Each night I went home with my father, saying nothing but thinking of how many I had seen and what they were doing in those large, darkened rooms of clothing. I imagined them buzzing up and down the escalators, floor to floor, enjoying a complete run of the cavernous spaces, perhaps picking up bits of thread and dragging them here or there. At times I worried for them, whether they were suffering, or had got themselves trapped, and so on. In those days people did not speak of infestations; they did not speak about flies much at all. It was a dustier age of screen doors, of wide-open spaces, a lonesome and harder and perhaps pitiless age, in many ways. And the more I imagined those long evenings downtown when everything was dark and quiet, the more an immeasurable calm began to grow on me. It was if something deep within me, a certain problem, if you will, that I, Thomas Hurley Jr, had been facing without knowing it, had been somehow resolved without my knowledge or me willing it to be so. I understood that my father, walking beside me in the dusk of the evening, or sitting outside on the porch while I slept, knew this and had led me to it. Perhaps it was during these moments that I realised that a kind of mystery was afoot in the world, and that I, the son, was to be part of it.
‘Whosoever harms the flies,’ I whispered to myself one evening while drifting to sleep, ‘harms Thomas Hurley.’
And so, against my better instincts, I became like the rest of them. I began—I began to love them.
***
When I was seventeen I developed some lofty plans for myself, as I suppose any young person is expected to do. I was always an agreeable and very pleasant child and I hesitated to upset my parents, but the time had come. I made application to nearby Huntford College with the express goal of studying business. I came downstairs one morning with the letter of acceptance in my hand. I would use my savings to pay most of the costs, I announced, and work off the remainder.
My mother wept into her apron but I could see that she was proud of me, and possibly relieved that I was finally getting on. My father’s displeasure behind his morning newspaper only strengthened my resolve, for I had grown weary of the tailors and I knew he suspected as much. For six years I had been bound to an apprenticeship which would mean my automatically taking the place of one of the tailors upon his retirement. There would have been no way out.
One might think the situation would have come to rest there. It goes without saying that a young man is not supposed to have much to do with flies if he wishes to have friends and a social life. You will not find a single young man who would brag about such a thing to a woman. You must seize the moment. Of course, I didn’t say any such thing out loud, but I thought it, and a month later I left for Huntford.
Then something remarkable happened. Out of nowhere I murdered a man.
In all the years since it happened I have never found a way to remember the afternoon of the tragedy without an overwhelming sense of disbelief. I have tried to come upon the memory obliquely, to belittle it as false and deceptive, to tell myself that it didn’t happen as I ‘seem to remember it’—the whole gamut of rationalisations of which the human mind is capable. I remind myself that I do not have the character of a murderer; that is certainly true. You will not find a single Hurley who ever murdered anyone.
And yet—the facts cannot be gainsaid or put aside.
During my sophomore year I returned to my dormitory late one afternoon from an accounting class to discover my roommate, Terence Philips, killing flies. You must understand that over the dozen or more months since leaving home I had seen flies, as any man does. A man is always seeing flies in one place or another, and I had learned from watching other people how to behave—as if they were nothing but a nuisance or something to be ignored. I had even come to accept the embarrassing truth of the matter—that my childhood had been a lot of foolishness and that I had always been mistaken about what was going on in Lambert’s. Nothing was going on. The extraordinary sight as I stepped into the dormitory could not be explained. Not a thousand years of thinking could explain how it had happened.
Dozen of flies spotted the walls and sprung wildly at random through the air. My desktop blotter was crawling with them, some in their death throes, dragging their leaking bodies past one another, some buzzing in circles unable to fly, but trying until the bitter end. Others hobbled along the floor dragging half-detached wings, or lay dead on their backs on textbooks. The smears everywhere were intolerable to see. My roommate’s expression was enraged, flushed, imperilled, as if he were caught up in a kind of madness, and as I stepped in with what must have been a look of astonishment, he looked up in disgust. ‘For God’s sake help me, Hurley,’ his expression said. ‘Help me kill these damn flies.’
I should point out that despite having lived together for several months, I had never come to know Terence Philips, and the more time we spent together the less did I wish to know him. What little I found out was that he hailed from the plains, was easy with money and liquor, had a father who ran a dry goods store, and thanks to a well-off cousin by the name of Mr Randolph, who had made a fortune in the oil business, had been admitted into Huntford on the off-chance that he might acquire an education.
As I came to understand later, when the police investigation had concluded and a simplistic but informative article was published in the school paper, a grounds custodian had sprayed the bushes around the dormitory that morning, leading to the evacuation of hundreds of flies, many of which had naturally flown through the nearest open windows. Philips, napping off one of his inebriations, had been caught unawares. As I entered the room and saw the devastation I knew none of this. I was overcome with a murderous rage of such proportions and intensity that I could not stop myself. I plunged across the room and with an open-mouthed snarl shoved Philips sideways through the window and to his death six floors below.
What coursed through me during those seconds was the kind of spiritual rejuvenation a man experiences in the throes of religious conversion. I was calm. Terribly calm. Transported even. But beneath the placidity was something else, something far deeper—I knew what I had done, I had done rightly.
