To the Master Engraver Jules de Bruyker

It had been raining since dawn. Damp had made my room as foul-smelling as a cave and its light was really that of a crypt where I was moldering, looking at tears streaming down the window and feeling that I was gradually swelling up with water absorbed through my pores. It seemed that this rain would last forever. I was surrounded by a pervasive odor of old scrapheaps and, since everything smelled, my body emitted the smell that tramps carry in their rags. My thoughts, like a bottle imp, slowly sank under the pressure of the opaque sky. And this inexorable descent into the void constituted a palpable but unspeakably horrible torture. Is it conceivable that a man in a room, unmoving and apparently impassive, could stand to feel his soul smothered without groaning, writhing, or praying?

As the day flowed by I sank lower and lower, my thoughts pulsing more and more feebly, but without obliterating themselves as I wished they would. And I was gripped by a premonition that this afternoon the world would come to an end, that the world could end in no other way. Our world wouldn’t explode in a glorious detonation; it was becoming a ball of mud, peeling, rotting, hydropic, destroyed by water, a miserable humanity returning to its primordial marshlands where elementary life fermented, filthy living debris, deaf and blind . . . Such were my thoughts, creeping like long worms, until the moment when my consciousness was sucked down into a muddy sleep.

Emerging from that low stupor, it seemed to me I was climbing back up toward the mouth of a pit. The rain had stopped. And my window allowed a singularly strong and heavy light to unfurl in the interior, one whose brutal, almost material flow pushed everything aside. That intense luminosity astonished me. It was no longer day, but night could not have fallen yet, and the sunset sky, a shattered mirror, had to exist somewhere behind the fissured wall of the rain. This light seemed truly liquid, lacking vibrancy and as though everything it touched was left coated with glycerine. Worried by that shaft of light, I got up from my damp couch, managing my limbs with difficulty. I staggered, trying to gain my balance, and the fear of no longer finding anything solid in the three dimensions of my room redoubled my disquiet. Was the cave now transforming itself into an aquarium, and was I going to find myself incapable of useful action, deprived of part of my weight? This fear of being stripped of my humanity revived my instincts and I threw myself toward the door with the movements of a swimmer. I felt somewhat reassured on running down the stairs but only recovered adequate confidence when I made contact with the street pavement, with the terrestrial globe that my fantasy had imagined lost. And I moved forward along the walls in search of the city and those who lived in it.

Scarcely any living beings to be seen; the city still existed, a charcoal mass, all outcrops and passages, still streaming with water and drifting in the ashen atmosphere without a guiding light, like a piece of flotsam. It beggared belief that no one was doing anything to fight the encroaching darkness, that not one lamp had been lit, that not one window glowed anywhere . . . Thankfully the air was breathable and not chilly, though autumn was advancing; old heat still lingered, discharged from the ground. My body had been rescued and it wasn’t long before I discovered what was pressing down on my soul. Coming out onto the level area that surrounds the church of St. Nicholas, where a hundred passageways and blind alleys come to discharge themselves as though into a vat, I surprised the secret of the deathly torpor, the lethargy that still suffused the city, similar in every respect to what I had suffered; just then the sky appeared to me, unexpectedly, like the sea discovered at the summit of a ramp; a bizarre, sunken sky, out of a prehistoric fantasia and made up of an accumulation of gaseous grottos. And these cloudy pockets seethed with light, a cold and slobbering light that you could have cut with a knife; a poisonously tinted light, slowly ejaculated . . . It looked to me like the invention of a possessed or mad painter. The discovery of this catastrophic sky awakened my sense of oppression and, simultaneously, my feeling that the Earth and the species pullulating on its crusts were threatened by an imminent calamity. I couldn’t accept that I was witnessing a twilight at its moment of crisis, a luminous orgasm. My mind as much as my eyes questioned this impossible sky, because it was an inverted echo of the entrails and abominable fluxes of the globe, and also because this meteorological phenomenon seemed to me, if I dare write this, a monstrous error of nature . . . And I hid my inflamed eyes.

