The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (5 page)

***

For the first few nights after this experience Slokker suffered no further episodes of sleepwalking. It seemed that his plan had worked and that his strange need to visit the windowless room had been sated. He gave up the practice of binding himself to the bed with cords, but on the fourth night, he awoke to find himself crawling on his hands and knees along the corridor towards 205.
 

Although he had discovered the cure for his somnambulism Slokker was loath to resort to it again. His visit to the room with the mirror had been troubling and unpleasant and although he was inclined to regard the far-off face in the mirror as a delusion brought on by tiredness, he retained a fear of it that he found hard to dismiss. However, he needed uninterrupted sleep if he were to continue his studies successfully, so the following morning he let himself into the abandoned apartment. This time he began a search of Deschamps’ rooms in the hope of discovering something to help him understand the purpose of the windowless room.

Deschamps’ books did not seem to have been arranged in any particular order. They were piled in corners and scattered randomly across the floor of the living room. However, as he examined them more closely, it appeared to Pieter that those most recently read had been piled around the base of a folding canvas chair. Deschamps seemed to have made notes about these on pieces of scrap paper, which he had then inserted into the volumes. He had also scrawled notes directly in the margins of some texts.

Contrary to the concierge’s assertion, very few of the books dealt with black magic, and these were riddled with dismissive remarks in pencil:
‘in other words an excuse for sexual self-gratification
’, ‘
the desire for power over others by means of a system of obfuscation
’, ‘
drug-related hallucinations
’, ‘
auto-suggestion and hypnosi
s’ etc. The texts that appeared to have held the most fascination for Deschamps were those stacked closest to the chair. Here Slokker found a series of privately-printed pamphlets dating from the early 1890s. He noticed that the pamphlets were all stamped with the official seal of the Bibliotheque Nationale: no doubt Deschamps had furthered his occult researches by stealing from a public library. Slokker sat down in the canvas chair to read them.

It seemed that they concerned the use of a chamber called a ‘psychomantium’. The pamphlets had been issued by an obscure sect of psychic researchers, and they were illustrated with photographic records of experiments conducted in rooms much like the one that Deschamps had fashioned in his apartment. The photographs were evidently of long exposure and showed blurred and distorted images of a series of faces apparently reflected in a mirror. The pamphlets claimed these to be ‘the faces of the dead.’ In truth, the quality of the reproduction was so poor that they rather resembled crudely fashioned dolls’ heads in various states of disrepair. Nevertheless, the accompanying texts stated that these were authentic visitations and that the mirror served as a doorway to the afterlife.

Once more, Slokker felt compelled to enter the windowless room. He turned on the feeble lamp, sat down before the mirror, and attempted to clear his mind. He stared into the void.

For the first few minutes he saw nothing. He began to relax, and then felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck, and he shivered as he realised that once again he could see the silvery-white glare within the depths of reflected darkness. And then he saw that within the glare was a face. The longer Slokker stared, the closer it seemed to approach, and the brighter became the glare, as if a camera lens were zooming in inexorably. He did not know how long he stared; his senses were becoming confused. That the face was that of a dead man Slokker had no doubt. The yellowish tinge of the bloodless skin betrayed that much, and the eyes of the apparition did not blink. But what caused him to overturn the chair and stagger out of the psychomantium in a blind panic was that the face he saw in the mirror was his own.

***

It was not difficult for Slokker to obtain the drugs he needed to calm his nerves, but he did it as discreetly as he could, for his medical studies were in a state close to chaos and his failure to attend seminars and lectures was attracting comment. There was really no alternative, though, because the strain was becoming unbearable.
 

In one of the pamphlets that he had not read the previous night, and which he seemed to have had the presence of mind to bring with him to his rooms, Slokker found a short history of the group calling themselves ‘La Société des âmes mortes’. They had made their first investigations into the afterlife by means of séances but had dismissed this line of enquiry after a series of encounters with fraudulent mediums. They had then explored the ‘science’ of ouija boards and claimed that their subsequent use of psychomantic chambers was a consequence of a spirit message thereby received. The first experiments had been uneventful and the techniques they had borrowed from the psychic literature of the time, involving the sitter concentrating on photographs and handling the effects of the deceased, produced results that were easy to dismiss as mere fancy.

Just after the Society proposed the abandoning of this new line of research, one of the sitters began to make extraordinary claims about having communicated with the dead. He insisted that a horrible secret had been revealed to him. Investigation of the transcripts he had made whilst experiencing the visitations revealed disturbing hints about the nature of consciousness after death. But the most extraordinary claim of all was that he had begun to communicate with his own dead spirit. However, he would not be drawn on the exact nature of these exchanges. What was apparent was that his mental state had suffered a dramatic collapse and, only a few weeks later, he was found to have committed suicide. There were those in the Society who followed in his wake, unable to resist the lure of the forbidden knowledge that their dead selves might impart to them. Those who did not succumb to the temptation abandoned all association with psychic research. There were hints that the revelations experienced were based on the concept that it is the dead that sustain the structure of the waking world through their dreams and that all living existence is illusory.

When Slokker came to a part of the pamphlet featuring a sepia photograph, one hundred years old, of the members of the Société des âmes mortes, he nearly dropped the thing in fright. Even had there not been a list of names beneath the photograph, he would have recognised the face of the man in the second row at the extreme right. It was that of Deschamps, or some identical ancestor. But this was not the worst of it. The other faces also seemed familiar, though they were blurred. One had a curious resemblance to the old concierge. And sitting next to him was someone whose identity could scarcely be mistaken. It was Slokker’s own face that stared back at him from the photograph.

