"Come on, Harvey, I whispered. "I don't like this at all.
Let’s get out of here."
He didn't hear me. His head bent, he was listening very sharply. Suddenly he looked up at me. "Did you hear that?" he asked.
"I didn't hear anything," I answered. I tried to laugh, but it sounded so strange and out of place, that I stopped immediately. The only thing I heard, was the echo of my own voice.
"I thought. I thought I heard a respiration," he whispered.
My ears had received no sound, and I didn't like it at all. Whatever could breathe in a dark cave like this? But then, it couldn't; he must have heard wrong. There was nothing down there. There couldn't be.
I took Harvey's arm. "Come on, let's get away."
"No, wait." He shook himself free and listened intendy, holding his breath, spying the darkness with his ears, almost eager to capture a sound.
"It sounds like a dog panting
"A dog?" I said. "Why should a dog be down there? Could be anything, even a wild animal."
"Maybe he fell," Harvey said. "Maybe he slipped on the stairs and broke a leg. Maybe his owner got tired of him and just chained him in there to let him die of starvation. Some people would just do a thing like that."
He had stopped whispering. "You wouldn't let a dog die down there, all alone in the darkness, hurt and wanting company, would you?"
I didn't answer.
"Listen," he said, "it’s almost like moaning. Now I'm sure, there's something down there, something alive and hurt. I'm going to see what it is."
Suddenly, I was deadly afraid to be left alone. I grasped Harvey. "No, please, don't go down. It is bad, I feel it"
"Now don't start acting like a sissie," he snapped. "The poor thing's probably just hungry. You stay here if you're scared."
Slowly, taking care not to slip on the stone steps, covered with lichens and dirt, he descended. It smelled dusty and damp. Small beasts hurried away over the steps. Of course, I couldn't Stay behind now, which would have proved me a coward. So I followed him, the fear throbbing in my throat.
Down there, the absolute darkness, filled the first seconds with colored lights and stripes and circles, dancing on my irises. Then, after a while, I started to perceive the dark forms of old furniture, the walls of the cave, and something dark, in a corner of the cellar, something slowly moving. It seemed almost to flow, an indefiniable black form, lying flat on the floor.
"There is the poor beast," Harvey said. With a courage I would never have believed him able of—or maybe it now seems recklessness — he stretched his hand to touch it.
And then the thing whispered. Not a moan or a groan, not a
recognizable sound, but a thick, slithery whisper, which seemed to go on and on between the slippery walls. The whisper of something old and feeble, something slimy and swollen, which seemed dead and yet alive, as if it had just awakened from a long sleep. Something petrified and timeless, suddenly coming to itself.
I turned and ran, my only thoughts for free air and light I slipped on the stairs and hurt my knee, but then I was out of the darkness and away from the horrible whispering.
Outside I got my breath and courage back, but not enough of the last to go back inside. I cursed my cowardice, but I didn't return. I just sat down and waited, then got up and started to walk around the ruins. Twice I called, but got no response of any kind. Not a sound came from the cellar. Harvey was alone down there, with the whispering thing. I waited. There was nothing else to do. Then, after a quarter of an hour, Harvey came out of the Infernal darkness. He was pale, and so I knew that he, too, had been scared, even if he was laughing now.
"Coward," he teased, "whatever did you run away from? There's nothing horrible down there, just a poor sick old dog, feeling lonesome."
I didn't say anything. I knew Harvey had lied to me. Whatever had whispered down there in the slimy blackness, hadn't been a dog or any other animal I knew.
We went home and got our second spanking for coming late for supper. The next days and weeks, I saw less and less of Harvey; he almost seemed to evade me. Whenever he spoke to me, he was short and unfriendly, not at all his usual self. Sometimes, on free days, I saw him leave the village, as soon as he could get away, to go to the cellar in the forest. Twice I accompanied him, but I didn't follow him down into the darkness, although he asked me to. He told me the dog was better now, and wanted to play with me also. It was a very old and friendly dog, Harvey said, he was so long and thin. Harvey nicknamed him "Stake" for that. Sometimes he told Harvey stories, and that's how I cornered Harvey.
