Grim Tales Read online

  His dog flushed a vole from out the ground. The vole had – he was sure of it – the face of an old man who made small, terrified cries before the dog ate it.

  He was one who did not believe in metamorphosis. Until one morning he woke up to find his skin turned to bark. His screams confirmed for him his error. He was well on the way to becoming a tree when his wife finished carving her initials in his trunk.

  He was turned into a hill so that small animals might make their burrows inside and, through the long winter, gnaw his bones.

  He was turned into a house so that there could be no turning away from people – their joy, sorrow – he, who had always been indifferent to others.

  He was turned into a field so that the harrow might pierce his heart – he, who had not once in his life been moved by anything.

  He was turned into rain so that his rocklike certainty might slowly erode.

  He was turned into a river so that he might be broken over rocks and mend, only to break again and so on, in torment, forever.

  He was turned into an animal so that at last he might understand the ways of men.

  He was turned into a revolver so that, one day, he might feel his cold mouth against hers – the woman he had destroyed – when, in despair, she shot herself.

  He was turned into a house so that one day boys might break in and set fire to it – he, who had always hated children.

  He was turned into a bed so that he might lie beneath a woman night after night and burn with unappeasable desire – this philanderer, who had broken the hearts of so many women.

  He was turned to stone (all but his heart), so that he might suffer in silence.

  He was turned to earth so that he might bury himself, then turned to rain so that he might weep; for who else was there to grieve for him?

  He was turned into a book so that he might disappear inside it.

  The hedgehog, dead by the side of the road, was once a man who refused to believe in fairy tales.

  That winter morning, the boy went out into the snow and brought back a snowball. He had packed it tightly, in his ungloved hands – packed it and smoothed it until it was like glass. The day was cold – a chill came off the snow. Snakes of snow writhed along the ground in the wind. Even inside the house, there was a chill to make the bones ache. He carried the snowball upstairs and set it on his dresser, on a saucer decorated along its rim with holly leaves and berries. The snowball remained there undisturbed and undiminished through the long, cold winter – even through the spring, though no one could explain how. In July when the house felt like an oven, the boy’s room was pleasantly cool. His mother liked to sit there in the hot afternoon and evening before the wind rose up and blew away the heat – liked to sit and read a book in the boy’s attic room. No one thought any longer about the snowball lying in the saucer like an extinguished crystal ball. The family had long since ceased advancing possible theories to one another about the enduring ice. In August the boy’s father came home – “sick to death” of the woman he had run away with in the fall of the previous year. The boy now sat waiting for his father to come upstairs to say whatever he would say to him, turning his hat in his hands the way he did when he was uneasy in his mind. The man knocked once at his son’s door, then entered. Before he could open his mouth to remark on the freezing room (in the dog days, look – frost on the windowpanes!), he was struck dead. It took only minutes for the ice to melt.

  Believing his time had come, he avenged himself on all those who had shown him contempt, then took his own life. But he had been mistaken in this belief just as he had mistaken the intentions towards him of those he murdered, which were always friendly, even affectionate.

  The flowering peach tree was not the first place he had thought to hang himself. But it was the most picturesque. That it should be so was important for his own pleasure, when his eyes closed for the last time on earth and for the shock he hoped the incongruity would cause his wife when she found his body. In this way her pain would be increased – a thing that made him glad as he stood on the ladder and prepared to jump.

  He said that a filament, very nearly invisible, connected all people, one to the other. Should it be broken – by death, for example – all feel it – feel death, their own and suffer it, an agony, if only in nightmare. Remembering the woman who, years before, had made him suffer, he killed himself, almost with pleasure.

  In the yard outside the man’s house, a swamp maple grew “overnight,” at least this is the impression those who lived in the neighborhood had. (There were some others, of course, who claimed it had always been there – but that could not be. It would have been noticed before then, certainly.) A little later – more quickly than anyone could have believed possible – a vine grew up the side of the tree, climbed out over the lowest branch and now hung down, lolling – its thick stem twisted into a kind of loop. The milkman was the first to see him – his body hanging from the tree, the vine around his neck. None knew his crime.

  He was powerless – he said – to resist the impulse to write once it had seized him. My muse – he said, his voice made strange by what emotion his friends could not guess. Often, when he had shut himself up in his room to write, they heard him weeping. He is with his muse – they told each other, embarrassed. Had they known it was a suicide note he had been helplessly composing, they might have saved him. But perhaps not – so inexorable was his muse, so obedient his hand.

