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Horror in Architecture
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Horror in Architecture
The Reanimated Edition
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any
proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to
notify the publisher.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
When abstraction sets about killing you, you had better get busy.
Albert Camus, The Plague
Introduction 1
Doubles and Clones 25
Exquisite Corpse 45
Partially and Mostly Dead 65
Reiteration and Reflexivity 75
Incontinent Objects 87
Trojan Horse 101
Homunculism and Gigantism 117
Solidity, Mass, Stereotomy 129
Distortion and Disproportion 141
Blobs 155
Puppets 165
Insurgent Natures 175
Displacement 193
Postscript 205
Notes 215
Index 243
This page intentionally left blank
Preface to the New Edition
The central argument of Horror in Architecture, when it was first published in 2013,
was that “unprecedented” moments—and transitional ones—create monsters.1
This substantially new edition of our study attempts to expand and sharpen an
exploration of this process: of how interesting times make interesting buildings.
It is a fascinating and difficult subject, and not an easy one to wrangle into
anything resembling a conventional academic work. A book that links horror to
architecture, and to industrial modernity, affective history, and creatures from
speculative film and fiction, should perhaps be condemned outright as mon-
strous. This is an inherent danger of interdisciplinary writing, which often runs
afoul of differing fields’ biases and emphases. Among architects and architectural
theorists, the fundamental importance of buildings, as sites of life and as things-
in-the-world, can be assumed. When we published a “crossover” study that was
to be read by literary historians, genre fans, writers, and artists, we quickly saw
the limits of this assumption.
Our modest paperback met with its avid supporters and also its discontents.
Some in film and media, especially a few concerned with “spatiality” in horror
movies, found our own theoretical concerns (typology, program, organization of
plan and section, materiality, meaning, and misrepresentation) to lack urgency.
Our approach contradicted a tendency in some regions of the humanities to view
architecture as symbolic backdrop or outsize figural sculpture. Others recognized
something more: a link from considerations of affect to physical objects and op-
erations of form, in doubling and cloning, subdivision, distortion and dispro-
portion, partial negation, and the like. Generous interlocutors in fiction, in the
arts and visual culture, and in theater and curatorial practices responded with
invaluable insights and correctives.
We found all the varied strains of reaction to be helpful as we considered how
a new edition might take shape. We have substantially reworked the contents of
the present volume to underscore what is at stake—that is, to make clear why
architecture matters. We have also expanded on horror’s intimate relation to
ix
the logics of advanced capital, a theme of the previous book; our discussion of
this topic has been clarified, broadened, and supplemented with four new chap-
ters. The result will, we hope, help to illustrate the fearful and perverse effects of
modernity while engaging broader issues of determination and autonomy in the
built environment. Finally, we have expanded our typologies to explain further
why these embody processes of genuine consequence, and not merely for those
involved or invested in design practice.
It is worth noting that this reanimated text has had to adapt to evolving
circumstances in the world at large. The past decade has been one of global up-
heaval, in politics and culture alike. This includes the advent of social media (now
inseparable from the experience of late modernity and of horror in all senses), a
planetary pandemic, the rise of illiberal populism, and a polarized, agonistic real-
politik between left and right. These events necessarily condition contemporary
thinking in design and theory. A darker and more irrational spirit, powerfully
ascendant, informs what follows.
These shifts, and an escalating sense of crisis, have had clear echoes in the
realm of cultural production, close to our subject. A significant effect has been
the so-called horror renaissance. Feature films are being made in greater num-
bers and for larger audiences, and are being distributed via streaming media as
an original modality. There has been substantial debate around this increase in
popularity. Explanations for it have ranged from universal psychoanalytic “needs”
to the emergent historical conditions of advanced capital.2 Significantly, the field
has been transformed by writers and directors of color, who have given new life
to a genre that recycles its own tropes and clichés ad infinitum. While Asian stu-
dios took the lead in the first decade of this century, African American auteurs are
now producing work that operates brilliantly as both speculative fiction and so-
cial critique, speaking to the present through its own frightening idiom. The films
of Jordan Peele and Ali LeRoi, among others, have added much to what follows.
The past ten years have seen the rise of eco-horror as a fertile literary space of
its own, particularly in the novels of Jeff VanderMeer, which imagine a universe
of extraordinary exchanges between human and natural biologies and forms. The
climate crisis gives heightened relevance to this genre, which exists also as a test
bed for the imagination of organic-anthropogenic beings, environments, and re-
lations. The subject is fraught but also wildly creative and surprising. We include
in this new edition a chapter on insurgent natures, about vegetal and elemental
anxieties. And romances.
