"And Mr. Taylor? By that time he already had been designated as a special adviser to the Const.i.tutional President. Now, and as an example of what individual effort can achieve, he was counting his thousands by the thousands; but this did not cause him to lose any sleep because he had read in the final volume of The Complete Works of William G. Knight that to be a millionaire was no dishonor if one did not despise the poor.
"I believe this will be the second time that I say that not all the times are good ones. Given the prosperity of the business, the moment arrived in which only the authorities and their wives, and the journalists and their wives remained in the vicinity. Without much effort, Mr. Taylor mused that the only possible remedy was to foment war with the neighboring tribes. Why not? It"s progress.
"With the help of some small cannons, the first tribe was cleanly beheaded in scarcely three months. Mr. Taylor tasted the glory of extending his domains. Then came the second, and afterward the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Progress extended with such rapidity that the hour arrived in which despite the efforts of the technicians, it was impossible to find new tribes to make war against.
"It was the beginning of the end.
"The two paths began to languish. Only once in a while could one see on them some lady or some poet laureate with a book under his arm. The weeds overran anew the two paths, making difficult and th.o.r.n.y the ladies" delicate steps. Along with the heads, the bicycles became scarce and almost all the happy optimistic greetings disappeared.
"The coffin manufacturer was more sad and funereal than ever before. And everyone felt as though they had awakened from a pleasant dream, from that wonderful dream in which you find a bag full of gold coins and you place it under your pillow and go back to sleep, and very early the next day, upon waking, you search for it and find emptiness.
"However, painfully, business went on as usual. But now one slept with difficulty, due to the fear of waking up exported.
"In Mr. Taylor"s country, of course, demand continued to rise. Daily new subst.i.tutes were appearing, but deep down inside n.o.body believed in them and everyone demanded the little heads from Latin America.
"It happened during the last crisis. Mr. Rolston, desperate, begged and begged for more heads. Despite the Company"s stocks suffering a sharp decline, Mr. Rolston was convinced that his nephew would do something to bail him out of that situation.
"The shipments, once daily, shrunk to once a month, now with anything, from children"s heads to those of ladies and deputies.
"Suddenly, they ceased totally.
"One harsh and gray Friday, home from the Exchange, stunned still by the cries and by the lamentable show of panic given by his friends, Mr. Rolston decided to jump through the window (instead of using a gun, whose noise filled him with terror) when upon opening a mail package he found the shrunken head of Mr. Taylor, brought to him from the distant, fierce Amazon, with a false child"s smile that seemed to say, "I"m sorry, I won"t do it again.""
Axolotl.
Julio Cortazar.
Translated into English by Gio Clairval.
Julio Cortazar (19141984) was an Argentine writer who became an architect of what is known as the Latin American Literary Boom. A novelist, poet, playwright, and nonfiction writer, Cortazar also wrote many short stories, collected in Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), and Las armas secretas (1959), among others. His entry point to the weird tale was the influence of surrealism. His fantastical stories almost always begin with a mundane reality into which unexplained strangeness intrudes. This fine translation of his "Axolotl" (1956) by Gio Clairval is the first new English version since the 1950s and considered the definitive translation by the author"s estate. Cortazar"s work as a translator, including the stories of Poe, also influenced his fiction.
There was a time when I thought quite often about the Axolotl. I used to go and see them in the aquarium of the Jardin des Plantes and remained for hours captivated, gazing at them, observing their immobility, their indistinct movements. Now I, too, am an Axolotl.
Chance led me to them one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peac.o.c.k tail after a long wintering. I strolled down Boulevard de Port Royal, took Saint-Marcel and L"Hopital, saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was acquainted with the lions and the panthers, but had never entered the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bicycle against the railing and went to see the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I opted for the aquarium, looked askance at ba.n.a.l fish until, unexpectedly, I came face to face with the Axolotl. I gazed at them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.
In the Sainte-Genevieve library, I consulted a dictionary and learned that the Axolotl are the larval stage, complete with gills, of a species of batrachians belonging to the genus Ambystoma. I already knew they were Mexican by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the sign above the tank. I read that specimens had been found in Africa capable of living on dry land during the periods of drought, and continuing their life under water when the rainy season set in. I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that their oil was used (it seems now no longer used) like codfish liver oil.
