Selected Stories Read online

  He had been living in the cottage for a full week when the nightmare came to him for the first time. That first night, he didn't see anything exceptional in the nightmare. The evening before, he had eaten rather late, and in his solitude had drowned a bottle of cheap but heady wine. So it was in a more elated mood than usual that he fell on his bed to sleep. But sleep was difficult to find, with the bed behaving itself like a ship in a storm. The part by his feet kept on rising and then suddenly made a sickening sideward movement, as if he had reached the crest of a big wave, and now went down and down, quicker and quicker. He steadied himself with both hands on the sides of the bed, but the illusion of being on a small yacht was continuous. A crazy wind howled in his ears, with a thin and painful whistling, and foam was hurled in his eyes. His mouth was burning, and on his lips he tasted the salt of sea water.

  He was thirsty, enormously thirsty. The continuous rocking, rising and dropping of the ship made him sick, and his stomach began to turn, but he couldn't vomit. There was an absolute darkness, but sometimes he thought he observed the small twinkling of a far star, very high above him, before a new wave hurled over him like a wet slimy coat.

  With an instinctive movement, he stretched out his arms to stop the oncoming wave, but his reaching fingers touched something no more than five centimeters above him. Something hard and unyielding. His fingers traced the hard surface sidewards, and suddenly there was an obstacle there too, which he couldn't move. He tried to sit up, but bumped his head immediately. Where in heaven's name was he? He suddenly realized that this was not his bed in which he was lying, and with that realization, he awoke. The room was dark around him, and outside an angry wind was howling. The bed still made uneasy movements, and he felt very sick, but at last he could move freely again. The rest of his night was full of dreams, but the morning sun found him the victim of a splitting headache, which didn't go away even after he had taken a few aspirins. That day he was absolutely unable to handle his brush, but he made the fixed resolution to start painting the next day.

  In the afternoon, he sat down in the chair, and stared at the sea with sleep-filled eyes. How placid she seemed, a sleeping woman, endlessly calm and peaceful, and yet full of hidden life. A seagull drifted away past him, like a small white airplane, leaving its lonely cry behind. Far on the horizon was a little ship, so small that it seemed as if he could crush it between two fingers. How good it was, just to sit here, and let life drift past, as on a misty rain cloud, to be one with the rest and the peace, part of the trinity of beach, sea, and sky. Without his noticing it, sleep took over, and the sea came to him with storm waves, cradling him in their frightening movement. But to his alarm, he now knew that it wasn't real, but part of a nightmare. With an unsettling certainty he knew that he was dreaming, but he didn't even try to awake. He felt curious and strangely indifferent at the same time, as if this wasn't happening to him. There was a secure feeling, knowing that it wasn't real, that he could awaken any time he really wanted to. He was no more than a spectator here, so why not wait it out?

  But he didn't lie at ease; the surface under him felt cold and hard and wet, and his shoulders itched. He tried rubbing them, and then moving. There was some space to his left and right, but not enough to roll over, or even to bring his hands to his face. The rocking movement again made him slightly sick, though he began to get used to it. If he only knew in what he was lying...

  And then suddenly he DID know. The walls everywhere around him... they were of wood, weren't they? The impossibility of moving more than a few centimeters to the left and right...

  The darkness all around... He was in a coffin.

  He was dead and buried in a coffin, somewhere on a ship, or in the sea. The fright and shock jerked his eyes open, and he was back in his chair, dazedly staring out over a grey sea, and a beach on which already the tall shadows of night were falling.

  That evening, by the light of his room lamp, he made a few preliminary sketches, but none gave him full satisfaction, and he threw them all away, and, dissatisfied, went to sleep. Inevitably, the cursed dream came back as soon as he dared close his eyes, but already he was getting used to the situation, and his position didn't frighten him anymore. After all, he knew that he was only dreaming, and if he wanted to, he could awaken immediately. But he didn't want to, not yet. He tried to think logically. A weird situation surely, knowing that one is in the middle of a dream and trying to reason about it. The coffin which carried him couldn't be on a ship, because no sounds came to him, except for what must be the howling of the wind. Also his resting place made insane tumblings, which it could hardly do if it was securely fastened on a ship.

