Grim Tales Read online

  She was frightened now that she had murdered him, seeing in his eyes as they closed on her the image of her own face, which – she knew – he would take with him even to the worms.

  The steamer appeared in the harbor at dusk, black smoke from its stacks losing itself in the coming darkness. As the boat drew closer to the wharf, men leaning against the bollards to smoke heard band music on the water: “The Mountains of the Moon,” a tune none had heard until then, which seemed to dissolve in the suddenly chill air. Night fell; the ship’s lights trembled against the black river. Here and there, passengers could be seen standing in the light that splashed down onto the decks. The men on the pier had never seen such a ship. It came to rest, gangplanks were let down and now the passengers began their slow disembarkation. They wore clothes the men thought peculiar – clothes that had been fashionable in 1912 when the Titanic is believed to have gone down. But the name of this ship was H.M.S. Titanic. Later, when the passengers were questioned, they laughed at the idea their ship had sunk! Didn’t we know it is “unsinkable”? There had been ice in the sea lanes and thick fog – they remembered the fog; but they had slept soundly that night and long – dreaming, in first class or steerage, of ballrooms or barrooms, polo or bocce. The best sleep of our lives! they said while they waited with letters in their hands for those who had promised to meet them.

  Forbidden to look at the sun, he did and ever after saw unimaginable sights.

  The children stopped their play and looked at the ground from which – they said – a music was coming like “ants singing.” But the mothers and fathers who had gone outside to see why the children had grown so silent heard nothing, though they strained to hear and went so far, some of them, as to kneel and put their ears to the ground. They could hear nothing like a music anywhere underneath the grass – all except the simple-minded one who mowed lawns in summer. He said shyly, “Like ants singing a nasty song that makes me want to run and hide.” That evening as the sun fell swiftly behind the hill, the children hid themselves down the wells, in storm drains, culverts, and other places inside the earth and were never seen again, although afterwards the simple-minded man said he heard them, from time to time – heard them sing a terrible song.

  The first thing the angel did when he came to earth was, with the help of a locksmith, to take off his wings. The second thing was to go up in an airplane. The third was to marry a woman, whom he called “angel,” although she was ordinary. When she died, he took his wings out of storage, had them cleaned and oiled and the rubies in their intricate works replaced by a watch-maker. Then he returned to the place from which he had come – satisfied that he had lived the life of a man.

  In another version of the story, the angel, having grown tired of life on earth, killed his wife and took her home in order to “give his beloved a head start on eternity.”

  In a third version, the wife murdered the angel, sold his wings for a fortune, and lived happily ever after with her lover, who was reasonably imperfect, had a wicked sense of humor, believed entirely in the here-and-now and not at all in the hereafter.

  During the night, lightning opened an ancient oak’s trunk below the first fork. In the morning, a hand was found revealed in the splintered wood – a hand fresh as if recently alive, although the ring on its finger was of a kind worn in Holland and in the Dutch colonies in the 17th century. This, the university archaeologists were able to ascertain with certainty. How the hand had been caused to be locked in the wood and how it had been preserved there were never adequately explained. Some of a fantastic disposition believed it had belonged to a malefactor, a thief perhaps, who had forfeited his hand in punishment and that it had been brought to the tree by a carrion-bird to nourish its young. But why it should have remained intact they could not say. One other explanation was put forward: that the hand had been at the throat of a woman – a wife, surely – when it had been severed “by a miracle,” then buried in the tree. But the proponent of this theory was ridiculed. She was of unstable mind, after all; and hadn’t her husband lost his hand in an accident?

  From the fissure that had opened during the night “like a piece of black lightning” issued a seemingly endless column of giant ants of a kind not previously identified but now believed to have come from the depths of the interior. In a short while – shorter than anyone had thought possible – the ants carried off the houses with their contents down to the last bed, broom and cup until nothing remained of them, and the ground where they had stood was beaten flat. Why this neighborhood had been singled out is unknown, as is the fate of those who had lately dwelled there. Some think that the former inhabitants are now living in a reconstruction of their original houses deep below ground under an artificial sun. Whether they were brought there to rescue or to punish is hotly debated.

  The pit is full, he said. Wiping blood from his hands, the other man answered: Dig another one.

  In a seaside hotel, he fell ill. His wife slept on the sofa in the other room because of his feverish tossing “like a man caught in the surf.” That night he dreamed of drowning. The next morning when she went into his room, he was dead – the sheet wet and his hair caked with sand.

  Those unfortunate enough to open their closet doors that night were smothered by the coats hanging inside. It was revenge taken by objects whose function is to humble themselves in the service of their owners. What is more, to stand in harm’s way, between their owners’ vulnerable bodies and the harshest of elements. Those who considered themselves lucky to have escaped their coats had only to wait until the next rain, when they were impaled on their umbrellas the moment they were unfurled.

