At dawn I had that dream again. I went down to the boiler room and there they were – my Mother and Grandmother. Both in summer dresses, flowery ones, both with handbags, as if they were off to church and had lost their way. They avoided my gaze when I began to reproach them.
‘What are you doing here, Mummy?’ I asked angrily. ‘How’s it possible?’
They were standing between a stack of wood and the boiler, absurdly stylish, though the patterns on their dresses looked washed-out and faded.
‘Get out of here!’ I shouted at them, but suddenly my voice stuck in my throat. I could hear shuffling noises and rising whispers coming from the garage.
I turned in that direction and saw that there were lots of people over there: men, women and children, in strangely festive clothing that had faded and gone grey. They had the same restless, terrified look in their eyes, as if they didn’t know what they were actually doing here. They were streaming in from somewhere in a swarm, crowding in the doorway, unsure whether they could come in. They were whispering to each other incoherently, and shuffling their boot soles against the stone floor of the boiler room and the garage. Pressing from behind, the crowd kept pushing the front rows forwards. I was seized with sheer terror.
I felt for the handle behind me and very quietly, doing my best not to draw attention to myself, I slipped out of there. Then, my hands trembling with fear, I spent a long time bolting the boiler room door.
When I woke up, the anxiety brought on by this dream was still intense. I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I thought the best thing I could do would be to go and see Oddball. The Sun had not yet fully risen, and I hadn’t had much sleep. A gentle mist floated over everything, just about to change into dew.
Oddball opened the door to me, looking sleepy. He couldn’t have had a proper wash: the red spots that I’d made for him the day before with lipstick were still on his cheeks.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
I didn’t know what to say.
‘Come in,’ he muttered. ‘So how did it go?’
‘Fine. Perfectly all right,’ I replied concisely, knowing that Oddball likes concise questions and concise answers.
I sat down, and he set about making coffee. First he spent a long time cleaning the machine, then poured the water from a measuring jug, and I noticed that he never stopped talking. It was very strange to see him so animated. Świętopełk, who talks and talks.
‘I’ve always wanted to know what you keep in that drawer,’ I said.
‘Here you are,’ he said, opening it to show me. ‘Be my guest – nothing but essential items.’
‘Just like me in the Samurai.’
The drawer silently slid open at a gentle tug of his finger. In dapper grey compartments lay some very neatly arranged kitchen Utensils. A rolling pin, an egg whisk, a tiny battery-powered milk beater and an ice-cream spoon. And also some Utensils that I couldn’t identify – some long spoons, spatulas and strange hooks. They looked like surgical Instruments for complicated operations. It was plain to see that their owner took extraordinary care of them – they were polished and put away in the right places.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, picking up some wide metal pincers.
‘Those are tongs for removing cling film when it sticks to the roller,’ he said, and poured the coffee into cups.
Then he reached for a small whisk, used it to whip the milk into snowy froth and poured it onto the coffee. From the drawer he took out a set of circular stencils and a small container of cocoa powder. For a while he wondered which pattern to choose, and finally picked a little heart shape. Then he sprinkled cocoa powder onto it, and, lo and behold, a brown cocoa heart appeared on the snowy foam on my coffee. He smiled broadly.
Later that day I thought about his drawer again, about how peeping into it brought me total calm, and how I would really like to be one of those useful Utensils.
By Monday everyone knew the President was dead. The women who had come to clean the firehouse had found him on Sunday evening. Apparently one of them had suffered shock and had ended up in hospital.
To the Police,
I realise that for some very important reason the Police are not in a position to answer letters from the public (not just the anonymous ones). Without going into those reasons, I shall take the liberty of referring you once more to the topic that I brought up in my previous letter. But I would not wish the Police nor anyone else to be ignored in this manner. The citizen whom the public services ignore is in a way condemned to non-existence. Yet it would be a mistake to forget that he who has no rights is not bound by any duties.
I am pleased to inform you that I have managed to obtain the date of birth of the deceased Mr Innerd and to draw up his Horoscope (without the time, unfortunately, which makes my cosmogram less precise), and have found an extremely interesting fact in it, which fully confirms the Hypotheses that I presented to you previously.
Thus it appears that at the moment of his death the victim had transiting Mars in Virgo, which, according to the best principles of traditional Astrology, has many analogies with fur-bearing Animals. At the same time his Sun in Pisces indicates the weakest parts of the body, such as the ankles. So it looks as if Mr Innerd’s death was accurately forecast in his radix Horoscope. Therefore, were the Police to take note of the findings of Astrologers, many people could be protected from misfortune. The configuration of the planets clearly tells us that the perpetrators of this cruel Murder were fur-bearing Animals, most probably Foxes, either wild ones or runaways from the farm (or both acting in collusion), that somehow managed to drive the victim into the snares people had been setting there for years. He was caught in a particularly cruel type of trap, known as a ‘gibbet’, and had hung in the air for some time.
This discovery leads us straight to a general conclusion. The Police should check exactly where each of the victims had Saturn. Then they will find that each one had Saturn in an animal sign; the President additionally had it in Taurus, which heralds a violent death by suffocation caused by an Animal…
Please find enclosed a newspaper cutting about the reported sightings of a certain as-yet-unidentified Animal, seen in the Opole region, which is said to kill other Animals with a blow of its paw to the chest. Recently on television I saw a video recorded on a mobile phone, in which a young Tiger was clearly visible. All this has been happening in the Opole region, and thus not far away from us. Perhaps they are Animals that escaped from a zoo, managed to survive the floods and are now at liberty? In any case the matter is worth investigating, especially since, as I have noticed, the local population is gradually yielding to pathological fear, if not panic.
As I was writing this letter, someone knocked timidly at my door. It was the Writer, the Grey Lady.
‘Mrs Duszejko,’ she said from the threshold. ‘What’s going on around here? Have you heard?’
‘Please don’t stand in the doorway, there’s a draught. Come inside.’ She was wearing a knitted cardigan, almost floor-length. She came in, taking tiny little steps, and sat down on the edge of a chair.
‘So what will become of us?’ she asked dramatically.
‘Are you afraid Animals are going to kill us too?’
She bristled. ‘I do not believe in your theory. It’s absurd.’
‘I thought that you, as a Writer, had an imagination and a capacity for conjecture, and were not closed to ideas that at first glance seem improbable. You should know that everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth,’ I concluded, citing Blake, which seemed to make an impression on her.
‘I’d never have written a single line if I didn’t have my feet firmly on the ground, Mrs Duszejko,’ she said in the tone of an official, and then added in a softer tone: ‘I cannot imagine it. Would you please tell me – was he really suffocated by cockchafers?’
I bustled about making tea. Black tea. Let her know what Tea is.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He was covered in those Insects, they’d gone into his mouth, his lungs, his stomach, his ears. The women said he was crawling with Beetles. I didn’t see it, but I can perfectly well imagine it. Cucujus haematodes everywhere.’
She gave me a penetrating stare. I couldn’t interpret that look.
I served the tea.