by John Norman
I felt my shoulders seized, and I was turned to face Brunetto. I sensed something, an emanation, or radiation, or vapor, or something that was like such things, and I tried ineffectually to extricate myself from that grip.
I felt myself shaken and I clenched my eyes closed, and then I was thrown to the floor, stunned.
“It is only psychological suggestion,” I told myself as I lay on the floor. “It is to be resisted.”
“Brunetto, no!” cried Giacomo.
I saw the white, starched nurse’s cap crumpled at the side of the bed.
The door to the hospital room closed.
Miss Henry lay on her belly amidst the glass and flowers. In one hand, bleeding from a cut, she clutched a bloom. “I love him,” she wept.
Dr. Roberts was moaning, and Dr. Hill lay on the floor, bleeding.
I had heard a cry outside the door, for the commotion within the room must have attracted attention. I struggled to my feet, but did not press the bulb to signal the nurse’s station. I feared bringing innocent people into the ambit of whatever force had within these antiseptic precincts been inadvertently unleashed, that force which had herein wreaked such havoc.
I found my dark glasses, which had been flung from my face, as I had been shaken in the hands of the patient. The lenses were smoked, and cracked, the temples half melted.
I looked to where Miss Henry lay. Her uniform was wet and blackened, and torn. One shoe was gone. Apparently, as her hair was terribly disarranged, and the barrette gone, she had been controlled by means of it, dragged to the side of the bed, and there put to the floor. He had probably there lifted her to her hands and knees, and held her in place, helplessly to him, by the waist, her arms thusly unable to fend him away. She was now on her stomach, trembling. She pressed her lips, the lipstick smeared about the left side of her face, to the grasped blossom, a rose, and kissed it. “I love him,” she wept. “I love him!”
“Uncle! Uncle!” I heard, from outside the room, a weird, piteous cry.
“It is Brunetto!” cried Giacomo. He rose unsteadily to his feet, and staggered toward the door.
“Beware!” I cried.
“No, no!” he said. “It is Brunetto, Brunetto!”
I rose to my feet, half falling. I could not let Giacomo face whatever terrors might lie outside in the hall.
I opened the door, and outside, in a strangely contorted position, lay an orderly. He had doubtless come toward the room to investigate, to help. Nurses, doctors, and even some patients, were in the hall, but muchly aligned along its sides, clearing a path for Brunetto and Giacomo. The elder Silone was leading Brunetto down the hall, away. Their passage was not contested.
“Wait!” I called.
But Brunetto, guided by his uncle, had disappeared through an exit, one leading to the stairwell.
I sank down for a moment in the hall. I was trembling, gasping. It seemed I could not move. One of the young residents now hurried to the orderly. He removed his stethoscope from the man’s chest. “He’s dead,” he said.
I held to the wall and stumbled after Brunetto and Giacomo. I was sure that whatever madness had seized the young man must now be passed. I made my way as best I could, drunkenly, to the exit through which they had left the corridor.
I looked upward.
In a moment I had come to the roof. I pressed aside the heavy metal door, and felt the wind whipping across the roof, and saw the skyline in the distance, the river, the marshes, the harbor.
“Stop!” I cried to Brunetto.
Giacomo, tears in his eyes, looking toward his nephew, held my arm. “No,” he said. “No, doctor, no.”
Brunetto stood some yards away, at the edge of the roof. I feared if I approached him more closely, he might fall.
“It is best,” whispered Giacomo, against the fresh September wind moving across the roof. “It is his wish.”
“Brunetto!” I called.
“He needed help to get to the roof,” said Giacomo. “He has not yet learned to see.”
Brunetto stood at the edge of the roof, looking out over the city. We do not know how much he saw, or what he understood of what he saw. But he must have sensed that there was spread before him a vast and wonderful world. I should like to think he felt that, that he knew that.
Suddenly Brunetto seemed to struggle at the edge of the roof. He twisted, and was half bent over, as though in pain. “You will not kill me!” we heard. “You cannot kill me!”
“Do not interfere!” said Giacomo.
