Nightmare fuel from 1972.
Scott Corbett's The Red Room Riddle.
I am, and always have been, a giant scaredy-cat.
I am, and always have been, a giant horror fan.
Somehow, I embody these two states of being.
I’ve never understood it and I probably never will.
When I was a kid, I was OBSESSED with Scott Corbett’s The Red Room Riddle.
Even though it scared the pants off me every single time I read it, I went back to it again and again and again.
I just re-read it, and at first, I did a little gentle mocking of my childhood self.
Because, despite the mention of a murdered baby, it doesn’t start off particularly dark or scary.
But then.
But then, I hit about the three-quarter mark, and I started remembering why Baby Leila found it so scary.
And I didn’t just remember the fear, I felt it.
Bruce Crowell and Bill Slocum don’t start off as friends—in fact, Bill bullies the crap out of him.
Since this book was written in The Past—and is set even further back in The Past—Bruce eventually wins Bill over by standing his ground and giving Bill a black eye. Because that’s how you dealt with bullies in The Past.
After that, they’re inseparable. Bill is the Scully, all facts and nonfiction and science; Bruce is the Mulder, all atmosphere and feelings and woo-woo.
Halloween comes around, and they’re planning on having the Best Night Ever:
In those days, it was all tricks. When we went out on Halloween, we considered the entire world as our enemy. We were not vandals, though; we were not out to destroy property. We were out to bedevil people. And we did.
(I love that the definition of being REALLY bad is destroying property. Harassing and tormenting people? Totally fine.)
Anyway, they decide to swing by the local supposedly-haunted house, which is when we get our first little hint of what’s to come:
“Virgil Higbee got me to walk up with him once to have a look at it,” I went on. “His dad had been talking about it the night before. He said something terrible was supposed to have happened there long ago. As near as Mr. Higbee could remember, there was some story about a baby’s body that was found buried in the garden, all chopped up. Anyway, the house has been empty and boarded up for umpteen years, and it just sits there, because Virgil says there was some trouble about the estate and the case has been in the courts for years.”
If you can think of any other chapter books that have mentions of chopped-up babies, please let me know. As far as I can remember, this is the only time I’ve ever run into that particular detail. *shudder*
While they’re poking around this abandoned property, they meet a seriously unpleasant kid named Jamie Bly, and his somewhat threatening bulldog, Major. The three of them have a run-in with the caretaker of the house, who chases them with a broken axe handle and calls Jamie by name, but they all manage to escape.
After, Jamie invites them—if you can call it an invitation, it’s more like a dare—to come by his house later that night, which he claims is haunted.
And so, later that night, despite a lot of posturing and bluster about how completely not scared they are, and a lot of back-and-forthing about how they’re not going to go, they go.
Because this is a horror story, so of course they do.
Fast forward a bit. They’re finally in Jamie’s house, they’re headed up the stairs, and Bruce suddenly tunes into the gigantic tapestry hanging on the wall:
There seemed to be about an acre of it. It was so large the figures in it were life-size, and right away I knew what the tapestry’s picture was all about. A Sunday School story that had made an impression on me was the one about the time King Herod told his soldiers to go out and kill all the children who were two years old or under. The Slaughter of the Innocents, it was called.
In the trembling light of the lamp Jamie was carrying, the soldiers seemed to be actually moving, sticking their swords into babies and chopping them up while their mothers screamed. I certainly did not think much of his family’s taste in tapestries. No wonder they had a kid like him!
Gotta appreciate Scott Corbett’s attempt at Lightening The Mood with those last two sentences, good grief.
That all goes down before they even enter the Red Room; in case you’d like to experience it for yourself, I’ll stop my recap here.
(Minor Digression: I was this many years old when I learned that there is a whole lot of Slaughter of the Innocents-themed art. BEHOLD, Wikipedia has a gallery.)
On the one hand: sure, it’s dated. They say things like “Go soak your head!” and “He’s full of hooey!” and “Maybe what you need is a push in the face1!” and throw the word ‘sissy’ around like it’s… uh… 1972.
But there are also moments that transcend era, like this one, which I love:
Sometimes the only thing to do about grown-ups’ wit is to endure it, so we smiled sickly smiles and Bill said, “We just want to have a look at the house.”
And, unless my reaction was purely based in my childhood feelings, it’s still a genuinely creepy story.
ALSO!! It got adapted into a ABC Weekend Special in 1983.
We just watched it.
It is TERRIBLE, and makes the weakest episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? look like cinematic masterpieces. It bears little resemblance to the source material—no dead babies or references to the Slaughter of the Innocents—but the entire thing is on YouTube and INCLUDES the ads that ran with it, which are largely amazing:
Did I end up at IMDb, scrolling through fifteen seasons of ABC Weekend Specials?
You bet I did. There are a TON of them—including adaptations of Bunnicula and Pippi Longstocking, Runaway Ralph and Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, and what I can only imagine is a 30-minute commercial called The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin—and I think it’s fair to assume that I’ll be seeking a bunch of them out soon.
Let’s be honest, I might try to bring that one back.