At this point, everything is all strangeness. You have been taken to a different place from where you were, and you are no longer in control. Anything could happen now. That is the suspicion that creeps into your thoughts as a nightmare begins. Nothing is safe and nothing is off limits. All of a sudden something was set into motion that changed everything into that which was not meant to be, at least according to your deluded conception of your life and its “meaningful” trajectory. Yet these things happen, as everyone knows. They have always happened and are always happening.
But we isolate the nightmare by calling it imaginary and denying it a place in our real life; we anchor ourselves in a place far away from it, where such “realities” as God and Country rule the wavelengths; we distract ourselves from it by confining our minds to places where it is not; and we sublimate the nightmare by placing it in stories and paintings and other devisings that we may put away at will. If we neglected to do this, we would be living at all times in a world of nightmare… a world that was not meant to be and yet is so. And thus we conspire with ourselves and against ourselves to deny the most obvious facts of the nightmare—death, disease, damage, and derangement. The horror story, by obeying the terms of the nightmare, is a way that, deviously, some people use to think about the unthinkable, to face what we otherwise would not choose to look upon, and, more importantly, to control and give meaning to that which can neither be controlled nor harbors any meaning. It is a perverted mode of defending ourselves from what would demean and destroy us, from what cannot be helped and should never have been—life itself in all its inane grotesquerie. However, for all our efforts to overwrite what has been written, to remake what had been made, to change what cannot be changed, and accept what is unacceptable, we have succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. No matter how many paper monsters we face down, no matter how many nightmares we shake off, the best we can do is open the pages of Poe and recite —with a resigned and sardonic calm, if we can manage it—those words from “The Conqueror Worm” that tell us a story in which there is “much of Madness, and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot.”
The Last Feast of Harlequin
My interest in the town of Mirocaw was first aroused when I heard that an annual festival was held there which promised to include, to some extent, the participation of clowns among its other elements of pageantry. A former colleague of mine, who is now attached to the anthropology department of a distant university, had read one of my recent articles (“The Clown Figure in American Media,” Journal of Popular Culture), and wrote to me that he vaguely remembered reading or being told of a town somewhere in the state that held a kind of “Fool’s Feast” every year, thinking that this might be pertinent to my peculiar line of study. It was, of course, more pertinent than he had reason to think, both to my academic aims in this area and to my personal pursuits.
Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. Every year for the past twenty years I have attended the pre-Lenten festivals that are held in various places throughout the southern United States. Every year I learned something more concerning the esoterics of celebration. In these studies I was an eager participant— along with playing my part as an anthropologist, I also took a place behind the clownish mask myself. And I cherished this role as I did nothing else in my life. To me the title of Clown has always carried connotations of a noble sort. I was an adroit jester, strangely enough, and had always taken pride in the skills I worked so diligently to develop.
I wrote to the State Department of Recreation, indicating what information I desired and exposing an enthusiastic urgency which came naturally to me on this topic. Many weeks later I received a tan envelope imprinted with a government logo. Inside was a pamphlet that catalogued all of the various seasonal festivities of which the state was officially aware, and I noted in passing that there were as many in late autumn and winter as in the warmer seasons. A letter inserted within the pamphlet explained to me that, according to their voluminous records, no festivals held in the town of Mirocaw had been officially registered. Their files, nonetheless, could be placed at my disposal if I should wish to research this or similar matters in connection with some definite project. At the time this offer was made I was already laboring under so many professional and personal burdens that, with aweary hand, I simply deposited the envelope and its contents in a drawer, never to be consulted again.
Some months later, however, I made an impulsive digression from my responsibilities and, rather haphazardly, took up the Mirocaw project. This happened as I was driving north one afternoon in late summer with the intention of examining some journals in the holdings of a library at another university.
Once out of the city limits the scenery changed to sunny fields and farms, diverting my thoughts from the signs that I passed along the highway.
Nevertheless, the subconscious scholar in me must have been regarding these with studious care. The name of a town loomed into my vision. Instantly the scholar retrieved certain records from some deep mental drawer, and I was faced with making a few hasty calculations as to whether there was enough time and motivation for an investigative side trip. But the exit sign was even hastier in making its appearance, and I soon found myself leaving the highway, recalling the roadsign’s promise that the town was no more than seven miles east.
These seven miles included several confusing turns, the forced taking of a temporarily alternate route, and a destination not even visible until a steep rise had been fully ascended. On the descent another helpful sign informed me that I was within the city limits of Mirocaw. Some scattered houses on the outskirts of the town were the first structures I encountered. Beyond them the numerical highway became Townshend Street, the main avenue of Mirocaw.
The town impressed me as being much larger once I was within its limits than it had appeared from the prominence just outside. I saw that the general hilliness of the surrounding countryside was also an internal feature of Mirocaw. Here, though, the effect was different. The parts of the town did not look as if they adhered very well to one another. This condition might be blamed on the irregular topography of the town. Behind some of the old stores in the business district, steeply roofed houses had been erected on a sudden incline, their peaks appearing at an extraordinary elevation above the lower buildings. And because the foundations of these houses could not be glimpsed, they conveyed the illusion of being either precariously suspended in air, threatening to topple down, or else constructed with an unnatural loftiness in relation to their width and mass.
This situation also created a weird distortion of perspective. The two levels of structures overlapped each other without giving a sense of depth, so that the houses, because of their higher elevation and nearness to the
