Grim Tales Read online

  He no longer knew how to live. In what way, so as to be happy and good. But of this he was certain: to remain in the city would be his doom. So he determined to leave it – leave everything by which he was known. His wife, his children, his dog, his job of courtroom usher, his clothes, the pipes and tobacco enjoyed by him each evening in the small garden he had made for himself behind the house – everything. I must begin again, he whispered. It’s the only way to become what I must become next. One morning when the house was empty, he wrote his letters of farewell and of resignation. He ruined his usher’s uniform and broke his pipe stems as a sign to himself there could be no turning back. Finally, he took his memories one by one, and as if they were clean shirts bearing the heat yet from his wife’s iron, he folded them and laid them neatly in a drawer of oblivion, for which he had no key. (Yes, there is such a drawer. But one must have traveled far from oneself to have found it.) Nothing of what used to be his life would go with him into what was to be, for him now, his new life. He closed the bedroom door, softly, almost regretfully and started down the stairs. Halfway down, he tripped – on a toy belonging to one of his children, on one of his wife’s shoes dropped there by the dog, or on a lace of his own shoe that had come undone – it doesn’t matter what sent him headlong to the bottom of the stair. He was not to leave, is all. No, it was impossible, really, to begin again in despite of all that claimed him. He ought to have known that.

  In the street, he stooped to pick up a dime only to find, as if in a dream, coin after coin, one after the other, which he followed, absorbedly – this trail of silver that led him irresistibly to an open manhole.

  They ought not to have burned Newton – his great Principia. The fire undid the laws that bind men and matter to earth. “Everything that was not nailed down” flew off into night, while the pages blackened and curled. Blackened and turned to ashes scattering among the stars. The stars, too, broke their strings. The stars fizzled, died, were extinguished – “like lights in a house being put out one by one,” until there was only night and the one who is writing this down, afraid to go outside, not wanting to leave his room and fly off into blackness.

  In another story, it is The Interpretation of Dreams they were burning, the book burners in their polished boots and stiff caps. When the book was burnt utterly so that not a single word was left, not even a syllable that one might intone in the way of an incantation – then the streets ran with beasts and madmen. Everywhere boys destroyed their fathers and took their mothers against their will or not. So was infamy let out from where it had been hidden, “like something unclean hiding itself under a rock.” But here and there, some men flew through windows into rooms where women slept and dreamed of flying men or of horses galloping over an endless plain.

  In a particularly grim version of this story, it is Robert Louis Stevenson they have burnt – his Jekyll and Hyde. In black alleyways and the unlit corners of parks, Hydes are fixed – “like photographs” – before they can be transformed once more into presentable men of distinction and fine feeling. Women, coming out of doors tonight in order to buy bread or milk or a pair of stockings, are walking (if they only knew it!) to their deaths.

  The Einstein they put to the fire left black holes; so that the universe was like a vast apartment building, many of whose rooms were now gutted – lathe laid bare, pipes broken, wires exposed. Those who were left clung to what light remained, shuddering in the icy wind that blew through the windows smashed by the fireman’s axe.

  Always a vain woman, she spent hours each day on her hair: brushing it, washing it in expensive shampoos, adorning it with combs. It was her hair – she believed – that most enthralled men. One day it began to grow with a speed and rapidity that frightened her. But she hesitated to cut it until, too late, it smothered her.

  He was amazed how quickly his nails grew now – the finger- and toenails both. Each night before going to bed, he cut them only to find them grown out again in the morning – each morning farther than the one before; until one day, they resembled claws more than human nails. That was the day he turned on a passenger in the elevator and tore him to pieces.

  The alarm clock rang and he fumbled out of sleep to turn it off before it should waken the whole house, which was still in darkness because of the early hour. Silence, ribbed with the anxiety of nightbirds, returned. As he groped in the dark for the light switch, the alarm rang once more “like glass shattering.” Much annoyed, he hastened to turn it off again. But now it would not be silenced, no matter how he tried. It was then he knew he was asleep and unable to enter the world. With his entire will, he tried desperately to wake but could not, though the others in the house were up and banging furiously on his door. None of them could hear his buried screams.

  A dog barked in the same room as the sleeping man. The man woke. There was no dog. He fell back to sleep. The dog stood at the foot of his bed and snarled. He woke again. There was no dog and he fell once more back to sleep. Now the dog leaped into bed with him. He woke. Still there was no dog and once more the man returned to sleep. The dog tore at his throat. This time he did not wake.

  The body was not recognizable. More than this, it was not identifiable as belonging to any known species – indeed, to any classification of life form, extinct or extant. It had been discovered in the reed-bed against the shore, which twice a day the river floods in response to the great bay’s tidal surge. The newspapers hailed it as the “next evolutionary thing,” but scientists who had come down from the university were reticent after an exhaustive examination using every known analytical technique. One man, speaking for himself and without the sanction of his colleagues, declared it to be without precedent; it is – he said – a precursor of that which will one day extinguish human life. It is – he continued – perfectly adapted to an environment which does not yet exist but is certain to supplant the present one. Describing certain properties of its digestive system, the man shuddered and turned away.

