Darker Worlds Read online

  “Mr Thurn bid me good afternoon then, and the last I saw of him he was walking off in the direction of the Crown Inn, so as to get a dog-cart to take him to Leatherhead, where he would meet a train to return him to London.

  “You will not be surprised when I say I did not sleep for a moment that night as I lay wondering if I had entertained a madman in my home that day. And yet, almost against my will, I could not entirely dismiss what he had told me as absolute fancy. I suppose madmen are earnest in their madness, but this gentleman seemed entirely lucid to me. Looking into his too-keen eyes was much like looking into your own, Mr Holmes.

  “In any case, at about half past two in the morning my restlessness caused me at last to rise from my bed, take up my lantern and venture from my chamber, stepping quietly so as not to disturb Mrs Littledale sleeping in my sister’s room next door. I was drawn into the central block of the mansion, and from there to the locked door that closed off the east wing of the house. I do not know quite what compelled me to do so, but it was as though I had sleepwalked there; that is to say, it did not seem a conscious decision. I feel now that I was acting on an intuition.

  “I leaned my head close to the panel but heard nothing beyond, even when I finally laid my ear against the wood. One might think I would then have turned back to my bedroom, and yet my compulsion had not been satisfied. I had brought the key with me as before, and again I unlocked the door and opened it while shining my lantern into the dreadful blackness beyond.

  “Oh that I had not done so, Mr Holmes, because I will never scrape from my mind the image that lay before me. I dare say I would not have needed my lantern to see into that long dark passage, because the two figures situated in its center seemed to radiate a soft pale glow much as though bathed in the rays of the moon. There on the floor of the hallway lay the cheetah, though I would not have recognised it as such had I not known that is what it was. Otherwise, I might easily have taken it for the skeleton of a large dog, impossibly imbued with life. It lay on its side, so wasted that it was a wonder it was able to raise its head. But its head was indeed raised, as it glared with a palpable malice at the man who stood over it only a few paces away.

  “That man, of course, was Mr Edward Thurn. I am embarrassed to tell you that he was without clothing, his skin appearing almost radiantly white as I have described. He was returning the intense gaze of the animal lying before him, but he had obviously heard me open the door and from the corner of his eye seen the glare of my lantern, for without taking his eyes off the creature he raised his left arm and pointed his finger at me. I understood what he signified by this gesture. He was commanding me to withdraw and close the door. This I did, and when I had turned the key in the lock I backed away from the door with the whole of my body shaking, for I had never in my life witnessed so ghastly a scene but for having watched my dear twin die before my very eyes. I returned to my room then and sat upon my bed, still shaking, until dawn. Only then could I summon the courage to return to the locked door and crack it open sufficiently to peer beyond. This time there was nothing to see but for shadows lying as thick as the silence. I experienced another intuition, and that was a certainty that the cheetah was gone forever.”

  At this point in Helen Stoner’s narrative Holmes asked, “Might this nocturnal excursion to the dilapidated wing of your house have only been a dream, Miss Stoner? For I am sorry to report that your visitor Edward Thurn is no longer among the living.”

  “What’s this, Holmes?” I said, quite surprised.

  “Really, Watson,” my friend said to me, “you must pay closer attention to the morning paper.” Here he gestured to a folded copy of that morning’s Daily Telegraph that rested nearby. “I knew the name as soon as you uttered it, Miss Stoner, but I wanted to hear your story in full before I admitted as much. Yet I suspect you are already aware of the man’s fate, for you have just now come from the place where he had taken a room in Upper Swandam Lane, have you not?”

  “You guess correctly, Mr Holmes,” said Miss Stoner.

  “I do not guess, Miss Stoner. I deduce. Your breathlessness when you entered this room and your freshly agitated aspect indicated a very recent shock.”