Freeing them after they had been rested, I saw that the aerial grottos had vanished and that the pallid twilit screen displayed a scene that was no less delirious; the clouds were outlined in relief and, in a sculpted frieze, depicted a pitiless scramble of cattle, ochre‑, brown‑, and blue-colored, a silent charge toward the gates of sunset. But everywhere the herds were surrounded by the darkness that had provoked the disaster, the panicked outlines drowned in black ink. Was I alone in contemplating these visions? Living souls sheltering in their dwellings obstinately persisted in leaving their lamps unlit. Did they reckon that the night wasn’t yet at its darkest? The taverns that usually yawned open like so many outlets of hell round the grounds of the church, even they didn’t send out their red glow! Nevertheless the city wasn’t dead; it was in a deep sleep and would awaken late. The few shadows that stole by in the distance couldn’t be those of passersby, rather of sleepers in search of matches. Was I going to remain petrified in the middle of this square where pools of mud surrounded me? The mud came out of the paving stones or else flowed like fetid lava from the hundred passageways, hypocritically filling the vat of St. Nicholas. And the danger posed by my solitude was heightened by banks of fog hovering as high as a man, where there was nothing to hold onto should the ground shift even more. A place of immediate refuge offered itself: the church, just like in the fearful days of wrath when people believed that the end of the world was nigh.

This decrepit church, so old and so shaken by the winds, was well qualified to awaken the idea of peril. Good people said that it constituted a perpetual miracle and a proof of Providence in action inasmuch as it never crumbled away, as in all logic it ought to have done on every day granted by God. Constructed in a quagmire, mistreated and set on fire a score of times, it persisted like an aged, decalcified body, all wounds and excrescences, standing thanks only to the crutches of its buttresses. Eroded by bad weather and dislocated by the water that swelled its porous walls, it endured only by the rights granted to phantoms, a shadow of a church that no archaeologist would have dared to touch for fear of seeing it collapse into debris. Nevertheless it regained its resilience and its primitive prestige in the darkness, and with its sheer walls and fortress-like central tower it appeared imperishable. I reached its porch, pushing at creaking partitions, stumbling on broken steps, believing myself descending, and descending in fact, for over the course of the ages the church had seen the ground rise around its walls, unless it happened to have sunk on its foundations. And I had the feeling of having fallen into a trap. I was in a grotto that was almost dark, but one where threatening, phosphorescent statues lay in ambush at various levels, where flights of columns formed frightening labyrinths. My eyes begged in vain for the illumination of a candle. From whence did all this fluorescence seep if not the stone itself? Or was it nothing but the glow emanating from the innumerable dead buried in the naves? I went down the axis of the chancel, advancing with outstretched arms, hypnotized by a distant tongue of purple fire licking at the void. The memorial slabs shifted under my feet. I breathed in funereal smells too, a latent decay added to which were rank odors, rancid incense. The mud of the city was no longer a threat, but didn’t the flagstones of this religious charnel house themselves constitute a trap that was no less dreadful? Ah! If I were to sink down into the muck from which these enormous cryptogamous pillars had grown! . . . Who then would stretch out a hand to save me? There was no one in this church, and I repeated in a loud voice and without awakening any echo, “Is there nobody here? . . .”

