The Weird Part 46

'Wait.'

Now the heat began.

'Wait.'

By a row of shops I fell. My chest was full of pain, my head of fear: I knew the madmen would come swooping from their dark asylum on the hill. I cried out to the naked hairy man: 'Stop! Help me!'

'Help you?' He laughed once, a high-pitched sound more awful than the screams had been; and then he turned and vanished in the moonless night.

I found a door, somehow.

The pounding brought a rifled burgher. Policemen came at last and listened to my story. But of course it was denied by Father Jerome and the Brothers of the Abbey.

'This poor traveler has suffered from the visions of pneumonia. There was no howling man at St. Wulfran's. No, no, certainly not. Absurd! Now, if Mr. Ellington would care to stay with us, we'd happily no? Very well. I fear that you will be delirious a while, my son. The things you see will be quite real. Most real. You'll think how quaint! that you have loosed the Devil on the world and that the war to come what war? But aren't there always wars? Of course! you'll think that it's your fault' those old eyes burning condemnation! Beak-nosed, bearded head atremble, rage in every word! 'that you'll have caused the misery and suffering and death. And nights you'll spend, awake, unsure, afraid. How foolis.h.!.+'

Gnome of G.o.d, Christophorus, looked terrified and sad. He said to me, when Father Jerome swept furiously out: 'My son, don't blame yourself. Your weakness was his lever. Doubt unlocked that door. Be comforted: we'll hunt him with our nets, and one day...'

One day, what?

I looked up at the Abbey of St. Wulfran's, framed by dawn, and started wondering, as I have wondered since ten thousand times, if it weren't true. Pneumonia breeds delirium; delirium breeds visions. Was it possible that I'd imagined all of this?

No. Not even back in Boston, growing dewlaps, paunches, wrinkles, sacks and money, at Ellington, Carruthers & Blake, could I accept that answer.

The monks were mad, I thought. Or: The howling man was mad. Or: The whole thing was a joke.

I went about my daily work, as every man must do, if sane, although he may have seen the dead rise up or freed a bottled djinn or fought a dragon, once, quite long ago.

But I could not forget. When the pictures of the carpenter from Braunau-am-Inn began to appear in all the papers, I grew uneasy; for I felt I'd seen this man before. When the carpenter invaded Poland, I was sure. And when the world was plunged into war and cities had their entrails blown asunder and that pleasant land I'd visited became a place of hate and death, I dreamed each night.

Each night I dreamed, until this week.

A card arrived. From Germany. A picture of the Moselle Valley is on one side, showing mountains fat with grapes and the dark Moselle, wine of these grapes.

On the other side of the card is a message. It is signed 'Brother Christophorus' and reads (and reads and reads!): 'Rest now, my son. We have him back with us again.'

Same Time, Same Place.

Mervyn Peake.

Mervyn Peake (19111968) was a visionary English writer, poet, and artist named in The Times's list of 'The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945'. Peake is best known for the phantasmagorical Gormenghast series (19461959). Parkinson's disease robbed Peake of the ability to complete the later novels in the cycle. Early influences included Charles d.i.c.kens and Robert Louis Stevenson, but the weirdness that permeates his work also demonstrates knowledge of Decadent-era literature and, in art, the Grotesques. Much of his short fiction is collected in Boy in Darkness and Other Stories (1976). 'Same Time, Same Place' (1963) shares affinities with the work of Leonora Carrington in its glimpse of the hidden in our contemporary world.

That night I hated Father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply stood there in his ugly armchair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head.

And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her, too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges not badly but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human like father.

She began to nag me about her gla.s.ses and the thread-bare condition of the elbows of my jacket, and suddenly I threw my book down. The room was unbearable. I felt suffocated. I suddenly realized that I must get away. I had lived with these two people for nearly twenty-three years. I had been born in the room immediately overhead. Was this the life for a young man? To spend his evenings watching the smoke drift out of his father's mouth and stain that decrepit old moustache, year after year to watch the worn-away edges of my mother's heels, the dark-brown furniture and the familiar stains on the chocolate-coloured carpet? I would go away; I would shake off the dark, smug mortality of the place. I would forego my birthright. What of my father's business into which I would step at his death? What of it? To h.e.l.l with it.

I began to make my way to the door, but at the third step I caught my foot in a ruck of the chocolate-coloured carpet, and in reaching out my hand for support I sent a pink vase flying.

Suddenly I felt very small and very angry. I saw my mother's mouth opening, and it reminded me of the front door and the front door reminded me of my urge to escape to where? To where?

I did not wait to find an answer to my own question but, hardly knowing what I was doing, ran from the house.

