Selected Stories Page 10

  He hated the waiting.

  At last the fire burned the palms of his hands, and he threw the rest of the cigarette away, knowing with a sick certainty that it was exactly the same part of a second he had thrown his cigarette away ten years ago, and nine years ago, and seven years ago...

  A church bell started chiming in the distance, the echoes of its strokes shattering through his ears and brain. Eleven strokes.

  Eleven strokes of horror, creating false images in the rain curtain in his brain. Lightning flashed, drawing with an electric pencil a short nightmare vision out of a surrealist painting, the houses as waiting sentinels with dead eyes and hungry mouths, the pavement stones upturned faces under his feet in unreal light, just before the shadows closed again their eager tentacles around him.

  It was like a short awakening from the climax of a nightmare, a moment of petrified time, the exact face of terror unremembered, but the fear running on and on through his veins.

  It would be soon now. The waiting was almost finished.

  Footfalls. Light steps from high-heeled shoes, sharply ticking sounds like a lonely clock. They came through the curtain of rain and darkness, walking through the still echoing sound of the church bells, through the empty street. Footsteps, where a few seconds before there had been nothing but silence. She must have come from one of the many small side streets, suddenly taking a corner. That was why he heard her approaching so clearly suddenly. Not that it mattered, he’d known they were coming. The footsteps were what he’d been waiting for.

  They came nearer, their sounds gliding through the separating layers of rain, now almost beside him. A second bolt of lightning cut the sky, dimmed through the downpour, and he saw her face.

  The white pastel face, wetness glittering as sparks on the colorless cheeks, and the half-open, red painted mouth. Water pearls on her black hair, falling in her eyes, a mass of dripping wetness; the classical straight nose with the quick-moving nostrils; the blued eyelids and the far-looking eyes, seeing in a distance which she alone could perceive. She passed by, unconscious of his presence. The lightning had gone, and the rain kept on falling from the open skies. Her high-heeled shoes clattered against the silence, as she went, the darkness closing after her passage.

  He started to follow her. He knew the way very well now, every street, every damn corner, as seconds submerged in the eternity of ten years of torture. He lighted a new cigarette, and had to throw it away because it was wet immediately, and crumbled into a brown pulp mass between his fingers.

  The light invited him, the only beacon before him in the darkness, changed and slightly pulsating through the rain fog. He stumbled from the three small steps and then was inside the cafe. Cold dampness welled out of the cellar, but it was still better than the wetness outside. At first there was only the thick blue-gray tobacco-smoke cloud, slowly crawling through the low ceiled room. Then his tearful eyes accustomed themselves to the moving fog, and he started to see. The ceiling was very low indeed, and rested on heavy wooden pillars.

  There was a poor-looking bar at the other end, and besides it a juke-box, cold and dead with a big, crudely lettered sign “Out Of Use.”

  The left and right sides contained about five wooden tables each, and posters decorated the walls, their colors faded and their corners wrinkled and brown. A few would-be artists, bearded, in ragged trousers and heavy pulls, were seated extremely left, the origin of the tobacco fog.

  The entering man received a short nod from the barkeeper, who was wrestling with his towel and dusty glasses, as if he was trying to scrub his emptiness off on them.

  She was seated at the third table on the right, the same place as before. Oh God, if only one small detail would be different this year. But then, it never was, and the nightmare continued, carrying him along, unresisting, while each small detail of the night fitted into the other ones, as a clock’s inner wheels. She was just sitting on her chair, with the neutral gray bag in her hand, and the untouched cup of coffee before her on the round table, losing its warmth in steady curls of smoke, slowly crawling up to the ceiling.

  He went over to her and sat down in the chair opposite her. There was no sign of recognition from her, she didn’t even acknowledge his presence; he was a ghost among the living. He observed her carefully, the patterns of ten years superimposing like paintings on glass plates, placed upon each other. She was pretty and well built, with just the right proportions where they belonged. On her, even the formless raincoat looked like something very feminine.

  Her hands were lying across her handbag. She didn’t wear gloves, and he saw she had no rings on her fingers. Her hands were long and small, and very white - the hands of a secretary or a typist.

