elimae

Grim Tales
Norman Lock

Portions of the Grim Tales have appeared in 3rd bed, 5_trope, elimae, Full Circle, Kayak, Linnaean Street, New England Review, Paragraph, Snow Monkey, and Taint. Grim Tales, along with Emigrés and Joseph Cornell's Operas, is available in printed form in Trio available from Ravenna Press/Triple Press.

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; and 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, and 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, and the 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. And 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, and 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. And 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. And 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.

A boy stooped over a storm drain, over a piece of string sticking up from it, and began to tug -- never wondering 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.

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.

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; and 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." And 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. And 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 earthen 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 her. 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 herself 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. And 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 in the house. He forced his way inside and slew them with the knife he had planned to make of himself a sacrifice to his God. 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. And, too, there was 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 his children were there with him in the house. 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 why 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.

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. And 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. And 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 -- quicker 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. And 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 Sunday. 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. And 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 way 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. And 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, put his arm around the young man's shoulder.

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 today, 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.

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. And 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. And everywhere boys destroyed their fathers and took their mothers against their will or not. And 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. And 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 -- chill packages 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.

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 & 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. And 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. And 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 ourselves. 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. And 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. And 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. And the next day, when the homicide detectives were 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.

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 drowned in a pool -- at night, swimming 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.

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 with head thrown back in utter 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. And 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 for him, 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 to not 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. And then the breathing stopped.

1996 � 2009