There was someone, against whom I had just stumbled: a Christ collapsed against a column and regally offended under his crown of thorns; he confronted me with the horrifying face of a torture victim, his grimace intolerable, the contorted mouth of a man strangled with a garrote. I was truly in despair at having to disappear without remission for my sins, and, my voice failing me, only my lips continued to murmur their plea: “Miserere!” No, there was no one in this gigantic cavern, under these crumbling vaults; no one to bear witness to the despairing death that would be mine. At first I’d pretended to feel nothing, but the evidence was clear; the church was inexorably foundering and I was sinking down with it, sucked down by the depth, in an abyss of foul mud; the vessel was going down, broken apart, and even if my reason refused to admit it my feet and legs knew it. Had I cried too loudly to heaven that I was abandoned? God abruptly manifested Himself to reply to me that He was still there even if no one else was, infallibly above and beyond disasters; He threw me a lifeline . . . By a miracle I was able to seize a rope. It was salvation, or death postponed. I must have arrived under the central tower. With this cable I could reach the vault, the roofs of that crenellated tower where the errant bells were sleeping; with them I would be able to sound the alarm, but at what cost, of such a climb. Besides, I needed to awaken them to save myself and, at the same time, rouse the town from its torpor by means of this tocsin that hadn’t sounded since the wars. How vigorously I grasped the rope, bending my knees like a gymnast, the better to jump. But at that moment a second miracle occurred: a golden tone broke out, solemnly, a voice of pure metal releasing a loud cry that spread out, undulating in the silence. That happened angelically, without my intervention. A gong sounded the hour of a mystery. Only a supernatural fist could have struck the golden hour over the abyss of Time . . . At this signal, the chancel filled up with an amber vapor, the pillars regained solidity and the naves unfolded harmoniously. The dislocated church remade itself geometrically, under the orders of an invisible architect that was nothing but light. Candles lit up like stars. The mortuary slabs once more steadied themselves. And with the advent of priests resembling bronzed birds, and who sought to exorcise the darkness with their gestures, I felt a fierce gratitude toward the magical Consciousness that prevented the world from perishing on this day of deluge. Everywhere human forms arose and went forward, like resurrected beings emerging from the walls and the pavements. These shades, were they singing, and were the organs expelling the opaque air of their lungs? This collective song might have been thought the voice of a crowd processing in the open air around the church; the song had barbaric overtones, though its inspiration seemed to be sacred. This vocal drone that I wasn’t able to identify didn’t fail to comfort me, just as the renewal of light had done, and it was without fear that I undertook to exit the church, climbing back up to the surface of the city without further difficulty.

Night had fallen, completely. Countless streetlights blazed, the façades wore their familiar faces. Living beings moved about in the reconsolidated city. And the precincts of St. Nicholas were swarming as in times of fairs and cavalcades. The church was encircled by herds. The cattle arrived in abundance, crossing the city from one end to the other, through the old passageways, with St. Nicholas as the cauldron that provided the terminus. It was the night of their holocaust. Their bellows fluctuated, melting together and making a deep pedal note that was counterpointed by sharp bleats and joyful barks. And the majestic cohorts were whipped on by mighty curses. I moved forward, squeezed between the oxen, lost in that flood of rumps and muzzles. The world hadn’t come to an end; the world smelled carnally after the deluge. And, under the lunar searchlights, I went with the musical and so fatally beautiful herds, deported to the cruel abattoirs where the beasts are sacrificed, their blood flowing in torrents in order to appease, who knows which, the wrath of the gods or the hunger of men . . .

The post A Twilight appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Although less known in the English-speaking world, Brussolo has produced over 200 books in his native France and is considered a national treasure among speculative fiction fans. Unfortunately, as of today, only one of his novels, The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, has been published in English. It was translated by Edward Gauvin (who also translated the two stories we’re running today) and was released in 2016 by Melville House.

While Brussolo’s work has often been categorized as science fiction, it often straddles the lines between horror, thriller, and fantasy. In his work, you’ll likely find elements of the fantastique as well as influences that range from J.G. Ballard to André Breton. We hope you enjoy these stories and we hope that we may see more Brussolo available in English in the future.

The post Introducing Two Weird Scifi Stories from Serge Brussolo appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

— David Davis, Translator

After a long voyage, marked by a few incidents not worth reporting, I arrived here at last.

I am sitting at a table in one of the city’s main restaurants. The regular swing of a punkah¹ cools the air, that impregnated with a moist heat, is suffocating. I just finished a conversation that shook me up; I am still trembling with astonishment. I dare not entrust this extraordinary incident to my memory; it is better to write it down right away.

I have known for some years a wealthy Dutch family, settled in Rotterdam. The Van Camps were once intrepid colonists in Oceania. Since then, they have founded a vast commercial empire of colonial commodities in their motherland, ceaselessly prospering under a bold and strong leadership, passed from father to son.

