Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (14 page)

What? I'll explain.

In the confessional version of Nathan's horror story, the main character must be provided with something shocking to confess, something befitting his persona as a die-hard freak of all things fearsome, fantastical, and inhuman. The solution is quite obvious. Nathan will confess his realization that he is up to his eyeballs in the aberrations of HORROR. He's had a predilection for this path since he can remember, and maybe even earlier than that. In other words, Nathan is not a normal boy, nor a real one.

The turning point in Nathan's biography as a man (or thing) of horror, as in previous accounts, is an aborted fling with Lorna McFickel. In the other versions of the story, the character known by this name is a personage of shifting significance, representing at turns the ultra-real or the super-ideal to her would-be romancer. The confessional version of “Romance of a Dead Man,” however, gives her a new identity, namely that of Lorna McFickel herself, who lives across the hall from me in a Gothic castle of high-rise apartments, twin-towered and honeycombed with newly carpeted passageways. But otherwise there's not much difference between the female lead in the fictional story and her counterpart in the factual one. While the storybook Lorna will remember Nathan as the creep who spoiled her evening, who disappointed her—Real Lorna, Normal Lorna, feels exactly the same way, or rather felt, since I doubt she even thinks about the one she called
the most disgusting creature on the face of the earth
.
And though these hyperbolic words were spoken in the heat of a very hot moment, I believe her attitude was sincere. Notwithstanding, I will never reveal the motivation for this outburst of hers, not even under the pain of torture. Character motivation is not important to this horror story anyway, or not nearly as important as what happens to Nathan following Lorna's revelatory rejection.

For he now finds out that his unwholesome nature is not just a fluke of psychology, and that, as a fact, supernatural influences have been governing his life all along, that he is subject only to the rule of demonic forces, which now want this expatriate from the pit of shadows back in their embracing arms. In brief, Nathan should never have been born a human being, a truth he must accept. Hard. And he knows that someday the demons will come for him.

The height of the crisis comes one evening when the horror writer's spirits are at low ebb. He has attempted to express his supernatural tragedy in a short horror story, his last, but he just can't reach a climax of suitable intensity and imagination, one that would do justice to the cosmic scale of his pain. He has failed to embody in words his semi-autobiographical sorrow, and all these games with protective names have only made it more painful. It hurts to hide his heart within pseudonyms of pseudonyms. Finally, the horror writer, while sitting at his writing desk, begins bawling all over the manuscript of his unfinished story. This goes on for quite some time, until Nathan's sole want is to seek a human oblivion in a human bed. Whatever its drawbacks, grief is a great sleeping draught to drug oneself into a noiseless, lightless paradise far from an agonizing universe. This is so.

A little later, someone is knocking, impatiently rapping really, on Nathan's apartment door. Who is it? One must answer to find out.

“Here, you forgot these,” a pretty girl said to me, flinging a woolly bundle into my arms. Just as she was about to walk away, she turned and scanned the features of my face a little more scrupulously. I have sometimes impersonated other people, the odd Norman and even a Nathan or two, and that night I put on the mask once more. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I thought you were Norman. This is his apartment, right across and one down the hall from mine.” She pointed to show me. “Who're you?”

“I'm a friend of Norman,” I answered.

“Oh, I guess I'm sorry then. Well, those're his pants I threw at you.”

“Were you mending them or something?” I asked innocently, checking them as if looking for the scars of repair.

“No, he just didn't have time to put them back on the other night when I threw him out, you know what I mean? I'm moving out of this creepy dump just to get away from him, and you can tell him those words.”

“Please come in from that drafty hallway and you can tell him yourself.”

I smiled my smile and she, not unresponsively, smiled hers. I closed the door behind her.

“So, do you have a name?” she asked.

“Penzance,” I replied. “Call me Pete.”

“Well, at least you're not Harold Wackers, or whatever the name is on those lousy books of Norman's.”

“I believe it's
Wickers
,
H. J. Wickers.”

“Anyway, you don't seem anything like Norman, or even someone who'd be a friend of his.”

“I'm sure that was intended as a compliment, from what I've gathered about you and Norman. Actually, though, I too write books not unlike those of H. J. Wickers. My apartment across town is being painted, and Norman was kind enough to take me in, even loan me his desk for a while.” I manually indicated the weeped-upon object of my last remark. “In fact, Norman and I sometimes collaborate under a common pen-name, and right now we're working together on a project.”

