During one of his blank nights of insomnia, he had wandered into the older section of town where there is unreserved activity at all hours. But Tressor was only interested in exhausting, not engaging those hours, in using them up with as little pain as possible. Thus, he gave no more than modest scrutiny to the character standing by the steps of a rotten old building, except to note that this man was roughly his own stature and that he seemed to be loitering to no special purpose, his hands buried deep in the huge pouches of his overcoat and his eyes gazing upon the passersby with a look of profound patience. The building outside of which he stood was itself a rather plain structure, one notable only for its windows, the way some faces are distinctive solely by virtue of an interesting pair of eyes. These windows were not the slender rectangles of most of the other buildings along the street, but were in the shape of half-circles divided into several slice-shaped panes. And in the moonlight they seem to shine in a particularly striking way, though possibly this is merely an effect of contrast to the surrounding area, where a few clean pieces of glass will inevitably draw attention to themselves. I cannot say for certain which may be upheld as the explanation.
In any case, Tressor was passing by this building, the one with those windows, when the man standing by the steps shoved something at him, leaving it in his grasp. And as he did so, he looked straight and deep into poor Tressor’s eyes, which Tressor was quick to lower and fix upon the object in his hand. What had been given to him was a small sheet of paper, and further down the street Tressor paused by a lamp-post to read the thin lines of tiny letters. Printed in black ink on one side of a coarse, rather gummy grade of pulp, the handbill announced an evening’s entertainment later that same night at the building he had just passed. Tressor looked back at the man who had handed him this announcement, but he was no longer standing in his place. And for a moment this seemed very odd, for despite his casual, even restful appearance of waiting for no one and for nothing, this man did seem to have been somehow attached to that particular spot outside the building, and now his sudden absence caused Tressor to feel... confused.
Once again Tressor scanned the page in his hand, absent-mindedly rubbing it between his thumb and fingers. It did have a strange texture, like ashes mixed with grease. Soon, however, he began to feel that he was giving the matter too much thought; and, as he resumed his insomniac meandering, he flung the sheet aside. But before it reached the pavement, the handbill was snatched out of the air by someone walking very swiftly in the opposite direction. Glancing back, Tressor found it difficult to tell which of the other pedestrians had retrieved the paper. He then continued on his way.
But later that night, desperate for some distraction which mere walking seemed no longer able to provide him, he returned to the building whose windows were shining half-circles.
He entered through the front door, which was unlocked and unattended, proceeding through silent, empty hallways. Along the walls were lamps in the form of dimly glowing spheres. Turning a corner, Tressor was suddenly faced with a black abyss, within which an unlighted stairway began to take shape as his eyes grew accustomed to the greater dark. After some hesitation he went up the stairs, playing a brittle music upon the old planks. From the first landing of the stairway he could see the soft lights above, and rather than turning back he ascended toward them. The second floor, however, much resembled the first, as did the third and all the succeeding floors. Reaching the heights of the building, Tressor began to roam around once again, even opening some of the doors.
But most of the rooms behind these doors were dark and empty, and the moonlight that shone through the perfectly clear windows fell upon bare, dust-covered floors and plain walls. Tressor was about to turn around and leave that place for good, when he spotted at the end of the last hallway a door with a faint yellow aura leaking out at its edges. He walked up to this door, which was slightly opened, and cautiously pushed it back.
Peering into the room, Tressor saw the yellowish globe of light which hung from the ceiling. Scanning slowly down the walls, he spied small, shadowlike things moving in corners and along the floor molding—the consequences of inept housekeeping, he concluded. Then he saw something by the far wall which made him quickly withdraw back into the hallway. What he had glimpsed were the dark outlines of four strangely shaped figures leaning upon the wall, the tallest of which was nearly as tall as he was and the smallest, far smaller. But once out in the hallway, he found these images had become clearer in his mind. He now felt almost sure of their true nature, although I have to confess that I could not imagine what they might have been until he spoke the key word: “cases.”
Venturing back into the room, Tressor stood before the closed cases which in all likelihood belonged to a quartet of musicians. They looked very old and were bound like books in some murky cloth. Tressor ran his fingers along this material, then before long began fingering the tarnished metal latches of the violin case. But he suddenly stopped when he saw a group of shadows rising on the wall in front of him.
“Why have you come in here?” asked a voice which sounded both exhausted and malicious.
“I saw the light,” answered Tressor without turning around, still crouching over the violin case. Somehow the sound of his own voice echoing in that empty room disturbed him more than that of his interrogator, though he could not at the moment say why this was. He counted four shadows on the wall, three of them tall and trim, and the fourth somewhat smaller but with an enormous, misshapen head.
“Stand up,” ordered the same voice as before.
Tressor stood up.
“Turn around.”
Tressor slowly turned around. And he was relieved to see standing before him three rather ordinary-looking men and a woman whose head was enveloped by pale, ragged clouds of hair. Moreover, among the men was the one who had given Tressor the handbill earlier that night. But he now seemed to be much taller than he had been outside in the street.
“You handed me the paper,” Tressor reminded the man as if trying to revive an old friendship. And again his voice sounded queer to him as it reverberated in that empty room.