Outside a circus, I had never heard a dog speak, and everyone knew in a circus it was just a trick. So Harvey had to admit, it wasn't a dog that whispered to him. Stake was a man, he said at last, a friend. He was old, very old. More than two hundred years, he had told Harvey, and he had come a long way. He had been very sick, and he had been so long in the dark, that the sun hurt his eyes, He never came out, not even at night. So if I wanted to meet Stake, I should go to him.
One day, I almost did. I followed Harvey down the slithery stone steps like carvings, leading downward into a hungry stomach of waiting shadows. My back felt hot and cold at the same time, and I was deadly afraid. Nevertheless, I followed. Then I was down, and groping my way, trying to see a thing. Then it whispered. A soft, throaty whisper, slithery and unspeakable evil. "Don, it whispered my name, in almost unrecognable words, almost as if it spoke with a tongue, not meant to utter human words.
I cried out, I couldn't hold it back. I panicked, stumbling out of the nauseating cave in a mad flight, and then I ran, away from the forest and the cave with its hellish horror. I never went near it again.
Harvey stopped playing with me altogether from that day on. In fact, he evaded all the other boys and girls of the village, too, and always went out to play alone. Once I overheard a conversation between our parents, and I heard them say that Harvey was always outside much too late. They said one night he even leaped through the window, thinking them asleep, and went out to the forest. Then they started suspecting things about Harvey and girls, which I didn't understand completely, but his father finished the argument, saying that Harvey was still much too young for that. It was just the boy's wild nature, he thought.
But after a while, people began to notice how pale and sick he looked.
I had seen it already for a long time, and I knew it to be the influence of the thick, stale air in the cellar, and the fact that he was always down there in the dark and never played any more in the sunlight. But I didn't tell on him, and maybe that's my big guilt.
Then he fell sick. The doctor said he had never seen a boy of his age looking so pale. His whole face was thin, almost fallen-in flesh around his skullbones. You could see his cheekbones sticking out. He had lost much weight too. The doctor couldn't exactly say, what was the matter with him, and that was strange too. Harvey had never been sick before, except the usual children’s diseases. The doctor ordered much fresh air, wholesome food and some vitamin-pills, and if that didn’t help, his parents should go and see a specialist in the city. And Harvey had always been so strong and healthy looking!
The second week of his sickness, I'll never forget, It was the next time,
I came unwillingly in contact with Harvey's "friend" Stake.
It was a cloudy, moonless night. The weather was fine, warm and windless, but not too hot. I had left the window of my room open. I wasn't asleep yet, which was luck for me. Otherwise I’d never have heard it, before it was too late.
It came from the woods, towards the village. Maybe it was bored. Maybe it wanted some company, or just wanted to find Harvey. Those were my thoughts then; now I know the much more important reason it had to come out of its cellar.
I heard the slow, dragging steps on the path, and then the crunching of the gravel. Don't ask me how; I just knew, with an unsetting clearness, what it was that walked stealthily towards our house through the protecting darkness outside, hidden ev
en from the moonlight. In one movement, I was out of bed and pulling the window shut. The very next second, something whispered very softly outside. There was a rubbing sound against the window, as if some soft body pressed against the cold wall, trying to get in, always whispering. There was nothing to be seen in the darkness outside.
Then the moon came through the clouds for a few fleeting moments, an eye of ice looking downwards that gave me the first glimpse ever of the unknown, which is always at our side. Because the whispering went on, something clawed against the glass, making sharp lines in it as for some eternal seeming seconds moonlight flooded the scene outside, and there was nothing there.
Real fear runs through your veins like ice; it crawls upwards under your skin to your neck. It feels like suddenly standing on the brink of an abominable deep pit with crawling emptiness. Something was there and yet wasn't I don’t know how I managed to move, but somehow I shrank backwards, never leaving the window out of my eyes. I couldn't breathe; unseen claws seemed to grope in my stomach and lungs. I’ll never know which reflex or instinct made me reach for the chair. I was very young then, and I had never had any experience with the unseen.