I didn"t care to consult any of the specialized works, but the next day I went back to the Jardin des Plantes. I began to go every morning, morning and afternoon some days. The aquarium guard gave a perplexed smile as he took my ticket. I would prop myself up on the railing in front of the tanks and set to study them. There was nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant continued to unite us nevertheless. It had been enough to keep me that first morning in front of the gla.s.s wall while bubbles rose through the water. The Axolotl huddled on the skimpy, narrow (only I can know how narrow and skimpy) floor of stone and moss in the tank. There were nine specimens, and most pressed their heads against the gla.s.s, looking with their eyes of gold at whoever approached them. Confused, almost ashamed, I felt indecent for lingering in front of these silent, still figures heaped at the bottom of the tank. To study them better, I mentally isolated one that was on the right and somehow apart from the others. I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky gla.s.s), similar to a small lizard about fifteen centimeters long, ending in a fish tail of extraordinary elegance, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin that joined the tail, but I was obsessed with the feet, of the subtlest grace, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human fingernails. And then I discovered the eyes, the face. The eyes were two holes as tiny as heads of pins entirely made of a transparent gold, devoid of all expression but still gazing, opening up to my stare, which seemed to pa.s.s through the golden spot and lose itself in a diaphanous inner mystery. A very thin, black ring encircled the eye and etched it in the pink flesh, and onto the rosy stone of a head vaguely triangular but with a curved and irregular outline, which created a strong likeness to a statuette corroded by time. The mouth was concealed by the triangular plane of the face, its considerable size only guessed in profile; in front a delicate cleft barely slit the lifeless stone. On both sides of the head, where the ears should have been, there grew three tiny sprigs, red as coral, a vegetal outgrowth, the gills, I suppose. And they were the only part that seemed alive; every ten or fifteen seconds the sprigs p.r.i.c.ked up stiffly and again began to relax. Whenever a leg twitched, I saw the minuscule toes alight on the moss in a smooth movement. In fact, we don"t enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped hardly do we move in any direction than we b.u.mp into one another"s tail or head conflicts arise, fights, fatigue. Time feels shorter if we remain quiet.
This sense of tranquillity fascinated me the first time I saw the Axolotl. In some obscure way, I understood their secret will, to abolish s.p.a.ce and time with indifferent immobility. Later I knew better; the contraction of the gills, the probing of the delicate legs on the stones, the sudden swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping the mineral stupor in which they spent entire hours. Above everything else, their eyes obsessed me. In the tanks on either side of them, various fish showcased the simple stupidity of their beautiful eyes so similar to our own. The eyes of the Axolotl told me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. Gluing my face to the gla.s.s (the guard, worried, coughed sometimes), I tried to see better those minuscule golden spots, this entrance to the infinitely slow and remote world of the roseate creatures. No point in tapping with a fingertip on the gla.s.s right in front of their faces; they never reacted in the slightest way. The golden eyes kept burning with their soft, terrible light; they kept gazing at me from an unfathomable depth that gave me vertigo.
And nevertheless they were close. I knew it before this, before being an Axolotl. I knew it the day I approached them for the first time. Contrary to what most people think, the anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the distance that separates them from us. The absolute lack of similarity between the Axolotl and a human being proved to me that my recognition was well founded, that I was not sustaining my theory with easy a.n.a.logies. Those little hands alone...But the common lizard has such hands, too, and we are not at all alike. I think it was the Axolotl"s head, that triangular pink shape with the tiny eyes of gold. That gazed and knew. That claimed. They were no animals.
It seemed easy, almost obvious, to dive into mythology. I began seeing in the Axolotl a metamorphosis that could not quite destroy some mysterious humanity. I imagined them aware, slaves to their bodies, forever condemned to an abyssal silence, to a hopeless meditation. Their blind gaze, the tiny golden disc, expressionless and nonetheless terribly lucid, entered my mind like a message: "Save us, save us." I surprised myself by mumbling words of consolation, conveying childish hopes. They continued to look at me, stock-still; from time to time the small, pink branches of the gills stiffened. In that instant I felt a dull pain. Perhaps they did see me, grasped my efforts to penetrate the impenetrable essence of their lives. They were not human beings, but in no animal had I ever found such a profound connection to myself. The Axolotl were like witnesses to something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ign.o.ble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvae, but "larva" means mask and also specter. Behind those Aztec faces, expressionless but of an implacable cruelty, what appearance awaited its hour?
