The Grammar of Participation

The walk was Aickman’s idea. He said he could not discuss folk horror indoors, that something about fluorescent lighting made the entire genre impossible, and Enriquez had looked at him as though he were confirming a suspicion she had carried for years about the English. But she agreed, and so we walked along a canal towpath outside London in November, the water brown and sluggish beside us, the sky the colour of wet cement. A narrowboat was moored fifty yards ahead, its chimney producing a thin thread of woodsmoke. Someone had planted geraniums in a window box that had no business surviving this weather, and yet they persisted, red and stubborn against the grey.

“The thing we have not discussed,” Aickman said, “is the question of address. The brief says second person. I am told this is mandatory.”

“You don’t like it,” Enriquez said.

“I don’t dislike it. I distrust it. Second person in horror has become a kind of parlour trick. You open the door. You see the shape. You feel the cold. It is meant to make the reader complicit, and instead it makes them aware of being manipulated. The machinery is too visible.”

“That’s because most writers use it wrong,” Enriquez said. She walked with her hands in her jacket pockets, her stride shorter than Aickman’s, which gave her an appearance of controlled impatience, as though she were tolerating the pace rather than setting it. “They use ‘you’ as a camera angle. A way to put the reader’s eyes where they want them. But ‘you’ is not a camera. ‘You’ is a finger pointed at someone’s chest.”

I had been thinking about this since the brief arrived — the question of what second person could do in a folk horror story that first or third could not. I’d tried writing the opening three different ways the night before, and the second-person version was the only one that frightened me, and I wasn’t sure I could explain why.

“Can I read you something?” I said. “Three sentences. Same scene. Three persons.”

Aickman gestured for me to continue, a slight inclination of the hand that managed to convey both permission and the reservation of future objections.

“Third person: ‘She walked through the village and noticed the doors were marked with chalk.’ First person: ‘I walked through the village and noticed the doors were marked with chalk.’ Second person: ‘You walk through the village and notice the doors are marked with chalk.’”

“The last one is the worst sentence,” Aickman said immediately. “Present tense makes it worse. It has the quality of a choose-your-own-adventure book.”

“But it’s the only one where you can’t look away,” Enriquez said. “The third person — she sees the chalk, fine. The reader can watch her. They are safe. The first person — I see the chalk. The reader is listening to someone’s story. They are still safe. But the second person — you see the chalk. Now the reader is standing in the village. The chalk is on the doors. And the reader did not choose to come here. Someone brought them.”

“Who brought them?”

“The narrator. The voice. The story itself. This is what I mean about the finger on the chest. Second person in folk horror should feel like being led somewhere by someone who knows the way and will not tell you where you are going. It is the voice of the community speaking to the outsider. The voice that says: you are here now. You are part of this now. You did not agree to be part of this, but your agreement was never required.”

We passed the narrowboat. Through a porthole I could see a bookshelf and the flicker of a television. Someone was living in there, in the brown water and the geraniums, and I thought about how thin the hull must be — how little separated their warm, lit room from the canal. Aickman glanced at the boat and then away, filing it somewhere.

“I concede the point about complicity,” he said. “But I want to add something. In my stories, the most unsettling moments are the ones where the protagonist behaves normally within an abnormal situation. They go along with things. They do not protest or flee. They accept a cup of tea from someone who should terrify them and they drink it because refusing would be awkward. And this — this compliant drifting through the uncanny — is, I think, what second person does best. Not accusation. Not implication. Instruction.”

“Instruction,” I said.

“Yes. Second person as ritual instruction. You do this. Then you do this. You walk here. You eat this. You are told to sit and you sit. The voice is calm and certain and does not explain why you are sitting, and you do not ask, because the voice has the authority of someone who has done this many times. It is the voice of the sacristan showing you to your pew. The voice of the aunt at the funeral telling you where to stand.”

Enriquez stopped walking. We were at a point where the towpath widened slightly, and there was a bench facing the water, its wooden slats bleached and splintered. She sat down on it without testing its soundness, which seemed like either confidence or indifference.

“This is closer to what I want,” she said. “In Argentina — in the provinces, in the north — there are festivals where outsiders are not forbidden. They are welcomed. Warmly. Genuinely. The people are not pretending to be kind. But the welcome has a grammar. There are things you do and things you don’t do and no one explains the difference. You learn by doing. You learn by making a mistake and seeing the faces change — not into anger, into patience. A particular kind of patience. The patience of someone watching a child reach for the stove. And the second person, for this, is perfect. Because the reader is learning the rules at the same speed as the protagonist. The reader is being taught.”

“Taught what, though?” I asked.

“That is the question the story must not answer.”

Aickman, who had remained standing, looked down at Enriquez with something that might have been approval. “We are in agreement on this, at least. The second person conducts the reader through a series of actions that feel increasingly ritualized, and the reader cooperates because the alternative is to stop reading. And stopping is — ”

“Rude,” Enriquez said.