Certainly, all that has transpired since 2013 suggests that horror is no less
Sublime Horror
Why spend time on horrifying things? Antonio Rocco, as early as 1635, argued
that we should look at them because they are instructive. And because the oppo
site, anodyne beauty, contains a dangerous surfeit of sweetness.1 Deviance
teaches; charm will make you sick. Rocco claimed that horrors in particular—
putrefaction, decay, distortion, and dissymmetry, among others—are sites of
fertility, change, and invention.
This is a book about horror in architecture. We explore discomfiting build-
ings and urbanisms, “authored” and non, that may be understood by analogy to
deviant and fearsome bodies and beings from popular history. These span from
pre-to postmodernity and are organized into typologies or tropes—identifiable
regions along a spectrum of morphological/anatomical deviance or monstrosity:
doubling, reiteration, disproportion, formlessness, shifts of scale, excess parts
and openings, solidity, and others. Such works are not necessarily bad, although
some may appear to violate good taste. The examples that follow have been se-
lected, rather, because they are interesting—and because they are highly sugges-
tive in considering possible futures.
Horror in the built environment is an urgent subject. As we will see, its emer-
gence is immanent in the project of the modern. It closely shadows the disconcert-
ing scalar and typological evolution of our cities, as well as the rise of economic and
social logics that put the building, as a category of object, into crisis. At the same
time, the unique character of horror is increasingly relevant in what we might
call an “age of affect,” within an emergent politics of the sublime that poses the
1
ecstatic and the shocking as alternatives to older Enlightenment values. Horror is
important because—as an intellectual-affective tradition and a sphere of cultural
production—it is effective in queering the norms of design practice. Horrid build-
ings deserve consideration because their violence is productive. They represent a
variety of Nietzschean operation. Their deviant physicality opposes the creep of
reification, of assumptions of objectivity and realism that mask a worrying order
of things. In their place, a dark or “paranoid” ontology emerges.
This is not least because horror pushes against the bounds of the thinkable.
The horrible, like the mad, presents the world not as it is but as it might be. It is
utopianism without utopia, transformation without telos. It speaks of the pres-
ent in the conditional tense. Through inversion—playing the fool—it says that
which cannot be said. Our architectural examples are deeply uneasy with respect
to the aspirations of contemporary design, with its patterns, parameters, and
diagrammatic postures. The inheritance of sublime terror is not nearly so elating,
or so beautifully aloof. Horror is one by-product of modernity and thus mimics its
advanced forms—evolving with them. But it remains a dark mirror, an unsettling
or ungrateful fellow traveler. It reverses, while sharing, formal characteristics.
This is due, in part, to a unique historical ambivalence. Horror is an aesthetic
category that has traditionally been a site of profound skepticism about the
merits of the aesthetic itself. From Roman times through the early nineteenth
century, it was posited as a quality distinct from either beauty or ugliness.2 For
Immanuel Kant, and for the romantics, it was an element of the sublime, experi-
enced for spiritual and didactic benefit—a mode of feeling that bypassed the eye,
skirted rationality, and addressed our inner nature. The terrible was one form of
sublimity, alongside the noble and the splendid. In the former camp were objects
that “arouse enjoyment but with horror.”3
For Kant, this gravity stood in opposition to beauty, which was a more super
ficial thing. In its simplicity and greatness, the sublime “moves.”4 Longinus, an
originator of the concept, claimed that it tears up facts “like a thunderbolt.”5
Such an effect is superior precisely because it need not engage the faculties of
persuasion. It is a sensation; when sublimity strikes, in the manner of pain or
mortal fear, we simply know it to be true.6 In the eighteenth century, Thomas
Reid noted that this mode of communication “carries the hearer along with it
involuntarily, and by a kind of violence rather than by cool conviction.”7 Indeed,
this wild affect is uncool. It is a site of swooning, of spiritual overpowering, of
renewed commitments.
