The Area
Stefan Grabinski

In a finer, more aesthetic world than ours, it would be the simplest matter for a skillful translator sympathetic to, let's say, a significant author of Poland, to receive a grant substantive enough to live on for a year while undertaking a careful translation. Afterward publishers would bid for the privilege of presenting the result to an eager public. In this world, of course, the small presses fill the aesthetic void. Miroslaw Lipinski founded and publishes The Grabinski Reader to promote and publish in English the works of "the Polish Poe," Stefan Grabinski (1887-1936), called by Thomas Ligotti, "a genuine visionary of nightmare." Each issue of The Grabinski Reader is a revelation of morosity, beauty, and horrible adventure.

For more than twelve years Wrzesmian had completely stopped writing. After putting out in 1900 the fourth in his series of original, insanely strange works, he became silent and irrevocably removed himself from the world scene. From that time on he didn't touch a pen, he didn't even express himself with a trivial verse. He wasn't wrested from silence by his friends' urgings, nor was he stirred by the attentive voices of critics, who for a lengthy interval advanced opinions concerning some epic-scaled new work. These anticipations passed, and nothing was heard from Wrzesmian.
Slowly an obvious opinion, as bright and clear as the sun, began to form concerning him: he had depleted himself prematurely. "Yes, yes," sadly nodded the heads of literary connoisseurs, "he expressed himself too quickly. He didn't understand the economy of production; he touched on a bit too many issues in one creation. He actually offended with his excess of ideas, which, condensed in compact summaries, oppressed the vigorous contents. The potion was too strong; it deserved, rather, to be given in smaller, diluted doses. He damaged his own reputation: he ran out of subject matter."
These judgments reached Wrzesmian, but they didn't elicit the slightest response. Consequently, his speedy impoverishment was believed in, and the world was tidied up with him. Besides, new talents emerged, new figures appeared on the horizon, and finally he was left in peace.
And, indeed, the majority of people were glad with this turn of events. Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy, filled with strong individualism, gave an unfavorable impression by turning upside down accepted aesthetic-literary theories, and annoyed scholars by ruthlessly mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for various reasons, and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. That's why his premature waning was received with a feeling of secret relief; people heaved out a sigh.
And no one supposed for a moment that the verdict of abatement could be fundamentally false, that the cause for withdrawing from the world scene did not necessarily have to be depletion and decrepitude. However, Wrzesmian was utterly indifferent as to what legend would arise about him. He considered the whole affair personal and private, and never thought of extricating himself from the fallacy.
And why should he? If what he wished for would realize itself, the future would show the truth and burst the hardened shell he had been submerged in; whereas if his dreams didn't materialize, he would be less than convincing, exposing himself only to jeers and insults. Therefore it was better to wait and be silent.
For Wrzesmian was not lacking in breath and force, but was seized with new desires. He wanted to attain stronger means of expression, and he began to aim for more formidable creative realizations. The word was already not enough for him: he was searching for something more direct; he was looking about for better artistic material to realize his thoughts.
The situation was so tied up with this, the dreams so little practical, that the path of creation he was treading departed far from the beaten track.
Ultimately the majority of works of art revolve, more or less, in a realistic area, reproducing or transforming the sights of life. Events, though fabricated, are only its analogy, intensified, admittedly, through exaltation or pathos, and therefore possible at some moment in time. Similar scenes could have once occurred in reality, they can appear sometime in the future, nothing prevents a belief in their possibility -- reason doesn't rebel against accessible fabrications. Even most works by fantasists do not exclude probable realization, unless they show an inclination toward pranks or the heedless smirk of a skillful juggler.
But in Wrzesmian's case the matter presented itself a little differently. The whole of his strange, enigmatic work was one great fiction. For naught had the pack of critics, cunning like foxes, labored in search of so-called "literary influences," "analogies," "foreign currents" that would, even if roughly, give a clue to the impenetrable castle of Wrzesmian's poetry; for naught had shrewd reviewers run for help to learned psychiatric experts, sifted through piles of all sorts of works, immersed themselves in encyclopedias: the writings of Wrzesmian came out victorious over successful interpretation, even more mysterious, bewildering, dangerous, unfathomable than before. A gloomy spell exuded from them, an alluring, vertiginous, bone-chilling depth.
In spite of their emphatically absolute fictitiousness, not even touching real life in one spot, Wrzesmian's writings jolted, puzzled, amazed: people dared not go past them with a disregardful shrug of the shoulders. Something resided in these short and compact bullet-like works, something riveted the attention, fettered the soul, some powerful suggestion rose from these incisive digests written in a seemingly reserved style -- as though a reporter's, as though a teacher's -- under which pulsated the fervor of a fanatic.
For Wrzesmian had believed in what he had been writing; for he had acquired as time went on the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can materialize, that one day it will live to see its fulfillment in space and time.
"No person thinks in vain; no thought, even the strangest, disappears fruitlessly," he used to repeat many times to his circle of friends and acquaintances.
And it seemed that precisely this belief in the materialization of fiction caused a hidden flame to flow through the arteries of his works, that in spite of their apparent coldness, they penetrated to the core...
But he was never satisfied with himself. Like every sincere creator, he was constantly seeking new means of expression, ever more distinct symbols that would give his thoughts their best possible accuracy. Finally, he had abandoned the word, scorning language as a trifle too crude form of expression, and he began to yearn for something more direct that would artistically and tangibly outdistance all existing attempts. It wouldn't be silence, the "resting of the word" of the symbolists; that was for him too pale, too nebulous -- and too little sincere. He wanted another realization.
What it could be, he didn't precisely know, but in its possibility he firmly believed. A few facts garnered while he still wrote and published strengthened this belief. He convinced himself even then that in spite of the imaginary character of his creations, they possessed a particular strength of flowing out onto the world and people. The crazy thoughts of Wrzesmian, coming out from the incandescent pulp of his works, seemed to have had the power of fertilizing and developing new, not hitherto known whirlpools, some demented mental monads whose manifestations would flare up unexpectedly in the acts and gestures of certain individuals, in the course of certain events.
But even this had not been enough for him. He desired realizations completely independent of the laws of reality, so free as their source: fiction; as their germ: dreams. This would be the ideal -- the absolutely highest achievement, a total expression without a shadow of insufficiency...
Wrzesmian understood, however, that such an achievement might result in his own extermination. Absolute fulfillment would also be a complete release of one's energy, therefore death through exertion, excess...
Because the ideal, as is known, is in death. A work overwhelms the author with its weight. Thoughts fully realized can become threatening and vengeful, especially thoughts that are insane. Left alone, without a point of support on a real base, they can be dangerous to the originator.
Wrzesmian had a presentment of this eventuality, but he wasn't swayed, wasn't frightened. His desire predominated above everything else...
Meanwhile the years went silently by, not bringing the dreamed-of realizations. Wrzesmian completely removed himself from the sight of people, taking up solitary residence at the outskirts of the city on a secluded suburban street mat looked onto fields and fallows. Here, closed in his two small rooms, cut off from society, he spent months and years in reading and contemplation. He slowly restricted himself to tighter circles of actual life, to which he didn't give the slightest attention, paying only minimal, unavoidable tribute. Besides, he was totally steeped in himself, in his dreams and in longing for then fulfillment. His ideas, not projected on paper as before, took on strength and juice; they swelled through non-expression of their contents. Sometimes it seemed to him that his thoughts were not abstractions but something materialistic, nearly thickened, that it would be sufficient to reach out a hand to enclose them, to seize them. But the illusion quickly blew away, leaving in its place bitter disappointment.
Yet he didn't lose heart. In order not to diffuse himself too much with die sights of the outside world, he narrowed the scope of everyday perceptions to a limited number of pictures, which, constantly seen without change, day after day, through entire years, gradually entered into a circle of ideas, became commensurate with their terrain, merging with the world of dreams into one particular area.
Thus, imperceptibly, some unreachable habitat was formed, some secret oasis to which no one had access except Wrzesmian, king of the unseen islet. This milieu, imbibed with the ego of the dreamer, saturated with it to the brink, appeared to the uninitiated as a simple place in space; people could only perceive its exterior side, its physical existence -- but the internal pulsations of fermenting thoughts, the subtle connection these had with the personage of Wrzesmian, they failed to sense...
By odd chance the space enveloped by the mind of the fantasist, that place which he transformed into the area of his dreams, was not his home. The oasis of his fiction rose opposite his windows, on the other side of his street, in the form of a two-storied villa.
The gloomy elegance of the house riveted him for the first moment after he had occupied his new abode. At the end of a black double row of cypresses, their two lines containing a stone pathway, appeared a several-stepped terrace where a weighty, stylized double door led to the interior. Across the iron railing that surrounded the mansion, the wings of the house were losing color. Coated with a pale-greenish paint, the ill and sad outer walls peered out from the depth. From underneath the garden, treacherously concealed humidity crawled out here and there with a dark oozing. Once carefully cultivated flower borders, now chimerically bundled beds, had with time lost the distinctness of their lines. Only two eternal fountains quietly wept, shedding water from marble basins onto clusters of rich, red roses. Only a muscular Triton on the left side continually raised his hand in the same gesture of greeting to a limber Harpy who, leaning from a marble cistern on the other side, enticed him for many years with the lure of a divine body; in vain, because they were separated by the mournful cypresses...
The entirety gave the impression of dismal loneliness, abandoned by people for a long time, isolated from neighboring buildings. The villa ended the street; beyond it was not even one house; there were only wide bands of marshy meadows, tracked fields, fallows, and, in the distance, beech woods, blackening during winter, rusting during autumn...
No one had been living in the celadon villa for a number of years. The owner, some wealthy aristocrat, had long since gone abroad, leaving the house without a caretaker.
Therefore it stood neglected in the middle of the rampant garden, wasted away by the destructive work of rain, and crumbled by the malice of winds and winter blizzards.
The dreary spell that blew from this retreat strangely pulled on Wrzesmian's soul. The villa was for him an artistic symbol of the mood, which pervaded his work; gazing intently on it, he felt as if in his own home.
That is why he spent whole hours beside his window, resting on the frame and casting his meditative glance in the direction of the sad house. He especially liked to observe on lunar nights the effects evoked on the fantastic retreat by the moon's light. Nighttime, in fact, seemed to be its real element. During the day the villa was dormant as if in lifeless sleep. The entire magic hidden in its mysterious interior appeared in full only after the setting of the sun. Then the house came back to life. Some intangible tremor coursed through the sleeping hermitage, shook the cypresses solidified in mourning, rippled with sinuous lines weathered pediments and friezes...
Wrzesmian watched and lived the life of the house. Distinct thoughts were awakened within him, harmonious with the scenery across the street; pathetic tragedies were born, as strong as death, as menacing as fate; then again, some vague thoughts loomed, dimmed as if by the moon's silver patina.
Every recess became a sensory counterpart to a fiction, a lumpish realization of thoughts that clung onto ledges, roamed about solitary, empty halls, wept on terrace steps. Jumbled crazy dreams, hazy imaginings roved in wet dispersion, wandered along walls, uncertain of support. Even these found a haven. Irritated by the capriciousness of their movement, the imagination thrust them away with contempt, so that, frightened, they flowed down in filmy streams into a large moss-grown vat at the corner of the house, moving into its black body somnolently, torpidly, like rain on the late-autumn inclement days. Faint, rusty thoughts, slightly acidic...
Wrzesmian got drunk with the dismal frolics of the fantasies, letting their creations run loose. According to his liking he changed their direction or drove them away from sight, in the next moment conjuring up new replacements...
No one bothered him. Any inopportune intruder did not traverse the secluded street in the distant quarter of the city; no noisy cart interrupted the atmosphere.
Thus he had lived the last several years -- years undisturbed by the outside, but full of menace and marvels from the inside.
Until suddenly one day some changes occurred in the house across the street, instantly excising memorizations that had already started to adopt forms set by habit and practice.
It happened on a fine July evening. Sitting, as usual, by an open window, his head propped by his hand, Wrzesmian was sweeping his meditative glance about the villa and the garden. All of a sudden, looking into one of the windows in a wing of the house, he shuddered. By the windowpane, gazing stubbornly at him, was the pale face of a man. The unmoving gaze of the strange stare was sinister. Wrzesmian became seized with a vague dread. He rubbed his eyes, walked about his room a couple of times, and looked again at the window; the severe face had not disappeared, staring continually in his direction.
"Has the owner of the villa already returned?" Wrzesmian threw out the weak supposition in an undertone.
The dreary mask answered by twisting itself into a wild-ironic smile. Wrzesmian let down the shade and lit up his home: he couldn't stand the gaze any longer.
To obliterate these impressions he immersed himself in reading until midnight. At twelve he wearily raised himself from a book, and drawn by an overpowering temptation, he lifted the edge of the shade to peek out the window. And again a shudder of fear chilled him to the bone: the pale man stood continually there, without movement, by the window on the right wing. Illuminated by the bright magnesium shine of the moon, he disabled Wrzesmian with his gaze. Uneasy, Wrzesmian returned the shade to its position and tried to fall asleep.
Unsuccessfully. His imagination, imbued with dread, didn't give him rest, tormenting him unbearably. Not until morning did he fall into a short, nervous sleep full of nightmares and visions. When he woke up around noon, with a giddy head, his first thought was to look at the villa's windows. He breathed out a sigh of relief: the obstinate face was gone.
Throughout the entire day there was peace. But upon evening he saw by a window on the first floor the mask of some woman staring at him, her unfurled hair bordering a face already withered but with traces of onetime great beauty, a face maddened by a pair of wild, intent eyes. And she was looking at him through frenzied pupils with the same severe gaze as that of her companion from the right wing. Both seemed not to know anything about their coexistence in the strange house. They were joined only by their menacing gesture turned toward Wrzesmian...
And again after a sleepless night, interrupted by looking at his persecutors, a day free of masks followed. But as soon as dusk was entering into its secret conspiracy with the night, a third new figure bloomed by a window, not retreating until dawn. So in the space of several days all the windows of the villa were filled up with sinister faces. From behind every window looked out some despairing eyes, some ovals marked with suffering or madness. The house gazed at him with the eyes of maniacs, the grimace of lunatics; it grinned toward him with the smile of the demented. Not one of these people had he seen in his life, and yet he somehow knew all of them. But from where, he knew not. Each one of them had a different expression, but all were united in their threatening deportment toward him; apparently he" was considered there as a common enemy. Their hatred terrified and at the same time pulled in a magnetic manner. And a strange thing: in the deepest layers of his mind, he understood then-anger and acknowledged its justness.
And they, as if solving him from afar, gathered certainty of expression, and their masks became cruder with every day.
Then one August night, while he was leaning out of his window, enduring the crucifying gazes directed at him from hateful eyes, the immobile faces suddenly became animated; in each flashed simultaneously the same will. Hundreds of arms, thin as tibias, raised themselves in a movement of command, and scores of pale hands performed an infliction of fingers in a characteristic gesture...
Wrzesmian understood: he was being summoned inside. As if hypnotized he leaped over the windowsill, crossed the narrow strip of street, jumped over the railing, and began to walk along the alley to the villa...
It was four in the morning, the hour before dawn's tremblings. The magnesium jets of the moon bathed the house in a silver whirlpool, lured long shadows from curves. The path was bright, dazzling white in the midst of sorrowful shrub walls. Hollowly echoed the distinct steps on stone slabs, silently rippled the fountains, mysteriously drizzled the bent waters... He went up the terrace and jerked strongly on the door handle: the door gave way. He walked along a lengthy corridor of two rows of Corinthian columns. The nocturnal dusk brightened the glory of the moon, which, pouring through a stained-glass panel at the end of the gallery, unreeled green fables onto porphyritic floor tiles...
Suddenly, as he was walking, some figure emerged from behind the shaft of column and followed him. Wrzesmian shuddered but silently went on. A couple of steps further a new figure detached itself from a niche between two columns; after it, a third figure, and a tenth -- all followed him. He wanted to turn back, but they blocked his way. So he crossed the column forest and swerved to his right, into some circular hall. Here it was bright from the moon's shimmering and full of some sort of people. He slipped between them, looking for an exit. In vain! They surrounded him with an increasingly dense, obtrusive circle. From pale, bloodless lips flowed out a menacing whisper:
"It's him! It's him!"
He stopped and looked defiantly at the throng:
"What do you want from me?"
"Your blood! We want your blood! Blood! Blood!"
"What do you want it for?"
"We want to live! We want to live! Why do you call us out from the chaos of nonexistence and condemn us to be miserable half-corporal vagrants? Look at how weak and pale we are!"
"Mercy!" he wailed, desperately throwing himself toward a winding staircase in depth of the hall.
"Hold him! Surround him! Surround him!"
With the speed of a madman he ascended the stairs to the upper floor and burst into some medieval chamber. But his oppressors entered right after him. Their slender arms, their fluid, mistily damp hands joined in a macabre file without exit.
"What did I do to you?"
"We want full life! You confined us, you wretch, to this house! We want to leave here and go out into the world, released from this place to live in freedom! Your blood will fortify us, your blood will give us strength! Strangle him! Strangle him!"
Thousands of hungry mouths extended toward him, thousands of pale suckers...
In a crazy reflex he flung himself toward the window in order to jump out. A legion of slimy, cold hands seized him by the middle, dug crooked finger hooks into his hair, coiled his neck... He struggled once, twice. Someone's fingernails cut into his larynx, someone's lips fastened to his temple...
He staggered, supported himself on the embrasure with his shoulders, inclined backward... His convulsively extended arms spread out in a sacrificial movement; a weary smile of fulfillment crept to his whitened lips -- he was already dead...
At the moment when the interior cooled with the agonizing throes of Wrzesmian's body, the predawn silence was interrupted by a dull plop. It came from the vat at the corner of the house. The surface of the water, moldy from green scum, seethed -- inside the rotten barrel, encompassed by rusty hoops, swirls rose, refuse undulated, sediment gurgled. A couple of large, distended bubbles escaped, and a misshapen stump of a hand appeared. Some sort of torso or framework emerged from the depth, dripping with water, covered with mold and a cadaverous putridity -- maybe a man, beast, or plant. The monstrosity glinted his amazed face toward the sky, opened spongy lips wide in a vague imbecilic-enigmatic smile, extracted from the vat legs twisted as a thicket of coral, and, shaking himself of water, started to walk with an unsteady, swinging step...
Already it was daybreak; violet luminosities slithered about the boundless regions of the world.
The freak was heading toward the deep-blue forest on the distant horizon. He parted the wicket in the garden beyond the house, shifted himself bowleggedly along a narrow path, and, drenched in the amethystine streams of morning twilight, tottered toward fields and meadows slumbering in daybreak's obscurity. Slowly, his figure diminished, became diluted, started to expire... until it dissolved, dispersing in the gleams of early dawn...