***

Although Slokker tried to dismiss these strange events and revelations from his mind, he found that his nightly compulsion to return and gaze into the mirror of the psychomantium was overwhelming. The drugs helped him to sleep and he still had recourse to binding his feet to the bed, but events soon overtook him, despite all of his precautions.
 

One morning, just as he had finished shaving, the mirror above the sink filled with the silvery-white glare. Slokker’s normal, bleary-eyed reflection was replaced with an image of his leering corpse-face. Its eyes had sunk deep into black-rimmed sockets and the yellowish skin stretched tight over the skull, drawing the lips back from teeth made prominent by the flesh’s decay. Hair was plastered down horribly across its mottled forehead. The face was close enough to touch and though it materialised for only a moment Slokker could trace each lineament of decay. It seemed to lean forward towards him, confidentially, and whispered:

‘You are simply a dream . . . and I am tired of dreaming.’

Then it was gone.

***

After that, Slokker could not bear to be alone. For hours, he tramped the streets of the city, seeking people, crowds. He sat in cafés during the afternoon and mingled with revellers in the evenings, but despite all his efforts to join in he was gripped by the idea that all this was merely scenery, abandoned backstage.
 

While he was out drinking himself into a state of oblivion in a bar close to Sacre Coeur, a group of his fellow medical students came across him, slumped over a corner table. They pressed their company upon him, enquiring after his health with real concern. Slokker was glad of their attentions and lost himself in evasion and claims that he would soon return to the University and complete his studies. But as his drunken elation reached its height, when even he half-believed that his fears were caused by nothing more than nervous exhaustion that would be overcome with time, he happened to glance at a mirror hanging on the wall behind one of his friend’s heads. There again was the silvery brightness and his dead, decaying face twisted into an expression of malign contempt. But this time it was not a momentary visitation; the image remained. And he thought that within the laughter around him he could hear a mocking quality, as if it were at his own expense. The dead face too, seemed to be laughing, and Slokker’s friends exchanged anxious glances as his own laughter turned to screams of horror. He got to his feet and pushed through the throng, shoving them roughly aside, until he was out into the streets and the Parisian night.

From then on all mirrors seemed to have become contaminated. In the darkness even shop windows glowed with the silver-white glare. When he got back to his apartment he smashed the mirrors in his rooms and covered the windows with newspaper to mask any reflections.

***

Shortly after Slokker had begun to retreat from the world he received some startling information from the concierge. Coming across him in his office after a trip out to buy some bread, the old man had beckoned Pieter over. It seemed that Deschamps’ body had finally been discovered. A police boat had found it floating miles downstream in the Seine, weeks of decomposition having brought the corpse to the surface. It seemed that the man had drowned himself. Apartment 205 was to be let out again, after extensive redecoration, of course.

***

Slokker’s mental condition continued to deteriorate. Some of the medical students who had heard about the encounter in the bar attempted to visit him, but he refused to let them in. Even his old lecturer came to the apartment once, but his initial sympathy soon turned to threats of calling in the authorities when faced with Slokker’s stubborn refusal to communicate. But Slokker viewed all these visitors as he would a series of shadows. He was afraid that the dead face in the mirror was now really set on his shoulders, despite the fact that his sense of touch told him otherwise. It had been days since he’d looked in a mirror. Mornings and afternoons were taken up with sitting in the corner of his living room, watching the flies circling around the centre of the ceiling. And when it was night he would sit in the darkness and stare into space, hoping to lose himself in it. He no longer dared sleep. Even after binding himself to the bed he found that the once laborious process of disentanglement no longer awoke him. He had learned to untie the most complex knots whilst still asleep.
 

Exhausted, emaciated, Slokker gradually lost the strength to resist the silent summons that drew him to the psychomantium. Soon, he knew he would give himself over to the compulsion to see again the dead face, and to listen to anything it might care to tell him.

Late one night, as he struggled to resist, Slokker remembered the landlord’s intention to have Apartment 205 redecorated. Suddenly panic-stricken, he hurried from his rooms and down the short corridor. He could barely turn the key in the lock for fear that the psychomantium might not be there, but as he entered he saw that, although the painters’ ladders and buckets had been stacked in the living room, work had yet to begin. He entered the windowless room and the dead face, appearing more decomposed than ever, was visible at once, as if it had been waiting for him. In the background was the familiar glare, like a continuous burst of lightning that reached only as far as the mirror’s surface. Slokker sat in the darkness for hours as the rotting face with the whispering, hollow voice spoke to him. It urged him to cast aside his life, this mirage, this dream in the decaying brains of the dead. It told of the grey, insensible void where the hopes and miseries of living existence have no meaning. ‘The world you move in is not real,’ the voice told Slokker. ‘The thoughts you think are not your own. Down in their mouldy graves, where the worms creep, the dead sustain the illusion you call life, waiting for you living beings to awaken in your narrow houses for all eternity. You will not die,’ said the voice, ‘for you have never been alive.’

And as Slokker gazed into the mirror he saw the revenant’s face smile almost benignly.

***

Some days later the old concierge made his way up the stairs to Slokker’s apartment. He had not seen the young man during this period and although he didn’t particularly care for him, he was obliged to investigate, as the owners of the building had complained that the rent had not been paid. Up until now the concierge had ignored the various entreaties that Slokker’s medical friends had made; his distaste for their profession made him dismiss them as do-gooders. The old man had his own theory: Slokker had simply absconded in the last few days without a word to anyone in order to escape his debts. It had happened before. What else would you expect from foreign students?