The figure that returned to the Sugimoris’ was not the Stephen they knew. He was back before they were, so they knew nothing of his excursion. Nonetheless, such a change had befallen him that, even ignorant of that day’s events, they were aware of it as soon as they set foot in the house. The atmosphere was tainted, more different than if they had been burgled. Stephen was in his unlit room, his back to the doorway, working on something at his desk. Something in the hunched set of that back alarmed Komakichi quite as much as if he had found an intruder. There seemed no possible reason for this except a trick of the imagination, and he was at a loss as to how to address Stephen.
‘I am back,’ he managed at length to say.
Stephen turned and Komakichi felt intensely uncomfortable. He met Stephen’s eyes and was overpowered by the impression that Stephen was brimming with darkness. Stephen made an inarticulate, barely vocal response. It did not matter that this was impolite. What was disturbing was how utterly lost Stephen seemed. All the underlying human contacts and assurances that are present normally in the most simple and functional of exchanges were absent.
Both Komakichi and his father were profoundly upset by Stephen’s altered demeanour. He was a stranger, and one that they had invited into their home. In fact, it seemed ridiculous to put it into words, though each knew the other was thinking it—he seemed barely human. A certain grief and natural concern for what might have happened to Stephen was overshadowed by the simple and compelling desire to be rid of him. What could they do? On the one hand Stephen was unapproachable. On the other, they had for the sake of form to go on treating him as a guest.
Stephen excused himself from the evening meal, pleading illness. His movements, the intonation of his words, and everything about him, told of a great pressure bearing down on him, which he was deploying all his energies to resist, maintaining a façade of perfect control. The truth was he could not hold out for long.
The Sugimoris’ quaggy dilemma was to be of short duration, however. In a sense, it solved itself. For, when the morning came, they were to find Stephen as absent in body as he had been in soul the previous night. He had taken Komakichi’s car. Some charred pages written in English were left in the ornamental downstairs fireplace.
Komakichi fished the pages from the fire. These must have been what Stephen was working on in his room. There had been perhaps a dozen leaves of scribbling, but now most of this was ash.
Komakichi had very good English and read the note with only a little difficulty. Afterwards he burned most of what remained, saving only what he deemed necessary to show the police. This is what he read:
I have gone back to the lake. Do not try to find my body. I do not know the law in this country, and perhaps it is illegal just to leave my body. But this is a matter of greater importance.
Some of the others tried to run away. They thought they could escape by slashing their wrists or . . . It’s no good. Wherever you run to it is already there waiting for you—darkness . . . There’s nothing for me to do but turn back and face the unfaceable. Perhaps, I tell myself, there is even some comfort, or glory, in going back to the very source of all the death and . . . of The Serpent itself. Perhaps in knowingly facing this thing I will scale heights never known to the run of human beings. Why else did the Mamushi . . . the agonies of insanity? But then, perhaps I will simply choke on the murk of that womb, writhing in terror and disappointment to the very end, like Mariko.
But I repeat—it is of the utmost importance that you do not search for my body. It is at the bottom of the lake. It is enough to know that.
I am afraid that you will not heed my warning without some explanation. Even though it is probably useless I feel that as the single living witness to the lake’s secrets, I must make some testimony here.
. . . The Great Serpent, The Devourer. The Black Ray is creeping across creation, and the lake is one tiny perforation from a splinter that is the precursor of that Ray. There are others across . . . the lake there is no time. Life is animated by the instinct to bridge the darkness of Eternity with a bridge of generations. That is its purpose . . . suspended in the waters of the lake life is subjected to an overview of Eternity. All time becomes visible. I have seen it with all my soul . . . is no further shore for the bridge of generations to reach. The bridge is collapsing on itself. It has already happened . . . the darkness, The Black Ray sweeping in . . . our deaths are fixed . . . everything is . . . space in itself is death, the devouring serpent, the outline that eats away at us, gives us shape, finishes us so perfectly . . . in The Black Ray the atoms themselves lose the will to cohere. Just as the fish go suddenly still at its touch and fall to the bottom . . . blanched of the will to exist. Soon we will enter a new phase in eternity. The stars have formed new alignments and the human race is becoming conscious of infinity and eternity as no other animal. Once the knowledge sinks into the bones, as it has with me, we shall simply cease reproducing and die out.
