Grim Tales (12 page)

In a particularly grim version of this story, it is Robert Louis Stevenson they have burnt – his
Jekyll and Hyde
. In black alleyways and the unlit corners of parks, Hydes are fixed – “like photographs” – before they can be transformed once more into presentable men of distinction and fine feeling. Women, coming out of doors tonight in order to buy bread or milk or a pair of stockings, are walking (if they only knew it!) to their deaths.

The Einstein they put to the fire left black holes; so that the universe was like a vast apartment building, many of whose rooms were now gutted – lathe laid bare, pipes broken, wires exposed. Those who were left clung to what light remained, shuddering in the icy wind that blew through the windows smashed by the fireman's axe.

Always a vain woman, she spent hours each day on her hair: brushing it, washing it in expensive shampoos, adorning it with combs. It was her hair – she believed – that most enthralled men. One day it began to grow with a speed and rapidity that frightened her. But she hesitated to cut it until, too late, it smothered her.

He was amazed how quickly his nails grew now – the finger- and toenails both. Each night before going to bed, he cut them only to find them grown out again in the morning – each morning farther than the one before; until one day, they resembled claws more than human nails. That was the day he turned on a passenger in the elevator and tore him to pieces.

The alarm clock rang and he fumbled out of sleep to turn it off before it should waken the whole house, which was still in darkness because of the early hour. Silence, ribbed with the anxiety of nightbirds, returned. As he groped in the dark for the light switch, the alarm rang once more “like glass shattering.” Much annoyed, he hastened to turn it off again. But now it would not be silenced, no matter how he tried. It was then he knew he was asleep and unable to enter the world. With his entire will, he tried desperately to wake but could not, though the others in the house were up and banging furiously on his door. None of them could hear his buried screams.

A dog barked in the same room as the sleeping man. The man woke. There was no dog. He fell back to sleep. The dog stood at the foot of his bed and snarled. He woke again. There was no dog and he fell once more back to sleep. Now the dog leaped into bed with him. He woke. Still there was no dog and once more the man returned to sleep. The dog tore at his throat. This time he did not wake.

The body was not recognizable. More than this, it was not identifiable as belonging to any known species – indeed, to any classification of life form, extinct or extant. It had been discovered in the reed-bed against the shore, which twice a day the river floods in response to the great bay's tidal surge. The newspapers hailed it as the “next evolutionary thing,” but scientists who had come down from the university were reticent after an exhaustive examination using every known analytical technique. One man, speaking for himself and without the sanction of his colleagues, declared it to be without precedent; it is – he said – a precursor of that which will one day extinguish human life. It is – he continued – perfectly adapted to an environment which does not yet exist but is certain to supplant the present one. Describing certain properties of its digestive system, the man shuddered and turned away.

I loved one man and married another, she confessed to her husband as she watched him close his eyes for the last time – the cord knotted at his neck.

He dreamed often of sewers – what the Romans called
cloacae
and which ordinary people put out of their minds as unclean, polluted, repellent. For him, there was no word to allay his disgust when he woke from such dreams; certainly he would not tell his wife of them, even though they were in the habit of sharing the night's residue. One evening, crossing a field on his way to what he liked to call a “rendezvous” (charming euphemism!), he fell down a pipe and, regaining consciousness, found himself in a sewer. As he began to scream, he heard – tumultuous in the drains all around him, like a cataract – the sound of flushing. He did not wake.

In his dream the world came to an end. When he woke, he found that it had indeed ended. He closed his eyes and dreamed the world whole again and, opening his eyes, found it to be so. In this way he lived and all those he had known in his lifetime also lived. But all those he did not know were no more.