The Uncanny Reader

by Marjorie Sandor

  This insight did not represent quite such a remarkable imaginative leap on the part of Dr. Tuberose as might at first appear. For, you see, he had already realised, quite suddenly that afternoon, that Pluckrose was the devil. The truth had dawned on him after it had struck him outside the lecture hall how Mephistophelean, even Luciferian, was Pluckrose’s little black beard: it flashed on him then that he was not just metaphorically but literally in disguise, that he was in fact the devil! As he mulled over his dream of the previous night, it was quite dear to Dr. Tuberose that the official in the form of a Himalayan bear whom McSpale had set on him could only be Pluckrose, that is, the devil, in another disguise. McSpale was God the Father, or more strictly (since Dr. Tuberose was a man of sophisticated literary sensibility) he was a symbolic projection of God the Father; and he was testing Dr. Tuberose by giving Satan power over him for a season, as he had done many years before with his servant Job. How perfectly it all fitted into place! How ever had he failed to see it before! He was being tested and proved like gold, and he must not be found wanting. And now Pluckrose the devil had come to him in yet another disguise, in the form of Demiurge the dog, and he must stand up to him and confront him boldly.

  Dr. Tuberose was now completely fearless. He advanced towards Demiurge with his left hand in his trouser pocket, a glass of wine in the other sensitive instrument, his head slightly on one side in an almost effeminate attitude, and a complacent, knowing smirk on his small, refined features.

  “Do you imagine that I am stupid, Pluckrose?” he commenced quietly, utterly in control of himself. The dog stopped yapping and stared in astonishment. “Do you think you can fool me? You can appear as a dog or a Himalayan bear or as King Kong, if you choose, it’s entirely up to yourself. You are being used, Pluckrose, don’t you realise that? You are no more than an instrument. Every dog has his day, and you have had yours. The future is mine. Justice will prevail, truth will prevail. You are yesterday’s man, Pluckrose. In fact, if you only knew it, you were yesterday’s man yesterday. I know who you are. But perhaps you don’t know who McSpale is … I shall be Acting Head of the Department! It has been decided and ordained!”

  Dr. Tuberose’s calm tone had been giving way during the course of this harangue to one of inspired, prophetic conviction, and now this in turn was converted into righteous fury. Dr. Tuberose cast his glass to the floor, dropped to his knees, and faced Demiurge nose to nose.

  “Mongrel trash!” he cried impetuously. “I’ll cut off your legs, you mongrel trash! Dog of hell!”

  Demiurge backed away from the raging madman, howling with terror. The ruin of a noble mind is always pitiful; but this was a terrible reversal to behold, the man in the role of the beast! But now the Cowperthwaites’ twelve-year-old daughter, who had been standing listening by the door, rushed forward fearlessly, gathered up Demiurge in her arms, and ran out with him, crying, “Never mind, Demmy! Never mind, my poor little Semi-semi-demiurge! Pay no attention to the silly, bad man!”

  Cowperthwaite had already gone into a huddle with Justin’s Daddy; they were talking eagerly, excitedly but in hushed tones. Dr. Tuberose found himself sitting bemusedly on a three-legged stool, in calm of mind, all passion spent; Florrie Dross-Jones had given him a Perrier water, which she said was very good for the digestion. Fragments of conversation reached Dr. Tuberose from the group clustering around Justin’s Daddy over by the door.

  “I can arrange for him to be admitted tonight…”

  “We’d better start phoning for a taxi right away, it’ll take ages on a Friday night…”

  “It’s all right, we’ve ordered one already, you can take that, we can wait…”

  “Poor man!”

  “Phil Pluckrose’ll have to take over his lecture course.”

  “Out of the question with all his departmental responsibilities.”

  “That’s not till next year. Phil’s the only one…”

  “Oh, no, Angela Mulhearn could do it very competently. It’s well within her field of interest.”

  “Should we let Malitia know, do you think?”

  “Good God, no!”

  “Better phone his GP, perhaps. I think it’s Gebbie.”

  “No, no, there’s no problem there, he can be taken in tonight.”

