‘You don’t understand him,’ she said, repeatedly. ‘He is very temperamental.’
The whole affair was a maddening mystery, but it seemed more and more that the girl herself was being drawn, either directly or indirectly, into the same fantasmal web that had enmeshed the artist.
I surmised that Amberville had done several new pictures of the meadow; but he did not show them to me, nor even mention them. My own impressions of the place, as time went on, assumed an unaccountable vividness that was almost hallucinatory. The incredible idea of some inherent force or personality, malevolent and even vampirish, became an unavowed conviction against my will. The place haunted me like a fantasm, horrible but seductive. I felt an impelling morbid curiosity, an unwholesome desire to visit it again, and fathom, if possible, its enigma. Often I thought of Amberville’s notion about a Genius Loci that dwelt in the meadow, and the hints of a human apparition that was somehow associated with the spot. Also, I wondered what it was that the artist had seen on the one occasion when he had lingered in the meadow after nightfall, and had returned to my house in driven terror. It seemed that he had not ventured to repeat the experiment, in spite of his obvious subjection to the unknown lure.
The end came, abruptly and without premonition. Business had taken me to the county seat, one afternoon, and I did not return till late in the evening. A full moon was high above the pine-dark hills. I expected to find Avis and the painter in my drawing-room; but they were not there. Li Sing, my factotum, told me that they had returned at dinnertime. An hour later, Amberville had gone out quietly while the girl was in her room. Coming down a few minutes later, Avis had shown excessive perturbation when she found him absent, and had also left the house, as if to follow him, without telling Li Sing where she was going or when she might return. All this had occurred three hours previously; and neither of the pair had yet reappeared.
A black and subtly chilling intuition of evil seized me as I listened to Li Sing’s account. All too well I surmised that Amberville had yielded to the temptation of a second nocturnal visit to that unholy meadow. An occult attraction, somehow, had overcome the horror of his first experience, whatever it had been. Avis, knowing where he was, and perhaps fearful of his sanity – or safety – had gone out to find him. More and more, I felt an imperative conviction of some peril that threatened them both – some hideous and innominable thing to whose power, perhaps, they had already yielded.
Whatever my previous folly and remissness in the matter, I did not delay now. A few minutes of driving at precipitate speed through the mellow moonlight brought me to the piny edge of the Chapman property. There, as on my former visit, I left the car, and plunged headlong through the shadowy forest. Far down, in the hollow, as I went, I heard a single scream, shrill with terror, and abruptly terminated. I felt sure that the voice was that of Avis; but I did not hear it again.
Running desperately, I emerged in the meadow-bottom. Neither Avis nor Amberville was in sight; and it seemed to me, in my hasty scrutiny, that the place was full of mysteriously coiling and moving vapors that permitted only a partial view of the dead willow and the other vegetation. I ran on toward the scummy pool, and nearing it, was arrested by a sudden and twofold horror.
Avis and Amberville were floating together in the shallow pool, with their bodies half hidden by the mantling masses of algae. The girl was clasped tightly in the painter’s arms, as if he had carried her with him, against her will, to that noisome death. Her face was covered by the evil, greenish scum; and I could not see the face of Amberville, which was averted against her shoulder. It seemed that there had been a struggle; but both were quiet now, and had yielded supinely to their doom.
It was not this spectacle alone, however, that drove me in mad and shuddering flight from the meadow, without making even the most tentative attempt to retrieve the drowned bodies. The true horror lay in the thing, which, from a little distance, I had taken for the coils of a slowly moving and rising mist. It was not vapor, nor anything else that could conceivably exist – that malign, luminous, pallid emanation that enfolded the entire scene before me like a restless and hungrily wavering extension of its outlines – a phantom projection of the pale and deathlike willow, the dying alders, the reeds, the stagnant pool and its suicidal victims. The landscape was visible through it, as through a film; but it seemed to curdle and thicken gradually in places, with some unholy, terrifying activity. Out of these curdlings, as if disgorged by the ambient exhalation, I saw the emergence of three human faces that partook of the same nebulous matter, neither mist nor plasm. One of these faces seemed to detach itself from the bole of the ghostly willow; the second and third swirled upward from the seething of the phantom pool, with their bodies trailing formlessly among the tenuous boughs. The faces were those of old Chapman, of Francis Amberville, and Avis Olcott.
