Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  “I believe it’s an angel’s trumpet,” I said.

  “That’s what I think it was! Angel’s trumpet! The flowers do look like small trumpets, don’t they.”

  “It’s a night bloomer,” my brother-in-law said. He’s an amateur gardener like me, but knows much more about botany. “The flowers open at night. The smell is also stronger during the night. And when spring comes, you can plant it in a sheltered and sunny spot.”

  “Wonderful. I think I’ll take it to the summer house,” I said.

  “They said at the flowershop that it can’t winter this far north, so you’ll have to bring it back inside in the autumn.”

  “I’ve heard that it’s sometimes called devil’s weed,” Roope said. “Did you know that, Noora?”

  “I bought a weed as a gift?” Noora was shocked.

  “At least it’s related to devil’s weed.”

  Roope rubbed a leaf between his fingers and then sniffed them. He grimaced.

  “The smell isn’t all that good. Technically it’s not a brugmansia, an angel’s trumpet, but a datura, a moonflower. The flowers on this one are erect, while those of brugmansia are pendulous. They are sometimes considered the same species, though. It’s a datura, I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “Why do they call it devil’s weed?”

  “I think datura were once used in witchcraft,” Roope said. “It’s poisonous. It has intoxicating qualities.”

  “Oh no, it doesn’t seem like a very good birthday present after all,” Noora said.

  “I like it. It’s gorgeous,” I said. “We don’t have to use it to bewitch anyone.”

  Another coughing fit came over me and just didn’t seem to stop. I went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, and when I got back, Roope said, “Did you know that this plant is said to cure asthma? Its poison can be used as medicine in small amounts. As is almost always the case with poisons.”

  “Really? And how are you supposed to take it? Eat fresh flowers? Dry them and smoke them? Use the leaves as tea? Chew ripe seeds?”

  “Don’t ask me. And don’t go trying it out, it might be dangerous. It just came to mind—I remember reading it somewhere. Forget it.”

  After Roope and Noora had left, I fell asleep for a while. When I woke up, the datura was there, in front of my eyes, like a guardian of my dreams. Dear lord, what a plant! It swelled with vitality, flourishing more by the minute.

  Out of impulse, I took one seed pod and crushed it between my fingers. The seeds were black and kidney shaped. I took a mortar and pestle and ground a couple of the seeds to powder. Why not, I thought, just as an experiment. Two seeds was a small amount in my opinion, just the right amount to be used as medicine. And it was a natural remedy after all. I made a sandwich with some sliced tomatoes and sprinkled some sea salt and the seed powder over the top.

  I chewed. A strange, completely foreign odor drifted up from the sandwich. A smell that I couldn’t link to any other plant. It wasn’t a fresh scent like the smell of so many herbs, but musty in some indefinable way. I fought back my revulsion, chewed and swallowed. I was soon overcome by drowsiness. I undressed and went to bed.

  The violin screeched; wagon wheels rumbled on a dirt road. I became conscious of these sounds. My mouth felt dry, but I soon fell asleep without much coughing. I had a feeling that I’d last felt as a child at bedtime: it was as though I was riding a spinning merry-go-round with my hair flying in the wind, only I was lying down as it went round and round. I found I still enjoyed it as much as I had as a child.

  I only woke once, in the small hours of the night. I felt that someone in a white dress was standing at the foot of the bed. Before I could take fright I realized that it was only the tall moonflower watching over my rest.

  Then the merry-go-round started up again, spinning at a dizzying speed.

  The New Anomalist

  The ceiling in the room was so low that even people my height instinctively walked with a slight hunch. The floor was made of unpainted concrete. The radiator was scalding hot from the beginning of September to the end of May, and there was no way to turn it down. Even when I’d bothered to wash the narrow window near the ceiling, the only window in the room, it was just as dusty again after a few days. The window faced northeast and opened onto a narrow asphalt deck where the printing house’s employees parked their cars. But at least I was able to see a strip of the opposite building’s yard between two brick walls—a swing and a birch tree. The air was not good in the room, which had once been a warehouse for hubcaps. Not a good thing considering the state of my poor lungs.

