Kull shook off the onrushing dizziness, flung back his head in the old, defiant gesture. He took a long, deep breath as does a strong swimmer before diving into the sea; then, sweeping back the tapestries, made the dais in a single lion-like bound. Brule had spoken truly. There stood men of the Red Slayers, guardsmen trained to move quick as the striking leopard; any but Kull had died ere he could reach the usurper. But the sight of Kull, identical with the man upon the dais, held them in their tracks, their minds stunned for an instant, and that was long enough. He upon the dais snatched for his sword, but even as his fingers closed upon the hilt, Kull’s sword stood out behind his shoulders and the thing that men had thought the king pitched forward from the dais to lie silent upon the floor.
“Hold!” Kull’s lifted hand and kingly voice stopped the rush that had started, and while they stood astounded he pointed to the thing which lay before them—whose face was fading into that of a snake. They recoiled, and from one door came Brule and from another came Ka-nu.
These grasped the king’s bloody hand and Ka-nu spoke: “Men of Valusia, you have seen with your own eyes. This is the true Kull, the mightiest king to whom Valusia has ever bowed. The power of the Serpent is broken and ye be all true men. King Kull, have you commands?”
“Lift that carrion,” said Kull, and men of the guard took up the thing.
“Now follow me,” said the king, and he made his way to the Accursed Room. Brule, with a look of concern, offered the support of his arm but Kull shook him off.
The distance seemed endless to the bleeding king, but at last he stood at the door and laughed fiercely and grimly when he heard the horrified ejaculations of the councilors.
At his orders the guardsmen flung the corpse they carried beside the others, and motioning all from the room Kull stepped out last and closed the door.
A wave of dizziness left him shaken. The faces turned to him, pallid and wonderingly, swirled and mingled in a ghostly fog. He felt the blood from his wounds trickling down his limbs and he knew that what he was to do, he must do quickly or not at all.
His sword rasped from its sheath.
“Brule, are you there?”
“Aye!” Brule’s face looked at him through the mist, close to his shoulder, but Brule’s voice sounded leagues and eons away.
“Remember our vow, Brule. And now, bid them stand back.”
His left arm cleared a space as he flung up his sword. Then with all his waning power he drove it through the door into the jamb, driving the great sword to the hilt and sealing the room forever.
Legs braced wide, he swayed drunkenly, facing the horrified councilors. “Let this room be doubly accursed. And let those rotting skeletons lie there forever as a sign of the dying might of the Serpent. Here I swear that I shall hunt the serpent-men from land to land, from sea to sea, giving no rest until all be slain, that good triumph and the power of Hell be broken. This thing I swear-I-Kull-king-of-Valusia.”
His knees buckled as the faces swayed and swirled. The councilors leaped forward, but ere they could reach him, Kull slumped to the floor, and lay still, face upward.
The councilors surged about the fallen king, chattering and shrieking. Ka-nu beat them back with his clenched fists, cursing savagely.
“Back, you fools! Would you stifle the little life that is yet in him? How, Brule, is he dead or will he live?”—to the warrior who bent above the prostrate Kull.
“Dead?” sneered Brule irritably. “Such a man as this is not so easily killed. Lack of sleep and loss of blood have weakened him—by Valka, he has a score of deep wounds, but none of them mortal. Yet have those gibbering fools bring the court women here at once.”
Brule’s eyes lighted with a fierce, proud light.
“Valka, Ka-nu, but here is such a man as I knew not existed in these degenerate days. He will be in the saddle in a few scant days and then may the serpent-men of the world beware of Kull of Valusia. Valka! But that will be a rare hunt! Ah, I see long years of prosperity for the world with such a king upon the throne of Valusia.”
