Anna Kavan - Sleep Has His House

Finally the roof lifts up like a lid and the lieutenant-colonel is seen hovering batlike and spraying from the poison ducts at the back of his vampire fangs a fine rain of blood with which the upturned faces are thinly spattered. Simultaneously his voice, very much amplified, yells through the loudspeaker, On your toes, boys. Remember whatsit. There’s a whatsit. Kill the swine. Kick his guts out.

As his image slowly fades it develops a recognizable though incomplete resemblance to the Liaison Officer. At the instant of disappearance the rim of his steel helmet catches the light and hangs in mid-air, a halo-like, phosphorescent ellipse which evaporates as the loudspeaker switches to soundtrack of war horror film

linking up with

a cinema audience in tightly-packed hall. The rows of people seen from the back all exactly similar somewhat elongated heads with protuberant ears. A big flag with crossed emblem hangs over the screen where an air-raid is shown in progress. Deafening accompaniment of appropriate noises: bombs, rockets, ack-ack, sirens, shouts, clanging bells of fire engines, ambulances, etc. Walls seen crumbling, A.R.P. and N.F.S. personnel search through wreckage and rubble for victims under mobile arc-lamps. A woman is carried by on a stretcher; where her face was, foot-long splinters of glass project like porcupine quills. A growl of rage, baited-animal sound, travels along the watching rows of the audience.

Quick over the road to the movie theatre on the other side. The rows of people here seen from the back all exactly similar somewhat square heads with protuberant ears. A big flag with circular emblem hangs over the screen where an air-raid is shown in progress. Deafening accompaniment of appropriate noises: bombs, rockets, ack-ack, sirens, shouts, clanging bells of fire engines, ambulances, etc. Walls seen crumbling, A.R.P. and N.F.S. personnel hunt through wreckage and rubble for victims under mobile arc-lamps. A woman is carried by on a stretcher; where her face was, foot-long splinters of glass project like porcupine quills. A growl of rage, baited-animal sound, travels along the watching rows of the audience.

Quickly the audiences of the two theatres crowding blackly out, overflowing the street like opposing ant-swarms. A rumbling roar goes up as they converge upon one another, interpenetrate.

The searchlight beam (now for the sake of convenience to be identified with the untroubled eye up above) wanders restlessly:

after a not arbitrary number of glimpses of world happenings,

roams towards a huge solitary fang-shaped rock, almost a mountain, jutting sheer out of the ocean, sleek oil-black faintly polished, belted with white scalloped beading of foam. A sudden long inexplicable swell gathers on the smooth water, mounting quickly to tidal-wave size, travels increasingly rapidly and toweringly to the rock; at the moment of impact the eyebeam telescopes into close-up of the shattering wave with heavy spray mane wind-combed and white from the black wave blown back.

In still closer analysis, the spray particles brightly illuminated, particularized, individualized, metamorphosed into papers of all descriptions.

Envelopes (with stamps of various countries, airmail stamps, Opened by Censor, D.D.A. stickers, O.H.M.S. signs, etc.) addressed in various handwritings or typewritten to places all over the world. Letters from lovers, banks, businesses, ministries, consulates, etc.; on embossed paper, thin paper, papers with printed headings, pages tom from exercise books. Birth, marriage, death certificates; diplomas, passports, dossiers, warrants, licences, ballot cards, invitations, tickets, cheques, coupons, leaflets, cables, menus, currency notes, programmes, manuscripts, drawings, photographs, labels, press-cuttings. These appear briefly (there is barely time to read them) with headlines in utter confusion. As

Gas leads suicide methods this winter. Shaw mumbles no in beard to love notes. Mayan temple hieroglyphics used as play-suit trimmings. No bass violinists in Folsom Prison. Atom Bomb opens new era in world destruction, entire city vaporized in black rain, victims vanish. Bishop thanks God for science.

There are perhaps one or two full paragraphs

Phosgene is the most practical and economical gas for the production of quick death. While mustard-gas casualties are a long time in hospital, sometimes several months, there is nothing about them, immediately after being gassed, to inspire terror in other troops. With phosgene, however, if heavily gassed, men will be dropping dead like flies in a few hours…

The impact of his body loosened the jam and started the coal moving downward to the funnel in the centre of the floor. While his companions ran for aid, Seery flailed about and when police of Emergency Squad 4 reached the scene only his head and shoulders were visible. The bottom of an ashcan was ripped out and lowered to him as an improvised caisson. A rope was then dropped and planks were laid on top of the moving coal on which Fire Captain Charles Kuchas of Hook and Ladder Co. 24 clambered to Seery and administered a hypodermic. Then the Rev. W. J. Faricker of the Church of the Epiphany made the same dangerous journey to administer the last rites of the Catholic Church. As Father Faricker finished the rope snapped and Seery was sucked beneath the surface…

Take a pleasant breezy jaunt with Jimmy Fidler, on location every day at the Mirror…

Finally the whole mass of papers flying, whirling through the air like Alice’s pack of cards. The paper storm condenses, recedes, spirals into funnel-shaped white cloud-whirl, tornado, travelling away at great speed over perfectly featureless, blank, near-black field: vanishing. The neutral shadowblank holds for a moment of discharging tension as the blissful eyes up above defocus slowly.

I can’t remember the journey or who arranged it. No one told me where I was going. No one told me the name of the shadow house or why I was brought there.

Some things about the place were confusing. There were wet nights when it seemed to be the house where my mother lived. Sometimes when the rain struck at the window I called my mother’s face to the black glass in the way a fisherman draws a fish to the surface of the water. Then it was hard to tell which face was my own.

Sometimes the shadow house was extremely quiet: vigilant silence crouched against every door. Sometimes the walls rang with tremendous music, lsrafel sang, whose heartstrings are a lute, and all the ghosts of China twittered like crazy birds.

Sometimes my mother’s familiars, sadness and boredom, loitered among the shadows: then I looked out of the window quickly.

My window was a magic glass which gave everything it reflected a kind face. Even hostility and chaos smiled in that mirror. When I looked out of the window everything became friendly and clear and simple. All day I could watch the white sky children wreathing light-hearted dances in their playground, while the air cherished them like a mother. And in the night my own mother came to the window to meet me, strange, solitary; splendid with countless stars; my mother Night; mine, lovely, mine. My home.

IT’S RATHER dark in the house where B has gone, and this isn’t because it’s evening outside. Of course, sometimes it is night out of doors, and then you’d expect the house to be dark indeed: but curiously enough there’s very little difference inside between the night and the day. It’s always twilight in those rooms where a lamp or a candle is just as likely to be burning at noon as in the small hours of the morning.

The house is really difficult to describe. You can say that it’s in a town, in a long street of other houses. But that only conveys the vaguest impression, if it isn’t actually misleading, for some of the upstairs windows look clean into the country with its lakes and streams and fields and forests and villages and the majestic mountains behind. It’s no easier to give a picture of the interior either. Like most old places, this house has been altered and enlarged again and again so that the rooms are of all shapes and sizes and periods, opening one into another, or linked by galleries or flights of steps leading up and down in the most unexpected and unconventional way. One circular tower room, for instance, appears to have been built on quite haphazard, as if the architect had overlooked the necessity for connecting it with the rest of the building, and had only added as an afterthought a crooked little staircase hidden away in a comer which you might pass a dozen times without noticing. This irregularity of design makes it hard to find your way about in the house. It’s such a rambling old place, there are so many rooms, and all of them half-dark, that you can never be absolutely certain you’ve been into every one.