by T E. D Klein
If I seem to credit these stories unduly—to dwell on them, even—it’s because of what had happened to me in the basement, at the start of the blackout, and because of another incident, far more terrible, which occurred later that night. Since then some years have elapsed; and now, with Karen’s permission, I can speak of it.
***
The two of them had driven back without mishap. Marcia had left Karen off in front of our apartment and had waited till she got inside. After all that they had been through that night, the neighborhood seemed an oasis of safety. There’d been stores broken into on Columbus, but our block, by this time, was relatively quiet. It was 2:15 a.m.
Unlocking the door, Karen felt her way into the kitchen and, with some difficulty, located a dusty box of Sabbath candles, one of which she lit on the top burner of the stove. A thin white stream of candle wax ran, wormlike, down her hand; she stood the candle upon a saucer to protect the rug. Moving slowly so that the flame would not go out, she walked into the bedroom, pausing to open the window and let some air into the room. She noticed, with some irritation, that it was already halfway open; someone had been careless, and it wasn’t her. She would have to remember to mention it to me when she called. The phone was there before her on the night table. Carefully, in the flickering light, she dialed Grandfather’s number.
I had been nodding off, lulled by the rhythm of Grandfather’s snoring, when the telephone jerked me awake. For a moment I forgot where I was, but then I heard Karen’s voice.
“Well,” she said, “here I am, safe and sound, and absolutely exhausted. One thing’s good, at least I won’t have to go to work tomorrow. I feel like I could use a good twelve hours’ sleep, though it’ll probably be pretty unbearable in here tonight without the air conditioner. There’s a funny smell, too. I just took a peek in the refrigerator, and all that meat you bought’s going to spoil unless—Oh God, what’s that?”
I heard her scream. She screamed several times. Then there was a thud, and then a jarring succession of bangs as the phone was dropped and left dangling from the edge of the table.
And then, in the background, I heard it: a sound so similar to the one coming from the bed behind me that for one horrifying second I’d confused the two.
It was the sound of snoring.
***
Nine flights of stairs and a dozen blocks later I stumbled from the darkness into the darkness of our apartment. The police had not arrived yet, but Karen had already regained consciousness, and a candle burned once more upon the table. A two-inch purple welt just below her hairline showed where, in falling, she had hit the table’s edge.
I was impressed by how well she was bearing up. Even though she’d awakened alone in the dark, she had managed to keep herself busy: after relighting the candle and replacing the telephone, she had methodically gone about locking all the windows and had carefully washed the stickiness from her legs. In fact, by the time I got there she seemed remarkably composed, at least for the moment—composed enough to tell me, in a fairly level voice, about the thing she’d seen drop soundlessly into the room, through the open window, just as another one leaped toward her from the hall and a third, crouched gaunt and pale behind the bed, rose up and, reaching forward, pinched the candle out.
Her composure slipped a bit—and so did mine—when, six hours later, the morning sunlight revealed a certain shape scratched like a marker in the brick outside our bedroom window.
Six weeks later, while we were still living at her mother’s house in Westchester, the morning bouts of queasiness began. The tests came back negative, negative again, then positive. Whatever was inside her might well have been mine—we had, ironically, decided some time before to let nature take its course—but we took no chances. The abortion cost only $150, and we got a free lecture from a Right to Life group picketing in front. We never asked the doctor what the wretched little thing inside her looked like, and he never showed the least inclination to tell us.
Wednesday, February 14, 1979
“‘Young men think that old men are fools,’” said Mrs. Rosenzweig, quoting with approval one of my grandfather’s favorite sayings, “‘but old men know that young men are fools.’” She pursed her lips doubtfully. “Of course,” she added, “that wouldn’t apply to you.”
I laughed. “Of course not! Besides, I’m not so young anymore.”
It had been exactly a year since I’d last seen her; having arrived today with a big red box of Valentine’s Day chocolates for her, I was glad to find her still alive—and still living at the Manor. Despite the night of terror she’d suffered back in ’77, she had returned here as soon as she’d been discharged from the hospital, believing herself too old for a change of scene, too old to make new friends. The Manor was her home, and she was determined to stay.
