Wingstroke
is a fabulously strange and over-looked piece of weird fiction from a writer,
of course, not usually associated with the horror or speculative genres.
It concerns
a man named Kern who, reeling from the suicide of his wife, finds himself at a
European ski resort where everything appears to be loaded with meaning and
coincidence. There is also a touch of
the fantastical about his surroundings, aswell as with his fellow skiers. Marooned in the hotel, he notices himself
being watched by ‘some pale girl with pink eyebrows’, and at dinner he
encounters a ‘man with goat eyes’; whilst his creepy acquaintance, Monfiori, is
described as having ‘pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with
reddish fluff on their tips.’ Kern
appears to have entered a new reality, one where when it snows the hotel seems
to ‘float upwards’. The perfect setting
then for a supernatural encounter.
Also at the
hotel is Isabel – known about the resort as ‘Airborne Isabel’ - an attractive and
popular young woman whom Kern befriends and quickly becomes obsessed with. She inhabits room thirty-five, the room next
door to Kern’s, thirty-five also being Kern’s age. Much to Kern’s disbelief, Isabel likes to
stay out on the slopes after dark, leaping, as she says, ‘right up to the
stars’ and encountering who-knows-what in the snowy darkness.
One night, unable to sleep, Kern hears guitar
music, laughter and strange barks coming from Isabel’s room. The next night – drunk, half-crazed, and
suicidal himself – Kern notices that Isabel’s key has been left in the
door. What Kern does next, bursting into
the room and telling Isabel that he needs her love, sets off the chain of bizarre
and unexplained events which reach their sad conclusion the next day when
Isabel takes part in a skiing competition.
Find it: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.