  I loved one man and married another, she confessed to her husband as she watched him close his eyes for the last time – the cord knotted at his neck.

  He dreamed often of sewers – what the Romans called cloacae and which ordinary people put out of their minds as unclean, polluted, repellent. For him, there was no word to allay his disgust when he woke from such dreams; certainly he would not tell his wife of them, even though they were in the habit of sharing the night’s residue. One evening, crossing a field on his way to what he liked to call a “rendezvous” (charming euphemism!), he fell down a pipe and, regaining consciousness, found himself in a sewer. As he began to scream, he heard – tumultuous in the drains all around him, like a cataract – the sound of flushing. He did not wake.

  In his dream the world came to an end. When he woke, he found that it had indeed ended. He closed his eyes and dreamed the world whole again and, opening his eyes, found it to be so. In this way he lived and all those he had known in his lifetime also lived. But all those he did not know were no more.

  Each night while he slept, the comet drew closer until one morning it was just above the trees when he woke. He might have climbed one and touched its bright package of death, held in temporary suspension during the conscious hours. He had known for some time that what was accomplished by him each night in sleep, though unseen by all others, would reach its inevitable conclusion during his last night. So that he would not suffer this most mortal dream, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died without waking.

  In another dream, it was a car that hurtled toward catastrophe. Each night it closed on a man who had just stepped off the curb – each night closer as he walked unseeing into the middle of the street. On the last night, he appeared full in the car’s headlights; and the dreamer saw that it was he himself who was about to be run down. He did not wake. It is thought that such a dream as this may explain why some die in their sleep.

  A boy stooped over a storm drain, over a piece of string sticking up from it and began to tug – never wonde
ring at all what a piece of string should be doing there. He pulled and pulled with a child’s relentlessness and thoughtlessness until the earth (whose core was a tightly wound ball of string) unraveled.

  He was compelled to wash his hands – twenty, thirty times a day. Only in this way could he hope to mitigate his anxiety. When, after years of treatment, he was cured of this “ritualistic behavior,” a plague was let loose in his city that very soon carried off half the population. No one could explain its pathogenesis.

  Each night before going into his house, he was compelled to drive around the block nine times; not one time more or less than nine – every night the same. One night, however, he willed himself to “break the iron bond of habit” and stopped the car after the eighth circling. The house was gone; his wife and children were never seen by him again.

  They are not – he was told – uncommon. For those with his disorder, to hear voices in one’s head is a manifestation of the malady at its most severe. He was certainly not schizophrenic. He was relieved to hear this although that night, when the women inside him began to scratch with their sharp nails, the pain was past enduring.

  The dog went into the darkness at the end of its rope and began to bark. A bark compounded of fear and ferocity. Then it stopped, suddenly: silence beat once more like a pulse among the crowding insect noises. Alarmed, a boy hurried out of the house and pulled the rope back – into the light of the yard. The dog’s head was missing.

  In another version of this story, the rope is around the neck of the boy’s father, who had often beaten dog and boy, both.

  The poison was good to the taste; and she swallowed it willingly, though she knew that, in a little while, she would die of it. She left just enough at the bottom of the glass to give her husband a sufficiency, urging him to drink a toast “to us – our happiness.”

  She said he ought to have his head examined. The shoemaker’s was not the first place he took it, but there he was at least made welcome. The shoemaker had little to do these days and was glad of any work. The shop smelled of leather and cabbage. Cabbage was always, for him, a powerful evocation of childhood. He liked the shoemaker’s hands. They were large and the blue veins twisted on the backs of them interestingly. He liked, too, the old man’s wife, who brought him coffee after her husband had shouted something foreign into a back room where she was presiding, presumably, over a cauldron of cabbage leaves and meat. As the man fell back into childhood, the shoemaker examined his head. After a time, he grunted and, spitting one nail after another into his palm, began to hammer.

  In another version of this story, the man had to leave his head overnight at a small appliance shop because the repairman was too busy with a toaster to examine it while he waited. The repairman thought it more than likely that a “screw was loose somewhere” in his head and finding it would not take long. The man came back the next morning, but the shop had burned down in the night.

  The building was burning. They could not go down. They went up – past the rooftop, to safety.

  They went the way shown on the map, though it was not the way they knew. The map had been purchased at a fair price from a dealer in rarities. It was thought to be early 18th century. The route, which was clearly indicated, no longer existed: the original path and road had long since been effaced by the accretions of time and civilization. But the travelers managed it because of the exact compass headings set down in the margin, as if the annotator had known that someone, nearly three centuries later, would attempt the journey, lured by the promise of “extraordinary pleasure and a clime exceedingly mild.” In the end, they entered a broad avenue of Dutch elms (trees no longer extant in the region) – just as the map showed – and were attacked by bandits, who robbed all, killed some and ravished the most beautiful of the women. It was not, as had been promised them, “paradise.”

