Maurice Level - Thirty Hours with a Corpse, and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol

“Suppose… no, it’s not possible…. Suppose it was… there it is again!… Again… louder and louder… someone is scratching, scratching, knocking…. My God! A voice… her voice! She is calling! She is crying! Help, help!”

He threw himself out of bed and roared:

“François!… quick! Help!… Look!…”

He was half mad with fear. He tore wildly at his hair, shouting:

“Look!… You’ve got eyes, you, you can see!…”

The moans became louder, the raps firmer. Feeling his way, stumbling against the walls, knocking against the packing-cases that served as furniture, tripping in the holes in the floor, he staggered about trying to find his sleeping brother.

He fell and got up again, bruised, covered with blood, sobbing:

“I have no eyes! I have no eyes!”

He had upset the plate on which lay the sprig of box, and the sound of the earthenware breaking on the floor gave the finishing touch to his panic.

“Help! What have I done? Help!”

The noises grew louder and more terrifying, and as an agonized cry sounded, his last doubts left him. Behind his empty eyes, he imagined he saw the horrible thing….

He saw the old sister beating against the tightly closed lid of her coffin. He saw her superhuman terror, her agony, a thousand times worse than that of any other death…. She was there, alive, yes, alive, a few steps away from him… but where? She heard his steps, his voice, and he, blind, could do nothing to help her.

Where was his brother? Flinging his arms from right to left, he knocked over the candles: the wax flowed over his fingers, hot, like blood. The noise grew louder, more despairing; the voice was speaking, saying words that died away in smothered groans….

“Courage!” he shrieked. “I’m here! I’m coming!”

He was now crawling along on his knees, and a sudden turn flung him against a bed; he thrust out his arms, felt a body, seized it by the shoulders and shook it with all the strength that remained in him.

Violently awakened, the deaf-mute sprang up uttering horrible cries and trying to see, but now that the candles were out, he too was plunged into night, the impenetrable darkness that held more terror for him than for the blind man. Stupefied with sleep, he groped about wildly with his hands, which closed in a viselike grip on his brother’s throat, stifling cries of:

“Look! Look!”

They rolled together on the floor, upsetting all that came in their way, knotted together, ferociously tearing each other with tooth and nail. In a very short time their hoarse breathing had died away. The voice, so distant and yet so near, was cut short by a spasm… there was a cracking noise… the imprisoned body was raising itself in one last supreme effort for freedom… a grinding noise… sobs… again the grinding noise… silence….

Outside, the trees shuddered as they bowed in the gale; the rain beat against the walls. The late winter’s dawn was still crouching on the edge of the horizon. Inside the walls of the hovel, not a sound, not a breath.

Night and Silence.

BECAUSE HE had good manners, and although there was no one present but Farmer Galot, Trache said on entering:

“Good day, gentlemen!”

“You again!” growled Galot, without turning around.

“To be sure,” replied Trache.

He raised his two maimed hands, as if explaining, by their very appearance, his instructions.

Two years ago, in harvest-time, a threshing-machine had caught him up and, by a miracle, dashed him to the ground again instead of crushing him to death. They had borne him off, covered with blood, shrieking, with arms mangled, a rib smashed in, and spitting out his teeth. There remained from the accident a certain dullness of intellect, short breath, a whistling sound that seemed to grope for words at the bottom of his chest, scrape them out of his throat, and jumble them up as they passed his bare gums, and a pair of crooked hands that he held out before him in an awkward and apprehensive manner.

“Well, what do you want?” snapped Galot.

“My compensation money,” answered Trache with a weak smile.

“Compensation money! I haven’t owed you anything for a long time. There’s nothing the matter with you now but laziness and a bad disposition. To begin with, you were drunk when the thing happened. I needn’t have given you anything.”

“I was not drunk,” said Trache quietly.

The farmer lost all patience.

“At this moment you can use your hands as well as anybody. You keep up the sham before people, but when you are alone you do what you like with them.”

“I don’t move them then; I can’t,” mumbled Trache.

“I tell you, you are an impostor, a trickster, a rascal; I say that you are fleecing me because I have not been firmer with you, that you are making a little fortune out of my money, but that you shall not have another cent. There, that’s final. Do you understand?”

“Yes, from your point of view,” assented Trache without moving.

Galot flung his cap on the table and began to pace the room with long strides.

Trache shook his head and hunched up his shoulders. At last Galot squared up before him.

“How much do you want to settle for good and all? Suppose we say five hundred francs and make an end of it?”

“I want what is due to me according to the judgment of the court.”

Galot became transported with rage:

“Ne’er-do-well, lazy-bones, good-for-nothing; I know what you told the court through the mouth of your doctor, and why you would not let mine examine you.”

“It was upon the sworn evidence of the doctors that the case was decided,” observed the cripple.

“Ah, it isn’t they who have to pay!” sneered Galot. “Let me see your hands…. Let me look, I say: I know something about injuries.”

Trache stretched out his arms and presented the wrists. Galot took them between his heavy hands, turned them over, turned them back, feeling the bones and the fleshy parts, as he would have done with cattle at a fair. Now and then Trache made a wry face and drew back his shoulder. At last Galot pushed him away with brutal force.

“You are artful, cunning. But look out for yourself: I am keeping my eye on you, and when I have found you out, look out for yourself ! You will end by laughing on the other side of your face, and to get your living you will have to work—you hear what I say?—to work.”

“I should like nothing better,” sighed the cripple.

Pale with wrath, Galot emptied a purse of silver money on the table, counted it and pushed it toward him.

“There’s your money; now be off.”

“If you would be so good as to put it in my blouse,” suggested Trache, “seeing that I can’t do it myself….”

Then he said, as on entering: “Good day, gentlemen,” and with stuffed pocket, shaking head and unsteady step, he took his departure.

To return to his lodging he had to pass along the riverside. In the fields the patient oxen trudged on their way. Laborers were binding the sheaves amid the shocks of corn; and across the flickering haze of the sultry air the barking of dogs came with softened intonation.

Near a bend of the river, where it deepened into a little pool, a woman was washing linen. The water ran at her feet, flecked with foam and in places clouded with a pearly tint.

“Well, are things going as you wish, Françoise?” asked Trache.

“Oh, well enough,” said she. “And you?”

“The same as usual… with my miserable hands.”

He sighed, and the coins jingled under his blouse. Françoise winked at him.

“All the same it isn’t so bad—what the threshing-machine has done for you, eh?… And then, to be sure, it’s only right; Galot can well afford to pay.”