“House of the Hatchet” (Weird Tales, January 1941)

Bloch, Robert. “House of the Hatchet.” Weird Tales, January 1941, pp. 40-50.
archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v35n07_1941-01/page/n41/mode/2up

The narrator is married to Dailsy, a situation he mostly regrets. It is their three-year anniversary, and so he plans a trip to Valos, the place to which they eloped. Their car ride was marked by mutual hostility and derision, broken only when he presents her with an expensive gift. They pass a sign for “The House of Terror,” a haunted house attraction along the roadside. Daisy, for whom tales of terror and carnage count as light entertainment, desperately wants to stop. The narrator grudgingly agrees hoping that it might be mercifully brief at least. They arrive pate in the day, and so they are the only ones on the tour. It seems to be an ordinary house until they reach the upstairs murder room. It is there that the narrator begins to feel the presence of the murdered woman as he looks at the hatchet and the butcher block where the incident allegedly occurred. The narrator is nearly overcome by the feeling and wants to get out of there as soon as possible. Daisy faints, however, and they are forced to stay for a while she recovers in an upstairs bedroom. The narrator joins the haunted house owner and wife for dinner. Even sitting in the kitchen, the narrator is disoriented by the presence he feels, the force of a woman’s hatred. he excuses himself saying he needs to check on his wife.

His thoughts are confused and disjointed.   When he returns to the kitchen, the owner explains drunkenly that none of the ghost story is true. The narrator drinks more than he should have and lets loose a litany of complaints about his wife. The house owner follows suit about his own wife and then makes fun of her for being afraid to go upstairs at night. The wife, indignantly, says that she will bring a cup of coffee to the narrator’s wife upstairs. The narrator tries to talk her out of it, but she goes. Moments after she leaves the room, the narrator loses his composure. He begs the owner to stop his wife from going upstairs. He pushes the drunk man to the bottom of the stairway where they hear the owner’s wife screaming. Out of the blackness upstairs, she staggers to the top of the stairway and topples downward. Only when she lies dead at their feet do they see the hatchet embedded in her neck. The owner whispers that there is no ghost. How could this have happened? The narrator replies that there is a ghost now; when he went up alone to check on Daisy, he killed her with the hatchet.
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I had to read the ending twice to understand it and then a third time to really get it. This story joins “Fangs of Vengeance” and “Be Yourself” as Bloch’s burgeoning commentary on marriage. We know that he’s got a lot of stories to come that feature marriage one way or another, but this one, where the ill-matched young couple fight constantly, go to a house whose main draw is a story of heinous domestic violence, and then one murders the other—that is perhaps something to pay attention to moving forward in Bloch’s body of work. This story edges close to the Cthulhu Mythos at one moment, As the owner of the house unspools his made-up tale of horror and murder, he uses as evidence details that might have been lifted straight form some of Bloch’s earlier stories or from those of HP Lovecraft himself. The owner of the house explains that the haunting originated with an old Hollywood director named Kluva who murdered his wife: “First thing he did was to mix himself up with a lot of foreign cults. This was way back, remember; Hollywood had some queer birds then. Prohibition, and a lot of wild parties; dope addicts, all kinds of scandals, and some stuff that never did get out. There was a bunch of devil-worshippers and mystics, too— not like these fakes down the road; genuine article. Kluva got in with them. I guess he was a little crazy or got that way. Because one night, after some kind of gathering here, he murdered his wife. In the upstairs room, on a kind of an altar he rigged up. He just took a hatchet to her and hacked off her head. Then he disappeared. The police looked in a couple of days later; they found her, of course, but they never did locate Kluva. Maybe he jumped off the cliffs behind the house. Maybe — I’ve heard stories — he killed her as a sort of sacrifice so he could go away. Some of the cult members were grilled, and they had a lot of wild stories about worshipping things or beings that granted boons to those who gave them human sacrifices; such boons as going away from Earth. Oh, it was crazy enough, I guess, but the police did find a damned funny statue behind the altar that they didn’t like and never showed around, and they burned a lot of books and things they got hold of here. Also they chased that cult out of California” (44). Statues behind an altar, eldritch books, human sacrifice: we know this story well by now. The thing is, on the final page where the truth comes out, the narrator admits to the owner of the house that he hated Daisy, that he planned to take her to Valos and kill her that night. Ghost or no ghost, the instinct for extreme violence is present in the general population. There does not need to be a ghost for someone to want to murder someone else. That there is a ghost seemingly in this story should not distract us from the fact that there does not need to be anything supernatural about murder. the supernatural elements are simply a sensational story to draw tourists. One of the best things about this story is that so many interpretations can be true simultaneously. This story has been in several anthologies over the year and was translated into English, German, French, and Italian. Fun stuff!