  If they had owned a new electric mixer instead of an old-fashioned egg-beater, they could have switched it off before it flew across the kitchen and attacked the baby.

  She was beguiled by a set of Chinese boxes, given to her by an aunt who traveled and whose fur piece, wet that morning with melting snow, had tickled the girl’s cheek. She spent hours playing with the boxes, making them disappear inside each other. It was this that beguiled her – how one box could swallow another completely and yet remain in its place, unseen. She was a strange child. A secretive child. A private child, whose mother and father feared her. The first day she disappeared, no one thought to look in her closet. When she was hungry, she came out and sat at the kitchen table, waiting for supper. The second time she disappeared, no one thought to look down the well in the yard. All night the girl slept, underwater, covered by the moon.

  The diver descended into a town flooded the year before during construction of a dam. Everything had been left to the deep lake that formed behind it: trees and streetlights, church and post office. All gone, out of sight. The town’s people had shut their windows and locked their doors as if they had every intention of returning. The diver swam among the houses, peering curiously. Sunlight from above shook down on the streets. In one house, she saw a fly crawling on the other side of the glass and, lying on a saucer, a cigarette scribbling blue Turkish letters on the air. The room ought to have been flooded, but wasn’t. In every house she looked, it was as if “someone had just left.” Rising to the surface, she heard the muffled ringing of a church bell and saw behind her the streetlights come on, one by one, in the drowned town.

  A woman stood at the window of her apartment, looking at the oak tree – its rough limbs, how they writhed and surged. And while she looked, rapt, perhaps because of sunlight glancing here and there along its branches and among its leaves, the branch closest to her – the thick one whose bark was patterned like the back of a python – slid through the window and, coiling deftly once around her waist, crushed her.

  After the rain, they saw revealed among the roots of a tree one root that, for many, resembled a man’s arm – its fingers clawing at the mud. That night it rained again. They stayed in their houses, looking out the windows as if through smoke. In the morning the root was gone. In the wet ground, they now saw a room or chamber or not so much room or chamber as an e
arthen mold in the form of a man.

  As he walked along the platform, he scarcely noticed the water that rained down from the sidewalk grating up above, creating a rivulet at the center of the tracks. Nor did he regard the water sliding down the tiled wall like a sheet of imperfect glass – so intent was he on the posters advertising the season’s new plays. He climbed out of the subway by the usual stairs – those he ascended every day on the final leg of his journey to the office. It was only when he stood at the top of them, where the sidewalk and street ought to have been and saw that all around him there was nothing but ocean that he began to be afraid.

  She came into the room, carrying two gin cocktails on a silver tray – one for her husband, the other for herself. She saw herself momentarily in the mirror as she passed and could not say what it was that affected her so strangely. (It was the utter blankness of her face, as if the features had been erased; but the moment was too slight, too fugitive for her to tell the cause of her dismay.) For some reason, her husband turned off the table lamp; and the room was suddenly emptied of furniture, walls, a seascape done in oil, which hung above the sofa covered in stripes of maroon-and-cream damask. When he turned the light on again, his wife was gone and there was only one cocktail on the silver tray, which he held in his hands – hands that did not in the least tremble.

  Each morning the fog appeared, as if from out of the ground. After the sun had risen sufficiently to burn it off, always new dangers were revealed. Once, a field of knives flashing in the midday sun. Another time, deep wells down which children disappeared. And not too long ago – mirrors in which those who gazed saw themselves as others did and were destroyed.

  They would not have been surprised had it been birds. They had for a long time expected birds. More than harbingers, birds would be their doom itself. But that moths should have clung to their eyes and tongues and filled their mouths with their soft wings – this none of them could have imagined!

  They were at their breakfast when the airplane took off from the field at the edge of town. They could hear its angry whine as it left the runway, rose and turned above the trees. The motor drowsed now as the plane came towards them, dragging its black shadow through the kitchen, across the table set with coffee cups and plates and silverware whose reflected light extinguished as the plane passed before the sun. They could see its shape duplicated in shadow – wings, tail, a body elongated by a property of light and distance. They had just time enough to wonder how that shadow could have fallen a thousand feet from the sky (like that of clouds herding across the valley), to slice through the house’s windows and remain a moment miraculously intact inside the kitchen, before they, all of them – mother, father and child – were smitten, mortally.

  She, who was always terrified of cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, was found dead – nightgown torn, her long hair twisted round her throat. She had the look of someone who has been roughly handled – the coroner stated at the trial. Certainly, it could not have been the fan over the bed that unleashed her destruction for a reason known only to objects, which, from time to time, become deranged. Surely the verdict of the court – that her husband took her life in an access of rage or passion – was the only possible one.