Here, inside her own room, it was virtually impossible to tell that she was blind (just as I had been fooled the first time I’d met her); habit had taught her the location of every article, every piece of furniture. But elsewhere in the building, with her former roommate, Mrs. Hirschfeld, no longer there to lean on, she’d felt helpless and alone—until my grandfather’d acted the gentleman. He had befriended her, made her feel secure; they had walked along Broadway together, traded stories of the past, and kept each other company through the long summer afternoons. For a while, he had replaced Mrs. Hirschfeld in her life; she had replaced poor old Father Pistachio in his...
“Did I ever show you what Herman gave me?” Unerringly she picked a small round object from the shelf beside her and began winding a key in its base. It appeared to be a miniature globe of the world, with a decal on the base proclaiming “Souvenir of Hayden Planetarium.” When she set it back on the shelf, it played the opening bars of “Home Sweet Home.”
“That’s very nice.”
The music ran on a few seconds more, then died in the air. The old woman sighed.
“It was nice of you to bring that chocolate. That’s just the kind of thing your grandfather would have done. He was always very generous.”
“Yes,” I said, “he was. He never had much, but he was devoted to his friends.”
The chocolate—in fact, the visit itself—had been my way of commemorating this day. It was the first anniversary of his death.
He had died following another stroke, just as the doctors had predicted—one of the few times in his life that he’d acted according to prediction. It had happened after dinner, while he’d been sitting in the game room with several of his cronies, laughing heartily at one of his own jokes. Laughter, Svevo tells us, is the only form of violent exercise old men are still permitted, but perhaps in this case the violence had been too much. Rushed to the hospital, he had lingered less than a week. I don’t believe his end was a hard one. His last words are unrecorded, which is probably just as well—what are anyone’s last words, after all, except a curse, a cry for help, or a string of nonsense?—but the last words I ever heard him say, and which have now become a family legend, were addressed to a young intern, fresh out of med school, who had come to take his blood pressure. During this process the old man had remained silent—speaking had become extremely difficult—and his eyes were closed; I assumed he was unconscious. But when the intern, putting away his instruments, happened to mention that he had a date waiting for him that night as soon as he got off work, my grandfather opened his eyes and said, in what was little more than a whisper, “Ask her if she’s got a friend for me.”
And Father Pistachio—he, too, is gone now, gone even before my grandfather. Although he has never been listed as such, he remains, as far as I’m concerned, the only likely fatality of the Great 1977 Blackout. It appears that, at the moment the power failed, he’d been on his way to visit Grandfather and me in the Manor, a short walk up the street. Beyond that it’s impossible to say, for no one saw what happened to him. Maybe, in the darkness, he got frightened and ran off, maybe he had a run-in with the same gang that attacked me, maybe he simply fell down a rabbit hole
and disappeared. I have one or two suspicions of my own—suspicions about the blackout itself, in fact, and whether it was really Con Ed’s fault—but such speculations only get my wife upset. All we really know is that the old man vanished without a trace, though Grandfather later claimed to have seen a white paper bag lying crumpled and torn near the stoop of Pistachio’s house.
As for his effects, the contents of his room, I am not the one to ask—and the one to ask is dead. Grandfather was supposed to have gone over and inquired about them, but he told me he’d been “given the runaround” by the superintendent of the building, a gruff Puerto Rican man who understood almost no English. The super had maintained that he’d given all Pistachio’s belongings to the “policia,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in fact, he’d kept for himself the things he thought of value and had thrown away the rest. Still, I like to pretend that somewhere, in a storeroom down the dusty corridors of some obscure city department, hidden away in some footlocker or cubbyhole or file shelf, there lies the old priest’s great work—the notes and maps and photos, the pages of English translation—complete with all the “new material” he’d hinted of.
