The Horla (5 page)

What if he wasn’t dead?… Maybe only time holds sway over that Invisible and Dreadful Being. Why should this body that is transparent, this unknowable body, this Spirit body, have to fear illnesses, wounds, infirmities, premature destruction?

Premature destruction? All the horrors of humanity stem from that alone. After mankind, the Horla.—After our race that can die any day, at any hour, at any minute, from any number of accidents, has come that one, who will only die on his day, at his hour, at his minute, when he has reached the term of his existence!

No … no … of course not … of course he is not dead.… So then—it’s me, it’s me I have to kill!

—May 1887

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE FEBRUARY 17, 1885 ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE
GIL BLAS,
UNDER THE PEN NAME “MAUFRIGNEUSE”

My dear Doctor, I place myself in your hands. Do with me what you like.

I am going to tell you my state of mind very frankly, and you will judge whether it isn’t better to have me taken care of for a little while in a sanatorium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that are plaguing me.

Here’s the story, lengthy and precise, of the singular illness of my soul.

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

It was a phrase from Montesquieu that suddenly illumined my thinking. Here it is:

“One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.”

I reflected on that for months on end, and, little by little, a strange clarity came to me, and this clarity let there be night.

In fact, our organs are the only intermediaries between the exterior world and ourselves. That is to say, the inner being, which constitutes
the ego
, is in contact, by means of a few nerve endings, with the exterior being, which constitutes the world.

Beyond the fact that this exterior being escapes us by its size, its lengthy existence, its countless and impenetrable properties, its origins, its future or its aims, its distant forms and its infinite manifestations, our organs provide us only with information as uncertain as it is paltry about the portion of it that we can know.

Uncertain, because it is nothing but the properties of our organs that determine for us the apparent properties of matter.

Paltry, because since our senses number only five, the field of their investigations and the nature of their revelations are both quite limited.

I will explain. The eye transmits dimensions, shapes, and colors to us. It deceives us on these three points.

It can reveal to us only objects and beings of an average dimension in relation to human size, which has led us to apply the word “large” to certain things and the word “small” to certain other things, only because the eye’s weakness does not allow it to be aware of what is too immense or too tiny for it. Hence, it knows
and sees almost nothing, and almost the entire universe remains hidden from it, the star that inhabits space as well as the microbe that inhabits a drop of water.

Even if our eye had even a hundred million times more than its normal strength, if it perceived in the air that we breathe all the races of invisible beings, and all the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist an infinite number of races of animals so small, and worlds so distant, that the eye could not see them.

All our ideas about size, then, are false, since there is no limit possible to largeness or to smallness.

Our awareness of dimensions and shapes has no absolute value, since it is determined solely by the power of the organ and in constant comparison with ourselves.

Let us add that the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. A flawless glass tricks it. It confuses it with the air, which it does not see either. Let us move on to color.

Color exists because our eye is constituted in such a way that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways that bodies absorb and break down, in accordance with their chemical composition, the light rays that strike them.

The various proportions of this absorption and breaking down make up the shades of color.

Thus this organ imposes on the mind its way of seeing, or rather its arbitrary way of noting dimensions and perceiving the relationships of light with matter.

Let us examine the sense of hearing.

Even more than with the eye, we are the playthings and dupes of this fanciful organ.

Two bodies colliding produce a certain shock in the atmosphere. This movement makes a certain tiny piece of skin vibrate in our ear, which changes immediately into a sound something that is in fact nothing but a vibration.

Nature is silent. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us all the quiverings of invisible waves in space in the form of meaning, meaning that changes depending on the number of vibrations.

This metamorphosis, which is performed by the auditory nerve over the short trajectory from the ear to the brain, has allowed us to create a strange art—music—the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

What shall we say of the senses of taste and smell? Would we recognize smells and the quality of various foods without the peculiar properties of the nose and the palate?

Humanity, however, could exist without the ear, without taste and smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or smell.

Thus, if we had a few organs less, we would be unaware of admirable and unusual things, but if we had a few organs more, we would discover around us an infinity of other things we would never have suspected while we lacked the means to observe them.

So we deceive ourselves when we pass judgments on the Known. We are surrounded by an unexplored unknown.

Everything is uncertain, and can be perceived in different ways.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

Let us formulate this certainty by using the old dictum: “Truth this side of the Pyrénées, error beyond.”

And let us say: Truth inside the sense organ, error outside.

