Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  I was certain that she knew me from the moment when our eyes met, and I had the odd impression that she might even have been expecting me.

  We were standing close together in the treatment room, one of the stops on what I suppose must be the regular tour afforded distinguished visitors. Her whisper was so soft that I am certain no one but I could hear it. But I could read her lips with perfect ease. “It is my little Irishman!” And then she licked them with her soft, pink tongue.

  BUT I SHOULD set down the afternoon’s events in their proper order. The hospital, La Salpêtriére, sprawls over several acres of land not far from the botanic gardens, and houses several thousand patients, nearly all women. (The Bicêtre, nearby, is reserved for men.)

  The famous doctor is now about sixty years of age, of small stature but imposing appearance. I have heard it said that he is pleased to exaggerate his natural resemblance to Napoléon . . . he is pale, clean-shaven with straight black hair only lightly tinged with grey, a firm mouth, and dark melancholy eyes that seem to remember some ancient loss.

  Our tour began in what seemed routine fashion. Charcot called several patients (by their given names only), and brought them forward one at a time to demonstrate the symptoms of their illness and the means he used to treat it. His comments were terse and to the point. Whatever could not be helped by the power of suggestion must be the result of heredity, and nothing could be done about it.

  I paid little attention to the mysterious girl when she first appeared, as routinely as any of the others, called out of her private room, or perhaps I should say cell. Her long, red hair, which first caught my eye, was bound up in a cap, from which a few strands of bright coppery red escaped, and she was decently clad, like the other patients, in a plain hospital robe. I did not even look closely at her until I heard her voice.

  Charcot was pronouncing his accented English in forceful tones. “Lucy, this gentleman has come from England to visit us today. He is a famous man in London, business manager of the Lyceum Theater.”

  Lucy—that is the only name by which I have heard her called—responded to the doctor’s questions in English bearing almost the same flavor of Ireland as does my own. From Charcot’s first remarks regarding her, it was clear that she has been his patient for only a few days. With a casual question I confirmed that she had been admitted on the very day of my own arrival in Paris.

  Stunned by the familiarity of her voice, I gazed intently at her face, and could no longer doubt her identity. There was an impudent presumption in the look she returned to me, and a twinkling in her green eyes that strongly suggested we shared a secret. There followed the whispered words which, though nearly inaudible, seemed to seal her identity as my nocturnal visitor.

  The tour was moving on. I wanted desperately to question Char-cot further on the background and history of the girl, but I delayed. I admit I feared to ask such questions in her presence, lest she put forward some convincing claim of having known me in different circumstances.

  Gradually more facts of her case came out. According to the doctor, Lucy displays a positive terror of sunlight, and has a disturbing habit of refusing to eat the standard fare provided for patients—the quality of which, I note in passing, seems higher than one might expect in this large an institution.

  Hers, he said, is a very interesting case. (Ah, if only he knew!) Several days ago Lucy had somehow got hold of a rat—I can well believe that Charcot was livid with anger when he heard of such a creature being found, in what he considered his hospital—and, using her own sharp-pointed teeth as surgical instruments, was delicately draining it of blood, which she appeared to consider a delicacy.

  It is also said that she manifests an intense fear of mirrors—as they are practically nonexistent within the walls of La Salpêtriére, this presents her caretakers with no urgent problem.

  As it was evident from my repeated questions that I had a strong interest in the patient, Charcot at the end of the tour obliged me by returning to her cell and questioning her at some length while I stood by.

  Lucy’s manner as she replied was not particularly shy, but still subdued, and somehow distant.

  What was her present age? She did not know, could not remember—and did not seem to think it was at all important.

  Had she been born in Paris? No—in Ireland, far across the sea—of that she was certain. How, then, had she come to France? Her parents had brought her when they had come to join the Paris Commune.

  This was interesting news indeed. The doctor frowned. “You must have been only a very small child at that time. How can you remember?”

  “Oh, no sir. I was fifteen years of age when we came to France, and much as you see me now.”

  Charcot gave me a significant look: The fierce rebellion of the Commune now lies fully seventeen years in the past, and the girl who stood before us today could hardly be more than eighteen at the most.

  His voice remained gentle, but insistent. “And you have been here, in Paris, ever since?”

  Lucy began to twist her fingers together nervously. “No; the fighting grew terrible in the city, soon after we arrived. My mother was killed, and quite early on I ran away.”

  “Indeed? You ran away alone?”

  There was a hesitation. Then, finally: “No, sir. It was then he came to me, and claimed me for his own, and took me away. To be his, forever and ever.” As she said this, the girl gave a strange sigh, as of triumph and dread all mingled.

  Charcot gave me another look filled with meaning and picked up on what he evidently thought an important clue. “ ‘He’? Who is this ‘he’?”

  The question produced evident distress. But however Charcot prodded, even threatening the girl with strict confinement if she refused cooperation, there was no answer.

  The doctor’s interest in this strange tale, though on his side purely professional, seemed to have become nearly as great as my own. He dispatched an orderly to bring him the girl’s dossier, and stood in an attitude of deep thought, chin supported in one hand. “And where did this person take you when you fled from Paris?”

