reading

Alexander Klymchuk

Bay Windows

Rediroma-Verlag

Dedicated to Jack Torrance;

for the monsters

the nightmares

and the dreamscapes

Translated from German to

English by Melanie Haupt

Original-Title: Erkerfenster

(ISBN 978-3-96103-853-4)

"Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability."

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

(1890 - 1937)

"Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain."

William Shakespeare

(1564 - 1616)

Special Effects

"It's fantastic," Harrison said enthusiastically. "Just as I've imagined him."

Phil nods. He had worked on the picture for weeks and hadn't accepted any other order during that time. It hadn't exactly had a positive effect on his finances, but the result was more than worth the effort. Painting didn't bring home the bacon many a time; Phil had learned that lesson quickly. Therefore, he had commercialized his talent and painted musclemen, blondes, monsters and gangster visages for the big film studios of the dream factory now. Hand-painted posters came back into fashion again, as well as balloon pants or fondue sets, which weren't called outdated or retro anymore, but vintage.

Harrison sipped on his whiskey, grinning from ear to ear.

He was just producing "An American Werewolf in New York". Even before the shooting, the movie, which was already the second sequel of the legendary classic by John Landis by now, was already subject to extremely high pressure to succeed.

The special effects had been visionary at that time. Such a realistic transformation into a werewolf hadn't found its equal yet. And that was exactly what was to be expected of the "New York werewolf", as the preannouncements of the press named him.

"Indeed," Harrison emphasized once again. "Just as I've imagined him."

"Oh well," Phil replied with a shrug. "I didn't have particularly much scope either. At last that beast should look exactly as it'll look in the movie. I merely adhered to the submittals."

"Nonsense, don't sell yourself so short, Philly-Boy. You're a real artist. I mean... shit! That thing looks creepier than in the photos from the Winston team. And those guys know their stuff."

"You're right. Stan is a genius. Who doesn't know the classic monsters he created, starting with the legendary remakes of the Lon Chaney Jr. movies and his wolf men whose hair grew over their faces without having CGI or such computer shit. It was ingenious."

Harrison sighed deeply and raised his glass.

"You said it, dude. To Stan!"

"You mustn't forget, of course, that Rick Baker was responsible for the effects in the first part."

"True that," Harrison seemed to recall. "Didn't they even nominate him for an Oscar?"

"He wasn't only nominated, but won an Oscar seven times in total."

"Seven times?"

"Seven times," Phil confirmed and resisted the urge to visualize it by using his fingers.

"Holy Moses! That's really a ballpark number for once!"

Harrison took a sip of his whiskey and swirled the glass absentmindedly in his hand. In doing so, he looked at the picture.

It showed a werewolf with facial features that could almost be described as graceful; a particularity that was reserved only for truly sublime carnivores. A ragged, wild mane formed a corona of fur around the red, glowing eyes of the monster whose face was dominated by wide open jaws with almost gigantic fangs from which the blood of its unfortunate victims dripped down.

The wolf menacingly stretched one of its paws backward, as if it wanted to execute a lethal stroke, whereas the other one was greatly enlarged and pointed toward the viewer's direction, thereby conveying the impression that the claws would pierce through the canvas and reach out from out of the picture.

Phil had blurred that paw to reinforce the three dimensional illusion even more. The paw was stretched forward to some extent, so that it should suggest the movement of the paw in addition and to emphasize a realistic looking body and a literal flowing coat.

"A masterpiece without any doubt. I find the jeans particularly awesome."

"As agreed on. It shall still be possible to recognize the man inside the animal."

"Yes yes, I know," Harrison interrupted him. "But you're still a damned artist." Harrison was in a patronizing mood. The schedule of the shooting seemed to work, the budget would double at the most, and the groundwork for the commercials was wrapped up, including trailers, radio spots, and the webpage that was already obligatory for every new movie in these days. The poster was the cherry on the cake, but it depended on the small stuff whether a movie would become a classic and whether it would meet the expectations of both the fan base and the critics.

"If we even get Danny Elfman for the soundtrack, then nothing can go wrong anymore. We've hooked "Backspacer" for the music. They are from Germany, and they call themselves a progressive-blues-grunge band. They'll make sure that everything rocks. And... Holy crap, dude! You should really see that Christian Bale during the shooting! It's a real doozy! He doesn't need a mask at all, nevertheless, you still buy it that he's a wolf, Philly-Boy. That's mega awesome."

Phil grinned, nodded stupidly to himself and remained silent. He hated it like poison when Harrison called him "Philly-Boy".

