The Uncanny Reader

by Marjorie Sandor

  A chair lying on its side. A crooked mirror, reflecting what looked like mist, or gas. Smoke stains like widespread black wings on the once-white wall.

  A smell of something terrible, like burnt flesh.

  “Please! Let’s leave.”

  “No one can see us.”

  “People have died here. You can tell. Please let’s leave.”

  The husband laughed at the wife, irascibly. In the reflected light from the stained glass his skin was unnaturally mottled, rubefacient; his eyes narrowed with thought, a kind of frightened animal cunning. His nostrils widened and contracted as if, like an animal, he was sniffing the air for danger.

  The wife pulled at his arm and he threw off her hand. But he relented, and followed her back to their car.

  The wife saw that the husband had parked the car crookedly at the curb. It was a large gleaming new-model Acura, a beautiful silvery-green color, yet parked so carelessly it looked clownish. The husband saw this too and drew in his breath sharply.

  “What the hell? I didn’t park the car like this.”

  “You must have.”

  “I said, I did not.”

  “Then who did?”

  “You drove.”

  “I did not drive! You drove.”

  “You drove, and you parked the car like a drunken woman or a—a senile woman. Lucky we aren’t in town, you’d have a ticket.”

  “But I didn’t drive here. I would never have driven here. I didn’t even bring my handbag, with my driver’s license.”

  “Driving without a license! That’s points on your license.”

  The wife was deeply agitated. The smell of the burnt house and what had burnt inside it was still in her nostrils. Badly she wanted to flee home and lie down on the bed and hide her face and sleep but in the corner of her eye she saw a figure approaching her and the husband, from the house across the cul-de-sac. A white-haired woman, genteel, with kindly eyes, in gardening clothes, on her head a wide-brimmed straw hat. On her hands, gloves. The wife saw that the white-haired woman had been tending to roses bordering the driveway of her house, a striking red-brick Edwardian with a deep front lawn. Obviously, the white-haired woman had, like the wife, a gardener-helper who came at least once a week to till the soil for her and take out the worst of the weeds.

  “Excuse me! Hello.”

  The white-haired woman removed her soiled gloves, smiling at the husband and the wife. Hers was a beautiful ruin of a face, soft as a leather glove; her nose was thin, aristocratic. Her small mouth was pale primrose-pink.

  “Are you—by any chance—considering that house? I mean—to buy?”

  “To buy? The house isn’t in any condition to be inhabited.”

  “Yes. But it could be rebuilt and repaired.”

  “And it isn’t for sale anyway, so far as we can see. Is it?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I mean—it might be listed with a realtor. Realtor’s signs aren’t allowed in Crescent Lake Farms.”

  The white-haired woman smiled at them wistfully. She went on to say how hopeful they all were, on West Crescent Drive, that someone would buy the house soon, and restore it. “What a beautiful house it was! This is all such a shame and a—tragedy.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “The fire was—wasn’t—an accident. So the investigators ruled.”

  “Who set the fire, if it wasn’t an accident? One of the sons?”

  Seeing that the husband was eager to know, the white-haired woman became cautious. She backed away, though with a polite smile.

  “No one knows. Not definitely.”

  “Was there a son? A teenager?”

  “There’s an investigation—ongoing. It’s been years now. I don’t know anything more.”

  “You must know if they died in the fire? Someone did die—yes?”

  “Who?”

  “Who? The Jesters, of course. How many of them died in the fire?”

  The husband was speaking harshly. The wife was embarrassed of his vehemence, with this gracious stranger. She tugged at his arm, to bring him back to himself.

  “‘The Jesters’? I don’t understand.”

  “What was the name of the family who lived here?”

  “I—don’t remember. I have to leave now.”

  The white-haired woman turned quickly away. That so gracious a person would turn her back on fellow residents of Crescent Lake Farms was astonishing to the wife though the husband grunted as if such rude behavior only confirmed his suspicions.

  “Let’s go. ‘The Jesters’ are taboo, it seems.”