I had reached a breaking point in those few seconds. I cried out and threw the chair towards the thing beyond the window. The glass splintered, as I ran to the door. It wasn't necessary; it moved outside, very quick, away from the house.
I got a spanking for having broken the window, and then they had to call the doctor to give me a sedative. Nobody paid attention to the glass splinters, which all lay inside the room. I had seen how the glass cracked and broke, just before the chair reached it!
Then Harvey died.
Very suddenly, in the midst of night. The doctor said his heart unexpectedly gave up, for no special reason at all. He had grown very weak and thin, almost just skin over his bones. He simply passed away, from this world into another. I hope it was into a better one.
Two days later, he was buried. Everyone I knew from the neighborhood was there, serious-looking people everywhere. There was a lot of crying going on. I don't know if I cried. When you're nine years old, there's no real understanding of the "death", I only felt Harvey was far, far away from me now, and he would never come back. Yes, maybe I did cry.
The next day, a free afternoon, I went alone to the churchyard to look at Harvey's tombstone and all the pretty flowers on it. Then I heard it again. Now it wasn't sneaking, covered by the dark of night and a moonless sky. It came as an angry thunderstorm, angry, mad, towards Harvey's grave. I jumped away, ran a few steps and let myself roll behind a large tombstone, where I stayed hidden, shivering with uncontrollable fear, while the raving terror came nearer and nearer, until it was so close I could hear it, the loathsome, angry whispering.
Much, much later, I came home, to break down in my mother's arms, raving and crying, trying to escape from every shadow in the room. They didn’t believe anything I said, until my father, to calm me, went to the graveyard and saw what somebody or something had done to the fresh grave and the stone, to the dug-up, broken coffin and to what was now still left of Harvey's little body. I was delirious for two days, before I could speak coherently of the cellar in the wood, and Harvey's friend who lived in there. They didn't believe it at first, but they went nevertheless, to find out what was true of my story. They went with many, armed with shovels, pick-axes, guns and electric lamps. They came back, late in the night, looking very tired and somehow scared. None of them said anything. The next day, my father told me I must have dreamed everything. They had only found a dead dog in the cave.
Only now, many years later, my father too has passed away, and
before me I have his diary on that day. In his fine and yet strong handwriting, at last I know what they really found down there.
It was something which could have been human once, but I can't be sure. Neither can any one of us. It was a skeleton, smaller than a normal man, and crouching, as if it wasn't meant to walk upright But on those yellow bones, new flesh, new muscles and fresh, soft skin were growing. Weak ones, nevertheless, the muscles and flesh of a young boy. They could hardly keep the heavy thing moving. It tried to strike us, and it whispered to us, as Don had told us. When Franz and then Wilfried hit it with their shovels, it whimpered. We crushed it with our spades, split the bones of the unspeakable thing, and all the time it kept on whispering to us and trying to fight us.
It couldn't get past us out of the cellar, and we kept it in the white burning circles of our torches. God forgive me, if it was something which had the right to live, but I don't think it had. The life which moved it was stolen, as was the flesh which grew on it. A foul stench of decay came in gulps out of it, when we broke the bones and split the soft skin. There was blood too, thick and spreading a stench of something very old and very dead Harold cut off an arm with a blow of his shovel, and the arm and the hand kept on moving crawling over the floor. Then Franz heard something outside. He and Peter went to look, and they swear there was nothing to be seen, yet suddenly trees were pushed aside and something struck them away from the entrance with a formidable strength.
We all heard something come down the stairs, and at that exact moment I split the skull of the moaning horror with my pick axe. There was a loud shriek, suddenly cut off and then there was nothing beside us in the cellar. The whispering had stopped, and the loathsome parts of flesh, bones and muscles lay silent
I can't think of that moment, without shuddering. What could the thing have done to us, if by pure luck, I hadn't hit the skull at the exact moment before the invisible projection (I can't think of a better suited word for it) reached us? We burned all which was on the floor of the cave, and then we made the cellar collapse over the ashes so that now there is nothing there but a heap of crumbling stones.