The tall man looked to his companions, surveying each of the other three faces in turn, as though reading some silent message in their expressionless features. Then he removed a piece of paper from inside his coat.
“You mean this,” he said to Tressor.
“Yes, that’s it.”
They all smiled gently at him, and the tall man said, “Then you’re in the wrong place. You should be one floor up. But the main stairway won’t take you to it. There’s another, smaller flight of stairs in the back hallway. You should be able to see it. Are your eyes good?”
“Yes.”
“Good as they look?” asked one of the other men.
“I can see very well, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what we mean,” said the woman.
Then the four of them stepped back to make a path for Tressor, two on either side of him, and he started to walk from the room.
“There are already some people upstairs for the concert,” said the tall man as Tressor reached the door. “We will be up shortly—to play!”
“Yes... yes... yes,” muttered the others as they began fumbling with the dark cases containing their instruments. “Their voices,” thought Tressor, “not my voice.”
As Tressor later explained it to me, the voices of the musicians, unlike his own, made no echoes of any kind in the empty room. Nevertheless, Tressor went to find the stairway, which at first looked like an empty shaft of blackness in the corner of the back hall. Guided by the fragile railing that twisted in a spiral, he reached the uppermost level of the old building. And there the hallways were much narrower than those below, mere passageways lit by spherical lamps which were caked with dust and no longer appeared at even intervals. There were also fewer doors, and these could be better found by touch than by sight. But Tressor’s eyes were very good, as he claimed, and he found
the room where a number of people were already gathered, true to the musicians’ claim.
I can imagine that it was not easy for Tressor to decide whether or not to go through with what he had started that night. If the inability to sleep sometimes leads a sufferer into strange or perilous consolations, Tressor still retained enough of a daylight way of thought to make a compromise. He did not enter the room where he saw people slumped down in seats scattered about, the black silhouettes of human heads visible only in the moonlight which poured through the pristine glass of those particular windows. Instead, he hid in the shadows farther down the hallway. And when the musicians arrived upstairs, burdened with their instruments, they filed into the moonlit room without suspecting Tressor’s presence outside. The door closed behind them with a click that did not echo in the narrow hallway.
For a few moments there was only silence, a purer silence than Tressor had ever known, like the silence of a dark, lifeless world. Then sound began to enter the silence, but so inconspicuously that Tressor could not tell when the absolute silence had ended and an embellished silence had begun. Sound became music, slow and muffled music in the soft darkness, somewhat muted as it passed through the intervening door. At first there seemed to be only a single note wavering alone in a universe of darkness and silence, coaxing its hearers to an understanding of its subtle voice, to sense its secrets and perhaps to hear the unheard. The single note then burst into a shower of tones, proliferating harmonies, and at that exact moment a second note began to follow the same course; then another note, and another. There was now more music than could possibly be contained by that earlier silence, expansive as it may have seemed. Soon there was no space remaining for silence, or perhaps music and silence became confused, indistinguishable from each other, as colors may merge into whiteness. And at last, for Tressor, that interminable sequence of wakeful nights, each a mirror to the one before it and the one to follow, was finally broken.
When Tressor awoke, the light of a quiet gray dawn filled the narrow hallway where he lay hunched between peeling walls. Recalling in a moment the events of the previous night, he scrambled to his feet and began walking toward the room whose door was still closed. He put his ear up to the rough wood but heard no sounds on the other side. In his mind a memory of wonderful music rose up and then quickly faded. As before, the music sounded muffled to him, diminished in its power because he had been too fearful to enter the room where the music was played. But he entered it now.
And he was surprised to see the audience still in their seats, which were all facing four empty chairs and four abandoned instruments of varying size. The musicians themselves were nowhere in sight.
The spectators were all dressed in white, hooded robes woven of some gauzy material, almost like ragged shrouds wrapped tightly around them. They were very quiet and very still, perhaps sleeping that profound sleep from which Tressor had just risen. Tressor felt a strange fear of this congregation, strange because he also sensed that they were completely helpless and no more capable of voluntary action than a roomful of abandoned dolls. As his eyes became sharper in the grayish twilight of the room, the robes worn by these paralyzed figures began to look more and more like bandages of some kind, a heavy white netting which bound them securely. “But they were not bandages, or robes, or shrouds,” Tressor finally told me. “They were webs, thick layers of webs which I first thought covered everyone’s entire body.”
But this was only how it appeared to Tressor from his perspective behind the mummified audience. For as he moved along the outer edge of the terrible gathering, progressing toward the four empty chairs at the front of the room, he saw that each stringy white cocoon was woven to expose the face of its inhabitant. And he also saw that the expressions on these faces were very similar, and that they might almost have been described as serene, if only those faces had been whole. But none of them seemed to have any eyes: the crowd was faced in the same direction to witness a spectacle it could no longer see, gazing at nothing with bleeding sockets. All save one of them, as Tressor finally discovered.