  “No, no, I cannot be taken in!” cried Dr. Tuberose suddenly. “You can take me in, if you understand me, but I cannot be taken in. I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

  “Don’t worry, Marcus, Justin’s Daddy is going to take you home; he’ll give you something to make you sleep, you’ll be fine in the morning!”

  “I see, you want me to go with Dr. Goebbels here? Well, that’s all right! Legs eleven—bingo! And not by accident. Yes, the legs of a Chinese waiter, with a club foot at one end and betrayal at the other!”

  “It’s funny, you very seldom see a club foot nowadays,” said Aminta, in the general confusion quite forgetting about Justin’s Daddy. Then she suddenly remembered! “Oh, dear! But it’s wonderful what they can do nowadays,” she added vaguely.

  The door-bell rang. “That’s the taxi!” everybody shouted at once.

  “I’ll let the driver know you’re coming,” said Robin DrossJones eagerly, and rushed down the stair.

  Dr. Goebbels took Dr. Tuberose gently but very firmly by the elbow and steered him towards the front door; he let himself be taken, offering no resistance. Everyone was crowding around him with looks and words of sympathy and concern, but Dr. Tuberose was no longer in need of sympathy or concern, for he had understood it all. Everything had suddenly become crystal-clear to him; and though it would be impossible to put into words the full depth and comprehensiveness of his understanding, there was no mistaking its reality, for his eyes glowed with exaltation, a smile of triumph played about his sensitive little mouth, and his whole being was suffused with a light of wonderful self-approbation.

  At the head of the stair he turned and faced the assembled company once more, gazing at them as if from an immense height.

  “I declare this meeting adjourned!” he cried with tremendous authority. “As Acting Head of Department, I declare this meeting adjourned.”

  PHANTOMS

  Steven Millhauser

  THE PHENOMENON. The phantoms of our town do not, as some think, appear only in the dark. Often we come upon them in full sunlight, when shadows lie sharp on the lawns and streets. The encounters take place for very short periods, ranging from two or three seconds to perhaps half a minute, though longer episodes are sometimes reported. So many of us have seen them that it’s uncommon to meet someone who has not; of this minority, only a small number deny that phantoms exist. Sometimes an encounter occurs more than once in the course of a single day; sometimes six months pass, or a year. The phantoms, which some call Presences, are not easy to distinguish from ordinary citizens: they are not translucent, or smoke-like, or hazy, they do not ripple like heat waves, nor are they in any way unusual in figure or dress. Indeed they are so much like us that it sometimes happens we mistake them for someone we know. Such errors are rare, and never last for more than a moment. They themselves appear to be uneasy during an encounter and swiftly withdraw. They always look at us before turning away. They never speak. They are wary, elusive, secretive, haughty, unfriendly, remote.

  * * *

  EXPLANATION #1. One explanation has it that our phantoms are the auras, or visible traces, of earlier inhabitants of our town, which was settled in 1636. Our atmosphere, saturated with the energy of all those who have preceded us, preserves them and permits them, under certain conditions, to become visible to us. This explanation, often fitted out with a pseudoscientific vocabulary, strikes most of us as unconvincing. The phantoms always appear in contemporary dress, they never behave in ways that suggest earlier eras, and there is no evidence whatever to support the claim that the dead leave visible traces in the air.

  * * *

  HISTORY. As children we are told about the phantoms by our fathers and mothers. They in turn have been
told by their own fathers and mothers, who can remember being told by their parents—our great-grandparents—when they were children. Thus the phantoms of our town are not new; they don’t represent a sudden eruption into our lives, a recent change in our sense of things. We have no formal records that confirm the presence of phantoms throughout the diverse periods of our history, no scientific reports or transcripts of legal proceedings, but some of us are familiar with the second-floor Archive Room of our library, where in nineteenth-century diaries we find occasional references to “the others” or “them,” without further details. Church records of the seventeenth century include several mentions of “the devil’s children,” which some view as evidence for the lineage of our phantoms; others argue that the phrase is so general that it cannot be cited as proof of anything. The official town history, published in 1936 on the three hundredth anniversary of our incorporation, revised in 1986, and updated in 2006, makes no mention of the phantoms. An editorial note states that “the authors have confined themselves to ascertainable fact.”

