A SYMPHONY OF DARK OBSESSION: THE GOLDEN EGG, SPOORLOOS, and THE VANISHING

[CAUTION: SPOILERS and MORE SPOILERS]

The story is simple.

After ten hours on the road at the start of their vacation, Dutch couple Rex Hofman and Saskia Ehlvest stop at a gas station following a brief quarrel. They quickly make up, signifying their love by burying two coins at a certain spot alongside the station and covering them with a pebble. Afterwards, Saskia takes the car keys and heads inside to grab some drinks for the road.

And vanishes, without a trace.

Years pass, and Rex becomes obsessed in discovering what happened to her. He puts up posters, ads in the paper. Needless to say, this is a challenge for any potential love interests, including his latest flame Lieneke. Finally, one day he is approached by French chemistry professor Raymond Lemorne, who not only intimates that he knows what happened to Saskia but reveals the car keys with the familiar, frayed scrap of leather she took along with her into the station all those years ago.

The unlikely pair take a drive, and the stranger gives Rex an ultimatum: drink a cup of drugged coffee and experience exactly what Saskia experienced—or refuse, and Rex will never know what happened to her. Lemorne (his surname means “the gloomy one”) claims there is no evidence connecting him with the crime, and should Rex go that route, he will never reveal what truly occurred.

“You’re insane,” Rex tells him.

“That is irrelevant,” Lemorne says.

As it happens, Lemorne has driven them back to the station, back to the place where Rex and Saskia had last buried those coins signifying their love.

Rex drinks the coffee.

He passes out, dreaming briefly of Saskia before waking in total darkness.

He already knew. It was too horrible to know.

He has been placed within the wooden walls of a casket and buried alive—just as Saskia had been years earlier.

“Stay calm,” he thought. “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. My name is Rex Hofman.” When he realized how ridiculous it was to have a name in this place, he began to laugh.

This is The Golden Egg.*

In my mind, this story has taken on the aura of a classic tale, not quite urban legend but worthy of the gold-emblazoned status afforded, say, “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs or that episode of the Twilight Zone where Rocky’s trainer breaks his reading glasses (“Time Enough At Last” with Burgess Meredith, for those keeping score at home). The central plot of The Golden Egg has, in fact, been compared to the urban legend of “The Vanishing Lady.”

Alternatively called “The Vanishing Hotel Room,” this tale concerns the world’s fair held in France in either 1889 or 1900. Accordingly, a woman and her daughter travel to Paris for the Exposition and, checking into their hotel, the mother soon falls ill. After consulting a doctor, the young girl is instructed to travel across town for the needed medication. Upon returning, she finds her mother not only vanished without a trace, but no one at the hotel having any memory of having seen either of them ever before.

Other stories credited with using this legend include Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), Terence Fisher’s So Long at the Fair (1950), the Julianne Moore flick The Forgotten (2004), Jodie Foster’s Flightplan (2005), and—one of my personal favorites—the Kurt Russell/J.T. Walsh thriller Breakdown (1997). The legend was also featured in the third edition of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series (“Maybe You Will Remember”) and, the gold standard and Mount Everest of anthology programs, Fox’s Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.**

The Golden Egg, originally published in Holland in 1984, was written by Dutch journalist and novelist Tim Krabbé, who is said to have based the story on a newspaper article he read about a tourist vanishing from a bus trip after stopping at a gas station in France (she was later found alive and well, having simply boarded the wrong bus). Krabbé went on to co-write the screenplay for the film adaptation, 1988’s Spoorloos.*** According to director George Sluizer, Stanley Kubrick contacted him after having watched Spoorloos as many as ten times, impressed by the film’s structure and ending—and purportedly telling Sluizer it was the most terrifying film he’d ever seen.

Likewise, at one time Entertainment Weekly had it ranked as the 25th Scariest Movie of All Time. I personally wouldn’t go that far—though, adjusted for cultural inflation, for its time I suppose this 1988 adaptation was about as wickedly grotesque as last year’s Speak No Evil.

Five years later, another adaptation would be released: 1993’s The Vanishing.

Starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, and Sandra Bullock, this time the story got the Hollywood treatment, though with director George Sluizer returning for the remake. The film was considered a box office bomb, poorly received and widely panned by critics. Most notably, the tragic—and perhaps more nihilistically impressionable—ending had gotten a remix, and this time the villain was bested by love and everything worked out just fine (not so much for Sandra Bullock, but still).

