Spells

Permeating these works is a fascination with urban life—European city life circumscribes the consciousness of the protagonists in most of these stories.  In their urban wanderings, buildings and public squares become a kind of living relic of history looming over the moments of citizens and revealing that the relationship between past and present is far more complex than we often assume, and that it may be more of a two-way street than we’d like to believe.  The secrets lurking behind the 20th century European streets, tucked away in obscure courtyards, or hidden in the inventory of a forgotten shop call to mind some of the same fascinations of setting that one encounters in the New York- and Paris-set weird fiction of Robert Chambers, or perhaps Jean Ray’s “The Shadowy Street,” which literalizes this general idea and builds an entire plot out of it.

Even as there is temptation, generally speaking, to account for great evil by turning to the supernatural, de Ghelderode’s fiction takes care not to entirely remove it from human agency.  It seems safe to assume that this tendency is at least in part abetted influenced by Europe’s escalation into World War II that would have been contemporaneous with the creation of many of these stories.  Threaded through virtually all of them are persistent reminders that hell might well exist entirely independent of a supernatural order: “Why, this is hell!  It’s this monstrous city, its everyday existence. And the damned? They’re my hideous fellow men and me too in their sordid flock!.” (“The Devil in London,” 29)  The observable and rational are sufficient in some ways to account for the idea of hell, and yet the devil may ultimately put in an appearance anyhow.  The ennui that pervades “The Devil in London” and “The Collector of Relics” evokes the sense that this corporeal existence is simply not the one we were meant to inhabit, a sentiment that will strike many readers as sharing a kinship with the modern author Thomas Ligotti.  If the book stumbles on occasion, its main obstacle is an excessive reliance on the same character type that so frequently makes such observations as the one above: the lone, depressed, sick, unmoored, solitary male wanderer in search of distraction from the malaise of the mundane.  Or a “demoralized soul,” as he puts it in “Fog.”  Indeed, one might lift any number of lines from these stories and find sentiments common to both Ligotti and de Ghelderode.  In “Rhotomago,” the protagonist exclaims that he “… pursued my own journey into the unfathomable, dreaming that for once I was sleeping without dreaming!” (83)

The strength of prose and complexity of theme are more than sufficient to recommend the book despite the limitations imposed by the use of relatively unvaried protagonists, but it will likely stand out as a weakness to some and has been discussed by scholars engaged with de Ghelderode’s work:

“Voiced by dedicated solitaries, the narratives discount social or even human relationships…Women too are in short supply; Ghelderode, in a draft prospectus for a planned further collection of stories, promised that women would feature more centrally but, as it turned out, no such stories were written.” (Introduction, x).

Women characters are certainly in short supply; however, it is a mistake to view the “dedicated solitary” as necessarily eschewing the importance of social and human relationships.  It seems not just shortsighted but counterproductive of de Ghelderode to craft so many tales in which the thesis is that “hell” could consist of “this monstrous city” and “my fellow men” but then have a glaring omission of such a large demographic that could add more depth to such treatments.  However, that caveat aside, I submit that the frequent juxtaposition of supernatural and sociohistorical forces under which the protagonists labor is done precisely as a means not of discounting social relationships but of critiquing them from a broader perspective, even as de Ghelderode’s critique could be improved if it were broader still in terms of which people are represented in the story.  It is worth noting a distinction between a lack of close friendships as a “solitary” (this is certainly true of most of the protagonists) and a discounting of human relationships entirely.  Introverted though the narrators may be, there is ample direct, ground-level social interaction that forms crucial components of plot and serves as a vehicle for such critiques, particularly in stories like “The Collector of Relics, “You Were Hanged,” and “The Odor of Pine.”

Octave Mirbeau

Although both Ligotti and de Ghelderode have clear predecessors in the Decadent movement, we can see a much closer connection to the Decadents with the historically proximate Belgian fantasist.  Echoes of French author Octave Mirbeau abound in the cynical frankness and casual cruelty with which one character in the story “You Were Hanged” discusses old and new means of execution contrived by societies in different historical periods.  The characters in most of the stories commit their fair share of transgressions, but the author is careful to foreground such individual ignoble acts against a backdrop of larger systemic cruelties like executions, which comprise an essential part of the structure of sociohistorical power operating in conjunction with the supernatural of de Ghelderode’s fiction.  The hypocrisy that underlies the use of powerful institutional violence against individual transgressors of social order is a theme that one will find in many forms in such literature, and it features prominently in this collection as well.  For example, one of the strongest stories, “You Were Hanged,” takes as its premise a discussion about state-sanctioned violence and explores differing moral responses to it as its specific tools of execution change with history, and supernatural events force the protagonist to confront such horrors from a perspective uncannily removed from the present in an effort to dissect the idea of “progress.”  The recursive relationship between materialist and supernatural concerns is introduced immediately in the first story, “The Public Scribe,” which features a wax dummy “tasked” with recording the ephemera of history in the material form of writing while undergoing a transformation that could not be accounted for by material processes.  Events disembodied by time become history, and here history becomes reembodied as it reattains material form.  The animation of abstractions like time and history recurs frequently throughout the collection and reveals an underlying anxiety about the power they hold over life.

While any astute reader will undoubtedly come away with a great deal to digest from these stories in terms of philosophical discussion, the literary craftsmanship that makes them so effective is remarkable.  Returning for a moment to “You Were Hanged,” for example, one can note several details that at first appear trivial but are threaded through the story such that the conclusion renders a completely different and nuanced significance to them than expected.  The cumulative effect of this is also contingent on any number of subtleties of language that seem to have been well preserved by the translator:

“I was under the clear impression that I’d been in that place [Saint-Jacques Plain] forever, and that my existence had never extended beyond that oblong square.” (153)

In a brief sentence and with the pointed use of “oblong”, de Ghelderode and Maclennan create a complex symbol that coheres perfectly with the themes of the story and the larger collection by inextricably entwining life, death, and social constructs that precede and survive the individual.  In this story as in several others, time and history explicitly become forces alive in ways that are usually invisible to us.  One might well encounter “the breathing of clocks” (159) in an inn adjacent to a setting of historical cruelties.  Sometimes this is direct and catastrophic and at others more restrained in a manner that might remind readers of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.  In much the way that an innocuous post in a wall may in another era have been the final destination for a condemned person, de Ghelderode frequently explores the significance of the idea of the historical relic in changing social contexts: common items afforded outsized importance as a byproduct of human action, history being an amalgamation whose power becomes greater than the sum of its parts and in turn acts on its descendants.  Many of the stories here are built around a “tunneling” effect of time, with two sets of significant events set apart by a lengthy interval during which the narration distances itself from events on the ground.  The cumulative effect is a volume of weird tales that remind the reader that history asserts itself upon the individual even while quietly hiding in the background.

“The Public Scribe” serves as one of the more subtle treatments of the erosive effects of time on human existence. In it we see a plot device, the infamous mannequin, that has become a fairly commonplace fixture of the weird.  The animate and the inanimate are juxtaposed in an exploration of the ways in which the uncanny valley of the mannequin threatens to usurp the former.  De Ghelderode himself wrote plays for marionettes and was influenced by puppet theater, and he seems to have a particular fascination with exploring exactly where the border between life and not-life resides (or if it can be safely said to exist at all).  Perhaps he’s drawing on his fascination with time and asking us, “what is a mannequin but the appearance of humanity frozen in an instant of time?”  Throughout the collection are frequent appearances of masks and other similar manifestations of these themes. Their usage in a context that consistently emphasizes the degradation and horror of corporeal existence begs the question:  which is truly the more unsettling prospect–attaining human consciousness or experiencing the loss of it?  The author is careful to present both sides of the equation in “The Public Scribe.”  If from the broader perspective of history the human condition is akin to “musical and so fatally beautiful herds, deported to the cruel abattoirs where the beasts are sacrificed.” (“A Twilight”, 146), then it seems a foregone conclusion to de Ghelderode that neither prospect could be a clear preference, and therein lives true horror.

De Ghelderode’s sense of the fantastic exists at times within a Christian context and at others within an apparently invented, at-times haphazard one that achieves much by way of implication and subtlety, even as it remains unclear as to whether the author aspired to create a singular mythos like Chambers’s King in Yellow tales.  In Chambers, there is a constant current of madness and the incomprehensible lurking just beneath the surface of events, and de Ghelderode’s fiction has a similar quality. This is significant especially when considering the biographical data; as the author fell into ill health in the time preceding and during the stories’ creation, scholar Roland Bayen conjectures that his “stories bear witness to an ‘increasing neurosis’, indeed are ‘the fruits of crisis’” (Introduction, viii).  But Chambers is not the only fixture of the weird that we might be tempted to admit to the discussion.  The hallucinatory, landscape-disrupting visions that occur in several of the tales in Spells have a vivid, bold, and intense quality.  For an author with such an interest in place and its influence on consciousness, it is not surprising that crises of the personal are strongly linked to crises of geography and the like.  In particular, such an occurrence in “Fog” might well remind readers of Belgian contemporary Jean Ray’s story “The Mainz Psalter”, with both stories featuring conjurations of hidden worlds lurking adjacent to our own.  De Ghelderode writes:

