"The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe" by Thomas Ligotti
Only Ligotti could transform one of the most peaceful and beloved nights of the year into a time of terrible weirdness. As the narrator Jack recounts, when he was a child the kaleidoscopic play of holiday lights in the thick fog rolling off a Michigan lake furnished the "image and atmosphere defining the winter holiday: a serene congregation of colors whose confused murmurings divulged to this world rumors of strange and solemn services that were concurrently taking place in another." This sense of a world beyond amazes here, but later will be the cause of dreadful dismay.
Like Lovecraft before him, Ligotti achieves his effects through dexterous verbal weaving--the steady accretion of details of setting and character that jointly work to fabricate an ominous mood. The domicile of the titular matron here forms a perfect example of such unsettling description. According to Jack, his aunt's house "fit very nicely--when it existed--into a claustrophobic cluster of trees on some corner acreage a few steps uphill from Lake Shore Drive." Note how that curious qualification between the em dashes practically erases the house at the same time the narrator endeavors to establish its location. The reader is given pause, forced to ponder the significance of that phrase "when it existed"--is Jack merely conveying that his aunt's place his since been razed, or does the house somehow possess the ability to wink in and out of existence? Jack concludes this second paragraph of the story by recalling how Aunt Elise's window lights countered the camou-
flaging effect of a "soot-gray stone" facade: "one realized that a house in fact existed where before there seemed to be only shadowed emptiness." Here again is that same hint of
impermanence, an ontological flickering that proves central to the ensuing narrative.
The details of the house's interior are no less atmospheric, as a rich, childless widow's excess of Christmas spirit (she insists that her extended family "celebrate each Christmas Eve in a style that exuded the traditional, the old-fashioned, the antique") somehow manages to disturb. The "main room" that Elise "always occupied and dominated" during those December 24th gatherings strikes Jack as "a fantasy of ornamentation, an hallucinatorium in holiday dress." The giant fireplace, meanwhile, blazes "with a festive inferno." Wrapped presents are stacked at the foot of an ornate Christmas tree, and "year after year these seemed, like everything else in the room, to be in exactly the same place, as if the gifts of last Christmas had never been opened, quickening in me the nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape." Jack follows this statement about torturous stasis with the parenthetical admission: "Somehow I am still possessed by this same feeling of entrapment, and after all these years." Jack's use of the term "possessed" (which hearkens bark to the story's subtitle) resonates here, an early clue that Jack's narrative is not headed towards a happy ending.
Not unexpectedly, Jack's attitude toward, and description of, his aunt is anything but positive. The very sound of her voice is grotesque, leading "you to expect that at any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff which was clinging to its insides." Jack sketches in further unflattering features: "tight-haired head (like combed wires), calm eyes of someone in a portrait (someone long gone), high cheekbones highly colored (less rosily than like a rash), and the prominent choppers of a horse charging in a dream." Perhaps the key detail, though, is provided in the story's opening statement--"We pronounced her name with a distinct 'Z' sound." This emphasizing of "Elize" equates the woman with her "Elizabethan country manor" home (a linkage central to the weirdness of this tale), but also suggests "elision"--whose denotations of deletion/omission in turn point to Jack's ultimate unreliability as a narrator and hint at the reason for his faulty memory.
Even stranger than Elise's appearance is her annual manner of entertaining--telling fireside ghost stories to her guests. Jack recalls one of her tales in which she speaks of a solitary old man who lived nearby, and who had his house torn down "brick by brick, shingle by shingle" after his death. Elise speculates: "Maybe by destroying his house, making it disappear, the old man thought he was taking it with him to the other world. People who have lived alone for a very long time often think and do very strange things." Jack sardonically comments, "I'm sure no one except me thought to apply this final statement to the storyteller herself." At this point, though, even Jack doesn't realize just how appropriate his remark is.