  The end of the world came; and to save his family from the horror which would befall those who must await their own end from storm or famine, fire or pestilence, he poisoned them all. As he was about to hang himself, an angel appeared and said to him that he had dreamed it – dreamt that the end of the world was come. He stared in horror at his wife and children lying dead in the room with him as the angel, with an inscrutable look, withdrew – its wings stiff with insolence.

  In small ways, too, the end of the world came. For example, a wooden crate was caught in the waves as they struggled close to the beach to return to the open sea. A man from the town on the other side of the dunes took off his shoes and went into the water to bring it ashore, hoping to find inside whiskey or something else of value he might sell in town. While he wrestled with it, a wave knocked him down and his head hit a corner of the crate so that the blood flowed. All the same he managed to bring it onto the beach and was delighted to find that it contained a disassembled motor-bike. This he could sell easily. Rather than tell his brother what he had found (for he owed him money), he explained the cut on his forehead by saying that Rolf, a man they both hated, had waylaid him in the alley behind the fish market. His brother, who wanted Rolf’s pretty wife for himself, went to the man’s house and knifed him where he stood in the doorway. This was the first attack.

  His was an amnesia whose consequences troubled not only himself but also that part of the world in which he came into even the most casual contact. Streets, houses, entire cities vanished, as – one after another – he forgot them. It was as if he – his disorder – were capable of the dissolution of matter itself, such was its virulence. In defense of all, indeed for the future of the cosmos, he had to be exterminated. Is this not evident?

  She had only to look at him (“those eyes!”) to make him put on his coat, leave the house, drive to the harbor where, at this restless hour, the ferries have already embarked for the opposite shore and, with his eyes staring straight ahead at a landscape invisible to all but him, plunge into the blackening harbor without ever waking.

  He went into the haberdashery to buy a shirt, leaving his wife to look at rings in a jewelry-store window. When he came outside again, she was gone. An old woman standing at the jeweler’s window seemed almost to recognize him. He noticed how loose the ring was as she twisted it round and round her withered finger.

  The train stopped at the station every afternoon at 5 – every afternoon the same, except holidays and Sundays. This day, however, the train did not stop although it was neither a holiday nor a Sund
ay. At least no one saw it stop; no one saw a train at all. But they felt a wind rise up against them and heard the roaring of a train hurtling past. Looking down from the station platform, they saw a man lying between the tracks, his body “as if torn apart by beasts.”

  A cat jumped onto the table and the thrust of its hind legs against the chair sent it crashing backwards into the aquarium. The China town, so long submerged, emptied of water, which poured through the broken glass wall into the dining room, flooding it and soon even the house itself. Now the city is submerged – its streets and houses inhabited by fish.

  He left his apartment building and walked to the restaurant where he liked to eat his breakfast. The streets were empty; but he thought little, if anything at all, about it. On the way, he discovered that he had forgotten his wallet. He returned to his building, opened the door and stepped through it into another street. All that day, he walked through one door after another only to be met immediately by another street. A street with no one on it except him. By nightfall, he was nearly mad with loss, realizing that his life – spent largely indoors – had, for a reason which could only be characterized as “sinister,” vanished.

  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.

  He practiced his art with a devotion many thought morbid. Certainly, his absorption left little time for anything else; for his friends, for example, who, one by one, drew away from him. He did not notice their absence. The world of his own making held him in thrall – so varied and attractive was it. A world enriched by complications – at times, by a danger that thrilled as nothing else had, all before now seeming to him merely a pale copy of this, his brilliant original. Finally, he no longer left his room and the typewriter on which, day by day, he lengthened the road according to a map drawn each night in sleep – the plot knitted from dream and desire. It was a minor character, really, who provided the catastrophe – a man who, in an early chapter, had seen the protagonist’s wife in a restaurant and conceived an extravagant passion for her, which finally unhinged him. (So minor was he that he lacked even a name.) To be frank, the man had been forgotten by his author and would, in revision, have been eliminated from the story. Did the man know this? Impossible to tell. But there was a satisfyingly tragic inevitability when he appeared one night in the author’s room, with a revolver. (The author had caused him to wear it concealed in a shoulder holster that night in the restaurant in order to plant a narrative seed, which never took root.) He emptied the revolver into his author. (The author had not, in his description of the man, failed to mention that the gun was loaded.) His death was the end of the author’s story; but not the killer’s, which went on a while longer, until, wandering into an alley belonging to some other story, he had his throat cut by “an unknown assailant.”

  Often, he dreamed of a woman, always the same woman – dark hair, dark eyes, a loose white dress showing the tops of her breasts. He desired her with an abandonment he did not know when awake. Always, as they were walking down the street, past the shops, on their way to her apartment, his wife appeared at his side to take him home. Not even in sleep, he thought.