Horror is also a slippery fish. The great works on the subject continually insist
upon its illuminating power, the value of clarified affect. In its wake, we will feel
2 Introduction
and we will know. But know what? For Kant, the “rigid” and “astonished” sensa-
tion revealed nothing less than the dignity of humanity itself. Experiencing the
sublime was an ethical operation and would spur one toward noble action. This
was not an unheard-of idea. The British writers of moral sensitivity and improve-
ment, such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Kames, likewise proposed
that there were objects in the world capable of bettering their observers. For oth-
ers, sublimity clearly invoked the religious. Erich Auerbach, for example, thought
that Dante’s description of the striding deity who “passed the Stygian ferry with
soles unwet” succeeded in viscerally communicating the power of divinity.8 Hor-
ror, as its acute manifestation, is the shadow of the metaphysical moving across
the waters. In a word, it is God.
Or a form of God. But a rarefied and perverse one, occupying a moment in
which the tidy beauty of nature wears at the seams, and the unruly side—a divine
excess—expresses itself. This announces its presence in the impenetrable dark
tangle of the valley floor, in split and sundered trees, in the mountains “unjust”
and “hook-shouldered,” and within the nimbus pregnancies of stormy skies. In the
two centuries following Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s 1674 translation of Longi-
nus, a godly surplus was felt in the appreciation of a “wild element, . . . something
different from regularity.”9 This was famously true for Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
hence his heroic standing among the French romantics. But it was more com-
monly the taste of English writers such as John Dennis and Thomas Burnet, who
caught glimmers of such ferocious power in art more generally.
This nature was not the charming pastoral of the previous century, but some-
thing appalling. In 1753, for example, Dr. John Brown wrote of Keswick in the
Lake District that its
Similarly, Thomas Gray wrote about a 1739 visit to a “monstrous precipice, almost
perpendicular,” which contained within itself “religion and poetry.”11 Joseph
Addison famously remarked that the Alps overtook him with an “agreeable type
Introduction 3
of horror,” as he absorbed “one of the most irregular mis-shapen scenes in the
world.”12 Burnet likewise praised those natural vistas that were “ill-figur’d” and
“confused.”13
Again, the emphasis here is not on the aesthetic so much as on the sensa-
tional: the eye becomes, in an actual sense, the window to the spiritual interior.
In his influential article on the picturesque, Edmund Burke praised the effect of
“sublime horrors,” which lead to a condition of astonishment—a “state of the
soul in which all emotions are suspended.”14 In contrast to beauty, this involves
physical pain; it is aesthetics made neural. Beauty is more closely related to ugli
ness. As the conservative philosopher was quick to point out, these may share
formal characteristics, such as proper proportion. But the stupefaction of fear
emerges from an alien matrix of feeling that permits no meaningful comparison.
For Burke, the agonizing presence of horror is quickly converted to pleasure.
As we realize we are not in actual danger, shock is sublimated in relief. In this sense,
the phenomenal arc of the sublime here resembles Kant’s. The ache, for the ideal
ist, is dispelled via the dignity of the mind, which in the moment of extremis
recognizes its own power. This formulation oddly shadows Sigmund Freud’s ex-
planation of laughter: it is “cathexic” energy that builds up anxiously, only to be
released in a variety of exhalation. Aristotle had already theorized such an effect
in his Poetics, in a rather similar image of catharsis. Fear (eleos) is one emotion
thought to be provoked by literary art, and also ritually ejected in a burst of social
delight. Such an idea might help to explain the proximity of comedy and fright,
as in the early American films The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Last Warning
(1929) and later in the Scream franchise (since 1996).
The experience of modernity has made these affective matters yet more tur-
bid. Since the passing of its romantic heyday, horror appears inseparable from
mass media. It seems mostly to have been exiled to the titillations of low culture.
It has become that most mediocre of things, a “genre”: an area of production os-
tensibly below the threshold of seriousness.15 This divestment takes place against
a backdrop of desacralization, the creep of the banal, and the routinization of
charisma. Or, at least, the eviction of myth to newer quarters. Theodor Adorno,
for example, denied the continued existence of fear in art. Such an expectation
was atavistic, the hallmark of a lost, enchanted age. It survived only as a feeling of
discomfort, inherent in the repulsion of ugliness. The Frankfurt School theorist
even rejected the kitsch character of those popular products—such as the anti-
war protest songs of the Vietnam era—that attempted to “take the horrendous
and make it somehow consumable.”16 For Adorno, the horrible was something
“out there,” in the violence of imperialism, Auschwitz, and the irrational.