“That's nice, I'm sure,” she said. “By the way. I'm Laura—”

“O'Finney,” I finished. “Norman's spoken quite highly of you.”

“Where is the creep, anyway?” she inquired.

“He's sleeping,” I answered, lifting a finger toward the rear section of the apartment. “We've been hard at work on a new story, but I could wake him up.”

The girl's face assumed a disgusted expression.

“Forget it,” she said, heading for the door. Then she turned and very slowly walked a little ways back toward me. “Maybe we'll see each other again.”

“Anything is possible,” I assured her.

“Just do me a favor and keep Norman away from me, if you don't mind.”

“I think I can do that very easily. But first you have to do something for me.”

“What?”

I leaned toward her very confidentially.

“Please die, Desiderata,” I whispered in her ear, while gripping her neck with both hands, cutting short a scream along with her life. Then I really went to work.

•   •   •

“Wake up, Norman,” I shouted. I was standing at the foot of his bed, my hands positioned behind my back. “You were really dead to the world, you know that?”

A little drama took place on Norman's face in which astonishment overcame sleepiness and both were vanquished by anxiety. He had been through a lot the past couple nights, laboring over our “notes” and other things, and really needed some rest.

“Who? What do you want?” he said, quickly sitting up in bed.

“Never mind what I want. Right now we are concerned with what
you
want. Remember what you told that girl the other night? Remember what you wanted her to do that got her so upset?”

“So that's it. You're a friend of Laura. Well, you can just get the hell out of here or I'm calling the cops.”

“That's what
she
said, too, remember? And then she said she wished she had
never met you
. And that was the line, wasn't it, that gave you the inspiration for our fictionalized adventure. Poor Nathan never had the chance you had. Nice work, thinking up those enchanted trousers. When the real reason—”

“Are you deaf? Get out of my apartment!” he yelled. But he calmed down somewhat when he saw that ferocity in itself had no effect on me.

“What did you expect from that girl? You did tell her that you wanted to entwine bodies with . . . what was it? Oh yes, a headless woman. Like that decapitated specter you read about in an old Gothic novel long years past. I would imagine that the illustration in that book only inflamed your fixation. I guess Laura didn't understand that in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of . . .
headless apparitions
. Headless. You told her you had the whole costume back at your place, if I correctly recall. Well, my lad, I've got the answer to your prayers. How's this for headless?” I said, holding up the head from behind my back.

He didn't make a sound, though his eyes screamed madly at what he saw. I tossed the long-haired and bloody noggin in his lap. In a blink, he threw the bedcovers over it and frantically pushed the whole business onto the floor with his feet.

“The rest of the body is in the bathtub if you want to have a go at it. I'll wait.”

I can't say for sure, but for a passing moment he seemed to be thinking about it. He stayed put in his bed, however, and didn't make a move or say a word for a minute or so. When he finally did speak, each syllable came out calm and smooth. It was as if one part of his mind had broken off from the rest, and it was this part that now addressed me.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Do you really need a name, and would it do you any good? Should we call that disengaged head down there Laura or Lorna, or just plain Desiderata? And what in the name of perdition should I call you—Norman or Nathan, Harold or Gerald?”

“I thought so,” he said disgustedly. Then he continued in that eerily rational voice, but very rapidly. He did not even seem to be talking to anyone in particular. “Since the thing to which I am speaking,” he said, “since this thing knows what only I could know, and since it tells me what only I could tell myself, I must therefore be completely alone in this room. Perhaps I'm dreaming. Yes, dreaming. Otherwise the diagnosis is insanity. Very true. Profoundly certain. Go away now, Mr. Madness. Go away, Dr. Dream. You made your point, now let me sleep. I'm through with you.”

Then he lay his head down on the pillow and closed his eyes.

“Norman,” I said. “Do you always go to bed with your trousers on?”

He opened his eyes and now noticed what he had not before. He sat up again.

“Very good, Mr. Madness. These look like the real thing. But that's not possible since Laura still has them, sorry about that. Funny, they won't come off. The imaginary zipper must be stuck. I guess I'm in trouble now. I'm a dead man if there ever was one, hoo. Always make sure you know what you're buying, that's what I say. Heaven help me, please. You never know what you might be getting yourself into. Come off, damn you! Well, so when do I start to rot, Mr. Madness? Are you still there? What happened to the lights?”