  So the only solution could be that the coffin was drifting in the sea. He didn't feel any pain because of the tumblings, though his head crashed against the wooden walls more than once. But after all, how could he feel pain in a dream? There was a peaceful feeling of security. He really felt at home in the coffin, just drifting aimlessly across the sea. Life and reality seemed far away nuisances, which he could do very well without, small matters of little importance to him. At a certain moment, he thought, "Now I really must wake up," and the dream drifted away from him like a fog, to be replaced by full daylight.

  He began finally on the background of his painting. He needed the whole morning, before he at last found the exact color he wanted, and in the early afternoon he began putting the first hazy lines on the canvas. But his glances kept stealing away outside, to the sea. Her grey enormousness gave him a futile impotent feeling: why was he trying to create something here, when he had only to sit down in the seat, and see what he was trying to bring to the canvas, and in vain.

  He knew that he never would succeed in bringing what he really wanted to his painting, but he could only try. With a doglike determination he kept on, but his mind was wandering, far away on the sea, in a rocking coffin.

  His dreamlike fantasies were disturbed by the knock of Mrs. Berens, who came to tell him that coffee was ready. She came in, and when she saw his work she made a surprised exclamation. "Well, you didn't tell me that you knew Mr. Morgan!" she said.

  "Who?" Marc asked, not understanding. Then he followed her glances to the painting and down to his own hand, still holding the sketching pencil. Against the light grey background, on the canvas now stood a face, a hurried sketch drawn in the strong hard lines he always used, the face of a middle-aged man, with a small ring beard, cold, sharp eyes, and a near-bald head. It was the face of a complete stranger to Marc.

  "Who? Whom did I know?" he asked again.

  "But Mr. Morgan, Charles Morgan," Mrs. Berens replied. "The man whose face you have painted there. Why surely you must have known that he was the tenant before you?"

  "But... but... that is, I know..." Marc stammered.

  "Why, you must be a real admirer of his work," Mrs. Berens continued her interrupted monologue, "to come specially here, to work where he has worked. Oh, you shouldn't deny it. I know how high-pitched artists are, Mr. Dolan, how sensitive they are to moods and atmosphere. Mr. Charles Morgan was like that, too. He always sat there, in that big chair, staring out at the sea. Sometimes he only made one single painting in months, and always it was about the sea. He used to say that only here could he really feel one with the sea, that this cottage seemed built at a focus of sea, beach, and sky, and that here he could really feel completely free and at peace."

  During coffee, she told her guest more about the former tenant, whose face Marc had during his day-dreaming sketched on the canvas, and he now remembered the name. A rather appreciated painter of sea views from some years ago, who had suddenly disappeared from the public eye, though new paintings tended to pop up now and then at art exhibitions. Mrs. Berens told him that Morgan had lived here several years, before he began his voyage.

  Marc went to bed with an uncanny feeling. A coffin in his dreams, the face of a stranger on his canvas. Where was the clue? ...if there was one.

  As always, the dream came back, but the atm
osphere had changed; there was a weird feeling of unrest in it. It seemed as if the peace absorbed everything else, and also wanted something in exchange. There was a hungry quality in the air around him, as if he had something the dream wanted from him, and he awoke with the sweat of fear on his “brow. When he got up, his feet felt icy, and they were wet. His bed was wet also, and so was part of the floor. He reached toward it with his finger and tasted it. Salt. But the biggest shock came when he put on the lights, and saw his painting. The background had been worked over, there was in the swirling grey colors now an inescapable sense of movement, of big, crested waves, and an aura of menace, created with only a few strokes of the brush. And in that monotonous grey, a rectangular box had been drawn, in strong, white lines. There were no crosses on the box, and no locks on its sides, yet the horrible knowledge of what it represented came through clearly. He put a sheet over the painting so he didn't have to look at it any more.