Then he cried to his nephew. “You are strong! Your father was strong! You can kill it! Kill it!”
“No!” we heard, an angry, protesting cry.
“Margaret! Margaret!” cried Brunetto.
And then as I cried out in dismay, he leapt from the roof.
I thought I heard, in his descent, a long, drawn out, wild, protesting, trailing cry, “No!”
“It is over,” said Giacomo, weeping.
We went to the edge of the roof and could make out the body, far below. There was already a small crowd gathered.
How small everything looked from that height.
Without speaking I left the roof, to go below, to assist as I could, if need be. Giacomo followed.
In a few minutes I knelt beside the body.
A crowd had gathered by now.
Nothing, it seemed, could have survived that fall. There was little doubt that Brunetto was dead. Every bone in his body must have been broken, and some of them, ribs, and a femur, protruded from the body. The head was crushed. The sidewalk and body were bloody.
Brunetto was dead.
I wondered if whatever had been within him, or had come and gone within him, was dead.
“You cannot kill me,” it had said.
“Back, back, boy!” cried a man, trying to restrain a large, stocky Rottweiler on its leash. It was a large, dark, spotted, ugly brute.
Its tongue was lolling.
“Disgusting!” said a woman.
“He won’t hurt anything!” said the fellow. “He won’t bite. He is quite tame!”
The dog, of course, carries in its heritage the legend of the pack, the memory of the wolf, the feral response to blood.
“Get it away!” I said.
But the dog had turned about and pulled free of the collar and rushed on the bloody body. It was snarling, and biting, and lapping at the blood. It would have been dangerous to attempt to restrain it, without the leash or collar.
“Come, boy!” said its owner, and took it about the shoulders, to pull it from the body, but, to his horror, the beast spun about and tore at his throat, leaving a terrifying gash at the side of the neck, and the fellow reeled backward, blood streaming between his fingers. If those fangs had been a hand’s breadth more centered the jugular would have been torn open. In that moment, doubtless from the mauling of the body, the eyes opened, and I thought I saw a tiny, malevolent smile transfuse the features of that battered, torn, empty wreck that had once been the house of a human being.
It seemed to me I heard, in a soft whisper, “You cannot kill me.”
The dog then, snarling, turned about, and the crowd widened its circle about the brute.
Then, for the briefest moment, it seemed that the eyes of that animal and my own eyes met.
The gaze that met mine seemed almost human, though insidiously evil, and the jaws of the beast seemed to move in such a way that fancy might have thought it a smile, fiendish and malevolent. Then, suddenly, it turned away, and ran through the crowd.
“Go inside,” I said to its owner. “Get treatment.”
I saw that Giacomo was now beside me. “Did you see?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Giacomo, sadly.
I am not settled in my own mind, as to the manner in which the preceding events are best explained.
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br /> One supposes that an optimum explanation would be in terms of psychological suggestion, and coincidence.
There was no hope to restore the vision of my colleague and friend, Roberts. It is known that hypnosis can induce physical alterations, blistering and such, and so we might best attribute his tragedy to that form of causation. Dr. Hill suffered a stroke, it seems, and lost the control of his skilled hands. He no longer practices, save in a consultative capacity. Old Giacomo took his retirement from the hospital, and lives alone in the city. I am getting on much as usual. The orderly who had died in the corridor had been the victim of a massive heart attack. He had, it seems, a history of heart problems. Miss Henry is pregnant. It seems likely that the child will be normal and healthy. The trait of the jettatore, if one believes there is such a trait, is a rare one, one might even say, recessive, or recessivelike, to use a metaphor. Brunetto was a fine young man. His mental instability, and his succumbing to superstition, were his tragedies.
I have sometimes wondered what became of the Rottweiler.
How Close the Habitat of Dragons
“Describe the room,” said the inspector.
I did so, in some detail.
“You have been there,” he said.
“No,” I said. “But I remember it.”
“Then you were there,” he said.
“No,” I said. “The memory, you see, is not mine.”
I later sat on a bench, it was early autumn, and pondered the matter.
