by S. T. Joshi
* * *
INTRODUCTION
WHEN THE EDITOR ASKED ME FOR A CONTRIBUTION TO this anthology (the very one in your hands), I knew I had my work cut out for me. A flurry of correspondence ensued: When was the book coming out? Who was the publisher? Was there a theme? What were the restrictions on length and so on?
As usual, the editor was courteous, prompt, and succinct. Did I mention thorough? At any rate, I went off to consider all this information and came to a stark realization—I had nothing to contribute! This was a quandary; I wanted to be part of the book, yet I had no idea what to write.
Weeks of vexation, false starts, irritable moods, and agitation followed. As the deadline loomed, I went through my normal course of actions, as is my coping strategy at such times:
1. I searched through my files and notebooks, hoping to stumble across that gem of an idea waiting to be fleshed out (always a dubious gamble, I might add).
2. I castigated myself as a procrastinator (though I had been quite involved in another task, which I will address in a moment).
3. I played loud music (a normal, albeit damaging, habit for me).
4. I stayed up very late, unable to sleep (another habit I cannot seem to rid myself of).
Finally, several months later and just a few weeks before the piece was due, I asked the (patient) editor if a nonfiction submission was acceptable, and the reply was “Of course! But I need it quickly.” I felt better then, as I had been working on something that had haunted me for some time, but was unsure where it might lead. I hoped that the article would be of use, as I felt no small amount of guilt that I had been spending hours fiddling with it and trolling around various libraries, bookstores, and online venues doing research in lieu of writing a story for the anthology I had committed to those many months previous.
A brief explanation: While conducting an investigation for an unrelated project, I stumbled across an old copy of the Georges Bataille1 classic Histoire de l’oeil2 at Powell’s City of Books3 in Portland, Oregon. As I was leafing through the crumbling pages of this book, something fell out and fluttered to the ground—a letter. It was tightly folded, ragged, stained, and yellow with age. I picked it up, and what I read filled me with a peculiar disquiet; as I deciphered the cramped, spidery handwriting, I lost all interest in the Bataille volume and, though I knew it was wrong, I could not resist the impulse to take the dispatch.
What follows are the contents of that strange missive; the notes are my own, based on investigations that have distracted me, as I stated, for the better part of a year and sidetracked my other ambitions, consuming more and more of my time and attention.
THE LETTER
Dearest—4
BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, I5 WILL BE NO MORE, AND most likely your time will be limited as well.6 Thus, as a final testament, I have decided to address a question that you posed long ago, and I never answered…
Do you recall when you asked what single event in my life had most disturbed me? I had scoffed at the notion, stating that I had no use for such banality, but the truth is—I was loath to revisit the moment. I’m ahead of myself: allow me to “begin at the beginning,” as it were…
It was yet another melancholy fall afternoon about eight years ago,7 and I was walking through the Olde Jewish Shopping District8 when I saw it. Just the recollection sets my teeth on edge! At any rate, I was crossing the street when I glanced up and there the hideous object was, on display—obscene display—in an antiquarian book and curio dealer’s window.9
Though I had been feeling febrile and ill for many months,10 and had been warned against undue excitement by my attending physician, I rushed back across the boulevard, pressing my hands against the cold glass of the display. I was horrorstruck that the rest of the world continued unabated as though this was the most natural thing in the world. My focus was now reduced—to this moment in time, to this instant of revulsion and comprehension brought on by the relic. The sky darkened for a moment and I felt nauseous, my stomach aflutter. As I extricated myself from the window, the Earth seemed somehow robbed of all colour, and the chilly air had the stale quality of a giant’s exhalation. A man bumped into me, and his cursing brought me back to the external present. Dabbing perspiration from my face, I straightened my tie and decided to enter the shoppe.
