“Hello?” he shouted. “Who are you, and what do you want at this time of night?”
He received no reply. Irritated, he thrust his feet into his boots, grabbed the stick he always kept in the corner, and went out to chase them away.
Only when he’d walked a little way out into the courtyard did he realize that they were shadows. They were human in shape, but they contained nothing but darkness.
He halted. He sensed a movement on his left, and he looked toward it. Several shadows came gliding along the wall.
They were coming from the well. They rose up from the well, glided along it, and stopped by the gate some twenty yards in front of him.
Antinous, they called again.
“What do you want with me?” Antinous shouted back.
There came no reply.
He stared intently at them. Even though new shadows kept arriving, the group before him didn’t increase. After a while he discovered that the new shadows merged into the old ones. And with each blending, their features became clearer. He saw something grayish beneath the black hats, there was a forehead, there a nose, there a cheek.
He took a few steps toward them.
The snow was falling wet and heavy.
“What do you want with me?” he asked again.
One of them came nearer. It stopped, and one of the flowing shadows coalesced with it, and then another, and before his eyes he saw his mother’s features starting to materialize.
“Mother,” he said.
Behind her another figure advanced.
“Father,” he said.
They both stood looking at him. He dropped the stick in the snow and went toward them. They stretched out their arms, and he embraced them. But his arms encompassed nothing but thin air.
He retreated a step.
“Why have you come back?” he asked.
“We haven’t come back, Antinous,” said his mother. “We’ve been here all the time. It’s you who’s come to us.”
He took another step back.
“Am I dead?” he asked.
Neither of them answered, they just stood there looking at him mild-eyed. He was their beloved son, they’d died and left him, now he’d followed them.
Then they were gone.
He stood alone in the courtyard, with the snow falling about him, on the ground lay the stick he’d cast aside, and when he bent down to pick it up, he became aware of his boots, they were the only things he was wearing.
He looked around.
What had happened? Had he been sleepwalking?
He must have been. He would never have gone naked into the courtyard otherwise, with a stick in his hand and boots on his feet.
But he hadn’t woken. There had been no waking up! They had stood just there, his mother and father, there, just now, and he hadn’t woken since then.
Or had he?
Or was it as they’d said? Was he dead?
Could one die without noticing it?
“Mad!” he shouted.
He turned and went into the house, took off his boots, went up to his bedroom, and got under the bedclothes again. The bed was still warm.
“Mad!” he shouted again.
Then he laughed out loud. If he’d been quite naked, he thought, he’d have had a shred of dignity to salvage. But not naked wearing boots and with a stick in the middle of the courtyard. And in conversation with his dead parents, too.
It was good no one had seen it.
He turned on his side and closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep. The thought that he might be dead wouldn’t leave him.
Wasn’t it a simple enough thing to find out if he was actually alive, he thought, and swung his feet out of bed, threw a cape across his shoulders, and went down to the ground floor. He walked, he saw, he thought. But for all he knew, the dead might be able to do that as well. He opened a cupboard in the kitchen and took out a loaf he’d baked the evening before, broke off a piece and put it in his mouth. The dead couldn’t eat, he thought, swallowing, and took another piece. But he didn’t even know that for certain.
If only there were other people here! Someone he could wake and ask. Am I alive? Or am I dead?
This is madness, he thought. “Of course I’m alive!”
But he wasn’t completely convinced, and went up to his bedroom again, dressed, looked at himself in the mirror, shook his head at his own foolishness, but still couldn’t abandon his desire to have the thing cleared up once and for all, so he went down again, put on his outdoor clothes, took his stick from its corner, and went out into the morning. It was still early, but down in the small town people had long been astir. He crossed the courtyard, where the traces of his sleepwalking, or whatever it was, were still clearly visible. He kicked the snow clear of the gate, opened it, and followed the road down toward the town. The branches of the trees stabbed into the mist, the snow lay wet on the landscape, and took on a bluish tinge, which at first made him think of thin, sour milk, then of veins under white skin.
Would a dead man have thought that?
He laughed to himself and flourished his stick in the air in front of him as was his wont. If he was dead, let him be dead, he thought. It seemed most pleasant. An excellent condition.
When he saw the lights of the town before him, muted by the mist, he realized, not without some amusement, that no one there could confirm or refute anything at all. If he was dead, they might all be as dead as him. What they said meant nothing. Perhaps they were dead and imagined they were living?
Perhaps everyone was dead? Perhaps he’d always been dead? That what he’d always assumed was life was actually death?
Then it makes no difference, he thought, and could have cuffed his own face in irritation. We’re here, we do what we do, and so what does it matter what we call it?
But despite that he didn’t stop. It didn’t matter if all the townspeople were in the same condition as him. But if they weren’t and, for example, didn’t see him because he was invisible to them, or began to scream because he looked like some phantom, it did matter.
He doubted that was the case. But now he was so close anyway that it wouldn’t hurt to finish what he’d begun.
He walked down among the houses, chose one that had lights in the windows, stood for a moment considering what excuse to use, then went up and knocked at the door.
A woman opened it. She looked at him in surprise, but was not dumbfounded or terrified. It was the hour that surprised her, not his corporeal state.
He said that he’d had a little turn, a fit of some kind of dizziness, and could she supply him with a glass of water?
She could. He gleaned from her attitude and the look she sent him as he drank, thinking herself unobserved, that she’d heard of him. He was a character, an eccentric, a figure of destiny.
He handed her the glass, thanked her, and walked back up to his house. When he closed the door behind him half an hour later, he sat down at his desk and wrote out the events of the night and morning. This took the whole morning. Then he ate, slept for an hour, went into his study again, and remained there all evening, but never noted down what he occupied himself with. He was fearful of sleep, the remnants of the eerie occurrence of that morning still hung about him, but no sooner had he doused the light and stretched out than he knew it would be a good and peaceful night.
He woke just as early the next morning. He put on his cape and went to the window. The weather was the same. The air was just as damp, the snow fell just as heavily.
He went down and had breakfast, went up again and shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and for some reason, perhaps because of the morning before, when it had been so pleasant to feel the moist air on his skin, see the snow falling through the mist, hear how the whole countryside was muffled, he decided to go out.