. . . of the perforations are stretching . . . until that time it is all we can do to keep away from such sites. There must still be many human generations before The Black Ray comes . . . the universe will come undone and the reign of Nothing will begin for ever.
In places the writing had been eaten blackly away by flames. Even in its fragmentary state it betrayed a powerful and frightening sense of purpose. Although the contents were a strange bubbling darkness that Komakichi would ordinarily have perceived as a flimsy delusion, there was something poignant in the entire circumstances of the note, so that it felt heavy and dangerous in his hands, a very fragment of The Black Ray it mentioned. And why had Stephen tried to burn it? Was this another triumph of the remorseless nihilism that had overtaken him? The charred leaves of paper appeared to him a manifestation of the tortured struggle between existence and non-existence that had gripped Stephen. ‘Soon this note too, and this suicide will be undone, as if they never were. Not only space, but time too will disintegrate in The Ray.’ These unwritten words were conveyed to him with distinctness by the half-destroyed remains.
Despite the fuss made by Stephen’s parents, the local police claimed they were unable to find the body. They were understandably anxious to avoid publicity, but had the whole area cordoned off for some time. However, it is impossible to keep a whole lake cordoned off forever. It was finally decided to put up notices, which proclaimed, ‘Swimming prohibited’. But reasons why swimming was prohibited could not be provided, and seeing that the signs might generate unwanted interest, someone had them removed again. For now the best policy is not to draw too much attention to the place, and hope the aura of desolation is enough to warn people off. Most will be repelled. There will always be some who are attracted. Perhaps the numbers are even increasing.
Some weeks after Komakichi’s abandoned car had been found by the side of the lake, Komakichi returned there himself. The lonely, rock-strewn shore seemed to him a gnawing away at the frayed edge of human society. He walked along its margin and stopped. He stood at the very edge of the lake, so that the tiny wavelets that grew transparent towards the shore almost washed the tips of his shoes.
The Two-Timer
Hey you! I know you, don’t I? Do you want to hear a story? There’s no need to look at me like that. Fact is, I think you’ll find this very interesting. And I want to tell you, anyway. Siddown! Have a drink! To be honest, I’m in my cups, and I’m feeling kind of lonely, and I thought, Nothing cheers a soul up like a story! And this one’s true!
Did you ever feel like you wanted to escape? I don’t mean from me now, I mean from everything—the world, people, time. Time is the worst. Twenty-four hours is so cramped and tight it doesn’t let you go anywhere. You know the worst fucking thing about time—it’s always moving. You sleep and you think, Great! Warm and safe in my own bed, I don’t have to worry about anything. But time is still moving underneath you. How can you get any rest like that?
Anyway, I always wanted to escape. I can’t remember exactly how it started, but it was
to do with some early difference of opinion between the world and me. I first met the world at school. The world thought I was thick, and to be frank, I thought the world was thick. Well, I’ve never been very good at expressing myself. But I’m not thick! Even as a child I knew I wasn’t thick, because I could never do anything but look down on my teachers and my classmates, even if I tried. I always longed for some definitive way to tell my teachers, ‘You are a wanker!’, so that they could not help but recognise The Truth and crumble before it. But, despite my possession of the absolute knowledge that this world is run by the despicable and the bad-breathed along the lines of a kind of institutionalised child-abuse, I could never even articulate this knowledge, let alone act on it.
The traumas of childhood sound exaggerated, but that’s because children are open to the true nature of things. A word can scar you for life! As a child, my frustration was continual and intense. It turned into my need to escape. And when I tell you what that finally brought about, you’ll understand the forces at work here; that the traumas of childhood are not exaggerated at all.