I was afraid of them. I think that had it not been for the proximity of other visitors and the guard, I would not have dared to be alone with them. "You"re eating them with your eyes," the guard said, laughing; he probably believed me a little insane. He didn"t realize they were the ones that devoured me with their eyes, slowly, in a cannibalism of gold. Away from the aquarium, my thoughts revolved solely around them, as though they could influence me from afar. At one point, I went to see them every day, and at night I thought of them unmoving in the darkness, slowly putting a hand out which immediately encountered another. Perhaps their eyes could see in the dead of night, and for them the day continued without end. The eyes of the Axolotl have no lids.
I know now that there was nothing strange, that it had to happen. Each new morning, as I leaned against the tank, the recognition grew stronger. They suffered; every fiber of my body reached out to sense that muzzled pain, that rigid torment at the bottom of the tank. They kept furtive watch over something, a faraway dominion now destroyed, an era of freedom when the world belonged to the Axolotl. Such a terrible expression trying to disturb the forced blankness of their stone faces could carry no message other than pain, proof of their eternal sentence, of the liquid h.e.l.l they endured. To no avail, I tried to convince myself that my own sensitivity projected a nonexistent consciousness upon the Axolotl. They and I both knew. Therefore, nothing of what happened was strange. My face pressed against the gla.s.s of the aquarium, my stare attempted once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold, without an iris, without a pupil. Close up, I saw the face of an Axolotl immobile near the gla.s.s. Without transition or surprise, I saw my own face against the gla.s.s, I saw it outside the tank, I saw it on the other side of the gla.s.s. Then my face drew back, and I understood.
Only one thing was strange: to think as I did before, knowing. At first, this realization resembled the horror of a man buried alive awakening to his fate. On the outside, my face came close to the gla.s.s again; I saw my own mouth, lips pressed together in the effort of understanding the Axolotl. I was an Axolotl and then knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium, and his thinking was a thinking outside the aquarium. Recognizing him, being him, I was an Axolotl and I was in my world. The horror began I knew it at the same moment I believed myself a prisoner in a body of Axolotl, transmigrated into him with my human mind intact, buried alive in an Axolotl, condemned to move lucidly among insensitive creatures. But this feeling stopped when a leg brushed my face, when I moved a little to the side and saw an Axolotl next to me who was watching me, and I understood that he knew also, no communication possible, but in such a limpid way. Or I was also in him, or all of us were thinking like men, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes staring at the man"s face pressed against the aquarium.
He returned many times thereafter, but he comes less often now. Weeks pa.s.s without his showing up. I saw him yesterday; he looked at me for a long time and left abruptly. I had the impression that he was not so interested in us any more, that he came out of habit. Since all I do is think, I could think about him a lot. It occurs to me that at the beginning we did communicate, that he felt more than ever one with the mystery over which he was obsessing. But the bridges were broken between him and me, because that which was his obsession is now an Axolotl, alien to the life of a man. I think that at the beginning I was capable of becoming him to a certain extent, only to a certain extent and I knew how to keep alive his desire to know us better. Now I am definitely an Axolotl, and if I think like a man, it"s only because every Axolotl thinks like a man behind that appearance of pink stone. I believe that all this I succeeded in communicating somehow to him in those first days, when I was still he. And in this final solitude to which he no longer returns, it consoles me to think that perhaps he will write about us, that, believing he"s imagining a story, he will write all this about the Axolotl.
A Woman Seldom Found.
William Sansom.
William Sansom (19121976) was an English writer who worked as a firefighter during the Blitz and was directly influenced by the Surrealists. Using descriptive, muscular prose, Sansom took the mundane and transformed it through his surrealist"s eye. His previous story in this volume, "The Long Sheet," explored weird ritual. "A Woman Seldom Seen" (1956), by contrast, is something rare for Sansom: an excellent example of the traditional weird tale and his most anthologized story. Readers wishing to explore more of Sansom"s prose should seek out the new volume from Faber & Faber, The Stories of William Sansom (2011).
Once a young man was on a visit to Rome.
