Supernatural Horror Short Stories
Author: Laura Bulbeck; Roger Luckhurst; Morgan Elektra; G. L. McDorman; Michelle Muenzler; Cody Schroeder; Oliver Smith; Lucy A. Snyder; Mariah Southworth; Angela Sylvaine; Damien Angelica Walters; Desmond Warzel; Trisha J. Wooldridge; Daniele Bonfanti; Carolyn Charron; E. E. W. Christman
Date: 2017-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Fantasy
Description: Following the great success of our Gothic Fantasy, deluxe edition short story compilations, Ghosts, Horror, Science Fiction, Murder Mayhem and Crime & Mystery this latest title crawls with the dark fingers of terror, the chilling sensation of another presence sitting alongside you while you read the tales of horror laid out before you. Contains a fabulous mix of classic and brand new writing, with authors from the US, Canada, and the UK. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: E.E.W. Christman, Morgan Elektra, Damien Angelica Walters, Michaël Wertenberg, Lucy A. Snyder, Stephen Kot

This is a FLAME TREE Book

Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells

Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck

Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker

Thanks to Will Rough

Publisher’s Note: Due to the historical nature of the classic text, we’re aware that there may be some language used which has the potential to cause offence to the modern reader. However, wishing overall to preserve the integrity of the text, rather than imposing contemporary sensibilities, we have left it unaltered.

FLAME TREE PUBLISHING

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First published 2017

Copyright © 2017 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78664-182-3

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78755-242-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Introducing our new fiction list:

FLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS

Award-Winning Authors & Original Voices

Horror, Crime, Science Fiction & Fantasy
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Contents

Foreword by Roger Luckhurst

Publisher’s Note

Caterpillars

E.F. Benson

The Boarded Window

Ambrose Bierce

John Bartine’s Watch

Ambrose Bierce

Bones of the Dead

Daniele Bonfanti

In the Court of the Dragon

Robert W. Chambers

Crossroads

Carolyn Charron

The Mourning Woman

E.E.W. Christman

The Fifth Gable

Kay Chronister

The Dream Woman

Wilkie Collins

The Upper Berth

F. Marion Crawford

For the Blood is the Life

F. Marion Crawford

Lot No. 249

Arthur Conan Doyle

She’s Gone

Morgan Elektra

The Spider

Hanns Heinz Ewers

Carmilla

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The Southwest Chamber

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

The Doom of the Griffiths

Elizabeth Gaskell

Swim At Your Own Risk

Matthew Gorman

Edward Randolph’s Portrait

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Voice in the Night

William Hope Hodgson

Worms of the Earth

Robert E. Howard

The Mezzotint

M.R. James

Casting the Runes

M.R. James

Merry-Go-Round, Never Broke Down

Jason L. Kawa

The Murmur of Its Name

Stephen Kotowych

The Shunned House

H.P. Lovecraft

An Idle Dream, Quite Gone Now

G.L. McDorman

The Pool of the Stone God

A. Merritt

This Time, Forever

Michelle Muenzler

The Power of Darkness

Edith Nesbit

The Wondersmith

Fitz-James O’Brien

William Wilson

Edgar Allan Poe

The Vampyre

John Polidori

Tracks in the Snow

Cody Schroeder

John Johnson

Oliver Smith

Magdala Amygdala

Lucy A. Snyder

My Brother Tom

Mariah Southworth

The Judge’s House

Bram Stoker

The Bride

Angela Sylvaine

The Floating Girls: A Documentary

Damien Angelica Walters

The Final One Percent

Desmond Warzel

The Flowering of the Strange Orchid

H.G. Wells

The Red Room

H.G. Wells

Midnight Snack

Michaël Wertenberg

The House of the Nightmare

Edward Lucas White

Manipulation

Trisha J. Wooldridge

Biographies & Sources

Foreword: Supernatural Horror Short Stories

This collection of classic tales stretches all the way from John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819) to H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shunned House’ (1937). Polidori’s story was the Romantic tale that first introduced the vampire as an aristocratic libertine to literature – Lord Ruthven is clearly the model for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. Polidori had worked as Lord Byron’s doctor, before being fired for cramping his boss’s style. When ‘The Vampyre’ was first published anonymously in London it was read as a sensational confession of Byron’s secret life.

The most recent of the classic fiction was a pulp horror by Lovecraft, published in the American magazine Weird Tales just before the Second World War. It is written in Lovecraft’s baroque style under completely different conditions from Polidori’s shocker: this is sensational horror fiction written for a mass audience that read the ‘shudder pulps’ that poured off the New York presses of the 1930s in their hundreds of thousands. That culture of reading was all to disappear with the onset of war in 1939.

These tales bookend a remarkable century, often considered the golden age of the ghost story. It was an era in which the religious framework of the old Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe and her myriad followers was replaced by something much more uncertain, anxious, and riven with doubt. That was mainly the fault of scientists such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, pioneers of geology and biology, whose theories challenged the Biblical account of the creation of the world. Darwin, uncertain himself about the implications of his theory of natural selection, famously held off publishing The Origin of Species for as long as he could. After that, the authority of the sciences steadily grew while religious believers felt ever more hemmed in with doubt. This transition produced a lot of strange symptoms: new religions, a revival of the occult, and respectable intellectuals chasing empirical proof of spirits at the séance table.

Ghost stories and horror tales are also symptoms of this era. Ghosts thrive on hesitations: we know they are dubious stories from outdated, superstitious days. Yet, as Sigmund Freud once observed, a simple creak of a door or a bump in the night can throw the modern cynic back into childhood, paralysed with fear. Ghost stories are compromise formations, fictions that let us entertain the fugitive possibility that the supernatural may still be hiding in the natural.

The authors in this collection represent the range of beliefs. E.F. Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury no less, yet wrote tales of particularly nasty hauntings. Arthur Conan Doyle trained first as a medic but ended his life as the leading advocate of Spiritualism. H.G. Wells was one of the first to be formally trained to teach biology in the 1880s and was (mostly) an atheist, although never as vitriolic in the view of a cruel and indifferent universe as the pitiless Lovecraft. There are many ways of coming to horror, it seems.

Edgar Allan Poe influentially suggested that the best tales were read in one sitting, to achieve a full ‘unity of impression.’ This collection is perfectly designed just for that: bite-sized stories perfect for producing shivers of unease. Do enjoy, but maybe check behind the curtain.

Roger Luckhurst

Publisher’s Note

This latest title in our deluxe Gothic Fantasy short story anthologies crawls with the dark fingers of terror, the chilling sensation of another presence sitting alongside you while you read the tales of horror laid out before you. From mysterious deaths to cursed objects, haunted houses and terrifying creatures – the array of masterfully penned classic fiction on offer in Supernatural Horror Short Stories will make you shudder to your very soul. We’ve included beloved works such as John Polidori’s The Vampyre and M.R. James’s ‘Casting the Runes’ alongside lesser-seen but no less terrifying works like Hanns Heinz Ewers’ ‘The Spider’.

Every year the response to our call for submissions seems to grow and grow, giving us a rich universe of stories to choose from, but making our job all the more difficult in narrowing down the final selection. We’ve loved delving into so many dark and haunted spaces, and ultimately chose a selection of stories we hope sit alongside each other and with the classic selection, to provide a fantastic Supernatural Horror book for all to enjoy.

Caterpillars

E.F. Benson

I saw a month or two ago in an Italian paper that the Villa Cascana, in which I once stayed, had been pulled down, and that a manufactory of some sort was in process of erection on its site.

There is therefore no longer any reason for refraining from writing of those things which I myself saw (or imagined I saw) in a certain room and on a certain landing of the villa in question, nor from mentioning the circumstances which followed, which may or may not (according to the opinion of the reader) throw some light on or be somehow connected with this experience.

The Villa Cascana was in all ways but one a perfectly delightful house, yet, if it were standing now, nothing in the world – I use the phrase in its literal sense – would induce me to set foot in it again, for I believe it to have been haunted in a very terrible and practical manner.

Most ghosts, when all is said and done, do not do much harm; they may perhaps terrify, but the person whom they visit usually gets over their visitation. They may on the other hand be entirely friendly and beneficent. But the appearances in the Villa Cascana were not beneficent, and had they made their ‘visit’ in a very slightly different manner, I do not suppose I should have got over it any more than Arthur Inglis did.

The house stood on an ilex-clad hill not far from Sestri di Levante on the Italian Riviera, looking out over the iridescent blues of that enchanted sea, while behind it rose the pale green chestnut woods that climb up the hillsides till they give place to the pines that, black in contrast with them, crown the slopes. All round it the garden in the luxuriance of mid-spring bloomed and was fragrant, and the scent of magnolia and rose, borne on the salt freshness of the winds from the sea, flowed like a stream through the cool vaulted rooms.

On the ground floor a broad pillared loggia ran round three sides of the house, the top of which formed a balcony for certain rooms of the first floor. The main staircase, broad and of grey marble steps, led up from the hall to the landing outside these rooms, which were three in number, namely, two big sitting-rooms and a bedroom arranged en suite. The latter was unoccupied, the sitting-rooms were in use. From these the main staircase was continued to the second floor, where were situated certain bedrooms, one of which I occupied, while from the other side of the first-floor landing some half-dozen steps led to another suite of rooms, where, at the time I am speaking of, Arthur Inglis, the artist, had his bedroom and studio. Thus the landing outside my bedroom at the top of the house commanded both the landing of the first floor and also the steps that led to Inglis’ rooms. Jim Stanley and his wife, finally (whose guest I was), occupied rooms in another wing of the house, where also were the servants’ quarters.

I arrived just in time for lunch on a brilliant noon of mid-May. The garden was shouting with colour and fragrance, and not less delightful after my broiling walk up from the marina, should have been the coming from the reverberating heat and blaze of the day into the marble coolness of the villa. Only (the reader has my bare word for this, and nothing more), the moment I set foot in the house I felt that something was wrong. This feeling, I may say, was quite vague, though very strong, and I remember that when I saw letters waiting for me on the table in the hall I felt certain that the explanation was here: I was convinced that there was bad news of some sort for me. Yet when I opened them I found no such explanation of my premonition: my correspondents all reeked of prosperity. Yet this clear miscarriage of a presentiment did not dissipate my uneasiness. In that cool fragrant house there was something wrong.

I am at pains to mention this because to the general view it may explain that though I am as a rule so excellent a sleeper that the extinction of my light on getting into bed is apparently contemporaneous with being called on the following morning, I slept very badly on my first night in the Villa Cascana. It may also explain the fact that when I did sleep (if it was indeed in sleep that I saw what I thought I saw) I dreamed in a very vivid and original manner, original, that is to say, in the sense that something that, as far as I knew, had never previously entered into my consciousness, usurped it then. But since, in addition to this evil premonition, certain words and events occurring during the rest of the day might have suggested something of what I thought happened that night, it will be well to relate them.

After lunch, then, I went round the house with Mrs. Stanley, and during our tour she referred, it is true, to the unoccupied bedroom on the first floor, which opened out of the room where we had lunched.

“We left that unoccupied,” she said, “because Jim and I have a charming bedroom and dressing-room, as you saw, in the wing, and if we used it ourselves we should have to turn the dining-room into a dressing-room and have our meals downstairs. As it is, however, we have our little flat there, Arthur Inglis has his little flat in the other passage; and I remembered (aren’t I extraordinary?) that you once said that the higher up you were in a house the better you were pleased. So I put you at the top of the house, instead of giving you that room.”

It is true, that a doubt, vague as my uneasy premonition, crossed my mind at this. I did not see why Mrs. Stanley should have explained all this, if there had not been more to explain. I allow, therefore, that the thought that there was something to explain about the unoccupied bedroom was momentarily present to my mind.

The second thing that may have borne on my dream was this.

At dinner the conversation turned for a moment on ghosts. Inglis, with the certainty of conviction, expressed his belief that anybody who could possibly believe in the existence of supernatural phenomena was unworthy of the name of an ass. The subject instantly dropped. As far as I can recollect, nothing else occurred or was said that could bear on what follows.

We all went to bed rather early, and personally I yawned my way upstairs, feeling hideously sleepy. My room was rather hot, and I threw all the windows wide, and from without poured in the white light of the moon, and the love-song of many nightingales. I undressed quickly, and got into bed, but though I had felt so sleepy before, I now felt extremely wide-awake. But I was quite content to be awake: I did not toss or turn, I felt perfectly happy listening to the song and seeing the light. Then, it is possible, I may have gone to sleep, and what follows may have been a dream. I thought, anyhow, that after a time the nightingales ceased singing and the moon sank. I thought also that if, for some unexplained reason, I was going to lie awake all night, I might as well read, and I remembered that I had left a book in which I was interested in the dining-room on the first floor. So I got out of bed, lit a candle, and went downstairs. I went into the room, saw on a side-table the book I had come to look for, and then, simultaneously, saw that the door into the unoccupied bedroom was open. A curious grey light, not of dawn nor of moonshine, came out of it, and I looked in. The bed stood just opposite the door, a big four-poster, hung with tapestry at the head. Then I saw that the greyish light of the bedroom came from the bed, or rather from what was on the bed. For it was covered with great caterpillars, a foot or more in length, which crawled over it. They were faintly luminous, and it was the light from them that showed me the room. Instead of the sucker-feet of ordinary caterpillars they had rows of pincers like crabs, and they moved by grasping what they lay on with their pincers, and then sliding their bodies forward. In colour these dreadful insects were yellowish-grey, and they were covered with irregular lumps and swellings. There must have been hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of writhing, crawling pyramid on the bed. Occasionally one fell off on to the floor, with a soft fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard concrete, it yielded to the pincerfeet as if it had been putty, and, crawling back, the caterpillar would mount on to the bed again, to rejoin its fearful companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but at one end of them there was a mouth that opened sideways in respiration.

Then, as I looked, it seemed to me as if they all suddenly became conscious of my presence.

All the mouths, at any rate, were turned in my direction, and next moment they began dropping off the bed with those soft fleshy thuds on to the floor, and wriggling towards me. For one second a paralysis as of a dream was on me, but the next I was running upstairs again to my room, and I remember feeling the cold of the marble steps on my bare feet. I rushed into my bedroom, and slammed the door behind me, and then – I was certainly wide-awake now – I found myself standing by my bed with the sweat of terror pouring from me. The noise of the banged door still rang in my ears. But, as would have been more usual, if this had been mere nightmare, the terror that had been mine when I saw those foul beasts crawling about the bed or dropping softly on to the floor did not cease then. Awake, now, if dreaming before, I did not at all recover from the horror of dream: it did not seem to me that I had dreamed. And until dawn, I sat or stood, not daring to lie down, thinking that every rustle or movement that I heard was the approach of the caterpillars. To them and the claws that bit into the cement the wood of the door was child’s play: steel would not keep them out.

But with the sweet and noble return of day the horror vanished: the whisper of wind became benignant again: the nameless fear, whatever it was, was smoothed out and terrified me no longer. Dawn broke, hueless at first; then it grew dove-coloured, then the flaming pageant of light spread over the sky.

The admirable rule of the house was that everybody had breakfast where and when he pleased, and in consequence it was not till lunch-time that I met any of the other members of our party, since I had breakfast on my balcony, and wrote letters and other things till lunch. In fact, I got down to that meal rather late, after the other three had begun. Between my knife and fork there was a small pill-box of cardboard, and as I sat down Inglis spoke.

“Do look at that,” he said, “since you are interested in natural history. I found it crawling on my counterpane last night, and I don’t know what it is.”

I think that before I opened the pill-box I expected something of the sort which I found in it.

Inside it, anyhow, was a small caterpillar, greyish-yellow in colour, with curious bumps and excrescences on its rings. It was extremely active, and hurried round the box, this way and that.

Its feet were unlike the feet of any caterpillar I ever saw: they were like the pincers of a crab. I looked, and shut the lid down again.

“No, I don’t know it,” I said, “but it looks rather unwholesome. What are you going to do with it?”

“Oh, I shall keep it,” said Inglis. “It has begun to spin: I want to see what sort of a moth it turns into.”

I opened the box again, and saw that these hurrying movements were indeed the beginning of the spinning of the web of its cocoon. Then Inglis spoke again.

“It has got funny feet, too,” he said. “They are like crabs’ pincers. What’s the Latin for crab?”

“Oh, yes, Cancer. So in case it is unique, let’s christen it: ‘Cancer Inglisensis.’” Then something happened in my brain, some momentary piecing together of all that I had seen or dreamed. Something in his words seemed to me to throw light on it all, and my own intense horror at the experience of the night before linked itself on to what he had just said. In effect, I took the box and threw it, caterpillar and all, out of the window. There was a gravel path just outside, and beyond it, a fountain playing into a basin. The box fell on to the middle of this.

Inglis laughed.

“So the students of the occult don’t like solid facts,” he said. “My poor caterpillar!”

The talk went off again at once on to other subjects, and I have only given in detail, as they happened, these trivialities in order to be sure myself that I have recorded everything that could have borne on occult subjects or on the subject of caterpillars. But at the moment when I threw the pill-box into the fountain, I lost my head: my only excuse is that, as is probably plain, the tenant of it was, in miniature, exactly what I had seen crowded on to the bed in the unoccupied room. And though this translation of those phantoms into flesh and blood – or whatever it is that caterpillars are made of – ought perhaps to have relieved the horror of the night, as a matter of fact it did nothing of the kind. It only made the crawling pyramid that covered the bed in the unoccupied room more hideously real.

After lunch we spent a lazy hour or two strolling about the garden or sitting in the loggia, and it must have been about four o’clock when Stanley and I started off to bathe, down the path that led by the fountain into which I had thrown the pill-box. The water was shallow and clear, and at the bottom of it I saw its white remains. The water had disintegrated the cardboard, and it had become no more than a few strips and shreds of sodden paper. The centre of the fountain was a marble Italian Cupid which squirted the water out of a wine-skin held under its arm. And crawling up its leg was the caterpillar. Strange and scarcely credible as it seemed, it must have survived the falling-to-bits of its prison, and made its way to shore, and there it was, out of arm’s reach, weaving and waving this way and that as it evolved its cocoon.

Then, as I looked at it, it seemed to me again that, like the caterpillar I had seen last night, it saw me, and breaking out of the threads that surrounded it, it crawled down the marble leg of the Cupid and began swimming like a snake across the water of the fountain towards me. It came with extraordinary speed (the fact of a caterpillar being able to swim was new to me), and in another moment was crawling up the marble lip of the basin. Just then Inglis joined us.

“Why, if it isn’t old ‘Cancer Inglisensis’ again,” he said, catching sight of the beast. “What a tearing hurry it is in!”

We were standing side by side on the path, and when the caterpillar had advanced to within about a yard of us, it stopped, and began waving again as if in doubt as to the direction in which it should go. Then it appeared to make up its mind, and crawled on to Inglis’ shoe.

“It likes me best,” he said, “but I don’t really know that I like it. And as it won’t drown I think perhaps –”

He shook it off his shoe on to the gravel path and trod on it.

All afternoon the air got heavier and heavier with the Sirocco that was without doubt coming up from the south, and that night again I went up to bed feeling very sleepy; but below my drowsiness, so to speak, there was the consciousness, stronger than before, that there was something wrong in the house, that something dangerous was close at hand. But I fell asleep at once, and – how long after I do not know – either woke or dreamed I awoke, feeling that I must get up at once, or I should be too late. Then (dreaming or awake) I lay and fought this fear, telling myself that I was but the prey of my own nerves disordered by Sirocco or what not, and at the same time quite clearly knowing in another part of my mind, so to speak, that every moment’s delay added to the danger. At last this second feeling became irresistible, and I put on coat and trousers and went out of my room on to the landing. And then I saw that I had already delayed too long, and that I was now too late.

The whole of the landing of the first floor below was invisible under the swarm of caterpillars that crawled there. The folding doors into the sitting-room from which opened the bedroom where I had seen them last night were shut, but they were squeezing through the cracks of it and dropping one by one through the keyhole, elongating themselves into mere string as they passed, and growing fat and lumpy again on emerging. Some, as if exploring, were nosing about the steps into the passage at the end of which were Inglis’ rooms, others were crawling on the lowest steps of the staircase that led up to where I stood. The landing, however, was completely covered with them: I was cut off. And of the frozen horror that seized me when I saw that I can give no idea in words.

Then at last a general movement began to take place, and they grew thicker on the steps that led to Inglis’ room. Gradually, like some hideous tide of flesh, they advanced along the passage, and I saw the foremost, visible by the pale grey luminousness that came from them, reach his door. Again and again I tried to shout and warn him, in terror all the time that they would turn at the sound of my voice and mount my stair instead, but for all my efforts I felt that no sound came from my throat. They crawled along the hinge-crack of his door, passing through as they had done before, and still I stood there, making impotent efforts to shout to him, to bid him escape while there was time.

At last the passage was completely empty: they had all gone, and at that moment I was conscious for the first time of the cold of the marble landing on which I stood barefooted. The dawn was just beginning to break in the Eastern sky.

Six months after I met Mrs. Stanley in a country house in England. We talked on many subjects and at last she said:

“I don’t think I have seen you since I got that dreadful news about Arthur Inglis a month ago.”

“I haven’t heard,” said I.

“No? He has got cancer. They don’t even advise an operation, for there is no hope of a cure: he is riddled with it, the doctors say.”

Now during all these six months I do not think a day had passed on which I had not had in my mind the dreams (or whatever you like to call them) which I had seen in the Villa Cascana.

“It is awful, is it not?” she continued, “and I feel I can’t help feeling, that he may have –”

“Caught it at the villa?” I asked.

She looked at me in blank surprise.

“Why did you say that?” she asked. “How did you know?”

Then she told me. In the unoccupied bedroom a year before there had been a fatal case of cancer. She had, of course, taken the best advice and had been told that the utmost dictates of prudence would be obeyed so long as she did not put anybody to sleep in the room, which had also been thoroughly disinfected and newly white-washed and painted. But –

The Boarded Window

Ambrose Bierce

In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier – restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which today we should call indigence, than, impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow upon the land which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of undisturbed possession. There were evidences of ‘improvement’ – a few acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the axe. Apparently the man’s zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes.

The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its ‘chinking’ of clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter, however, was boarded up – nobody could remember a time when it was not. And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the occupant’s dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living today who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.

The man’s name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his ageing. His hair and long, full beard were white, his grey, lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders – a burden bearer. I never saw him; these particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got the man’s story when I was a lad. He had known him when living nearby in that early day.

One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter of this true story – excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier chapter – that supplied by my grandfather.

When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his axe to hew out a farm – the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support – he was young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man’s widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit to a lot like that?

One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was no physician within miles, no neighbour; nor was she in a condition to be left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness arid so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.

From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar natural laws. He was surprised, too, that he did not weep – surprised and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead. “Tomorrow,” he said aloud, “I shall have to make the coffin arid dig the grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but now – she is dead, of course, but it is all right – it must be all right, somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem.”

He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness ran an undersense of conviction that all was right – that he should have her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know he was so hard struck; that knowledge would come later, and never go. Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon the table’s edge, and dropped his face into them, tearless yet and unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window a long, wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the darkening woods! But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than before, sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild beast; perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep.

Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher awoke and lifting his head from his arms intently listened – he knew not why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all without a shock, he strained his eyes to see – he knew not what. His senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood had stilled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who – what had waked him, and where was it?

Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step – another – sounds as of bare feet upon the floor!

He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he waited – waited there in the darkness through seeming centuries of such dread as one may know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the dead woman’s name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same instant he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe. Murlock had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there!

There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little groping seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth fixed in her throat! Then there were darkness blacker than before, and silence; and when he returned to consciousness the sun was high and the wood vocal with songs of birds.

The body lay near the window, where the beast had left it when frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The clothing was deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow. From the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was broken; the hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal’s ear.

John Bartine’s Watch

A Story by a Physician

Ambrose Bierce

“The exact time? Good God! My friend, why do you insist? One would think – but what does it matter; it is easily bedtime – isn’t that near enough? But, here, if you must set your watch, take mine and see for yourself.”

With that he detached his watch – a tremendously heavy, old-fashioned one – from the chain, and handed it to me; then turned away, and walking across the room to a shelf of books, began an examination of their backs. His agitation and evident distress surprised me; they appeared reasonless. Having set my watch by his, I stepped over to where he stood and said, “Thank you.”

As he took his timepiece and reattached it to the guard I observed that his hands were unsteady. With a tact upon which I greatly prided myself, I sauntered carelessly to the sideboard and took some brandy and water; then, begging his pardon for my thoughtlessness, asked him to have some and went back to my seat by the fire, leaving him to help himself, as was our custom. He did so and presently joined me at the hearth, as tranquil as ever.

This odd little incident occurred in my apartment, where John Bartine was passing an evening. We had dined together at the club, had come home in a cab and – in short, everything had been done in the most prosaic way; and why John Bartine should break in upon the natural and established order of things to make himself spectacular with a display of emotion, apparently for his own entertainment, I could nowise understand. The more I thought of it, while his brilliant conversational gifts were commending themselves to my inattention, the more curious I grew, and of course had no difficulty in persuading myself that my curiosity was friendly solicitude. That is the disguise that curiosity usually assumes to evade resentment. So I ruined one of the finest sentences of his disregarded monologue by cutting it short without ceremony.

“John Bartine,” I said, “you must try to forgive me if I am wrong, but with the light that I have at present I cannot concede your right to go all to pieces when asked the time o’ night. I cannot admit that it is proper to experience a mysterious reluctance to look your own watch in the face and to cherish in my presence, without explanation, painful emotions which are denied to me, and which are none of my business.”

To this ridiculous speech Bartine made no immediate reply, but sat looking gravely into the fire. Fearing that I had offended I was about to apologize and beg him to think no more about the matter, when looking me calmly in the eyes he said:

“My dear fellow, the levity of your manner does not at all disguise the hideous impudence of your demand; but happily I had already decided to tell you what you wish to know, and no manifestation of your unworthiness to hear it shall alter my decision. Be good enough to give me your attention and you shall hear all about the matter.

“This watch,” he said, “had been in my family for three generations before it fell to me. Its original owner, for whom it was made, was my great-grandfather, Bramwell Olcott Bartine, a wealthy planter of Colonial Virginia, and as stanch a Tory as ever lay awake nights contriving new kinds of maledictions for the head of Mr. Washington, and new methods of aiding and abetting good King George. One day this worthy gentleman had the deep misfortune to perform for his cause a service of capital importance which was not recognized as legitimate by those who suffered its disadvantages. It does not matter what it was, but among its minor consequences was my excellent ancestor’s arrest one night in his own house by a party of Mr. Washington’s rebels. He was permitted to say farewell to his weeping family, and was then marched away into the darkness which swallowed him up forever. Not the slenderest clew to his fate was ever found. After the war the most diligent inquiry and the offer of large rewards failed to turn up any of his captors or any fact concerning his disappearance. He had disappeared, and that was all.”

Something in Bartine’s manner that was not in his words – I hardly knew what it was – prompted me to ask:

“What is your view of the matter – of the justice of it?”

“My view of it,” he flamed out, bringing his clenched hand down upon the table as if he had been in a public house dicing with blackguards –”my view of it is that it was a characteristically dastardly assassination by that damned traitor, Washington, and his ragamuffin rebels!”

For some minutes nothing was said: Bartine was recovering his temper, and I waited. Then I said:

“Was that all?”

“No – there was something else. A few weeks after my great-grandfather’s arrest his watch was found lying on the porch at the front door of his dwelling. It was wrapped in a sheet of letter paper bearing the name of Rupert Bartine, his only son, my grandfather. I am wearing that watch.”

Bartine paused. His usually restless black eyes were staring fixedly into the grate, a point of red light in each, reflected from the glowing coals. He seemed to have forgotten me. A sudden threshing of the branches of a tree outside one of the windows, and almost at the same instant a rattle of rain against the glass, recalled him to a sense of his surroundings. A storm had risen, heralded by a single gust of wind, and in a few moments the steady plash of the water on the pavement was distinctly heard. I hardly know why I relate this incident; it seemed somehow to have a certain significance and relevancy which I am unable now to discern. It at least added an element of seriousness, almost solemnity. Bartine resumed:

“I have a singular feeling toward this watch – a kind of affection for it; I like to have it about me, though partly from its weight, and partly for a reason I shall now explain, I seldom carry it. The reason is this: Every evening when I have it with me I feel an unaccountable desire to open and consult it, even if I can think of no reason for wishing to know the time. But if I yield to it, the moment my eyes rest upon the dial I am filled with a mysterious apprehension – a sense of imminent calamity. And this is the more insupportable the nearer it is to eleven o’clock – by this watch, no matter what the actual hour may be. After the hands have registered eleven the desire to look is gone; I am entirely indifferent. Then I can consult the thing as often as I like, with no more emotion than you feel in looking at your own. Naturally I have trained myself not to look at that watch in the evening before eleven; nothing could induce me. Your insistence this evening upset me a trifle. I felt very much as I suppose an opium-eater might feel if his yearning for his special and particular kind of hell were re-enforced by opportunity and advice.

“Now that is my story, and I have told it in the interest of your trumpery science; but if on any evening hereafter you observe me wearing this damnable watch, and you have the thoughtfulness to ask me the hour, I shall beg leave to put you to the inconvenience of being knocked down.”

His humor did not amuse me. I could see that in relating his delusion he was again somewhat disturbed. His concluding smile was positively ghastly, and his eyes had resumed something more than their old restlessness; they shifted hither and thither about the room with apparent aimlessness and I fancied had taken on a wild expression, such as is sometimes observed in cases of dementia. Perhaps this was my own imagination, but at any rate I was now persuaded that my friend was afflicted with a most singular and interesting monomania. Without, I trust, any abatement of my affectionate solicitude for him as a friend, I began to regard him as a patient, rich in possibilities of profitable study. Why not? Had he not described his delusion in the interest of science? Ah, poor fellow, he was doing more for science than he knew: not only his story but himself was in evidence. I should cure him if I could, of course, but first I should make a little experiment in psychology – nay, the experiment itself might be a step in his restoration.

“That is very frank and friendly of you, Bartine,” I said cordially, “and I’m rather proud of your confidence. It is all very odd, certainly. Do you mind showing me the watch?”

He detached it from his waistcoat, chain and all, and passed it to me without a word. The case was of gold, very thick and strong, and singularly engraved. After closely examining the dial and observing that it was nearly twelve o’clock, I opened it at the back and was interested to observe an inner case of ivory, upon which was painted a miniature portrait in that exquisite and delicate manner which was in vogue during the eighteenth century.

“Why, bless my soul!” I exclaimed, feeling a sharp artistic delight – “how under the sun did you get that done? I thought miniature painting on ivory was a lost art.”

“That,” he replied, gravely smiling, “is not I; it is my excellent great-grandfather, the late Bramwell Olcott Bartine, Esquire, of Virginia. He was younger then than later – about my age, in fact. It is said to resemble me; do you think so?”

“Resemble you? I should say so! Barring the costume, which I supposed you to have assumed out of compliment to the art – or for vraisemblance, so to say – and the no mustache, that portrait is you in every feature, line, and expression.”

No more was said at that time. Bartine took a book from the table and began reading. I heard outside the incessant plash of the rain in the street. There were occasional hurried footfalls on the sidewalks; and once a slower, heavier tread seemed to cease at my door – a policeman, I thought, seeking shelter in the doorway. The boughs of the trees tapped significantly on the window panes, as if asking for admittance. I remember it all through these years and years of a wiser, graver life.

Seeing myself unobserved, I took the old-fashioned key that dangled from the chain and quickly turned back the hands of the watch a full hour; then, closing the case, I handed Bartine his property and saw him replace it on his person.

“I think you said,” I began, with assumed carelessness, “that after eleven the sight of the dial no longer affects you. As it is now nearly twelve”– looking at my own timepiece – “perhaps, if you don’t resent my pursuit of proof, you will look at it now.”

He smiled good-humoredly, pulled out the watch again, opened it, and instantly sprang to his feet with a cry that Heaven has not had the mercy to permit me to forget! His eyes, their blackness strikingly intensified by the pallor of his face, were fixed upon the watch, which he clutched in both hands. For some time he remained in that attitude without uttering another sound; then, in a voice that I should not have recognized as his, he said:

“Damn you! It is two minutes to eleven!”

I was not unprepared for some such outbreak, and without rising replied, calmly enough:

“I beg your pardon; I must have misread your watch in setting my own by it.”

He shut the case with a sharp snap and put the watch in his pocket. He looked at me and made an attempt to smile, but his lower lip quivered and he seemed unable to close his mouth. His hands, also, were shaking, and he thrust them, clenched, into the pockets of his sack-coat. The courageous spirit was manifestly endeavoring to subdue the coward body. The effort was too great; he began to sway from side to side, as from vertigo, and before I could spring from my chair to support him his knees gave way and he pitched awkwardly forward and fell upon his face. I sprang to assist him to rise; but when John Bartine rises we shall all rise.

The post-mortem examination disclosed nothing; every organ was normal and sound. But when the body had been prepared for burial a faint dark circle was seen to have developed around the neck; at least I was so assured by several persons who said they saw it, but of my own knowledge I cannot say if that was true.

Nor can I set limitations to the law of heredity. I do not know that in the spiritual world a sentiment or emotion may not survive the heart that held it, and seek expression in a kindred life, ages removed. Surely, if I were to guess at the fate of Bramwell Olcott Bartine, I should guess that he was hanged at eleven o’clock in the evening, and that he had been allowed several hours in which to prepare for the change.

As to John Bartine, my friend, my patient for five minutes, and – Heaven forgive me! – my victim for eternity, there is no more to say. He is buried, and his watch with him – I saw to that. May God rest his soul in Paradise, and the soul of his Virginian ancestor, if, indeed, they are two souls.

Bones of the Dead

Daniele Bonfanti

“Are they ghosts, Mummy?”

A warm laughter. “No, sweetie,” she says, chewing with a hand raised to cover her mouth. “Wow, these bones of the dead taste so good!”

The voice of another child – slightly older, female – agrees with enthusiasm while spraying crumbles all around, “They’re awesome, Mom!”

The woman swallows. “Thank you, darling.”

The younger child, a little boy maybe four years old, looks with fascination at the dishful of vertebrae-shaped cookies in his small hands; he holds it with utter care. “But, Mummy, you say they’re dead and they come back at night and eat the cookies…”

The woman lays a gentle hand on his wild shock of hair, “There is no such thing as ghosts, sweetie. Come on, now be a good boy and set the dish on the table there, just by the candle so they’ll find it. They get pretty hungry, you know?”

The child slowly, gingerly follows her instructions, placing the dish at the center of the walnut table, near a lit candle for the dead.

“But, I don’t understand, Mummy. If they aren’t ghosts, then…”

“Let’s say they’re…angels, okay?”

A snort from the large fireplace at the end of the long terracotta-tiled kitchen, where an older woman, her hair thick and grey, is sitting on a heavy, carved rocking chair with her eyes on a fat paperback. The flame near her feet is scorching blackened chunks of cherrywood, its sweet scent mixing in the air thick with fresh baking, the lingering aroma of pizzoccheri – the few leftovers still encrust the dishes in the sink – and old furniture. Her eyes do not shift from the pages as everybody’s attention turns to her. Her Italian is much more accented, singsongy with the quick consonants and heavy vowels of the Bergamasque Alps, “They’re not angels. They’re souls.”

The little girl crosses her arms and protests with a reproachful tone, “Souls don’t eat cookies, Granny.”

It is her mother who answers, “They do this night.”

“How can they?” the children respond in chorus.

The door slams in the small hall nearby, and a serpent of cold, damp air slithers in. They turn to the kitchen doorway, filled a second later by a large figure, dark and hooded, gleaming with droplets of water.

“Oh, you’re finally back,” the woman says.

He throws back his hood revealing a bearded, angular face; he rubs his hands and breathes on them, while stomping his feet on the ground. “Brrr. Pretty cold out there. Sorry it took a while: the Roaming Chicken was missing again, but I found her. Did you already steal all of tomorrow’s bones of the dead?”

“Saved a few for you to steal, and some survived for the dead, too. By the way, you’re just in time, Berto. Tell these little beasts how come souls eat cookies this night.” She looks at the kids. “Daddy knows these things, you know?”

The man pulls off his jacket and crouches down to his children’s level, then spreads his arms in a gesture of invitation. They approach him and he puts a hand on each one’s shoulder, gathering them in a conspiratorial circle. The little boy complains, “Granny Teresa says they’re souls, but everybody knows: Souls can’t eat cookies.”

Berto’s voice is plot-like too, “Oh, they can this night. Because this night is special. And these,” he points at the dish on the table, “these are very special cookies.” Berto takes a theatrical pause, letting them observe the unmoving off-white biscuits. “The ones that come back this night, they’re the souls of family ancestors. And this is the only night when they become partly substantial –”

“What’s a parlysubashal?” the boy asks.

“Partly substantial. It means they sort of have a body, but not really…”, he pinches his son’s belly, getting an amused squeal, “fleshy like ours. So, as they suddenly have a body, they suddenly feel hungry as well, ’cause they never eat where they are. They can stay until sunrise and eat the food of the living. And you know what’s the one thing to eat they miss the most?”

“Cookies!”

“Exactly, and now that I grabbed you…”, he says, and at the same time he stands up, holding the two of them at the waist with one arm each, lifting them up like they were sacks of potatoes. “Bedtime!”

“Nooo!” The kids wriggle and twist, and he pretends to be knocked down as they break free. He springs up and chases them in a carousel around the table, the kids laughing uncontrollably. After the third round, Berto drops on a faded sofa, pretending to be out of breath, and addresses his wife, “I’m too old for this, Angela.”

The children keep running and suddenly they are in a dogfight, their arms spread and machine-gun bursts erupting from their mouths, before becoming Formula One cars with crazily jerking steering wheels, dangerously skirting their grandmother’s rocking chair – her stance and expression do not stir, she just raises her eyes now and again, her eyebrows unmoving, and a hint of a smile colors her face. Their mother laughs while scraping the leftovers from the dishes into the chicken bin and then placing them into the dishwasher.

When they become starship fighters laser-beaming each other across and under the table while arguing about who gets to be the alien craft, their father stands up and says with a firm voice, “Okay, kids, now bedtime for real.”

“No, no, we want to wait for the ghosts!”

Angela turns around raising a finger and laughing, “They’re not ghosts, I told you!”

“We want to see them anyway!”

Berto crosses his arms on his chest. “No way, youngsters, they come very, very late at night. Now, come with me and I’ll tell you a story.”

“The one with the dogs and frogs!” the boy says, while his sister is screaming, “Not the one with the dogs and frogs!”

“Double-time, troops, with me!”

Bickering, the children follow Berto out of the kitchen and up the stony stairs, leaving the women alone.

* * *

Silence, broken by the popping of logs in the fireplace, pages of Teresa’s old book turning, and the humming of the dishwasher.

While handwashing a large wooden spoon encrusted with Bitto cheese, Angela casts a quick look over her shoulder to her mother, then, without turning, casually says, “They asked about you down in town at Mass this morning.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“It was a good sermon, you know? The Don was in one of his up days, talked about accepting death being the ultimate act of faith in Jesus, and…”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Mum, you could come at least these holy days.”

“I don’t care.”

“The kids asked why you didn’t come to the graveyard this morning, if you’re coming tomorrow. What am I supposed to say to them?”

“You’re the mother. You choose.”

Angela dries her open hands in her apron, turning to look at her with rebuke. “Mum, come on, it’s been thirty years.” She glances at a framed photograph on a wall: a black-and-white, younger Teresa is there with an escort of four children, standing at a sort of military attention. They have their good-day dresses on, laces and crochets. Despite the young age, the smaller of the two girls has Angela’s big eyes and smile on her face, so that she really cannot be mistaken. The sixth figure in the picture is a handsome, square-shouldered and square-faced man with eyes black like his beard. He smiles broadly enveloping the two males in his strong arm, while Teresa is dead serious in the image. “Are you still angry with him?”

“You bet I am.”

“He made a mistake, Mum…”

“He got drunk by mistake? Got drunk and went out hunting and fell in a gully and left me to raise four children alone? Mistake, you call it. That’s interesting.”

Angela does not answer; she takes the unmarked bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter and, as she removes the cork, a trace escapes, smelling like the end of summer. She pours a glass for herself and, while she moves to the window, she changes the subject, “By the way, know who I saw at the graveyard?”

“Dead people, I guess.”

While Angela’s lips sip the wine, her eyes are on the glaring moon sliding up from behind the mountain ridge, beneath towering clouds rising with a fluorescent grey glow. From the flattened summit, the ridge abandons gold-washed meadows, toward the black beech wood that spreads down until it meets the treeline at the edge of their garden. On both sides of the ridge, the woods plunge down to gloomy valleys – sparse lights on the Bergamo face outlining the trees, on the Lecco face a solid wall of blackness reaching up to gigantic waves against the ultramarine slice of the lower sky, and then turning abruptly into fearsome limestone fangs.

Theirs is the last house of a hamlet nesting in a narrow saddle of the ridge: a line of about twenty buildings of large stones, fused together in two ranks flanking a winding cobbled street two-people wide. On one end of the street, a pitted, one-lane asphalt road ending in a slight widening now hosting two pickups and a four-wheel drive FIAT Panda; on the other, it loses itself in a trail. Only three of the buildings have their lights on, some of the others abandoned to their apparent ruin.

“La Filomena,” she mutters, almost lost in thought, without taking her eyes away from the view.

A snorting sound from her mother is the only comment.

“You won’t believe it, but I talked her into giving me a piece of her starter dough! I used it for the bones of the dead,” she nods toward the cookies on the table.

“That one is a stria,” grumbles Teresa. “Had I known, I wouldn’t have touched the blasted things. And you shouldn’t have either.”

Angela turns around to look at her, and laughs heartily. “Perhaps she’s a witch – she certainly looks like one, a bit. But sure as hell her starter dough is outstanding, and the cookies quite proved it.”

Teresa does not remark further. She ponderously closes the book with a whiff and thud, and straightens up, a slow and slightly stiff, but powerful movement. She is smaller than her daughter, who is tall and large-boned, but despite a slightly rigid stance the older woman looks sinewy and energetic. She lays the book on the carved mantelpiece and slowly steps, with a bobbing gait, to the stony staircase.

“Already going to bed?”

“Got some work to do in the garden early in the morning.”

“But tomorrow is the Day of the Dead!”

She snorts and goes up the stairs.

* * *

A sudden, stifled crash from downstairs.

Angela is straddling Berto as she starts and half-turns, apparently mistreating him someway where it hurts, judging from the expression on his flushed face. She has turned right, to face the closed door, covering her generous motherly breasts with the linen as though someone had suddenly appeared at the threshold.

“What’s the matter?” he asks, catching his breath, pain evaporating from his face yearning for more action.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“What?”

“Downstairs, something broke.”

“I didn’t hear anything, honey.” He reaches out with his hands to seek her breasts under the linen. “Come on, let’s –”

She grabs his hands and takes them away, holding them. “I’m sure, Berto. I think it was a dish.”

Berto grins. “Oh, I see. Must have been the kids, out looking for ghosts. They must have dropped the dish with the bones of the dead. Let’s just pretend we don’t know, okay?”

She shakes her head. “Could be them. But I’m going to check anyway. Maybe they cut themselves.”

And with a smooth movement she is on her feet, her strong body glistening with sweat in the moonlight. She throws a nightgown on and her hand is already on the door handle when the resigned Berto sighs, “Wait. I’m coming too.”

As he puts on his pajama pants, she says, “We should have gone down anyway to make the cookies disappear, unless you want to see some very disappointed little faces tomorrow morning.”

“Yep, I know. I just hoped we’d go a little later…”

As they pad along the corridor, they can’t help but make the old wooden planks creak a little. Angela leans her head in the children’s room, just a couple of seconds, then retreats, looking at her husband with a frown. “They’re both sleeping. Soundly.”

Berto spreads his arms, raising his eyebrows and smiling. “So there’s nothing to –” Then his face stiffens as he reads her expression. “Are you sure you heard the noise?”

“Positive.”

“Then it’s probably a mouse, but still, stay back,” he says resolutely, and begins stealthily descending the stairs with a compressed-spring look to all his wiry muscles. She follows two steps behind him, in an almost complete silence.

As Berto appears in the kitchen doorway, his fists raised and closed, he opens his mouth and just stays there like that.

Angela is still on the last step, her partial view of the kitchen is blotted out by her statuary husband. But it is way too cold, the air so dense and clashing with contrasting odors – the scent of flowers, irises, like the head of a newborn; and an acrid stench, hardly identifiable. She lunges forward to shake him and look inside, whispering hard, “What?”

And then she sees the ghost.

It is crouching, furiously lapping cookie crumbs with its black tongue from the ground littered with shattered ceramic. It does not seem to have noticed them yet. It has no hint of colors in the silvery moonlight and in the gentle, wavering blaze of the candle for the dead, just the milky white of his naked skin – the last layer of which looks like greased plastic wrap – and the deep black of the tongue and an oily smoke swirling slowly around its black-lipped mouth and head, filling in parts of its chest that seems to fade out of existence, dissolving where other parts materialize, or maybe solidifying into them.

It turns its head and looks at them with deep wells bursting with black fire.

A piercing, hissing snarl, like ground metal, pours out of its gaping mouth. And it moves toward them half-crawling and half-skittering on all fours, one of its legs and one of its arms bent at wrong angles as all its limbs seem to be animated in stop motion. Nevertheless, it is quick.

Angela screams and shakes Berto and tugs him back a few clumsy steps with her, through the small hall and into the dinette, where they stumble backward and trip, with Angela landing on her back, having the wind knocked out of her as Berto falls hard upon her.

Everything spins for a moment, and when the world comes back it is filled with the screaming face of the ghost – features indiscernible, like an overexposed photo, its stink of rank milk and burnt rubber and stale alcohol washing over Angela like a clammy fluid.

Berto has rolled away from her, putting his arm across her chest to shield her as best he can. She crawls back but there is just the large solid-wood credenza there.

The ghost reaches out with its tattered hands and then there is a chill around their necks – a sad, burning cold, together with a deep sense of desiccation and atrocious pins-and-needles, spreading fast.

The objects around blur and the air becomes sharp and heavy and darkness fills the edges of sight, creeping in.

A sudden, loud clatter.

The ghost’s head swirls back one hundred and eighty degrees as some light returns at once. The cutting pain becomes numb and dull, swelling quickly.

Teresa is on the doorless threshold of the illuminated hall, slamming two pans together and looking at the ghost fiercely. “Leave them alone, shitface.”

Sluggishly, the ghost crawls backward, its head looking toward Teresa while its body still faces the couple. Its body parts are moving out of sync: head, spine, and belly seem more solid than the rest, more three-dimensional, but also more static.

Teresa’s voice is steady, addressing her daughter and son-in-law without looking at them, her eyes fixed on the creeping figure that still seems to hesitate between targets. “Grab the kids and go. Walk until sunrise, don’t stop. Don’t call anyone, don’t seek help – no one can help. Hell, no one could even see him.” A bewildered look from her daughter. Clang. “Don’t you get it? We ate the bones of the dead!”

The ghost partially straightens up and turns the rest of itself toward Teresa. Angela and Berto, staggering, help each other up, holding their necks with their hands, their asthmatic breaths whistling. Angela’s voice is a scraping wheeze, “But – Mum!”

The ghost stops and, its head spinning backward at once, begins to crawl again toward Angela and Berto. Another, louder clank of pans, causes it to shiver as if an electrical current had run through it.

Teresa snarls, “Here, shitface!”

She slams her pans together again. The ghost moves resolutely in her direction.

“Obey, Angela! I can deal with this one,” she orders, and in the following instant has swiveled around and is hurrying to the door, the ghost disjointedly darting in her wake.

* * *

The garden. Bright moonlight glazing greens, crystallizing the air saturated with minuscule waterdrops.

The ghost has almost reached Teresa, who is crouching – out of breath? tripped? – between a patch of cauliflower and one of chards in clay soil, squishy and slightly muddy from the impalpable drizzle.

As the ghost lunges forward, arms stretching ahead and talons eager to squeeze, she straightens up and spins around in one fluid movement, a large-bladed, thick-handled spade raised above her, eclipsing the moon for a fraction of a second, then plunging down hard with a dull whistle of ploughed air and connecting with the incoming forehead of the ghost.

It makes no sound as it meets miry resistance.

It sinks in, splitting the head half the width of the iron, black oil erupting out. And the ghost drops.

Teresa’s chest heaves with a hiss as she steps ahead, looking at the body from above.

It is twitching. Teresa lays her foot on the upper edge of the rusty, pointy flat blade and pushes it down through its head. The ghost stops moving.

As she pants and flinches, reaching back with a hand to massage her back, the thick and pasty oil grows tendrils that slither around the blade.

Smoke. Sizzling.

Teresa starts and jerks back, pulling out the spade and almost losing her balance as she slides on the slippery ground, her eyes widening at the frying lump on the ground which is becoming a head again.

It begins to scuttle toward her even before the head is complete, fumbling with its arms, seeking her ankles.

The spade comes down again, sinking into the head and nailing it to the ground.

She talks in strict dialect now, “What did you think, that I didn’t recognize you, shitface? I’d smell you anywhere.”

He comes in together with a tang of alcohol sweat, shouting, “I’m hungry!”

She is mending a pair of trousers, stooping on her work on the sewing machine, its ticking the only sound in the kitchen. She stands up now, grabs him by a shoulder as he stumbles into the edge of the table with a piercing creak on the cotto floor.

“Shush! I’ve just managed to put little Angela to bed!”

He looks at her hand on him like it were something alien. Then slowly drags up his dark eyes to glower at her. “Don’t you talk to me like that.”

The ghost screeches. The spade slams down.

“I can do it as many times as it takes.”

It sinks in.

The slap is almost instantaneous, he does not even seem to have moved.

She spins a half-turn and grabs the edge of the stove so as not to fall as the room is suddenly rocking around. Taste of blood.

Another time. The ghost’s head splits open.

“How many times have you smacked me, you drunk shit? It made you feel like a real man, did it, shitface?”

As he steps toward her with a satisfied look on his ruddy face, she straightens up – her own face half-reddened, twitching with wild surges of emotion – and pushes him away with both hands, hard.

He trips on his own feet, fumbling ridiculously for purchase and finding none, then falls back on his buttocks with a loud thud.

She laughs bitterly, “Look at you. You’re pathetic.”

He gets up slowly, threateningly slowly, with a dark light in his eyes.

The black oil sizzles, the spade escapes its clammy tentacles.

She holds up her hands as he approaches, but he is upon her, his fist pulled back to his shoulder, then jabs out at once.

It hits her in the eye.

She is sent back to slam into the cast-iron stove, rebounding down to the floor, moaning, coughing up blood, quivering.

Little Angie stands on the last step of the stairs, frozen, her Teddy Bear dangling at her side while she holds its paw. From her angle, she can just see her mother on the ground. Her eyes are full of tears. “Nooo, Mummy, you’re hurt!”

Vertigo. Black flash.

Teresa staggers, a stab in her back, discharging pain. She groans as she renews her purchase on the ashwood handle with bleeding hands, propping herself on it to stay on her feet.

One of the hands of the ghost has taken advantage of her moment of crisis, and it has spidered onto her slipper.

Teresa’s voice is a harsh gargle, “It’s all right, dear, go upstairs. Mummy’s just tripped.”

Her father leans on the doorway, a wide grin on his face. “Heard your mother? Go upstairs. I’ll take care of her.”

As the little girl begrudgingly obeys, Teresa pushes on her trembling arms, raising her head, half of her face a throbbing violet bump.

“You coward shitface.”

His face is on fire.

He stalks toward her, but she leaps onto her feet and ducks, dodging his flailing arms. He takes hold of a lock of hair and she shrieks, her head pulled back.

The hand clutches her ankle.

She moans in pain, trying without success to pull the leg away.

She swirls the spade and strikes at the wrist, severing half of it from the still-squeezing hand. A stream of oil squirts onto her leg, frying skin. She yowls and then hits again, detaching the hand entirely and jerking it away from the rest of the body. It stops squeezing at once, dropping on the dirt, leaving its print on her mud-smudged ankle – the touched skin looks like coal sprinkled with ash.

She stamps on his toes and with a choked cry his fingers slide out, a bunch of torn hair is all they got as Teresa reaches the door and runs out to the garden.

He stomps fast behind her, whispering curses in the starlit night.

She vanishes into the wooden toolshed.

He laughs as he slows down, a victorious grin settling on his face, “Think I didn’t see you? Now you’re like a trapped mouse in there.” He cracks his fingers. “And it’s time you learn your lesson.”

The ghost has scrambled on all fours and is lunging at her; she is about to lose her balance as soon as she puts weight on the damaged leg. He leaps, his intact hand reaching toward her, his mouth gaping like a black hole. She deliberately drops on the ground and the ghost vaults over her, brushing her without managing to grab her and tumbling over. She turns and, knees set in the soft clay, hammers the spade down on the nape of his neck.

He collapses with a long hiss.

She explodes out of the toolshed, spade in hands, marching toward him with steady steps and a firm straight mouth.

“And now what do you –” he starts, his laugh rising and then it quickly fades to hesitating as he meets her squinted eyes, and then to nothing as she charges him, raising the spade high. “No no no!” he screams throwing his arms up too late. The blade cleaves between his hands and strikes in the middle of his forehead.

“You remember this spade, shitface? Thirty years and it is still good.”

He falls hard on his knees with goggling eyes, blood pouring out from the gash.

He tries to say something as he puts his hands on the wound as if to stop the red flood, but all that comes out of his mouth is gibberish. He tries again to open his mouth, blood dripping into it from above, but before he can even utter a sound, a second blow takes him right there, between the teeth.

He is on his back on the ground when the third bash comes. And the fourth. And the fifth.

He doesn’t move anymore at the tenth, his face a clump of mangled flesh.

Teresa leans on the spade, sunk in his neck, panting, exhausted.

She shakes hard, her sweaty clothes reduced to chilly wet rags, heavy with mud, pressing on her skin.

The ridge of the mountain is starker now, and from behind it a slow grey-orange light is swelling up to eat the stars.

The spade comes down, shattering the head again.

A doorbell, a shawl-covered head with a worried face very much like Teresa’s – just a little older – showing up at the door. Whispers in the night.

The two sisters struggling to drag him along a trail through the woods, exertion distorting their sweaty faces.

The two of them crossing themselves in front of a small shrine with a painting of the Virgin, faded and peeling, half hidden behind a skull resting on cracked bones, staring at them with empty eyes.

Perfect darkness broken by fleeting torches. Owls telling them ancient secrets.

Teresa putting an empty bottle of grappa in his rucksack. Her sister putting his shotgun in his stiff hands.

Pushing the corpse down a gully, together.

Looking down in silence at the disarranged thing in the bloodstained snow, lit by the still torrent of starlight streaming down from the ridge of the mountain, one arm and leg bent at wrong angles as if drawing a broken star.

She sits, the injured leg stiff and straight, the other drawn up to tremble on her chest, her palms behind her feeling the dew coalescing.

She breathes, inhaling the balsamic scent from a large bush of sage, still swaying after she has trod through it in her final onslaught, a scent which meets with one of wet clay and of porcini coming from the wood.

She looks, while the mountain ridge turns rusty and then is swept over by a glare, spears of light piercing through the dimness and running wild on the meadows, flashing on rocky outcrops, sinking into the last green leaves, and setting ablaze the thousand shades in the autumn crowns of beeches.

The ghost begins to melt.

The damp, rich-smelling humus begins to absorb it.

Earthworms can be seen wiggling just underground.

Teresa coughs up phlegm and hawks it on the threads of the decomposing body.

Her voice is a low rasp. “Go back to the worms. Where you belong, shitface.”

In the Court of the Dragon

Robert W. Chambers

“Oh, thou who burn’st in heart for those who burn

In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;

How long be crying –‘Mercy on them.’ God!

Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?”

In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle, sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C–.

My chair was near the chancel rail, I now turned toward the west end of the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too. There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting. Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the French quality of taste: taste reigned supreme, self-controlled, dignified and reticent.

Today, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse, a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect’s books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening, too, but not in works on architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon. Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do not love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the manuals blared approval. Poor devil! Whoever he was, there seemed small hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows of the kneeling nuns, still turned towards the altar, lost none of their devout abstraction under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C–. For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the rest I had counted on when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble: the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favourite church for healing. For I had been reading The King in Yellow.

“The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in their dens.” Monseigneur C– delivered his text in a calm voice, glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why, toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white as his coat was black. “Good riddance!” I thought, “with your wicked music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.”

With a feeling of relief – with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here, at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

“My children,” said the preacher, “one truth the human soul finds hardest of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see that nothing can really harm it.”

“Curious doctrine!” I thought, “for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he will reconcile that with the Fathers.”

“Nothing can really harm the soul,” he went on, in, his coolest, clearest tones, “because –”

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery the same way. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank; and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church straight into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me so? – Me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which have not even coloured glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him: I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbour supernatural horrors! That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C– his collected manner and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady supporting one corner of the pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else, from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C– himself. For all devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my ears of

“The skirts of St. Paul has reached.

Having preached us those six Lent lectures,

More unctuous than ever he preached,”

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing, but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back – a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these years: it was there, though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the Rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river-side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench, children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him where he went down the broad crowded Avenue, that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far out beyond it – I know not where I went, but after a long while as it seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now since I had seen him. Physical fatigue and mental suffering had left me no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon.

It is an ‘impasse’; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon. Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken pavement collects unsavoury pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavoury as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard, honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone. When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and I took it.