Behind this eery, wraith-like projection of itself, the actual landscape leered with the same infernal and vampirish air which it had worn by day. But it seemed now that the place was no longer still – that it seethed with a malignant secret life – that it reached out toward me with its scummy waters, with the bony fingers of its trees, with the spectral faces it had spewed forth from its lethal deadfall.
Even terror was frozen within me for a moment. I stood watching, while the pale, unhallowed exhalation rose higher above the meadow. The three human faces, through a further agitation of the curdling mass, began to approach each other. Slowly, inexpressibly, they merged in one, becoming an androgynous face, neither young nor old, that melted finally into the lengthening phantom boughs of the willow – the hands of the arboreal death, that were reaching out to enfold me. Then, unable to bear the spectacle any longer, I started to run.
There is little more that need be told, for nothing that I could add to this narrative would lessen the abominable mystery of it all in any degree. The meadow – or the thing that dwells in the meadow – has already claimed three victims…and I sometimes wonder if it will have a fourth. I alone, it would seem, among the living, have guessed the secret of Chapman’s death, and the death of Avis and Amberville; and no one else, apparently, has felt the malign genius of the meadow. I have not returned there, since the morning when the bodies of the artist and his fiancée were removed from the pool…nor have I summoned up the resolution to destroy or otherwise dispose of the four oil paintings and two watercolor drawings of the spot that were made by Amberville. Perhaps…in spite of all that deters me…I shall visit it again.
The Town of Cats
Hagiwara Sakutaro
Translated into English by Jeffrey Angles
Hagiwara Sakutar (1886–1942) was a Japanese writer considered one of the foremost poets of the Taish and early Showa periods. Sakutar was interested in exploring madness, hallucinations, obsession, and abnormal psychology in his works. To do so, he largely rejected naturalism and used colloquial language, impressionistic images, a sense of personal intimacy, and modern subject matter. The classic ‘The Town of
Cats’ (1935) is the poet’s only short story and explores themes of disorientation and the illusory nature of reality. It depicts a surreal urban journey that presages the work of Haruki Murakami. Iconic weird writer Thomas Ligotti has cited ‘The Town of Cats’ as among his favorite stories.
The quality that incites the desire for travel has gradually disappeared from my fantasies. Before, however, symbols of travel were all that filled my thoughts. Just to picture a train, steamboat, or town in an unfamiliar foreign land was enough to make my heart dance. But experience has taught me that travel presents nothing more than ‘identical objects moving in identical spaces.’ No matter where one goes, one finds the same sort of people living in similar villages and repeating the same humdrum lives. One finds merchants in every small country town spending their days clicking abacuses and watching the dusty white road outside. In every municipal office, government officials smoke and think about what they will have for lunch. They live out insipid, monotonous lives in which ea
ch new day is identical to the last, gradually watching themselves grow old as the days go by. Now the thought of travel projects onto my weary heart an infinitely tedious landscape like that of a paulownia tree growing in a vacant lot, and I feel a dull loathing for human life in which this sameness repeats itself everywhere. Travel no longer holds any interest or romance for me.
In the past, I often undertook wondrous voyages in my own personal way. Let me explain…I would reach that unique moment in which humankind sometimes finds itself able to soar – that special moment outside of time and space, outside the chain of cause and effect – and I would adroitly navigate the borderline between dreams and reality to play in an uninhibited world of my own making. – Having said this much, I doubt I need to explain my secret further. Let me simply add that, in undertaking these hallucinatory trips, I generally preferred to use the likes of morphine and cocaine, which can be ingested in a simple shot or dose, instead of opium, which is hard to obtain in Japan and requires troublesome tools and provisions.