  But that was where The New Anomalist was put together.

  The chief editor and founder of the magazine was my former class mate Markus, who has been called the Marquis since childhood, probably because everyone at school thought he was strange and a bit snobbish. When the Marquis suggested I become the assistant editor of The New Anomalist, I doubted whether I was suitable for the job, because I wasn’t familiar with the magazine’s subject matter.

  “You’ll acclimatize soon enough,” the Marquis said.

  He was right. It wasn’t long before I was familiar with anomalies, strange phenomena and the occult, the supernatural and the paranormal, many dissident thoughts and alternative world views. In short, mostly rubbish.

  We believe, we secretly hope, that the flux of mysteries would open . . . Without a doubt The New Anomalist sought to sate this eternal appetite in its readers.

  Every now and again, amid the marginal, petty, and perhaps even harmful, something noteworthy would pop up, something with some connection to reality and not just delusions inside someone’s head. No one ever taught me how to tell them apart. I can only guess that sometimes it’s possible to move from the margins and break into the mainstream, from the realm of pseudoscience into respected scientific circles.

  The magazine published news and articles on all kinds of paranormal phenomena, extrasensory perception, magic and the occult, millennialism, catastrophism, prophesies, astral traveling, demonology, cryptozoology, channeling, remote viewing, chiropractic, holism, the holographic paradigm, kundalini, reiki and shamanism, numerology, past life regression therapy, black helicopters, MKULTRA documents, the Illuminati, spontaneous human combustion, the goth subculture, as well as poltergeists, ghosts, and apparitions, just to name a few.

  The Q&A column would deal with how to make a psychotronic generator or how to take Kirlian photos at home or what reference works had the best information on the basics of alchemy, martinism, or chaos magic. Every now and then we also published news on apparitions and miracles, stigma and bleeding statues.

  However, the Marquis didn’t want to feature anything that had to do with spiritism, psychic surgery, spiritual healing, or ufology. It was a difficult, sometimes even impossible, distinction to make.

  We also had a paranoia section, a paraphysics section, and pages for parapsychology and parabiology. The paranoia section covered alleged government cover-ups, scheming authorities, and international conspiracies. Paraphysics and alternative technology took up a few spreads. The columns on those pages would introduce the reader to alternatives to the theory of relativity, free energy, time travel, antimatter, cold fusion, and cryonics.

  The parapsychology section would have features on things like orgonomy and transpersonal psychology. The parabiology section focused on alternative evolution theories—of which there are many, believe me—cryptids, the aquatic ape hypothesis, and exobiology. Sometimes we got messages from “Otherkin,” people who didn’t think they were humans, but other forms of life.

  The number of subscribers doubled within just a few years, but the editor and the assistant editor still had to do everything ourselves.

  As time went by, the Marquis turned more and more tasks over to his subeditor, meaning, me. My inbox would have dozens of new messages every morning, and my desk would be covered with random material, both letters from readers and newspaper articles in English, French, and German.
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  I became an expert on concepts like “vibrational frequency,” “bioenergy,” and “energy field.” Many of the terms had been appropriated from theoretical physics or information technology. I learned what kind of creatures the Nguoi Rungs were and that ectoplasm was a slimy, disgusting looking substance that would gush from the ears and mouths of turn-of-the-century mediums.

  The Marquis seldom came to the office, but I had to spend nearly six hours a day in that rathole. I tried to make it a bit more cozy. I put a rug on the concrete floor and brought in an armchair with torn corduroy upholstery that I’d found at a flea market. By throwing a blanket over the armchair, I managed to make it look neat and welcoming. I put a table lamp with a green lampshade on my desk and even put a light therapy lamp on the windowsill. I grew a couple of Phalaenopsis orchids in its glow.

