Selected Stories Read online

  How can I describe in human words the feeling of that kiss, the intense and unearthly coldness that was inside her and that now came out and into me—a coldness so biting that it burned my mouth? How can I explain the enormous need and desire for warmth waiting in her, that cruel and needing desire for human warmth? I had that warmth in me, the warmth she needed, and my mind held the feelings she needed to drive away the cold, and I gave them to her. Willingly, glad that at last I could share them with someone. We melted into each other, and in exchange for the warmth of life I offered her, she gave me herself, her body and mind, and the knowledge that I was no longer alone. We both gave of that which we had too much for ourselves and which the other needed, my beautiful darkling and I, and our whole world was focused in that cocoon of darkness that held us like a protecting womb. There was no longer a fairground or a world outside. There was only Cathy and me, the only reality still in existence.

  Afterward our thoughts moved over each other like caressing warm blankets carrying us to rest in a peaceful mutual semi-sleep. When she finally left, the fair was dead, all lights out. We hadn’t exchanged a single word; we hadn’t needed it.

  I remained there for another hour, feeling totally exhausted. I had never felt so tired before, as if Cathy’s coldness coming into me had built there a second leaden skeleton crushing mine, making even breathing difficult. Yet my mind was burning with a never-before-felt excitement. Going home I met two late walkers, but their thoughts reached me only partially and dulled, as if my new knowledge somehow created a barrier between them and me. I went to bed and slept through the next morning. When I finally got up late in the afternoon, the coldness was gone completely, and I felt myself again.

  Then I thought that it had been the effect of having had sex. I hadn’t been with a woman since the crash... But it was much more than this. It was the mental intercourse that had tired me so much—the blending of our minds, and our exchange of emotions—two nuclei clashing together and burning themselves out.

  Psychic vampirism, you may say? No, certainly not. I admit that I have had thoughts along that direction, and believe me, such things do exist. With my... talent, I can be certain of that. I have felt it before in other people’s minds, though mostly they are totally unaware of it. But psychic vampirism demands one totally dominating personality who feeds on its victim, and this is not what Cathy is doing with me, nor I with her for that matter. She has a desperate need for human warmth and life force that I can give to her, and in turn she gives me part of herself, lets me share her world. This world, you people, have rejected me, cut me off. Cathy is keeping me alive! She is all I have left in this so-called reality of yours—the knowledge that I’m not alone and that the contact between us can never be broken.

  From then on we met regularly, on other nights, at other fairs. I never learned if she has a last name, where she lives, what she does by day... who she is. To me she’s just my Cathy, my beautiful darkling, and that is enough. My whole life has become concentrated on our meetings. And though I realize that I only see part of her identity, I also keep my ordinary life away from her. Maybe it’s that we both prefer to keep part of our independence. It would be no good to know everything about the other: no doubt we both have things in our lives that could create barriers between us. And when we are together it is of no importance—only the two of us count then, and that which we share at those moments. I know that she waits for me at every fair I visit—a waiting, inviting shadow.

  The days in between are a torture to me. I move through them as through an evil and boring dream—a passage of time that I want to get over with as soon as possible. Then I think about the beautiful coldness we’ll be sharing again shortly. Like a ghostly touch I can already sense her lips on my mouth and face, the youthful buoyancy of her body pressing against mine. Sometimes it is as if every window, every mirror reflects her eyes, and when I’m alone in my room I can feel her presence close by, as if she lives in every wall. I know that I’m never alone now, that always she’s somewhere thinking about me.

  It is impossible to know how absolute loneliness feels, if you’ve never tasted it, never lived through it as I have done. There’s no place where loneliness is so absolute as in a big city.

  Cathy never comes out by herself. Always I have to search for her, and then it becomes like a magical dance of reunion. Every meeting is a search and a hunt; we are both the hunter and the prey, and there is the final triumph in our mutual loss.

