Grim Tales Read online

  It was – he told them – as if the world were uncovered. Like the seabed after the tide has gone out – what one finds in the soft, wet sand: things that are mired, desperate, hobbled, dying. Or something left under the snow not to be discovered until the thaw. A body. A child’s. He saw – he said, his voice trembling with an emotion whose depths embarrassed them – what was, for them, underneath and rarely remarked. If remarked at all, only in dreams, in nightmare. He was out of his mind, of course; and they turned away and ran out of the hospital like children fleeing from an impossible assignment into the freedom of the sunlit playground.

  He knew how to look at a person so that, even after a moment’s stare, the life was absorbed. That look – so terrible in its intensity and longing – was as if barbed. When the eyes left those of their victim, they drew with it some essential element without which life is impossible to sustain. It was not uncommon that those who had suffered this stare succumbed soon afterwards to a wasting disease – often mortal.

  You’re playing with fire, she warned. But he would not stop – no, not even when his hands started to smoke inside her blouse.

  She bared her throat to him but instead of kisses received a wound from which she bled to death more swiftly than any of the other guests thought possible.

  His practice of vampirism would not have been recognizable in previous centuries. He forsook the cape, for one thing and in general had banished black from his wardrobe in favor of other, gayer colors. He slept in a bed, although a sachet of Old World earth was sewn into the mattress, emitting a dank, not altogether unpleasant odor that might have been mistaken for that of potting soil had there been plants in the room. He had also managed by slow degrees to overcome his famous intolerance for Christian symbols and garlic to the point where he could enter Oude Kerk on the arm of a woman and, later, enjoy an Italian supper with her. His manners were not so suave as Ligosi’s, though certainly a world away from the uncouth Count Orlak (as played by Max Schreck in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu). In two things, however, the family trait remained: his enjoyment of a beautiful woman’s neck and a mirror’s inability to possess his image. These two came together tragically one night in the bedroom of a lady. Looking in from the hallway, her husband happened to glance into the dressing-table mirror and – to his astonishment – saw her, sitting alone, with head thrown back in abandonment. Embarrassed by her shamelessness, he closed the door softly and went to his club. By morning she was “white as a ghost.”

  Mirrors interested him; how one becomes in them an image without history, without depth. So it was that he spent more and more time in front of the mirror until one day, turning from it at the sound of his wife’s coming into the room, his face remained in the mirror – inscrutably looking at her as she, seeing the sudden facelessness of the man in the room, began to scream.

  It was not vanity that drew him always to the mirror to see his face there but doubt – wearying and unassuageable – of his own existence.

  He conceived a mode of travel by which he might send his reflected image to destinations remote, exotic, or forbidden until one day, in Port au Prince, the mirror shattered; and, as if in sympathy, his own features recomposed themselves into something impossible to describe. He had to kill himself – surely you can see that?

  Every mirror in the city showed them making love in front of a mirror.

  Early that morning, which was to be his final morning, she took down the large, round mirror where she was often seen by her husband to sigh, for what cause he did not know (for the sake of her unhappiness, which was great, and, the man for whom she burned!) – took down the mirror and carried it out onto the lawn. Later, at the window, waiting for breakfast, her husband saw a pool of light, dazzling now that the sun had climbed the rooftops. He went outside as if drawn there and, looking into the mirror, fell into the sky. Quickly, she smashed the mirror.

  He had become a prisoner although there were no bars at the window or locked door to keep him in. Neither was there dog, snake, loathsome insect, or rat – there was not so much as a mouse to blockade the door against those who feared mice, which he did not. There was nothing at all to stand in the way of his escape except a small mirror in which he saw a face he very nearly recognized as his own.

  In another version of the story, he does recognize it.

  Having walked by chance one morning into a fog, he was troubled thereafter by dreams of death. He was – people said of him – a strange man, distant and unapproachable. He spent the years that remained to him in private pursuits – making ornate picture frames with fretsaw and glue, for example. It was only at the hour of his death that his former serenity appeared, momentarily, like moonlight on snow, before the light went out of his eyes and he was no more. We are sorry he is gone – people said – but we did not know him at all, really. They could not know that the fog had taken both his vitality and his expressiveness. Or, more precisely, Death had, in order to leave the fog for a time and walk unnoticed among them. Death, whose image he had framed, repeatedly, as if vainly trying to steal back his own face.

  What Wells failed to consider was the fate of Griffin’s cat. Perhaps he disdained the fairy tale aspect of his story or refused grumpily to enter the charmed world of fable. Be that as it may, the cat on which Griffin had tested his serum did become invisible, did become mad and did wreak its own havoc on London’s Great Portland Street. While the Invisible Man committed mayhem in Iping, his cat’s criminality advanced relentlessly from laddering the stockings of several shop girls, to scratching a baby’s face as it slept in its pram, to – the ultimate in viciousness – removing, with quick deft strokes such as an oyster shucker or surgeon might envy, the eyes of an old man so that he – it can be imagined – might understand the anguish of invisibility. To see nothing in the world is much the same thing as not to be seen in it. Either way, one is desperately alone.

  He wouldn’t hurt a fly. This was true, though many thought his forbearance mere folly. They were confirmed in their belief when a fly visited his room one night, having come from who knows what infernal region and crushed him to death.

  There are unfinished parts of the universe. Into one of them, a man strayed. Lath, newel, banister, mullion, a flight of stairs ending in cloud, a frieze without decoration, apple parings, an unmade bed. It was the bed which attracted him, for he had been without sleep since leaving the house three days earlier to buy a newspaper. How he had come to be in this space (too tentative to be called a room) he did not know. The passage here from the sidewalk outside the news agency had been suave, untroubled – “like putting a hand in water.” Exhausted, he lay down and slept. When he woke, he was again in front of the news agency – only the newspaper was blank, so, too, the face of the agent, who stepped out onto the sidewalk to study the sky for signs.

  He slept and heard in his sleep God breathing and woke to find it was his child, who was breathing in the room with him and not God. Or perhaps it was the opposite: it was his child, whom he heard in sleep and God, who was breathing there with him when he woke. It was impossible to say which case was true. Then the breathing stopped.

  Norman Lock is the author of numerous works of fiction, as well as stage and radio plays, including The House of Correction (Broadway Play Publishing Co.), A History of the Imagination (FC2), Land of the Snowmen (Calamari Press, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, Publishers-Japan), The Long Rowing Unto Morning (Ravenna Press), The King of Sweden (Ravenna Press) and, most recently, Shadowplay (Ellipsis Press). He is a recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize given by The Paris Review, prose fellowships awarded by both the New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and, in 2011, a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, with his wife, Helen.

  the Mud Luscious Press catalog :

  WE TAKE ME APART

  Molly Gaudry

  FIRST YEAR

  { an mlp anthology }

  AN ISLAND OF FIFTY

  Ben Brooks

&n
bsp; WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS

  Sasha Fletcher

  GRIM TALES

  Norman Lock

  THE HIEROGLYPHICS

  Michael Stewart

  I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR

  Mathias Svalina

  C.

  { an mlp Stamp Stories anthology }

  [ www.mudlusciouspress.com ]

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