It was his first visit, he came from the country but he was neither on the one hand so young nor on the other so simple as to imagine that a great and beautiful capital should hold out finer promises than anywhere else. He already knew that life was largely illusion, that though wonderful things could happen, nevertheless as many disappointments came in compensation: and he knew, too, that life could offer a quality even worse the probability that nothing would happen at all. This was always more possible in a great city intent on its own business.
Thinking in this way, he stood on the Spanish Steps and surveyed the momentous panorama stretched before him. He listened to the swelling hum of the evening traffic and watched as the lights went up against Rome"s golden dusk. Shining automobiles slunk past the fountains and turned urgently into the bright Via Condotti, neon-red signs stabbed the shadows with invitation; the yellow windows of buses were packed with faces intent on going somewhere everyone in the city seemed intent on the evening"s purpose. He alone had nothing to do.
He felt himself the only person alone of everyone in the city. But searching for adventure never brought it rather kept it away. Such a mood promised nothing. So the young man turned back up the steps, pa.s.sed the lovely church, and went on up the cobbled hill towards his hotel. Wine-bars and food-shops jostled with growing movement in those narrow streets. But out on the broad pavements of the Vittoro Veneto, under the trees mounting to the Borghese Gardens, the high world of Rome would be filling the most elegant cafes in Europe to enjoy with aperitifs the twilight. That would be the loneliest of all! So the young man kept to the quieter, older streets on his solitary errand home.
In one such street a pavementless alley between old yellow houses, a street that in Rome might suddenly blossom into a secret piazza of fountain and baroque church, a grave secluded treasure-place he noticed that he was alone but for the single figure of a woman walking down the hill towards him.
As she drew nearer, he saw that she was dressed with taste, that in her carriage was a soft Latin fire, that she walked for respect. Her face was veiled, but it was impossible to imagine that she would not be beautiful. Isolated thus with her, pa.s.sing so near to her, and she symbolizing the adventure of which the evening was so empty a greater melancholy gripped him. He felt wretched as the gutter, small, sunk, pitiful. So that he rounded his shoulders and lowered his eyes but not before casting one furtive glance into hers.
He was so shocked at what he saw that he paused, he stared, shocked, into her face. He had made no mistake. She was smiling. Also she too had hesitated. He thought instantly: "Wh.o.r.e?" But no it was not that kind of smile, though as well it was not without affection. And then amazingly she spoke: "I I know I shouldn"t ask you...but it is such a beautiful evening and perhaps you are alone, as alone as I am..."
She was very beautiful. He could not speak. But a growing elation gave him the power to smile. So that she continued, still hesitant, in no sense soliciting: "I thought...perhaps...we could take a walk, an aperitif..."
At last the young man achieved himself: "Nothing, nothing would please me more. And the Veneto is only a minute up there."
She smiled again: "My home is just here..."
They walked in silence a few paces down the street, to a turning that young man had already pa.s.sed. This she indicated. They walked to where the first humble houses ended in a kind of recess. In the recess was set the wall of a garden, and behind it stood a large and elegant mansion. The woman, about whose face shone a curious pale glitter something fused of the transparent pallor of fine skin, of grey but brilliant eyes, of dark eyebrows and hair of lucent black inserted her key in the garden gate.
They were greeted by a servant in velvet livery. In a large and exquisite salon, under chandeliers of fine gla.s.s and before a moist green courtyard where water played, they were served with a frothy wine. They talked. The wine iced in the warm Roman night filled them with an inner warmth of exhilaration. But from time to time the young man looked at her curiously.
With her glances, with many subtle inflections of teeth and eyes she was inducing an intimacy that suggested much. He felt he must be careful. At length he thought the best thing might be to thank her somehow thus to root out whatever obligation might be in store. But here she interrupted him, first with a smile, then with a look of some sadness. She begged him to spare himself any perturbation; she knew it was strange, that in such a situation he might suspect some second purpose; but the simple truth remained that she was lonely and this with a certain deference something perhaps in him, perhaps in that moment of dusk in the street, had proved to her inescapably attractive. She had not been able to help herself.
The possibility of a perfect encounter a dream that years of disillusion will never quite kill decided him. His elation rose beyond control. He believed her. And thereafter the perfections compounded. At her invitation they dined. Servants brought food of great delicacy; sh.e.l.l-fish, fat bird-flesh, soft fruits. And afterwards they sat on a sofa near the courtyard, where it was cool. Liqueurs were brought. The servants retired. A hush fell upon the house. They embraced.
