Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Well, they have a strong enough force to seize a strategic point on the coast and hold it while their friends arrive in battalions. They certainly have enough to do for Prince George. I feel we’ll learn the whole story in the next couple of hours.’

  Vassos was waiting for them. When they reached his boat he said gravely, ‘Kyrie Cartnee, kyrie Barans, I entreat you not to do as you intend.’

  ‘We have to do it, Vassos,’ said Courtenay. ‘It is duty.’

  ‘I know nothing of that. Then you will go?’

  ‘Of course. Do you expect us to turn back at this stage?’

  ‘No, kyrie, but remember that I entreated you to.’

  ‘Very well. Now let us move.’

  By midnight they had reached the spot carefully chosen through the telescope. The two Englishmen disembarked; Vassos took his boat a few yards off into deep shadow. The climb ahead of Courtenay looked a good deal more formidable than they had had reason to expect, but he indicated that he could manage it and was soon out of sight. Barnes himself was in shadow and settled down to wait, till half an hour before dawn if need be. If Courtenay had not rejoined him before then, it was to be assumed, as agreed, that he had been forcibly prevented from doing so. In that eventuality, Barnes was to return whence he had come and inform the British authorities in the island. Meanwhile he was to be on hand to cover the withdrawal.

  In fifty-five minutes he heard Courtenay returning. This surprised and dismayed Barnes: the junior officer was famous in the Department for his ability, unexpected perhaps in so big a man, to move over the most difficult ground in silence. Was he who approached indeed Courtenay? Barnes shifted position and drew his revolver.

  Courtenay came into view, but it was not the Courtenay who had set off to climb the face of the headland. The dimly seen figure lurched and tottered from side to side, as if almost over come by intolerable lassitude.

  ‘Courtenay,’ called Barnes, softly but urgently. ‘Over here.’

  With obvious, toilsome effort, the other changed direction and took half a dozen weary steps towards the voice. Then he fell forward and did not move. Barnes, revolver in pocket, ran to him and turned him over on to his back. Blood was spreading from a wound in his chest. The eyes were open. After a moment they recognized Barnes; another moment later the whole face took on a look of enormous loathing.

  ‘Don’t go up there,’ said Courtenay.

  ‘What did you find?’ Barnes became aware that Vassos, disinclination to set foot on the headland forgotten, was at his side.

  Courtenay made another great effort, this time to speak again. ‘Terror,’ he seemed to say, ‘to fill . . .’ After a single indistinct further sound he fainted.

  ‘He has seen,’ said Vassos.

  ‘Let’s get him into the boat,’ said Barnes.

  When Courtenay was lying unconscious in the bows, Vassos lifted his hand to help Barnes aboard. It was refused.

  ‘Take him back and fetch a doctor,’ said Barnes. ‘You have never seen this man before; you found him on the beach. Then return here and wait for me. If I don’t come by first light, everything is changed. Go to the English bey in the town and tell him what you know.’

  Vassos signified consent and rowed away into the darkness.

  Since Courtenay had not been pursued and no observable alarm had been raised, it seemed probable that he had killed or otherwise silenced his assailant. At any moment this might become known; Barnes must hurry. Here was his only chance, for once Count Axel’s men were alerted no outsider would ever afterwards be able to reach the objective unseen.

  Barnes, taxed though he was by the ascent, managed to do so. He stood in shadow at the corner of the main house and listened for five minutes; nothing and nobody stirred. When, after another five minutes, he rounded the further corner and came in view of the outbuilding with the bricked-up windows, he at once caught sight of a human body lying near the door in full moonlight. With the utmost speed he went to it and dragged it into the comparative darkness under a carob tree. It was that of a strongly built man in his thirties with Courtenay’s knife still deep in his side. Barnes turned the corpse face down and made for the door of the outbuilding. Its lock had not yet responded to his attentions when, behind him, he heard another door open. In no time he was hidden and watching.

