The Great Nocturnal: Tales of Dread

By Jean Ray and Scott Nicolay

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray’s reputation as the Belgian master of the weird tale

After the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal.

Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray’s personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher’s monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish Kümmel and keep watch over a deceased woman’s apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader’s expectations as they do with their characters.

Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wakefield Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781939663771

Book preview

THE GREAT NOCTURNAL

THE GREAT NOCTURNAL

TALES OF DREAD

JEAN RAY

TRANSLATED BY SCOTT NICOLAY

WAKEFIELD PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

This translation © 2020 Wakefield Press

Wakefield Press, P.O. Box 425645, Cambridge, MA 02142

Originally published as Le grand nocturne: Récits d’épouvante in 1942. This English edition is published by special arrangement with Alma éditeur, France, in conjunction with their duly appointed agents L’Autre agence and 2 Seas Literary Agency.

© Héritier Jean Ray, 2016 et Alma éditeur. Paris, 2016

Cover image: Clip # 21890, La Mort de Mozart (dir. Louis Feuillade, Gaumont, 1909) from the Davide Turconi collection at the George Eastman Museum.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Garamond Premier Pro and Helvetica Neue Pro by Wakefield Press. Printed and bound by McNaughton & Gunn, Inc., in the United States of America.

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-939663-49-8

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-939663-77-1

Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

To Clovis Baert¹

It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

CONTENTS

The Great Nocturnal

The Seven Castles of the Sea King

The Phantom in the Hold

When Christ Walked across the Sea

The Centipede

Translator’s Notes

Translator’s Afterword

Translator’s Acknowledgments

THE GREAT NOCTURNAL

I

A carillon mingled its iron and copper droplets with the heavy western rain that had flogged the city and its suburbs mercilessly since dawn.

Mr. Théodule Notte could follow, through the depths of the foggy street, from newborn star to newborn star, the march of an invisible lamplighter. He rewound the double saw of a Carcel lamp¹ that stood on the corner of a counter cluttered with dull cloth swatches and livid calicoes.

The round flame illuminated an old-fashioned shop whose brown wooden shelves overflowed with drab material.

For the haberdasher, this hour of the evening’s initial clarity marked a traditional break in his day.

He gently opened the door to prevent the doorbell from making too much noise, and positioning himself solidly on the doorstep, he sniffed the street’s humid air with pleasure.

The sign, a huge bobbin of painted metal, protected him against a continuous jet of water from the perforated gutter.

He lit his red clay pipe—for he was careful never to smoke in his shop—and watched the passersby returning home, turning their backs on the toil of the day.

There is Mr. Desmet coming around the corner of Canal Street, he murmured. The belfry-tender could set the city’s clock on the passage of Mr. Desmet; he is a respectable man. Miss Bulus is late. Ordinarily they cross paths in front of the Trumpet Café, which Mr. Desmet only enters on Sundays after the eleven o’clock mass. Ah! there she is … They will not greet each other until they reach Professor Deltombe’s house. If it were not raining, they would pause a minute to chat about the weather and their health. And the professor’s dog would start barking …

The shopkeeper sighed; this departure from the norm shocked him. The October evening lingered on the roofs of the Ham² and the embers in his pipe cast a rosy glow over Mr. Notte’s chin.

A fiacre with yellow wheels turned the corner of the bridge.

Mr. Pinkers is back on his feet again … my pipe is going to go out.

It was a tiny pipe whose minuscule bowl could hold only two pinches of coarse Flanders tobacco. A smoke ring blossomed in the air and went spinning off into the night.

Oh, what a winner that was! marveled the smoker. And I did it without trying; I shall describe it to Mr. Hippolyte.

Thus ended Théodule Notte’s working day and so began the hours of leisure that he devoted to friendship and pleasure.

Tock, tock, tock!

An iron-tipped cane tapped the pavement in the shadowy reaches of the street and Mr. Hippolyte Baes appeared.

He was a short, stocky man, dressed in a comfortable Veronese frock coat and wearing an absolutely irreproachable hat. Throughout the thirty years he had come each evening to play checkers at the Iron Bobbin, his impeccable appearance always inspired Théodule’s admiration. They exchanged words of welcome on the threshold, observed for a moment the procession of clouds emerging from the west in order to make their predictions about the weather, then entered.

