Everyone's response to fiction or any other work of art is dependent in varying degrees upon both the work itself and individual experience. This is particularly true of one's response to the strange tales of Robert Aickman, where the deeply personal, irrational response to the images and their conjunction within the tale is as important as the objective, rational reading of Aickman's elegant prose.

My father was transferred from Michigan to Kansas when I was 2 years old. He was transferred back to Michigan 3 years later.  My first memories of Michigan followed my arrival by train into the town in which I was born. Dropping me off at my godmother's house, my father disappeared for the remainder of the week so as to prepare the house into which we were to move once my mother, brother and infant sister arrived.  The trip and layover in Chicago had been an eventful one for a 5 year old, but what I remember most vividly is that first night in this strange new place among these friendly, strange people. My godmother's daughter had recently wed; hence her room was given to me. In the hurry, the commotion and the fatigue, the only feature that had stood out for me in that room, at first, was an overabundance of pink and frills. I did not much care at that point: the bed looked soft and I was tired. My godmother, concerned lest I experience night terrors in this new environment, had thoughtfully provided a night-light. She turned off the overhead light, walked to the wall, then bent to turn on the light. A moment later, a gentle yellow glow framed her dark, stooping form. When she stepped away from the wall, stepped to and out the door, however, the entire room changed. Lined along every wall, along the floor, on shelves, on the sills and the dresser-tops, were more dolls than I had ever seen in my life, all turned toward the bed, each eye and fixed smile now lit from below. There were no dolls in our house in Kansas City. The only dolls I had seen were life-sized mannikins in the museum and shop-windows, all wearing the same sly smile, and the occasional baby doll, eyes rolled backward in feigned sleep, in the arms of one of the neighbor girls.  Surely, there was no movement, but I sensed the threat of it, and the bulb in the night-light was wont to flicker now and then, was it not? Did not that one move, just then,  just a little? Few nights since have seemed longer.

Nearly a year later, settled firmly into our new home, one block behind that of my godmother, we used to stare at the lone, high window atop the large, stone house next door. Trees kept it in shadow much of the year, so we were not entirely sure we did not occasionally see a light in it. On those rare occasions when daylight did strike those panes, all that was visible was a uniform steely glare with the hint of movement behind it. We never thought to ask any of the adults what lay behind that window. Inside, the house had more than its share of tortuous hallways and rooms tucked-away where you would not expect to find any more than a closet. Around one bend of the second floor, was one dark, extremely narrow staircase leading up to a distant door, beneath which we would see the faintest trace of gray light. The oldest daughter of the house told us, in a whisper, that we were never to ascend those stairs or open that door. She smiled at our frightened assent.  One day, alone in the house with the youngest daughter, I did ascend those stairs. Shifting light and shadow, filtered green through the opposing trees, swept the small room and its slanting ceiling. Never had a desk, a sweater slung across a chair and an empty bed, from which the outline of a recently recumbent body had not been entirely smoothed, seemed so ominous. And the smell in the room was almost indescribable - a heavy minty smell just barely covering another pungent, almost fishy odor as if it meant to disguise it. The effect was nauseous. At the first sound from below, I ran down the stairs and away from that stairway so quickly it is a wonder I did not spill headlong and fracture my neck. The daughter's laughter both  embarrassed and terrified me. What did she know about the denizen of that room that I did not know?

One day, a month later, the door opened while we were peering at it and a small seated figure called to us in a thick voice. I had no intentions of staying, but the youngest daughter proceeded up the stairs, dragging me by the hand.   At the top of those stairs sat a very old man with a harsh voice and a German accent, making sandwiches from hard-tack crackers, Limburger cheese and sardines. Now and then, he would refresh himself with a pinch of snuff.  Crumbs of snuff and crackers, smears of cheese and sardine streaked his broad charcoal sweater. He offered to share his snack with us, but we said, no, thank you, we had just eaten lunch. There was nothing menacing about him, but he did not appear to be quite natural to me. With his bowed shoulders and curved spine, he seemed to have folded in upon himself; this and the remarkable economy of movement with which he performed every task gave me the sense that he held great amounts of energy in reserve, like a coiled spring. To my child's mind, he was holding something at bay alone in that shadow-swept room and they were wise who asked us not to disturb him at it. He asked us one favor before excusing us by claiming fatigue. His shoulder pained him and he could not reach the precise spot he needed with the wintergreen oil. Would we mind? Not too long after this, he was dead. The room now seemed too empty to have held only that one person; it now seemed to hold a vacuum. When I dream about that stairway and its distant door, I see something altering the narrow strip of pale gray light beneath it and wake myself before I can reach the latch.

