Insofar
as houses we inhabit in nightmare represent the contents of our minds, the two
places we instinctively want to avoid are the attic and the basement—especially
the basement. Come to think of it, it’s
probably not a bad idea to stay out of the kitchen, the shower, the bedroom, or
any of the closets. The house, the human
mind—haunted or seemingly purified of
the obstacles that cloud its understanding—is the darkest and scariest place on
earth.
Thomas
Ligotti’s masterful 2003 story Purity,
contains at least two houses. There is reference to one haunted attic and
two vividly rendered basements. Like
much of his fiction, this one exhibits the internally coherent logic of dream,
which brings a unity to the work and increases its power to disturb the reader. Though quite effective on the level of horror
entertainment, there is much more going on in this ambitious story.
The
narrative includes discussion and application of a grim philosophical notion: that there are no new ideas, no originality,
no uncontaminated understandings of the world.
There is only endless “renting” and recycling of old notions. People are infested with “intellectual
cooties”—(memes?)—many of them constrictive and stifling. The story contains a sympathetic portrayal of
impoverished and oppressed people, but consistent with Ligotti’s world view,
there is no deliverance from their misery, only flight. The boy narrator Daniel has an intimate
relationship with two very different families, but a basement of horrors lies
underneath each one. Finally, Ligotti
uses the setting of each home to introduce and play with the idea of the egregore, which—in this story at least—may be an agent of grace. (See also Nethescurial
as an Egregore.)
The intricately
balanced, symmetrical structure of the story is impressive. In Daniel’s family, father-and-son and
mother-and-daughter are dyads that exist in completely separate worlds that do
not communicate. By the end of the
story, there is a victim left in the basement of both houses, bereft of cash,
sanity, and in one case, life. Both
families have to flee to new houses as a result of horrific events, a process
the author implies will occur again and again in the future.
There
are numerous vertical and horizontal parallels:
between what happens on the top floor and what lies underneath, and
between events that occur in the narrator’s home and in his friend Candy’s
house. She lives just a few streets away, but in a much more dangerous,
dilapidated neighborhood. All of the
“halves” are held together by the young narrator, who carries a prized
possession with him as he visits top and bottom, or this side and the other. Daniel is an ambassador, or perhaps an
interloper.
He also
an unusual child—the first subject in his father’s obsessive experimentation in
the basement. His father literally wants to “siphon” off the “three
principle obstacles”, mental impurities that prevent the human race from
obtaining “a pure conception of existence”.
The first two principles to be removed include nationalism and belief in God,
(or more broadly, the supernatural).
Ligotti elaborates on these and similar notions in many of his stories
and essays—see for example his 2010 nonfiction work, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Horror Contrivance.
Daniel’s
cognitive impediment is a minor one: he
wants to believe that the attic is haunted, perhaps by the spirit of someone
who once hanged himself up there, thereby creating a supernatural link to
another dimension. His father
impatiently dismisses this—dad knows best.
Instead he gives his son an explanation that describes what some
occultists would call an egregore: a force or substance that exists in certain
places that can be shaped and manifested by the human imagination. “The attic is not haunting your head,” he
says, “your head is haunting the attic.”
The father uses a contraption in his basement laboratory to siphon this
sensibility out of his Daniel’s mind, curing him. But he gives the stuff back to him in a
little jar for a keepsake, a nice touch.
(It is
no accident that later on, an evangelist, collecting donations for a religious
charity, happens to ring the wrong doorbell and becomes an unwitting subject of
the father’s gruesome research.)
Meanwhile,
the narrator repeatedly visits his friend Candy over in the “bad”
neighborhood. She is an African American
woman of uncertain age, one of a number of squatters inhabiting a decrepit and
hazardous shell of a house just a few blocks away. She is “sweet” to the boy, but her name
contrasts sharply with a life embittered by poverty, crime, and
oppression. The two are affectionate and
protective of each other, but like the father-and-son and mother-and-daughter
division in his own home, parts of their respective worlds do not overlap and
cannot be shared or communicated.
However, they do share the narrator’s prized possession, the little jar
of jelly-like substance, distilled egregore.
We
learn that the stuff operates differently depending on the individual. For the young narrator, it reproduces the
wonder and awe of the supernatural; for his friend Candy, comfort in her loss;
for the villain who arrives to threaten Candy and kidnap the boy, momentary
terror, then rejection.
There is a climactic encounter with the malevolent police detective who may also be a local child murderer, (compare to one of Ligotti’s earlier stories, The Frolic—see also Talismanic Terrors in Lovecraft and Ligotti). He is swiftly dispatched, becoming the second victim in the story, but Candy and her associates must now flee the premises and part with their young friend.
Daniel
and his family are reunited in the end after this disturbing adventure at Candy’s. They too must move because of what is now in their basement. His father has apparently had a nervous
breakdown related to the results of his peculiar research project. Interestingly, Daniel is finally interacting
with the other half of his family, his sister-and-mother. The story ends with an iteration of the third principle, the third impediment to
human progress. This is expressed in the
form of a jarringly homey platitude—it must be intended as bitterly ironic, its
sarcasm rising to toxic levels. It is a final
slap in the face of those complacent enough to believe they understand the
nature of human existence or have any hope for its future.