“During this respite I entertained many such speculations, and all the more easily in that I didn’t have to deal with my usual rational self. Alas! No ecstasy goes without a reversal.  The state of grace left me.  And I felt myself in danger.  Streams of lights climbed the walls, this time coming from down below, coarse reflections of nocturnal fairs lit up with opaque red and green smoke. What I saw could only be an invention of delirium: mouths once more, down at ground level and reaching toward me.  A monstrous host surrounded me of which only the mouths were visible.  Oh! Abject mucous membranes salivating and spitting, swallowing words that I sensed were sordid and that I congratulated myself on not understanding…I was abruptly galvanized by the image of a nearby hell over which I was cataleptically suspended.” (136)

In Spells, there is a malevolence to the universe that becomes apparent whenever the supernatural manifests on the page, but the author is careful to always give the devil his due and remind the reader that human action and events play a part in that malevolence.  There’s a persistent association of social evils and the uncanny, particularly as in “You Were Hanged” and “The Odor of Pine”.  Readers will also note a more direct engagement with real-world religion than in many of the authors of weird tales to which he’s most comparable, which is perhaps not surprising given the overlapping of theme with preceding European authors like Mirbeau, who wrote nothing of the supernatural but obsessively critiqued the real-life figures purporting to be conduits to it.  De Ghelderode’s writing has been described by scholars as anticlerical, but his fascination with religious relics, churches, and other physical remnants of Christian belief systems reveals what seems best described as nostalgia made problematic and ambiguous by the ways in which he ties such holy artifacts to social ills.  Mortal sin, atonement, and many other religious constructs form the core of anxiety that plagues some of the protagonists, but they exist alongside and entwined with the materialism represented by real historical tribulations that seem to carry an equal weight that survives into the present.  In “The Collector of Relics,” for example, norms of both religious and secular life are simultaneously tested and transgressed by the protagonist as a byproduct of his own personal contrarian obsessions.  As the narrator states regarding whether or not to discover what might lurk inside a dim antiques shop: “I’ve found myself tempted to cross the threshold.” (69)  Like Bataille’s Story of the Eye, there is an animus in the character that conflates these two categories of social norms under a reactionary, impulsive, and accelerating disgust.  It becomes clear by the conclusion of “The Collector of Relics” that the reader would be advised to allow for multiple interpretations of the idea of crossing thresholds as the protagonist continually pressures the collector to pursue progressively more taboo objectives, and the preservation of this ambiguity in translation is vital for understanding the story.

De Ghelderode’s fiction has not been broadly available to English readers, and this edition of Spells will hopefully do its part to remedy that.  The consistent execution and thought-provoking, nuanced premises in these stories are enough to render them overlooked classics (at least, to non-Belgian audiences)—there are no real low points to speak of, and it seems unsurprising that the stories are among the final efforts produced by an author with a lengthy and well-developed body of work.  In short, Spells will have much to say, some of it new and some of it quite familiar, to most readers of the weird.

The post Review: “Spells” by Michel de Ghelderode 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.

The bicycle is an ancient model, deliberately picked for its thick, heavy frame and pedals, bare of rubber cover, whose serrated ridges as the hours go by cut first into callus, then the flesh of feet that press upon them.

The crankset, big as a gear from a belfry clock, is covered in the same tenacious rust that attacks brakes and handlebars. Each bicycle has its own particular skin disease: this one is flecked as if by a colony of metal-eating fleas that fatigue the steel itself, the wound from rust’s bite bigger with each passing day. That one seems overtaken by a paralysis of the joints; the handlebars never turn without a howl now, while the brake levers are pairs of jaws that won’t close.

The seat leather… but is it really leather? It seems cut from a triangle of emery cloth, of granite, so easily does its mere touch bruise muscle. Or is it leather chiseled off a mummy from a display case in some tumbledown museum of natural history? Whatever it is, in the hours to come, the seat leather will join the ranks of your enemies. For if you must confront the road, never forget that you will have to battle your own machine.

Sit as little as possible: the constant drizzle makes the leather’s friction on your skin even more painful. It’s like a stinging sensation growing between your legs. Don’t sit down.

Nothing to be done about the rain. The squall will scour your sides all day long, mixing with your sweat, clinging to your pubic hair in brilliant pearls. Nothing more annoying than the relentless drip-drip-dripping from the tip of a prick that’s become a drainpipe, the constant feeling like you’re urinating and can’t stop.

The cold, of course, is something to get used to. Especially on the downhills when, naked on your cast-iron grasshopper, you’ll scatter with your front wheel the iridescent mass of gas bubbles, some of which cling to the bike frame, to your skin. Try to pop them right away, before the metal tarnishes at their touch, or your skin starts breaking out in hard blisters.

The desquamation can last whole days, always working deep down, digging into dermis, fat, muscle. The bubbles stick especially to the hollow of the groin and the insides of the thighs. Nor do they scorn the armpits. Best thing, of course, is to avoid the bubble clusters stagnating on the road, across the yellow lines, but the compact mass of the peloton significantly reduces your maneuvering room. Moreover, condensation on the visor of your gas mask warps your sense of distance, and a collision is always to be feared.

One single commandment: NEVER STOP PEDALING. To which one might add: never lift your head too high, to avoid any pointless torque on the tubing between the gas mask and the crankset-powered air-production system. The rubber already has a hard time resisting the corrosive gas, and any sudden movements might result in a tear. It might seem obvious, but never forget: stop pedaling and you cut off your own air as surely as if you turned off a tap.

Never set foot on the ground. Urinate or defecate while you pedal standing up. Never stop.

As for flats—best not to mention them. As soon as your feet quit rhythmically pushing the pedals, the air pressure inside the mask will drop too low to push back the gas seeping in.

Then you’ll have three or four seconds before you feel a swarm of razor blades flay your larynx and explode in your lungs. The pain is tough to take, though it won’t kill you. Some cyclists start coughing so hard they burst a vessel and their chins get sticky with blood. Other let out long streams of scarlet urine, as if an invisible razor had just castrated them mid-race. Most of the time, you see them zigzagging before leaving the road and collapsing on the sidewalk’s sharp edge. And there they stay, paralyzed by pain, or twitching spasmodically like a worm severed with a pocketknife, until they can get back in the saddle and start pedaling again. No one helps them. Not pedestrians, whose bare feet squelch on the damp asphalt, or cyclists.

When the rain stops, artificial suns flood the road with harsh, unbearable light, and the bubbles play at being magnifying glasses, needling your skin with myriad luminous points each red-hot as the tip of a cigarette. Who hasn’t, as a child, toyed with making just such a weal rise from the back of a hand or a fatty thigh gushing from a pair of shorts, by focusing the sun through an old camera lens? Here, the pain is multiplied one hundred percent.

Constant contact with the rubber gas mask always ends up causing severe dermatoses, and you must fight the urge to slip your nails under the protective rim to itch yourself, since the gas will slither right in.

The signal to start is given in the morning, “morning” simply being an arbitrary and comforting way of locating yourself in time. There is no sky here, no real sun or moon.

Only an unbroken line of spotlights stippling the metallic vault over our heads, the gray ribbon of the road with its dotted yellow dividing line. To either side, sidewalks, then the dead-end red brick wall, devoid of door or window. No one looks at us, no one watches us. Why would they? Riveted to our machines as we are, we cannot stop pedaling for even so much as a moment.

The signal to start is given in the morning, surely too early, to go by the weight of exhaustion still stiffening muscles. Afterwards, there’s nothing but the constant squeal of tires on asphalt, the creak of the crankset or poorly greased gears. No way of talking, the masks smother voices, and the respirator tubing only carries a series of indecipherable gurglings. Besides, better focus on the road, keep an eye out for tacks that might’ve been scattered in the night. Victims of flats are often older, vision failing, ones who’ve lost or cracked their glasses. Besides, the mask is designed to make it hard to wear it over a pair of glasses, no matter how small.

The course is long. Very long. Straight at first, the road takes one turn, then another… the monotony of the wall and sidewalks cancels any sense of landmark, no way of knowing if the ribbon of asphalt makes a circle or just keeps going on and on, ever farther, to infinity. I think it’s a circle, but in that case, how to explain the endless changes to the asphalt’s morphology? Drawing a map amounts to a utopian notion; no cyclist ever encounters the same hill, the same curve, twice. No way of knowing what awaits you around the next bend. I keep thinking that the road is a closed circuit, but I must bring myself to face the fact that it warps during the night. Like an undulating snake, a gray snake, flat and striped with yellow.

On the sidewalks, the pedestrians push and shove one another. Their nudity makes them not know what to do with their arms. Some swing them rhythmically; others—women especially—cross them over their breasts; others still walk with their hands crossed behind them like schoolchildren of yore… or prisoners. (Don’t use that word.)

A long, high glass wall keeps the gas from them, and the greenish glints playing on the panes give their skin an odd aquatic tinge.

It’s said their toenails are polished with a magnetic varnish that carries a charge individual to each of them. In this way, optical scanners scattered throughout the asphalt identify the walkers, calculating the average time of each group. If the computer deems their pace too slow, the glass wall reveals its vents, letting in a quantity of gas proportional to the accumulated delay.

Then we hear them gasping, coughing, spitting. Invariably, they start running clumsily, and the women’s heavy breasts jolt and quiver like masses of gelatin on a lunatic platter.

Many envy the pedestrians; the physical effort imposed on them indeed seems less restrictive, but there may be other drawbacks…

The route is a tunnel marked off in hours, not miles; the route is a pipeline of pain we must ride on leaden machines in the ceaseless whine of pedals, the screech of ill-oiled chains, the stridency of brakes, or the tremendous din of a bike crumpling in two.