  “I did not realise his death had already been reported in the paper. This morning when I inquired about Mr Thurn at the address given on the letter he had sent to my stepfather I was told there had been a terrifying cry from his room at about three in the morning, and when the door was finally forced Mr Thurn was found lying dead on the bed, his eyes staring fixedly into nothingness. It was the opinion of those who saw him that his heart had given out.”

  “The cause given in the paper was apoplexy,” Holmes stated. “But surely you see the dilemma here, Miss Stoner. The body of the obscure explorer and world traveller Mr Edward Thurn was discovered at three in the morning, but you claim to have seen him standing in your very home at approximately half past two. It is impossible for him to have arrived back in London in so short a time.”

  “Precisely, Mr Holmes. It would be an impossibility under natural circumstances.”

  “It is supernatural circumstances you propose, then. That it was not actually Mr Thurn you saw in your home, but some projected essence of himself that he sent to deal with that other phantom being.”

  “Make of it what you will, Mr Holmes. It is all beyond me.”

  “And rather beyond me,” Holmes said. “If I must admit it.”

  Miss Stoner rose from her chair and proceeded to excuse herself, saying, “I am meeting my fiancé soon, Mr Holmes, so I will take my leave. Perhaps as you muse upon the events I have recounted you will come to some other explanation that escapes me, and if so I hope you will share it with me. Until that time, I extend to you the same invitation I did to poor Mr Thurn, who I fear may not only have died from the strain of battling his final monster, but may even have hoped to do so, to atone for the sins he felt he had committed.”

  “You are offering me your stepfather’s books, then? It is kind of you, and as you mentioned there were some of an esoteric nature I wonder if they might shed further light on these mysterious events, but I suggest that despite your reluctance to retain any of your stepfather’s belongings you keep them and read them yourself, Miss Stoner. You have a sharp and inquisitive mind, and perhaps it is you who will one day better explain to me what transpired in your home. And might I say, I hope your home proves less haunted henceforth.”

  “I repeat that my only hope is to soon step out of its door once and for all. Good day, gentlemen.”

  When our visitor had departed Holmes clicked his pipe stem against his teeth, then pondered aloud, “Of course there is no such thing as a swamp adder. What was I thinking?”

  I said to him, “If one were to entertain for even a moment such outrageous notions, surely a man as hateful as Grimesby Roylott would not be capable of the mental feats this Thurn fellow claimed were required for their collaboration.”

  Lowering his pipe, my friend Sherlock Holmes replied, “But Roylott was, in some ways, well suited to such an exercise, being that he felt he answered to no man or God, and that his mental acuity entitled him to power. There is no richer soil for the growth of evil than the supposition that one is superior to one’s fellow human beings. Mind, there are those who, being cognisant of their greater than average intelligence, will utilise it for the betterment of others as if it were a resource they had received in unfair quantity. But too many are those who hoard their intelligence, clutch it to their breast jealously, and allow it to deform their self-conception into something superhuman, when in fact inhuman would be the better designation. Unfortunately, Roylott was not a singular specimen; this world teems with his ilk.”

  “True enough, but all that aside, you are the most rational of men and surely you cannot believe in ghosts and hobgoblins.”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Watson, than are dreamt of in my philosophy. There is only one matter I am certain of.”

  “And what is that, Holm
es?”

  “One day, truly, I must travel to Tibet.”

  DIRTY DESK

  The Pearsons believed in no heaven they could look forward to – and here in the realm of concrete and mud, no life-changing epiphany, nothing to inspire real awe or wonder. There was only waking at six o’clock every morning (even on weekends, because their biological clocks were attuned to that), emptying their bladders, refilling them with coffee. There was the dead-eyed drive in their respective cars to their respective jobs.

