Anna Kavan - Sleep Has His House

What is it that emerges from this droplet of broth, or is it bouillon, deposited with professional precision upon the slide? What menacing creatures are these, battened on the nourishing fluid, which now encircle and stalk down their unconscious victims?

The successful preservation of whatsit often depends on the ability of the whatsit to combat and destroy the various whatsit and whatsit whatsits, which manoeuvre so much more rapidly, and which, if not speedily checked, will often ruin the whole of a whatsit in a whatsit. The great secret is to be continually on the watch, and to attack the whatsit at the outset before it has had time to gain a whatsit.

On this occasion the experimenter (though doubtless familiar with every branch of the technique), perhaps in the pursuit of further knowledge, makes no attempt to interfere with the fate of these hapless humble martyrs to science, but dispassionately observes the onslaught of the voracious attackers who tear into their prey like tigers and devour them wholly till no single trace remains.

But Nemesis is not far away.

No whatsit need remain in any uncertainty about the kind of whatsit to use in a whatsit, for information is freely available to all and it is the duty of every whatsit one of us to make himself familiar with a few simple whatsits for whatsit. Remember that a whatsit’s whatsit may depend on your whatsit. Whatsit now

Swift indeed is the retribution which overtakes the aggressors; and for a display of poetic justice it would be hard to rival the terrible scene which now ensues. A third infinitesimal drop is planted deftly on the slide, an agent so powerful that, extending rapidly in a thin film around and over the fierce corpuscular conquerors, it instantaneously absorbs them into itself, eliminating them in a second by a horrid process of ingurgitation.

Tiring, one imagines, of this close concentration upon bacillic dramatics, a simple adjustment on the part of the eye (Pinto et Issaverdens precision instruments) scales the operational field up to major proportions. A truly astounding scene is forthwith presented, one guaranteed to strike the stoutest heart with terror and amazement. The very seat of reason itself quakes under the visual impact of this awful spectacle, hardly to be expressed in ordinary words. How can one describe even the background, that dark and whirling storm of fiery particles, blinding and burning and asphyxiating at die same time? It’s a fog and yet it’s a fire, intolerable heat combined with suffocating obscurity. Through this murky inferno, huge armour-plated monsters, blind and mad, are charging in all directions, demented, hideous, driven by their Gadarene frenzy to charge each other in indiscriminate fury, stampeded and possessed by maniacal fiends.

Even the perennially untroubled eye of the Heaven-Born prefers not to linger on this unspeakable shambles

and passes on through the world wilderness of death to a large remote semi-demolished, sham-antique building. Under powerful moonshine lamp-flood black forms are busily hauling and hoisting and heaving apart various beams, arches, windows, etc., of this fake medieval edifice. View of the partially dismantled whole narrows down to a doorway; moves over trampled ground to a mock mulberry tree which two sweaty workmen in singlets are preparing to remove. They unhook several large boughs hinged to the main trunk, drop them carelessly on the ground (the torn faded fabric leaves flutter dusty in dust); wrench remainder of tree from its socket; struggle off, lugging it between them.

The general view again, very briefly, indefinitely, outlines blurred and figures eliminated; retreating almost immediately to distant glimpse of roughly similarly-shaped sand-castle on a deserted beach in moonlight. The tide comes in quickly. Views of successive small summer waves breaking (with soft soooooon sound), opening white-lipped mouths on the sand, each sucking a few inches nearer the castle.

The first wave reaches the castle wall. The white wavelips suck at the sand with their sibilance, insidiously: soooon soooooon sooooon (each wave sucking a little harder, higher, undermining the castle).

The sand walls spread, subside, sink, settle, submerge — their soft almost soundless sigh sunk in the sea sound.

In a house where furnished seaside lodgings are rented a girl, asleep in her bed, green slippers under the bed as she kicked them off toe-to-heel, dreams, stirs and hears the subsidence (it is only a dressing-gown slipping off the end of the bed); she does not wake; although she changes position.

The empty beach with the sand now covered by water, smooth and full. The moon gravely passes with quiet deliberation behind a cloud, drawing after her all detail; leaving only the tranquilly breathing breast of dark and murmurous water; which the eye observes, as it seems, pensively, and one is anthropomorphically inclined to believe, with relief in respite, until

goddess no longer of the moony crested tire, quick-change artist and record-holder, out steps the twenty-one-year-old lieutenant-colonel — the youngest in the whatsit army — wearing steel helmet, rakishly askew, eccentric battledress copiously stippled with pig’s blood, bedroom slippers with soft woollen pompons (I intend to invade whatsit in comfort); his face is blacked like a nigger minstrel’s with white eye-circles, one emitting searchlight illumination: through the second orifice a whizzing stream of machine-gun bullets, exploding bombs, rockets, clods of earth, power-diving planes, bombers, fighters, vampires, anopheles-size and vicious, in inexhaustible swarms.

The searchlight beam points erratically hither and thither, in the manner of a retriever questing for game, over the vast slow-seething seabulk which is now apperceptible as a sort of time symbol holding locked in its dark plasma the innumerable bubbles of all past and future eventualities.

At irregular intervals the beam oscillates violently in the agitation of finding, then slowly fixes, freezing in its terminal circle small distant sharp scenes of topical interest. As,

an idealized country house in sunny summery landscape, roses round the door, elm-muffled peaceable strokes of church clock striking the tea hour, strawberries and cream and deck-chairs on the lawn, unseen pigeons cooing, every exile’s sentimental picture of home.

Twilight gathers quickly; a bleak wind rising overturns the deserted chairs: the roses droop, wither, fall, their petals are blown away; the pigeon-coos hoarsen to ominous hooting as a huge spectral white owl with lambent eyes sweeps stealthily past, concentrating to pounce as it disappears; immediately afterwards a thin mouse death-shriek is heard.

In deepening darkness dimly seen conspiratorial forms, wearing some kind of horrific disguise-uniform (Inquisition or Ku-Klux-Klan suggestion) by unclear and rapid manipulation convert the house to traditional haunted-house aspect.

The Hanged Man swings from a black tree; he is looking at something unseen in the air; spinning slowly in the wind with desolate bone creaking; muttering, I am too old to be in a tree. A mongrel pup, starved ribcage on four matchsticks, slinks in and out of sight. Mist wraiths coagulate, hover lugubriously, disintegrate, among dark shapes of bushes or tombstones or crouching things. After slight pause, a small white bone falls like a full stop on the black grass.

Now inside the house: a storm lantern flickers feebly on dusty and empty rooms that the wind whimpers through, and on the uneasy group of neophytes herded together. These are boys of about fourteen, with dumb-bucolic or vicious-urban-degenerate faces sniggering in discomfort, and with restless movements and whispers hiding their half-alarm. They are dressed in badly fitting uniforms of cheap coarse material, some with jackets sagging loose to the knees, some with tight sleeves which fail to cover their wrists. They are armed with weapons contrastingly, expensive, efficient, ultra-modern and deadly looking. Carrying out their orders, they move through the rooms, a few displaying exaggerated toughness, the others alternatively scared and vacuously amused by the various trick manifestations, hidden traps, skulls springing out of cupboards, chains clanking, lights suddenly flashing, doors suddenly opening or slamming, moans, screams, howls, etc.