The Horla (2 page)

I said, “If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn’t we meet them a long time ago? Why haven’t you yourself seen them? Why haven’t I seen them, myself?”

He replied, “Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look, here is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks men
down, destroys buildings, uproots trees, whips the sea up into mountains of water, destroys cliffs, and throws great ships onto the shoals; here is the wind that kills, whistles, groans, howls—have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists.”

I fell silent before this simple reasoning. This man was a wise man, or perhaps an idiot. I wasn’t able rightly to tell; but I fell silent. What he said then, I had often thought.

July 3
. I slept badly; there must indeed be a feverish influence here, for my coachman suffers from the same illness as I do. When I returned yesterday, I noticed his unusual pallor. I asked him:

“What is wrong with you, Jean?”

“I can no longer rest, Monsieur; my nights are eating up my days. Since Monsieur left, that’s what’s been sticking to me like a curse.”

The other servants are doing well, though, but I am very afraid of a relapse.

July 4
. Without a doubt, I have caught it again. My old nightmares are coming back. Last night, I felt someone squatting over me, who, with his mouth over mine, was drinking in my life through my lips. Yes, he was sucking it in from my throat, just like a leech. Then he rose, sated, and I woke up, so wounded, broken, and annihilated, that I could no longer move. If that goes on for a few more days, I will definitely go away again.

July 5
. Have I lost my reason? What I saw last night is so strange that my head spins when I think of it!

As I do now each evening, I had locked my door; then, since I was thirsty, I drank half a glass of water, and I noted by chance that my carafe was full to its crystal stopper.

Then I went to bed, and fell into one of my dreadful sleeps, from which I was snatched after about two hours by an even more frightful shock.

Imagine a man asleep, who is being killed, and who wakes up with a knife in his lung, with a death rattle, covered in blood, who can no longer breathe, who will die, and doesn’t understand why—that’s what it’s like.

Having finally come to my senses, I was thirsty again; I lit a candle and went towards the table where my carafe was. I raised it and tipped it over my glass; nothing poured out.—It was empty! It was completely empty! First, I was at a complete loss; then, all of a sudden, I experienced such a terrible emotion that I had to sit down, or rather, fall into a chair. Then I bounded up again to look around me. Then I sat down again, overcome with astonishment and fear, before the transparent crystal! I contemplated it fixedly, trying to comprehend. My hands were trembling! Someone must have drunk this water. Who? Me? It must be me; it could only be me. So I was a sleepwalker, then, and was living, without knowing it, this double mysterious life, which makes us suspect that there are two beings
inside us, or that a foreign being, unknowable and invisible, animates our captive body when our soul is dulled; and our body obeys this other being as it does ourselves, or obeys it more than ourselves.

Who can understand my abominable anguish? Who can understand the emotion of a man, of a healthy mind, wide awake, full of reason, who looks through the glass of a carafe, terrified that a little water has disappeared while he slept. And I stayed there till daylight, without daring to return to my bed.

July 6
. I am going mad. Again someone drank the entire contents of my carafe last night—or rather, I drank it.

But is it me? Is it me? Who could it be? Who? Oh my God! am I going mad? Who can save me?

July 10
. I have just carried out some surprising experiments.

Without a doubt, I am mad! And yet …

On July 6, before I went to bed, I placed on my table some wine, some milk, some water, some bread, and some strawberries.

Someone drank—I drank—all the water, and a little milk. They didn’t touch the wine, or the bread, or the strawberries.

On July 7, I repeated the same test, which gave the same result.

On July 8, I didn’t include the water and the milk. They touched nothing.

Finally, on July 9, I put on my table just the water and the milk, taking care to wrap the carafes in pieces of white muslin, and to tie down the stoppers. Then I rubbed my lips, beard, and hands with graphite, and I went to bed.