  * * *

  HOW WE KNOW. We know by a ripple along the skin of our forearms, accompanied by a tension of the inner body. We know because they look at us and withdraw immediately. We know because when we try to follow them, we find that they have vanished. We know because we know.

  * * *

  CASE STUDY #1. Richard Moore rises from beside the bed, where he has just finished the forty-second installment of a never-ending story that he tells each night to his four-year-old daughter, bends over her for a good-night kiss, and walks quietly from the room. He loves having a daughter; he loves having a wife, a family; though he married late, at thirty-nine, he knows he wasn’t ready when he was younger, not in his doped-up twenties, not in his stupid, wasted thirties, when he was still acting like some angry teenager who hated the grown-ups; and now he’s grateful for it all, like someone who can hardly believe that he’s allowed to live in his own house. He walks along the hall to the den, where his wife is sitting at one end of the couch, reading a book in the light of the table lamp, while the TV is on mute during an ad for vinyl siding. He loves that she won’t watch the ads, that she refuses to waste those minutes, that she reads books, that she’s sitting there, waiting for him, that the light from the TV is flickering on her hand and upper arm. Something has begun to bother him, though he isn’t sure what it is, but as he steps into the den he’s got it, he’s got it: the table in the side yard, the two folding chairs, the sunglasses on the tabletop. He was sitting out there with her after dinner, and he left his sunglasses. “Back in a sec,” he says, and turns away, enters the kitchen, opens the door to the small screened porch at the back of the house, and walks from the porch down the steps to the backyard, a narrow strip between the house and the cedar fence. It’s nine thirty on a summer night. The sky is dark blue, the fence lit by the light from the kitchen window, the grass black here and green over there. He turns the corner of the house and comes to the private place. It’s the part of the yard bounded by the fence, the side-yard hedge, and the row of three Scotch pines, where he’s set up two folding chairs and a white ironwork table with a glass top. On the table lie the sunglasses. The sight pleases him: the two chairs, turned a little toward each other, the forgotten glasses, the enclosed place set off from the rest of the world. He steps over to the table and picks up the glasses: a good pair, expensive lenses, nothing flashy, stylish in a quiet way. As he lifts them from the table he senses something in the skin of his arms and sees a figure standing beside the third Scotch pine. It’s darker here than at the back of the house and he can’t see her all that well: a tall, erect woman, fortyish, long face, dark dress. Her expression, which he can barely make out, seems stern. She looks at him for a moment and turns away—not hastily, as if she were frightened, but decisively, like someone who wants to be alone. Behind the Scotch pine she’s no longer visible. He hesitates, steps over to the tree, sees nothing. His first impulse is to scream at her, to tell her that he’ll kill her if she comes near his daughter. Immediately he forces himself to calm down. Everything will be all right. There’s no danger. He’s seen them before. Even so, he returns quickly to the house, locks the porch door behind him, locks the kitchen door behind him, fastens the chain, and strides to the den, where on the TV a man in a dinner jacket is staring across the room at a woman with pulled-back hair who is seated at a piano. His wife is watching. As he steps toward her, he notices a pair of sunglasses in his hand.

  * * *

  THE LOOK. Most of us are familiar with the look they cast in our direction before they withdraw. The look has been variously described as proud, hostile, suspicious, mocking, disdainful, uncertain; never is it seen as welcoming. Some witnesses say that the phantoms show slight movements in our direction, before the decisive turning away. Others, disputing such claims, argue that we cannot bear to imagine their rejection of us and misread their movements in a way flattering to our self-esteem.