At night, a door opens in the brick wall. An entrance invisible in the daytime, which no one can ever find. One final push of the pedal, and then the bike is hung in the gloom of a chamber where oxygen lashes our legs, forcing back the clusters of bubbles that try to enter in the our wake. The wall closes again.

Take off the masks sticky with sweat; the skin where its straps dug in will remain raw all night. Some cyclists stay there, right by their machines, for fear someone will steal a part from them in the night. They’re probably right.

The room is empty, bare. At the far end, the doors to little booths gape open on the decomposer-reconstitutors: at least that’s what we call the white enameled devices in the middle of each 3 by 3 foot closet barely lit by a frosted bulb of measly wattage. Close up, they’d look just like toilets, if it weren’t for the network of ducts and the radiation lamps. All excremental matter is immediately broken down, each particle resuming its pre-intestinal aspect, and the regenerator lamps try and restore to it all an adequate nutrient content. The pasty material then removed from the tank has neither taste nor color. When the nutrient content drops to zero, when the regenerators can no longer extract anything from our excrement, we pop open some canned food, or chew a bar of alimentary concentrate. The regenerator allow us to live on these for at least three months, mining and making the most of the teensiest nutritive particles our digestive systems have discharged. At first, some cyclists vomited after every meal, while others obstinately refused to swallow the slightest mouthful. On the door of my booth someone’s scrawled four words in pencil: “Trash fed by trash…” I’ll have to erase that.

Those who arrive after the doors have closed must keep pedaling all night long, or get used to suffering. They probably try as much of both as they can stand…

The guards have donned fireproof gloves to put the cap back on the blackened jerry-can… but the cap won’t screw back on the spout deformed by the explosion. It’s some kind of acid meant to absorb the radiation, I think (so they say). The only drawback is it explodes on contact with liquid, which makes handling it rather tricky. Sometimes, a shadow slips away from the group, grabs one of the jerry-cans, and pisses into it. The results are instantaneous. Flames rocket out, white and blinding as lightning, blazing like a laser, right between the guy’s legs… For a few seconds, a magnesium glare lights up the room. I look around to try and spot the edges, but the flame never lasts long enough.

It can’t be said suicides have gone up… I mustn’t be disingenuous.

Recently, rocks have been ricocheting off the surface of the water without sinking in. The effects of solar lighting vary from place to place, greening your face in the valley, yellowing your shoulders on the flatlands, blurring your belly on the hilltops. Trees have been growing upside down, roots turned skywards, foliage buried under the grass. Chestnuts would explode the minute you made as if to touch them, sending burrs flying in all directions. Sometimes the wind would steal sounds and mix them up, a thunderclap would come out of your mouth, words you spoke would hang from a condor’s beating wings… the (don’t talk about how it was before). Besides, there’s no proof these images are real, doubtless my diseased memory has distorted much more rational facts. The bicycles clink and rattle in the shadows, lining the walls of the room. Only the tandem corner is empty. Nowadays all couples are separated. Little by little, as the hours go by, the crouching forms stretch out on the floor, the wreck of a conversation will dwindle to a monologue soon worn down by fatigue.

No rules oblige sleepers to remain in the lower chamber; we are all free to climb one of the stairwells with steps caparisoned in red wool that lead to the upper floor. However, few indeed undertake such a journey; no sooner are their bikes hung than exhaustion nails them to the floor. Up above, table with giant feet bear massive silverware whose mere weight could sink a ship.

A line of blue-green plates and dishes runs to the vanishing point of a hall hung with oppressive velours. A banquet for an army or a crowd, but the guests will be forever absent. The next few rooms, with their high beds, hordes of pillows in all sizes, flanked by candelabra rooted in floorboards that smell of beeswax… But it is raining on the empty soup tureens, and each drop is like the tapping of a woman’s long, pointed fingernail, a tinny music that fills the tarnished plates and mildews the tablecloth. The shower often pierces sheets and blankets, and an unhealthy moisture encourages mushrooms deep within the mattress. Dead birds overflow the credenza drawers; pages of books from the library are now forever faded, and only vast white pages remain, so beautiful they seem to be reserved for epitaphs, or deaths of historical importance…

Once, Maria cruelly bit my hand; I dropped a candle on the woolen rug. It was so damp that the flame went out at once.

You can sleep in these beds, you even sleep better there, a deeper sleep than the room downstairs. As the whiff of mold acted as a potent anesthetic, in its way. Upon waking, however, a slight worry assails sleepers regarding the uses made of them during their hours of unconsciousness, for rare is the occasion when sleepers do not wake with each orifice of their bodies feeling forced and painful.

And so Maria—

(Don’t—)

In the blemished mirrors on the upper floor, I can perfectly make out my face purpled by the swellings of asphyxia. And on the canopy bed’s still-white sheets, I can see perfectly well that my shadow is red.

HOWEVER, I will refrain from drawing any hasty conclusions, exhaustion and malnutrition maintaining me in a torpor from in which it is sometimes hard to tell dream from reality…

***

I can no longer remember just how I got here. Like most of us, I woke up in the room down below after the explosion, my head empty and yet heavy. Since that day, my sense of touch has diminished considerably, and I have the hardest time holding a pencil in my numb fingers. My memories have gradually faded away, surely from shock. Some whisper that we are dead, that we expiate our sins in the first circle of an absurd hell, but I find this theory far too romantic. No, for me, it’s more—

The fact is, each new arrival is brought in by a hearse, and unloaded on a stretcher amidst the others, who will teach him the rules… But I believe this is a vulgar practice meant to keep us in a certain state of unease.

I know the gas is corroding my brain cells—first my memory, then my perception of reality. The near impossibility drawing differentiations and making logical connections will not make me give up my desire to know, to… understand.

Are we prisoners in some forgotten jail, of some computer warden ignorant of changes in historical context?

Ignorant of the fact that the empty eye sockets of its programmers are now forever fixed on a white sun, so white their dark glasses have melted away?

And the machine continues to function, on insufficient data. Continues to drag, from their cells, convicts who have forgotten the very cause of their incarceration. Ensuring, through the intermediary of its android jailers, that sentences are handed out, never to be commuted, for lack of new data?

That’s just a theory, of course, and I lack the strength to carry out the verifications needed to refute it; besides I’m not at all sure my data is objective. The disaster and the gas have destroyed my mental workings… Unless… unless this is just the first phase of some kind of brainwashing, the prelude to an undertaking that escapes me.

At other times, I like to imagine that the blurriness of thoughts is an effect I strive for consciously. Then I convince myself that this entire monologue is recorded in a memory circuit… a magnetic tape speaks through my mouth, and I’m just an android with an official number, employed in the Funnyway Penitentiary, in charge of welcoming new prisoners when they come out of the usual post-conviction brainwashing.

My monologue is a speech type whose sole purpose is to increase their mental unease, to make them lose all bearings… to break them.

A fictional speech, but gangrenous.

My name is Alpha‑3, I belong to the section for the suppression of speed fetishists—I—

Who knows?

I will NEVER know if I am a prisoner or a jailer…

Besides, what would be the point?

What pleasure, what satisfaction would I derive from the certainty of being someone sentenced to life, instead of an android on the fritz, ready for the junkyard…

Or the opposite.

The bicycle is an ancient model, deliberately picked for its thick, heavy frame. We usually say that there are trap-cycles, one hidden in every dozen. Like a deadly bullet in a firing squad, eleven of whose twelve rifles are loaded with blanks. I don’t know how much credence to give these legends. Our machines are changed during the night according to a schedule difficult to determine for people like us, without watches or calendars. An entirely subjective estimate might be every six months. The machine from hell would have suddenly razorlike pedals, a seat that can burst into flames in a matter of minutes, lead wheels with sticky tires, and especially, the ability to triple its weight on uphills. We call it the black bicycle, or even the cycle of Asmodeus. They say its timbre is curiously crazed, never making the same sound twice.

But I’m not saying these things to frighten you; we too have our legends, our myths…

You’ll find your bicycle next to the others. If the handlebars are sticky, it’s due to sweat. If the pedals are hard, it’s because hundreds of feet have failed to get the better of the hatred stored in them.

You’ll learn to foil its treacheries, to beg for its favors… You…

Tomorrow, when it’s time to leave, my mask will keep me from muttering a word of encouragement, so I’m taking advantage of this moment to wish you “a good trip.”

Or as they say around these parts…

FUNNYWAY

The post Funnyway appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

It was like a gigantic pyre rising from the center of the gray, argil plain. A colossal intertwining of branches atop which the city seemed bizarrely unbalanced, with its towers broader at the base than the summit, its keeps oddly narrowed toward their crenellations, such that from a distance they might be taken for factory smokestacks that went on forever. The fortifications around the city had the same truncated-cone look; it was as if like the sentries pacing their wall-walks might at any moment topple into the void and go sliding down the steeply banked sides, helmets slashing showers of sparks from the black, gleaming slabs pierced here and there by spindly embrasures. Drawing closer, it became clear the mountainside where the city took root was entirely covered in countless logs, freshly pruned, sawn, scalped, reduced to the state of anonymous timber, forming an inextricable tangle that piled up against the outermost stones of the city’s surrounding wall. Whence the curious impression of a pyre thrown together pell-mell for some feverish sacrifice.