The acc.u.mulated boredom of the last twenty-three years was at my back, and it seemed that I was propelled through the garden gate from its pressure against my shoulder-blades.

The road was wet with rain, black and s.h.i.+ny like oilskin. The reflection of the street-lamps wallowed like yellow jellyfish. A bus was approaching a bus to Piccadilly, a bus to the never-never land a bus to death or glory.

I found neither. I found something which haunts me still.

The great bus swayed as it sped. The black street gleamed. Through the window a hundred faces fluttered by as though the leaves of a dark book were being flicked over. And I sat there, with a sixpenny ticket in my hand. What was I doing? Where was I going?

To the centre of the world, I told myself. To Piccadilly Circus, where anything might happen. What did I want to happen?

I wanted life to happen! I wanted adventure; but already I was afraid. I wanted to find a beautiful woman. Bending my elbow I felt for the swelling of my biceps. There wasn't much to feel. 'Oh h.e.l.l,' I said to myself, 'Oh d.a.m.nable h.e.l.l. This is awful.'

I stared out of the window, and there before me was the Circus. The lights were like a challenge. When the bus had curved its way from Regent Street and into Shaftesbury Avenue I alighted. Here was the jungle all about me, and I was lonely. The wild beasts prowled around me. The wolf packs surged and shuffled. Where was I to go? How wonderful it would have been to have known of some apartment, dimly lighted; of a door that opened to the secret knock, three short ones and one long one where a strawberry blonde was waiting or perhaps, better still, some wise old lady with a cup of tea, an old lady, august and hallowed and whose heels were not worn down on their outside edges.

But I knew nowhere to go either for glamour or sympathy. Nowhere except the Corner House.

I made my way there. It was less congested than usual. I had only to queue for a few minutes before being allowed into the great eating-palace on the first floor. On, the marble and gold of it all! The waiters coming and going, the band in the distance how different all this was from an hour ago, when I stared at my father's moustache.

For some while I could find no table, and it was only when moving down the third of the long corridors between tables that I saw an old man leaving a table for two. The lady who had been sitting opposite him remained where she was. Had she left I would have had no tale to tell. Unsuspectingly I took the place of the old man and in reaching for the menu lifted my head and found myself gazing into the midnight pools of her eyes.

My hand hung poised over the menu. I could not move, for the head in front of me was magnificent. It was big and pale and indescribably proud and what I would now call a greedy look seemed to me then to be an expression of rich a.s.surance, of majestic beauty.

I knew at once that it was not the strawberry blonde of my callow fancy that I desired for glamour's sake, nor the comfort of the tea-tray lady but this glorious creature before me who combined the mystery and exoticism of the former with the latter's mellow wisdom.

Was this not love at first sight? Why else should my heart have hammered like a foundry? Why should my hand have trembled above the menu? Why should my mouth have gone dry?

Words were quite impossible. It was clear to me that she knew everything that was going on in my breast and in my brain. The look of love which flooded from her eyes all but unhinged me. Taking my hand in hers she returned it to my side of the table where it lay like a dead thing on a plate. Then she pa.s.sed me the menu. It meant nothing to me. The hors d'ouvres and the sweets were all mixed together in a dance of letters.

What I told the waiter when he came I cannot remember, nor what he brought me. I know that I could not eat it. For an hour we sat there. We spoke with our eyes, with the pulse and stress of our excited breathing and towards the end of this, our first meeting, with the tips of our fingers that in touching each other in the shadow of the teapot seemed to speak a language richer, subtler, and more vibrant than words.

At last we were asked to go and as I rose I spoke for the first time. 'Tomorrow?' I whispered. 'Tomorrow?' She nodded her magnificent head slowly. 'Same place? Same time?' She nodded again.

I waited for her to rise, but with a gentle yet authoritative gesture she signalled me away.

It seemed strange, but I knew I must go. I turned at the door and saw her sitting there, very still, very upright. Then I descended to the street and made my way to Shaftesbury Avenue, my head in a whirl of stars, my legs weak and trembling, my heart on fire.

I had not decided to return home but found nevertheless that I was on my way back back to the chocolate-coloured carpet, to my father in the ugly armchair, to my mother with her worn shoe heels.

When at last I turned the key it was near midnight. My mother had been crying. My father was angry. There were words, threats and entreaties on all sides. At last I got to bed.

The next day seemed endless, but at long last my excited fretting found some relief in action. Soon after tea I boarded the west-bound bus. It was already dark, but I was far too early when I arrived at the Circus.

I wandered restlessly here and there, adjusting my tie at shop windows and filing my nails for the hundredth time.

At last, when waking from a day dream as I sat for the fifth time in Leicester Square, I glanced at my watch and found I was three minutes late for our tryst.

