Grim Tales Read online

  GRIM TALES

  Norman Lock

  [ mud luscious press ]

  first eBook printing: 2012

  cover design : Steven Seighman

  editor : J. A. Tyler

  assoc. editor : Andrew Borgstrom

  acknowledgments :

  Individual tales appeared in 3rd bed, 5_trope, elimae, Fairy Tale Review, First Intensity, Full Circle Journal, Kayak, Linnaean Street, New England Review, Paragraph, Seems, Snow Monkey and Taint. Grim Tales, together with Joseph Cornell’s Operas and Émigrés, was published as Trio by Triple Press and is available from Ravenna Press. The complete tales are posted as an ebook at elimae. The author is grateful to his publishers Kathryn Rantala, Cooper Renner and Deron Bauman, as well as the editors of the above publications, for allowing him to reprint the texts here.

  eBook isbn: 978-1-938103-03-2

  l c c n : 2010916969

  In the Dark of This Small Mirror

  an introduction by Matt Bell

  Grim Tales is a book I have always wanted to protect, to keep for myself and myself alone.

  My first reading of Grim Tales was not so long ago nor hard to remember, although the book was then shaped differently, still in its first incarnation as an e-book at the great literary magazine elimae. At the time, I felt like I had been woken up from a dream only to stumble onto a secret body of knowledge, one so important and necessary that immediately I wanted to hoard it, despite knowing that to refuse to share something is eventually to diminish it, to reduce its power in the world.

  It was an obviously ridiculous urge anyway, since I was reading Grim Tales online, but knowing better didn’t stop me from being obsessed or from pretending I was the only one who knew about the book. I printed a copy of the manuscript so that I could carry it around in my bag, slid into the accordion file that contained my then-daily life: my students’ papers, the work of my classmates, and my own frustrating fictions. I would read that printout between classes, or while waiting in public places, knowing that what I was reading was different from what anyone else in the room was holding, maybe from anything else they had ever seen. And so for months, beside all the rest of my life, there lay this weird and restless thing, these Grim Tales, familiar enough to the fairy tales I’d loved to grant me instant access to their world while still remaining uniquely alien, apart, made separate by their containing nothing but that which came from Norman Lock. From the very first page, this was a meticulously ordered world that pretended to randomness even as it made claims of predestination:

  Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order – no matter how he tried to resist it, this “settling of accounts.”

  And so it goes. Nearly every stylistic subtlety contained within the entirety of Grim Tales is included in that opening pair of sentences and from their words issue forth over one-hundred-and-fifty mostly self-contained sections, each one an aggression aimed at the idea that our world is knowable, that its borders are finite, that the relationships we have to the people, places, and artifacts of our days will remain as they are, as we would perhaps like them to be. Here this once-static world is assailed not from without but from within: It is our spouses who are most likely to end our lives, the objects of our houses most likely to avenge us or else take their own revenge, and it is the worst parts of our persons that are likely to define us, to open us up to the judgment of what judges there are left.

  More than most books, Grim Tales lives up to its title, in the near-pun of Grim to Grimm, and in the common meaning of the same word. Which is not to say that Lock is all doom-saying and threatening imagination. He provides a corrective at certain points of the fiction, a light to guide the reader through the dark forest he’s created. This character—a writer or else a series of writers, else perhaps himself—appears several times, including one memorable section near the center of the book, a fulcrum upon which the rest turns:

  He was one who was writing a book of tales. In the middle of his book, he left a note in which he confessed to all things – no matter how wicked or shameless – that were set down in the book, like fiction. In it, he mentioned lightly, as if wanting it to be overlooked, that at the end of his writing of this book he would write another, his last, in which he would disappear forever in a manner to be decided later.

  In this way—and in so many others—Lock changes what we are reading, so that even as the text unsteadies the ground upon which we must live out the rest of our lives, so his tale unsteadies itself, makes what we are reading as mutable and transmutable as the events it describes: Is this character the author whose name appears on the cover, or another writer—another Lock—altogether? If the book of tales being written in this section is the one you are holding—if it is Grim Tales, written by Norman Lock—then where is the missing middle section, the one that should fit right where this intimation of its existence fits instead? And what if it is something else, something I cannot imagine or else perhaps refuse to share? How many other interpretations might be possible of this section, of any section of this book, and how many of those might be simultaneously right to different readers, or even correct as contradictions within a single reader, as I feel they are within me?

  This unsteady brand of certainty is one of the most brilliant aspects of Lock’s accomplishment in Grim Tales: This is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter breaking bonds that had never before been broken. Throughout, the book defies the physics and metaphysics of our known world even as it pretends to a reaching backward, to drawing forth these tales from some shared past, dissembling not to deceive but to aggress us anew. See the quotation marks which suggest some unavailable subtext but which quote nothing but Lock’s own imagination, or else that of his arranging characters, his possible narrator, and you see the layers of interpretation he is willing to risk so as to prevent any easy explanation, any trite truth too cleverly left unconcealed. Better always that the work be mysterious, that the mystery be allowed to work upon us.

