The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (8 page)

***

As the weeks wore on my life beyond the quarter seemed like a garish hallucination and I gradually lost all interest in it. I resigned from my job. My work had ceased to be intelligible anyway, and the company gratefully accepted my offer to quit. No one at the place seemed to regret my leaving. I think I must have become a disturbing figure to them. There were no surviving members of my family to avoid and what few friends I possessed did not pursue my company. It was easy to sever my ties with the outside world. I spent all my time, now, on the study of ancient languages; Zend, Aramaic, Akkadian, Hebrew, Etruscan, Phoenician; in the hope that they would help me in my attempt to decipher the occult language of the quarter.
 

One day I received a visit from the landlord, Mangan. It was quite early in the morning and the sound of his gravelly voice shouting, accompanied by the hammering at my door awakened me. He had obviously let himself into the building and had only failed to get into the flat because of the new bolt I’d installed.

I asked him to wait while I dressed and then unlocked the door. He took one look at me and backed off, but he lingered on the stairs, his eyes flicking over the multitude of books and paper.

‘Um . . . Mr Smith . . . your rent . . . it’s a month late. Not acceptable. You must pay or get out.’

I remembered that I had put some money in an envelope somewhere and I retrieved it from its hiding place and handed it over. Mangan opened it and counted the notes inside.

‘Mr Smith, this is six month’s rent in advance. You want to stay that long?’

I nodded absently.

‘Ah, well, good, good.’ He pocketed the money. ‘Now, see here,’ he said, ‘I know it’s none of my business, but if I were you I’d see a doctor. You’re looking ill, like those weirdoes who live around here. And these papers everywhere, on the floor, scattered. A fire risk. You should clean . . .’

I closed the door very slowly while he spoke and bolted it. I could hear the sound of him descending the stairs and the quiet throb of his car’s engine as he drove away.

***

That night, as I sat in the bay window looking out over the rooftops, the maze of narrow streets and the boarded-up buildings, I spotted a gathering of night-walkers at the top of Ravel Street. There followed a sort of spectral procession by moonlight, along the street towards my building, past the rows of amputated trees. To my astonishment the crowd massed in front of my house, their pale and expressionless faces staring up at my window like smeared images in a bad photograph. There were hundreds of them.
 

I heard the front door being forced open and the sound of heavy footsteps as dozens of the nightwalkers stumbled up the stairs. Before they reached the attic I crossed the room and unbolted the door.

They staggered in like sleepwalkers and bore down on me, their white faces all around me, whispering incessantly. The woman from the flat opposite was there. She talked to me; half in English, half in the dead language, and finally I understood. . . .

***

We are all of us lost in the vast and endless night that is ourselves. We wander, hopelessly and eternally abandoned, through our own secret chambers of hell. Just as shadows are devoured by the night so our souls cry out for their source. And all that then remains is the truth: there is nothing to understand; the words of the dead language cannot be deciphered and everything is bleak and icy and desolate, without meaning or final resolution . . .

I had been living in a cramped apartment out in the suburbs to the south of the city. The apartment over-looked a dingy street, invariably strewn with rubbish due to the preponderance of fast food outlets. Amongst these was a café that remained open for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
 

The café was useful to me. After 1 a.m. it was usually deserted, and I often spent time there, sipping a greasy coffee and reading. My insomnia made sleep impossible most nights and the owners were uncommunicative foreigners who took no interest in their customers. The décor (moulded plastic seats and Formica tables) seemed not to have changed since the 1970s. Overhead, neon strip lighting gave the place a gleaming white sanitary air, like a hospital canteen.

One night, as I sat in the café drinking a lukewarm coffee in my usual corner, a woman in her early thirties, wearing a fur-trimmed black coat, came over to my table.

‘May I join you?’ she asked. ‘It’s okay if you’d prefer to be alone.’

My first reaction was one of alarm; I was surprised that she should take it upon herself to invade my privacy. But her manner was apologetic and inoffensive and I had no wish to cause a scene by being rude.

She bought me another coffee. I had been sipping at the dregs of the last one for the past half hour. The woman told me that her name was Emily Curtis.

‘Excuse my curiosity,’ she said, ‘but you look very tired. Do you suffer from insomnia too?’

We had a conversation about sleepless nights and the various forms of medication prescribed to alleviate the condition. She had tried many of the same drugs as I, and had similarly found that the side effects had led her to abandon their use:

‘Did you try the latest,’ she asked, ‘the supposedly extremely powerful one that’s just come on the market?’

‘Triaxopol?’ I asked. ‘It worked for the first few weeks with me. But the stomach cramps became unbearable. The only way I could fend off the pain was with stimulants, which defeated the purpose of the soporific! In the end I found that I preferred to live with the exhaustion.’