A little later, with no word, she took his arm and led him from the room. How deep a silence had fallen between them! The young man"s heart beat fearfully it might be heard, he felt, echoing in the hall whose marble they now crossed, sensed through his arm to hers. But such excitement rose now from certainty. Certainty that at such a moment on such a charmed evening nothing could go wrong. There was no need to speak. Together they mounted the great staircase.
In her bedroom, to the picture of her framed by the bed curtains and dimly naked in a silken shift, he poured out his love; a love that was to be eternal, to be always perfect, as fabulous as this their exquisite meeting.
Softly she spoke the return of his love. Nothing would ever go amiss, nothing would ever come between them. And very gently she drew back the bedclothes for him.
But suddenly, at the moment when at last he lay beside her, when his lips were almost upon hers he hesitated.
Something was wrong. A flaw could be sensed. He listened, felt and then saw the fault was his. Shaded, soft-shaded lights by the bed but he had been so careless as to leave on the bright electric chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. He remembered the switch was by the door. For a fraction, then, he hesitated. She raised her eyelids saw his glance at the chandelier, understood.
Her eyes glittered. She murmured: "My beloved, don"t worry don"t move..."
And she reached out her hand. Her hand grew larger, her arm grew longer and longer, it stretched out through the bed-curtains, across the long carpet, huge and overshadowing the whole of the long room, until at last its giant fingers were at the door. With a terminal click, she switched out the light.
The Howling Man.
Charles Beaumont.
Charles Beaumont (19291967) was a prolific American author who established himself as a script writer in Hollywood and died of a brain disorder at the tragically young age of thirty-eight. In addition to his macabre short stories, he wrote several Twilight Zone episodes, but also penned the screenplays for cult films like 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, and The Masque of the Red Death. The cla.s.sic story reprinted here, "The Howling Man" (1959), was adapted as a screenplay for Twilight Zone. In the episode, a reference to a cross was changed to "staff of truth," out of fear of a backlash from Christian preachers. In its approach, the story oddly evokes Decadent-era writing and spotlights Beaumont"s stylistic prowess.
The Germany of that time was a land of valleys and mountains and swift dark rivers, a green and fertile land where everything grew tall and straight out of the earth. There was no other country like it. Stepping across the border from Belgium, where the rain-caped, mustached guards saluted, grinning, like operetta soldiers, you entered a different world entirely. Here the gra.s.s became as rich and smooth as velvet; deep, thick woods appeared; the air itself, which had been heavy with the French perfume of wines and sauces, changed: the clean, fresh smell of lakes and pines and boulders came into your lungs. You stood a moment, then, at the border, watching the circling hawks above and wondering, a little fearfully, how such a thing could happen. In less than a minute you had pa.s.sed from a musty, ancient room, through an invisible door, into a kingdom of winds and light. Unbelievable! But there, at your heels, clearly in view, is Belgium, like all the rest of Europe, a faded tapestry from some forgotten mansion.
In that time, before I had heard of St. Wulfran"s, of the wretch who clawed the stones of a locked cell, wailing in the midnight hours, or of the daft Brothers and their mad Abbot, I had strong legs and a mind on its last search, and I preferred to be alone. A while and I"ll come back to this spot. We will ride and feel the sickness, fall, and hover on the edge of death, together. But I am not a writer, only one who loves wild, unhousebroken words; I must have a real beginning.
Paris beckoned in my youth. I heeded, for the reason most young men just out of college heed, although they would never admit it: to lie with mysterious beautiful women. A solid, traditional upbringing among the corseted ruins of Boston had succeeded, as such upbringings generally do, in honing the urge to a keen edge. My nightly dreams of beaded bagnios and dusky writhing houris, skilled beyond imagining, reached, finally, the unbearable stage beyond which lies either madness or respectability. Fancying neither, I managed to convince my parents that a year abroad would add exactly the right amount of seasoning to my maturity, like a dash of curry in an otherwise bland, if not altogether tasteless, chowder. I"m afraid that Father caught the hot glint in my eye, but he was kind. Describing, in detail, and with immense effect, the hideous consequences of profligacy, telling of men he knew who"d gone to Europe, innocently, and fallen into dissolutions so profound they"d not been heard of since, he begged me at all times to remember that I was an Ellington and turned me loose. Paris, of course, was enchanting and terrifying, as a jungle must be to a zoo-born monkey. Out of respect to the honored dead, and Dad, I did a quick tour through the Tuileries, the Louvre, and down the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe; then, with the fall of night, I cannoned off to Montmartre and the Rue Pigalle, embarking on the Grand Adventure. Synoptically, it did not prove to be so grand as I"d imagined; nor was it, after the fourth week, so terribly adventurous. Still, important to what followed, for what followed doubtless wouldn"t have but for the sweet complaisant girls.