Hirai Tarō (1894–1965), known to the literary world as Edogawa Ranpo, was a Japanese author and translator commonly acknowledged as a master of crime and mystery fiction. Ranpo even created the Japanese Gothic mystery, influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. He was the first Japanese author to ever pen a story about a vampire in one of the books of his Akechi series, Vampire (1930). In 1955, the Mystery Writers of Japan decided to give an award in his honor. The Edogawa Ranpo award is presented annually to an unpublished mystery novel. “The Man Traveling with the Brocade Portrait” is one of the most unusual fantasy stories in this volume and showcases Ranpo’s mastery.
The Man Traveling with the Brocade Portrait
Edogawa Ranpo
Translated by Michael Tangeman
IF THIS STORY IS NOT A DREAM of mine or a hallucination brought on by a temporary state of insanity, then surely the man traveling with the brocade portrait was himself insane. Yet, like a dreamer who is permitted to peek at a world other than our own or a lunatic who hears and sees what the rest of us cannot, it may well be that I happened to catch a glimpse—if only for an instant—of something that lies beyond the field of vision in our world, and by using the bizarre mechanism of the atmosphere as my lens, I peered into a corner of a realm that exists outside our own. The date escapes me, but it was a warm, overcast day. I had set out to see the famous mirages at the seashore at Uozu. Now I was on my way home.
Close friends always interrupt me when I get to this point in the story.
“Hey, wait a minute,” they ask incredulously. “When did you ever go to Uozu?”
Well, put it that way, and I suppose I can’t produce evidence to demonstrate categorically I was there on such and such a day. Maybe it was a dream after all. But never before had I experienced a dream in which the colors were so vivid. The scenes in most dreams are, like those in black-and-white movies, devoid of color. But the one from that night when I took the train home alone from Uozu to Tokyo is burned into my memory as vividly as one might remember the eye of a snake. And at the heart of that dream is the gaudy portrait I saw that night, brocade puffed up and stuffed from inside, fabric woven in brilliant hues of purple and red. The dream was so powerful that it makes me wonder if we’ll be able to see the dream of films made in color come true.
The trip was the first time I had ever seen a mirage. I imagined a mirage would look like an old-fashioned painting in which the beautiful Dragon Palace of the God of the Sea floated majestically among bubbles rising from a giant clam. But seeing the real thing took me completely by surprise. It came to me as a shock. The experience bordered on fear, and it made me break into oily sweat.
A breathless throng had gathered among the stretch of pine trees that ran along the sandy beach. People looked no bigger than dried beans scattered on a tray as they stood there taking in the expanse of both sea and sky that filled our field of vision. I had never seen the sea so quiet. It was silent as a deaf-mute. The calm was all the more unexpected since I had always thought the Sea of Japan as being terribly rough. The gray sea, which was smooth and without a wave or a ripple, reminded me of a vast marsh that stretches on and on without end. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan has no horizon. Instead the water seemed to meld into the sky and become an identical, indistinct gray haze of indeterminate thickness. So that, just when I thought I was looking at the upper reaches of the haze—that is, what I mistook for sky—all of a sudden a large, white sailboat floated across it like a ghost wing through a mist. I was startled to realize I was staring at the surface of water!
The mirage looked like drops of India ink, dripped one by one on a piece of milky white film. Slowly but steadily the black droplets spread across the surface of the film until it became a gigantic movie screen projected on vast, open sky.
Viewed through
these two different layers of sky, each with its own refracting lens, the distant forests of the Nōtō Peninsula were like a black-bug that one examines through a microscope yet to be adjusted and brought into focus. An indistinct yet grossly enlarged image appeared to be suspended over the heads of the spectators on the beach. It resembled a strangely shaped black cloud, and it really did appear to exist there in the sky. Yet, oddly enough, the distance between it and the spectators was indistinct and impossible to gauge. At first, the mirage was a big cumulonimbus floating high above the sea. But then it seemed to change. It became a weird sort of haze that pressed within a foot of the viewer’s face. Or still closer—like a blur that flits across the cornea of the eye. What was important was the indistinctness. The inability to gauge distance was what gave it the air of something unimaginable…of something weird…of something insane.