From the Arc to the Rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour, especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the mercy of Sunday fete-makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon’s wings to meet my enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our concierge and his wife walked among them, with their black poodle, keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, halfway down the court, reached by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open door, the friendly old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw him, ten paces off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by the entrance on the Rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway, and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the Rue du Dragon were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows; the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I set my back against the barred doors and defied him.

There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse’s staff in the south aisle, preceding Monseigneur C– to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also, with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. Had I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him – they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”

Crossroads

Carolyn Charron

Temptation looms in front of me.

To anyone else, it looks like a bridge, a perfectly formed arch over a divided highway. Stone and concrete, iron and rust. It’s dense and heavy, yet somehow still light and airy.

This bridge seems innocent but I know its secret. I can see below the surface, to where the spirit that lives here twines around the physical beams and spars holding the roadway aloft. I can see its decadent shadow, blending rebar and mist into a tantalizing thing that calls to me, begging me to join with it.

Bridge and not-bridge. It’s contradictory, attractive and repulsive in equal measure.

A truck rattles behind me, shaking the ground where I stand, staring at the bridge ahead of me, my heart pounding with anticipation. Two lanes of traffic snake under the concrete curve, metallic rivers that sparkle in the sun before flowing into the darkness and then out again in an endless stream of rolling wheels.

Hidden in its wide concrete span, I know the shadow is alive. Not alive in the usual animal sense, but I feel something, a dark spirit. This darkness wants love, it wants me. It wants me as its lover. I am horrified by the idea yet a tiny part of me is curious and I return each day to listen. Some days the screeching traffic drowns it out and on sunny days I hear only the wind.

Today is a lovely overcast grey day and that sweet darkness ensnares me easily, draws me forward into its reach. As I reach the base of the bridge, the air thickens, sticky with fuel and flowers. My first step onto the bridge walkway awakens an intense yearning inside me that leaves me breathless. With my next step, a tsunami of lust envelops me, blinding me to the world for a long moment.

When I can see again, the shadow coaxes me to climb the gradual rise, high above the lanes of oblivious vehicles. I stop at the apex of the two-lane overpass. Behind me, a car drives by, the breath of its passage ruffling my hair.

I’m alone here but I’m not. The shadowy spirit pulses under the bridge, a dark presence that urges me to mount the railing, spread my arms wide and step off, falling into its embrace. I can’t decide if this would be a good thing or a terrible thing but it is moot. There is a metal mesh suicide barrier attached above the hand rail, preventing me from lust-driven folly.

Every time I step onto this bridge, I am seduced by those unknowable shadows. My reaction – intertwined loathing and longing – is the price I pay to cross this bridge and I pay it willingly every day. I could take a different route but I don’t. I’m testing myself against it.

At least, that is what I tell myself when I’m at home. When I stand here, linked to the darkness below, I’m not certain I think at all. Flooded with strange, black feelings, my logical thoughts scatter, tiny mice hiding from a terrifying panther. Under the stink of diesel I can smell the jungle rain of the hunt. But am I the hunted or the hunter? Does it matter when you are full of love?

I hear words in the whispering of tires on the wet pavement far below; jump, jump, you know you want to, everything you ever wanted is here in the shadows, jump, join us, love us.

It is the most persuasive offer I have ever been given.

I’ve never felt this anywhere else, only here.

This place is an intersection, a crossroads between places, between the world I live in and the world of the spirit. I don’t know if the shadow presence was here before the bridge was built or if it came after, but this location is an open doorway, allowing something alien to peek through.

I’m not the first to hear its siren call. Flowers line the sidewalks, along with photos, teddy bears, crosses. Mementos of other battles this shadow has waged; won or lost, I don’t know, nor do I care. I only care about my battle. Whether this is a summons to love or to death, it is a beguiling choice. I am wanted – so desperately that it hurts.

I sway in place, mesmerized by the traffic flowing beneath me, my hands clenched so tightly on the railing that my fingers cramp with pain. The darkness below the bridge tugs at me, caresses my skin, raising goosebumps of pleasure.

Dimly, I hear a car stop on the bridge behind me, a voice asking if I am okay. I nod my heavy head and they leave but the spell is broken.

I unpeel my frozen fingers from the slender rail separating me from the promise of happiness, of love. I drag myself away from my would-be-lover.

Stumbling off my bridge, a shiver of cold passes over my body and instantly the tugging sensation is gone, as ephemeral as mist. I have lost the seductive compulsion to fly into its embrace.

The scent of decaying flowers follows me down the rain-washed street. I realize I am drenched – my shoes squelch when I walk – but I don’t recall when it rained or even how long I stood on the bridge this time.

I try to regain the feeling of standing high above that mysterious and welcoming presence. I imagine being part of it. But it is faint and disconnected from my regular life, the memory as hollow and short-lived as a rainbow-hued soap bubble.

Tears prick at me, scald my cheeks. I want more than a transient experience, I want…I want…more. I want to always be enveloped in that sensation of homecoming.

Lonely for something I can’t name, I prowl through the rain-washed canyon of buildings, searching.

* * *

I awake to sunshine and tangled sheets, missing the rain. My shadow never comes out in the sunshine, only misty wet days beckon me to its side.

I wish the sunlight gone but in truth, I am relieved.

I am unclean today, unworthy of its attention.

Harold rolls over beside me, his heaviness pulling the sheets awry. He’d come last night for our weekly date. I’d been quiet, unsure how to break it off with him. What reason could I use that he’d understand? It sounds crazy even to me.

While he was in me, grunting his passion, I’d felt adulterous. The smooth sweep of the arch of Harold’s foot echoed the arch of my bridge and I wanted to stroke it. My bridge, not Harold’s slick skin. The bones of his limbs and his spine reminded me of concrete and embedded rebar. Sweat dripped off his brow and I smelled oil-soaked pavement.

I can no longer remember why I started seeing Harold in the first place. His flesh is too meaty. The shadows under his chin and arms resemble my beloved shadow. I remember a time – so long ago! – when I was excited to hear Harold’s voice and welcomed his touch. Now those days seem like a dream. Only my shadowy bridge seems real.

Harold kissed me this morning as he left smiling, leaving me to slink my way here, to stare guiltily at my would-be-lover, hidden below its bridge skin, barred by the too-bright sunshine that scrapes at my eyes with tiny blades of light.

I am going mad, I am falling in love with darkness. Somehow my steps have brought me back here but the sunlight has hidden my beloved from me and it’s only concrete and metal spars suspended over a roadway.

I skulk back home, ashamed and lonely.

* * *

Days pass slowly and I wait anxiously for rain, hoping my shadow will return. I haven’t felt its damp touch since Harold. I haven’t returned any of Harold’s calls since then either. I can’t. I hope my lover will forgive me, although I don’t feel I deserve it.

Harold leaves increasingly panicked messages that I ignore. He is not the one for me, I know this now. I need my shadowy love. I have begun to hate the sunlight as it keeps my beloved from me.

At last the skies cloud over and the sunlight dims. My heels click happily to our meeting, I have dressed for our reunion. I arrive breathless and spend one last moment savouring the anticipation before I step up onto the bridge.

A river of lust sweeps me up. My heart stutters.

It is back and it still loves me. Dark tendrils swirl out from under the wet asphalt, happy in my return. I am forgiven for my transgression. It still wants me.

Mist curls between my painted toenails and hides the roadway far below, muting the sounds. Oh, how I have missed this! I want to caress my shadow, inhale its thick air, recline in its clasp. My skin tingles with desire, my nipples so hard they hurt, wonderful pain that shreds my sanity.

I rush to the top, eager, heedless of the flowers and mementoes. My fingers clutch the worn railing. My heart slams in my chest so hard, I am light-headed with yearning.

I cannot wait a moment longer.

I have prepared for today and I pull heavy-duty wire cutters from my purse, dropping the bag to the ground. Snip, snip, snip, the wires barring me from my love fall away, passing through the arms of my shadowy lover harmlessly and clanging onto the cars underneath my bridge.

Screeching tires, both behind and below me. A far away scream echoes in my ears.

I glance up and dimly recognize Harold at the foot of the bridge. He will try to stop me. I must hurry.

I snip faster, my muscles bunching into the task, another piece of thick metal mesh falls free leaving an opening to my love.

I lift myself up and over, cartwheeling into the abyss, liquid with need. Faintly I hear Harold screaming my name but it is too late, I have already let go.

My shadow catches me, eases me into its embrace, and I explode.

I am home.

* * *

The sun burns too strong, I can’t see beyond the glare. I wait for rain.

* * *

Grey skies loom overhead, twisted shadows ooze from behind parked cars and the occasional tree. The rain has stopped but a thick dripping comes from the struts of the bridge, joined by the tears of the weeping man above me.

Above me.

I float on the air, below my beloved bridge. The cars slip by under me, disturbing my limbs. I straddle the road and let them pass, I don’t want them. I want him. The weeping man.

I can see his emotions as clearly as I once saw his face. For a moment I can’t remember his name, then it comes back to me. Harold.

He’s confused by these wracking tears, his grief is too strong. He doesn’t think he has the right, he hasn’t loved this woman – me – deeply enough for such emotion. He hadn’t known me long enough. If he had, he should have known what was going on, would have been in time. He thinks he could have stopped me, could have saved me.

Harold keeps his eyes lowered, not in respect – in fear. He doesn’t want to see that memory again but straining with effort, I push it to the forefront of his thoughts.

The woman’s unforgettable happy waltz up the sidewalk, the casual snipping of the wires and her fluttering leap over the side, followed by his mad scramble to the ragged-edged hole screaming her name in time her body twisted around to smile up at him from below.

Harold shies away from the rest of the vision. He hasn’t told anyone what he saw – he can barely acknowledge it to himself. It terrifies him.

And that is the edge I need. I call his name but he doesn’t hear me. My voice, for now, is only a sibilant whispering at the edge of his hearing, enough to make him look up but no more.

A patch on the suicide barrier draws his gaze. The patch is a repair is of woven metal strands, a different colour than the original, visible mute testimony to the fact of my existence and my leap. The smell of roses clogs his throat, his floral offering to me at his feet. It joins the others on my bridge.

I whisper louder. He senses something, I can tell.

He strains to drown me out with a useless prayer. He leans on the railing, pressing his forehead into the cold metal, denting his skin. This metal skein is meant to prevent my prey from joining me but it hasn’t worked and the many tributes scattered along its length say it never will. There are dozens of memorials, dozens of repaired holes.

I remember every one. I am every one. My lovers surround me, are joined with me, watching avidly as I woo this man into our embrace. Each has wooed their own to join us. Our dimpled darkness is made of sparks of blackness, each a soul added to ourselves with love. We have been here long before the bridge, before the cars when humans avoided us and we fed infrequently – we are ancient.

Harold leans harder on the cold barrier, it flexes gently, as gently as I did when I floated on the dark arms of shadow. This is the memory he can never tell anyone – the shadow is real; I’m not gone.

He saw me join the darkness, disappear into it, smiling and laughing. He saw me blissful in my new lover’s midnight embrace and the memory of it frightens him.

We eat his fear, sating our hunger. His terror will be my wedge, my way of inching into his mind, coaxing him to join us.

Under a perfect grey sky, my shadow pulses in time to his heartbeat. He finishes his prayer. I whisper his name as he turns to go. He gives the flower-strewn, shadow-doused bridge one last look and in that look, I know he will come back and each time my voice will be clearer to him.

One day soon, perhaps next week or next month, he will climb over the railing and take his own leap of faith.

And we will catch him.

The Mourning Woman

E.E.W. Christman

I was seven the first time I saw the ghost.

I woke up early in the morning. Or very late at night, depending on your perspective. I didn’t feel sleepy or groggy or anything. I was just asleep and then very suddenly awake, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck to my ceiling. Mom helped me put them in constellations. Libra, my astrological sign, was right above me.

I sat up, more confused than anything. I looked around my dark room, and there it was. Tall and rail thin and disembodied. A girl, maybe? Her hair was long, but she was mostly featureless. I never learned her name because she never talked. She was standing in front of my dresser, just in front of my Jupiter nightlight mom got me for Christmas – are you getting that I was super into space as a kid? Anyway, I remember thinking, “How can I see the nightlight if she’s standing in front of it?” Let me clarify: there is a fucking stranger in my room watching me sleep, and all I care about is the stupid nightlight.

The girl didn’t move toward me. She didn’t move at all. The more I looked at her, the more I figured out. She’s see-through, I thought. Like a jellyfish. She was pale, and I don’t mean she didn’t get out much. It was like all the color had been drained from her. And not just her, but her clothes and everything. It’s like her whole presence had been blanched. And I know this is the most cliché thing, but she kind of glowed. But that’s not quite the right word…it was like she reflected light that wasn’t there.

I know, I know. It all sounds crazy.

And then, seven year-old-me finally figured it out: that person was a ghost.

Cool, I thought.

So I decided I shouldn’t be rude to the jellyfish ghost girl. After all, I was her host. Mom was big on being a good hostess, so I thought it was important to make her feel welcome.

“Hi,” I said. She didn’t say anything back. I tried waving, thinking she was too shy to talk. I knew kids like that. And sure enough, she raised a hand to me.

Not a real wave, but it was a start.

“My name’s George. It’s short for Georgia. What’s your name?”

The ghost girl remained silent, her white arm still raised to me.

“Maybe you can’t talk,” I said, hopping down from my bed. “Can you write it?”

I got my crayons out, even though the girl hadn’t said she could write.

“Here,” I said very casually. I arranged the paper and crayons in front of her. Her head might’ve tilted slightly, but otherwise, she didn’t move.

“I’ll show you.” I took a crayon – green, my favorite – and wrote ‘George’ in big, lower-case letters. “See? G-E-O-R-G-E. That’s me.”

I tried holding out a crayon to her. I chose khaki, since I never used it. I even tried dropping it into her ghostly hand. It just fell through.

That finally freaked me out a little bit. “Fine,” I told her and ran back to bed, pulling the covers over me and pretending the ghost wasn’t there.

It wasn’t easy. But eventually I fell asleep, and when I woke up, she was gone.

When I went to clean up my crayons, I saw a drawing. Next to my name, there was a picture of a house. It was like a dollhouse, with the front completely shaved away so you could see inside. There was a little kitchen, a living room, and upstairs, there was a tall figure and a little girl standing together.

It was all in khaki.

* * *

The ghost didn’t come back the next night, or even the one after that. But I left my crayons out for her, and lots of paper. In return, she left me drawings. They were all of the same house, with the front removed so you could see inside. One showed me eating breakfast in the kitchen. Another showed my mom and dad walking outside with briefcases, leaving for work, and me riding on a yellow school bus outside. She was in them, too. A colorless outline of a featureless person, sometimes hovering above me as I ate cereal, or watching us leave through a window. It should’ve been terrifying, seeing drawings of me going about my life as an invisible girl followed me. But it wasn’t. It made me feel…special. Like there was this big secret that was all mine.

I waited up for her every night, wanting to talk to the silent jellyfish ghost. I wanted to thank her for the pictures. And I wanted to ask her questions. Like, how she died and whether she had lived in this house or just died here and if she had died a long time ago or recently.

On the third night, my patience was rewarded. I’d fallen asleep during my vigil, but suddenly, I was just awake. Just like that first night.

And when I sat up, the ghost girl stood in the exact same spot. Completely still.

“You’re back!” I pronounced, grinning. I jumped out of bed and sat in front of her like we were having a slumber party. “Thanks for the drawings. I really liked them. Why did it take you so long to come back?”

That’s when I noticed them. Two pieces of paper on the floor. Crayons were everywhere.

“New drawings! Let me see…” I picked it up. Still smiling. Still not afraid. God, if only I’d been afraid.

There was our house. My parents were asleep in their bedroom, and I was asleep in mine. But there was a new room, just above mine. An attic? A crawlspace? I wasn’t sure. The ghost girl was there, but she wasn’t alone. She’d drawn someone with her. They wore a long black shroud, or maybe it was hair. It completely obscured their face. Whoever it was was enormous; their body took up the whole space, curling around it and the girl. Trapped, I immediately thought.

“Who’s this?” The ghost girl said nothing. But her hand jerked. Flip it over? I did. In big, black letters, it read:

MOURNING WOMAN.

At the time, I thought she’d just misspelled, ‘morning’. I didn’t know what ‘mourning’ was. I looked at the second page. There wasn’t a picture. It simply read:

DON’T EVER LOOK AT HER.

That’s when I finally felt it, the thing I should’ve felt from the very first time I set eyes on the ghost in my room: fear. Raw, unfiltered, and terrible. I looked up, but she was gone.

I screamed. I screamed until my parents came running into the room in a flurry of cries: what happened, what’s wrong, are you OK? I buried myself in my mother’s shoulder as they held me. I breathed them in, closed off the rest of the world the way scared children do, taking relief in my parents’ presence.

My dad saw the drawings. After that night, they took me to a child therapist because they were scared, too. The therapist was a woman with coily grey hair who asked me about my imaginary friend, who she referred to as ‘the girl’. I went to see her for a couple of months. We played with toys, drew pictures, and talked about ‘the girl’. And after some time passed, I no longer thought about her. I believed that she was a game that I’d made up. An imaginary friend. A secret.

And life moved on. Ten years of life, to be precise, and I’d very nearly forgotten about the ghost and the ‘morning’ woman.

It was the summer after high school graduation, and the summer before my first semester of college. It was one of those in-between times, when you’re neither one thing or the other. I was in a cocoon, no longer a caterpillar but not yet a butterfly.

I was excited. My life was expanding into something new. I had dreams of physics and mathematics. And the biggest dream of all: NASA. Space. Stars. I’d put myself on the right track. Good grades, good college, good outlook. Everything just seemed so good.

But I was enjoying this summertime freedom. Tests were done, applications were finished and accepted. Now came the waiting. I spent the hot summer days wandering through the town with my friends. Some were staying, most were going. We gathered at the places we’d been going to for years, the burger stands and the swimming pools and the strip mall, as if they would disappear when we did. At night, we slept at each other’s houses, where we talked about our plans for the future.

But one night, I was just at home. Reading a book, listening to music, and generally enjoying my own company.

I don’t know why it all happened that night. I can’t tell you why there had been such a gap between the first time and the last time. I don’t know.

All I know is that as I was reading, I became aware of something strange. A sound, barely audible. I turned down the music, straining to hear it.

Crying. Someone was crying. My first thought was that it was mom or dad. But they weren’t at home, I remembered. They’d gone to the movies. I’d declined to go for no real reason other than wanting to be alone.

I shivered. The air was suddenly cold. I told myself I was just scared, because I was. The hairs on my neck and arms stood up – I had always thought that was just something people said, but it was true. My hackles were up like a nervous cat.

The crying was coming from my closet.

The voice of common sense commanded me to just leave. Just go downstairs, go outside, go to Sam’s house or Lydia’s or Jackie’s. Call mom and dad. Call the cops. Do anything but stay in this room.

I didn’t listen. I pushed fear and common sense aside. I tiptoed to the closet, took a deep breath, and threw open the doors to find:

Nothing. Not nothing. Shoes and shirts and dresses, but nothing else.

So why was the crying louder?

In that moment, it all came back. The girl, the drawings, and his warning. Like the memory had been asleep and was suddenly just awake.

“Hello?” I called, pushing my clothes this was and that, searching for the pale girl. But I couldn’t find her. “I hear you but I can’t see you!”

I felt a desperation to find the source of the crying that I didn’t really understand. I thought that I could help, I guess. So I listened. Very carefully, I listened.

The crying was coming from somewhere above me. I pulled down my clothes, a shelf piled with shoes and forgotten articles of clothing, anything else between me and the crying.

In the corner of the ceiling of my closet, there was a depression. It was an access panel, hidden behind the shelves and clothes in my closet. I stood up and pushed at it, grunting with effort. I strained against the wood. Just when I thought maybe it was sealed, painted over too many times or nailed shut, it creaked one last time before giving way. Using my phone as a flashlight, I looked up, but could only see dusty rafters. I had to stand on top of a box of winter sweaters to reach the opening, but after a few tries, I pulled myself inside the crawlspace.

The sobbing was very loud now. “Hello?” I called, scanning the secret room with my phone.

There were piles of things. Most of them were crumbling from age, and it was impossible to tell what they might have once been. That dusty piece of fabric could have once been a coat or a tapestry or a tablecloth. Now it was mostly dust. There were cobwebs everywhere. I pushed myself passed them and all the junk, searching for the ghost.

The crawlspace was bigger than I’d thought it could be. How could this be in my house without anyone knowing? I remembered the drawings of the girl following me and my parents around, always floating above us. Did this space extend throughout the entire house? The space was low, forcing me to crawl through on my hands and knees. The crying seemed to come from everywhere, and I couldn’t see anyone. I kept calling out, hoping to draw her out.

As I crawled and searched and called, my light caught the corner of something big. There was an old trunk ahead of me. It was covered in dust and cobwebs, but seemed to have survived the years. With a slow, careful hand, I opened it.

Inside, I found old clothes, more well-preserved than everything else up here. They were a woman’s clothes, old velvet dresses and tiny hats. Victorian? Rummaging, I found a bundle of letters. The owner had tied them together with a soft, silk ribbon. I tried to read some of them, but they were too faded. There was a leatherbound book toward the bottom. It was a photo album. All the pictures were sepia-toned and faded. They were those kinds of old photographs where no one smiled. There was a picture of a family at the very beginning. A man with a handlebar mustache, a woman with dark hair, and a baby. Most of the pictures were of the man and the woman, or of other random people. Only a few at the end showed the three of them. Then the album abruptly ended, only filling half of the pages. The last picture was of the man and woman, who I assumed were husband and wife, and their baby. But something wasn’t right. The man and woman were both wearing all black. The woman’s face was hidden behind a lace veil. And the baby… the baby’s eyes were glassy, its expression was unnatural…

It was dead, I realized. The baby was dead.

And the crying…it was so loud now. When had it gotten so much louder?

The woman in the veil…the woman in mourning…

I dropped the album. I wanted to leave. I no longer cared about the crying ghost. I just didn’t want to see her, remembering the warning of the mourning woman.

I turned back the way I came, but stopped. And I don’t just mean I physically stopped. Everything stopped. I didn’t breathe, didn’t move, didn’t blink; I think even my heart faltered in fear. Up ahead, framed by the light pouring in from my bedroom, where absolutely no one had been before, was someone.

They were crouched on the floor, facing away from me. They rocked back and forth rhythmically. It wasn’t the ghost. Instead of the jellyfish glow I remembered, this creature glowed with darkness. It’s almost impossible to explain… the form was so dark, so much blacker than the shadows of the crawlspace, that its own darkness glowed in contrast to it. It was blacker than the deepest trenches of the ocean, blacker than the starkest stretch of space.

I didn’t want to go near it. I didn’t care if that was the only way out, I wasn’t going near that thing.

I turned around to crawl as quickly as I could in the other direction, the crying so close, it was earsplitting.

I stopped. Impossible was all I could think.

The creature was still ahead of me. Somehow. It was closer.

Don’t look at the mourning woman. I closed my eyes, blocking her out, afraid I’d already damned myself. But I hadn’t seen her face. Not yet.

With my eyes shut, I crawled backwards toward where I remembered the entrance being. My world became the dusty wood beneath me and the shrill cries echoing all around me. The crying made my teeth ache, made my head split. But I just kept moving, fighting past the fear and past the crying. Just get out, I told myself. Get out, get out, get out!

The floor was gone. The entrance, I thought as my body fell forward. At the last minute I remembered to cover my head. I clattered to my closet floor amidst the shoes and clothes I’d thrown there to get up to the crawlspace. I immediately hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken.

The crying had stopped. Tentatively, I opened my eyes, and saw only my closet ceiling.

Relief. Sweet relief ran through me like a shot of morphine. I’d gotten away. I was safe. With a sigh, I sat up and turned –

Blackness. Impossible blackness sat at the foot of my bed, cradling something in its arms. A bundle that I immediately knew swaddled whatever remained of that baby in the pictures. And swimming in the blackness was a veil. And behind the veil were eyes. Horrible eyes. Lifeless and glassy but somehow staring right at me.

With a cry, the woman rushed to me, scooped me up, and carried me away. I felt the world drop away and there was only her. I struggled against her, feeling no body or even clothes or bones. My hands fought against her formless, chilling darkness. I screamed, but she swallowed up the sounds. And I felt it. Her loneliness. Her sadness. It washed over me like a wave and dragged me down like a rip tide. I cried for her, for me, I cried for her to let me go, to think of my mother, but she only held me tighter.

I heard my parents below us. I screamed, but the sound disappeared on my lips. I heard them calling for me, searching for me. George! George! My mother and father’s voices echoed beneath me. I heard sirens and footsteps and tears that seemed to go on forever. I’m right here! But no one heard me. And soon, even their sounds were swallowed up by the blackness, and I was alone with the woman.

I felt myself slipping away. My body seemed to melt in that endless cold. Had it been a day? A week? Eternity? It was impossible to say. I shrank in her arms, forgetting myself and remembering only briefly that I hated her and was terrified of her. My body melted away and fell to a pile in the dust. I saw my rotting flesh and, later, my bones. What was left of me was small and scared and glowed with something I felt the woman desperately wanted. Something other than grief. She held me tightly, and time and the house below stopped existing in a way that made sense. Now there’s only the woman, and the parts of me she won’t let go. Sometimes, the good times, I don’t remember who I was or that I’d had a life before this one. Those times, there’s only the darkness, the cold, and her, and there was never anything else. Other times, I remember everything. Me, my mom and dad, my friends, my dreams, my life, and I wish I could die all over again.

She loosens her grip. Now, or then, a decade or a century ago or right now. I float away, barely able to control myself. I see my room, my old room, my Jupiter nightlight, my stars, and me.

I try to tell you. I try to warn you. But I know you didn’t listen. You looked. Goddamn you, you looked.

The Fifth Gable

Kay Chronister

The first woman to live in the four-gabled house fermented her unborn children in the wine cellar. When they came to term, she broke them open on the floorboards. Her heartiest son weighed half an ounce at birth. His face, curved to the shape of the Mason jar womb where he developed, stayed pink for an hour before he died in a puddle of formaldehyde and afterbirth.

The second woman to live in the four-gabled house pulled her children from the ground like stubborn roots. They came out of the soil smelling of pollen, with faces like tulips. They were healthy until she cut their stems, and then they withered. They returned reedy and gray-faced to the earth.

The third woman in the four-gabled house said she had no children.

The fourth woman in the four-gabled house built her children from the parts of old radios and tractors. Their cries sounded like the spinning of propellers. Some of them could blink and one could even smile, but breast milk fried their motors. In their mother’s arms, they dissolved into heaps of crackling wires.

* * *

The women had been married before, to ordinary men, but no one wanted to mention that in light of what happened to the children.

The women in the four-gabled house no longer got many visitors.

* * *

All through the month of September, the women in the four-gabled house watched as a sober, clean-faced young creature walked down their street, past their house, to the end of the cul-de-sac, then turned and walked back.

The stranger would not walk in a neighborhood as unfashionable as their neighborhood if she did not want something with the four-gabled house and the women who lived there, they were sure of it.

“We should call someone,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable of the four-gabled house. “Get a neighborhood watch together.”

“Nonsense. She’s probably selling magazine subscriptions,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable of the four-gabled house. “Or collecting bits of metal for the war effort, or trying to interest us in a quilting bee so the orphans can have blankets. Or she’s from some society that has asked her to come by our house, but the problem is that she’s just too scared to do it.”

“Are we still frightening?” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable of the four-gabled house. “I thought we’d gotten past that a few decades ago.”

“She’s a young girl in a fashionable hat,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “What could frighten her more than four old mothers with nary a man between them?”

“Well,” sniffed the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “If she ever came down to my cellar, she’d know real fright.”

* * *

September became October, October passed into November, and a damp, uncertain snow shimmered on the walks when the stranger came at last to the four-gabled house. Her knock was hesitant, as if she feared to hurt the door.

The woman who made her bed in the first gable of the four-gabled house came to the door. The scent of myrrh clung to all her clothes and the damp of cellar walls clung to all her eyelids. She was the least approachable, so she always dealt with strangers.

“Please, may I come in?” said the stranger, and the woman who made her bed in the first gable thought for a moment, then nodded once, solemnly, and stepped aside.

The young woman crossed the foyer into the sitting room, where the other three women were waiting. “I’ve brought a pie for you,” she said, pushing a towel-covered dish at the most approachable person in the sitting room, which happened to be the woman who made her bed in the third gable of the four-gabled house. “I hope you like rhubarb.”

“Certainly,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, and while she smiled warmly, her hands trembled when she took the dish. “Thank you, dear.” She said ‘dear’ after a long, conspicuous pause, as if correcting herself.

“My name is Marigold Hest,” said the stranger. “I wonder – do you know my husband?”

“I doubt it,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, at the same time that the woman who made her bed in the second gable said indignantly, “Should we?”

“Never mind that,” said Marigold. “In fact, I’m glad. It will make things simpler.” She sat for a moment, fidgeting with the brim of her hat, then huffed out a soft little breath and added, “I’ve heard that you have children here. I need one.”

“Do you think they fall out of the eaves?” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. “What makes you believe we have a child for you? You’re a married woman – go get one off your husband.”

The young woman blushed as pink as rhubarb, but she persisted. “People talk about you. They say you used to be midwives, and now you’re witches. They say you’re descended from the women who they hung in Salem. They say you’re German and came to Amherst to seduce our men and spy on us. But I don’t care what you are. Somehow you get babies, lots of them. Please, let me have one.”

None of the women said anything for a long while. The woman who made her bed in the first gable of the four-gabled house raised her eyebrows. The woman who made her bed in the second gable stifled a laugh. The woman who made her bed in the third gable did nothing. At last, the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable said, “And what sort of child is it that you’re wanting?”

“Any sort,” said Marigold. “Really, any one would do. As long as I can get it soon.”

“We’re not an assembly-line,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. “Did someone tell you that we had…procured a baby for them?”

“No,” said Marigold, in a whisper that sounded more like yes.

“We wouldn’t,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “Ordinarily. Not out of selfishness, dear, but because we can’t.”

The others looked at her, noticing the word ordinarily and wondering if a stranger in a fashionable hat really counted as an exception. They had made an exception, once before. The exception was why the woman who made her bed in the third gable did not have children.

“But if you can try,” said Marigold. “If there’s any chance that you could get one for me, that would be better than no chance at all.”

“Why?” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable. “You’re young yet. Do you need a child now?”

“I’m afraid to say,” said Marigold. “Must I say?”

“No,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, before anyone else could speak. “We will try. Let us try.”

* * *

The woman who made her bed in the fourth gable was the first to take up Marigold’s cause. She took apart the ice box for its metal, marooning a bottle of milk and a package of frozen vegetables so she would have the materials to begin constructing a child. Sighing in resignation, the other women prepared a meal with all of their perishable foods. This had happened before, with the lamps and the radiator and the toaster oven. Wartime made metal hard to come by. Scrap-metal children had been rationed almost out of existence.

“This could be my last,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable. She had a spoonful of warm grape jelly in her mouth, a soldering iron warming in her hand. “For a while, anyway, this could be my last.”

The probable lastness of the child did not make him any more eager to survive.

When he was complete, a small frame of plated steel and plastic with a hungry gaping buzzsaw mouth, the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable called Marigold to the house and laid the child in her arms.

“Oh,” Marigold said. “Oh. What a miracle he is.” She kissed the shining smooth metal of his face, and held him in her arms. She said already he felt like hers. And then she went away.

For three days, the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable stayed there, weeping for the child she had abandoned to another woman, drinking cocoa made with curdled milk, listening to the radio: Little Orphan Annie had adventures twice daily; the president reported on the War only once, at five. On the third day Marigold brought the pile of wire and aluminum back to the four-gabled house, tucking him underneath her pea-coat to shield him from the wind. She wanted him buried properly; she wanted to go on pretending that he was a real child; she wanted to be told sorry.

The women who lived in the four-gabled house frowned and shook their heads. But they would not say sorry. They were glad to see that a young pretty stranger could not succeed where they always failed.

“A pity, that I could not make a better child,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable. “But not, I suppose, a surprise.”

“A pity,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable.

“A pity,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable.

The woman who made her bed in the third gable would not say anything.

* * *

They let Marigold bury the child; she had already purchased a headstone for him.

“Bury him anywhere you like. Just, please,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable, “not where water can reach him. He’ll fry if water reaches him.”

Marigold didn’t say what she thought, which was: he’s already dead, why should it matter what reaches him? She only nodded. She shifted his small body in her arms, and she handed the women a printed invitation to a wake that none of them would attend.

* * *

The woman who made her bed in the second gable felt a sort of pity for Marigold, now that the girl was grieving like the rest of them. That Marigold considered herself their superior, that she came to them in secret with her fashionable hat hiding her prim face, only made the girl more pathetic. She had not realized yet. She didn’t know. Some women simply aren’t meant for children.

The child that the woman who made her bed in the second gable made for Marigold would be a calla lily, with a decorative white face and a stem that wouldn’t wilt – at least not for a while. “Come twice a day and feed her,” she instructed Marigold, tipping a watering can over her own brood of children.

The wet soil darkened to a rich, nourished color. Marigold studied the ground attentively. “What is that you’re feeding them?”

“What does any mother feed her hungry infant?”

The girl’s eyes widened. She said, “I don’t believe I can do that, ma’am.”

“Don’t you ever call me ma’am,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. “When your child pushes her way out of the ground, when she looks at you with her hungry mouth wide-open, then you’ll believe you can do it. The milk has to be yours, understood?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Marigold, cowed but unrepentant, watching as a row of robust, root-colored children uncurled their long tendril-arms and lifted their faces to the sun.

* * *

The woman who made her bed in the second gable had garden clippers that she kept in perfect condition. She polished them before and after use, kept them from rust, and removed them from their leather case for one reason only: to cut loose those children who had come to term. It was with great reluctance that she handed the clippers to Marigold, who cut her child out of the ground and then, minutes later, sent her back to it.

“It seems wrong to bury her where she grew,” Marigold whispered.

The clippers rested in the pocket of Marigold’s flannel skirt. With uncharacteristic gentleness, the woman who made her bed in the second gable took them and returned them to their leather case.

“We could try again,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable, but she said the words so Marigold would know she didn’t mean them. And Marigold, sniffling, obediently shook her head no.

“I think my husband suspected, after the first child,” she said. “Perhaps it’s a blessing that this one died so soon. It would be wrong to try again. Wouldn’t it?”

She wanted to be told: no, it’s not wrong. Let’s try. This time your child will not be fed on borrowed breast milk. This time you will not make a diagonal cut down your child’s stem, as if she is a flower you are preparing for a vase. This time you will be better.

“Years ago, I let them grow too long, and they hurt me,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. How many years, the girl would not know. “They made my insides ache. But I wanted them to stay with me longer, that’s why I did it. You don’t yet know what it feels like, to lose them again and again.”

“It must be dreadful,” said Marigold.

Later, she baked an apple tart. She smudged all the lipstick from her mouth and let her fashionable hat sit crooked on her head, and she sought the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

* * *

The women who lived in the four-gabled house found each other in tabloids, then in Sunday papers, then finally in a medical journal that three times failed to pass a peer review. But before then, the woman who made her bed in the third gable had lived alone. And the house had only one gable, and she could bear no children.

To the woman who made her bed in the third gable, this was a tragedy.

To the rest of the world, it was a great relief.

* * *

The woman who made her bed in the third gable gasped in fright when Marigold came to her door. Visitors, when they came to the four-gabled house at all, never climbed the staircase to the rooms where the women made their beds. When the woman peeked around her bedroom door, she sighed softly in relief and stepped aside. Marigold removed her hat, then stepped over the threshold.

“Is that apple?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

“Yes – a tart.” Marigold handed over the steaming dish as if she could not wait to be rid of it. The woman who made her bed in the third gable set the dish aside, and did not look in its direction again.

“I suppose you heard what happened to the last baby,” Marigold said, after a moment.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, her voice quivering on the final word. “That must have been very hard for you.”

“Yes,” said Marigold. Then, steeling herself, she added, “I want to try again.”

“I’m afraid that’s how all her children come out. They simply cannot survive without the earth to nourish them.”

“Not from her,” Marigold said. “From you. Please. It would mean the world to me.”

“How much is the world?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, frowning. She studied Marigold. “I’m not sure you’re ready to bear and bring up the sort of child I would make, dear.”

“When will I be ready?”

“There is one other woman in this household you have not asked for a child.”

“I had not thought she would say yes to me,” said Marigold. “I rather thought she disapproved of the whole thing.”

“She said no to you when you were young and childless. She did not want you to be happy. Now you have lost two children, and you ask her only for the chance to lose another.”

“So I will lose her child too?”

The woman who made her bed in the third gable would not say.

* * *

In the cellar, the air smelled like rust and formaldehyde and old gardenia petals. The temperature was many degrees lower than it was in the rest of the four-gabled house, and Marigold wrapped her coat tightly around herself as she descended the stairs. She had no tart or cake for the woman who made her bed in the first gable, for she suspected that nothing baked or roasted would satisfy such a woman, and she was right. The woman who made her bed in the first gable liked pickled things, things crunchy with salt and long-preserved, and she hated how fresh dough collapsed on her tongue. When she saw Marigold, she always thought of that fresh-dough feeling.

“I know already what you are coming to ask me,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable.

Marigold stepped down off the last step, making it squeak. “What will you say?”

“I don’t know yet,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “You’re not much of a mother so far, with your hat on straight and only two children in the ground. You don’t deserve my child.”

“And how many children do you have in the ground?” said Marigold.

“Two thousand, four hundred, and eighty-one,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “Some were twins,” she added.

“None lived?” Marigold said.

“None,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, with a touch of pride.

“Then I don’t think I want one of your children,” said Marigold.

“I don’t think you do,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, “I shall give you one.”

* * *

The woman who made her bed in the first gable no longer made her bed there. She holed up in the cellar with a block of brie and a feather-stuffed duvet, and she emerged only to wash her wine glass or collect the lukewarm cup of Earl Grey that the woman who made her bed in the third gable left out for her each afternoon.

The women did not like to interfere in each other’s creative processes, so none of them peeked down into the cellar. The woman who made her bed in the cellar did not care to discuss the child she was fermenting, though if she had, she would have told them that he was fashioned from the heart of a white rabbit, four dollars at the pet shop around the corner, and twice embalmed in myrrh and soda ash.

He had to grow in his mother’s womb, so she washed out the pie pan that Marigold had brought and sealed it with a glass cover.

Inside his tin womb, the child soaked and swelled and slowly became animate.

Inside her duvet, the woman who made her bed in the cellar dreamt of all the children she had lost inside her wombs.

The child reached such a size that he no longer fit inside the pie pan, then such a size that he no longer fit in a three-gallon pickle jar. The woman who made her bed in the cellar was stubborn, she wanted to see Marigold mourn, so she dug a hole, four feet deep, in the cellar’s dirt floor. When she was finished, she padded the floor with rock salt and lowered the child into the hole. February was halfway over, the temperatures were still low, and the cold and the salt would preserve the child for a few days more – long enough to make the girl believe, long enough to make her miserable when he rotted.

The woman who made her bed in the cellar did not always produce beautiful children, but this one was exquisite, a wet blood-colored salamander-like creature whose arteries worked like legs and whose eyes could see even in the depths of the cellar. In the womb of the earth he grew to three feet in length before he cried for release.

The woman who made her bed in the cellar telephoned Marigold to announce the child’s birth, knowing at half-past five her husband would be home, knowing that Marigold herself would be away at one of a dozen equally useless ladies’ society meetings and thus unable to intercept the call.

“Your son is crying for you,” said the woman who made her bed in the cellar, when a man answered.

She laid the phone down, waiting to feel satisfied, instead feeling hungry.

* * *

Before they had been women who lived in the four-gabled house, they had been:

A maiden aunt.

A minister’s wife.

A washed-up stage actress.

A nurse.

They did not resemble themselves anymore.

* * *

When Marigold came to the cellar, the woman who made her bed there had already left. The feather-stuffed duvet and frozen block of brie were gone; fourteen cups with shallow pools of Earl Grey in their bottoms remained. Marigold looked at each of the teacups, listened for her child’s cries, and felt reluctant to walk any closer to the dark end of the cellar.

Upstairs, the women who made their beds in the four-gabled house were making dinner.

Damp, rich sounds came from the dark end of the cellar and echoed off the brick walls until Marigold could not hear the banging of pots and pans upstairs, nor the record spinning on the player, nor even the sounds of the women’s voices.

She was afraid, but she would not leave the cellar without a son. She took up the iron bar propped up against the wall – she did not think, “someone might have put this bar there”; she thought very little – and walked forward until her child leapt up from the grave where he was born, four feet tall, hungry, hissing wetly at his mother.

Marigold swung the iron bar and struck the child in his moist, blood-colored forehead, then struck him again. She flew at him in such a fury that she did not stop to wonder what or who he was until he was already dead.

“Bury him yourself,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable when she heard. “Didn’t I already dig a suitable grave?”

“Won’t you have some shepherd’s pie before you go back down there, dear?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

Buttered baguette slices, tin cups of milk, heaping cuts of pie: a good meal by ration standards, a good meal even by pre-war standards, and they had ruined it for her. The women smiled proudly at their visitor.

“I suppose I might have a little,” Marigold said, polite in her fashionable hat, black blood drying on her hands.

When all five plates were empty, the other women retired to their gables. The woman who made her bed in the third gable washed each plate, carefully, methodically, while her guest waited at the table.

Then she said, “It hurt to lose that one, didn’t it, dear?”

“Yes,” Marigold whispered. “It was my fault, this time.”

“You’re ready now,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, “for the sort of child I could give you.”

“I don’t know if I can bear the pain of another child,” said Marigold.

“I know,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. She dried the final plate and wiped her hands clean on her apron, then made for the staircase. “Come along now, dear.”

“Where are we going?” said Marigold.

“The fifth gable,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable of the four-gabled house. “We’ll need privacy.”

Marigold’s husband waited at home for the arrival of their adopted son. Marigold could not leave empty-handed. Marigold was unaccustomed to wanting something that once lost could not be regained. She followed the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

The fifth gable was smaller than the others, drafty, the walls windowless. A vase of dying gardenias rested on a small end table in the corner. The gardenias had been wilting for longer than Marigold had been alive, which comforted the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

“Sit down,” the woman said, motioning to the armchair in the middle of the room. A thin layer of dust covered its seat and arms and high, narrow back. Marigold settled into the chair and held her crumpled hat in her lap like it was a small and ill-behaved dog.

“Do you expect you’ll have to be tied down for this bit?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

“What are you going to do?” said Marigold.

“Oh, I do very little, dear,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “You said you wanted a child, any child, isn’t that right?”

“Ye-es,” said Marigold, in a lilting voice that sounded more like no.

The woman who made her bed in the third gable got to her knees and rested her clasped hands in Marigold’s lap, as if comforting, as if pleading. “Whatever else you do, dear, remember to blame yourself.”

She rose to her feet and turned and left, locking the door from the outside.

Inside the fifth gable of the four-gabled house, dampness became cold and dimness became darkness, and Marigold’s skin felt like wax beneath her fingers when she tried to rub her gooseflesh off.

* * *

The women who lived in the four-gabled house buried Marigold’s cellar child together, all but the woman who made her bed in the first gable, because she could not make herself look at the mangled body of the child she had made.

“We should sing a hymn,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable.

“Why?” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable.

“It’s conventional. She’d like that.”

The women contemplated the idea of being conventional for a while. Their eyes lost focus as they studied the raised mound of earth with the cellar child inside.

“He was such a fine boy,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “But I’m glad she hurt him, I must admit.”

The woman who made her bed in the third gable could only bear children in the womb of another woman’s suffering.

* * *

Marigold came from the fifth gable of the four-gabled house looking smaller, with hair like straw. The women had a luxurious breakfast prepared for her, butter on the toast and sugar for the coffee. Marigold stirred cream into her coffee with one hand and supported her squalling, red-faced child in the other.

“A hideous creature,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, after Marigold and the child had gone. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “He wasn’t really mine. None of them have been.”

“If you made me one, he would be different,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “My hurt would be the furthest thing from hers, and the child who came from it would be strong and strange and proud.”

“Perhaps in a few years,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “You haven’t felt enough yet. I couldn’t be sure of the outcome if you hadn’t felt enough yet.”

And the woman who made her bed in the first gable knew this to be true, having seen many dozens of the small dead fish-like things that came from half-felt suffering. She could not rush suffering, so she returned to her cellar and shut her door and set to work on her next child. This time, she thought, perhaps she would love them enough. Perhaps they would hurt her so deeply that she could at last ascend to the fifth gable and bear a child that would live.

The Dream Woman

Wilkie Collins

I

I had not been settled much more than six weeks in my country practice when I was sent for to a neighboring town, to consult with the resident medical man there on a case of very dangerous illness.

My horse had come down with me at the end of a long ride the night before, and had hurt himself, luckily, much more than he had hurt his master. Being deprived of the animal’s services, I started for my destination by the coach (there were no railways at that time), and I hoped to get back again, toward the afternoon, in the same way.

After the consultation was over, I went to the principal inn of the town to wait for the coach. When it came up it was full inside and out. There was no resource left me but to get home as cheaply as I could by hiring a gig. The price asked for this accommodation struck me as being so extortionate, that I determined to look out for an inn of inferior pretensions, and to try if I could not make a better bargain with a less prosperous establishment.

I soon found a likely-looking house, dingy and quiet, with an old-fashioned sign, that had evidently not been repainted for many years past. The landlord, in this case, was not above making a small profit, and as soon as we came to terms he rang the yard-bell to order the gig.

“Has Robert not come back from that errand?” asked the landlord, appealing to the waiter who answered the bell.

“No, sir, he hasn’t.”

“Well, then, you must wake up Isaac.”

“Wake up Isaac!” I repeated; “that sounds rather odd. Do your ostlers go to bed in the daytime?”

“This one does,” said the landlord, smiling to himself in rather a strange way.

“And dreams too,” added the waiter; “I sha’n’t forget the turn it gave me the first time I heard him.”

“Never you mind about that,” retorted the proprietor; “you go and rouse Isaac up. The gentleman’s waiting for his gig.”

The landlord’s manner and the waiter’s manner expressed a great deal more than they either of them said. I began to suspect that I might be on the trace of something professionally interesting to me as a medical man, and I thought I should like to look at the ostler before the waiter awakened him.

“Stop a minute,” I interposed; “I have rather a fancy for seeing this man before you wake him up. I’m a doctor; and if this queer sleeping and dreaming of his comes from any thing wrong in his brain, I may be able to tell you what to do with him.”

“I rather think you will find his complaint past all doctoring, sir,” said the landlord; “but, if you would like to see him, you’re welcome, I’m sure.”

He led the way across a yard and down a passage to the stables, opened one of the doors, and, waiting outside himself, told me to look in.

I found myself in a two-stall stable. In one of the stalls a horse was munching his corn; in the other an old man was lying asleep on the litter.

I stooped and looked at him attentively. It was a withered, woe-begone face. The eyebrows were painfully contracted; the mouth was fast set, and drawn down at the corners. The hollow wrinkled cheeks, and the scantly grizzled hair, told their own tale of some past sorrow or suffering. He was drawing his breath convulsively when I first looked at him, and in a moment more he began to talk in his sleep.

“Wake up!” I heard him say, in a quick whisper, through his clenched teeth. “Wake up there! Murder!”

He moved one lean arm slowly till it rested over his throat, shuddered a little, and turned on his straw. Then the arm left his throat, the hand stretched itself out, and clutched at the side toward which he had turned, as if he fancied himself to be grasping at the edge of something. I saw his lips move, and bent lower over him. He was still talking in his sleep.

“Light gray eyes,” he murmured, “and a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it – all right, mother – fair white arms, with a down on them – little lady’s hand, with a reddish look under the finger nails. The knife – always the cursed knife – first on one side, then on the other. Aha! You she-devil, where’s the knife?”

At the last word his voice rose, and he grew restless on a sudden. I saw him shudder on the straw; his withered face became distorted, and he threw up both his hands with a quick hysterical gasp. They struck against the bottom of the manger under which he lay, and the blow awakened him. I had just time to slip through the door and close it before his eyes were fairly open, and his senses his own again.

“Do you know anything about that man’s past life?” I said to the landlord.

“Yes, sir, I know pretty well all about it,” was the answer, “and an uncommon queer story it is. Most people don’t believe it. It’s true, though, for all that. Why, just look at him,” continued the landlord, opening the stable door again. “Poor devil! He’s so worn out with his restless nights that he’s dropped back into his sleep already.”

“Don’t wake him,” I said; “I’m in no hurry for the gig. Wait till the other man comes back from his errand; and, in the meantime, suppose I have some lunch and a bottle of sherry, and suppose you come and help me to get through it?”

The heart of mine host, as I had anticipated, warmed to me over his own wine. He soon became communicative on the subject of the man asleep in the stable, and by little and little I drew the whole story out of him. Extravagant and incredible as the events must appear to everybody, they are related here just as I heard them and just as they happened.

II

Some years ago there lived in the suburbs of a large sea-port town on the west coast of England a man in humble circumstances, by name Isaac Scatchard. His means of subsistence were derived from any employment that he could get as an ostler, and occasionally, when times went well with him, from temporary engagements in service as stable-helper in private houses. Though a faithful, steady, and honest man, he got on badly in his calling. His ill luck was proverbial among his neighbors. He was always missing good opportunities by no fault of his own, and always living longest in service with amiable people who were not punctual payers of wages. ‘Unlucky Isaac’ was his nickname in his own neighborhood, and no one could say that he did not richly deserve it.

With far more than one man’s fair share of adversity to endure, Isaac had but one consolation to support him, and that was of the dreariest and most negative kind. He had no wife and children to increase his anxieties and add to the bitterness of his various failures in life. It might have been from mere insensibility, or it might have been from generous unwillingness to involve another in his own unlucky destiny; but the fact undoubtedly was, that he had arrived at the middle term of life without marrying, and, what is much more remarkable, without once exposing himself, from eighteen to eight-and-thirty, to the genial imputation of ever having had a sweetheart.

When he was out of service he lived alone with his widowed mother. Mrs. Scatchard was a woman above the average in her lowly station as to capacity and manners. She had seen better days, as the phrase is, but she never referred to them in the presence of curious visitors; and, though perfectly polite to everyone who approached her, never cultivated any intimacies among her neighbors. She contrived to provide, hardly enough, for her simple wants by doing rough work for the tailors, and always managed to keep a decent home for her son to return to whenever his ill luck drove him out helpless into the world.

One bleak autumn, when Isaac was getting on fast toward forty, and when he was, as usual, out of place through no fault of his own, he set forth from his mother’s cottage on a long walk inland to a gentleman’s seat where he had heard that a stable-help was required.

It wanted then but two days of his birthday; and Mrs. Scatchard, with her usual fondness, made the promise, before he started, that he would be back in time to keep that anniversary with her, in as festive a way as their poor means would allow. It was easy for him to comply with this request, even supposing he slept a night each way on the road.

He was to start from home on Monday morning, and, whether he got the new place or not, he was to be back for his birthday dinner on Wednesday at two o’clock.

Arriving at his destination too late on the Monday night to make application for the stable-helper’s place, he slept at the village inn, and in good time on the Tuesday morning presented himself at the gentleman’s house to fill the vacant situation. Here again his ill luck pursued him as inexorably as ever. The excellent written testimonials to his character which he was able to produce availed him nothing; his long walk had been taken in vain: only the day before the stable-helper’s place had been given to another man.

Isaac accepted this new disappointment resignedly and as a matter of course. Naturally slow in capacity, he had the bluntness of sensibility and phlegmatic patience of disposition which frequently distinguish men with sluggishly-working mental powers. He thanked the gentleman’s steward with his usual quiet civility for granting him an interview, and took his departure with no appearance of unusual depression in his face or manner.

Before starting on his homeward walk, he made some inquiries at the inn, and ascertained that he might save a few miles on his return by following a new road. Furnished with full instructions, several times repeated, as to the various turnings he was to take, he set forth on his homeward journey, and walked on all day with only one stoppage for bread and cheese. Just as it was getting toward dark, the rain came on and the wind began to rise, and he found himself, to make matters worse, in a part of the country with which he was entirely unacquainted, though he knew himself to be some fifteen miles from home. The first house he found to inquire at was a lonely roadside inn, standing on the outskirts of a thick wood. Solitary as the place looked, it was welcome to a lost man who was also hungry, thirsty, foot-sore, and wet. The landlord was civil and respectable-looking, and the price he asked for a bed was reasonable enough. Isaac therefore decided on stopping comfortably at the inn for that night.

He was constitutionally a temperate man. His supper consisted of two rashers of bacon, a slice of home-made bread, and a pint of ale. He did not go to bed immediately after his moderate meal, but sat up with the landlord, talking about his bad prospects and his long run of ill luck, and diverging from these topics to the subjects of horse-flesh and racing. Nothing was said either by himself, his host, or the few laborers who strayed into the tap-room, which could, in the slightest degree, excite the very small and very dull imaginative faculty which Isaac Scatchard possessed.

At a little after eleven the house was closed. Isaac went round with the landlord and held the candle while the doors and lower windows were being secured. He noticed with surprise the strength of the bolts and bars, and iron-sheathed shutters.

“You see, we are rather lonely here,” said the landlord. “We never have had any attempts made to break in yet, but it’s always as well to be on the safe side. When nobody is sleeping here, I am the only man in the house. My wife and daughter are timid, and the servant-girl takes after her missusses. Another glass of ale before you turn in? No! Well, how such a sober man as you comes to be out of place is more than I can make out, for one. Here’s where you’re to sleep. You’re our only lodger tonight, and I think you’ll say my missus has done her best to make you comfortable. You’re quite sure you won’t have another glass of ale? Very well. Goodnight.”

It was half past eleven by the clock in the passage as they went upstairs to the bedroom, the window of which looked on to the wood at the back of the house.

Isaac locked the door, set his candle on the chest of drawers, and wearily got ready for bed. The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, monotonous, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night-silence. Isaac felt strangely wakeful. He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy, for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moaning of the wind in the wood.

Sleep stole on him before he was aware of it. His eyes closed, and he fell off insensibly to rest without having so much as thought of extinguishing the candle.

The first sensation of which he was conscious after sinking into slumber was a strange shivering that ran through him suddenly from head to foot, and a dreadful sinking pain at the heart, such as he had never felt before. The shivering only disturbed his slumbers; the pain woke him instantly. In one moment he passed from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness – his eyes wide open – his mental perceptions cleared on a sudden, as if by a miracle.

The candle had burnt down nearly to the last morsel of tallow, but the top of the unsnuffed wick had just fallen off, and the light in the little room was, for the moment, fair and full.

Between the foot of his bed and the closed door there stood a woman with a knife in her hand, looking at him.

He was stricken speechless with terror, but he did not lose the preternatural clearness of his faculties, and he never took his eyes off the woman. She said not a word as they stared each other in the face, but she began to move slowly toward the left-hand side of the bed.

His eyes followed her. She was a fair, fine woman, with yellowish flaxen hair and light gray eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. He noticed those things and fixed them on his mind before she was round at the side of the bed. Speechless, with no expression in her face, with no noise following her footfall, she came closer and closer – stopped – and slowly raised the knife. He laid his right arm over his throat to save it; but, as he saw the knife coming down, threw his hand across the bed to the right side, and jerked his body over that way just as the knife descended on the mattress within an inch of his shoulder.

His eyes fixed on her arm and hand as she slowly drew her knife out of the bed: a white, well-shaped arm, with a pretty down lying lightly over the fair skin – a delicate lady’s hand, with the crowning beauty of a pink flush under and round the finger nails.

She drew the knife out, and passed back again slowly to the foot of the bed; stopped there for a moment looking at him; then came on – still speechless, still with no expression on the blank, beautiful face, still with no sound following the stealthy footfalls – came on to the right side of the bed, where he now lay.

As she approached she raised the knife again, and he drew himself away to the left side. She struck, as before, right into the mattress, with a deliberate, perpendicularly-downward action of the arm. This time his eyes wandered from her to the knife. It was like the large clasp-knives which he had often seen laboring men use to cut their bread and bacon with. Her delicate little fingers did not conceal more than two thirds of the handle: he noticed that it was made of buck-horn, clean and shining as the blade was, and looking like new.

For the second time she drew the knife out, concealed it in the wide sleeve of her gown, then stopped by the bedside, watching him. For an instant he saw her standing in that position, then the wick of the spent candle fell over into the socket; the flame diminished to a little blue point, and the room grew dark.

A moment, or less, if possible, passed so, and then the wick flamed up, smokingly, for the last time. His eyes were still looking eagerly over the right-hand side of the bed when the final flash of light came, but they discerned nothing. The fair woman with the knife was gone.

The conviction that he was alone again weakened the hold of the terror that had struck him dumb up to this time The preternatural sharpness which the very intensity of his panic had mysteriously imparted to his faculties left them suddenly. His brain grew confused – his heart beat wildly – his ears opened for the first time since the appearance of the woman to a sense of the woeful ceaseless moaning of the wind among the trees. With the dreadful conviction of the reality of what he had seen still strong within him, he leaped out of bed, and screaming “Murder! Wake up, there! Wake up!” dashed headlong through the darkness to the door.

It was fast locked, exactly as he had left it on going to bed.

His cries on starting up had alarmed the house. He heard the terrified, confused exclamations of women; he saw the master of the house approaching along the passage with his burning rush-candle in one hand and his gun in the other.

