Selected Stories Read online

  June 3rd:

  Poor diary, I’m sorry but I’m much too happy to spend much time in writing today! It is now half past eleven, and Georges has just left. I’m dreaming on my old, worn seat, and I’d rather go on doing nothing, but it would be unfair to you, my old companion, not to record this evening for the future. Georges has just asked me to marry him. Oh, the way he did it, so simple and straightforward, like everything he does, in fact not so very romantic. He just put his arm around me, and said, “Darling, when do we get married?” It seems so awfully down-to-earth and practical, when I see it written down; he should have done it with a kiss and a bunch of flowers (he knows I love roses—every young girl does…) but that’s just not HIS way of doing things. He caught me completely off guard, I didn’t know what to say. I just nodded. He’ll buy me an engagement ring tomorrow, first thing he’ll do in the morning before he goes to the office, he said. A very pretty one in platinum gold, with a sparkling diamond in its heart. But only a small one, he added as an afterthought. A small diamond, but a big heart. Georges can be romantic, if he wants to. As soon as he gets back from his Parisian assignment, we’ll announce our engagement officially. The wedding will be in October, we can’t make it sooner. Georges has too many things to do, and he won’t be able to get a vacation from the paper until that time. It doesn’t matter. I’m so happy, so happy!

  June 8th:

  I have taken Georges to the train. He kissed me and said, “I’ll be back soon darling. Don’t run too far.” I cried a bit, after the train had left, but I still feel so happy I could sing the whole day through. I’ll be married in October! Of course I knew he’d ask me one day but he waited so long…

  June 10th:

  I’ve found a marvel of a little house with a pretty though neglected garden, just what I’ve wanted all my life. It all came about accidentally. I was lonely and took a bus out of town, and then started walking… and I really stumbled upon it. A very small villa house, a bit old and rather isolated, but I’m sure it will be beautiful once I’ve finished with it. It’s almost the only house left in an old street, all the others on both sides have been torn down a long time ago. I liked it at first sight—what a cliche—and out of curiosity went into the garden to have a good look at it. Imagine, it was for rent! I immediately went to the address mentioned on the sign (you know how impulsive I am) and see! Now I already have the keys and the signed contract in my purse. Maybe I have been rather hurried with it, but after all I only rented it for one year to start with. I must phone the removal company, so that they can bring my few bits of furniture from the studio. I already phoned my landlord, Miss Esphalton, and she’s probably only too glad to be rid of me, though she didn’t say it in so many words. She never liked me anyway, and she has already got several people on her waiting list. I must send the great news to Georges immediately, and give him my new address.

  June 13th:

  Today they have brought the furniture. The fools broke the legs of one of my best chairs, and I didn’t tip them. That’ll show them, though they said that I will be refunded by their insurance company. I doubt that, but it hasn’t spoilt my good humour. The house simply is a jewel. Dusty and in need of painting, but a gem all the same. It has a kitchen, a living room and a library room downstairs, two big bedrooms and a work-room upstairs, and a big attic above. I brought someone to fix a few small holes in the walls, and one broken window. I’ll need other windows, though, as the glass is murky and soiled. There are no cellars, and even in the attic there is hardly a trace of real decay. No holes in the roof either, I checked that but I didn’t stay long. I don’t like attics. In the living-room there is a big fireplace with antique Flemish brickwork, and beside it a colossal mirror, with only a few small spots. I think I’ll go into town and choose a suitable wallpaper. I must pick up some of my savings from the bank too, after having paid a guarantee deposit and two months’ rent in advance.

  June 17th:

  Georges just wrote me a long and lovely letter. He’s doing fine, and hopes to finish his “reportage du coeur de Paris” much sooner than he thought. He’s very excited about our house, and can’t wait to see it, though he writes that he would have preferred to inspect it himself first before I moved in. I should really start giving the house a good cleaning now, but I don’t feel like it. That’s not like me, but I think it’s the heat which makes me feel so listless and tired. These last days, the sun seems almost to have burned a blazing hole in the cloudless sky, and the heat is lying over the house and me like some enormous suffocating hand. I hope it’ll rain soon. It usually does in this country. Just try taking a really long walk when the sun is so hot, and you’re very likely to return completely soaked by the rain.

  June 19th:

  I took a short walk this morning to get some supplies from the grocer. When I got back, I thought at first there was somebody there, waiting for me. But I was wrong, there was nobody. Still, the whole day I have had the impression that somebody is in the house, somebody always watching me, spying on me. I couldn’t shake that impression off, and I’m usually not a nervous woman. I’ve taken the big mirror away from beside the fireplace because it frightened me nearly to death this morning. I had just got up, and went downstairs, and somebody else came suddenly walking up to me. Of course I was still partly asleep, like I always am before I’ve had my first cup of coffee, but I should have known that it was only my reflection in that mirror. Well I do feel better, more at ease now that it’s gone, though the place where it hung shows clearly now against the discoloured wallpaper.

  June 20th:

  I can’t write much, I’m nervous, the slightest sound outside makes me jump as if the earth is opening under me. I can’t get rid of that weird feeling that somebody or something is looking over my shoulder, following me wherever I go. Another letter came from Georges this morning, a short hurried note. Something unforeseen happened, and he won’t be back till the end of August.