***

"The Inner Room" first appeared in THE SECOND FONTANA BOOK OF GREAT GHOST STORIES in 1966. At first glance, it is one of its author's simplest and most direct structures.

In true Aickman fashion, the tale opens with a breakdown. Lene, the narrator,  and her family are on a holiday excursion occasioned by Lene's birthday, when the motor of their automobile begins falling apart near the middle of nowhere, probably somewhere near the back of beyond, familiar to us from "The Hospice." Her Father, in his typical ineffectual fashion - he can pronounce six languages perfectly, but speak only one of them - waits half an hour before attempting to summon help,  attempts to signal only those least likely to assist, then allows a man to reach into and snap something off of the engine before towing them into town on the end of a rope "black and greasy as the hangman's." Lene, crying desolately at her lost chance to visit the beach, is led with her brother by her parents to a shop in search of gifts.

"It was not merely an out of fashion shop, but a shop that at the best sold too much of what no one wanted."    Robert Aickman "The Inner Room," THE COLLECTED STRANGE STORIES, VOLUME I (Tartarus Press/Durtro Press: 1999), p. 278.

The window display which attracts Lene's brother Constantin, is for display only and no amount of cajoling will interest the owner into selling any part of it. Inside this shop, which Lene's mother characterizes as "a shop that has died," is an "austere," doll house, dusty and neglected, rather like "a model for Pentonville gaol," and nothing like standard doll houses, all of which seem to have been patterned after the villa in which Lene's successful uncle lives. All of the windows are shut fast except for one on the ground floor from which a ragged doll has half emerged. The shopkeeper is none too eager to sell this item either, mumbling about having received it from an old woman who had to get rid of it. He agrees to sell it very cheaply in order to free up space in his shop.

Once installed in the Spare Room, Lene's doll house proves to be virtually impenetrable. All of the windows are now sealed shut, including that from which the doll had been sagging in the shop. Has the doll fallen back inside, fallen out and been lost or has it somehow escaped? None of the walls will come away, no portion of the roof will detach in order to provide a view of the house's insides.  The front door opens easily, but Lene has to use portions of a match-stick to force it closed once again. The place is a shambles and occupied by at least 9 dolls, 8 in the Drawing Room dressed in "woolen Victorian clothes" and one, other,  her hair in disarray and her posture clearly deranged, sits with her back to the window writing. One other room splashed and spotted with ink is apparently her bedroom. This unnerves Lene as much as the Trophy Room, every surface of which is covered with the heads and pelts of slain animals and over the mantelpiece of which is a portrait of  "an aggressive figure menacing the room." As carefully as she examines the house, she can discover no kitchen or room which could pass for one. In spite of her terror at the violence of the Trophy Room and the madness evidenced by the doll in the Writing Room, she pities the occupants of the house -

"Happy people, I felt even then, would not wear these variants of rust, indigo and greenwood." p. 282.

  - and determines to "be a good landlord."

During a thunderstorm within days of acquiring the house, Lene dreams of visiting it, "the wooden wedges" she had used to prop the door closed, set "jagged and swollen" beside the open doors of a full-sized house. Seemingly awakened from her dream, she hears unfamiliar footsteps outside her bedroom door and sees the back of the red-haired doll, life-sized, in the hall. Thereafter, she begins to hear the dolls tapping, stamping and creeping in the darkness. She locks up the house in the Spare Room and abandons it.