  What strange things were happening here?

  He must have begun sleep walking; there was no other solution, though he had never done so before in his life. He should go to a doctor, and ask for something strong, so he could sleep without disturbing dreams. He could hardly go on this way. But not today. He didn't feel like it. Maybe tomorrow.

  He went for a short walk on the beach, and in the afternoon sat again in the big chair, unable to work. The mood just wouldn't come, and in a flare of anger, he threw his brushes and color tubes into the corner. An indefinable feeling of sullen menace hung in the air; the beach seemed strange and alien to him. His thoughts kept returning to the coffin in the sea of his dreams, and the strange face he had painted, which really had belonged to someone. What was the matter with him? He couldn't concentrate on anything, his mind kept on wandering aimlessly. As soon as he started to reason it out, an enormous wheel started spinning somewhere in his brain, tearing his thoughts apart in a seething chaos. And always there was the sea before his eyes, grey and endless and somehow calling him, as if the world stopped existing here, and there was nothing else but the sea, and the white untouched sand of the beach, where only his own feet had left their marks, already fading away under the wind's power. The silence of the afternoon drowned him, and then made place for the silence of the coming evening, and still he sat in the chair, fighting the chaos in his mind. A storm was coming up outside, the wind became stronger and heavy clouds were obscuring the evening sky. Far away, lightning drew a fire pattern across the leaden heavens.

  "... and he had drawn the face of Mr. Morgan," Mrs. Berens was talking downstairs to one of her few friends, who had come over for a short visit and a cup of coffee. "You know, the painter who lived here until last year, the one I told you about, who loved the sea so much, and who never wanted to meet anyone."

  "Yes, I do remember your telling me about him;

  I never saw him in person. He never even wanted to come down from his room, did he? A very sensitive man. Didn't he drown or something?"

  "No, not exactly. He loved the sea, but he never went near her; he seemed kind of superstitious about it. Always said that the sea wanted him but wouldn't get him, and he preferred to watch her from his chair out of the window. He never even went for a walk on the beach or on the dunes. Then there was the possibility of a big exhibition in some art center in England, and he went there and suddenly died."

  "But I thought..."

  "But he was never buried. They brought his body back on a small ship, there was an unforeseen storm, and the ship never arrived. They have searched for pieces of driftwood, but they never even found those..."

  Rain was boiling against the windows now, changing everything outside through a hazy curtain. The sea was an unchained animal, an angry amoebical creature with long foam-coated tentacles. Lightning formed crazy fire tongues above her seething darkness. No peace, no rest any more, he was in hell, a moving shrieking hell of movement and rocking and tumbling, from wave to wave, up and down, falling, gliding. The room, the seat, the window, they were all gone, far away shades of a dream fantasy. This was Marc's reality, the hard strong wood under and above him, the taste of the salt water, the battering of the waves against the sides of the coffin, the creaking of the tortured wood, the shrieking of the wind outside, the insane tumult of the mad sea. And in that sound, there was something else which reached for him with raw bloody claws, something calling his name, wanting something from him, claiming something from him.

  Instinctively he fought the nameless something, but his resistance was weak. Once the storm was over, there would be peace and quietness once again. But the shrieking stayed, tearing his mind apart into a chaotic ferris wheel of fragmentary memories of reality and dreams. "I want to awake," he shrieked. "God, I must awake! I must awake!"

  But he didn't awake; there were only the pitiless walls of the coffin, and the menacing unknown something, which was overpowering his mind, taking over his body and thinking. Then he stopped fighting, and felt his mind and body flow away, as if they were only protoplasm, submerging with the sea, and together with the wet salt taste on his mouth, came a long dark rest, and at last, complete peace...

  "But what is that?" Mrs. Berens shrieked. Something dripped down from the ceiling, and left wet greenish spatters on her white table cloth.

  There was a strong smell of the sea in the room, and new drops came down from above, through the small cracks in the ceiling.