One thing, at least, has survived. The super, a religious man (or perhaps just superstitious), had held back one of Pistachio’s books, believing it to be a Bible, and this he allowed my grandfather to take. In a sense he was right, it was a Bible—the 1959 Harper & Row edition of The Gospel According to Thomas, which now stands on my desk looking very scholarly next to the cheap Spanish version of his “Commentary.” The book holds little interest for me, nor is it particularly rare, but I find it makes an excellent memento of its former owner, thanks to the hundreds of annotations in Pistachio’s crabbed hand: tiny comments scribbled in the margins, “sí” and “indudable!” and even one “caramba!” along with some more cryptic—“Ync.” and “Qch.” and “X.T.”—and pages and pages of underlinings. One passage, attributed to Christ himself, was actually circled in red ink:
Whoever feels the touch of my hand shall become as I am, and the hidden things shall be revealed to him… I am the All, and the All came forth from me. Cleave a piece of wood and you will find me; lift up a stone and I am there.
Beneath it he had written, “Está hecho.” It is done.
I was feeling depressed as I said good-bye to Mrs. Rosenzweig. Though I agreed to visit her again soon, privately I doubted I’d be back before next year. Coming here aroused too many painful memories.
Outside, the world looked even bleaker. It was not yet 5:00 p.m., and already getting dark. We’d had below-freezing temperatures throughout the week and the pavement was covered with patches of snow. Turning up my collar against the icy wind, I headed up the block.
Now, one of the hoariest clichés of a certain type of cheap fiction—along with the mind that “suddenly goes blank,” and the fearful town where everyone “clams up” when a stranger arrives, and the victimized industrialist who won’t go to the police because “I don’t want the publicity,” and the underworld informer who says “I know who did it but I can’t tell you over the phone”—along with these is the feeling of “being watched.” One’s flesh is supposed to crawl, one’s hair to stand on end; one is supposed to have an “indefinable sense” that one is under scrutiny. The truth is not so mystical. In the course of my life I have stared, and stared hard, at thousands of people who, were they the least bit sensitive, would have shivered or turned or perhaps even jumped in the air. None has ever done so. For that matter, I’ve undoubtedly been glared at by hundreds of people in my time without ever realizing it.
This time was the same. I was standing on the corner of 81st and Amsterdam, hunching my shoulders against the cold and waiting impatiently for the light to change. My mind was on the clean new restaurant across the street that advertised “Dominican and American Cuisine,” right where Davey’s Tavern used to stand. How nice, I said to myself. Things are looking up.
The light changed. I took one step off the curb, and heard something crackle underfoot. That was why I happened to look down. I saw that I had stepped upon a little mound of pistachio shells, red against the snow, piled by the opening to a sewer.
And I froze—for there was something in the opening, just beside my shoe: something watching intently, its face pressed up against the metal grating, its pale hands clinging tightly to the bars. I saw, dimly in the streetlight, the empty craters where its eyes had been—empty but for two red dots, like tiny beads—and the gaping red ring of its mouth, like the sucker of some undersea creature. The face was alien and cold, without human expression, yet I swear that those eyes regarded me with utter malevolence—and that they recognized me.
It must have realized that I’d seen it—surely it heard me cry out—for at that moment, like two exploding white stars, the hands flashed open and the figure dropped back into the earth, back to that kingdom, older than ours, that calls the dark its home.
Black Man With A Horn
The Black [words obscured by postmark] was fascinating—I must get a snap shot of him.
—H. P. Lovecraft, postcard to E. Hoffmann Price, 7/23/1934
There is something inherently comforting about the first-person past tense. It conjures up visions of some deskbound narrator puffing contemplatively upon a pipe amid the safety of his study, lost in tranquil recollection, seasoned but essentially unscathed by whatever experience he’s about to relate. It’s a tense that says, “I am here to tell the tale. I lived through it.”
