The Other

by Thomas Tryon

Unseasonably dry this year. No rain in months now, so the blotch hasn’t spread much lately. But it will, I suppose. It’s inevitable. Death, taxes, and that damn stain.

Niles felt a queer chill, like a slowly growing stain, spreading through all the walls and membranes of his stomach.

A curtain fluttered. Behind it he glimpsed a figure partially hidden by the shadow of the half-raised window; two dark eyes in a dim face peered indistinctly back at him. Like a pale lily a hand bloomed there for an instant, then wilted, a gesture as gossamer as the curtain immediately obscuring it.

Niles a child of the air, a joyous spirit, well disposed, warm, affectionate, his nature in his face; tender, merry, loving. Holland? Something else again. She had always loved them equally, yet Holland was a child of the earth; still, guarded, bound within himself, fettered by secrets unshared. Craving love but not able to give it; so mysteriously withdrawn.

Holland’s very birth—his body struggling, rending the womb, emerging dead. Slapped into angry life by the doctor. Twenty minutes later, when midnight had come and gone, Niles appearing with miraculous ease. Smoothest delivery I ever saw, Dr. Brainard had said, delicately removing the caul. Imagine, born with the caul.

Aunt Vee always selected her words as she might fruit, squeezing each for ripeness and juiciness.

“No.” He turned this over. “Pride goeth before a fall—” “‘Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.’”

“Why did Brünnhilde ride into the fire?” “My, what made you think of that, the Wagner music? Why, in those days, that is what the women did. It was called immolation. They offered themselves on the pyre of the beloved.” “Yes, but why?” “For love, I imagine. When one’s love of the beloved is greater than one’s love of life or of one’s self, one sometimes prefers death. It is not so much an immolation of the body, I think, of one’s physical being as—” she paused to select her words. “What, then?” “As an immolation of the heart.”

sleep is a most holy thing. It is while we sleep that we get our mind and our imagination filled up again.” She shaped a bowl with her gnarled hands. “It is like a deep pool, this imagination, and during the day it gets used up, like water, and when we sleep at night the water we have used during the day gets replaced. And if it is not replaced, if there is none to drink of, we are thirsty. It is from sleep that God gives us our strength and our power and our peace, do you see.”

“We help one another by understanding one another: that is the only help there is. And the only hope as well.”

The Thing given to him by Holland, that which lay there at the center of the corolla-like layers of tissue, that Thing of shriveled flesh and bone and cartilage that was a severed human finger.

Beware when mad dogs lurk, for lurking they shall bite, was all Ada could reply to her queries, remembering always to add, And biting, shall bite again.

Childhood was but a few brief summers; winter a whole, cold, lifetime long.

The novelist Peter Straub has said that horror is the genre of literature most closely concerned with loss: our fear of it, its approach, its inevitable triumph.