The whole show as to I-am-your-buddy-of-course-and-the-world-is-mega-cool that Harrison put on and took off again like a bank robber his ski mask set his teeth on edge. But Phil could swallow all those things that ranged somewhere between "small talk" and "shit happens" and didn't touch him personally.

The fact, however, that Harrison, after laying Phil's cousin Sally, had unambiguously threatened to destroy her career if she confided it to anyone one day, didn't leave him unmoved at all.

And he took it extremely personal.

"Too bad," Harrison said in a somewhat slurred voice, dribbling some drops of his Jack Daniel's on his Armani shirt at the same time. "It's really too bad that the Twin Towers are gone. They would have been a funky skyline for the background."

He laughed with a shake of his head and poured himself another whiskey.

"Did you know that Sam Raimi staged a scene in the second Spider Man flicker, where Spidy spun a web between the towers of the World Trade Center, so that he could trap a helicopter with it?"

"No," Phil replied. "I didn't know that."

"But that's what he did. They had to cut out that scene. Doing something like that wasn't kosher anymore after September 11th. Let's say: politically incorrect."

Harrison shook his head indignantly and downed his drink in one. "Al Qaida! Bin Laden! Fuck'em all!"

Phil smirked. It sounded as if Harrison were really interested in the victims of that terror attack, which was nonsense, of course. Those terrorist suicides had merely spoiled the background of his movie poster, and that's all there was to it.

"Well...," Phil began, "...I think that the Brooklyn Bridge fits in pretty well."

They stood in front of the enormous canvas stand, eying the picture up. In doing so, Harrison acted as if he were the art expert of the Louvre and was just trying to find the right words to evaluate Mona Lisa's beauty in categories of technique, coloration, perspective and proportions.

"The blood is mega," Harrison said with a nod, as if he had to agree to himself. "Looks damned real."

"It's real."

"Are you serious?"

Phil raised his left hand, showing Harrison a cut on his palm, which had almost already healed again.

"The picture contains my lifeblood. In the true sense of the word."

Harrison cackled and patted Phil on the shoulder.

"As I said, dude. You're a goddamned artist who puts his heart and soul into his works. If anyone is kissed by the muse and tames that bitch, it'll only be my Philly-Boy."

Phil grinned and said nothing. Then they talked about some trivialities, until he finally said goodbye and left Harrison's apartment.

As soon as he was alone, Harrison strolled back to the mini bar and filled his glass once again. Grinning, he raised it to his lips and looked at the canvas stand.

He batted his eyelashes.

The canvas displayed the Brooklyn Bridge below a perfectly proportioned full moon.

Harrison crossed the room and approached the picture, as it wasn't easy for him not to weave.

The wolf had disappeared.

A feeling of unreality came over him. He dropped his glass of whiskey, and it rolled across the inlay carpet.

And while he was staring at the canvas in bewilderment, desperately trying to ignore his trembling hands, he heard a sound behind him, which sounded like a snarl.

The Faceless Man

This isn't a confession, but a narrative of the things that happened.

And I know that you won't believe me. If anyone told me the story that I'm writing down here and then even came up with such a lurid title for it, which sounds more like a spine-chiller than a factual report, I wouldn't take him seriously or declare him insane.

But it's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the absolute truth.

I don't omit anything, unless I forget or repress something, which, however, eventually doesn't have any influence on the storyline.

I don't make assumptions about the meaning of it all or why it happened to me of all people. I won't answer any arising questions or provide any logical explanations.

Item 1:

I did NOT murder my wife Ursula and my son Frederick.

Item 2:

I know WHO did it.

And if you think now that you have an objective listing of simple facts in front of you, which can be rattled through, that you can read the whole contents from the beginning to the end to be in the picture then, as if reading a TV paper, then you're seriously mistaken. I leave the light fare to others, considering that too many things are going on in my head.

I think about good and bad. About the mere words and their real meaning. About myself. About things that are getting out of hand and all the other stuff that somehow plays a role in life. And again and again, I think of fingers, several yards high, bending and groping for me.

Mainly, however, I think about fate and how much I dislike the thought that I'm not in control of my own destiny.

I believe and hope that there is a moment of decision in the life of each one of us; a situation of vital significance when courses are set for the future journey through life.

I perceive that situation as a boundary; as some kind of barrier that wasn't drawn by the hand of man. It delimits a gigantic, undiscovered area, which separates us from the things that dwell in the hidden corners in the world, in the shadows of the creation and in the deepest abysses in our immortal soul.

And whenever that boundary is crossed, the abyss inside us begins to look back, and the things crawl out from the corners and take our place.

I've always believed in that and I still do it even now, while I'm waiting for the gas chamber, and all what still remains for me to be done is to tell this story.