The lights had gone out in the room and everything glowed with a bluish luminescence. Lightning began flashing outside the bedroom window, and thunder resounded in the midst of a rainless night. Through an aperture in the clouds shone a moon that only beings of another world can see. Puppet-shadows played upon its silvery screen.

“Rot your way back to us, you quirk of creation. Rot your way out of this world. Come home to a hell so excruciating it is bliss itself.”

“Is this really happening to me? I mean, I'm doing my best, sir. But it isn't easy. Some kind of electrical charge making me all shivery down there. It feels as if I'm dissolving. Oh, it hurts, my love. Ah, ah, ah. What a way to end a miserable life, turning to mush. Can you help me, Dr. Dream?”

I could feel myself changing form, shuffling off that human suit I was wearing. Bony wings began rising out of my back, and I saw them spread gloriously in the blue mirror before me. My eyes were now jewels, hard and radiant. My jaws were a cavern of dripping silver and through my veins ran rivers of putrescent gold. He was writhing on the bed like a wounded insect, making sounds like nothing human. I swept him up and wrapped my sticky arms again and again around his trembling body. He was laughing like a child, the child of another world. And a great wrong was about to be rectified.

I signaled the windows to open onto the night, and, very slowly, they did. His childlike laughter had now turned to tears, but they would soon run dry, I knew this. At last we would be free to live magically, timelessly beyond the pull of the earth. The windows opened wide over the city below and, in a manner of speaking, the profound blackness above welcomed us.

I had never tried this before.

But when the time came, I found it all so easy.

A TALE OF POSSESSION IN OLD GROSSE POINTE

We pronounced her name with a distinct “Z” sound—
Remember, Jack, remember
—the way some people slur Missus into Mizzuz. It was at her home in Grosse Pointe that she insisted our family, both its wealthy and its unwealthy sides, celebrate each Christmas Eve in a style that exuded the traditional, the old-fashioned, the antique. Actually, Aunt Elise constituted the wealthy side of the family all on her own. Her husband had died many years before, leaving his wife a prosperous real estate business and no children. Not surprisingly, Aunt Elise undertook the management of the firm with admirable success, perpetuating our heirless uncle's family name on “for sale” signs planted on front lawns in three states. But what was Uncle's
first
name, a young nephew or niece sometimes wondered. Or, as it was more than once put by one of us children: “Where's
Uncle
Elise?” To which the rest of us answered in unison: “He's at his ease,” a response we learned from none other than our widowed aunt herself.

Aunt Elise was without husband or offspring of her own, true enough. But she loved all the ferment of big families, and every holiday season she possessed as much in blood relations as she did in her tangible and intangible assets and investments. Nevertheless, she was not the conspicuously consuming type of rich bitch. Her house was something of an Elizabethan country manor in style while remaining modest, even relatively miniature, in its mass. It fit very nicely—when it existed—into a claustrophobic cluster of trees on some corner acreage a few steps from Lake Shore Drive, profiling rather than facing the lake itself. A rather dull exterior of soot-gray stones somewhat camouflaged the old place in its woodland hideaway, until one caught sight of its diamond-paned windows and realized that a house in fact existed where before there seemed to be only shadowed vacancy.

Around Christmastime the many-faceted windows of my aunt's residence took on a candied glaze in the pink, blue, green, and other-colored lights strung about their perimeters. More often in the old days—
Remember them, Jack
—a thick December fog rolled off the not-yet-frozen lake and those kaleidoscopic windows would throw their spectrums into the softening haze. This, to my child's senses, was the image and atmosphere defining the winter holiday: a serene congregation of colors that for a time turned our everyday world into one where mysteries abounded. This was the celebration, this was the festival. Why did we leave it all behind us, leave it outside? Every Christmas Eve of my childhood, as I was guided up the winding front walk toward my aunt's house, a parent's hand in each of mine, I always stopped short, pulling Mom and Dad back like a couple of runaway horses, and for a brief, futile moment refused to go inside.