I had these memories, yes, but they were not my memories. There is a difference, you know. One’s own memories are unmistakable. Even if they are false memories, constructions from fragments of recollection, or outright fabrications, they are unmistakably one’s own constructions or fabrications. They have one’s mark on them, so to speak. They say “mine.” But these memories did not say “mine.” Clearly, unmistakably, they said “not yours, not yours.”
I supposed this sort of business was not unique to me, as I was, as far as I could tell, in no sense unique, other than in those ways in which any other human being is unique, as, say, every twig, or pebble, is unique. On the other hand I had not heard of this sort of thing before. It was, at any rate, unfamiliar. Perhaps, I thought, psychology has a name for it. I wonder if you have ever had such an experience.
Perhaps you will speculate, with some plausibility, at least until you know more about this, that I might have gone mad. I certainly considered that possibility at first, but, I think, with a curiosity, a serenity, and a detachment which I would suppose would be unusual among those suffering from the defensive agitations of insanity. To be sure, as I understand it, the insane usually do not regard themselves as insane, and, I suppose, in their own unusual experiential world, they would be right. Indeed, in their small, unusual universes they perhaps constitute a paradigm of rationality. In a world of madness only the mad can be sane, and so on. The others simply do not understand. But there are some serious reasons for discarding this hypothesis of madness, at least in my case, for the peculiarities to which I unwillingly found myself subject fitted too nicely, even terrifyingly so, I am afraid, into our great common world of the allegedly sane. The memories, you see, in so far as I could put them to the bar of verification, proved to be veridical. They were actual memories, it seemed, and testable as such. More of that shortly.
In any event I was either insane or not. If I wasn’t, then that was an end of it, at least as far as that question was concerned. If, on the other hand, I was insane, it seemed to be an insanity of a sort which was more peculiar than debilitating or dangerous. I did my work, I discharged my duties, I engaged in my social relations, and so on. Nothing in my exterior life, so to speak, was awry. I considered consulting a psychologist, or psychiatrist, but did not do so. That could always be done later. In the meantime, given the nature of the memories, and the possible obligations which might arise out of them, I did not wish to risk possibly instigating some sort of conceivable professional intervention, for example, sedation, treatment of some sort, being placed under surveillance, being remanded to some authority for evaluation, possibly being institutionalized, temporarily or indefinitely, or such. I think you can understand that. Surely that would be inconvenient. And, as I suggested earlier, there was no hurry about the matter.
More importantly, if the memories were veridical, if they corresponded to reality, at least closely, I was not insane, no more than an individual amongst the blind who can open his eyes and see objects that are truly there.
One would be different, true, but not insane. Gifted, or cursed, perhaps, but not insane. No one would be insane. One, however, might be gifted, or cursed.
Certainly I did not want the memories. You may be sure of that. Some of them were alarming, and disturbing.
So there seemed to be two sorts of memories involved, the usual sort that one recognizes as one’s own, namely, such things as memories of incidents from one’s childhood, events of the day, conversations, what one had for breakfast, and such. Then there was the other sort, clearly memories also, as it turned out, but also, as clearly, not mine.
The first memory, even though it bore the mark of memory, but not that of my memory, I rejected as mnemonic. I refused, at that time, despite its psychological cast, to count it as a memory.
I did not know the individual in the memory. I had never seen him. He was elderly, perhaps sickly. The room was dingy, with drawn blinds, half dark, papers were about, cluttering the floor. There was a desk there, a box, metal, open on the desk. The man turned about, startled. He seemed angry, then frightened.
I thought this memory must be a sudden, inexplicable, unrelated, random image, and what shortly ensued must be the manifestation of some sort of insistent, terrible, uncontrollable, irresistible day dream, an alarming, ugly fantasy, an unwelcome, inadvertent, heinous fiction, in its way an unsettling thing, terribly so, some sort of waking nightmare.
The hand went behind the old man’s neck, pulling him forward. I remembered the sight of the blade, no more than a glimpse, a flash, so quick, so brief, and how it entered the body, the rip of cloth, a tiny sound, the movement, the pushing in, the grunt of the old man, his slipping downward, blood on the shirt, the floor, on the hand with the knife, the stepping over him, the going to the box on the desk.