  A lamp approached from the house. Soon Barnes was able to recognize Count Axel in a white dressing-gown and Turkish slippers. His look of pleased expectation changed to one of mild puzzlement when, it could be assumed, he noted the absence of the man now lying under the carob. He glanced about for a moment while Barnes crouched very still and hoped very much that the small patch of blood where the man had first lain was small enough not to be noticed; then, evidently deciding that the matter could be left, the Count took a key from his dressing-gown pocket, opened the outbuilding door, entered, shut it behind him, and relocked it.

  At once Barnes hurried over and went on with his work. The lock was confoundedly stubborn and the need for complete silence a severe constriction. Some seven or eight minutes went by before the lock allowed itself to be turned. In that interval it occurred to Barnes that Courtenay must have been attacked while re-locking the door, then that that was precisely when he could not have been attacked, or not effectively, because his wound was in front. So he had allowed himself to be disabled by an antagonist who had met him face to face. But his reflexes were known to be outstandingly quick. What had deprived him of the initiative?

  Slowly Barnes pushed the door open an inch, two inches. Inside it was almost dark. He pushed further. A little light came through gaps in the curtain that covered a portal at the far end of a short passage straight in front of him; beyond it, he had learned, lay the main room of the building. On each side of the passage were smaller rooms, just then seemingly deserted. Barnes crossed the threshold and shut the door. Soon he was standing at the portal in an excellent position to see what was on the other side of the curtain without being seen. Some rhythmical movement and the sound of heavy breathing could be heard, but no speech. He put his eyes to the most promising gap.

  A lamp, the Count’s or another, gave illumination that, while not bright, was clear enough. The room held five day-beds or couches, each with an occupant. All of these were naked. All were female. On the couch nearest Barnes there lay a girl of about twenty-five with pretty brown hair and three legs, two normally placed, the third, somewhat withered, growing out above the left hip. Opposite: was it two negro women or one? – at the shoulders certainly two, at the hindquarters as certainly one; it was easy to see why Vassos had been undecided about how many people had landed that night. Next to the two or the one, another double entity was disposed, a slim girl of about the same age as the first, evidently an Asiatic half-caste with exquisite features and the look of being some months gone in pregnancy; emerging under her left arm was something like the top half of a five-year-old child, which now stirred in its sleep. It was impossible to tell anything as to the age of the fourth occupant, because it – she – had no face, none, that is, in the human sense, only as we speak by analogy of the face of a dog or a horse or, more applicable, a tapir.

  This being was actually the last to come to Barnes’s attention. The first rocked and strained in Count Axel’s arms, and Barnes had thought her normal, her face, a true face unlike that other poor creature’s, half-turned in his direction, but now, when he gazed at her again, that face turned away, and as it did so another began to come into view, another face on the same head, a Janus-head, another true face that gaped its mouth and half-closed its eyes in pleasure.

  Somehow Barnes took himself out of that building without being heard, somehow he climbed and ran and stumbled down the headland without serious injury; he was bruised and bleeding in twenty places when he came to the boat and Vassos. He had waited till he was out of hearing of the house before letting himself start to sob and whimper and managed to keep almost completely quiet after they landed, though he let Vassos give him raw brandy
and bread and hot goat’s milk and put him to bed and sit up with him for the rest of the night. He gives these details himself in his report, a painful chronicle with its abrupt swings from the style of a conscientious, highly trained officer to that of a sensitive man still in a state of shock and semi-hysteria. But, as he says, he could not afford to wait till such time as he might feel better: he must have orders, and a replacement.

  For Courtenay was dead, had died in a monastery hospital within an hour of arriving there. It was on hearing this news that Barnes, again by his own account, wished most fervently that he had killed Count Axel when he had had the chance. But if he had, what would have happened to those occupants of the outbuilding? At that time in that place, they would almost certainly have been quietly slaughtered, and it would have taken a bold man to pronounce them better off dead. I am not as confident as Roger Harvey that Barnes’s report was acted upon, though to be sure orders to do nothing constitute action.

