The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife,” Robert chanted dully. “Damn, I let her get away again.”

  “I tell you, Rampy,” Clarence Little-Saddle squared on him, “a man that lets his wife get away twice doesn’t deserve to keep her. I give you till nightfall; then you forfeit. I’ve taken a liking to the brood. One of us is going to be down there tonight.”

  After a while a bunch of them were off in that little tavern on the road between Cleveland and Osage. It was only half a mile away. If the valley had run in the other direction, it would have been only six feet away.

  “It is a psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk. “It is maintained subconsciously by the concatenation of at least two minds, the stronger of them belonging to a man dead for many years. It has apparently existed for a little less than a hundred years, and in another hundred years it will be considerably weakened. We know from our checking out folk tales of Europe as well as Cambodia that these ensorceled areas seldom survive for more than two hundred and fifty years. The person who first set such a thing in being will usually lose interest in it, and in all worldly things, within a hundred years of his own death. This is a simple thanato-psychic limitation. As a short-term device, the thing has been used several times as a military tactic.

  “This psychic nexus, as long as it maintains itself, causes group illusion, but it is really a simple thing. It doesn’t fool birds or rabbits or cattle or cameras, only humans. There is nothing meteorological about it. It is strictly psychological. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to it, or it would have worried me.”

  “It is continental fault coinciding with a noospheric fault,” said the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan. “The valley really is half a mile wide, and at the same time it really is only five feet wide. If we measured correctly, we would get these dual measurements. Of course it is meteorological! Everything, including dreams, is meteorological. It is the animals and cameras which are fooled, as lacking a true dimension; it is only humans who see the true duality. The phenomenon should be common along the whole continental fault where the earth gains or loses half a mile that has to go somewhere. Likely it extends through the whole sweep of the Cross Timbers. Many of those trees appear twice, and many do not appear at all. A man in the proper state of mind could farm that land or raise cattle on it, but it doesn’t really exist. There is a clear parallel in the Luftspiegelungthal sector in the Black Forest of Germany, which exists, or does not exist, according to the circumstances and to the attitude of the beholder. Then we have the case of Mad Mountain in Morgan County, Tennessee, which isn’t there all the time, and also the Little Lobo Mirage south of Presidio, Texas, from which twenty thousand barrels of water were pumped in one two-and-a-half-year period before the mirage reverted to mirage status. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to this, or it would have worried me.”

  “I just don’t understand how he worked it,” said the eminent scientist Willy McGilly. “Cedar bark, jack-oak leaves, and the world ‘Petahauerat.’ The thing’s impossible! When I was a boy and we wanted to make a hideout, we used bark from the skunk-spruce tree, the leaves of a box-elder, and the word was ‘Boadicea.’ All three elements are wrong here. I cannot find a scientific explanation for it, and it does worry me.”

  They went back to Narrow Valley. Robert Rampart was still chanting dully: “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife.”

  Nina Rampart came chugging up out of the narrow ditch in the camper and emerged through that little gate a few yards down the fence row.

  “Supper’s ready, and we’re tired of waiting for you, Robert,” she said. “A fine homesteader you are! Afraid to come onto your own land! Come along now; I’m tired of waiting for you.”

  “I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife!” Robert Rampart still chanted. “Oh, there you are, Nina. You stay here this time. I want my land! I want my children! I want an answer to this terrible thing.”

  “It is time we decided who wears the pants in this family,” Nina said stoutly. She picked up her husband, slung him over her shoulder, carried him to the camper and dumped him in, slammed (as it seemed) a dozen doors at once, and drove furiously down into the Narrow Valley, which already seemed wider.

  Why, that place was getting normaler and normaler by the minute! Pretty soon it looked almost as wide as it was supposed to be. The psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome had collapsed. The continental fault that coincided with the noospheric fault had faced facts and decided to conform. The Ramparts were in effective possession of their homestead, and Narrow Valley was as normal as any place anywhere.

  “I have lost my land,” Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. “It was the land of my father, Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son, Clarence Bare-Back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it.”

  Clarence Little-Saddle and the eminent scientist Willy McGilly were standing on the edge of Narrow Valley, which now appeared its true half-mile extent. The moon was just rising, so big that it filled a third of the sky. Who would have imagined that it would take a hundred and eight of such monstrous things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead, and yet you could sight it with sighters and figure it so.

  “I had a little bear-cat by the tail, and I let go,” Clarence groaned. “I had a fine valley for free, and I have lost it. I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible. Destitution is my lot.”

  Willy McGilly looked around furtively. They were alone on the edge of the half-mile-wide valley.

  “Let’s give it a booster shot,” Willy McGilly said.

  Hey, those two got with it! They started a snapping fire and began to throw the stuff onto it. Bark from the dog-elm tree—how do you know it won’t work?

