Grim Tales (13 page)

Each night while he slept, the comet drew closer until one morning it was just above the trees when he woke. He might have climbed one and touched its bright package of death, held in temporary suspension during the conscious hours. He had known for some time that what was accomplished by him each night in sleep, though unseen by all others, would reach its inevitable conclusion during his last night. So that he would not suffer this most mortal dream, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died without waking.

In another dream, it was a car that hurtled toward catastrophe. Each night it closed on a man who had just stepped off the curb – each night closer as he walked unseeing into the middle of the street. On the last night, he appeared full in the car's headlights; and the dreamer saw that it was he himself who was about to be run down. He did not wake. It is thought that such a dream as this may explain why some die in their sleep.

A boy stooped over a storm drain, over a piece of string sticking up from it and began to tug – never wondering at all what a piece of string should be doing there. He pulled and pulled with a child's relentlessness and thoughtlessness until the earth (whose core was a tightly wound ball of string) unraveled.

He was compelled to wash his hands – twenty, thirty times a day. Only in this way could he hope to mitigate his anxiety. When, after years of treatment, he was cured of this “ritualistic behavior,” a plague was let loose in his city that very soon carried off half the population. No one could explain its pathogenesis.

Each night before going into his house, he was compelled to drive around the block nine times; not one time more or less than nine – every night the same. One night, however, he willed himself to “break the iron bond of habit” and stopped the car after the eighth circling. The house was gone; his wife and children were never seen by him again.

They are not – he was told – uncommon. For those with his disorder, to hear voices in one's head is a manifestation of the malady at its most severe. He was certainly not schizophrenic. He was relieved to hear this although that night, when the women inside him began to scratch with their sharp nails, the pain was past enduring.

The dog went into the darkness at the end of its rope and began to bark. A bark compounded of fear and ferocity. Then it stopped, suddenly: silence beat once more like a pulse among the crowding insect noises. Alarmed, a boy hurried out of the house and pulled the rope back – into the light of the yard. The dog's head was missing.

In another version of this story, the rope is around the neck of the boy's father, who had often beaten dog and boy, both.

The poison was good to the taste; and she swallowed it willingly, though she knew that, in a little while, she would die of it. She left just enough at the bottom of the glass to give her husband a sufficiency, urging him to drink a toast “to us – our happiness.”

She said he ought to have his head examined. The shoemaker's was not the first place he took it, but there he was at least made welcome. The shoemaker had little to do these days and was glad of any work. The shop smelled of leather and cabbage. Cabbage was always, for him, a powerful evocation of childhood. He liked the shoemaker's hands. They were large and the blue veins twisted on the backs of them interestingly. He liked, too, the old man's wife, who brought him coffee after her husband had shouted something foreign into a back room where she was presiding, presumably, over a cauldron of cabbage leaves and meat. As the man fell back into childhood, the shoemaker examined his head. After a time, he grunted and, spitting one nail after another into his palm, began to hammer.