The description, in my own case, is perfectly accurate—as far as it goes. I am indeed seated in a kind of study: a small den, actually, but lined with bookshelves on one side, below a view of Manhattan painted many years ago, from memory, by my sister. My desk is a folding bridge table that once belonged to her. Before me the electric typewriter, though somewhat precariously supported, hums soothingly, and from the window behind me comes the familiar drone of the old air conditioner, waging its lonely battle against the tropic night. Beyond it, in the darkness outside, the small night-noises are doubtless just as reassuring: wind in the palm trees, the mindless chant of crickets, the muffled chatter of a neighbor’s TV, an occasional car bound for the highway, shifting gears as it speeds past the house...
House, in truth, may be too grand a word; the place is a green stucco bungalow just a single story tall, third in a row of nine set several hundred yards from the highway. Its only distinguishing features are the sundial in the front yard, brought here from my sister’s former home, and the jagged little picket fence, now rather overgrown with weeds, which she had erected despite the protests of neighbors.
It’s hardly the most romantic of settings, but under normal circumstances it might make an adequate background for meditations in the past tense. “I’m still here,” the writer says, adjusting to the tone. (I’ve even stuck the requisite pipe in mouth, stuffed with a plug of latakia.) “It’s over now,” he says. “I lived through it.”
A comforting premise, perhaps. Only, in this case, it doesn’t happen to be true. Whether the experience is really “over now” no one can say; and if, as I suspect, the final chapter has yet to be enacted, then the notion of my “living through it” will seem a pathetic conceit.
Yet I can’t say I find the thought of my own death particularly disturbing. I get so tired, sometimes, of this little room, with its cheap wicker furniture, the dull outdated books, the night pressing in from outside... And of that sundial out there in the yard, with its idiotic message. “Grow old along with me...”
I have done so, and my life seems hardly to have mattered in the scheme of things. Surely its end cannot matter much either.
Ah, Howard, you would have understood.
***
That, boy, was what I call a travel-experience!
—Lovecraft, 3/12/1930
If, while I set it down, this tale acquires an ending, it promises to be an unhappy one. But the beginning is nothing of the kind; you may find it rather humorous, in fact—full of comic pratfall
s, wet trouser cuffs, and a dropped vomit-bag.
“I steeled myself to endure it,” the old lady to my right was saying. “I don’t mind telling you I was exceedingly frightened. I held on to the arms of the seat and just gritted my teeth. And then, you know, right after the captain warned us about that turbulence, when the tail lifted and fell, flip-flop, flip-flop, well—” she flashed her dentures at me and patted my wrist, “—I don’t mind telling you, there was simply nothing for it but to heave."
Where had the old girl picked up such expressions? And was she trying to pick me up as well? Her hand clamped wetly round my wrist. “I do hope you’ll let me pay for the dry cleaning.”
“Madam,” I said, “think nothing of it. The suit was already stained.”
“Such a nice man!” She cocked her head coyly at me, still gripping my wrist. Though their whites had long since turned the color of old piano keys, her eyes were not unattractive. But her breath repelled me. Slipping my paperback into a pocket, I rang for the stewardess.
The earlier mishap had occurred several hours before. In clambering aboard the plane at Heathrow, surrounded by what appeared to be an aboriginal rugby club (all dressed alike, navy blazers with bone buttons), I’d been shoved from behind and had stumbled against a black cardboard hatbox in which some Chinaman was storing his dinner; it was jutting into the aisle near the first-class seats. Something inside sloshed over my ankles— duck sauce, soup perhaps—and left a sticky yellow puddle on the floor. I turned in time to see a tall, beefy Caucasian with an Air Malay bag and a beard so thick and black he looked like some heavy from the silent era. His manner was equally suited to the role, for after shouldering me aside (with shoulders broad as my valises), he pushed his way down the crowded passage, head bobbing near the ceiling like a gas balloon, and suddenly disappeared from sight at the rear of the plane. In his wake I caught the smell of treacle, and was instantly reminded of my childhood: birthday hats, Callard and Bowser gift packs, and after-dinner bellyaches.