4 Introduction
The ache of an increasingly disenchanted world has doggedly haunted this
discourse for centuries. It was certainly felt by the romantics. In the work of
Burke, as well as Lord Byron and Caspar David Friedrich, we are already aware
of a groping for intensity of experience. Like the famous Claude glass that was
used to make picturesque landscapes look more picturesque, this aspiration was
ridiculed in its own time as dangerously overripe, as a frequently forced attempt
to stage emotive experiences.17
The romantic courtship of sensation was likewise powerful in a society less
frazzled than our own. In contemporary culture, horror becomes merely one
source of shock among many. The effects of the sublime must compete with the
alarmism of sensationalist news, video games simulating mass killing, ubiqui-
tous pornography, “venti” coffees, and militarized foods—like potato chips de-
signed to deliver one hundred decibels into the inner ear for an “extreme” eating
experience.18 Theorists of the modern condition have understood such titillation
as a desensitizing force, causing a “blasé attitude.” This phrase is Georg Simmel’s,
and refers to the stupor that arises from the constant jostling of urban life.19 It
is a sickness that leads the overstimulated to seek further stimulation. Stephen
Eide, in his close reading of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Locke, locates the ori-
gins of the problem of restlessness even prior to the explosion of the metropolis,
as a central pathology of liberalism itself.20 Within the Tocquevillian narrative of
Peter Carey’s novel Parrot and Olivier in America, a rocking chair epitomizes the
plight of “agitated” republican subjects. Unsettled by social and financial mobil-
ity, they cannot sit still, and must calm themselves through neurotic repetition:
motion that simulates movement.21 For its critics, this society produces a strain
of traumatic automatism, which Adorno identified in pop and jazz “standards”
on endless replay.22
Perhaps for this reason, horror in the contemporary appears fated to a state
of mediocrity. The emotion is evacuated of high-cultural or philosophical import,
and when employed for “serious” art or for credible culture—as in the films of
Andy Warhol, Lars von Trier, and Quentin Tarantino, or in Francis Ford Cop-
pola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)—can only be rehabilitated as camp.23 As an
inherently affective and graphic mode of communication, horror necessarily
flirts with kitsch and falls prey to a problem avoided by the abstract arts of the
twentieth century. At least, if we believe Clement Greenberg and Gillo Dorfles in
their contention that bad taste grows from sentiment and representation.24 This
“vulgar” tendency leads to exile, to the spheres of Hollywood and pulp cinema.
The venerable sensation has become inseparable from the calculus of commercial
spectacle.
Introduction 5
Herein lies a paradox central to this book. While horror increasingly attends
the experience of modernity—and nowhere clearer than in architecture—it has
been largely banished from the mainstream of prestigious cultural production.
Certainly, it remains close, as a kind of dodgy fellow traveler. Moreover, it ap-
pears not as its own theorized entity, but as a spectral eminence: a secondary,
shadow-or countercultural sensibility that is overwhelmed by discourses of pro-
gressivism, positivism, and transcendent abstraction. We feel its critical chill in
the work of Kurt Schwitters, Hannes Meyer, and those who likewise expressed
the anxieties of the early twentieth century. Or, more recently, in the iconoclastic
portraiture of Francis Bacon (see our chapter “Distortion and Disproportion”).
The sublime went “underground,” to reappear in Gordon Matta-Clark’s vivisec-
tioned houses, or in Vito Acconci’s audible masturbation beneath the floorboards
of the Sonnabend Gallery.25
While terror and the uncanny may be highly abstract—a vaporous or creep-
ing unease—horror is more commonly literal. The artist Paul Thek perhaps
best expressed this sensibility, using latex casts to stage contrasts between the
“finish-fetish” of midcentury art and chunks of meat and bone. Thek famously re-
reappropriated the icons of Warhol and combined them with simulated butcher-
shop cuttings. In the slyest example, a Brillo box is laid on its side to reveal a kind
of spinal flap in its hollow underbelly.26 This asserts an explicit fleshliness lurking
within works of minimalism and pop art, and by extension in the commodity and
its fetishism. It makes use of a vulgar technique, of gore as it would be modeled
by a B-movie studio, and intrudes into the rarefied atmosphere of commercial
iconography and its seizure by refined culture.
The staging of horror, as a recurrent social scandal of the modern, frequently
operates via Thek’s method: a paradoxical effect that produces the literal, as bodily
substance, alongside a certain trespass of epistemological limits. We might think,
for example, of the Sex Pistols: a threatening and incomprehensible physicality,
ritualized through sputum, vomit, blood, piercings, and “senseless” violence. The
reification of the pop product, its resolution into an autonomous and objective
reality, is resisted through a tactical incontinence.27 Importantly, this embodies
a resistance to this process, which grows from deep unease regarding the power
of objects in the current dispensation. Here, the consumable is continually juxta-
posed with a biophysical substrate. It is a most vulgar kind of materialism, which
reorients one to the notion that what exists is not necessarily what could be.