To gain entrance to the city took long days of navigating this labyrinth of wood, wood at first sticky with sap and then, nearer the summit, dry and studded with splinters. A path where every step might at any minute disturb and shatter the equilibrium of imbricate trunks, an instant death sentence beneath a hellish, thundering avalanche of logs, such that travelers feel like they’re picking their way through a giant game of pick-up sticks where the slightest misstep immediately leads to a crushing disqualification.

I, for one, quite clearly recall that no sooner had I stepped through the only gate than I sought the coolness of a church with blue slate walls, fleeing in the heart of its shadows the heat and unbearable smell of sawdust that had accompanied my entire climb. Instinctively, my fingers reached for the marble font normally beside the collection box on the first pillar. The merest touch of that icy liquid on my joints immediately dispelled my migraine, early warning signs for which had been buzzing at my temples. I rested my palm in the middle of the chipped Carrera conch, in the little iridescent puddle where a few rare glimmers danced, filtering through the stained glass windows. Pulling my hand back with a painful effort that betrayed all the exhaustion of my journey, I touched my thumb to my forehead, lips, and belly… The heady smell of fuel gave me a shiver.

I stayed there for a moment, leaning against the pillar, savoring the cold marble through my sweat-soaked shirt. From somewhere deep in the crypt rose a baby’s cry, frail, no doubt surprised to find itself naked and in unfamiliar hands above the baptismal basin while drops of kerosene pearled at the sacred cruet’s spout and splattered on its forehead, between its brows.

I left the church, eyes lowered, returning to the cobblestones of the sun-drenched street where in the burning dawn, the arabesques of one final farandole were dwindling away. Low to the ground, the wind blew a rolling wave of red confetti that stuck to my bare legs, gummy with sweat, like so many strange and fanciful pustules. Sick with the carnival measles, I made for the cracked fountain where a cluster of verdigrised bronze tritons spat ethyl alcohol by the mouthful, slick and almost viscous. Methanol, maybe. The harsh reek—nuanceless and even industrial—made me curse such a lack of taste and imagination in the choice of fluid. But the exhilarating fumes scrambled my thoughts, paralyzed my brain as if through prolonged exposure to ether, and images unrelated to my worries of the moment intervened between my eyes and reality.

As always, I had to make a violent effort not to let myself drown, knees suddenly weak, lifeless, and tear myself from the swell of ever more pervasive odors. I tore up the sloping street, twisting my ankles on uneven cobblestones rainbowed by steaks of alcohol with starbursts of gold and steel blue. The first pyres appeared right away, lining the sidewalks and thoroughfare. Meticulous stacks of dry, dusty firewood, jealously defended from humidity for years in waiting for this final day. Mountains of cunningly interlocked logs with access corridors and central combustion chambers designed for the entire family… I slowed my pace, offering up my irritated mucous membranes to the scent of knotty, splintering wood, those dark desiccated twigs, kindling, armfuls of rustling, skeletal branchings shattering underfoot in a concert of dry detonations. For a moment I watched the white, bluish hands striped with scratches hauling bunches of bines scrupulously selected long ago in anticipation of this ritual, and then I wandered among the piles of branches, amidst scents and sounds of an autumn forest. It was even hotter now, and my eyebrows could no longer stem the tide of perspiration flooding my brow. Suddenly I wished I could drown myself in the shade of the archways, and an unbearable thirst clogged my throat, swelling my tongue between my teeth.

A dark vault sucked me in… a dance hall with its floor a deep black reflective, its echoes at once near and far: a dome of night blue as the slumber of burrowed beasts. My toes left an incongruous halo of condensation on the marble, testifying to a fever that suddenly took on an obscene dampness in this place where mirrors and windows seemed conceived for something entirely apart from harvesting the dying breaths. At my feet, a handful of confetti had hastily sketched out a planisphere of unknown constellations. A silken shawl, stirred by a breeze, moved across the floor, strange fabric smoke fallen from a dancer’s shoulders to end up drifting the surface of this lake of frozen ink.

An intruder in this world of black snow, with my panting and sweat-stink, all of a sudden I wanted to see if my soles had melted the ice the floor seemed to be, and if my ankles were sinking into a pond of indelible waters, marking me for life in the most ridiculous way.

The woman was standing back, elbow on a caryatid, and her pale, bluish hand, nails cyanotic from an irrepressible internal cold, lay quite precisely between the breasts of the sculpted torso in an unintentionally provocative posture. A long scarf of gray silk wound round her neck, ends crossing behind her nape and falling again over her clavicles all the way to the floor, surrounding her frozen, naked body in a parenthesis of cloth. Her belly drooped and her breasts sagged. Networks of violet venules traced her flesh just under the skin, bringing to mind finely crazed porcelain. Fragile. Darkness drowned her features; all I caught was a glimpse of a thickened, graceless silhouette, pale and distressing; already her outstretched hand was offering me a cup of some liquid…

I drank. Without a word. Just before leaving, I seized her still outstretched fingers, bowed my head, and placed my mouth on the back of her hand just above the lumpen line of joints. She didn’t flinch, but the minute her wrist fell back, I saw quite clearly the horrible burn my lips had left on her smooth, cold skin, twin swollen lines of oozing blisters. Had I listened more closely, I might have caught, just as I was kissing her hand, a crackle and the unmistakable smell of burning flesh…

She smiled with an apologetic, weary, and worldly air, like a hostess who, upon noting an inadvertent lapse in etiquette during a lavish dinner, begs the complicit indulgence of her guests. I took my leave. Returned to the avenues, the heat, and the row of pyres punctuating the asphalt at regular intervals. Was I really feverish? Probably no more than usual.

I watched as some looked away from me, and others more shrewdly feigned to stare me down without seeing me, as if I’d been divested of all my opacity—made, in a word, transparent.

My detour into the dance hall had done nothing except make the furnace outdoors even more felt. Groups of silent, naked girls cluttered the balconies on either side of the street. Looking up, I could see on their hardened pubes shocks of hair, daubed in red phosphorus like their eyelashes, hair, and nipples. A few of them had shaved their heads and their bare skulls, which crusts of scarlet phosphorus fitted close as a helmet, helplessly teased my mind with the image of a giant match.

I think a few of them smiled my way, but I can’t be sure… I noticed their drawn features still bore traces of fatigue from the night before, from singing, dancing, maybe even fear. For I know bizarre festivities fill the alleys at night, horrible farandoles where boys and girls dance corseted in costumes coated with white phosphorus that spontaneously combusts when ambient heat reaches the fateful limit of 303°K, forcing them to vanish, to flee the streets and open squares as the first glimmer of dawn. From that moment on, woe betide he whom day catches drunkenly sprawled on a park lawn, lounging about in his deadly costume whose powdery white is not unlike the unsettling texture of butterfly wings.

Transformed into a living torch, the unlucky victim will be unable even to hurl himself into the first fountain he sees, for that will only fan the flames ravaging him. And yet they keep doing it. Every night, from one end of the city to the other, through puerile and outdated yet  laboriously reconstructed Italian carnival décor, they spread themselves out, dreadfully vulnerable, offered up, exposed to the slightest friction that might prove too brusque, to the tips of cigarettes some start smoking out of defiance, bravado, and dandyism. They dance without watches or reminders of any sort, since all the town’s clocks are now stopped. They dance on, knowing full well that in these latitudes, night gives way to day without transition of any sort, and that since they’ve lost all notion of time from drink, they will soon be unable to predict where and when dawn will surprise them.

And so the squares, gardens, grand esplanades that offer hardly any places to hide are particularly prized during these ironic and despairing sarabands. “The greater the risk, the better the party,” go the songs, and more than one farandole has suddenly gone up in flames like a living fuse, in a matter of seconds consuming everyone holding hands just a moment ago, leaving but a garland of charred corpses strewn across the flagstones, corpses oddly reduced and deformed by the fire’s devouring, tragically tarry statues that chance has shriveled up in postures straight from the rituals of ancient magic.

Thirst and fever made me stagger once more and seek refuge in the hollows of doorways. Atop a flight of steps, my damp and burning hands flattened against a chiseled marble plaque set above a great bronze knocker. Taking over from my eyes, briefly blinded in the gloom, my fingers deciphered the word MUSEUM graven in tall uprights and sharp serifs.  An ink-black carpet guided my steps between the hedges of gilded chain meant to protect the objects on display from the visitors’ tactile curiosity. The breeze from the still-open door made the festoons of metal links clank in lazy cadence. Right away the acid reek from the row of sculptures overwhelmed me, irritating my sinuses, a drilling prickle along my nostrils, and I grew lost in the contemplation of lemon yellow statues lining the hall. Slender maidens, tapering folds and veils atop which a countenance of absence of beatific nothingness discloses itself. Titans frozen in one final, prodigious spasm. Ephebes with curves soft and firm all at once, and so many more, all standing on their ebon pedestals, freed from sulfur by the chisel of a genius. Brittle masterpieces, of incredible fragility and suffocating smell, which a stray elbow might reduce to crumbs, to powder, which a spark might set ablaze in a torrent of choking smoke, leaving nothing of the work behind but a great flower of soot splattering the wall like the forgotten shadow of something that no longer exists. I have never been able to resist the fascination of these bodies, these actions, arrested by an artist in Sulfur, a medium so ill-suited to immortality; never been able to resist the cognitive heartbreak provoked by these friable and powdery wonders. We want them to be eternal, to be preserved forever from time the destroyer, and instead we find them poignant in their fragility, as if the creator, in picking an eminently perishable material for his art, had wished to highlight the irony of their vulnerability.

