The White Hands and Other Weird Tales

by Mark Samuels

  I had no great interest in the fate of Emily Curtis at this point, despite the fact that one of my correspondents, who also lived in the city, wrote to tell me that he had encountered her on the streets. This was possibly on the same night that I had spotted her looking up at my window. Apparently, she had been wandering as if in a daze, and when he approached her she had fled in terror. She seemed not to have recognised him although they had met on several occasions since our meeting to discuss my published short story collections.

  Two weeks later, I received a manuscript posted to me by Emily Curtis. It appeared that she had written a tale of her own, which she had called ‘The Communication’. There was an accompanying letter. One glance was enough to confirm that the contamination was a progressive rather than temporary condition. It was a very short letter and the salient portion ran as follows:

  I am in a confused state of mind. I quite forget my own name, or even where I am for much of the time. I watch the shadows from the window during the day as they creep towards me. And I watch the men who work by night. The enclosed story, which I began a week ago, belongs to you. I may not have time to finish it. Before what I have been is lost for good, best that you should see it.

  It was as I expected: the manuscript appeared incomprehensible. Written on foolscap, it consisted of seemingly random words. These were not written in horizontal lines, but at varying angles to one another, in spirals and around the edges of the paper. Some of the words were in English, others in various other languages and a number were outré characters that would have been mere gibberish to anyone but myself. Those portions that were in English I have quoted below, having first arranged them in a linear fashion and incorporated translation where required. They mirror almost exactly my own story ‘The Dybbuk Pyramid’.

  In the dream she had found herself in a strange and unknown city. Her body was unfamiliar to her and appeared be that of an almost hairless biped covered by dark fabrics. This body was a source of repulsion; being an upright mass of tissue filled with water, fæces and mucus. Its senses were overwhelming; disparate but consecutive images of vivid colour and puzzling airborne perceptions seemed to enter through holes in its head, vibrations that made no sense entered through other holes on each side and pressures that varied with a maddening intensity rippled across the biped’s outer layer. As this creature stumbled across the deserted and dark city of monoliths and past black vertical columns that fanned out into rustling limbs, it sucked air into itself repeatedly, with a horrible sense of uneven rhythm. The dream did not seem to last very long and was terminated when the creature came across another of its kind. Seeing this other and knowing that this was the form in which she also was trapped, Curtis found the horror too much to bear. The creature staggered towards her, clad in similar fabrics, but these did not hide the monstrosity of its awful face, like that of some deranged white ape. When it made an expression that was utterly alien, she fled, to be awoken by her own screams, fully clothed on the bed in the apartment she shared with her elderly mother. Whether it was the dream itself that had awakened her, or the memory of the dream whilst in a state of semi-consciousness, she could not tell.

  I realised that what had been set in motion now required my own intervention: it was time that Emily met with an accident of her own. Doubtless she would do so anyway, in due course, but such had been the corruption of my own physical form in the interim that in order for me to gauge the success of my plan my timetable had to be brought forward. My psoriasis had worsened into something more akin to leprosy, and I was unsure how long my health would hold out.

  ***

  The journey on the bus to Curtis’s part of the city took just under an hour. Apart from the driver and myself the bus was empty. One of the small windows that provided ventilation was jammed open and freezing air blew into the deck. I had telephoned ahead and Curtis’ mother had answered.

  ‘Hello?’ she had sounded strained and tense.

  ‘Mrs Curtis? This is Trefusis Vrolyck. I’m a friend of your daughter. Excuse my calling, but I understand she’s ill and I’m concerned about her.’

  ‘Oh Mr Vrolyck, thank you for calling. Emily’s mentioned you to me several times.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘The doctor thinks it’s a nervous breakdown. She’s not left her bed for days. She doesn’t speak or eat, only lies there, staring.’

  ‘Perhaps I could see her? It might help.’

  ‘Oh yes please. I’m at my wit’s end. She often told me how much she admired you and unless her condition changes the doctor says she’ll have to be taken into some horrible psychiatric unit. I couldn’t bear that to happen.’

  ‘I can be there in an hour or so. Would that be convenient?’

  ‘Oh yes, it’d be wonderful. Thank you so much Mr Vrolyck.’

  ‘I’ll see you shortly, then.’

  And so I alighted onto the pavement next to a very busy dual carriageway flanked by 1950s council estates. The buildings were blocks seven floors high, each of identical plain grey concrete with flat roofs and exterior walkways. The Curtis apartment was situated in one of the blocks on the eastern edge.

  All of the walls were covered with graffiti, most of it simply the names of those who had turned their spray cans upon them, but there were some symbols indicating an origin that was familiar to me. These were the symbols that I had attempted to communicate in English via ‘The Dybbuk Pyramid’.

  I had to climb a vandalised stairway to reach the second floor. On the way up I passed a vagrant who seemed to be lost in some private ritual of his own. He was muttering to himself and arranging the rubbish strewn on the stairs into a little pile. He eyed me curiously as I passed and there was something in his expression that made me hesitate. On closer inspection, he seemed unused to the flesh and muscles that covered his skull and continually screwed his face up in a contorted manner as if unsure of the appropriate impression it should convey to others. I had myself experienced such a dilemma after my accident.