  In any event, no answer to his request appears in the folder. The final document is a signal from the Stockholm police; Count Axel had large estates near Karlskrona; he had not resided in Sweden for thirty years; late in 1898 he had fled inexplicably from a house he owned in Portugal, leaving it full of possessions. Even in those days it could hardly have been easy for him to kidnap or buy his company and then keep it hidden; now, with governments and police quick to trace any missing person, none of it would be possible.

  One small item that puzzled Barnes I can clear up. Courtenay’s last words to him had nothing to do with terror; he was trying to say a single word that I, with my Ancient as well as Modern Greek, can identify, though I have never encountered it: teratophilia, erotic attraction to monsters. No doubt Courtenay had run across it in his psychological dabblings. It stands for an inclination bound to arouse abhorrence in those fortunate enough not to share it. Nevertheless I have pondered on it and other matters a good deal these last days, since reading the contents of that folder. I have felt I have had to. Consider: I was born in June or July 1899, in the Levant; nobody living knows exactly when or where. My colouring is Nordic. I have what might be an Asiatic eye-characteristic. Also consider something nobody living knows in detail but I: near my right hip I have an old scar, very old, the relic of surgery carried out so early in my infancy that my foster-parents, who started to care for me when I was six weeks old, did not know, or said they did not know, the nature of the operation. I have read that the tendency to bear twins is strongly inherited. Finally consider what has occurred to me as I write these lines: whence do I derive what Harvey called my fascination with the bizarre?

  That has decided me; I will write to Celia to break off our engagement. I have no idea whether the tendency to bear twins, or near-twins, is inheritable through the male line, nor do I propose to find out. But I must do more. I feel that an office job is unsuitable for a healthy man, even one of forty, in wartime. When I meet Harvey for our farewell drink tomorrow, I will ask him for an introduction.

  Note: Acting-Sergeant Chalmers, R.F., of the Royal rifle Regiment was killed in France in May, 1940 when, showing complete disregard for his own safety, he attacked an enemy tank with hand-grenades. He was awarded a posthumous DCM.

  TO SEE THE SUN

  I – Stephen Hillier to Constance Hillier, Wheatley, England

  Albergu snt. Ioanni,

  Nuvakastra,

  Dacia

  31 August 1925

  Darling Connie,

  Well, I was always pretty sure I had the wisest of wives, but never has the truth of that proposition become as clear to me as this afternoon on the journey from Arelanópli. I had known in advance that there were no railways in this part of the world, and precious few motor-cars; I was quite unprepared for the roads. In many places, and almost everywhere in the foothills and higher, they simply don’t exist, except round the larger towns, which are few and far enough between. The equipage that brought me here was of a piece with them: a veritable box on wheels, iron-tyred wheels at that, a couple of scraggy horses straight out of Browning, ‘every bone a-stare’, and at the reins an unshaven fellow in a sheepskin jacket that looked as if he had made it with his own far from fair hands – and not taken it off since its first day on his back.

  Our ride took us through some of the wildest and most beautiful scenery in Europe – distant peaks wreathed in cloud, great pine-forests that shut out the sun, mountain streams in white traceries down almost sheer cliffs, and sudden vistas of the green plain far below. But it was hard (or so I found it) to appreciate these delights at their true worth, or even to take them in at all, while being perpetually flung from side to side and bounced into the air only to be dropped an instant later on to an unpadded bench that grew harder with each descent. My attempts to contrive a cushion out of my travelling-rug were an utter fiasco, and when, after what seemed like many hours, I reached my destination, I had a violent headache and a sick feeling in my stomach, a dull pain racked every muscle and I could have sworn I was bruised from head to foot. Last but not least, my eyes, full of dust and pollen, stung and itched intolerably. How very wise of you to have stayed at home!

