The Horla (3 page)

“But it’s my husband who wants them.”

I tried to convince her for an hour, but didn’t succeed.

When she had left, I ran over to the doctor’s. He was about to go out; and he listened to me, smiling. Then he said:

“Do you believe now?”

“Yes, I’m compelled to.”

“Let’s go to your cousin’s.”

She was already napping on a chaise longue, overwhelmed with fatigue. The doctor took her pulse, looked at her for some time, then raised his hand over her eyes. Gradually they closed, under the irresistible force of this magnetic power.

When she had fallen asleep:

“Your husband no longer needs the five thousand francs. You are going to forget that you begged your cousin to lend them to you. If he speaks to you about it, you will not understand.”

Then he woke her up. I took my wallet out of my pocket.

“Here, dear cousin, is what you asked me for this morning.”

She was so surprised that I didn’t dare insist. I did try to revive her memory, but she strongly denied everything, thought I was making fun of her, and, in the end, almost became angry.

There you have it. I have just returned; I couldn’t eat lunch, so upsetting this experience was for me.

July 19
. Many people to whom I reported this adventure made fun of me. I no longer know what to think. The wise man says, “Perhaps!”.

July 21
. I went out to dine in Bougival; then I spent the evening at a dance at the rowing club. Decidedly, everything depends on places and environments. To believe in the supernatural on the Ile de la Grenouillère would be the height of folly … but on top of Mont Saint-Michel? Or in India? We are appallingly subject to the influence of our surroundings. I will return to my house next week.

July 30
. I have been back home since yesterday. Everything is fine.

August 2
. Nothing new; the weather is superb. I spend my days watching the Seine flow by.

August 4
. Quarrels among the servants. They claim someone is breaking the glasses at night in the china closets. The valet blames the cook, who blames the laundress, who blames the other two. Who is guilty? Who can say, in the end?

August 6
. This time, I am not mad. I saw … I saw … I saw! I can no longer doubt—I saw! I am still cold down to my fingertips … I am still afraid to the marrow of my bones … I saw!

I was taking a walk at two o’clock, in the full sunlight, in my rose garden … in the lane of autumn roses, which are beginning to flower.

As I was pausing to look at a
Géant des Batailles
, which bore three magnificent flowers, I saw, very distinctly, quite close to me, the stem of one of these roses bend itself, as if an invisible hand were twisting it, then break off, as if this hand had plucked it! Then the flower rose up, following the curve an arm would have described when carrying it toward a mouth, and it remained suspended in the transparent air, all alone, immobile, a terrifying red shape three feet from my eyes.

Agitated, I threw myself on it, to seize it. I found nothing; it had disappeared. Then I was overcome with a furious rage at myself; for a reasonable, serious man may not permit himself such hallucinations.

But was this truly a hallucination? I turned back to look for the stem, and I found it immediately on the shrub, freshly broken, between the two other roses that remained on the branch.

Then I returned to my house, my soul in turmoil; for I am certain, now, certain as I am of the alternation of day and night, that there exists close to me an invisible being, who feeds on milk and water, who can touch things, hold them, and make them change places. He is gifted, consequently, with a material nature, although it is imperceptible to our senses, and he is living, as I am, beneath my roof.…

August 7
. I slept calmly. It drank the water from my carafe, but did not trouble my sleep at all.

I wonder if I am crazy. As I was walking just now in the full sunshine, along the river, doubts about my reason came to me, not vague doubts as I have had till now, but precise, absolute doubts. I have seen madmen; I have known some who remained intelligent, lucid, even perceptive about all matters of life, except on one point. They speak of everything with clarity, agility, and profundity, and suddenly, as their thoughts turn to the stumbling-block of their madness, their thought processes shatter, scatter, and sink into that terrifying and furious ocean, full of leaping waves, fogs, and squalls, which we call “dementia”.

Surely, I would think myself crazy, absolutely crazy, if I weren’t aware of my condition, if I weren’t completely familiar with it, if I didn’t probe it by means of the most complete and lucid analysis. So I am in fact just a rational person suffering from hallucinations. An unknown distress has been produced in my brain, one of those distresses that the physiologists of today try to observe and explain. This distress has established a profound divide in my mind, in the order and logic of my ideas. Similar phenomena occur in dreams, which parade us through the most implausible phantasmagoria without our being surprised, since the verifying apparatus, the sense of control, is asleep, while the imaginative faculty is awake and at work. Isn’t it possible that one of those imperceptible keys on the cerebral keyboard has become paralyzed
in me? After an accident, people can lose their memory of proper names or verbs or numbers, or just dates. The localizations of all these fragments of thought have now been proven. So what is so surprising about the fact that my faculty of controlling the unreality of certain hallucinations has been numbed in me for the moment?

I was thinking about all of that as I followed the water’s edge. The sun was coating the river with brightness, making the land delightful, filling my gaze with love for life, for the swallows, whose agility is a joy to my eyes, for the grasses on shore, whose rustling is a delight to my ears.

Little by little, however, an inexplicable uneasiness penetrated me. A force, it seemed to me, an occult force was making me go numb, stopping me, preventing me from going further, was calling me back. I felt that painful need to return that oppresses you when you have left an ailing loved one at home, and you suddenly feel a premonition that the sickness has grown worse.

So I returned, despite myself, certain that I was going to find, in my house, some piece of bad news, a letter or a telegram. There was nothing there, yet I was more surprised and anxious than if I had had another fantastic vision.