The reputation of this firm of old stock is one of the most well established in the great Dutch port.

As a child, I played with the Van Camps’ son, Hendricus, a lad of strong appearance like all those in his family, but one whose character was revealed, immediately in his youth, to be completely different from that of his ancestors.

The young Hendricus was a dreamer, shy, sweet as a little girl, and of a sensitivity truly unimaginable. I remember a few traits of his character that were quite unusual in this family of pragmatic business men. At the age when other Van Camps would begin to start commercial operations, it was not uncommon to find Hendricus in the street playing with children younger than him. Once even, he distributed among his friends all the money he had in his pockets. Another time, in the dead of winter, he returned to his parents, freezing, shivering with cold; he had given his coat to a drunkard who aroused his sympathy by pretending to be miserable.

***

On the advice of a friend of the family, the old Mr. Van Camp decided to send his son to the colonies.

He had been offered a rather lucrative position in charge of the Administration of Affairs of State in Batavia². The father hoped that these constant and positive occupations would teach his son to become better adjusted. However, his farewell had a severity which I found shocking; he would not accompany the young man to the boat. So it was I who drove Hendricus to the port to embark.

Several months after his departure, I received a letter from Batavia. Hendricus requested that I ask his father to send him a specific amount of money; I learned that he had quit his job, but he advised me to hide this fact from his family.

Other than this, no detail of this letter seemed to betray any new dispositions of the young man’s character.

Saddened by what I had learned, I went to find the old Van Camp in order to perform the favor my friend had asked of me.

A few more months passed, and I received another letter, stamped from Sumatra.

This time, my surprise was overwhelming. The tone and even the handwriting were totally different; they indicated a complete transformation in the personality of Hendricus. This letter contained only energetic sentences, formed solely of the words inscribed by a steady hand; the young man asked me to find him some houses in Rotterdam which were willing to purchase a new culture of tobacco products from a venture he had setup on the island of Sumatra, a region difficult to colonize, with a deadly climate, and full of pitfalls, savage indigenous people, and a terrain fraught with intractable forests.

I hastened to deliver this amazing news to the old Van Camp. He trembled with joy upon reading the letter from Hendricus and he shook my hand, tears in his eyes.

“It’s definitely him this time,” he said; “I realize now his laziness has passed… He woke up, he’s my son, a true Van Camp, a worthy representative of his ancestry…”

***

We immediately busied ourselves with the affairs of the young man, and for about a year they appeared consistently to prosper. Orders arrived regularly. The old Van Camp was able to boast that his son was finally following in his family’s footsteps.

The letters that Hendricus wrote to us appeared to confirm this view; they always had the firm and energetic tone, which had given me so much surprise, of that first announcement. A detail however perplexed me. In talking of his home, of his plantations, of his life in Sumatra, my friend now employed terms that indicated quite clearly that he was not alone. Everywhere, “we” was replacing the former “me.” In vain I asked about the source of this, but I did not receive a clear response.

After a year, I received a letter, completely out of the blue. Hendricus told me that a revolt had broken out among the workers employed on his plantations, and that he had been forced to find other help because he had killed half of his men with his own hands after quashing the riot.

All this was told in the letter, in brutal terms, almost foul; one could not recognize in these lines the gentle, shy person with whom I had lived in Rotterdam nor the enterprising and positive planter of the previous months.

I could not understand anything about this new change.

The old Van Camp was painfully struck. In consideration of the kindness his entire family had shown me, and in memory of my former relations with his son, he begged me to leave immediately for the colony, to see for myself the mysterious transformation in the character and manner of my friend. He is too old to undertake the journey himself, and the rest of the business keeps him in Holland. It is in order to fulfill this charge that I have come here.

I have just seen Hendricus, and what he has told me exceeds the fantastic ramblings of the most confused and wild mind. I do not know how to interpret his story. Its meaning escapes me. But I will note down its essence, as it was presented in the words of my friend and uncovered through my further personal observations.