  For what it was worth their vehicles were always new, because of her job as a car salesperson. She did well at her job because she was earnest, a friend (“Oh my God, I grew up in Eastborough, too! Do you know the Weirs?”), she wanted what was best for her customers (“I’m going to do right by you because I want to build an ongoing relationship with you,” she’d say, especially to the men). When they asked why the car they saw on the website was $9,777 with a monthly payment of $129 (zero down) and yet the car they were given to test drive turned out to have a monthly payment of $280, and they came to realize they were being shown a new car with only 26 miles on the clock – whereas the affordable used model the customer had expected to be shown had 17,900 miles – as often as not they’d cave (well, it was a virgin vehicle with no previous owner), and soon it was congratulations! and you can take it home today! and oh and for an additional $9 a month for 72 months (your credit rating didn’t qualify you for the 84 months, sorry) you can extend the warranty! and oh and we’ll auction your trade-in (without telling you how that works to your benefit)! call me if you have any questions! enjoy your new $17,040 car!

  She had told her husband, “Women like me because they see me as being on their side in the masculine world of the car. Men like me because, well…”

  “Because you’re hot,” said Mr. Pearson.

  “Ex-act-ly. They can’t see straight for all the steam I give off.”

  “Ooh.”

  If Mr. Pearson was to describe his work to someone, he’d say his job was attending meetings. At these meeting they talked in a secret code of numbers. This was not the hard and indisputable mathematics of nature, however, in which a bird had two eyes and two wings and two feet with four toes each. This was the more abstract mathematics of sales figures and losses, production costs and company stocks, all of it as illusory as the concept of money itself.

  He had said to his wife once, in a kind of lamenting or at least philosophical tone, “I’ve never made anything with my hands. I’ve never created anything. Nothing tangible, at least.”

  “Well, we could get you a part-time job making pizzas on the weekends,” she had said, smiling.

  “Yes! Yes, that would fill the void. Or my stomach, at least.”

  The bottom line, in any case, was that the two of them fretted less over making the mortgage payments on their home at 159 Golden Elm Lane than many of the others who dwelt in the neighborhood. They had even broken up their workaday tedium with the occasional special vacation, either together or separately. He had recently returned from Thailand, and had told his wife in great detail about all his hotel frolics, mostly with ladyboys but also with an underage pair of girls. She had kept him abreast of her recent month-long affair with a coworker, both of them laughing when she told him how the man had begged her and wept when she’d broken it off. Their sex was always more exciting, reinvigorated, after such reports.

  For his last birthday she had given him an old video, burned on DVD, he had only heard rumors about previously, showing a boy being torn to pieces by wild horses in an apparent ritual while an audience of men masturbated to the spectacle. Mr. Pearson had said, “Oh, honey,” appreciatively, all the more appreciative when she began pumping his member while he watched the video a second time.

  But aside from such meager interludes, still the waking at six. Pissing, coffee, driving to work. Smiling at coworkers they wanted to stab in the eyes with an icepick.

  He would sometimes sit on his sofa in the dark and peek out through a chink between the front window’s drapes, as if in a deer blind, watching the comings and goings of neighbors, seeing them pass by in their own windows, and he’d wonder if their lives were any more exciting, what kind of secret activities they performed. Not, of course, the mundane stuff – the picking of noses, the smelling of fingers, drinking straight from the milk jug – but activities that offered rebellion, if only furtively, against the bastions of routine and monotony. Against the arbitrary notions of ethics and sanity. Did this man across the street who lived alone don a silicone woman’s mask with attached wig when he came home from the office? Did that man there hoard kiddie porn? Did the woman in that house beat her children…sleep with her teenage son? Mr. Pearson would share these fantasies with his wife, and then – fleetingly vitalized – they would go and fuck.

  Together they would peer out at Golden Elm Lane and share ideas, propose plans, in whispers and stifled giggles. Could they lure into their house that elderly neighbor’s big friendly coon cat? How about that couple’s kindergartener, who liked to play in his front lawn? But the torture of a cat didn’t promise more than a brief spark (even if imagining the old woman’s misery over her vanished pet enhanced the scenario), and as tantalizing as the child scheme was it invited too much danger; the police would be all over that, and in these days of ubiquitous CCTV cameras their recorded interaction with a missing child could prove disastrous.