  And then came that dreadful evening... this evening. I was walking about the fair, and it was getting later and later, and the tension in me was mounting. I could feel my blood pushing through my arteries, screaming inside my head and my heart as if it wanted to pump right out of my pores. I needed Cathy, and she didn’t come. I need Cathy and she’s not there. I can’t find her! I’ve been searching everywhere, between the fair booths and the caravans, then through the dark, silent small streets in the neighborhood, and she’s nowhere! But she has to be!

  Then... No, I don’t really know what happened exactly. Yes, I know there were people all around me, but they didn’t matter. I had to have Cathy. Suddenly a woman was screaming, and there were those policemen. Yes, I know, I should have come with them right away—but you see, I must not have noticed that they were policemen. They were keeping me from finding Cathy.

  Yes, you’re right, I shouldn’t have tried to hit them. I apologize for that. I won’t do it again. But you do understand that I can’t find Cathy here? It is much too clearly lighted here, and Cathy and I are children of the dark. Only there, in the dark, can I find her, and can we make love. But if you all come with me, and we search the fairground, surely we will find her. Then I’ll have my Cathy back and you can all go back to your usual work. Please, won’t you help me? Please?

  But... Hey, Fred! Dr. Hildeblink! How is it possible that you’re here? Good old Fred, my doctor! How did you get here?

  They found your card in my wallet, and they got you out of bed and brought you here? They shouldn’t have done that, not at this hour of the night. But since you’re here anyway, you must help me. I think they don’t believe me, but you know me, you know everything about Cathy—I’ve told it to you so many times.

  You’ll help me find Cathy? Really?

  When I’ve found her again? Yes, of course I’ll be quiet then—you know me. Yes, I promise: when I have Cathy back, I’ll go with the policeman to my house and go to sleep. I promise. Now do we go search for her? Not necessary, you say? But Fred, my dear Fred, you know how much I need her. You know I have to find her; otherwise I won’t go anywhere, I’ll stay sitting here till you help me. I hadn’t expected this of you, Dr. Hildeblink, not that you would be working against me. I thought you were my friend. That’s why I told you all about Cathy.

  Here? You say she’s here? How could she be? Don’t play ridiculous games, Dr. Hildeblink. I don’t believe you. If she’s here as you say, then show her to me.

  No, it’s true you’ve never lied to me, but I don’t believe... All right, I’ll watch and...

  Cathy!

  Fred, you weren’t lying! Cathy, my beloved Cathy, my tender beautiful darkling, you’re here, right in front of me.

  Yes, Fred. Yes, yes, yes, I see her. Her eyes glitter like polished stones, her smile is so warm and tender. I touch her thoughts and she needs me as always. How beautiful she is!

  Yes, I’ll keep my promise, too. Now that I know she’s safe, here in this room. Now I'll go with the policeman. Really, I’ll go to my room and go to sleep now. It’s not even necessary for him to go with me...

  All right, if you insist. Good night, officers. Good night, Fred. Thank you so very much for finding her.

  End of the tape

  ***

  “Such a man should be permanently kept under medical care,” the police officer said abruptly. “It is irresponsible to let him walk around free. He should be locked up somewhere.”

  “Come on, he isn’t really dangerous,” Dr. Fred
Hildeblink said calmingly. “You can trust my word on it. After all, I’ve been treating him close to three years, since the car crash. This is the first time he’s done anything like this. He’s just an old and very unhappy man; he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “So they said about the Boston Strangler, and, if I recall correctly, so said Anthony Perkins at the end of a movie in which he stabbed quite a number of innocent people to death.”

  “This isn’t a Hitchcock movie, officer.”

  “No. But he attacked a young girl, and did quite a filthy thing in front of a middle-aged lady with about ten other people around to watch it. If you ask me, he’s a spooky, demented little man—crawling around in the dark between the fair booths and doing who knows what else there.”

  “He didn’t attack that girl; he touched her by the shoulder only to ask if she’d seen Cathy. He’s asking everybody for her. The policeman will take him home, and there’ll be no more trouble.”