“What is it?” asked the landlord, breathlessly.

Isaac could only answer in a whisper. “A woman, with a knife in her hand,” he gasped out. “In my room – a fair, yellow-haired woman; she jabbed at me with the knife twice over.”

The landlord’s pale cheeks grew paler. He looked at Isaac eagerly by the flickering light of his candle, and his face began to get red again; his voice altered, too, as well as his complexion.

“She seems to have missed you twice,” he said.

“I dodged the knife as it came down,” Isaac went on, in the same scared whisper. “It struck the bed each time.”

The landlord took his candle into the bedroom immediately. In less than a minute he came out again into the passage in a violent passion.

“The devil fly away with you and your woman with the knife! There isn’t a mark in the bedclothes anywhere. What do you mean by coming into a man’s place, and frightening his family out of their wits about a dream?”

“I’ll leave your house,” said Isaac, faintly. “Better out on the road, in rain and dark, on my road home, than back again in that room, after what I’ve seen in it. Lend me a light to get my clothes by, and tell me what I’m to pay.”

“Pay!” cried the landlord, leading the way with his light sulkily into the bedroom. “You’ll find your score on the slate when you go downstairs. I wouldn’t have taken you in for all the money you’ve got about you if I’d known your dreaming, screeching ways beforehand. Look at the bed. Where’s the cut of a knife in it? Look at the window – is the lock bursted? Look at the door (which I heard you fasten yourself) – is it broke in? A murdering woman with a knife in my house! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

Isaac answered not a word. He huddled on his clothes, and then they went downstairs together.

“Nigh on twenty minutes past two!” said the landlord, as they passed the clock. “A nice time in the morning to frighten honest people out of their wits!”

Isaac paid his bill, and the landlord let him out at the front door, asking, with a grin of contempt, as he undid the strong fastenings, whether “the murdering woman got in that way”.

They parted without a word on either side. The rain had ceased, but the night was dark, and the wind bleaker than ever. Little did the darkness, or the cold, or the uncertainty about the way home matter to Isaac. If he had been turned out into a wilderness in a thunder-storm, it would have been a relief after what he had suffered in the bedroom of the inn.

What was the fair woman with the knife? The creature of a dream, or that other creature from the unknown world called among men by the name of ghost? He could make nothing of the mystery – had made nothing of it, even when it was midday on Wednesday, and when he stood, at last, after many times missing his road, once more on the doorstep of home.

III

His mother came out eagerly to receive him. His face told her in a moment that something was wrong.

“I’ve lost the place; but that’s my luck. I dreamed an ill dream last night, mother – or maybe I saw a ghost. Take it either way, it scared me out of my senses, and I’m not my own man again yet.”

“Isaac, your face frightens me. Come in to the fire – come in, and tell mother all about it.”

He was as anxious to tell as she was to hear; for it had been his hope, all the way home, that his mother, with her quicker capacity and superior knowledge, might be able to throw some light on the mystery which he could not clear up for himself. His memory of the dream was still mechanically vivid, though his thoughts were entirely confused by it.

His mother’s face grew paler and paler as he went on. She never interrupted him by so much as a single word; but when he had done, she moved her chair close to his, put her arm round his neck, and said to him.

“Isaac, you dreamed your ill dream on this Wednesday morning. What time was it when you saw the fair woman with the knife in her hand?”

Isaac reflected on what the landlord had said when they had passed by the clock on his leaving the inn; allowed as nearly as he could for the time that must have elapsed between the unlocking of his bedroom door and the paying of his bill just before going away, and answered.

“Somewhere about two o’clock in the morning.”

His mother suddenly quitted her hold of his neck, and struck her hands together with a gesture of despair.

“This Wednesday is your birthday, Isaac, and two o’clock in the morning was the time when you were born.”

Isaac’s capacities were not quick enough to catch the infection of his mother’s superstitious dread. He was amazed, and a little startled also, when she suddenly rose from her chair, opened her old writing-desk, took pen, ink, and paper, and then said to him.

“Your memory is but a poor one, Isaac, and, now I’m an old woman, mine’s not much better. I want all about this dream of yours to be as well known to both of us, years hence, as it is now. Tell me over again all you told me a minute ago, when you spoke of what the woman with the knife looked like.”

Isaac obeyed, and marveled much as he saw his mother carefully set down on paper the very words that he was saying.

“Light gray eyes,” she wrote, as they came to the descriptive part, ‘with a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it; white arms, with a down upon them; little lady’s hand, with a reddish look about the linger nails; clasp-knife with a buck-horn handle, that seemed as good as new.” To these particulars Mrs. Scatchard added the year, month, day of the week, and time in the morning when the woman of the dream appeared to her son. She then locked up the paper carefully in her writing-desk.

Neither on that day nor on any day after could her son induce her to return to the matter of the dream. She obstinately kept her thoughts about it to herself, and even refused to refer again to the paper in her writing-desk. Ere long Isaac grew weary of attempting to make her break her resolute silence; and time, which sooner or later wears out all things, gradually wore out the impression produced on him by the dream. He began by thinking of it carelessly, and he ended by not thinking of it at all.

The result was the more easily brought about by the advent of some important changes for the better in his prospects which commenced not long after his terrible night’s experience at the inn. He reaped at last the reward of his long and patient suffering under adversity by getting an excellent place, keeping it for seven years, and leaving it, on the death of his master, not only with an excellent character, but also with a comfortable annuity bequeathed to him as a reward for saving his mistress’s life in a carriage accident. Thus it happened that Isaac Scatchard returned to his old mother, seven years after the time of the dream at the inn, with an annual sum of money at his disposal sufficient to keep them both in ease and independence for the rest of their lives.

The mother, whose health had been bad of late years, profited so much by the care bestowed on her and by freedom from money anxieties, that when Isaac’s birthday came round she was able to sit up comfortably at table and dine with him.

On that day, as the evening drew on, Mrs. Scatchard discovered that a bottle of tonic medicine which she was accustomed to take, and in which she had fancied that a dose or more was still left, happened to be empty. Isaac immediately volunteered to go to the chemist’s and get it filled again. It was as rainy and bleak an autumn night as on the memorable past occasion when he lost his way and slept at the road-side inn.

On going into the chemist’s shop he was passed hurriedly by a poorly-dressed woman coming out of it. The glimpse he had of her face struck him, and he looked back after her as she descended the doorsteps.

“You’re noticing that woman?” said the chemist’s apprentice behind the counter. “It’s my opinion there’s something wrong with her. She’s been asking for laudanum to put to a bad tooth. Master’s out for half an hour, and I told her I wasn’t allowed to sell poison to strangers in his absence. She laughed in a queer way, and said she would come back in half an hour. If she expects master to serve her, I think she’ll be disappointed. It’s a case of suicide, sir, if ever there was one yet.”

These words added immeasurably to the sudden interest in the woman which Isaac had felt at the first sight of her face. After he had got the medicine-bottle filled, he looked about anxiously for her as soon as he was out in the street. She was walking slowly up and down on the opposite side of the road. With his heart, very much to his own surprise, beating fast, Isaac crossed over and spoke to her.

He asked if she was in any distress. She pointed to her torn shawl, her scanty dress, her crushed, dirty bonnet; then moved under a lamp so as to let the light fall on her stern, pale, but still most beautiful face.

“I look like a comfortable, happy woman, don’t I?” she said, with a bitter laugh.

She spoke with a purity of intonation which Isaac had never heard before from other than ladies’ lips. Her slightest actions seemed to have the easy, negligent grace of a thorough-bred woman. Her skin, for all its poverty-stricken paleness, was as delicate as if her life had been passed in the enjoyment of every social comfort that wealth can purchase. Even her small, finely-shaped hands, gloveless as they were, had not lost their whiteness.

Little by little, in answer to his questions, the sad story of the woman came out. There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and over again in police reports and paragraphs about Attempted Suicides.

“My name is Rebecca Murdoch,” said the woman, as she ended. “I have ninepence left, and I thought of spending it at the chemist’s over the way in securing a passage to the other world. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse to me than this, so why should I stop here?”

Besides the natural compassion and sadness moved in his heart by what he heard, Isaac felt within him some mysterious influence at work all the time the woman was speaking which utterly confused his ideas and almost deprived him of his powers of speech. All that he could say in answer to her last reckless words was that he would prevent her from attempting her own life, if he followed her about all night to do it. His rough, trembling earnestness seemed to impress her.

“I won’t occasion you that trouble,” she answered, when he repeated his threat. “You have given me a fancy for living by speaking kindly to me. No need for the mockery of protestations and promises. You may believe me without them. Come to Fuller’s Meadow tomorrow at twelve, and you will find me alive, to answer for myself. No! No money. My ninepence will do to get me as good a night’s lodging as I want.”

She nodded and left him. He made no attempt to follow – he felt no suspicion that she was deceiving him.

“It’s strange, but I can’t help believing her,” he said to himself, and walked away, bewildered, toward home.

On entering the house, his mind was still so completely absorbed by its new subject of interest that he took no notice of what his mother was doing when he came in with the bottle of medicine. She had opened her old writing-desk in his absence, and was now reading a paper attentively that lay inside it. On every birthday of Isaac’s since she had written down the particulars of his dream from his own lips, she had been accustomed to read that same paper, and ponder over it in private.

The next day he went to Fuller’s Meadow.

He had done only right in believing her so implicitly. She was there, punctual to a minute, to answer for herself. The last-left faint defenses in Isaac’s heart against the fascination which a word or look from her began inscrutably to exercise over him sank down and vanished before her forever on that memorable morning.

When a man previously insensible to the influence of women forms an attachment in middle life, the instances are rare indeed, let the warning circumstances be what they may, in which he is found capable of freeing himself from the tyranny of the new ruling passion. The charm of being spoken to familiarly, fondly, and gratefully by a woman whose language and manners still retained enough of their early refinement to hint at the high social station that she had lost, would have been a dangerous luxury to a man of Isaac’s rank at the age of twenty. But it was far more than that – it was certain ruin to him – now that his heart was opening unworthily to a new influence at that middle time of life when strong feelings of all kinds, once implanted, strike root most stubbornly in a man’s moral nature. A few more stolen interviews after that first morning in Fuller’s Meadow completed his infatuation. In less than a month from the time when he first met her, Isaac Scatchard had consented to give Rebecca Murdoch a new interest in existence, and a chance of recovering the character she had lost by promising to make her his wife.

She had taken possession, not of his passions only, but of his faculties as well. All the mind he had he put into her keeping. She directed him on every point – even instructing him how to break the news of his approaching marriage in the safest manner to his mother.

“If you tell her how you met me and who I am at first,” said the cunning woman, “she will move heaven and earth to prevent our marriage. Say I am the sister of one of your fellow-servants – ask her to see me before you go into any more particulars – and leave it to me to do the rest. I mean to make her love me next best to you, Isaac, before she knows anything of who I really am.”

The motive of the deceit was sufficient to sanctify it to Isaac. The stratagem proposed relieved him of his one great anxiety, and quieted his uneasy conscience on the subject of his mother. Still, there was something wanting to perfect his happiness, something that he could not realize, something mysteriously untraceable, and yet something that perpetually made itself felt; not when he was absent from Rebecca Murdoch, but, strange to say, when he was actually in her presence! She was kindness itself with him. She never made him feel his inferior capacities and inferior manners. She showed the sweetest anxiety to please him in the smallest trifles; but, in spite of all these attractions, he never could feel quite at his ease with her. At their first meeting, there had mingled with his admiration, when he looked in her face, a faint, involuntary feeling of doubt whether that face was entirely strange to him. No after familiarity had the slightest effect on this inexplicable, wearisome uncertainty.

Concealing the truth as he had been directed, he announced his marriage engagement precipitately and confusedly to his mother on the day when he contracted it. Poor Mrs. Scatchard showed her perfect confidence in her son by flinging her arms round his neck, and giving him joy of having found at last, in the sister of one of his fellow-servants, a woman to comfort and care for him after his mother was gone. She was all eagerness to see the woman of her son’s choice, and the next day was fixed for the introduction.

It was a bright sunny morning, and the little cottage parlor was full of light as Mrs. Scatchard, happy and expectant, dressed for the occasion in her Sunday gown, sat waiting for her son and her future daughter-in-law.

Punctual to the appointed time, Isaac hurriedly and nervously led his promised wife into the room. His mother rose to receive her – advanced a few steps, smiling – looked Rebecca full in the eyes, and suddenly stopped. Her face, which had been flushed the moment before, turned white in an instant; her eyes lost their expression of softness and kindness, and assumed a blank look of terror; her outstretched hands fell to her sides, and she staggered back a few steps with a low cry to her son.

“Isaac,” she whispered, clutching him fast by the arm when he asked alarmedly if she was taken ill, “Isaac, does that woman’s face remind you of nothing?”

Before he could answer – before he could look round to where Rebecca stood, astonished and angered by her reception, at the lower end of the room, his mother pointed impatiently to her writing-desk, and gave him the key.

“Open it,” she said, in a quick, breathless whisper.

“What does this mean? Why am I treated as if I had no business here? Does your mother want to insult me?” asked Rebecca, angrily.

“Open it, and give me the paper in the left-hand drawer. Quick! Quick, for Heaven’s sake!” said Mrs. Scatchard, shrinking farther back in terror.

Isaac gave her the paper. She looked it over eagerly for a moment, then followed Rebecca, who was now turning away haughtily to leave the room, and caught her by the shoulder – abruptly raised the long, loose sleeve of her gown, and glanced at her hand and arm. Something like fear began to steal over the angry expression of Rebecca’s face as she shook herself free from the old woman’s grasp. “Mad!” she said to herself; “and Isaac never told me.” With these few words she left the room.

Isaac was hastening after her when his mother turned and stopped his farther progress. It wrung his heart to see the misery and terror in her face as she looked at him.

“Light gray eyes,” she said, in low, mournful, awe-struck tones, pointing toward the open door; “a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it; white arms, with a down upon them; little lady’s hand, with a reddish look under the finger nails – The Dream Woman, Isaac, the Dream Woman!”

That faint cleaving doubt which he had never been able to shake off in Rebecca Murdoch’s presence was fatally set at rest forever. He had seen her face, then, before – seven years before, on his birthday, in the bedroom of the lonely inn.

“Be warned! Oh, my son, be warned! Isaac, Isaac, let her go, and do you stop with me!”

Something darkened the parlor window as those words were said. A sudden chill ran through him, and he glanced sidelong at the shadow. Rebecca Murdoch had come back. She was peering in curiously at them over the low window-blind.

“I have promised to marry, mother,” he said, “and marry I must.”

The tears came into his eyes as he spoke and dimmed his sight, but he could just discern the fatal face outside moving away again from the window.

His mother’s head sank lower.

“Are you faint?” he whispered.

“Broken-hearted, Isaac.”

He stooped down and kissed her. The shadow, as he did so, returned to the window, and the fatal face peered in curiously once more.

IV

Three weeks after that day Isaac and Rebecca were man and wife. All that was hopelessly dogged and stubborn in the man’s moral nature seemed to have closed round his fatal passion, and to have fixed it unassailably in his heart.

After that first interview in the cottage parlor no consideration would induce Mrs. Scatchard to see her son’s wife again, or even to talk of her when Isaac tried hard to plead her cause after their marriage.

This course of conduct was not in any degree occasioned by a discovery of the degradation in which Rebecca had lived. There was no question of that between mother and son. There was no question of anything but the fearfully-exact resemblance between the living, breathing woman, and the spectre-woman of Isaac’s dream.

Rebecca, on her side, neither felt nor expressed the slightest sorrow at the estrangement between herself and her mother-in-law. Isaac, for the sake of peace, had never contradicted her first idea that age and long illness had affected Mrs. Scatchard’s mind. He even allowed his wife to upbraid him for not having confessed this to her at the time of their marriage engagement, rather than risk anything by hinting at the truth. The sacrifice of his integrity before his one all-mastering delusion seemed but a small thing, and cost his conscience but little after the sacrifices he had already made.

The time of waking from this delusion – the cruel and the rueful time – was not far off. After some quiet months of married life, as the summer was ending, and the year was getting on toward the month of his birthday, Isaac found his wife altering toward him. She grew sullen and contemptuous; she formed acquaintances of the most dangerous kind in defiance of his objections, his entreaties, and his commands; and, worst of all, she learned, ere long, after every fresh difference with her husband, to seek the deadly self-oblivion of drink. Little by little, after the first miserable discovery that his wife was keeping company with drunkards, the shocking certainty forced itself on Isaac that she had grown to be a drunkard herself.

He had been in a sadly desponding state for some time before the occurrence of these domestic calamities. His mother’s health, as he could but too plainly discern every time he went to see her at the cottage, was failing fast, and he upbraided himself in secret as the cause of the bodily and mental suffering she endured. When to his remorse on his mother’s account was added the shame and misery occasioned by the discovery of his wife’s degradation, he sank under the double trial – his face began to alter fast, and he looked what he was, a spirit-broken man.

His mother, still struggling bravely against the illness that was hurrying her to the grave, was the first to notice the sad alteration in him, and the first to hear of his last worst trouble with his wife. She could only weep bitterly on the day when he made his humiliating confession, but on the next occasion when he went to see her she had taken a resolution in reference to his domestic afflictions which astonished and even alarmed him. He found her dressed to go out, and on asking the reason received this answer:

“I am not long for this world, Isaac,” she said, “and I shall not feel easy on my death-bed unless I have done my best to the last to make my son happy. I mean to put my own fears and my own feelings out of the question, and to go with you to your wife, and try what I can do to reclaim her. Give me your arm, Isaac, and let me do the last thing I can in this world to help my son before it is too late.”

He could not disobey her, and they walked together slowly toward his miserable home.

It was only one o’clock in the afternoon when they reached the cottage where he lived. It was their dinner-hour, and Rebecca was in the kitchen. He was thus able to take his mother quietly into the parlor, and then prepare his wife for the interview. She had fortunately drunk but little at that early hour, and she was less sullen and capricious than usual.

He returned to his mother with his mind tolerably at ease. His wife soon followed him into the parlor, and the meeting between her and Mrs. Scatchard passed off better than he had ventured to anticipate, though he observed with secret apprehension that his mother, resolutely as she controlled herself in other respects, could not look his wife in the face when she spoke to her. It was a relief to him, therefore, when Rebecca began to lay the cloth.

She laid the cloth, brought in the bread-tray, and cut a slice from the loaf for her husband, then returned to the kitchen. At that moment, Isaac, still anxiously watching his mother, was startled by seeing the same ghastly change pass over her face which had altered it so awfully on the morning when Rebecca and she first met. Before he could say a word, she whispered, with a look of horror,

“Take me back – home, home again, Isaac. Come with me, and never go back again.”

He was afraid to ask for an explanation; he could only sign to her to be silent, and help her quickly to the door. As they passed the bread-tray on the table she stopped and pointed to it.

“Did you see what your wife cut your bread with?” she asked, in a low whisper.

“No, mother – I was not noticing – what was it?”

“Look!”

He did look. A new clasp-knife, with a buck-horn handle, lay with the loaf in the bread-tray. He stretched out his hand shudderingly to possess himself of it; but, at the same time, there was a noise in the kitchen, and his mother caught at his arm.

“The knife of the dream! Isaac, I’m faint with fear. Take me away before she comes back.”

He was hardly able to support her. The visible, tangible reality of the knife struck him with a panic, and utterly destroyed any faint doubts that he might have entertained up to this time in relation to the mysterious dream-warning of nearly eight years before. By a last desperate effort, he summoned self-possession enough to help his mother out of the house – so quietly that the ‘Dream Woman’ (he thought of her by that name now) did not hear them departing from the kitchen.

“Don’t go back, Isaac – don’t go back!” implored Mrs. Scatchard, as he turned to go away, after seeing her safely seated again in her own room.

“I must get the knife,” he answered, under his breath. His mother tried to stop him again, but he hurried out without another word.

On his return he found that his wife had discovered their secret departure from the house. She had been drinking, and was in a fury of passion. The dinner in the kitchen was flung under the grate; the cloth was off the parlor table. Where was the knife?

Unwisely, he asked for it. She was only too glad of the opportunity of irritating him which the request afforded her. “He wanted the knife, did he? Could he give her a reason why? No! Then he should not have it – not if he went down on his knees to ask for it.” Further recriminations elicited the fact that she had bought it a bargain, and that she considered it her own especial property. Isaac saw the uselessness of attempting to get the knife by fair means, and determined to search for it, later in the day, in secret. The search was unsuccessful. Night came on, and he left the house to walk about the streets. He was afraid now to sleep in the same room with her.

Three weeks passed. Still sullenly enraged with him, she would not give up the knife; and still that fear of sleeping in the same room with her possessed him. He walked about at night, or dozed in the parlor, or sat watching by his mother’s bedside. Before the expiration of the first week in the new month his mother died. It wanted then but ten days of her son’s birthday. She had longed to live till that anniversary. Isaac was present at her death, and her last words in this world were addressed to him:

“Don’t go back, my son, don’t go back!”

He was obliged to go back, if it were only to watch his wife. Exasperated to the last degree by his distrust of her, she had revengefully sought to add a sting to his grief, during the last days of his mother’s illness, by declaring that she would assert her right to attend the funeral. In spite of all that he could do or say, she held with wicked pertinacity to her word, and on the day appointed for the burial forced herself – inflamed and shameless with drink – into her husband’s presence, and declared that she would walk in the funeral procession to his mother’s grave.

This last worst outrage, accompanied by all that was most insulting in word and look, maddened him for the moment. He struck her.

The instant the blow was dealt he repented it. She crouched down, silent, in a corner of the room, and eyed him steadily; it was a look that cooled his hot blood and made him tremble. But there was no time now to think of a means of making atonement. Nothing remained but to risk the worst till the funeral was over. There was but one way of making sure of her. He locked her into her bedroom.

When he came back some hours after, he found her sitting, very much altered in look and bearing, by the bedside, with a bundle on her lap. She rose, and faced him quietly, and spoke with a strange stillness in her voice, a strange repose in her eyes, a strange composure in her manner.

“No man has ever struck me twice,” she said, “and my husband shall have no second opportunity. Set the door open and let me go. From this day forth we see each other no more.”

Before he could answer she passed him and left the room. He saw her walk away up the street.

Would she return?

All that night he watched and waited, but no footstep came near the house. The next night, overpowered by fatigue, he lay down in bed in his clothes, with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning. His slumber was not disturbed. The third night, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth passed, and nothing happened. He lay down on the seventh, still in his clothes, still with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning but easier in his mind.

Easier in his mind, and in perfect health of body when he fell off to sleep. But his rest was disturbed. He woke twice without any sensation of uneasiness. But the third time it was that never-to-be-forgotten shivering of the night at the lonely inn, that dreadful sinking pain at the heart, which once more aroused him in an instant.

His eyes opened toward the left-hand side of the bed, and there stood –

The Dream Woman again? No! His wife; the living reality, with the dream-spectre’s face, in the dream-spectre’s attitude; the fair arm up, the knife clasped in the delicate white hand.

He sprang upon her almost at the instant of seeing her, and yet not quickly enough to prevent her from hiding the knife. Without a word from him – without a cry from her – he pinioned her in a chair. With one hand he felt up her sleeve, and there, where the Dream Woman had hidden the knife, his wife had hidden it – the knife with the buck-horn handle, that looked like new.

In the despair of that fearful moment his brain was steady, his heart was calm. He looked at her fixedly with the knife in his hand, and said these last words:

“You told me we should see each other no more, and you have come back. It is my turn now to go, and to go forever. I say that we shall see each other no more, and my word shall not be broken.”

He left her, and set forth into the night. There was a bleak wind abroad, and the smell of recent rain was in the air. The distant church-clocks chimed the quarter as he walked rapidly beyond the last houses in the suburb. He asked the first policeman he met what hour that was of which the quarter past had just struck.

The man referred sleepily to his watch, and answered, “Two o’clock”. Two in the morning. What day of the month was this day that had just begun? He reckoned it up from the date of his mother’s funeral. The fatal parallel was complete: it was his birthday!

Had he escaped the mortal peril which his dream foretold? Or had he only received a second warning?

As that ominous doubt forced itself on his mind, he stopped, reflected, and turned back again toward the city. He was still resolute to hold to his word and never to let her see him more; but there was a thought now in his mind of having her watched and followed. The knife was in his possession; the world was before him; but a new distrust of her – a vague, unspeakable, superstitious dread had overcome him.

“I must know where she goes, now she thinks I have left her,” he said to himself, as he stole back wearily to the precincts of his house.

It was still dark. He had left the candle burning in the bedchamber; but when he looked up to the window of the room now, there was no light in it. He crept cautiously to the house door. On going away, he remembered to have closed it; on trying it now, he found it open.

He waited outside, never losing sight of the house, till daylight. Then he ventured in-doors – listened, and heard nothing – looked into kitchen, scullery, parlor, and found nothing; went up, at last, into the bedroom – it was empty. A picklock lay on the floor, betraying how she had gained entrance in the night, and that was the only trace of her.

Whither had she gone? That no mortal tongue could tell him. The darkness had covered her flight; and when the day broke, no man could say where the light found her.

Before leaving the house and the town forever, he gave instructions to a friend and neighbor to sell his furniture for anything that it would fetch, and apply the proceeds to employing the police to trace her. The directions were honestly followed, and the money was all spent, but the inquiries led to nothing. The picklock on the bedroom floor remained the one last useless trace of the Dream Woman.

* * *

At this point of the narrative the landlord paused, and, turning toward the window of the room in which we were sitting, looked in the direction of the stable-yard.

“So far,” he said, “I tell you what was told to me. The little that remains to be added lies within my own experience. Between two and three months after the events I have just been relating, Isaac Scatchard came to me, withered and old-looking before his time, just as you saw him today. He had his testimonials to character with him, and he asked for employment here. Knowing that my wife and he were distantly related, I gave him a trial in consideration of that relationship, and liked him in spite of his queer habits. He is as sober, honest, and willing a man as there is in England. As for his restlessness at night, and his sleeping away his leisure time in the day, who can wonder at it after hearing his story? Besides, he never objects to being roused up when he’s wanted, so there’s not much inconvenience to complain of, after all.”

“I suppose he is afraid of a return of that dreadful dream, and of waking out of it in the dark?” said I.

“No,” returned the landlord. “The dream comes back to him so often that he has got to bear with it by this time resignedly enough. It’s his wife keeps him waking at night, as he has often told me.”

“What! Has she never been heard of yet?”

“Never. Isaac himself has the one perpetual thought about her, that she is alive and looking for him. I believe he wouldn’t let himself drop off to sleep toward two in the morning for a king’s ransom. Two in the morning, he says, is the time she will find him, one of these days. Two in the morning is the time all the year round when he likes to be most certain that he has got that clasp-knife safe about him. He does not mind being alone as long as he is awake, except on the night before his birthday, when he firmly believes himself to be in peril of his life. The birthday has only come round once since he has been here, and then he sat up along with the night-porter. ‘She’s looking for me,’ is all he says when anybody speaks to him about the one anxiety of his life; ‘she’s looking for me.’ He may be right. She may be looking for him. Who can tell?”

“Who can tell?” said I.

The Upper Berth

F. Marion Crawford

I

Somebody asked for the cigars. We had talked long, and the conversation was beginning to languish; the tobacco smoke had got into the heavy curtains, the wine had got into those brains which were liable to become heavy, and it was already perfectly evident that, unless somebody did something to rouse our oppressed spirits, the meeting would soon come to its natural conclusion, and we, the guests, would speedily go home to bed, and most certainly to sleep. No one had said anything very remarkable; it may be that no one had anything very remarkable to say. Jones had given us every particular of his last hunting adventure in Yorkshire. Mr. Tompkins, of Boston, had explained at elaborate length those working principles, by the due and careful maintenance of which the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad not only extended its territory, increased its departmental influence, and transported live stock without starving them to death before the day of actual delivery, but, also, had for years succeeded in deceiving those passengers who bought its tickets into the fallacious belief that the corporation aforesaid was really able to transport human life without destroying it. Signer Tombola had endeavored to persuade us, by arguments which we took no trouble to oppose, that the unity of his country in no way resembled the average modern torpedo, carefully planned, constructed with all the skill of the greatest European arsenals, but, when constructed, destined to be directed by feeble hands into a region where it must undoubtedly explode, unseen, unfeared, and unheard, into the illimitable wastes of political chaos.

It is unnecessary to go into further details. The conversation had assumed proportions which would have bored Prometheus on his rock, which would have driven Tantalus to distraction, and which would have impelled Ixion to seek relaxation in the simple but instructive dialogues of Herr Ollendorff, rather than submit to the greater evil of listening to our talk. We had sat at table for hours; we were bored, we were tired, and nobody showed signs of moving.

Somebody called for cigars. We all instinctively looked towards the speaker. Brisbane was a man of five-and-thirty years of age, and remarkable for those gifts which chiefly attract the attention of men. He was a strong man. The external proportions of his figure presented nothing extraordinary to the common eye, though his size was above the average. He was a little over six feet in height, and moderately broad in the shoulder; he did not appear to be stout, but, on the other hand, he was certainly not thin; his small head was supported by a strong and sinewy neck; his broad, muscular hands appeared to possess a peculiar skill in breaking walnuts without the assistance of the ordinary cracker, and, seeing him in profile, one could not help remarking the extraordinary breadth of his sleeves, and the unusual thickness of his chest. He was one of those men who are commonly spoken of among men as deceptive; that is to say, that though he looked exceedingly strong he was in reality very much stronger than he looked. Of his features I need say little. His head is small, his hair is thin, his eyes are blue, his nose is large, he has a small moustache, and a square jaw. Everybody knows Brisbane, and when he asked for a cigar everybody looked at him.

“It is a very singular thing,” said Brisbane.

Everybody stopped talking. Brisbane’s voice was not loud, but possessed a peculiar quality of penetrating general conversation, and cutting it like a knife. Everybody listened. Brisbane, perceiving that he had attracted their general attention, lit his cigar with great equanimity.

“It is very singular,” he continued, “that thing about ghosts. People are always asking whether anybody has seen a ghost. I have.”

“Bosh! What, you? You don’t mean to say so, Brisbane? Well, for a man of his intelligence!”

A chorus of exclamations greeted Brisbane’s remarkable statement. Everybody called for cigars, and Stubbs, the butler, suddenly appeared from the depths of nowhere with a fresh bottle of dry champagne. The situation was saved; Brisbane was going to tell a story.

I am an old sailor, said Brisbane, and as I have to cross the Atlantic pretty often, I have my favourites. Most men have their favourites. I have seen a man wait in a Broadway bar for three-quarters of an hour for a particular car which he liked. I believe the bar-keeper made at least one-third of his living by that man’s preference. I have a habit of waiting for certain ships when I am obliged to cross that duck-pond. It may be a prejudice, but I was never cheated out of a good passage but once in my life. I remember it very well; it was a warm morning in June, and the Custom House officials, who were hanging about waiting for a steamer already on her way up from the Quarantine, presented a peculiarly hazy and thoughtful appearance. I had not much luggage – I never have. I mingled with the crowd of passengers, porters, and officious individuals in blue coats and brass buttons, who seemed to spring up like mushrooms from the deck of a moored steamer to obtrude their unnecessary services upon the independent passenger. I have often noticed with a certain interest the spontaneous evolution of these fellows. They are not there when you arrive; five minutes after the pilot has called “Go ahead!” they, or at least their blue coats and brass buttons, have disappeared from deck and gangway as completely as though they had been consigned to that locker which tradition unanimously ascribes to Davy Jones. But, at the moment of starting, they are there, clean shaved, blue-coated, and ravenous for fees. I hastened on board. The Kamtschatka was one of my favourite ships. I say was, because she emphatically no longer is. I cannot conceive of any inducement which could entice me to make another voyage in her. Yes, I know what you are going to say. She is uncommonly clean in the run aft, she has enough bluffing off in the bows to keep her dry, and the lower berths are most of them double. She has a lot of advantages, but I won’t cross in her again. Excuse the digression. I got on board. I hailed a steward, whose red nose and redder whiskers were equally familiar to me.

“One hundred and five, lower berth,” said I, in the business-like tone peculiar to men who think no more of crossing the Atlantic than taking a whisky cocktail at downtown Delmonico’s.

The steward took my portmanteau, great-coat, and rug. I shall never forget the expression of his face. Not that he turned pale. It is maintained by the most eminent divines that even miracles cannot change the course of nature. I have no hesitation in saying that he did not turn pale; but, from his expression, I judged that he was either about to shed tears, to sneeze, or to drop my portmanteau. As the latter contained two bottles of particularly fine old sherry presented to me for my voyage by my old friend Snigginson van Pickyns, I felt extremely nervous. But the steward did none of these things.

“Well, I’m d–d!” said he in a low voice, and led the way.

I supposed my Hermes, as he led me to the lower regions, had had a little grog, but I said nothing, and followed him. One hundred and five was on the port side, well aft. There was nothing remarkable about the state-room. The lower berth, like most of those upon the Kamtschatka, was double. There was plenty of room; there was the usual washing apparatus, calculated to convey an idea of luxury to the mind of a North American Indian; there were the usual inefficient racks of brown wood, in which it is more easy to hang a large-sized umbrella than the common tooth-brush of commerce. Upon the uninviting mattresses were carefully folded together those blankets which a great modern humorist has aptly compared to cold buckwheat cakes. The question of towels was left entirely to the imagination. The glass decanters were filled with a transparent liquid faintly tinged with brown, but from which an odour less faint, but not more pleasing, ascended to the nostrils, like a far-off sea-sick reminiscence of oily machinery. Sad-coloured curtains half closed the upper berth. The hazy June daylight shed a faint illumination upon the desolate little scene. Ugh! how I hate that state-room!

The steward deposited my traps and looked at me, as though he wanted to get away – probably in search of more passengers and more fees. It is always a good plan to start in favour with those functionaries, and I accordingly gave him certain coins there and then.

“I’ll try and make yer comfortable all I can,” he remarked, as he put the coins in his pocket. Nevertheless, there was a doubtful intonation in his voice which surprised me. Possibly his scale of fees had gone up, and he was not satisfied; but on the whole I was inclined to think that, as he himself would have expressed it, he was “the better for a glass.” I was wrong, however, and did the man injustice.

II

Nothing especially worthy of mention occurred during that day. We left the pier punctually, and it was very pleasant to be fairly under way, for the weather was warm and sultry, and the motion of the steamer produced a refreshing breeze. Everybody knows what the first day at sea is like. People pace the decks and stare at each other, and occasionally meet acquaintances whom they did not know to be on board. There is the usual uncertainty as to whether the food will be good, bad, or indifferent, until the first two meals have put the matter beyond a doubt; there is the usual uncertainty about the weather, until the ship is fairly off Fire Island. The tables are crowded at first, and then suddenly thinned. Pale-faced people spring from their seats and precipitate themselves towards the door, and each old sailor breathes more freely as his seasick neighbor rushes from his side, leaving him plenty of elbow-room and an unlimited command over the mustard. One passage across the Atlantic is very much like another, and we who cross very often do not make the voyage for the sake of novelty. Whales and icebergs are indeed always objects of interest, but, after all, one whale is very much like another whale, and one rarely sees an iceberg at close quarters. To the majority of us the most delightful moment of the day on board an ocean steamer is when we have taken our last turn on deck, have smoked our last cigar, and having succeeded in tiring ourselves, feel at liberty to turn in with a clear conscience. On that first night of the voyage I felt particularly lazy, and went to bed in 105 rather earlier than I usually do. As I turned in, I was amazed to see that I was to have a companion. A portmanteau, very like my own, lay in the opposite corner, and in the upper berth had been deposited a neatly folded rug, with a stick and umbrella. I had hoped to be alone, and I was disappointed; but I wondered who my room-mate was to be, and I determined to have a look at him.

Before I had been long in bed he entered. He was, as far as I could see, a very tall man, very thin, very pale, with sandy hair and whiskers and colourless grey eyes. He had about him, I thought, an air of rather dubious fashion; the sort of man you might see in Wall Street, without being able precisely to say what he was doing there – the sort of man who frequents the Café Anglais, who always seems to be alone and who drinks champagne; you might meet him on a racecourse, but he would never appear to be doing anything there either. A little overdressed – a little odd. There are three or four of his kind on every ocean steamer. I made up my mind that I did not care to make his acquaintance, and I went to sleep saying to myself that I would study his habits in order to avoid him. If he rose early, I would rise late; if he went to bed late, I would go to bed early. I did not care to know him. If you once know people of that kind they are always turning up. Poor fellow! I need not have taken the trouble to come to so many decisions about him, for I never saw him again after that first night in 105.

I was sleeping soundly when I was suddenly waked by a loud noise. To judge from the sound, my room-mate must have sprung with a single leap from the upper berth to the floor. I heard him fumbling with the latch and bolt of the door, which opened almost immediately, and then I heard his footsteps as he ran at full speed down the passage, leaving the door open behind him. The ship was rolling a little, and I expected to hear him stumble or fall, but he ran as though he were running for his life. The door swung on its hinges with the motion of the vessel, and the sound annoyed me. I got up and shut it, and groped my way back to my berth in the darkness. I went to sleep again; but I have no idea how long I slept.

When I awoke it was still quite dark, but I felt a disagreeable sensation of cold, and it seemed to me that the air was damp. You know the peculiar smell of a cabin which has been wet with sea-water. I covered myself up as well as I could and dozed off again, framing complaints to be made the next day, and selecting the most powerful epithets in the language. I could hear my room-mate turn over in the upper berth. He had probably returned while I was asleep. Once I thought I heard him groan, and I argued that he was sea-sick. That is particularly unpleasant when one is below. Nevertheless I dozed off and slept till early daylight.

The ship was rolling heavily, much more than on the previous evening, and the grey light which came in through the porthole changed in tint with every movement according as the angle of the vessel’s side turned the glass seawards or skywards. It was very cold – unaccountably so for the month of June. I turned my head and looked at the porthole, and saw to my surprise that it was wide open and hooked back. I believe I swore audibly. Then I got up and shut it. As I turned back I glanced at the upper berth. The curtains were drawn close together; my companion had probably felt cold as well as I. It struck me that I had slept enough. The state-room was uncomfortable, though, strange to say, I could not smell the dampness which had annoyed me in the night. My room-mate was still asleep – excellent opportunity for avoiding him, so I dressed at once and went on deck. The day was warm and cloudy, with an oily smell on the water. It was seven o’clock as I came out – much later than I had imagined. I came across the doctor, who was taking his first sniff of the morning air. He was a young man from the West of Ireland – a tremendous fellow, with black hair and blue eyes, already inclined to be stout; he had a happy-go-lucky, healthy look about him which was rather attractive.

“Fine morning,” I remarked, by way of introduction.

“Well,” said he, eyeing me with an air of ready interest, “it’s a fine morning and it’s not a fine morning. I don’t think it’s much of a morning.”

“Well, no – it is not so very fine,” said I.

“It’s just what I call fuggly weather,” replied the doctor.

“It was very cold last night, I thought,” I remarked, “However, when I looked about, I found that the porthole was wide open. I had not noticed it when I went to bed. And the state-room was damp, too.”

“Damp!” said he. “Whereabouts are you?”

“One hundred and five –”

To my surprise the doctor started visibly, and stared at me.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“Oh – nothing,” he answered; “Only everybody has complained of that state-room for the last three trips.”

“I shall complain, too,” I said. “It has certainly not been properly aired. It is a shame!”

“I don’t believe it can be helped,” answered the doctor. “I believe there is something – well, it is not my business to frighten passengers.”

“You need not be afraid of frightening me,” I replied. “I can stand any amount of damp. If I should get a bad cold I will come to you.”

I offered the doctor a cigar, which he took and examined very critically.

“It is not so much the damp,” he remarked. “However, I dare say you will get on very well. Have you a room-mate?”

“Yes; a deuce of a fellow, who bolts out in the middle of the night, and leaves the door open.”

Again the doctor glanced curiously at me. Then he lit the cigar and looked grave.

“Did he come back?” he asked presently.

“Yes. I was asleep, but I waked up, and heard him moving. Then I felt cold and went to sleep again. This morning I found the porthole open.”

“Look here,” said the doctor quietly, “I don’t care much for this ship. I don’t care a rap for her reputation. I tell you what I will do. I have a good-sized place up here. I will share it with you, though I don’t know you from Adam.”

I was very much surprised at the proposition. I could not imagine why he should take such a sudden interest in my welfare. However, his manner as he spoke of the ship was peculiar.

“You are very good, doctor,” I said. “But, really, I believe even now the cabin could be aired, or cleaned out, or something. Why do you not care for the ship?”

“We are not superstitious in our profession, sir,” replied the doctor, “but the sea makes people so. I don’t want to prejudice you, and I don’t want to frighten you, but if you will take my advice you will move in here. I would as soon see you overboard,” he added earnestly, “as know that you or any other man was to sleep in 105.”

“Good gracious! Why?” I asked.

“Just because on the last three trips the people who have slept there actually have gone overboard,” he answered gravely.

The intelligence was startling and exceedingly unpleasant, I confess. I looked hard at the doctor to see whether he was making game of me, but he looked perfectly serious. I thanked him warmly for his offer, but told him I intended to be the exception to the rule by which everyone who slept in that particular state-room went overboard. He did not say much, but looked as grave as ever, and hinted that, before we got across, I should probably reconsider his proposal. In the course of time we went to breakfast, at which only an inconsiderable number of passengers assembled. I noticed that one or two of the officers who breakfasted with us looked grave. After breakfast I went into my state-room in order to get a book. The curtains of the upper berth were still closely drawn. Not a word was to be heard. My room-mate was probably still asleep.

As I came out I met the steward whose business it was to look after me. He whispered that the captain wanted to see me, and then scuttled away down the passage as if very anxious to avoid any questions. I went toward the captain’s cabin, and found him waiting for me.

“Sir,” said he, “I want to ask a favour of you.”

I answered that I would do anything to oblige him.

“Your room-mate has disappeared,” he said. “He is known to have turned in early last night. Did you notice anything extraordinary in his manner?”

The question coming, as it did, in exact confirmation of the fears the doctor had expressed half an hour earlier, staggered me.

“You don’t mean to say he has gone overboard?” I asked.

“I fear he has,” answered the captain.

“This is the most extraordinary thing –” I began.

“Why?” he asked.

“He is the fourth, then?” I explained. In answer to another question from the captain, I explained, without mentioning the doctor, that I had heard the story concerning 105. He seemed very much annoyed at hearing that I knew of it. I told him what had occurred in the night.

“What you say,” he replied, “coincides almost exactly with what was told me by the room-mates of two of the other three. They bolt out of bed and run down the passage. Two of them were seen to go overboard by the watch; we stopped and lowered boats, but they were not found. Nobody, however, saw or heard the man who was lost last night – if he is really lost. The steward, who is a superstitious fellow, perhaps, and expected something to go wrong, went to look for him this morning, and found his berth empty, but his clothes lying about, just as he had left them. The steward was the only man on board who knew him by sight, and he has been searching everywhere for him. He has disappeared! Now, sir, I want to beg you not to mention the circumstance to any of the passengers; I don’t want the ship to get a bad name, and nothing hangs about an ocean-goer like stories of suicides. You shall have your choice of any one of the officers’ cabins you like, including my own, for the rest of the passage. Is that a fair bargain?”

“Very,” said I; “and I am much obliged to you. But since I am alone, and have the state-room to myself, I would rather not move. If the steward will take out that unfortunate man’s things, I would as lief stay where I am. I will not say anything about the matter, and I think I can promise you that I will not follow my room-mate.”

The captain tried to dissuade me from my intention, but I preferred having a state-room alone to being the chum of any officer on board. I do not know whether I acted foolishly, but if I had taken his advice I should have had nothing more to tell; There would have remained the disagreeable coincidence of several suicides occurring among men who had slept in the same cabin, but that would have been all.

That was not the end of the matter, however, by any means. I obstinately made up my mind that I would not be disturbed by such tales, and I even went so far as to argue the question with the captain. There was something wrong about the state-room, I said. It was rather damp. The porthole had been left open last night. My room-mate might have been ill when he came on board, and he might have become delirious after he went to bed. He might even now be hiding somewhere on board, and might be found later. The place ought to be aired and the fastening of the port looked to. If the captain would give me leave, I would see that what I thought necessary was done immediately.

“Of course you have a right to stay where you are if you please,” he replied, rather petulantly; “but I wish you would turn out and let me lock the place up, and be done with it.”

I did not see it in the same light, and left the captain, after promising to be silent concerning the disappearance of my companion. The latter had had no acquaintances on board, and was not missed in the course of the day. Towards evening I met the doctor again, and he asked me whether I had changed my mind. I told him I had not.

“Then you will before long,” he said, very gravely.

III

We played whist in the evening, and I went to bed late. I will confess now that I felt a disagreeable sensation when I entered my state-room. I could not help thinking of the tall man I had seen on the previous night, who was now dead, drowned, tossing about in the long swell, two or three hundred miles astern. His face rose very distinctly before me as I undressed, and I even went so far as to draw back the curtains of the upper berth, as though to persuade myself that he was actually gone. I also bolted the door of the state-room. Suddenly I became aware that the porthole was open, and fastened back. This was more than I could stand. I hastily threw on my dressing-gown and went in search of Robert, the steward of my passage. I was very angry, I remember, and when I found him I dragged him roughly to the door of 105, and pushed him towards the open porthole.

“What the deuce do you mean, you scoundrel, by leaving that port open every night? Don’t you know it is against the regulations? Don’t you know that if the ship heeled and the water began to come in, ten men could not shut it? I will report you to the captain, you blackguard, for endangering the ship!”

I was exceedingly wroth. The man trembled and turned pale, and then began to shut the round glass plate with the heavy brass fittings.

“Why don’t you answer me?” I said roughly.

“If you please, sir,” faltered Robert, “there’s nobody on board as can keep this ’ere port shut at night. You can try it yourself, sir. I ain’t a-going to stop hany longer on board o’ this vessel, sir; I ain’t, indeed. But if I was you, sir, I’d just clear out and go and sleep with the surgeon, or something, I would. Look ’ere, sir, is that fastened what you may call securely, or not, sir? Try it, sir, see if it will move a hinch.”

I tried the port, and found it perfectly tight.

“Well, sir,” continued Robert triumphantly, “I wager my reputation as a A1 steward that in ’arf an hour it will be open again; fastened back, too, sir, that’s the horful thing – fastened back!”

I examined the great screw and the looped nut that ran on it.

“If I find it open in the night, Robert, I will give you a sovereign. It is not possible. You may go.”

“Soverin’ did you say, sir? Very good, sir. Thank ye, sir. Good night, sir. Pleasant reepose, sir, and all manner of hinchantin’ dreams, sir.”

Robert scuttled away, delighted at being released. Of course, I thought he was trying to account for his negligence by a silly story, intended to frighten me, and I disbelieved him. The consequence was that he got his sovereign, and I spent a very peculiarly unpleasant night.

I went to bed, and five minutes after I had rolled myself up in my blankets the inexorable Robert extinguished the light that burned steadily behind the ground-glass pane near the door. I lay quite still in the dark trying to go to sleep, but I soon found that impossible. It had been some satisfaction to be angry with the steward, and the diversion had banished that unpleasant sensation I had at first experienced when I thought of the drowned man who had been my chum; but I was no longer sleepy, and I lay awake for some time, occasionally glancing at the porthole, which I could just see from where I lay, and which, in the darkness, looked like a faintly luminous soup-plate suspended in blackness. I believe I must have lain there for an hour, and, as I remember, I was just dozing into sleep when I was roused by a draught of cold air, and by distinctly feeling the spray of the sea blown upon my face. I started to my feet, and not having allowed in the dark for the motion of the ship, I was instantly thrown violently across the state-room upon the couch which was placed beneath the porthole. I recovered myself immediately, however, and climbed upon my knees. The porthole was again wide open and fastened back!

Now these things are facts. I was wide awake when I got up, and I should certainly have been waked by the fall had I still been dozing. Moreover, I bruised my elbows and knees badly, and the bruises were there on the following morning to testify to the fact, if I myself had doubted it. The porthole was wide open and fastened back – a thing so unaccountable that I remember very well feeling astonishment rather than fear when I discovered it. I at once closed the plate again, and screwed down the loop nut with all my strength. It was very dark in the state-room. I reflected that the port had certainly been opened within an hour after Robert had at first shut it in my presence, and I determined to watch it, and see whether it would open again. Those brass fittings are very heavy and by no means easy to move; I could not believe that the clump had been turned by the shaking of the screw. I stood peering out through the thick glass at the alternate white and grey streaks of the sea that foamed beneath the ship’s side. I must have remained there a quarter of an hour. Suddenly, as I stood, I distinctly heard something moving behind me in one of the berths, and a moment afterwards, just as I turned instinctively to look – though I could, of course, see nothing in the darkness – I heard a very faint groan. I sprang across the state-room, and tore the curtains of the upper berth aside, thrusting in my hands to discover if there were any one there. There was someone.

I remember that the sensation as I put my hands forward was as though I were plunging them into the air of a damp cellar, and from behind the curtains came a gust of wind that smelled horribly of stagnant sea-water. I laid hold of something that had the shape of a man’s arm, but was smooth, and wet, and icy cold. But suddenly, as I pulled, the creature sprang violently forward against me, a clammy, oozy mass, as it seemed to me, heavy and wet, yet endowed with a sort of supernatural strength. I reeled across the state-room, and in an instant the door opened and the thing rushed out. I had not had time to be frightened, and quickly recovering myself, I sprang through the door and gave chase at the top of my speed, but I was too late. Ten yards before me I could see – I am sure I saw it – a dark shadow moving in the dimly lighted passage, quickly as the shadow of a fast horse thrown before a dog-cart by the lamp on a dark night. But in a moment it had disappeared, and I found myself holding on to the polished rail that ran along the bulkhead where the passage turned towards the companion. My hair stood on end, and the cold perspiration rolled down my face. I am not ashamed of it in the least: I was very badly frightened.

Still I doubted my senses, and pulled myself together. It was absurd, I thought. The Welsh rarebit I had eaten had disagreed with me. I had been in a nightmare. I made my way back to my state-room, and entered it with an effort. The whole place smelled of stagnant sea-water, as it had when I had waked on the previous evening. It required my utmost strength to go in, and grope among my things for a box of wax lights. As I lighted a railway reading lantern which I always carry in case I want to read after the lamps are out, I perceived that the porthole was again open, and a sort of creeping horror began to take possession of me which I never felt before, nor wish to feel again. But I got a light and proceeded to examine the upper berth, expecting to find it drenched with sea-water.

But I was disappointed. The bed had been slept in, and the smell of the sea was strong; but the bedding was as dry as a bone. I fancied that Robert had not had the courage to make the bed after the accident of the previous night – it had all been a hideous dream. I drew the curtains back as far as I could and examined the place very carefully. It was perfectly dry. But the porthole was open again. With a sort of dull bewilderment of horror I closed it and screwed it down, and thrusting my heavy stick through the brass loop, wrenched it with all my might, till the thick metal began to bend under the pressure. Then I hooked my reading lantern into the red velvet at the head of the couch, and sat down to recover my senses if I could. I sat there all night, unable to think of rest – hardly able to think at all. But the porthole remained closed, and I did not believe it would now open again without the application of a considerable force.

The morning dawned at last, and I dressed myself slowly, thinking over all that had happened in the night. It was a beautiful day and I went on deck, glad to get out into the early, pure sunshine, and to smell the breeze from the blue water, so different from the noisome, stagnant odour of my state-room. Instinctively I turned aft, towards the surgeon’s cabin. There he stood, with a pipe in his mouth, taking his morning airing precisely as on the preceding day.

“Good morning,” said he quietly, but looking at me with evident curiosity.

“Doctor, you were quite right,” said I. “There is something wrong about that place.”

“I thought you would change your mind,” he answered, rather triumphantly. “You have had a bad night, eh? Shall I make you a pick-me-up? I have a capital recipe.”

“No, thanks,” I cried. “But I would like to tell you what happened.”

I then tried to explain as clearly as possible precisely what had occurred, not omitting to state that I had been scared as I had never been scared in my whole life before. I dwelt particularly on the phenomenon of the porthole, which was a fact to which I could testify, even if the rest had been an illusion. I had closed it twice in the night, and the second time I had actually bent the brass in wrenching it with my stick. I believe I insisted a good deal on this point.

“You seem to think I am likely to doubt the story,” said the doctor, smiling at the detailed account of the state of the porthole. “I do not doubt it in the least. I renew my invitation to you. Bring your traps here, and take half my cabin.”

“Come and take half of mine for one night,” I said. “Help me to get at the bottom of this thing.”

“You will get to the bottom of something else if you try,” answered the doctor.

“What?” I asked.

“The bottom of the sea. I am going to leave this ship. It is not canny.”

“Then you will not help me to find out –”

“Not I,” said the doctor quickly. “It is my business to keep my wits about me – not to go fiddling about with ghosts and things.”

“Do you really believe it is a ghost?” I enquired, rather contemptuously. But as I spoke I remembered very well the horrible sensation of the supernatural which had got possession of me during the night. The doctor turned sharply on me.

“Have you any reasonable explanation of these things to offer?” he asked. “No; you have not. Well, you say you will find an explanation. I say that you won’t, sir, simply because there is not any.”

“But, my dear sir,” I retorted, “do you, a man of science, mean to tell me that such things cannot be explained?”

“I do,” he answered stoutly. “And, if they could, I would not be concerned in the explanation.”

I did not care to spend another night alone in the state-room, and yet I was obstinately determined to get at the root of the disturbances. I do not believe there are many men who would have slept there alone, after passing two such nights. But I made up my mind to try it, if I could not get any one to share a watch with me. The doctor was evidently not inclined for such an experiment. He said he was a surgeon, and that in case any accident occurred on board he must be always in readiness. He could not afford to have his nerves unsettled. Perhaps he was quite right, but I am inclined to think that his precaution was prompted by his inclination. On enquiry, he informed me that there was no one on board who would be likely to join me in my investigations, and after a little more conversation I left him. A little later I met the captain, and told him my story. I said that, if no one would spend the night with me, I would ask leave to have the light burning all night, and would try it alone.

“Look here,” said he, “I will tell you what I will do. I will share your watch myself, and we will see what happens. It is my belief that we can find out between us. There may be some fellow skulking on board, who steals a passage by frightening the passengers. It is just possible that there may be something queer in the carpentering of that berth.”

I suggested taking the ship’s carpenter below and examining the place; but I was overjoyed at the captain’s offer to spend the night with me. He accordingly sent for the workman and ordered him to do anything I required. We went below at once. I had all the bedding cleared out of the upper berth, and we examined the place thoroughly to see if there was a board loose anywhere, or a panel which could be opened or pushed aside. We tried the planks everywhere, tapped the flooring, unscrewed the fittings of the lower berth and took it to pieces – in short, there was not a square inch of the stateroom which was not searched and tested. Everything was in perfect order, and we put everything back in its place. As we were finishing our work, Robert came to the door and looked in.

“Well, sir – find anything, sir?” he asked, with a ghastly grin.

“You were right about the porthole, Robert,” I said, and I gave him the promised sovereign. The carpenter did his work silently and skilfully, following my directions. When he had done he spoke.

“I’m a plain man, sir,” he said. “But it’s my belief you had better just turn out your things, and let me run half a dozen four-inch screws through the door of this cabin. There’s no good never came o’ this cabin yet, sir, and that’s all about it. There’s been four lives lost out o’ here to my own remembrance, and that in four trips. Better give it up, sir – better give it up!”

“I will try it for one night more,” I said.

“Better give it up, sir – better give it up! It’s a precious bad job,” repeated the workman, putting his tools in his bag and leaving the cabin.

But my spirits had risen considerably at the prospect of having the captain’s company, and I made up my mind not to be prevented from going to the end of the strange business. I abstained from Welsh rarebits and grog that evening, and did not even join in the customary game of whist. I wanted to be quite sure of my nerves, and my vanity made me anxious to make a good figure in the captain’s eyes.

IV

The captain was one of those splendidly tough and cheerful specimens of seafaring humanity whose combined courage, hardihood, and calmness in difficulty leads them naturally into high positions of trust. He was not the man to be led away by an idle tale, and the mere fact that he was willing to join me in the investigation was proof that he thought there was something seriously wrong, which could not be accounted for on ordinary theories, nor laughed down as a common superstition. To some extent, too, his reputation was at stake, as well as the reputation of the ship. It is no light thing to lose passengers overboard, and he knew it.

About ten o’clock that evening, as I was smoking a last cigar, he came up to me, and drew me aside from the beat of the other passengers who were patrolling the deck in the warm darkness.

“This is a serious matter, Mr. Brisbane,” he said. “We must make up our minds either way – to be disappointed or to have a pretty rough time of it. You see I cannot afford to laugh at the affair, and I will ask you to sign your name to a statement of whatever occurs. If nothing happens tonight we will try it again tomorrow and next day. Are you ready?” So we went below, and entered the state-room. As we went in I could see Robert the steward, who stood a little further down the passage, watching us, with his usual grin, as though certain that something dreadful was about to happen. The captain closed the door behind us and bolted it.

“Supposing we put your portmanteau before the door,” he suggested. “One of us can sit on it. Nothing can get out then. Is the port screwed down?”

I found it as I had left it in the morning. Indeed, without using a lever, as I had done, no one could have opened it. I drew back the curtains of the upper berth so that I could see well into it. By the captain’s advice I lighted my reading lantern, and placed it so that it shone upon the white sheets above. He insisted upon sitting on the portmanteau, declaring that he wished to be able to swear that he had sat before the door.