I crossed the hall slowly, leaving behind a double row of flammable creations, and entered the library. The smell of leather and paper, in heavy waves fringed with mold and dust, gradually supplanted the bitter whiffs of sulfur, and all I had to do now was let my fingers run over the shelves, counting out the gold-stamped spines like the letters of a prayer wheel… The curiosity of an entire people slumbered here, abandoned to all manner of fungus and rodents: phlogistical treatises establishing fire as the very essence of the body’s composition, abstruse studies on the putrefaction of fish and phosphine emanations as the source of will‑o’-the-wisps, parchment scrolls whose flow of exotic characters dissert on the secret of Greek fire, thirty-volume histories of Bengal lights and fireworks, with a main section of comprehensive reports on Roman candles, missiles, bottle rockets, snakes, and peonies… I continued on my way, pressing the palms of my hands cooled on leather bindings to my cheeks burning with infection. A corridor on high hurled me into the coppery world of pyrometers, a forest of feverish dials, each with a needle more sensitive than the last. As I did not know what units were used to calibrate them, the leaps and quiverings of red cursors as I passed gave me no clear idea of my condition. The corridor led to a vast chamber whose unaffected architecture, based wholly on the interlocking of enormous blocks, informed me that it was most likely located within the city’s walls. No system of lighting allowed me to banish the gloom maintained by two embrasures overgrown with vegetation. So I held my breath, knowing in advance what I would find. Quite soon and without surprise, my blind, outstretched fingers touched the smooth surface of a showcase, and I knew right away I’d made no mistake.

I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the setting around me: rows of glass display cases like high upright aquariums holding within their walls the only canvases of ancient masters, invaluable tapestries, fabrics and silks painted long ago by virtuoso brushes. An entire world of irreplaceable portraits, frescoes, triptychs, painted or woven in their time with the help of materials derived from phosphorus pentoxide, and thus endowed with the disagreeable property of spontaneously combusting upon contact with air.

Whence the necessity of keeping them locked up in a vacuum forever within sealed and leaded glass walls that seem at first to insulate them once and for all from any danger. However, trusting in this apparent fact would be to misestimate gravely the great aesthetic perversity of artists on this planet, for not a single one of these protective panes is thick enough to stand up to a simple hurled stone. Some of them—usually those containing artistic treasures beyond compare—are made of the most fragile crystal, and the mere impact of a stray bird, come in through an embrasure and fluttering randomly about, would be enough to crack them from top to bottom, letting the surrounding air in immediately with a shrill whistling. Not a single one of the pyrophoric media on display would last more than a few seconds under such conditions, and the tapestries would consume themselves, victims of an internal combustion, a destruction written into their very pigments, their wool, their threads, from the first day of their existence, when they were created in an airtight tank by an artist in a diving suit in a total vacuum. What could be more riveting than to imagine this obscene and subtle game wherein an artist strives to destroy by creating—wherein, far from wanting to see his work cast in bronze, he toils to make something infinitely more delicate and fragile in which the seed of death might awaken at any moment. From then on, the constant danger can only keep the aesthete, the amateur in a state of rare and powerful exaltation, heightening his perception of things, a sensation not unlike that of trying, in the space of scant seconds, to commit faces from a railway platform to memory because already you know you will never see them again. I retraced my steps, in no hurry, borne by the fever’s torpor. Numb, and yet terrified at having to return to the heat outside.

It is true that here, on this planet, in these streets, beneath these archways, deep in these marble vaults, people die of strange frigid diseases that kill with neither fever nor sweats. “Adiabatism,” a girl once whispered in my ear long ago, in a single word summing up the problem of these bodies that neither receive nor emit heat in any quantity. Whence their fascination with flame, their entire aesthetic, and their morbid cult of incineration. But all this matters little, since after all, my task is not to ponder but to act. I know that they will feel nothing when they burn, that a child out strolling could have his hand on fire, watching his carbonized fingers shrivel, and not stop chewing on his mouthful of candy for a single second. What does it matter, then, if naked couples wallow on sheets damp with fuel and desperately rub their bodies up against each other, knowing all the while that in a few seconds the boy’s pubis, daubed in a crust of phosphorus and potassium chlorate, will strike his partner’s mons veneris, also abrasively lacquered, and this friction will give rise to the spark that will set them both ablaze in a final embrace. What does it matter?

My role will be over in a few hours, as soon as everyone has climbed to the top of the pyre like castaways clinging to the ridge of a tiny desert island and I myself, through streets now empty, have come to the great council chamber where, in the middle of an immense ceremonial table, lost in a vastness of dark varnish, the only match in all the city awaits me.

Perhaps, like some of their kind in other cities, they will have readied for me one of those shapeless white asbestos jumpsuits with a narrow slit of fire-resistant glass at eye level, but such considerations, though they attest to extreme sensitivity, are quite useless.

I will take the match, I will set it on my lips burning with fever, attentive to the quick crackle before ignition, and then with a sweep of my arm, all I’ll have to do is toss it out the window into the nearest fountain overflowing with alcohol. And then…

Then I’ll walk away amidst the first cracklings of the conflagration flowing from fountains in streams, streams to pyres, I will walk out of the city, through the whirlwind of sparks the wind blows into every opening. Perhaps, all the same, I shall wear the asbestos jumpsuit for the sole pleasure of seeing it darken in the whorls of soot…

I will leave through the city’s main gate, careful not to turn back until I’m about to enter the maze of trunks covering the hillside. Then I’ll see smoke, hard and thick in curls and scrolls surging upward like a living tumult atop the towers, making them at last like the factory smokestacks of my imagination, and the conflagration will growl and rumble behind the ramparts with a mighty, muffled roar. When I set foot on the plain, I will turn back once more, to sear deep into my mind the image of the hill become a gargantuan pyre, a mound of flames in the middle of the desert, and listen to the heavy shuddering of the inferno.

When the final flames die away, I will turn back, scaling the hillock once more in the sharp crackle of charred bark. I will climb toward the summit, toward the blackened ramparts, hugging close to my chest the little box of white wood, with its schoolboy-notebook label of two parallel dotted lines framed by the usual thick pink margin. Gently, from the hollow of my palm, I will pour between the four walls of this paltry and fragile receptacle the ashes of a people as vain as the hope of success. At night, my nails sullied with blue ink, fingers tight around the slender stem of my little penholder, I must inscribe, in laborious calligraphy, the name of the city, the planet, and its inhabitants in writing my fiery breath will dry that very instant…

© Éditions Denoël, 1980

The post Sun of Sulfur appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

With regard to good stories, here is one that was told to me by a trustworthy man, who claimed to be the friend of a friend of an eye-witness who played a significant role in the drama that I am about to relate to you briefly, not without making the ardent wish that the story in question might be honored before long by an adaptation for the theater—which is, as everyone knows, the greatest honor that can be desired nowadays.

Not six weeks ago, a young Englishman named Belfort was dying, quite simply from a bad chest and a few crazy years recklessly spent. The young man, although he was nearing the end, did not regret losing his life too much, for he had had his fair share of amours, duels, bad debts, picnics, and even fine sermons—in short, his fair share of all the Parisian joys.

One of his friends, a man of science but a good enough fellow regardless, seeing that Charles Belfort would soon render his last breath, came to say to him, in his softest voice: “If it wouldn’t displease you too much, my dear invalid, I’ll use my abilities to magnetize you, and I’ll choose the moment when you render up your soul; it seems to me that it will be a fine experiment, and that there’s nothing about it likely to displease you. What do you say?”

“Not only doesn’t your experiment displease me,” the other replied, “but it seems to me to be very amusing and interesting, and I thank you for having thought of me for the proof, which will be decisive. Count on me, my dear doctor; you’ll be content with my patience, I hope, and I’ll be sure to let you know when the moment comes.”

With those words, the two friends shook hands and separated, saying that they would see one another again soon. They were both full of hope, and it would have been difficult to decide which of the two was the more content, the moribund or the magnetizer.

Two days went by—two centuries—while the magnetizer waited impatiently for the final agony, which did not seem to want to arrive for good and all. The dying man, for his part, lost patience, and he said to his friend: “Damn it, my dear chap, it’s not my fault if death is treating me with such ill-will, but what consoles me is that you won’t lose anything by waiting, and I’ll be a magnificent subject.”

On the night following this conversation, the sick man had a final crisis and fell into a comatose ecstasy; he started sketching fantastic spider-webs with his finger, and yet, in the midst of the most abominable grimaces, he still had the presence of mind to say to his comrade: “You have to lift my head, to hide the light that is hurting my eyes.”

The other obeyed. He propped his moribund up in a sitting position, took away every importunate light and set about the operation; which is to say that never, absolutely never, had such beautiful passes and counter-passes—the whole customary apparatus, in short—been performed. The magnetizer was in the swim; but in the end, when he had enveloped the moribund—who lent himself to it with exemplary willingness—with his all-powerful fluid, and saw that his subject had arrived at magnetic perfection, the magnetizer started to interrogate him.

“How are you doing, Belfort? Where are you?”

“My dear friend,” the other said, “I’m just dying; you’ve caught me just at the moment when the breath was leaving my body, and now it depends entirely on you to let me finish the job or to keep me here, suspended between being and non-being, which doesn’t seem to me to be a disagreeable state, so far.”

“Let’s wait,” said the magnetizer. “There’s no hurry, Belfort, my friend.” And with that, the magnetizer went to dinner, without taking the trouble to demagnetize his friend.