I ran all the way panting with anxiety, but when I arrived at the table on the first floor I found my fear was baseless. She was there, more regal than ever, a monument of womanhood. Her large, pale face relaxed into an expression of such deep pleasure at the sight of me that I almost shouted for joy.

I will not speak of the tenderness of that evening. It was magic. It is enough to say that we determined that our destinies were inextricably joined.

When the time came for us to go I was surprised to find that the procedure of the previous night was once more expected of me. I could in no way make out the reason for it. Again I left her sitting alone at the table by the marble pillar. Again I vanished into the night alone, with those intoxicating words still on my lips. 'Tomorrow...tomorrow...same time...same place...'

The certainty of my love for her and hers for me was quite intoxicating. I slept little that night and my restlessness on the following day was an agony both for me and my parents.

Before I left that night for our third meeting I crept into my mother's bedroom, and opening her jewel box I chose a ring from among her few trinkets. G.o.d knows it was not worthy to sit upon my loved one's finger, but it would symbolize our love.

Again she was waiting for me, though on this occasion I arrived a full quarter of an hour before our appointed time. It was as though, when we were together, we were hidden in a veil of love as though we were alone. We heard nothing else but the sound of our voices; we saw nothing else but one another's eyes.

She put the ring upon her finger as soon as I had given it to her. Her hand that was holding mine tightened its grip. I was surprised at its power. My whole body trembled. I moved my foot beneath the table to touch hers. I could find it nowhere.

When once more the dreaded moment arrived, I felt her sitting upright, the strong and tender smile of her farewell remaining in my mind like some fantastic sunrise.

For eight days we met thus, and parted thus, and with every meeting we knew more firmly than ever that whatever the difficulties that would result, whatever the forces against us, yet it was now that we must marry, now, while the magic was upon us.

On the eighth evening it was all decided. She knew that for my part it must be a secret wedding. My parents would never countenance so rapid an arrangement. She understood perfectly. For her part she wished a few of her friends to be present at the ceremony.

'I have a few colleagues,' she had said. I did not know what she meant, but her instructions as to where we should meet on the following afternoon put the remark out of my mind.

There was a registry office in Cambridge Circus, she told me, on the first floor of a certain building. I was to be there at four o'clock. She would arrange everything.

'Ah, my love,' she had murmured, shaking her large head slowly from side to side, 'how can I wait until then?' And with a smile unutterably bewitching she gestured for me to go, for the great marmoreal hall was all but empty.

For the eighth time I left her there. I knew that women must have their secrets and must be in no way thwarted in regard to them, and so, once again, I swallowed the question that I so longed to put to her. Why, oh why had I always to leave her there and why, when I arrived to meet her, was she always there to meet me?

On the following day, after a careful search, I found a gold ring in a box in my father's dressing-room. Soon after three, having brushed my hair until it shone like sealskin, I set forth with a flower in my b.u.t.tonhole and suitcase of belongings. It was a beautiful day with no wind and a clear sky.

The bus fled on like a fabulous beast, bearing me with it to a magic land.

But, alas, as we approached Mayfair we were held up more than once for long stretches of time. I began to get restless. By the time the bus had reached Shaftesbury Avenue I had but three minutes in which to reach the office.

It seemed strange that when the sunlight shone in sympathy with my marriage the traffic should choose to frustrate me. I was on the top of the bus and, having been given a very clear description of the building, was able, as we rounded at last into Cambridge Circus, to recognize it at once. When we came alongside my destination the traffic was held up again, and I was offered the perfect opportunity of disembarking immediately beneath the building.

My suitcase was at my feet, and as I stooped to pick it up I glanced at the windows on the first floor for it was in one of those rooms that I was so soon to become a husband.

I was exactly on a level with the windows in question and commanded an unbroken view of the interior of a first-floor room. It could not have been more than a dozen feet away from where I sat.

I remember that our bus was hooting away, but there was no movement in the traffic ahead. The hooting came to me as through a dream, for I had become lost in another world.

My hand was clenched upon the handle of the suitcase. Through my eyes and into my brain an image was pouring. The image of the first-floor room.

I knew at once that it was in that particular room that I was expected. I cannot tell you why, for during those first few moments I had not seen her.

To the right of the stage (for I had the sensation of being in a theatre) was a table loaded with flowers. Behind the flowers sat a small pinstriped registrar. There were four others in the room, three of whom kept walking to and fro. The fourth, an enormous bearded lady, sat on a chair by the window. As I stared, one of the men bent over to speak to her. He had the longest neck on earth. His starched collar was the length of a walking stick, and his small bony head protruded from its extremity like the skull of a bird. The other two gentlemen who kept crossing and recrossing were very different. One was bald. His face and cranium were blue with the most intricate tattooing. His teeth were gold, and they shone like fire in his mouth. The other was a well-dressed young man and seemed normal enough until, as he came for a moment closer to the window, I saw that instead of a hand the cloven hoof of a goat protruded from the left sleeve.

