Dark Entries

by Robert Aickman

When I was forty-one, two things happened which have a bearing on this narrative. The first was that a catastrophe befell me which led to my again taking up residence with my parents. Details are superfluous.

“You’re an artist, Mel. You can’t expect to be a success at the same time.”

Indeed, it was a house of the kind in which the work is never either satisfying or complete: an ever-open mouth of a house.

I completed my sequence of new experiences by fainting indeed.

They descended a flight of stone steps at which the sea had sucked and bitten.

her insobriety, like her affability, seemed to have an exact and definite limit.

The ungainly sentence was made music by her voice.

“If you really love me, as I know you do, you won’t want to stop seeing me because of that. You would only do that if it was yourself you loved and not me.”

he suspected that his own not unsuccessful career in the Foreign Office had already so sobered and discoloured his imagination that his music and painting, products now of “spare time” only, would be unlikely to catch that great joy of emancipation which alone, he asserted, made life and art worthy of attention.

When decision is required, reflection avails only a few.

“You must have noticed it is always too late when questions are answered and hopes fulfilled and sacrifices made and murder done. Because it is always later than you think.”

“I think the secret,” she replied, kissing him, “is to get it down quickly. Quickly. Immediately you see it. When you see it. Don’t stop till you’ve got it down.” “I wonder how you know? You’re perfectly right. Yesterday——” “That’s just it,” she said. “Yesterday—and to-day everything’s different. Things only exist as long as you see them. And we are all of us nothing but the sum of our moods.”

He was alone and all the foolish, bad, unlovely world were strangers.