by Aaron French
I looked up to check on Jonathan, and saw him once more transfixed by the inner shell of the third-layer doll. He did not seem distressed by what he was looking at but completely mesmerized instead. Staring unblinking, he seemed to be breathing at a slower rate than usual. Something in there was holding him spellbound, almost roping him in. I had problems this time in looking into the doll’s body, for he was blocking my line of sight and could not be made to move. My brother had almost become made of stone and I was half expecting to catch a glimpse of Medusa’s locks painted inside the casing.
But again, the same constellation was staring back at me, much compacted by the smaller size body it was constrained to. In fact, it looked like somebody had taken the formation and twisted it most violently, as if some powerful astral winds had taken hold and uprooted the stellar bodies from their normal path. Again there was a sense of movement inside the lacquer, bringing a disturbing life into the design. I was getting fascinated as well – I could feel that my eyes had not blinked for what seemed to be ages – but suddenly I heard Jo moan, “It’s coming.” This was enough to jolt me back to attention and I asked him what he meant by that. But he did not reply. He looked straight ahead of him into the box and just repeated – just a hoarse whisper, really – “It’s coming.”
I did not like that. I wrestled the doll’s halves from his hands – I had to actually unpeel his fingers one by one from them – and tossed them aside before shaking him awake. His face looked so drawn suddenly that I again said we should forget the matrioshka for today and that maybe he should take a nap. He refused most violently at first, but then suddenly his face relaxed and, with the strangest smile on his face, he agreed to rest for a while. I was to wake him up in an hour with a cup of warm chocolate. Could I gather the bits of dolls and put them back on his bedside table? He was afraid that they might be crushed underfoot or lost and it would be a shame, for once, that Auntie Alice had brought us something interesting. So, I did chase and pick up the various doll parts from inside his covers and underneath the bed. I attempted to close the bigger dolls again, but the lacquer refused to comply with my wish, so I left them opened, placing them by order of size on his table.
Then I tucked him in, kissed him on the forehead, closed the heavy curtains against the afternoon sun, and went off to watch an episode of “Black Adder” on DVD – another gift that a parent had showered Jonathan with and that he had agreed gracefully to lend me.
After an hour or so, I made some hot chocolate and went to his room to wake him up.
It was...
It was as if his whole bedroom space had been saturated with the static luminous points we used to get on late TV, back in the days when we did not have programs on all the time. The air was buzzing angrily with them. It was so thick that I could not even see the room: it was like entering into another dimension, dark and blinding at the same time and cold, cold beyond winter.
I think I dropped the mug of chocolate and screamed.
Unfortunately, there was nobody else at home, so help was not going to come.
That thing...
These blinking light dots were flashing and racing around as the content of a gigantic digital hornet’s nest, angry after its home has been shattered. It pulsated darkness around its forms as if it could absorb space. I would have turned around and fled, but the thought of my little brother lost somewhere in there with that... thing, rooted me where I was. The dots were becoming smaller and brighter, more aggressive in many ways, but the growing darkness lurking between each one of them was looming, cold and getting stronger, seeping a sinister sense of gloom and loss inside my brain.
I don’t know quite why – it might have been the progress of obscurity inside the room, covering me like a viscous film, that did it – but my hand instinctively jerked in the direction of the light switch, turning the main ceiling lamp on.
There was a tearing noise and the darkness seemed to contract, twisting in the luminous dots in its wake, as if they were fingers that had just been burnt. I started to see a little of the room appear and, diving to the side of the room, switched on the desk lamp as well. The creature started to crackle, hissing in frequencies that hurt my ears, lashing at me with a glowing tentacle. While moving, I caught my feet in the carpet and fell heavily on the ground, but that saved me by an inch from the incandescent whip, which only grazed my arm, sending an arctic frost into the deep of my bones, spurring me further into the room.
I dove under the window, hiding in the folds of the curtains. And then, summoning all my courage and energy to do so, I stood up, tore the drape open, inundating the room with glorious sun-setting light. The creature yowled in fury and made to attack me once more.
At that point, panic got the best of me and I hurled myself through the window, landing on the porch roof, gasping for breath and in pain, incapable of defending myself from the monster anymore. I watched it trying to reach me once more – another lightning tendril slit a frosty scratch into my left leg – but faltering in the pale winter sunlight, gathering its feelers around it, closing unto itself like a centipede, getting smaller, smaller still, and disappearing in a whiff of smoke while the first calls of neighbours rushing in to see what the matter was started to break inside my frantic mind.
I suddenly thought of Jonathan again and rushed back in – limping from the icy contact and cutting myself some more on the glass shards – to find him lying arched and stiff on his bed, his mouth frozen in a silent scream. His body was blue with frost and his eyes were stuck wide open, dry from tears and black, black from an absolute darkness, older than our universe.
In his clutched hands, the fifth doll lay open.
About the author: Nathalie Boisard-Beudin is a middle-aged French woman living in Rome, Italy. She has more hobbies than spare time, alas – reading, cooking, writing, painting and photography – so hopes that her technical colleagues at the European Space Agency will soon come up with a solution to that problem by stretching the fabric of time. Either that or send her up to write about the travels and trials of the International Space Station, the way this was done for the exploratory missions of old. Clearly the woman is a dreamer.