And then suddenly it all happened. A door of their room must have opened, for all at once all the heads in the room were turned in one direction and a moment later something in white trotted like a dog across the room.

But it was no dog. It was vertical as it ran. I thought at first that it was a mechanical doll, so close was it to the floor. I could not observe its face, but I was amazed to see the long train of satin that was being dragged along the carpet behind it.

It stopped when it reached the flower-laden table, and there was a good deal of smiling and bowing, and then the man with the longest neck in the world placed a high stool in front of the table and, with the help of the young man with the goat foot, lifted the white thing so that it stood upon the high stool. The long satin dress was carefully draped over the stool so that it reached the floor on every side. It seemed as though a tall, dignified woman was standing at the civic altar.

And still I had not seen its face, though I knew what it would be like. A sense of nausea overwhelmed me and I sank back on the seat, hiding my face in my hands.

I cannot remember when the bus began to move. I know that I went on and on and on and that finally I was told that I had reached the terminus. There was nothing for it but to board another bus of the same number and make the return journey. A strange sense of relief had by now begun to blunt the edge of my disappointment. That this bus would take me to the door of the house where I was born gave me a twinge of homesick pleasure. But stronger was my sense of fear. I prayed that there would be no reason for the bus to be held up again in Cambridge Circus.

I had taken one of the downstairs seats, for I had no wish to be on an eye level with someone I had deserted. I had no sense of having wronged her, but she had been deserted nevertheless.

When at last the bus approached the Circus I peered into the half darkness. A street-lamp stood immediately below the registry office. I saw at once that there was no light in the office, and as the bus moved past I turned my eyes to a group beneath the street-lamp. My heart went cold in my breast.

Standing there, ossified as it were into a malignant ma.s.s standing there as though they never intended to move until justice was done were the five. It was only for a second that I saw them, but every lamplit head is forever with me the long-necked man with his bird skull head, his eyes glinting like chips of gla.s.s; to his right the small bald man, his tattooed scalp thrust forward, the lamplight glinting on the blue markings. To the left of the long-necked man stood the youth, his elegant body relaxed but a snarl on his face that I still sweat to remember. His hands were in his pockets, but I could see the shape of the hoof through the cloth. A little ahead of these three stood the bearded lady, a bulk of evil and in the shadow that she cast before her I saw in that last fraction of a second, as the bus rolled me past, a big whitish head, very close to the ground.

In the dusk it appeared to be suspended above the kerb like a pale balloon with a red mouth painted upon it a mouth that, taking a single diabolical curve, was more like the mouth of a wild beast than of a woman.

Long after I had left the group behind me set, as it were, forever under the lamp, like something made of wax, like something monstrous, long after I had left it I yet saw it all. It filled the bus. They filled my brain. They fill it still.

When at last I arrived home I fell weeping upon my bed. My father and mother had no idea what it was all about, but they did not ask me. They never asked me.

That evening, after supper, I sat there, I remember, six years ago in my own chair on the chocolate-coloured carpet. I remember how I stared with love at the ash on my father's waistcoat, at his stained moustache, at my mother's worn-away shoe heels. I stared at it all and I loved it all. I needed it all.

Since then I have never left the house. I know what is best for me.

The Other Side of the Mountain.

Michel Bernanos.

Translated into English by Gio Clairval.

Michel Bernanos (19241964) was a French writer, the son of well-known writer Georges Bernanos and the only one of six children to follow in his father's footsteps. However, he refused to use his father's name, publis.h.i.+ng thrillers under the pen names 'Michel Talbert' and 'Michel Drowin'. 'The Other Side of the Mountain', first published in 1967, three years after the writer's suicide in the forest of Fontainebleau, is considered a surreal masterpiece; it is also the only story to be published under his real name. Gio Clairval's fine new translation should be considered definitive, and for the first time conveys the stark and beautiful essence of the writer's vision.

Part One.

I had just turned eighteen when, after a night of drinking, the hand of a friend guided mine into signing myself onboard a galleon for one year.

The beginning of this dreadful adventure remains a vague memory or, should I say, a faint trace. In truth, not until the following morning did I face the reality of my situation. To my vast surprise, I found myself stretched out on hard, bare boards, greeted by the depths of a bright blue sky. Then I noticed sails filled by a gentle breeze, and the rolling sea speckled with white caught in a single wavelet and multiplied toward the horizon.