The Other

by Thomas Tryon

  “Who are you?” the voice demanded cunningly.

  “I’m me. Niles. Niles Perry.”

  “Are you? Are you really?” This with a sly chuckle, light, mocking, eminently satisfied. Niles was bewildered. Wasn’t he? Really? Wasn’t he Niles Perry? If not, who then? Who else could he be? Why the chuckle? What was so funny? What was the joke?

  A grating sound came from above; he strained in the scarlet darkness.

  “Listen! Somebody’s up there! Listen—hear?”

  “You’re crazy.” Another chuckle.

  “There is! I can hear them! I can!” And so he did; really heard it: the grating of metal along the graveled drive, the rusty creak of door hinges, the bump-bump-bump of the can dragging over the wooden floor; a moment’s silence, then the heavy trapdoor lifting . . . upward . . . a slowly widening arc . . .

  His shiver was exquisite horror. He would close his eyes and count to five, then open them and see who would be there.

  One. Two.

  He heard the low chuckle in the darkness. “It’s not, you know.”

  “Not?” he echoed foolishly. He was to be disappointed, then?

  He stared at the red walls, and in the dancing light saw, gathering out of nothingness, shapes hideously alluring, gigantically filling the room, saw, overhead, serpents, anaconda-long, never warm, half-sloughed skins like glittering chain mail, coiling undulant soft spotted wreaths around the beams, salmon tongues slicking, into mortise and tenon. And Peregrine, Peregrine himself, amber-eyed Falcon Peregrine, come crying, cawing, swooping, brazen bird, audaciously rustling those pinions that were the measure of the boy’s madness. He beat at the bird, striking it away, flailing, ducking, writhing, trying to cover eyes, ears, to smother, shut out sight and sound.

  Remember.

  He heard the word, and as it hung in the air, it broke apart into a chain of echoes— remember—remember—remember—remember—

  “Don’t you remember?” Holland was saying, his voice coldly demanding.

  “What? Remember what?” Why did he suddenly feel doomed? “Remember what?”

  Three. Four.

  “Holland?” he implored. “Help. Help!”

  “You forgot. Didn’t you?” He sounded almost angry. “You forgot.”

  “Yes.” Meekly he admitted it; he had forgotten. But what? What was it he had forgotten?

  “It’s all right, Niles Alexander,” he heard Holland’s voice, suddenly comforting as the trapdoor was at last thrown back. “We all have things that we forget, or”—very grave now, a little soothing, and not at all mocking—“things we would like to.”

  “Behold.”

  And Niles looked up and beheld.

  She was standing there, just at the edge of the opening. A vision. That is to say, she appeared a vision: her pale form lighted by the lantern hanging below; her hair swinging about her shoulders, and the wings, the lofty white wings, rising and falling with the slow movement of her arms. He got up, moved toward her, as though walking in a dream, his eyes intent upon her face, her countenance so radiant, so serene, so peaceful, so—

  No. Wait. Wait!

  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Where was the radiant expression, the look of peace? Could this really be her? Her face was sad, its expression the most sorrowful, most pitiful, most wildly penitent imaginable; her eyes filled with tears, while she bent low above him; behind her fluttering wings—no, no radiance, no halo, only endless darkness there.

  Her wings beat desperately. It seemed she beckoned him. Her tears fell faster; ah, but he would stop them, he thought, for now there could never be tears again, surely; somehow he must make her stop. But they continued, the tears, wetting his hands, soaking his uplifted face. Bitterly they stung, dropping like rain, drenching the red snow, running in rivulets, between the stones, drowning the room; and it came to him then, peering up into her eyes as she leaned toward the light, that the tears would never stop, they would flow on forever, like an everlasting river, like Acheron; and lo, the dream dissolved, became a nightmare.