Thankfully this was all there was to the first visitation of this thing, though it recurred, more darkly, more disturbingly, with ever greater detail and depth, from time to time, over the next weeks. Occasionally it comes back, even now.
One may speak of a memory model of reality.
When one remembers what one did, what one said, and so on, it is usually as though one stood outside of oneself, and observed oneself. One sees oneself, at least commonly, from the outside, so to speak, when one remembers oneself. Consider a memory of yourself walking down a street, for example. You will usually, at least, see yourself in this memory from above, and usually from behind. When you recall shaking the hand of a friend, embracing a lover, speaking to a group, you will usually see yourself in the memory doing so, which is quite different, of course, from the experience of actually doing these things. When one walks down the street actually one does not see oneself walking down the street, though one is aware of doing so. It is in the memory, rather, that one sees oneself walking down the street, and so on. In any event, this is common in memory, if not universal.
And I saw, or sensed, the assailant in the memory, rather from behind, moving swiftly, closing, the knife flashing, which had been held to the side until that moment. I did not see the face of the assailant.
Despite the vivacity of this imagery, and its irresistible sense of the veridical, its emblazoned sense of the nonrepudiable, I refused to accept it as genuinely mnemonic. Oddly, too, in the experience, and certainly in its subsequent repetitions, I had first, a sense of hatred, and decision, and then, in the doing of the deed, a sense of power and elation, and
then, in moments, a sense of greed and eagerness, and then the hand was rifling in the contents of the metal box, clutching and drawing forth bills, even coins, and thrusting them in his pockets. Then, but moments after, as it seemed to see, almost for the first time, the twisted, bloodied figure of the old man on the floor, there was a sense of anger, and there was not that much money, and then there was a sense of horror, of sudden loathing, then of terror, and guilt. And then the figure rushed from the room.
Though the memories were of the same event, the later ones, as I have suggested, seemed richer, in a dark sense, and more detailed than the earlier, almost fragmentary recollection. Indeed, it was almost as if the memory were being elaborated upon, or was being reinstituted, to accommodate thoughts and feelings that may not have been there in the beginning. Or perhaps it was rather that the renewal of the memory was now being experienced through a filter of subsequent reflections, being drenched, as it were, in an emotive context which was not present in the beginning, which seemed primarily simple, rapid, more primitive, more reflexive. It was not simply then, later, a memory but, so to speak, a memory of a memory, one now clothed with disgust, fear, perhaps regret, perhaps some sort of remorse. I sensed in it, too, a nascent self-loathing. The assailant, I speculated, would have preferred for the old man, however hated, to have been absent. The assailant, however driven by fury or greed, did not seem to have in him the stuff of the killer, the psychopathic detachment, the criminal insouciance, with which one might break a stick, or crush a box.
Despite the psychological signs which commonly, infallibly, identify a passage of thought as a memory, distinguishing it from idle imagery, calculation, or such, I continued to reject these experiences as genuinely mnemonic. I knew nothing of the individuals and incidents involved. The eerie sense of reality attending these episodes, however, was disturbing.
I suspected myself of self-generating them, somehow, for some reason, but this thought, too, was disturbing. They had come suddenly upon me, without anticipation or warning. I had no history of such things. Too, I found them unaccountable, not only for their explicitness, but nature. I did not think I was the sort of person who would be likely to, or even could, produce things of this sort. They were not me, so to speak, or, at least, me, as I knew myself. I did entertain the hypothesis that such aberrations, seemingly so different from my conscious modalities, might somehow be products of the subconscious mind, and its less favored aspects, that they might be analogous in their way to lurking denizens prowling within unsuspected caverns, monsters, now somehow breaking free, and bursting snarling, vicious, and appetitious, into the light, appearing embarrassingly now, suddenly, within the white-washed precincts and antiseptic corridors of hypocrisy, the benign, acceptable, well-lit localities of the conscious mind. How close might be the habitat of dragons!