‘Whosoever harms the flies,’ I whispered, ‘harms Thomas Hurley.’
At that moment the campus cathedral bells rang a godly and melancholy melody, a sound of sweet horror unlike any I had heard before. Then began the hysterical roars and piercing screams of the students on the ground floor. . . .
Later that evening Philips was taken away. I composed a letter to the college authorities stating that I was dropping out, that the horrific suicide made it impossible for me to continue my studies. No-one ever questions the statement of a man who says he cannot go on. I delivered my letter the next morning with a shaking hand, which the ladies in the registrar’s office observed with quiet, pitiful glances of dignified understanding. I had written: ‘And now that I have seen a man die with my own eyes I must be finished with anything to do with profit.’ It’s the way of the world I suppose that death makes survivors more believable, especially when they have tears in their eyes.
I left the college that night on foot, carrying my small suitcase, just as I had arrived. The road in is the same as the road out, they say. And that is how the flies found me. Back to the city I went a new man, but not a better one.
***
Those weeks and months after Philips’ murder were some of the strangest of the whole affair. I had come back into the city without my father or mother’s knowledge, in a state of shock. I think if we had passed one another on the street neither would have recognised me, anymore than I recognised myself in the storefront reflections. So much had I changed that a strange look had come into my eyes, the very same expression, I might add, that a man has when choking to death. I had taken a single-room, coldwater apartment in the far side of the city and tried to keep to myself and stay out of trouble. I had no job, no known purpose, really. My days were filled with the jumble of stores, streets flowing with strangers, the hundreds of those with shopping bags I would never know milling about for
one purpose or another, or perhaps, like myself, no purpose at all.
During the evenings I lay in bed thinking about what the murder of Philips had brought upon me, for murder, whether discovered or undiscovered, always brings something with it. No-one knows this more than the murderer himself. I, Thomas Hurley, had done something extraordinary. Though I have never considered myself a man of great insight I knew that my own sanity depended on my understanding what I had done.
I had killed a man because of some flies. Objectively it seemed to me that such a thing could not be true in the wildest flights of fantasy. Even in a nightmare I, Thomas Hurley Jr, son of Margaret and Thomas Hurley, could not have done such a thing. Perhaps, then (I reasoned), it was not true. Yes, I had cared for the flies many years ago, but since then I had outgrown them, felt nothing for them. After all, had I not by my own choice left to go to Huntford, and done so without any hesitation, and only with the sincerest wish to advance myself? Perhaps it was seeing Philips hung over that had brought me to the brink; the resentment between us was bound to reach boiling point. And then the mess he had made of my belongings. . . . Yes, I told myself, it was Philips, of course; it had always been Philips. But (and here my thinking would take a problematic turn), was it really that incredible? Might a man not murder for something that had once had value to him? Might he not forget until that very instant what it was? And might it not flash before his mind so quickly that it might compel him to action? And might it not happen again?
Those hours of reflection were like some taunting flame that brought me to the very edge of madness. Deeper and deeper I might go, directly into the centre of the flames. But of one thing I was certain—not even the cleverest detective in the world would suspect what had really happened to Terence Philips. Not with all the time in the world would they ever figure it out.
During this period came other changes inevitable in the life of a young man, even a young man lying in bed staring at a wall. Entirely by accident I ran into a tailor from Lambert’s and learned that my mother had died from complications associated with a nervous collapse due, he said, to my disappearance. Within a week my father had been fired for drinking on the job and developed pneumonia in both lungs. He was hospitalised nearby, near death. All this the tailor told me in the light-hearted manner in which one might report an unfortunate incident to a stranger—as if the lives he spoke about had nothing to do with me. I turned and staggered on.
I knew what was going to happen. Of course I did.
The day my father was to ‘pass away’ I came to the hospital and met Dr Burke, who told me in the cold, bland manner of one who knew I had little interest in the dying piece of meat in Room 406 that I was too late. My father was fading rapidly and had only hours to live, and I should not waste time but make what ‘arrangements’ I wished. ‘Hours to live’, were his exact words and I took him at his word. I went to Room 406 and sat at my father’s side, holding his weathered hand as though someone was watching me to make sure I held it properly in the way a son should. But the longer I looked at that face (which resembled a caved-in piece of fruit), a face that had grown as obscure to me as any wind-blown piece of garbage, the more I saw that it would have to be. It was going to happen now because it was the right thing. And when the hallway seemed clear and I could hear no voices, I reached over with the pillow I had taken from another bed on my way in and did exactly what I knew I had to do for such a lifelong friend of the flies—I smothered my father to death.
Yes, it was a good thing, the right thing—even, if I may say so, a beautiful thing. Beauty takes many forms in even the most deplorable corners of the world. Things come full circle, as poets often remark. And when I left Room 406, strangely enough, I no longer felt a murderer. I was no longer afraid. I was relieved. I understood. The mystery was solved.