On the boat, on his way to the island of Java, Hendricus Van Camp made friends with some Hindu characters who were headed towards Ceylon. They talked of morals and ideas from their countries. The Hindus provided the young Dutchman some detailed explanations of the wisdom and the feats of Yogis, and they related to him some astonishing examples of the ways in which these ascetics illustrated their doctrines.

One can easily imagine that the official functions which brought the young man to Batavia did not motivate him with the necessary zeal. Hendricus Van Camp neglected daily office work to indulge without restraint in his favorite studies, and soon, despite the protections and support that led to his appointment, the officer in charge of colonial administration was given notice to let him go.

It was at this time that he wrote to me to request the sum of money.

Unconcerned by what had happened to him, my friend continued his research. After all sorts of trial and error, and many disappointments, too many to enumerate, he began to direct his will towards a specific purpose: he tried to materialize his own reflection, to bring forth the double that he saw in front of him.

I will not say by what mysterious process, but finally Hendricus was lucky enough to see his efforts succeed; very dimly at first, then with a clarity more and more accentuated, the desired image began to take shape and form in front of him. Then, one day, the perfect double of Hendricus Van Camp stood in the flesh and on two legs.

But there was something quite curious and unexpected: it was a woman.

***

During the first few weeks he lived with this miracle, he could not satisfy himself as to which, this woman or he himself, represented his true nature. However, he soon became acclimated to this duality, and he even began to consider her as one that would live by his side, as a companion he might have chosen freely.

Meanwhile, his character had changed as a result of this extraordinary event. He had become the energetic and determined man that second letter, dated from Sumatra, had so suddenly revealed.

In the company of his partner, and despite enormous difficulties, he had organized a tobacco plantation on the dangerous island, which demanded constant work and continued determination. For many months, the business began to give better results. The zeal and commitment of the young colonizer was such that all his ancestors’ prodigious labors were outdone in a single stroke.

***

After a year of living on their plantation in Sumatra, his double, or his wife, I do not know what to call her, gave birth to a child. (I am retelling what I heard here, at the same table I now write on; I think it’s his voice that dictates the words, his voice as echoed back by the walls and the disordered objects on the table where we had lunch together.)

At the moment of birth, according to his own words, Hendricus Van Camp felt stripped of the childish parts of his personality and character. He lost the constant sensitivity, which had always produced his generous impulses, and that had remained despite the development of the more masculine qualities which enabled him to better manage his business.

Once humane and moderate, almost overnight he became cruel, tough, and pitiless.

It was at this time he committed the murder, needless and terrible, of some of his employees, simply to take revenge for their revolt.

With this new staff, he appeared just as brutal and insensitive. But a strange event once again transformed his character.

This came bit by bit, gradually. Hendricus Van Camp noticed that his double, or his wife, call her what you will, began to lose weight: initially he did not notice, but soon he began to pay better attention to the strange decline. It seemed to him that his partner began to diminish, lose solidity; her complexion also paled day by day, and her strength seemed to evaporate while he himself felt his vigor somewhat reinforced. His companion faded and eventually she vanished altogether.

Left alone with his child, the planter almost unwittingly changed his attitude towards the workers who lived on his land. He lost that pitiless harshness which made him inflict the tough punishments on his men, forcing himself to do the grueling chores. Perhaps he became too lenient because his business began to decline.

A few days before my arrival in Batavia, he saw his child turn wan and seem to wane just as the other had; he observed the same phenomena, the progressive weakening of the flesh, the transparent pallor. A gradual evaporation of all parts of being followed, and finally a complete disappearance, a return to nothingness.

***

My awkward friend confided in me, with an angelic facial expression, that the disappearance of his wife and child did not cause him any pain. On the contrary, he claimed that as he saw them extinguished, he found himself relieved of a cruel weight; a feeling of inner rigidity, that he had felt for some time, left him almost immediately.