The vaguely shaped, giant jet-black triangles of the mirage were piled on top of the other, but then, in the blink of an eye, they fell apart and arrayed themselves horizontally as if they were a row of box cars linked together like a train. In turn they broke into smaller pieces, becoming the treetops in a stand of Lebanese cedars. They stood there, still and immovable, until they transformed themselves again—abracadabra—into radically different shapes.
If the magic of a mirage possesses the power to drive a person insane, then surely I was under its spell as I boarded the train in Uozu and headed home for Tokyo. Having spent more than two hours riveted to the spot as I watched a series of seductive and unearthly transfigurations in the sky, there was no question I was not fully myself that long night I spent on the train. My state of mind was completely different from what it would have been on an ordinary day. Perhaps it was akin to temporary insanity—like the hysteria that sets in when a phantom spirit or robber accosts one out of the blue and leaves one in fear for one’s life.
I boarded the train at Uozu Station bound for Ueno Station in Tokyo at about six p.m. I don’t know if it was by strange coincidence or merely a normal event on trains in the area, but the second-class car where I sat (at the time there were still first-, second-, and third-class cars) was, save for myself, as empty as a church. Only one other passenger had boarded ahead of me, and he was hunkered down on a seat in the far corner of the car.
The train ran on and on, its monotonous, mechanical sounds reverberating along the lonely shoreline with its steep cliffs and sandy bays. A dark, blood-colored sun floated lazily over the depths of the haze as it set over the marshlike sea. A white sail, which appeared to be abnormally large, scudded through the haze as if it were moving in a dream. It was a windless, stiflingly hot day, and windows in the car were open here and there. Yet even the gentle breeze, which slipped in like a legless ghost, did little to stir the air. The many short tunnels and the thin slats on row after row of snow fences broke the endless gray expanse of sky and sea into stripes as we passed them.
By the time we passed the cliffs at Oyashirazu, the lamplight in the car and the light left in the sky appeared to cancel each other out, and darkness closed in on us aboard the train. It was then that the only other passenger in the car, the man sitting in the far corner, abruptly stood up and spread a large black cloth over the seat. Then he took an object of two to three feet in length—it had been turned toward the window—and began wrapping it up in the cloth. His actions gave me a decidedly eerie feeling.
I felt certain the flat object was a framed picture, and it appeared there was special significance to the fact the man had propped it up to face toward the train window. I was convinced that earlier he had deliberately removed the object from the cloth and placed it in the window to face the outside. Based on the quick glimpse I stole when he rewrapped it, I could tell the picture, which was executed in the most brilliant combination of colors, had a marvelously raw, vital quality to it. There was something not of this world about it—or at least not of our everyday world.
I took a second look at the bearer of the strange package. As peculiar as the object in his possession may have seemed, I was more surprised by its owner, who looked very strange indeed. He was an old-fashioned type the likes of which one sees only in faded photographs from our fathers’ youth. He was dressed in a black suit with a narrow collar and pointy shoulders. Yet the suit looked strangely appropriate given the man’s height and his long legs. It even made him look dapper. He had a long, narrow face, and aside from his eyes that seemed to burn a tad too brightly, he was handsome and his features well proportioned. His neatly parted hair shone with a black, luxurious sheen, making me think at first glance he was about forty years old. Upon closer examination, however, I noticed a considerable number of wrinkles on his face. He seemed to age twenty years in a single leap. He could have been sixty easily. The contrast between his pitch-black hair and the maze of wrinkles etched across his pale face was striking enough that it took my breath away. It struck me as most peculiar and unsettling.
As the man finished carefully wrapping up the picture, he happened to look in my direction just as I was observing his every move. Our eyes locked. The corners of his lips turned nervously upward into a faint and awkward smile. Without stopping to think, I returned his greeting by nodding in his direction.