  When I reached the Curtis apartment I had to ring the bell several times before I heard shuffling footsteps. The door was opened a few inches, though held by a safety chain. An old woman peered out at me.

  ‘Mr Vrolyck?’ she asked.

  Initially I thought that she was perturbed by my appearance, for in truth, the masking lotion I employed no longer disguised the ravages time had wrought upon my skin. However, it was obvious that her eyesight was not keen and she was simply squinting at me myopically, too vain or stupid to wear spectacles.

  ‘That’s right. You must be Emily’s mother.’

  ‘Yes. Oh please come inside, won’t you?’ the woman said.

  She unchained the door and beckoned me to follow her as she shuffled back down the hallway in her carpet slippers. She said:

  ‘I’ve just had a telephone call from Dr Phelps telling me that he felt I really should sign the papers. You know, the ones authorising him to arrange for Emily to be taken into care? It’s all so distressing.’

  ‘I can imagine that it must be terrible for you. But I think you’re wise to try every option before agreeing to that course of action,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you know what I think caused all this?’ she asked.

  ‘Please tell me.’

  ‘It’s the vandals on this estate. They’re all into drugs, you know. For some reason she took an interest in their graffiti and they took advantage of her.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Some of the neighbours told me that she’d paid them to spray-paint her own designs on the walls. But why should she do that? I don’t believe them. They’re gossips. Nasty people. And since those vandals were found dead; you’ll have read about it in the papers; they’ve been spreading the rumour that my Emily was somehow to blame!’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Everyone knows they killed themselves. It was probably the drugs, and my daughter’s never taken drugs. Can you believe what they’re saying? My daughter! Can you believe it M
r Vrolyck?’

  ‘It’s ridiculous, of course . . .’

  ‘Of course it is. And anyway, I saw a gang of them just the other night spraying the walls again, the same ones that Emily used to meet. So how do they explain that, eh? I think newspapers make these stories up.’

  ‘That’s probably the answer.’

  ‘It’s an absolute disgrace . . .’

  ‘I understand how you feel.’

  We stood outside Emily’s room. Her mother opened the door and, although it was dark within and the curtains were drawn, I could just make out a figure in the bed propped up with several pillows.

  As I drew closer I could see that Emily Curtis’s face was blank and her eyes stared straight ahead without blinking. But I thought I detected a flicker of movement as I came into her view.

  ‘Do you think that I could be alone with her for a short while?’ I asked her mother.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ll make us some tea and bring it in. You sit down next to her.’

  Left alone with Emily I sat down on the edge of the bed. I softly spoke her name and her eyes rotated in the direction of my voice and a vague, unnatural smile distorted her previously placid features. There were two forces at war within her brain, and the pressure upon it could only be relieved when one of them gained control.

  The sound of her mother making tea filtered along the hallway. I heard cups clinking and a kettle being filled. I would not have long. Removing one of the pillows from beneath Emily’s head, I gripped it tightly in both hands and pressed it down over her face as hard as I could. There was a gurgling, and then her body thrashed around for what seemed a long time. Finally she slumped back and I took the pillow away from her face. Her mouth was open and her eyes wide with death. Gently, I closed them and turned her head to one side. I replaced the pillow in its original position, making it look as if she were asleep.

  A few seconds later the mother entered bearing a tray. Before she could find anywhere to set it down I motioned that we should leave the room.

  ‘Was there any response?’ she asked in a hushed voice as we walked back down the hall.

  ‘I think so, yes. She seemed to recognise my voice before she drifted off to sleep. She even smiled.’

  The mother poured out the tea in the kitchen and I sat and sipped the weak liquid, explaining that it would be wise if we let Emily rest. I suggested that perhaps the response I had witnessed might be the first sign of a pleasing amelioration in her condition.

  When I left there were tears of gratitude in the eyes of the old woman.

  ‘Perhaps you could come again soon?’

  But I pretended not to hear.

  ***

  As I made my way back down the vandalised stairway the vagrant was still there. He had been busy in my absence and had completed the arrangement he was fashioning from crumpled wrappers, ash and cigarette butts. It looked like a rubbish heap, but on examining it more closely I could see that it had been fashioned into a crudely-shaped pyramid. His face was still struggling with its expressions, and from time to time one of his grimy hands traced a path along the graffiti upon the walls. But it was when he spoke that I knew the contamination had not been confined to my own contacts. For the tramp, with his pale dead face, mouthed the words:

  ‘It is the time of the black radiance from the stars.’

  Although the words were English, it was in my own language that I received his telepathic transmissions.