When Clown Face Speaks
Aaron J. French
Clown Face is the painting that hangs over the writing desk in my office. It is a medium-sized print with a white background and a walnut frame. It depicts a floating, disembodied clown head. The clown has a white face, puffy orange hair, a red mouth, a red nose, and a pair of blue-and-black eyes.
There is nothing inherently wicked about the Clown Face painting. And the story of its acquisition is also quite innocuous. I won it at one of those carnival games. The one where you shoot a water pistol into the yawning mouth of a frightened-looking duck, which then inflates a balloon attached to the duck’s head. The object of the game is to inflate the balloon to bursting before the time limit runs out.
After three tries, I did just that. The game’s operator, sullen though he was about my victory, offered me any one of the prizes dangling overhead. I asked Sylvia, my wife, to pick something, but she insisted on my choosing. She said I had beaten the game fair and square, so I deserved the prize.
Behind the stuffy child-sized bears, the filigree of small ducks and kittens, behind the baseball caps and inflatable snakes, hung Clown Face on the rear boards of the stall. I asked about it and he reluctantly gave it up. It’s hung above my writing desk ever since.
I’ve always thought it a bit odd with its goofy grin and dead, staring eyes, but I liked it because it reminded me of my favorite book—Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut. The various covers of that book depict a clown face of some kind; so whenever I looked at my Clown Face, I was reminded of Slapstick, which is a brilliant book. In this way it served as a source of inspiration, especially during the end times when Sylvia and I were always arguing, when writing had become more chore than voyage.
It didn’t become a supernatural painting until Sylvia left; that’s when it finally felt safe to reveal i
tself. Sylvia’s career was in the computer sciences, and she held a Bachelor of Science degree... so for the most part she was skeptical of all things unnatural. In my opinion, her presence alone negated any possibility of the supernatural made manifest.
I, on the other hand, am much more sensitively organized. When our marriage fell apart—mostly on account of my increased alcoholism and her endless boredom with our sex life, which she eventually found relief from in a coworker named Dennis Ulster—her departure from our home, and the subsequent removal of her things, felt like a planetary death. With Sylvia gone, I found solace in my writing. I worked on a new novel, this one a horror story, and I sent my agent Jim Royce the preliminary chapters.
“Charles, this is some of the best prose you’ve ever written,” he told me over the phone.
“Do you think so? It’s not too gloomy?”
He chuckled. “Oh it is, but that’s what’s so great about it. There is more feeling in this one than in your other novels. It’s a horrible feeling, but still a feeling.”
“I don’t know...”
The line between what I wrote and who I was began to blur around this time. I lost myself to the work. Day and night I toiled, perched at my desk like a golem with the cats looking on. I seldom left the house—or The Castle, as I had termed it—except to replenish my supply of alcohol.
Two weeks after my lovely princess was taken from The Castle by an evil wizard, I was seated in the upper turret of the east wing, writing my novel with a quill and inkpot, when suddenly Clown Face morphed into lurid life.
Its first word was my name. “Charles,” it said, more a statement than a question. “You... are... Charles.”
I had become conscious of a certain ambiance in The Castle which was more sensitive than in previous years when the princess roamed its halls. This ambiance did strange things to one’s perceptions. More than once I’d stopped to stare at some unusual spot on the floor or ceiling, convinced something was wrong about it. I would stare for hours, not quite sure what I was seeing, but sure it was dissolving, that I was seeing the atoms whirling about.
A handful of these experiences had alerted me to the increasingly sensitive nature of The Castle. So when I heard the voice of Clown Face speaking over my head, it didn’t surprise me all that much.
“Who’s there, who’s calling me?” I asked.
“Up here. Look and see.”
My attention thus directed, I regarded the painting and noticed that the bleached background was swirling dreamily. Clown Face, whom I have already taken the time to describe and shall not do so again, bobbed in this churning whiteness, his lips parted in a bloated grin, eyes blank and staring, dead and seeing nothing (everything).
“I see you,” I said. “Are you some demon come to torment me?”
Clown Face laughed. “What makes you think I am a demon?”
“There are only demons,” I answered bitterly.
“Foolish mortal—simplistic mortal man. You are blind to the truth of reality.”
“What truth, as if I should like to know...” It occurred to me that I was holding a conversation with a painting, and scolding myself with various sanity-based epithets, I returned to my manuscript.
For the next several hours Clown Face tried to get my attention, but I resisted. I banged away at the keyboard, producing God knew what rubbish, until eventually it quieted.
The Castle returned to its former mode of existing—sensitive and brooding, while mercifully keeping its most powerful secrets hidden. The painting I had won at a carnival game solidified and ceased its swirling, and the cats went about their business and I went about my writing. But now I had the knowledge that The Castle possessed certain secrets which were soon to be revealed.