Her Father, his feelings wounded, because Lene would not allow him to find a way to open the house with his tools and "unskillful hand," now complains to her mother that she had been warned she would not retain interest the house. Her Mother replies,  "None of us can learn except by experience," as if she understands something about the situation unknown to the rest of the household.

Here appears a curious episode wherein Lene returns home from school to find the "dining-room table littered with peculiarly uninteresting printed drawings" that "curled up on themselves when one tried to examine them, and bit one's finger." Her brother is producing an axonometric projection of the house for a school assignment and discovers a hidden space, an inner room, for which the building's outside measurements will not account. Lene accounts for these drawings by comparing them vaguely to her own weak knowledge of geometry, but the passage seems to imply more than this. The drawings seem to act axonometrically by converging on their axes and biting Lene when touched, more the behavior of possible axonomancy - if we recall the use of sucromany in "A Roman Question" - than mere complex mathematics. Lene feels that "temporarily, I became a different person: confident, practical, simple." Furthermore, Lene's mother's reaction to this information about the hidden is to confirm the existence of the hidden room with her son and purposefully excluding Lene, as if for her own good. The next day, the doll house is gone, both parents claiming they had to sell it because the Father had lost another job.
 

"I began to perceive how relative and instrumental truth could be." p. 288.

Thirty years pass.
 

"It was, as I say, for two or three months in 1921, that I owned the house and from time to time dreamed that creatures I supposed to be its occupants, had somehow invaded my home." p. 289.

At age fifteen, Lene's father is run over by a car and killed. Her mother has returned to Germany, become increasingly sympathetic to the new regime and disappeared.

Lene has succeeded in fulfilling her dream to become a dancer, but soon gives it up after marriage -
 

"My husband aroused physical passion in me for the first time." p. 289.

He soon complains of her self-absorption, which she ascribes to remembering the perfection of "beauty, and gentleness, and depth, and capacity for love" that were her Mother's alone. He enters the military and disappears during World War II, the second of "two people who mattered to me in such very different ways, and who so unreasonably vanished."  Soon her brother is lost to her due to his Jesuit zealotry.

She had wanted to live vicariously through the doll house when it first arrived, reveling in the prospect of masked balls. Now, after thirty years, she has no longer believes in anything, but death, doubting if "there is endurance in anything but suffering."
 

"I was nearly lost, and this time I could not blame my father." p. 291.

Lene takes an Aickmanesque short cut, ostensibly through a storm-tossed, marshy wood, but straight out of consensus reality into the world of her own childhood nightmares. Seeking shelter and suspecting what she may find, she is led by prenaturally silent, regular greeny-pink lightning to the life-sized replica of the doll house. A head bobs out "like Punch from the side of his booth" first telling her she cannot come in, then inviting her at the prompting of another resident. As in her dream, wooden wedges lie beside the door. The floor is rotting away.  The women and the house's interior are even further raddled than her dolls and doll house had been. Each of the women is named for her birthstone, those who receive her in the Drawing Room and Topaz who is in another room "keeping the record." The list of stones, though ancient in tone,  follows no recognizable pattern -  Opal, the oldest, Emerald, Diamond, Garnet, Carnelian, Chrysolite, Sardonyx, Topaz and Turquoise, the youngest. Emerald, who admitted her, has the same dyed red hair as the figure seen outside her bedroom door and repeatedly fingers the narrator's clothing. The occupants speak to her with increasing agitation of how their negligent landlord "failed in the barest duty of sustenation," an ominous phrase suggesting both succor and sustenance which will be reinforced again and again before the tale ends.  The house is sustained by hatred:
 

"Our father was a man of measureless wrath against a slight. It is his continuing presence about the house which largely upholds us." p. 294.

