The Great Grimpen Mire

My grandmother believed that all children like to be scared, at least a little. In Sunday school,  elementary school, even as a babysitter, she taught kids her favorite rhyme:

Here’s a candle
to light you to bed
here’s a chopper
to chop off your head!

Not all parents endorsed her ideas about kids and fear, it turned out. I’m on the fence myself. On the whole, I don’t like to be scared. I never read Stephen King and I avoided most of the popular horror novels of the eighties, including the creepy Flowers in the Attic series. I hated horror movies, too; I was never a fan of gore.

And yet, from an early age I loved the whodunit. I liked not knowing. I liked, in short, suspense. Even The Boxcar Children was suspenseful, insofar as it contained uncertainty: what will become of them? How will they survive? Will they be discovered? Will they be in trouble?

Fear and suspense are quite different if you think about it, though I suppose you could argue that each contains a little of the other. Which brings me to Sherlock Holmes.

When I found him, I felt like I’d found the Master, the way some people feel about Alfred Hitchcock. I loved that the stories were old; I was thrilled that even a hundred years ago, people loved plot turns and detectives and crime solving. I also loved that they were simple. A major comfort of the Holmes mysteries is that they are unsolvable. The author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a withholder; key information was left out. The first published Holmes story, for example, was “A Study in Scarlet,” and it contained a lengthy digression, “Part ll,” a rather dull history of Mormonism in America that contained key facts of the case.

Dr. Watson, narrator and sidekick, tells the tales based on what he learns as he learns it; if he’s left in the dark (and he often is), so is the reader. Thus, the reader kicks back and watches the drama unfold. Some joy is to be found in beating Watson to the punch; the man can be dense. But most of the stories are happy puzzles with satisfying endings that don’t take too much work. Many are creepy. And then there’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, probably the best known Holmes story, and definitely the scariest. With this one, Doyle crossed from merry suspense to something close to horror. I first read it in my late teens; when I  recently returned to it, I did so with the same giddy awareness of my own reaction: churning gut, pounding chest. Look at me! I thought. I’m actually afraid!

The Hound was serialized in 1901 in The Strand magazine, where Holmes made his first appearance in the late 1880s. In fact, Sherlock and his nemesis, Moriarty, had died in 1893 with “The Adventure of the Final Problem.” Doyle positioned The Hound as an untold tale from the detective’s past. The story was later published as a novella, which is how modern readers experience it.

You can feel the serialization; each short chapter ends with a cliffhanger or a major plot turn. The story wends, like a tunnel through a terrible wood, drawing you in when you’d rather turn back. No time is spent on lyrical language or character development; the mystery opens when a friend of old man Baskerville comes to Baker Street hoping to solve the mystery of the man’s death: he collapsed from fright in the middle of the night, standing at his garden gate. Paw prints were found by the gate; it appears the ancient curse of the Baskervilles has been reignited.

Holmes and Watson learn of the curse, a century old story of Hugo Baskerville, who fell in love with a yeoman’s daughter. She wasn’t interested, so, like modern frat boys, Hugo and his friends got drunk and kidnapped her. She escaped her prison and ran for her life across the moors of Devon, finally dropping dead of exhaustion. Too late, Hugo and the boys grabbed their horses to search for her; they became separated. Hugo was found holding her lifeless body; standing over him was a “great, black beast, shaped like a hound:”

The thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing eyes and ripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor.

Brutality, drunkenness, and gore. That’s on page five. Not what I was expecting, but I was riveted. My second read, twenty years later, was a repeat of the first; I flew threw it in two sittings, breathless, thinking of nothing else.

Just as bad as the sight of the hound is the sound of him. Watson and Sir Henry, the last surviving Baskerville, are hunting an escaped murderer from a nearby prison (yep!) who has been spotted on the moor when they hear this:

A long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor. . . . It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing.

The rhythm of these short, simple sentences throws the reader. The prose is not difficult, but its simple lyricism contrasts deliciously with its subject. Count, for instance, the happy beat of these foreboding words: It came with the wind through the silence of the night. Scary. Strident, wild, and menacing. Oh yeah.

The depiction of the moor itself is equally deceptive; what appears as flat emptiness turns out to contain a soul crushing loneliness. Here is Watson’s summary of the place:

The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples . . . . . if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own.

He is describing Devon, a county in England in the far southwest, east of Cornwall. The moors of Devon contain traces of prehistoric man and are home to Dartmoor, a wild, inhabitable region known for its tors, or hills topped with granite, similar to what we might call badlands.