Elise continues her story, narrating about a neighborhood-canvassing antiquarian who was long fascinated by the old man's home. One night, encountering "not a dark empty place" but one of "bright Christmas lights shining all fuzzy through the fog," the wanderer decides to knock on the door. The silent, queerly-smiling owner answers and admits him into the "narrow halls and long-abandoned rooms." Growing increasingly uncomfortable in his host's presence, the visitor glances down at his pocket watch, but when he look sup again, the old man has vanished. Hastening to exit, the antiquarian stops "dead in his tracks" when he spies the scene outside the front window: "Only the fog and some horrible, tattered shapes wandering aimlessly within it." He sees a wizened visage reflected in the window which he first assumes is that of the old man returning to stand behind him. "But then the young man realized that this was now his own face, and, like those terrible, ragged creatures lost in the fog, he too began to cry." Elise concludes the tale of possession: "After that night, no on around here ever saw that young man again, just as no one has ever seen the house that was torn down. At least no one has yet!" That last sentence is more than a storyteller's ghoulish touch; it foreshadows Jack's own ghostly experiences.
Elise's story has a hypnotic, enervating effect on Jack: "I felt tired," he says afterwards, "more tired than I'd ever been in my life." It "could almost have been hours later" when he finds himself wandering down a street whose fogginess serves as an objective correlative to his own disoriented state. "The fog formed impenetrable white walls around me," Jack notes, "narrow corridors leading nowhere and rooms without windows"--architectural particulars that recall the description of the old man's house in Elise's tale. Sure enough, Jack next spots a house strewn with Christmas lights, and its appearance is oddly frightening to him: "Why did this peaceful vision of inaccessible and hazy wonder, which possessed such marvelous appeal in my childhood, now strike me with all the terror of the impossible? The colors bled into the fog and were sopped up as if by a horrible gauze which drank the blood of rainbows." The terrifying tableau is completed by the sight of "her thin smiling face" in the front window. "Then I remembered," Jack asserts, his belated realization serving as the story's shocking revelation: "Aunt Elise was dead now and her house, at the instruction of her will, had been dismantled brick by brick, shingle by shingle."
"Uncle Jack, wake up," the following paragraph begins, and in the blink of an eye Ligotti performs a sleight of hand, shifting the scene to another time and place. Jack is now an elderly figure spending the holiday with relatives (other than Elise): "It was Christmas Eve, and as usual I had had a little too much to drink" and nodded off in a chair. Jack has a hard time shaking off his bizarre dream; he quietly retrieves his coat and makes his exodus. Next thing he knows, he's back in Grosse Pointe, haunting the empty lot where his aunt's house once stood. He has no memory of traveling there, but what he does recall is presented in a paragraph that conveys a sense of mounting dread and nightmarish helplessness:
Because what I do remember is this: standing before the door of a house which no longer existed. And then seeing that door begin to open in a slow, monumental sweep, receding with all the ponderous labor of a clock's barely budging hands. Another hand also moved with a monstrous languor, as it reached out and laid itself upon me. Then her face looked into mine, and the last thing I remember is that great, gaping smile, and the words: 'Merry Christmas, Old Jack!'With that last utterance, a traditional season's greeting is transformed into a sinister curse. Because Ligotti's story offers one more turn of the screw, as the final, italicized pargarph abruptly shifts into Elise's point of view: "Oh, I'll never forget the look on his face when I said these words. I had him at last, him and his every thought, all the pretty pictures of his mind." Here the reader realizes that the italicized comments interspersed throughout the narrative ( e.g. "Leave out nothing , Jack. Remember.") are not Jack's own injunctions but those of the imperious, consciousness-usurping Elise. She has stripped her nephew of his corporeality in order to feast on his mind: "Those weeping demons, those souls lost forever to happiness, came out of the fog and took away his body. He was one of them now, crying like a baby! But I have kept the best part, all his beautiful memories, all those lovely times we had--the children, the presents, the colors of those nights!" All that is now Elise's "to play with like toys according to my will." She rejoices: "Oh, how nice, how nice and how lovely to have my little home. How nice and lovely to live in a land where it's always dead with darkness, and where it's always alive with lights! And where it will always, forever after, be just like Christmas Eve." A wonderful time for Elise perhaps, but certainly not for Jack, sentenced to some eldritch limbo.
Ligotti has gifted readers with a gem of holiday weirdness, a story whose lines form dazzling strings of poetry (e.g. "the rich, rotting vibrations of Aunt Elise's cathedral-esque keyboard of Christmas Eves past."). "The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise" is a tale that can be cherished not just on the 24th of December, but on any night of the year.
***
Note: This story appears in Ligotti's collection The Nightmare Factory, from which all textual quotations here have been drawn.
No comments:
Post a Comment