Now for a little full disclosure. Having grown up with this version of the story, without knowledge of Tim Krabbé’s novella nor Spoorloos, I actually really loved this film—and still enjoy it to this day.

Jeff Bridges is magnetic and doofy and terrifying as Raymond, now named Barney Cousins (a rare villain turn for The Dude), and Sutherland (Rex/Jeff Harriman), Travis (Lieneke/Rita Baker), and Bullock (Saskia/Diane Shaver) play their parts perfectly. The happy ending certainly didn’t bother me,**** and I had no original to hold it up against and feel short-changed or kid-gloved.

Now, after having read the novella and watched the original film, I’ve come to appreciate them each for what they are—not just different arrangements of the same musical piece, but rather three movements making up one grand symphony. The original ending—that is, of the novella and 1988 film—had to exist, throwing a punch to the gut that lingers forever. But there’s an undeniable, conventional sort of beauty in the American adaptation, in a world where love conquers all and Jack Bauer doesn’t have to spend eternity in a pine box. Nancy Travis fleshed out the Lieneke/Rita role with charm and emotion. For my money, it also has Rex/Jeff’s most realistic reaction when confronted by Raymond/Barney and that dangling set of car keys.

In the film versions, as they embark on that final drive back to the station, Raymond/Barney relates a story. He’s a teenager, and while reading on a high balcony he begins to wonder what would happen if he jumped. He considers the pros and cons, “always with the dark sense that it was already certain he would jump.” He sits on the balustrade for an hour and half, pondering the implications—and then leaps.

He later spends six week in the hospital with a broken leg and an arm fractured in two places.***** In like fashion, years later while out with his family, his daughter spots a young girl drowning. Without hesitation, he leaps from the bridge, plunging down into the water. To the praise and adoration of his family, he rescues the drowning girl. Lemorne, meanwhile, considers his heroism as only one side of a coin. He wonders if he is likewise as capable of committing great evil as good. And so, he had methodically set his mind to doing just that.

For me, the most compelling—and disturbing—portions of the story are not those involving Rex's obsession with discovering the truth, but rather Raymond Lemorne/Barney Cousins and his meticulous planning and charades toward accomplishing his goal.

Dousing himself with chloroform and timing his chemical naps with a stopwatch. Practicing his approach to random targets, his delivery, his methods of abduction. Taking his pulse, getting his heart rate nice and low. Going through the motions of his step-by-step, sleight-of-hand dance around the car to ready his chloroform rag. And, most chilling, the smothering of his imaginary victim.

Focusing on the potential for and machinations of human evil in the story, we learn that the most terrifying sort of monster is not the serial killer who goes on killing, stampeding as a beast of unruly passions and blind fury.

Much more dangerous and cunning is the methodical slayer of life, getting just a taste and then returning once more to their normal lives, blending in among us. One random yet coordinated act of senseless violence, forever forgotten in the rush of ordinary years.

"Rex remembered an article he had once written for his magazine about falling, including accounts from people who had survived a fall from a plane. None of them had felt fear. They had been resigned, curious and, above all, lucid.

That was how he felt now too: dazzlingly lucid."

FOOTNOTES

*The title itself, The Golden Egg, is taken from a dream Saskia describes.

All versions of the story involve an incident in which the couple run out of gas on a treacherous stretch of road (a darkened tunnel in the films, a pitch-dark Italian country road in the novella). Rex abandons Saskia in the car, taking a jerry can in search of gas. Though entirely nixed from the 1993 adaptation, the novella and original film go on to describe a certain childhood nightmare of Saskia’s in which she is “locked inside a golden egg that was flying through the universe. Everything was black, there weren’t even any stars, she’d be stuck in there forever, and she couldn’t die. There was only one hope. There was another golden egg flying through space; if they collided, they’d both be destroyed, and it would be over.” As the novella relates: "Rex had been shocked that such an image of horror could arise in such a small child.”

In both films, there is undeniable imagery of Saskia waiting at the end of that dark tunnel after Rex returns with the jerry can of gas; the halo of light surrounding her indeed resembles a golden egg. However, I think the couple's final resting places inside the wooden casket—each fitted with a small mattress in the original story—is the ultimate realization of this “golden egg.”