  Her eyes were focused on the faded wall poster's, but she saw through them, almost as if she studied the cracks and spider webs of the naked wall beyond them. He didn’t try to start a conversation; it would be completely useless. She wouldn’t react in any way, not even when he would touch her. To her, he didn’t exist; he could as well be just another wall poster, to be neglected and stared through, just like the others whose discolored smiles were grinning down on him. He was just a player in the dark game, a toy without a life of his own.

  The proprietor came over to him, and he ordered a glass of cheap red wine. After being paid his fifteen francs, the barman returned to the bar and continued whipping imaginary dust from his beer glasses.

  The man nipped from his glass, and put it down again. He waited for her to turn, which she did exactly at seventeen minutes past twelve. Slowly she revolved in her chair, and he saw the gliding movements of her hands, as coiled snakes over her well formed legs. Her skirt had crawled up, and he had a short glimpse of the softness of her leg above her stockings. As a statue on a moving showpiece, her profile turned, and the cold gray knowing eyes met his for a split second—a dip into a deep fog, which left him shivering.

  At exactly half past twelve, when the chimes sounded, she checked the time on her wrist watch, then stood up and left. The night closed after her, as if she’d never been there.

  He called the bartender, and asked him the question he had asked over and over again in those ten years, the question whose answer was engraved with letters of ice in his shrieking mind.

  “Do you know the woman who was sitting here with me?”

  The bartender looked surprised and suspicious. “Woman? What woman? Excuse me, but you have been sitting here alone for over twenty minutes. All by yourself.” He went back to his bar; his hands crawled like two enormous fat white-bellied spiders over the glasses and bottles, and he shot half-angered glances at the man who asked such questions.

  The man had known it all the time, and his beating heart was changed into a big freezing room, from which ice water was pumped through his veins. The coldness was all over his stomach. He slowly was preparing himself for hell. He left, too, and the night engulfed him, suspicious, hostile. He had walked that night ten years, had tasted every bitter drop of rain and darkness and fear, and yet still he was an outsider, someone beyond even the laws of darkness.

  He followed the street, the sound of his nailed shoes following him... tik... tik... tik...tik. If he could only stop them; but he couldn’t, and the sound went on and on, echoing through his mind. The dead eyes of the houses he passed looked down on him. Go away, they shrieked, go away from us, you don’t belong. Their mouth doors were closed to him, as to all unwanted night creatures. And his feet walked on, carrying him with them, like their own private zombie. How he wanted to stop them. But just as he hadn’t stopped them ten years ago, so he couldn’t now. Tik, tik, tik, the sounds crawling up the house walls, and falling down on him, burying him, petrifying his brain, like an insect caught in wax, fossilized. His mind didn’t react now; it cowered inside his skull, screaming soundlessly, and his body, the frozen flesh and blood machine, went along the empty street, following the girl before him.

  Now he had seen her, quickly stepping. When he had approached her to ten me
ter’s distance, he knew that she had heard him. This was where and when she always heard him coming nearer, the hunter closing in on the game. She looked over her shoulder, puzzled, then frightened. She hurried her steps, tik, tik, tik, meaningless echoes in a night for fear. Now five meters, now four, now three, his own steps smothering hers. Two meters, it all went so quick now; she started running, too late, much too late-damn you, why didn’t you run earlier when there was still time? Now there’s no time left, now, now, not ever! He stretched out his hands across ten years.

  He wished he could cry out the horror cupped inside him. If he could only stop this time circle and end the game, but he couldn’t, he never could. His feet ran, and his arms went out like striking snakes; his hands very young, and very white, the veins as cords running under his skin, blood pumping through them at the speeded up rhythm of his heart beat. He felt the excitement crawling like an uneasy animal in his belly, beating in his brain, drowning everything else except the horror. Then she turned and opened her mouth to scream, and his hands closed around her throat.

