The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

Every night as I lay on the borders of a sleep which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as Wagner, I would be visited by a young woman in a négligé made of a fabric the colour and texture of the petals of poppies which clung about her but did not conceal her quite transparent flesh, so that the exquisite filigree of her skeleton was revealed quite clearly. Where her heart should have been there flickered a knot of flames like ribbons and she shimmered a little, like the air on a very hot summer’s day. She did not speak; she did not smile. Except for those faint quiverings of her unimaginable substance, she did not move. But she never failed to visit me. Now I know that the manifestations of those days were – as perhaps I then suspected but refused to admit to myself – a language of signs which utterly bemused me because I could not read them. Each phantom was a symbol palpitating with appalling significance yet she alone, my visitor with flesh of glass, hinted to me a little of the nature of the mysteries which encompassed us and filled so many of us with terror.