The invincible sleep seized me, followed soon after by the atrocious awakening. I had not moved at all; my covers themselves did not have any stains. I rushed over to my table. The pieces of cloth enclosing the bottles had remained spotless. I undid the strings, quivering with fear. Someone had drunk all the water! And all the milk! Oh my God …

I am going to leave soon for Paris.

July 12
. Paris. I must have lost my head, those last few days. I must have been the plaything of my exhausted imagination, unless I am actually a sleepwalker, or have undergone one of those influences, which have been observed but are yet to be explained, that are called ‘suggestive.’ In any case, my panic was bordering on madness, but twenty-four hours in Paris have sufficed to restore my composure.

Yesterday, after I did some shopping and paid some visits, which made me enter into the mood of the fresh, invigorating air, I ended my evening at the Théatre-Français. They were performing a play by Alexandre
Dumas the younger, and that alert, powerful wit completed my cure. Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time, we people the void with phantoms.

I came back to the hotel very happy, by way of the boulevards. Rubbing shoulders with the crowd, I thought, not without irony, of my recent terrors and surmises, when I believed, yes, I believed an invisible being was living beneath my roof. How weak our head is, how easily alarmed it is, how quickly it wanders, as soon as a little incomprehensible fact strikes us!

Instead of concluding with these simple words: “I do not understand because the cause escapes me,” we immediately imagine terrifying mysteries and supernatural powers.

July 14
. Bastille Day. I walked about in the streets. I was as delighted by the firecrackers and flags as a child. It is idiotic, though, to be happy on schedule, on a day decreed by the government. The people are an imbecilic herd, sometimes stupidly patient and sometimes ferociously rebellious. They are told, “Have fun.” They have fun. They are told, “Go fight with your neighbor.” They go fight. They are told, “Vote for the Emperor.” They vote for the Emperor. Then, they are told: “Vote for the Republic.” And they vote for the Republic.

Those who run it are also fools; but instead of obeying people, they obey principles, which can only be inane, impotent, and false because of the very fact that they
are
principles, that is, ideas imagined to be definite and immutable, in this world where we are sure of nothing, since light is an illusion, since sound is an illusion.

July 16
. I saw some things yesterday that troubled me very much.

I was dining at my cousin’s, Madame Sablé, whose husband is in command of the 76th Chasseurs in Limoges. I was there as a guest along with two young women, one of whom had married a doctor, Dr. Parent, who spends much of his time studying nervous illnesses and the extraordinary symptoms that experiments with hypnotism and suggestion are producing these days.

He told us at great length about the incredible results obtained by English scholars and by doctors in the Nancy school.

The facts he mentioned seemed to me so bizarre that I told him I didn’t believe him at all.

“We are,” he asserted, “on the verge of discovering one of the most important secrets of nature, I mean one of its most important secrets on this earth, for nature must have far more important ones, up there, in the stars. Ever since man has thought, ever
since he has known how to speak and write his thoughts, he has felt touched by a mystery impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he has tried, by the effort of his intelligence, to compensate for the powerlessness of his organs. When this intelligence was still in its rudimentary state, this haunting by invisible phenomena took frightening forms of the most commonplace kind. Hence popular beliefs in the supernatural were born, legends of wandering spirits, fairies, gnomes, ghosts, I will even say the legend of God, for our concepts of the artificer-creator, from whatever religion they come to us, are indeed the most mediocre inventions, the stupidest, the most unacceptable ones ever to have come from the frightened brains of creatures. Nothing is truer than this saying of Voltaire’s: ‘God made man in his image, but man has returned the favor.’

“But for a little more than century there has been a presentiment of something new. Mesmer and a few others have put us on an unexpected track, and we have truly arrived, especially in the last four or five years, at surprising results.”

My cousin, also very skeptical, smiled. Dr. Parent said to her,

“Do you want me to try to put you to sleep, Madame?”

“Yes, I’d like that very much.”