So, just don't expect me to hurry.

I'm on DEATH ROW, got it?

There were guys locked up here for half of their lifetimes, waiting and hoping that any guy scribbled his name on any piece of paper, thereby giving them freedom, but the majority of the inmates could have submitted a hundred appeals for clemency only to smell gas anyway in the end.

When you are imprisoned here, you live from one day to the next, and you can only be sure that IT won't happen today, when you lie in your cot and the lights go out.

WHEN IS IT MY TURN? That question is omnipresent at this place; it echoes throughout the walls and fills the heads. Elsewhere, you would call it "hell", but here, it's plain and simple "daily routine".

At night, you count a billion of sheep, stare at the ceiling, pray and wait for death.

You clean the toilet in your cell, have breakfast, crack dirty jokes (that's what's called "gallows humor" outside) and wait for death.

You stick stamps on advertising letters, swap cigarettes for weed, hope for visitors who never come and wait for death. And so on and so on.

You surely anticipate where that leads to.

You wait for death.

And it changes you in a way that you can't clothe in words, no matter how many letters you string together.

I'M WAITING FOR MY DEATH!

Nevertheless, these lines aren't a first-hand drama, no eulogy, no muck-raking journalism, nor the famous last words from a cursed, but they are plain and simple what they are.

The lines of a story.

My story.

There'll be passages that may seem to you long-winded for the simple reason that they were important to me and still are, and I'll take my time to tell them as I perceived them. You'll want to ask, "What does it have to do with that crackbrained guy who was mentioned in the beginning?" Or, "Damned, where the hell is that jerky, fucking man who runs around without his dumb fucking face?" But it doesn't interest me in the slightest.

Everyone tells his story in his way, in his pace, in his words and metaphors. And believe me that writing down such a story takes a considerably longer time than reading it.

It's incredibly important to me that you understand that before you continue reading; otherwise you'll probably be disappointed.

In fact, the devil is in the detail. Isn't that the saying?

So much for the introductory part. The body of this story was the reason for the guards to remove all objects, which can be used for committing suicide, out of my reach. And the pencil, with which I'm writing down these words, is too small and too blunt for piercing it through my eye into my brain.

If they hadn't changed the furniture and the equipment in my cell on the insistence of the psychologist in a manner, which makes it impossible for me to act out my so-called "suicidal tendencies", or given me a customary ball pen to textualize this story, these pages would be blank, the plot next to my wife and my son would be occupied, and the voice of that beast, which came into my house and slaughtered my family, would be far away and wouldn't have anything to do with me.

But the guard is coming through the door right now, telling me that it's time for the yard exercise.

I have to stop writing, I'll continue later.

I perceived the first signs of his arrival in the fall of the year 1987. In the beginning it was just an uneasy feeling that overtook me when entering our house. Then that feeling turned into a shiver despite closed doors and windows. Before long, however, I was convinced that something crucial had changed.

There was something in the air that you couldn't really catch hold of like a delicate scent, and it disappeared all the faster the more you focused on trying to locate it. The certainty that something had lodged itself under the basement stairs, only waiting for me to be stupid enough to go alone down to the basement, came over me every time when I went through the hallway. The mere thought of fetching canning jars from the pantry or putting the dirty laundry in the washing machine made me downright feel sick. Therefore I sent my son downstairs.

Back then I blamed my wife for my fear, because she was the one who finally dragged all that Halloween stuff into our house. Even weeks before the foliage in the colors of rust and urine, which was typical of fall, blocked driveways and sidewalks, these ridiculous pumpkins of porcelain were sitting all over the house. Bats of window color were stuck to the bathroom tiles as well as to all windows.

Plastic spider webs hung down from the lamps, and black candles flickered on the windowsills. To top it all off, there was that bullshit called trick or treat, for which she spruced Freddy up, until he looked like a mixture of Gollum, Ozzy Osbourne and George W. Bush.

And yet, all the years before, when Ursula prepared the house and our son for that disgusting, commercial celebration, I had never had that debilitating feeling. The very feeling, which murmured to me in a dusty voice that I should better leave the bedside light on, because otherwise something would step out of the shadow, grab me and take me with it into the gloominess.

I'm not saying that I'm a sissy, and just as little can I claim to be particularly brave.

I think, however, that there're many gray areas in between, where you can feel at home.

At the age of forty-one, you know, of course, that there is no monster at all under your bed, that the twigs, which knock on the window, aren't the fingers of a willow from hell and that the empty spaces in the wheat fields aren't caused by landing UFO's, but by stormy gusts of wind.