Then he requested me to search the state-room thoroughly, an operation very soon accomplished, as it consisted merely in looking beneath the lower berth and under the couch below the porthole. The spaces were quite empty.

“It is impossible for any human being to get in,” I said, “or for any human being to open the port.”

“Very good,” said the captain calmly. “If we see anything now, it must be either imagination or something supernatural.”

I sat down on the edge of the lower berth.

“The first time it happened,” said the captain, crossing his legs and leaning back against the door, “was in March. The passenger who slept here, in the upper berth, turned out to have been a lunatic – at all events, he was known to have been a little touched, and he had taken his passage without the knowledge of his friends. He rushed out in the middle of the night and threw himself overboard, before the officer who had the watch could stop him. We stopped and lowered a boat; it was a quiet night, just before that heavy weather came on; but we could not find him. Of course, his suicide was afterwards accounted for on the ground of his insanity.”

“I suppose that often happens?” I remarked, rather absently.

“Not often – no,” said the captain; “never before in my experience, though I have heard of it happening on board of other ships. Well, as I was saying, that occurred in March. On the very next trip – What are you looking at?” he asked, stopping suddenly in his narration.

I believe I gave no answer. My eyes were riveted upon the porthole. It seemed to me that the brass loop-nut was beginning to turn very slowly upon the screw – so slowly, however, that I was not sure it moved at all. I watched it intently, fixing its position in my mind, and trying to ascertain whether it changed. Seeing where I was looking, the captain looked, too.

“It moves!” he exclaimed, in a tone of conviction. “No, it does not,” he added, after a minute.

“If it were the jarring of the screw,” said I, “it would have opened during the day; but I found it this evening jammed tight as I left it this morning.”

I rose and tried the nut. It was certainly loosened, for by an effort I could move it with my hands.

“The queer thing,” said the captain, “is that the second man who was lost is supposed to have got through that very port. We had a terrible time over it. It was in the middle of the night, and the weather was very heavy; there was an alarm that one of the ports was open and the sea running in. I came below and found everything flooded, the water pouring in every time she rolled, and the whole port swinging from the top bolts – not the porthole in the middle. Well, we managed to shut it, but the water did some damage. Ever since that the place smells of sea-water from time to time. We supposed the passenger had thrown himself out, though the Lord only knows how he did it. The steward kept telling me that he cannot keep anything shut here. Upon my word – I can smell it now, cannot you?” he enquired, sniffing the air suspiciously.

“Yes – distinctly,” I said, and I shuddered as that same odour of stagnant sea-water grew stronger in the cabin. “Now, to smell like this, the place must be damp,” I continued, “and yet when I examined it with the carpenter this morning everything was perfectly dry. It is most extraordinary – hallo!”

My reading lantern, which had been placed in the upper berth, was suddenly extinguished. There was still a good deal of light from the pane of ground glass near the door, behind which loomed the regulation lamp. The ship rolled heavily, and the curtain of the upper berth swung far out into the state-room and back again. I rose quickly from my seat on the edge of the bed, and the captain at the same moment started to his feet with a loud cry of surprise. I had turned with the intention of taking down the lantern to examine it, when I heard his exclamation, and immediately afterwards his call for help. I sprang towards him. He was wrestling with all his might with the brass loop of the port. It seemed to turn against his hands in spite of all his efforts. I caught up my cane, a heavy oak stick I always used to carry, and thrust it through the ring and bore on it with all my strength. But the strong wood snapped suddenly and I fell upon the couch. When I rose again the port was wide open, and the captain was standing with his back against the door, pale to the lips.

“There is something in that berth!” he cried, in a strange voice, his eyes almost starting from his head. “Hold the door, while I look – it shall not escape us, whatever it is!”

But instead of taking his place, I sprang upon the lower bed, and seized something which lay in the upper berth.

It was something ghostly, horrible beyond words, and it moved in my grip. It was like the body of a man long drowned, and yet it moved, and had the strength of ten men living; but I gripped it with all my might – the slippery, oozy, horrible thing – the dead white eyes seemed to stare at me out of the dusk; the putrid odour of rank sea-water was about it, and its shiny hair hung in foul wet curls over its dead face. I wrestled with the dead thing; it thrust itself upon me and forced me back and nearly broke my arms; it wound its corpse’s arms about my neck, the living death, and overpowered me, so that I, at last, cried aloud and fell, and left my hold.

As I fell the thing sprang across me, and seemed to throw itself upon the captain. When I last saw him on his feet his face was white and his lips set. It seemed to me that he struck a violent blow at the dead being, and then he, too, fell forward upon his face, with an inarticulate cry of horror.

The thing paused an instant, seeming to hover over his prostrate body, and I could have screamed again for very fright, but I had no voice left. The thing vanished suddenly, and it seemed to my disturbed senses that it made its exit through the open port, though how that was possible, considering the smallness of the aperture, is more than any one can tell. I lay a long time upon the floor, and the captain lay beside me. At last I partially recovered my senses and moved, and instantly I knew that my arm was broken – the small bone of the left forearm near the wrist.

I got upon my feet somehow, and with my remaining hand I tried to raise the captain. He groaned and moved, and at last came to himself. He was not hurt, but he seemed badly stunned.

Well, do you want to hear any more? There is nothing more. That is the end of my story. The carpenter carried out his scheme of running half a dozen four-inch screws through the door of 105; and if ever you take a passage in the Kamtschatka, you may ask for a berth in that state-room. You will be told that it is engaged – yes – it is engaged by that dead thing.

I finished the trip in the surgeon’s cabin. He doctored my broken arm, and advised me not to ‘fiddle about with ghosts and things’ any more. The captain was very silent, and never sailed again in that ship, though it is still running. And I will not sail in her either. It was a very disagreeable experience, and I was very badly frightened, which is a thing I do not like. That is all. That is how I saw a ghost – if it was a ghost. It was dead, anyhow.

For the Blood is the Life

F. Marion Crawford

We had dined at sunset on the broad roof of the old tower, because it was cooler there during the great heat of summer. Besides, the little kitchen was built at one corner of the great square platform, which made it more convenient than if the dishes had to be carried down the steep stone steps broken in places and everywhere worn with age. The tower was one of those built all down the west coast of Calabria by the Emperor Charles V early in the sixteenth century, to keep off the Barbary pirates, when the unbelievers were allied with Francis I against the Emperor and the Church. They have gone to ruin, a few still stand intact, and mine is one of the largest. How it came into my possession ten years ago, and why I spend a part of each year in it, are matters which do not concern this tale. The tower stands in one of the loneliest spots in Southern Italy, at the extremity of a curving, rocky promontory, which forms a small but safe natural harbour at the southern extremity of the Gulf of Policastro, and just north of Cape Scalea, the birthplace of Judas Iscariot, according to the old local legend. The tower stands alone on this hooked spur of the rock, and there is not a house to be seen within three miles of it. When I go there I take a couple of sailors, one of whom is a fair cook, and when I am away it is in charge of a gnome-like little being who was once a miner and who attached himself to me long ago.

My friend, who sometimes visits me in my summer solitude, is an artist by profession, a Scandinavian by birth, and a cosmopolitan by force of circumstances.

We had dined at sunset; the sunset glow had reddened and faded again, and the evening purple steeped the vast chain of the mountains that embrace the deep gulf to eastward and rear themselves higher and higher towards the south. It was hot, and we sat at the landward corner of the platform, waiting for the night breeze to come down from the lower hills. The colour sank out of the air, there was a little interval of deep-grey twilight, and a lamp sent a yellow streak from the open door of the kitchen, where the men were getting their supper.

Then the moon rose suddenly above the crest of the promontory, flooding the platform and lighting up every little spur of rock and knoll of grass below us, down to the edge of the motionless water. My friend lighted his pipe and sat looking at a spot on the hillside. I knew that he was looking at it, and for a long time past I had wondered whether he would ever see anything there that would fix his attention. I knew that spot well. It was clear that he was interested at last, though it was a long time before he spoke. Like most painters, he trusts to his own eyesight, as a lion trusts his strength and a stag his speed, and he is always disturbed when he cannot reconcile what he sees with what he believes that he ought to see.

“It’s strange,” he said. “Do you see that little mound just on this side of the boulder?”

“Yes,” I said, and I guessed what was coming.

“It looks like a grave,” observed Holger.

“Very true. It does look like a grave.”

“Yes,” continued my friend, his eyes still fixed on the spot. “But the strange thing is that I see the body lying on the top of it. Of course,” continued Holger, turning his head on one side as artists do, “it must be an effect of light. In the first place, it is not a grave at all. Secondly, if it were, the body would be inside and not outside. Therefor, it’s an effect of the moonlight. Don’t you see it?”

“Perfectly; I always see it on moonlight nights.”

“It doesn’t seem it interest you much,” said Holger.

“On the contrary, it does interest me, though I am used to it. You’re not so far wrong, either. The mound is really a grave.”

“Nonsense!” cried Holger incredulously. “I suppose you’ll tell me that what I see lying on it is really a corpse!”

“No,” I answered, “it’s not. I know, because I have taken the trouble to go down and see.”

“Then what is it?” asked Holger.

“It’s nothing.”

“You mean that it’s an effect of light, I suppose?”

“Perhaps it is. But the inexplicable part of the matter is that it makes no difference whether the moon is rising or setting, or waxing or waning. If there’s any moonlight at all, from east or west or overhead, so long as it shines on the grave you can see the outline of the body on top.”

Holger stirred up his pipe with the point of his knife, and then used his finger for a stopper. When the tobacco burned well, he rose from his chair.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ll go down and take a look at it.”

He left me, crossed the roof, and disappeared down the dark steps. I did not move, but sat looking down until he came out of the tower below. I heard him humming an old Danish song as he crossed the open space in the bright moonlight, going straight to the mysterious mound. When he was ten paces from it, Holger stopped short, made two steps forward, and then three or four backward, and then stopped again. I know what that meant. He had reached the spot where the Thing ceased to be visible – where, as he would have said, the effect of light changed.

Then he went on till he reached the mound and stood upon it. I could see the Thing still, but it was no longer lying down; it was on its knees now, winding its white arms round Holger’s body and looking up into his face. A cool breeze stirred my hair at that moment, as the night wind began to come down from the hills, but it felt like a breath from another world.

The Thing seemed to be trying to climb to its feet helping itself up by Holger’s body while he stood upright, quite unconcious of it and apparently looking toward the tower, which is very picturesque when the moonlight falls upon it on that side.

“Come along!” I shouted. “Don’t stay there all night!”

It seemed to me that he moved reluctantly as he stepped from the mound, or else with difficulty. That was it. The Thing’s arms were still round his waist, but its feet could not leave the grave. As he came slowly forward it was drawn and lengthened like a wreath of mist, thin and white, till I saw distinctly that Holger shook himself, as a man does who feels a chill. At the same instant a little wail of pain came to me on the breeze – it might have been the cry of the small owl that lives amongst the rocks – and the misty presence floated swiftly back from Holger’s advancing figure and lay once more at its length upon the mound.

Again I felt the cool breeze in my hair, and this time an icy thrill of dread ran down my spine. I remembered very well that I had once gone down there alone in the moonlight; that presently, being near, I had seen nothing; that, like Holger, I had gone and had stood upon the mound; and I remembered how when I came back, sure that there was nothing there, I had felt the sudden conviction that there was something after all if I would only look back, a temptation I had resisted as unworthy of a man of sense, until, to get rid of it, I had shaken myself just as Holger did.

And now I knew that those white, misty arms had been round me, too; I knew it in a flash, and I shuddered as I remembered that I had heard the night owl then, too. But it had not been the night owl. It was the cry of the Thing.

I refilled my pipe and poured out a cup of strong southern wine; in less than a minute Holger was seated beside me again.

“Of course there’s nothing there,” he said, “but it’s creepy, all the same. Do you know, when I was coming back I was so sure that there was something behind me that I wanted to turn around and look? It was an effort not to.”

He laughed a little, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and poured himself out some wine. For a while neither of us spoke, and the moon rose higher and we both looked at the Thing that lay on the mound.

“You might make a story about that,” said Holger after a long time.

“There is one,” I answered. “If you’re not sleepy, I’ll tell it to you.”

“Go ahead,” said Holger, who likes stories.

* * *

Old Aderio was dying up there in the village beyond the hill. You remember him, I have no doubt. They say that he made his money by selling sham jewelry in South America, and escaped with his gains when he was found out. Like all those fellows, if they bring anything back with them, he at once set to work to enlarge his house, and as there are no masons here, he sent all the way to Paola for two workmen. They were a rough-looking pair of scoundrels – a Neapolitan who had lost one eye and a Sicilian with an old scar half an inch deep across his left cheek. I often saw them, for on Sundays they used to come down here and fish off the rocks. When Alario caught the fever that killed him the masons were still at work. As he had agreed that part of their pay should be their board and lodging, he made them sleep in the house. His wife was dead, and he had an only son called Angelo, who was a much better sort than himself. Angelo was to marry the daughter of the richest man in the village, and, strange to say, though the marriage was arranged by their parents, the young people were said to be in love with each other.

For that matter, the whole village was in love with Angelo, and among the rest a wild, good-looking creature called Cristina, who was more like a gipsy than any girl I ever saw about here. She had very red lips and very black eyes, she was built like a greyhound, and had the tongue of the devil. But Angelo did not care a straw for her. He was rather a simpleminded fellow, quite different from his old scoundrel of a father, and under what I should call normal circumstances I really believe that he would never have looked at any girl except the nice plump little creature, with a fat dowry, whom his father meant him to marry. But things turned up which were neither normal nor natural.

On the other hand, a very handsome young shepherd from the hills above Maratea was in love with Cristina, who seems to have been quite indifferent to him. Cristina had no regular means of subsistence, but she was a good girl and willing to do any work or go on errands to any distance for the sake of a loaf of bread or a mess of beans, and permission to sleep under cover. She was especially glad when she could get something to do about the house of Angelo’s father. There is no doctor in the village, and when the neighbours saw that old Alario was dying they sent Cristina to Scalea to fetch one. That was late in the afternoon, and if they had waited so long it was because the dying miser refused to allow any such extravagance while he was able to speak. But while Cristina was gone matters grew rapidly worse, the priest was brought to the bedside, and when he had done what he could he gave it as his opinion to the bystanders that the old man was dead, and left the house.

You know these people. They have a physical horror of death. Until the priest spoke, the room had been full of people. The words were hardly out of his mouth before it was empty. It was night now. They hurried down the dark steps and out into the street.

Angelo, as I have said, was away, Cristina had not come back – the simple woman-servant who had nursed the sick man fled with the rest, and the body was left alone in the flickering light of the earthen oil lamp.

Five minutes later two men looked in cautiously and crept forward toward the bed. They were the one-eyed Neapolitan mason and his Sicilian companion. They knew what they wanted. In a moment they had dragged from under the bed a small but heavy iron-bound box, and long before anyone thought of coming back to the dead man they had left the house and the village under cover of darkness. It was easy enough, for Alario’s house is the last toward the gorge which leads down here, and the thieves merely went out by the back door, got over the stone wall, and had nothing to risk after that except that possibility of meeting some belated countryman, which was very small indeed, since few of the people use that path. They had a mattock and shovel, and they made their way without accident.

I am telling you this story as it must have happened, for, of course, there were no witnesses to this part of it. The men brought the box down by the gorge, intending to bury it on the beach in the wet sand, where it would have been much safer. But the paper would have rotted if they had been obliged to leave it there long, so they dug their hole down there, close to that boulder. Yes, just where the mound is now.

Cristina did not find the doctor in Scalea, for he had been sent for from a place up the valley, half-way to San Domenico. If she had found him we would have come on his mule by the upper road, which is smoother but much longer. But Cristina took the short cut by the rocks, which passes about fifty feet above the mound, and goes round that corner. The men were digging when she passed, and she heard them at work. It would not have been like her to go by without finding out what the noise was, for she was never afraid of anything in her life, and, besides, the fishermen sometimes come ashore here at night to get a stone for an anchor or to gather sticks to make a little fire. The night was dark and Cristina probably came close to the two men before she could see what they were doing. She knew them, of course, and they knew her, and understood instantly that they were in her power. There was only one thing to be done for their safety, and they did it. They knocked her on the head, they dug the hole deep, and they buried her quickly with the iron-bound chest. They must have understood that their only chance of escaping suspicion lay in getting back to the village before their absence was noticed, for they returned immediately, and were found half and hour later gossiping quietly with the man who was making Alario’s coffin. He was a crony of theirs, and had been working at the repairs in the old man’s house. So far as I have been able to make out, the only persons who were supposed to know where Alario kept his treasure were Angelo and the one woman-servant I have mentioned. Angelo was away; it was the woman who discovered the theft.

It was easy enough to understand why no one else knew where the money was. The old man kept his door locked and the key in his pocket when he was out, and did not let the woman enter to clean the place unless he was there himself. The whole village knew that he had money somewhere, however, and the masons had probably discovered the whereabouts of the chest by climbing in at the window in his absence. If the old man had not been delirious until he lost consciousness he would have been in frightful agony of mind for his riches. The faithful woman-servant forgot their existence only for a few moments when she fled with the rest, overcome by the horror of death. Twenty minutes had not passed before she returned with the two hideous old hags who are always called in to prepare the dead for burial. Even then she had not at first the courage to go near the bed with them, but she made a pretence of dropping something, went down on her knees as if to find it, and looked under the bedstead. The walls of the room were newly whitewashed down to the floor and she saw at a glance that the chest was gone. It had been there in the afternoon, it had therefore been stolen in the short interval since she had left the room.

There are no carabineers stationed in the village; there is not so much as a municipal watchman, for there is no municipality. There never was such a place, I believe. Scalea is supposed to look after it in some mysterious way, and it takes a couple of hours to get anybody from there. As the old woman had lived in the village all her life, it did not even occur to her to apply to any civil authority for help. She simply set up a howl and ran through the village in the dark, screaming out that her dead master’s house had been robbed. Many of the people looked out, but at first no one seemed inclined to help her. Most of them, judging her by themselves, whispered to each other that she had probably stolen the money herself. The first man to move was the father of the girl whom Angelo was to marry; having collected his household, all of whom felt a personal interest in the wealth which was to have come into the family, he declared it to be his opinion that the chest had been stolen by the two journeymen masons who lodged in the house. He headed a search for them, which naturally began in Alario’s house and ended in the carpenter’s workshop, where the thieves were found discussing a measure of wine with the carpenter over the half-finished coffin, by the light of one earthen lamp filled with oil and tallow. The search-party at once accused the delinquents of the crime, and threatened to lock them up in the cellar till the carabineers could be fetched from Scalea. The two men looked at each other for one moment, and then without the slightest hesitation they put out the single light, seized the unfinished coffin between them, and using it as a sort of battering ram, dashed upon their assailants in the dark. In a few moments they were beyond pursuit.

That is the end of the first part of the story. The treasure had disappeared, and as no trace of it could be found the people supposed that the thieves had succeeded in carrying it off. The old man was buried, and when Angelo came back at last he had to borrow money to pay for the miserable funeral, and had some difficulty in doing so. He hardly needed to be told that in losing his inheritance he had lost his bride. In this part of the world marriages are made on strictly business principles, and if the promised cash is not forthcoming on the appointed day, the bride or the bridegroom whose parents have failed to produce it may as well take themselves off, for there will be no wedding. Poor Angelo knew that well enough. His father had been possessed of hardly any land, and now that the hard cash which he had brought from South America was gone, there was nothing left but debts for the building materials that were to have been used for enlarging and improving the old house. Angelo was beggared, and the nice plump little creature who was to have been his, turned up her nose at him in the most approved fashion. As for Cristina, it was several days before she was missed, for no one remembered that she had been sent to Scalea for the doctor, who had never come. She often disappeared in the same way for days together, when she could find a little work here and there at the distant farms among the hills. But when she did not come back at all, people began to wonder, and at last made up their minds that she had connived with the masons and had escaped with them.

* * *

I paused and emptied my glass.

“That sort of thing could not happen anywhere else,” observed Holger, filling his everlasting pipe again. “It is wonderful what a natural charm there is about murder and sudden death in a romantic country like this. Deeds that would be simply brutal and disgusting anywhere else become dramatic and mysterious because this is Italy, and we are living in a genuine tower of Charles V built against Barbary pirates.”

“There’s something in that,” I admitted. Holger is the most romantic man in the world inside of himself, but he always thinks it necessary to explain why he feels anything.

“I suppose they found the poor girl’s body with the box,” he said presently.

“As it seems to interest you,” I answered, “I’ll tell you the rest of the story.”

The mood had risen by this time; the outline of the Thing on the mound was clearer to our eyes than before.

* * *

The village very soon settled down to its small dull life. No one missed old Alario, who had been away so much on his voyages to South America that he had never been a familiar figure in his native place. Angelo lived in the half-finished house, and because he had no money to pay the old woman-servant, she would not stay with him, but once in a long time she would come and wash a shirt for him for old acquaintance’ sake. Besides the house, he had inherited a small patch of ground at some distance from the village; he tried to cultivate it, but he had no heart in the work, for he knew he could never pay the taxes on it and on the house, which would certainly be confiscated by the Government, or seized for the debt of the building material, which the man who had supplied it refused to take back.

Angelo was very unhappy. So long as his father had been alive and rich, every girl in the village had been in love with him; but that was all changed now. It had been pleasant to be admired and courted, and invited to drink wine by fathers who had girls to marry. It was hard to be stared at coldly, and sometimes laughed at because he had been robbed of his inheritance. He cooked his miserable meals for himself, and from being sad became melancholy and morose.

At twilight, when the day’s work was done, instead of hanging about in the open space before the church with young fellows of his own age, he took to wandering in lonely places on the outskirts of the village till it was quite dark. Then he slunk home and went to bed to save the expense of a light. But in those lonely twilight hours he began to have strange waking dreams. He was not always alone, for often when he sat on the stump of a tree, where the narrow path turns down the gorge, he was sure that a woman came up noiselessly over the rough stones, as if her feet were bare; and she stood under a clump of chestnut trees only half a dozen yards down the path, and beckoned to him without speaking. Though she was in the shadow he knew that her lips were red, and that when they parted a little and smiled at him she showed two small sharp teeth. He knew this at first rather than saw it, and he knew that it was Cristina, and that she was dead. Yet he was not afraid; he only wondered whether it was a dream, for he thought that if he had been awake he should have been frightened.

Besides, the dead woman had red lips, and that could only happen in a dream. Whenever he went near the gorge after sunset she was already there waiting for him, or else she very soon appeared, and he began to be sure of her blood-red mouth, but now each feature grew distinct, and the pale face looked at him with deep and hungry eyes.

It was the eyes that grew dim. Little by little he came to know that someday the dream would not end when he turned away to go home, but would lead him down the gorge out of which the vision rose. She was nearer now when she beckoned to him. Her cheeks were not livid like those of the dead, but pale with starvation, with the furious and unappeased physical hunger of her eyes that devoured him. They feasted on his soul and cast a spell over him, and at last they were close to his own and held him. He could not tell whether her breath was as hot as fire, or as cold as ice; he could not tell whether her red lips burned his or froze them, or whether her five fingers on his wrists seared scorching scars or bit his flesh like frost; he could not tell whether he was awake or asleep, whether she was alive or dead, but he knew that she loved him, she alone of all creatures, earthly or unearthly, and her spell had power over him.

When the moon rose high that night the shadow of that Thing was not alone down there upon the mound.

Angelo awoke in the cool dawn, drenched with dew and chilled through flesh, and blood, and bone. He opened his eyes to the faint grey light, and saw the stars were still shining overhead. He was very weak, and his heart was beating so slowly that he was almost like a man fainting. Slowly he turned his head on the mound, as on a pillow, but the other face was not there. Fear seized him suddenly, a fear unspeakable and unknown; he sprang to his feet and fled up the gorge, and he never looked behind him until he reached the door of the house on the outskirts of the village. Drearily he went to his work that day, and wearily the hours dragged themselves after the sun, till at last it touched the sea and sank, and the great sharp hills above Maratea turned purple against the dove-coloured eastern sky.

Angelo shouldered his heavy hoe and left the field. He felt less tired now than in the morning when he had begun to work, but he promised himself that he would go home without lingering by the gorge, and eat the best supper he could get himself, and sleep all night in his bed like a Christian man. Not again would he be tempted down the narrow way by a shadow with red lips and icy breath; not again would he dream that dream of terror and delight. He was near the village now; it was half an hour since the sun had set, and the cracked church bell sent little discordant echoes across the rocks and ravines to tell all good people that the day was done. Angelo stood still a moment where the path forked, where it led toward the village on the left, and down to the gorge on the right, where a clump of chestnut trees overhung the narrow way. He stood still a minute, lifting his battered hat from his head and gazing at the fast-fading sea westward, and his lips moved as he silently repeated the familiar evening prayer. His lips moved, but the words that followed them in his brain lost their meaning and turned into others, and ended in a name that he spoke aloud – Cristina! With the name, the tension of his will relaxed suddenly, reality went out and the dream took him again, and bore him on swiftly and surely like a man walking in his sleep, down, down, by the steep path in the gathering darkness. And as she glided beside him, Cristina whispered strange, sweet things in his ear, which somehow, if he had been awake, he knew that he could not quite have understood; but now they were the most wonderful words he had ever heard in his life. And she kissed him also, but not upon his mouth. He felt her sharp kisses upon his white throat, and he knew that her lips were red. So the wild dream sped on through twilight and darkness and moonrise, and all the glory of the summer’s night. But in the chilly dawn he lay as one half dead upon the mound down there, recalling and not recalling, drained of his blood, yet strangely longing to give those red lips more. Then came the fear, the awful nameless panic, the mortal horror that guards the confines of the world we see not, neither know of as we know of other things, but which we feel when its icy chill freezes our bones and stirs our hair with the touch of a ghostly hand. Once more Angelo sprang from the mound and fled up the gorge in the breaking day, but his step was less sure this time, and he panted for breath as he ran; and when he came to the bright spring of water that rises half way up the hillside, he dropped upon his knees and hands and plunged his whole face in and drank as he had never drunk before – for it was the thirst of the wounded man who has lain bleeding all night upon the battle-field.

She had him fast now, and he could not escape her, but would come to her every evening at dusk until she had drained him of his last drop of blood. It was in vain that when the day was done he tried to take another turning and to go home by a path that did not lead near the gorge. It was in vain that he made promises to himself each morning at dawn when he climbed the lonely way up from the shore to the village. It was all in vain, for when the sun sank burning into the sea, and the coolness of the evening stole out as from a hiding-place to delight the weary world, his feet turned toward the old way, and she was waiting for him in the shadow under the chestnut trees; and then all happened as before, and she fell to kissing his white throat even as she flitted lightly down the way, winding one arm about him. And as his blood failed, she grew more hungry and more thirsty every day, and every day when he awoke in the early dawn it was harder to rouse himself to the effort of climbing the steep path to the village; and when he went to his work his feet dragged painfully, and there was hardly strength in his arms to wield the heavy hoe. He scarcely spoke to anyone now, but the people said he was ‘consuming himself’ for love of the girl he was to have married when he lost his inheritance; and they laughed heartily at the thought, for this is not a very romantic country. At this time Antonio, the man who stays here to look after the tower, returned from a visit to his people, who live near Salerno. He had been away all the time since before Alario’s death and knew nothing of what had happened. He has told me that he came back late in the afternoon and shut himself up in the tower to eat and sleep, for he was very tired. It was past midnight when he awoke, and when he looked out toward the mound, and he saw something, and he did not sleep again that night. When he went out again in the morning it was broad daylight, and there was nothing to be seen on the mound but loose stones and driven sand. Yet he did not go very near it; he went straight up the path to the village and directly to the house of the old priest.

“I have seen an evil thing this night,” he said; “I have seen how the dead drink the blood of the living. And the blood is the life.”

“Tell me what you have seen,” said the priest in reply.

Antonio told him everything he had seen.

“You must bring your book and your holy water tonight,” he added. “I will be here before sunset to go down with you, and if it pleases your reverence to sup with me while we wait, I will make ready.”

“I will come,” the priest answered, “for I have read in old books of these strange beings which are neither quick nor dead, and which lie ever fresh in their graves, stealing out in the dusk to taste life and blood.”

Antonio cannot read, but he was glad to see that the priest understood the business; for, of course, the books must have been instructed him as to the best means of quieting the half-living Thing for ever.

So Antonio went away to his work, which consists largely in sitting on the shady side of the tower, when he is not perched upon a rock with a fishing-line catching nothing. But on that day he went twice to look at the mound in the bright sunlight, and he searched round and round it for some hole through which the being might get in and out; but he found none. When the sun began to sink and the air was cooler in the shadows, he went up to fetch the old priest, carrying a little wicker basket with him; and in this they placed a bottle of holy water, and the basin, and sprinkler, and the stole which the priest would need; and they came down and waited in the door of the tower till it should be dark. But while the light still lingered very grey and faint, they saw something moving, just there, two figures, a man’s that walked, and a woman’s that flitted beside him, and while her head lay on his shoulder she kissed his throat. The priest has told me that, too, and that his teeth chattered and he grasped Antonio’s arm. The vision passed and disappeared into the shadow. Then Antonio got the leathern flask of strong liquor, which he kept for great occasions, and poured such a draught as made the old man feel almost young again; and gave the priest his stole to put on and the holy water to carry, and they went out together toward the spot where the work was to be done. Antonio says that in spite of the rum his own knees shook together, and the priest stumbled over his Latin. For when they were yet a few yards from the mound the flickering light of the lantern fell upon Angelo’s white face, unconscious as if in sleep, and on his upturned throat, over which a very thin red line of blood trickled down into his collar; and the flickering light of the lantern played upon another face that looked up from the feast, upon two deep, dead eyes that saw in spite of death – upon parted lips, redder than life itself – upon two gleaming teeth on which glistened a rosy drop. Then the priest, good old man, shut his eyes tight and showered holy water before him, and his cracked voice rose almost to a scream; and then Antonio, who is no coward after all, raised his pick n one hand and the lantern in the other, as he sprang forward, not knowing what the end should be; and then he swears that he heard a woman’s cry, and the Thing was gone, and Angelo lay alone on the mound unconscious, with the red line on his throat and the beads of deathly sweat on his cold forehead. They lifted him, half-dead as he was, and laid him on the ground close by; then Antonio went to work, and the priest helped him, thought he was old and could not do much; and they dug deep, and at last Antonio, standing in the grave, stooped down with his lantern to see what he might see.

His hair used to be dark brown, with grizzled streaks about the temples; in less than a month from that day he was as grey as a badger. He was a miner when he was young, and most of these fellows have seen ugly sights now and then, when accidents have happened, but he had never seen what he saw that night – that Thing which is neither alive nor dead, that Thing that will abide neither above ground nor in the grave. Antonio had brought something with him which the priest had not noticed – a sharp stake shaped from a piece of tough old driftwood. He had it with him now, and he had his heavy pick, and he had taken the lantern down into the grave. I don’t think any power on earth could make him speak of what happened then, and the old priest was too frightened to look in. He says he heard Antonio breathing like a wild beast, and moving as if he were fighting with something almost as strong as himself; and he heard an evil sound also, with blows, as of something violently driven through flesh and bone; and then, the most awful sound of all – a woman’s shriek, the unearthly scream of a woman neither dead nor alive, but buried deep for many days. And he, the poor old priest, could only rock himself as he knelt there in the sand, crying aloud his prayers and exorcisms to drown these dreadful sounds. Then suddenly a small iron-bound chest was thrown up and rolled over against the old man’s knee, and in a moment more Antonio was beside him, his face as white as tallow in the flickering light of the lantern, shoveling the sand and pebbles into the grave with furious haste, and looking over the edge till the pit was half full; and the priest said that there was much fresh blood on Antonio’s hands and on his clothes.

* * *

I had come to the end of my story. Holger finished his wine and leaned back in his chair.

“So Angelo got his own again,” he said. “Did he marry the prim and plump young person to whom he had been betrothed?”

“No; he had been badly frightened. He went to South America, and has not been heard of since.”

“And that poor thing’s body is there still, I suppose,” said Holger. “Is it quite dead yet, I wonder?”

I wonder, too. But whether it be dead or alive, I should hardly care to see it, even in broad daylight. Antonio is as grey as a badger, and he has never been quite the same man since that night.

Lot No. 249

Arthur Conan Doyle

Of the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and final judgment will ever be delivered. It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old’s, and from such other people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of Nature has been overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of Nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.

In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and knitted together with withes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong has been that tide of young, English life. And what was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies, save here and there in some old-world churchyard a few scratches upon a stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet here were the silent stair and the grey, old wall, with bend and saltire and many another heraldic device still to be read upon its surface, like grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed.

In the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms which opened on to the separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting-room and of a bedroom, while the two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were used, the one as a coal-cellar, and the other as the living-room of the servant, or scout, Thomas Styles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men above him. To right and to left was a line of lecture-rooms and of offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion, which made the chambers popular among the more studious undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied them now – Abercrombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him, and William Monkhouse Lee upon the lowest storey.

It was ten o’clock on a bright, spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay back in his arm-chair, his feet upon the fender, and his briar-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend Jephro Hastie. Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river, but apart from their dress no one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men – men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust. Hastie, indeed, was stroke of his college boat, and Smith was an even better oar, but a coming examination had already cast its shadow over him and held him to his work, save for a few hours a week which health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with scattered bones, models, and anatomical plates, pointed to the extent as well as the nature of his studies, while a couple of single-sticks and a set of boxing-gloves above the mantelpiece hinted at the means by which, with Hastie’s help, he might take his exercise in its most compressed and least-distant form. They knew each other very well – so well that they could sit now in that soothing silence which is the very highest development of companionship.

“Have some whisky,” said Abercrombie Smith at last between two cloudbursts. “Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle.”

“No, thanks. I’m in for the sculls. I don’t liquor when I’m training. How about you?”

“I’m reading hard. I think it best to leave it alone.”

Hastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence.

“By the way, Smith,” asked Hastie, presently, “have you made the acquaintance of either of the fellows on your stair yet?”

“Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more.”

“Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but as much as I want. I don’t think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there’s much amiss with Monkhouse Lee.”

“Meaning the thin one?”

“Precisely. He is a gentlemanly little fellow. I don’t think there is any vice in him. But then you can’t know him without knowing Bellingham.”

“Meaning the fat one?”

“Yes, the fat one. And he’s a man whom I, for one, would rather not know.”

Abercrombie Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced across at his companion.

“What’s up, then?” he asked. “Drink? Cards? Cad? You used not to be censorious.”

“Ah! You evidently don’t know the man, or you wouldn’t ask. There’s something damnable about him – something reptilian. My gorge always rises at him. I should put him down as a man with secret vices – an evil liver. He’s no fool, though. They say that he is one of the best men in his line that they have ever had in the college.”

“Medicine or classics?”

“Eastern languages. He’s a demon at them. Chillingworth met him somewhere above the second cataract last long, and he told me that he just prattled to the Arabs as if he had been born and nursed and weaned among them. He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat. There are some old hermit Johnnies up in those parts who sit on rocks and scowl and spit at the casual stranger. Well, when they saw this chap Bellingham, before he had said five words they just lay down on their bellies and wriggled. Chillingworth said that he never saw anything like it. Bellingham seemed to take it as his right, too, and strutted about among them and talked down to them like a Dutch uncle. Pretty good for an undergrad. of Old’s, wasn’t it?”

“Why do you say you can’t know Lee without knowing Bellingham?”

“Because Bellingham is engaged to his sister Eveline. Such a bright little girl, Smith! I know the whole family well. It’s disgusting to see that brute with her. A toad and a dove, that’s what they always remind me of.”

Abercrombie Smith grinned and knocked his ashes out against the side of the grate.

“You show every card in your hand, old chap,” said he. “What a prejudiced, green-eyed, evil-thinking old man it is! You have really nothing against the fellow except that.”

“Well, I’ve known her ever since she was as long as that cherry-wood pipe, and I don’t like to see her taking risks. And it is a risk. He looks beastly. And he has a beastly temper, a venomous temper. You remember his row with Long Norton?”

“No; you always forget that I am a freshman.”

“Ah, it was last winter. Of course. Well, you know the towpath along by the river. There were several fellows going along it, Bellingham in front, when they came on an old market-woman coming the other way. It had been raining – you know what those fields are like when it has rained – and the path ran between the river and a great puddle that was nearly as broad. Well, what does this swine do but keep the path, and push the old girl into the mud, where she and her marketings came to terrible grief. It was a blackguard thing to do, and Long Norton, who is as gentle a fellow as ever stepped, told him what he thought of it. One word led to another, and it ended in Norton laying his stick across the fellow’s shoulders. There was the deuce of a fuss about it, and it’s a treat to see the way in which Bellingham looks at Norton when they meet now. By Jove, Smith, it’s nearly eleven o’clock!”

“No hurry. Light your pipe again.”

“Not I. I’m supposed to be in training. Here I’ve been sitting gossiping when I ought to have been safely tucked up. I’ll borrow your skull, if you can share it. Williams has had mine for a month. I’ll take the little bones of your ear, too, if you are sure you won’t need them. Thanks very much. Never mind a bag, I can carry them very well under my arm. Good night, my son, and take my tip as to your neighbour.”

When Hastie, bearing his anatomical plunder, had clattered off down the winding stair, Abercrombie Smith hurled his pipe into the wastepaper basket, and drawing his chair nearer to the lamp, plunged into a formidable, green-covered volume, adorned with great, coloured maps of that strange, internal kingdom of which we are the hapless and helpless monarchs. Though a freshman at Oxford, the student was not so in medicine, for he had worked for four years at Glasgow and at Berlin, and this coming examination would place him finally as a member of his profession. With his firm mouth, broad forehead, and clear-cut, somewhat hard-featured face, he was a man who, if he had no brilliant talent, was yet so dogged, so patient, and so strong that he might in the end overtop a more showy genius. A man who can hold his own among Scotchmen and North Germans is not a man to be easily set back. Smith had left a name at Glasgow and at Berlin, and he was bent now upon doing as much at Oxford, if hard work and devotion could accomplish it.

He had sat reading for about an hour, and the hands of the noisy carriage clock upon the side-table were rapidly closing together upon the twelve, when a sudden sound fell upon the student’s ear – a sharp, rather shrill sound, like the hissing intake of a man’s breath who gasps under some strong emotion. Smith laid down his book and slanted his ear to listen. There was no one on either side or above him, so that the interruption came certainly from the neighbour beneath – the same neighbour of whom Hastie had given so unsavoury an account. Smith knew him only as a flabby, pale-faced man of silent and studious habits, a man whose lamp threw a golden bar from the old turret even after he had extinguished his own. This community in lateness had formed a certain silent bond between them. It was soothing to Smith when the hours stole on towards dawning to feel that there was another so close who set as small a value upon his sleep as he did. Even now, as his thoughts turned towards him, Smith’s feelings were kindly. Hastie was a good fellow, but he was rough, strong-fibred, with no imagination or sympathy. He could not tolerate departures from what he looked upon as the model type of manliness. If a man could not be measured by a public-school standard, then he was beyond the pale with Hastie. Like so many who are themselves robust, he was apt to confuse the constitution with the character, to ascribe to want of principle what was really a want of circulation. Smith, with his stronger mind, knew his friend’s habit, and made allowance for it now as his thoughts turned towards the man beneath him.

There was no return of the singular sound, and Smith was about to turn to his work once more, when suddenly there broke out in the silence of the night a hoarse cry, a positive scream – the call of a man who is moved and shaken beyond all control. Smith sprang out of his chair and dropped his book. He was a man of fairly firm fibre, but there was something in this sudden, uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled his blood and pringled in his skin. Coming in such a place and at such an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head. Should he rush down, or was it better to wait? He had all the national hatred of making a scene, and he knew so little of his neighbour that he would not lightly intrude upon his affairs. For a moment he stood in doubt and even as he balanced the matter there was a quick rattle of footsteps upon the stairs, and young Monkhouse Lee, half-dressed and as white as ashes, burst into his room.

“Come down!” he gasped. “Bellingham’s ill.”

Abercrombie Smith followed him closely downstairs into the sitting-room which was beneath his own, and intent as he was upon the matter in hand, he could not but take an amazed glance around him as he crossed the threshold. It was such a chamber as he had never seen before – a museum rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was slung in a double noose.

In the centre of this singular chamber was a large, square table, littered with papers, bottles, and the dried leaves of some graceful, palm-like plant. These varied objects had all been heaped together in order to make room for a mummy case, which had been conveyed from the wall, as was evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of the table. The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with its claw-like hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up against the sarcophagus was an old, yellow scroll of papyrus, and in front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of the room, his head thrown back, his widely opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every expiration.

“My God! He’s dying!” cried Monkhouse Lee, distractedly.

He was a slim, handsome young fellow, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, of a Spanish rather than of an English type, with a Celtic intensity of manner which contrasted with the Saxon phlegm of Abercrombie Smith.

“Only a faint, I think,” said the medical student. “Just give me a hand with him. You take his feet. Now on to the sofa. Can you kick all those little wooden devils off? What a litter it is! Now he will be all right if we undo his collar and give him some water. What has he been up to at all?”

“I don’t know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty well, you know. It is very good of you to come down.”

“His heart is going like a pair of castanets,” said Smith, laying his hand on the breast of the unconscious man. “He seems to me to be frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him! What a face he has got on him!”

It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of fear, but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the under side of a sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time been considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled ears protruding at the sides. His light-grey eyes were still open, the pupils dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. It seemed to Smith as he looked down upon him that he had never seen Nature’s danger signals flying so plainly upon a man’s countenance, and his thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had given him an hour before.

“What the deuce can have frightened him so?” he asked.

“It’s the mummy.”

“The mummy? How, then?”

“I don’t know. It’s beastly and morbid. I wish he would drop it. It’s the second fright he has given me. It was the same last winter. I found him just like this, with that horrid thing in front of him.”

“What does he want with the mummy, then?”

“Oh, he’s a crank, you know. It’s his hobby. He knows more about these things than any man in England. But I wish he wouldn’t! Ah, he’s beginning to come to.”

A faint tinge of colour had begun to steal back into Bellingham’s ghastly cheeks, and his eyelids shivered like a sail after a calm. He clasped and unclasped his hands, drew a long, thin breath between his teeth, and suddenly jerking up his head, threw a glance of recognition around him. As his eyes fell upon the mummy, he sprang off the sofa, seized the roll of papyrus, thrust it into a drawer, turned the key, and staggered back on to the sofa.

“What’s up?” he asked. “What do you chaps want?”

“You’ve been shrieking out and making no end of a fuss,” said Monkhouse Lee. “If our neighbour here from above hadn’t come down, I’m sure I don’t know what I should have done with you.”

“Ah, it’s Abercrombie Smith,” said Bellingham, glancing up at him. “How very good of you to come in! What a fool I am! Oh, my God, what a fool I am!”

He sank his head on to his hands, and burst into peal after peal of hysterical laughter.

“Look here! Drop it!” cried Smith, shaking him roughly by the shoulder.

“Your nerves are all in a jangle. You must drop these little midnight games with mummies, or you’ll be going off your chump. You’re all on wires now.”

“I wonder,” said Bellingham, “whether you would be as cool as I am if you had seen –”

“What then?”

“Oh, nothing. I meant that I wonder if you could sit up at night with a mummy without trying your nerves. I have no doubt that you are quite right. I dare say that I have been taking it out of myself too much lately. But I am all right now. Please don’t go, though. Just wait for a few minutes until I am quite myself.”

“The room is very close,” remarked Lee, throwing open the window and letting in the cool night air.

“It’s balsamic resin,” said Bellingham. He lifted up one of the dried palmate leaves from the table and frizzled it over the chimney of the lamp. It broke away into heavy smoke wreaths, and a pungent, biting odour filled the chamber. “It’s the sacred plant – the plant of the priests,” he remarked. “Do you know anything of Eastern languages, Smith?”

“Nothing at all. Not a word.”

The answer seemed to lift a weight from the Egyptologist’s mind.

“By the way,” he continued, “how long was it from the time that you ran down, until I came to my senses?”

“Not long. Some four or five minutes.”

“I thought it could not be very long,” said he, drawing a long breath. “But what a strange thing unconsciousness is! There is no measurement to it. I could not tell from my own sensations if it were seconds or weeks. Now that gentleman on the table was packed up in the days of the eleventh dynasty, some forty centuries ago, and yet if he could find his tongue, he would tell us that this lapse of time has been but a closing of the eyes and a reopening of them. He is a singularly fine mummy, Smith.”

Smith stepped over to the table and looked down with a professional eye at the black and twisted form in front of him. The features, though horribly discoloured, were perfect, and two little nut-like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was drawn tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black, coarse hair fell over the ears. Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent joints and craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing which made Smith’s gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with their parchment-like covering, were exposed, and the sunken, leaden-hued abdomen, with the long slit where the embalmer had left his mark; but the lower limbs were wrapped round with coarse, yellow bandages. A number of little clove-like pieces of myrrh and of cassia were sprinkled over the body, and lay scattered on the inside of the case.

“I don’t know his name,” said Bellingham, passing his hand over the shrivelled head. “You see the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see it printed on his case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked him up.”

“He has been a very pretty sort of fellow in his day,” remarked Abercrombie Smith.

“He has been a giant. His mummy is six feet seven in length, and that would be a giant over there, for they were never a very robust race. Feel these great, knotted bones, too. He would be a nasty fellow to tackle.”

“Perhaps these very hands helped to build the stones into the pyramids,” suggested Monkhouse Lee, looking down with disgust in his eyes at the crooked, unclean talons.

“No fear. This fellow has been pickled in natron, and looked after in the most approved style. They did not serve hodsmen in that fashion. Salt or bitumen was enough for them. It has been calculated that this sort of thing cost about seven hundred and thirty pounds in our money. Our friend was a noble at the least. What do you make of that small inscription near his feet, Smith?”

“I told you that I know no Eastern tongue.”

“Ah, so you did. It is the name of the embalmer, I take it. A very conscientious worker he must have been. I wonder how many modern works will survive four thousand years?”

He kept on speaking lightly and rapidly, but it was evident to Abercrombie Smith that he was still palpitating with fear. His hands shook, his lower lip trembled, and look where he would, his eye always came sliding round to his gruesome companion. Through all his fear, however, there was a suspicion of triumph in his tone and manner. His eyes shone, and his footstep, as he paced the room, was brisk and jaunty. He gave the impression of a man who has gone through an ordeal, the marks of which he still bears upon him, but which has helped him to his end.

“You’re not going yet?” he cried, as Smith rose from the sofa.

At the prospect of solitude, his fears seemed to crowd back upon him, and he stretched out a hand to detain him.

“Yes, I must go. I have my work to do. You are all right now. I think that with your nervous system you should take up some less morbid study.”

“Oh, I am not nervous as a rule; and I have unwrapped mummies before.”

“You fainted last time,” observed Monkhouse Lee.

“Ah, yes, so I did. Well, I must have a nerve tonic or a course of electricity. You are not going, Lee?”

“I’ll do whatever you wish, Ned.”

“Then I’ll come down with you and have a shakedown on your sofa. Good night, Smith. I am so sorry to have disturbed you with my foolishness.”

They shook hands, and as the medical student stumbled up the spiral and irregular stair he heard a key turn in a door, and the steps of his two new acquaintances as they descended to the lower floor.

In this strange way began the acquaintance between Edward Bellingham and Abercrombie Smith, an acquaintance which the latter, at least, had no desire to push further. Bellingham, however, appeared to have taken a fancy to his rough-spoken neighbour, and made his advances in such a way that he could hardly be repulsed without absolute brutality. Twice he called to thank Smith for his assistance, and many times afterwards he looked in with books, papers and such other civilities as two bachelor neighbours can offer each other. He was, as Smith soon found, a man of wide reading, with catholic tastes and an extraordinary memory. His manner, too, was so pleasing and suave that one came, after a time, to overlook his repellent appearance. For a jaded and wearied man he was no unpleasant companion, and Smith found himself, after a time, looking forward to his visits, and even returning them.

Clever as he undoubtedly was, however, the medical student seemed to detect a dash of insanity in the man. He broke out at times into a high, inflated style of talk which was in contrast with the simplicity of his life.

“It is a wonderful thing,” he cried, “to feel that one can command powers of good and of evil – a ministering angel or a demon of vengeance.” And again, of Monkhouse Lee, he said, – “Lee is a good fellow, an honest fellow, but he is without strength or ambition. He would not make a fit partner for a man with a great enterprise. He would not make a fit partner for me.”

At such hints and innuendoes stolid Smith, puffing solemnly at his pipe, would simply raise his eyebrows and shake his head, with little interjections of medical wisdom as to earlier hours and fresher air.

One habit Bellingham had developed of late which Smith knew to be a frequent herald of a weakening mind. He appeared to be for ever talking to himself. At late hours of the night, when there could be no visitor with him, Smith could still hear his voice beneath him in a low, muffled monologue, sunk almost to a whisper, and yet very audible in the silence. This solitary babbling annoyed and distracted the student, so that he spoke more than once to his neighbour about it. Bellingham, however, flushed up at the charge, and denied curtly that he had uttered a sound; indeed, he showed more annoyance over the matter than the occasion seemed to demand.

Had Abercrombie Smith had any doubt as to his own ears he had not to go far to find corroboration. Tom Styles, the little wrinkled man-servant who had attended to the wants of the lodgers in the turret for a longer time than any man’s memory could carry him, was sorely put to it over the same matter.

“If you please, sir,” said he, as he tidied down the top chamber one morning, “do you think Mr. Bellingham is all right, sir?”

“All right, Styles?”

“Yes, sir. Right in the head, sir.”

“Why should he not be, then?”

“Well, I don’t know, sir. His habits has changed of late. He’s not the same man he used to be, though I make free to say that he was never quite one of my gentlemen, like Mr. Hastie or yourself, sir. He’s took to talkin’ to himself something awful. I wonder it don’t disturb you. I don’t know what to make of him, sir.”

“I don’t know what business it is of yours, Styles.”

“Well, I takes an interest, Mr. Smith. It may be forward of me, but I can’t help it. I feel sometimes as if I was mother and father to my young gentlemen. It all falls on me when things go wrong and the relations come. But Mr. Bellingham, sir. I want to know what it is that walks about his room sometimes when he’s out and when the door’s locked on the outside.”

“Eh? You’re talking nonsense, Styles.”

“Maybe so, sir; but I heard it more’n once with my own ears.”

“Rubbish, Styles.”

“Very good, sir. You’ll ring the bell if you want me.”

Abercrombie Smith gave little heed to the gossip of the old man-servant, but a small incident occurred a few days later which left an unpleasant effect upon his mind, and brought the words of Styles forcibly to his memory.

Bellingham had come up to see him late one night, and was entertaining him with an interesting account of the rock tombs of Beni Hassan in Upper Egypt, when Smith, whose hearing was remarkably acute, distinctly heard the sound of a door opening on the landing below.

“There’s some fellow gone in or out of your room,” he remarked.

Bellingham sprang up and stood helpless for a moment, with the expression of a man who is half-incredulous and half-afraid.

“I surely locked it. I am almost positive that I locked it,” he stammered. “No one could have opened it.”

“Why, I hear someone coming up the steps now,” said Smith.

Bellingham rushed out through the door, slammed it loudly behind him, and hurried down the stairs. About half-way down Smith heard him stop, and thought he caught the sound of whispering. A moment later the door beneath him shut, a key creaked in a lock, and Bellingham, with beads of moisture upon his pale face, ascended the stairs once more, and re-entered the room.

“It’s all right,” he said, throwing himself down in a chair. “It was that fool of a dog. He had pushed the door open. I don’t know how I came to forget to lock it.”

“I didn’t know you kept a dog,” said Smith, looking very thoughtfully at the disturbed face of his companion.

“Yes, I haven’t had him long. I must get rid of him. He’s a great nuisance.”

“He must be, if you find it so hard to shut him up. I should have thought that shutting the door would have been enough, without locking it.”

“I want to prevent old Styles from letting him out. He’s of some value, you know, and it would be awkward to lose him.”

“I am a bit of a dog-fancier myself,” said Smith, still gazing hard at his companion from the corner of his eyes. “Perhaps you’ll let me have a look at it.”

“Certainly. But I am afraid it cannot be tonight; I have an appointment. Is that clock right? Then I am a quarter of an hour late already. You’ll excuse me, I am sure.”

He picked up his cap and hurried from the room. In spite of his appointment, Smith heard him re-enter his own chamber and lock his door upon the inside.

This interview left a disagreeable impression upon the medical student’s mind. Bellingham had lied to him, and lied so clumsily that it looked as if he had desperate reasons for concealing the truth. Smith knew that his neighbour had no dog. He knew, also, that the step which he had heard upon the stairs was not the step of an animal. But if it were not, then what could it be? There was old Style’s statement about the something which used to pace the room at times when the owner was absent. Could it be a woman? Smith rather inclined to the view. If so, it would mean disgrace and expulsion to Bellingham if it were discovered by the authorities, so that his anxiety and falsehoods might be accounted for. And yet it was inconceivable that an undergraduate could keep a woman in his rooms without being instantly detected. Be the explanation what it might, there was something ugly about it, and Smith determined, as he turned to his books, to discourage all further attempts at intimacy on the part of his soft-spoken and ill-favoured neighbour.

But his work was destined to interruption that night. He had hardly caught up the broken threads when a firm, heavy footfall came three steps at a time from below, and Hastie, in blazer and flannels, burst into the room.

“Still at it!” said he, plumping down into his wonted arm-chair. “What a chap you are to stew! I believe an earthquake might come and knock Oxford into a cocked hat, and you would sit perfectly placid with your books among the ruins. However, I won’t bore you long. Three whiffs of baccy, and I am off.”

“What’s the news, then?” asked Smith, cramming a plug of bird’s-eye into his briar with his forefinger.

“Nothing very much. Wilson made 70 for the freshmen against the eleven. They say that they will play him instead of Buddicomb, for Buddicomb is clean off colour. He used to be able to bowl a little, but it’s nothing but half-volleys and long hops now.”

“Medium right,” suggested Smith, with the intense gravity which comes upon a ‘varsity man when he speaks of athletics.

“Inclining to fast, with a work from leg. Comes with the arm about three inches or so. He used to be nasty on a wet wicket. Oh, by the way, have you heard about Long Norton?”

“What’s that?”

“He’s been attacked.”

“Attacked?”

“Yes, just as he was turning out of the High Street, and within a hundred yards of the gate of Old’s.”

“But who –”

“Ah, that’s the rub! If you said ‘what,’ you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be inclined to agree with him.”

“What, then? Have we come down to spooks?”

Abercrombie Smith puffed his scientific contempt.

“Well, no; I don’t think that is quite the idea, either. I am inclined to think that if any showman has lost a great ape lately, and the brute is in these parts, a jury would find a true bill against it. Norton passes that way every night, you know, about the same hour. There’s a tree that hangs low over the path – the big elm from Rainy’s garden. Norton thinks the thing dropped on him out of the tree. Anyhow, he was nearly strangled by two arms, which, he says, were as strong and as thin as steel bands. He saw nothing; only those beastly arms that tightened and tightened on him. He yelled his head nearly off, and a couple of chaps came running, and the thing went over the wall like a cat. He never got a fair sight of it the whole time. It gave Norton a shake up, I can tell you. I tell him it has been as good as a change at the seaside for him.”

“A garrotter, most likely,” said Smith.

“Very possibly. Norton says not; but we don’t mind what he says. The garrotter had long nails, and was pretty smart at swinging himself over walls. By the way, your beautiful neighbour would be pleased if he heard about it. He had a grudge against Norton, and he’s not a man, from what I know of him, to forget his little debts. But hallo, old chap, what have you got in your noddle?”

“Nothing,” Smith answered, curtly.

He had started in his chair, and the look had flashed over his face which comes upon a man who is struck suddenly by some unpleasant idea.

“You looked as if something I had said had taken you on the raw. By the way, you have made the acquaintance of Master B. since I looked in last, have you not? Young Monkhouse Lee told me something to that effect.”

“Yes; I know him slightly. He has been up here once or twice.”

“Well, you’re big enough and ugly enough to take care of yourself. He’s not what I should call exactly a healthy sort of Johnny, though, no doubt, he’s very clever, and all that. But you’ll soon find out for yourself. Lee is all right; he’s a very decent little fellow. Well, so long, old chap! I row Mullins for the Vice-Chancellor’s pot on Wednesday week, so mind you come down, in case I don’t see you before.”

Bovine Smith laid down his pipe and turned stolidly to his books once more. But with all the will in the world, he found it very hard to keep his mind upon his work. It would slip away to brood upon the man beneath him, and upon the little mystery which hung round his chambers. Then his thoughts turned to this singular attack of which Hastie had spoken, and to the grudge which Bellingham was said to owe to the object of it. The two ideas would persist in rising together in his mind, as though there were some close and intimate connection between them. And yet the suspicion was so dim and vague that it could not be put down in words.

“Confound the chap!” cried Smith, as he shied his book on pathology across the room. “He has spoiled my night’s reading, and that’s reason enough, if there were no other, why I should steer clear of him in the future.”

For ten days the medical student confined himself so closely to his studies that he neither saw nor heard anything of either of the men beneath him. At the hours when Bellingham had been accustomed to visit him, he took care to sport his oak, and though he more than once heard a knocking at his outer door, he resolutely refused to answer it. One afternoon, however, he was descending the stairs when, just as he was passing it, Bellingham’s door flew open, and young Monkhouse Lee came out with his eyes sparkling and a dark flush of anger upon his olive cheeks. Close at his heels followed Bellingham, his fat, unhealthy face all quivering with malignant passion.

