James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

Once I’m alone, I go up to my room. Tonight I have the courage to face my own image, this strange body which yet is mine.

I stand before the large mirror, completely naked. I close my eyes, unable to bear this horrible vision, this grotesque reflection of myself. Yet, I must! I open my eyes. I can’t help flinching in repulsion. With horror, I notice the extent of the illness that’s devouring me. My breasts are completely covered in short, bushy hairs. Is this arm mine, this hairy chest? These arms, these legs, made up in a long, hideous down? Is this really me, this hermaphrodite, this unnatural thing?

My eyes wander for a moment over the bedside table where the photo of my husband is. At least he would have helped me to get through this stage of my life. Only today do I realize how I miss his silent presence and what a void his death has left. Exhausted, I swallow two sleeping pills.

For several days I don’t notice anything abnormal. My transformation seems to have stopped, the growth of my body hair seems to have balanced out. Only the forerunner symptoms of menopause persist and reassure me: dizziness, hot flashes, bloating.

On the other hand, my skin worries me. Some already existing wrinkles have become accentuated; others have appeared on my forehead. Bags have formed under my eyes. Now I look like a middle-­aged woman. After all, maybe that’s what getting old is, maybe that’s the menopause the medical books talk too briefly about. I suddenly realize I’m the first woman to see herself grow old. In our world, women never reach old age, what becomes of them? I know the answer. I refuse to believe it. But can one struggle against the order of things?

In the street, no one notices me. The couples are all alike: young women in the arms of their middle-­aged husbands, families built on the same model: young girls holding the hands of their mother and their worthy father, in the prime of his life. They all pass close by me without noticing anything. Maybe people take me for what I’m not. The other day, coming out of a store, a young woman bumped into me and said: ‘Oh! Sorry, sir!’ It’s true that I was wearing pants.

So I’ve decided to shave my legs and arms and wear dresses again. What a pleasure to see those vile hairs drowned in the bathtub! I’m finally going to put on an elegant dress. Who cares if my face is marked with age, my legs are still respectable. I take a dress from the wardrobe and slip it on. I have the impression that it used to fit a little tighter at the hips. The anxiety of the past few weeks must have made me lose weight. So much the better! There, all done.

I turn towards the large mirror. I look at myself, I burst out laughing. I laugh until it hurts, no, it’s not me, this miserable clown. I laugh harder and harder, no, it’s not me, this grotesque creature, this transvestite, this weirdly attired caricature in a dress that hangs everywhere, this woman with no breasts, no hips, no curves. And I laugh over and over without realizing that my laughter ends in tears.

I got up early this morning. A sort of intuition forced me to get out of bed. I feel that something irreversible happened last night. I avoid the large mirror. I run my hand over my face. Under my fingers my skin is as rough as that of a man who hasn’t shaved in several days. The mirror behind me mocks me. I won’t look at myself. I already know what I’ll see.

I take off my nightgown unhurriedly. All the hairs have grown back, my breasts have totally disappeared. I hold my breath. My heart beats harder and harder, faster and faster. Gently, slowly, I lower my eyes towards the only feminine symbol I have left. I can hardly breathe, my vision goes blurry, I put my hand between my thighs, I’m reeling, I’m losing my mind. Under my fingers, an unambiguous growth. In a final cry of horror I lose consciousness.

It’s dark, I must have slept a long time. My memories are confused. I have the impression of living a second life, in a new skin. I’m sitting in the living room, in an armchair. An appetizing smell is coming from the kitchen. I get up, I light my pipe. I am very elegant tonight in my three-­piece suit. Dominique told me that we’ll be receiving guests. An old friend, it seems. Here she is. She smiles at me, young and radiant.

‘Did you sleep well, darling? Clément and his wife won’t be long.’

A ring at the door. They’re here. Standing on the doorstep are the young woman and the man who are living in Clémence’s house. He looks at me in silence and hands me a record: ‘Afrikan Krystal’.

‘Happy birthday,’ he says to me, with an attitude of complicity.

It’s commonly claimed – even by the Dutch – that the Netherlands has no real tradition of horror fiction, but Dutch literature does contain some hidden gems in the genre, like the often horror-tinged ‘fantastic’ tales of Ferdinand Bordewijk and Belcampo, Kathinka Lannoy’s volumes of ghost stories, and the bizarre and unsettling stories of Jacques Hamelink. And in more recent years, the Dutch horror scene has shown increasing signs of life. The works of Paul van Loon and Christien Boomsma have proven extremely popular with younger audiences, while Thomas Olde Heuvelt scored an international success with his 2016 novel Hex . Both Olde Heuvelt and Boomsma were featured alongside a number of other emerging horror writers in a pioneering 2016 anthology of new Dutch horror fiction, from which the following tale, ‘The Bones in Her Eyes’, is taken. The story came to Boomsma after she accidentally hit a cat with her car: the look in the animal’s eyes haunted her in her dreams, though we doubt those dreams were quite as nightmarish as this tale they inspired.

It’s the eyes I just can’t get out of my system, glowing yellow-­green in the darkness when they were caught in the glare of my headlights. Some people would call such a sight demonic, but they’re haters, and why should I pay any attention to what they say? No, to me they were mirrors that showed with an unsettling sharpness a truth that I didn’t seem to grasp. I knew it was important for me to see it, to understand it. But it eluded me, and it eludes me still.

Matt – my boyfriend – always said there was nothing you could do about it when it happens, but I never believed him. I considered those rural roads full of carelessly murdered hedgehogs, flattened frogs, squashed rabbits, and bleeding ducks to be a typical expression of human inability to treat the world with respect. Getting home in time to watch Farmer Wants a Wife is more important than a creature that breathes, that feels. That dies.

But that evening I discovered that things could be different. I had had a long day because I go – no, went – once a month to the drawing academy in Rotterdam. Quite a drive if you live as far north as I do. So when I drove back into the village I could already taste the night in the day. It was the time when animals leave their holes and lairs and slip into the world. A dangerous time.

So I drove slowly, scanning the roadside where the grass was already withered because autumn was on its way. And I saw them: a cat’s eyes, like small glowing lamps in the falling dusk.

What was perhaps more frustrating: the cat saw me too. It sat motionless waiting along the side of the road and watched as I approached.

And this is what’s so infinitely difficult to accept: I wasn’t careless and I wasn’t speeding, although naturally I wanted to get home, plop down on the couch, and close my eyes while Matt poured me a glass of port.

In the end, the animal did it itself. And there was nothing I could do.

One moment it was still there. I saw the ears – a little too short – and the tail, which looked as if it had once been longer and had an odd kink in it. I even imagine seeing the whiskers, a blend of black and white, although that is highly unlikely. But in my head, where I keep the memory, I do see them.