So, after a very short exposure to the psychological battering that is education, I became one of those very withdrawn kids. Not bright and withdrawn. Just private and withdrawn. The teachers must have sensed that I was keeping everything to and for myself, in my own head, and they couldn’t stand it. They gave me crappy marks and wrote insinuating things about me on my reports. Of course, it’s outrageous to them that a child should have a private life. And, of course, if the contents of my head had been emptied onto their desks, as my pockets often were, they would have confiscated the lot as obscene and downright insulting to them. Well, that was just who I was, and, basically, they didn’t like me.
But thanks to my tortuous introversion, I discovered that I was gifted, after all. I could do something that none of them could ever do. It was proof that I was right and they were wrong. Oh, the triumph! The triumph!
It was during the summer holidays that it happened. Those six weeks always seemed like eternity to me, and anything can happen in eternity. I was playing alone in the little lane that ran along the tops of all the back gardens of the road where I lived. I don’t know if you could even call it a lane, really. It was a path, half-overgrown. In summer one end of it could become near impassable with brambles and weeds. Anyway, you know that kind of stillness you sometimes have on a summer’s day in the country, on a little path like that. It was so still you could suddenly hear your heart beating, sort of half-peaceful, half-thrilled. I was just sitting there, playing with a blade of grass, and it seemed to me that the air was so clear and the day so still that I could see everything in infinitely detailed focus. Even the dust on the path seemed to glisten here and there with Hadit points of gold. D’you know ‘Hadit’? It’s an occult term. It means a point so small that if it was any smaller it wouldn’t exist. So, there I was. I could see Everything. And I was twisting in the centre of some very peculiar thoughts. I won’t tell you what those thoughts were, or how I did what I did. It was a bit like picking a lock. I made the right manipulations, just on an impulse, and suddenly . . . Nothing! But this was a strange sort of nothing, like a silent echo, going on forever. I couldn’t work out what had happened for a while. I knew that everything was different, but somehow I couldn’t grasp what it was. Then I saw this cabbage white by the hedge. I’d never seen a butterfly hover like that, in one place, in mid-air, without even fluttering its wings. It was then that I realised exactly what I had done. I could hardly breathe with the suspense.
Well, at that age I had no vested interest in any one reality, so I was curious more than scared. I got closer to the mid-flight butterfly and just looked at it for a very long time. Somehow I could tell it was still alive. It had just stopped. I suppose I had to do what I did next. I reached out and took the butterfly’s wing between my thumb and forefinger. It fell from its position in the air very easily, like a petal detaching from a dying flower. I had plucked it from its rightful place at that moment in time. With the butterfly in the palm of my hand I had this moment of absolute panic. I felt as if I had been playing with matches, you know, starting fires, and I’d lit a fire that had got out of hand and was threatening to burn down several fields and a farmhouse.
A butterfly is a very small and delicate detail of existence, incidental, you might say. But I was awed by what I had done, and it seemed that motionless butterfly was an omen of cosmic disaster. Now that I had touched it, it had become subject to the laws of gravity—although it still didn’t move of its own accord—and I couldn’t pin it back onto the air I had taken it from.
Eventually, I gave up. I left it on the path, as if leaving an uncontrolled blaze behind me. Whether I had cast a spell on the rest of the world or only on myself, the result was the same. I could stop time. This idea suddenly reared up in front of me like a mushroom cloud and I felt an overpowering need to see the new world I had entered.
The butterfly had given me a scare. It was a lesson I never forgot. But as I walked back down the path and towards home, I was not afraid of anything. Because time had stopped something invisible had disappeared. I had never realised until then what human laws were. While time flowed they were as omnipresent as the air, a constant straightjacket. No one ever told me, for instance, not to walk down the street naked or put my hand up my teacher’s skirt. But I would never have dared. I might have been too young to be arrested, but if I had done anything like that I would have soon run into the invisible wall called law. Now that wall was gone. Far from the suspense I had felt earlier, now I felt so relaxed it was hardly human. For the first time in my life I could really breathe.
