"The Bullet That Grows in the Gun" (1985) by Terry Dowling
Macabre: A Journey Through Australia's Darkest Fears (2010) edited by Angela Challis & Marty Adrian Young.
Readers unfamiliar with "The Bullet That Grows in the Gun" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
Terry Dowling did not appear on my reader radar (©readar) until this week. That was when I read this Facebook post by author and anthologist Orrin Grey:
If I could make everyone read just one short story, it might be Terry Dowling's "The Bullet That Grows in the Gun." Not because it's good (though it is) but because its central conceit is one I think about all the time, but because no one knows it, I can't use it as shorthand.
This underscores the usefulness of social media. Not the 99% of material that is healthy as a pyroclastic cloud, but the little serendipities we are permitted to "overhear" between like-minded enthusiasts.
To locate "The Bullet That Grows in the Gun" online was the work of more than a moment. Dowling has never pinged my readar, even though anthologies I own include his work. Eventually, I found the story in the 2010 anthology Macabre: A Journey Through Australia's Darkest Fears edited by Angela Challis and Marty Young.
"The Bullet That Grows in the Gun" is a beautifully organized and executed short story. Dowling creates a showdown with three sets of characters coming together in one room for an hour. Some have come for help, some for vindication, others to save or triumph in their professional careers.
It's a campus academic thriller imbricated with the supernatural.
In the unnamed college department that seems to study psychic phenomena--to use an old-fashioned phrase--an eight year old academic disagreement is to be resolved when the Bremmer-Markham-Gellis box is opened.
The disagreement is about the causes of supernatural phenomena.
Gustav Bremmer, head of department, defends a line he terms "psychic stain" theory:
"[….] when a person dies, their released personality, their vitality, actually ‘stains’ the room or locality in which that personality terminates.... [the] liberated psyche does charge the surroundings and continues in a much vitiated half- life state.....
"At one extreme, some people see ghosts and hear voices; at the other, there is just a feeling, uneasiness, inquiétude...."
Dr. Markham, a younger man forced by Brenner to resign and leave the campus eight years before, has a very different theory. It is termed "form follows function."
In a nutshell: "....houses are haunted because they try to grow their own people.”
Harry Gellis, Dowling's point of view character, plays at being referee between the two men. The three come together in Bremmer's mezzanine office. They are joined by graduate students Sally Radbrook and Charles Ross. Rounding out the party are Mr. and Mrs. Tate, who have come to the department for help. Their home and family are beset by a menacing phenomenon they call "the green man."
Gellis offers a recapitulation of the Brenner and Markham theses to aid newcomers in understanding the debate. As he does so, Brenner takes every chance to needle and denigrate Markham's theory as "hypothetical and instrinsically absurd.”
Markham bristles, and offers a spirited defense of "Form Follows Function."
[….] “And what about houses? Those with no deaths yet to stain the locale but filled with a presence all the same. Not the restless spirits of the departed shot into the surroundings in death trauma, but probably the causal resonances of living people— induced by the presence of our psyches, our spirits, our personas, day after day. The magnetic fields of a person provide a template, a living by- product of our being. The used artifact is imprinted with it, saturated. Psychic stain, yes, but the stain of living forces not terminated ones. We impregnate our artifacts, load them with it. Any wonder there are ghosts, life echoes. It helps to account for the melancholy surrounding an armchair at a dump, a rusted bicycle in some dunes, ruins in the desert, derelict cars in a wrecker’s yard. Closed factories, closed schools. The melancholy that De Chirico noticed, which could be simply the absence of people from their artifacts, but is possibly something more. It’s residual ‘vitality’, or could be— let me finish, Gustav!— some outlandish cause and effect working at some level in inanimate things, at the level of design, of function, of intentions.
“We bestow the cause and effect. We must make allowances for our ability to haunt ourselves. Any bullet that forms in an unloaded gun represents the bridge between the levels of reality, the crossover point. Of course, it sounds absurd, it must. We must be alert to that first and foremost, the inherent absurdity of any theorising here at such a point.
“Eight years ago tonight, with Harry Gellis here as observer, we locked an unloaded— unloaded, mind you, we all checked it—. 38 revolver in an iron deed box. Three locks, three keys, one for each of us, and locked that in the small walk- in closet that’s now concealed behind that bookcase there. Again, three locks— Harry did the carpentry for us— and three keys. Gustav will presently allow us to move the bookcase, open the closet and the box, and inspect the gun. He is to put it to his head and squeeze the trigger six times. That was the arrangement.”
Eight years prior to this night, Markham offered an explanation for accidental handgun deaths that occurred when operators knew the guns were unloaded: the guns grew their own bullets to fill the empty spaces bullets would normally occupy.
About the closet in Bremmer's office sealed and barricaded for eight years:
“There is an armchair in there as well [as an unloaded revolver],” Markham continued. “An old upholstered armchair, to test the other part of the experiment....
"My position is untenable. I don’t necessarily expect the gun to be loaded or the chair to be occupied— that’s too simplistic, too much how our universe of quantitative experience operates. But I expect— well, at least sensations. Feelings. Some signs at the threshold of perception.”
When the closet is opened, the armchair is empty, as are the revolver chambers. But this only thickens the atmosphere of dread and quickening suspense Dowling has created.
Markham departs the group after this admonition:
"[….] The bullet I expected to find in that gun is not just some phantom. It represents the corner that science hasn’t gone into yet, because it cannot yet, because there is never any empirical evidence. It is the untenable fact, the chilling intuition- reality that we brush aside so that it won’t leave us looking foolish. All I ask now is that, when I’ve gone, you have the chair removed at once and the gun taken as far away from here as possible. Let one of the students keep it till it can be disposed of. Or Harry, you take it.
“Please do it, Gustav! Please!”
When nemesis arrives, it does more than shatter hypotheses and careers.
* * *
Dowling's handling of analepsis is skilled and unobtrusive. Like Peter Straub and John Langan, other writers who shine in shorter forms, he is at ease with dialogue as action, with third-person narration that makes each character's inner life focused and compelling.
The second half of "The Bullet That Grows in the Gun" details the plight of the Tate family. How could their "green man" menacer be explained by "psychic stain" or "form follows function" theory? How could either side in the debate account for a haunting that manifests in two houses the family has lived in since their crisis began?
This is the banquet Dowling sets for readers.
Jay