**To be honest, I don’t believe “The Vanishing Lady” legend is a perfect fit for The Golden Egg, as so many of these examples involve a certain amount of conspiracy among folks to cover the truth; in this story, not even Raymond Lemorne’s family is privy to his actions (apart from suspecting an affair).

***Spoorloos (Dutch translation: “Traceless” or “Without a Trace”) was submitted to the Academy Awards in 1988 as the official Dutch entry for Best Foreign Language Film—and later disqualified, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) ruled there was too much French dialogue in the film to warrant being a Dutch candidate.

****Speaking of Hollywood endings, this movie ends in essentially the same fine dining establishment where James Caan enjoys lunch after caving in Annie Wilkes head with a typewriter in the final scene of Misery.

*****It is, in fact, after coming across a picture of himself from this time, his arm shattered, that Lemorne hits on the missing ingredient in his abduction scheme: donning a faux cast and sling, he utilizes the Ted Bundy approach in luring his victims away.

PAPER CUTS EPISODE 61!

Long-time Listener, First-time Caller

This past Friday, August 4th, I was fortunate enough to be a guest on the Paper Cuts Live Show and Podcast, with special guest co-host Chad Lutzke (author of Broad Street Bastard, Wallflower, and Skullface Boy, plus many others). We discussed Drencrom and Wayward Suns, music, and horror movies, among other things.

I've been a fan of this show for a long time and the guys behind the magic, Brad and J, are always generous and entertaining hosts. Previous guests on Paper Cuts include Catriona Ward, Ronald Malfi, and Kathe Koja, so needless to say it was an honor to sit in on the program. Always cool when you manage to fit Raymond Carver, Eddie Van Halen, and shit-gremlins in the same conversation.

Check out the full video below:

short story: cherokee

Based on travels around the Smoky Mountains, Nantahala Forest, and Cherokee regions of western Carolina

CHEROKEE

Hamelin Bird

For what felt like a long time, Paul stood gazing over the small lot he’d come to know as home, one hand sick with arthritis caressing the flap of his own belly. Seventy plus ten equals eighty, he was thinking. Eighty could mean lots of things, but for Paul Collins eighty was a darkened hall—not a very long one—cluttered with the unknowable toys of cancer and heart failure and, at the other end, a big mouth. Along with his cholesterol, Paul’s weight was sky-high, which meant that mouth would have teeth, tiny daggers razored with experience in matters of human misery.

He wobbled from the window and over to a worn La-Z-Boy recliner, a gift from his son back when his son wasn’t a grown man or married and hadn’t given them a couple grandbabies they got to hold twice a year. Paul sat down, staring into the stain-dappled wall at the far end of the room. He was still staring like that when Marie walked in and said, “So, what do you think? Wanna ride down to the Casino?”

Sometimes Marie liked to go down to the Casino and have a few drinks. It was the only place on the whole reservation they sold alcohol, and sometimes Marie liked to go out and get a little tipsy. She also liked to put fives and tens in the slot machines—there were over four thousand to choose from—and when that happened, drinking was the only thing Paul had left to do.

“No,” he told her. “No, I don’t.” Before she could say anything, Paul said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking, and I’ve changed my mind about the flagpole.”

She came over, placing a tentative hand on his knee.

“But Paul! The man is scheduled for Tuesday.”

“Cancel it,” Paul said. “Call him and cancel it, I don’t want it.”

“But Paul, honey, are you sure? You’ve put so much into this already—what about your sketches? And all your catalogues…” Marie gestured to the stack of catalogues on the corner table, their covers filled with bright, rippling flags hung from brighter poles. Then she glanced out the window and said, “What, what about the neighbors…”

“Don’t want it, I said. Drop it. They have their own flagpoles, why should I buy one for them, too?”

They’d talked a lot about flagpoles over the last year.

They were in this for the long haul, they’d decided, and Marie imagined the pole would maybe help them fit in, make a few friends, become part of the neighborhood. Neighborhood? he’d thought. What you had here was a twice-ravaged plot of campers and RVs with a filthy stream running along one side. The mountains were nice, no doubt about that, and should he and Marie ever leave Paul was sure the sky would seem too big anywhere else, but these so-called neighbors of theirs were frigid as a crypt.

