An Excessively Normal Childhood (according to Lafferty)

Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal, for he came very near the high norms themselves.  He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk.  All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel.  Abel was an imaginative, a creative boy.  He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world:  that is always important.  And he did not like empty spaces at all.  Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space he filled it with his imagination.  There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house.  He filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes.  He would eat apples and blackberries there till he got sick.

There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley.  A house had once stood there.  It had burned down: the house had faced on the side street.  Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house.  He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house and fixed their names to be Mrs and Mr Ostergoster.  He put a boy to live in the house.  He fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster.  Mikey fixed a cat.  Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away.  Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick.  Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man (he was a soldier such as they used to have in another time, not the sort of soldier they have now).  Mrs and Mr Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier.  Everybody began to have a big fight then.  Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

"You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters," Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into a secondary patina.  "There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them and remember how they burned in the little house there - ah, in the little house that is not there.  And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off that crazy man. With our reputation we can't afford to seem too old-line Southern.  And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog.  I remember that dog before they had to kill it.  It was one mean dog; its a wonder that you weren't bitten.  Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think that you're an odd kid."

But Abel wasn't an odd kid at all.  He was absolutely normal.  It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel.  The family seemed to attract ghosts and the neighbors objected.  (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts... Both his father and his mother had talent.

And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult.  An average child will lose such talents, but a normal child will retain them:  the two aren't the same.

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Rivers of Damascus' (1974)

'A monstrous noise like that could be bagged and sold to horror movies by the pound'

The house at 1313 East Hodges was large and empty.  The windows were broken out.  The doors sagged open.  Yet it once had been a glorious house.  Ancient nobility clung to it like old moss.  It was down in its luck, that house, but it maintained an attitude of grandeur.

"Oh, this is the old haunted house," Agata said.  "I remember it."

"In we go," cried the madam.  "This may be the new home of one or both of you.  Over the threshold with you, Conrad.  In, Agata, in!  Ah, you can hear old echoes in the air right now.  Come, come, friends in residence, greet us with the laugh."

The laugh came so powerfully that it knocked the three arrivals to their knees.  The scream (blood-thirsty and foully happy), the heart-freezing clatter, the gobbling laugh that curdled all the body juices - a laugh like that should not be allowed in hell.  That was the sound of a male Spokelspuk.  The tape had not done it justice.

"The element spuk in the name is spook, ghost, isn't it?" Agata asked.  She had to say something to disguise her shaking...

The other male Spokelspuk sounded.  His gobbling laugh was stronger than that of the first.

"No human nerves can stand much of that horror," Agata said...

A monstrous noise like that could be bagged and sold to horror movies by the pound.  The twin devil-ghost laughters were like ripsaws cutting the brain and meninges and every nerve.  They set up a screaming in each inch of the body.  Such two pillars of strident cacophony could not be topped.

Could they not?  The female sounded.  That cutting, killing, spirit-shriveling laughter set the very rats to tumbling fearfully out of the walls of the haunted house.  Sound could never be quite the same again, after it had included this.

"I wonder if I could do that?" Agata asked almost rationally.  Almost, but her eyes weren't rational now.  She bled copiously from the mouth from her self-bitten tongue and lips, and from the ears as they all did.  And there was white froth gathering in the mouth corners.

"Sure you could do it, Agata," Madam Hexe purred.  "And it is almost time that you do it now."

"And it is almost time that you do it now," Conrad echoed...

The horrible triple laughing of the Spokelspuks rose to a crest, then to a higher crest, then still higher.  Would it never break?

"Come here, mad Agata," Madam Hexe ordered in her own delight.  "You are ripe for it now.  Come here." The Madam was happy in her coming triumph.  She was one happy medium.


-R. A. Lafferty, 'Endangered Species' (first published in Galaxy science siction magazine, May 1974)

[The other day I was compiling a list of all the stories by Lafferty that were published in horror anthologies and magazines of the 1960s and 70s - there's a surprising lot - when my 'google alert' for Lafferty linked to a discussion about this very topic on the Vault of Evil: Brit Horror Pulp Plus! site.  We've been having a good discussion about it there and none other than the renowned Ramsey Campbell himself has weighed into the thread, reminiscing about when he chose Lafferty's 'The Funny Face Murders' to be included in his anthology New Terrors 2 (1980).  The excerpt above is from one of Lafferty's many stories that thematically could have been included in such horror anthologies also.  I'm hoping to do a series of posts on Lafferty and Horror in the near-ish future.]