Supernatural Tales 15

by Walter, Adam

  The tired woman who sold me my roll and butter in the morning, the old man who swept the square, the concierge of my building, the lame gardener in the Diaconessen park – it was from them that this feeling of loss came to me; or rather, it was to them, to each of them that the feeling clung, like a pocket of cold air. I sensed it when I drew near to them or looked at them closely: a sudden sinking of the heart, accompanied by the idea that something vital was missing from them.

  I remember the moment when this idea first took the form that it kept in my imagination and that caused me so much distress over the following weeks. I was queuing to collect some shirts at the laundry I used. It was not the most convenient one I could have chosen, but the friendly woman who ran it accepted my efforts to communicate in Frisian with a matter-of-factness that pleased me. I knew nothing of her history or private life, except that a rather snuffly husband was sometimes in evidence behind the counter with her; they seemed to have no children, or none that lived at home.

  The queue was not long, but still I had to wait while the right parcel of clean clothes was scouted out for each customer and a word or two of news exchanged. As I waited, I became aware of a growing sense of dread quite out of keeping with the circumstances and the occasion. The closer I drew to the front of the queue, the more strongly I felt that sinking of my heart, that sense of hopelessness, of destitution, that had troubled me since my arrival in Leeuwarden; and yet there was nothing to account for it.

  What little of the conversation around me I was able to understand was innocuous, indeed banal; the smell of freshly laundered linen, too, was a homely one, and should have soothed my nerves. But by the time my turn came to step to the counter I could barely present my ticket, my hand shook so. An icy sweat prickled my skin, and I was unable to return the laundrywoman’s greeting or look her in the eye. I felt a powerful urge to bolt, but seemed nailed to the spot. The voices behind me rose to a kind of gabble of which I knew myself, somehow, to be the subject. Against my will, as if acquiescing in my own execution, I raised my eyes and met her gaze.

  And then I saw it. Or rather—and this is the crucial point—I saw nothing, but knew, while her eyes held mine, that what I did not see was there, just where my gaze was not directed: a hollow region next to her sternum, an emptiness or concavity scooped, as it were, from her chest, in which hovered the image of a small boy, perhaps five years old. If I told you that it resembled a portrait bust, that would leave out the fact that it was alive in a way that the most skilfully managed portrait can never be.

  And this living likeness was clothed in a light of such penetrating sadness that its lineaments, I knew, would never change, though it might withdraw more deeply into the cavity, and wore, already, a somewhat distant look, as if I were seeing it through a lens of weak shrinking power.

  The moment cannot have lasted more than a few seconds, but in that time I took the full dose of what the vision signified: that the woman had had a son, that she had loved him, and that he had died.

  Can you appreciate the irony of my predicament? Everyone around me was behaving normally. The setting could not have been more mundane. Only one person in the shop had gone pale in the face, stood trembling and sweating and unable to speak, while his heart laboured under a crushing weight and his mind struggled to deny the reality of what he had just seen. Only one person, that is to say, had just seen a ghost.

  Even the laundrywoman looked at me with uncomprehending concern. She had no idea how big a chunk of her I knew to be missing, or how clearly imprinted on my mind was the face of her dead child. Was mijnheer unwell? Would he like to sit down?

  The stir around me brought me back to myself. My eyes left hers and dropped to the place where the emptiness was—had been. I saw her smock, her flowered blouse, but no hole, no shrine, no child. Nothing to show that anything had happened anywhere but in my mind.

  Immediately, the massive ordinariness of my surroundings made me doubt what I had seen. Was it not likely that this vision belonged to the troubled state of mind that had laid me low in London, and that had been creeping upon me again since I got to Friesland? If I looked objectively at the behaviour of everyone else, I had to admit that there was nothing odd about it. Then it must be I who imputed that terrible sadness to the laundrywoman, that life-in-death dimness to my students, that ebb of vitality to Professor de Balg... mustn’t it?