“You fool!” he hissed. “You’ll be sorry.”

“Very likely,” cried the other. “Mind what I say. It’s off! I won’t hear of it!”

“You’ve promised, anyhow.”

“Oh, I’ll keep that! I won’t speak. But I’d rather little Eva was in her grave. Once for all, it’s off. She’ll do what I say. We don’t want to see you again.”

So much Smith could not avoid hearing, but he hurried on, for he had no wish to be involved in their dispute. There had been a serious breach between them, that was clear enough, and Lee was going to cause the engagement with his sister to be broken off. Smith thought of Hastie’s comparison of the toad and the dove, and was glad to think that the matter was at an end. Bellingham’s face when he was in a passion was not pleasant to look upon. He was not a man to whom an innocent girl could be trusted for life. As he walked, Smith wondered languidly what could have caused the quarrel, and what the promise might be which Bellingham had been so anxious that Monkhouse Lee should keep.

It was the day of the sculling match between Hastie and Mullins, and a stream of men were making their way down to the banks of the Isis. A May sun was shining brightly, and the yellow path was barred with the black shadows of tall elm-trees. On either side the grey colleges lay back from the road, the hoary old mothers of minds looking out from their high, mullioned windows at the tide of young life which swept so merrily past them. Black-clad tutors, prim officials, pale, reading men, brown-faced, straw-hatted young athletes in white sweaters or many-coloured blazers, all were hurrying towards the blue, winding river which curves through the Oxford meadows.

Abercrombie Smith, with the intuition of an old oarsman, chose his position at the point where he knew that the struggle, if there were a struggle, would come. Far off he heard the hum which announced the start, the gathering roar of the approach, the thunder of running feet, and the shouts of the men in the boats beneath him. A spray of half-clad, deep-breathing runners shot past him, and craning over their shoulders, he saw Hastie pulling a steady thirty-six, while his opponent, with a jerky forty, was a good boat’s length behind him. Smith gave a cheer for his friend, and pulling out his watch, was starting off again for his chambers, when he felt a touch upon his shoulder, and found that young Monkhouse Lee was beside him.

“I saw you there,” he said, in a timid, deprecating way. “I wanted to speak to you, if you could spare me a half-hour. This cottage is mine. I share it with Harrington of King’s. Come in and have a cup of tea.”

“I must be back presently,” said Smith. “I am hard on the grind at present. But I’ll come in for a few minutes with pleasure. I wouldn’t have come out only Hastie is a friend of mine.”

“So he is of mine. Hasn’t he a beautiful style? Mullins wasn’t in it. But come into the cottage. It’s a little den of a place, but it is pleasant to work in during the summer months.”

It was a small, square, white building, with green doors and shutters, and a rustic trellis-work porch, standing back some fifty yards from the river’s bank. Inside, the main room was roughly fitted up as a study – deal table, unpainted shelves with books, and a few cheap oleographs upon the wall. A kettle sang upon a spirit-stove, and there were tea things upon a tray on the table.

“Try that chair and have a cigarette,” said Lee. “Let me pour you out a cup of tea. It’s so good of you to come in, for I know that your time is a good deal taken up. I wanted to say to you that, if I were you, I should change my rooms at once.”

“Eh?”

Smith sat staring at a lighted match in one hand and his unlit cigarette in the other.

“Yes; it must seem very extraordinary, and the worst of it is that I cannot give my reasons, for I am under a solemn promise – a very solemn promise. But I may go so far as to say that I don’t think Bellingham is a very safe man to live near. I intend to camp out here as much as I can for a time.”

“Not safe! What do you mean?”

“Ah, that’s what I mustn’t say. But do take my advice and move your rooms. We had a grand row today. You must have heard us, for you came down the stairs.”

“I saw that you had fallen out.”

“He’s a horrible chap, Smith. That is the only word for him. I have had doubts about him ever since that night when he fainted – you remember, when you came down. I taxed him today, and he told me things that made my hair rise, and wanted me to stand in with him. I’m not straight-laced, but I am a clergyman’s son, you know, and I think there are some things which are quite beyond the pale. I only thank God that I found him out before it was too late, for he was to have married into my family.”

“This is all very fine, Lee,” said Abercrombie Smith curtly. “But either you are saying a great deal too much or a great deal too little.”

“I give you a warning.”

“If there is real reason for warning, no promise can bind you. If I see a rascal about to blow a place up with dynamite no pledge will stand in my way of preventing him.”

“Ah, but I cannot prevent him, and I can do nothing but warn you.”

“Without saying what you warn me against.”

“Against Bellingham.”

“But that is childish. Why should I fear him, or any man?”

“I can’t tell you. I can only entreat you to change your rooms. You are in danger where you are. I don’t even say that Bellingham would wish to injure you. But it might happen, for he is a dangerous neighbour just now.”

“Perhaps I know more than you think,” said Smith, looking keenly at the young man’s boyish, earnest face. “Suppose I tell you that someone else shares Bellingham’s rooms.”

Monkhouse Lee sprang from his chair in uncontrollable excitement.

“You know, then?” he gasped.

“A woman.”

Lee dropped back again with a groan.

“My lips are sealed,” he said. “I must not speak.”

“Well, anyhow,” said Smith, rising, “it is not likely that I should allow myself to be frightened out of rooms which suit me very nicely. It would be a little too feeble for me to move out all my goods and chattels because you say that Bellingham might in some unexplained way do me an injury. I think that I’ll just take my chance, and stay where I am, and as I see that it’s nearly five o’clock, I must ask you to excuse me.”

He bade the young student adieu in a few curt words, and made his way homeward through the sweet spring evening, feeling half-ruffled, half-amused, as any other strong, unimaginative man might who has been menaced by a vague and shadowy danger.

There was one little indulgence which Abercrombie Smith always allowed himself, however closely his work might press upon him. Twice a week, on the Tuesday and the Friday, it was his invariable custom to walk over to Farlingford, the residence of Doctor Plumptree Peterson, situated about a mile and a half out of Oxford. Peterson had been a close friend of Smith’s elder brother, Francis, and as he was a bachelor, fairly well-to-do, with a good cellar and a better library, his house was a pleasant goal for a man who was in need of a brisk walk. Twice a week, then, the medical student would swing out there along the dark country roads and spend a pleasant hour in Peterson’s comfortable study, discussing, over a glass of old port, the gossip of the ‘varsity or the latest developments of medicine or of surgery.

On the day which followed his interview with Monkhouse Lee, Smith shut up his books at a quarter past eight, the hour when he usually started for his friend’s house. As he was leaving his room, however, his eyes chanced to fall upon one of the books which Bellingham had lent him, and his conscience pricked him for not having returned it. However repellent the man might be, he should not be treated with discourtesy. Taking the book, he walked downstairs and knocked at his neighbour’s door. There was no answer; but on turning the handle he found that it was unlocked. Pleased at the thought of avoiding an interview, he stepped inside, and placed the book with his card upon the table.

The lamp was turned half down, but Smith could see the details of the room plainly enough. It was all much as he had seen it before – the frieze, the animal-headed gods, the hanging crocodile, and the table littered over with papers and dried leaves. The mummy case stood upright against the wall, but the mummy itself was missing. There was no sign of any second occupant of the room, and he felt as he withdrew that he had probably done Bellingham an injustice. Had he a guilty secret to preserve, he would hardly leave his door open so that all the world might enter.

The spiral stair was as black as pitch, and Smith was slowly making his way down its irregular steps, when he was suddenly conscious that something had passed him in the darkness. There was a faint sound, a whiff of air, a light brushing past his elbow, but so slight that he could scarcely be certain of it. He stopped and listened, but the wind was rustling among the ivy outside, and he could hear nothing else.

“Is that you, Styles?” he shouted.

There was no answer, and all was still behind him. It must have been a sudden gust of air, for there were crannies and cracks in the old turret. And yet he could almost have sworn that he heard a footfall by his very side. He had emerged into the quadrangle, still turning the matter over in his head, when a man came running swiftly across the smooth-cropped lawn.

“Is that you, Smith?”

“Hullo, Hastie!”

“For God’s sake come at once! Young Lee is drowned! Here’s Harrington of King’s with the news. The doctor is out. You’ll do, but come along at once. There may be life in him.”

“Have you brandy?”

“No.”

“I’ll bring some. There’s a flask on my table.”

Smith bounded up the stairs, taking three at a time, seized the flask, and was rushing down with it, when, as he passed Bellingham’s room, his eyes fell upon something which left him gasping and staring upon the landing.

The door, which he had closed behind him, was now open, and right in front of him, with the lamp-light shining upon it, was the mummy case. Three minutes ago it had been empty. He could swear to that. Now it framed the lank body of its horrible occupant, who stood, grim and stark, with his black, shrivelled face towards the door. The form was lifeless and inert, but it seemed to Smith as he gazed that there still lingered a lurid spark of vitality, some faint sign of consciousness in the little eyes which lurked in the depths of the hollow sockets. So astounded and shaken was he that he had forgotten his errand, and was still staring at the lean, sunken figure when the voice of his friend below recalled him to himself.

“Come on, Smith!” he shouted. “It’s life and death, you know. Hurry up! Now, then,” he added, as the medical student reappeared, “let us do a sprint. It is well under a mile, and we should do it in five minutes. A human life is better worth running for than a pot.”

Neck and neck they dashed through the darkness, and did not pull up until panting and spent, they had reached the little cottage by the river. Young Lee, limp and dripping like a broken water-plant, was stretched upon the sofa, the green scum of the river upon his black hair, and a fringe of white foam upon his leaden-hued lips. Beside him knelt his fellow-student, Harrington, endeavouring to chafe some warmth back into his rigid limbs.

“I think there’s life in him,” said Smith, with his hand to the lad’s side. “Put your watch glass to his lips. Yes, there’s dimming on it. You take one arm, Hastie. Now work it as I do, and we’ll soon pull him round.”

For ten minutes they worked in silence, inflating and depressing the chest of the unconscious man. At the end of that time a shiver ran through his body, his lips trembled, and he opened his eyes. The three students burst out into an irrepressible cheer.

“Wake up, old chap. You’ve frightened us quite enough.”

“Have some brandy. Take a sip from the flask.”

“He’s all right now,” said his companion Harrington. “Heavens, what a fright I got! I was reading here, and he had gone out for a stroll as far as the river, when I heard a scream and a splash. Out I ran, and by the time I could find him and fish him out, all life seemed to have gone. Then Simpson couldn’t get a doctor, for he has a game-leg, and I had to run, and I don’t know what I’d have done without you fellows. That’s right, old chap. Sit up.”

Monkhouse Lee had raised himself on his hands, and looked wildly about him.

“What’s up?” he asked. “I’ve been in the water. Ah, yes; I remember.”

A look of fear came into his eyes, and he sank his face into his hands.

“How did you fall in?”

“I didn’t fall in.”

“How then?”

“I was thrown in. I was standing by the bank, and something from behind picked me up like a feather and hurled me in. I heard nothing, and I saw nothing. But I know what it was, for all that.”

“And so do I,” whispered Smith.

Lee looked up with a quick glance of surprise.

“You’ve learned, then?” he said. “You remember the advice I gave you?”

“Yes, and I begin to think that I shall take it.”

“I don’t know what the deuce you fellows are talking about,” said Hastie, “but I think, if I were you, Harrington, I should get Lee to bed at once. It will be time enough to discuss the why and the wherefore when he is a little stronger. I think, Smith, you and I can leave him alone now. I am walking back to college; if you are coming in that direction, we can have a chat.”

But it was little chat that they had upon their homeward path. Smith’s mind was too full of the incidents of the evening, the absence of the mummy from his neighbour’s rooms, the step that passed him on the stair, the reappearance – the extraordinary, inexplicable reappearance of the grisly thing – and then this attack upon Lee, corresponding so closely to the previous outrage upon another man against whom Bellingham bore a grudge. All this settled in his thoughts, together with the many little incidents which had previously turned him against his neighbour, and the singular circumstances under which he was first called in to him. What had been a dim suspicion, a vague, fantastic conjecture, had suddenly taken form, and stood out in his mind as a grim fact, a thing not to be denied. And yet, how monstrous it was! How unheard of! How entirely beyond all bounds of human experience. An impartial judge, or even the friend who walked by his side, would simply tell him that his eyes had deceived him, that the mummy had been there all the time, that young Lee had tumbled into the river as any other man tumbles into a river, and the blue pill was the best thing for a disordered liver. He felt that he would have said as much if the positions had been reversed. And yet he could swear that Bellingham was a murderer at heart, and that he wielded a weapon such as no man had ever used in all the grim history of crime.

Hastie had branched off to his rooms with a few crisp and emphatic comments upon his friend’s unsociability, and Abercrombie Smith crossed the quadrangle to his corner turret with a strong feeling of repulsion for his chambers and their associations. He would take Lee’s advice, and move his quarters as soon as possible, for how could a man study when his ear was ever straining for every murmur or footstep in the room below? He observed, as he crossed over the lawn, that the light was still shining in Bellingham’s window, and as he passed up the staircase the door opened, and the man himself looked out at him. With his fat, evil face he was like some bloated spider fresh from the weaving of his poisonous web.

“Good evening,” said he. “Won’t you come in?”

“No,” cried Smith fiercely.

“No? You are as busy as ever? I wanted to ask you about Lee. I was sorry to hear that there was a rumour that something was amiss with him.”

His features were grave, but there was the gleam of a hidden laugh in his eyes as he spoke. Smith saw it, and he could have knocked him down for it.

“You’ll be sorrier still to hear that Monkhouse Lee is doing very well, and is out of all danger,” he answered. “Your hellish tricks have not come off this time. Oh, you needn’t try to brazen it out. I know all about it.”

Bellingham took a step back from the angry student, and half-closed the door as if to protect himself.

“You are mad,” he said. “What do you mean? Do you assert that I had anything to do with Lee’s accident?”

“Yes,” thundered Smith. “You and that bag of bones behind you; you worked it between you. I tell you what it is, Master B., they have given up burning folk like you, but we still keep a hangman, and, by George! If any man in this college meets his death while you are here, I’ll have you up, and if you don’t swing for it, it won’t be my fault. You’ll find that your filthy Egyptian tricks won’t answer in England.”

“You’re a raving lunatic,” said Bellingham.

“All right. You just remember what I say, for you’ll find that I’ll be better than my word.”

The door slammed, and Smith went fuming up to his chamber, where he locked the door upon the inside, and spent half the night in smoking his old briar and brooding over the strange events of the evening.

Next morning Abercrombie Smith heard nothing of his neighbour, but Harrington called upon him in the afternoon to say that Lee was almost himself again. All day Smith stuck fast to his work, but in the evening he determined to pay the visit to his friend Doctor Peterson upon which he had started the night before. A good walk and a friendly chat would be welcome to his jangled nerves.

Bellingham’s door was shut as he passed, but glancing back when he was some distance from the turret, he saw his neighbour’s head at the window outlined against the lamp-light, his face pressed apparently against the glass as he gazed out into the darkness. It was a blessing to be away from all contact with him, if but for a few hours, and Smith stepped out briskly, and breathed the soft spring air into his lungs. The half-moon lay in the west between two Gothic pinnacles, and threw upon the silvered street a dark tracery from the stonework above. There was a brisk breeze, and light, fleecy clouds drifted swiftly across the sky. Old’s was on the very border of the town, and in five minutes Smith found himself beyond the houses and between the hedges of a May-scented, Oxfordshire lane.

It was a lonely and little-frequented road which led to his friend’s house. Early as it was, Smith did not meet a single soul upon his way. He walked briskly along until he came to the avenue gate, which opened into the long, gravel drive leading up to Farlingford. In front of him he could see the cosy, red light of the windows glimmering through the foliage. He stood with his hand upon the iron latch of the swinging gate, and he glanced back at the road along which he had come. Something was coming swiftly down it.

It moved in the shadow of the hedge, silently and furtively, a dark, crouching figure, dimly visible against the black background. Even as he gazed back at it, it had lessened its distance by twenty paces, and was fast closing upon him. Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck, and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams. He turned, and with a cry of terror he ran for his life up the avenue. There were the red lights, the signals of safety, almost within a stone’s-throw of him. He was a famous runner, but never had he run as he ran that night.

The heavy gate had swung into place behind him but he heard it dash open again before his pursuer. As he rushed madly and wildly through the night, he could hear a swift, dry patter behind him, and could see, as he threw back a glance, that this horror was bounding like a tiger at his heels, with blazing eyes and one stringy arm out-thrown. Thank God, the door was ajar. He could see the thin bar of light which shot from the lamp in the hall. Nearer yet sounded the clatter from behind. He heard a hoarse gurgling at his very shoulder. With a shriek he flung himself against the door, slammed and bolted it behind him, and sank half-fainting on to the hall chair.

“My goodness, Smith, what’s the matter?” asked Peterson, appearing at the door of his study.

“Give me some brandy.”

Peterson disappeared, and came rushing out again with a glass and a decanter.

“You need it,” he said, as his visitor drank off what he poured out for him. “Why, man, you are as white as a cheese.”

Smith laid down his glass, rose up, and took a deep breath.

“I am my own man again now,” said he. “I was never so unmanned before. But, with your leave, Peterson, I will sleep here tonight, for I don’t think I could face that road again except by daylight. It’s weak, I know, but I can’t help it.”

Peterson looked at his visitor with a very questioning eye.

“Of course you shall sleep here if you wish. I’ll tell Mrs. Burney to make up the spare bed. Where are you off to now?”

“Come up with me to the window that overlooks the door. I want you to see what I have seen.”

They went up to the window of the upper hall whence they could look down upon the approach to the house. The drive and the fields on either side lay quiet and still, bathed in the peaceful moonlight.

“Well, really, Smith,” remarked Peterson, “it is well that I know you to be an abstemious man. What in the world can have frightened you?”

“I’ll tell you presently. But where can it have gone? Ah, now, look, look! See the curve of the road just beyond your gate.”

“Yes, I see; you needn’t pinch my arm off. I saw someone pass. I should say a man, rather thin, apparently, and tall, very tall. But what of him? And what of yourself? You are still shaking like an aspen leaf.”

“I have been within hand-grip of the devil, that’s all. But come down to your study, and I shall tell you the whole story.”

He did so. Under the cheery lamp-light with a glass of wine on the table beside him, and the portly form and florid face of his friend in front, he narrated, in their order, all the events, great and small, which had formed so singular a chain, from the night on which he had found Bellingham fainting in front of the mummy case until this horrid experience of an hour ago.

“There now,” he said as he concluded, “that’s the whole, black business. It is monstrous and incredible, but it is true.”

Doctor Plumptree Peterson sat for some time in silence with a very puzzled expression upon his face.

“I never heard of such a thing in my life, never!” he said at last. “You have told me the facts. Now tell me your inferences.”

“You can draw your own.”

“But I should like to hear yours. You have thought over the matter, and I have not.”

“Well, it must be a little vague in detail, but the main points seem to me to be clear enough. This fellow Bellingham, in his Eastern studies, has got hold of some infernal secret by which a mummy – or possibly only this particular mummy – can be temporarily brought to life. He was trying this disgusting business on the night when he fainted. No doubt the sight of the creature moving had shaken his nerve, even though he had expected it. You remember that almost the first words he said were to call out upon himself as a fool. Well, he got more hardened afterwards, and carried the matter through without fainting. The vitality which he could put into it was evidently only a passing thing, for I have seen it continually in its case as dead as this table. He has some elaborate process, I fancy, by which he brings the thing to pass. Having done it, he naturally bethought him that he might use the creature as an agent. It has intelligence and it has strength. For some purpose he took Lee into his confidence; but Lee, like a decent Christian, would have nothing to do with such a business. Then they had a row, and Lee vowed that he would tell his sister of Bellingham’s true character. Bellingham’s game was to prevent him, and he nearly managed it, by setting this creature of his on his track. He had already tried its powers upon another man – Norton – towards whom he had a grudge. It is the merest chance that he has not two murders upon his soul. Then, when I taxed him with the matter, he had the strongest reasons for wishing to get me out of the way before I could convey my knowledge to anyone else. He got his chance when I went out, for he knew my habits and where I was bound for. I have had a narrow shave, Peterson, and it is mere luck that you didn’t find me on your doorstep in the morning. I’m not a nervous man as a rule, and I never thought to have the fear of death put upon me as it was tonight.”

“My dear boy, you take the matter too seriously,” said his companion. “Your nerves are out of order with your work, and you make too much of it. How could such a thing as this stride about the streets of Oxford, even at night, without being seen?”

“It has been seen. There is quite a scare in the town about an escaped ape, as they imagine the creature to be. It is the talk of the place.”

“Well, it’s a striking chain of events. And yet, my dear fellow, you must allow that each incident in itself is capable of a more natural explanation?”

“What! Even my adventure of tonight?”

“Certainly. You come out with your nerves all unstrung, and your head full of this theory of yours. Some gaunt, half-famished tramp steals after you, and seeing you run, is emboldened to pursue you. Your fears and imagination do the rest.”

“It won’t do, Peterson; it won’t do.”

“And again, in the instance of your finding the mummy case empty, and then a few moments later with an occupant, you know that it was lamp-light, that the lamp was half turned down, and that you had no special reason to look hard at the case. It is quite possible that you may have overlooked the creature in the first instance.”

“No, no; it is out of the question.”

“And then Lee may have fallen into the river, and Norton been garrotted. It is certainly a formidable indictment that you have against Bellingham; but if you were to place it before a police magistrate, he would simply laugh in your face.”

“I know he would. That is why I mean to take the matter into my own hands.”

“Eh?”

“Yes; I feel that a public duty rests upon me, and besides, I must do it for my own safety, unless I choose to allow myself to be hunted by this beast out of the college, and that would be a little too feeble. I have quite made up my mind what I shall do. And first of all, may I use your paper and pens for an hour?”

“Most certainly. You will find all that you want upon that side-table.”

Abercrombie Smith sat down before a sheet of foolscap, and for an hour, and then for a second hour his pen travelled swiftly over it. Page after page was finished and tossed aside while his friend leaned back in his armchair, looking across at him with patient curiosity. At last, with an exclamation of satisfaction, Smith sprang to his feet, gathered his papers up into order, and laid the last one upon Peterson’s desk.

“Kindly sign this as a witness,” he said.

“A witness? Of what?”

“Of my signature, and of the date. The date is the most important. Why, Peterson, my life might hang upon it.”

“My dear Smith, you are talking wildly. Let me beg you to go to bed.”

“On the contrary, I never spoke so deliberately in my life. And I will promise to go to bed the moment you have signed it.”

“But what is it?”

“It is a statement of all that I have been telling you tonight. I wish you to witness it.”

“Certainly,” said Peterson, signing his name under that of his companion. “There you are! But what is the idea?”

“You will kindly retain it, and produce it in case I am arrested.”

“Arrested? For what?”

“For murder. It is quite on the cards. I wish to be ready for every event. There is only one course open to me, and I am determined to take it.”

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t do anything rash!”

“Believe me, it would be far more rash to adopt any other course. I hope that we won’t need to bother you, but it will ease my mind to know that you have this statement of my motives. And now I am ready to take your advice and to go to roost, for I want to be at my best in the morning.”

Abercrombie Smith was not an entirely pleasant man to have as an enemy. Slow and easy-tempered, he was formidable when driven to action. He brought to every purpose in life the same deliberate resoluteness which had distinguished him as a scientific student. He had laid his studies aside for a day, but he intended that the day should not be wasted. Not a word did he say to his host as to his plans, but by nine o’clock he was well on his way to Oxford.

In the High Street he stopped at Clifford’s, the gun-maker’s, and bought a heavy revolver, with a box of central-fire cartridges. Six of them he slipped into the chambers, and half-cocking the weapon, placed it in the pocket of his coat. He then made his way to Hastie’s rooms, where the big oarsman was lounging over his breakfast, with the Sporting Times propped up against the coffee-pot.

“Hullo! What’s up?” he asked. “Have some coffee?”

“No, thank you. I want you to come with me, Hastie, and do what I ask you.”

“Certainly, my boy.”

“And bring a heavy stick with you.”

“Hullo!” Hastie stared. “Here’s a hunting crop that would fell an ox.”

“One other thing. You have a box of amputating knives. Give me the longest of them.”

“There you are. You seem to be fairly on the war trail. Anything else?”

“No; that will do.” Smith placed the knife inside his coat, and led the way to the quadrangle. “We are neither of us chickens, Hastie,” said he. “I think I can do this job alone, but I take you as a precaution. I am going to have a little talk with Bellingham. If I have only him to deal with, I won’t, of course, need you. If I shout, however, up you come, and lam out with your whip as hard as you can lick. Do you understand?”

“All right. I’ll come if I hear you bellow.”

“Stay here, then. I may be a little time, but don’t budge until I come down.”

“I’m a fixture.”

Smith ascended the stairs, opened Bellingham’s door and stepped in. Bellingham was seated behind his table, writing. Beside him, among his litter of strange possessions, towered the mummy case, with its sale number 249 still stuck upon its front, and its hideous occupant stiff and stark within it. Smith looked very deliberately round him, closed the door, and then, stepping across to the fireplace, struck a match and set the fire alight. Bellingham sat staring, with amazement and rage upon his bloated face.

“Well, really now, you make yourself at home,” he gasped.

Smith sat himself deliberately down, placing his watch upon the table, drew out his pistol, cocked it, and laid it in his lap. Then he took the long amputating knife from his bosom, and threw it down in front of Bellingham.

“Now, then,” said he, “just get to work and cut up that mummy.”

“Oh, is that it?” said Bellingham with a sneer.

“Yes, that is it. They tell me that the law can’t touch you. But I have a law that will set matters straight. If in five minutes you have not set to work, I swear by the God who made me that I will put a bullet through your brain!”

“You would murder me?”

Bellingham had half-risen, and his face was the colour of putty.

“Yes.”

“And for what?”

“To stop your mischief. One minute has gone.”

“But what have I done?”

“I know and you know.”

“This is mere bullying.”

“Two minutes are gone.”

“But you must give reasons. You are a madman – a dangerous madman. Why should I destroy my own property? It is a valuable mummy.”

“You must cut it up, and you must burn it.”

“I will do no such thing.”

“Four minutes are gone.”

Smith took up the pistol and he looked towards Bellingham with an inexorable face. As the second-hand stole round, he raised his hand, and the finger twitched upon the trigger.

“There! There! I’ll do it!” screamed Bellingham.

In frantic haste he caught up the knife and hacked at the figure of the mummy, ever glancing round to see the eye and the weapon of his terrible visitor bent upon him. The creature crackled and snapped under every stab of the keen blade. A thick, yellow dust rose up from it. Spices and dried essences rained down upon the floor. Suddenly, with a rending crack, its backbone snapped asunder, and it fell, a brown heap of sprawling limbs, upon the floor.

“Now into the fire!” said Smith.

The flames leaped and roared as the dried and tinder-like debris was piled upon it. The little room was like the stoke-hole of a steamer and the sweat ran down the faces of the two men; but still the one stooped and worked, while the other sat watching him with a set face. A thick, fat smoke oozed out from the fire, and a heavy smell of burned resin and singed hair filled the air. In a quarter of an hour a few charred and brittle sticks were all that was left of Lot No. 249.

“Perhaps that will satisfy you,” snarled Bellingham, with hate and fear in his little grey eyes as he glanced back at his tormentor.

“No; I must make a clean sweep of all your materials. We must have no more devil’s tricks. In with all these leaves! They may have something to do with it.”

“And what now?” asked Bellingham, when the leaves also had been added to the blaze.

“Now the roll of papyrus which you had on the table that night. It is in that drawer, I think.”

“No, no,” shouted Bellingham. “Don’t burn that! Why, man, you don’t know what you do. It is unique; it contains wisdom which is nowhere else to be found.”

“Out with it!”

“But look here, Smith, you can’t really mean it. I’ll share the knowledge with you. I’ll teach you all that is in it. Or, stay, let me only copy it before you burn it!”

Smith stepped forward and turned the key in the drawer. Taking out the yellow, curled roll of paper, he threw it into the fire, and pressed it down with his heel. Bellingham screamed, and grabbed at it; but Smith pushed him back and stood over it until it was reduced to a formless, grey ash.

“Now, Master B.,” said he, “I think I have pretty well drawn your teeth. You’ll hear from me again, if you return to your old tricks. And now good morning, for I must go back to my studies.”

And such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith as to the singular events which occurred in Old College, Oxford, in the spring of ’84. As Bellingham left the university immediately afterwards, and was last heard of in the Soudan, there is no one who can contradict his statement. But the wisdom of men is small, and the ways of Nature are strange, and who shall put a bound to the dark things which may be found by those who seek for them?

She’s Gone

Morgan Elektra

My mother always told me people went to bars to disappear. Since I already felt stretched so thin light would shine through me, it seemed like as good a place to go as any. Better than most, even. The liquor would help me forget.

“Well, look at you.”

I flinched away from the hardscrabble rasp at my elbow, spilling the cheap bourbon I was attempting to drown in.

I hadn’t seen the old man climb onto the stool beside me, but that was hardly a surprise. The rest of the patrons were completely ignoring me and I’d been returning the favor.

I lost myself in the gingerbread colored depths of the burnt-sugar-and-turpentine scented liquor – my third glass – trying not to picture the scene back at my apartment: my best friend Bella’s curvy body looming above Rick, her hair a tumble of black curls down her smooth, naked back as she rode my fiancé into the 800 thread count sheets my mother gave us as a housewarming gift.

I drained the dregs of alcohol from the water-spotted tumbler. The napalm burn wiped the image momentarily from my synapses and I sighed in relief.

I reached a shaking hand for the pile of tarnished coins on the bar and plucked up a quarter, the visage on it edged in black. I spun it on the uneven wood, watched it wobble, and snatched it back up.

I couldn’t bear to see what it would land on.

The metal throbbed against my fingertips, warm as blood.

Beside me, the man swung around, making the rickety stool creak. I caught a glimpse of scraggly hair the color of wet clay and watery amber eyes surrounded by pouches of wrinkles.

The look in them was like the neon light shining in the bourbon, or fire reflected on the surface of a lake.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No.”

It came out a disagreeable grunt, but he didn’t take offense. He kept watching me, mouth pursed in contemplation as I poured myself another slug of bourbon.

I glanced over to see if he was expecting me to share, but his beer still sweated glistening beads of moisture. He lifted it to lips the color of raw liver.

I turned my face away to discourage his attempts at conversation. My skin ached under the bruising weight of his gaze. I rubbed at the liquor-sticky surface of the bar, tracing decades old water stains and burns from cigarettes whose ghosts still lingered in the hazy air. Both felt more substantial than me.

He was undeterred by my rudeness.

When he leaned closer, his breath puffed against my cheek, thick with hops and something darker. Something unpleasant. Like meat gone grey and greasy.

My stomach did a slow roll.

“Name’s Garen.” He pronounced it with a throat thick with phlegm. White dots of spittle flecked his lips. “Friends called me Gary.”

“Jane.” I took another drink, hoping to occupy my mouth with something other than conversation that made my brain ache. It didn’t work. The bourbon made my tongue too loose. “Plain Jane.”

Rick’s words. I’d always thought it sweet that he had a nickname for me. Though, after hearing his husky voice gasping and groaning and calling out ‘Oh my God! Yes! Like that!’ with guttural astonishment as Bella swivelled her ample hips, I guessed maybe Plain Jane wasn’t so charming a thing for my fiancé to call me, after all.

Desperate to distance myself from those thoughts, I whirled on my stool to face Gary, wobbling only a little. My head felt like a blister, throbbing, ready to pop.

“Why’re you asking about ghosts?”

Part of me, the part that knew this entire evening was already nauseatingly cliché, expected the grizzled old codger to tell me I looked like I knew something about being haunted.

Instead of answering my question, he reached over and plucked the coin from my hand, flashing a brief grin and spinning it over his cracked knuckles.

“I’ve seen ’em. On the job.”

Gary leaned one elbow on the bar, ignoring the puddle of moisture that darkened the material of his threadbare suit jacket. A giggle bubbled up my throat. Gary nodded as if answering an unasked question.

I stared at the broad, wrinkled face framed by thinning hair and struggled to picture the rumpled old man in front of me being confronted by smoky apparition.

My drinking buddy had probably once been a handsome man – the strong line of his jaw and bold slope of his forehead said so – but he didn’t look at all well at the moment. I thought he must have been big; tall, broad shouldered, and barrel-chested. Not gorgeous, but solid and good-looking.

Now, his sallow flesh hung on the bones of his face in wrinkled flaps. Despite his gauntness, the thin skin around his eyes and under his jaw was puffy and swollen. Once strong shoulders curled in toward a sunken chest. He appeared moments away from folding in on himself.

Burst blood vessels spiderwebbed beneath the fragile skin of his cheeks and stained the jaundiced whites of his eyes.

Considering the world weary look in his eyes and his rumpled suit, I hazarded a guess.

“You’re a cop?”

I was whispering, I realized, empty glass up to my lips as if I was trying to hide what we were talking about from the rest of the bar’s disinterested patrons. Maybe I was. It seemed ridiculous to be talking about ghosts. There were worse things in the world. Real things that stole your breath and slipped into your heart like a knife.

Gary nodded. I wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with my words, or my unspoken scepticism.

“Of a sort,” Gary replied against the lip of his beer bottle.

I tasted metal on my tongue and poured myself another glass to wash it away. Gary tilted his head, red neon glittering in his eyes.

“I worked as a detective in Vice once.”

Vice. The word conjured images of hookers with lipstick leers, mouths red and open, Bella’s tongue curling around Rick’s shaft. My stomach pitched, and my heart lurched. I swallowed both back down. I sipped at the liquor, wincing at the burn in my throat, suddenly desperate to hear about Gary’s ghosts.

“I would have figured Homicide. Since we’re talking about restless spirits.”

He picked at the label on the beer bottle, shaking his head. His hair brushed his shoulders, rustling like dry leaves. Like Rick’s heels sliding against our soft sheets.

“Mostly I spent my time busting up illegal books and taking the working girls off the street for a few nights. Not too much excitement, really. A lot of paperwork. Better than some other gigs I’ve had.”

His lips twitched into half a grin. I snorted into my glass.

On the scarred wood of the bar, a fat fly wandered into a puddle of spilled bourbon. It twitched and flailed, wings fluttering uselessly.

I closed my eyes, bothered by how broken it looked.

“Hardly sounds like the place for spooky stories.”

To me, ghost stories meant fog shrouded graveyards and crumbling old Victorians; not seedy gambling dens and noisy city streets.

“Ghosts are everywhere, Janey. Mostly people just don’t look.”

I shivered a little at his words, cold despite the heat of the liquor burning in my belly and the sweaty warmth of the bar. My heart squeezed.

I scowled at Gary. Or I meant to, but my eyes slid past him to the darkness outside the bar’s wide front window. The streetlight flickered intermittently, splashing some message across the pavement in code.

The street itself was nearly empty, cars passing every few minutes instead of in their normal steady stream. Though it was still early yet. Or at least I thought it was.

A glance at the big, old-fashioned clock above the bar showed the hour hand hovering near the eleven. Not even midnight yet.

Something white – a flash of headlights? – flared just at the periphery of my vision as I turned to the old man.

Shaking my throbbing head, I focused on my new friend, and slurped more warm liquor to cover up my momentary distraction. I choked on it, hacking to clear my throat, shoulders heaving. My airways burned, but I managed to catch my breath.

“So, tell me about this one you saw – the ghost.”

Gary turned toward the window too, perhaps looking for whatever it was I’d seen from the corner of my eye. His hangdog face in profile was so full of sorrow it made me catch my breath. Tears stung my eyes.

Unease crawled up my spine, many-legged as a millipede, as my gaze slid around the room. It lit briefly on the owner, Trudy, where she leaned behind the bar.

Trudy was bottle-blonde, a sassy and fierce 40-something who’d always had a bit of a soft spot for me. She fed me free sodas all the times I served as designated driver for Rick and his buddies. She joked with all the patrons and never seemed to take anything – aside from tips – seriously. But now she had a scowl on her face like a thundercloud as she murmured into the heavy black rotary phone she kept behind the bar.

“I hadn’t been a detective long,” Gary finally said, blinking slowly as his gaze wandered back to mine. “Maybe a year. Could be two. After this long, it’s hard to say for sure. But I was still new enough that I always got stuck with the lion’s share of the paperwork, I remember that.”

His chuckle was the uneven chop of a sputtering engine about to stall out.

“That was the hottest summer I ever remember, ’til now. It was the Pansy Elliot case. I knew most of the regular girls who worked the corners down by the Point. You try and get ’em off the street, hope they decide to do something else…” He wiped his lips with gnarled fingers. “But the sad truth is, most of ’em just went right back as soon as they were out. It was all they knew to do to get by.”

I thought of Bella. Other people had always called her unkind names because of her wild behavior. I’d defended her time and time again, told people she was just a free spirit and who cared how many people a woman took to her bed?

Now, burning with the pain of betrayal and past the point of being a little drunk, I heard Gary’s words, ‘It was all they knew to do,’ and my brain translated them to something more vicious, in keeping with my mood: Once a whore, always a whore.

Bourbon dribbled down my chin as I tipped the heavy glass to my lips, stinging a cut on my jaw I didn’t remember getting. I swiped at the rivulet with the back of my hand, smearing the sticky liquid over my cheek.

“She was a pretty little thing. Young. Maybe twenty.” He paused, eyes on me, beer halfway to his mouth. “How old are you, Janey?”

“Twenty-two. A week ago.” Rick took me out to dinner for my birthday and got my favorite chocolate cake for dessert. At home, he laid me in our bed and kissed every inch of me with such tenderness my heart nearly broke with it. I felt that way again now, a tightness in my chest that made it hurt to breathe.

Gary shook his head, as if he was saddened by my words too.

“Pansy hadn’t been on the street long, maybe a month or two. Long enough to have realized the reality of it, but not long enough that it’d worn her down much. She still had a bit of sparkle in her eye.”

I crossed my forearms on top of the bar and rested my cheek against them, my eyes on Gary. The sour-sweet smell of liquor stung my nose, mixed with the scent of overripe fruit and something bitter and mineral.

Out in the hot night, I heard the rev of an engine, the squeal of tires on asphalt, the honk of a horn. Not uncommon in the city, but it sounded loud to my ears. I flinched at the throb of blood in my temples.

I concentrated instead on the dim red-brown light of the bar, the hushed rumble of Gary’s voice, the warm, thick air still tinged with the scent of smoke even all these years after the indoor smoking ban. It all coalesced into a numbing sort of blanket that wrapped around me, insulating me from the outside world. I was pathetically grateful for it.

Tears gathered on my lashes but I blinked them away.

Gary leaned over and patted my arm. His irises glowed orange, like a candle flame. That fetid meat smell wafted from his suit again, and I swallowed hard as bile bubbled in my stomach.

“I’ve never been much good with crying females,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was talking about me.

I sniffed a little, but he smiled and continued, and I realized he was still caught up in his story.

“But I was the only one in the squad room just then, so I had to deal with it. And there Pansy was, sitting at my desk, crying her pretty blue eyes out, with a nasty shiner, a split lip, and a gash on her temple still seeping blood. She’s wanting to file charges on her pimp, who’d roughed her up good when she didn’t make enough the night before.”

I felt myself drifting a little, between the alcohol and Gary’s measured words. My body felt heavy, an ache in my bones and gut that throbbed. My eyes stung, and I blinked them rapidly, the neon sign above the bar smearing everything red.

“Seems brave,” I muttered through numb lips, wondering if I’d ever been that. I thought of what I’d done when I saw Bella and Rick, and my heartbeat stuttered.

Gary nodded.

“It was. Especially considering her pimp was a real piece of work. I had been trying to get something to stick to him for months, but none of his girls would talk. Too scared. Pansy wasn’t though. Between sobs, she was singing prettier than a canary. Names of his associates, Johns, everything. She was real upset. Which she had a right to be, because according to her, Ray had hit her so hard he knocked her out and left her bleeding on the floor of her apartment. As soon as she woke up, she went straight to the precinct.”

Lights flashed by outside, red and blue, as if conjured by Gary’s story. I shivered at the thought and shook my head. Just the booze. Cop cars were hardly a novelty in the city.

“This doesn’t sound like any ghost story I’ve ever heard. Aren’t there usually creepy noises and shrouded corpses?” I expected Gary to chuckle or crack a joke. Maybe I hoped for it. He did neither.

Instead, he sipped his beer.

“That’s because those are just stories, Janey. They’re not true.”

He said it so matter-of-factly that I could only stare at him. I shifted my legs on the rungs of the stool. They were starting to tingle with pins-and-needles from sitting on the unstable seat. I had no idea how long I’d been at the bar.

I couldn’t remember much of anything between seeing Rick and Bella twined together and the time Gary sat down beside me. Had it been dark when I ran out of the apartment? I thought perhaps I had wandered a while, lost, before I saw the familiar sign and found my way onto the uncomfortable stool.

I knew I must have looked terrible, because Trudy had left me the bottle of bourbon. Though, I didn’t remember that part either.

Still, the bottle was there, so it must have happened.

I picked at a torn cuticle on my thumb, scraping away the dried blood staining the nail bed.

Gary stared into my eyes as if trying to read something there. I had no idea what.

The other patrons paid us no attention. I wondered what we must look like to them.

A tired old man in a wrinkled suit looming over an obviously drunk girl in a pale sundress dotted with poppies like spatters of blood, whose eyes were swollen from crying. It was like a really bad Hopper painting.

“I took down everything Pansy said.” His voice cracked a bit. He sipped his beer and started again.

“I was real excited, despite her distress. I wanted to finally get that scumbag on something. I told her she needed to get herself to the hospital and have her head checked out. She begged me to bring Ray in as soon as possible. She was afraid to go back to her apartment, scared he’d find out she came in. I told her I would, and headed out to check out the scene.”

I tried to picture a young, unwrinkled Gary, fresh off the beat and filled with an enthusiasm for his job, but I just couldn’t see past the wizened man slumped in front of me. I felt as if he’d always been old.

He’d managed to get one corner of the label on his beer bottle up and was scratching at it with one long, yellowed nail.

“Her apartment was on the seventh floor of a flophouse. It had been a nice hotel once, but the carpets were rotted through, all the crystals from the chandeliers had been broken, and the wallpaper was peeling. I remember, the walls in the lobby were all down to lumpy plaster and rusty water had leaked down them to stain like blood. The whole place smelled like stale rat turds and BO.”

Gary stopped then, turning back toward the window behind us. I didn’t – couldn’t – move, but followed his gaze. More flashing lights went by, dragging me from the story and back into a world where there were no such things as ghosts and best friends did things to fiancés that made them shout to the ceiling of my bedroom.

My vision went momentarily all white and red.

I felt a burst of jagged anger in my chest. I wanted to slap at Gary’s arm and demand he continue, but my hands were too numb to lift. Rheumy golden eyes slid down to my grimacing face.

Gary chewed his thick lower lip for a second. “Those cop cars –”

“Back to the story.”

I didn’t care about the cop cars. Or what I’d left back in my apartment. I cared about Gary’s ghost story.

He sighed, a tire leaking air, but nodded.

“Just as I got to the sixth floor landing, I heard Pansy scream and I started running. Because that scream…” Gary shuddered, pale face going even whiter. “It sounded like a girl looking her worst nightmare in the eye.”

I could almost hear it, in my head. A high-pitched, tearing keen that hurt my ears. Like screeching metal. Or Bella’s teakettle yowl. Nausea rolled through me just at the thought of it and white lights speared into the back of my eyes.

Still better than thinking of Rick and the sound of his voice when he whispered, ‘Christ, PJ, I love you so much,’ in my ear. Or shouted ‘Jane, what are you doing?’

I closed my eyes, refusing to hear him.

“And then what?”

“I made it to the seventh floor in about half a second. I was fast back then. Before the cancer got me.”

I think of running down the stairs from my second floor apartment, ears ringing. The world sways and ripples around me. Gary’s voice tolls like a bell inside my head.

“No one came out to see what the screaming was about, but that was hardly surprising in a place like that. Pansy’s apartment door was closed, so I kicked it in, my gun already in my hand.” He reached over and refilled my glass, nudging it toward me with two fingers. He sipped out of the bottle, smacking his droopy lips, still twirling my quarter on his knuckles.

“First time I drew my piece, come to think of it.”

He scrubbed his mouth on his sleeve. The fabric looked shiny and dark, worn from repetitive use.

From the other end of the bar, I could hear Trudy arguing in a low voice with someone. She sounded upset and I felt the distant urge to comfort her, but my body might as well have been made of petrified wood for all I could control it.

“It took a second,” Gary said, and for the first time I could see that his weary amber eyes had darkened to umber with the shadows of the memory. “It took a second for the smell to hit me. That place smelled so bad as it was.”

Gary was pretty rank himself, reeking of burnt oil and rubber, blood and shit. I swallowed heavily and shifted further away from him, wondering how I’d missed the stench earlier. Maybe some of it was the liquor? I’d never been so drunk in my life. I doubted I could stand up straight if I tried.

Gary’s eyes were steady on mine, now dark as pitch but still glistening like flame.

“Pansy was just where Ray left her. On the floor. He’d caved her temple right in. She’d been dead by the time she hit the floor, and laid there all night and all morning in the heat.”

I frowned, my head already beginning to throb. I’d never been hungover before, but it felt like death.

“It was her ghost that came into the precinct?”

I snorted, because for all that my unease had been building while Gary told me his story, I still found the idea of ghosts ridiculous. Especially when I knew you could be haunted by other things so easily – like the actions of others. Or your own.

Dried blood flaked from my hands down onto the bar, tingeing the spilled bourbon red.

“No other way to explain it,” Gary replied. “How else would I know to go to her apartment? Plus, I had the filled out report, full of names and details of meetings I shouldn’t have.”

I waved him away, surprised at the sudden lightness of my limbs. Where before I’d felt much too heavy, now it seemed almost as if I could float.

“Yeah, yeah. Did you get Ray? Did he go to prison?”

Gary’s mouth pressed together into a tight line, as if I’d missed the point.

“Eventually. Not for Pansy though. Couldn’t explain how I got the information, you understand. But we got him in the end. It always comes comes around. And she did what she intended to do, I think. Her final act. They’ve all got one, you know? Their last thing. Something they need to do before they can move on.”

There were more flashing lights outside now, and sirens. A few of the other patrons drifted toward the front window, blocking the view of the darkened street.

One of them murmured about an accident around the corner, someone stepping into the road, said something about bodies. Trudy’s voice wobbled with tears as she replied, but her fist was pressed to her mouth and I couldn’t make out her words. One of them might have been my name. Or not.

Gary still stared at me expectantly. I sat up straight, balancing on the wobbly stool, and narrowed my eyes at him.

“Why did you tell me this story?”

If it had a point, I’d missed it, and now I was feeling surly. There hadn’t been any justice for Pansy. Ray may have gone to prison, but he didn’t really pay for what he did to her.

People deserved justice.

He cocked a crooked thumb toward the front window.

“Don’t you want to see what’s going on out there?”

There was a high-pitched whine in my ears. I shook my aching head to clear it, sending a wave of pain and nausea down to my toes.

“No!”

My denial came out a shout but no one turned to look. Gary sighed, wafting air scented with the coppery tang of blood over my face. I squeezed my eyes shut against the sadness welling from his pores, trying to breathe through the increasing pressure in my chest.

“She’s gone.”

That wasn’t Gary’s voice, so close to my ear. My eyes popped open, shock kicking at my heart. But he was the only one there. Everyone else was still staring out into the night.

Trudy cried in earnest now; one of the other patrons put his arm around her shoulders.

The pressure on my chest slid away and tears pricked my own eyes. Beside me, Gary patted my hand with gentle fingers. The other hand spun the discolored coin on the bar.

“I think you should go look, Janey.”

“You can’t make me.”

I sounded stubborn and childish. But I’d seen enough bad things for one day, and I knew whatever was happening out in the street wasn’t going to make me feel any better.

“No, ma’am. That ain’t my job.” He sighed, the sound heavy as a bellows.

My lower lip pushed out and I sucked it back in, tasting blood and bourbon.

“Is it your job to tell random drunk women strange stories?”

It wasn’t funny but I snickered anyway.

Gary shook his head at me, but he was watching Trudy cry.

“Oh, these days I guess you could say I’m in transportation.”

I felt as if my ribcage had been suddenly pulled open, my heart exposed and raw with fear. Gary’s eyes, burning deep, were steady on my face, and his smile was tender.

I turned back to the bar, away from that smile and thoughts of what my final act would be. I placed my hands on either side of my empty glass, staring down at my neatly trimmed nails. There was a cut on the webbing between my thumb and forefinger, but the blood had already begun to dry. And it wasn’t that bad, anyway.

I felt Gary swing himself back around with another weary sigh, but he didn’t say anything else.

Behind us, Trudy’s choked voice whimpered, “I can’t believe she’d do something like that. She was such a sweet girl.”

I ignored her, and the pain in my belly and chest, and the blood spattered on my dress. I ignored Gary, with his spinning coin and flames for eyes, and carefully poured another few fingers of bourbon into my glass.

The Spider

Hanns Heinz Ewers

When the student of medicine, Richard Bracquemont, decided to move into room #7 of the small Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens (Paris 6), three persons had already hanged themselves from the cross-bar of the window in that room on three successive Fridays.

The first was a Swiss traveling salesman. They found his corpse on Saturday evening. The doctor determined that the death must have occurred between five and six o’clock on Friday afternoon. The corpse hung on a strong hook that had been driven into the window’s cross-bar to serve as a hanger for articles of clothing. The window was closed, and the dead man had used the curtain cord as a noose. Since the window was very low, he hung with his knees practically touching the floor-a sign of the great discipline the suicide must have exercised in carrying out his design. Later, it was learned that he was a married man, a father. He had been a man of a continually happy disposition; a man who had achieved a secure place in life. There was not one written word to be found that would have shed light on his suicide…not even a will.

Furthermore, none of his acquaintances could recall hearing anything at all from him that would have permitted anyone to predict his end.

The second case was not much different. The artist, Karl Krause, a high wire cyclist in the nearby Medrano Circus, moved into room #7 two days later. When he did not show up at Friday’s performance, the director sent an employee to the hotel. There, he found Krause in the unlocked room hanging from the window cross-bar in circumstances exactly like those of the previous suicide. This death was as perplexing as the first. Krause was popular. He earned a very high salary, and had appeared to enjoy life at its fullest. Once again, there was no suicide note; no sinister hints. Krause’s sole survivor was his mother to whom the son had regularly sent 300 marks on the first of the month.

For Madame Dubonnet, the owner of the small, cheap guesthouse whose clientele was composed almost completely of employees in a nearby Montmartre vaudeville theater, this second curious death in the same room had very unpleasant consequences. Already several of her guests had moved out, and other regular clients had not come back. She appealed for help to her personal friend, the inspector of police of the ninth precinct, who assured her that he would do everything in his power to help her. He pushed zealously ahead not only with the investigation into the grounds for the suicides of the two guests, but he also placed an officer in the mysterious room.

This man, Charles-Maria Chaumié, actually volunteered for the task. Chaumié was an old ‘Marsouin’, a marine sergeant with eleven years of service, who had lain so many nights at posts in Tonkin and Annam, and had greeted so many stealthily creeping river pirates with a shot from his rifle that he seemed ideally suited to encounter the ‘ghost’ that everyone on Rue Alfred Stevens was talking about.

From then on, each morning and each evening, Chaumié paid a brief visit to the police station to make his report, which, for the first few days, consisted only of his statement that he had not noticed anything unusual. On Wednesday evening, however, he hinted that he had found a clue.

Pressed to say more, he asked to be allowed more time before making any comment, since he was not sure that what he had discovered had any relationship to the two deaths, and he was afraid he might say something that would make him look foolish.

On Thursday, his behavior seemed a bit uncertain, but his mood was noticeably more serious. Still, he had nothing to report. On Friday morning, he came in very excited and spoke, half humorously, half seriously, of the strangely attractive power that his window had. He would not elaborate this notion and said that, in any case, it had nothing to do with the suicides; and that it would be ridiculous of him to say any more. When, on that same Friday, he failed to make his regular evening report, someone went to his room and found him hanging from the cross-bar of the window.

All the circumstances, down to the minutest detail, were the same here as in the previous cases. Chaumié’s legs dragged along the ground. The curtain cord had been used for a noose. The window was closed, the door to the room had not been locked and death had occurred at six o’clock. The dead man’s mouth was wide open, and his tongue protruded from it.

Chaumié’s death, the third in as many weeks in room #7, had the following consequences: all the guests, with the exception of a German high-school teacher in room #16, moved out. The teacher took advantage of the occasion to have his rent reduced by a third. The next day, Mary Garden, the famous Opéra Comique singer, drove up to the Hotel Stevens and paid two hundred francs for the red curtain cord, saying it would bring her luck. The story, small consolation for Madame Dubonnet, got into the papers.

If these events had occurred in summer, in July or August, Madame Dubonnet would have secured three times that price for her cord, but as it was in the middle of a troubled year, with elections, disorders in the Balkans, bank crashes in New York, the visit of the King and Queen of England, the result was that the affaire Rue Alfred Stevens was talked of less than it deserved to be. As for the newspaper accounts, they were brief, being essentially the police reports word for word.

These reports were all that Richard Bracquemont, the medical student, knew of the matter.

There was one detail about which he knew nothing because neither the police inspector nor any of the eyewitnesses had mentioned it to the press. It was only later, after what happened to the medical student, that anyone remembered that when the police removed Sergeant Charles-Maria Chaumié’s body from the window cross-bar a large black spider crawled from the dead man’s open mouth. A hotel porter flicked it away, exclaiming, “Ugh, another of those damned creatures.”

When in later investigations which concerned themselves mostly with Bracquemont the servant was interrogated, he said that he had seen a similar spider crawling on the Swiss traveling salesman’s shoulder when his body was removed from the window cross-bar. But Richard Bracquemont knew nothing of all this.

It was more than two weeks after the last suicide that Bracquemont moved into the room. It was a Sunday. Bracquemont conscientiously recorded everything that happened to him in his journal. That journal now follows.

* * *

Monday, February 28

I moved in yesterday evening. I unpacked my two wicker suitcases and straightened the room a little. Then I went to bed. I slept so soundly that it was nine o’clock the next morning before a knock at my door woke me. It was my hostess, bringing me breakfast herself. One could read her concern for me in the eggs, the bacon and the superb café au lait she brought me. I washed and dressed, then smoked a pipe as I watched the servant make up the room.

So, here I am. I know well that the situation may prove dangerous, but I think I may just be the one to solve the problem. If, once upon a time, Paris was worth a mass (conquest comes at a dearer rate these days), it is well worth risking my life pour un si bel enjeu. I have at least one chance to win, and I mean to risk it. As it is, I’m not the only one who has had this notion. Twenty-seven people have tried for access to the room. Some went to the police, some went directly to the hotel owner. There were even three women among the candidates. There was plenty of competition. No doubt the others are poor devils like me.

And yet, it was I who was chosen. Why? Because I was the only one who hinted that I had some plan – or the semblance of a plan. Naturally, I was bluffing.

These journal entries are intended for the police. I must say that it amuses me to tell those gentlemen how neatly I fooled them. If the Inspector has any sense, he’ll say, “Hm. This Bracquemont is just the man we need.” In any case, it doesn’t matter what he’ll say. The point is I’m here now, and I take it as a good sign that I’ve begun my task by bamboozling the police.

I had gone first to Madame Dubonnet, and it was she who sent me to the police. They put me off for a whole week – as they put off my rivals as well. Most of them gave up in disgust, having something better to do than hang around the musty squad room. The Inspector was beginning to get irritated at my tenacity. At last, he told me I was wasting my time. That the police had no use for bungling amateurs. “Ah, if only you had a plan. Then…”

On the spot, I announced that I had such a plan, though naturally I had no such thing. Still, I hinted that my plan was brilliant, but dangerous, that it might lead to the same end as that which had overtaken the police officer, Chaumié. Still, I promised to describe it to him if he would give me his word that he would personally put it into effect. He made excuses, claiming he was too busy but when he asked me to give him at least a hint of my plan, I saw that I had picqued his interest.

I rattled off some nonsense made up of whole cloth. God alone knows where it all came from.

I told him that six o’clock of a Friday is an occult hour. It is the last hour of the Jewish week; the hour when Christ disappeared from his tomb and descended into hell. That he would do well to remember that the three suicides had taken place at approximately that hour. That was all I could tell him just then, I said, but I pointed him to The Revelations of St. John.

The Inspector assumed the look of a man who understood all that I had been saying, then he asked me to come back that evening.

I returned, precisely on time, and noted a copy of the New Testament on the Inspector’s desk. I had, in the meantime, been at the Revelations myself without however having understood a syllable. Perhaps the Inspector was cleverer than I. Very politely-nay-deferentially, he let me know that, despite my extremely vague intimations, he believed he grasped my line of thought and was ready to expedite my plan in every way.

And here, I must acknowledge that he has indeed been tremendously helpful. It was he who made the arrangement with the owner that I was to have anything I needed so long as I stayed in the room. The Inspector gave me a pistol and a police whistle, and he ordered the officers on the beat to pass through the Rue Alfred Stevens as often as possible, and to watch my window for any signal. Most important of all, he had a desk telephone installed which connects directly with the police station. Since the station is only four minutes away, I see no reason to be afraid.

* * *

Wednesday, March 1

Nothing has happened. Not yesterday. Not today.

