Work Text:
[CLICK]
Statement of Imke Hansen, regarding a terrifying encounter in her room after acquiring a copy of Der Sandmann. Original statement given September 19th, 1990. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins.
I am sorry, I am not quite sure where I should even begin. You have to understand, I only heard of your institute from an acquaintance and I am still not sure if he didn’t send me here as some kind of joke. It’s not like I believe that what I experienced never actually happened. Because I do. Believe that it happened, that is. I am not fool enough to imagine otherwise. It’s just that I truly don’t know what does constitute as the beginning of all of…this. But I shall give it my best.
I came to London for my studies, you see, I grew up near the sea in a small village in Northern Germany but I wanted to see more of the world and when my uni offered us English majors to study for a semester or two in London, how could I decline? I wish I had. At first it was great, I loved my classes and eagerly took a few more that sounded interesting and it was there that I met Professor Robert Golding. Normally I wouldn’t have had much contact with him, he’s teaching for the history department, you see, but that first winter semester I arrived he taught a class about historical events in literature that was co-taught with the English department and so I signed up. It was much more interesting than I thought it would be and I enjoyed Rob’s easy way of teaching so I decided to take more of his classes that following summer. Oh, that’s what he asked us to call him, Rob. Said anything else made him feel old. He told us that he also owned a pub and that we were welcome to visit whenever we wanted. When my living arrangement at that time fell through, he offered me a room above the pub, or inn as he seemed to own the whole building, for a reduced price. Anyway, that’s how I came to know him better, I liked to sit down in the pub and soon the bartenders had a standing order to feed me whenever I looked hungry. Keeping me fed so I would actually care to follow his classes along, he claimed. But I think that my decision to write a paper in his class was the beginning of everything that came after.
That summer the class was about historical folktales and I loved it. Of course, it mostly focused on English stories but Rob was happy to let me ramble about German ones as well. I have a bit of a soft spot for folk and fairy tales, especially the ones that don’t always end in a happy ending, or at least not what most children’s movies would tell us are happy endings. My mother owns this huge old book that she used to read out of it for me before I went to bed, I remember the small illustrations running along the edges of the text and how I would follow them with my finger while my mother murmured the words into my ear. They’re not nice, these stories, not all of them and especially not to everyone involved. My favourite was Die Gänsemagd, a story in which a servant swaps places with the princess she is sworn to serve while they travel to a faraway land so that the princess may marry and then forces her to become a goose girl while she goes on to marry the prince. In the end, the king realizes the ploy and the servant is tricked into choosing her own punishment: getting dragged to death in a barrel with internal spikes. What I mean to say is: I am not easily scared, never have been. Believe me when I say that I enjoy stories full of chilling events and haunting ends. But this one I didn’t.
At the end of the semester, Rob let us run wild with the assignment, we could choose any literary piece we liked and write about the historical background as well as the folktales surrounding it. So off I went, hunting through the flea markets of London in search of anything interesting I could find. You would not believe what people tended to throw away, especially with regards to old books. Or maybe you would, working in a place like this. I got lucky near the end of August, a friend told me about an old woman selling some items including books. I remember that it was hot that day and how I nearly decided to forgo my decision to take a look. I didn’t, of course, in the end the knowledge that I still hadn’t gotten started weighted too much. God, I’ve thought so much about that day since then, about deciding that no, it was way too hot and I should definitely enjoy that summer day in the park instead of hunting for some books. Didn't happen that way of course.
My friend and I arrived and at first I was disappointed. It truly was just two tables and a whole bunch of knickknacks lying around, everything dusty and a mouldy smell wafted in the air. I remember how we looked at each other and how my friend grimaced at me. But we were already there so why not take a look? I am not sure how exactly it caught my eye, it was a small book, a boring cream colour that nearly got lost between everything else. Der Sandmann, by E.T.A. Hoffmann, a German version even. Eagerly, I opened the pages and flipped through some of them. It was a slim thing all around and had to have been custom-bound because I remember the weird texture of the cover, gritty somehow, and the name Jurgen Leitner pressed into it. But I knew I had found the perfect story for my assignment and when I asked the woman how much she wanted she just waved me away and said I could take it for free, she had not thought anyone would want a book in German and had planned on throwing it away anyway. I thanked her and we want back to my flat where my friend left me to read my new acquisition alone.