“Impossible. Stopping is impossible in the same way that leaving a village festival is impossible when everyone has been kind to you and the food is good and someone’s grandmother has taken your hand and told you she is glad you came. The social contract and the ritual contract become indistinguishable. This is what Jackson understood. In ‘The Lottery,’ the horror is not the stoning. The horror is that everyone shows up. Year after year. They show up and they draw slips of paper and when the paper has the mark on it they accept the result because the lottery is the lottery, and the lottery has always been the lottery, and to refuse the lottery is to refuse the village, and the village is all there is.”

“So the second person should feel like a lottery,” I said. “The reader draws the slip. The reader’s slip has the mark.”

“No. The reader holds the stone.” Enriquez looked out at the canal water. “That’s the difference between Jackson’s story and what we’re writing. In Jackson, the victim is the victim and the community is the community. The line is clear. But what if the line isn’t clear? What if the ‘you’ is both? What if the story puts you in the position of participating in something, and you don’t know whether you are the one giving or the one being given?”

I felt something shift in my understanding of what we were making. Not a plot — I still didn’t have a plot — but a sensation. The feeling of walking through a village where every door has chalk on it and you don’t know if the chalk means you’re welcome or you’re chosen and the two might be the same thing.

“The setting,” I said. “Where does this happen?”

“Somewhere hot and dry,” Enriquez said immediately. “Not England. Not mist and standing stones. Daylight. The kind of sun that leaves nowhere to hide. The Midsommar brief is right about this — the horror of total visibility. But I want it rooted in a real place. A place with an economy, a history of violence. Not a theme park of pagan dread.”

“I had been imagining somewhere in Spain,” I said. “A village in Castilla. There are festivals there — ”

“Spain is possible. Spain has the right kind of emptiness. The meseta. Towns where half the houses are abandoned because everyone went to Madrid. And the people who stayed — they stayed because they could not leave, or because they would not leave, and neither reason is simple. And they have festivals. And the festivals are Catholic on top and something else underneath, the way a church is sometimes built on top of a temple, and the floor has two layers, and the lower one is older and does not care what was built above it.”

Aickman said: “The abandoned houses. Those are important. A village that is emptying. A community that is diminishing. And the festival is the thing that keeps it — not alive, that is too strong. The festival keeps it present. Without the festival, the village becomes merely a place where people used to live. With the festival, it is still a place where something happens. And what happens requires attendance. It requires — ”

“Bodies,” Enriquez said.

“Participants.”

“Same thing.”

He conceded this with a silence that lasted four or five steps along the towpath. A cyclist passed us, bell ringing, and we pressed single file against the hedge. When the path widened again, Aickman said, “I want to resist one thing. I know the temptation will be to escalate. To build toward a revelation — the sacrifice, the blood, the moment when the mask comes off. I would very much like the mask to stay on.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the story should end with the protagonist — with ‘you’ — still participating. Still at the table. Still eating. Still being welcomed. The horror is not what happens next. The horror is that you are still here, and you have been here for some time, and you cannot identify the moment when remaining became something other than choice. You did not walk into a trap. You walked into a village, and the village was kind, and somewhere between the first greeting and the last plate of food, you became part of what happens here. And you did not notice the transition because there was no transition. There was only participation, and participation was the trap.”

“That’s Jackson to the letter,” I said.

“That is Jackson seen through my particular lens, which is the lens of someone who has spent his life writing about English people who drift into situations that claim them. My protagonists do not fight. They do not flee. They accept a second glass of sherry and by the time they realize the sherry is part of it, the ‘it’ has already absorbed them. The sherry was not offered to be kind. The sherry was offered because that is what is done, and what is done is what binds.”

Enriquez stood from the bench. The geraniums on the narrowboat were behind us now, but I could still see them if I turned — bright red against the grey, surviving for no good reason.

“One thing,” she said. “The second person must also do something political. In my work, horror is never separate from power. The village has a relationship to the state, to the city, to money. The festival exists in that relationship. If we are writing about a place that is emptying, a place where the young have left, a place that the government has forgotten — then the festival is also about what a community does when it is abandoned. What it falls back on. What it keeps practicing because the practice is the only thing that still works, even if what it does is terrible, even if what it costs is more than anyone would choose to pay if they had other options. The second person should make the reader feel this. Not just the ritual. The economics of the ritual. The desperation underneath the welcome.”

None of us said anything for a while. The canal moved slowly beside us, or didn’t move at all — it was hard to tell. A duck sat on the water with the absolute composure of something that has decided this particular stretch of brown water is sufficient. I thought about empty houses and chalk marks and the voice that says you walk through the village, and I thought about how the “you” in that sentence is not an invitation. It is a fact. You are already walking. You were walking before the sentence began. The story did not bring you here. You have been here all along, and the story is only now telling you where you are.

I said this out loud — or tried to. It came out wrong, the way ideas do when they are still soft.

Aickman said, “That is nearly right. Keep hold of it.”

Enriquez said nothing. She was watching the duck.