“Paul,” she said, “are you okay? Are you, Paul? Ever since the party, you’ve been acting a little, well—”

“Just fine,” Paul told her, standing to his feet, thinking how much easier it used to be to stand to his feet. “Listen, honey, I think I’ll ride down to the library, check out a couple those new military books they got in. Want anything?”

“I want you to be okay,” Marie told him, dropping another, even more tentative hand on his shoulder. He thought he saw a tear in her eye then, but that was just a trick of the light, had to be. The last ten years may’ve done a number on her face but her eyes were as green and pretty as ever, like emeralds, and sometimes they sparkled. She said, “I just want you to be happy.”

Then he told her she was batty as hell and walked out the door.

Paul started for the Jeep, still limping a little from the fall he’d taken earlier that week. He climbed in, had almost turned the key when he remembered what his doctor said about the human body, and how it needs exercise. Pretty smart for a guy right out of diapers.

“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled, and got out, closed the door.

He thought, Seventy plus twenty equals ninety. Impossible.

He walked along the Oconaluftee River, watching the young families play and the young men fish. Friendly couples sat on benches with their full hair and all-teeth smiles, staring blindly into the world, and watching this tiny circus of life Paul found himself spinning the Rolodex of his own mind, watching the pictures roll by like old friends he’d forgotten were still there. He’d always heard that memories fade over time, that eventually all those pictures are tarnished in the exhaust of Life Full Speed Ahead. But Paul, in his seventies as of last month, knew that wasn’t true. Memories of his sweltery tobacco-picking days, or of long summers with a cane pole and Mason jar of worms, and especially of his wild nights dodging bullets in Southeast Asia, all these had never faded from his mind. Staring at his loafers as they carried him farther down the path ahead, Paul imagined these memories were just as alive and real as if they’d happened only last week, tops a month, and the feeling of them kicking around in the pink mass within his skull made him nervous and excited and a little confused.

He hadn’t gone much farther when he noticed two teenagers embraced on a small wooden bench. For a brief moment the teenagers and the memories melded, becoming one, and it was him and Marie on the bench, two newlyweds brimming with untold joy at the future. Only these two were doing more than kissing—quite a bit more, actually—and Paul felt himself grow strange the closer he came to where they sat beside the burbling water. Before knowing it he had stopped, staring, his jaw hung loose like a door kicked by the wind. The boy opened his eyes and, seeing Paul, jumped to his feet.

He said, “Hey, what’re you looking at? Huh?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Paul said, the words too quiet to be heard over the rushing water. He felt like he’d just woken up.

“Hear what I said? Beat it, gramps, before I beat your face. Get lost.”

The boy stepped closer, and Paul felt his chest tighten; without knowing it he lifted his hands, not to fight but to keep from being hit.

The girl said, “Scott, come on, leave him alone, come back…”

The boy spat a little ball of something into the earth at Paul’s feet. He glared a moment, drawing it out, and Paul thought what he wouldn’t give to be twenty years younger, to have his own body back for a change, if only long enough to administer a swift lesson on respect; his body, after all, had once been trained for such lessons…

Instead he looked away and kept down the river, letting the sound of the waves against the rocks carry him far, far away. Ten minutes later, when at last he stopped to take a rest, his ankles felt full of broken glass and his thighs were greasy with sweat. He swallowed a couple Lipitor for his cholesterol, doc’s orders, and imagined what sort of excitement lay ahead for the weekend. Some old friends from Tennessee—Marie’s friends—were staying over, and he wasn’t so sure how he felt about that. He was still trying to decide when again he remembered the line that had been stuck in his head all morning, and got to wondering if maybe he could find who said it. Time makes strangers of us all, that was the line. Something like that. Who knows, maybe he could trademark it, put it on some shirts, or maybe a front-porch rug like all those other absurd welcome mats he’d seen over the years. WELCOME, BUT DON'T EXPECT MUCH. WIPE YOUR FEET, HONEY CHILD. Or his favorite, CHECK FOR DOOKIES.