Madame Dubonnet brought a new curtain cord from another room – the rooms are mostly empty, of course. Madame Dubonnet takes every opportunity to visit me, and each time she brings something with her. I have asked her to tell me again everything that happened here, but I have learned nothing new. She has her own opinion of the suicides. Her view is that the music hall artist, Krause, killed himself because of an unhappy love affair. During the last year that Krause lived in the hotel, a young woman had made frequent visits to him. These visits had stopped, just before his death. As for the Swiss gentleman, Madame Dubonnet confessed herself baffled. On the other hand, the death of the policeman was easy to explain. He had killed himself just to annoy her.

These are sad enough explanations, to be sure, but I let her babble on to take the edge off my boredom.

* * *

Thursday, March 3

Still nothing. The Inspector calls twice a day. Each time, I tell him that all is well. Apparently, these words do not reassure him.

I have taken out my medical books and I study, so that my self-imposed confinement will have some purpose.

* * *

Friday, March 4

I ate uncommonly well at noon. The landlady brought me half a bottle of champagne. It seemed a meal for a condemned man. Madame Dubonnet looked at me as if I were already three-quarters dead. As she was leaving, she begged me tearfully to come with her, fearing no doubt that I would hang myself ‘just to annoy her’.

I studied the curtain cord once again. Would I hang myself with it? Certainly, I felt little desire to do so. The cord is stiff and rough – not the sort of cord one makes a noose of. One would need to be truly determined before one could imitate the others.

I am seated now at my table. At my left, the telephone. At my right, the revolver. I’m not frightened; but I am curious.

* * *

Six o’clock, the same evening

Nothing has happened. I was about to add, ‘Unfortunately’. The fatal hour has come – and has gone, like any six o’clock on any evening. I won’t hide the fact that I occasionally felt a certain impulse to go to the window, but for a quite different reason than one might imagine.

The Inspector called me at least ten times between five and six o’clock. He was as impatient as I was. Madame Dubonnet, on the other hand, is happy. A week has passed without someone in #7 hanging himself. Marvelous.

* * *

Monday, March 7

I have a growing conviction that I will learn nothing; that the previous suicides are related to the circumstances surrounding the lives of the three men. I have asked the Inspector to investigate the cases further, convinced that someone will find their motivations. As for me, I hope to stay here as long as possible. I may not conquer Paris here, but I live very well and I’m fattening up nicely. I’m also studying hard, and I am making real progress. There is another reason, too, that keeps me here.

* * *

Wednesday, March 9

So! I have taken one step more. Clarimonda.

I haven’t yet said anything about Clarimonda. It is she who is my ‘third’ reason for staying here. She is also the reason I was tempted to go to the window during the ‘fateful’ hour last Friday. But of course, not to hang myself.

Clarimonda. Why do I call her that? I have no idea what her name is, but it ought to be Clarimonda. When finally I ask her name, I’m sure it will turn out to be Clarimonda.

I noticed her almost at once…in the very first days. She lives across the narrow street; and her window looks right into mine. She sits there, behind her curtains.

I ought to say that she noticed me before I saw her; and that she was obviously interested in me. And no wonder. The whole neighborhood knows I am here, and why. Madame Dubonnet has seen to that.

I am not of a particularly amorous disposition. In fact, my relations with women have been rather meager. When one comes from Verdun to Paris to study medicine, and has hardly money enough for three meals a day, one has something else to think about besides love. I am then not very experienced with women, and I may have begun my adventure with her stupidly. Never mind. It’s exciting just the same.

At first, the idea of establishing some relationship with her simply did not occur to me. It was only that, since I was here to make observations, and, since there was nothing in the room to observe, I thought I might as well observe my neighbor – openly, professionally. Anyhow, one can’t sit all day long just reading.

Clarimonda, I have concluded, lives alone in the small flat across the way. The flat has three windows, but she sits only before the window that looks into mine. She sits there, spinning on an old-fashioned spindle, such as my grandmother inherited from a great aunt. I had no idea anyone still used such spindles. Clarimonda’s spindle is a lovely object. It appears to be made of ivory; and the thread she spins is of an exceptional fineness. She works all day behind her curtains, and stops spinning only as the sun goes down. Since darkness comes abruptly here in this narrow street and in this season of fogs, Clarimonda disappears from her place at five o’clock each evening.

I have never seen a light in her flat.

What does Clarimonda look like? I’m not quite sure. Her hair is black and wavy; her face pale.

Her nose is short and finely shaped with delicate nostrils that seem to quiver. Her lips, too, are pale: and when she smiles, it seems that her small teeth are as keen as those of some beast of prey.

Her eyelashes are long and dark; and her huge dark eyes have an intense glow. I guess all these details more than I know them. It is hard to see clearly through the curtains.

Something else: she always wears a black dress embroidered with a lilac motif; and black gloves, no doubt to protect her hands from the effects of her work. It is a curious sight: her delicate hands moving perpetually, swiftly grasping the thread, pulling it, releasing it, taking it up again; as if one were watching the indefatigable motions of an insect.

Our relationship? For the moment, still very superficial, though it feels deeper. It began with a sudden exchange of glances in which each of us noted the other. I must have pleased her, because one day she studied me a while longer, then smiled tentatively. Naturally, I smiled back. In this fashion, two days went by, each of us smiling more frequently with the passage of time. Yet something kept me from greeting her directly.

Until today. This afternoon, I did it. And Clarimonda returned my greeting. It was done subtly enough, to be sure, but I saw her nod.

* * *

Thursday, March 10

Yesterday, I sat for a long time over my books, though I can’t truthfully say that I studied much. I built castles in the air and dreamed of Clarimonda.

I slept fitfully.

This morning, when I approached my window, Clarimonda was already in her place. I waved, and she nodded back. She laughed and studied me for a long time.

I tried to read, but I felt much too uneasy. Instead, I sat down at my window and gazed at Clarimonda. She too had laid her work aside. Her hands were folded in her lap. I drew my curtain wider with the window cord, so that I might see better. At the same moment, Clarimonda did the same with the curtains at her window. We exchanged smiles.

We must have spent a full hour gazing at each other.

Finally, she took up her spinning.

* * *

Saturday, March 12

The days pass. I eat and drink. I sit at the desk. I light my pipe; I look down at my book but I don’t read a word, though I try again and again. Then I go to the window where I wave to Clarimonda. She nods. We smile. We stare at each other for hours.

Yesterday afternoon, at six o’clock, I grew anxious. The twilight came early, bringing with it something like anguish. I sat at my desk. I waited until I was invaded by an irresistible need to go to the window – not to hang myself; but just to see Clarimonda. I sprang up and stood beside the curtain where it seemed to me I had never been able to see so clearly, though it was already dark.

Clarimonda was spinning, but her eyes looked into mine. I felt myself strangely contented even as I experienced a light sensation of fear.

The telephone rang. It was the Inspector tearing me out of my trance with his idiotic questions.

I was furious.

This morning, the Inspector and Madame Dubonnet visited me. She is enchanted with how things are going. I have now lived for two weeks in room #7. The Inspector, however, does not feel he is getting results. I hinted mysteriously that I was on the trail of something most unusual.

The jackass took me at my word and fulfilled my dearest wish. I’ve been allowed to stay in the room for another week. God knows it isn’t Madame Dubonnet’s cooking or wine-cellar that keeps me here. How quickly one can be sated with such things. No. I want to stay because of the window Madame Dubonnet fears and hates. That beloved window that shows me Clarimonda.

I have stared out of my window, trying to discover whether she ever leaves her room, but I’ve never seen her set foot on the street.

As for me, I have a large, comfortable armchair and a green shade over the lamp whose glow envelopes me in warmth. The Inspector has left me with a huge packet of fine tobacco – and yet I cannot work. I read two or three pages only to discover that I haven’t understood a word. My eyes see the letters, but my brain refuses to make any sense of them. Absurd. As if my brain were posted: ‘No Trespassing’. It is as if there were no room in my head for any other thought than the one: Clarimonda. I push my books away; I lean back deeply into my chair. I dream.

* * *

Sunday, March 13

This morning I watched a tiny drama while the servant was tidying my room. I was strolling in the corridor when I paused before a small window in which a large garden spider had her web.

Madame Dubonnet will not have it removed because she believes spiders bring luck, and she’s had enough misfortunes in her house lately. Today, I saw a much smaller spider, a male, moving across the strong threads towards the middle of the web, but when his movements alerted the female, he drew back shyly to the edge of the web from which he made a second attempt to cross it. Finally, the female in the middle appeared attentive to his wooing, and stopped moving. The male tugged at a strand gently, then more strongly till the whole web shook. The female stayed motionless. The male moved quickly forward and the female received him quietly, calmly, giving herself over completely to his embraces. For a long minute, they hung together motionless at the center of the huge web.

Then I saw the male slowly extricating himself, one leg over the other. It was as if he wanted tactfully to leave his companion alone in the dream of love, but as he started away, the female, overwhelmed by a wild life, was after him, hunting him ruthlessly. The male let himself drop from a thread; the female followed, and for a while the lovers hung there, imitating a piece of art. Then they fell to the window-sill where the male, summoning all his strength, tried again to escape. Too late. The female already had him in her powerful grip, and was carrying him back to the center of the web. There, the place that had just served as the couch for their lascivious embraces took on quite another aspect. The lover wriggled, trying to escape from the female’s wild embrace, but she was too much for him. It was not long before she had wrapped him completely in her thread, and he was helpless. Then she dug her sharp pincers into his body, and sucked full draughts of her young lover’s blood. Finally, she detached herself from the pitiful and unrecognizable shell of his body and threw it out of her web.

So that is what love is like among these creatures. Well for me that I am not a spider.

* * *

Monday, March 14

I don’t look at my books any longer. I spend my days at the window. When it is dark, Clarimonda is no longer there, but if I close my eyes, I continue to see her.

This journal has become something other than I intended. I’ve spoken about Madame Dubonnet, about the Inspector; about spiders and about Clarimonda. But I’ve said nothing about the discoveries I undertook to make. It can’t be helped.

* * *

Tuesday, March 15

We have invented a strange game, Clarimonda and I. We play it all day long. I greet her; then she greets me. Then I tap my fingers on the windowpanes. The moment she sees me doing that, she too begins tapping. I wave to her; she waves back. I move my lips as if speaking to her; she does the same. I run my hand through my sleep-disheveled hair and instantly her hand is at her forehead. It is a child’s game, and we both laugh over it. Actually, she doesn’t laugh. She only smiles a gently contained smile. And I smile back in the same way.

The game is not as trivial as it seems. It’s not as if we were grossly imitating each other – that would weary us both. Rather, we are communicating with each other. Sometimes, telepathically, it would seem, since Clarimonda follows my movements instantaneously almost before she has had time to see them. I find myself inventing new movements, or new combinations of movements, but each time she repeats them with disconcerting speed. Sometimes I change the order of the movements to surprise her, making whole series of gestures as rapidly as possible; or I leave out some motions and weave in others, the way children play ‘Simon Says’. What is amazing is that Clarimonda never once makes a mistake, no matter how quickly I change gestures.

That’s how I spend my days…but never for a moment do I feel that I’m killing time. It seems, on the contrary, that never in my life have I been better occupied.

* * *

Wednesday, March 16

Isn’t it strange that it hasn’t occurred to me to put my relationship with Clarimonda on a more serious basis than these endless games. Last night, I thought about this…I can, of course, put on my hat and coat, walk down two flights of stairs, take five steps across the street and mount two flights to her door which is marked with a small sign that says ‘Clarimonda’. Clarimonda what? I don’t know. Something. Then I can knock and…

Up to this point I imagine everything very clearly, but I cannot see what should happen next. I know that the door opens. But then I stand before it, looking into a dark void. Clarimonda doesn’t come. Nothing comes. Nothing is there, only the black, impenetrable dark.

Sometimes, it seems to me that there can be no other Clarimonda but the one I see in the window; the one who plays gesture-games with me. I cannot imagine a Clarimonda wearing a hat, or a dress other than her black dress with the lilac motif. Nor can I imagine a Clarimonda without black gloves. The very notion that I might encounter Clarimonda somewhere in the streets or in a restaurant eating, drinking or chatting is so improbable that it makes me laugh.

Sometimes I ask myself whether I love her. It’s impossible to say, since I have never loved before. However, if the feeling that I have for Clarimonda is really love, then love is something entirely different from anything I have seen among my friends or read about in novels.

It is hard for me to be sure of my feelings and harder still to think of anything that doesn’t relate to Clarimonda or, what is more important, to our game. Undeniably, it is our game that concerns me. Nothing else – and this is what I understand least of all.

There is no doubt that I am drawn to Clarimonda, but with this attraction there is mingled another feeling, fear. No. That’s not it either. Say rather a vague apprehension in the presence of the unknown. And this anxiety has a strangely voluptuous quality so that I am at the same time drawn to her even as I am repelled by her. It is as if I were moving in giant circles around her, sometimes coming close, sometimes retreating…back and forth, back and forth.

Once, I am sure of it, it will happen, and I will join her.

Clarimonda sits at her window and spins her slender, eternally fine thread, making a strange cloth whose purpose I do not understand. I am amazed that she is able to keep from tangling her delicate thread. Hers is surely a remarkable design, containing mythical beasts and strange masks.

* * *

Thursday, March 17

I am curiously excited. I don’t talk to people any more. I barely say “hello” to Madame Dubonnet or to the servant. I hardly give myself time to eat. All I can do is sit at the window and play the game with Clarimonda. It is an enthralling game. Overwhelming.

I have the feeling something will happen tomorrow.

* * *

Friday, March 18

Yes. Yes. Something will happen today. I tell myself – as loudly as I can – that that’s why I am here. And yet, horribly enough, I am afraid. And in the fear that the same thing is going to happen to me as happened to my predecessors, there is strangely mingled another fear: a terror of Clarimonda. And I cannot separate the two fears.

I am frightened. I want to scream.

* * *

Six o’clock, evening

I have my hat and coat on. Just a couple of words.

At five o’clock, I was at the end of my strength. I’m perfectly aware now that there is a relationship between my despair and the ‘sixth hour’ that was so significant in the previous weeks. I no longer laugh at the trick I played the Inspector.

I was sitting at the window, trying with all my might to stay in my chair, but the window kept drawing me. I had to resume the game with Clarimonda. And yet, the window horrified me. I saw the others hanging there: the Swiss traveling salesman, fat, with a thick neck and a grey stubbly beard; the thin artist; and the powerful police sergeant. I saw them, one after the other, hanging from the same hook, their mouths open, their tongues sticking out. And then, I saw myself among them.

Oh, this unspeakable fear. It was clear to me that it was provoked as much by Clarimonda as by the cross-bar and the horrible hook. May she pardon me…but it is the truth. In my terror, I keep seeing the three men hanging there, their legs dragging on the floor.

And yet, the fact is I had not felt the slightest desire to hang myself; nor was I afraid that I would want to do so. No, it was the window I feared; and Clarimonda. I was sure that something horrid was going to happen. Then I was overwhelmed by the need to go to the window – to stand before it. I had to…

The telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and before I could hear a word, I screamed, “Come. Come at once.”

It was as if my shrill cry had in that instant dissipated the shadows from my soul. I grew calm.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead. I drank a glass of water. Then I considered what I should say to the Inspector when he arrived. Finally, I went to the window. I waved and smiled. And Clarimonda too waved and smiled.

Five minutes later, the Inspector was here. I told him that I was getting to the bottom of the matter, but I begged him not to question me just then. That very soon I would be in a position to make important revelations. Strangely enough, though I was lying to him, I myself had the feeling that I was telling the truth. Even now, against my will, I have that same conviction.

The Inspector could not help noticing my agitated state of mind, especially since I apologized for my anguished cry over the telephone. Naturally, I tried to explain it to him, and yet I could not find a single reason to give for it. He said affectionately that there was no need ever to apologize to him; that he was always at my disposal; that that was his duty. It was better that he should come a dozen times to no effect rather than fail to be here when he was needed. He invited me to go out with him for the evening. It would be a distraction for me. It would do me good not to be alone for a while. I accepted the invitation though I was very reluctant to leave the room.

* * *

Saturday, March 19

We went to the Gaieté Rochechouart, La Cigale, and La Lune Rousse. The Inspector was right: It was good for me to get out and breathe the fresh air. At first, I had an uncomfortable feeling, as if I were doing something wrong; as if I were a deserter who had turned his back on the flag. But that soon went away. We drank a lot, laughed and chatted. This morning, when I went to my window, Clarimonda gave me what I thought was a look of reproach, though I may only have imagined it. How could she have known that I had gone out last night? In any case, the look lasted only for an instant, then she smiled again.

We played the game all day long.

* * *

Sunday, March 20

Only one thing to record: we played the game.

* * *

Monday, March 21

We played the game – all day long.

* * *

Tuesday, March 22

Yes, the game. We played it again. And nothing else. Nothing at all.

Sometimes I wonder what is happening to me? What is it I want? Where is all this leading? I know the answer: there is nothing else I want except what is happening. It is what I want…what I long for. This only.

Clarimonda and I have spoken with each other in the course of the last few days, but very briefly; scarcely a word. Sometimes we moved our lips, but more often we just looked at each other with deep understanding.

I was right about Clarimonda’s reproachful look because I went out with the Inspector last Friday. I asked her to forgive me. I said it was stupid of me, and spiteful to have gone. She forgave me, and I promised never to leave the window again. We kissed, pressing our lips against each of our windowpanes.

* * *

Wednesday, March 23

I know now that I love Clarimonda. That she has entered into the very fiber of my being. It may be that the loves of other men are different. But does there exist one head, one ear, one hand that is exactly like hundreds of millions of others? There are always differences, and it must be so with love. My love is strange, I know that, but is it any the less lovely because of that? Besides, my love makes me happy.

If only I were not so frightened. Sometimes my terror slumbers and I forget it for a few moments, then it wakes and does not leave me. The fear is like a poor mouse trying to escape the grip of a powerful serpent. Just wait a bit, poor sad terror. Very soon, the serpent love will devour you.

* * *

Thursday, March 24

I have made a discovery: I don’t play with Clarimonda. She plays with me.

Last night, thinking as always about our game, I wrote down five new and intricate gesture patterns with which I intended to surprise Clarimonda today. I gave each gesture a number. Then I practiced the series, so I could do the motions as quickly as possible, forwards or backwards. Or sometimes only the even-numbered ones, sometimes the odd. Or the first and the last of the five patterns. It was tiring work, but it made me happy and seemed to bring Clarimonda closer to me. I practiced for hours until I got all the motions down pat, like clockwork.

This morning, I went to the window. Clarimonda and I greeted each other, then our game began. Back and forth! It was incredible how quickly she understood what was to be done; how she kept pace with me.

There was a knock at the door. It was the servant bringing me my shoes. I took them. On my way back to the window, my eye chanced to fall on the slip of paper on which I had noted my gesture patterns. It was then that I understood: in the game just finished, I had not made use of a single one of my patterns.

I reeled back and had to hold on to the chair to keep from falling. It was unbelievable. I read the paper again – and again. It was still true: I had gone through a long series of gestures at the window, and not one of the patterns had been mine.

I had the feeling, once more, that I was standing before Clarimonda’s wide open door, through which, though I stared, I could see nothing but a dark void. I knew, too, that if I chose to turn from that door now, I might be saved; and that I still had the power to leave. And yet, I did not leave – because I felt myself at the very edge of the mystery: as if I were holding the secret in my hands.

“Paris! You will conquer Paris,” I thought. And in that instant, Paris was more powerful than Clarimonda.

I don’t think about that any more. Now, I feel only love. Love, and a delicious terror.

Still, the moment itself endowed me with strength. I read my notes again, engraving the gestures on my mind. Then I went back to the window only to become aware that there was not one of my patterns that I wanted to use. Standing there, it occurred to me to rub the side of my nose; instead I found myself pressing my lips to the windowpane. I tried to drum with my fingers on the window sill; instead, I brushed my fingers through my hair. And so I understood that it was not that Clarimonda did what I did. Rather, my gestures followed her lead and with such lightning rapidity that we seemed to be moving simultaneously. I, who had been so proud because I thought I had been influencing her, I was in fact being influenced by her. Her influence…so gentle…so delightful.

I have tried another experiment. I clenched my hands and put them in my pockets firmly intending not to move them one bit. Clarimonda raised her hand and, smiling at me, made a scolding gesture with her finger. I did not budge, and yet I could feel how my right hand wished to leave my pocket. I shoved my fingers against the lining, but against my will, my hand left the pocket; my arm rose into the air. In my turn, I made a scolding gesture with my finger and smiled.

It seemed to me that it was not I who was doing all this. It was a stranger whom I was watching.

But, of course, I was mistaken. It was I making the gesture, and the person watching me was the stranger; that very same stranger who, not long ago, was so sure that he was on the edge of a great discovery. In any case, it was not I.

Of what use to me is this discovery? I am here to do Clarimonda’s will. Clarimonda, whom I love with an anguished heart.

* * *

Friday, March 25

I have cut the telephone cord. I have no wish to be continually disturbed by the idiotic inspector just as the mysterious hour arrives.

God. Why did I write that? Not a word of it is true. It is as if someone else were directing my pen.

But I want to…want to…to write the truth here…though it is costing me great effort. But I want to…once more…do what I want.

I have cut the telephone cord…ah…

Because I had to…there it is. Had to…

We stood at our windows this morning and played the game, which is now different from what it was yesterday. Clarimonda makes a movement and I resist it for as long as I can. Then I give in and do what she wants without further struggle. I can hardly express what a joy it is to be so conquered; to surrender entirely to her will.

We played. All at once, she stood up and walked back into her room, where I could not see her; she was so engulfed by the dark. Then she came back with a desk telephone, like mine, in her hands. She smiled and set the telephone on the window sill, after which she took a knife and cut the cord. Then I carried my telephone to the window where I cut the cord. After that, I returned my phone to its place.

That’s how it happened…

I sit at my desk where I have been drinking tea the servant brought me. He has come for the empty teapot, and I ask him for the time, since my watch isn’t running properly. He says it is five fifteen. Five fifteen…

I know that if I look out of my window, Clarimonda will be there making a gesture that I will have to imitate. I will look just the same. Clarimonda is there, smiling. If only I could turn my eyes away from hers.

Now she parts the curtain. She takes the cord. It is red, just like the cord in my window. She ties a noose and hangs the cord on the hook in the window cross-bar.

She sits down and smiles.

No. Fear is no longer what I feel. Rather, it is a sort of oppressive terror which I would not want to avoid for anything in the world. Its grip is irresistible, profoundly cruel, and voluptuous in its attraction.

I could go to the window, and do what she wants me to do, but I wait. I struggle. I resist though I feel a mounting fascination that becomes more intense each minute.

Here I am once more. Rashly, I went to the window where I did what Clarimonda wanted. I took the cord, tied a noose, and hung it on the hook…

Now, I want to see nothing else – except to stare at this paper. Because if I look. I know what she will do…now…at the sixth hour of the last day of the week. If I see her, I will have to do what she wants. Have to…

I won’t see her…

I laugh. Loudly. No. I’m not laughing. Something is laughing in me, and I know why. It is because of my…I won’t…

I won’t, and yet I know very well that I have to…have to look at her. I must…must…and then…all that follows.

If I still wait, it is only to prolong this exquisite torture. Yes, that’s it. This breathless anguish is my supreme delight. I write quickly, quickly…just so I can continue to sit here; so I can attenuate these seconds of pain.

Again, terror. Again. I know that I will look toward her. That I will stand up. That I will hang myself.

That doesn’t frighten me. That is beautiful…even precious.

There is something else. What will happen afterwards? I don’t know, but since my torment is so delicious. I feel…feel that something horrible must follow.

Think…think…Write something. Anything at all…to keep from looking toward her…

My name…Richard Bracquemont. Richard Bracquemont…Richard Bracquemont…

Richard…

I can’t…go on. I must…no…no…must look at her…Richard Bracquemont…no…

No more…Richard…Richard Bracque – …

* * *

The inspector of the ninth precinct, after repeated and vain efforts to telephone Richard, arrived at the Hotel Stevens at 6:05. He found the body of the student Richard Bracquemont hanging from the cross-bar of the window in room #7, in the same position as each of his three predecessors.

The expression on the student’s face, however, was different, reflecting an appalling fear.

Bracquemont’s eyes were wide open and bulging from their sockets. His lips were drawn into a rictus, and his jaws were clamped together. A huge black spider whose body was dotted with purple spots lay crushed and nearly bitten in two between his teeth.

On the table, there lay the student’s journal. The inspector read it and went immediately to investigate the house across the street. What he learned was that the second floor of that building had not been lived in for many months.

Carmilla

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Prologue

Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.

This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual learning and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man’s collected papers.

As I publish the case, in this volume, simply to interest the ‘laity’, I shall forestall the intelligent lady, who relates it, in nothing; and after due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from presenting any précis of the learned Doctor’s reasoning, or extract from his statement on a subject which he describes as “involving, not improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and its intermediates.”

I was anxious on discovering this paper, to reopen the correspondence commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.

She, probably, could have added little to the Narrative which she communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce, such conscientious particularity.

I

An Early Fright

In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvelously cheap, I really don’t see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.

My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on which it stands, a bargain.

Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets of water lilies.

Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its towers, and its Gothic chapel.

The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that this is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say truth. Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left. The nearest inhabited schloss of any historic associations, is that of old General Spielsdorf, nearly twenty miles away to the right.

I have said “the nearest inhabited village,” because there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorf’s schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church, now roofless, in the aisle of which are the moldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate chateau which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town.

Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and melancholy spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you another time.

I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute the inhabitants of our castle. I don’t include servants, or those dependents who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the schloss. Listen, and wonder! My father, who is the kindest man on earth, but growing old; and I, at the date of my story, only nineteen. Eight years have passed since then.

I and my father constituted the family at the schloss. My mother, a Styrian lady, died in my infancy, but I had a good-natured governess, who had been with me from, I might almost say, my infancy. I could not remember the time when her fat, benignant face was not a familiar picture in my memory.

This was Madame Perrodon, a native of Berne, whose care and good nature now in part supplied to me the loss of my mother, whom I do not even remember, so early I lost her. She made a third at our little dinner party. There was a fourth, Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, a lady such as you term, I believe, a ‘finishing governess’. She spoke French and German, Madame Perrodon French and broken English, to which my father and I added English, which, partly to prevent its becoming a lost language among us, and partly from patriotic motives, we spoke every day. The consequence was a Babel, at which strangers used to laugh, and which I shall make no attempt to reproduce in this narrative. And there were two or three young lady friends besides, pretty nearly of my own age, who were occasional visitors, for longer or shorter terms; and these visits I sometimes returned.

These were our regular social resources; but of course there were chance visits from ‘neighbors’ of only five or six leagues distance. My life was, notwithstanding, rather a solitary one, I can assure you.

My gouvernantes had just so much control over me as you might conjecture such sage persons would have in the case of a rather spoiled girl, whose only parent allowed her pretty nearly her own way in everything.

The first occurrence in my existence, which produced a terrible impression upon my mind, which, in fact, never has been effaced, was one of the very earliest incidents of my life which I can recollect. Some people will think it so trifling that it should not be recorded here. You will see, however, by-and-by, why I mention it. The nursery, as it was called, though I had it all to myself, was a large room in the upper story of the castle, with a steep oak roof. I can’t have been more than six years old, when one night I awoke, and looking round the room from my bed, failed to see the nursery maid. Neither was my nurse there; and I thought myself alone. I was not frightened, for I was one of those happy children who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us cover up our heads when the door cracks suddenly, or the flicker of an expiring candle makes the shadow of a bedpost dance upon the wall, nearer to our faces. I was vexed and insulted at finding myself, as I conceived, neglected, and I began to whimper, preparatory to a hearty bout of roaring; when to my surprise, I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself under the bed.

I was now for the first time frightened, and I yelled with all my might and main. Nurse, nursery maid, housekeeper, all came running in, and hearing my story, they made light of it, soothing me all they could meanwhile. But, child as I was, I could perceive that their faces were pale with an unwonted look of anxiety, and I saw them look under the bed, and about the room, and peep under tables and pluck open cupboards; and the housekeeper whispered to the nurse: “Lay your hand along that hollow in the bed; someone did lie there, so sure as you did not; the place is still warm.”

I remember the nursery maid petting me, and all three examining my chest, where I told them I felt the puncture, and pronouncing that there was no sign visible that any such thing had happened to me.

The housekeeper and the two other servants who were in charge of the nursery, remained sitting up all night; and from that time a servant always sat up in the nursery until I was about fourteen.

I was very nervous for a long time after this. A doctor was called in, he was pallid and elderly. How well I remember his long saturnine face, slightly pitted with smallpox, and his chestnut wig. For a good while, every second day, he came and gave me medicine, which of course I hated.

The morning after I saw this apparition I was in a state of terror, and could not bear to be left alone, daylight though it was, for a moment.

I remember my father coming up and standing at the bedside, and talking cheerfully, and asking the nurse a number of questions, and laughing very heartily at one of the answers; and patting me on the shoulder, and kissing me, and telling me not to be frightened, that it was nothing but a dream and could not hurt me.

But I was not comforted, for I knew the visit of the strange woman was not a dream; and I was awfully frightened.

I was a little consoled by the nursery maid’s assuring me that it was she who had come and looked at me, and lain down beside me in the bed, and that I must have been half-dreaming not to have known her face. But this, though supported by the nurse, did not quite satisfy me.

I remembered, in the course of that day, a venerable old man, in a black cassock, coming into the room with the nurse and housekeeper, and talking a little to them, and very kindly to me; his face was very sweet and gentle, and he told me they were going to pray, and joined my hands together, and desired me to say, softly, while they were praying, “Lord hear all good prayers for us, for Jesus’ sake.” I think these were the very words, for I often repeated them to myself, and my nurse used for years to make me say them in my prayers.

I remembered so well the thoughtful sweet face of that white-haired old man, in his black cassock, as he stood in that rude, lofty, brown room, with the clumsy furniture of a fashion three hundred years old about him, and the scanty light entering its shadowy atmosphere through the small lattice. He kneeled, and the three women with him, and he prayed aloud with an earnest quavering voice for, what appeared to me, a long time. I forget all my life preceding that event, and for some time after it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness.

II

A Guest

I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eyewitness.

It was a sweet summer evening, and my father asked me, as he sometimes did, to take a little ramble with him along that beautiful forest vista which I have mentioned as lying in front of the schloss.

“General Spielsdorf cannot come to us so soon as I had hoped,” said my father, as we pursued our walk.

He was to have paid us a visit of some weeks, and we had expected his arrival next day. He was to have brought with him a young lady, his niece and ward, Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt, whom I had never seen, but whom I had heard described as a very charming girl, and in whose society I had promised myself many happy days. I was more disappointed than a young lady living in a town, or a bustling neighborhood can possibly imagine. This visit, and the new acquaintance it promised, had furnished my daydream for many weeks.

“And how soon does he come?” I asked.

“Not till autumn. Not for two months, I dare say,” he answered. “And I am very glad now, dear, that you never knew Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt.”

“And why?” I asked, both mortified and curious.

“Because the poor young lady is dead,” he replied. “I quite forgot I had not told you, but you were not in the room when I received the General’s letter this evening.”

I was very much shocked. General Spielsdorf had mentioned in his first letter, six or seven weeks before, that she was not so well as he would wish her, but there was nothing to suggest the remotest suspicion of danger.

“Here is the General’s letter,” he said, handing it to me. “I am afraid he is in great affliction; the letter appears to me to have been written very nearly in distraction.”

We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendor behind the sylvan horizon, and the stream that flows beside our home, and passes under the steep old bridge I have mentioned, wound through many a group of noble trees, almost at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson of the sky. General Spielsdorf’s letter was so extraordinary, so vehement, and in some places so self-contradictory, that I read it twice over – the second time aloud to my father – and was still unable to account for it, except by supposing that grief had unsettled his mind.

It said:

“I have lost my darling daughter, for as such I loved her. During the last days of dear Bertha’s illness I was not able to write to you.

Before then I had no idea of her danger. I have lost her, and now learn all, too late. She died in the peace of innocence, and in the glorious hope of a blessed futurity. The fiend who betrayed our infatuated hospitality has done it all. I thought I was receiving into my house innocence, gaiety, a charming companion for my lost Bertha. Heavens! What a fool have I been!

I thank God my child died without a suspicion of the cause of her sufferings. She is gone without so much as conjecturing the nature of her illness, and the accursed passion of the agent of all this misery. I devote my remaining days to tracking and extinguishing a monster. I am told I may hope to accomplish my righteous and merciful purpose. At present there is scarcely a gleam of light to guide me. I curse my conceited incredulity, my despicable affectation of superiority, my blindness, my obstinacy – all – too late. I cannot write or talk collectedly now. I am distracted. So soon as I shall have a little recovered, I mean to devote myself for a time to enquiry, which may possibly lead me as far as Vienna. Some time in the autumn, two months hence, or earlier if I live, I will see you – that is, if you permit me; I will then tell you all that I scarce dare put upon paper now. Farewell. Pray for me, dear friend.”

In these terms ended this strange letter. Though I had never seen Bertha Rheinfeldt my eyes filled with tears at the sudden intelligence; I was startled, as well as profoundly disappointed.

The sun had now set, and it was twilight by the time I had returned the General’s letter to my father.

It was a soft clear evening, and we loitered, speculating upon the possible meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences which I had just been reading. We had nearly a mile to walk before reaching the road that passes the schloss in front, and by that time the moon was shining brilliantly. At the drawbridge we met Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, who had come out, without their bonnets, to enjoy the exquisite moonlight.

We heard their voices gabbling in animated dialogue as we approached. We joined them at the drawbridge, and turned about to admire with them the beautiful scene.

The glade through which we had just walked lay before us. At our left the narrow road wound away under clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight amid the thickening forest. At the right the same road crosses the steep and picturesque bridge, near which stands a ruined tower which once guarded that pass; and beyond the bridge an abrupt eminence rises, covered with trees, and showing in the shadows some grey ivy-clustered rocks.

Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight.

No softer, sweeter scene could be imagined. The news I had just heard made it melancholy; but nothing could disturb its character of profound serenity, and the enchanted glory and vagueness of the prospect.

My father, who enjoyed the picturesque, and I, stood looking in silence over the expanse beneath us. The two good governesses, standing a little way behind us, discoursed upon the scene, and were eloquent upon the moon.

Madame Perrodon was fat, middle-aged, and romantic, and talked and sighed poetically. Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical, and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people, it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that her cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light on the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.

“The moon, this night,” she said, “is full of idyllic and magnetic influence – and see, when you look behind you at the front of the schloss how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendor, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms to receive fairy guests.”

There are indolent styles of the spirits in which, indisposed to talk ourselves, the talk of others is pleasant to our listless ears; and I gazed on, pleased with the tinkle of the ladies’ conversation.

“I have got into one of my moping moods tonight,” said my father, after a silence, and quoting Shakespeare, whom, by way of keeping up our English, he used to read aloud, he said:

“‘In truth I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me: you say it wearies you; But how I got it – came by it.’

“I forget the rest. But I feel as if some great misfortune were hanging over us. I suppose the poor General’s afflicted letter has had something to do with it.”

At this moment the unwonted sound of carriage wheels and many hoofs upon the road, arrested our attention.

They seemed to be approaching from the high ground overlooking the bridge, and very soon the equipage emerged from that point. Two horsemen first crossed the bridge, then came a carriage drawn by four horses, and two men rode behind.

It seemed to be the traveling carriage of a person of rank; and we were all immediately absorbed in watching that very unusual spectacle. It became, in a few moments, greatly more interesting, for just as the carriage had passed the summit of the steep bridge, one of the leaders, taking fright, communicated his panic to the rest, and after a plunge or two, the whole team broke into a wild gallop together, and dashing between the horsemen who rode in front, came thundering along the road towards us with the speed of a hurricane.

The excitement of the scene was made more painful by the clear, long-drawn screams of a female voice from the carriage window.

We all advanced in curiosity and horror; me rather in silence, the rest with various ejaculations of terror.

Our suspense did not last long. Just before you reach the castle drawbridge, on the route they were coming, there stands by the roadside a magnificent lime tree, on the other stands an ancient stone cross, at sight of which the horses, now going at a pace that was perfectly frightful, swerved so as to bring the wheel over the projecting roots of the tree.

I knew what was coming. I covered my eyes, unable to see it out, and turned my head away; at the same moment I heard a cry from my lady friends, who had gone on a little.

Curiosity opened my eyes, and I saw a scene of utter confusion. Two of the horses were on the ground, the carriage lay upon its side with two wheels in the air; the men were busy removing the traces, and a lady with a commanding air and figure had got out, and stood with clasped hands, raising the handkerchief that was in them every now and then to her eyes.

Through the carriage door was now lifted a young lady, who appeared to be lifeless. My dear old father was already beside the elder lady, with his hat in his hand, evidently tendering his aid and the resources of his schloss. The lady did not appear to hear him, or to have eyes for anything but the slender girl who was being placed against the slope of the bank.

I approached; the young lady was apparently stunned, but she was certainly not dead. My father, who piqued himself on being something of a physician, had just had his fingers on her wrist and assured the lady, who declared herself her mother, that her pulse, though faint and irregular, was undoubtedly still distinguishable. The lady clasped her hands and looked upward, as if in a momentary transport of gratitude; but immediately she broke out again in that theatrical way which is, I believe, natural to some people.

She was what is called a fine looking woman for her time of life, and must have been handsome; she was tall, but not thin, and dressed in black velvet, and looked rather pale, but with a proud and commanding countenance, though now agitated strangely.

“Who was ever being so born to calamity?” I heard her say, with clasped hands, as I came up. “Here am I, on a journey of life and death, in prosecuting which to lose an hour is possibly to lose all. My child will not have recovered sufficiently to resume her route for who can say how long. I must leave her: I cannot, dare not, delay. How far on, sir, can you tell, is the nearest village? I must leave her there; and shall not see my darling, or even hear of her till my return, three months hence.”

I plucked my father by the coat, and whispered earnestly in his ear: “Oh! Papa, pray ask her to let her stay with us – it would be so delightful. Do, pray.”

“If Madame will entrust her child to the care of my daughter, and of her good gouvernante, Madame Perrodon, and permit her to remain as our guest, under my charge, until her return, it will confer a distinction and an obligation upon us, and we shall treat her with all the care and devotion which so sacred a trust deserves.”

“I cannot do that, sir, it would be to task your kindness and chivalry too cruelly,” said the lady, distractedly.

“It would, on the contrary, be to confer on us a very great kindness at the moment when we most need it. My daughter has just been disappointed by a cruel misfortune, in a visit from which she had long anticipated a great deal of happiness. If you confide this young lady to our care it will be her best consolation. The nearest village on your route is distant, and affords no such inn as you could think of placing your daughter at; you cannot allow her to continue her journey for any considerable distance without danger. If, as you say, you cannot suspend your journey, you must part with her tonight, and nowhere could you do so with more honest assurances of care and tenderness than here.”

There was something in this lady’s air and appearance so distinguished and even imposing, and in her manner so engaging, as to impress one, quite apart from the dignity of her equipage, with a conviction that she was a person of consequence.

By this time the carriage was replaced in its upright position, and the horses, quite tractable, in the traces again.

The lady threw on her daughter a glance which I fancied was not quite so affectionate as one might have anticipated from the beginning of the scene; then she beckoned slightly to my father, and withdrew two or three steps with him out of hearing; and talked to him with a fixed and stern countenance, not at all like that with which she had hitherto spoken.

I was filled with wonder that my father did not seem to perceive the change, and also unspeakably curious to learn what it could be that she was speaking, almost in his ear, with so much earnestness and rapidity.

Two or three minutes at most I think she remained thus employed, then she turned, and a few steps brought her to where her daughter lay, supported by Madame Perrodon. She kneeled beside her for a moment and whispered, as Madame supposed, a little benediction in her ear; then hastily kissing her she stepped into her carriage, the door was closed, the footmen in stately liveries jumped up behind, the outriders spurred on, the postilions cracked their whips, the horses plunged and broke suddenly into a furious canter that threatened soon again to become a gallop, and the carriage whirled away, followed at the same rapid pace by the two horsemen in the rear.

III

We Compare Notes

We followed the cortege with our eyes until it was swiftly lost to sight in the misty wood; and the very sound of the hoofs and the wheels died away in the silent night air.

Nothing remained to assure us that the adventure had not been an illusion of a moment but the young lady, who just at that moment opened her eyes. I could not see, for her face was turned from me, but she raised her head, evidently looking about her, and I heard a very sweet voice ask complainingly, “Where is mamma?”

Our good Madame Perrodon answered tenderly, and added some comfortable assurances.

I then heard her ask:

“Where am I? What is this place?” and after that she said, “I don’t see the carriage; and Matska, where is she?”

Madame answered all her questions in so far as she understood them; and gradually the young lady remembered how the misadventure came about, and was glad to hear that no one in, or in attendance on, the carriage was hurt; and on learning that her mamma had left her here, till her return in about three months, she wept.

I was going to add my consolations to those of Madame Perrodon when Mademoiselle De Lafontaine placed her hand upon my arm, saying:

“Don’t approach, one at a time is as much as she can at present converse with; a very little excitement would possibly overpower her now.”

As soon as she is comfortably in bed, I thought, I will run up to her room and see her.

My father in the meantime had sent a servant on horseback for the physician, who lived about two leagues away; and a bedroom was being prepared for the young lady’s reception.

The stranger now rose, and leaning on Madame’s arm, walked slowly over the drawbridge and into the castle gate.

In the hall, servants waited to receive her, and she was conducted forthwith to her room. The room we usually sat in as our drawing room is long, having four windows, that looked over the moat and drawbridge, upon the forest scene I have just described.

It is furnished in old carved oak, with large carved cabinets, and the chairs are cushioned with crimson Utrecht velvet. The walls are covered with tapestry, and surrounded with great gold frames, the figures being as large as life, in ancient and very curious costume, and the subjects represented are hunting, hawking, and generally festive. It is not too stately to be extremely comfortable; and here we had our tea, for with his usual patriotic leanings he insisted that the national beverage should make its appearance regularly with our coffee and chocolate.

We sat here this night, and with candles lighted, were talking over the adventure of the evening.

Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine were both of our party. The young stranger had hardly lain down in her bed when she sank into a deep sleep; and those ladies had left her in the care of a servant.

“How do you like our guest?” I asked, as soon as Madame entered. “Tell me all about her?”

“I like her extremely,” answered Madame, “she is, I almost think, the prettiest creature I ever saw; about your age, and so gentle and nice.”

“She is absolutely beautiful,” threw in Mademoiselle, who had peeped for a moment into the stranger’s room.

“And such a sweet voice!” added Madame Perrodon.

“Did you remark a woman in the carriage, after it was set up again, who did not get out,” inquired Mademoiselle, “but only looked from the window?”

“No, we had not seen her.”

Then she described a hideous black woman, with a sort of colored turban on her head, and who was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding and grinning derisively towards the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, and her teeth set as if in fury.

“Did you remark what an ill-looking pack of men the servants were?” asked Madame.

“Yes,” said my father, who had just come in, “ugly, hang-dog looking fellows as ever I beheld in my life. I hope they mayn’t rob the poor lady in the forest. They are clever rogues, however; they got everything to rights in a minute.”

“I dare say they are worn out with too long traveling,” said Madame.

“Besides looking wicked, their faces were so strangely lean, and dark, and sullen. I am very curious, I own; but I dare say the young lady will tell you all about it tomorrow, if she is sufficiently recovered.”

“I don’t think she will,” said my father, with a mysterious smile, and a little nod of his head, as if he knew more about it than he cared to tell us.

This made us all the more inquisitive as to what had passed between him and the lady in the black velvet, in the brief but earnest interview that had immediately preceded her departure.

We were scarcely alone, when I entreated him to tell me. He did not need much pressing.

“There is no particular reason why I should not tell you. She expressed a reluctance to trouble us with the care of her daughter, saying she was in delicate health, and nervous, but not subject to any kind of seizure – she volunteered that – nor to any illusion; being, in fact, perfectly sane.”

“How very odd to say all that!” I interpolated. “It was so unnecessary.”

“At all events it was said,” he laughed, “and as you wish to know all that passed, which was indeed very little, I tell you. She then said, ‘I am making a long journey of vital importance – she emphasized the word – rapid and secret; I shall return for my child in three months; in the meantime, she will be silent as to who we are, whence we come, and whither we are traveling.’ That is all she said. She spoke very pure French. When she said the word ‘secret,’ she paused for a few seconds, looking sternly, her eyes fixed on mine. I fancy she makes a great point of that. You saw how quickly she was gone. I hope I have not done a very foolish thing, in taking charge of the young lady.”

For my part, I was delighted. I was longing to see and talk to her; and only waiting till the doctor should give me leave. You, who live in towns, can have no idea how great an event the introduction of a new friend is, in such a solitude as surrounded us.

The doctor did not arrive till nearly one o’clock; but I could no more have gone to my bed and slept, than I could have overtaken, on foot, the carriage in which the princess in black velvet had driven away.

When the physician came down to the drawing room, it was to report very favorably upon his patient. She was now sitting up, her pulse quite regular, apparently perfectly well. She had sustained no injury, and the little shock to her nerves had passed away quite harmlessly. There could be no harm certainly in my seeing her, if we both wished it; and, with this permission I sent, forthwith, to know whether she would allow me to visit her for a few minutes in her room.

The servant returned immediately to say that she desired nothing more.

You may be sure I was not long in availing myself of this permission.

Our visitor lay in one of the handsomest rooms in the schloss. It was, perhaps, a little stately. There was a somber piece of tapestry opposite the foot of the bed, representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom; and other solemn classic scenes were displayed, a little faded, upon the other walls. But there was gold carving, and rich and varied color enough in the other decorations of the room, to more than redeem the gloom of the old tapestry.

There were candles at the bedside. She was sitting up; her slender pretty figure enveloped in the soft silk dressing gown, embroidered with flowers, and lined with thick quilted silk, which her mother had thrown over her feet as she lay upon the ground.

What was it that, as I reached the bedside and had just begun my little greeting, struck me dumb in a moment, and made me recoil a step or two from before her? I will tell you.

I saw the very face which had visited me in my childhood at night, which remained so fixed in my memory, and on which I had for so many years so often ruminated with horror, when no one suspected of what I was thinking.

It was pretty, even beautiful; and when I first beheld it, wore the same melancholy expression.

But this almost instantly lighted into a strange fixed smile of recognition.

There was a silence of fully a minute, and then at length she spoke; I could not.

“How wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Twelve years ago, I saw your face in a dream, and it has haunted me ever since.”

“Wonderful indeed!” I repeated, overcoming with an effort the horror that had for a time suspended my utterances. “Twelve years ago, in vision or reality, I certainly saw you. I could not forget your face. It has remained before my eyes ever since.”

Her smile had softened. Whatever I had fancied strange in it, was gone, and it and her dimpling cheeks were now delightfully pretty and intelligent.

I felt reassured, and continued more in the vein which hospitality indicated, to bid her welcome, and to tell her how much pleasure her accidental arrival had given us all, and especially what a happiness it was to me.

I took her hand as I spoke. I was a little shy, as lonely people are, but the situation made me eloquent, and even bold. She pressed my hand, she laid hers upon it, and her eyes glowed, as, looking hastily into mine, she smiled again, and blushed.

She answered my welcome very prettily. I sat down beside her, still wondering; and she said:

“I must tell you my vision about you; it is so very strange that you and I should have had, each of the other so vivid a dream, that each should have seen, I you and you me, looking as we do now, when of course we both were mere children. I was a child, about six years old, and I awoke from a confused and troubled dream, and found myself in a room, unlike my nursery, wainscoted clumsily in some dark wood, and with cupboards and bedsteads, and chairs, and benches placed about it. The beds were, I thought, all empty, and the room itself without anyone but myself in it; and I, after looking about me for some time, and admiring especially an iron candlestick with two branches, which I should certainly know again, crept under one of the beds to reach the window; but as I got from under the bed, I heard someone crying; and looking up, while I was still upon my knees, I saw you – most assuredly you – as I see you now; a beautiful young lady, with golden hair and large blue eyes, and lips – your lips – you as you are here.

“Your looks won me; I climbed on the bed and put my arms about you, and I think we both fell asleep. I was aroused by a scream; you were sitting up screaming. I was frightened, and slipped down upon the ground, and, it seemed to me, lost consciousness for a moment; and when I came to myself, I was again in my nursery at home. Your face I have never forgotten since. I could not be misled by mere resemblance. You are the lady whom I saw then.”

It was now my turn to relate my corresponding vision, which I did, to the undisguised wonder of my new acquaintance.

“I don’t know which should be most afraid of the other,” she said, again smiling – “If you were less pretty I think I should be very much afraid of you, but being as you are, and you and I both so young, I feel only that I have made your acquaintance twelve years ago, and have already a right to your intimacy; at all events it does seem as if we were destined, from our earliest childhood, to be friends. I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you; I have never had a friend – shall I find one now?” She sighed, and her fine dark eyes gazed passionately on me.

Now the truth is, I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, ‘drawn towards her’, but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.

I perceived now something of languor and exhaustion stealing over her, and hastened to bid her good night.

“The doctor thinks,” I added, “that you ought to have a maid to sit up with you tonight; one of ours is waiting, and you will find her a very useful and quiet creature.”

“How kind of you, but I could not sleep, I never could with an attendant in the room. I shan’t require any assistance – and, shall I confess my weakness, I am haunted with a terror of robbers. Our house was robbed once, and two servants murdered, so I always lock my door. It has become a habit – and you look so kind I know you will forgive me. I see there is a key in the lock.”

She held me close in her pretty arms for a moment and whispered in my ear, “Good night, darling, it is very hard to part with you, but good night; tomorrow, but not early, I shall see you again.”

She sank back on the pillow with a sigh, and her fine eyes followed me with a fond and melancholy gaze, and she murmured again “Good night, dear friend.”

Young people like, and even love, on impulse. I was flattered by the evident, though as yet undeserved, fondness she showed me. I liked the confidence with which she at once received me. She was determined that we should be very near friends.

Next day came and we met again. I was delighted with my companion; that is to say, in many respects.

Her looks lost nothing in daylight – she was certainly the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, and the unpleasant remembrance of the face presented in my early dream, had lost the effect of the first unexpected recognition.

She confessed that she had experienced a similar shock on seeing me, and precisely the same faint antipathy that had mingled with my admiration of her. We now laughed together over our momentary horrors.

IV

Her Habits – A Saunter

I told you that I was charmed with her in most particulars.

There were some that did not please me so well.

She was above the middle height of women. I shall begin by describing her.

She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were languid – very languid – indeed, there was nothing in her appearance to indicate an invalid. Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and soft, and in color a rich very dark brown, with something of gold. I loved to let it down, tumbling with its own weight, as, in her room, she lay back in her chair talking in her sweet low voice, I used to fold and braid it, and spread it out and play with it. Heavens! If I had but known all!

I said there were particulars which did not please me. I have told you that her confidence won me the first night I saw her; but I found that she exercised with respect to herself, her mother, her history, everything in fact connected with her life, plans, and people, an ever wakeful reserve. I dare say I was unreasonable, perhaps I was wrong; I dare say I ought to have respected the solemn injunction laid upon my father by the stately lady in black velvet. But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another. What harm could it do anyone to tell me what I so ardently desired to know? Had she no trust in my good sense or honor? Why would she not believe me when I assured her, so solemnly, that I would not divulge one syllable of what she told me to any mortal breathing.

There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light.

I cannot say we quarreled upon this point, for she would not quarrel upon any. It was, of course, very unfair of me to press her, very ill-bred, but I really could not help it; and I might just as well have let it alone.

What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation – to nothing.

It was all summed up in three very vague disclosures:

First – her name was Carmilla.

Second – her family was very ancient and noble.

Third – her home lay in the direction of the west.

She would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, nor the name of their estate, nor even that of the country they lived in.

You are not to suppose that I worried her incessantly on these subjects. I watched opportunity, and rather insinuated than urged my inquiries. Once or twice, indeed, I did attack her more directly. But no matter what my tactics, utter failure was invariably the result. Reproaches and caresses were all lost upon her. But I must add this, that her evasion was conducted with so pretty a melancholy and deprecation, with so many, and even passionate declarations of her liking for me, and trust in my honor, and with so many promises that I should at last know all, that I could not find it in my heart long to be offended with her.

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die – die, sweetly die – into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.”

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

Her agitations and her language were unintelligible to me.

From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms.

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling.

I now write, after an interval of more than ten years, with a trembling hand, with a confused and horrible recollection of certain occurrences and situations, in the ordeal through which I was unconsciously passing; though with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main current of my story.

But, I suspect, in all lives there are certain emotional scenes, those in which our passions have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of all others the most vaguely and dimly remembered.

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.” Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.

“Are we related,” I used to ask; “what can you mean by all this? I remind you perhaps of someone whom you love; but you must not, I hate it; I don’t know you – I don’t know myself when you look so and talk so.”

She used to sigh at my vehemence, then turn away and drop my hand.

Respecting these very extraordinary manifestations I strove in vain to form any satisfactory theory – I could not refer them to affectation or trick. It was unmistakably the momentary breaking out of suppressed instinct and emotion. Was she, notwithstanding her mother’s volunteered denial, subject to brief visitations of insanity; or was there here a disguise and a romance? I had read in old storybooks of such things. What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade, with the assistance of a clever old adventuress. But there were many things against this hypothesis, highly interesting as it was to my vanity.

I could boast of no little attentions such as masculine gallantry delights to offer. Between these passionate moments there were long intervals of commonplace, of gaiety, of brooding melancholy, during which, except that I detected her eyes so full of melancholy fire, following me, at times I might have been as nothing to her. Except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her, quite incompatible with a masculine system in a state of health.

In some respects her habits were odd. Perhaps not so singular in the opinion of a town lady like you, as they appeared to us rustic people. She used to come down very late, generally not till one o’clock, she would then take a cup of chocolate, but eat nothing; we then went out for a walk, which was a mere saunter, and she seemed, almost immediately, exhausted, and either returned to the schloss or sat on one of the benches that were placed, here and there, among the trees. This was a bodily languor in which her mind did not sympathize. She was always an animated talker, and very intelligent.

She sometimes alluded for a moment to her own home, or mentioned an adventure or situation, or an early recollection, which indicated a people of strange manners, and described customs of which we knew nothing. I gathered from these chance hints that her native country was much more remote than I had at first fancied.

As we sat thus one afternoon under the trees a funeral passed us by. It was that of a pretty young girl, whom I had often seen, the daughter of one of the rangers of the forest. The poor man was walking behind the coffin of his darling; she was his only child, and he looked quite heartbroken.

Peasants walking two-and-two came behind, they were singing a funeral hymn.

I rose to mark my respect as they passed, and joined in the hymn they were very sweetly singing.

My companion shook me a little roughly, and I turned surprised.

She said brusquely, “Don’t you perceive how discordant that is?”

“I think it very sweet, on the contrary,” I answered, vexed at the interruption, and very uncomfortable, lest the people who composed the little procession should observe and resent what was passing.

I resumed, therefore, instantly, and was again interrupted. “You pierce my ears,” said Carmilla, almost angrily, and stopping her ears with her tiny fingers. “Besides, how can you tell that your religion and mine are the same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals. What a fuss! Why you must die – everyone must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home.”

“My father has gone on with the clergyman to the churchyard. I thought you knew she was to be buried today.”

“She? I don’t trouble my head about peasants. I don’t know who she is,” answered Carmilla, with a flash from her fine eyes.

“She is the poor girl who fancied she saw a ghost a fortnight ago, and has been dying ever since, till yesterday, when she expired.”

“Tell me nothing about ghosts. I shan’t sleep tonight if you do.”

“I hope there is no plague or fever coming; all this looks very like it,” I continued. “The swineherd’s young wife died only a week ago, and she thought something seized her by the throat as she lay in her bed, and nearly strangled her. Papa says such horrible fancies do accompany some forms of fever. She was quite well the day before. She sank afterwards, and died before a week.”

“Well, her funeral is over, I hope, and her hymn sung; and our ears shan’t be tortured with that discord and jargon. It has made me nervous. Sit down here, beside me; sit close; hold my hand; press it hard – hard – harder.”

We had moved a little back, and had come to another seat.

She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided. “There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!” she said at last. “Hold me, hold me still. It is passing away.”

And so gradually it did; and perhaps to dissipate the somber impression which the spectacle had left upon me, she became unusually animated and chatty; and so we got home.

This was the first time I had seen her exhibit any definable symptoms of that delicacy of health which her mother had spoken of. It was the first time, also, I had seen her exhibit anything like temper.

Both passed away like a summer cloud; and never but once afterwards did I witness on her part a momentary sign of anger. I will tell you how it happened.

She and I were looking out of one of the long drawing room windows, when there entered the courtyard, over the drawbridge, a figure of a wanderer whom I knew very well. He used to visit the schloss generally twice a year.

It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that generally accompany deformity. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to make my father laugh. They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots, squirrels, fish, and hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great neatness and startling effect. He had a fiddle, a box of conjuring apparatus, a pair of foils and masks attached to his belt, several other mysterious cases dangling about him, and a black staff with copper ferrules in his hand. His companion was a rough spare dog, that followed at his heels, but stopped short, suspiciously at the drawbridge, and in a little while began to howl dismally.

In the meantime, the mountebank, standing in the midst of the courtyard, raised his grotesque hat, and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his compliments very volubly in execrable French, and German not much better.