On confessing this, Hendricus Van Camp’s face relaxed into that gentle expression I knew well. I peered into his eyes and seemed to discover a new and curious feature: they gave me an impression that I can only describe by comparing the look in them with the look in the eyes of a mother…

In the way of his words and in his gestures, I found the young man sweet, timid, and generous in an old fashioned way. He told me that one thing worried him deeply. It was not the fate of his business; he knew that was lost and that he could no longer fix it. Instead he anxiously wondered what would happen to his staff after the ruin of his business. These men would find themselves without work. Should he not share the money from the liquidation with his employees who were deprived of bread because of him?…

Hearing him say those words, I looked at Hendricus Van Camp in amazement. It seemed that the unforgiving climate of the island had probably altered the mental faculties of my poor friend, and it became absolutely necessary to save him from madness. I told him that his father had sent me and asked him earnestly to return with me to Holland. Timid as a child, he said he would obey.

We leave tomorrow for Europe. The more I think of this story the less I comprehend it. We will see what the doctors in Rotterdam say.

_____

¹ A punkah is a large swinging ceiling fan that originated in Southeast Asia.

² Batavia was the capital of the Dutch East Indies colony which became Indonesia following World War II. Today it is known as Jakarta.

The post The Double appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

I beg you, don’t come back, my sweet little girl. Leave me in my solitary decay, with the sound of the mill. I’ve done too much lying, because of your bare arms around my face, because of your tender looks, because of your love, fresh as the laughter of the moon in the May undergrowth. My baby, my little mistress! Stay away, never come back and never call me “your light.” The enchantment of love is a trap. How is it you haven’t noticed my wrinkled brow, my grey locks, and this systematic approach to pleasure which makes plain the usury of the senses, and this costuming of language which indicates a ragged heart. I’m like an apple that rots in the storehouse. This discolored, self-hardened thing! No new blood could ever revive it. I must break the spell that enchants you.

Your chamber filled with hawthorne, the very chamber in which you go to sleep under my marvelling gaze, will soon be engulfed in a terrifying darkness. The words I use may seem exaggerated to you, but what can describe so much horror? When you have read to the end of this confession, you will understand. Unless you have cast aside these sheets and fled screaming…

I imagine how inexplicable, in the serenity of your spirit, my preamble must seem to you. But be patient. I will tell you all, and condemn myself, by telling you all, to the terrible punishment I have earned, and which will not be the punishment of men. Beside derision and human justice there is another justice, an imminence that takes note of each of our crimes. Mine have been many. But a spirit as honest as yours cannot fathom the depths to which a man may descend when he is the slave of fear.

Yes, you will be the only one to know, because your eyes filled with birds, because your unbelievably youthful voice and your flashes of laughter hasten me toward the sound of the mill. The sound of the mill! Ah, if you could hear it tonight, the ceaseless grating of mouldering beams and the disordered breathing that whispers down below, raucous and deep, like the dull roars of a thousand tea kettles. I told you: It’s just the river. Do you remember? And perhaps you also remember that fearful cry you heard on the first day, as you approached the mill.

– “That’s nothing, just a pig they’re slaughtering, down there on the farm… Tonight they’ll be dancing around steaming sausages…”

You smiled, my silly little mistress. You were reassured. And what could be more horrible than slaughtering a pig?

I’d known many women. You will surely be the last, since, as your own miraculously innocent thoughts are my witness, I refuse to stave off my own death for a few more years. You think I’m rambling. Alas, no! Later you will understand. The river, the sound of the mill, everything. And it is for this reason that I tell you today: Never come back!

Remember the layout of this derelict habitation, in the hollow of a dale. “It’s so beautiful!” you said to me, with welling eyes. All the little darlings who came before you said to me:

– “How lovely it is! How ravishing it is! Oh, how extraordinary it is!”

But all of them, and you as well I’m sure, upon leaving this paradisal spot, brought away with them a feeling of disquiet. Nothing is more enchanting than the traces of human dwelling place as they are reclaimed and effaced by nature. This old pile of five storeys, besieged by bracken and flowered with viburnum, where the ivy and the wild vines overrun the doors and windows, must seem particularly strange to those who approach it with fresh eyes, strange and disturbing.