  My first Anomalist winter was especially dark. There was no snow, only icy drizzle. Still, I must confess that even then I liked the midwinter, even if it was snowless, the bleakest time imaginable. The dead of winter is like a pocket you can hide in. Winter offers one of the best illusions: the illusion that time can stop. If nothing grows, blooms, or flourishes, nothing can wither away, either.

  The city in winter is more present and real than during other seasons. The lights of windows, cars, shops, and theaters, all of them speak of presence, that there are others like me. When the lights fade as the sun climbs higher, when the growing season begins and summer finally comes, I almost forget about people. I concentrate on the world of vegetation, the vibrant life of sprouts, shoots, and buds.

  But there, back then, the short days repeated as if they were one and the same day, and we, too, repeated the day before again and again.

  “Old clouds never clear

  Dawn breaks with them lowering.

  And each new day here

  its own verse neverending.”

  We lived in the eternity of winter, thinking we would always remain the same, trying not to see what was changing.

  The Master of Sound

  “Sounds are everywhere, even where you wouldn’t think mumblemumble. We don’t hear them, but they exist. Even in the most silent of silences.”

  The lowering silver sky, the Master of Sound’s suit, and his muted voice were all of one color.

  “I’m sorry, but could you explain this alternative audiotechnology a bit more,” I said, slightly impatiently. “I’ve only worked here a few weeks. There are so many important topics in this field that I’ve never heard of before.”

  “Alternative audiotechnology is a means to reveal sounds that the human ear usually can’t mumblemumble,” the Master of Sound explained in a friendly, but extremely quiet voice.

  I was annoyed. I felt like I would have needed alternative audiotechnology just to be able to hear what this man had to say.

  “Everyday life would be quite chaotic, though, if we could hear every single noise,” I said. “I’d think the fact that the human ear can hear only as much as it does is practical, lucky even.”

  “The brain’s task is, of course, to mumblemumble,” he concurred. “The brain cannot take in everything. But the mumblemumblemumble of our hearing leads us to believe that there is nothing else to be heard. The same goes with all our senses, even mumblemumblemumble”.

  His voice became so quiet again that I had to concentrate. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “Even our intellect and knowledge,” he repeated. “We cannot begin to know what we don’t know! We can’t even begin to guess!”

  “You’re right about that,” I said. It was actually a completely new idea to me despite its simplicity.

  “And still we are so convinced that we know something substantial mumblemumble mum mumble mum.”

  “Pardon me?” He was really starting to get on my nerves.

  “Something substantial about the laws and regularities of the universe,” he said.

  “Don’t we, then?”

  “A little of this and that, without a doubt. But reality isn’t limited to the world we know. And sometimes we should mumblemumble or at least mumblemumble to hear a bit more than we normally hear,” he continued. “It does wonders to broaden one’s mumble. That’s why I’ve created a mumblemumble mumble.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A Detector of Silent Sounds.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A very simple device,” he said. “ I have a tape recorder that is activated by even the weakest of sounds. I leave it in an empty room, when I go to work. No one else has a mumble to the room.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “No one else has a key to the room. Last year I had the walls mumblemumble. When I get back from work, I listen to the tape.”

  “Every day?”

  “Every day. It’s become a mumblemumble.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A habit. But, naturally, there isn’t always anything to listen to.”

  “Are you saying that there are times when you’ve heard something peculiar? Sounds in an empty and locked room?”

  “Certainly, many times. Sometimes I’ve heard a buzz as if from a mumble nest. Other times it sounds like some mumblemumblemumblemumble.”

  “Excuse me?

  “Like some vehicle is accelerating and decelerating.”

  “I see,” I said. “Hmm. Very interesting. Would you perhaps consider writing an article for The New Anomalist about this phenomenon?”