‘I think my condition is hereditary,’ she said, ‘my mother suffers from the same problem. One or other of us is awake during the small hours. Still, we keep each other company.’

‘I live alone. I don’t find I have much in common with other people,’ I replied.

I learned that she and her mother lived on the north side of the city and that she had been visiting some friends in this quarter. She had come into the café in order to while away the hours until dawn. I suppose that I envied her ability to approach a stranger without betraying any self-consciousness, for my own temperament is acutely solitary.

After half an hour or so, she asked me about the ‘white make-up’ that entirely covered my face and hands. I suppose that the question was inevitable and I was surprised that it had taken her so long to broach the subject.

‘Please excuse my saying so,’ she said, ‘but it gives you a ghoulish appearance. I thought that you might wear the make-up deliberately, like some Goths do, to appear morbid.’

‘Hardly,’ I replied. ‘I don’t have a choice. It masks the worst signs of chronic psoriasis. It’s one of the crosses I bear along with insomnia. I’m told that it’s psychosomatic and was brought on by the stress of an accident I suffered recently.’

‘You’re really in a pretty bad way, aren’t you?’

‘Isn’t everyone?’

Although our conversation flowed naturally and I found her more congenial than anyone with whom I had spoken in many weeks, I soon began to resent the intrusion and was longing to return to my apartment.

The woman noticed the book that I had set aside in order to talk with her. It was a battered old copy of
The Noctuary of Time
, and she picked it up, turning the pages with curiosity.

‘I love this stuff,’ she said, ‘I have done for as long as I can remember. When I was, oh, around four years old I found a copy of
Struwwelpeter
amongst the books in the local library. The pictures started off my obsession with weird horror.’

‘And now that you’re older?’ I asked.

‘I read the European writers, the ones whose work deals with cruelty and pain: the likes of Hanns Heinz Ewers, Stefan Grabinski, and Leonid Andreyev. Are you familiar with their fiction?’

‘I am indeed.’

She laughed: ‘I think my reading habits have contributed to my insomnia, you know. When I do sleep, some of the dreams I have are quite awful!’

‘Mine too. But at least I can use them; I write.’

‘Really? Have you had anything published?’

‘Just a couple of slim books of weird tales. They weren’t very successful, but they did bring me some little recognition amongst those who read such works. Just lately I haven’t written a great deal. I’ve been trying to finish something that I began just after my accident.’

‘What is it called?’

‘The working title is ‘The Dybbuk Pyramid’.’

‘I’d love to read it,’ she offered.

‘I don’t know. It needs more work, though I can’t quite see what to do with it at the moment.’

‘Perhaps I could make a few suggestions?’

I thought for a moment, then nodded my assent:

By now it was past four in the morning and I could no longer resist the urge to be alone. As I stood up and pulled on my black overcoat she thanked me for the conversation and told me that she would be back in the café in forty-eight hours time and hoped that we might talk again. I promised to bring along the manuscript of ‘The Dybbuk Pyramid’.

The fact that she’d admitted suffering from literary-inspired nightmares fascinated me, and I resolved to keep the appointment.

***

Our next meeting was rather perfunctory. We only spoke
for
a
short
time,
since
she
was
somewhat
inebriated, but I gave her the manuscript of my story and called for a taxi to take her home. We did, however, arrange another appointment at the café, and she insisted on giving me her telephone number. Before I put her in the taxi she squeezed my hand in an affectionate manner. I noticed with embarrassment that traces of my masking lotion were left behind on her fingers.

***

Our third meeting proved to be the most interesting to date as it revealed the degree to which my influence on her had grown.
 

She was in the café before I arrived, nursing a coffee and smoking the same brand of cigarettes that I myself bought. I noticed a certain change in her features; the naïve quality seemed to have been repressed and, in its place was an unusual expression, almost of dislocation, which I knew very well indeed. She had the copy of ‘The Dybbuk Pyramid’ laid out on the plastic-coated table before her.

I sat down and accepted the cigarette she offered. Without preamble, she uttered the following:

‘This story is without doubt the strangest thing I’ve ever read. It is as if the text is a reflection of my own thoughts. No—that’s wrong. It is as if my thoughts are only a reflection of the story. While I read I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the page and I forgot all about the outside world. It seemed as if my mind was becoming a part of the text. It was horrible and irresistible at the same time. And the really bizarre thing is that, on the surface, it appeared only to be a confused jumble of disconnected words!’

‘It’s an experiment,’ I told her, ‘a new technique I’m trying to perfect.’