  And yet, how could I account for the vividness of what I saw? How could I know, for example, with such certainty that I did not need to ask for confirmation, that the laundrywoman’s dead son had had a birthmark on his left cheek? Or was my certainty itself just part of a delusion?

  In either case, the episode unbalanced me in the same way that the private loss of which I spoke at the beginning had done. I fell into a state of acute depression, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t stop weeping, saw no one, wouldn’t leave my room. The thought of the utter hopelessness and pointlessness of everything was like a black hole in the centre of my mind, and the only way to get rid of it (I knew) was to jump in.

  And yet, there were two points of difference from that earlier experience. The first was that my mental pictures were not drawn from memory: the face of the child with the birthmark, for instance, was one I had never actually seen. The second was the sense that all my recent apprehensions were connected. The faintness of my Tsjerkesleat landlady, the diminished strength of Kobold de Balg, the cooler atmosphere that clung to certain strangers I had observed: these seemed to be pictures of several kinds, yet they arose, I felt sure, from the same underlying emptiness, and converged in the same intolerable sinking of my heart.

  Grief and despair are familiar companions of depression; but dread belongs properly to a threat from outside oneself. Now, if anything were wanting to sustain the ambiguity of my experience, it was that my grief and despair were mingled with dread. Beneath the layers I have told you about, and lying nearer to the hollow core, was a face, or more than one, which I had not yet seen, the face of someone glimpsed in death, not in life. I dreaded to see that face.

  After about a week, Kobold de Balg came to see me. His manner was calculated to pull me out of my funk, combining as it did a friendly concern for my health with a reminder of what I owed to my students.

  “How can we avoid letting them down?” he asked, as if posing a problem we might solve together.

  It shamed me, and I made an effort to pull myself together. But the shock of what I had seen had been working on me in my solitude, and I was a badly frightened man. I shrank, not only from looking de Balg in the eye, but from looking at him at all, as if I apprehended that my vision might pierce the crust of his being at any point and reveal, with terrible clarity, the face of someone he had lost. I could not bear to join him in his grief, you see; a grief which he, like every well-adjusted person, kept locked up in some inner chamber of his heart.

  Still, I agreed to return to my duties right away, and prepared to do so with as much courage as I could muster. It comforted me to don my Frisian jacket again, and to venture forth into the streets of Leeuwarden with de Balg at my side. That first day was an ordeal, but I got through it somehow, though without forming any clear idea of what my colleagues and students thought of me, since I dared not meet their eyes. Perhaps they felt more pity than disdain for the shadow I had become – the trembling mimosa with the furtive glance and cringing manner, pale and weak from weeping in the dark. Certainly everyone treated me with perfect tact, and I was relieved to be accepted back into the routine of working life without great outpourings of solicitude.

  After a few days I began to feel better. The conditions governing my contact with other people were new and inconvenient, but I adapted to them, and the sense that I was not alone with my despair had a healing effect on my mind.

  All of that changed abruptly, in the following way.

  Among my junior colleagues was a young man called Piet Koon, a tall, weedy chap with a shock of unkempt hair and a premature stoop, not exactl
y witty but with an open sense of humour that made his company very agreeable to those who didn’t take themselves too seriously. I found his laugh the best antidote for what ailed me. He had a young wife and daughter who came round to fetch him sometimes, and it gave me real pleasure to see them together. In a quiet way, they seemed to radiate happiness in the present and promise for the future, and to stand for what makes life worth living after all.

  One day I arrived at the department to find an atmosphere of shock and desolation. Koon’s wife and daughter had been killed. An elderly driver with poor eyesight had hit them as they came out of a bakery. The tragedy was so appalling, so sudden and so complete that no one seemed able to come to terms with it. Classes were cancelled and the university was closed for three days. The destruction of Koon’s life threw everyone who knew him into a condition resembling mine. They shrank into themselves and avoided one another’s eyes, as if they dreaded to encounter there a reflection of their own feelings, which were too terrible to face.