  Yet he was awake! Stop! What was she doing? The wings beat deliriously for the brief instant she hovered there. Stooping, she seized the lantern, and he, crying out, backed away to the wall while, in one explosive motion she hurled down the lantern, then in a swift, unlooked-for rush, wings rippling, shuddering, threw herself after, and the snow and the stones melted, the apple cellar itself surrendered its form, and the torrent of tears became one vast melting glow. Arms flung out against the blazing light, his back flat against the little door, he was suddenly reminded of that which he had forgotten, the one thing he had tried so hard to remember, and which in a split second, in this one particular moment, was disclosed to him. The fact was, he was going to die, and his dying wish, that wish, the very last thing he had desired to see, had been beheld: the Angel of the Brighter Day.

  It had come to pass. Verily, as though he had stood at Lourdes, he had seen a vision. And this is a very rare thing, for to see such a vision, to know, is not given to many in their lifetime; but who was there then to tell him it had come to him, this vision, not as she whom he awaited, but as the Angel of Death?

  Truly, it was a revelation.

  Miss De Groot is quite late tonight. Unusual for her. Do you notice how the lilac has deepened to blue, the blue to purple, the purple to black? Ombré, the French say, though I don’t know where I got that word. I can no longer make out the stain on the ceiling, that rust-colored watermark with the familiar face peering down at me. Is that significant? I wonder what Miss DeGroot would say about that. Oh, I have remembered—Miss DeGroot thinks the stain is shaped like the Belgian Congo; imagine—though I know they probably have a new name for the Belgian Congo too these days. I can’t keep up with the way they change the map, can you? I mean, given my choice, I have always preferred Leghorn to Livorno, Konigsberg to Kronstadt. But I’m not at all convinced that that blotch is like the Belgian Congo, whatever Miss DeGroot may say; to me it still looks like a face.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re not interested in Miss DeGroot, or the face on the ceiling. You’re thinking about the old lady. You’re thinking Ada could not have committed such horror, taking her own life that way in order to take that of the boy, appointing herself at once judge and executioner, dragging along the drive the heavy can of gasoline, summoning, God knew how, the strength to raise the trapdoor, pouring the gasoline down into the apple cellar—certainly a tinderbox with all that cattail stuff around—crashing down the lantern, pitching herself into the holocaust. How could she?

  But she did.

  Such was her will. People afterward said she was crazy; and I agreed. Completely out of her mind to do such a thing. Thinking back over that last, tragic event, I am left with the thought of that wistful phrase of hers about the heart’s immolation; she was her own Brünnhilde, and I have never doubted she did it for love.

  As it happened, her neck was broken in the fall to the stone floor; she never felt the flames. Myself, I was fortunate to have escaped. You may imagine the terror I experienced, and my subsequent relief as I backed away to the Slave Door, remembering only in time that Uncle George’s padlock, which secured the hasp outside, had been sawed off with the hacksaw to accommodate the Chan Yu disappearing trick. It’s true: of just such minor happenstances does our life consist. Ironic, isn’t it? You will perhaps understand my being at pains to leave the Slave Door open behind me, that there might be sufficient draft drawn through the trap and down into the room.

  Afterward, I suggested to Mrs. Pennyfeather that it might be fitting if Professor Lapineaux played “Rock of Ages” at the funeral. Naturally, Mr. Tuthill recited the Twenty-third Psalm.

  Poor Ada.

  With her death, I supposed that whatever story I chose to tell would be believed. I must confess that it was I who suggested that she must have been crazy, and I was believed—up to a certain point. Soon after, however, thinking it safe to retrieve the contents of the Prince Albert tobacc
o tin—the ring, the finger, the glasses which had belonged to Russell, a ribbon from the baby’s dress, the evidence, in short—from the toe of one of the rubber hip boots hanging on the tool-shed wall, where it had been safely hidden, I was surprised in this act by Mr. Angelini, he who had seen all from the very beginning, he who had been certain he’d hung his pitchfork back in its proper place on the wall.

  And so it was Mr. Angelini who confided to Uncle George his discovery. Now it only remained for Uncle George to initiate the proper steps, which is how I came, in time, to this place.