An archaic bell, too loud in my sensitive state, jangled atop the door as I stepped through the ornate threshold. The musty atmosphere was frigid—colder even than the late fall day outside. A chill swept my bones and the crisp air inside felt alive; in every direction I looked, I could not escape the unspeakably ghoulish contents of the room. Sinister etchings and shadowed portraits peered from the corners of the weirdly expansive shoppe, and the dimly lit parlour seemed scarcely able to contain all the objets d’art that the owner had accumulated over the years. The place reeked with the mould of old furniture and older books, causing my nose to tickle as I observed the bottles of freak fetuses preserved in clouded green fluid, the rough-skinned shrunken heads with empty-eyed stares, the colorful voodoo effigies of the Caribbean, the strange skin-bound tomes of an apparently Arab11 origin, their spines decorated in Sanskrit letters…
I glanced to the window that I had leered through only a moment before; the heavy door closed behind me with dreadful finality, and I felt my throat constrict. I should have stayed away; in that moment, I had decided to turn, to leave, to try to forget the madness in the window, but was interrupted…
“Mon Dieu! I see you’ve returned,” the shopkeeper said from the back of the cramped space. Lately, I had been experiencing disturbing bouts of déjà vu; as the wizened, stoop-shouldered proprietor shuffled toward me, the sensation reasserted itself in a forcefully disorienting fashion.
“Au contraire, Monsieur—I’m quite sure I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting your fine establishment before.… Perhaps I have a twin?” My clumsy attempt at humour was met with stoicism by the keeper, who was now in front of me, leaning on a gnarled wooden cane capped by a silver skull. Squinting, he studied me with piercing blue eyes from behind thick, wire-rimmed spectacles, thoughtfully stroking his white beard; after a long moment, he straightened his shawl-covered frame and flashed a brief smile.
“Oui—quite a remarkable doppelgänger. How may I assist you?” He paused, then bent forward, conspiratorially peering over his glasses: “Let me guess—the display in the window, correct?” His voice was quiet, his enunciation precise.
The world seemed to spin for an instant. I glanced again around the claustrophobic showroom, with its dust-enrobed grotesqueries and curios from across the planet; its masks out of darkest Africa; its fetishes from the cannibal tribes of Papua New Guinea; its arcane trinkets from the savages of South America and the madmen of Asia.
“Yes,” I managed at last. “The window.” Our gaze locked, and I realised that I could no longer hear the bustle of the street outside, just the creak of wooden shelves, the wheeze of the shopkeeper’s ragged breath. I dabbed my forehead again, though the dark room was chilly to the point of my breath fogging. Perhaps my fever had returned. Perhaps it was something else.
The owner nodded. “I thought so, just like yesterday, and all the days prior to that…”
Before I could rouse another protest, he turned his icy stare away, breaking our connection.
Here I must insert an aside: Though the aged retailer insisted that we’d met before, I know that this is not the case. His innuendo of “yesterday” would have been an impossibility, for example, as I had been in the next town over, acting as a pallbearer with Ernst, Alistair, and Isaac for my poor brother, Stefan,12 who had finally succumbed to his injuries.13 Given the great distance and my ill health, there was no way I could have been at the funeral service and then to his establishment in the same [illegible].
“Oui, oui—you’ve never been here before; I recall,” he said, lightly tapping the side of his head as he moved to the front of the store. I followed, navigating around the jammed shelves, the queer it
ems suspended from the ceiling. In the swirl of dust motes kicked up by our trespass, I continued to be plagued by the peculiar nag of déjà vu; the whole strange episode had the quaint aspect of a fever dream.
The old bay windows of the storefront rattled from a sudden gust. A dull ache began to throb in my temple as I felt the barometric pressure drop; such is the normal course of events in coastal towns when a storm gathers on the sea. The waning orange glow of evening glinted off the chop in the harbour across the bay,14 clearly visible from the dirt-gauzed panes. The antiquarian dealer’s battered shingle squealed as it was buffeted by the wind. No one was outside; the cobblestones on the street glistened with rain, puddles reflecting the baleful flicker of the gaslights.15 A cloud of dread enveloped me as I watched twilight cloak the city. It was rare that I frequented this aspect of the port, even more rare that I would be out this late in the day, especially at this time of the year, when the light and the darkness changed places so much earlier. My salivary glands tightened, making my mouth dry, my jaw twinge, adding to my headache.