After arriving he spent a couple hours piddling in the stacks at the Qualla Library, searching for the quote but not having much luck. When the young librarian suggested he Google it, Paul thought maybe she was speaking some sort of regional slang and decided it was time for him to leave. He was halfway home when a man in a headdress walked up to him and said, “How’d ya like your picture taken? Hey-hey, how about it?”

“Excuse me?”

“A souvenir,” the man said, “how about it? Have your picture taken with a real live Indian?”

Paul thought the waitress they’d had the other night—a dark-eyed girl, beautiful but with too much mascara and a bunch of fishing hooks in her face—was a “real live Indian” too, and you couldn’t have paid him a million bucks to have his picture taken with her. But this guy seemed pretty nice, so he said yeah, all right, and when the picture was done he slipped the man five dollars and the old Indian smiled and waved him on.

The Childers arrived around noon the following day.

The two couples spent the afternoon gabbing on the little rectangle that served as their front porch—Marie had planted a flower garden along the front, and there was a birdbath and a couple of those hanging ferns—and later that night they drove over to the Casino, where things were very much as Paul remembered. Forget what you’d seen in the movies; here there were no pinstriped card sharks, no glamour girls, no high rollers tossing dice and chomping on cigars. Just a lot of mostly old, mostly white, mostly overweight misers—something he saw way too much of in the morning mirror, in other words—some buzzing around on those little motorized carts, but most of them sitting there staring blankly at a flashing screen while one finger taps…taps…taps.

After breakfast the next morning they went out to all the local shops, where the Childers purchased authentic Native American pottery and colorful beadwork and a couple coffee mugs—ten dollars apiece for the mugs. But mostly Paul thought about that line, about sharp teeth at the end of darkened halls, and about time and what sort of terrible things it had in store for an old man like himself.

He thought, Twenty years ago, I was a real person.

They visited the old Mingus Mill and took pictures with the Indian-in-a-headdress from two days before—if he remembered Paul, he didn’t let on—before motoring out to the Oconaluftee Indian Village, where for twenty bucks apiece they were shown how real-life Cherokees lived during the 1750s. They were taught how to knap arrowheads from stone, and shown how a tree is prepped with clay and gutted by fire to form a canoe. Then they were treated to several traditional Native American dances: the Beaver Hunt, the Mauling Bear, and, last of all, the Friendship Dance, during which Frank and Judy Childers were pulled from their seats and consumed by the chain of tourists swept round the sacred square.

When the dancing was finished, a Cherokee man of medium height stepped into the square, entering from the east, always the east, which they had been told was the direction of new beginnings, of renewal. He took up a drum with one hand and a stick with the other. He banged the drum with the stick—once, twice, make it three times—and when it was over he settled the drum and took up his voice.

“The Cherokee,” he said, his words gravelly and potent, “were once a great people. Our various clans covered an area from this land to as far south as Georgia, east into Tennessee, north up into Kentucky and parts of West Virginia.”

Seventy plus thirty equals one hundred. That’s a good bingo.

“For a long time that’s the way things were. Then one day we found ourselves forced from our home, driven like wild beasts to a place we did not wish to go. Defying this brutality, brought about by threats and chicanery, over four hundred of our people escaped to these-here hills, and here they waited, a remnant who would someday inherit this land once more. Who would not succumb to tyranny, but would rise again from the ashes of persecution…”

And as this stranger began to recite the history of the Eastern Band of Cherokees, to explain the harsh realities of such things as forced exile and the Trail of Tears, and of long-suffering remnants marching to the future, Paul sensed something shift down deep within. He assumed the movement was a corporeal effect—an overstuffed gut, heartburn, maybe a coronary—and upon discovering it wasn’t, he sat up and for a moment held his breath. Again the elder beat at his drum—one, two, three—and shutting his eyes Paul witnessed the mad flight of the refugees, a band of warriors running and hiding in the great clefts of the Smokies, flourishing in secret, finally emerging to come and dance before him like bears and bang on drums and to show themselves without shame of all that had come before, of all they’d suffered and endured.

Paul glanced down, and when he did something flashed from his face, splashing onto his arm. The crowd began to clap, some standing, others whooping loudly in his ear. He looked over, and through his tears saw Marie staring at him queerly.

“Paul? Paul, hon, are you okay?”

Once more the drum sounded over the crowd—once, twice, three times—and when it was done Paul took her hand and squeezed tight, and said he was fine, just fine.