Then, disengaging his fiddle, he began to scrape a lively air to which he sang with a merry discord, dancing with ludicrous airs and activity, that made me laugh, in spite of the dog’s howling.

Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and his hat in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed at our service, and the curiosities and entertainments which it was in his power, at our bidding, to display.

“Will your ladyships be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire, which is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods,” he said dropping his hat on the pavement. “They are dying of it right and left and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you may laugh in his face.”

These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them.

Carmilla instantly purchased one, and so did I.

He was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least, I can answer for myself. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our faces, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity,

In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd little steel instruments.

“See here, my lady,” he said, displaying it, and addressing me, “I profess, among other things less useful, the art of dentistry. Plague take the dog!” he interpolated. “Silence, beast! He howls so that your ladyships can scarcely hear a word. Your noble friend, the young lady at your right, has the sharpest tooth – long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle; ha, ha! With my sharp and long sight, as I look up, I have seen it distinctly; now if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of a fish, but of a beautiful young lady as she is. Hey? Is the young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her?”

The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the window.

“How dares that mountebank insult us so? Where is your father? I shall demand redress from him. My father would have had the wretch tied up to the pump, and flogged with a cart whip, and burnt to the bones with the cattle brand!”

She retired from the window a step or two, and sat down, and had hardly lost sight of the offender, when her wrath subsided as suddenly as it had risen, and she gradually recovered her usual tone, and seemed to forget the little hunchback and his follies.

My father was out of spirits that evening. On coming in he told us that there had been another case very similar to the two fatal ones which had lately occurred. The sister of a young peasant on his estate, only a mile away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very nearly in the same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking.

“All this,” said my father, “is strictly referable to natural causes. These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbors.”

“But that very circumstance frightens one horribly,” said Carmilla.

“How so?” inquired my father.

“I am so afraid of fancying I see such things; I think it would be as bad as reality.”

“We are in God’s hands: nothing can happen without his permission, and all will end well for those who love him. He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us.”

“Creator! Nature!” said the young lady in answer to my gentle father. “And this disease that invades the country is natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature – don’t they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so.”

“The doctor said he would come here today,” said my father, after a silence. “I want to know what he thinks about it, and what he thinks we had better do.”

“Doctors never did me any good,” said Carmilla.

“Then you have been ill?” I asked.

“More ill than ever you were,” she answered.

“Long ago?”

“Yes, a long time. I suffered from this very illness; but I forget all but my pain and weakness, and they were not so bad as are suffered in other diseases.”

“You were very young then?”

“I dare say, let us talk no more of it. You would not wound a friend?”

She looked languidly in my eyes, and passed her arm round my waist lovingly, and led me out of the room. My father was busy over some papers near the window.

“Why does your papa like to frighten us?” said the pretty girl with a sigh and a little shudder.

“He doesn’t, dear Carmilla, it is the very furthest thing from his mind.”

“Are you afraid, dearest?”

“I should be very much if I fancied there was any real danger of my being attacked as those poor people were.”

“You are afraid to die?”

“Yes, everyone is.”

“But to die as lovers may – to die together, so that they may live together.

Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see – each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure. So says Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room.”

Later in the day the doctor came, and was closeted with papa for some time.

He was a skilful man, of sixty and upwards, he wore powder, and shaved his pale face as smooth as a pumpkin. He and papa emerged from the room together, and I heard papa laugh, and say as they came out:

“Well, I do wonder at a wise man like you. What do you say to hippogriffs and dragons?”

The doctor was smiling, and made answer, shaking his head –

“Nevertheless life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”

And so they walked on, and I heard no more. I did not then know what the doctor had been broaching, but I think I guess it now.

V

A Wonderful Likeness

This evening there arrived from Gratz the grave, dark-faced son of the picture cleaner, with a horse and cart laden with two large packing cases, having many pictures in each. It was a journey of ten leagues, and whenever a messenger arrived at the schloss from our little capital of Gratz, we used to crowd about him in the hall, to hear the news.

This arrival created in our secluded quarters quite a sensation. The cases remained in the hall, and the messenger was taken charge of by the servants till he had eaten his supper. Then with assistants, and armed with hammer, ripping chisel, and turnscrew, he met us in the hall, where we had assembled to witness the unpacking of the cases.

Carmilla sat looking listlessly on, while one after the other the old pictures, nearly all portraits, which had undergone the process of renovation, were brought to light. My mother was of an old Hungarian family, and most of these pictures, which were about to be restored to their places, had come to us through her.

My father had a list in his hand, from which he read, as the artist rummaged out the corresponding numbers. I don’t know that the pictures were very good, but they were, undoubtedly, very old, and some of them very curious also. They had, for the most part, the merit of being now seen by me, I may say, for the first time; for the smoke and dust of time had all but obliterated them.

“There is a picture that I have not seen yet,” said my father. “In one corner, at the top of it, is the name, as well as I could read, ‘Marcia Karnstein’, and the date ‘1698’; and I am curious to see how it has turned out.”

I remembered it; it was a small picture, about a foot and a half high, and nearly square, without a frame; but it was so blackened by age that I could not make it out.

The artist now produced it, with evident pride. It was quite beautiful; it was startling; it seemed to live. It was the effigy of Carmilla!

“Carmilla, dear, here is an absolute miracle. Here you are, living, smiling, ready to speak, in this picture. Isn’t it beautiful, Papa? And see, even the little mole on her throat.”

My father laughed, and said “Certainly it is a wonderful likeness,” but he looked away, and to my surprise seemed but little struck by it, and went on talking to the picture cleaner, who was also something of an artist, and discoursed with intelligence about the portraits or other works, which his art had just brought into light and color, while I was more and more lost in wonder the more I looked at the picture.

“Will you let me hang this picture in my room, papa?” I asked.

“Certainly, dear,” said he, smiling, “I’m very glad you think it so like. It must be prettier even than I thought it, if it is.”

The young lady did not acknowledge this pretty speech, did not seem to hear it. She was leaning back in her seat, her fine eyes under their long lashes gazing on me in contemplation, and she smiled in a kind of rapture.

“And now you can read quite plainly the name that is written in the corner. It is not Marcia; it looks as if it was done in gold. The name is Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and this is a little coronet over and underneath A.D. 1698. I am descended from the Karnsteins; that is, mamma was.”

“Ah!” said the lady, languidly, “so am I, I think, a very long descent, very ancient. Are there any Karnsteins living now?”

“None who bear the name, I believe. The family were ruined, I believe, in some civil wars, long ago, but the ruins of the castle are only about three miles away.”

“How interesting!” she said, languidly. “But see what beautiful moonlight!” She glanced through the hall door, which stood a little open. “Suppose you take a little ramble round the court, and look down at the road and river.”

“It is so like the night you came to us,” I said.

She sighed; smiling.

She rose, and each with her arm about the other’s waist, we walked out upon the pavement.

In silence, slowly we walked down to the drawbridge, where the beautiful landscape opened before us.

“And so you were thinking of the night I came here?” she almost whispered. “Are you glad I came?”

“Delighted, dear Carmilla,” I answered.

“And you asked for the picture you think like me, to hang in your room,” she murmured with a sigh, as she drew her arm closer about my waist, and let her pretty head sink upon my shoulder. “How romantic you are, Carmilla,” I said. “Whenever you tell me your story, it will be made up chiefly of some one great romance.”

She kissed me silently.

“I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on.”

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”

How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!

Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.

Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. “Darling, darling,” she murmured, “I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.”

I started from her.

She was gazing on me with eyes from which all fire, all meaning had flown, and a face colorless and apathetic.

“Is there a chill in the air, dear?” she said drowsily. “I almost shiver; have I been dreaming? Let us come in. Come; come; come in.”

“You look ill, Carmilla; a little faint. You certainly must take some wine,” I said.

“Yes. I will. I’m better now. I shall be quite well in a few minutes. Yes, do give me a little wine,” answered Carmilla, as we approached the door.

“Let us look again for a moment; it is the last time, perhaps, I shall see the moonlight with you.”

“How do you feel now, dear Carmilla? Are you really better?” I asked.

I was beginning to take alarm, lest she should have been stricken with the strange epidemic that they said had invaded the country about us.

“Papa would be grieved beyond measure,” I added, “if he thought you were ever so little ill, without immediately letting us know. We have a very skilful doctor near us, the physician who was with papa today.”

“I’m sure he is. I know how kind you all are; but, dear child, I am quite well again. There is nothing ever wrong with me, but a little weakness. People say I am languid; I am incapable of exertion; I can scarcely walk as far as a child of three years old: and every now and then the little strength I have falters, and I become as you have just seen me. But after all I am very easily set up again; in a moment I am perfectly myself. See how I have recovered.”

So, indeed, she had; and she and I talked a great deal, and very animated she was; and the remainder of that evening passed without any recurrence of what I called her infatuations. I mean her crazy talk and looks, which embarrassed, and even frightened me.

But there occurred that night an event which gave my thoughts quite a new turn, and seemed to startle even Carmilla’s languid nature into momentary energy.

VI

A Very Strange Agony

When we got into the drawing room, and had sat down to our coffee and chocolate, although Carmilla did not take any, she seemed quite herself again, and Madame, and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, joined us, and made a little card party, in the course of which papa came in for what he called his ‘dish of tea’.

When the game was over he sat down beside Carmilla on the sofa, and asked her, a little anxiously, whether she had heard from her mother since her arrival.

She answered “No.”

He then asked whether she knew where a letter would reach her at present.

“I cannot tell,” she answered ambiguously, “but I have been thinking of leaving you; you have been already too hospitable and too kind to me. I have given you an infinity of trouble, and I should wish to take a carriage tomorrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find her, although I dare not yet tell you.”

“But you must not dream of any such thing,” exclaimed my father, to my great relief. “We can’t afford to lose you so, and I won’t consent to your leaving us, except under the care of your mother, who was so good as to consent to your remaining with us till she should herself return. I should be quite happy if I knew that you heard from her: but this evening the accounts of the progress of the mysterious disease that has invaded our neighborhood, grow even more alarming; and my beautiful guest, I do feel the responsibility, unaided by advice from your mother, very much. But I shall do my best; and one thing is certain, that you must not think of leaving us without her distinct direction to that effect. We should suffer too much in parting from you to consent to it easily.”

“Thank you, sir, a thousand times for your hospitality,” she answered, smiling bashfully. “You have all been too kind to me; I have seldom been so happy in all my life before, as in your beautiful chateau, under your care, and in the society of your dear daughter.”

So he gallantly, in his old-fashioned way, kissed her hand, smiling and pleased at her little speech.

I accompanied Carmilla as usual to her room, and sat and chatted with her while she was preparing for bed.

“Do you think,” I said at length, “that you will ever confide fully in me?”

She turned round smiling, but made no answer, only continued to smile on me.

“You won’t answer that?” I said. “You can’t answer pleasantly; I ought not to have asked you.”

“You were quite right to ask me that, or anything. You do not know how dear you are to me, or you could not think any confidence too great to look for. But I am under vows, no nun half so awfully, and I dare not tell my story yet, even to you. The time is very near when you shall know everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”

“Now, Carmilla, you are going to talk your wild nonsense again,” I said hastily.

“Not I, silly little fool as I am, and full of whims and fancies; for your sake I’ll talk like a sage. Were you ever at a ball?”

“No; how you do run on. What is it like? How charming it must be.”

“I almost forget, it is years ago.”

I laughed.

“You are not so old. Your first ball can hardly be forgotten yet.”

“I remember everything about it – with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent. There occurred that night what has confused the picture, and made its colours faint. I was all but assassinated in my bed, wounded here,” she touched her breast, “and never was the same since.”

“Were you near dying?”

“Yes, very – a cruel love – strange love, that would have taken my life. Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now; I feel so lazy. How can I get up just now and lock my door?”

She was lying with her tiny hands buried in her rich wavy hair, under her cheek, her little head upon the pillow, and her glittering eyes followed me wherever I moved, with a kind of shy smile that I could not decipher.

I bid her good night, and crept from the room with an uncomfortable sensation.

I often wondered whether our pretty guest ever said her prayers. I certainly had never seen her upon her knees. In the morning she never came down until long after our family prayers were over, and at night she never left the drawing room to attend our brief evening prayers in the hall.

If it had not been that it had casually come out in one of our careless talks that she had been baptised, I should have doubted her being a Christian. Religion was a subject on which I had never heard her speak a word. If I had known the world better, this particular neglect or antipathy would not have so much surprised me.

The precautions of nervous people are infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them. I had adopted Carmilla’s habit of locking her bedroom door, having taken into my head all her whimsical alarms about midnight invaders and prowling assassins. I had also adopted her precaution of making a brief search through her room, to satisfy herself that no lurking assassin or robber was ‘ensconced’.

These wise measures taken, I got into my bed and fell asleep. A light was burning in my room. This was an old habit, of very early date, and which nothing could have tempted me to dispense with.

Thus fortifed I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony.

I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep.

But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long for it measured fully the length of the hearthrug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.

I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that Carmilla had been playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my door. I hastened to it, and found it locked as usual on the inside. I was afraid to open it – I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered my head up in the bedclothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning.

VII

Descending

It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall the occurrence of that night. It was no such transitory terror as a dream leaves behind it. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition.

I could not bear next day to be alone for a moment. I should have told papa, but for two opposite reasons. At one time I thought he would laugh at my story, and I could not bear its being treated as a jest; and at another I thought he might fancy that I had been attacked by the mysterious complaint which had invaded our neighborhood. I had myself no misgiving of the kind, and as he had been rather an invalid for some time, I was afraid of alarming him.

I was comfortable enough with my good-natured companions, Madame Perrodon, and the vivacious Mademoiselle Lafontaine. They both perceived that I was out of spirits and nervous, and at length I told them what lay so heavy at my heart.

Mademoiselle laughed, but I fancied that Madame Perrodon looked anxious.

“By-the-by,” said Mademoiselle, laughing, “the long lime tree walk, behind Carmilla’s bedroom window, is haunted!”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Madame, who probably thought the theme rather inopportune, “and who tells that story, my dear?”

“Martin says that he came up twice, when the old yard gate was being repaired, before sunrise, and twice saw the same female figure walking down the lime tree avenue.”

“So he well might, as long as there are cows to milk in the river fields,” said Madame.

“I daresay; but Martin chooses to be frightened, and never did I see fool more frightened.”

“You must not say a word about it to Carmilla, because she can see down that walk from her room window,” I interposed, “and she is, if possible, a greater coward than I.”

Carmilla came down rather later than usual that day.

“I was so frightened last night,” she said, so soon as were together, “and I am sure I should have seen something dreadful if it had not been for that charm I bought from the poor little hunchback whom I called such hard names. I had a dream of something black coming round my bed, and I awoke in a perfect horror, and I really thought, for some seconds, I saw a dark figure near the chimneypiece, but I felt under my pillow for my charm, and the moment my fingers touched it, the figure disappeared, and I felt quite certain, only that I had it by me, that something frightful would have made its appearance, and, perhaps, throttled me, as it did those poor people we heard of.

“Well, listen to me,” I began, and recounted my adventure, at the recital of which she appeared horrified.

“And had you the charm near you?” she asked, earnestly.

“No, I had dropped it into a china vase in the drawing room, but I shall certainly take it with me tonight, as you have so much faith in it.”

At this distance of time I cannot tell you, or even understand, how I overcame my horror so effectually as to lie alone in my room that night. I remember distinctly that I pinned the charm to my pillow. I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept even more soundly than usual all night.

Next night I passed as well. My sleep was delightfully deep and dreamless.

But I wakened with a sense of lassitude and melancholy, which, however, did not exceed a degree that was almost luxurious.

“Well, I told you so,” said Carmilla, when I described my quiet sleep, “I had such delightful sleep myself last night; I pinned the charm to the breast of my nightdress. It was too far away the night before. I am quite sure it was all fancy, except the dreams. I used to think that evil spirits made dreams, but our doctor told me it is no such thing. Only a fever passing by, or some other malady, as they often do, he said, knocks at the door, and not being able to get in, passes on, with that alarm.”

“And what do you think the charm is?” said I.

“It has been fumigated or immersed in some drug, and is an antidote against the malaria,” she answered.

“Then it acts only on the body?”

“Certainly; you don’t suppose that evil spirits are frightened by bits of ribbon, or the perfumes of a druggist’s shop? No, these complaints, wandering in the air, begin by trying the nerves, and so infect the brain, but before they can seize upon you, the antidote repels them. That I am sure is what the charm has done for us. It is nothing magical, it is simply natural.

I should have been happier if I could have quite agreed with Carmilla, but I did my best, and the impression was a little losing its force.

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet.

Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

I would not admit that I was ill, I would not consent to tell my papa, or to have the doctor sent for.

Carmilla became more devoted to me than ever, and her strange paroxysms of languid adoration more frequent. She used to gloat on me with increasing ardor the more my strength and spirits waned. This always shocked me like a momentary glare of insanity.

Without knowing it, I was now in a pretty advanced stage of the strangest illness under which mortal ever suffered. There was an unaccountable fascination in its earlier symptoms that more than reconciled me to the incapacitating effect of that stage of the malady. This fascination increased for a time, until it reached a certain point, when gradually a sense of the horrible mingled itself with it, deepening, as you shall hear, until it discolored and perverted the whole state of my life.

The first change I experienced was rather agreeable. It was very near the turning point from which began the descent of Avernus.

Certain vague and strange sensations visited me in my sleep. The prevailing one was of that pleasant, peculiar cold thrill which we feel in bathing, when we move against the current of a river. This was soon accompanied by dreams that seemed interminable, and were so vague that I could never recollect their scenery and persons, or any one connected portion of their action. But they left an awful impression, and a sense of exhaustion, as if I had passed through a long period of great mental exertion and danger.

After all these dreams there remained on waking a remembrance of having been in a place very nearly dark, and of having spoken to people whom I could not see; and especially of one clear voice, of a female’s, very deep, that spoke as if at a distance, slowly, and producing always the same sensation of indescribable solemnity and fear. Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.

It was now three weeks since the commencement of this unaccountable state.

My sufferings had, during the last week, told upon my appearance. I had grown pale, my eyes were dilated and darkened underneath, and the languor which I had long felt began to display itself in my countenance.

My father asked me often whether I was ill; but, with an obstinacy which now seems to me unaccountable, I persisted in assuring him that I was quite well.

In a sense this was true. I had no pain, I could complain of no bodily derangement. My complaint seemed to be one of the imagination, or the nerves, and, horrible as my sufferings were, I kept them, with a morbid reserve, very nearly to myself.

It could not be that terrible complaint which the peasants called the oupire, for I had now been suffering for three weeks, and they were seldom ill for much more than three days, when death put an end to their miseries.

Carmilla complained of dreams and feverish sensations, but by no means of so alarming a kind as mine. I say that mine were extremely alarming. Had I been capable of comprehending my condition, I would have invoked aid and advice on my knees. The narcotic of an unsuspected influence was acting upon me, and my perceptions were benumbed.

I am going to tell you now of a dream that led immediately to an odd discovery.

One night, instead of the voice I was accustomed to hear in the dark, I heard one, sweet and tender, and at the same time terrible, which said,

“Your mother warns you to beware of the assassin.” At the same time a light unexpectedly sprang up, and I saw Carmilla, standing, near the foot of my bed, in her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, in one great stain of blood.

I wakened with a shriek, possessed with the one idea that Carmilla was being murdered. I remember springing from my bed, and my next recollection is that of standing on the lobby, crying for help.

Madame and Mademoiselle came scurrying out of their rooms in alarm; a lamp burned always on the lobby, and seeing me, they soon learned the cause of my terror.

I insisted on our knocking at Carmilla’s door. Our knocking was unanswered.

It soon became a pounding and an uproar. We shrieked her name, but all was vain.

We all grew frightened, for the door was locked. We hurried back, in panic, to my room. There we rang the bell long and furiously. If my father’s room had been at that side of the house, we would have called him up at once to our aid. But, alas! He was quite out of hearing, and to reach him involved an excursion for which we none of us had courage.

Servants, however, soon came running up the stairs; I had got on my dressing gown and slippers meanwhile, and my companions were already similarly furnished. Recognizing the voices of the servants on the lobby, we sallied out together; and having renewed, as fruitlessly, our summons at Carmilla’s door, I ordered the men to force the lock. They did so, and we stood, holding our lights aloft, in the doorway, and so stared into the room.

We called her by name; but there was still no reply. We looked round the room. Everything was undisturbed. It was exactly in the state in which I had left it on bidding her good night. But Carmilla was gone.

VIII

Search

At sight of the room, perfectly undisturbed except for our violent entrance, we began to cool a little, and soon recovered our senses sufficiently to dismiss the men. It had struck Mademoiselle that possibly Carmilla had been wakened by the uproar at her door, and in her first panic had jumped from her bed, and hid herself in a press, or behind a curtain, from which she could not, of course, emerge until the majordomo and his myrmidons had withdrawn. We now recommenced our search, and began to call her name again.

It was all to no purpose. Our perplexity and agitation increased. We examined the windows, but they were secured. I implored of Carmilla, if she had concealed herself, to play this cruel trick no longer – to come out and to end our anxieties. It was all useless. I was by this time convinced that she was not in the room, nor in the dressing room, the door of which was still locked on this side. She could not have passed it. I was utterly puzzled. Had Carmilla discovered one of those secret passages which the old housekeeper said were known to exist in the schloss, although the tradition of their exact situation had been lost? A little time would, no doubt, explain all – utterly perplexed as, for the present, we were.

It was past four o’clock, and I preferred passing the remaining hours of darkness in Madame’s room. Daylight brought no solution of the difficulty.

The whole household, with my father at its head, was in a state of agitation next morning. Every part of the chateau was searched. The grounds were explored. No trace of the missing lady could be discovered. The stream was about to be dragged; my father was in distraction; what a tale to have to tell the poor girl’s mother on her return. I, too, was almost beside myself, though my grief was quite of a different kind.

The morning was passed in alarm and excitement. It was now one o’clock, and still no tidings. I ran up to Carmilla’s room, and found her standing at her dressing table. I was astounded. I could not believe my eyes. She beckoned me to her with her pretty finger, in silence. Her face expressed extreme fear.

I ran to her in an ecstasy of joy; I kissed and embraced her again and again. I ran to the bell and rang it vehemently, to bring others to the spot who might at once relieve my father’s anxiety.

“Dear Carmilla, what has become of you all this time? We have been in agonies of anxiety about you,” I exclaimed. “Where have you been? How did you come back?”

“Last night has been a night of wonders,” she said.

“For mercy’s sake, explain all you can.”

“It was past two last night,” she said, “when I went to sleep as usual in my bed, with my doors locked, that of the dressing room, and that opening upon the gallery. My sleep was uninterrupted, and, so far as I know, dreamless; but I woke just now on the sofa in the dressing room there, and I found the door between the rooms open, and the other door forced. How could all this have happened without my being wakened? It must have been accompanied with a great deal of noise, and I am particularly easily wakened; and how could I have been carried out of my bed without my sleep having been interrupted, I whom the slightest stir startles?”

By this time, Madame, Mademoiselle, my father, and a number of the servants were in the room. Carmilla was, of course, overwhelmed with inquiries, congratulations, and welcomes. She had but one story to tell, and seemed the least able of all the party to suggest any way of accounting for what had happened.

My father took a turn up and down the room, thinking. I saw Carmilla’s eye follow him for a moment with a sly, dark glance.

When my father had sent the servants away, Mademoiselle having gone in search of a little bottle of valerian and salvolatile, and there being no one now in the room with Carmilla, except my father, Madame, and myself, he came to her thoughtfully, took her hand very kindly, led her to the sofa, and sat down beside her.

“Will you forgive me, my dear, if I risk a conjecture, and ask a question?”

“Who can have a better right?” she said. “Ask what you please, and I will tell you everything. But my story is simply one of bewilderment and darkness. I know absolutely nothing. Put any question you please, but you know, of course, the limitations mamma has placed me under.”

“Perfectly, my dear child. I need not approach the topics on which she desires our silence. Now, the marvel of last night consists in your having been removed from your bed and your room, without being wakened, and this removal having occurred apparently while the windows were still secured, and the two doors locked upon the inside. I will tell you my theory and ask you a question.”

Carmilla was leaning on her hand dejectedly; Madame and I were listening breathlessly.

“Now, my question is this. Have you ever been suspected of walking in your sleep?”

“Never, since I was very young indeed.”

“But you did walk in your sleep when you were young?”

“Yes; I know I did. I have been told so often by my old nurse.”

My father smiled and nodded.

“Well, what has happened is this. You got up in your sleep, unlocked the door, not leaving the key, as usual, in the lock, but taking it out and locking it on the outside; you again took the key out, and carried it away with you to some one of the five-and-twenty rooms on this floor, or perhaps upstairs or downstairs. There are so many rooms and closets, so much heavy furniture, and such accumulations of lumber, that it would require a week to search this old house thoroughly. Do you see, now, what I mean?”

“I do, but not all,” she answered.

“And how, papa, do you account for her finding herself on the sofa in the dressing room, which we had searched so carefully?”

“She came there after you had searched it, still in her sleep, and at last awoke spontaneously, and was as much surprised to find herself where she was as any one else. I wish all mysteries were as easily and innocently explained as yours, Carmilla,” he said, laughing. “And so we may congratulate ourselves on the certainty that the most natural explanation of the occurrence is one that involves no drugging, no tampering with locks, no burglars, or poisoners, or witches – nothing that need alarm Carmilla, or anyone else, for our safety.”

Carmilla was looking charmingly. Nothing could be more beautiful than her tints. Her beauty was, I think, enhanced by that graceful languor that was peculiar to her. I think my father was silently contrasting her looks with mine, for he said:

“I wish my poor Laura was looking more like herself”; and he sighed.

So our alarms were happily ended, and Carmilla restored to her friends.

IX

The Doctor

As Carmilla would not hear of an attendant sleeping in her room, my father arranged that a servant should sleep outside her door, so that she would not attempt to make another such excursion without being arrested at her own door.

That night passed quietly; and next morning early, the doctor, whom my father had sent for without telling me a word about it, arrived to see me.

Madame accompanied me to the library; and there the grave little doctor, with white hair and spectacles, whom I mentioned before, was waiting to receive me.

I told him my story, and as I proceeded he grew graver and graver.

We were standing, he and I, in the recess of one of the windows, facing one another. When my statement was over, he leaned with his shoulders against the wall, and with his eyes fixed on me earnestly, with an interest in which was a dash of horror.

After a minute’s reflection, he asked Madame if he could see my father.

He was sent for accordingly, and as he entered, smiling, he said:

“I dare say, doctor, you are going to tell me that I am an old fool for having brought you here; I hope I am.”

But his smile faded into shadow as the doctor, with a very grave face, beckoned him to him.

He and the doctor talked for some time in the same recess where I had just conferred with the physician. It seemed an earnest and argumentative conversation. The room is very large, and I and Madame stood together, burning with curiosity, at the farther end. Not a word could we hear, however, for they spoke in a very low tone, and the deep recess of the window quite concealed the doctor from view, and very nearly my father, whose foot, arm, and shoulder only could we see; and the voices were, I suppose, all the less audible for the sort of closet which the thick wall and window formed.

After a time my father’s face looked into the room; it was pale, thoughtful, and, I fancied, agitated.

“Laura, dear, come here for a moment. Madame, we shan’t trouble you, the doctor says, at present.”

Accordingly I approached, for the first time a little alarmed; for, although I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a thing that may be picked up when we please.

My father held out his hand to me, as I drew near, but he was looking at the doctor, and he said:

“It certainly is very odd; I don’t understand it quite. Laura, come here, dear; now attend to Doctor Spielsberg, and recollect yourself.”

“You mentioned a sensation like that of two needles piercing the skin, somewhere about your neck, on the night when you experienced your first horrible dream. Is there still any soreness?”

“None at all,” I answered.

“Can you indicate with your finger about the point at which you think this occurred?”

“Very little below my throat – here,” I answered.

I wore a morning dress, which covered the place I pointed to.

“Now you can satisfy yourself,” said the doctor. “You won’t mind your papa’s lowering your dress a very little. It is necessary, to detect a symptom of the complaint under which you have been suffering.”

I acquiesced. It was only an inch or two below the edge of my collar.

“God bless me! So it is,” exclaimed my father, growing pale.

“You see it now with your own eyes,” said the doctor, with a gloomy triumph.

“What is it?” I exclaimed, beginning to be frightened.

“Nothing, my dear young lady, but a small blue spot, about the size of the tip of your little finger; and now,” he continued, turning to papa, “the question is what is best to be done?”

“Is there any danger?” I urged, in great trepidation.

“I trust not, my dear,” answered the doctor. “I don’t see why you should not recover. I don’t see why you should not begin immediately to get better. That is the point at which the sense of strangulation begins?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And – recollect as well as you can – the same point was a kind of center of that thrill which you described just now, like the current of a cold stream running against you?”

“It may have been; I think it was.”

“Ay, you see?” he added, turning to my father. “Shall I say a word to Madame?”

“Certainly,” said my father.

He called Madame to him, and said:

“I find my young friend here far from well. It won’t be of any great consequence, I hope; but it will be necessary that some steps be taken, which I will explain by-and-by; but in the meantime, Madame, you will be so good as not to let Miss Laura be alone for one moment. That is the only direction I need give for the present. It is indispensable.”

“We may rely upon your kindness, Madame, I know,” added my father.

Madame satisfied him eagerly.

“And you, dear Laura, I know you will observe the doctor’s direction.”

“I shall have to ask your opinion upon another patient, whose symptoms slightly resemble those of my daughter, that have just been detailed to you – very much milder in degree, but I believe quite of the same sort. She is a young lady – our guest; but as you say you will be passing this way again this evening, you can’t do better than take your supper here, and you can then see her. She does not come down till the afternoon.”

“I thank you,” said the doctor. “I shall be with you, then, at about seven this evening.”

And then they repeated their directions to me and to Madame, and with this parting charge my father left us, and walked out with the doctor; and I saw them pacing together up and down between the road and the moat, on the grassy platform in front of the castle, evidently absorbed in earnest conversation.

The doctor did not return. I saw him mount his horse there, take his leave, and ride away eastward through the forest.

Nearly at the same time I saw the man arrive from Dranfield with the letters, and dismount and hand the bag to my father.

In the meantime, Madame and I were both busy, lost in conjecture as to the reasons of the singular and earnest direction which the doctor and my father had concurred in imposing. Madame, as she afterwards told me, was afraid the doctor apprehended a sudden seizure, and that, without prompt assistance, I might either lose my life in a fit, or at least be seriously hurt.

The interpretation did not strike me; and I fancied, perhaps luckily for my nerves, that the arrangement was prescribed simply to secure a companion, who would prevent my taking too much exercise, or eating unripe fruit, or doing any of the fifty foolish things to which young people are supposed to be prone.

About half an hour after my father came in – he had a letter in his hand – and said:

“This letter had been delayed; it is from General Spielsdorf. He might have been here yesterday, he may not come till tomorrow or he may be here today.”

He put the open letter into my hand; but he did not look pleased, as he used when a guest, especially one so much loved as the General, was coming.

On the contrary, he looked as if he wished him at the bottom of the Red Sea. There was plainly something on his mind which he did not choose to divulge.

“Papa, darling, will you tell me this?” said I, suddenly laying my hand on his arm, and looking, I am sure, imploringly in his face.

“Perhaps,” he answered, smoothing my hair caressingly over my eyes.

“Does the doctor think me very ill?”

“No, dear; he thinks, if right steps are taken, you will be quite well again, at least, on the high road to a complete recovery, in a day or two,” he answered, a little dryly. “I wish our good friend, the General, had chosen any other time; that is, I wish you had been perfectly well to receive him.”

“But do tell me, papa,” I insisted, “what does he think is the matter with me?”

“Nothing; you must not plague me with questions,” he answered, with more irritation than I ever remember him to have displayed before; and seeing that I looked wounded, I suppose, he kissed me, and added, “You shall know all about it in a day or two; that is, all that I know. In the meantime you are not to trouble your head about it.”

He turned and left the room, but came back before I had done wondering and puzzling over the oddity of all this; it was merely to say that he was going to Karnstein, and had ordered the carriage to be ready at twelve, and that I and Madame should accompany him; he was going to see the priest who lived near those picturesque grounds, upon business, and as Carmilla had never seen them, she could follow, when she came down, with Mademoiselle, who would bring materials for what you call a picnic, which might be laid for us in the ruined castle.

At twelve o’clock, accordingly, I was ready, and not long after, my father, Madame and I set out upon our projected drive.

Passing the drawbridge we turn to the right, and follow the road over the steep Gothic bridge, westward, to reach the deserted village and ruined castle of Karnstein.

No sylvan drive can be fancied prettier. The ground breaks into gentle hills and hollows, all clothed with beautiful wood, totally destitute of the comparative formality which artificial planting and early culture and pruning impart.

The irregularities of the ground often lead the road out of its course, and cause it to wind beautifully round the sides of broken hollows and the steeper sides of the hills, among varieties of ground almost inexhaustible.

Turning one of these points, we suddenly encountered our old friend, the General, riding towards us, attended by a mounted servant. His portmanteaus were following in a hired wagon, such as we term a cart.

The General dismounted as we pulled up, and, after the usual greetings, was easily persuaded to accept the vacant seat in the carriage and send his horse on with his servant to the schloss.

X

Bereaved

It was about ten months since we had last seen him: but that time had sufficed to make an alteration of years in his appearance. He had grown thinner; something of gloom and anxiety had taken the place of that cordial serenity which used to characterize his features. His dark blue eyes, always penetrating, now gleamed with a sterner light from under his shaggy grey eyebrows. It was not such a change as grief alone usually induces, and angrier passions seemed to have had their share in bringing it about.

We had not long resumed our drive, when the General began to talk, with his usual soldierly directness, of the bereavement, as he termed it, which he had sustained in the death of his beloved niece and ward; and he then broke out in a tone of intense bitterness and fury, inveighing against the ‘hellish arts’ to which she had fallen a victim, and expressing, with more exasperation than piety, his wonder that Heaven should tolerate so monstrous an indulgence of the lusts and malignity of hell.

My father, who saw at once that something very extraordinary had befallen, asked him, if not too painful to him, to detail the circumstances which he thought justified the strong terms in which he expressed himself.

“I should tell you all with pleasure,” said the General, “but you would not believe me.”

“Why should I not?” he asked.

“Because,” he answered testily, “you believe in nothing but what consists with your own prejudices and illusions. I remember when I was like you, but I have learned better.”

“Try me,” said my father; “I am not such a dogmatist as you suppose. Besides which, I very well know that you generally require proof for what you believe, and am, therefore, very strongly predisposed to respect your conclusions.”

“You are right in supposing that I have not been led lightly into a belief in the marvelous – for what I have experienced is marvelous – and I have been forced by extraordinary evidence to credit that which ran counter, diametrically, to all my theories. I have been made the dupe of a preternatural conspiracy.”

Notwithstanding his professions of confidence in the General’s penetration, I saw my father, at this point, glance at the General, with, as I thought, a marked suspicion of his sanity.

The General did not see it, luckily. He was looking gloomily and curiously into the glades and vistas of the woods that were opening before us.

“You are going to the Ruins of Karnstein?” he said. “Yes, it is a lucky coincidence; do you know I was going to ask you to bring me there to inspect them. I have a special object in exploring. There is a ruined chapel, ain’t there, with a great many tombs of that extinct family?”

“So there are – highly interesting,” said my father. “I hope you are thinking of claiming the title and estates?”

My father said this gaily, but the General did not recollect the laugh, or even the smile, which courtesy exacts for a friend’s joke; on the contrary, he looked grave and even fierce, ruminating on a matter that stirred his anger and horror.

“Something very different,” he said, gruffly. “I mean to unearth some of those fine people. I hope, by God’s blessing, to accomplish a pious sacrilege here, which will relieve our earth of certain monsters, and enable honest people to sleep in their beds without being assailed by murderers. I have strange things to tell you, my dear friend, such as I myself would have scouted as incredible a few months since.”

My father looked at him again, but this time not with a glance of suspicion – with an eye, rather, of keen intelligence and alarm.

“The house of Karnstein,” he said, “has been long extinct: a hundred years at least. My dear wife was maternally descended from the Karnsteins. But the name and title have long ceased to exist. The castle is a ruin; the very village is deserted; it is fifty years since the smoke of a chimney was seen there; not a roof left.”

“Quite true. I have heard a great deal about that since I last saw you; a great deal that will astonish you. But I had better relate everything in the order in which it occurred,” said the General. “You saw my dear ward – my child, I may call her. No creature could have been more beautiful, and only three months ago none more blooming.”

“Yes, poor thing! When I saw her last she certainly was quite lovely,” said my father. “I was grieved and shocked more than I can tell you, my dear friend; I knew what a blow it was to you.”

He took the General’s hand, and they exchanged a kind pressure. Tears gathered in the old soldier’s eyes. He did not seek to conceal them. He said:

“We have been very old friends; I knew you would feel for me, childless as I am. She had become an object of very near interest to me, and repaid my care by an affection that cheered my home and made my life happy. That is all gone. The years that remain to me on earth may not be very long; but by God’s mercy I hope to accomplish a service to mankind before I die, and to subserve the vengeance of Heaven upon the fiends who have murdered my poor child in the spring of her hopes and beauty!”

“You said, just now, that you intended relating everything as it occurred,” said my father. “Pray do; I assure you that it is not mere curiosity that prompts me.”

By this time we had reached the point at which the Drunstall road, by which the General had come, diverges from the road which we were traveling to Karnstein.

“How far is it to the ruins?” inquired the General, looking anxiously forward.

“About half a league,” answered my father. “Pray let us hear the story you were so good as to promise.”

XI

The Story

“With all my heart,” said the General, with an effort; and after a short pause in which to arrange his subject, he commenced one of the strangest narratives I ever heard.

“My dear child was looking forward with great pleasure to the visit you had been so good as to arrange for her to your charming daughter.” Here he made me a gallant but melancholy bow. “In the meantime we had an invitation to my old friend the Count Carlsfeld, whose schloss is about six leagues to the other side of Karnstein. It was to attend the series of fetes which, you remember, were given by him in honor of his illustrious visitor, the Grand Duke Charles.”

“Yes; and very splendid, I believe, they were,” said my father.

“Princely! But then his hospitalities are quite regal. He has Aladdin’s lamp. The night from which my sorrow dates was devoted to a magnificent masquerade. The grounds were thrown open, the trees hung with colored lamps. There was such a display of fireworks as Paris itself had never witnessed. And such music – music, you know, is my weakness – such ravishing music! The finest instrumental band, perhaps, in the world, and the finest singers who could be collected from all the great operas in Europe. As you wandered through these fantastically illuminated grounds, the moon-lighted chateau throwing a rosy light from its long rows of windows, you would suddenly hear these ravishing voices stealing from the silence of some grove, or rising from boats upon the lake. I felt myself, as I looked and listened, carried back into the romance and poetry of my early youth.

“When the fireworks were ended, and the ball beginning, we returned to the noble suite of rooms that were thrown open to the dancers. A masked ball, you know, is a beautiful sight; but so brilliant a spectacle of the kind I never saw before.

“It was a very aristocratic assembly. I was myself almost the only ‘nobody’ present.

“My dear child was looking quite beautiful. She wore no mask. Her excitement and delight added an unspeakable charm to her features, always lovely. I remarked a young lady, dressed magnificently, but wearing a mask, who appeared to me to be observing my ward with extraordinary interest. I had seen her, earlier in the evening, in the great hall, and again, for a few minutes, walking near us, on the terrace under the castle windows, similarly employed. A lady, also masked, richly and gravely dressed, and with a stately air, like a person of rank, accompanied her as a chaperon. Had the young lady not worn a mask, I could, of course, have been much more certain upon the question whether she was really watching my poor darling. I am now well assured that she was.

“We were now in one of the salons. My poor dear child had been dancing, and was resting a little in one of the chairs near the door; I was standing near. The two ladies I have mentioned had approached and the younger took the chair next my ward; while her companion stood beside me, and for a little time addressed herself, in a low tone, to her charge.

“Availing herself of the privilege of her mask, she turned to me, and in the tone of an old friend, and calling me by my name, opened a conversation with me, which piqued my curiosity a good deal. She referred to many scenes where she had met me – at Court, and at distinguished houses. She alluded to little incidents which I had long ceased to think of, but which, I found, had only lain in abeyance in my memory, for they instantly started into life at her touch.

“I became more and more curious to ascertain who she was, every moment. She parried my attempts to discover very adroitly and pleasantly. The knowledge she showed of many passages in my life seemed to me all but unaccountable; and she appeared to take a not unnatural pleasure in foiling my curiosity, and in seeing me flounder in my eager perplexity, from one conjecture to another.

“In the meantime the young lady, whom her mother called by the odd name of Millarca, when she once or twice addressed her, had, with the same ease and grace, got into conversation with my ward.

“She introduced herself by saying that her mother was a very old acquaintance of mine. She spoke of the agreeable audacity which a mask rendered practicable; she talked like a friend; she admired her dress, and insinuated very prettily her admiration of her beauty. She amused her with laughing criticisms upon the people who crowded the ballroom, and laughed at my poor child’s fun. She was very witty and lively when she pleased, and after a time they had grown very good friends, and the young stranger lowered her mask, displaying a remarkably beautiful face. I had never seen it before, neither had my dear child. But though it was new to us, the features were so engaging, as well as lovely, that it was impossible not to feel the attraction powerfully. My poor girl did so. I never saw anyone more taken with another at first sight, unless, indeed, it was the stranger herself, who seemed quite to have lost her heart to her.

“In the meantime, availing myself of the license of a masquerade, I put not a few questions to the elder lady.

“‘You have puzzled me utterly,’ I said, laughing. ‘Is that not enough? Won’t you, now, consent to stand on equal terms, and do me the kindness to remove your mask?’

“‘Can any request be more unreasonable?’ she replied. ‘Ask a lady to yield an advantage! Beside, how do you know you should recognize me? Years make changes.’

“‘As you see,’ I said, with a bow, and, I suppose, a rather melancholy little laugh.

“‘As philosophers tell us,’ she said; ‘and how do you know that a sight of my face would help you?’

“‘I should take chance for that,’ I answered. ‘It is vain trying to make yourself out an old woman; your figure betrays you.’

“‘Years, nevertheless, have passed since I saw you, rather since you saw me, for that is what I am considering. Millarca, there, is my daughter; I cannot then be young, even in the opinion of people whom time has taught to be indulgent, and I may not like to be compared with what you remember me. You have no mask to remove. You can offer me nothing in exchange.’

“‘My petition is to your pity, to remove it.’

“‘And mine to yours, to let it stay where it is,’ she replied.

“‘Well, then, at least you will tell me whether you are French or German; you speak both languages so perfectly.’

“‘I don’t think I shall tell you that, General; you intend a surprise, and are meditating the particular point of attack.’

“‘At all events, you won’t deny this,’ I said, ‘that being honored by your permission to converse, I ought to know how to address you. Shall I say Madame la Comtesse?’

“She laughed, and she would, no doubt, have met me with another evasion – if, indeed, I can treat any occurrence in an interview every circumstance of which was prearranged, as I now believe, with the profoundest cunning, as liable to be modified by accident.

“‘As to that,’ she began; but she was interrupted, almost as she opened her lips, by a gentleman, dressed in black, who looked particularly elegant and distinguished, with this drawback, that his face was the most deadly pale I ever saw, except in death. He was in no masquerade – in the plain evening dress of a gentleman; and he said, without a smile, but with a courtly and unusually low bow:

“‘Will Madame la Comtesse permit me to say a very few words which may interest her?’

“The lady turned quickly to him, and touched her lip in token of silence; she then said to me, ‘Keep my place for me, General; I shall return when I have said a few words.’

“And with this injunction, playfully given, she walked a little aside with the gentleman in black, and talked for some minutes, apparently very earnestly. They then walked away slowly together in the crowd, and I lost them for some minutes.

“I spent the interval in cudgeling my brains for a conjecture as to the identity of the lady who seemed to remember me so kindly, and I was thinking of turning about and joining in the conversation between my pretty ward and the Countess’s daughter, and trying whether, by the time she returned, I might not have a surprise in store for her, by having her name, title, chateau, and estates at my fingers’ ends. But at this moment she returned, accompanied by the pale man in black, who said:

“‘I shall return and inform Madame la Comtesse when her carriage is at the door.’

“He withdrew with a bow.”

XII

A Petition

“‘Then we are to lose Madame la Comtesse, but I hope only for a few hours,’ I said, with a low bow.

“‘It may be that only, or it may be a few weeks. It was very unlucky his speaking to me just now as he did. Do you now know me?’

“I assured her I did not.

“‘You shall know me,’ she said, ‘but not at present. We are older and better friends than, perhaps, you suspect. I cannot yet declare myself. I shall in three weeks pass your beautiful schloss, about which I have been making enquiries. I shall then look in upon you for an hour or two, and renew a friendship which I never think of without a thousand pleasant recollections. This moment a piece of news has reached me like a thunderbolt. I must set out now, and travel by a devious route, nearly a hundred miles, with all the dispatch I can possibly make. My perplexities multiply. I am only deterred by the compulsory reserve I practice as to my name from making a very singular request of you. My poor child has not quite recovered her strength. Her horse fell with her, at a hunt which she had ridden out to witness, her nerves have not yet recovered the shock, and our physician says that she must on no account exert herself for some time to come. We came here, in consequence, by very easy stages – hardly six leagues a day. I must now travel day and night, on a mission of life and death – a mission the critical and momentous nature of which I shall be able to explain to you when we meet, as I hope we shall, in a few weeks, without the necessity of any concealment.’

“She went on to make her petition, and it was in the tone of a person from whom such a request amounted to conferring, rather than seeking a favor. This was only in manner, and, as it seemed, quite unconsciously. Than the terms in which it was expressed, nothing could be more deprecatory. It was simply that I would consent to take charge of her daughter during her absence.

“This was, all things considered, a strange, not to say, an audacious request. She in some sort disarmed me, by stating and admitting everything that could be urged against it, and throwing herself entirely upon my chivalry. At the same moment, by a fatality that seems to have predetermined all that happened, my poor child came to my side, and, in an undertone, besought me to invite her new friend, Millarca, to pay us a visit. She had just been sounding her, and thought, if her mamma would allow her, she would like it extremely.

“At another time I should have told her to wait a little, until, at least, we knew who they were. But I had not a moment to think in. The two ladies assailed me together, and I must confess the refined and beautiful face of the young lady, about which there was something extremely engaging, as well as the elegance and fire of high birth, determined me; and, quite overpowered, I submitted, and undertook, too easily, the care of the young lady, whom her mother called Millarca.

“The Countess beckoned to her daughter, who listened with grave attention while she told her, in general terms, how suddenly and peremptorily she had been summoned, and also of the arrangement she had made for her under my care, adding that I was one of her earliest and most valued friends.

“I made, of course, such speeches as the case seemed to call for, and found myself, on reflection, in a position which I did not half like.

“The gentleman in black returned, and very ceremoniously conducted the lady from the room.

“The demeanor of this gentleman was such as to impress me with the conviction that the Countess was a lady of very much more importance than her modest title alone might have led me to assume.

“Her last charge to me was that no attempt was to be made to learn more about her than I might have already guessed, until her return. Our distinguished host, whose guest she was, knew her reasons.

“‘But here,’ she said, ‘neither I nor my daughter could safely remain for more than a day. I removed my mask imprudently for a moment, about an hour ago, and, too late, I fancied you saw me. So I resolved to seek an opportunity of talking a little to you. Had I found that you had seen me, I would have thrown myself on your high sense of honor to keep my secret some weeks. As it is, I am satisfied that you did not see me; but if you now suspect, or, on reflection, should suspect, who I am, I commit myself, in like manner, entirely to your honor. My daughter will observe the same secrecy, and I well know that you will, from time to time, remind her, lest she should thoughtlessly disclose it.’

“She whispered a few words to her daughter, kissed her hurriedly twice, and went away, accompanied by the pale gentleman in black, and disappeared in the crowd.

“‘In the next room,’ said Millarca, ‘there is a window that looks upon the hall door. I should like to see the last of mamma, and to kiss my hand to her.’

“We assented, of course, and accompanied her to the window. We looked out, and saw a handsome old-fashioned carriage, with a troop of couriers and footmen. We saw the slim figure of the pale gentleman in black, as he held a thick velvet cloak, and placed it about her shoulders and threw the hood over her head. She nodded to him, and just touched his hand with hers. He bowed low repeatedly as the door closed, and the carriage began to move.

“‘She is gone,’ said Millarca, with a sigh.

“‘She is gone,’ I repeated to myself, for the first time – in the hurried moments that had elapsed since my consent – reflecting upon the folly of my act.

“‘She did not look up,’ said the young lady, plaintively.

“‘The Countess had taken off her mask, perhaps, and did not care to show her face,’ I said; ‘and she could not know that you were in the window.’

“She sighed, and looked in my face. She was so beautiful that I relented. I was sorry I had for a moment repented of my hospitality, and I determined to make her amends for the unavowed churlishness of my reception.

“The young lady, replacing her mask, joined my ward in persuading me to return to the grounds, where the concert was soon to be renewed. We did so, and walked up and down the terrace that lies under the castle windows.

Millarca became very intimate with us, and amused us with lively descriptions and stories of most of the great people whom we saw upon the terrace. I liked her more and more every minute. Her gossip without being ill-natured, was extremely diverting to me, who had been so long out of the great world. I thought what life she would give to our sometimes lonely evenings at home.

“This ball was not over until the morning sun had almost reached the horizon. It pleased the Grand Duke to dance till then, so loyal people could not go away, or think of bed.

“We had just got through a crowded saloon, when my ward asked me what had become of Millarca. I thought she had been by her side, and she fancied she was by mine. The fact was, we had lost her.

“All my efforts to find her were vain. I feared that she had mistaken, in the confusion of a momentary separation from us, other people for her new friends, and had, possibly, pursued and lost them in the extensive grounds which were thrown open to us.

“Now, in its full force, I recognized a new folly in my having undertaken the charge of a young lady without so much as knowing her name; and fettered as I was by promises, of the reasons for imposing which I knew nothing, I could not even point my inquiries by saying that the missing young lady was the daughter of the Countess who had taken her departure a few hours before.

“Morning broke. It was clear daylight before I gave up my search. It was not till near two o’clock next day that we heard anything of my missing charge.

“At about that time a servant knocked at my niece’s door, to say that he had been earnestly requested by a young lady, who appeared to be in great distress, to make out where she could find the General Baron Spielsdorf and the young lady his daughter, in whose charge she had been left by her mother.

“There could be no doubt, notwithstanding the slight inaccuracy, that our young friend had turned up; and so she had. Would to heaven we had lost her!

“She told my poor child a story to account for her having failed to recover us for so long. Very late, she said, she had got to the housekeeper’s bedroom in despair of finding us, and had then fallen into a deep sleep which, long as it was, had hardly sufficed to recruit her strength after the fatigues of the ball.

“That day Millarca came home with us. I was only too happy, after all, to have secured so charming a companion for my dear girl.”

XIII

The Woodman

“There soon, however, appeared some drawbacks. In the first place, Millarca complained of extreme languor – the weakness that remained after her late illness – and she never emerged from her room till the afternoon was pretty far advanced. In the next place, it was accidentally discovered, although she always locked her door on the inside, and never disturbed the key from its place till she admitted the maid to assist at her toilet, that she was undoubtedly sometimes absent from her room in the very early morning, and at various times later in the day, before she wished it to be understood that she was stirring. She was repeatedly seen from the windows of the schloss, in the first faint grey of the morning, walking through the trees, in an easterly direction, and looking like a person in a trance. This convinced me that she walked in her sleep. But this hypothesis did not solve the puzzle. How did she pass out from her room, leaving the door locked on the inside? How did she escape from the house without unbarring door or window?

“In the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of a far more urgent kind presented itself.

“My dear child began to lose her looks and health, and that in a manner so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened.

“She was at first visited by appalling dreams; then, as she fancied, by a specter, sometimes resembling Millarca, sometimes in the shape of a beast, indistinctly seen, walking round the foot of her bed, from side to side.

Lastly came sensations. One, not unpleasant, but very peculiar, she said, resembled the flow of an icy stream against her breast. At a later time, she felt something like a pair of large needles pierce her, a little below the throat, with a very sharp pain. A few nights after, followed a gradual and convulsive sense of strangulation; then came unconsciousness.”

I could hear distinctly every word the kind old General was saying, because by this time we were driving upon the short grass that spreads on either side of the road as you approach the roofless village which had not shown the smoke of a chimney for more than half a century.

You may guess how strangely I felt as I heard my own symptoms so exactly described in those which had been experienced by the poor girl who, but for the catastrophe which followed, would have been at that moment a visitor at my father’s chateau. You may suppose, also, how I felt as I heard him detail habits and mysterious peculiarities which were, in fact, those of our beautiful guest, Carmilla!

A vista opened in the forest; we were on a sudden under the chimneys and gables of the ruined village, and the towers and battlements of the dismantled castle, round which gigantic trees are grouped, overhung us from a slight eminence.

In a frightened dream I got down from the carriage, and in silence, for we had each abundant matter for thinking; we soon mounted the ascent, and were among the spacious chambers, winding stairs, and dark corridors of the castle.

“And this was once the palatial residence of the Karnsteins!” said the old General at length, as from a great window he looked out across the village, and saw the wide, undulating expanse of forest. “It was a bad family, and here its bloodstained annals were written,” he continued. “It is hard that they should, after death, continue to plague the human race with their atrocious lusts. That is the chapel of the Karnsteins, down there.”

He pointed down to the grey walls of the Gothic building partly visible through the foliage, a little way down the steep. “And I hear the axe of a woodman,” he added, “busy among the trees that surround it; he possibly may give us the information of which I am in search, and point out the grave of Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein. These rustics preserve the local traditions of great families, whose stories die out among the rich and titled so soon as the families themselves become extinct.”

“We have a portrait, at home, of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein; should you like to see it?” asked my father.

“Time enough, dear friend,” replied the General. “I believe that I have seen the original; and one motive which has led me to you earlier than I at first intended, was to explore the chapel which we are now approaching.”

“What! See the Countess Mircalla,” exclaimed my father; “why, she has been dead more than a century!”

“Not so dead as you fancy, I am told,” answered the General.

“I confess, General, you puzzle me utterly,” replied my father, looking at him, I fancied, for a moment with a return of the suspicion I detected before. But although there was anger and detestation, at times, in the old General’s manner, there was nothing flighty.

“There remains to me,” he said, as we passed under the heavy arch of the Gothic church – for its dimensions would have justified its being so styled – “but one object which can interest me during the few years that remain to me on earth, and that is to wreak on her the vengeance which, I thank God, may still be accomplished by a mortal arm.”

“What vengeance can you mean?” asked my father, in increasing amazement.

“I mean, to decapitate the monster,” he answered, with a fierce flush, and a stamp that echoed mournfully through the hollow ruin, and his clenched hand was at the same moment raised, as if it grasped the handle of an axe, while he shook it ferociously in the air.

“What?” exclaimed my father, more than ever bewildered.

“To strike her head off.”

“Cut her head off!”

“Aye, with a hatchet, with a spade, or with anything that can cleave through her murderous throat. You shall hear,” he answered, trembling with rage. And hurrying forward he said:

“That beam will answer for a seat; your dear child is fatigued; let her be seated, and I will, in a few sentences, close my dreadful story.”

The squared block of wood, which lay on the grass-grown pavement of the chapel, formed a bench on which I was very glad to seat myself, and in the meantime the General called to the woodman, who had been removing some boughs which leaned upon the old walls; and, axe in hand, the hardy old fellow stood before us.

He could not tell us anything of these monuments; but there was an old man, he said, a ranger of this forest, at present sojourning in the house of the priest, about two miles away, who could point out every monument of the old Karnstein family; and, for a trifle, he undertook to bring him back with him, if we would lend him one of our horses, in little more than half an hour.

“Have you been long employed about this forest?” asked my father of the old man.

“I have been a woodman here,” he answered in his patois, “under the forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on, as many generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the village here, in which my ancestors lived.”

“How came the village to be deserted?” asked the General.

“It was troubled by revenants, sir; several were tracked to their graves, there detected by the usual tests, and extinguished in the usual way, by decapitation, by the stake, and by burning; but not until many of the villagers were killed.

“But after all these proceedings according to law,” he continued – “so many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of their horrible animation – the village was not relieved. But a Moravian nobleman, who happened to be traveling this way, heard how matters were, and being skilled – as many people are in his country – in such affairs, he offered to deliver the village from its tormentor. He did so thus: There being a bright moon that night, he ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of the chapel here, from whence he could distinctly see the churchyard beneath him; you can see it from that window. From this point he watched until he saw the vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the linen clothes in which he had been folded, and then glide away towards the village to plague its inhabitants.

“The stranger, having seen all this, came down from the steeple, took the linen wrappings of the vampire, and carried them up to the top of the tower, which he again mounted. When the vampire returned from his prowlings and missed his clothes, he cried furiously to the Moravian, whom he saw at the summit of the tower, and who, in reply, beckoned him to ascend and take them. Whereupon the vampire, accepting his invitation, began to climb the steeple, and so soon as he had reached the battlements, the Moravian, with a stroke of his sword, clove his skull in twain, hurling him down to the churchyard, whither, descending by the winding stairs, the stranger followed and cut his head off, and next day delivered it and the body to the villagers, who duly impaled and burnt them.

“This Moravian nobleman had authority from the then head of the family to remove the tomb of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, which he did effectually, so that in a little while its site was quite forgotten.”