  I was particularly anxious to avoid Koon. Of course I felt a profound sympathy for him and would have liked to express it; but the violence with which his family had been ripped from him filled me with a horror so intense that I had no choice in the matter: I could no more face him than I could voluntarily thrust my head into the open door of a furnace. I did not attend the funeral, and afterwards heard that he had gone to live with his widowed mother in the country.

  The semester came to an end in early December. We gave our exams and posted our grades, and then the business of the university was adjourned until the second week of January. I had come by this time to depend on the routine of daily work as the course most conducive to the preservation of my sanity. My comings and goings at the department were oblique and largely silent, but it did me good to feel that I was among living, breathing people.

  I hated especially to be alone in my flat, where I lived in fear of catching my own eye reflected in the pier glass between the front windows, and thus, of being forced to see again the face of someone who was lost to me forever. So I asked Professor de Balg if I might have a key to the building that housed our department, explaining that I wanted to make use of my office during the vacation. He granted my request.

  At about four o’clock on Christmas Eve I made my way through the deserted grounds of the university and let myself into the building. It was perfectly quiet. Just enough light came through the tall windows to guide me up the staircase and along the darkened corridor. My thoughts had turned again to the subject of my research and I was pondering a problem of interpretation as I went, head down, not needing to look, when at the angle of the corridor I collided with Piet Koon, coming from the other direction with an armful of books. We both staggered, and without thinking I looked right in his face.

  The tragedy had worked a terrible change in him. His whole frame was emaciated, and his eyes seemed to wobble in their pits as if there were no tissue left to hold them still. This motion gave an intermittence to the vision I had, through them, of a raw hole in his chest, perhaps ten inches wide. Its walls had not yet settled to the drabness of the cavity I had seen in the laundrywoman. They were fresh, dark red, and seemed to quiver with an unceasing thrill of pain. In the centre I saw Piet’s wife, Kaatje, and his daughter, Meirit. Their appearance told exactly how they had died. They had been thrown to the ground with great violence, crushed under the front wheels of the car, then dragged face-down over the cobblestones for a yard or more.

  That is as far as I can tell my story consecutively. I was non compos mentis for weeks, and have to rely on the account of others to know what happened to me. On Professor de Balg’s orders I was removed to a sanatorium near Crewe, where my aunt could monitor the progress of my recovery.

  This was long and slow; in fact, she died before it was complete. So my first responsibility, as one newly certified to be of sound mind, was to empty and sell her house. Among the lumber of her ingrown life I found several parcels addressed to me, which proved to contain all the books and clothing I had left behind in Leeuwarden. There was also a note from Professor de Balg expressing friendly good wishes and the hope that I should soon feel well. It ended with a curious postscript.

  “I include your Frisian jacket,” he wrote, “which I have had cleaned and pressed. Did you know that it is an object of some rarity? A so-called jas van weduwes, or widows’ jacket, made to commemorate husbands and sons fallen in battle. You may have noticed that the pockets are lined with military ribbons, some of which go back a long way. I recognise Dogger Bank (1781), Naarden Siege (1814), the Java War (1825-30); there is even a very scarce one for the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Orange Nassau (1688). An expert could tell you more.”

  NEGLECTED CLASSICS

  Editor’s Note: Your humble editor threw out a challenge in the last issue; do any readers want to propose neglected classics of supernatural fiction? He got not one but two responses, and here they are…

  The Shadowy Thing, by H. B. Drake (US 1928)

  First published as The Remedy (UK 1925)

  “The Shadowy Thing summons up strange and terrible vistas.”

  H.P. Lovecraft

  H(enry) B(urgress) Drake, (1894-?) was for thirty years a successful novelist.

  Many of his novels were first published in England and then in America. At least three other of his novels may contain supernatural elements, Cursed Be the Treasure (1926), Hush-a-Bye Baby (1952), and The Woman and the Priest (1955). But sadly Drake has fallen into such obscurity that we have no date from his (presumed) death.

  Do not be misled by the fact that Lovecraft only gives Drake’s bestknown book a single line. He would lift that central idea from the novel, in toto, for the climax of his own story, ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’, a unique tribute to a contemporary author. A strong indication that Lovecraft remained fascinated by the idea is its reappearance, in a modified form, eight years later, in his masterpiece ‘The Shadow Out Of Time’.