At the end of a rather chaotic row of chairs in the back of the room, one member of the dead audience stirred in his seat. As Tressor slowly approached this figure, with vague thoughts of rescue in his mind, he noticed that its eyelids were shut. Without delaying for an instant, he began tearing at the webs which imprisoned the victim, speaking words of hope as he worked at the horrible mesh. But then the closed eyelids of the bound figure popped open and looked around, ultimately focusing on Tressor.
“You’re the only one,” said Tressor, laboring at the webby bonds.
“Shhhh,” said the other, “I’m waiting.”
Tressor paused in confusion, his fingers tangled with a gruesome stuff which felt sticky and abrasive, intolerably strange to touch.
“They might return,” insisted Tressor, even though he was not entirely sure whom he meant by “they.”
“They will return,” answered the other’s soft but excited voice. “With the moon they will return with their wonderful music.”
Appalled by this enigma, fearful of things he could not name, Tressor began to back away. And I suspect that from within a number of those hollow sockets, four of them to be exact, the tiny eyes of strange creatures were watching him as he fled that horrible room.
Afterward Tressor visited me night after night to tell me about the music, until it seemed I could almost hear it myself and could tell his story as my own. Soon he talked only about the music, as he recalled hearing it somewhat dulled by a closed door. When he tried to imagine what it would be like to have heard the music, as he phrased it, “in the flesh,” it was obvious that he had forgotten the fate of those who did hear it in this way. His voice became more and more faint as the music grew louder and clearer in his mind. Then one night Tressor stopped coming to visit me.
And now it seems that I am the one who cannot sleep, especially when I see the moon hovering above our city—the moon all pale and fat, glaring down on us from within its gauzy webs of clouds. And how can I rest beneath its enchanting gaze? How difficult it is to keep myself from straying into a certain section of town as night after night I wander strange streets alone.
The Journal of
J.P. Drapeau
Introduction
IT WAS late and we had been drinking. My friend, a poet who can become very exciteable at times, looked across the table at me. Then he revived a pet grievance of his as though I had not heard it all before.
“Where is the writer,” he began, “who is unstained by any habits of the human, who would be the ideal of everything alien to living, and whose own eccentricity, in its darkest phase, would turn in on itself to form increasingly more complex patterns of strangeness? Where is the writer who has remained his entire life in some remote dream that he inhabited from his day of birth, if not long before? Where is the writer from some mist-shrouded backwater of the earth—the city of Bruges itself, that withered place which some dreamer has described as ‘a sumptuous corpse of the Middle Ages that sings to itself from innumerable bell-towers and lays bony bridges across the black veins of its old canals.’
“But perhaps our writer’s home would have to be an even older, more decaying Bruges in some farther, more obscure Flanders... the one envisioned by Breughel and by Ensor. Where is the writer who was begotten by two passionate masks in the course of those macabre festivities called kermessel. Who was abandoned to develop in his own way, left to a lonely evolution in shadowed streets and beside sluggish canals. Who was formed by the dreams around him as much as those within him, and who filled himself with strange learning. Where is this writer, the one whose entangled hallucinations could only be accommodated by the most intimate of diaries? And this diary, this journal of the most unnecessary man who ever lived, would be a record of the most questionable experiences ever known, and the most beautiful.”
“Of course, there is no such writer,” I replied. “But there’s always Drapeau. Out of anyone I
could name, he most nearly meets, if I may say, those rather severe prerequisites of yours. Living the whole of his life in Bruges, keeping those notebooks of his, and he—”
But my friend the poet only moaned in despair:
“Drapeau, always Drapeau.”
Excerpts from the Journal
April 31, 189—
I have noticed that certain experiences are allowed to languish in the corners of life, are not allowed to circulate as freely as others. My own, for example. Since childhood, not one day has passed in which I have failed to hear the music of graveyards. And yet, to my knowledge, never has another soul on earth made mention of this phenomenon. Is the circulation of the living so poor that it cannot carry these dead notes? It must be a mere trickle!
December 24, 189—
Two tiny corpses, one male and the other female, live in that enormous closet in my bedroom. They are also very old, but still they are quick enough to hide themselves whenever I need to enter the closet to get something. I keep all my paraphernalia in there, stuffed into trunks or baskets and piled quite out of reach. I can’t even see the floor or the walls any longer, and only if I hold a light high over my head can I study the layers of cobwebs floating about near the ceiling. After I close the door of the closet, its two miniature inhabitants resume their activities. Their voices are only faint squeaks which during the day hardly bother me at all. But sometimes I am kept awake far into the night by those interminable conversations of theirs.
May 31, 189—
After serving out the hours of a night in which sleep was absolutely forbidden, I went out for a walk. I had not gone far when I became spectator to a sad scene. Some yards ahead of me on the street, an old man was being forceably led from a house by two other men. They had him in restraints and were delivering him to a waiting vehicle. Laughing hysterically, the man was apparently destined for the asylum. As the struggling trio reached the street, the eyes of the laughing man met my own. Suddenly he stopped laughing. Then, in a burst of resistance, he broke free of his escorts, ran toward me, and fell right into my arms. Since his own were so tightly bound, I had to hold up his full weight.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer Page 25