  Let me say I was not sorry to leave the house on Valley Hill Road. I found it, after a while, too large, too noiseless, too—dead. It seemed to be growing, enlarging and expanding, the whole house, and I felt its emptiness oppressive, as though conspiring against me, and I realized how much of my time was spent looking for someone, someone in the house, listening, waiting, seeking around corners, up a stairway, along a corridor, behind a door. But no. There was nothing. I was alone. Truly; though there were others in the house, I was alone. And lonely, let me admit it. I think it was then that I began to miss him, felt the lack of him, began to seek him out, to look for him, all through the house, the barn, the fields, down by the river. But he was gone, of course, he truly was dead then, he who I had been, the Other; and I became aware then how really alone I was. Sometimes I would think I saw him, a fleeting glimpse only, a flash, just for a brief moment, standing there, there in the darkened corner of a closet, or there, winding the grandfather clock as he used to, or there, in the storeroom, wearing the pink shirt and playing the old Victrola. But it wasn’t really him. Winnie saw to keeping the clock wound, for who else could be bothered? The Victrola stood covered with dust in the storeroom—that silent room—and no corner of any closet harbored the Other. He was gone; I could not conjure him up, as he had me. He was gone, and, sadly, I missed him. I was alone then, in the house, and I have been alone ever since.

  Look. Do you see the moon? I was certain there would be one. Lying here on my bed, I can see it clearly. Interesting, how its light catches on the bars outside my window, making them blacker and thicker and so much more stern-looking. Hateful place, this. But Miss DeGroot says I’m “family,” meaning, I suppose, that I have been here that long. That’s Miss DeGroot’s little joke; but I don’t think it’s terribly funny.

  With a moon tonight, perhaps there’ll be a sun tomorrow. I still remember that day when the moon and sun both showed themselves together. I’ve never seen it since. I hope the sun does come out. I do hope it. As I hope for . . . well, no, not really, you know. I don’t hope. As I said, I have been lonely here, and Miss DeGroot doesn’t really count for very much. The coldness, the grayness, the sink, the radiator—what the hell. It’s a terrible place, as I said, and I do not care to have to do with the others who are here also. I could, of course, if I chose, am in fact urged to, but I do not, will not. They laugh at me in the halls and downstairs, laugh at me behind the wire grill, annoy me; annoy me because they will not call me by my name as Miss DeGroot does. Call me his name—Niles; Niles, for God’s sake, isn’t that crazy? When I have told them, for years have told them, my name is Holland. Holland William Perry. But they are like that here in Babylon. (By coincidence, Miss DeGroot knew Grandmother Perry when she was sent here, so you know she’s got to be pretty old, having been around all that time.) So I keep to myself. Mostly I like to watch the Shadow Hills buses end their route at the corner and turn around. Oh yes, they took the streetcars off years ago, but other than that nothing much has changed. It’s still the end of the line.

  AFTERWORD

  I first read Thomas Tryon’s novel The Other the summer I turned thirteen. I knew little about the book or its author. I didn’t know that Tryon had been a well-known actor who had stopped performing after he became a writer. I had never seen the TV series he starred in, Texas John Slaughter, or his various films, like The Cardinal, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination in 1963. I wasn’t even aware that The Other had been a huge best seller—more than 3.5 million copies—and that the book had been, along with Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, one of the forerunners of the horror-novel craze of the 1970s.

  I was living then in Nebraska. It was 1977, and I, fairly ignorant and innocent, had picked up a Fawcett mass market edition of the book in a bargain bin for twenty-five cents. I was whiling away my summer in a tiny isolated village, not that different from Tryon’s Pequot Landing, and I was interested, mostly, in reading a scary story about twins. Twins were spooky, I thought, but also fascinating. Here was Niles Perry, the “good boy”—I identified with him, of course—and then there was his brother, Holland, who was dark and secretive and sly. I was the only kid my age in my little town, and I kind of wished that I had a daring and reckless brother. And so I sat under a tree in the backyard and tipped myself into a nightmare.

  I can vividly remember how deeply the book impressed me and messed with my head. “Legerdemain” was a word I discovered in the pages of The Other, a word that even now I associate with the Gothic, dreamlike world of the Perry family farm. Legerdemain—sleight of hand—a good word for this book, a novel that is never quite as it seems, a novel that fools the reader repeatedly with its chimeric form, its elusive shifts and turns.