“Storm’s on the way,” the proprietor said, staring at the water. The harbormaster’s warning horn sounded. By this point, the scene had grown unbearably tense, and I knew I should take my leave—[illegible] just forget this horrible place and its contents for good.
“[Illegible],” the shopkeeper said at last; then he crept over to the display and reached in. I wiped the sweat from my forehead again, my stomach in turmoil and competing with the pain in my head.
“Perhaps it is too much effort—” I said. My voice was hoarse, a whisper.
“No, no: just one moment; it always takes a moment to [illegible]…”
Another odd statement from the owner; I was beginning to wonder if the old man was losing his grip on reality.16 The wind kicked up again; it was now completely dark outside. A stroke of lightning split the night, followed by a low roll of thunder. As I watched, several denizens staggered against the mounting gale—they seemed unnatural, pained, ensconced in tattered overcoats and filthy gloves that obscured their features. They determinedly made their way in the wind toward the opening night of the Ceremony,17 no doubt driven by the long tradition of the Rituals;18 indeed, I had forgotten that this was the return of that savage and disturbing five-year spectacle.19 Backward hamlets such as this are places so entombed in their traditions, so ossified by their histories that they appear to have lost all [illegible] and rational thought when it comes to these “historic” defences of orchestrated mayhem. Rotting leaves plaster the windows, whipped onto the loose panes by the tempest, and the lights in the store, already dim, lower. Finally I look away, awash once more in the anxious sensation of inhabiting a nightmare, but knowing this could not be the case. At that moment the keeper was at my side, brandishing the foul item from the window.20
“This is what you seek?” he stated more than asked, thrusting the obscenity into my hands, his thin flesh clammy and vaguely scaly to the touch. I was horrified to behold the object up close, and for a moment just stared into the cold, rheumy eyes of the proprietor. “Go on,” he commanded, his voice clotted, distant, as he pushed the artifact toward me. “Take it—there’s not another on Earth.”
As I held it in my hands, unsure if it were real or imagined, living or dead, I felt its dark energy course through my fingers… so much pain… so much filth… so much strength and cosmic wisdom… so much power. It appeared alive somehow, even conscious. Once again, the world started to tumble…
“How—how did you come to possess—this?” I asked, fingering the smooth, hard curves and planes, studying the bizarre runes and glyphs adorning the dreadful object. My impulses were divided as I hefted the thing: part of me wanted to destroy it, smash it into pieces, while another part of me longed to fall down in worship, inwardly cringing at its simultaneous beauty and loathsomeness.
“Mon Dieu—now that is a good question,” he said, his smile dark, macabre, like a bruise on the face of a bride. It seemed starkly out of place. I glanced down—my hands were covered in what appeared to be blood: the thing was oozing a sticky red fluid; its rigidity was lessened and it now felt prickly, malleable. “Sadly,” the shopkeeper said, “there is no answer: it comes from yesterday and tomorrow. It came to me long ago in a dream…”
A gust howled against the windows, and the light failed: suddenly a revolting, deformed face pressed against the iced glass of the storefront. A mewling din surged over the wind, and an ominous crowd began to gather outside the shoppe.
The proprietor laughed behind me, [illegible] I felt frozen, unable to move. As everything vanished from view, I thought about how this was the strangest thing in all the world… the most dreadful thing.… And then the idol was twitching in my hands… birthing…
Darkness: I awoke in darkness on the windswept street, my hands stained crimson, my palms singed and painful, though I have no memory of how I got there. I could not find the store, and the relic was gone…
* * *
SINCE THAT TIME, I HAVE BEEN TROUBLED BY A PECULIAR dream.
In the reverie, I am approaching a decrepit house on a devastated plain. The moon hangs low, bloated and blue in the sky. Fog snakes the ground. As I get nearer, a sickly yellow light winks on in an upstairs window, and a shadow passes in front of it. The wind blows, and a low rumble grows in the distance. The air is frosty, biting.