***
I have often looked upon the lives of others as richer and more complex than my own, and no more so than during this time when I made my discovery about who and what I had become. Over the years I had grown away from myself as a tree limb grows from its trunk, not knowing how far I had gone, how tenuous and fragile my life had become. That fragility was compounded by the disappearance of things I had taken for granted—my mother and father, a career—to leave me with the feeling of being an invisible man floating through life. But now—I understood. I must do everything in my power to protect others from the man I had become. If I loved the flies then so be it, but it must go no further than that. And so my vow was made.
I met Miss Franklin sometime after I killed my father. I had moved to another part of the city, hoping for an anonymous existence where I might be of no danger to others. I found work in an insurance company. Voorhees Insurance was a place Philips had spoken about in tones of reverence—a teeming ten-floor hive where one might find numerous ways to rise to the top. But it was ‘the top’ I now wished to avoid. A lowly desk job in accounting was perfect for my purposes.
Looking back, I consider those months of solitary routine behind a grey metal desk the most pleasantly unremarkable of my life. It was a dreary, pencil-driven, nine-to-five existence, the intolerable ordinariness and monotony of which would have been too much for most. Each moment gave me another drop of hope that I might lead a normal life. Barely can I recall seeing more than a few flies, and these provoked nothing in me, not the slightest stir of sentiment or compulsion, even when they landed on my desk. Sometimes I didn’t even look up.
About six months later I met her.
Sitting in the cafeteria one afternoon I looked up to see a woman older than myself with a long sympathetic face seated over her lunch several tables away beneath a large clock. A single glance communicated everything to me. It was one of those tumultuous moments when everything passes between two people, a seizure through the air. I still remember the exact time: 12:01 in the afternoon.
It is said one always knows attraction when it happens, but there are other things one might know that are perhaps more important: that one is not alone in this life; that one is understood instantly at the deepest level possible for one human being to know and care for another. Such was my first moment of seeing Miss Franklin, a person as ordinary, common and forgotten as I, Thomas Hurly Jr.
Within a month we decided to marry. There would be no children of course; that went without saying. Never would I subject another soul to even the slightest chance of inheriting the strange illness that had struck me down. If I might save one human being from such suffering, then I would do it.
In our every moment, from the ceremony downtown in that haggard, dimly lit chamber presided over by a yellow-skinned clerk from City Hall, to our hours together at Voorhees, I felt she had an instinctive awareness of my plight, but was simply too kind a soul to mention it. ‘Most subtle indeed are the ways of the flies,’ I wrote not long after, when I’d begun a journal and had time to reflect on the course of events that had brought me to this point, ‘but more so the human heart.’ I was happier then—happier than I’d ever been before.
That January evening was like any other. Winter had come and heavy snow blanketed the city. Broad, powerful winds moaned down the empty streets and avenues. Thanks to Miss Franklin’s intimate knowledge of the city, we had found a dark, walk up, ‘railroad-style’ apartment. Our windowless bedroom looked down a long corridor into a sitting room, and the front door led down four flights to a stoop. You will recognise these rather ugly living quarters if you have ever been in them, and you might know this too: flies will have nothing to do with such lightless tenements. Again, instinctively, she had known that.
That night, approximately three months after we had married, I woke to a sight whose memory still makes me wish I had never been born.
I opened my eyes to the feeling that something was deeply wrong. I was lying beneath the sheet, which was folded across my waist, and my arms lay atop it at my sides. The darkness of the bedroom pulsated like a living organ. Without moving I cast my eyes around but saw nothing untoward. The
n, taking a deep breath and keeping my arms very still, I turned my head to look at Miss Franklin—and almost screamed.
A fly was poised on her forehead right above the bridge of her nose. Her eyes, wide open, reflected a glassy terror that was nauseating in its suffering. How long she had lain without moving or speaking I did not know. Possibly, I thought, for quite some time. But she had done it for me.
They had found me again, and I knew what they wanted.
What happened next came from deepest instinct. The same instinct, I might hazard, that allows a man to lift a car from a trapped child or stick his hand into a fire to rescue a treasure. As long as I live I will never forgive myself for even thinking of the alternative.
I inched off the bed and walked quietly down the corridor into the outer room, put on my clothes and raincoat and descended the stairs into the city. The road in is the same as the road out. I knew I would never see her again. When I turned the far corner I paused under the lamplight and looked at my watch. 12:01, on the dot.
***
It was soon after the flies tried to make me kill Miss Franklin that I resigned from my job and came to ground in the Somerset Hotel, a ‘single room occupancy’ hotel that catered for homeless and transients on the far side of the city. I had nowhere else to go.
The thought has likely occurred to you by now that this account is written by a madman. Madmen, it is believed, often have such a glib, everyday manner in describing obscenities, and there is a horror in falling into the grasp of such thought processes even for a brief time. I do consider myself a ‘madman’, for as anyone can tell you, there is madness in traps, in the experience and the recognition of being in a trap, especially a trap that no one else can see, in one’s own mind. That consciousness of my plight was my trap, and one cannot escape one’s own consciousness.
Strange Tales V Page 23