PLAYING CATCH (5)
By:
July 14, 2025
Algernon Blackwood’s “Playing Catch” appeared in the 1924 collection Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
In the confused and frenzied search that followed, Mr. Anthony experienced such acute anguish, such poignant, heartfelt sadness, such aching misery and distress of mind, that he realised it was altogether impossible to continue looking. It was a hopeless, an intolerable search: the strain was unbearable; the pain was more than he could support without a collapse that involved the awful disaster of some terrible extinction. He, therefore, gave up the search, and turned his thoughts to other things. … The power of detachment pertaining to a mind that dealt with unanswerable questions asserted itself once again. At the back of his head, moreover, was a feeling that really he knew all the time exactly where Mabel was, what she was concealing from him, and why she was concealing it; yet, further, that when she did reveal her secret it would prove to be something he had known all along quite well. What puzzled him a little, indeed, was why he hid this knowledge from himself? Why did he shrink from facing it? Why did he deliberately avoid it? Whence came this elaborate and artificial pretence? He raged, he shrank, he trembled. …
Then, suddenly, the reason for his attitude flashed clearly. He understood the monstrous thing: if he faced it, his terror would be too appalling to contemplate and live. He must go mad, or die.
That Mabel grasped this and, out of love for him, still consented to remain Lost, brought a measure of comfort to his anguished soul, though it was in vain he tried to grasp its full significance. The full meaning of the whole episode continued to evade him. That her remaining lost bore some subtle relation to the throwing of the moon, he perceived vaguely, but what that relation precisely was he could not, for the life of him, determine. The effort to understand at length exhausted him. He dripped with perspiration. …
With sharp, dreadful clarity, his intelligence then strangely opened, and — he knew.
Transfixed with terror, he could scarcely breathe. His voice failed him. He called out wildly, but no sound was audible. He screamed and shrieked for help, but no whisper left his lips. He was alone, entirely alone, lost in an infinity of emptiness. And — he was shining: a figure of light amid the Egyptian blackness of outer space.
He himself had been thrown away. He was falling, falling … and Mabel was aware of it. …
In those awful seconds before he crashed upon some point in ultimate space, the full significance of the moon’s return became at last quite clear. The revelation came with a final certainty there was no resisting. It was appalling beyond words. The Other Player, he realised, had held the catch — this time. But one day that catch would not be held. It would be missed. Another heavenly body would then be seized and flung, a constellation, perhaps the Pleiades, perhaps — the Earth herself!
“One day soon, we, too, shall be flung away!” he roared aloud, incoherent with the horror of his dizzy falling. But no sound left his lips. He heard instead — where, oh where, had she said this dreadful thing? — the voice of his landlady:
“The Pleiades would scatter in a handful of golden dust!”
His terrified thought could not grapple with such fearful words. Meanwhile, he rushed and tore and fell. …
“Mabel!” he screamed, finding a strangled voice that hurt his throat in the effort to get out. “Mabel! Look out, dear! Look out! He’s going to— miss!”
The odd thing — the first detail in the whole experience that occurred to him as really strange — the odd thing was that Mabel seemed quite unfrightened. She was not even interested, much less disturbed. She paid no attention to his frenzied warning, as she passed, prettily smiling, through the room. The sunlight fell on her smooth, comely body in its becoming bathing-suit that was dripping wet and clung tightly to her. She went very quickly towards the inner room to dry herself and put her clothes on. She came, evidently, straight from her dip in the sea, and it annoyed him that she had gone to bathe alone, without even letting him know that she was going.
This annoyance, however, lay far below his terror, barely recognisable at all. His terror usurped all other feeling. Even the frightful descent through empty space was quite forgotten. It was the smile on her placid, patient face that petrified him. The ghastly horror of it, its indifference, its gentle sweetness, its fatuous imperturbability, froze his blood.
He understood at last — everything.
The tossed moon, the stupendous arm and hand that clutched her, the horrible increase of the bathing-sheds, his own fierce fling through blackness towards some final crash of extinction — all, all had a reason, an explanation, which had been concealed from him with cunning and diabolical success by — Mabel, by his own stupid, loving, faithful, yet knowing wife.
Mabel knew. She knew everything. Also — she had always known.
Yet his understanding, even now, was not complete. God! Would he never understand anything completely?
He slowly turned his head. Mabel, in the act of passing out of the room, was looking back at him over her wet, shapely shoulder. The line of her delicious body enticed him. Her lips were moving. She was mentioning something — by the way, as it were:
“He has missed, dear! But, why bother … ?”
Mr. Anthony, shivering with cold, opened his eyes, rose from his indifferent shelter below the breakwater, and walked home rapidly to his cheerless lodgings. …
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.