  June 22nd:

  I made a horrible discovery today. There must be rats in the house. I heard them, scrambling around in the attic. I went up, and when I threw the door open, something small and dark ran away. I stood there for a while, all the time feeling its eyes locked on me, watching, waiting for me to do something. I locked the door, and tomorrow I’m going to buy a dose of rat poison and a big cat.

  June 23rd:

  I put the cat in the attic, and I left the door ajar, so she could come and go whenever she felt like it. Later in the evening, I heard the door of the attic creak. I went upstairs with a strong flashlight, and something small hurried away from the beacon. When I came down, the cat was at the front door, frantically trying to get out. Every one of my attempts to catch her failed, and she acted as if she’d gone mad. The only results of my chase are some severe scratches on my hands from her claws.

  June 24th:

  This morning as I came down, I found the blasted cat in the living-room. The beast was dead, but there were no marks on her body. The eyes were bulging horribly, and the jaws wide open. Saliva and a bit of blood had dripped on to the floor. The cat must have been sick when I bought her. At first I wanted to go and complain to the pet shop where I got her, but I decided to leave it at that. I went upstairs again and searched the whole attic, but I found nothing living there, and no holes in the walls either. I have locked the attic. I don’t think I’ll bother buying another cat, though it is getting rather lonesome in the house.

  Late afternoon. Another discovery, and a creepy one this time. While I was walking through the garden, I suddenly stumbled over something. When I pushed the high growing grass away, I found a stone under it, the biggest part buried under the ground. Then when I looked closely I spotted the marks on it. They turned out to be letters, forming a name, which I could decipher after cleaning the stone a bit: Francesca Denverra. There were dates too, but I couldn’t make them out. I was only able to discover that they were sometime in the late 19th Century. It must be an old tombstone. I don’t want that thing
lying around in my garden. First thing tomorrow morning I’ll complain to the landlord to get it taken away.

  June 25th:

  The landlord wasn’t home, so I left a note, and I’ll see him tomorrow. I want a garden with my house, not a miniature graveyard. Every day seems to bring new discoveries. As I had again heard the scurrying in the attic, I decided to try the rat poison. While I was laying it down, I found heaps of yellowed paper and old writing material in one of the cabinets. There were several notebooks, full of a spidery handwriting, definitely female, all notes for novels or short stories, apparently. I took them down with me to have a good look at them. They seem strange stories for a woman to write: fictional notes on witchcraft, mandragores, the occult, ghostly appearances, vampirism, lycanthropy, satanism, and other weird things. The titles alone seem sufficient: “The Creature from the Tomb,” “Hands of Decay,” “The Whispering Thing,” “A Taste of Rain and Darkneses”… Once I started reading them, I had to finish them, though their contents often disgusted me. The horribly realistic way she wrote about those things, as if she really believed in them herself, had even experienced them! But then, once there was an eighteen-year-old girl who wrote “Frankenstein,” and many other female writers have gone in for horror stories. I’ll ask the landlord also about these things tomorrow. Maybe the manuscripts, even if many seem unfinished, might have a certain bibliographical value. Who knows, I might even make some money out of them!

  June 26th:

  I had a long talk with the proprietor this morning. I was dead right—what a choice of words! The thing in the garden is indeed a gravestone. Fortunately there’s nothing under it. Miss Denverra, born in 1834, died in 1917, seems to have had a certain reputation as an author. The landlord said that she had written several novels, but that of course was before his time, he hadn’t read them, but probably they were in the local library. When she died, he had bought the house from a distant cousin who had inherited it. In her will, she had requested that her grave in the garden shouldn’t be disturbed. The queer woman had bought the tombstone several years before her death, and had it placed where I’d seen it, but of course she was buried in the cemetery—though the landlord had kept the stone in the garden. “Rather picturesque,” he said, “it makes the house something a bit special you know.” He refused to remove the stone—“It doesn’t hurt you, does it?” he said—and as I don’t want to give up my lovely house, I’ll have to put up with it, at least till Georges arrives and finds a solution.

  I still have that idea of someone watching over my shoulder. It gives me the creeps.

  June 27th:

  I went to the library and borrowed a few books by Francesca Denverra. They didn’t have all her works the librarian said, but they did have all her best and most important novels. He told me that she died at the top of her creative power. He seemed quite an expert in the field, and told me many details he knew about Denverra, how she sometimes worked for several years on one book, refusing to use a typewriter, living only on her savings and the irregular income her books brought her. He gave me “Scream from the Cellar,” “All the Shadows of Fear” and “Eye of the Vampire,” and said that if I wanted some others he had many by Machen, James and Poe, and even a few scarce titles by Lovecraft and Hodgson. But I have enough with Denverra. Besides, I never liked horror stories, and these only interest me because the woman has lived in the house. I leafed through some of the books. Horrible. How could a woman in her sane mind ever write those accursed blasphemous things? The books themselves seem filled with their evil, overflowing with decay and corruption. They disgust me … and yet, in a strange way, they fascinate by their horror.