  Her mouth stayed open, her teeth flashing as she curled up her lips like a snarling cat. He pushed her against the wall of a house, the light of a nearby lantern spilling over her face, like a faded close-up. He was almost one with her squirming body, feeling every movement of it against his own. She tried to kick, but his legs were between hers and stopped the frantic movements. She made small sounds, krrh, ahrrg, and her nails made bloody patterns on his iron hands. They felt the softness of her throat, the pulsing power of her aorta, as they pressed and pressed; the convulsive movements of her adam’s apple; her gasping mouth open to the night and the rain. The excitement was all over his body now, and he felt his legs tremble with red waves pulsing.

  Her face grew dark, as her eyes grew wide and the tongue came out of her mouth, dark and swollen between her teeth, lolling out of her gasping mouth. Spittle dripped on his hands. Her body made short shaking movements, a small animal running crazy in a trap, slowly dying. Only his brain kept screaming, stop it, goddamnyou stopitstopitstopit, but it didn’t stop. He felt the corners of his mouth draw up, forming the insane grin his face had worn that time, his breath coming in groaning gasps. She suddenly made a last gurgling sound and stiffened, her eyes bulging as those of a frog, her legs making one last convulsive movement.

  His hands loosened their grip, and her shawl stayed between his fingers. She stayed upright against the wall, her eyes staring doors into emptiness, her lolling tongue a dark piece of paper put against her blue lips. He leaned against the wall, wishing desperately to be sick, but again he couldn’t. Time restarted running, and as he looked, her left eye became fluid and ran across her cheek, leaving a wet slimy trail like a snail’s. Her right eye followed, and blood started streaming from the holes, then dried up and left dusty trails. Her body sagged slowly, while the flesh of her face decayed, first the cheeks falling inwards in her mouth, then crumbling into rotting flesh. Yellow bones came splintering through, as the face fell further into ashes, the teeth making small rattling sounds as they clattered upon the street stones. The disintegrating body fell upon its knees, then slowly keeled backwards, to the sound of cracking bones and tearing rotted flesh and muscles.

  Then he turned and began to run through the horror-ridden streets of night, the slightest sound of high-heeled footsteps following him and meeting him from every corner, her dying rattle echoing from every black window. At last, when he couldn’t run any more, he fell flat on his face, his hands beating the stones until the blood ran from them and stained his clothes. Then he was very sick, and when his insides stopped turning inside out, and he stopped panting, he looked up at the rain shrouded stars and prayed, “My God, please PLEASE LET IT BE THE LAST TIME, LET IT BE FINISHED NOW. A senseless prayer, because he knew.

  He knew that next year, the night of November seventh, he would again stand in the lonely street, smoking a cigarette in the downpouring rain, tasting the rain and the darkness, waiting for the sound of her high heels. He looked at his hands. They were old and tired, without any strength left; but next year again, they would become the claws of the other, waiting one, deep inside him, while he again would be no more than a watching, tormented machine. He felt the shawl he still held in his hand, and kneaded it into a silken mass in his hot face, the last straw before the opening edge of definite madness, so near and yet never near enough for him.. . How senseless, his prayer. If there was a God, it was the God from the Old Testament, who wanted an eye for an eye. Because she had not really been there. He knew that as sure, like the fact that the shawl between his clasped fingers would turn into dust, mixing with the mud on his shoes, as soon as he entered the threshold of his home.

  A Pentagram for Cenaide

  Jack Morgan was a painter, or at least that was what he always said, and his close friends—those who judgment he cared about—agreed with him on that point, so it hardly mattered what the critics said about his work, whenever they did take the trouble to say something. His life had always been a very calm and peaceful one, he liked drinking, but not much more than anyone else, and he had tried a few mild drugs to, and had stayed away from them after a severe headache. He had an exceptional ear for music, and always claimed that he could get high on hearing music, so why spend hard cash for ersatz? He had known, and loved, and hated a few women in his life, and had left them all behind, or they had left him behind depending on what viewpoint one takes. Time had come for a marriage, which never realised, and time had gone past that point too. Jack also liked laughing, and simple fun as well as enjoy reading Sartre. He had many friends who liked him very much until he needed them, when they always seemed to be just out of reach, but always eager to return when he didn’t need, or didn’t want their help anymore.