Boston"s Straights and Narrows don"t, I fear, prepare one except psychologically for the Wild Life. My health broke in due course and, as my thirst had been well and truly slaked, I was not awfully discontent to sink back into the contemplative coc.o.o.n to which I was, apparently, more suited. Abed for a month I lay, in celibate silence and almost total inactivity. Then, no doubt as a final gesture of rebellion. I got my idea got? or had my concentrated sins received it, like a signal from a failing tower? and I made my strange, un-Ellingtonian decision. I would explore Europe. But not as a tourist, safe and fat in his fat, safe bus, insulated against the beauty and the ugliness of changing cultures by a pane of gla.s.s and a room at the English-speaking hotel. No. I would go like an unprotected wind, a seven-league-booted leaf, a nestless bird, and I would see this dark strange land with the vision of a boy on the last legs of his dreams. I would go by bicycle, poor and lonely and questing as poor and lonely and questing, anyway, as one can be with a hundred thousand in the bank and a partnership in Ellington, Carruthers & Blake waiting.
So it was. New England blood and muscles wilted on that first day"s pumping, but New England spirit toughened as the miles dropped back. Like an ant crawling over a once-lovely, now decayed and somewhat seedy d.u.c.h.ess, I rode over the body of Europe. I dined at restaurants where boars" heads hung, all vicious-tusked and blind; I slept at country inns and breathed the musty age, and sometimes girls came to the door and knocked and asked if I had everything I needed ("Well...") and they were better than the girls in Paris, though I can"t imagine why. No matter. Out of France I pedaled, into Belgium, out, and to the place of cows and forests, mountains, brooks, and laughing people: Germany. (I"ve rhapsodized on purpose for I feel it"s quite important to remember how completely Paradisical the land was then, at that time.) I looked odd, standing there. The border guard asked what was loose with me, I answered Nothing grateful for the German, and the French, Miss Finch had drummed into me and set off along the smallest, darkest path. It serpentined through forests, cities, towns, villages, and always I followed its least likely appendages. Unreasonably, I pedaled as if toward a destination: into the Moselle Valley country, up into the desolate hills of emerald.
By a ferry, fallen to desuetude, the reptile drew me through a bosky wood. The trees closed in at once. I drank the fragrant air and pumped and kept on pumping, but a heat began to grow inside my body. My head began to ache. I felt weak. Two more miles and I was obliged to stop, for perspiration filmed my skin. You know the signs of pneumonia: a sapping of the strength, a trembling, flashes of heat and of cold; visions. I lay in the bed of damp leaves for a time, then forced myself onto the bicycle and rode for what seemed an endless time. At last a village came to view. A thirteenth-century village, gray and narrow-streeted, cobbled to the hidden store fronts. A number of old people in peasant costumes looked up as I b.u.mped along, and I recall one ancient tallow-colored fellow nothing more. Only the weakness, like acid, burning off my nerves and muscles. And an intervening blackness to pillow my fall.
I awoke to the smells of urine and hay. The fever had pa.s.sed, but my arms and legs lay heavy as logs, my head throbbed horribly, and there was an empty shoveled-out hole inside my stomach somewhere. For a long while I did not move or open my eyes. Breathing was a major effort. But consciousness came, eventually.
I was in a tiny room. The walls and ceiling were of rough gray stone, the single gla.s.sless window was arch-shaped, the floor was uncombed dirt. My bed was not a bed at all but a blanket thrown across a disorderly pile of crinkly straw. Beside me, a crude table; upon it, a pitcher; beneath it, a bucket. Next to the table, a stool. And seated there, asleep, his tonsured head adangle from an Everest of robe, a monk.
