Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The succeeding moments seemed but an imitation of life. Whereas once Darconville had no bond with the darkness for loving alone in the upper light, that changed — radically now, for as he stood in the mess of that room he happened to pick up the strange piece of paper which upon his first visit to that enfer of a library had slipped from one of Dr. Crucifer’s books. Was it — a code? He turned it sideways, then upsidedown. At first it seemed nothing more than a piece of illogical scribia with lines of miscast letters running on meaninglessly, irrespective of whence or whither. It was written in a kind of bizarre agraphia going right to left, he saw, in looking-glass letters — with the words spelled backwards!

For some reason he suddenly felt the room grow cold as ice.

WITHOUT HESITATION, Darconville took the sheet of paper to the mirror and held it at right angles to the glass: it was still unreadable. He tried in vain, as well, to read it through the back of the sheet. So he began to figure it as it had presumably been written, reading withershins letter by letter what turned out to be Latin. It came up slowly in the curial style and seemed to be a formal — what? Suddenly, his face fell, a witness to malfeasance, and went pale as paper.

alligiS

te mued et reficuL euqretsigam enimoD

erivres ibit roedllop te,ocsonga mepicnirp

oicnuner tE.ereviv oretop uidnauq eridebo te

te soila te mutsirhC museJ te mueD muertla

macilotsopA maiselccE suispi ainmo te manamoR

tiussop seledif subiuq senoitagor te senoitaro senmo

maicaf diuq roedllop ibit te;em orp eredecretni

rep alam da erehartta te,oretop mulam touqtouq

,mumsitpab te mamsirhc oicnunerba te;senmo

:murotcnas suispi te itsirhC useJ atirem ainmo te

:inoitaroda te iutivres eaut oreed is te

,orecef suispi iem menoitalbo non is te

.rnaut tucis maem mativ od ibit,eid euqouq

.ceD sumisecirt;eid te onna coh iceF

.LMCM

.reficurC

,sinrefni xe mutcartxE

.munomead ailisnoc retni

His eyes forked in comprehension as he read it to the end with a preying ache, moving his head as though punctuating with self-directed nods secret decisions of sympathy with it, his fingers twittering with the thrill of such evil, and then shutting it like a clapstick, as though some faculty or prevision in him were unexpectedly proved, he felt something suddenly pass through him — whereupon, freeing his heart, he burst into a cruel laughter of recognition that never seemed to end.

A GRIM WEEK BEGAN. There was a roar of rain on the slate roof, blown by a wind of such power and purpose as almost to shatter the windowpanes against which the raindrops burst like stars. And all through the first night Darconville brooded, torn between a decision— living for a hating or dying for a love. It was, needless to say, no longer a question informed by any hope, either of enchantment or exorcism, of winning back Isabel Rawsthorne but rather one of related options touching on the summary execution-by-evil of the spectre whose photograph he once again set up on the mantelpiece: the crime that would make him happy or the scaffold that would prevent him from being unhappy. He held up his candle to the photograph as he listened to the wind outside, the whistling, the violent rattling of a window-catch, and his interrupted heart-pulse swam in death: he recognized nothing: it was the face of the Queen of Spit.

To one man in a million dreadful knowledge is revealed. There is, it is true, a kind of psychic poikilothermism when the mind, like the body, must assume the temperature of its surroundings. But Crucifer’s black pact with the devil seemed only to awaken in his own mind certain secret knowledge that had long lain dormant, figures of every adjunct to the heavens and characters of signs and evening stars by which the spirits are enforced to rise. There was a harpocratic oath made that night in the silence where, dosed with benperidol, he sat waiting to prey. It would be a revenge Kydian, fierce, and immediate. Darconville chose the way.

* * * * *

Monday . In the morning, he was fully resolved. It would be a matter of diligent preparation, sedulous care, and finally celerity of execution. He would never give up, nothing would stop him. Hunger eats through walls of stone. He first arranged all her letters, photos, the cassette, all the notebooks he’d kept on her. Why? He didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. He would head her off on fronts both natural and supernatural, for who, he wondered, was so stupid and foolish as to think that all the things done by the body have no effect on the spirit? She could not have found a more ruthless and persequent enemy: he stomped into the haft of his shoe, the heel dropped home snug and positive, and he drew a figure in the air with his finger in front of the photograph which he then turned upsidedown. “ Asmo-deus ,” whispered Darconville, “ I utterly forsake thee !” And immediately he went out and bought a new carving knife.

* * * * *

Tuesday . The weather, turning, brought cold sunlight, but Darconville saw none of it. He pulled the shades, intentionally put his desk out of the light, and, secretive in whatever he did now (for, in the doing, none but himself knew why), spent the morning for some reason compelled to write — facts only — of everything he could remember of her; the estimate of all she wasn’t looked fulsome in a list. A bora was blowing up in the Adriatic of his soul, and, patience, the only virtue left there, became a pleasant timekeeper. He baited his fishhooks.

First, he had no trouble learning from van der Slang’s grandmother — a boastful and polyphagous old bat who lived near them down there — what he had feared: they were already engaged. (Scarce manumised and already his!) She, however, knew nothing else. And so under false pretenses he wrote to the Naval Academy again for information as to the Dutchman’s screwship and its nautical itinerary, hoping thus to determine by logical, if general, conjecture in which month or months in the coming annus deliberandi the wedding day might be set. That wasn’t all. He wrote to several Quinsy girls in Charlottesville, well-disposed to him, he remembered, because ill-disposed to Isabel, requesting them to monitor the local papers there for any announcements of consequence.

The concrete acts of maléfice had just begun. One ingenuity mothered another. Darconville worked with the morbid logic of an inquisitor not only to learn more of this witch and her repeating frauds but also to emperor outrages to serve his pain and so to fright all pity from the world withal where killing the living to regenerate death alone fit the ways of the woes he felt. To know more? To dig more deeply? It was of course folly, reasonless — motus without motive, motive not motivirt! — and yet a wish, the wish a desire, the desire an uncontrollable longing perversely perpetrated upon him because he felt he should not , an act soliciting only the absolution of hell unless by sulphuring himself in the sins he learned and so converting to vapor in the heat of his throes to ascend upon her in an infamy unseen he somehow mitigate the strategy of evil involved in the terrible but just equivalence of pain awaiting her. Who would boast a victory that cost no chance of loss? Who would bulletin such success as that which, in the field of mind, took only random memory for an assailant? No, it was too late. No sweet behavior now, no soft minioning could ever hope to turn him from where his appetite was fixed.