  Lucy frowned; her eyes were by then closed, and she seemed to be experiencing some type of painful memory. Her answer when it came was long and rambling and unclear, and I do not remember every word. But the gist of it was that her mysterious abductor, who had evidently also become her lover at some point, had carried her to what she called the dark land, “beyond the forest.”

  By that time the girl’s medical record had been brought to Char-cot from the office; on opening, it proved to contain only a single sheet of paper. Turning to me, Charcot read rapidly from it. “She has been telling the same story all along: that she is the child of an Irish Russian revolutionary couple, brought to Paris by her parents when they came, with others of like mind, to join the Commune in ’71. But that is absurd on the face of it, for the girl cannot be more than twenty years old at the very most.”

  Another brief notation in the record stated that Lucy on first being admitted to the hospital had been housed in a regular ward. There she had displayed an almost incredible skill at slipping away during the night, but was always to be found in her bed again at dawn, the means of her return as mysterious as that of her disappearance. Irked by this disregard of regulations, the doctor in immediate charge of her case had transferred her to a private cell, in the section set aside for patients who are violent or otherwise present unusual difficulties. Even there she had at least twice somehow managed to leave the locked cell at night, so that a search of the hospital wards and grounds was ordered.

  “Without result, I may add,” Char cot informed me. “But each time, in the morning, she was found in her cell again, wanting to do nothing but sleep through the day. I found it necessary to dismiss two employees for carelessness.”

  “She seems a real challenge,” was the only comment I could make.

  By then it was obvious that the doctor was growing more and more intrigued. But his voice maintained the same calm, profe
ssional tone as he turned back to the girl and asked, “What did you do in the land beyond the forest?”

  The trouble in Lucy’s countenance cleared briefly. “I slept and woke . . . feasted and fasted . . . . danced and loved . . . in a great house . . .”

  “What sort of a great house?”

  “It was a castle . . .”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow, expressing in a French way considerable doubt. “A castle, you say.”

  “Yes.” She nodded solemnly. “But later he was cruel to me there . . . so I ran away again.”

  “Who was it that was cruel to you? What was his name?”

  At this the girl became quite agitated, displaying a mixture of emotions . . .

  “He who brought me there . . . the prince of that land,” she finally got out. Then one more sentence burst forth, after which she seemed relieved. “He made me the dearg-due.”

  “I did not understand that word,” Char cot complained briskly. But the girl could not be induced to repeat it, and could not or would not explain.

  All this time I said nothing; but I had understood the Gaelic all too well. My hand strayed unconsciously to touch the small marks on my throat.

  The questioning went on. Why had Lucy come back to Paris? She had been “following the little Irishman, who is so sweet.”(She said this without looking in my direction; and I was much relieved that neither Charcot nor the attendants standing by imagined “the little Irishman” could possibly mean me.)

  She went on, in a voice increasingly tight with strain, “I am afraid to return to the dark land. And I yearn to go back to blessed Ireland, but I dare not, or he will find me, and take me back to his domain, the land beyond the forest . . .”

  Thinking quickly and decisively, as is his wont, Charcot abruptly announced that he had decided to try hypnotism. In a few minutes we had adjourned to a small room that is kept reserved for such experiments. There he soon began to employ his preferred method of inducing trance, which is visual fixation on a small flame—a candle against a background of dark velvet.

  Lucy was seated in a chair, directly facing the candle. Charcot stationed himself just behind her, murmuring in a low, soothing voice, whilst I stood somewhat farther back. What happened next I cannot explain. It seemed that even as the girl began to sink into a trance I could feel the same darkness reaching for me, as if my mind and Lucy’s were already somehow bound together.

  I fell, losing my balance as awkwardly as some weak woman in a faint. At the last moment I roused enough to try to catch myself by grabbing the seat of a nearby chair, breaking my fall to some extent but seriously spraining my left thumb.

  CHARCOT HELPED ME to a private room where he insisted that I lie down until I was fully recovered from my “faint.” Meanwhile, as he provided a rather awkward splint and bandage for my thumb, I had the chance for a private consultation with the famous doctor.

  Charcot confessed himself intrigued by my behavior in the presence of the girl. I began to tell him something of my case, and confessed my overwhelming fear.

  He nodded, and prepared to give me a quick examination. But another detail still bothered him. “What was that word—neither French nor English . . . something, she said, that her princely abductor had caused her to become.”

  “It is in the old language of Ireland: dearg-due, meaning the sucker of red blood.”

  “Yes . . . I see.” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Having some connection with her behavior with regard to the rat.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “No doubt that was it.”

  Charcot examined me briefly, I suppose as thoroughly as possible without advance preparation. He then gave me some hope, as a world expert on tabes dorsalis, by saying that while he certainly could not rule out the possibility in my case, he thought it unlikely that the dreams, or delusions, that I described were due to any organic lesion of the brain.

  Instead, Charcot suggests that a kind of displacement has taken place: the girl in the hospital only resembles the one of whom I dreamed, and my unconscious mind has somehow altered my memory of the dream to fit the available reality.