The next day the maker of magnetism reappeared in the mortuary chamber; everything was in its place, including the cadaver.

“Belfort,” said the scientist, after a few preliminary passes, “what have you been doing since you died?”

“In truth, my dear chap,” the dead man replied, “I’ve been obliged to follow you everywhere you went.”

And with that, the dead man told the living one everything that the latter had done the day before: he had dined in a cheap eatery, and from there he had gone to stand on the steps of the Café de Paris; he had been given a ticket to the Vaudeville and he had seen some young women who were pretty enough, but some of whom sang out of tune; finally he had gone back home, and read a little of a novel that he had picked up on the way.

“And if you’ll permit me to make an observation,” the dead man said, “so long as I’m attached to you by a thread that only you can break, eat better, I beg you, remembering that I’m sharing the experience. You know that I like music, so don’t expose me to hearing quavering voices that would spoil the most beautiful faces. All alone here, I’m getting bored, and I wouldn’t be sorry if you were to read a good novel from time to time, but at least, for pity’s sake, read it all the way through. Finally, if you please, don’t go to bed so late; I become irritated not sleeping, because for twenty-four hours, I ought to have been sleeping eternally.”

With these words, the man slumped back, and the magnetizer left the room, slightly discomfited by the strange spy that was dogging his heels.

The next day, the living man came back, and found his dead man a trifle numb. He warmed him up with a further dose of magnetic fluid, rendering him, if not life, at least a little color and the ability to speak.

“Ah!” said the dead man, raising himself up. “You’re not showing me any charity. What! You go to see such hideous sick people, and I have to hear them coughing, spitting, howling, moaning and all the rest! In the street you follow a horrible woman reeking of musk, a woman in old shoes and a dirty skirt, and I have to keep you company counting the holes and the stains of the filthy creature! Then you go to meet up with some young people, and you tell them about your good luck! You make the streetwalker into a duchess, and a cotton apron into a silk skirt! When you’re dead, you know, lying makes you feel ill. And what makes you feel even worse, when you’re dead, is stupidity—some quip that would have made me laugh when I was of this world appears to me to be utter nonsense now that I can hear your mind with the ears of my own. So try to talk better my dear chap, and, if it’s all the same to you, I’d be obliged if you didn’t get drunk on adulterated wine; my throat’s been torn apart by the alcohol you’ve swallowed.”

Who do you think pulled a face? It was the living man, who was beginning to think that his dead man was damnable hard to please—because, after all, the previous evening’s indulgence hadn’t been deserving of such scorn. As for the lady with the worn-out shoes, the living man hadn’t noticed the shoe, but only the foot and a little bit of the leg. However, he was fond to his dead man, and he resolved to keep a better eye on himself, in order not to give poor Belfort further reason for discontentment.

When he came back two days later, he found the deceased in a state of incredible excitement. The dead man was sweating copiously, with indignation legible on his distressed face.

First of all, the magnetizer set about trying to calm that anger; he blew his most soothing breath upon those irritated nerves, and appeased that motionless and frozen heart as best he could, which beat in memory.

“What is it, Master Belfort? Who’s upset you? And for God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with me?” replied the cadaver, after a long pause. “What’s the matter with me, imbecile that you are? A curse upon the brazen threads that attach me to a fool like you! What’s the matter with me! But my dear chap, for two days you’ve been going from one stupidity to another. The day before yesterday, it’s true, you were well-groomed and well-dressed, but you’d fastened your belt too tight and I nearly choked. Your boots—or, rather, our boots—were well-polished, but they were too small, and if I could still walk, I’m sure that I’d be limping with my right foot.

“I’ve nothing to say about the lovely salon to which you took me; it was pleasant and it was calm; the clothes weren’t at all garish; the mature ladies kept to their place, leaving the foreground to the young women; no one played the slightest sonata or read the slightest sonnet; people only spoke in even voices, neither too loud nor too quiet, and said the nicest things—trivial but light, benevolent and sonorous. In brief, had it not been for your belt and our footwear, I would have blessed you for having taken me to such a beautiful place. But good heavens! Could you have been any more gauche, maladroit and absurd?

“In a corner of the little room to the left, a more beautiful woman than I ever saw with my mortal eyes was sitting; by dint of attention and will-power, via your terrestrial intermediation. I had attracted the benevolent interest of that amiable lady; already she was looking at me with a certain tenderness, and she was about to smile at me; our two souls were no longer any but one, and we were about to fall in love, when you turned your head like an idiot to greet I don’t know what starchy spirit. Then the image of my beautiful lady fled, and if you live for a hundred years you won’t find either another face as beautiful or another heart as noble.

“Idiot that you are, having done that, what do you do next? You know that I’ve left some glaring debts, and that I don’t even have a tomb. You haven’t a sou yourself; you live from hand to mouth; your rent hasn’t been paid and never will be; in brief, you’re as poor as a poet and an actor rolled into one—which is to say, abominably poor! Well, you sit down at a card-table, tremulously risk a wretched pistole, and, having won the hand, you pocket the money and run away like a thief!

“Now, do you know what you did there, Monsieur Idiot? You renounced getting your hands on a round sum of four lovely thousand louis d’or, for you’d have won the next thirteen hands, my son! With your four thousand louis you’d have had a carriage and I’d have had a first-class funeral. You’d have had a new suit and I’d have had an embroidered shroud. You’d have gone to seek your supper in the chorus of the Opéra, and I’d have gone to look for Monsieur Gannal.¹

“Damn your feeble intelligence—you can’t make use of what little sense you have, but you amuse yourself dragging another man’s intelligence around with you. Go away—you make me sick, wretched living individual that you are!”

When our magnetizer finally understood that whatever he did would surely attract criticism or sarcasm, he fell silent. Now that he felt that he was being followed and observed at close range by some invisible entity that he had retained on the boundary between the two worlds, the scientist dare not take a step in the street; he scarcely dared answer yes or no to the simplest questions that were addressed to him; it was as if he were deaf and dumb. At times he wondered whether he might be the magnetized man and the magnetizer that great motionless—but not speechless—cadaver, the mere sight of which had ended up making him shiver.

An idea, a thought, is such a powerful thing, even independent of life! An idea pursues you, obsesses you, more tenacious than a shadow, as eloquent as remorse or hope, full of starts, excitations and perils!

However, our man went back to his friend Belfort three days later. This time, once again, a great change was evident in his inanimate face; pure and simple scorn had replaced indignation and anger. The half-closed eyes seemed to be saying: “Away with you!” The tight lips were expressing an indescribable disdain. Every muscle, taut from top to bottom, held a contempt suspended from every thread connecting it to the soul.

“What’s the matter now, my friend?” cried the living man, “You seem dazed. You can’t say this time that I’ve done or said anything stupid, because I’ve stayed at home, alone, entirely given over to my thoughts.”

“Oh, my dear fellow,” the dead man said, “it’s the contemplation of your thoughts that’s giving me nausea. Motionless as you were, I was forced to look into the depths of that chaos you call your soul. But what kind of animal are you to occupy yourself with so many ignoble, frivolous and shameful things? When I was alive and I called you my friend, everyone said that you were a gallant fellow; you had a reputation for keen, even eloquent wit; you were credited with philosophy, probity and tact.

“For three days, unable to help it, I’ve been watching you very attentively—but my dear fellow, you’re a complete mess! What you know, you know poorly; what you don’t know, you replace with words as empty as your head. Your generosity is a certain organic weakness that ends up making your eyes red, and that’s all. Your intelligence is represented by a few mechanical cog-wheels that rotate of their own accord like the wheel of a water-mill incessantly repeating the same tick-tock. Your courage—I’ve seen all the way its depths, your courage!—is a cardboard mask that frightens children. Your probity—let’s talk about your probity!—is written in the margins of the commercial Code and the penal Code.

“Shame upon your vices, those of a badly brought-up child! I wouldn’t give four sous for your vices; they make me sick, your wicked shameful vices: they’re like a kind of boasting! As for your virtues, they’re so worthless I wouldn’t even give them to my lackeys; there’s something limp and vain about your virtue, which bears some resemblance to a badly-cooked broth. Oh, I advise you not to lay bare the inside of your brain and your heart—it’s not a pretty sight, although, on the other hand, it’s very sad.

“And what ideas you have about other men! What thwarted ambitions! And I don’t envy your work at all, my poor sir! What! You aren’t ashamed, even of your castles in Spain, when you amuse yourself rambling on for entire hours in petty daydreams?

“Anyway, Monsieur, let’s leave it at that—but I’m damnably sorry that I ever called you my friend!”

It would not have taken much on this occasion for the magnetizer to destroy his work and liberate himself from the unwelcome thought that was obsessing him. He left the mortuary chamber in a very bad mood, and on the way home he said to himself that it was, after all, quite an accomplishment to have stopped Belfort’s discontented soul half-way.

Then again, the living man said to himself, sadly, what good has it done me to have retained that dead man in the edge of his grave? To have myself told such rude home-truths, to hear the story of my everyday life told in such a cruel and grotesque fashion, no longer to be alone with my conscience, my thoughts, my ambitions, my self? If the clairvoyant that sees everything were, at least, to indicate some unknown science to me—a remedy for the gout or some hidden treasure easy to extract—I’d be rewarded for my troubles, but no! For having carried out the most difficult task, the most excellent miracle that magnetism has ever accomplished, here I am dragging behind me a bilious inquisitor who isn’t content with anything, and who’ll end up making me disgusted with myself.

