Free The White Hands and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels Page A

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