Dartmoor is a national park, though it wasn’t at the time Doyle stayed at the Duchy Hotel in Princetown in March of 1901. The author is rumored to have walked 16-18 miles a day over the moors, dreaming up this story. He visited the Dartmoor Prison, built in 1809 and he certainly visited Fox Tor Mire, a wide, shallow amphitheater scarred with abandoned tin mines, and the basis for the great Grimpen Mire.

The mire is the central image of the book, the setting within the setting. It’s introduced early, by Stapleton, Baskerville’s neighbor, who warns Watson that though it looks like a “a rare place for a gallop,” it is a quagmire where one “false step” means “death to man or beasts.” The ground is pocked by camouflaged soft spots, places where the earth can swallow one whole.

Right on cue, the two men hear a terrible sound and turn to see a wild moor pony sinking to its death:

Something brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonised, writhing neck shot upward and a dreadful cry echoed over the moor. It turned me cold with horror, but my companion’s nerves seemed to be stronger than mine.
“It’s gone!” said he. “The mire has him. Two in two days, and many more, perhaps, for they get in the way of going there in the dry weather and never know the difference until the mire has them in its clutches. It’s a bad place, the great Grimpen Mire.”

Indeed.

The story’s climax unfolds in the mire, a delicious culmination of elements: hound and murderer caught red-handed. Clearly the place is central to the story’s plot and its eeriness cannot be argued. But I think the mire goes beyond plot, even beyond setting. This time when I read it, I was convinced that with the mire, Doyle had struck writerly gold.

I learned about quicksand in middle school science, around the same time I learned that sand dunes move, shifting across the surface of the earth like massive slugs. The sand can give way and you can drown. The idea haunted me; to be swallowed by the earth. Water was one thing; you expect to sink. The concept that firm ground can open shook me to the core. What can you trust, if not the ground beneath your feet?

I was twenty-three when I came west as a volunteer range technician for the BLM. I’d never heard the term ‘range,’ as in basin and range, and I had no concept of public land. Essentially, the job entailed driving around in a half ton pickup looking at tracts of land so big and treeless you couldn’t see the far side. There was no far side. Infinity was the far side.

One day my supervisor and I were walking through an aspen stand, a pocket of woods nestled in a fold of the range, when I fell hip deep into the earth. It happened so fast I gasped, fighting to inhale. One second I was walking on the earth, the next I was in the earth, unable to move. My arms were up and my left leg was folded behind me; my right leg was fully extended beneath me, not in a hole, not in water, but in the earth. I made a kind of gagging sound; my supervisor turned and walked over to peer down at me. “What’re you doing down there?” he asked.

Once he’d pulled me out we stood a while studying the hidden bog, a hot hole, a sink. There was no indication that the earth wasn’t solid, and there was no way to tell how big the sink was. We pushed on the earth with sticks and found the soft spot to be about three feet in diameter. I later learned that such places can be bigger, especially in the spring.

This incident happened between my two encounters with The Hound of the Baskervilles. I didn’t know such places existed when I was nineteen, yet I’m convinced that even then it was the mire that scared me. More than the lonely moor or the escaped convict, even more than the hound with glowing eyes, the great Grimpen Mire is the source of the story’s power. The thing is downright archetypal. According to Jungian psychology, an archetype is “a collective, inherited, unconscious idea, pattern of thought, or image universally present in individual psyches.” In literature, an archetype can be a character, theme, setting or situation. Its power transcends time and culture because it’s universal. All humans recognize it.

I would argue that everybody knows the Mire, that dark swallow-pit that hides on the vast, lonely moors of the mind. Here is the sore spot, the cellar, the nerve cave where we contain the thoughts, desires, memories, and fears that might dismantle us. We step carefully around this pit; we live carefully around it. In conversation, in most relationships, even lying awake in the middle of the night, we tread with great care.

It hardly matters that your mire is different from mine, just as it doesn’t matter that I’ve never been to Dartmoor. I know this place. No two mires are alike, yet all contain a torment we recognize, every bit as frightening as a hound with glowing eyes.

Can there be a better metaphor for suspense? Was there ever a firmer argument for the value of fiction? The Hound of the Baskervilles exemplifies the ways novels allow us to practice being scared. Not knowing. Attempting to understand, to make sense. Holding the terrifying uncertainty of what’s out there, waiting in the dark.