Thus the clever man reasoned; he was very annoyed, and firmly resolved to put an end to his dealings with such a miscreant, no matter what it cost.

As he was unable to sleep, the magnetizer went back to Belfort’s house that same evening, at midnight.

Belfort watched him come in, and without waiting to be interrogated—for the magnetic fluid becomes, it seems, a habit, and replaces life as a well-lit candle replaces with winter sun—the dead man cried: “I’ll tell you what you’ve just done, amiable doctor! You’ve quite simply decided to murder me! Yes, you’re jealous of this artificial life, you’re furious at my revelations, and you’ve decided to extract me abruptly from magnetic sleep in order to return me to dust and silence!

“That’s handsome of you, Monsieur, it’s glorious, what you’re doing, coming to murder…a dead man! Coming to trouble a cadaver in his coffin! Attacking the thought of a man because the man, having become, thanks to you, a part of eternal life, is no longer able and no longer wants to flatter you!

“Well, get on with it, then, and turn me to dust—but that dust, when you’ve cast it to the wind, will summon to its aid another, bolder thought, to follow in your tracks, another gaze, even more clairvoyant, to read the depths of your soul, another avenger, even more implacable: remorse!”

At these threats the magnetizer fled, but, in his distress, he left the door ajar.

The neighbors of both sexes, who had initially kept their distance, took the chance, one after another, and finally all together, of coming to greet and interrogate the dead man, and picked up, here and there, some of those fine verities—I mean a few of those eternal, ever-living truths—that only the dead know how to voice appropriately. Husbands, wives, children, tenants, owners, masters and servants, the rich and the poor, all the way to the porter, each obtained a parcel of justice addressed to them.

The dead man spoke true words and expressed true notions, and what he said was, admittedly, cruel. If you asked him where fortune lay, he would point out a wart on the end of your nose; if you mentioned ambition to him, he would talk to you about modesty, economy and bonhomie. The female neighbors found him so ungallant that they slammed the door violently.

That was all that the late Monsieur Belfort wanted.

A week went by without the magnetized and the magnetizer seeing one another again; they were sulking, but it was obviously not up to the dead man to make the first move. The scientist finally understood that, and came back to his subject’s bedside.

“I’ve thought about everything that has happened,” Belfort said to him, “and I’d be glad if you were to carry through the plan you made the other day. You’re right: wake me up, so that I can finish dying quietly. It had made such a good beginning, when you came along to disrupt it, that I’d already be devoured by worms and returned via the thousand pores of universal decomposition into the ocean of life and light. Wake me up, then, and I’ll die entirely—and joyfully, for, this time, I’ll amuse myself by gazing, not at your soul, which isn’t beautiful, but at your body, which is very ugly.

“Only the other day—I caught you in that agreeable occupation—you were telling yourself how fortunate you were before, but please, where are these women who can look lovingly at an ape like you? You’re badly-formed; you always have one shoulder higher than the other, this one over that one or that one over this one. Your hair started falling out a long time ago, and what’s left is hanging on to rotten roots, like last year’s thatch after the winter. Your eyes can still see, but I can see some sort of pellicle extending over your line of sight that doesn’t augur anything good.

“Oh, if you could see those layers of yellow chalk encrusted in the joints of your fingers, which are corrupting your bones and are going to break them bit by bit, like the boot of torture, but more slowly, more insidiously and with a more obstinate verve!

“Your heart is swollen, my dear chap, and the point is being torn by some viscera or other that is wounded in its turn. Your left lung isn’t much better than my right lung. Gradually infiltrating between your skin and your softened tendons I can see layers of thick fat which makes you resemble some sort of sea-cow. Your teeth are already turning yellow; they’re loose in their bloody cavities. In your brain I can see veins swollen with apoplectic blood, ready to burst. You’re doomed, you see, and—give me your hand—you’re dead!”

On hearing those lugubrious words, the magnetizer begs the magnetized for mercy, pity and forgiveness. And, in order to free himself from the vision that is obsessing him, to expel from his mind that voice, which is pursuing him with such bruising stubbornness, in order not to remain exposed to that mockery and those prophecies of misfortune, the magnetizer sets about countermanding the magnetic fluid and destroying that artificial life.

The dead man resists, but in vain; it is necessary that a corpse, which is dead, should yield to a man who is still alive.

Gradually, the voice fades away. It utters one last gasp, and then Belfort, so eloquent a little while before, is no longer more than I don’t know what, that which I don’t know how to name in any language….

It was, in fact, for three weeks already that death had had possession of the cadaver, and now the magnetic breath had ceased, corruption and the worm took hold of their prey again and did not let go.

One shivers at the mere idea that the magnetizer might have died before having demagnetized his friend Belfort. How long eternity would have seemed to the latter then—unless his thought, obedient all the way to the abyss, or to Heaven, had followed the soul of magnetizer.

That would be another trial to attempt!

____

The post The Magnetized Corpse appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

Why do they say that I am insane?

Just because I am not like absolutely everyone else, just because I do not play my role like one of Panurge’s sheep, just because I remain indoors for weeks and months at a time–is that any reason to call me insane? On the contrary; I believe that thanks to the life I have led—above all to the great idea which that life has revealed to me—I am a sage. I was certainly not in the least insane when I first conceived that idea.

I had read a great deal, studied a great deal. I was particularly attracted to works of philosophy—but I do not like the philosophers of our own day, because they do not know how true philosophers must live. In order to conceive a philosophical system it is necessary to follow a contemplative lifestyle, solitary and absorbed. Now, how can you find such studious conditions in our hectic world, whose distractions seep into a man’s every pore? I therefore confined my studies to the pleasurable company of the ancient philosophers. I sought out those whose mutilated works are only known to us through fragments or translations: Leucippus, Democritus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides. I felt a singular joy in reconstructing old systems of thought with the aid of their remaining debris, much as Cuvier has reconstructed antediluvian species from a few bones. Men who occupy themselves with decaying things are the only ones who will comprehend the happiness that I obtained by thus rediscovering the homoeomeric theory of Anaxagoras, and a few others. Alongside these fragments, I also cherished the complete but obscure systems of mystics and theologians: subtle depths into whose metaphysical exercises a wounded spirit plunges with delight. The Alexandrines, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus have enraptured me, and I have tasted ineffable sensuality with St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas.

I do not offer this reading-list, any part of which would suffice to prove that I am a savant, out of vanity; I offer it partly to demonstrate that I have merely been a scholar, not a madman, and—more importantly—to explain how the great idea of which I spoke before first came to me.

This is it!

In the course of all this reading I was struck by one thing, which became the point of departure for my own system: the knowledge that in the midst of cosmogonic and theological hypotheses, the human spirit locates itself less by reasoning than by intuition. This is not a matter of logical deduction, since one does not move from “the assertion of what is known” to “the contents of the unknown”. It is a matter of positing the “contents of the unknown” directly—which is to say, in other words, of seeing the absolute. Proof is not an issue; the absolute must be seen. One sees, or one does not see. I might experience it myself at any moment.

Such an enlightenment, of which I had not previously been able to obtain any sensation, came to me suddenly after a long meditation. The absurd became an evident truth. I felt like a blind man, who had had the concept of colour explained to him at length without having any ability to understand it, whose eyes were suddenly opened to sensation.

If this process allowed me to understand the truths of metaphysics, it followed that they had also been discovered by this procedure: such was my first step. I inferred that the absolute was, for us, not a conclusion but an apparition. A fact which seemed at first to be bizarre and unreasonable was soon proven by me, by means of a superhuman sense which sometimes seizes words.

A word, or an assemblage of words—a phrase—is there before me; it becomes an absurdity, as if inscribed in hieroglyphics. I repeat the word—the phrase—without any longer being able to attach any meaning to it; somehow, I fix my spirit to the material form of the word, to the image of the alphabetical signs, to the sound of the syllables. For a week, a month, many months afterwards, I have arranged matters so that I am voluntarily haunted by an incomprehensible absurdity. Then, one fine day, the human sense of that absurdity obliterates itself, the form and the sound of the word become symbols, and I comprehend the incomprehensible.

I had found the key to metaphysics.

I shall not tell you how the idea was refined, little by little, to the point at which it condensed into a theory. That would take too long. The slow and shadowy transformations of an idea are a labyrinth of reflections, whose thread is lost even while one is extending it. Having shown how I arrived at the portal of the labyrinth, I will simply tell you what I sought to draw out of it: my system of perceptible metaphysics.

Until now, only three aspects of human inner life have been considered: sensation, consciousness and reason. To make the next part of my discourse clearer, I will call the senses by the correct term “external senses”, inasmuch as they apply themselves to external objects; and I will reunite consciousness and reason under the term “internal senses”, inasmuch as they both apply themselves to my interior self and its modifications.

The metaphysical error which still weighs us down thus becomes palpable: the materialists apply the external senses, and the spiritualists the internal senses, to the absolute—but the absolute is neither in me nor in the objects exterior to me. There is the reason for the impotence of human research into the absolute—an impotence that has remained constant throughout the ages. The sceptics have set metaphysical questions aside. Sincere searchers have tried to escape the error, the mystics by means of ecstasy and the theologians by means of faith; they were in the right in searching for a new means, but both fell back into error by subjecting ecstasy and faith to the procedures of reason.