***
Days and nights started feeling the same. Sunlight was no longer able to penetrate into my Gothic cathedral, even with the drapes pulled and the windows open; the sunrays seemed to flicker out as soon as they crossed the threshold and entered the dark world I now called home.
I would often stand by one of the windows, focusing my attention; then, when the sun reached the rectangular space over the windowsill, it did a strange thing by bursting apart into a million glittering gold specks. Those specks, like dust motes, entered The Castle and immediately dimmed and dispersed, negating any illuminating qualities they might have possessed.
Still, when my agent Jim Royce called, I answered and did my best to seem sharp.
“How’s the writing going?” was his imperishable question.
My answer, always: “Absolutely fabulous. The best I have ever written.”
“That’s wonderful to hear, I’m so excited about this new novel of yours. What are the chances of getting a few chapters?”
“Not good. At the moment I need everything I have for reference. This book is unlike anything I’ve ever attempted, so it’s easy for me to get lost. And when I get lost I have to backtrack and pick up the thread. You understand.”
“Of course I understand, but let me know when you’re getting close to completing it so I can start with the publicity buzz.”
“Will do.”
“And Charles?”
“Yes?”
“Chapters, chapters, chapters! The sooner you can get those chapters to me the—”
“Yes, will do, Jim.”
Chapters.
Who cared about chapters when my world was crumbling apart? I sure as hell didn’t. My writing was no longer limited to such lineal constraints as chapters. Everything was much more cyclical because the writing, like myself, was being undone.
***
Once I realized the extent to which The Castle was sensitively built, I began to accept the phenomenon of Clown Face’s speaking. It was a process, a wearing down of my defenses, and the advent of my suprasensory perception.
The painting would speak. I would listen. And then I would write.
“What do you want to tell me today?”
Clown Face, bobbing in its rectangle of creamy whiteness, said, “Write this down. ‘All reality is subjective.’ How’s that?”
I stared at the four words. “Sounds like bullshit.”
Clown Face laughed. “Now write this. ‘There is no objective reality that exists in the space outside of mind. All external phenomena are actually internal phenomena. Mind is the ruler over all. Physical matter exists only in the mind. Laws of Science exist only in the mind.’ How’s that?”
I leaned back in my chair. “It’s interesting. But it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the narrative.”
“Forget the narrative. We are writing a philosophical treatise.”
“But my agent—”
“Your agent exists only in the mind. If your agent is talking to you, but your mind is not present, your agent is not talking.”
“No, but he’s still talking.”
“To whom is he talking?”
“He’s talking to himself, I guess.”
“That’s right.”
I shot up from my desk, enraged. “I’m getting tired of this. If people could see me, they’d call me crazy. They’d say I was losing my mind.”
Clown Face replied, “That’s preposterous. It is you who is gaining your mind, and they who have lost it. Besides, just tell them a disembodied clown head told you.”
“Tell them a clown painting talks to me? Are you insane? They’d have me committed. And then they’d say it’s all in my mind.”
“Then they would be telling the truth because it is all in your mind... but so are the Laws of Science. The law of gravity, for example, exists only because the mind knows about it. A rock dropped from someone’s hand only appears to fall, for if the mind were not around there would be nothing to perceive the rock, and so the rock would not fall at all.”
I continued to listen, but my attention had been arrested by one of the cats. I could no longer remember their names so I recalled them by fur color. This was the black one.
Over my shoulder, Clown Face
said, “What’s that you’re looking at? Careful: If you stare too hard, you may see through it.”
But I kept my eyes on the black cat sitting on the small end table. It had scattered various stacks of paper across the surface in an effort to get comfortable. It was sitting so still that for a moment I believed it was a statue. Then it swung its head and peered up at me with jade-green eyes.
I began focusing on the strange fuzzy outline of non-light appearing to ring its body. The closer I studied this blur, the more defined it became, until it was almost more real-looking than the cat itself.
“You’ll go too far,” Clown Face warned.
The fuzzy white outline extended a full five inches off the cat, and not only was it visible around the edges, but also at its center.
I stared for a long time until strain caused me to look away. I gasped. Now I could see the cat wherever I turned my head, like it was burned onto my retinas.
I got a terrible feeling in my stomach. It was the feeling of knowing you’d had too many drinks, too much marijuana, or too much acid. I looked back to that original spatial zone the cat had occupied, but it was gone. Only the empty table and the scattered papers remained.
Frantically, I scanned the room, poking my head into every nook and cranny, and under the bed, under the desk, in the closet, and out in the hall. But the cat had vanished.
I heard Clown Face’s deep, godlike chuckle. “Missing something?”
“The cat, the black one—where? It was just here, I know it. I saw it with my own two eyes. Now it’s—”
“It’s gone, Charles. In fact it was never there in the first place. It was only visible to you because in your mind you had decided to perceive it. Since mind is all, one can just as easily decide to un-see something, as well as decide to see it.”
I thought my brain was being cleaved in half. The disappearance of the black cat marked a turning point in these events. Following the incident, I ceased my questioning, doubting, and skepticism, and I was more openly conducive to the inflowing current of sensitive organization of The Castle. Things were not quite the same after that.