I must have groaned, for the shorn pate bobbed up precipitately. Two silver trails gleamed down the corners of the suddenly exposed mouth, which drooped into a frown. The slumbrous eyes blinked.
"It is G.o.d"s infinite mercy," sighed the gnome-like little man. "You have recovered."
"Not as yet," I told him. Unsuccessfully, I tried to remember what had happened; then I asked questions.
"I am Brother Christophorus. This is the Abbey of St. Wulfran"s. The Burger-meister of Schwartzhof, Herr Barth, brought you to us nine days ago. Father Jerome said that you would die and he sent me to watch, for I have never seen a man die, and Father Jerome holds that it is beneficial for a Brother to have seen a man die. But now I suppose that you will not die." He shook his head ruefully.
"Your disappointment," I said, "cuts me to the quick. However, don"t abandon hope. The way I feel now, it"s touch and go."
"No," said Brother Christophorus sadly. "You will get well. It will take time. But you will get well."
"Such ingrat.i.tude, and after all you"ve done. How can I express my apologies?"
He blinked again. With the innocence of a child, he said, "I beg your pardon?"
"Nothing." I grumbled about blankets, a fire, some food to eat, and then slipped back into the well of sleep. A fever dream of forests full of giant two-headed beasts came, then the sound of screaming.
I awoke. The scream shrilled on Klaxon-loud, high, cutting, like a cry for help.
"What is that sound?" I asked.
The monk smiled. "Sound? I hear no sound," he said.
It stopped. I nodded. "Dreaming. Probably I"ll hear a good deal more before I"m through. I shouldn"t have left Paris in such poor condition."
"No," he said. "You shouldn"t have left Paris."
Kindly now, resigned to my recovery, Brother Christophorus became attentive to a fault. Nurselike, he spooned thick soups into me, applied compresses, chanted soothing prayers, and emptied the bucket out the window. Time pa.s.sed slowly. As I fought the sickness, the dreams grew less vivid but the nightly cries did not diminish. They were as full of terror and loneliness as before, strong, real in my ears. I tried to shut them out, but they would not be shut out. Still, how could they be strong and real except in my vanishing delirium? Brother Christophorus did not hear them. I watched him closely when the sunlight faded to the gray of dusk and the screams began, but he was deaf to them if they existed. If they existed!
"Be still, my son. It is the fever that makes you hear these noises. That is quite natural. Is that not quite natural? Sleep."
"But the fever is gone! I"m sitting up now. Listen! Do you mean to tell me you don"t hear that?"
"I hear only you, my son."
The screams, that fourteenth night, continued until dawn. They were totally unlike any sounds in my experience. Impossible to believe they could be uttered and sustained by a human, yet they did not seem to be animal. I listened, there in the gloom, my hands balled into fists, and knew, suddenly, that one of two things must be true. Either someone or something was making these ghastly sounds, and Brother Christophorus was lying, or I was going mad. Hearing-voices mad, climbing-walls and frothing mad. I"d have to find the answer: that I knew. And by myself.
I listened with a new ear to the howls. Razoring under the door, they rose to operatic pitch, subsided, resumed, like the cries of a surly, hysterical child. To test their reality, I hummed beneath my breath, I covered my head with a blanketing, scratched at the straw, coughed. No difference. The quality of substance, of existence, was there. I tried, then, to localize the screams; and, on the fifteenth night, felt sure that they were coming from a spot not far along the hall.
"The sounds that maniacs hear seem quite real to them."
I know. I know!
The monk was by my side, he had not left it from the start, keeping steady vigil even through Matins. He joined his tremulous soprano to the distant chants, and prayed excessively. But nothing could tempt him away. The food we ate was brought to us, as were all other needs. I"d see the Abbot, Father Jerome, once I was recovered. Meanwhile...
"I"m feeling better, Brother. Perhaps you"d care to show me about the grounds. I"ve seen nothing of St. Wulfran"s except this little room."
"There is only this little room multiplied. Ours is a rigorous order. The Franciscans, now, they permit themselves esthetic pleasure; we do not. It is, for us, a luxury. We have a single, most unusual job. There is nothing to see."
"But surely the Abbey is very old."
"Yes, that is true."
"As an antiquarian"
"Mr. Ellingto"