Grim Tales (10 page)

He practiced his art with a devotion many thought morbid. Certainly, his absorption left little time for anything else; for his friends, for example, who, one by one, drew away from him. He did not notice their absence. The world of his own making held him in thrall – so varied and attractive was it. A world enriched by complications – at times, by a danger that thrilled as nothing else had, all before now seeming to him merely a pale copy of this, his brilliant original. Finally, he no longer left his room and the typewriter on which, day by day, he lengthened the road according to a map drawn each night in sleep – the plot knitted from dream and desire. It was a minor character, really, who provided the catastrophe – a man who, in an early chapter, had seen the protagonist's wife in a restaurant and conceived an extravagant passion for her, which finally unhinged him. (So minor was he that he lacked even a name.) To be frank, the man had been forgotten by his author and would, in revision, have been eliminated from the story. Did the man know this? Impossible to tell. But there was a satisfyingly tragic inevitability when he appeared one night in the author's room, with a revolver. (The author had caused him to wear it concealed in a shoulder holster that night in the restaurant in order to plant a narrative seed, which never took root.) He emptied the revolver into his author. (The author had not, in his description of the man, failed to mention that the gun was loaded.) His death was the end of the author's story; but not the killer's, which went on a while longer, until, wandering into an alley belonging to some other story, he had his throat cut by “an unknown assailant.”

Often, he dreamed of a woman, always the same woman – dark hair, dark eyes, a loose white dress showing the tops of her breasts. He desired her with an abandonment he did not know when awake. Always, as they were walking down the street, past the shops, on their way to her apartment, his wife appeared at his side to take him home. Not even in sleep, he thought.

That it was only in his dreams he behaved violently to her made it no less culpable: the bruises to her face and arms were always new as she brought him his breakfast.

Such dreams as yours, he said, are common – I assure you; do not worry, try to relax; there are techniques to manage terror; you must – above all – sleep. The man thanked the doctor, he whose study is the mind – its mysterious workings – and went home. That night, after swallowing a tablet, he fell promptly “into the arms of Morpheus” and found himself once more in the empty street “under night's black hand.” The tiger was at that very moment coordinating its exquisite mechanism of attack – nerves, muscles and bone. Then it leapt and, leaping, seemed to the man as it unfurled in the night air to be a flag of prophecy. In the morning, they found his mutilated body behind the tea importer's warehouse. The tea from Ceylon, where there are tigers.

He read in the morning paper of his own death in a boating accident. That same day he bought a boat and took it out on the river. It capsized and he drowned. He was a man who believed always what he read.

The instructions were in the mailbox, waiting for him. Who had sent him them and for what reason he did not know. He commenced building at once, not knowing what it was he built, only that he was intrigued – no, more than this, compelled. He worked through the night, the morning and well into the next day's afternoon. It was – the apparatus – beautiful. It possessed an intricacy of design and movement he found infinitely fascinating. It was like nothing he had ever seen. He was enraptured and “could not tear himself away.” His body was discovered by a friend – transfixed, the eyes, the eyes staring, as if spellbound.

He was warned against walking under ladders. As long ago as childhood, his mother had told him never, under any circumstances, enter that dangerous threshold. He did not, ever, walk under one. If he had, he might have seen the door and, flinching inside, saved himself when the truck jumped the curb. But he could not, so obedient was he always to the admonitions of his mother.

Warned by her mother against stepping on a crack, she did; and her mother did indeed break her back after falling down a flight of stairs, for a reason no one has ever been able to explain.

He found among his late father's things a roll of undeveloped film. Curious, he sent it to a lab and received back twelve prints – each of a young woman he recognized as having disappeared twenty years before “under mysterious circumstances.”