Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

The fire was dying. I took it on myself to poke at the logs and drop on another one. Arthur poured us more brandy, but said nothing. His face was less pallid, but had the greasy look of light sweating.

When I straightened up I said, “What happened then, when you were sixteen?”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “your father remembered that, did he? Yes. It was nothing really. Nothing for them. We were to visit a garden. A zoological garden. By that time I’d got much better at suppressing my fear. Or I told myself I had. I’d been nerving myself to the excursion, thinking it might be a test I could overcome. But then—I heard them roaring, you see. In the distance. Over the trees. Lions. I knew instantly what the noise was. I screamed, as I had in my nightmares, and screaming is all I recollect after this, until I found myself at home again. I left my father’s house as soon as I was well enough to do so. I led then a quite unadventurous life. I won’t bore you with the details. They bore me, too, you see. Until that piece of luck with the recipe, the marmalade—more an orange jam, you understand. An old Scottish formula. Pure luck. Idiotic. But it made us rich, my partners and I. I can assure you, however, such good fortune doesn’t hold off loneliness. I have always found it awkward, to mix with people, to find companions. And so I have been a lonely man. Unmarried—childless—I can’t imagine such things as wedlock or paternity, for myself. Even so, I have got by. I have lived. And now,” he said. Arthur leant back in his chair as I sat down again in mine. “And now,” he repeated.

Though never having myself walked out on the boards, save in the most administrative capacity, I found myself responding as if we two, he and I, were spot-lit now at the centre of a stage. Faultless on my cue I announced, “And now it has returned.”

Arthur met my eyes. His had changed to flat dark stones. “Yes. It has come back.”

“As the gypsy said it would.”

“As he said.”

“Do you know why?”

“Oh yes. Something very ordinary.”

I leant forward. “Which is?”

“I saw the damnable picture again.”

“Good lord—where? Where did you see it?”

“Oh, not in that vile little book. No, it was reproduced in a catalogue. It seems the ghastly work is now something of an antique, and this illustration, the particular one, the one I think was fashioned in Hell, for me alone, that picture had been reproduced in the brightest, gaudiest detail. Leafing carelessly through the catalogue in the house of a business associate, suddenly it was all before me again. I had to leave the house immediately, making some incredible excuse, I can’t remember what. That night I tried to reason with myself. But it was no use whatsoever. I found myself at 2 a.m., wandering about with the whisky decanter. Afraid to go to bed, just as I had been, night after night, when a child. In the end, of course, adult common-sense propelled me to my room. I downed a final glass of whisky and fell instantly asleep. Half an hour later I woke half the servants with my shrieks. My poor housekeeper believed criminals had broken in and were murdering me. It might have been amusing, if this state of affairs hadn’t, then, continued for six further months. Yes, naturally, my doctor, and then several specialists, were summoned. They could do nothing, only drug me to a deathly moribund slumber from which—despite all the muck I had swallowed—I still woke once a night screaming in terror. The lion—” Arthur spoke the name now in a loud clear stroke, like the movement of a surgeon’s knife, “— the lion came for me, as he always had. Out of the dark hole in the arena wall, over the dirty sand, leaping, his claws raking the air, just missing me as I sprang awake.”

I too lifted my glass and drained it.

“But,” I said, “six further months, I heard you say. Do you mean you found a way again to stop the dreams?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Arthur stared downwards into nothingness. “A last specialist arrived here two months ago. In his demeanour he reminded me once more of my father, though he was younger than I am now. A strong-minded, bullying man, himself brave as—I was going to say, brave as a lion. He told me roundly I was a nervous wreck, and that the fault lay only with me. I had let this literary phantasm prey on me, and had offered no resistance. To drug myself with morphine or liquor was past the point. I must instead lie down to sleep and face the beast, in the knowledge that it was nothing. Nothing at all. It was only, he told me sternly, my own fear which had birthed, and subsequently sustained the nightmare. Forgivable, he admitted, in a very young child but in a grown man nauseating and absurd. ‘It is your cowardice,’ he bluntly said, ‘which is destroying your sleep, your health and your life. You and you alone can be rid of it. You must cast it out. Then you will be free.’ When he’d quite done with me, I was trembling like a boy. But I could see, as I can see now, that he was fundamentally in the right. My terrors had formed this curse. I must turn my back on them. And so I ate a light supper, had a couple of drinks, and went to bed. I stayed awake about half an hour, during which time I refused myself a single thought of the nightmare, and fell asleep abruptly. I dreamed of nothing at all. Since then too, the dream hasn’t plagued me once. Indeed, I can sleep at any hour of day or night without any inconvenience.”

I sat looking at him. His hands were folded down, one on each arm of his chair. He stared on into the abyss, invisible to me, which opened at his feet.

Arthur said, “I think you’ll be both too mature and too young to know the fears and nervousness, in their way not unlike those of infancy, which can come on with increasing age. I suspect, too, being so like my own father in appearance, that you yourself may never succumb to this form of trepidation, even in old age. Death may never tap you on the shoulder to expound his prologue. You may never think about it. Your kind, and please do not think I insult you, I am only very jealous, can stay impervious to most horrors and frights. Your nerve holds in battle, and if there are ever such things as ghosts or demons, you would confront them, face them down. Or produce a revolver and shoot them, perhaps, back to mortal life.”

Embarrassed by his accuracy, I too lowered my gaze. Where my glance fell then, I saw, across the fine Aubussin carpet, a curious baroque shadow, thick and black, lying oddly sidelong from the lamps. What was it? Puzzled, I turned my head and looked straight up into the corner of the room. There was a slice of darkness there also, and in the dark, something—no, two things—glittered in a sudden crushed flicker of brilliancy, now yellowish, now red.

“Ah,” he said, in a quiet, cracked little voice, almost sarcastic, almost bitter. “Is it there? Can you see it?”

I turned back and glared at Arthur. “See what, precisely?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No, frankly. Of course I’m sympathetic to what’s happened to you. But even you yourself are now calling it a form of neurasthenia. So what is there to gain from dramatizing any of it further?”

“I can’t help myself, it seems. When that clever specialist rehearsed my case before me, he mercilessly showed me exactly what I had most to fear: my own fear itself. My terrors, whether real or groundless, are my worst enemies. But I have to tell you, for such a person as myself, terror is now basic to my personality. And by refusing to let it visit me in sleep, it seems—it seems—I’ve let it out into the concrete world, at last. Where, having had me consistently elude it for so long, it has always yearned to follow me. My nightmare—has become a reality, and my terror feeds it every hour. Perhaps not even only terror, either. My accustomedness.”