  * * *

  HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE. Now and then we hear reports of a more questionable kind. The phantoms, we are told, have grayish wings folded along their backs; the phantoms have swirling smoke for eyes; at the ends of their feet, claws curl against the grass. Such descriptions, though rare, are persistent, perhaps inevitable, and impossible to refute. They strike most of us as childish and irresponsible, the results of careless observation, hasty inference, and heightened imagination corrupted by conventional images drawn from movies and television. Whenever we hear such descriptions, we’re quick to question them and to make the case for the accumulated evidence of trustworthy witnesses. A paradoxical effect of our vigilance is that the phantoms, rescued from the fantastic, for a moment seem to us normal, commonplace, as familiar as squirrels or dandelions.

  * * *

  CASE STUDY #2. Years ago, as a child of eight or nine, Karen Carsten experienced a single encounter. Her memory of the moment is both vivid and vague: she can’t recall how many of them there were, or exactly what they looked like, but she recalls the precise moment in which she came upon them, one summer afternoon, as she stepped around to the back of the garage in search of a soccer ball and saw them sitting quietly in the grass. She still remembers her feeling of wonder as they turned to look at her, before they rose and went away. Now, at age fifty-six, Karen Carsten lives alone with her cat in a house filled with framed photographs of her parents, her nieces, and her late husband, who died in a car accident seventeen years ago. Karen is a high school librarian with many set routines: the TV programs, the weekend housecleaning, the twice-yearly visits in August and December to her sister’s family in Youngstown, Ohio, the choir on Sunday, dinner every two weeks at the same restaurant with a friend who never calls to ask how she is. One Saturday afternoon she finishes organizing the linen closet on the second floor and starts up the attic stairs. She plans to sort through boxes of old clothes, some of which she’ll give to Goodwill and some of which she’ll save for her nieces, who will think of the collared blouses and floral-print dresses as hopelessly old-fashioned but who might come around to appreciating them someday, maybe. As she reaches the top of the stairs she stops so suddenly and completely that she has the sense of her own body as an object standing in her path. Ten feet away, two children are seated on the old couch near the dollhouse. A third child is sitting in the armchair with the loose leg. In the brownish light of the attic, with its one small window, she can see them clearly: two barefoot girls of about ten, in jeans and T-shirts, and a boy, slightly older, maybe twelve, blond-haired, in a dress shirt and khakis, who sits low in the chair with his neck bent up against the back. The three turn to look at her and at once rise and walk into the darker part of the attic, where they are no longer visible. Karen stands motionless at the top of the stairs, her hand clutching the rail. Her lips are dry and she is filled with an excitement so intense that she thinks she might burst into tears. She does not follow the children into the shadows, partly because she doesn’t want to upset them, and partly because she
knows they are no longer there. She turns back down the stairs. In the living room she sits in the armchair until nightfall. Joy fills her heart. She can feel it shining from her face. That night she returns to the attic, straightens the pillows on the couch, smooths out the doilies on the chair arms, brings over a small wicker table, sets out three saucers and three teacups. She moves away some bulging boxes that sit beside the couch, carries off an old typewriter, sweeps the floor. Downstairs in the living room she turns on the TV, but she keeps the volume low; she’s listening for sounds in the attic, even though she knows that her visitors don’t make sounds. She imagines them up there, sitting silently together, enjoying the table, the teacups, and the orderly surroundings. Now each day she climbs the stairs to the attic, where she sees the empty couch, the empty chair, the wicker table with the three teacups. Despite the pang of disappointment, she is happy. She is happy because she knows they come to visit her every day, she knows they like to be up there, sitting in the old furniture, around the wicker table; she knows; she knows.

  * * *

  EXPLANATION #2. One explanation is that the phantoms are not there, that those of us who see them are experiencing delusions or hallucinations brought about by beliefs instilled in us as young children. A small movement, an unexpected sound, is immediately converted into a visual presence that exists only in the mind of the perceiver. The flaws in this explanation are threefold. First, it assumes that the population of an entire town will interpret ambiguous signs in precisely the same way. Second, it ignores the fact that most of us, as we grow to adulthood, discard the stories and false beliefs of childhood but continue to see the phantoms. Third, it fails to account for innumerable instances in which multiple witnesses have seen the same phantom. Even if we were to agree that these objections are not decisive and that our phantoms are in fact not there, the explanation would tell us only that we are mad, without revealing the meaning of our madness.