  What kind of novel is this, after all? At first, it seems to be a fairly traditional psycho-killer potboiler, structured around a series of chilling, macabre, and gruesome deaths. In particular, it seems to resemble the “psychopath next door” sub-genre, in which a seemingly innocuous neighbor or family member is revealed to be, in fact, a cold-blooded killer—think of Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, or the young Ripley of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Some reviewers compared The Other to William March’s 1955 The Bad Seed, a novel about a murderous little girl who has a genetic disposition toward evil, and readers who first approached Tryon’s book might have expected the kind of campy thrills provided by March’s book and its subsequent film incarnation, in which blond and pigtailed Patty McCormack embodied the tap-dancing little sociopath as a kind of satanic, Shirley Temple–like moppet.

  But while The Other certainly delivers its share of grotesque, Grand Guignol set pieces—death by pitchfork, the “changeling” in the wine cask—it’s also clear that it is after something more nuanced than a series of spine-tingling murder tableaux.

  As the novel progresses, we realize that its premise has slowly begun to shift beneath us. While it follows the structure of the psychopath novel, with its escalating body count, the identity of its central killer comes increasingly into question. The question is not merely “What will Holland do next?” but “What is Holland?”

  Are we reading a ghost story? A story of demonic possession? A tale of madness and delusion? Stealthily, the narrative begins to look more and more like a novel of hauntings, in the tradition of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. As in those novels, the supernatural element—the phantom—is ambiguous. Are the figures that seem to haunt James’s governess and her young charges really spirits? Or are they merely figments of the young woman’s fevered imagination, poisonous hallucinations with which she infects the children in her care? Is Jackson’s Hill House truly malevolent, or is it simply a reflection of the unstable mind of Eleanor Vance as she drifts into psychosis?

  But ultimately The Other is not about the supernatural. Instead, it moves more deeply into the possibility of the main character’s madness. And by the third part, it has become clear that what we are reading is a story of self-delusion—not unlike Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness, Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, or Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. All three of these books feature shocking twists revealing that the main characters are not at all what they had seemed to be.

  To this end, Tryon makes crafty use of narrative voice. The book undulates through a number of different perspectives, but there are two central viewpoints: the first is that
of an initially unidentified speaker who directly addresses us at the beginning of each of the novel’s three parts; the second, which makes up the majority of the book, is that of a limited third-person narrator. The first voice belongs to a forty-eight-year-old asylum inmate. It’s petty, aggrieved, critical, cynical, full of toothless sarcasm, a parody of adult worldliness. The second voice, most often presented from the viewpoint of twelve-year-old Niles Perry, is that of recalled childhood, a memoir voice filtered through a sieve of fairy tales and adventure stories, boyish mystery and romance.

  All of which is to say that it is the very structure of the book that messes with our heads, shifting as it does from one genre tradition into another, one voice to another, toying with our expectations, then upending them. The novel is a tour de force of design, a cunning, tricked-out patchwork of thriller tropes—evil twins and ghostly possession, magic acts and carnivals and mysterious packages, madness and murders.

  Slowly, the reader becomes aware of the hypnotic incantation of images: the candlelit, crypt-like apple-cellar hideout, with its “mottled wall, the whitewash flaking away in leprous patches . . .the smell of dust and mold and withered coppery fruit scattered about . . .an irregular stack of empty bushel baskets climbed the wall like a huge caterpillar”; the Winter Kingdom of adventure icon Doc Savage, created of cattail-fluff snow; the cupola of the abandoned granary, with its cooing of fantail pigeons, where Russell’s family of pet white rats have been adopted by an old Belgian hare “who thought she was their mother.” There is the murky green lake below the platform flooring of the icehouse, where Niles imagines “primordial ooze, spawning strange beings down below, a race of quasi-lunged, half-legged creatures dragging themselves along the bottom”; the dried-up well, “the peaked roof . . .rusted with disuse, the bucket . . . cracked and leached”; the “glamorous” storeroom, “crammed to overflowing with sheet-draped trunks . . .a dress dummy, a wheelchair, a gilt and painted rocking horse, a tangled marionette dangling on the mirror door of a wardrobe.”