During the short period of time it took the train to race through the next two or three local stations, we sat in our respective corners of the car, repeating the game of nervously looking out the window if our eyes happened to meet. Outside everything was pitch black. Even if I pushed my face against the window, there was nothing to see but darkness, except for the occasional running lights of fishing boats that bobbed at a distance on the sea. In the endless dark, our long, narrow car rattled on and on as if it existed in its own little world. Inside the dimly lit compartment I felt as if every living being in the world had disappeared without a trace, leaving only the two of us behind. No passengers boarded our second-class car at any station, and neither porter nor conductor appeared. Now that I think about it, this too strikes me as most bizarre.
I grew increasingly leery and frightened of the strange man who looked, simultaneously, both forty and sixty and who possessed the demeanor of a magician from the West. Fear has a way of growing infinitely and overtaking one physically when there is nothing to dispel it. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and no longer able to bear the suspense, I finally stood up and boldly walked over to the man sitting at the opposite end of the car. The more detestable and fearsome he became, the more I wanted to approach him.
Without so much as a word I lowered myself into the seat directly opposite him. As I drew nearer, a strange, tumultuous feeling welled up inside me. If he seemed not-of-this-world, then I too might be a phantom. My eyes became narrow slits, and I held my breath as I studied his odd, heavily wrinkled face.
The man seemed to welcome me with his eyes from the instant I left my seat, and as I stared at his face, he gestured with his chin at the frame sitting beside him. It was as though he had been waiting for me. He eschewed the usual preliminary niceties and asked, as if it were the most natural question in the world,
“Is this what interests you?” His tone was so matter-of-fact that it gave me pause. “Would you care to take a look at it?” His manner was very polite.
I sat there in total silence. I was at a loss for words. He repeated the question.
“Would you be kind enough to show it to me?” I was enchanted by his manner and found myself uttering this odd request in spite of the fact that I had left my seat intending not to look at the man’s picture.
“I’d be delighted. I have been wondering when you would ask. I felt certain you’d come and take a look.”
As he spoke, the man—perhaps it would be more appropriate to say “the old man”—deftly undid the large cloth with his long fingers and propped the framelike object against the window. But this time he turned it to face the inside of the car.
Why was it that I unconsciously closed
my eyes after taking a quick glance at the picture? To this day I do not know why, but I felt an inexplicable, overwhelming urge to do so. I closed my eyes for a mere second or two, but when I looked again what I saw was a vision so strange that it was unlike anything I had ever seen. Even now I do not have words to describe what was so eerie about it.
The artist’s exaggerated use of perspective allowed the viewer to peer into a series of rooms inside a palace the likes of which one sees on the stage of the Kabuki theater. It was quite a spectacle—the tatami mats were brand-new and still somewhat green; the paneled ceiling stretched into the depths of the painting; the tempera colors, especially the indigo, had been applied quite heavily—even grossly. In the foreground to the left, the window of a room constructed in the style of a shoin, or gentleman’s study, was roughly sketched in using heavy black brush strokes. A writing desk, also in black, was drawn in beneath the window. It too was done in a hand unconcerned with getting the angles correct. Perhaps you’ll find it easier to understand if I describe the backdrop as done in the style typical of votive plaques one sees at a temple.
Two figures, both about a foot high, floated against this background. I say “floated” because they were the only part of the painting not done in tempera paints. Instead they were constructed of silk brocade that had been applied a layer at a time to create two raised or padded figures. An elderly gentleman, who had white hair and wore an outdated Western suit made of black velvet, sat stiffly at the center. (I noticed he was, oddly enough, a perfect match for the man who carried the painting, even down to the cut of his suit.) Meanwhile, his companion was a smooth-skinned beauty of seventeen or eighteen who had her hair done in the yuiwata style and who wore a black satin sash over a red long-sleeved kimono dyed in a dappled pattern. She was leaning coquettishly against the old man’s knees. The two of them looked like they belonged in a love scene on the stage.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 138