  It was working! Already the other side of the valley seemed a hundred yards closer, and there were alarmed noises coming up from the people in the valley.

  Leaves from a black locust tree—and the valley narrowed still more! There was, moreover, terrified screaming of both children and big people from the depths of Narrow Valley, and the happy voice of Mary Mabel Rampart chanting “Earthquake! Earthquake!”

  “That my valley be always wide and flourish and such stuff, and green with money and grass!” Clarence Little-Saddle orated in Pawnee chant style. “But that it be narrow if intruders come, smash them like bugs!”

  People, that valley wasn’t over a hundred feet wide now, and the screaming of the people in the bottom of the valley had been joined by the hysterical coughing of the camper car starting up.

  Willy and Clarence threw everything that was left on the fire. But the word? The word? Who remembers the word?

  “Corsicanatexas!” Clarence Little-Saddle howled out with confidence he hoped would fool the fates. He was answered not only by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning, but also by thunder and raindrops.

  “Chahiksi!” Clarence Little-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would. It will be all right now. I can use the rain.”

  The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.

  The camper car struggled out of Narrow Valley through the little gate. It was smashed flat as a sheet of paper, and the screaming kids and people in it had only one dimension.

  “It’s closing in! It’s closing in!” Robert Rampart roared, and he was no thicker than if he had been made out of cardboard.

  “We’re smashed like bugs,” the Rampart boys intoned. “We’re thin like paper.”

  “Mort, ruine, ecrasement!” spoke-acted Cecilia Rampart like the great tragedienne she was.

  “Help! Help!” Nina Rampart croaked, but she winked at Willy and Clarence as they rolled by. “This homesteading jag always did leave me a little flat.”

  �
�Don’t throw those paper dolls away. They might be the Ramparts,” Mary Mabel called.

  The camper car coughed again and bumped along on level ground. This couldn’t last forever. The car was widening out as it bumped along.

  “Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flatlander say to the other?”

  “Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don’t think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road. The next time I do it, I think I’ll throw wood-grain plastic on the fire to see who’s kidding who.”

  Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) was a Russian writer who was interested in literature and theater from an early age but pursued a medical career. He served with the Red Cross during the First World War, then with the White Army during the Russian Revolution, and for a time was conscripted into the Ukrainian People’s Army, until almost dying of typhus. Because of his illness, he was not able to emigrate with his relatives to France; he never saw them again. In the early 1920s, Bulgakov moved to Moscow and abandoned his medical career for journalism, fiction, and playwriting, though he immediately struggled with censorship. He adapted his novel White Guards into the play The Days of the Turbins for the renowned Moscow Art Theatre, where it was directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. The production was briefly canceled, then revived at the insistence of Stalin, whose protection allowed it to play for another decade, becoming the work for which Bulgakov was best known in his lifetime, but the fame didn’t help him get further work produced or published, and the last years of his life were bitter ones. Bulgakov began writing the novel The Master and Margarita in the late 1920s and worked sporadically on it up until his death, when the novel was complete but Bulgakov had not had the chance to finish editing it. It was first published in a censored form by a Moscow literary magazine in 1966 and 1967, then in full form in Paris in 1969, and finally Russian readers were able to read the complete novel in 1973. Like much of Bulgakov’s work, The Master and Margarita is satirical and fantastical, hugely imaginative, and philosophically rich. In this chapter, “The Sinister Apartment,” we are presented with many of the main characters, and the stage is set for the fantastical strangeness to come.

  THE SINISTER APARTMENT

  (EXCERPT FROM THE MASTER AND MARGARITA)

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Translated by Ekaterina Sedia

  IF THE NEXT MORNING someone told Styopa Likhodeev, “Styopa! If you don’t get up this very minute, you’ll be executed by a firing squad!” Styopa would respond in an indolent, barely audible voice, “Go ahead, shoot me, do what you will, but I will not get up.”

  Forget getting up; he imagined that he could not even open his eyes, because the moment he would do so, a lightning would flash and tear his head into pieces. His head that was booming with heavy church bells, between his eyeballs and closed eyelids swam brown spots with fiery-green edges, and to top it all off he felt nauseous, in such a way that the nausea was inextricably linked to the sounds of some nagging phonograph.

  Styopa struggled to remember anything at all, but the only thing he was able to recall was that he, apparently yesterday, stood in an unknown location with napkin in his hand and tried to kiss some lady, while promising her that the next day, at noon exactly, he would come over for a visit. The lady refused, saying, “Oh no no, I won’t be home!” but Styopa insisted, “What if I go ahead and come over anyway!”

  Neither the woman’s identity, nor what hour of what day of which month was it now, Styopa had no idea, and worst of all, could not comprehend where he was. He decided to at least find out the latter, and to that end he peeled apart the sticky eyelids of his left eye. In the darkness, something glinted dully. Styopa finally recognized the mirrored console and realized that he lay supine in his bed (or rather the firmer bed of the jeweler’s widow), in the bedroom. Then his head throbbed, and he closed his eyes and moaned.

