“With the exception of two timid persons,—a sea-captain and a returned Californian, who immediately gave notice that they would leave,—all of Mrs Moffat’s guests declared that they would accompany her in her chivalric incursion into the abode of spirits.”
The jollity of being haunted, invited lock, stock and barrel as Mrs Moffatt’s boarding-house guests, to another home at a house numbered “No. —“, a no. — repeated several times in the story text, yes, a no number, a dash for nothing, a house once owned, we are told, by a famous bank fraudster….
Money in the bank is nothing, too, except one’s belief in it as a number representing a degree of wealth. The paper and coins that one often sees have a weight but are not the money itself as a wealth. The real meaning of wealth or wealth of meaning is a belief or faith in your mind that we all agree to exchange and barter something for nothing and vice versa. Not unlike meaning and words. To the infinite degree of maths in today’s crypto currency. (My ramblings, not necessarily the story’s.)
The narrator and his friend Hammond in the new house enjoy opium on the quiet, leading to positivity and beauty in their minds, until it doesn’t! Then the narrator and Hammond, amid melting streets, are beset by the thought of defining the greatest terror possible, and it’s a nothing shape that eventually terrifies the narrator like an invisible incubus, one that needs to be tied in knots or in what I have long called ligotti. (“Hammond stood holding the ends of the cord that bound the Invisible, twisted round his hand, while before him, self-supporting as it were, he beheld a rope laced and interlaced, and stretching tightly around a vacant space.”) A discoverable shape, though, this invisibility, with weight and movement, but, still yet, terrifyingly, it is nothing at all!
But this nothing-at-all was also a means for O’Brien to earn money, I guess, by frightening the . . . . out of his readers who would avidly seek this story to harvest its terror for themselves, even more than they sought Crowe’s ‘The Night Side of Nature’!
*
Meanwhile, as an aside, these two passages from the story somehow terrified me even more than the nothing of what-it-was, as terror can work in different ways…
“Once the black butler asseverated that his candle had been blown out by some invisible agency while he was undressing himself for the night; but as I had more than once discovered this colored gentleman in a condition when one candle must have appeared to him like two, I thought it possible that, by going a step further in his potations, he might have reversed this phenomenon, and seen no candle at all where he ought to have beheld one.”
“…beholding, as I once did, a woman floating down a deep and rapid river, with wildly lifted arms, and awful, upturned face, uttering, as she drifted, shrieks that rent one’s heart, while we, the spectators, stood frozen at a window which overhung the river at a height of sixty feet, unable to make the slightest effort to save her, but dumbly watching her last supreme agony and her disappearance.”
Terror, or other emotions, from the weight of words….
***
My review of O’Brien’s THE DIAMOND LENS: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/07/05/the-big-book-of-classic-fantasy/
My other reviews of miscellaneous horror literature: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
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