However, if you lie in your bed at night and can't fall asleep, because you hear something besides the breath of your wife and the creaking planks, which sounds like a quiet, malicious giggle, you'll forget that you know all those things, and you'll become that small child again that crawls under its covers again with fear.

And I heard that giggle. That hoarse, chortling, malicious laughter, which was actually no more than a whisper. An unspecified background sound that barely took up space in the silence of the night, but still found its way into my ears again and again.

I didn't tell my wife anything about it, of course. She would've only ridiculed me. Even though as amiably as you would wink at a prankster to let him know that you find him cute. Or like pinching a rascal's cheek to show him that you've understood his jokes. However, no matter how gently and sympathetically Ursula would have dealt with my irrational fear, which was completely untypical of me, it would've always given me a feeling of humiliation.

So, I remained silent.

That giggle didn't remain silent. Not a single night in fall. And along with the advent of winter, which blanketed and afflicted the country with its piercing, windy cold and the beginning snow showers like an uninvited guest that had to be hosted year in, year out, whether you wanted it or not, the giggle was getting increasingly courageous.

It didn't get louder, but it was coming closer. It had been in the hallway behind the basement door first, wormed its way through the keyhole and wafted through the rooms like the sigh of a castle ghost. And then, two weeks before the official beginning of winter, which was exactly defined according to the calendar, even though its gray and white mud already covered the streets, the giggle found the way to my bed.

One night I woke up with a scream on my lips, because I heard that hissing, whispering mumble, which sounded like laughter, right next to me in the blackness of the room.

Invisible to me and protected by the darkness, shrouding all shadows, it was as if the owner of that giggling voice, which sounded in no way human, laughed directly at my face.

Henceforth, the nighttime visitor came to my bed every day dead on time at three o'clock in the morning and let me know that it was there. And yet, the sound remained so vague and undeterminable that I couldn't have pinned down the exact spot where it was in the room, because it wandered around; sometimes it was here, sometimes there, above me, under the bed, right next to me and sneaked through the room again.

At no time I could have said with certainty, much less proven it that the giggle wasn't a figment of my imagination.

And so, I left it at that and dismissed that demonic grin in my head, which means the visual, constantly changing counterpart to the barely audible, but still abominably clear sound in the darkness of the room as the symptoms of overwork, even though I actually knew better.

And every day I managed anew to suppress the giggle, so that a nightly succubus remained and melted in the rays of the midday sun like a forgotten snowman behind the house. In the daytime, I was aware of my adult maturity again, trusted my sound human understanding, called myself an idiot, rebuked myself for my childish fear and forced my feet to remain on the ground where they should be. My life was back to normal, and reality was something I could rely on again, and that giggle was nothing but a figment of my imagination.

An unpleasant dream that would disappear by itself one day.

But a dream can return, and particularly in the case when it teaches you the meaning of fear. Being afraid of a dream is even sufficient to bring it back. Dreading it alone makes sure that it burns itself into your mind, and your fear invokes it over and over again.

As a child, I had such a dream once.

I was running through a forest, but instead of trees, fingers, which were several yards high, protruded from the ground. Those fingers bent toward me, trying to squeeze me like a flea, but every time I managed to slip through them by a hair's breadth, before the fingertips dug themselves into the stony ground.

The dream returned so often that I therefore had to see a psychiatrist who told my parents something about "penis envy" and "misguided mother love". So, my father bought me a pile of "jerk-off magazines", as he called them, and he and my mother's behavior toward me was even more impersonal than it was anyway.

The dream remained the same, but I told my parents that everything was okay. It disappeared only a few years later. I heard my father saying once, "Now he has probably given himself one off the wrist", and with that, "the issue was over for him".

And that dream remained buried inside me for decades, waiting only for the right moment to resurrect from the dead.

And one day, I was already in my mid-thirties, I watched something on TV. It was a commercial advertising hand cream or something like that.

And all of a sudden, I had a feeling that my surroundings, the couch, the floral wallpaper, the mini bar, the entire house and even my family were just a clever illusion, created only for the purpose of distracting me and lulling me into a deceitful sense of security.

In actual fact I was still in that forest of fingers, of course, swaying in the wind like a wheat field of flesh.

In actual fact my life had been the dream, and I finally woke up in the middle of those enormous fingers. They rose up to the dark sky and bent down toward me to crush me.

Oh, the guard announces bedtime. The light will go off in ten minutes.

Sufficient time to hole myself up under the blanket and to persuade myself unsuccessfully that I'm an adult male who doesn't have to fear anything in the darkness except for the fear itself.

I saw that man, who is creeping around like a carnivore in the finger forest of my nightmares now, in the winter of the year 1994.

"needed distance"