  It was brilliant. The city was covered with such graffiti, the symbols reproducing like bacteria. How much more effective than my own attempts to disseminate them under the guise of my writing! As you may have guessed, the symbols were a sign, a sort of cosmic homing-beacon, calling down others of my kind to enter the bodies of human beings. And I thought how ironic it was that, after all my efforts, it was vandals, those self-styled popular artists contaminated by Curtis, who had proved the more effective communicators.

  ***

  My last sight of Emily Curtis was in the café where we first met.

  Some days after the incident I have just described, I was out on the streets, seeking further signs of the contamination. There was indeed ample evidence of its unchecked spread. The symbols had been plastered on bridges, railway carriages, buses and any wall that would show them clearly. I am not sure that the people were particularly aware, except for Curtis, the unknown vagrant, the vandals and, of course, myself. I had been one of the very first, the pathfinder, so to speak. There were twelve billion of us waiting out there, so only around half our number would be able to find shelter in the human race on this planet. In order for a successful transfer to take place, all human thoughts had to be extinguished from the individual for a long enough period to allow our own to take hold, so the prior death of the brain was entirely necessary.

  Emily Curtis was sitting in the window, gazing out through the misty, condensation-soaked glass of the café at nothing in particular. Her skin was even paler than it had been in life and was caked in the same white foundation that I wore. As I passed by, her eyes met mine for a brief moment. There lurked within them a black radiance, filtered from the stars.

  She knew now, as did I, that we are here only temporarily, until these physical shells rotted away. Then we would have to move on again, fleeing the death that pursued us. But for now, like me, she was trapped within the human carcass, suffering the horrifying existence of the biped simian, the maddening trace-memories lingering within the fabric of their brains: a dead person’s memories, names drawn in the sand just beyond the reach of the waves breaking from the black ocean before it.

  The Search for Kruptos

  The man who writes these lines bears only an infinitesimal resemblance to the bespectacled student of the waking world who left Dublin æons ago clad in his father’s three-piece suit. That memory is now my only link to the past. Many individuals take refuge in a foreign country but what of those who depart for the exile of dreams? Was I really the ‘dangerous’ atheist who, forsaking the Judaism of his immediate ancestors and the Roman Catholicism of his adopted country, had turned to the world of the secular imagination? I studied metaphysics at Trinity and it was in the library there that I must have first stumbled across some reference to the writings of Thomas Ariel while I half-dozed over its ancient and mouldy volumes. It seems obvious to me now that whatever glimpses I have obtained into the life and works of Ariel have occurred at points where, as Poe claimed, ‘the confines of the waking world blend with the world of dreams.’

  Ariel was the author of a number of provocative works published during the first half of the nineteenth century. His ontological speculations were akin to the wildest phantasies of Poe and De Quincey. His fundamental belief was that the mechanism of dreaming was a function with limitless possibilities. When he attempted the private publication of his short treatise, The Mysteries of Dreaming, the printers refused to handle it. Details of its contents were passed to the authorities and a warrant was issued for Ariel’s arrest. He fled England in 1824. There followed a quiet campaign of book burning and the eradication of his name from most bibliographic records. Blackwoods, The Quarterly and like publications henceforth returned his letters and accompanying manuscripts unopened. But I managed to accumulate a small number of documents, articles etc. by Ariel and also a charred daguerreotype taken in northern Germany during his long exile with the date ‘1842’ scratched into the back. It depicted the head of a balding, clean-shaven man in his fifties with traces of whitening hair around the temples. His expansive face was haunted by shadows. His eyes were set deep in the sockets and in their expression there seemed to lurk a suggestion of world-weary nihilism. A black neckerchief was wrapped around his throat. The overall effect was quite funereal.

  Records of Ariel during his exile in Europe are extremely sketchy. One or two sources gave credence to the rumour that he had, in 1879, at the grand old age of eighty-nine, turned up unexpectedly in the cathedral city of Basel, paying a call on a prominent professor of classical ph
ilology. After this there is silence—for Ariel seemed determined to die in as northern a latitude as he could, apparently intent on feasting his dying eyes on the aurora borealis while filling his lungs with opium-smoke.

  Perhaps, mentally, he had not travelled far from those early days when De Quincey had praised his work, hiding discreetly behind his pseudonym X.Y.Z. in The London Magazine:

  I go on, therefore, to commend the work of Mr A—. Though not of a moral nature, one might say of his points of genius, like one of the twelve Caesars, Ut puto, Deus fio. Marvellously, indeed, has this author succeeded in revealing tantalising glimpses of those hoary volumes which rest in chambers outside the scope of present human knowledge, until now known only to the moonstruck and the opium-eater. No man is better qualified to explore those obtuse speculations of a metaphysical cast which redeem the excesses of the rationalists. His proposed work Kruptos bids fair to be a most notable production.

  It was the manuscript of Kruptos which I sought above all else. Ariel had started work on it before his enforced flight from England and in all probability carried it with him across Europe throughout his exile. It was to be the magnum opus which would secure his reputation. But it seemed that he never finished it and I came to believe that he took the uncompleted manuscript with him, in 1880, when he travelled northwards towards his strange, planned death within the Arctic circle.