  The husband drove. At the intersection of West Crescent Drive with a smaller road called Lilac Terrace he turned left, thinking to take a shortcut to Juniper, and home; but Lilac Terrace turned out, as the wife might have told the husband, to be a dead end. NO OUTLET.

  After some maneuvering, the husband and the wife returned home to 88 East Crescent Drive. In their absence, the house had remained unchanged.

  * * *

  Next morning at dawn they were awakened by—what was it?—a battery of shots—crack crack crack CRACK.

  The wife sat up in panic thinking that the roof of the house was collapsing upon them.

  The husband swung his legs out of bed in panic thinking that someone had entered the house, to shoot them.

  They went to the window which was a floor-to-ceiling window with a balcony, rarely used, outside. Because of the Jesters’ unpredictable noises, the husband and the wife no longer opened this window even on cool summer nights.

  The husband’s face was mottled with rage, and fear. The wife thought I will comfort him all the days of our lives.

  It was the morning of July 4. The Jesters were celebrating early.

  THE DEVIL AND DR. TUBEROSE

  John Herdman

  Dr. Marcus Tuberose was being victimised. Whether it was because he had a poetic temperament, or because of his present difficult domestic circumstances, or because of the machinations of Dr. Philip Pluckrose, his rival and enemy, or whether all these factors were fatally combining to discredit and disadvantage him was not yet clear. An artistic sensibility, he well knew, was not a recommendation in the world of academic departmental politics; rather it was a focus of jealousy, suspicion, and mistrust. Dr. Tuberose did not flaunt his superiority in the very least; but neither on the other hand did he attempt hypocritically to conceal it. He knew his worth, and he knew that some day that worth would be recognised. But his openness in this respect did put him at a disadvantage, he was well aware of that. He did not conceal that from himself, not at all.

  The fact that he had recently been deserted by his wife, Malitia, did not help either. The break-up of a marriage might no longer be in itself a social embarrassment, but in this case the circumstances, the particular and special circumstances … Dr. Tuberose was not unconscious of the fact that there were people who did not scruple to laugh at him behind his back. People were like that, and academics in particular were like that. Dr. Tuberose knew that he had not always made himself popular. He spoke his mind when it would be against his conscience to keep silent, and that was not a worldly-wise thing to do. But he thanked God that worldly wisdom had never been a part of his make-up. He was also not adept at currying favour in high places, unlike certain successful departmental politicians he could think of. It was amazing, he always thought, how intelligent people were so easily taken in by flattery. But then vanity was a powerful force, a more powerful force than intelligence, or disinterested commitment, a much stronger force than honesty or intellectual integrity … that was the way the world was, the way it had always been.

  Ever since it had become known that Professor McSpale was to spend the coming academic year at the University of Delaware, a certain sentence had kept revolving and repeating itself in Dr. Tuberose’s head. He had not exactly composed it, it had come as it were unbidden and without his full consent. These things happened to people of a poetic sensibility, of an intuitive temperament, they were not a
ltogether under conscious control. “Marcus Aurelius Tuberose, M.A., B. Litt., Ph. D., has been appointed Acting Head of the Department of English Literature for the academic year 1988–89.” That was the little sentence, or jingle. It was silly, he knew—he was even a little ashamed of it, deep down. But, after all, the message which it contained communicated an essential truth. The formal recognition which that sentence would represent, should it ever emerge from the mind of Dr. Tuberose into outer reality, would be no more than he deserved. He did not expect it or ask for it, he disdained to canvas it or tout for it or flatter for it, but he was too honest to hide from himself the simple fact that he deserved it. Not that he wanted it, no, but simply that he deserved it.