There is not enough room here to describe in detail the lands that I traveled in those dreams of narcotic ecstasy, but I will tell you that the trips frequently took me wandering through wetlands where little frogs gathered, through polar coasts where penguins live, and on and on. The landscapes in those dreams were filled with brilliant primary hues. The sea and sky were always as clear and blue as glass. Even after returning to normal, I would cling to those visions and relive them again and again in the world of reality.
These drug-induced voyages took a terrible toll on my health. I grew increasingly drawn and pale by the day, and my skin deteriorated as if I had aged terribly. By and by, I began to pay more attention to my health. Following my doctor’s advice, I started taking walks through my neighborhood. Every day, I would cover the distance of forty or fifty ch, walking anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. One day while I was out taking my exercise, I happened upon a new way to satisfy my eccentric wanderlust. I was walking through the usual area around my home. Normally, I do not deviate from my established path, but for some reason that day, I slipped into an unfamiliar alley, and going the wrong way, I lost all sense of direction.
All in all, I have no innate sense of direction. My ability to keep track of the points of the compass is terribly deficient. As a result, I am awful at remembering my way anywhere, and if I go someplace even slightly unfamiliar, in no time I end up completely lost. To make matters worse, I have a habit of getting absorbed in my thoughts as I walk. If an acquaintance happens to greet me along the way, I will pass by in total obliviousness. Because I am so bad at keeping track of directions, I can lose my way even in a place that I know perfectly well, such as my own neighborhood. I can be so close to my destination that people laugh at me when I ask how to get there. Once I walked tens of times around the hedge surrounding the very house in which I have lived for years. Though the gate was right before my eyes, my lack of a sense of direction made it impossible for me to find it. My family insisted a fox must have bewitched me. Psychologists would probably account for this bewitching as a disturbance of the inner ear. I say this because the experts claim that the function of sensing direction belongs to the semicircular canals located in the ear.
In any case, I was completely lost and bewildered. I made a random guess and rushed down the street in search of my house. After going in circles several times in a neighborhood of suburban estates surrounded by trees, suddenly I came upon a bustling street. It was a lovely little neighborhood, but I had no idea where I was!
The roads had been swept clean, and the flag-stones were wet with dew. All of the shops were neat and tidy, all with different types of unusual merchandise lined up in polished show windows. A flowering tree flourished by the eaves of a coffee shop, bringing an artistic play of light and shadow to the borough. The red mailbox at the street crossing was also beautiful, and the young woman in the cigarette shop was as bright and sweet as a plum.
I had never seen such an aesthetically charming place! Where in Tokyo could I possibly be? But I was unable to recall the layout of the city. I figured I could not have strayed far from home because so little time had elapsed. It was perfectly clear that I was within the territory where I ordinarily strolled, only a half hour or so from home, or at least not too far from it. But how could this place be so close without my having known it?
I felt as if I was dreaming. I wondered if perhaps what I was seeing was not a real town but a reflection or silhouette of a town projected on a screen. Then, just as suddenly, my memory and common sense returned. Examining my surroundings again, I realized I was seeing an ordinary, familiar block in my neighborhood. The mailbox was at the intersection as always, and the young lady with the gastric disorder sat in the cigarette shop. The same out-dated, dusty merchandise yawned from the space that it occupied in the store windows. On the street, the eaves of the coffee shop were boorishly decorated with an arch of artificial flowers. This was nowhere new. It was my familiar, boring neighborhood.
In the blink of an eye, my reaction to my surroundings had altered completely. The mysterious and magical transformation of this place into a beautiful town had occurred simply because I had mixed up my directions. The mailbox that always stood at the south end of the block seemed to be on the opposite, northern approach. The tradesmen’s houses on the left side of the street had shifted to the right. The changes sufficed to make the entire neighborhood look new and different. In that brief moment that I spent in the unknown, illusory town, I noticed a sign above a store. I swore to myself that I had seen a picture just like it on a signboard somewhere else.