  I could go on, but even now, having just finished reading it for the tenth time in the last two years—ten full times, which doesn’t count when I’ve dipped back in, just for a few pages, just to get a little of its magic all over me all over again—even now I don’t want to give what I know away, and that means not telling you everything I have learned to see in the dark of this small mirror, this wizard’s glass masquerading as mere book. Better that you see it for yourself, that you agree to take its secrets on and let them change you by their keeping. Perhaps you will then feel as I felt: Once I wanted this book all for myself, because it had written its alphabet upon my bones, so that both the shape of me and what that shape contained were made different.

  And yet here we are: Now you too have what I had, and you are at its very beginning. You will turn the page, and the book will say “Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night” and it will say “he woke to find in his bed an instrument of destruction” and also “he was drawn from a small to a larger place, in accord with a law of physics yet to be discovered” and then on and on, saying more and more with each small tale. When you are finished you will perhaps be as discomfited as I was, possessed by a good fear, one never before put upon you. Perhaps, like me, you will keep that fear—that grimness—a secret; and few, therefore, will recognize how it has helped to set you apart, even if only in some smallest of ways.

  But all that is after. Between you, as you are now, and that person—a reader set apart—lies these Grim Tales. They begin with the waking from a dream, and so for you the dream ends when you turn this page. The world you’re about to wake into is like no other, and you will be there not nearly as long as you’ll wish you cou
ld be, which is not to say that it won’t be long enough to give you everything you need.

  I’ll see you on the other side, back in whatever dream is still left to us, fading as it always is now, and as Lock shows us it always has been. Not to despair: There’s a lot of beauty left in the dream’s dusk, and I look forward to standing with you when you return, ready to gaze ever more truly upon what world remains.

  Matt Bell is the author of the fiction collection How They Were Found, and the editor of The Collagist.

  FOR MAXWELL & MALCOLM

  … MERELY CURVING A MIRROR’S SURFACE CAN PLUNGE A MAN INTO AN IMAGINED WORLD …

  Umberto Eco

  GRIM TALES

  Norman Lock

  Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order – no matter how he tried to resist it, this “settling of accounts.” No matter that, in desperation one night, he burnt the papers, including his last will and testament, which was now being written in a hand he did not recognize, leaving everything to his estranged wife, a woman whom he despised. Last night, having resigned himself, he took an overdose of sleeping pills, sufficient to stop his heart.

  The pebbles grew into stones, the stones into great rocks. The rocks reared up into mountains, which cast their shadows over the land – their cold shadows. Darkness fell on the fields and the town and on a woman pinning sheets onto the line, her mouth full of clothespins and her breasts taut and lifted against her blouse. When her husband looked out the window and saw her, desire rose up in him. When she came into the house, he laid her down on the unmade bed and covered her body with his own just as the first boulders broke loose from the mountains and the avalanches began.

  The cloud, which looked, they said, ominous – a roiling darkness minutely veined with fire – rolled over the city and, after a time, settled on a part of it “like a cupped hand.” No light could pierce it: not the light from the streetlamps or from the house windows. Those who walked inside the darkness wondered at it – how it clung to them, their clothes and hands. When it lifted the following day, that part of the city where it had been was as if erased.

  Because he had died under mysterious circumstances, an autopsy was performed. The coroner removed a bullet from the right ventricle; however, neither entrance nor exit wound could be found. The bullet was of a type used by snipers in the World War, during which the man’s father had been lost and presumed dead. The man had never known his father, whom the man’s mother hated still with a passion equal to her love for her son. The wound – the coroner observed – was perfect, as if the bullet had been “introduced into the heart by means other than a weapon.”

  At midnight, a man received a call from someone who assured him he would not see the sun rise; that he – the caller – was even now getting ready to come and murder him. Escape was impossible: the house was watched by confederates, impervious to bribes or entreaties. Shortly after putting down the phone, the man died of fear. He could not know that the caller had dialed the wrong number and that it was another man, in another part of the city, who did not see morning.

  Each morning he woke to find in his bed an instrument of destruction: knife, noose, capsule, an ice-cold gun that felt in his hand like the breast of a dead bird. At breakfast, he would watch his wife pour coffee, butter toast, carry the remains of toast to the sink – look at her closely, his face a question. But hers gave no hint in answer, of an intent to do away with him by moving him to thoughts of suicide. They lived together: there was no one else in the apartment but them. If not she, then who? he wondered. This morning he found a black silk band on his wife’s pillow and remembered how, during the night, he had dreamed of waking to find a black silk band on the pillow, had tied it round his eyes, and then, opening the window, had jumped. He woke, terrified and breathless, before reaching the street. Awake now, he takes the black silk and ties it round his eyes, jumps, and does not cease to scream until he hits the pavement. Later, searching the apartment, the police find (hidden behind his books) a straight razor, matches soaked in paraffin, an envelope of powder tasting like arsenic.