  A month ago it had seemed to him that it was really going to happen. Things were looking good, he felt, he was not blind to the impression that there were certain factors in his favour, certain realities which it would be foolish to ignore, unrealistic, in a sense, to disregard … Then had come the day of the departmental meeting. Dr. Tuberose had arrived early, but Philip Pluckrose was there before him, and so, strange to say, was Professor McSpale. Dr. Tuberose did not like the smell of that. They were huddled deep in conversation when he entered, McSpale expatiating assertively but in low, almost conspiratorial tones, Pluckrose nodding vehemently, but with a look of fawning obsequiousness that was quite revolting. When Tuberose entered the room they ceased their confabulations quite suddenly, even blatantly, as if scorning to conceal the truth that they had been saying things that were not for his ears, things that were almost certainly to his direct disadvantage.

  The decision as to the appointment of the Acting Head of Department was, as it turned out, deferred until the next meeting. Tuberose did not like that, it was clear to him that it meant that whatever understanding was being worked out between McSpale and Pluckrose required time to be brought to fruition, that it was unscrupulously being given time, and that time was therefore on the side of his enemies. During the course of that afternoon, he was frequently aware of Professor McSpale directing at him, from under his coarse, tangled, greying eyebrows, a quite peculiar look. It was a look that, thinking about it afterwards, he found it very hard to analyse. It was a look of scorn, perhaps, of hard, cold scorn, and there was something insolently defiant about it, something altogether blatant. It seemed to say that power was going to be exercised, directly and shamelessly, that justice and right were going to be disregarded, trampled upon, set altogether at nought, that this was wrong, yes, certainly, but it was going to happen all the same, and there was nothing whatever that Dr. Tuberose could do about it, not this time. This, Tuberose realised, was the price of integrity, this was the cost of speaking one’s mind.

  Ever since that meeting the attitude of condescending friendliness which Philip Pluckrose customarily adopted towards him had become more odiously bland, and at the same time more unconcealedly tinctured with genial contempt. On one occasion he had even had the effrontery to pretend to commiserate with Tuberose about his domestic misfortune. ‘You’ll have to come and have a meal with Polly and I,’ he had fawned with his customary grammatical insensibility, ‘and if there is anything we can do to help, Marcus, you know we’re always at the end of the phone…’—and so on and so on; it would be embarrassing to record all the banal, gloating hypocrisies that oozed from his lips and hung heavily in the air like halitosis.

  But Dr. Tuberose’s nature was not of the kind that lies down meekly under persecution. He had, of course, the clean bright shield of conscious integrity with which to defend himself, but he had something else, too, something more tellingly substantial, an eloquent expression of his worth that would be hard for anyone simply to ignore, even the hardened careerists of the department, to whom intellectual distinction was apparently such a contemptible irrelevance in the primitive struggle for place, power, and personal advantage. This secret weapon was his new lecture course on the Romantic Imagination, which was to form the nucleus, the matrix, of his projected work on this well-worn topic. Already, in spite of himself, Dr. Tuberose could hear phantom phrases from future critical comments on this embryonic work of genius flitting restlessly about his brain: ‘allusive, learned, lucid, and perspicacious’; ‘the daring taxonomies of Tuberose’; ‘as Tuberose has seminally suggested’; and so on and so forth.

  Everything, however, depended on the success of the lecture course, really everything. Dr. Tuberose was now in such a position and of such an age that if he didn’t go up, he could only go down—or even out. Things being as they were in the academic world, it was either promotion or early retirement, Tuberose knew that. Since the most recent departmental meeting he was aware, too, that the odds were stacked heavily against him. But the lecture course might yet change all that. There were some things that simply couldn’t be disregarded, even by the English department, one had to believe that, or else life could hold no meaning.