  Would that the matter could be so easily explained. But I fear that it cannot.

  Tuesday, 17 July, morning—

  Lucy came to me again last night, here in my hotel. Before retiring, I had made doubly sure of the room’s single window being closed (it is utterly inaccessible from outside, two stories above the street) and locked the door and blocked it with a chair, which has become my nightly habit. This morning after her departure, when I examined the window in broad daylight, after my strange visitor’s departure, a thin caking of dust and an intact small spiderweb offered proof that it had not been opened.

  If the girl in the asylum be real, as must be the case, can her shade or spirit in my room at night be anything but a figment of my own disordered reason?

  In the course of last night’s visit, she said to me, “From the moment I first heard you speak in London, my little man, I knew great hunger for your sweet Irish blood.”

  Flat on my back in bed, I still did not know if I was dreaming. But I was curious. “Where did you hear me speak?”

  “It was at the back door of your Lyceum Theater.”

  “And is it that you love the theater, then? You come to watch my employer, the great Henry Irving, on the stage?”

  “Oh aye, he’s marvelous. And I love the darkness and the lights, the curtains that can hide so much, the painted faces and the masks . . .”

  Still murmuring, she bent over me, and all was as before. It seems that when her touch is upon me, my uninjured hand is as powerless to resist as the sprained one.

  Thursday, 19 July, late afternoon—

  This will be my last entry in this journal. The business has come to a conclusion in the most startling and amazing way.

  Lucy appeared in my room again last night, and events followed their usual frightening course, of grotesque horror mingled with indescribable pleasure—until, at the last moment before our intimacy reached its peak, she abruptly broke off and pulled away from me.

  Raising myself dazedly on one elbow, I became aware of a new presence in the room.

  Though the tall figure standing near the window was visible only in outline, I could be sure it was a man. Lucy cowered away before him.

  Moving silently at first, the new apparition (very shadowy in darkness, hard to see distinctly) advanced toward the bed.

  Hardly knowing what to make of this development, I could only stammer out, “But you are real!”

  A deep voice answered, speaking English in a strange accent that was neither French nor Irish. “I am as real as life and death.”

  In the next moment the newcomer turned to the girl, who was still cowering away. His voice was softer, and almost tender. “Lucy, my dear, your sisters are waiting for you at home, in the land beyond the forest. I am ready to take you to them.”

  “I do not want to go!”

  “But you cannot continue in this way.” He might almost have been a parent, remonstrating with a wayward child. “Your vanishing from the hospital. Your toying with this man.”

  She dared to raise her eyes, and pleaded piteously. “He is my sweet little—”

  The man took another step toward her, and spoke in a tone charged with menace. “Silence! These games you play will bring again the hunters down upon us, with their crosses and their garlic and their stakes!”

  When Lucy struggled, he knocked her down with a single blow from the flat of his hand.

  That was not to be borne, and the instinct of manhood in me sent me springing out of bed, bent on defending the girl.

  Honorable as my intentions were, and sincere my effort, the only result was that the nightmare seemed to close upon me with new force. Seizing me by the throat, in a one-handed grip of iron, my opponent forced my body back upon the bed, meanwhile murmuring something of which the only two words I could hear clearly were “misplaced chivalry.”

  Meanwhile, L
ucy had regained her feet, and she in turn tried to come to my aid. But with his right hand the tall man caught her by the hair and forced her to her knees, saying, “You will see him no more.”

  Those were the last words I heard from either of my visitors. Struggle as I might, I could not loosen the dark man’s grip by even a fraction of an inch. I doubt whether I could have succeeded even had I been able to use both hands, which of course I could not. And once more darkness overcame me.

  WHEN I RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS THIS MORNING, there were no blood spots on my pillow. But there were bruises on my throat beneath my beard, five small purpling spots that must have been made by the grip of a single hand, a left hand, of overpowering strength—and it is blessedly clear to me that with my own left hand, injured as it is, I could never have done this to myself. Charcot, when I managed to see him today at the hospital, confirmed the reality of the bruises—as indeed the internal soreness of my throat had already done, to my own full satisfaction. To explain them to the doctor I made up some tale of a scuffle with a would-be robber in the street.

  I am ecstatic with a sense of glorious relief: the man who with one hand overpowered me was a terrible opponent, fit to inhabit a nightmare—but he was real! So was Lucy, my girlish “succubus,” truly in my room, and so were all the visits she has paid me. Nothing that has happened was the product of an infected and disordered brain. Whether or not Lucy is ever to appear to me again, and whatever the ultimate explanation of the mystery, it has nothing, nothing whatever to do with locomotor ataxia.

  One might think this knowledge a new occasion for terror, this time of the supernatural. But the dominant emotion it arouses in me is a relief so strong that it is almost terrible in quite a different way.

  I do not, after all, find myself doomed, hopelessly succumbing to the tertiary stage of syphilis. I can hope to avoid that stage entirely, as do most victims of the disease. Whatever bizarre powers may have intruded in my life, and whether or not they are of occult derivation, my fate is at least not that.