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Dragon Phoenix · Judge Doom

NIGHTMARE IN THE LUBERON

Waking up to the sound of a screaming wife is not the best way to start the day. I should have seen it coming. At the best of times she can have nightmares, and after yesterday afternoon...

It had been a lovely day. We were really enjoying our spring holiday in the Provence, lots of sunshine and not too hot. During the day, we had already seen a number of typical Provence villages in the gorgeous Luberon, and I had one more on the list before returning to the hotel. This one turned out to be quite different however. No peaceful collection of houses perched on a hilltop, visible from a far, with art galleries and locals enjoying their game of petanque. Instead, we had to park our car outside and walk up a hill through a park with trees obscuring the view. Our dog liked the exercise, but we already got a strange feeling. "The flowers are too beautiful", my wife whispered. I nodded, and tried to ignore that my stomach was starting to ache. When we finally arrived in the town, we were confronted by a huge entry gate, which would not have been out of place in a grim medieval castle. We looked at eachother and though we did not say a word, we knew that we both felt a reluctance to enter. Fortunately, there was a little bar nearby, where we could sit for a while.

For some time, we sat quietly drinking a glass of wine. Gradually, I noticed something strange. Even in May, all the other towns had been lively with scores of tourists. Here I saw no-one, except for our waitress and an old man sitting with his dog in front of the gate. Weird. Finally, we decided to take the plunge, paid and went to the gate. The old man did not look at us. Neither did his dog. Never mind, in we go. We were not quite prepared for what we found behind the gate. No cute little houses - just ruins. Trees growing inside rooms through the windows which had not seen glass for ages. Baffled, we walked on, and just around a corner, we suddenly saw the House. Not in ruins, except for the fact that there was no glass in the windows, offering an unobstructed view of a strange spiral staircase in a little tower. Aside from that, it looked perfectly normal. Normal? There was something about it which defied that word. We just could not figure out what. My wife stared at me. I stared at my wife. And then, on a side wall, I suddenly saw the face. I knew it was just a sculpture, but who in God's name had come up with the bright idea to make a sculpture of a face looking as if it was someone inside trying to get out of the wall? To make things worse, our dog, normally joyful and well-behaved, suddenly started to whine and to pull on his lease like a raving lunatic, wanting to get away from this place as fast as possible. We decided to oblige him.

During diner that evening, we tried to laugh the whole experience off, but we did not quite succeed. Back in the hotel, we briefly discussed our experience with our elderly landlady. She told us that she simply could not go into this town, because the sun never shines there. Not very helpful. Before we went back to our hotel room, I managed to pick up a book with the history of the Luberon. It turned out that this town had been deserted and repopulated a number of times throughout the centuries. The plague had once decimated the population. Battles had been fought there. The most recent abandoning was a century ago, when the inhabitants had decided to build a new town in the valley for unknown reasons. It did not help very much to put our minds at ease.

The nightmare was practically unavoidable in the circumstances. Quivering in my arms, my wife told me all about it. It was the House of course. She was walking around the empty house, with white shadows around her. Slowly the shadows focused, and they turned out to be white bicycles running around without anyone on them. Then suddenly, a lady, dressed in white, with a grey face appeared in front of her, with a shadowy figure behind her. "Please leave my husband and me alone" she whispered, and then she turned around and walked up the spiral stair case, slowly disappearing into thin air. My wife could not utter a single word, as the shadows slowly returned, this time with a taint of black. The bicycles suddenly fell on the floor, wheels spinning aimlessly in the air. A dark face with a wet nose appeared in from of my wife's face and she started to scream - to find our dog looking at her with an astonished look on his face.

Finally, my wife managed to fall asleep again in the early morning. I got up to take the dog for a walk. And now I have a problem. How the hell am I going to explain to my wife that there is a small white bicycle standing in a corner of our hotel room?

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Apart from the detail that our dog started to whine when I read this story just now to my wife (

) - what do you think?