  He read a lot, from crime novels to Wodehouse, and from the classics to science-fiction, and had a healthy distaste for ladies’ novels, until he fell right into one himself, and gradually discovered that there was no way out. The newly arisen dilemma, which had been there for a long time already if he had only seen it, embittered him at first, and angered him. It came in the way of his work, and in his own way he was a straight-forward man who hated dilemmas which couldn’t be solved, but he also prided himself in his tact, and that was what made him unable to solve his particular predicament. That was; when he discovered, surprising himself most of all, that he was in love with his best friend’s wife.

  Paul and his wife Cenaide were long time friends of Jack, who used to drop in on him at the weirdest hours of day and night, and he was always ready for them, for a drink, and a chat; besides, he used to visit them quite a lot himself. Cenaide wasn’t exactly a classic beauty, and neither was she a very intelligent woman, but one evening when they had gone to a dance, the three of them, and he took her in his arms, felt the softness of her cheek and the tickling of her hair against his face, the suppleness of her body against his, he suddenly realised that he loved her. He had known love before, and he still remembered how it felt and tasted and then hurt afterwards, so this surprised him, then he found it rather funny, and then it angered him. He had no business being in love with this girl, he told himself. Her hair was too short, he had always liked long hair, and the colour wasn’t right either. Her manner of speech was rude and she spoke with a strong cheap dialect which she never was able to hide. No doubt she had lots of personal, annoying habits, and she couldn’t even talk about things on his own level of understanding. Above all she was married to his friend, whom she loved very much, of that he was certain. But he loved her with a sudden furious passion, which must have been smouldering in the depths of his mind for some time already, unnoticed. When he began thinking seriously about it later, when he was alone in his room, he recalled the fun they had had just by being together, talking about a lot of stupid unimportant things. He began to remember the peace he had felt, just sitting there and talking to her, knowing that she was near. He began to recall many things, small silly tilings, but they all add
ed up as he brought them out of their hiding places in his mind, die tingle in his fingers when he touched her hand as she passed him his drink, and the warmth he had felt one evening when she had drunk a few glasses too much of the bottle of wine he had brought with him and had fallen asleep on the couch, and he had looked down upon her relaxed, resting face. He remembered now the sudden flare of anger he had felt one day when Paul had been shouting at her for some unimportant stupidity, and his uneasiness when he had visited them one evening, and she hadn’t been home, arriving very late.

  He tried the shortest way out of this silly situation, and stopped visiting them without giving a reason, but they came to him, bewildered, and he never let someone stand before a closed door. He tried to be rude, and only succeeded in surprising and hurting them, but they came back nevertheless, and he couldn’t keep on being rude to her. Then the pain began, and the uneasiness, standing before his window in his empty room, looking out over the rain-shrouded city roofs, smoking a cigarette, the smoke biting in his eyes. He took to taking solitary walks through the empty night streets, alone with his brooding thoughts, and this insane love for a woman who wasn’t his, and who would never be his. But the darkness never gives an answer, and if there was an answer to it, it would have to come out of himself.

  He couldn’t work anymore with the accuracy so typical for his fingers, starting three paintings, leaving the first one unfinished, tearing the second apart with his knife, and throwing the third against the wall with such a force that it split. He tried looking at it logically, but refused to come into agreement with himself. At first he viewed it as a friendship’s dilemma, until he discovered that he couldn’t care less. He knew how his friend felt about his wife, a superficial love which had drifted into habit through the yeays. Paul was no real obstacle, Jack wouldn’t stop because of him. But the real barrier was lying inside Jack himself, and in his guesswork concerning her feelings. He knew for certain that she cared for him only as a good friend, and nothing more, and there wasn’t the slightest chance of a step out of line, because her narrow mindedness on such matters had often before surprised him. Especially as he knew that Paul was far from a faithful husband, and sometimes it was so eye- piercing that it seemed almost impossible for Cenaide not to notice it. She didn’t however, or else plainly refused to see things in their true light. She cared a lot for her husband, and would never let him go. Along those lines she also didn’t give a damn for Jack Morgan.