Out of Time by George Langelaan.
Title: Out of Time.
Author: George Langelaan.
Genre: Literature, fiction, short stories, science fiction, horror.
Country: England, U.K., France.
Language: English, French.
Publication Date: 1957, 1958, 1961, 1962, (this collection 1964).
Summary: A collection of 10 stories. In The Fly (1957), a scientist working on a teleporter has a horrible accident when he tests it on himself, and has a fly get stuck in the apparatus with him. In The Devil His Due (1962), a man who loses his wife and his (more) beloved dog in a short span of time makes a bargain with a gypsy woman for a second chance, which turns out even more horrible. In Armchair Detective (1962), an elderly narrator observes from an armchair as a family deals with a kidnapping of a baby, but when he figures out the culprit, he must overcome his physical limitations and spring into action. In Past the Time Limit (1962), a Lieutenant undergoing a scientific experiment of "conscious hibernation" is accidentally launched into high-speed, grinding the world around him to an almost-halt. In Recession (1962), a man is conscious for his journey of death, what comes after and, eventually, by effort and choice, rebirth. In The Lady from Nowhere (1964), a mysterious woman, claiming to be a nurse who had disappeared during the bombing of Nagasaki, communicates with an atomic plant engineer by means of his TV, claiming that the atomic explosion pushed her into a different dimension. In The Other Hand (1961), a man approaches a surgeon asking him to remove one of his hands that he claims is no longer his, and is becoming more and more malicious and out of control. In The Miracle (1958), a man fakes paralysis after a train accident at work to get the big pay-out, but when he finally decides to have a miraculous recovery, something quite unforeseen gets in his way. In The Drop of Forgetfulness (1962), a man sentenced to death for the murder of his wife is missing a vital piece of information that would prove his innocence, but can only recall it when he's having one of his typical falling nightmares. In Parkson's Last Flight (1962), a pilot of a commercial airliner flying his last flight miraculously avoids a head-on collision with another plane when he sees something odd outside the window.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ Telephones and telephone bells have always made me uneasy. Years ago, when they were mostly wall fixtures, I disliked them, but nowadays, when they are planted in every nook and corner, they are a downright intrusion. We have a saying in France that a coalman is master in his own house; with the telephone that is no longer true, and I suspect that even the Englishman is no longer king in his own castle.
At the office, the sudden ringing of the telephone annoys me. It means that, no matter what I am doing, in spite of the switchboard operator, in spite of my secretary, in spite of doors and walls, some unknown person is coming into the room and onto my desk to talk right into my very ear, confidentially-and that whether I like it or not. At home, the feeling is still more disagreeable, but the worst is when the telephone rings in the dead of night. If anyone could see me turn on the light and get up blinking to answer it, I suppose I would look like any other sleepy man annoyed at being disturbed. The truth in such a case, however, is that I am struggling against panic, fighting down a feeling that a stranger has broken into the house and is in my bedroom. By the time I manage to grab the receiver and say: "lei Monsieur Delambre. le vous ecoute," I am outwardly calm, but I only get back to a more normal state when I recognize the voice at the other end and when I know what is wanted of me.
This effort at dominating a purely animal reaction and fear had become so effective that when my sister-in-law called me at two in the morning, asking me to come over, but first to warn the police that she had just killed my brother, I quietly asked her how and why she had killed
André.
♥ Have you ever tried to explain to a sleepy police officer that your sister-in-law has just phoned to say that she has killed your brother with a steam-hammer? I repeated my explanation, but he would not let me.
♥ It could hardly have been the result of some stupid bet or a test of his courage. He hated betting and had no patience with those who indulged in it. Whenever he heard a bet proposed, he would invariably remind all present that, after all, a bet was but a contract between a fool and a swindler, even if it turned out to be a toss-up as to which was which.
♥ He tried to step away from me and caught his foot in one of the stools which I had not troubled to pick up. He made a violent effort to regain his balance, and the velvet cloth slowly slid off his shoulders and head as he fell heavily backward.
The horror was too much for me, too unexpected. As a matter of fact, I am sure that, even had I known, the horror-impact could hardly have been less powerful. Trying to push both hands into my mouth to stifle my screams and although my fingers were bleeding, I screamed again and again. I could not take my eyes off him, I could not even close them, and yet I knew that if I looked at the horror much longer, I would go on screaming for the rest of my life.
Slowly, the monster, the thing that had been my husband, covered its head, got up and groped its way to the door and passed it. Though still screaming, I was able to close my eyes.