They never knew what it had been exactly. Neither did they try to find out too hard. But I can't forget what is burned in my memory by such a petrifying fear as I had never known, and hope will never know again. It is that day, when I lay alone behind the shadow of a tomb, shivering madly in the full sunlight, while something unseen crushed Harvey's tombstone and broke open his grave, always whispering, whispering.
The Man Who Collected Eyes
Claes Perquoi had always been extremely interested in eyes. Already in his youth, when he used to live in the house next to my parents’, he could spend hours just standing before a mirror, or outside bent over a small stream, making silly faces to his own reflection, watching, no, studying his own eyes.
This mania—because I can hardly name it otherwise—was created very early in his life by his parents, not withstanding their good intentions. Parents all have only the best of intentions concerning their offspring. Being very Catholic, they had decorated the children’s room in the best possible way to their rather narrow minds. On the wall, opposite of the little child’s bed, they had hung one of those prints, still often encountered in older farm houses, featuring in burning colors a large triangle, an enormous eye, within the midst, looking down on anyone unfortunate enough to be in the room. Above the eye, which was supposed to have a kind and benevolent look, in red letters of flame, the painting said “God Sees You”. One could not escape the eye; it saw everything, and specially the young occupant of the room.
It can be called typical for the young Claes’ character, that the eye had exactly the opposite reaction on him that it would have had on any normal human being. Instead of beginning to fear the omnipresent eye, he got rather attached and interested in it. Instead of starting to hate its influence, he started to love it. After that, one thing led to the others, and I could rightfully say “One eye led to the others” in this case. His own eyes were the first to receive his fullest attention. Before the mirror, he turned his eyeballs in all directions, an art he mastered very quickly, so that soon only the white stayed visible and the small red veins, like a blank piece of paper with smears of red ink on it. Sometimes when he was turning his eyes, 1 was afraid that one day they’d escape fr
om their orbits and roll over the floor like large bloody marbles, or just burst open like fallen eggs.
At the age of fourteen, Claes started studying girls’ eyes with an even more fixed attention that before. This time not before mirrors, but on small shaded benches in parks, and on the back seats of theaters and other quiet places, where it was in fact a bit too dark to see really much of their eyes. He didn’t find what he was looking for anyway, because ten years later, he was still a bachelor. Maybe the girls he dated just wanted something more besides a monologue about the qualities, faults or purity of their eyes.
It was after those first ten years, that he started his collection. He hated it when somebody called his innocent hobby “horrible” or “morbid”. “The eye,” he preferred to reply to accusations of that kind, “is the most beautiful thing of creation. One should look at the iris as upon a diamond, full of sparkling life, a moving black expression with colored dots around it like a crown of pearls. The pupil is a star, a heart, the brain of the eye, the inner mirror of the soul. The white should be approached like a lake of pure milk, an anti-galaxy of snow purity, in which the pupil drifts like an island in space, a miniature planetoid. The little, almost invisible strings of slime are small clouds, the little arteries as undersea volcanoes, full or burning fire, veins of pulsating life force, blood!”
He started indeed rather innocently with eyes of dead birds, dogs, cats and even fish, all of which he kept as a real treasure. Big and small eyes, in all colors, which he cut out of the bodies of dead animals, and treated with a special recipe—a magical recipe, he used to joke—so they didn’t get slimy and rot away. His living room began to fill, with the results of his collection. Eyes in class cases, like flowers on the cupboards; other eyes swimming in aquariums like lazy fish, trailing their nerves slowly behind as tails; eyes in hermetically closed terrariums, sunning themselves as tortoises. He had a pair of sparkling lizard eyes made into a pair of cuff-links, and a parrot’s eye fixed into a tie-pin.
Selected Stories Page 18