Two and two no longer have to make four outside of our atmosphere.

Truth on Earth, error further away. So I conclude that the mysteries we have glimpsed—like electricity, hypnotic sleep, transmission of will, suggestion, all the magnetic phenomena—remain hidden from us, because nature has not provided us with the organ, or organs, necessary to understand them.

After I had convinced myself that everything my senses reveal to me exists only for me as I perceive it, and would be completely different for someone else differently organized, after having concluded that a differently made humanity would have about the world, about life, about everything, ideas that are absolutely opposite to our own, since the consensus of beliefs results only from the similarity of human organs, and differences of opinion come only from slight differences in the functioning of our nerve endings, I made an effort
at superhuman thought in order to get some inkling of the impenetrable universe that surrounds me.

Have I gone mad?

I told myself: “I am surrounded by unknown things.” I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me—afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

And this confused terror of the supernatural, which has haunted mankind since the birth of the world, is legitimate, since the supernatural is nothing other than what remains veiled to us!

Then I understood terror. It seemed to me that I kept brushing against the discovery of a secret of the universe.

I tried to sharpen my organs, to excite them, to make them perceive glimpses of the invisible.

I told myself, “Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?”

How many men feel them, tremble at their approach, shudder at their imperceptible contact. We feel them around us, but we cannot discern them, for we do not have the eyes to see them, or specifically the unknown organ that could discover them.

Then, more than anyone else, I felt them myself, these supernatural passersby. Beings or mysteries? How can I know? I can’t say what they are, but I can always indicate their presence. And I have seen—I have seen an invisible being—as much as one can see them, these beings.

I remained motionless for entire nights, seated in front of my table, my head in my hands, thinking of that, thinking of them. Often I thought an intangible hand, or rather an ungraspable body, was lightly grazing my hair. He didn’t touch me, since it wasn’t a carnal essence, but an imponderable, unknowable essence.

One evening, I heard the floor creak behind me. It creaked in a strange way. I trembled. I turned around. I saw nothing. And I thought no more of it.

But the next day, at the same time, the same sound occurred. I was so afraid that I got up, certain, certain, certain that I was not alone in my bedroom. I could see nothing. The air was clear, transparent everywhere. My two lamps lit up all corners of the room.

The sound was not repeated, and little by little I calmed down; I remained uneasy, though, and often looked around.

The next day I shut myself in early, looking for a way I could contrive to see the invisible being that was visiting me.

And I saw him. I almost died from the terror of it.

I had lighted all the candles on my mantelpiece and chandelier. The room was illumined as if for a celebration. Both my lamps were burning on my table.

Opposite me, my bed, an old oaken four-poster. To my right, my fireplace. To my left, the door, which I had locked shut. Behind me, a very large wardrobe with a mirror. I looked at myself in it. My eyes looked strange, and my pupils quite dilated.

Then I sat down, as I did every day.

The sound had occurred, the night before and the night before that, at 9:22. I waited. When the precise moment arrived, I perceived an indescribable sensation, as if a fluid, an irresistible fluid, had penetrated me through all the pores of my skin, drowning my soul in an atrocious, true terror. And the creaking sounded, right next to me.

I got up, turning around so quickly that I almost fell down. You could see everything there as if in full daylight, but I couldn’t see myself in the mirror! It was empty, clear, full of light. I was not inside it, and yet I was facing it. I looked at it with panic-stricken eyes. I dared not go towards it, since I knew he was between us, he, the invisible one, and he was concealing me.

I was terrified. And then I began to see myself in a mist far back in the mirror, in a mist as if through
water; and it seemed to me that this water shimmered left to right, slowly, making me more precise from second to second. It was like the end of an eclipse.

What was hiding me had no outlines, but a kind of opaque transparency that little by little became clearer.

And finally I could see myself clearly, just as I do every day when I look at myself.

I had seen it!

And I did not see it again.

But I wait for it ceaselessly, and I feel that my mind is wandering in this waiting.

I remain for hours, nights, days, weeks, in front of my mirror, waiting for him! He does not come anymore.

He has understood that I’ve seen him. But I feel that I will wait for him always, until death, that I will wait for him without rest, in front of this mirror, like a hunter lying in wait.

And, in this mirror, I am beginning to see crazy images, monsters, hideous corpses, all kinds of terrifying beasts, atrocious beings, all the unlikely visions that must haunt the minds of madmen.

That is my confession, my dear Doctor. Tell me, what should I do?