That moment, quite literally, lasted some hours, but the very fact of its stillness gave me an impression more like that of forever. I tottered back into the house to see my mother strangely motionless before the chopping board in the kitchen, a knife in her raised hand. It wasn’t like a stopped film, or anything, where the whole image seems cemented with some sort of glossy glue. It was a soft stillness, perfectly focused, perfectly real, but like a dream. The sun was streaming in through the glass beads at the window, all bright and filmy and full of motionless motes, and it shone on the curling folds of my mother’s patterned skirt. Her skirt looked like the slightest breath of air would make it stir. But it didn’t stir. The sight was rapture. I can’t explain it. I had found my way to fields upon endless fields of amazement, all in full bloom, and I was ready to roly-poly down them, drunk on the perfume of forever.
Cigarette? Well, I hope you don’t mind if I have one. When I drink I have to smoke. So, anyway, that was the first time, or the first no-time, if you like. Yeah, yeah, I did figure out how to get time started again and everything. It wasn’t difficult. Now, like I say, the lesson of that butterfly stayed with me, and I was a shrewd little bastard anyway, quick on the uptake. So I didn’t go mad with my newfound worshipful God-like status right away. I realised there was no rush and I was what you might call circumspect. I suppose I’d seen too many films in which robbers plan the perfect crime and then get caught. Old films are always like that—it really pissed me off as a kid. So, what I wanted to do was to get away with it, sweet and scot-free, and fuck all that old film morality. As a result, here I am today. I have remained discreet, apart from now, of course, divulging my adventures to you, here. But you don’t believe me. And I never went insane, and I never turned into an evil megalomaniac. I think.
I was really keeping my discovery to myself, not using my gift or anything, occasionally thinking about it and feeling my chest swell like I was counting gold. Well, about this time I had my first girlfriend. It was just one of those cool, flukey things that seemed very natural at the time. This’ll give you an idea of how young I was: I used to blow kisses to her while I was pretending to be an aeroplane buzzing around the playground. Swoop by, and instead of dropping doodlebugs from the bomb bay, I’d blow a smacker her way. Fuck knows why! I’d never actually spoken to her. But she was called Nicola, she
was in the year below me—astonishing difference at that age—and she was as cute as a currant in a bun, you know what I mean, when you bite into it and it’s all cold and sweet? Other boys would brag about girls, even then, and whether what they said was true or not, it just so happened that I quietly got on with wooing Nicola and succeeded with flying colours, and I wasn’t popular or anything. These things happen all the time, but no one notices.
I’d never made approaches to any girls before, and I’d always made sharp replies to any ‘my friend fancies you’ sort of messages. But that was because of fear. I just did not know what you’re supposed to do when you go out with someone. This time, though, the whole thing had started with my spitfire kisses, so I felt like I didn’t touch the ground the whole time. It was all based on my fantasy and therefore took on a momentum of its own. I didn’t have to wonder what to do. I used to walk her home via the lanes that ran behind the school, and we’d hold hands. We’d linger particularly on the old wooden bridge. It doesn’t sound like much when I talk about it now, but even that much was as magical as my recent discovery, and it seemed like it was just the time for magical things to happen. Just to be able to use her name, like it was our secret, and have her answer, this perfect little stranger, was the strangest feeling ever. I suppose you could say it was an adventure.
I had a very rich fantasy life, and she entered into it without any discussion, and that was what out ‘dates’ were like. You want to know what sort of fantasies? But that’s just the thing. You can never remember dreams properly when you wake up, can you? Or even if you can, and you try to explain them to someone, they never make sense, or the words themselves seem to miss the whole atmosphere of the dream completely. It’s the same with these fantasies. So, okay, on the day I’m going to tell you about we went up one of the steep lanes that leads to the old silver mine. The trees make a tunnel there, and somehow I got the idea that I was a sort of king of the woodland, a lonely, tragic figure, spurned by mankind and yet without the peace of the beasts and trees I ruled over. Nicola was a mortal girl who had strayed into my domain and whose beauty might redeem me and reconcile me to the world. I’m sure you know the kind of thing. We’ve all been there—the old wild, brambly hair and the fairy ruffs like the spiky collars on hazel nuts. Don’t laugh! It was actually quite profound. Definitely very real. It wasn’t so much make-believe as a very natural dramatisation of our actual relationship. Let’s not quibble, it was our actual relationship. People should try it more often.
Morbid Tales Page 17