I who had ever been a true Catholic, who believed in God and another, better life hereafter, have today but one hope: that when I die, I really die, and that there may be no after-life of any sort because, if there is, then I shall never forget! Day and night, awake or asleep, I see it, and I know that I am condemned to see it forever, even perhaps into oblivion!
Until I am totally extinct, nothing can, nothing will ever make me forget that dreadful white hairy head with its low flat skull and its two pointed ears. Pink and moist, the nose was also that of a. cat, a huge cat. But the eyes! Or rather, where the eyes should have been were two brown bumps the size of saucers. Instead of a mouth, animal or human, was a long hairy vertical slit from which hung a black quivering trunk that widened at the end, trumpet-like, and from which saliva kept dripping.
..The noise of the typewriter suddenly stopped and I felt I was going to scream again as something touched the door and a sheet of paper slid from under it. Shivering with fear and disgust, I crawled over to where I could read it without touching it:
NOW YOU UNDERSTAND. THAT LAST EXPERIMENT WAS A NEW DISASTER, MY POOR HELENE. I SUPPOSE YOU RECOGNIZED PART OF DANDELO'S HEAD. WHEN I WENT INTO THE DISINTEGRATOR JUST NOW, MY HEAD WAS ONLY THAT OF A FLY. I NOW ONLY HAVE EYES AND MOUTH LEFT. THE REST HAS BEEN REPLACED BY PARTS OF THE CAT'S HEAD. POOR DANDELO WHOSE ATOMS HAD NEVER COME TOGETHER. YOU SEE NOW THAT THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE POSSIBLE SOLUTION, DON'T YOU? I MUST DISAPPEAR. KNOCK ON THE DOOR WHEN YOU ARE READY AND I SHALL EXPLAIN WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.
~~The Fly.
♥ The fox did not raise its head from between its paws, but its two large, luminous eyes spoke to the Englishman who had just stopped in front of the cage. The fox knew he could understand; it had known the moment their eyes had met, when the man, strolling away from the crowded beach, suddenly found himself in front of the old caravan that had once been painted red, the silent old gipsy woman who had once been beautiful, and the cage in front of her that had once been a packing case. In the other part of the home-made cage-for a captive fox needs very little room-a monkey with black, unintelligent, human eyes scratched itself thoughtfully. Although this shook the whole box, the fox took no notice; all its attention was concentrated on the man, and in its eyes which were neither blue nor grey, the man could see the sky and the winds, the trees and the fields, the rivers and the lakes, all that the fox was telling him about.
♥ It had been a ghastly business. Tom had known that the vet was putting him to death but had died quietly in his master's arms since that was what was wanted of him.
♥ "That, does not make sense. Besides, you are not the devil."
"Are you so sure that the Evil One is a man? You men are so inordinately proud that even in wickedness, the most wicked must of necessity be a man! How do you know that I am not here to tempt you?"
"Tempt me in what way, may I ask?"
Breathing smoke through her nostrils, she eyed him for some time before answering.
"With a little pact, of course. Another chance in exchange for your soul."
"What do you mean by another chance?"
"You were thinking of giving my fox another chance, weren't you?"
"Perhaps I was."
"He does not need it. He has had several. You do not need another chance either, but you feel that if you had one, you would act differently, don't you? Therefore, I offer you another chance in exchange for your soul."
"Sorry, I'm afraid I don't believe in the devil."
"Fine! That makes the bargain much easier, doesn't it? You get another chance and yet you don't feel that you are really giving anything in exchange for it."
~~The Devil His Due.
♥ "Grandpap, you wonderful, wonderful dog, " sobbed Mary, all over me.
There was a wonderful cushion, in a chair by the piano, a great yellow satin cushion.... Nothing like trying, I thought. Getting gingerly off my armchair-my paws ache something terrible every time I start walking-I went to the door of the next room and scratched. Mary opened it immediately, of course-she was in a mood to open anything. Glancing up at her and putting plenty of dramatic appeal in my right eye-the other one is blind-I went to the chair where the cushion is and very gently, ever so gently, tugged at the corner.
"Grandpap, you want Mum's beautiful cushion. Oh, you dear, wicked old dog! " she sobbed and, as I followed wagging my tail slowly for even that is painful, she took the cushion, put it on the big armchair by the fire and helped me to climb up
~~Armchair Detective.
♥ "He must be tired, poor dear," she said, looking over Doctor Martinaud's shoulder.
"Unless the Professor is all wrong, he'll be as fresh as a daisy after three days of a test that has only lasted an hour as far as he is concerned."
"Then... Yvon is in truth two days younger?" asked the nurse, opening a metal cabinet full of surgical instruments.
"Well, no... that is, not really," said the Engineer. "We are three days older and Yvon is one hour older than when we started."