  In the early hours of the morning of the day, a Friday, on which he was due to deliver his first lecture in the series, Dr. Tuberose awoke in his lonely bed moaning and groaning from a most appalling nightmare. He had entered through the sliding doors of the main arts building of the university, his lecture notes in his briefcase, to find himself, without surprise, in the chamber of the House of Commons. A vast crowd composed of students, newspaper correspondents, internationally famous critics, and even a few well-known movie stars was wedged closely in the benches and thronging eagerly in the aisles, jostling for position, manifesting every symptom of impatient excitement, awaiting in breathless anticipation some crucial public announcement. As the bewildered Tuberose mingled with the throng, an official in the shape of a Himalayan bear advanced towards the Speaker’s chair, followed by Professor McSpale in the garb of the Lord Chancellor. The Himalayan bear banged three times on the ground with his ceremonial staff and called for silence. Professor McSpale, instantly picking out Tuberose among the seething press, fixed him for a terrible moment with a baleful eye flashing with a most hellishly malignant lustre. Then he averted his gaze, and drawing from among the folds of his gown a slip of paper, read out in clear and ringing tones: “Philip Endymion Pluckrose, M.A., D. Phil., has been appointed Acting Head of the Department of English Literature for the academic year 1988–89.”

  A wild cheer rose up, and almost instantly every eye was turned upon Dr. Tuberose with open, wicked mockery, while raucous laughter burst out and jeers, whistles, and catcalls smote upon his ears. He dropped his head in shame and struggled to leave, but no one would let him pass; instead they shoved and shouldered him provocatively while heaping upon him vague but deadly insults. Then Professor McSpale pointed to him with his long, lank, skinny finger, slapped the Himalayan bear on the rump, and shouted, “Go get him, Spielberg!” The crowd instantly parted, and the bear charged down the aisle towards Dr. Tuberose with slavering fangs, and there was nowhere for him to flee. Its teeth were not a hair’s-breadth from his throat when the unhappy scholar awoke in the pitiable condition already indicated. For the remainder of that night he tossed and turned hopelessly as fragments of his lecture, the announcement by Professor McSpale, the superior smile of Pluckrose, the teeth of the Himalayan bear, and the inscrutable eyes of a certain Chinese waiter mingled and coalesced in the fevered jumble of his imagination.

  It may be imagined that Dr. Tuberose entered the lecture hall considerably unnerved. He was made of stern stuff, however, Marcus Aurelius Tuberose was not a man of jelly, and in spite of every setback he remained quietly but ruthlessly determined to do himself justice, to acquit himself with honour, to put all his cards squarely on the table, to show up Pluckrose for what he was. In this first lecture he was plunging right into the very heart of the matter, addressing Coleridge’s distinction between Fancy and Imagination. As he warmed to his subject he began to be stirred and even exalted by his own eloquence, and he was soon confident that he had his audience eating out of the palm of his hand. The tables were turned, Pluckrose was a dead letter—even in the impetuous onrush of
his discourse that consciousness was shining at the back of his mind. And then a terrible thing happened.

  “We have, above all, to ask ourselves,” Dr. Tuberose was saying as he reached what he thought of as the high point of his lecture, “what exactly Coleridge meant by ‘Imagination.’ We have to be clear about this before we can proceed any further. Did he mean by ‘Imagination’ a permanent, universal faculty of the human mind, equally possessed by all? Or did he mean by it what we nowadays usually understand the term to mean, namely a mere image-forming capacity, an ability to image to ourselves facts and possibilities and potentialities outside immediate reality, a capacity which different people possess in differing and variable degrees? Do we all possess Imagination in the same way in which we all possess two arms and two legs?”

  Dr. Tuberose paused impressively and looked around at his audience. He was about to continue when he noticed a hand raised about three-quarters of the way up the lecture hall, to his right, near a side-entrance. To his irritation, and with a certain sinking of the heart, he saw that it belonged to an unhealthy-looking young man in a wheelchair, the lower moiety of whose person was concealed by a travelling-rug.

  “Yes?” he snapped impatiently, in a way which he hoped indicated that interruptions were not scheduled for this lecture course.

  “Excuse me,” came back at him the weak but at the same time assertive tones of the student in the wheelchair, “but it is not true that we all possess two arms and two legs.”

  Dr. Tuberose frowned and traversed the rostrum once or twice, looking at his feet.

  “Let me rephrase that,” he resumed. “Do we all possess Imagination in the same way in which we all possess a head?” He paused again. “Or am I once again assuming too much? Is there anyone here without a head?”