  A man stood at the railing and watched his child ride the carrousel. The child would disappear momentarily into the darkness at the outermost limit of the carrousel’s turning, before rushing back into the light. The light draped over the midway pinched by shadows that folded over the crowd “like black wings.” The man dropped his cigarette. He looked down to crush it underfoot, then looked up again as his child’s horse swung round into the light. The horse was riderless.

  They rode into the tunnel of love; and after a while, the boat came out again without them. Some declared they had been consumed in the heat of desire by spontaneous combustion, but this romantic theory was much ridiculed. Some others maintained that the young couple had been pulled from the boat by vagrants living inside the tunnel. Although a silk scarf was found, no one could recall whether or not the woman had been wearing one when she entered the tunnel of love. The explanation offered by the operator, who held a boathook almost fiercely – that the man and woman had been devoured by the mechanical monsters lurking in the tunnel’s alcoves – was never seriously considered.

  He believed that the end of the world would come at dawn and left his wife and children in order to “save myself, alone, as we – each of us – must when we stand before our maker.” He drove to the hills overlooking the sea where God was to arrive. When the dawn came and God did not, he returned to his family. They refused to let him into the house. He forced his way inside and slew them with the knife he had planned to use to make of himself a sacrifice. At day break, sick at heart, he pierced his side with it.

  She was about to step into the bathtub when the wall opened and a hand – large and grotesquely misshapen – reached out and pulled her inside. Her husband hurried to her; but the crack had, in an instant, closed “like a wound that has healed.”

  Slender ladders were let down out of the fog, their lowest rungs visible above the field. The rungs were lit by an uncanny light difficult to describe but reminding many of those who saw it of the sea, at dusk, when the waves lie down as if to rest and the suddenly flattened sea grows luminous until the setting of the sun. There was, too, that song which made most of them uneasy but which a few found irresistibly sweet. They were the ones who climbed the ladders into the fog; after which the ladders were, one by one, drawn up into the sky, never to reappear in their lifetime. Believe me no one could have stopped them from climbing!

  It rained all day inside the house. The door was unlocked; outside the sun was shining. But they preferred to remain indoors. So they put up their umbrellas and, after a time, drowned.

  Now, Death had only to address an envelope and send it to its victim in order to claim him. The envelope would fall through the mail slot into the living room where a man was listening to the radio or building a model or looking at a photograph album. He opened the envelope, soon sickened and died. In some other room, Death waited to read of it in the newspaper.

  By the time he reached the ground after having jumped from the tenth floor, he had regretted his decision, which was based – he now saw clearly – on a rash and altogether unwarranted presumption. His wife – he knew with certainty – had meant nothing by the kiss she had given her co-worker the night before, when he had stepped away from the table to use the phone. He ought not to have jumped to conclusions – he told himself – and in future would not be so quick to do so.

  The falling man did not stop until he had left the ground behind him.

  He had been dreaming of flying and, waking, found himself on a rooftop high above the city with a woman who had been dreaming of flying when she woke to find herself on a rooftop with a man who had been dreaming. Their eyes sought each other, desiring; but they were afraid of flying into one another’s arms for fear they might fall asleep and be lost to one other.

  Haven’t I given you reasons enough to do nothing, to remain as we are? he shouted. But she was curious and stepped from the ledge almost gladly.

  She brought a small round white stone from the seaside because it pleased her – its touch and that it had come from the ocean floor (from how many miles distant, over how many years?). She placed it carefully on her windowsill, in the sun, between the African violet and the cedar box containing threads from her mother’s sewing basket she had once taken in remembrance. During the night, she drowned in her bed. The man in the apartment below hers said that he had heard a noise “like the crashing of waves.”

  He would not have kept a gun in the house. He hated them “on principle” and because his children were there with him. He would not for a moment have considered possessing any sort of weapon. He was, in fact, afraid of them. That night when he came home from the office, he found a revolver waiting for him on the desk, behind the locked door of his study. No one knew how it had come to be there, or w
hy he should have shot himself in the head with it.

  He bludgeoned the old woman to death and, on his way out the door with her valuables, had his eyes sewn shut by the needle and thread with which she had been darning a sock. Blinded, the man stumbled into the street where he fell, fatally, beneath the wheels of a truck.

  He brought home a stone from Pompeii – a fragment of igneous rock. In the evening, he would hold it in his hand, dreaming always of the same lovely woman whose eyes searched the harbor for her husband’s ship and whose sandaled feet walked the footpaths, from the flower stalls to the villa of the Mysteries. One night his house burned. They found him kneeling in the ruin – his arms embracing empty air, his body untouched by the fire. In his hand, a stone.