‘It’s kind of like Joyce’s stream of consciousness or Burroughs’ cut-ups?’

‘Kind of,’ I agreed warily. I suppose that the majority of writers would be pleased and flattered by such remarks. It was after all a sign that the story had had precisely the desired effect. However, personal satisfaction as a writer was no longer any use to me.

‘What inspired you to write it?’ she asked.

‘I have some notes here that I made in an attempt to sort things out in my own mind, when it all began. They’re very short. You’re welcome to read them.’

I passed her a sheet of paper I had torn from my notebook:

‘The Dybbuk Pyramid’ is an attempt to delineate an utterly alien consciousness that comes into contact with this world and interacts with it. It is not the case that the creature is evil—such an interpretation is solely of the human paradigm—but that its very existence is inimical to mankind.

The first draft attempted to present the tale from the viewpoint of the alien creature itself: its thought processes were to be markedly different from those of humans and naturally it would not do to utilise vocabulary common to the experience of mankind.

I soon realised that the first draft could not possibly succeed. It read as total gibberish. Ninety-nine percent of the experiences of an alien entity would have no meaning for us. Even had the tale been confined to a simple encounter with the human race, the tremendous distortion in narrative technique meant that it would most resemble the aimless scrawling produced by some schizophrenics.

Then I realised that it might be possible to write such a tale in a first person narrative, were the alien consciousness fused with that of a man or woman, perhaps as a prelude to an invasion by outside forces. Thereby the alien aspect might be filtered through human perception, giving the narrative a cohesion and familiarity that would enable it to be communicable to its human readership.

Curtis had finished reading and seemed to be considering what I’d written. During her silence I lit one of my own cigarettes, offered her one, and watched the smoke curling up towards the neon light strips on the ceiling.

‘You succeeded,’ she said finally. ‘The story’s like an incantation. There’s some mysterious power in it that words can’t explain. Perhaps the closest analogy I can make is that one feels as if everything human is a sham: a façade for something else entirely. And what lies behind the façade cannot be understood.’

I nodded and flicked ash into the saucer of my coffee cup.

‘You’re as close as anyone can get to the truth,’ I said.

The word ‘contamination’ rose unbidden in my mind. I stubbed out my cigarette in the saucer, drank the last dregs of my coffee, and told her that it was late and I really must go. ‘I am a person,’ I said, ‘who requires separation from other people.’ I had found that too much contact with them invariably disturbed the state of withdrawal that allowed me to function. Also, I knew that my work here was practically done.

She smiled, as if she understood my dilemma, and then put one of her gloved hands over my own, stroking it with her fingertips.

‘One thing I’ve not mentioned,’ she said, ‘is the sense of isolation that comes across in the story. It’s as if the author is utterly at a loss in this world, utterly alone. Perhaps it’s a cry for help?’

I removed my hand from beneath hers, stood up with finality and thanked her. Wrapping myself in my heavy winter overcoat, I made my way toward the door. There was no need for us to meet again, unless further personal intervention was required to accelerate the process.

***

The walk back to my apartment was only a matter of minutes. I invariably found pleasure in the sight of the deserted streets at this time of night. During the day the main thoroughfare was busy with traffic and pedestrians, but after midnight it had an air of pleasing desolation.
 

I let myself into the nondescript block and made my way up the stairs towards my rooms. As far as I knew there were only three other tenants, and this suited me very well, for at night the whole place was deathly quiet.

Once inside, I sat down in the armchair adjacent to the window. The familiarity of my surroundings allowed me to relax after the encounter with Emily Curtis. I looked across the room at the low bookcase filled with the three-dozen or so battered books that I had read and re-read. I knew the volumes by heart, from the blemishes and tears on the dust-wrappers through to the dark horror of their contents. I had used them as exemplars in perfecting my method.

From the armchair I reached across to the window and opened the curtains so that I could gaze up at the stars. As usual, I felt the delicious sensation of falling upwards in a rush of cosmic vertigo, as if the sky were below me rather than above. I opened the window and leant out for a clearer view. For some time I allowed the pleasurable nausea to overwhelm me, but finally I had to return my gaze to the street. I was afraid that I might overbalance and plummet to the pavement below, as had happened to me once before.

There, beneath a streetlamp, I saw the pale face of Emily Curtis, watching me with a concentrated stare. I drew the curtains against the sight, and when I opened them again half an hour later she had gone.

***

I managed to sleep for a few hours. Later that morning, after I’d bathed and applied the masking lotion to my skin, the phone rang. It was Emily. I cradled the receiver between my shoulder and ear and listened, lighting a cigarette, as she apologised for her intrusion.