  “I certainly hope not. Next time he'll be spending the night here for indecent exposure. And what’s the truth about this whole idiotic story of his Cathy? What did you show him to make him go so willingly? My men had some trouble getting him in here—he’s much stronger than you’d expect for such an old man.”

  “He looks so old, but he isn’t, not really,” Dr. Hildeblink said softly. “And Cathy... doesn’t exist. It was very good of you to call me as soon as you found my card. He’s been in my care since the first symptoms developed after the accident. I suppose he told you about that? He’s sixty-two now. Three and a half years ago he held a good job with a mail-order company, where he’d been working for about fifteen years. He’s never been married.

  “Then one day he met a girl who came with a complaint about an order which had never arrived. A very ordinary girl—she worked in some factory or other, putting nails in boxes the whole day through. She was very beautiful... and very young, barely seventeen. Her name was Catherine... Cathy for short. He invited her for a cup of coffee, and they met a couple of times afterward, went for a drink or to a movie. He’s a very well-read man, you know, and a very fascinating and interesting man to talk to. That must have been the only thing Cathy saw in him, but he fell in love with her. It went bad, of course, when she realized that he wanted more from her than just some company and a chat. She threw a scene and kicked him out. He kept pursuing her with presents and letters, and finally her parents went to his employers and had him fired. Shortly afterward Cathy moved without leaving an address. He got very drunk, crashed his car... and you know the rest of the story.

  “Since then he’s been living in two worlds. By day he’s very normal; he now works for a firm distributing publicity flyers from mailbox to mailbox. But he never accepted the rejection. The human mind is a very strange and complicated thing: when it is confronted with something too horrible to believe it creates a shield around itself. We just... forget. We make believe it never happened. Cathy’s rejection was such a confrontation, and therefore to him it never happened. In the evening hours the loneliness gets too strong, the mind searches for an alternative. He lost all his friends after his affair and the accident, so he makes himself believe that he can read minds: now everybody is in some way his friend. So he created his own succubus: his Cathy. He is lost in the twilight zone of his own mind, and in that mental darkness his dream creature, his Cathy, waits for him.”

  “But you said she was here, in this room. What did you show him to make him calm down? A picture of that girl, Catherine?”

  “No. Cathy is not Catherine. Remember that Cathy is his own creation, and how could any photograph resemble a being who exists only in his own mind? There is only one face that he’ll recognize as Cathy. I showed him a pocket mirror.”

  After a last cup of coffee, Dr. Fred Hildeblink left the police station and slowly walked back through the fairground toward where he had parked his car. Most of the booths were closed now; only two of the pinball arcades were still open. He thought maybe he would treat himself to a pack of warm chips, but then decided against it. It was too late, bad for his stomach; he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep if he indulged.

  Besides, he wondered if he would be able to go to sleep at all. He felt slightly guilty, and yet glad that he had managed to get the affair cleaned up at the police station. Somehow he knew that he should have been able to prevent what had happened. During the last session with his patient he had felt a crisis coming, but at the end of the sitting he had thought he had it under control. Well, he had been proven wrong this time. He would see that it didn’t happen a second time.

  His patient had been very panicky the last time; that must have been... about a week ago, he could check it in his book. He could almost recall the exact words of his patient:

  “Cathy is going away from me, Fred, I feel it. The contact is changing. Maybe I’m getting too old... maybe I can’t give her enough... breath of life. She needs that energy so badly, that fresh breath of life that I can give her. The only thing I can give her. If she doesn’t get it, she’ll... I don’t know, maybe die... or maybe she’ll leave me, and that I wouldn’t be able to bear. I feel myself getting old and weak, and can’t hold on to my strength as I used to. And so I can’t pass it on to her... and she knows it. She’s getting distant. She’ll leave me, I can feel it, and I can’t stand the thought..."

