Le Horla

A man lives alone on the banks of the Seine, near Rouen, in a white house he loves as one loves one's own flesh—its roots, the immense plane tree, the distant Gothic spires, the hum of bells carried by the breeze. It is May 8, a magnificent day, and he watches the ships glide by on the river. A Brazilian three-master, pristine white, flawlessly clean and gleaming, sails up the current. He salutes it, not knowing why, so immense is the pleasure the sight of this vessel brings him.

A few days later, fever sets in. Not an outright fever, but a dull nervous exhaustion, a baseless melancholy, a premonition of some approaching doom that remains nameless. Come evening, a vague apprehension washes over him—a fear of sleep, a dread of his own bed. He lies down, awaiting rest as one might await the executioner, and in the night, someone draws near, kneels on his chest, takes his neck in their hands, and squeezes, squeezes with all their might to strangle him. He struggles, paralyzed by the impotence of dreams, and wakes up covered in sweat, alone.

The doctor finds nothing amiss. Cold showers prove futile, bromide proves futile. A walk in the forest of Roumare turns into pure anguish: a shiver of dread, the certainty of being followed, a wave of vertigo when he closes his eyes and spins like a top. He departs for a few weeks, visiting Mont Saint-Michel. Up there, a monk tells him something simple and terrible: the wind knocks men over, topples buildings, raises the sea into mountains of water—and yet, has anyone ever seen it? He falls silent before this logic. The man is either a sage or a fool, he cannot quite say, but what he stated, he himself had often pondered.

He returns cured, or believes himself to be. Yet his coachman suffers from the same affliction, and the nightmares return. This time, in the night, someone crouching upon him drinks his life from his lips, like a leech. And one morning, the water carafe he had filled to its crystal stopper is empty. Completely empty. His hands tremble. Who drank this water? Him, sleepwalking? Or a foreign entity, unknowable, invisible, animating his captive body while his soul lay dormant? He devises methodical experiments: wine, milk, water, bread, strawberries. The water and the milk have been drunk. Neither the wine, nor the bread, nor the strawberries have been touched. He wraps the carafes in white muslin, ties the stoppers with string, rubs his hands with graphite to see if he touched them in his sleep. By morning, the cloths are immaculate. All the water has been drunk. All the milk has been drunk.

He flees to Paris. Twenty-four hours are enough to restore his composure. At the Théâtre-Français, amidst the jostling of the boulevards, he reflects on his terrors with irony. How weak the human mind is, how quickly it panics the moment a small, incomprehensible fact strikes us! Yet at the home of his cousin, Madame Sablé, a physician named Dr. Parent puts the young woman to sleep through hypnotism, makes her see a mirror in a calling card, and commands her to borrow five thousand francs the next morning—and she obeys, trembling, harassed by an alien will that has entered her, unable to fathom where the impulse originated. This experiment unnerves him more than anything else.

Upon his return home, it all begins again—and worse. The servants quarrel, glasses shatter in the cupboards at night. One sunlit afternoon, in the rose alley, he sees a rose stem bend as though twisted by an invisible hand, then snap, and the flower rise into the air, following the curve of an arm carrying it to a mouth, remaining suspended, motionless, a terrifying crimson stain three paces from his eyes. He lunges at it: nothing. The stem is indeed snapped on the bush, freshly broken between two other roses still on the branch. He is now certain, as certain as the alternation of day and night, that an invisible being dwells beneath his roof.

Thus begins the possession. He can no longer leave the house. He wants to step into his carriage to drive to Rouen—he cannot. Someone wills it for him, and he obeys. He desires to rise from his armchair—he is riveted to his seat, and his seat clings to the floor. Then, suddenly, he is compelled to go pick strawberries at the end of the garden, and he goes, and he eats them. There is nothing left of him, nothing but an enslaved, terrified spectator of every action his body performs without him. He manages to escape for two hours, running to the Rouen library to seek out a treatise on invisible beings, but just as he is about to shout to his coachman to drive to the train station, the word 'home' spills from his mouth, and he falls back, frantic, onto the cushions of his carriage.

One night, seated by his open window, he reads this treatise, then dozes off. Opening his eyes again, he sees a page of the book lift and turn on its own, as though flipped by a finger. His armchair is empty—yet he understands that the other is there, seated in his place, reading. He leaps to seize him; the chair topples, the lamp falls, the window slams shut as if a startled burglar had plunged into the night. Therefore, the creature had been afraid. Therefore, one day perhaps, he might be caught and destroyed.

Then he reads in a journal that an epidemic of madness is raging in the province of São Paulo, Brazil—inhabitants hounded, possessed, governed by invisible beings who feed on their life-force as they sleep and drink water and milk. And he remembers the beautiful Brazilian three-master that sailed past his windows on the 8th of May. The being was aboard, hailing from that distant land where its race was born. It saw the white dwelling, and it leapt from the vessel to the shore. Its name—he feels as though he is screaming the name—the Horla.

One evening, he pretends to write to draw it out. All the lamps are lit, the eight candles on the mantelpiece are burning. And suddenly he rises, turns toward the mirrored wardrobe—and does not see himself. The glass is empty, clear, profound, full of light, but his image is not in it. He stands before it, yet does not see himself. Then slowly, in a mist, as if through a sheet of water, his reflection reappears, second by second, like the end of an eclipse. What was concealing him possessed no sharp contours, but a sort of opaque transparency, gradually clearing.

He has iron shutters and an iron door installed on his bedroom. One September evening, he senses that the Horla is present. He paces left and right, carelessly pulls off his boots, then closes the shutters, double-locks the door, and fastens the padlock on the window. He feels the being thrash about, commanding him to open. He resists, slipping outside backward, opening the door just wide enough to squeeze through, and locks it inside. Alone. He goes down to the drawing room, pours the oil from the lamps over the carpet, the furniture, everywhere, and sets it alight. Then he flees to hide at the bottom of the garden, in a grove of laurels.

He waits. All is black, mute, still. Then a window bursts under the pressure of the blaze, and a red and yellow flame climbs the white wall all the way to the roof. But a horrific scream, a woman's scream, pierces the night—he had forgotten his servants. He sees their frantic faces, their flailing arms in the mansard windows. He runs toward the village howling for help. The house is now nothing but a monstrous pyre illuminating the whole earth, a pyre where men are burning, and where, perhaps, the Horla is burning too. The roof caves in between the walls, a volcano of flames erupting to the sky. Dead? But this body that daylight passed through, this transparent, unknowable body—was it destructible by the means that kill our own? No, without a doubt, it is not dead. Therefore, he will have to kill himself.