  “How about one of your customers?” he asked her. “You could bring him here on a ‘test drive.’” He hooked his fingers into quotation marks.

  “Dumbass,” she said. “And I go back without him and say I lost him? It could never be anyone associated with us. A friend, a coworker, a customer, a neighbor. I don’t think you’re really serious about it.”

  “I’d want it as much as you would.” If he couldn’t make something, let him unmake something.

  But for now, after such conversations, they would let the drapes fall into place again. And tomorrow it would be: wake, piss, drink, drive.

  Until the day a cog slipped in the universe, and the Pearsons’ washing machine broke down.

  ***

  The Pearsons had picked out their new washer, and of course a new dryer to complement it, but it would be two weeks before the set could be delivered and the old units removed, and in the meantime the dirty laundry had piled up. On Friday evening Mrs. Pearson heaved a sigh, loaded up her latest new car, and drove it to the nearest laundromat, first stopping for a coffee to accompany the book she would read – The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, by Yukio Mishima – while she waited for her clothes to wash and dry.

  She had asked if her husband wanted to come, if only to help lug baskets, but he was in one of his quiet funks, sitting on the sofa with one finger and one eye hooked between the drapes. “Not really,” he had muttered.

  It was winter, and though there presently wasn’t much snow on the ground, when she’d stepped outside with the first basket the cold was like a pail of acid thrown in her face. At least, when she turned from the car for the next, here he came carrying another of the four baskets for her. When the car was loaded, though, it was back to the sofa for him.

  The laundromat was in a tiny strip mall on the gray, frayed edge of the city. She carried in her baskets one at a time, and on her last trip a respectable-looking man who had been sitting down by the rows of dryers – the only other customer right now – rushed over to hold the door open for her. She thanked him.

  It had been a while since she’d done this and cursed repeatedly under her breath as she went about loading her wash. First, because she put detergent into one machine before noticing the Out of Order sign on its front, then because another machine kept spitting out the quarters she fed it. Looking over from the chair he’d returned to, the man joked, “We can fake putting a man on the moon but we can’t even make a washing machine that works properly, huh?”

  How witty and charming. Well, he wasn’t bad looking, and she considered taking him
into the single restroom, fucking him, then afterwards when he asked when he could see her again telling him, “If you say one more word to me I’ll call the police and say you raped me.” But she only glanced over at him and smiled, and soon she was sitting at the far end of the room from him sipping her coffee and reading her novel.

  As it went into one of its inexplicable cycles, one of the machines the man was using to dry his clothes began making an odd sound. It was loud and distinct but somehow at the same time hushed and hissing, and to Mrs. Pearson sounded very much like a human voice. A human voice trying to whisper in a sinister way, like someone portraying a demon or witch in a movie. She lifted her head to listen more attentively. If she were to make words out of the noise, she’d say they were “dirty desk” – dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk,dirtydesk.

  Like her husband, she was a watcher for signs; signs that there was more to existence than the commonplace and readily explainable. She couldn’t parse any personal meaning in “dirty desk,” however. Her desk at work was a tad cluttered, that was all, and her husband was similarly neat, nor could she interpret anything more broadly symbolic in such words. No…unfortunately it was just the sound of a running down machine in a running down universe.

  She set aside her book to go use the restroom (alone), and as she passed the man seated near the dryers he gestured at the one that was whispering dirtydesk and said, “Noisy, huh?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Scary,” he added, with a chuckle.

  Ah, so he had a similar impression. But she didn’t discuss it with him. When she emerged from the restroom it was back to her chair closer to the front, and in time the machine stopped making that sound. The man extracted his clothes, thankfully didn’t remain to order them on the folding tables. In leaving he said goodnight and she politely responded in kind. A gust of biting cold dashed through the briefly open door, dying at her feet. Now she was alone, and it was black beyond the laundromat’s front windows.