Perhaps because she had been most successful in emerging into Lene's world, "everyone but Emerald can see that the work is done."  She pulls a card from her musty garment and hands it to Lene, who sees a photograph of herself as a child, through the heart of which someone has pushed a tiny bobbed needle.  Opal responds, as if  reveling in personally wringing the last drop of hope, love and life from her guest's heart, "Wouldn't you think her heart would have rusted away by now?"  This vaguely vampiric image is reinforced by the increasingly explicit references to the one room in the house their landlord has not ruined, the inner room, where they feast. They rejoice at this, rising from their "spidery bowers" and clapping their hands "like a rustle of leaves." Opal now invites Lene into this previously hidden and forbidden room from which her family had attempted to protect her so many years before. She demurs and Opal leads her out of the house, saying "Our father would never have let you go so easily, but I think we have done what we can with you." Pleading her innocence, Lene leaves the house and takes up her "painful, lost and forgotten way."

If we saw her now, would she resemble the house's previous owner, a sagging doll emerging from the house, alive but depleted?  She has been left with nothing, as if faced, like Chief Seattle, with "the end of living and the beginning of survival." Her pleas, "I did nothing. Nothing!" avails her naught, no matter how small her fault may have been. That she did nothing is precisely the reason she has been victimized by those who perceived themselves victims of her own self-absorption and indifference. Opal pronounces her guilt and her doom with a severity worthy of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu:
 

"It's what you do that counts, not what you feel about it afterwards."
p. 294.

What bothers me most about this tale, aside from the inordinate harshness of Lene's punishment, is the identity of Emerald and her sisters. Identified as they are with an odd assortment of months and of varying age, are they moments in Lene's life she has repudiated? And could that inner room be some aspect of Lene's self she cannot face without destroying herself? If this is so, how does that relate to the previous owner finding it necessary to rid herself of the house and the doll emerging from the ground floor window prior to purchase?

Their father, that "furious old man," with his multitude of trophies suggests the Greek hero, Orion, who boasted of being able to kill any animal on earth, or Nimrod who appears in GENESIS as "a mighty hunter before the Lord." Both are men of great power and even greater pride. The latter is associated in some traditions with the building of the Tower of Babel. Unfortunately, I have not been able to link either figure with at least 9 daughters, not that the dream logic in Aickman's tales always necessarily follows such a direct progression.

***

One final personal connection with the events in this story presents itself - my own childhood encounter with Emerald.  When I was 3 years old, we visited the beach cottage of family friends in Kansas. After paddling and running around like savages all day in the hot sun, my brother and I were so tired we could barely stand, but irritable and still very wound up. Therefore, my mother put my brother and me onto a bed in one of the cottage's back rooms for a nap until the adults were ready to call it a night and we could all go home.  I remember lying on a broad white towel with a large pink flamingo printed on it, watching my mother turn down the lighted hallway and head down the hall. The adults droned on in another room. After a short interval, a shadow moved up the hall, I heard the rustle of a skirt and saw the shape of an attractive young woman standing in the doorway. I thought at first it was my mother come to check on us, but the aureole of lit hair round the top of her head was the wrong color - my mother's hair was red and this woman's was dark. Even though her back was to the light, I could see her eyes as she stared into mine - the darkest, deepest, widest eyes I had ever seen, with glints of pale yellow light round the irises. A gentle smile crossed her lips. She stood at the door for a long time, with one hand at its edge, then moved forward to stand at the side of the bed before lying down beside me, placing her face on a level with mine.. I told myself that if I lay very still and did not make a sound, she could not really notice me, even though her eyes had never left mine once she first appeared in the doorway. She too lay still once she reached the bed. I tried holding my breath until the air in the room swam with gray spirals, but she remained at my side, always staring, always close, but never quite touching me. This seemed to go on for hours, until the sound from the other room changed timbre. At this, my companion rose from the bed and walked to the door, still regarding me over her shoulder. The faint light was now being disrupted by movement in the hall. The shape at the doorway entered the room, looked down at the bed and touched my face. It felt as if something broke inside my chest at that touch and I cried out in panic, only to find that this shape was my mother who denied meeting anyone in the hallway on her way to the room.

"I do not say that the whole of what goes before is so heavily filtered through later experience as to be of little evidential value. . . All I can do is to tell something of what happened, as it now seems to me to have been." p. 288.

Like Lene I am left wondering some days how fine is the line between waking and sleeping, or how what we view in one world might come to affect this other in which we live and breathe and love.
 

Jim Rockhill
6/20/01