Do you know the story? Der Sandmann tells the story of young man named Nathanael who is haunted by the tale of the Sandman, a childhood story of a figure that steals the eyes of children refusing to sleep to feed them to his own children, and associates the Sandman with a man from his childhood who once attacked him, threatening to take his eyes, and killed his father before disappearing. He believes to meet the man again when he is at university but his friends think him delusional, he falls in love with a strange girl and seemingly gets over his obsession but she turns out to be an automaton created partly by the man from his childhood. The young man has a psychotic break but appears to be healed later on and he returns home where he attempts to throw the sister of his childhood friend off a steeple. She is saved but instead he hurls himself over the railing to his death and the girl is mentioned to get her happy ending. Or at least, that is the version I was familiar with.
The story about the childhood tale of the titular Sandman that the man becomes obsessed with is mentioned right at the beginning in a letter, it’s actually just a short part of the overall story, as I said, Nathanael believes a visitor of his father to be the Sandman and that he is attacked by him. But it’s actually more of a dream sequence, he describes how the man threatens to take his eyes but then instead twists his feet and hands off and puts them back in different places, after that he blacks out and awakens later on. Not in this version, no, in this version it isn’t a dream. It describes how the man takes Nathanael with him and uses him for his experiments while creating the automaton. He studies him, like he’s nothing more than a doll. I think the worst thing is how everything is written from Nathanael’s view. How it feels when the man rummages inside his body to shape it to his wishes. In the end, he does take Nathanael’s eyes and puts them into the automaton. In the original, the man creates the clockwork for the automaton while someone else creates the eyes.
The last page of the book was just black and stuck to the covering. At that point I was truly unsettled but I had never stopped reading and when I looked up I realized how dark it had already gotten. Funnily enough, I think that was what truly got to me then, the dark. Der Sandmann is a short story, maybe 25 pages, and I had started reading it on a sunny summer day. But it was dark already. I must have sat in the dark for a while at that point, so how could I have read the book without any problem? I tried to switch on the lights in my room but they only flickered weakly before dying again. So that’s where I was, in a room that seemed to get steadily darker and when I tried to look outside I could see nothing. As if someone had painted my window over with black paint.
And then I heard it, at first just softly but then louder and louder. A trickling of something flowing down on the ground, sand flowing down to the ground. I froze. I am not proud of that, but I froze and then something began to unfold itself from the book I had left lying on my bed. A shadow mixing with the black sand pouring onto the wooden boards and rising up until it towered under my ceiling. I am not sure how long we stared at each other. And I know, I know, that it stared at me even if I couldn’t make out anything even resembling a human being. I couldn’t move, like Nathanael in the book just frozen in place like a doll. I had never been that afraid in my life and I don’t think I ever will be again.
It moved towards me in a sliding way and I could hear the sand shifting with it, like dunes shifting in the wind. The room was small, there wasn’t much space to avoid this thing but I tried, god I tried. I pressed back and fumbled against my chair and desk, just trying to get away, put space between me and that horror slowly moving forward while my limbs still felt like lead and wouldn’t fully follow my wishes. Something inside me knew it was inevitable, that it just would not stop but I had to try. I just had to try. The book had made clear what would happen otherwise, that was the only actual clear thought in my mind, that this thing was the man Nathanael thought to be the Sandman and that he would reshape me anew until I was nothing more than a grotesque doll he would grow bored off and then pluck out my eyes as a final modification.
I can see how you look at me, you don’t believe me, do you? I can’t describe it, the thought was just there and I knew with a ringing finality that this would be my fate. At that moment I just panicked. my limbs still wouldn’t move right, still frozen and stiff and uncoordinated and I flailed around my desk for anything that I could maybe use as a weapon. Until my fingers grazed the red poppies growing in a small pot on my desk. Rob had given them to me when I moved in, joked that they would keep me company and guard my sleep. He has flower boxes full of them in his pub, I think they were a gift from his friend, a tall goth I had only seen on some occasions but who always stopped to touch the flowers with a smile when he visited Rob.
You know, I am not sure what I actually planned to do with them, throw them at the thing and hope the pot would hurt it? That wasn’t what happened. I never managed to do anything with them when that thing just stopped and focused on my flowers. Even the sound of sand stopped and for a moment we just stood there in the dark, me nearly bend in half over my desk, fingers clutching the poppies, and the creature frozen in the midst of its slide forward. Never moving my eyes from it, I leaned forward again and took the flowers with me so I could press them like some kind of flowery shield to my chest. That was when I realized how warm my fingers were getting again, like a comforting fire pressing outwards from the flowerpot and unfreezing my body until I felt I could actually sprint out of the room. I didn’t, I had no idea why exactly that thing stopped but I didn’t dare to do anything but stand there trembling with my flowers, fearing that I might accidentally make it move again. But the thing didn’t.