I’ll close the shutters …

Let them knock, what does it matter to us! declared Mr. Baes.

And I will bring the lamp.

The luminary, said Mr. Hippolyte.

It’s Tuesday: we will dine together before I beat you at checkers, teased Théodule.

Nay, my friend, I am certain the victory will be mine this time …

These eternal words, exchanged for so many years, in the same tone, accompanied by the same gestures, arousing identical reactions of joy and mischievousness, gave the two old men a comforting sense of immutability.

Men who enslave time by not allowing one day to differ from the next are stronger than death. Neither Théodule Notte nor Hippolyte Baes said as much, but they felt it as a profound truth against which nothing could prevail.

The dining room, now lit by the Carcel lamp, was small, with a very high ceiling.

One day Mr. Notte had compared it to a tunnel and had frightened himself with the accuracy of the image. But, as it was, with its ceiling drowned in shadow and mystery, pierced by the tiny moon of the round lamp, it pleased the two friends a great deal.

It is exactly ninety-nine years since my mother was born in this room, said Théodule. For in those days the ground floor was sublet to Captain Sudan. Yes, a hundred years less a year. I am fifty-nine years old, and as my mother married at a reasonable age, God granted her a son in her fortieth year.

Mr. Hippolyte counted on his pudgy little fingers.

I am sixty-two years old. I knew your mother, a saintly woman, and your father, who had the sign of the Iron Bobbin installed. He had a handsome beard and loved good wine. I knew the young Misses Beers, Marie and Sophie, who frequented the house.

Marie was my godmother … how I loved her, sighed Théodule.

… and, continued Mr. Hippolyte Baes, I knew Captain Sudan, a frightening man!

Théodule Notte sighed more deeply.

Certainly, a terrible man! Upon his death he left all his furniture to my parents, who did not change a thing in the rooms where he’d lived.

Just as you, yourself, my friend, have not changed a thing …

Oh, no, I … you know well I would not dare.

And it is a wise thing you do, my friend, said the old man gravely, removing the cover from a dish.

Hey! Hey! Look at this cold veal in its juice, and I’ll wager this brown terrine contains a chicken pie from Cerneau’s.

Baes would have won his wager, because the order of Tuesday night’s menus rarely changed.

They ate slowly, nibbling on thin slices of buttered bread, which Mr. Hippolyte surreptitiously dunked in the juice.

You are a first-rate chef, Théodule!

This compliment, too, never varied.

Théodule Notte lived alone; a gourmand, he spent the enormous amount of leisure time that his seldom-frequented shop afforded him in the preparation of little dishes.

The overall management of the house was entrusted to an old deaf woman, who devoted a couple hours there every day, arriving, moving about, and disappearing like a shadow.

To pipes, to drinks, and to the ladies! proclaimed Hippolyte, after they had savored a rich quince custard for dessert.

The black and ocher pawns began their travels over the checkerboard’s squares.

Such was the case every night, except on Wednesdays and Fridays, days on which Mr. Hippolyte Baes did not share his friend’s dinner, and on Sundays, when he did not come.

When the alabaster clock sounded ten o’clock, they parted, and Notte accompanied his friend to the doorstep, brandishing the little nightlight in its big blue jar on high like a torch. Then he went to his bed in the third-floor room that had belonged to his parents.

He passed quickly across the second-floor landing before the closed doors of Captain Sudan’s rooms, tall, narrow doors, so black they made a shadowy gulf of those walls dark from grime and the night. He never looked at them and it never occurred to him to push them open and allow the glow of the blue nightlight to roam the rooms they guarded.

Only on Sundays did he enter therein.

* * *

The late Captain Sudan’s apartment held no mystery, however.

The bedroom was quite ordinary with its deep canopied bed, its cylindrical nightstand, its two shiny walnut armoires, and the round table with its varnish scorched by pipes and cigars and gouged by the circular scars of old glasses and bottles. But the captain seemed to have wanted to compensate for