She sat down in an armchair and he began to look at her fixedly, hypnotizing her. I felt all of a sudden a
little troubled; my heart was beating and my throat tightened. I saw Madame Sablé’s eyes becoming heavier, her mouth clenching, her chest heaving.

After ten minutes, she was asleep.

“Position yourself behind her,” the doctor said to me.

So I sat down behind her. He placed in her hands a visiting card and said to her, “This is a mirror. What do you see in it?”

She replied, “I see my cousin.”

“What is he doing?”

“He is twisting his moustache.”

“And now?”

“He is taking a photograph out of his pocket.”

“What does this photograph show?”

“Himself.”

It was true! And this photograph had just been delivered to me, that very evening, at the hotel.

“How is he shown in this portrait?”

“He is standing, with his hat in his hand.”

So she could see in this card, in this white pasteboard, as she would have seen in a mirror.

The other young women, terrified, said, “That’s enough! Enough! Enough!”

But the doctor commanded, “You will get up tomorrow at eight o’clock; then you will go find your cousin at his hotel, and you will beg him to lend you five thousand francs, which your husband asks you for, and which he needs to get from you for his next trip.”

Then he woke her up.

As I was returning to the hotel, I thought about this curious séance, and I began to be assailed by doubts—not about the absolute, unquestionable good faith of my cousin, whom I have known like my sister, since childhood, but about the possible trickery of the doctor. Might he not have been hiding a mirror in his hand, which he was showing to the young woman asleep, at the same time as his visiting card? Professional magicians are known to do even more unusual things.

I returned, then, and went to bed.

This morning, around eight-thirty, I was awakened by my valet, who said to me:

“Madame Sablé is here, asking to speak to Monsieur right away.”

I dressed myself in haste and invited her in.

She sat down, very agitated, her eyes lowered, and, without raising her veil, she said to me:

“My dear cousin, I have a great favor to ask you.”

“What is it, cousin?”

“It embarrasses me very much to tell you, but I must. I am in need, in dire need, of five thousand francs.”

“Really? You?”

“Yes, me, or rather, my husband, who has asked me to get them.”

I was so stupefied that I stammered out my replies. I wondered if she and Dr. Parent weren’t really making fun of me, if this weren’t simply a farce prepared in advance and very well played.

But, as I looked at her attentively, all my doubts dissipated. She was trembling with anxiety, so painful was this task to her, and I could tell that her throat was choking with sobs.

I knew she was very wealthy, and I continued:

“But doesn’t your husband have five thousand francs at his disposal? Think about it. Are you really sure he told you to ask me for them?”

She hesitated for a few seconds, as if she were making a great effort to search through her memory, then replied:

“Yes … yes … I am sure.”

“He wrote to you?”

She hesitated again, thinking. I could see how hard it was for her to think. She didn’t know. She just knew that she had to borrow five thousand francs from me for her husband. So she dared to lie.

“Yes, he wrote to me.”

“When? You never mentioned it to me yesterday.”

“I only received his letter this morning.”

“Can you show it to me?”

“No … no … no … it contained private matters … too personal … I … I burned it.”

“So, your husband has debts, then?”

She hesitated again, then murmured:

“I don’t know.”

I stated flatly: “The fact is, I can’t give you five thousand francs right now, my dear cousin.”

She let out a sort of cry of anguish.

“Oh! I implore you, I implore you, find them.…”

She became distraught, joining her hands together as if she were praying to me! I heard her voice change tone. She cried and stammered, tormented, dominated by the irresistible order she had received.

“Oh! I beg you … if you only knew how much I am suffering … I must have the money today.”

I took pity on her.

“You will have it this afternoon, I swear to you.”

She cried out: “Oh! Thank you! Thank you! How good you are.”

I continued: “Do you remember what happened yesterday at your house?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember that Dr. Parent put you to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he ordered you to come to me this morning to borrow five thousand francs from me, and you are obeying his suggestion right now.”

She thought for a few seconds and replied: