The Somnambulist

Short Story

In the matter of spiritualism, I was more for the school of Harry Houdini, while my wife held the opposite belief, attending the lectures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on both occasions he graced our little town of Port Arthur, most recently in 1923. The silver mines, you see, and the ghosts, attracted him here. I never met the man, and I’m not a fan of mystery, so not a word of Sherlock Holmes have I read, either.

I tried to tell her, all of it was hogwash—not the novels, but the séances and whatever. “And besides,” I asked her once, “isn’t it all a bit insulting to the miners to go traipsing over their graves for a lark?”

“Silver Islet has the most beautiful cemetery,” she said. I’ve only bothered to go out there once, and I didn’t find it half so nice as she did. “You can feel the ghosts in the fog on the best nights.”

“Darling,” I said, “if you truly believe the dead can speak, they should bloody well remember their own histories.” Referring not only to Houdini’s misadventures in séances—a Hungarian mother suddenly speaking English from the afterlife—but to my mirrored experience which June was very familiar with, a séance I was forced to participate in after the death of my own mother to help “ease my grief.” Lot of good that did, the charlatan gave her English affectations, and none of her charming Scottish ones. A very poor illusion, and only reaffirmed my conviction it was all ridiculous, all the cracking of toes and knuckling of tables going on.

But she, my dear June, for all her wonderful qualities did I forgive her this one folly.

Lord knows I’ve got plenty of my own, all of which she forgave in turn. This is the truth in why I miss her so—not just the love we shared, but it is necessary for a man to have a woman that holds up his strengths, or he sinks into the quagmire of his weaknesses.

Foremost of my faults is that I am a somnambulist—a sleepwalker. June would use this as her reason for belief in the supernatural—I walk strange patterns, speak strange things, I act very unlike myself, and she often said it gave her chills.

A secondary failure of my person is that I am a creature of strict habit. I must have my papers on my desk just so—my tea served in the way that June had memorized and could likely prepare even in sleep, if she were to ever catch my somnambulism like a case of influenza.

One morning, what I thought was the same time I awake every morning—any diversion from it must surely mean I’ve taken ill—I found a cup of tea gone cold at my bedside and stale water in the washbasin. I began calling for June. We had no children, and no housekeeper after I fired every one of them for failing to meet my highly specific needs, damn my persnickety nature—creases ironed where I don’t want creases or the wrong texture in my oats or some such irritating bastardry only my sweet June could abide without turning insane—and I was alone in the house, three floors and not a sign of life but my own nervous steps and calls.

As I entered my study a fear gripped my heart that all the strewn papers from my desk might be a sign that something had happened to her—something I might have done in my sleep. I checked myself all over,—my hands, face, all fine, no signs of struggle or injury, so I fixed my nightshirt and returned my attention, partially, to the papers.

Several years before, June and I attended a showing of the very strange, but very intriguing film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. As I bundled the papers and tapped the edges on my desk to order them more easily, my movements so automatic it allowed my mind to wander, I remembered something June had said once we left the theatre.

“Wouldn’t it be incredible if . . . through hypnotism perhaps, something like that Edgar Cayce fellow—if one could speak with the dead while asleep?”

“All I do is knock things about,” I said flippantly, and we both laughed.

A while later, Sir Arthur made his second visit to Port Arthur, and gave a lecture June would have killed to attend, had I not bought her a ticket.

It was after this lecture June became even more inquisitive with me. Not a quiet moment of wakefulness, so many questions. “Have you ever seen auras?” she asked once. I answered, “What the devil is an aura?”

Something was odd about the papers, once my mind returned to task. My pen was just as I had left it;—ink pot there, lamp turned at the correct angle, pipe in its holder, all correct. Only the papers were in disarray, and more than that, I couldn’t read a word. My own handwriting is like chicken scratch, I admit, but this was something else, something I couldn’t decipher. Some foreign alphabet I had never encountered in my life.

I took a blank page, uncrumpled it and pressed it flat, but I couldn’t pick up my pen. I stood there and stared at it, but damn me, I couldn’t reach for it to write.

