V. J. Waks and I have both been very busy with adapting our available work to the changing market. Having to manage our own publishing affairs in this changing world has precluded us collaborating regularly on major works. While we will strike the occasional novel together, Victoria has suggested that we look into the short works of classic authors who have touched on that field of horror that we have both, seemingly by accident, found ourselves writing in.

So, for Robert Louis Stevenson, Her Take was a look at Olalla and the Body Snatchers in The Immediacy Of Evil By V. J. Waks, and His Take is The Visitant, a look at the short Markheim. Victoria suggested that we avoid spoiling the story at all costs by not giving away plot details, and that we instead offer an interpretation of the tale’s essence, in hopes of inspiring the reader to see for their self. If you would like to read RLS all of his literature is open domain and may be read free online here

1886, reading from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other stories, Barnes and Noble, 203, pages 225-42

“Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror.”

And so we come to learn of Markheim, a man irritated as much by his own failings as he is of those around him. In this gripping short, essentially a character study of a descendent criminal spiraling into a quasi secular hell of self-decreed damnation, we are treated to the backdrop of a curio shop. The clocks haunt the shop like so many judgmental angels. The mirror, suggested to Markheim as a Christmas present, strikes him with dread.

Time is a malevolent force in the mind’s eye of the criminal as he sinks towards the unredeemable state that awaits him. The many clocks bear witness to Markheim’s descent:

“Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow, as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried.”

In my reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s disturbing sketch of the immergent modern criminal mind the author straddles theology and science, metaphysics and the material world, through the lens of one tortured perspective. Markheim struggles with the question of the divine and of man’s everyday plight, exposing the duality in both.

On Monday night as I read this I grasped much of what the author wanted us to see through the character’s eyes. The character, however, was still illusive to me. Markheim baffled me. Then, last night, I met him on the misty rain drenched streets of Baltimore, on a dark night not so different from the dripping London evoked by Stevenson.

Criminals see a person’s station, their role, rarely getting a glimpse of those with whom they share the world. Just as Markhiem was shocked to the core by the human frailties of the shopkeeper he had come to victimize on Christmas, his ethical descendents who stalk our own streets generally see attire, bearing, authority, vulnerability, and, for the most part, would be equally shocked if confronted with their victim's humanity in a pitiful light. Few souls are entirely dark.

My Markheim is a tall man in early middle age, as was Markheim. He sells stolen goods, overseeing a loosely knit gang of muggers and shoplifters about 10 strong in Northeast Baltimore.

Five years past, as a white collar and black tie store manager, I arrayed my security men against his shoplifters, bounced his muggers off of my lot, barred him from the premises. We watched each other with calculated malice from across the street as his minions alternately failed or succeeded. I once watched him slap around a junky who had returned empty handed from my job site.

I saw my Markheim as purely evil.

Lately my opinion has softened. I see him in his retail customer service role now, selling stolen goods with the utmost politeness in bars and under bus shelters. He looks at me unknowing, not guessing that this bearded grunge in 30 year old clothes was once his tie wearing enemy. He is however very attuned to those around him, and senses that I do not want stolen goods. He has never even asked me if I would like this or that, but nods respectfully. Last Sunday night he nodded to me in a passing act of courtesy after selling a stolen frozen turkey to a Baltimore City police officer for $5 not ten paces from where I stood.

Last night, as I arrived drenched at the bus stop, he was there with two others. He was sold out, with nothing to sell and had appointed himself as the host of the bus stop, taking the rainy spot, asking after our health, standing aside as we boarded, and even befriending an angry man who argued with another on the bus to diffuse the tension that was seeping into us all.

It came to me then, who Markheim was, a descendent criminal riding the cult of materialism down through an ever more godless world, who has imagined for himself his own hell; the hell of committing ever more heinous crimes to correct the folly of previous crimes, fearful that he will end up becoming damned in the eyes of his own self-imposed God. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Markheim, was, like my former antagonist, deeply cut by the question of Redemption, and forever falling into its debt.

Criminal though he is, Markheim, the man who cannot bear to look into the mirror offered in the shopkeeper’s hand, fears nothing more than becoming even less than what he has already fallen to in his own estimation, fears it like a Christian fears the Devil’s embrace.

Markheim is a masterful short that sticks with you.