I have no idea how long we stood there, locked in a weird staring contest in that I stared at that thing and tried not to blink too often lest it jumped forward and get me while that thing stared at my flowers. Terror was rolling through me, I am pretty sure those flowers were the only thing keeping me from just crumbling to the floor. It could have been seconds, it could have been days, but suddenly something else moved in the dark and I could have wept because the sound of flowing sand was back. It didn’t come from the creature in front of me, it came from the door, and it got so loud that I could not even hear my pounding heart anymore. Something grabbed my arm, hard, there was a bang and then I was on the ground.
I screamed. Someone was shouting and shaking me and it took me a moment to focus on the face in front of me because everything was blurry and I realized I had lost my glasses somewhere. That grounded me, somehow, glasses are expensive and I had lost mine and I could not see anything beyond a meter or two clearly. But Rob’s face I could see. A pressure I hadn’t even realized was there popped in my ears and I could finally understand him. He told me to breath and so I did and I did not dare to look to my left where I knew the door to my room was. I laid in the corridor in front of the inn’s rooms with Rob by my side and from my vantage point I could see the window at the end of it, an orange summer sky slowly turning into night. In my hands, I still clutched the flowers in a death grip.
That was the point at which I started weeping. I had no clue what had happened but I know that Rob and his weird flowers had saved my life, I just knew it. He was kind enough to take me down to the pub and I did my best to ignore the muffled scream I could hear behind me when stepped to the stairs. I remember that he pressed a glass of alcohol in my hands and that I shakily nipped at it while Rob rambled beside me. I couldn’t ask him what had happened. Mind you, I wanted to, but after my wailing in the corridor it was again as if something had sealed my lips and no word would leave them. He was worried, I could see that, but I got the feeling as if he was only worried about me. There was a monster in my room, in his room above his pub, and all he was worried about was me.
Time was weird after that, and everything was hazy from my exhaustion and the alcohol so Rob let me curl up in the booth. Last thing I remember before sleep finally took me was him throwing a thin blanket on me and his goth friend laying a hand on his shoulder before looking at me. That image stayed with me because I know that he had not been there a second before, I was tired, yes, but he was just there, from one moment to the next, and his eyes. I have never seen any eyes like that before, like a void in which a star is burning relentlessly. Something soft caressed my face and that was all before I was gone.
I woke up much later in a different room with my poppies by my side and I never went into my old room again, someone had gathered everything of mine together and put it into this new room. I have no idea what exactly that thing was, or what happened to my book, but I know that had I read it anywhere else I would be dead now. It’s like the knowledge about what would happen to me, a feeling that I just can’t shake. Had I not been a guest of Rob’s inn and had I not had the poppies I would be dead now. Or worse even, a doll to form however that fake Sandman wanted. And I say “fake” because I know that the creature wasn’t the real one.
How I know? Well, my time abroad ends soon and when I travel back home to Germany, my flowers will come with me then. Oh, and I did finish my assignment about Hoffmann’s Sandman, Rob enjoyed my take on the nightmarish version versus the dreamweaver of other folktales. And my dreams have been full of light ever since.
Statement ends.
Another Leitner. We’ve attempted to gather more information from Imke Hansen who now works as a professor of literature in Germany via her work mail but she declined any further talk about her meeting with this “fake” Sandman.
We had even less luck with contacting Prof. Robert Golding, he died a few years after the described encounter in a car accident, and his pub, the “New Inn”, is currently owned by his nephew who claimed to have no knowledge of whatever happened that day. It seems as if the younger Robert Golding Jr. followed in his uncles footsteps and works currently as a professor for literature. When Martin followed up with Prof. Golding Jr., he described him as a kind man who sent his sympathy that he could not be of much more help. It seems that the New Inn’s flowerboxes are still over grown with poppies. Maybe it is just a coincidence but research about these flowers unearthed that they are generally linked with the domain of sleep.
Sasha managed to find a picture of Prof. Golding Sr. and Martin swears that Prof. Golding Jr. looks exactly like his uncle. But then he also swears that he saw a pale man dressed like a goth looking at him from the upper windows of the inn.
End recording.
[CLICK]