This echoes in the output of some contemporary British artists, who also
fill their abstract containers with meat and viscera. Examples include Damien
Hirst’s installations of rotting or cross-sectioned creatures in technical cham-
6 Introduction
Paul Thek, Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box, from the series Technological Reliquaries, 1965. Wax,
painted wood, and Plexiglas, 14 × 7 × 17 inches (35.6 × 43.2 × 43.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art,
purchased with funds contributed by the Daniel W. Diedrich Foundation, 1990. Copyright Estate of
George Paul Thek. Photograph: D. James Dee. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.
bers that resemble the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth
House (1951). These are flooded with chemicals or fetid air and provide a foil to
the gore—like the glass freezer that preserves Marc Quinn’s Self (first produced
in 1991), a bust cast from his own blood. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, critics have
charged that the atmosphere of horror devalues the work. Such products have of-
ten been dismissed as expensive juvenilia.28 Even Hirst himself has claimed that
the shark in his tank was unnecessary; the formaldehyde was enough.29
But there is more. In the subcultural sensibility of horror, suspicion of the
object—as an example of commodity logic—is matched by a corresponding dis-
trust in knowledge. Even in its most apparently debased expressions, there re-
mains an unsettling power of epistemic rejection. This is diametrically opposed
to the power claimed by Burke et al.: that is, an affective shortcut to truth. The
Introduction 7
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Viola, kinek, valahányszor nejére nézett, a fájdalom jutott eszébe,
melyet e szerencsétlen érzeni fog, ha a dolgok valódi állását
megtudja, jellemének egész szilárdsága mellett néha alig tarthatá
vissza könyeit; de erőt vett magán ő is, s midőn este nejét utólszor
kebléhez szorítva lovára ült, nem vehette volna senki észre
felgerjedését. Maga Zsuzsi nem gyanítá, hogy midőn férje ajkairól az
utolsó Isten veled-et hallá, a szerencsétlennek szivét azon sejdítés
tölté, hogy utólszor szólt kedveséhez. Viola rég megszokta a
szenvedést; mint a tenger sötét habjai, úgy arczának mindig komor
kifejezése eltakará a vészt, mely keblében dúlt; de midőn jó lován az
erdő felé vágtatva annyira jött, hogy mozdulatai az utána néző által
nem láttathattak, rég leküzdött keserve kitört, s szemének keserű
cseppjei sűrűn peregtek le arczán.
Már este volt, mikor Viola elhagyá házát. A lealkonyodott nap
végsugárai csak még gyenge világot terjesztének a láthatáron, s a
félhold, mely könnyű fellegek között lebegett az égen, fényesen önté
le ezüst sugárait, s minden ünnepélyes csendben állt szelid
világítása alatt. A természet bájai nagy bajainkat nem felejtetik el
velünk, de elveszik keserűségöket. A szenvedélyes bánat helyett,
melyet emberek között vagy szobánkba zárkózva érezénk, szelid
szomorúság tölti lelkünket; úgy látszik, mintha az egész természet
részt venne fájdalmunkban, mintha minden csillag sajnálkozva
nézne le reánk; a nagy láthatáron körültekintve, érezzük egész
parányiságunkat, s önszerencsétlenségünk kisebbnek látszik, midőn
eszünkbe jut, mily kevés s mily mulékony egész létünk. A nyugalom,
melyet maga körül látott, végre nyugodtabbá tevé Violát is. Lépésre
mérsékelé lovának sebes futását, s letörülve könyeit, fel a
csillagokra nézett, honnan annyi fönséges remény ragyog le minden
szenvedőre.
Midőn a dombra ért, honnan néhány hónap előtt új tanyáját
először meglátta, egy perczig megállt s visszanézett. A távolság s a
hold bizonytalan világa miatt csak egy fehér folt s nem messze tőle
egy gyenge pásztortűz vala minden, a mit látott. Eszébe jutottak
mindazon remények, melyekkel e helyre jött, – a keservek, melyeken
azóta keresztül ment, – gyermekei, kiket a hegyoldalon eltemetett, s
végre a szerencsétlen nő, kire életének legnehezebb csapása vár, –
s e gondolatoknál ismét köny nyomult szemébe; de fájdalmának
szenvedélyes kitörése után Viola visszanyerte ismét szilárdságát. –
Ki tehet róla? – így szólt, midőn egy nehéz fohász után ismét útnak
indult, – sorsát senki nem kerülheti ki; én szerencsétlenségre
születtem.