  Let us explain: Styopa Likhodeev, the director of the Variety Theater, came to his senses in the morning, in that very apartment he occupied with the deceased Berlioz, in a large six-storied building resting along the Sadovaya Street.

  It must be said that this apartment—number 50—had for a long while enjoyed if not bad then, in any case, strange reputation. Only two years ago it belonged to the widow of the jeweler de Fougere. Anna Frantzevna de Fougere, a very respectable and business-savvy fifty-year-old lady, rented three out of the five rooms to two tenants: one, whose name was likely Belomut; and another one, with a forever lost name.

  And so, two years ago unexplained events started taking place in the apartment: people started disappearing without a trace. Once a policeman showed up during a weekend, called the second tenant (the one whose last name was lost) to the entryway and told him that he was needed just for a minute down at the station, to sign something. The tenant ordered Anfisa, the loyal and long-time housekeeper of Anna Frantzevna, that if anyone called, to tell them that he would return in ten minutes, and left with the polite policeman in white gloves. But he did not return in ten minutes; in fact he never returned. The most amazing part of it was that apparently the policeman disappeared along with him.

  Religious, but more truthfully superstitious, Anfisa told very distraught Anna Frantzevna bluntly that it was sorcery, and that she knew very well who dragged away the tenant and the policeman, but would not mention such an entity so late at night. But as everyone knows, once sorcery starts, nothing can be done to stop it. The second tenant disappeared, as some remember, on Monday, and on Wednesday Belomut did too—as if the earth swallowed him—but under different circumstances. In the morning the car came to pick him up as usual, to take him to the office, but it never brought him back and never returned itself.

  Grief and terror of Madam Belomut could not be described. But alas both were short-lived. That very night when Anna Frantzevna (and Anfisa) returned from her dacha she had to hastily visit for some reason, she found neither of the citizens Belomut in the apartment. On top of it, the doors of both rooms the spouses occupied were sealed. Two days passed by and by. On the third day, Anna Frantzevna who suffered from insomnia this entire time, again hastily left for the dacha…needless to say, she never returned!

  Left alone, Anfisa, having cried her fill, went to sleep after 1 a.m. What happened to her after is unknown, but the denizens of other apartments told that all night long they could hear knocks of some sort, and that all night the windows blazed with electric light. In the morning it became apparent that Anfisa no longer was there.

  There were many legends told in the apartment building about the disappeared and the cursed apartment; for example there was one about the thin and religious Anfisa wearing on her desiccated chest a suede bag with twenty-five large diamonds belonging to Anna Frantzevna. Or that in the wood shed at the very dacha Anna Frantzevna had to visit so urgently some uncounted treasures in the form of those same diamonds as well as gold coins from Tsars’ mint had revealed themselves…and so on, in the same vein. But what we don’t know we are not swearing to.

  Whatever it was, the apartment stood empty and sealed only for a week, and then they moved in: deceased Berlioz with his spouse, and Styopa, also with a spouse. Naturally, as soon as they found themselves in this accursed apartment, everything went haywire. Namely, in the course of one month both wives disappeared. But not without a trace: they said that Madam Berlioz was seen in Kharkov with some choreographer, and that Styopa’s spouse showed up at Bozhedomka where, as they gossiped, the Variety’s director got her a room using his countless connections, but on the condition that she would stay away from Sadovaya…

  Anyway, Styopa moaned. He wanted to call housekeeper Grunya and ask her for a Pyramidon, but realized that it was foolish and that Grunya did not have any Pyramidon. He tried to call Berlioz for help, moaned twice, “Misha…Misha…” but as you well understand received no answer. The
apartment remained completely silent.

  After he wiggled his toes, Styopa realized that his socks were on; with trembling hand he touched his thigh to determine the presence of his trousers, but was unable to determine such.

  Finally, seeing that he was abandoned and alone, that there was no one to help him, he decided to rise, no matter what inhuman effort it would take. He peeled his sticky eyelids apart and the mirror reflected him as a man with hair sticking up in all directions, with a bloated face covered in black stubble, with swollen eyes, wearing a dirty shirt with the collar and the tie, long johns, and socks.

  This is how he saw himself in the console mirror, and next to the mirror he saw an unknown person, dressed in all black, in a black beret.

  Styopa sat on the bed and stared as hard as he could with his bloodshot eyes at the stranger. The stranger broke the silence as he said the following in his low, heavy voice with a foreign accent, “Good say, most likeable Stepan Bogdanovich!”

  A pause occurred then, after which Styopa managed to utter after the hardest effort, “How may I be of service?” and was quite shaken by his unrecognizable voice. He pronounced “how” in falsetto, “may I” in basso, and “be of service” did not come out at all.