Grim Tales (4 page)

The first thing the angel did when he came to earth was, with the help of a locksmith, to take off his wings. The second thing was to go up in an airplane. The third was to marry a woman, whom he called “angel,” although she was ordinary. When she died, he took his wings out of storage, had them cleaned and oiled and the rubies in their intricate works replaced by a watch-maker. Then he returned to the place from which he had come – satisfied that he had lived the life of a man.

In another version of the story, the angel, having grown tired of life on earth, killed his wife and took her home in order to “give his beloved a head start on eternity.”

In a third version, the wife murdered the angel, sold his wings for a fortune, and lived happily ever after with her lover, who was reasonably imperfect, had a wicked sense of humor, believed entirely in the here-and-now and not at all in the hereafter.

During the night, lightning opened an ancient oak's trunk below the first fork. In the morning, a hand was found revealed in the splintered wood – a hand fresh as if recently alive, although the ring on its finger was of a kind worn in Holland and in the Dutch colonies in the 17th century. This, the university archaeologists were able to ascertain with certainty. How the hand had been caused to be locked in the wood and how it had been preserved there were never adequately explained. Some of a fantastic disposition believed it had belonged to a malefactor, a thief perhaps, who had forfeited his hand in punishment and that it had been brought to the tree by a carrion-bird to nourish its young. But why it should have remained intact they could not say. One other explanation was put forward: that the hand had been at the throat of a woman – a wife, surely – when it had been severed “by a miracle,” then buried in the tree. But the proponent of this theory was ridiculed. She was of unstable mind, after all; and hadn't her husband lost his hand in an accident?

From the fissure that had opened during the night “like a piece of black lightning” issued a seemingly endless column of giant ants of a kind not previously identified but now believed to have come from the depths of the interior. In a short while – shorter than anyone had thought possible – the ants carried off the houses with their contents down to the last bed, broom and cup until nothing remained of them, and the ground where they had stood was beaten flat. Why this neighborhood had been singled out is unknown, as is the fate of those who had lately dwelled there. Some think that the former inhabitants are now living in a reconstruction of their original houses deep below ground under an artificial sun. Whether they were brought there to rescue or to punish is hotly debated.

The pit is full, he said. Wiping blood from his hands, the other man answered: Dig another one.

In a seaside hotel, he fell ill. His wife slept on the sofa in the other room because of his feverish tossing “like a man caught in the surf.” That night he dreamed of drowning. The next morning when she went into his room, he was dead – the sheet wet and his hair caked with sand.

Those unfortunate enough to open their closet doors that night were smothered by the coats hanging inside. It was revenge taken by objects whose function is to humble themselves in the service of their owners. What is more, to stand in harm's way, between their owners' vulnerable bodies and the harshest of elements. Those who considered themselves lucky to have escaped their coats had only to wait until the next rain, when they were impaled on their umbrellas the moment they were unfurled.

If they had owned a new electric mixer instead of an old-fashioned egg-beater, they could have switched it off before it flew across the kitchen and attacked the baby.

She was beguiled by a set of Chinese boxes, given to her by an aunt who traveled and whose fur piece, wet that morning with melting snow, had tickled the girl's cheek. She spent hours playing with the boxes, making them disappear inside each other. It was this that beguiled her – how one box could swallow another completely and yet remain in its place, unseen. She was a strange child. A secretive child. A private child, whose mother and father feared her. The first day she disappeared, no one thought to look in her closet. When she was hungry, she came out and sat at the kitchen table, waiting for supper. The second time she disappeared, no one thought to look down the well in the yard. All night the girl slept, underwater, covered by the moon.