I was having a nightmare, I decided. Some strange state, a first in my history of somnambulism that had me just aware enough to know I was sleeping, perhaps I had begun to wake and I just needed to get myself back to bed—I must have taken ill after all—and under the covers I went.

***

When I was a boy, the closure of the mine on Silver Islet was still fresh in the memory of the populace—Such wealth dug out from beneath Lake Superior only to have it all flooded. Even now, the near-empty village is the source of many ghost stories, of moaning dead miners coaxing treasure hunters to their deaths, of sea captains in windows. The place had become an obsession of June’s, and I allowed her that indulgence, as I said before. So far it had caused no issue, but . . .

After another day of her absence and no sign of her at all, my teacup growing a layer of mould and—you must understand that if I had done the washing and made a fresh pot it would be like admitting June was truly gone from my life, neurotic of me as it is—I returned again to my study, and looked for any other clues to where she had gone. Had she told me of a weekend out at Silver Islet and I had forgot? But my papers—they were different again. Through the days since her vanishing they were never in the same place twice, no matter how often I reordered them and placed them where they were supposed to be,—always a mess. Quickly the fear I felt at her absence, and my confusion at the fact that either I was being a nuisance to myself in my sleep or someone was playing an elaborate prank on me in my own study, was replaced by frustration I have never felt before in my life.

So much anger, as I passed one of our mirrors, it was there, my aura—as June would have described it—glowing like the white sunrise of a moving picture. I don’t recall what occurred after that, I must have fainted. More proof I was ill, for I was not prone to fainting.

Though I was careful not to pass down that same hallway again, not for days, I did glance down it. At some point a black curtain was draped over it, and the urge to tear it off struck me—but I couldn’t bring myself to go near it.

But the house was empty! It was only me and the cold breezes of autumn’s approach. No fires did I light, no heat from the radiators. I was preferring the cold, as if any heat would melt me in my confusion, the cold kept me alert for June to return and thaw me. She would stand at the foot of our bed, like she had a habit of, and she would chastise me for leaving the windows open to catch my death.

It was that thought that had me close the window, for surely she was right and I had caught myself some brain sickness, going mad with festering delirium.

***

Always my papers. Every day—I had lost count—I would go to my study and I would need to right them. I would straighten my pen, even if it didn’t need straightening. Angle my light correctly, switch it on and off as if to keep it fresh.

One day, it must have been winter by then, for I was ice-cold in the bed, despite the blankets piled high, quilts stitched by June’s own hands—but I hadn’t fetched them. An old woman sat at my bedside, behind her a man dressed proper like some educated authority, and I thought, goodness I’m about to be taken to a madhouse, aren’t I? But he didn’t come at me with a straitjacket. He held a notebook in his lap, a pipe in his mouth. There was something strange about their clothes, the cut of his suit must have been some foreign fashion that hadn’t reached June’s magazines yet. But I had no fear, no rage in my heart at the sight of these two strangers in my bedroom.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Tears sprang from the old woman’s eyes. I noticed nearby was some sort of radio-like device, lights flickering and dials and what I think was a small telephone receiver.

“Why, Bruce—This is June, dear.”

And she patted my hand.

“Now, Bruce, you must recall Dr. Beaumont. He’s a psychiatrist, and specializes in hypnotism and problems with sleep. Do you remember Dr. Beaumont at all?”

At first, I confessed I did not. Later, I would correct myself. He was with us at Silver Islet.

“He comes while you’re asleep, but you’ve met him awake many times.”

Dr. Beaumont removed his pipe to nod at me, and stuck the pipe back between his teeth without saying a word.

“Shall we get the mirror?” old-June asked the doctor. He blessedly shook his head “no,” and muttered something about the fragility of my lucid state.

A young man in the doorway of my room cast his shadow. It was then I noticed how bright the hallway was—my bedroom only had candles for light, which was very unusual.

“Is it working?” the young man asked, a snide tone in his voice. “Did you catch him?”

