Out of ideas

I read this as part of LK’s Horror Short Story Short Challenge - it being a short challenge, I of course took simply bloody ages to do it. Sorry. I can cheerfully blame it on all that studying I’m supposed to be doing, and no one will gainsay me [Ahem - Ed].

I ought to warn the Gentle Reader that I am but most totally going to fill this with spoilers. Should you wish to go away and read The Horla, please do… full text provided. If you can’t be bothered, well, please don’t be bothered. I’m sure Guy de Maupassant can survive my little attacks on his narrative suspense.

I have always been more frightened by (and therefore, I suppose, more pleased by) horror stories in which the ghosts and demons are like as not figments of the imagination. Insanity is up there in my top three completely horrible things (along with slugs and cramped little dank underground places) [Oh, don't ask. She might stop and tell you]. The Horla is in this respect highly satisfactory. Let me explain:

At the very beginning of the story, a white Brazilian ship sails past the narrator’s house. The narrator says: ‘I saluted it, I hardly know why, except that the sight of the vessel gave me great pleasure.’ Months later, he reads an article about strange happenings in Rio de Janeiro:

‘Ah! Ah! I remember now that fine Brazilian three-master which passed in front of my windows as it was going up the Seine, on the 8th of last May! I thought it looked so pretty, so white and bright! That Being was on board of her, coming from there, where its race sprang from. And it saw me! It saw my house which was also white, and he sprang from the ship onto the land. Oh! Good heavens!’.

What a wonderful back-formation of portents. I am very glad the author refused to allow him a standard shiver of cold fear at the sight. A mysterious thrill of pleasure is so ever so much more interesting.

Alas, a strange presence (no more than a presence, invisible, inaudible) is now haunting him. There are no other corroborrative witnesses - helpfully, the story is in diary form, so even if the narrator were to claim he had a witness, we could cheerfully carry on doubting him. Something is disturbing his sleep, and he finds something has drunk the water out of his bottle in the night. He tries to lay traps to see if he himself is doing this in his sleep, but it would seem not. Something really (really?) is living under his roof.

The narrator flees these unsettling events for Paris. He meets his cousin there - and sees her being hypnotised at a dinner party, inventing all sorts of excuses for her odd behaviour, and on being unhypnotised, denying she ever did anything of the kind. The narrator is exceedingly upset by this incident. His cousin was completely unaware that she was being controlled by someone else, and yet the narrator is morbidly aware, now, when he reaches home again, that the mysterious water-drinker is controlling his actions. See? It could all so easily, so very easily, be in his own mind. It is in his own mind, of course, but what, exactly, is in his mind? Mad as a basket of drunken frogs. Or, afflicted with a Brazilian vampire. Or - whyever the hell not? - both.

And of course, it all goes horribly badly, like all good horror-stories should.