  Now all my ills are a thing of the past. A bath, which incidentally revealed my almost complete bruiselessness, a change of clothes, and food and drink, have between them set me up again, and my eyes, though still a little bloodshot, have responded well to careful bathing with boracic solution. (Bless you for remembering to pop the tin into my luggage!) Although this place is nothing more than a village inn, it’s excellent of its kind – spotlessly clean, bone dry and providing quantities of plain wholesome food and the sturdy red wine of the region. Far from uncomfortable, too; I write this at a table by the window of a pleasant, light room of fair size, furnished with a handsome and ample bed, its mattress a little hard (that one expects) but commendably free from lumps. The landlord is a sterling chap with a swarthy skin and the unexpected blue eyes I’ve come across before in remote parts of the northern Balkans. He and his smiling, apple-cheeked wife have made a great fuss of me, bringing me plates of patties and bowls of fresh fruit quite unasked and providing enough hot water to bath a horse.

  The first shades of dusk are here and I must pause to light my candle. With the passing of the day, what I see from this window has changed a little and goes on changing as I write. Beyond the dark-red roofs of the peasant cottages, sharply sloped against the heavy winter snows, there’s a level grassy stretch something like a mile across (though it’s hard to be precise) and bounded by an irregular line of low hills that give place to higher hills, these being in turn topped by summits of what must be pretty considerable elevation, seeing that Nuvakastra itself can’t be much less than two thousand feet up. Until a few minutes back, the expanse of the plateau, broken here and there by a farmhouse with its outbuildings, a mill, a church, at one point a tiny village of tiny houses, had a warm and inviting look, and the distant mountains, though indeed wild, seemed to offer a noble mystery, a kind of primeval innocence. But now, how remote, how lonely everything seems! Imagine what it must feel like to be a wayfarer on that exposed plain with night closing in, even more to be lost among those desolate ravines and crags, beset by strange sounds and half-fancied movements in the dark! What makes us think that hidden forces are likely to be benevolent?

  Some people would say I’m overdoing it rather. Somebody called Constance or some such name would go further and accuse me of childish romancing, that old bad habit of mine. Well, it’s possible. I’ll see how I feel when I come back from this evening’s expedition. Nothing elaborate, hardly more than a stroll before dinner. I have a good hour to kill, it’s a clear evening and anyway I must get out and about. I’m so rested that I’m restless. (Can those two words really be connected?) Or perhaps I’m simply impatient to start my investigation. You must bear with me about this business, darling Connie. You must do more than that; I know (how well I know!) that you consider the whole thing to be the most perfect piffle imaginable, and you’re probably rig
ht, but do, like the sweetest as well as the wisest of wives, wish me luck in my search for the vampire.

  This won’t go off till the morning (if then!) so I’ll leave it open and add any new information of interest before I finally post it. Meanwhile, I give you my love, I give you my thoughts, and my heart is joined with yours even though you are so far away.

  II – Countess Valvazor’s Journal

  31 August 1925 – The undirected uneasiness, the small vague fears I have been subjected to over these last weeks, sharpened tonight into foreboding: I sense the approach of danger. What kind or degree of danger still eludes me, but I hardly care if it should prove to be mortal. I take a long look at this statement now that I have committed it to paper and ask myself in all honesty whether it is true. Yes, I say, I believe it is. I am weary beyond all expression, and I have nothing to look forward to in my life. If only I could appeal to God to help me to endure! But everything is over between Him and my wretched self, and I am alone in perpetuity.

  Again I reread what I have just written, and am struck equally by the self-pity in it and its quality of – what shall I call it? – determined hopelessness, refusal to consider any prospect of alleviation. In the impossible event that a stranger ever comes across these lines, he could think no differently. But, stranger, I would cry to him, these repulsive characteristics are part of my condition. They poison everything, they come between me and everything I once enjoyed: food and drink, literature, art. Here I am surrounded by beautiful objects, or so at least I regarded them at one time. Now, an abominable mist hangs over them, coarsening the outlines, tainting and muddying the colours. Poems I loved in the past are no longer intelligible; they are full of words that have lost their meaning for me, references to feelings I cannot remember. Come, whatever you are, whoever you are, do what you will with me, so long as you sweep the mist aside, make me see the way I used to see, help me to escape from myself.