Closer now, the door opens: its hinges groan and the inside is darker than the outside; the smell of wet earth is robust, sickly.
In the foyer, on a table, there is a bundle of unbound, mildewed papers, tied together with a string. I untie it, and as I leaf through the stained manuscript, I notice that nearly every inch of the yellowed parchment is covered in weird symbols, incomprehensible diagrams, and crude illustrations.
And then, a few pages into the document, there it is: a hasty pen-and-ink sketch of the thing in the window!
I hurl the stack of papers to the ground and sense that I am not alone. Every time I have the dream, I am able to peruse more of the leaves in the bundle before I reach the drawing, and more of the presence reveals itself. Turning around, I can barely make out a ramshackle spiral staircase near the back of the room, which ascends to the ceiling, but not an ordinary one: it is instead a galactic canopy of stars and swirling celestial bodies, and the stairs climb into the face of a terrible midnight sun, its merciless solar flares blinding me, scorching my skin…
Then it appears: the idol from the shoppe. But not as some hand-held miniature, no. Instead it is a massive, jabbering horror, rending the fabric of my sanity with its tormented shrilling, its ultra-human sonorities.… It reaches to me across the aeons, the gulfs of eternity, and holds my broken body in its awful clutches—now I am the miniature!
I always awake screaming, and, more recently, I have had… injuries. Burns. Scratches. [Illegible] I feel that I must be hurting myself in my sleep, but, even though I take precautions against unintentional self-mutilation, the injuries are becoming more serious…
* * *
I SUSPECT THAT THE DREAM HAS SIGNIFICANCE; THAT IT means I am destined to find the ghastly relic again. Since that horrible day all those years ago, I have been obsessed: searching for, but unable to find, the mysterious antiquarian dealer’s shoppe. I still look for it daily amidst the new and unknown alleyways and shuttered businesses littering the darkened ends of the port. Every face I encounter I study, looking for the old merchant, to no avail. The place and its owner seem to have vanished from the Earth.
[Illegible] I recall the [illegible] shoppe to be has in its stead a mapmaker’s facility; they claim that the establishment I look for was there once—but more than a hundred years previous. I have moved away several times, trying to forget what I saw that fateful evening, but the strange pull of the place compels me back. There must be a reason for this; I hold it as a sign.
I have carried this with me for so long now, Dearest One. The dreams are becoming more intense, more frequent, more vivid… I sense that I am
on the verge… I know that am at the cusp of some great insight, some stupefying revelation… I must get to the bottom of it before I draw my last breath, but the way things are proceeding, I am not confident that this will happen. [Illegible]
If I ever find the infernal object again, I know what I must do… and I will do it.21
Heaven help me, Dearest, I have22
FINAL THOUGHTS
THIS LETTER IS AN INTERESTING DOCUMENT: IT RAISES more questions than it answers.
My hope is that I will one day be able to sort out where the port is located, what happened to the author, perhaps even understand the strange information seemingly “encoded” in the note. The vagueness of the memo and the obscured identity of its author are puzzling, tantalizing. Colleagues have even suggested that it is some elaborate hoax, but the content and the delivery make me wonder. Besides, to what end? So that, one day years later, someone would try to sort out the conundrum after the involved parties are (one would presume) all deceased?
Buddhists have a saying: “When the student is ready, the Master will appear.” Perhaps this is one of those times: I have a theory that the phenomenon of déjà vu (touched upon in the letter several times) is related to the process of dreaming.
It might be a way for the unconscious or the subconscious to process the reliving of events from multiple lifetimes, or of the same life lived multiple times. Another religious group, the Hindus, have long held that life is a cyclic, recurring event (reincarnation), and that there might even be different physical selves, but with the same soul (read: consciousness) over vast spans of time. Who is to say that there could not be the same consciousness relived repeatedly in the same physical self in some other, parallel universe?