August 8
. I had a frightful evening yesterday. It no longer manifests itself, but I feel it close to me, spying
on me, watching me, penetrating me, dominating me, being all the more dreadful by hiding itself than if it gave some sign of its invisible and constant presence by means of supernatural phenomena.

Yet I slept.

August 9
. Nothing, but I am afraid.

August 10
. Nothing. What will happen tomorrow?

August 11
. Still nothing. I can no longer remain at home with this fear and this thought always in my soul. I am going to go away.

August 12
, 10 o’clock in the evening. All day I wanted to leave, but I could not. I wanted to perform this act of freedom that is so easy, so simple—going out—climbing into my carriage to go to Rouen—but I could not. Why?

August 13
. When one is stricken with certain illnesses, all the resources of the physical being seem to be destroyed, all energies annihilated, all muscles limp. The bones seem to have become soft as flesh, and the flesh liquid as water. I am experiencing exactly that in my moral fiber in a strange and distressing way. I have lost all strength, all courage, all self-control, even all power to put my will in motion. I can no longer want anything; but someone wants for me; and I obey.

August 14
. I am lost. Someone possesses my soul and governs it. Someone controls all my actions, all my movements, all my thoughts. I am nothing inside, nothing but a slave spectator, terrified of all the things I do. I want to go out. I cannot. It doesn’t want to, so I remain, distraught, trembling, in the armchair where it is keeping me seated. I just want to get up, to stand up, just to believe I am still master of myself. I can’t. I am riveted to my chair; my chair sticks to the floor, so that no strength can raise us.

Then all of a sudden, I must, I must go to the back of my garden to pick strawberries and eat them. And I go. I pick strawberries and I eat them! Oh my God! My God! Is there a God? If there is, set me free, save me! Help me! Forgive me! Have pity on me! Mercy! Save me! Save me from this suffering—this torture—this horror!

August 15
. Surely this is how my poor cousin was possessed and dominated, when she came to borrow five thousand francs from me. She was undergoing a strange will that had entered her, like another soul, like a parasitic and dominating soul. Is the world about to end?

But the one that is governing me, what is it, this invisible thing? This unknowable thing, this prowler from a supernatural race?

So Invisible Beings do exist! But why haven’t they ever revealed themselves in a clear way since the
beginning of the world, as they are doing for me? I have never read anything that resembles what has been going on in my house. If only I could leave it, if only I could go out, flee and not come back, I would be saved. But I cannot.

August 16
. I was able to escape today for two hours, like a prisoner who finds the door of his dungeon left open by chance. I felt I was free all of a sudden, and that he was far away. I ordered the carriage to be harnessed quickly, and I reached Rouen. What joy it was to be able to say to someone who obeys: “Go to Rouen!”

I had him stop in front of the library, and I asked them to lend me the great treatise by Dr. Hermann Herestauss on the unknown inhabitants of the ancient and modern world.

Then, as I was climbing back into my carriage, I wanted to say, “To the train station!” but I shouted—not said, but shouted—in such a loud voice that a passersby turned around, “Home,” and I fell, stricken with anguish, onto the cushion of my car. He had found me and recaptured me.

August 17
. What a night! What a night! And yet it feels as if I should rejoice. Until one in the morning, I read. Hermann Herestauss, doctor of philosophy and theogony, has written the history and manifestations of all the invisible beings that prowl around mankind,
or that we dream of. He describes their origins, their dwelling-places, their powers. But not one of them resembles the one that is haunting me. We might reason that, ever since man began to think, he has had a premonition and a dread of some new being, stronger than he, his successor in this world, and that, feeling him nearby yet being unable to foresee the nature of this master, he has created, in his terror, the entire fantastic population of occult beings, vague phantoms born from fear.

After reading till one in the morning, I went to sit down near my open window in order to cool my forehead and my thoughts in the calm night breeze.

It was fine and warm out. How I would have loved this night, once upon a time!

No moon. The stars in the depths of the black sky twinkled quaveringly. Who lives in those worlds? What forms, what living beings, what animals, what plants are there? What do the sentient beings in those distant universes know, more than we do? What more are they capable of doing than we? What do they see that we have not the least knowledge of? Some day or other, won’t one of them, crossing space, appear on our earth to conquer it, just as long ago the Normans crossed the sea to subjugate people who were weaker?

We are so infirm, so helpless, so ignorant, so small, we others, on this spinning grain of mud mixed with a drop of water.

I dozed off, musing like that, in the cool evening wind.

After sleeping for about forty minutes, though, I reopened my eyes without making a movement, awakened by some confused, strange emotion. At first I saw nothing; then, all of a sudden, it seemed to me that a page of the book that I had left open on my table had just turned, all by itself. No breath of air had entered through my window. I was surprised, and I waited. After about four minutes, I saw, yes, I saw with my own eyes, another page rise up and fall back on the one before, as if a finger had turned it. My armchair was empty, seemed empty; but I understood that he was there, seated in my place, and that he was reading. With a furious leap, the leap of a rebellious animal who is about to disembowel his tamer, I crossed my room to seize him, strangle him, kill him!… But before I could reach it, my chair was knocked over, as if someone were fleeing before me … my table rocked back and forth, my lamp fell and went out, and my window slammed as if a surprised thief had rushed out into the night, grabbing the shutters.

So he had run away. He had been afraid. He, afraid of me!

Then … then … tomorrow … or the day after … or someday … I’ll be able to hold him in my fists, and crush him to the ground! Don’t dogs, sometimes, bite and choke their masters?

August 18
. I have been thinking all day. Oh, yes, I will obey him, follow his impulses, accomplish all his wishes, make myself humble, submissive, cowardly. He is the stronger one. But a time will come.…