  June 29th:

  I still feel listless. The heat keeps on, the earth feels dry and hot, the air stale and strangling, trees give almost no shade. The world outside seems dead, burned, and only the house gives peace and shadow. The damned tombstone is giving me nightmares now. Tonight I dreamed that I saw Francesca Denverra, sitting in one of my chairs, now in the attic, with the notes of her novel. “The Smell of Blood” in her lap. She was making corrections in the notebook, and I could read everything she wrote, and it made me feel sick. When I awoke I was soaked in sweat.

  July 3rd:

  At last another letter from dear Georges. Good news this time! He thinks he’ll be back very soon now, no date fixed but much earlier than expected. Thank God! I just can’t wait till he gets here, though the feeling of being watched has gone away now. I sleep much better too, untroubled by the weird nightmares I was having up till a few nights ago. It’s almost as if finally I’ve been accepted by this house as its new inhabitant, and now it gives me peace.

  July 4th:

  I have read “Scream from the Cellar” a second time through. I had wanted to go to the library to pick up some love stories and historical romances, but the heat was just too much; it engulfed me in a suffocating grip as soon as I left the house. When will it ever rain? So there’s nothing left in the house but Denverra’s books. It doesn’t seem so horrible anymore upon a second reading, mainly I guess because now I know in advance what is going to happen. The shock elements have lost their power, and now I can spend more time on the literary qualities, and ignore the plot. In a way there is a weird beauty in her books, a beauty which is evil and yet absorbing. It is like the nightmarish quality of a Bosch painting, or a Dali, or the shrieking yet hilarious madness of a Topor or a Gahan Wilson cartoon, and sometimes even the weird and unreal fascination of a Matisse.

  July 6th:

  This afternoon, I slept a bit in a chair in the garden. When I walked back into the house I felt strange, as if something had been very subtly changed while I was away; as if something was really out of place. Only after a while did I realise what it was. It’s my furniture, my own modern furniture, which doesn’t fit the rooms. I had thought at first to change the rooms completely into something modern, but you can’t do that with these old houses and their high ceilings and their building structure. But I must do something about it, maybe rearranging the furniture will make it look better, more homely.

  July 7th:

  I re-read Denverra’s notes, her unfinished manuscript. The librarian was right, the manuscripts are grotesque, horrible, almost the work of a deranged mind, and yet they are powerful, much better written than any of the published books, much more meaningful in content and researched details. Literature really lost something with her. There were even a few parts I must have skipped over the first time, they seem to have been added later, all in her small spidery handwriting.

  July 8:

  Today I had all the modern furniture removed. I tried to make it look better, but it kept on degrading the atmosphere of the rooms. Now it looks much better. I only kept my chairs, and brought down the old cabinets from the attic and dusted them off. It looks now like it must have looked before, so easy, solemn, and peaceful. I even put the big mirror back in its place. I couldn’t stand looking at the awful mark on the wallpaper where it had hung.

  July 9:

  The weather is beautiful. I have been sitting idly in the garden through the whole day, without bothering to do anything. A lot of sun is good for me, the doctor once said, and I have always kept that in mind. Come to think of it, it’s really been a long time since I saw him. Not that I need him for anything, I feel better than I ever felt before, perfectly healthy.

  July 12:

  I think I’ll have to start working again one of these days. No doubt my publisher will be severely angry with me yet again, though he should know my habits by now! I’m very surprised he hasn’t written already, asking for my first draft, or at least for some working notes on my latest novel. I have re-read my draft notes for the plot structure, and they’re good. A complete synopsis already, with detailed notes on all the central characters. Now only a few researches on the background, and I can begin with writing in earnest. “Metempsychosis” will be my best novel so far.

  July 14:

  Something very strange happ
ened this morning. A young man called, a certain Georges Vaarberg, who had come direct from Paris. He was very surprised when I opened the door, and mumbled something about a probable mistake. He asked me if I knew a young teacher, a certain Miss Frances Denvar, who used to live here. I answered him that no-one lived here except me. He excused himself, and went away. At the entrance he turned and looked back, a baffled expression on his face. I didn’t see him again.

  I wonder what he wanted from an old woman like me?

  A Taste of Rain and Darkness

  Night had crawled over the city, as a slug over a small fish. In thick layers, she had drowned the evening sounds, until now there was only the silence of darkness and the rain. Night was a mother for her children, protecting them, smoothing them in her black cloak. Soft and tender and terrifying.

  The street was empty now, the throbbing of its life-blood ebbed away with the going of its inhabitants. The dim light of a few lanterns created false twilights in the deep portals and comers of the old houses, and gave a wet glitter to the pavement. It changed the downpouring November rain into a silver-threaded spiderweb, with downgliding pearls.

  He was an unmoving statue, a part of the darkness and the rain. The wetness seeped ice-fingers through his drenched coat. He waited, with his closed hands protecting the spark of fire in his cupped palms, a half-finished cigarette. He waited, as he had waited ten years ago, and nine years ago, and every night between the seventh and the eighth November. It rained, as it always rained that night, every damned year.