Only one man, prior to myself, has glimpsed the infallible procedure which leads to the Absolute. That was the theologian Thomassin, who wrote these words:

Mens, sola sibi reddita, naturae suae ingenium et praestantiam totam obtinens, naturaliter ominatur SENSIT que summum aliquid et INEXCOGITABILE principium.

Which means:

The soul, reduced to itself alone, in possession of all its being and all its power, perceives naturally and SENSES that something, that sovereign principle, which is INACCESSIBLE TO REASON.

The words are clear, and I think that even the most vulgar intelligence can understand them. This quotation renders in simple terms all that remains for me to say in completing my theory, which can now be summarized in a single affirmation:

Besides the external senses and the internal senses, there is another sense, internal and external at the same time, knowing its object as the external senses do, immaterial as the internal senses are, but having absolutely nothing in common with either of them—and that is the SENSE OF THE ABSOLUTE.

But what am I saying? What have I written there? To tell the truth, I am afraid. I have kept my mind as calm as I could in order to explain my discovery in simple terms. Now that task is complete, I am terrified. Have I read the meaning of what I have written? It is as if I have written that human beings have a third eye! Worse than that–I have written that human beings have a new sense. A monstrosity!

It seems to me that I can hear laughter all around me, and voices saying: mad, mad, mad! I am, however, perfectly lucid. My intellect is sound—I am certain of it. No, I am not mad; that is not true. I can see—I tell you. I can see. But they will not believe that I can see, because they are blind. How unfortunate! Who, then, will hear me without laughing? How can I show that?

That is nothing in itself. The eyes cannot see it; the ears cannot hear it; the fingers cannot touch it; consciousness cannot speak of it. What horror! Reason itself cannot comprehend it. Ah! You see, you admit that you are beyond reason—you must be mad! No, no, a thousand times no. Who calls me mad, then? You lie! The whole world is laughing, isn’t it? Oh well—if I am mad, I might as well go all the way; I’ll die of it if I have to—but that which I see, you will see too.

My sense of the absolute is real; it exists; it is. I shall exercise this new sense; I shall sacrifice everything in its cause; I shall write down the things that it has revealed to me, and those things will be so prodigious, so resplendent, so true, that the world will be dazzled by them. They will have to listen to me when they hear about the manifest Apocalypse!

An analogy immediately suggested a means by which I might exercise this new sense vigorously. I observed that blind men have an extremely delicate sense of touch, and that men who become deaf are recompensed by tracking the movements of the lips with their eyes, thus coming to understand the words which they do not hear. It is easy enough to conclude that the atrophy of one sense makes the others sharper.

I understood, then, why the priests of Buddha are compelled to seek solitary and silent immobility, and I no longer found the situation of those seers who absorbed in contemplation of their navels ridiculous. They seek in contemplative ecstasy to forget the sensible world. Unfortunately, ecstasy does not last; and in spite of their heroism, these immobile ones experience sensations between their cataleptic fits. Nor are they limited to indistinct and confused sensations; they are eternally confined within the workings of Consciousness and Reason, so they are perpetually distracted, if not by the external senses, at least by the internal ones.

It was necessary, therefore, to find a state in which the mind was unoccupied either by sensations or by thoughts.

Was that possible?

As for sensations, yes. Nothing is easier, given a firm and resolute will, than to render oneself blind, deaf and dumb. It is a matter of paralysing the nerves, nothing more. When the day came, I could deprive myself of my senses, conserving only touch, so that I would be able to write down my visions in the dark. Eventually, I would arrive at the point of having no more memories of sensations—they would be effaced, little by little, from a mind that was no longer cultivated in that manner.

As for thoughts, that was not so easy. If one ceases to think, does one not cease to be? Yes, in the everyday sense of the word—but not in mine. What need had I of the modes of thought in common usage? What did reasoning matter to me, in all its forms? So, it was necessary to cease to think, or at least to think as little as possible. To cure me of that particular malady, I had a remedy already: obsession. Obsession atrophies all other ideas, leaving one and one only in possession of the mind. That would complement the atrophy of the senses within my mental regime.

That regime, which would soon be mine, was therefore reduced to this: to annihilate, as far as was possible, all my internal and external senses, in order to allow free play and give an exceeding acuity to the sense of the absolute.

It remained, before undertaking the great work, to identify the precise circumstances in which that sense is at its most vigorous, and in which it could be most comfortably exerted. My reflections and researches on this point were lengthy. A memory of my youth put me on the track of that which I was trying to find. Delicate as the subject of this memory is, I must insist on its introduction here, in the interests of science and better to understand the means that I believed I had to employ.

Everyone knows that in the course of pleasurable excitation there is a brief—and, in consequence, very little studied—moment, during which one’s entire being melts, like a filament of metal in an electric current. It is like a flash of lightning in which a human being is engulfed in a substance, of which it is at that moment a sort of conductor. All of creation is alive in that flash; it is, if I might express it in such terms, the microcosm of the absolute. I discovered this subtle explication while recalling to mind the sensation itself.

On the other hand, I had to consider that the moment in question is, as I have said, a mere flash. There is no way of making that kind of flash last indefinitely—but I took note of the fact that this pleasurable excitation possesses its strange property, not because it is pleasurable, but because it is an excitation. The Orientals have prolonged it by introducing pain into the ecstasy. By the excitation of pain, in effect, the flash becomes less vivid but more durable. One can produce by this means an agitation in which everything is annihilated, a kind of current that melts humanity. This, then, is the exact state in which the startled mind can attain the absolute.

I had only to imagine a kind of continuous pain, powerful enough to throw me into that state, and an apparatus that, while making it utterly impossible for me to escape the pain in question, would permit me to write down my visions. The kind of pain that I eventually settled on was the prolonged irritation of the dental nerves, and the choice inspired me in no time at all to devise the ingenious apparatus within which I was soon seated.

So, this is what is firmly decided at the present moment: I shall deliver myself to the absolute. After fifteen years spent working on my system and putting my regime into effect, I believe that I have finally brought about the conditions necessary for an attempt of the last and greatest experiences of all. I have subjected myself to all the necessary mutilations. I am blind and deaf. I have not spoken a single word for fifteen years. I have renounced the use of gross and imperfect senses, including Consciousness and Reason, which might constrain my new sense. I have kept nothing of the old humanity but attention and will. I know how to write in the dark; the words I shall write will provide illumination!

My first experience will last about an hour. It is now seven o’clock in the morning. My old manservant will come to my room at eight. There, he will find my written instructions, as he is accustomed to do every day. In these instructions I tell him to descend to the basement of my house, which he has never entered, and I explain how he can let me out of the apparatus if he finds me unconscious. I write all these details so as to establish firmly that I act entirely freely and knowing perfectly well what I am doing.

As I could die during the experience, I have also taken the opportunity to record the history of my theory briefly and clearly. For the same reason, desirous of leaving no mystery behind me, I shall now describe my metaphysical apparatus.

It is a mechanical chair, all of whose parts I have made and assembled myself. My legs will be immobilised by a sheath into which I will introduce them as I sit down. Once seated, I shall place my left arm on the arm of the chair, and my head upon an earflap to the right. In this position, I shall open my mouth, which will be kept open by a solid leather plug covered in India-rubber, which I can bite without breaking my jaws. Beside the earflap, in the gap made by my open mouth, I shall place the little mechanism which will produce the pain, which comprises a drill-bit that moves back and forth rapidly and continuously.

This drill will plunge into a hollow tooth, progressing automatically to a depth of half a centimetre in the course of an hour. Another mechanism will gradually unwind a scroll of parchment under my right hand, on which I shall record continuously whatever I see.

To avoid the natural laxity of humanity, which might incite me to stop the drilling-mechanism, I have arranged the whole machine in the following manner: one button is situated within range of my left hand; to the first pressure I exert the machine will respond and I shall immediately be secured to the chair by shackles of iron which will encircle my arms and fix my head. At the same time, the two mechanisms will begin to operate; once started, it will be impossible for me to stop them.

The clockwork movement is set for one hour.

***

.…I am here–everything is going well.…

     .…I am writing this on the scroll, as a trial.…

     .…atrocious pain–good–the beginning.…

     .…I’m waiting.…

     .…joy–horror–absolute–absolute–words?–I can see at last–inexcogitabile—mad—mad—mad—joy—joy.…

     .…words to express?—obvious—of course—yes.…

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….

…enough—triangle—enough.…

     .…absolute—here it is—at last—here it is—here it is.…

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….

***

At eight o’clock the old manservant went into his master’s room, found the written instructions and went down into the basement.

The madman was in his chair. He was dead.

The convulsions of his legs had twisted the sheath without being able to get out. The wrist of his left hand was badly torn by the iron bracelet, against which it had strained in vain. Flayed tendons were visible, taut as violin strings. The right arm was restrained between the shoulder to the elbow but free from the elbow to the wrist. The hand, unable to reach as far as the head, was stuck to the breast, which it had clawed repeatedly with its fingernails. Two of the fingers were embedded to the depth of the first knuckle. The head, half-turned around but maintained in its position by the earflap, displayed a hideous grimace. Bloody froth oozed from the gums. The teeth had cut through the rubber and had broken in their anguished mastication of the plug within.

The roller was still advancing the parchment, and the drill was still boring implacably into a molar, making an almost imperceptible grinding sound: bzi, bzi, bzi.

It was the laughter of the absolute.

The post The Metaphysical Machine 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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