But weren’t they already blinded by love’s magic, those young women who agreed to come out to this isolated place and to climb the flimsy exterior stairs up to my hidden aerie? Many had lived there for months, years even, without the slightest suspicion. How could they have suspected anything? In the old mill, straddling the river, the room was filled only with flowers, with sunlight, with caresses and with kisses. Sometimes, one would say to me:

– “It’s odd, your house seems so large, and yet you occupy only a small section of it… Why don’t you use all the rooms?”

I made up a story: the storeys beneath the main one were used as storehouses by local companies. Each one believed me. Until a certain fatal morning, for I always chose the hour in which nature is freshly awake, with all its native innocence.

***

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Again you said to me, leaning over the river, through which one could see the undulating weeds between the stones:

– “Look how clear the water is, you could count all the fish that live in it…”

Transparent, yes, but at what price! As for the fish, not so! For a long time there had been only one, downstream from the mill. Nothing is more poetic than flowing water. Limpid, the water glides, and the weeds at the bottom, waving. It’s like your eyes, in which the currents of your tenderness are ever stirring, sweet love! But stagnant water, if you had been able to see upstream, you would have seen how troubled it was, how thick and foetid, clogged with what one would not dare to inspect too closely, debris choking in slime, carrion turning blue with decay… And yet, the moment it passed through my mill, nothing more, all as clean as if it had gone through a filter. Nothing left but a mirror over which they, those beauties, might lean, like me.

Listen to me! This mill has been, from bygone centuries long past, that stream’s destination. You will know soon enough what sort of grain I have been grinding in it… I am trembling as I write this to you, I ramble, I hesitate to open your eyes to all its horrors. And yet I cannot avoid revealing to you now the fact that I am unable to leave this place, where so many phantoms hold me. The last time that I beheld you sleeping, I swore before your purity that I would tell you everything. When I have finished, the sound of the mill will never be able to overshout my voice, wash out my speech, drown me in its powerful whisper.

I inherited the property on my father’s death. My father was a biologist. He had installed his “laboratory” in this old mill. How can I say these things without seeming ridiculous? His laboratory! In reality: his monster workshop. My father was a very learned man. He studied the dynamic interrelations of molecular chaos, the growth of living tissue, the reproductions of protoplasm. Let’s say simply, since I am not competent to speak of these things and will not know how to explain them to you, that he claimed he’d discovered the origins of life. When I came into possession of this house, I sold off the alembic (my father was also something of an alchemist!), the test tubes, the precision instruments. I was primarily an artist. I had spent my youth in other studies. To be honest, I was my father’s opposite. All this organic chemistry in which life made itself matter was not much to my taste. I loved the spirit, only. The outer world was for me only a stage I could populate with the creatures of my dreams. I cleaned the place out. I installed my workshop on the ground floor; on the second, the kitchen and dining room; on the third, bedrooms (I had planned to bring my friends here, all rowdy types). The lower floors I reserved for games, a private cinema, an intimate little theatre, ping-pong, billiards, roulette, etc. What a program!

I had forgotten only one thing, did I tell you? The mill wheel. The wine and coal were stored in a cellar. How could I have known that my father had installed, in the building, in an actual fermentation vat, the product of his researches. Now I come to what is essential.

***

I had forgotten only one thing, did I tell you? Yes, that one thing: THE THING. That which expanded ceaselessly, that which grew more every day and could not be destroyed. An insatiable, gelatinous mass, armed with long, thin mobile filaments, a supple skeleton, tentacles proliferating without end, but not a brain, not a brain. Only a mouth, or rather the agglutination of thousands of mouths increasing without respite, with slow digestions always followed by unpredictable growths…

I am not raving. How can I name for you this thing that can have no name, consisting of thousands of active globules, this sort of formless, unclean heart, pulsating with gluttonous life, which now completely fills the house? This thing is not an animal. I know only that it is always hungry, with a terrible hunger.