"Isn't that what I said?" asked Aline with a little shrug, as she prepared a tray and a hypodermic syringe. "And if Professor Massei kept him there long enough..."
"We would grow ever so old and he would still be young!" chuckled Martinuad, reaching for one of the Engineer's cigarettes.
♥ Every mile or so, I passed silent, petrified trainloads of early workers who would never know what had happened. Some, I could see, were reading morning papers, but the majority who had been thinking or day-dreaming and looking at nothing in particular were now gazing at eternity.
♥ If only I had some way of measuring time. If the entire universe had come to a standstill, I suppose that time no longer existed, but for me at least, it still existed since I was alive, since though it would be six in the morning for the rest of my life, I ate and slept and thought and acted.
♥ One thing seemed certain, I thought, shaving carefully in a washroom I had discovered by the kitchens: I would not die of hunger. I would soon know whether or not the process of putrefaction had also ceased to exist. If it had, then barring accidents, I might live for quite a time, a sort of Robinson Crusoe in the heart of Paris, able to see and touch millions of people, nevertheless quite alone in the world, without either a parrot or a goat, possibly without even a microbe to help me fall ill and die. How long could I stand living in the silence of this gigantic waxwork show?
♥ The first café I entered had a clock over the counter, and it marked twenty-five minutes past six, five minutes ahead of the great station clock-a precaution all hotel and cafe proprietors take near railway stations.
~~Past the Time Limit.
♥ I knew now that I was dying. I had known for some time, of course, but that had been a mere subconscious knowledge. It was not the pain, or the fatigue, or the difficulty I had in breathing at times, all normal enough for a man of eighty; it had been something more, something strange, both an urge to leave and an urge to see the people I loved and the things I loved as much and as often as possible. "Hate to bother you, son, but I am getting on, you know, and I won't last for ever", had been my usual excuse to drag one or both of them round. Consciously, that was a lie, I only wanted their company; but deep down, I knew that it was the truth.
♥ Death is but a recession. Where had I heard or read that before? There are so many nooks and corners full of words and phrases and stories and doubts and truths collected in an old man's brain, especially that of a book-lover, that it is difficult and sometimes quite impossible to trace the origin of a thought.
♥ The clashing of instruments in trays was disagreeable. Otherwise, their voices sounded just as voices used to sound round the tea table when I was a very little boy and, hugging my mother's neck, I used to fall asleep on her soft warm breast, inside which I could hear her breathe and talk and live.
♥ The voices and the noise of instruments sounded fainter and fainter on each side. rather as though I had been standing in the middle portion of a long corridor with the same sounds coming from each end. And just over my head, at the end of a three-hundred-foot chimney was a light like the one over my bed.
That was it! That was the recession! I was receding from sound and light... and life of course. What a surprising and interesting experience, so very different to what I had expected. I was not leaving life; life was receding from me in every direction.
♥ The black-out of sound and light did come, but it was some time before I accepted the scientific fact that I was dead. Old men are prone to argue and to put forward embarrassing questions; for instance, I reasoned that since I could still think, it could only mean that my brain was working and, since my brain was functioning, blood was flowing through it, which in turn could only mean that my heart was still beating. Logically, I was therefore in some sort of coma and death would come later.
It was only a good deal later that I began to feel that my body was indeed dead, that my brain had also ceased to function and that what was left, what was active, could only be ME, my soul, or whatever it was that could not perish. That was it! Something that could not, did not perish. What surprised me, though, was that I could both remember and reason, but that was all, I knew nothing else! Was I inside or outside my body, I wondered? Judging by the last sensations I could remember, I had an uncomfortable feeling that I-my ME-was in the very centre of my head, perhaps in the pituitary gland. In that case, it might mean a good many months, or years, before I could be freed... unless, of course, some bright doctor decided to have a post-mortem. But that was highly improbable in the sort of nursing home my sons had treated me to: I could well imagine my body all done up ever so nice in some sort of de luxe morgue, with a deep-freeze box of sorts purring away under my backside. Or perhaps I was already buried? No sensation of any sort, no means of measuring time: it was frightening. How was I to know whether I had only been dead a few minutes, two days or ten years? Of course, I could measure ten seconds, or a minute or two by counting the seconds, but I could not do that all the time!
Deliberately, I tried to panic. Here I was, completely, totally shut up in a prison without light, without sound, without sleep, unable to move or do anything as I knew or had known action and, for all I knew, shut up with one thing: eternity! Unfortunately, it is quite impossible to panic without a heart maddened by adrenaline, without a mouth to scream, without eyes to turn up and without fingers and nails with which to scratch them out!