Viola föltevé magában, hogy Tiszarétre megy, s Réty Ákos
kezeibe adja magát, vagy ha ezt nem találná ott, legalább Liptáknét
nejéhez küldi; s miután e hely a tanyától, hol nejét hagyá, jó húsz
mérföldnyire volt, s Viola, hogy senki kezeibe ne kerüljön, főkép
Taksonymegyébe érve, minden jártabb utakat elkerült, többnyire
csak éjjel ment, hosszú utazása alatt ideje vala gondolkozni.
Gondolatait többnyire neje foglalta el. – Szegény Zsuzsi! – így szólt
sokszor magában, – csak miatta ne kellene aggódnom, de ha
megtudja, hogy a vármegye kezébe adtam magamat, kétségbe esik.
De mit tehetek? Végre is megtudták volna hollétemet. Valamint az
öreg János, úgy más is fölkereshetett, s akkor még rosszabb volna
dolgom. Igy, ha magamat feladom, legalább Tengelyi úr irásait nem
vehetik el tőlem, rajta segíthetek, és ki tudja, nem kapok-e végre
mégis gratiát, mint János mondta? – S ez utolsó gondolat a
szerencsétlennek nem kis vigasztalására szolgált. – Ha valaha férfi
nyugodtan nézett a halál elébe, ő vala az; de a gondolat, hogy életét
hóhér kezei által veszítse, borzadással tölti a legbátrabbat is; s Viola,
nejére gondolva, készebb vala mindent eltűrni inkább, mint azt, mit e
kedves teremtés túlélni nem fogna. – Zárjanak be tíz esztendőre –
gondolá magában, – kínozzanak, tegyenek velem akármit, az, hogy
élek s hasznomra lehet, fenn fogja tartani Zsuzsim erejét, s én is el
fogok tűrni mindent, ha őt néha láthatom. Hisz végre minden elmúlik,
s mint az öreg János mondta, még mint becsületes ember
végezhetem napjaimat. Ilyen emberi természetünk; ha oly helyzetbe
jutottunk, honnan semmi kedvező kilátás nem nyílik, a kisebb
rosszhoz kötjük reményhorgonyunkat, de egy napig sem
maradhatunk remény nélkül.
Viola minél tovább gondolkozott helyzetéről, annál
nyugodtabbnak érzé magát. A két emberölésen kívül, melynek
mindegyikénél mentségére annyi okot hozhatott föl, soha nagyobb
bűntettet nem követett el. Maga az, hogy a halálos félelmet kiállta s
most önmaga adja magát biróság kezébe, a legkeményebb ítéletet
elháríthatja róla, s azonkívül nem számolhat-e Réty Ákos s általa
annyi becsületes ember pártfogására, ha Tengelyit jelen
szerencsétlen helyzetéből megmenti? Legnagyobb aggodalma,
midőn harmadik éjjel Tiszaréttől már csak néhány mérföldnyire volt,
az vala, hogy mielőtt magát s irásait Réty Ákos- vagy Vándory-nak
átadhatta, Nyúzó pandurjainak kezeibe kerül. Viola a magával hozott
irományok fontosságának okát nem ismeré, de miután ez irományok
utolsó elfogatása alkalmánál tőle elvétettek s Nyúzó által
eltagadtattak, félnie kellett, hogy a főbiró, kinek jellemét
tapasztalásból ismeré, ez irományokat most is, ha kezébe
kerülnének, elsikkasztaná, s föltevé magában, inkább végső csepp
vérig védelmezni magát, hogysem Tengelyi irásait más, mint biztos
kezekbe tegye le.