After the first Christmas Eve I can recall—chronologically my fifth—I knew what happened inside the house, and year after year there was little change either in the substance or surface details of the program. For those from large families, this scene is a little too familiar to bother describing. Perhaps even lifelong orphans are jaded to it. Still, there are others for whom depictions of unusual uncles, loveable grandparents, and a common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear; those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feel of their paper flesh. I tell you they share this temper with my Aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them.

For the duration of these Christmas assemblies, my aunt always occupied the main room of her house. This room I never saw except as a fantasy of ornamentation, a hallucinatorium in holiday dress. Right now I can only hope to portray a few of its highlights. First of all holly, both fresh and artificial, hung down from wherever it was possible to hang—the frames of paintings, the stained-wood shelves of a thousand gewgaws, even the velvety embossed pattern of the wallpaper itself, intertwining with its swirls and flourishes, if memory serves. And from the fixtures above, including a chandelier delicately sugared with tiny Italian lights, down came gardens of mistletoe. The huge fireplace blazed with a festive inferno, and before its cinder-spitting hearth was a protective screen, at either end of which stood a pair of thick brass posts. And slipped over the crown of each post was a sock-puppet Santa, its mittens outstretched in readiness to give someone a tiny, angular hug.

In the corner of the main room, the one beside the front window, a plump evergreen was somewhere hidden beneath every imaginable type of dangling, roping, or blinking decoration, as well as being dolled up with silly bows in pastel shades, satiny bows lovingly tied by human hands. The same hands also did their work on the presents beneath the tree, and year after year these seemed, like everything else in the room, to be in exactly the same place, as if the gifts of last Christmas had never been opened, quickening in me the nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape. (Somehow I am still possessed by this same feeling of entrapment.) My own present was always at the back of that horde of packages, almost against the wall behind the tree. It was tied up with a pale purple ribbon and covered with pale blue wrapping paper upon which little bears in infants' sleeping gowns dreamed of more pale blue presents which, instead of more bears, had little boys dreaming upon them. I spent much of a given Christmas Eve sitting near this gift of mine, mostly to find refuge from the others rather than to wonder at what was inside. It was always something in the way of underwear, nightwear, or socks, never the nameless marvel which I fervently hoped to receive from my obscenely well-heeled aunt. Nobody seemed to mind that I sat on the other side of the room from where most of them congregated to talk or sing carols to the music of an ancient organ, which Aunt Elise played with her back to her audience, and to me.

Slee—eep in heav—enly peace.

“That was very good,” she said without turning around. As usual, the sound of her voice led you to expect that any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff which was clinging to its insides. Instead she switched off the electric organ, after which gesture some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house.

“We didn't hear Old Jack singing with us,” she said, turning to look across the room where I was seated in a large chair beside a fogged window. On that occasion I was about twenty or twenty-one, home from school for Christmas. I had drunk quite a bit of Aunt Elise's holiday punch, and felt like answering: “Who cares if you didn't hear Old Jack singing, you old bat?” But instead I simply stared her way, drunkenly taking in her visage for the family scrapbook of my memory: tight-haired head (like combed wires), calm eyes of someone in an old portrait (someone long gone), high cheekbones highly colored (less rosily than like a rash), and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream. I had no worry about my future ability to remember these features, even though I had vowed this would be the last Christmas Eve I would view them. So I could afford to be tranquil in the face of Aunt Elise's taunts that evening. In any case, further confrontation between the two of us was aborted when some of the children began clamoring for one of their aunt's stories. “And this time a
true
story, Auntie. One that really happened.”

“All right,” she answered, adding that “maybe Old Jack would like to come over and sit with us.”

“Too old for that, thank you. Besides, I can hear you just fine from—”

“Well,” she began before I'd finished, “let me think a moment. There are so many, so
many
. Anywho, here's one of them. This happened before any of you were born, a few winters after I moved into this neighborhood with your uncle. I don't know if you ever noticed, but a little ways down the street there's an empty lot where there should be, used to be, a house. You can see it from the front window over there,” she said, pointing to the window beside my chair. I let my eyes follow her finger out that window and through the fog witnessed the empty lot of her story.

“There it once stood, a beautiful old house much bigger than this one. In that house lived a very old man who never went out and who never invited anyone to visit him, at least no one I ever noticed. And after the old man died, what do you think happened to the house?”

“It disappeared,” answered some of the children, jumping the gun.