  "What is he doing up there in that room?" Surprised and severely angry, she ran upstairs, followed by her guest. At the door of her tenant's chamber, she hesitated. There was not the slightest sound from Marc's room, and no one answered her knocking. Resolutely she threw open the door, and was met with a wave of salt air.

  Her beautifully painted walls, the floor, the furniture, even the ceiling, everything was wet through and through by sea water. Small fragments of seaweed hung on the lamps and the paintings on the wall, and small crabs scurried away over the floor. A lonely fish made his last convulsions, his gills red as bloody toothless mouths. The painter was nowhere to be seen, but the high seat was slightly turned.

  "Well, did you ever..." Mrs. Berens began, and went to the chair. She never finished her sentence, because then she saw what was sitting in the chair, looking out over the storm sea with a vague smile on what was left of its face. She didn't recognize the face, there wasn't enough left for that, but just before she sank down in merciful unconsciousness, she recognized the big gold seal ring on one of the skeleton's fingers, with the initials "C.M." engraved on it.

  Charles Morgan had made a far journey, but finally he had found the way back home.

  My Eyes, They Burn!

  Through the darkness, I am gliding, very softly as the shadow river carries me along on its rippling back. There is no boat, nothing to hold on to, I am just aimlessly drifting in the water, my face turned upward. Though I have nothing to guide myself with, I stay in the middle of the current, never touching the land on both sides. I know that I can, if I would like to; I'd just have to stretch out my fingers and the river banks will close in on me as the walls of a coffin. But I'm not really interested.

  Strange growths throw their blacker shades over the dark river, sometimes their moldgreen fingers almost touch my face as I drift under them. Their leaves open as crowns of flowers, but there is only dark hair growing on them, constantly and slowly moving as ff it consists of millions of microscopic insects. When I look in front of me, I can see the river, endlessly crawling along, dimly illuminated by a strange fading light, while behind me the darkness is complete. I can see only the water and the trees, and even those only when I am passing directly underneath them. As time passes, I begin to notice other things, though the darkness doesn't lift. It is almost as if I am turning into a nyctalope, able to stare through the dark haze which is hovering around everything of the country around me. There are hills beyond the treetops, weirdly glittering hills, perfectly well formed and bare of any growths, and they have small, sharply pointed towers on top of them, as alien n
ipples on enormous iron breasts. Sometimes small hawklike things soundlessly drift through the black yet illuminated sky, passing over me as I drift toward the river's unknown end. The current is softly rocking me, and the water is comfortably warm, so, without noticing it, my eyelids drop and I drift away into dreamshades.

  Something makes me open my eyes and look in front of me. The water is changing into ice, freezing into insanely shaped forms all around me. Half-frozen pieces grate along my back and legs with many needlepoints. I stare right into an enormous eye looming up before me and cynically looking me over. The stream flows into the center of the iris. I begin thrashing around wildly, but the river banks disappear on both sides, and I am all alone in a dark sea that stretches endlessly in all directions, except for the eye. The current goes on toward it, taking me along. I stretch out my hands and feet to keep it away, and then on my hands, my fingers, on my feet, the flesh tears, and a thousand eyes open on my body, all looking at the enormous eye awaiting me. The iris splits, its darkness flows out to meet me, envelops me with slimy tentacles, drowns and soothes my panic into a fading nothingness...

  A soft humming sound as of an enormous but distant beehive crawled through the subterranean control rooms. The machines rose up along the walls of the room as colossal metal insects, their countless dials staring as cold but intelligent eyes. The people, all uniformly dressed in white, moved as silently as the many androids busy with files and computer cards. Only what was absolutely necessary was spoken out loud; for the rest, only mechanical sounds rippled the waters of silence. The dry click of a moved handle, the short knack of a pushed button, the bipbipbip of a control light. This was no place for human beings, here only machines felt at home, and people who themselves were closer to the machine than to humanity, people who thought in numbers and computer symbols. E.T.A., short for Extra-Terrestrial Explorations, kept close watch on the development of Project CYB.