Már hajnallani kezdett, midőn a szt.-vilmosi erdőhöz ért. Lova,
melyről egész éjtszaka le nem szállt, fáradt vala; s a helyről, melyen
állt, még jó két óráig kelle mennie, mielőtt Tiszarétre érhetett. Viola
megsajnálta jó lovát, melynek életében annyi hasznát vette, de
átlátta a veszélyt, mely reá nézve abból támadhat, ha fényes nappal
közeledvén a faluhoz, még mielőtt föltételét teljesíthetné,
megismertetik s erőszakkal a szolgabiróhoz hurczoltatik. Az erdőnek
épen legsürűbb része e télen kivágatván, a fák között, főkép most,
midőn ágaikat még lomb nem takará, rejteket találni nem lehetett, s
ezt látva, neki mégis legtanácsosabbnak látszott, ha útját tovább
folytatja. – A nagy rónaságon – gondolá magában – távolról
meglátok s kikerülhetek mindenkit; s te jó Hollóm – szólt, midőn
kedves paripájának nyakát veregeté, – ma még meg kell tenni
szolgálatodat, gondom lesz, hogy jó kezekbe kerülj. Talán Ákos úrfi
istállójába fogad s agarász-lónak használ, hisz megtanulhattad a
szaladást, eleget kergettek előbbi uraddal, én rajtad többé ülni nem
fogok. Viola ismét szomorú gondolatokba merülve folytatá útját, s
lova, mintha osztoznék ura bánatában, leeresztett fővel ballagott
tovább a fák között, melyeken annyiszor átszáguldott.
Szomorú ábrándjaiból Violát lódobogás ébreszté föl. Arra nézett,
s a kis erdővel körülfogott rétnek, melyen épen átment, másik
oldalán három lovas pandurt vett észre, kik mihelyt őt megláták,
feléje tartottak. Kitérnie vagy elrejtőznie nem lehetett,
megsarkantyúzta tehát lovát s futásban keresé menedékét. –
Megállj! – kiáltának üldözői – vagy halál fia vagy! – midőn utána
rohantak; de Holló, minden fáradtsága mellett, a pandurlovak által
nem vala oly könnyen elérhető, s a pár lövés, mely utána tétetett,
csak nevelé sebességét. Viola egyenesen Tiszarét felé tarta
futásában; a pandurok, nem vesztve őt szemeik elől, bizonyos
távolságban utána nyargaltak.
Ákos épen Tiszaréten volt. Az alispán mióta neje meghalt, nem
szivesen ment ki jószágára, s fiára bizá gazdaságát, ki most is a
tavaszi szántás végett több napot töltött itt, – s mert az utolsó időben
történteknek emléke neki is kínos vala, nem a kastélyban, hanem az
öreg Vándorynál lakott. Vándory, szokása szerint e reggelen is jókor
fölkelve, midőn az egészen tiszta eget látá, nem állhatott ellen a
vágynak, hogy ismét egyszer a Török-dombról nézze a felkelő napot,
s magával híva Ákost, vele ugyanazon helyre ment, hol őt
történetünk kezdetén először találtuk.
Kevés fiatal ember van a világon, ki reggeli álmát könnyen
hagyná el, – s Ákos nem jó kedvben követé öreg barátját, ki út között
szüntelen a felkelő nap szépségéről szólt, s előre élvezé a gyönyörű
látmányt, mely reájok a Török-dombon vár, sőt egyik hősöm
szégyenére, meg kell vallanom, hogy ámbár a napkelet soha
pompásabb szinekkel nem takarta a láthatárt, e látvány őt ma
hidegen hagyá.
Múlt ősz óta, hol az agarászat után Tengelyi- s Vándoryval a
Török-dombon találkozott, Ákos nem vala itt, s igen természetes, ha
most ugyanazon helyre jövén, azon dolgok jutottak eszébe, melyek a
domb körül akkor történtek, s hogy a napkeletről majdnem
elfelejtkezve, Vándoryt ezekre emlékezteté. – Mintha ma volna, oly
elevenen áll előttem minden – szólt a lelkészhez fordulva, – hol most
mi állunk, veled akkor szegény Tengelyi állott. A domb alatt lovaink,
előttetek Kálmán s én jobbra, ott az átkozott Nyúzó, mintha még
most is káromkodni hallanám, midőn a szt.-vilmosi erdő felé nézve
meglátá, hogy pandurjai valakit hoznak, s én nem akartam hinni,
hogy Violát fogatta meg.
Ákos e szavaknál mintegy akaratlanul a szt.-vilmosi erdő felé
fordult, s jó szemével észrevevé a lovasokat, kik a fák közül épen
most jöttek ki a síkra. – Mi ez? – szólt Vándoryhoz, midőn arra
mutatva, őt is a lovasokra figyelmezteté, – átkozott sebesen jőnek,
elől egy, utána három, mintha itt is valaki üldöztetnék.