“In a way, I suppose it did disappear. Actually what happened was that some men came and tore the house down brick by brick. I think the old man who lived there must have been very mean to want that to happen to his house after he died.”

“How do you know he wanted it?” I interjected, trying to spoil her assumption.

“What other sensible explanation is there?” Aunt Elise answered. “Anywho,” she went on, “I think that the old man just couldn't stand the thought of anyone else living in the house and being happy there, because surely he wasn't. But maybe, just maybe, he had his house torn down for another reason,” said Aunt Elise, drawing out these last words to suspenseful effect. The children sitting cross-legged before her now listened with a new intentness, while the crackling logs seemed to start up a little more noisily in the fireplace.

“Maybe by destroying his house, making it disappear, the old man thought he was taking it with him into the other world. People who have lived alone for a very long time often think and do very strange things,” she emphasized, though I'm sure no one except me thought to apply this final statement to the storyteller herself. (
Tell everything, Jack
.) She went on:

“Now what would lead a person to such conclusions about the old man, you may wonder? Did something strange happen with him and his house after both of them were gone? Well, the answer is yes, something did happen. And I'm going to tell you just what it was.

“One night—a foggy winter's night like this one, oh my little children—someone came walking down this exact street and paused at the property line of the house of the old man who was now dead. This someone was a young man whom many people had seen wandering around here off and on for some years. I myself, I tell you, once confronted him and asked him what business he had with us and with our homes, because that's what he seemed most interested in. Anywho, this young man called himself an an-tee-quarian, and he said he was very interested in old things, particularly old houses. And he had a very particular interest in the house of that strange old man. A number of times he had asked him if he could look around inside, but the old man always refused. Most of the time the house was dark as though no one was home, even if someone always was.

“So you can imagine the young man's bewilderment when on that winter's night what he saw was not a dark house where it seemed no one was inside, but a place all lit up with bright Christmas lights shining through the fog. Could this be the old man's house, decorated so nice and cheerful with these lights? Yes, it could, because there was the old man himself standing at the window with a rather friendly look on his face. So, one more time, the young man thought he would try his luck and maybe get to see the inside of the old house. He rang the bell and the front door slowly opened wide. The old man didn't say anything, but merely stepped back so that his caller could come in. Finally the young antiquarian would be able to study the inside of the house to his heart's content. Along the way, in narrow halls and long-abandoned rooms, the old man stood silently beside his guest, smiling all the time.”

“I can't imagine how you know this part of your
true
story,” I interrupted.

“Aunt Elise
knows
,
” asserted one of my little cousins just to shut me up. And when my aunt cast a glance at me, it seemed for a moment that she really did know. Then she continued her true story.

“After the young man had looked all around the house, both men sat down in the deep comfortable chairs of the front parlor and talked a while. But it wasn't too long before that smile on the old man's face, that quiet little smile, began to bother his visitor in a peculiar way. At last the young man claimed he had to go, glancing down at the watch he had drawn from his pocket. And when he looked up again . . . the old man was gone. Naturally, this startled the young man, who jumped up from his chair and nervously checked the nearby rooms and hallways for his host, calling “Sir, sir,” because he never found out the old man's name. And though he could have been in any number of different places, the owner of the house didn't seem to be anywhere that the young man investigated. So the antiquarian finally decided just to leave without saying good-bye or thank you or anything like that.

“But he didn't get as far as the door when he stopped dead in his tracks because of what he saw through the front window. There seemed to be no street anymore, no street lamps or sidewalks, not even any houses, besides the one he was in, of course. There was only the fog and some horrible, tattered shapes wandering aimlessly within it. The young man could hear them crying. What was this place, and where had the old house taken him? He didn't know what to do except stare out the window. And when he saw the face reflected in the window, he thought for a second that the old man had returned and was standing behind him again, smiling his quiet smile.

“But then the young man realized that this was now his own face, and, like those terrible, ragged creatures lost in the fog, he too began to cry.

“After that night, no one around here ever saw the young man again. Well, did you like that story, children?”

I felt tired, more tired than I'd ever been in my life. I barely had the will or the strength to push myself out of the chair into which I'd sunk down so deep. How slowly I trudged past faces that seemed far off in the distance. Where was I going? Was I in want of another drink? Did I desire another dainty from the table spread with Christmas treats? What was it that was calling me away from that room?