♥ It seemed evident that I would have to find some other occupation or go mad. But what a wonderful idea! Insanity was a form of oblivion. There again I failed miserably. How can one go mad without a cock-eyed brain, without nerves to jingle and help, without a body to shudder and sob, and a mouth to slobber and rave? Quite impossible.
♥ How about living my life all over again? Some people write their memoirs? Horrible cheats, every one of them, the biggest being probably Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Since I had no audience, I could at least enjoy an honest autobiography.
♥ After trying to remember every book I had ever read, and failing rather miserably, I resorted to the memory of the pleasures of love. Just try to concoct the pleasures of love without a body, and blood to surge through it!
♥ Free without a body with which to communicate with the world I had known? For all I knew, I was free. For all I knew, I was in wind and sunlight. After all, all that mattered little. What did matter was that I was conscious of ME and ME only, a prisoner in the most perfect prison ever invented by man or god. Compared to me, the genie in the bottle was a free man. One can dream of escaping from a dungeon, a room, a bottle, even a coffin, but no one can escape from nothing, no space, the atom of the atom, anti-space perhaps.
♥ That bridge was the first thing that gave me any real pleasure, perhaps because the only possible satisfaction of a mind is to create. I would have to go on creating.
♥ I have been fighting and fainting and sleeping for a long while now. Lord! The length of that tunnel... a tunnel that grips and sticks and crushes you! Now I know why so many people have recurrent and terrible nightmares in which they find themselves struggling through impossible small gaps, or under great walls or mountains, or working their way along passages much too narrow for them.
~~Recession.
♥ It is a miracle that only one of the three "portable " atom bombs stored at the Government Nuclear Research Institute exploded. It only killed 6,083 people· outright. Fall-out and radiations were, however, much deadlier; of the 122,349 cases rounded up and put in the camp hospital of Willowback, 29,846 died in the first month. It is doubtful if more than eight or ten percent of the total number of casualties will survive.
♥ Call it what you like, intuition, instinct or, what is more likely, some thirty years of experience, but I knew that Berny had had something to do with it the moment I entered his living-room. When a dog has a bone to hide, it digs a hole and covers it up; when a man has a secret which he thinks others might discover, he writes it down, burns it and leaves the ashes all over the place. The ashes were in the fireplace and there were quite a lot of them.
♥ I knew that no one would believe me and, what is more, that if I did make an official report of it, I would stand a fifty-fifty chance of ending up in the local asylum. However, written as a story, if it ever does get published, I can always say that it is but a story and nothing more. Only my wife and perhaps a few scientists will know that, as usual, truth is so much stranger than fiction.
♥ "It is difficult to explain where we are because, to be quite truthful, we are nowhere. ..As far as you are concerned, we are dead. No, we are not ghosts. ..The people round me are Japanese. They are some of those who were caught in the full blast of the Nagasaki atom-bomb. I was also there and, as you would say, killed in the same circumstances. ..Only one of us here, Professor Kizoki, is able to explain. I know nothing of these scientific things but I shall do my best to translate. He wishes me to state first of all that we were not killed and that this was because we happened to find ourselves in the very centre of an atomic and molecular disintegration. The chain reaction which produced this disintegration jumped ahead of time-I am quoting the Professor's words-jumped ahead of time as you know it. To give you an idea, it took place at a much greater speed than that of light which, as you may know, is not the greatest speed known to ordinary man. ..You cannot understand but to give you an idea, the Professor says: suppose that it happened at such a speed that by the simple theory of relativity and your standards of measuring time, the disintegration was complete before or almost before it had started. Do listen, please! The Professor says that that is the only way in which he can give you a picture, a possibility of comprehension."
Berny nodded vigorously, and she went on:
"The result of all this is just as difficult to explain but the Professor suggests two pictures. From a three dimensional state in a four dimensional universe, we have been transferred or changed into a four dimensional state in a five dimensional universe. Or, if you prefer, we have become a form of anti-matter, which amounts to the same thing, says the Professor."
~~The Lady from Nowhere.
♥ "What is the matter with your hand?"
"It is no longer mine, Doctor," he said slowly, looking me straight in the eyes.
"I see, and whose is it?" I asked, drawing a sheet of note-paper towards me and beginning to write. Years of experience had taught me never to show surprise or so much as smile at anything a patient said.
♥ Walking ahead of us were two girls, the type of girls which, for some mysterious reason, tourists consider as so typically Parisian and who, of course, are not-you know, the sort of girls that are just a little too well dressed, with heels two centimetres too high, skirts two centimetres too short, round hips, a little too tight, that swing just a little too much.
~~The Other Hand.