  Dr. Hildeblink smiled compassionately. A darkling... “When you’ll sleep, my beautiful darkling, in the depths of a tomb...” Charles Baudelaire had once written that, in a poem in his collection Flowers of Evil; and no doubt it was out of that poem that his patient had gotten the expression “darkling.” His patient had always shown his taste for les poetes maudits and for the gothic novelists with their bombastic romanticism and their fascination with the supernatural. A succubus. Once his patient had said the word himself—a parasitic being that fed on the victim till he died. A mental vampire... But here the vampire was his own mind, his own loneliness. No wonder, when the mind was put under such heavy pressure, that it was so easy to turn to a supernatural being. It was easier than admitting one was destroying oneself. It was all so typical: the name association, the cold as symbolic of his mental coldness, and so typical of a hysteric.

  He had tried to keep his patient on a rational track by following him partly into his delusion, but now he’d have to put a firm halt to it. Dreams can’t go on forever. Precisely the fact that the crisis was manifesting itself now proved that the first real doubts as to the reality of the delusion were springing from the sick mind itself. They could be the first steps to an acceptance of reality, and from there on perhaps they could work together toward a complete cure. Once his patient could realize that Cathy was only an alternative shard of his own personality...

  Still Dr. Hildeblink felt dissatisfied. There were some things that didn’t fit into the pattern of schizophrenic delusions. Maybe it would be better if he visited his patient tomorrow, not just as his doctor but as his friend. He’d have to handle it carefully. He knew his patient, but the personality known as Cathy he knew only from what his patient had told him. He had hesitated to use hypnosis so far, but maybe it would be a good idea now to use it in the treatment.

  He passed a blotch of darkness between two fair booths, all locked up and silent. The darkness seemed like a gasping black mouth, and something stirred inside that mouth as if it stuck a tongue out at him. He stood still. Something was moving in the darkness there, a shadow moving forward. The hesitant, distant streetlamps threw a softly fearful light on the legs of a young woman. She wore boots. She was standing on the exact edge of light and darkness, her face and the upper part of her body hidden in the shadows.

  Something seemed to touch his mind, like a far fluttering of dark wings, as if the darkness whispered a name that remained unspoken on his lips.

  The young woman extended an arm and pointed at him. It felt as if an icy shock of coldness hit his mind, like a wave coming out at him from the dark.

  He wet his lips and put his hand
s in his pockets. They were shaking. I’m tired, he thought; I’m beginning to imagine things. Time I took off for a rest myself.

  The cold fingered his brain, seeping icy stalks down his back. He saw her hand, the palm extended and open, very white and very soft, the small long fingers without rings. The fingers moved—a calculated slow movement, inviting, waiting.

  As from very far away, there was a scream of desperation in his mind. It was gone in an instant, and he wasn’t sure he had ever heard it, that mindless insane scream of despair.

  It’s a hooker, he thought, clasping his hands together. It’s only a hooker, that’s all. I’ll just go away and forget her.

  The cold was intense now; his teeth chattered. It numbed his thoughts, as he stood there hesitating.

  Then the shadow disappeared into the dark between the fair caravans. He knew he had no choice; he would never be able to forget it if he didn’t find out, if he wasn’t certain...

  I want to go in there, he told himself, trying to convince himself. I want to go in there myself. And he knew he had to go; he had to follow her there into the waiting darkness, whoever or whatever she was.

  I Wonder What He Wanted…

  Selected fragments from the diary of Miss Francie Denvar, former teacher at Cornoudghe College, found among the possessions of the late inhabitant of Number Nine, Nowhill Street.

  June 2nd:

  Wonderful! The rest, the peace! At last I’m finished with the school turmoil, the endless mountains and mountains of examination copies to be corrected, the exhausting interrogations of uninteresting and uninterested youngsters who really couldn’t care less, the reports in X duplicates to be made, and all the rest! College has fallen from my shoulders like a badly-smelling dusty cloak, and I feel as if I’m arisen like a phoenix. The restfulness is like a soft wine, it reanimates me, thrills through my whole body. A real pity Georges couldn’t be here with me now for the whole vacation. But it was impossible, he said. Within the next week he has to leave for France, for some special article or other which he has to do for his paper. He thinks he’ll be away for at least three weeks, or maybe even more. Well, I’ll manage by myself, I suppose.