  He brought a door with him and placed it against the hillside. Then he went in and closed it. What happened to him next is not known, because the door was for him alone. Later when they heard him scream, there was nothing anyone could do.

  The trees now grew without any longer observing the limits assigned them by nature. They reached into the sky until they looked out over “the floor of heaven.” Recalling the old story, boys climbed them. Not only boys but men and even some old men who wished for gold. One by one they fell – the old men and the young boys, too – not one of them having reached the top branches let alone the floor of heaven. Instead, they fell, all of them, earning for themselves neither wealth nor fame, only death at the foot of the unruly trees. Still the trees continued to grow without regard for the limitations of their kind until the roots tore from the ground and the earth was broken into pieces and destroyed.

  There, where the grass was allowed to grow without let or hindrance, children liked to hide from those who might call them home to their lessons. This evening when their mothers went into the towering grass to bring home the fugitives, they found entrances to what appeared to be underground tunnels. Putting their ears to them, they could hear a distant sound like the gnashing of teeth.

  It was the man who hit him over the head with a gaff. But she bound her husband’s ankles and wrists with cord; and together, they dropped him over the side. They had met at the summer home of a mutual friend. A man “connected to the theater.” Almost immediately, they had become lovers. Their affair was torrid, shameless, indiscreet. Her husband, however, knew nothing. Plotting to kill him had become, for the lovers, a game. The more they played it, the less impossible it seemed. Soon they thought of nothing else: the desire to kill him “perfectly” replaced their desire for each other. The night they disposed of the body, she dreamed of a crab scuttling across the ocean floor. The second night, of a door on the bottom. On the third night, she dreamed of a whale. It spoke to her in a way she understood. It told her to drive – now, before night was ended – to the sea; to take off her clothes and swim out as far as she could swim. The moon lay among the black waves like broken plates. She swam until she could swim no more. Then she sank beneath the waves. Her husband was waiting for her the moment she woke.

  He happened to look down, idly, at a book lying open on the table and read in it his own death, which instantly came to pass. What he might have seen or thought he had seen in this book – his wife’s cookbook – will never be known. Perhaps at that moment his mind was bent on self-destruction, as a mind will be from time to time. Or perhaps this: he saw there a recipe for a meal that, long ago, someone had predicted would be his last.

  When he was struck down by his wife’s lover, the scythe moaned in the wheat. In the kitchen, cutting open a loaf, she dropped her knife as the blood spilled out the bread’s fresh wounds.

  They had thought her drowned and her body, after so long a search, was never to be recovered. During the memorial service, when she stood in the vestry doorway in a wet dress, her hair wet and threaded with bits of green and orange weed – they panicked (feeling as if they were drowning) and ran outside “to stand under God’s own sky and to breathe fresh air!” Their terror assuaged, they went inside again, ashamed. But she was for a second time gone – leaving nothing to mark her sudden, brief presence but dampness on the carpet and a bit of green and orange weed. This, too: the odor of river bottom as it is dredged up on the blades of oars into sunlight.

  The drowned do not stay put. They circulate among the seas and oceans, rivers and bays, watching through the swaying window the sun and moon trade places in the sky, while they, too, move relentlessly on – impatient to find for themselves a grave, but pleased in spite of themselves with effortless swimming and the suave beauties of their world.

  He drowned in a pool – at night, s
wimming alone – and was found the next morning by fishermen trolling off the coast for mackerel. How does one explain this except by saying that between a swimming pool and an ocean lies that which no man can contemplate without profound revulsion? A kind of drain or sluice through which the body will, on rarest occasions, be drawn from a small to a larger place, in accord with a law of physics yet to be discovered.

  They had lived for generations in their village on the river. Lived entirely without violence or neurosis – “big city troubles.” They liked their sedate houses and businesses, set back from the quiet streets, behind green hairpin fences. They liked the fields that swept down to the river – mobbed with wild flowers and Timothy in summer and, in winter, burnished gold by stiff winter wheat sticking up above the snow. They especially liked their river – the swans, the rustling music as the water swayed among the reeds, how the sky seemed to sink down in it some days and on other days how the water blackened and ran before the wind. The morning after the ribbon-cutting ceremony opened their new bridge to traffic (a thing they did not want), the first “jumper” leaped from the rail and drowned.

  Sit still! she shouted; but the boy would not sit still. So she changed him into a chair.

  Until that morning, furniture had never betrayed the slightest wish to move – ostensibly content with a luxurious, if sedentary existence, out of the weather, attended daily by vacuum and duster, caressed lovingly with fragrant oils. No one sharing the house with tables and chairs suspected that in their resinous or upholstered hearts they burned for a change of scenery: to face a different wall or window. That morning, while the man and his wife wielded pruning hooks among the trees, a table took its first diffident steps across the living room, with the woman’s prized Limoges vase on its back – poised to fall and break. By nature smugly self-assured, an armchair threw its arms around the child’s neck, who was at that moment eating barley sugar and daydreaming of lions, and strangled him. This was the first reported instance in what has come to be known as the Revenge of Objects.