  The plot of The Shadowy Thing seems, on first reading, fairly straightforward. Two boys meet at an English public school and take an instant dislike to each other. Richard Bellew, the narrator, is the epitome of an Edwardian aristocrat, unimaginative, athletic and straightforward. Avery Booth is flamboyant and psychic. He gains great popularity by practicing magic tricks and deep hypnosis on his classmates. During one of his mesmerizing sessions, a fellow student, Gaveston, is possessed by an elemental spirit and becomes mad. Richard’s sister, Blanche, herself a medium, struggles to save the boy.

  Richard never forgives Avery. Their struggle will last a lifetime – and beyond. Later Avery will kidnap Richard’s finance, Katrina. Richard will track him down and shoots him. But their final battle will occur after Avery’s return from the dead, after he’s killed in the First World War!

  Richard Bellow is an intriguing choice for a first person narrator. He is, on the surface, completely reliable. He would never deliberately lie. But he has no understanding of the situation he is involved in and not enough selfawareness to ever grasp what is really happening. He is truly like a dog in a library, able to see everything but understands nothing. He sister Blanche could, of course, explain some of the mysteries of the séance and of spiritualism to him. But he has reacted with such hostility and anger whenever she had previously tried to so, that she has given up any attempt to enlighten him. So it is left to the imagination of the reader to supple much of the details as to what is really happening. Indeed, enough of a loophole is left that it is possible to imagine the details if Avery were telling the story.

  What happened to Gaveston was an accident, the result of his youthful inexperience. He wanted to set it right and sought help from Richard but is rebuffed. Katrina had enough feelings for him that she married him of her own free will.

  Even Richard admits that Avery used his powers to save Katrinia’s life from a charging bull. During the Great War he struggles to develop a super weapon that will defeat the dreaded Hun. Only after his death does he un
disputedly go over to the dark side. Only then, it could be argued, does Avery finally becomes what Richard believed he was all along; an egotistical monster with superhuman powers.

  The characterization of Richard and his vision of Avery are cleverly and convincingly done. The characters of Blanche and her husband Olave, who will also play a key role, are much less well-developed but given Richard’s limited vision, this is perhaps inevitable,

  Many of the best supernatural novels create and develop an outré situation, building tension until a climax is reached. This novel, being episodic, has three different resolutions, either more horrific that the one before. But each page is permeated with Dread. Even the most benign scenes can quickly, without warning, be invested with a powerful and terrifying menace.

  In a rare moment of insight, Richard releases that he can not accept the situation he has experienced, because to live in a world beyond his understanding,, to never be safe from forces he can neither anticipate or control, will drive him mad. Ultimately the novel tells us, we are all Richard; we are all like dogs in a library and that is the greatest horror of all. The Shadowy Thing is a neglected classic of supernatural fiction that deserves reading and reprinting.

  Rebekah Memel Brown

  Re: Neglected Classics It could be, of course, that it's only me who's just discovered this one, but: The Other Passenger (1946) by John Keir Cross The titles alone should draw one in: ‘The Glass Eye', 'Hands' ,'The Lovers', 'Amateur Gardening', 'Clair de Lune' - and 'Petronella Pan' will absolutely turn your sense of reality completely around! 'Exorcist Twist', as the Slayer once said.

  Guy Weston

  An Editor Writes Some More…

  Thanks to Rebekah and Guy. I haven’t been able to get a copy of The Shadowy Thing, but did obtain a copy of The Other Passenger. Sort of. I found a cheap paperback on Amazon UK, and thought I had nabbed the genuine article, But ah! Things are seldom so simple with neglected authors, and this is a semi-cautionary tale. What I have in fact got is an American paperback (Ballantine 1961) that’s got a 2/6 price stamp reading British Import. And the title of the volume is Stories from The Other Passenger – so it’s not a complete collection. Curses!