Grim Tales (5 page)

The diver descended into a town flooded the year before during construction of a dam. Everything had been left to the deep lake that formed behind it: trees and streetlights, church and post office. All gone, out of sight. The town's people had shut their windows and locked their doors as if they had every intention of returning. The diver swam among the houses, peering curiously. Sunlight from above shook down on the streets. In one house, she saw a fly crawling on the other side of the glass and, lying on a saucer, a cigarette scribbling blue Turkish letters on the air. The room ought to have been flooded, but wasn't. In every house she looked, it was as if “someone had just left.” Rising to the surface, she heard the muffled ringing of a church bell and saw behind her the streetlights come on, one by one, in the drowned town.

A woman stood at the window of her apartment, looking at the oak tree – its rough limbs, how they writhed and surged. And while she looked, rapt, perhaps because of sunlight glancing here and there along its branches and among its leaves, the branch closest to her – the thick one whose bark was patterned like the back of a python – slid through the window and, coiling deftly once around her waist, crushed her.

After the rain, they saw revealed among the roots of a tree one root that, for many, resembled a man's arm – its fingers clawing at the mud. That night it rained again. They stayed in their houses, looking out the windows as if through smoke. In the morning the root was gone. In the wet ground, they now saw a room or chamber or not so much room or chamber as an earthen mold in the form of a man.

As he walked along the platform, he scarcely noticed the water that rained down from the sidewalk grating up above, creating a rivulet at the center of the tracks. Nor did he regard the water sliding down the tiled wall like a sheet of imperfect glass – so intent was he on the posters advertising the season's new plays. He climbed out of the subway by the usual stairs – those he ascended every day on the final leg of his journey to the office. It was only when he stood at the top of them, where the sidewalk and street ought to have been and saw that all around him there was nothing but ocean that he began to be afraid.

She came into the room, carrying two gin cocktails on a silver tray – one for her husband, the other for herself. She saw herself momentarily in the mirror as she passed and could not say what it was that affected her so strangely. (It was the utter blankness of her face, as if the features had been erased; but the moment was too slight, too fugitive for her to tell the cause of her dismay.) For some reason, her husband turned off the table lamp; and the room was suddenly emptied of furniture, walls, a seascape done in oil, which hung above the sofa covered in stripes of maroon-and-cream damask. When he turned the light on again, his wife was gone and there was only one cocktail on the silver tray, which he held in his hands – hands that did not in the least tremble.

Each morning the fog appeared, as if from out of the ground. After the sun had risen sufficiently to burn it off, always new dangers were revealed. Once, a field of knives flashing in the midday sun. Another time, deep wells down which children disappeared. And not too long ago – mirrors in which those who gazed saw themselves as others did and were destroyed.

They would not have been surprised had it been birds. They had for a long time expected birds. More than harbingers, birds would be their doom itself. But that moths should have clung to their eyes and tongues and filled their mouths with their soft wings – this none of them could have imagined!

They were at their breakfast when the airplane took off from the field at the edge of town. They could hear its angry whine as it left the runway, rose and turned above the trees. The motor drowsed now as the plane came towards them, dragging its black shadow through the kitchen, across the table set with coffee cups and plates and silverware whose reflected light extinguished as the plane passed before the sun. They could see its shape duplicated in shadow – wings, tail, a body elongated by a property of light and distance. They had just time enough to wonder how that shadow could have fallen a thousand feet from the sky (like that of clouds herding across the valley), to slice through the house's windows and remain a moment miraculously intact inside the kitchen, before they, all of them – mother, father and child – were smitten, mortally.

She, who was always terrified of cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, was found dead – nightgown torn, her long hair twisted round her throat. She had the look of someone who has been roughly handled – the coroner stated at the trial. Certainly, it could not have been the fan over the bed that unleashed her destruction for a reason known only to objects, which, from time to time, become deranged. Surely the verdict of the court – that her husband took her life in an access of rage or passion – was the only possible one.

A man stood at the railing and watched his child ride the carrousel. The child would disappear momentarily into the darkness at the outermost limit of the carrousel's turning, before rushing back into the light. The light draped over the midway pinched by shadows that folded over the crowd “like black wings.” The man dropped his cigarette. He looked down to crush it underfoot, then looked up again as his child's horse swung round into the light. The horse was riderless.