  In this story, the angel was weeping rust, its wings fused to its sides. It had not moved in a very long time. It was surrounded by a green hairpin fence. Poppies mocked its sober gravity. The sky was blue or not. The grass was green or not – depending on the time of year. Then a day came when the angel was summoned, by whom it is not known. It moved. It ceased its weeping. Its wings shed the ice-like sheath of inertia in which they had been pinioned. The angel flew to the city and destroyed every living inhabitant under a sky that was neither blue nor gray, but red – the red of poppies. Of blood when it is still fresh.

  The first morning that the sun did not rise, they were only mildly concerned. They had other things on their minds. Work or money or love. The second morning when they woke again to darkness, they betrayed, most of them, anxiety – to their wives or husbands, to the man or woman sitting next to them on the bus. (The children seemed not to have missed daylight. It was winter, after all; and darkness is to be expected in winter.) The third morning they opened their eyes, slowly, afraid to find the room in darkness. It was. Outside, the streetlights were still lit. Those whose windows faced east hurried to them, hoping to see the sky lightening above the rooftops. But blackest night held sway. They turned from the windows, each of them wondering what it might mean. The fourth night no one went to sleep. They stood in the street and waited and talked among themselves. The lights in the houses and in the buildings burned all the more brightly for the darkness. The sun did not rise. The fifth night they closed the blinds, drew the curtains and faced away from their windows. They left the lights on in the rooms. In the morning the sun did rise again, but there was no one living to see it.

  It’s an old-wives’ tale – he said – that a cat will suck the life out a baby in its crib. To prove it to her, who was always so backward and anxious, he put the cat into the room where the baby was sleeping. Later, when they went on tiptoe to see whether she had opened her pretty blue eyes, they found not a baby but a blue-eyed cat.

  If history made a sound, it would be a cry, a moan, a scream, a roar, a hiss, a scream. Luckily, history is mute – its mouth stopped up with the dead, with ash, with mud, with blood, with bones, with the dead.

  The man had been walking a long time when he came to a town. Hungry, he entered a bakery and bought a sweet roll. Paying for it, he thought the baker looked familiar. This turned out to be the case everywhere he went: tobacconist, newspaper seller, cinema cashier, hatcheck girl, cigarette girl – all were familiar to him. He had forgotten that they were, like him, dead and that in the city of the dead all recognize one another – or, more precisely, see in each other’s face their own. He had forgotten this in the same way he had forgotten that the dead are not permitted to leave their city. For a brief time, he had strayed outside but soon returned, so powerful is the fascination of the dead world for those who inhabit it – so irresistible its attractions. So long as they live, the living will never understand this.

  He received his sentence when he was still only a child and carried it with him always, without complaint, knowing there was nothing he could do to change it. When the day came for its execution, he took his own life rather than submit to his destiny.

  Her commission of a stairway in the field behind the house struck many as the last elaborate conceit of a mind passing from eccentricity into madness. It was elegantly wrought. It displayed a workmanship that could only be called fabulous. It went nowhere. More precisely, it rose from a garden that had long ago been “let go to wrack and ruin,” turned gracefully on its newel and soared magisterially before ending abruptly high above a tangle of burdock. Soon after its completion, she was never seen again. The slippers found by police on the stairway’s last step were considered the comic invention of a pathological mind: whether that of the woman (who was believed by some to have gone abroad) or that of an abductor (whom others believed had botched her kidnapping). That she might have continued to climb the stairs, having first discarded her slippers as unnecessary, was not seriously entertained.

  It’s just the wind shaking the sash – he said to the dog, which whimpered in its sleep. The next day, when the homicide detectives w
ere examining the body where it lay by the locked window, they could not explain the marks left on the dead man’s windpipe, which had been crushed in “an unusually powerful grip.”

  She was one who believed always that life – her real life – lay just out of sight. She had a dear friend, an illusionist, who would perform for her alone the most celebrated sleights-of-hand in a career that had – years before – made him famous. Now, no longer jealous of his gift, he pointed out to her, frankly, how the illusion was accomplished outside the “sight lines.” The woman came to understand that reality proceeded immediately beyond the limit of peripheral vision – an iron restraint she was powerless to escape. Then one day it happened that she heard a noise such as an animal might make when it has fastened onto the body of its prey. Turning with surprising celerity, she saw at last the beast that had all her days kept well out of sight. The last thing the woman saw on earth was this beast, this monster, flying at her.

  Under each dry, fallen leaf, a world waiting for the match.

  One night he found himself inside a house where all that had been kept well down in his unconscious mind was made manifest, as if put “on deliberate display” – the props of his secret dramas: a knife, rope, poison, a pair of silk stockings, a glove, a bloody handkerchief and something he would not name, whose recollection even now made him shudder. He swore they were real – he had handled them all! – and shame, repugnance and horror had been, in his mouth, like vomit. Even – he admitted – those pleasures that in dreams sometimes it had been his to know, they, too, had caused him exquisite distress as he touched their most intimate tokens. He could do nothing – he said – but suffer them. Already when he left the house, his hair was white and his face lined like that of an old man or of a man who has experienced more than can be borne in a single lifetime, much less a single night. It was – they knew – inevitable and quite natural that he would, with a glad heart, shortly take his own life.