  “Why not?” said the Master of Sound. “That’s what I had in mind. But there is no reason to mumblemum only on this phenomenon. Alternative mumblemumble, of course, has so much more to offer. It can reveal to us totally mumblemumble things about the universe and human life.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Maybe you’ve heard of instrumental mumblemumblemumble?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Instrumental transcommunication.”

  “I must say I haven’t.”

  “Or of Doctor Konstantin Raudive and his mumblemumble.”

  “Excuse me”

  “Of his goniometer.”

  “No, unfortunately not.”

  He looked displeased.

  “Well, maybe you’ve heard of EVP, then?”

  “I’m not familiar with that either,” I said, already embarrassed at the gap in my education.

  “EVP stands for electronic voice phenomenon,” he explained patiently.

  “I seem to learn something new every day in this job.”

  “EVP sounds typically last only a mumble or two and can barely be heard. Usually you must use good mumblemumble and train your mumble to be able to distinguish them.”

  I stopped listening to him at some point, I was so tired and annoyed. It was hard having to constantly strain my hearing, although what he was talking about was strange and new to me, and interesting in that sense, at least.

  “Very well,” I said, rudely interrupting his mumbling at long last. “Excellent. Write a short article about this subject for us. Of course, I can’t guarantee it will be published. Let’s aim for the next issue. Your deadline is at the beginning of March.”

  “Mumblemumble!” he uttered, seemingly pleased. “Goodbye. Mumblemumblemumble!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It was nice to meet you,” whispered the Master of Sound, disappearing silently into the pale winter’s day.

  The Voynich Manuscript

  My cough was no longer as hacking and tormenting as before. I didn’t need my inhaler anymore. Each night I ate a tomato sandwich with a few datura seeds on top or drank tea made from datura leaves. There were some side effects, though. I had to drink much more than normal, because datura was dehydrating. That’s why it worked well as cough medicine.

  At times I also had some difficulty focusing my eyes. When I glanced in the mirror, I saw that my pupils were large and unusually glassy. In that way, datura had a similar effect to belladonna. It made my eyes beautiful.

  A facsimile edition
of an ancient manuscript had appeared on the corner table. The Marquis had also brought me various articles in French and Latin that he said were attempts to interpret the manuscript. I didn’t know what he expected me to do with them. I only knew basic Latin and my French wasn’t very good either. I didn’t recognize the language of the manuscript or even the alphabet. I reckoned, however, that it might have been Romanic or Arabic. The hand was skilled and beautiful; there were no corrections to be seen.

  I flipped through the manuscript, getting more intrigued by the minute. It looked medieval and was richly illuminated: symbols, maps, circles, celestial bodies or maybe cells, it was impossible to know. Naked women with rosy cheeks bathing, and animals of unknown species, possibly frogs, salamanders, fish, cats, lions . . .

  The colorful etchings, which depicted odd flowers and herbs, appealed to me the most. Some of them looked like they were connected to man-made components, maybe tubes or cables. Or were they snakes? Some of the imaginary plants had been linked together into some kind of dancing line.

  Human faces were everywhere, in astronomical pictures as well as hidden in the leaves and roots of plants.

  “What is this?” I asked the Marquis.

  “It’s the Voynich manuscript.”

  “Who’s Voynich?”

  “Voynich was the name of the American book dealer who found the manuscript in a Jesuit monastery in Frascati at the turn of the last century, though it’s been suspected that Voynich himself was the author. He believed that it was written by Doctor Mirabilis, Roger Bacon. The real origin of the manuscript is still unknown. No one knows where or when it was written or who wrote it. But usually it’s dated to the fifteenth century at the earliest.”

  “This language . . . ”

  “This is the only known example of the language. But it seems to contain elements from various languages. It might be a cipher, some dead language, or some sort of ancient artificial language. Many cryptologists have tried to decipher it for almost a hundred years now, and there are many transcriptions. Yet no one has been able to interpret the manuscript.”