This thing sealed in the basement, at the time I discovered it, had already become impossible to destroy. I understood that it too was part of my inheritance from my father. Wasn’t it, in a certain sense, another of his children? I realized that I would have to live with it, come to some kind of arrangement with it, that is to say: feed it. If I did not want to be devoured by it.

You can guess the rest, you believe in intuition. But you cannot know the secret terror my life became after I made this bargain. All that the river carries downstream is so much fodder for that gluttonous, pullulating mass, which clings to the beams, to the structure, even to the stones, slowly gnawing at its food. That is why the water is so transparent downstream. I began by throwing whatever I could find in the vicinity into the water. But if, at the outset, that nourishment was sufficient, later it proved inadequate.

With what anguish, in times already long in the past, had I listened to the steadily growing pounding, stronger and stronger, of what I too had believed to be the sound of the mill. And later this sound exploded, in the course of a day, rough and unbearable, making its demands by way of a hellish drumming. The thing was hungry. Filling the void was its only desire, filling itself up with all, beyond measure, overrunning everything. Its gelatinous bulk pounds on my door even now.

I abandoned my workshop to its voracity, then each storey in turn, after bricking up the windows. For a few years an uneasy peace prevailed. Finally, I moved into this room, which you know, this room under the rafters, accessible by means of a sort of exterior passageway along the roof. Doubtless it is my immediate duty to reveal my secret to the world, and give over this haunted house to men of science. Flee, I must flee. But it’s just as these ideas occur to me that the demon whispers in my ear.

***

I told you how I have always loved women. At that time, I could not do without Sylvie, nor could she do without me. But I loved her whereas she, on the other hand, hated me, which made me hate her in turn. Nothing could satisfy her. What love can resist that, without weakening, without being destroyed? Without apology she left me to take turns with any man she pleased, and I swore to avenge myself. Sylvie, the first, became fodder for the thing.

After this choice morsel, I enjoyed the novelty of a few years of peace during which a demonic idea grew in me. One quickly grows tired of a woman. And the problem this poses is: how to get rid of them? A chain of circumstances had given me the means, what am I saying? I was constrained, forced, to employ those means. Ten times, twenty times, they brought me back to the same scene, which had very quickly become a perfectly regular routine.

As I told you, I always chose the dawn, when the newborn day brushes the windows and the birds are just beginning to sing. There were Jeanne, Léa, Claire, Simonne… There were Solange, Lucette… oh, I don’t remember them all. I did the impossible to avoid being cruel. I never had any doubts about that, before. When my beauty awaked, unlacing her limbs from mine, entirely naked as always, and weary after a night of love, I would whisper in her ear:

“I’ve fixed up the next room, so you could have a place of your own in which to rest and to dream. Go and see if it pleases you.”

She would always rush to look, with the same conspiratorial smirking: “Oh, how kind of you…” I caught a glimpse (one last time!) of a body more pitiful than radiant in the pallor of the morning. Then she opened the door, which I had unbolted as she slept, and disappeared FOREVER.

So I would rise, my eyes brimming with tears, and swiftly go to seal the door from which there swelled up, as if suddenly erupting into delirious activity, the sound of the mill. My God! will I be condemned to die a thousand times before I will forget that sound? Afterwards, I would be at peace. A year, perhaps two, sometimes even more. Freed from my fear, I could begin to live again, to love, to look for new prey…

***

And now, you know all. What is there to add? It’s bawling, this particular day, without cease, my nightmare of an older brother, my peculiar rival. I’ve tried stopping up my ears, but nothing can prevent my hearing it now. It’s calling for you. Those few times when you slept with me, its thousand papillae hung just behind the walls snuffing the fragrance of your young flesh. Oh! I beg you, my sweet little one, never come back here! Behind the door that yet protects me, there is a sound like the rushing of a furious sea, a vast hissing that shakes the frame and making the planking bulge.

It’s my turn.

My child, my little mistress, never come back here! Leave me in my decaying solitude, among the agitated and relentless shadows that I have been feeding for so many years. And if you think that there is a monster within me, tell yourself it is still less cruel than the one who waited for me, at the bottom of your gaze full of the green grass and of birds.

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