When my memory was back in working order, all of the directions reversed themselves. Until a moment before, the crowds on my left had been on the right, and I discovered that, though I had been walking north, I was now headed south. In that instant when my memory returned to normal, the needle of my compass spun around, and the cardinal directions switched positions. The whole universe changed, and the mood of the town that manifested itself before me became utterly different. The mysterious neighborhood that I had seen a moment before existed in some universe of opposite space where the compass was reversed.
After this accidental discovery, I made it a point to lose my bearings in order to travel again to such mysterious places. The deficiency on my part that I described before was especially helpful in allowing me to undertake these travels, but even people with a normal, sound sense of direction may at times experience the same special places that I have. For instance, imagine yourself returning home on a train late at night. First, the train leaves the station, and then the tracks carry you straight east to west. Some time later, you wake from a dream-filled nap. You realize the train has changed directions at some point and is now moving west to east. You reason this cannot be right, and in the reality you perceive, the train is moving away from your destination. To double check, you look out the window. The intermediary stations and landscapes to which you are accustomed are all entirely new. The world looks so different that you cannot recognize a single place. But you arrive in the end. When you step down on the familiar train platform, you awaken from the illusion and regain an accurate sense of direction. And once that sense is regained, strange landscapes and sights transform themselves into boring familiarities as unremarkable and ordinary as ever.
In effect, you see the same landscape, first from the reverse and then from the front, as you are accustomed to seeing it. One can think of a thing as having two separate sides. Just by changing your perspective, the other side will appear. Indeed there is no metaphysical problem more mysterious than the notion that a given phenomenon can possess a ‘secret, hidden side.’ When I was a boy a long time ago, and I used to examine a framed picture that hung on the walls of the house, I wondered all the while what worlds lay hidden on the reverse side of the framed landscape. I removed the frame repeatedly to peep at the back side of the painting. Those childhood thoughts have now turned into a riddle that remains impossib
le for me to solve even as an adult.
But the story that I am about to tell may contain a hint for solving the riddle. Should my strange tale lead you, my readers, to imagine a world of the fourth dimension hidden behind things and external manifestations – a universe existing on the reverse side of the landscape – then this tale will seem completely real to you. If, however, you are unable to imagine the existence of such a place, then what follows will seem like the decadent hallucinations of an absurd poet whose nerves have been shattered by a morphine addiction.
In any event, I shall gather my courage and write. I am not a novelist, and therefore I do not know the intricacies of drama and plot that will excite readers. All that I can do is give a straightforward account of the realities I experienced.
II
I was staying in the Hokuetsu region at a hot spring resort in a town that I shall call K. September was nearly over, the equinox already past. Being in the mountains, we were well into autumn. All of the guests who had come from the city to escape the summer heat had returned home, leaving only a handful of visitors to quietly nurse their illnesses in the healing waters of the spa. The autumn shade had grown long, and the leaves of the trees were scattered across the lonely courtyard of our inn. I would don a flannel kimono and spend time pursuing my daily ritual of walking alone along the back mountain roads.
There were three towns a short distance from the hot spring. Perhaps I should not call them towns they were so small. Two of them were like a little cluster of country homes, about the size of what would pass as a village elsewhere. The third, however, was a compact country settlement that sold the necessities of daily living. It even had restaurants like those one finds in the city. I shall call this town, the most prosperous of the three, U. Each of the three towns connected directly to the hot spring via a road, and every day at prescribed times, horse-drawn coaches traveled back and forth between them. A small, narrow-gauge railway had been laid to U, so I often made the trip to it on the train to shop and have a drink with the ladies. But simply riding the train was enough to bring me tremendous pleasure. The cute, toylike railway would weave through groves of deciduous trees and gorges that revealed views of entire valleys.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 52