“Yes, he’s here with us now. Would you like to speak with him?” old-June asked, but the young man snorted and walked away. I was all but blinded by the light he left behind.

I must have really been on death’s door, for so much confusion to rattle me so. I fainted again, and I think it was just my brain trying to save me from something yet more strange.

In my dream, black and white like in pictures, I was back at the theatre with June—young, us both—her eyes sparkled in wonder as we walked arm-in-arm, she had been so taken by the magic of the film, Caligari, and didn’t find it disturbing at all, only fascinating. She had been the same all her life, with anything a normal young woman would have been shaken by. This was another reason I was so taken with her—and perhaps why she had fallen in with me, for I was far from a usual man, myself.

Upon reflection, she quite resembled the actress Marion Davies. I looked more like a bucktoothed John Gilbert, at the risk of being overly generous with myself. But I digress.

“Anne and I were thinking about visiting there again soon. Please say you’ll come along, this time. Everyone is always asking about you.”

I wasn’t stubborn enough, and I had said yes.

I believe that night, the real night in my memory, I walked right out of the house before she caught me and brought me back inside.

***

So many candles I could smell the beeswax. I stirred awake, but I was alone in the bedroom—standing up. A cup of tea, just where it should be, but something kept my arms down, I couldn’t reach for it. Even my lungs failed to function as I stared at the cup.

The same young man walked past the room and I couldn’t call for him. I was stiff, standing there in my nightshirt, my feet melded with the rug.

The old woman who called herself June—and she did look a lot like her, perhaps the way June’s mother might have looked had she not died in childbirth—appeared some time later with a fresh pot of tea. Seeing me there, still as stone and numb by lack of movement, she jumped—tea and tray dropped and smashed. The young man came back in a hurry, with my damn pen in his hand.

“It’s alright, ma,” he said. “But you should stop before you hurt yourself.”

“He’s right, you know,” I said. Only she looked at me, the young man might have not heard or seen me at all.

Later, the doctor came. They performed a most peculiar ritual, a strange sort of hypnotism. That device was horribly droning up and down. June asked me what I remembered about that last trip to Silver Islet. To really go deep into my subconscious. But as I came up with nothing, except the ridiculous séances because apparently I was talking with the miners in my sleep, so the living idiots needed me there as a medium . . . and while I stewed on the fact they were using me for their stupid hobby, she went on:—that night, after all went back to their rooms, I walked in my sleep as if to go down to my study, but the hotel was laid out too differently, and with me being such a homebody—well, I fell out of the window and bashed my head open.

Even now, I don’t know if I am awake or asleep, ever. And if I am awake, all my memories consume me. And if I sleep, all the strangenesses make me shake, I become stormy.

Stormy. Like the lake, flooding the mine.

I asked her again for clarity's sake, another night, about that visit to Silver Islet, when I opened my head on the earth. The strange device crackled as I spoke. The doctor was there, but I was getting accustomed to his presence and his brand of tobacco. It never did occur to me to ask for my own pipe, but it comforted me to know it was just as I had kept it, June made sure it was just so.

My question brought more tears. “It was the most successful night of any of our visits. If only Sir Arthur could have witnessed.” I winced at that. “The air was damp with the humidity of the dead—and it being my first time, well, the first time I had actually communicated with the spirit realm . . . Whoever it was we were speaking with—Oh! Don’t you remember? It was through you he spoke, in your sleep . . . We had nearly given up for the night. ‘I’d like to visit the mine in the morning,’ you said when you were awake enough to make it to our room. But you woke me, violently you shook me awake and demanded I take you, but it wasn’t you. I think you were . . . you . . . when you fell from the window.”

At this point the doctor asked her to stop. She was so frail, like onionskin paper, the candles could almost shine through her, and I worried she’d crumble to dust with any more tears.

There was no tea at my bedside the next morning. I went down to my study, and my pen was gone. Everything else was covered in cobwebs and decay, but I have never stopped hoping for June to return, I wail some nights for her. Even after the roof caved in.