  That it was only in his dreams he behaved violently to her made it no less culpable: the bruises to her face and arms were always new as she brought him his breakfast.

  Such dreams as yours, he said, are common – I assure you; do not worry, try to relax; there are techniques to manage terror; you must – above all – sleep. The man thanked the doctor, he whose study is the mind – its mysterious workings – and went home. That night, after swallowing a tablet, he fell promptly “into the arms of Morpheus” and found himself once more in the empty street “under night’s black hand.” The tiger was at that very moment coordinating its exquisite mechanism of attack – nerves, muscles and bone. Then it leapt and, leaping, seemed to the man as it unfurled in the night air to be a flag of prophecy. In the morning, they found his mutilated body behind the tea importer’s warehouse. The tea from Ceylon, where there are tigers.

  He read in the morning paper of his own death in a boating accident. That same day he bought a boat and took it out on the river. It capsized and he drowned. He was a man who believed always what he read.

  The instructions were in the mailbox, waiting for him. Who had sent him them and for what reason he did not know. He commenced building at once, not knowing what it was he built, only that he was intrigued – no, more than this, compelled. He worked through the night, the morning and well into the next day’s afternoon. It was – the apparatus – beautiful. It possessed an intricacy of design and movement he found infinitely fascinating. It was like nothing he had ever seen. He was enraptured and “could not tear himself away.” His body was discovered by a friend – transfixed, the eyes, the eyes staring, as if spellbound.

  He was warned against walking under ladders. As long ago as childhood, his mother had told him never, under any circumstances, enter that dangerous threshold. He did not, ever, walk under one. If he had, he might have seen the door and, flinching inside, saved himself when the truck jumped the curb. But he could not, so obedient was he always to the admonitions of his mother.

  Warned by her mother against stepping on a crack, she did; and her mother did indeed break her back after falling down a flight of stairs, for a reason no one has ever been able to explain.

  He found among his late father’s things a roll of undeveloped film. Curious, he sent it to a lab and received back twelve prints – each of a young woman he recognized as having disappeared twenty years before “under mysterious circumstances.”

  Some there were who claimed that the camera steals the souls of those it photographs. Were their detractors able to see the ghosts that flee the rolls of exposed negatives, they would not have jeered. But spirits are invisible in the darkroom, even under a red light; and the shriek they habitually utter is beyond human audition.

  The man loved to look at old photographs, especially of people he did know, taken long before in places he had never visited. While looking at a picture of the 1914 graduates of a small business college, he was stunned to see himself there on the marble staircase, under a swag of patriotic bunting, his finger touching the knot of his tie. Too late he dropped the picture onto the flea-market table. Already, he was adjusting the knot of his tie, nervously, while the owner of the Groningen Tractor Manufacturing Company, who had hired him yesterday, began to climb the staircase toward him.

  There was one photograph among those he received from the lab that he had not taken: of a woman of unearthly beauty. Seeing it, he was lost to her – her eyes, the intensity of their gaze. He spent the next five years in search of her. It was as if she had been able to enthrall him with a single look. Because he could not forget her, he forgot everything else that had mattered to him: wife, child, house, job. Forgetting them, he lost them all. In the fifth year of his search, he found her. She was not what he had expected. She was five years older. But more than this, she had not the photograph’s power to possess him. Her eyes – in it so entrancing – would, after a moment, slide off his in embarrassment. He was broken. But he married her in spite of his disenchantment in order to “justify himself.” It was a marriage he bitterly regretted.

  For a rope to become a snake, a snake a rope – there is nothing marvelous in these. But for a man to become a rope or snake – it is truly a marvel. There was a man with this gift. While a rope, he strangled his friend. While a snake, he poisoned his wife. The two were lovers and happy to die together in one another’s arms. Did they not tell him they could not live a moment longer without each other?

  Her completely innocent remark to her husband at breakfast, that he was not himself t
oday, severed the slender attachment he had not only to her but also to himself – his identity. If not himself, then who? He left the house that same morning, never to return. It was only natural that, in a barroom close by the docks, he should take the first identity that came to hand and kill the sailor who had given him offense. After having assumed in the most casual way this new and homicidal self, it was inevitable that he became, for a time, the most hunted criminal in the city in which once he had lived so peaceably. He was sentenced to death in the presence of witnesses able to verify without the slightest doubt his identity as a murderer.

  To lose one’s mind is tragic; but to find it again inside someone else – this was the catastrophe that sent him, raving, to his death.