“Can you point out where it stood?” asked the General, eagerly.

The forester shook his head, and smiled.

“Not a soul living could tell you that now,” he said; “besides, they say her body was removed; but no one is sure of that either.”

Having thus spoken, as time pressed, he dropped his axe and departed, leaving us to hear the remainder of the General’s strange story.

XIV

The Meeting

“My beloved child,” he resumed, “was now growing rapidly worse. The physician who attended her had failed to produce the slightest impression on her disease, for such I then supposed it to be. He saw my alarm, and suggested a consultation. I called in an abler physician, from Gratz.

Several days elapsed before he arrived. He was a good and pious, as well as a learned man. Having seen my poor ward together, they withdrew to my library to confer and discuss. I, from the adjoining room, where I awaited their summons, heard these two gentlemen’s voices raised in something sharper than a strictly philosophical discussion. I knocked at the door and entered. I found the old physician from Gratz maintaining his theory. His rival was combating it with undisguised ridicule, accompanied with bursts of laughter. This unseemly manifestation subsided and the altercation ended on my entrance.

“‘Sir,’ said my first physician,‘my learned brother seems to think that you want a conjuror, and not a doctor.’

“‘Pardon me,’ said the old physician from Gratz, looking displeased, ‘I shall state my own view of the case in my own way another time. I grieve, Monsieur le General, that by my skill and science I can be of no use. Before I go I shall do myself the honor to suggest something to you.’

“He seemed thoughtful, and sat down at a table and began to write.

Profoundly disappointed, I made my bow, and as I turned to go, the other doctor pointed over his shoulder to his companion who was writing, and then, with a shrug, significantly touched his forehead.

“This consultation, then, left me precisely where I was. I walked out into the grounds, all but distracted. The doctor from Gratz, in ten or fifteen minutes, overtook me. He apologized for having followed me, but said that he could not conscientiously take his leave without a few words more. He told me that he could not be mistaken; no natural disease exhibited the same symptoms; and that death was already very near. There remained, however, a day, or possibly two, of life. If the fatal seizure were at once arrested, with great care and skill her strength might possibly return. But all hung now upon the confines of the irrevocable. One more assault might extinguish the last spark of vitality which is, every moment, ready to die.

“‘And what is the nature of the seizure you speak of?’ I entreated.

“‘I have stated all fully in this note, which I place in your hands upon the distinct condition that you send for the nearest clergyman, and open my letter in his presence, and on no account read it till he is with you; you would despise it else, and it is a matter of life and death. Should the priest fail you, then, indeed, you may read it.’

“He asked me, before taking his leave finally, whether I would wish to see a man curiously learned upon the very subject, which, after I had read his letter, would probably interest me above all others, and he urged me earnestly to invite him to visit him there; and so took his leave.

“The ecclesiastic was absent, and I read the letter by myself. At another time, or in another case, it might have excited my ridicule. But into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is at stake?

“Nothing, you will say, could be more absurd than the learned man’s letter. It was monstrous enough to have consigned him to a madhouse. He said that the patient was suffering from the visits of a vampire! The punctures which she described as having occurred near the throat, were, he insisted, the insertion of those two long, thin, and sharp teeth which, it is well known, are peculiar to vampires; and there could be no doubt, he added, as to the well-defined presence of the small livid mark which all concurred in describing as that induced by the demon’s lips, and every symptom described by the sufferer was in exact conformity with those recorded in every case of a similar visitation.

“Being myself wholly skeptical as to the existence of any such portent as the vampire, the supernatural theory of the good doctor furnished, in my opinion, but another instance of learning and intelligence oddly associated with some one hallucination. I was so miserable, however, that, rather than try nothing, I acted upon the instructions of the letter.

“I concealed myself in the dark dressing room, that opened upon the poor patient’s room, in which a candle was burning, and watched there till she was fast asleep. I stood at the door, peeping through the small crevice, my sword laid on the table beside me, as my directions prescribed, until, a little after one, I saw a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl’s throat, where it swelled, in a moment, into a great, palpitating mass.

“For a few moments I had stood petrified. I now sprang forward, with my sword in my hand. The black creature suddenly contracted towards the foot of the bed, glided over it, and, standing on the floor about a yard below the foot of the bed, with a glare of skulking ferocity and horror fixed on me, I saw Millarca. Speculating I know not what, I struck at her instantly with my sword; but I saw her standing near the door, unscathed. Horrified, I pursued, and struck again. She was gone; and my sword flew to shivers against the door.

“I can’t describe to you all that passed on that horrible night. The whole house was up and stirring. The specter Millarca was gone. But her victim was sinking fast, and before the morning dawned, she died.”

The old General was agitated. We did not speak to him. My father walked to some little distance, and began reading the inscriptions on the tombstones; and thus occupied, he strolled into the door of a side chapel to prosecute his researches. The General leaned against the wall, dried his eyes, and sighed heavily. I was relieved on hearing the voices of Carmilla and Madame, who were at that moment approaching. The voices died away.

In this solitude, having just listened to so strange a story, connected, as it was, with the great and titled dead, whose monuments were moldering among the dust and ivy round us, and every incident of which bore so awfully upon my own mysterious case – in this haunted spot, darkened by the towering foliage that rose on every side, dense and high above its noiseless walls – a horror began to steal over me, and my heart sank as I thought that my friends were, after all, not about to enter and disturb this triste and ominous scene.

The old General’s eyes were fixed on the ground, as he leaned with his hand upon the basement of a shattered monument.

Under a narrow, arched doorway, surmounted by one of those demoniacal grotesques in which the cynical and ghastly fancy of old Gothic carving delights, I saw very gladly the beautiful face and figure of Carmilla enter the shadowy chapel.

I was just about to rise and speak, and nodded smiling, in answer to her peculiarly engaging smile; when with a cry, the old man by my side caught up the woodman’s hatchet, and started forward. On seeing him a brutalized change came over her features. It was an instantaneous and horrible transformation, as she made a crouching step backwards. Before I could utter a scream, he struck at her with all his force, but she dived under his blow, and unscathed, caught him in her tiny grasp by the wrist. He struggled for a moment to release his arm, but his hand opened, the axe fell to the ground, and the girl was gone.

He staggered against the wall. His grey hair stood upon his head, and a moisture shone over his face, as if he were at the point of death.

The frightful scene had passed in a moment. The first thing I recollect after, is Madame standing before me, and impatiently repeating again and again, the question, “Where is Mademoiselle Carmilla?”

I answered at length, “I don’t know – I can’t tell – she went there,” and I pointed to the door through which Madame had just entered; “only a minute or two since.”

“But I have been standing there, in the passage, ever since Mademoiselle Carmilla entered; and she did not return.”

She then began to call “Carmilla”, through every door and passage and from the windows, but no answer came.

“She called herself Carmilla?” asked the General, still agitated.

“Carmilla, yes,” I answered.

“Aye,” he said; “that is Millarca. That is the same person who long ago was called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Depart from this accursed ground, my poor child, as quickly as you can. Drive to the clergyman’s house, and stay there till we come. Begone! May you never behold Carmilla more; you will not find her here.”

XV

Ordeal and Execution

As he spoke one of the strangest looking men I ever beheld entered the chapel at the door through which Carmilla had made her entrance and her exit. He was tall, narrow-chested, stooping, with high shoulders, and dressed in black. His face was brown and dried in with deep furrows; he wore an oddly-shaped hat with a broad leaf. His hair, long and grizzled, hung on his shoulders. He wore a pair of gold spectacles, and walked slowly, with an odd shambling gait, with his face sometimes turned up to the sky, and sometimes bowed down towards the ground, seemed to wear a perpetual smile; his long thin arms were swinging, and his lank hands, in old black gloves ever so much too wide for them, waving and gesticulating in utter abstraction.

“The very man!” exclaimed the General, advancing with manifest delight. “My dear Baron, how happy I am to see you, I had no hope of meeting you so soon.” He signed to my father, who had by this time returned, and leading the fantastic old gentleman, whom he called the Baron to meet him. He introduced him formally, and they at once entered into earnest conversation. The stranger took a roll of paper from his pocket, and spread it on the worn surface of a tomb that stood by. He had a pencil case in his fingers, with which he traced imaginary lines from point to point on the paper, which from their often glancing from it, together, at certain points of the building, I concluded to be a plan of the chapel. He accompanied, what I may term, his lecture, with occasional readings from a dirty little book, whose yellow leaves were closely written over.

They sauntered together down the side aisle, opposite to the spot where I was standing, conversing as they went; then they began measuring distances by paces, and finally they all stood together, facing a piece of the sidewall, which they began to examine with great minuteness; pulling off the ivy that clung over it, and rapping the plaster with the ends of their sticks, scraping here, and knocking there. At length they ascertained the existence of a broad marble tablet, with letters carved in relief upon it.

With the assistance of the woodman, who soon returned, a monumental inscription, and carved escutcheon, were disclosed. They proved to be those of the long lost monument of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.

The old General, though not I fear given to the praying mood, raised his hands and eyes to heaven, in mute thanksgiving for some moments.

“Tomorrow,” I heard him say; “the commissioner will be here, and the Inquisition will be held according to law.”

Then turning to the old man with the gold spectacles, whom I have described, he shook him warmly by both hands and said:

“Baron, how can I thank you? How can we all thank you? You will have delivered this region from a plague that has scourged its inhabitants for more than a century. The horrible enemy, thank God, is at last tracked.”

My father led the stranger aside, and the General followed. I know that he had led them out of hearing, that he might relate my case, and I saw them glance often quickly at me, as the discussion proceeded.

My father came to me, kissed me again and again, and leading me from the chapel, said: “It is time to return, but before we go home, we must add to our party the good priest, who lives but a little way from this; and persuade him to accompany us to the schloss.”

In this quest we were successful: and I was glad, being unspeakably fatigued when we reached home. But my satisfaction was changed to dismay, on discovering that there were no tidings of Carmilla. Of the scene that had occurred in the ruined chapel, no explanation was offered to me, and it was clear that it was a secret which my father for the present determined to keep from me.

The sinister absence of Carmilla made the remembrance of the scene more horrible to me. The arrangements for the night were singular. Two servants, and Madame were to sit up in my room that night; and the ecclesiastic with my father kept watch in the adjoining dressing room.

The priest had performed certain solemn rites that night, the purport of which I did not understand any more than I comprehended the reason of this extraordinary precaution taken for my safety during sleep.

I saw all clearly a few days later.

The disappearance of Carmilla was followed by the discontinuance of my nightly sufferings.

You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire.

If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the Vampire.

For my part I have heard no theory by which to explain what I myself have witnessed and experienced, other than that supplied by the ancient and well-attested belief of the country.

The next day the formal proceedings took place in the Chapel of Karnstein.

The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognized each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed.

Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head was next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.

My father has a copy of the report of the Imperial Commission, with the signatures of all who were present at these proceedings, attached in verification of the statement. It is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene.

XVI

Conclusion

I write all this you suppose with composure. But far from it; I cannot think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and re-induced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

Let me add a word or two about that quaint Baron Vordenburg, to whose curious lore we were indebted for the discovery of the Countess Mircalla’s grave.

He had taken up his abode in Gratz, where, living upon a mere pittance, which was all that remained to him of the once princely estates of his family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the minute and laborious investigation of the marvelously authenticated tradition of Vampirism. He had at his fingers’ ends all the great and little works upon the subject.

‘Magia Posthuma’, ‘Phlegon de Mirabilibus’, ‘Augustinus de cura pro Mortuis’, ‘Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de Vampiris’, by John Christofer Herenberg; and a thousand others, among which I remember only a few of those which he lent to my father. He had a voluminous digest of all the judicial cases, from which he had extracted a system of principles that appear to govern – some always, and others occasionally only – the condition of the vampire. I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants, is a mere melodramatic fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life. When disclosed to light in their coffins, they exhibit all the symptoms that are enumerated as those which proved the vampire-life of the long-dead Countess Karnstein.

How they escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of disturbance in the state of the coffin or the cerements, has always been admitted to be utterly inexplicable. The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigor of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.

The vampire is, apparently, subject, in certain situations, to special conditions. In the particular instance of which I have given you a relation, Mircalla seemed to be limited to a name which, if not her real one, should at least reproduce, without the omission or addition of a single letter, those, as we say, anagrammatically, which compose it.

Carmilla did this; so did Millarca.

My father related to the Baron Vordenburg, who remained with us for two or three weeks after the expulsion of Carmilla, the story about the Moravian nobleman and the vampire at Karnstein churchyard, and then he asked the Baron how he had discovered the exact position of the long-concealed tomb of the Countess Mircalla? The Baron’s grotesque features puckered up into a mysterious smile; he looked down, still smiling on his worn spectacle case and fumbled with it. Then looking up, he said:

“I have many journals, and other papers, written by that remarkable man; the most curious among them is one treating of the visit of which you speak, to Karnstein. The tradition, of course, discolors and distorts a little. He might have been termed a Moravian nobleman, for he had changed his abode to that territory, and was, beside, a noble. But he was, in truth, a native of Upper Styria. It is enough to say that in very early youth he had been a passionate and favored lover of the beautiful Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Her early death plunged him into inconsolable grief. It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

“Assume, at starting, a territory perfectly free from that pest. How does it begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A person, more or less wicked, puts an end to himself. A suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire. That specter visits living people in their slumbers; they die, and almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires. This happened in the case of the beautiful Mircalla, who was haunted by one of those demons. My ancestor, Vordenburg, whose title I still bear, soon discovered this, and in the course of the studies to which he devoted himself, learned a great deal more.

“Among other things, he concluded that suspicion of vampirism would probably fall, sooner or later, upon the dead Countess, who in life had been his idol. He conceived a horror, be she what she might, of her remains being profaned by the outrage of a posthumous execution. He has left a curious paper to prove that the vampire, on its expulsion from its amphibious existence, is projected into a far more horrible life; and he resolved to save his once beloved Mircalla from this.

“He adopted the stratagem of a journey here, a pretended removal of her remains, and a real obliteration of her monument. When age had stolen upon him, and from the vale of years, he looked back on the scenes he was leaving, he considered, in a different spirit, what he had done, and a horror took possession of him. He made the tracings and notes which have guided me to the very spot, and drew up a confession of the deception that he had practiced. If he had intended any further action in this matter, death prevented him; and the hand of a remote descendant has, too late for many, directed the pursuit to the lair of the beast.”

We talked a little more, and among other things he said was this:

“One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of Mircalla closed like a vice of steel on the General’s wrist when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from.”

The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations – sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

The Southwest Chamber

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“That school teacher from Acton is coming today,” said the elder Miss Gill, Sophia.

“So she is,” assented the younger Miss Gill, Amanda.

“I have decided to put her in the southwest chamber,” said Sophia.

Amanda looked at her sister with an expression of mingled doubt and terror. “You don’t suppose she would –” she began hesitatingly.

“Would what?” demanded Sophia, sharply. She was more incisive than her sister. Both were below the medium height, and stout, but Sophia was firm where Amanda was flabby. Amanda wore a baggy old muslin (it was a hot day), and Sophia was uncompromisingly hooked up in a starched and boned cambric over her high shelving figure.

“I didn’t know but she would object to sleeping in that room, as long as Aunt Harriet died there such a little time ago,” faltered Amanda.

“Well!” said Sophia, “of all the silly notions! If you are going to pick out rooms in this house where nobody has died, for the boarders, you’ll have your hands full. Grandfather Ackley had seven children; four of them died here to my certain knowledge, besides grandfather and grandmother. I think great-grandmother Ackley, grandfather’s mother, died here, too; she must have; and great-grandfather Ackley, and grandfather’s unmarried sister, great-aunt Fanny Ackley. I don’t believe there’s a room nor a bed in this house that somebody hasn’t passed away in.”

“Well, I suppose I am silly to think of it, and she had better go in there,” said Amanda.

“I know she had. The northeast room is small and hot, and she’s stout and likely to feel the heat, and she’s saved money and is able to board out summers, and maybe she’ll come here another year if she’s well accommodated,” said Sophia. “Now I guess you’d better go in there and see if any dust has settled on anything since it was cleaned, and open the west windows and let the sun in, while I see to that cake.”

Amanda went to her task in the southwest chamber while her sister stepped heavily down the back stairs on her way to the kitchen.

“It seems to me you had better open the bed while you air and dust, then make it up again,” she called back.

“Yes, sister,” Amanda answered, shudderingly.

Nobody knew how this elderly woman with the untrammeled imagination of a child dreaded to enter the southwest chamber, and yet she could not have told why she had the dread. She had entered and occupied rooms which had been once tenanted by persons now dead. The room which had been hers in the little house in which she and her sister had lived before coming here had been her dead mother’s. She had never reflected upon the fact with anything but loving awe and reverence. There had never been any fear. But this was different. She entered and her heart beat thickly in her ears. Her hands were cold. The room was a very large one. The four windows, two facing south, two west, were closed, the blinds also. The room was in a film of green gloom. The furniture loomed out vaguely. The gilt frame of a blurred old engraving on the wall caught a little light. The white counterpane on the bed showed like a blank page.

Amanda crossed the room, opened with a straining motion of her thin back and shoulders one of the west windows, and threw back the blind. Then the room revealed itself an apartment full of an aged and worn but no less valid state. Pieces of old mahogany swelled forth; a peacock-patterned chintz draped the bedstead. This chintz also covered a great easy chair which had been the favourite seat of the former occupant of the room. The closet door stood ajar. Amanda noticed that with wonder. There was a glimpse of purple drapery floating from a peg inside the closet. Amanda went across and took down the garment hanging there. She wondered how her sister had happened to leave it when she cleaned the room. It was an old loose gown which had belonged to her aunt. She took it down, shuddering, and closed the closet door after a fearful glance into its dark depths. It was a long closet with a strong odour of lovage. The Aunt Harriet had had a habit of eating lovage and had carried it constantly in her pocket. There was very likely some of the pleasant root in the pocket of the musty purple gown which Amanda threw over the easy chair.

Amanda perceived the odour with a start as if before an actual presence. Odour seems in a sense a vital part of a personality. It can survive the flesh to which it has clung like a persistent shadow, seeming to have in itself something of the substance of that to which it pertained. Amanda was always conscious of this fragrance of lovage as she tidied the room. She dusted the heavy mahogany pieces punctiliously after she had opened the bed as her sister had directed. She spread fresh towels over the washstand and the bureau; she made the bed. Then she thought to take the purple gown from the easy chair and carry it to the garret and put it in the trunk with the other articles of the dead woman’s wardrobe which had been packed away there; but the purple gown was not on the chair!

Amanda Gill was not a woman of strong convictions even as to her own actions. She directly thought that possibly she had been mistaken and had not removed it from the closet. She glanced at the closet door and saw with surprise that it was open, and she had thought she had closed it, but she instantly was not sure of that. So she entered the closet and looked for the purple gown. It was not there!

Amanda Gill went feebly out of the closet and looked at the easy chair again. The purple gown was not there! She looked wildly around the room. She went down on her trembling knees and peered under the bed, she opened the bureau drawers, she looked again in the closet. Then she stood in the middle of the floor and fairly wrung her hands.

“What does it mean?” she said in a shocked whisper.

She had certainly seen that loose purple gown of her dead Aunt Harriet’s.

There is a limit at which self-refutation must stop in any sane person. Amanda Gill had reached it. She knew that she had seen that purple gown in that closet; she knew that she had removed it and put it on the easy chair. She also knew that she had not taken it out of the room. She felt a curious sense of being inverted mentally. It was as if all her traditions and laws of life were on their heads. Never in her simple record had any garment not remained where she had placed it unless removed by some palpable human agency.

Then the thought occurred to her that possibly her sister Sophia might have entered the room unobserved while her back was turned and removed the dress. A sensation of relief came over her. Her blood seemed to flow back into its usual channels; the tension of her nerves relaxed.

“How silly I am,” she said aloud.

She hurried out and downstairs into the kitchen where Sophia was making cake, stirring with splendid circular sweeps of a wooden spoon a creamy yellow mass. She looked up as her sister entered.

“Have you got it done?” said she.

“Yes,” replied Amanda. Then she hesitated. A sudden terror overcame her. It did not seem as if it were at all probable that Sophia had left that foamy cake mixture a second to go to Aunt Harriet’s chamber and remove that purple gown.

“Well,” said Sophia, “if you have got that done I wish you would take hold and string those beans. The first thing we know there won’t be time to boil them for dinner.”

Amanda moved toward the pan of beans on the table, then she looked at her sister.

“Did you come up in Aunt Harriet’s room while I was there?” she asked weakly.

She knew while she asked what the answer would be.

“Up in Aunt Harriet’s room? Of course I didn’t. I couldn’t leave this cake without having it fall. You know that well enough. Why?”

“Nothing,” replied Amanda.

Suddenly she realized that she could not tell her sister what had happened, for before the utter absurdity of the whole thing her belief in her own reason quailed. She knew what Sophia would say if she told her. She could hear her.

“Amanda Gill, have you gone stark staring mad?”

She resolved that she would never tell Sophia. She dropped into a chair and begun shelling the beans with nerveless fingers. Sophia looked at her curiously.

“Amanda Gill, what on earth ails you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” replied Amanda. She bent her head very low over the green pods.

“Yes, there is, too! You are as white as a sheet, and your hands are shaking so you can hardly string those beans. I did think you had more sense, Amanda Gill.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Sophia.”

“Yes, you do know what I mean, too; you needn’t pretend you don’t. Why did you ask me if I had been in that room, and why do you act so queer?”

Amanda hesitated. She had been trained to truth. Then she lied.

“I wondered if you’d noticed how it had leaked in on the paper over by the bureau, that last rain,” said she.

“What makes you look so pale then?”

“I don’t know. I guess the heat sort of overcame me.”

“I shouldn’t think it could have been very hot in that room when it had been shut up so long,” said Sophia.

She was evidently not satisfied, but then the grocer came to the door and the matter dropped.

For the next hour the two women were very busy. They kept no servant. When they had come into possession of this fine old place by the death of their aunt it had seemed a doubtful blessing. There was not a cent with which to pay for repairs and taxes and insurance, except the twelve hundred dollars which they had obtained from the sale of the little house in which they had been born and lived all their lives. There had been a division in the old Ackley family years before. One of the daughters had married against her mother’s wish and had been disinherited. She had married a poor man by the name of Gill, and shared his humble lot in sight of her former home and her sister and mother living in prosperity, until she had borne three daughters; then she died, worn out with overwork and worry.

The mother and the elder sister had been pitiless to the last. Neither had ever spoken to her since she left her home the night of her marriage. They were hard women.

The three daughters of the disinherited sister had lived quiet and poor, but not actually needy lives. Jane, the middle daughter, had married, and died in less than a year. Amanda and Sophia had taken the girl baby she left when the father married again. Sophia had taught a primary school for many years; she had saved enough to buy the little house in which they lived. Amanda had crocheted lace, and embroidered flannel, and made tidies and pincushions, and had earned enough for her clothes and the child’s, little Flora Scott.

Their father, William Gill, had died before they were thirty, and now in their late middle life had come the death of the aunt to whom they had never spoken, although they had often seen her, who had lived in solitary state in the old Ackley mansion until she was more than eighty. There had been no will, and they were the only heirs with the exception of young Flora Scott, the daughter of the dead sister.

Sophia and Amanda thought directly of Flora when they knew of the inheritance.

“It will be a splendid thing for her; she will have enough to live on when we are gone,” Sophia said.

She had promptly decided what was to be done. The small house was to be sold, and they were to move into the old Ackley house and take boarders to pay for its keeping. She scouted the idea of selling it. She had an enormous family pride. She had always held her head high when she had walked past that fine old mansion, the cradle of her race, which she was forbidden to enter. She was unmoved when the lawyer who was advising her disclosed to her the fact that Harriet Ackley had used every cent of the Ackley money.

“I realize that we have to work,” said she, “but my sister and I have determined to keep the place.”

That was the end of the discussion. Sophia and Amanda Gill had been living in the old Ackley house a fortnight, and they had three boarders: an elderly widow with a comfortable income, a young congregationalist clergyman, and the middle-aged single woman who had charge of the village library. Now the schoolteacher from Acton, Miss Louisa Stark, was expected for the summer, and would make four.

Sophia considered that they were comfortably provided for. Her wants and her sister’s were very few, and even the niece, although a young girl, had small expenses, since her wardrobe was supplied for years to come from that of the deceased aunt. There were stored away in the garret of the Ackley house enough voluminous black silks and satins and bombazines to keep her clad in somber richness for years to come.

Flora was a very gentle girl, with large, serious blue eyes, a seldom-smiling, pretty mouth, and smooth flaxen hair. She was delicate and very young – sixteen on her next birthday.

She came home soon now with her parcels of sugar and tea from the grocer’s. She entered the kitchen gravely and deposited them on the table by which her Aunt Amanda was seated stringing beans. Flora wore an obsolete turban-shaped hat of black straw which had belonged to the dead aunt; it set high like a crown, revealing her forehead. Her dress was an ancient purple-and-white print, too long and too large except over the chest, where it held her like a straight waistcoat.

“You had better take off your hat, Flora,” said Sophia. She turned suddenly to Amanda. “Did you fill the water-pitcher in that chamber for the schoolteacher?” she asked severely. She was quite sure that Amanda had not filled the water-pitcher.

Amanda blushed and started guiltily. “I declare, I don’t believe I did,” said she.

“I didn’t think you had,” said her sister with sarcastic emphasis.

“Flora, you go up to the room that was your Great-aunt Harriet’s, and take the water-pitcher off the wash-stand and fill it with water. Be real careful, and don’t break the pitcher, and don’t spill the water.”

“In that chamber?” asked Flora. She spoke very quietly, but her face changed a little.

“Yes, in that chamber,” returned her Aunt Sophia sharply. “Go right along.”

Flora went, and her light footstep was heard on the stairs. Very soon she returned with the blue-and-white water-pitcher and filled it carefully at the kitchen sink.

“Now be careful and not spill it,” said Sophia as she went out of the room carrying it gingerly.

Amanda gave a timidly curious glance at her; she wondered if she had seen the purple gown.

Then she started, for the village stagecoach was seen driving around to the front of the house. The house stood on a corner.

“Here, Amanda, you look better than I do; you go and meet her,” said Sophia. “I’ll just put the cake in the pan and get it in the oven and I’ll come. Show her right up to her room.”

Amanda removed her apron hastily and obeyed. Sophia hurried with her cake, pouring it into the baking-tins. She had just put it in the oven, when the door opened and Flora entered carrying the blue water-pitcher.

“What are you bringing down that pitcher again for?” asked Sophia.

“She wants some water, and Aunt Amanda sent me,” replied Flora.

Her pretty pale face had a bewildered expression.

“For the land sake, she hasn’t used all that great pitcherful of water so quick?”

“There wasn’t any water in it,” replied Flora.

Her high, childish forehead was contracted slightly with a puzzled frown as she looked at her aunt.

“Wasn’t any water in it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Didn’t I see you filling the pitcher with water not ten minutes ago, I want to know?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What did you do with that water?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you carry that pitcherful of water up to that room and set it on the washstand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Didn’t you spill it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Now, Flora Scott, I want the truth! Did you fill that pitcher with water and carry it up there, and wasn’t there any there when she came to use it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Let me see that pitcher.” Sophia examined the pitcher. It was not only perfectly dry from top to bottom, but even a little dusty. She turned severely on the young girl. “That shows,” said she, “you did not fill the pitcher at all. You let the water run at the side because you didn’t want to carry it upstairs. I am ashamed of you. It’s bad enough to be so lazy, but when it comes to not telling the truth –”

The young girl’s face broke up suddenly into piteous confusion, and her blue eyes became filmy with tears.

“I did fill the pitcher, honest,” she faltered, “I did, Aunt Sophia. You ask Aunt Amanda.”

“I’ll ask nobody. This pitcher is proof enough. Water don’t go off and leave the pitcher dusty on the inside if it was put in ten minutes ago. Now you fill that pitcher full quick, and you carry it upstairs, and if you spill a drop there’ll be something besides talk.”

Flora filled the pitcher, with the tears falling over her cheeks. She sniveled softly as she went out, balancing it carefully against her slender hip. Sophia followed her.

“Stop crying,” said she sharply; “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What do you suppose Miss Louisa Stark will think. No water in her pitcher in the first place, and then you come back crying as if you didn’t want to get it.”

In spite of herself, Sophia’s voice was soothing. She was very fond of the girl. She followed her up the stairs to the chamber where Miss Louisa Stark was waiting for the water to remove the soil of travel. She had removed her bonnet, and its tuft of red geraniums lightened the obscurity of the mahogany dresser. She had placed her little beaded cape carefully on the bed. She was replying to a tremulous remark of Amanda’s, who was nearly fainting from the new mystery of the water-pitcher, that it was warm and she suffered a good deal in warm weather.

Louisa Stark was stout and solidly built. She was much larger than either of the Gill sisters. She was a masterly woman inured to command from years of school-teaching. She carried her swelling bulk with majesty; even her face, moist and red with the heat, lost nothing of its dignity of expression.

She was standing in the middle of the floor with an air which gave the effect of her standing upon an elevation. She turned when Sophia and Flora, carrying the water-pitcher, entered.

“This is my sister Sophia,” said Amanda tremulously.

Sophia advanced, shook hands with Miss Louisa Stark and bade her welcome and hoped she would like her room. Then she moved toward the closet. “There is a nice large closet in this room – the best closet in the house. You might have your trunk –” she said, then she stopped short.

The closet door was ajar, and a purple garment seemed suddenly to swing into view as if impelled by some wind.

“Why, here is something left in this closet,” Sophia said in a mortified tone. “I thought all those things had been taken away.”

She pulled down the garment with a jerk, and as she did so Amanda passed her in a weak rush for the door.

“I am afraid your sister is not well,” said the schoolteacher from Acton. “She looked very pale when you took that dress down. I noticed it at once. Hadn’t you better go and see what the matter is? She may be going to faint.”

“She is not subject to fainting spells,” replied Sophia, but she followed Amanda.

She found her in the room which they occupied together, lying on the bed, very pale and gasping. She leaned over her.

“Amanda, what is the matter; don’t you feel well?” she asked.

“I feel a little faint.”

Sophia got a camphor bottle and began rubbing her sister’s forehead.

“Do you feel better?” she said.

Amanda nodded.

“I guess it was that green apple pie you ate this noon,” said Sophia. “I declare, what did I do with that dress of Aunt Harriet’s? I guess if you feel better I’ll just run and get it and take it up garret. I’ll stop in here again when I come down. You’d better lay still. Flora can bring you up a cup of tea. I wouldn’t try to eat any supper.”

Sophia’s tone as she left the room was full of loving concern. Presently she returned; she looked disturbed, but angrily so. There was not the slightest hint of any fear in her expression.

“I want to know,” said she, looking sharply and quickly around, “if I brought that purple dress in here, after all?”

“I didn’t see you,” replied Amanda.

“I must have. It isn’t in that chamber, nor the closet. You aren’t lying on it, are you?”

“I lay down before you came in,” replied Amanda.

“So you did. Well, I’ll go and look again.”

Presently Amanda heard her sister’s heavy step on the garret stairs. Then she returned with a queer defiant expression on her face.

“I carried it up garret, after all, and put it in the trunk,” said, she. “I declare, I forgot it. I suppose your being faint sort of put it out of my head. There it was, folded up just as nice, right where I put it.”

Sophia’s mouth was set; her eyes upon her sister’s scared, agitated face were full of hard challenge.

“Yes,” murmured Amanda.

“I must go right down and see to that cake,” said Sophia, going out of the room. “If you don’t feel well, you pound on the floor with the umbrella.”

Amanda looked after her. She knew that Sophia had not put that purple dress of her dead Aunt Harriet in the trunk in the garret.

Meantime Miss Louisa Stark was settling herself in the southwest chamber. She unpacked her trunk and hung her dresses carefully in the closet. She filled the bureau drawers with nicely folded linen and small articles of dress. She was a very punctilious woman. She put on a black India silk dress with purple flowers. She combed her grayish-blond hair in smooth ridges back from her broad forehead. She pinned her lace at her throat with a brooch, very handsome, although somewhat obsolete – a bunch of pearl grapes on black onyx, set in gold filagree. She had purchased it several years ago with a considerable portion of the stipend from her spring term of school-teaching.

As she surveyed herself in the little swing mirror surmounting the old-fashioned mahogany bureau she suddenly bent forward and looked closely at the brooch. It seemed to her that something was wrong with it. As she looked she became sure. Instead of the familiar bunch of pearl grapes on the black onyx, she saw a knot of blonde and black hair under glass surrounded by a border of twisted gold. She felt a thrill of horror, though she could not tell why. She unpinned the brooch, and it was her own familiar one, the pearl grapes and the onyx. “How very foolish I am,” she thought. She thrust the pin in the laces at her throat and again looked at herself in the glass, and there it was again – the knot of blond and black hair and the twisted gold.

Louisa Stark looked at her own large, firm face above the brooch and it was full of terror and dismay which were new to it. She straightway began to wonder if there could be anything wrong with her mind. She remembered that an aunt of her mother’s had been insane. A sort of fury with herself possessed her. She stared at the brooch in the glass with eyes at once angry and terrified. Then she removed it again and there was her own old brooch. Finally she thrust the gold pin through the lace again, fastened it and turning a defiant back on the glass, went down to supper.

At the supper table she met the other boarders – the elderly widow, the young clergyman and the middle-aged librarian. She viewed the elderly widow with reserve, the clergyman with respect, the middle-aged librarian with suspicion. The latter wore a very youthful shirt-waist, and her hair in a girlish fashion which the schoolteacher, who twisted hers severely from the straining roots at the nape of her neck to the small, smooth coil at the top, condemned as straining after effects no longer hers by right.

The librarian, who had a quick acridness of manner, addressed her, asking what room she had, and asked the second time in spite of the schoolteacher’s evident reluctance to hear her. She even, since she sat next to her, nudged her familiarly in her rigid black silk side.

“What room are you in, Miss Stark?” said she.

“I am at a loss how to designate the room,” replied Miss Stark stiffly.

“Is it the big southwest room?”

“It evidently faces in that direction,” said Miss Stark.

The librarian, whose name was Eliza Lippincott, turned abruptly to Miss Amanda Gill, over whose delicate face a curious colour compounded of flush and pallour was stealing.

“What room did your aunt die in, Miss Amanda?” asked she abruptly.

Amanda cast a terrified glance at her sister, who was serving a second plate of pudding for the minister.

“That room,” she replied feebly.

“That’s what I thought,” said the librarian with a certain triumph. “I calculated that must be the room she died in, for it’s the best room in the house, and you haven’t put anybody in it before. Somehow the room that anybody has died in lately is generally the last room that anybody is put in. I suppose you are so strong-minded you don’t object to sleeping in a room where anybody died a few weeks ago?” she inquired of Louisa Stark with sharp eyes on her face.

“No, I do not,” replied Miss stark with emphasis.

“Nor in the same bed?” persisted Eliza Lippincott with a kittenish reflection.

The young minister looked up from his pudding. He was very spiritual, but he had had poor pickings in his previous boarding place, and he could not help a certain abstract enjoyment over Miss Gill’s cooking.

“You would certainly not be afraid, Miss Lippincott?” he remarked, with his gentle, almost caressing inflection of tone. “You do not for a minute believe that a higher power would allow any manifestation on the part of a disembodied spirit – who we trust is in her heavenly home – to harm one of His servants?”

“Oh, Mr. Dunn, of course not,” replied Eliza Lippincott with a blush. “Of course not. I never meant to imply –”

“I could not believe you did,” said the minister gently. He was very young, but he already had a wrinkle of permanent anxiety between his eyes and a smile of permanent ingratiation on his lips. The lines of the smile were as deeply marked as the wrinkle.

“Of course dear Miss Harriet Gill was a professing Christian,” remarked the widow, “and I don’t suppose a professing Christian would come back and scare folks if she could. I wouldn’t be a mite afraid to sleep in that room; I’d rather have it than the one I’ve got. If I was afraid to sleep in a room where a good woman died, I wouldn’t tell of it. If I saw things or heard things I’d think the fault must be with my own guilty conscience.” Then she turned to Miss Stark. “Any time you feel timid in that room I’m ready and willing to change with you,” said she.

“Thank you; I have no desire to change. I am perfectly satisfied with my room,” replied Miss Stark with freezing dignity, which was thrown away upon the widow.

“Well,” said she, “any time, if you should feel timid, you know what to do. I’ve got a real nice room; it faces east and gets the morning sun, but it isn’t so nice as yours, according to my way of thinking. I’d rather take my chances any day in a room anybody had died in than in one that was hot in summer. I’m more afraid of a sunstroke than of spooks, for my part.”

Miss Sophia Gill, who had not spoken one word, but whose mouth had become more and more rigidly compressed, suddenly rose from the table, forcing the minister to leave a little pudding, at which he glanced regretfully.

Miss Louisa Stark did not sit down in the parlour with the other boarders. She went straight to her room. She felt tired after her journey, and meditated a loose wrapper and writing a few letters quietly before she went to bed. Then, too, she was conscious of a feeling that if she delayed, the going there at all might assume more terrifying proportions. She was full of defiance against herself and her own lurking weakness.

So she went resolutely and entered the southwest chamber. There was through the room a soft twilight. She could dimly discern everything, the white satin scroll-work on the wallpaper and the white counterpane on the bed being most evident. Consequently both arrested her attention first. She saw against the wallpaper directly facing the door the waist of her best black satin dress hung over a picture.

“That is very strange,” she said to herself, and again a thrill of vague horror came over her.

She knew, or thought she knew, that she had put that black satin dress waist away nicely folded between towels in her trunk. She was very choice of her black satin dress.

She took down the black waist and laid it on the bed preparatory to folding it, but when she attempted to do so she discovered that the two sleeves were firmly sewed together. Louisa Stark stared at the sewed sleeves. “What does this mean?” she asked herself. She examined the sewing carefully; the stitches were small, and even, and firm, of black silk.

She looked around the room. On the stand beside the bed was something which she had not noticed before: a little old-fashioned work-box with a picture of a little boy in a pinafore on the top. Beside this work-box lay, as if just laid down by the user, a spool of black silk, a pair of scissors, and a large steel thimble with a hole in the top, after an old style. Louisa stared at these, then at the sleeves of her dress. She moved toward the door. For a moment she thought that this was something legitimate about which she might demand information; then she became doubtful. Suppose that work-box had been there all the time; suppose she had forgotten; suppose she herself had done this absurd thing, or suppose that she had not, what was to hinder the others from thinking so; what was to hinder a doubt being cast upon her own memory and reasoning powers?

Louisa Stark had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown in spite of her iron constitution and her great will power. No woman can teach school for forty years with absolute impunity. She was more credulous as to her own possible failings than she had ever been in her whole life. She was cold with horror and terror, and yet not so much horror and terror of the supernatural as of her own self. The weakness of belief in the supernatural was nearly impossible for this strong nature. She could more easily believe in her own failing powers.

“I don’t know but I’m going to be like Aunt Marcia,” she said to herself, and her fat face took on a long rigidity of fear.

She started toward the mirror to unfasten her dress, then she remembered the strange circumstance of the brooch and stopped short. Then she straightened herself defiantly and marched up to the bureau and looked in the glass. She saw reflected therein, fastening the lace at her throat, the old-fashioned thing of a large oval, a knot of fair and black hair under glass, set in a rim of twisted gold. She unfastened it with trembling fingers and looked at it. It was her own brooch, the cluster of pearl grapes on black onyx. Louisa Stark placed the trinket in its little box on the nest of pink cotton and put it away in the bureau drawer. Only death could disturb her habit of order.

Her fingers were so cold they felt fairly numb as she unfastened her dress; she staggered when she slipped it over her head. She went to the closet to hang it up and recoiled. A strong smell of lovage came in her nostrils; a purple gown near the door swung softly against her face as if impelled by some wind from within. All the pegs were filled with garments not her own, mostly of somber black, but there were some strange-patterned silk things and satins.

Suddenly Louisa Stark recovered her nerve. This, she told herself, was something distinctly tangible. Somebody had been taking liberties with her wardrobe. Somebody had been hanging some one else’s clothes in her closet. She hastily slipped on her dress again and marched straight down to the parlour. The people were seated there; the widow and the minister were playing backgammon. The librarian was watching them. Miss Amanda Gill was mending beside the large lamp on the centre table. They all looked up with amazement as Louisa Stark entered. There was something strange in her expression. She noticed none of them except Amanda.

“Where is your sister?” she asked peremptorily of her.

“She’s in the kitchen mixing up bread,” Amanda quavered; “is there anything –” But the schoolteacher was gone.

She found Sophia Gill standing by the kitchen table kneading dough with dignity. The young girl Flora was bringing some flour from the pantry. She stopped and stared at Miss Stark, and her pretty, delicate young face took on an expression of alarm.

Miss Stark opened at once upon the subject in her mind.

“Miss Gill,” said she, with her utmost schoolteacher manner, “I wish to inquire why you have had my own clothes removed from the closet in my room and others substituted?”

Sophia Gill stood with her hands fast in the dough, regarding her. Her own face paled slowly and reluctantly, her mouth stiffened.

“What? I don’t quite understand what you mean, Miss Stark,” said she.

“My clothes are not in the closet in my room and it is full of things which do not belong to me,” said Louisa Stark.

“Bring me that flour,” said Sophia sharply to the young girl, who obeyed, casting timid, startled glances at Miss Stark as she passed her. Sophia Gill began rubbing her hands clear of the dough. “I am sure I know nothing about it,” she said with a certain tempered asperity. “Do you know anything about it, Flora?”

“Oh, no, I don’t know anything about it, Aunt Sophia,” answered the young girl, fluttering.

Then Sophia turned to Miss Stark. “I’ll go upstairs with you, Miss Stark,” said she, “and see what the trouble is. There must be some mistake.” She spoke stiffly with constrained civility.

“Very well,” said Miss Stark with dignity. Then she and Miss Sophia went upstairs. Flora stood staring after them.

Sophia and Louisa Stark went up to the southwest chamber. The closet door was shut. Sophia threw it open, then she looked at Miss Stark. On the pegs hung the schoolteacher’s own garments in ordinary array.

“I can’t see that there is anything wrong,” remarked Sophia grimly.

Miss Stark strove to speak but she could not. She sank down on the nearest chair. She did not even attempt to defend herself. She saw her own clothes in the closet. She knew there had been no time for any human being to remove those which she thought she had seen and put hers in their places. She knew it was impossible. Again the awful horror of herself overwhelmed her.

“You must have been mistaken,” she heard Sophia say.

She muttered something, she scarcely knew what. Sophia then went out of the room. Presently she undressed and went to bed. In the morning she did not go down to breakfast, and when Sophia came to inquire, requested that the stage be ordered for the noon train. She said that she was sorry, but was ill, and feared lest she might be worse, and she felt that she must return home at once. She looked ill, and could not take even the toast and tea which Sophia had prepared for her. Sophia felt a certain pity for her, but it was largely mixed with indignation. She felt that she knew the true reason for the schoolteacher’s illness and sudden departure, and it incensed her.

“If folks are going to act like fools we shall never be able to keep this house,” she said to Amanda after Miss Stark had gone; and Amanda knew what she meant.

Directly the widow, Mrs. Elvira Simmons, knew that the schoolteacher had gone and the southwest room was vacant, she begged to have it in exchange for her own. Sophia hesitated a moment; she eyed the widow sharply. There was something about the large, roseate face worn in firm lines of humour and decision which reassured her.

“I have no objection, Mrs. Simmons,” said she, “if –”

“If what?” asked the widow.

“If you have common sense enough not to keep fussing because the room happens to be the one my aunt died in,” said Sophia bluntly.

“Fiddlesticks!” said the widow, Mrs. Elvira Simmons.

That very afternoon she moved into the southwest chamber. The young girl Flora assisted her, though much against her will.

“Now I want you to carry Mrs. Simmons’ dresses into the closet in that room and hang them up nicely, and see that she has everything she wants,” said Sophia Gill. “And you can change the bed and put on fresh sheets. What are you looking at me that way for?”

“Oh, Aunt Sophia, can’t I do something else?”

“What do you want to do something else for?”

“I am afraid.”

“Afraid of what? I should think you’d hang your head. No; you go right in there and do what I tell you.”

Pretty soon Flora came running into the sitting-room where Sophia was, as pale as death, and in her hand she held a queer, old-fashioned frilled nightcap.

“What’s that?” demanded Sophia.

“I found it under the pillow.”

“What pillow?”

“In the southwest room.”

Sophia took it and looked at it sternly.

“It’s Great-aunt Harriet’s,” said Flora faintly.

“You run down street and do that errand at the grocer’s for me and I’ll see that room,” said Sophia with dignity. She carried the nightcap away and put it in the trunk in the garret where she had supposed it stored with the rest of the dead woman’s belongings. Then she went into the southwest chamber and made the bed and assisted Mrs. Simmons to move, and there was no further incident.

The widow was openly triumphant over her new room. She talked a deal about it at the dinner-table.

“It is the best room in the house, and I expect you all to be envious of me,” said she.

“And you are sure you don’t feel afraid of ghosts?” said the librarian.

“Ghosts!” repeated the widow with scorn. “If a ghost comes I’ll send her over to you. You are just across the hall from the southwest room.”

“You needn’t,” returned Eliza Lippincott with a shudder. “I wouldn’t sleep in that room, after –” she checked herself with an eye on the minister.

“After what?” asked the widow.

“Nothing,” replied Eliza Lippincott in an embarrassed fashion.

“I trust Miss Lippincott has too good sense and too great faith to believe in anything of that sort,” said the minister.

“I trust so, too,” replied Eliza hurriedly.

“You did see or hear something – now what was it, I want to know?” said the widow that evening when they were alone in the parlour. The minister had gone to make a call.

Eliza hesitated.

“What was it?” insisted the widow.

“Well,” said Eliza hesitatingly, “if you’ll promise not to tell.”

“Yes, I promise; what was it?”

“Well, one day last week, just before the schoolteacher came, I went in that room to see if there were any clouds. I wanted to wear my gray dress, and I was afraid it was going to rain, so I wanted to look at the sky at all points, so I went in there, and –”

“And what?”

“Well, you know that chintz over the bed, and the valance, and the easy chair; what pattern should you say it was?”

“Why, peacocks on a blue ground. Good land, I shouldn’t think any one who had ever seen that would forget it.”

“Peacocks on a blue ground, you are sure?”

“Of course I am. Why?”

“Only when I went in there that afternoon it was not peacocks on a blue ground; it was great red roses on a yellow ground.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“What I say.”

“Did Miss Sophia have it changed?”

“No. I went in there again an hour later and the peacocks were there.”

“You didn’t see straight the first time.”

“I expected you would say that.”

“The peacocks are there now; I saw them just now.”

“Yes, I suppose so; I suppose they flew back.”

“But they couldn’t.”

“Looks as if they did.”

“Why, how could such a thing be? It couldn’t be.”

“Well, all I know is those peacocks were gone for an hour that afternoon and the red roses on the yellow ground were there instead.”

The widow stared at her a moment, then she began to laugh rather hysterically.

“Well,” said she, “I guess I sha’n’t give up my nice room for any such tomfoolery as that. I guess I would just as soon have red roses on a yellow ground as peacocks on a blue; but there’s no use talking, you couldn’t have seen straight. How could such a thing have happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Eliza Lippincott; “but I know I wouldn’t sleep in that room if you’d give me a thousand dollars.”

“Well, I would,” said the widow, “and I’m going to.”

When Mrs. Simmons went to the southwest chamber that night she cast a glance at the bed-hanging and the easy chair. There were the peacocks on the blue ground. She gave a contemptuous thought to Eliza Lippincott.

“I don’t believe but she’s getting nervous,” she thought. “I wonder if any of her family have been out at all.”

But just before Mrs. Simmons was ready to get into bed she looked again at the hangings and the easy chair, and there were the red roses on the yellow ground instead of the peacocks on the blue. She looked long and sharply. Then she shut her eyes, and then opened them and looked. She still saw the red roses. Then she crossed the room, turned her back to the bed, and looked out at the night from the south window. It was clear and the full moon was shining. She watched it a moment sailing over the dark blue in its nimbus of gold. Then she looked around at the bed hangings. She still saw the red roses on the yellow ground.

Mrs. Simmons was struck in her most vulnerable point. This apparent contradiction of the reasonable as manifested in such a commonplace thing as chintz of a bed-hanging affected this ordinarily unimaginative woman as no ghostly appearance could have done. Those red roses on the yellow ground were to her much more ghostly than any strange figure clad in the white robes of the grave entering the room.

She took a step toward the door, then she turned with a resolute air. “As for going downstairs and owning up I’m scared and having that Lippincott girl crowing over me, I won’t for any red roses instead of peacocks. I guess they can’t hurt me, and as long as we’ve both of us seen ’em I guess we can’t both be getting loony,” she said.

Mrs. Elvira Simmons blew out her light and got into bed and lay staring out between the chintz hangings at the moonlit room. She said her prayers in bed always as being more comfortable, and presumably just as acceptable in the case of a faithful servant with a stout habit of body. Then after a little she fell asleep; she was of too practical a nature to be kept long awake by anything which had no power of actual bodily effect upon her. No stress of the spirit had ever disturbed her slumbers. So she slumbered between the red roses, or the peacocks, she did not know which.

But she was awakened about midnight by a strange sensation in her throat. She had dreamed that some one with long white fingers was strangling her, and she saw bending over her the face of an old woman in a white cap. When she waked there was no old woman, the room was almost as light as day in the full moonlight, and looked very peaceful; but the strangling sensation at her throat continued, and besides that, her face and ears felt muffled. She put up her hand and felt that her head was covered with a ruffled nightcap tied under her chin so tightly that it was exceedingly uncomfortable. A great qualm of horror shot over her. She tore the thing off frantically and flung it from her with a convulsive effort as if it had been a spider. She gave, as she did so, a quick, short scream of terror. She sprang out of bed and was going toward the door, when she stopped.

It had suddenly occurred to her that Eliza Lippincott might have entered the room and tied on the cap while she was asleep. She had not locked her door. She looked in the closet, under the bed; there was no one there. Then she tried to open the door, but to her astonishment found that it was locked – bolted on the inside. “I must have locked it, after all,” she reflected with wonder, for she never locked her door. Then she could scarcely conceal from herself that there was something out of the usual about it all. Certainly no one could have entered the room and departed locking the door on the inside. She could not control the long shiver of horror that crept over her, but she was still resolute. She resolved that she would throw the cap out of the window. “I’ll see if I have tricks like that played on me, I don’t care who does it,” said she quite aloud. She was still unable to believe wholly in the supernatural. The idea of some human agency was still in her mind, filling her with anger.

She went toward the spot where she had thrown the cap – she had stepped over it on her way to the door – but it was not there. She searched the whole room, lighting her lamp, but she could not find the cap. Finally she gave it up. She extinguished her lamp and went back to bed. She fell asleep again, to be again awakened in the same fashion. That time she tore off the cap as before, but she did not fling it on the floor as before. Instead she held to it with a fierce grip. Her blood was up.

Holding fast to the white flimsy thing, she sprang out of bed, ran to the window which was open, slipped the screen, and flung it out; but a sudden gust of wind, though the night was calm, arose and it floated back in her face. She brushed it aside like a cobweb and she clutched at it. She was actually furious. It eluded her clutching fingers. Then she did not see it at all. She examined the floor, she lighted her lamp again and searched, but there was no sign of it.

Mrs. Simmons was then in such a rage that all terror had disappeared for the time. She did not know with what she was angry, but she had a sense of some mocking presence which was silently proving too strong against her weakness, and she was aroused to the utmost power of resistance. To be baffled like this and resisted by something which was as nothing to her straining senses filled her with intensest resentment.

Finally she got back into bed again; she did not go to sleep. She felt strangely drowsy, but she fought against it. She was wide awake, staring at the moonlight, when she suddenly felt the soft white strings of the thing tighten around her throat and realized that her enemy was again upon her. She seized the strings, untied them, twitched off the cap, ran with it to the table where her scissors lay and furiously cut it into small bits. She cut and tore, feeling an insane fury of gratification.

“There!” said she quite aloud. “I guess I sha’n’t have any more trouble with this old cap.”

She tossed the bits of muslin into a basket and went back to bed. Almost immediately she felt the soft strings tighten around her throat. Then at last she yielded, vanquished. This new refutal of all laws of reason by which she had learned, as it were, to spell her theory of life, was too much for her equilibrium. She pulled off the clinging strings feebly, drew the thing from her head, slid weakly out of bed, caught up her wrapper and hastened out of the room. She went noiselessly along the hall to her own old room: she entered, got into her familiar bed, and lay there the rest of the night shuddering and listening, and if she dozed, waking with a start at the feeling of the pressure upon her throat to find that it was not there, yet still to be unable to shake off entirely the horror.

When daylight came she crept back to the southwest chamber and hurriedly got some clothes in which to dress herself. It took all her resolution to enter the room, but nothing unusual happened while she was there. She hastened back to her old chamber, dressed herself and went down to breakfast with an imperturbable face. Her colour had not faded. When asked by Eliza Lippincott how she had slept, she replied with an appearance of calmness which was bewildering that she had not slept very well. She never did sleep very well in a new bed, and she thought she would go back to her old room.

Eliza Lippincott was not deceived, however, neither were the Gill sisters, nor the young girl, Flora. Eliza Lippincott spoke out bluntly.

“You needn’t talk to me about sleeping well,” said she. “I know something queer happened in that room last night by the way you act.”

They all looked at Mrs. Simmons, inquiringly – the librarian with malicious curiosity and triumph, the minister with sad incredulity, Sophia Gill with fear and indignation, Amanda and the young girl with unmixed terror. The widow bore herself with dignity.

“I saw nothing nor heard nothing which I trust could not have been accounted for in some rational manner,” said she.

“What was it?” persisted Eliza Lippincott.

“I do not wish to discuss the matter any further,” replied Mrs. Simmons shortly. Then she passed her plate for more creamed potato. She felt that she would die before she confessed to the ghastly absurdity of that nightcap, or to having been disturbed by the flight of peacocks off a blue field of chintz after she had scoffed at the possibility of such a thing. She left the whole matter so vague that in a fashion she came off the mistress of the situation. She at all events impressed everybody by her coolness in the face of no one knew what nightly terror.

After breakfast, with the assistance of Amanda and Flora, she moved back into her old room. Scarcely a word was spoken during the process of moving, but they all worked with trembling haste and looked guilty when they met one another’s eyes, as if conscious of betraying a common fear.

That afternoon the young minister, John Dunn, went to Sophia Gill and requested permission to occupy the southwest chamber that night.

“I don’t ask to have my effects moved there,” said he, “for I could scarcely afford a room so much superior to the one I now occupy, but I would like, if you please, to sleep there tonight for the purpose of refuting in my own person any unfortunate superstition which may have obtained root here.”

Sophia Gill thanked the minister gratefully and eagerly accepted his offer.

“How anybody with common sense can believe for a minute in any such nonsense passes my comprehension,” said she.

“It certainly passes mine how anybody with Christian faith can believe in ghosts,” said the minister gently, and Sophia Gill felt a certain feminine contentment in hearing him. The minister was a child to her; she regarded him with no tincture of sentiment, and yet she loved to hear two other women covertly condemned by him and she herself thereby exalted.

That night about twelve o’clock the Reverend John Dunn essayed to go to his nightly slumber in the southwest chamber. He had been sitting up until that hour preparing his sermon.

He traversed the hall with a little night-lamp in his hand, opened the door of the southwest chamber, and essayed to enter. He might as well have essayed to enter the solid side of a house. He could not believe his senses. The door was certainly open; he could look into the room full of soft lights and shadows under the moonlight which streamed into the windows. He could see the bed in which he had expected to pass the night, but he could not enter. Whenever he strove to do so he had a curious sensation as if he were trying to press against an invisible person who met him with a force of opposition impossible to overcome. The minister was not an athletic man, yet he had considerable strength. He squared his elbows, set his mouth hard, and strove to push his way through into the room. The opposition which he met was as sternly and mutely terrible as the rocky fastness of a mountain in his way.

For a half hour John Dunn, doubting, raging, overwhelmed with spiritual agony as to the state of his own soul rather than fear, strove to enter that southwest chamber. He was simply powerless against this uncanny obstacle. Finally a great horror as of evil itself came over him. He was a nervous man and very young. He fairly fled to his own chamber and locked himself in like a terror-stricken girl.

The next morning he went to Miss Gill and told her frankly what had happened, and begged her to say nothing about it lest he should have injured the cause by the betrayal of such weakness, for he actually had come to believe that there was something wrong with the room.

“What it is I know not, Miss Sophia,” said he, “but I firmly believe, against my will, that there is in that room some accursed evil power at work, of which modern faith and modern science know nothing.”

Miss Sophia Gill listened with grimly lowering face. She had an inborn respect for the clergy, but she was bound to hold that southwest chamber in the dearly beloved old house of her fathers free of blame.

“I think I will sleep in that room myself tonight,” she said, when the minister had finished.

He looked at her in doubt and dismay.

“I have great admiration for your faith and courage, Miss Sophia,” he said, “but are you wise?”

“I am fully resolved to sleep in that room tonight,” said she conclusively. There were occasions when Miss Sophia Gill could put on a manner of majesty, and she did now.

It was ten o’clock that night when Sophia Gill entered the southwest chamber. She had told her sister what she intended doing and had been proof against her tearful entreaties. Amanda was charged not to tell the young girl, Flora.

“There is no use in frightening that child over nothing,” said Sophia.

Sophia, when she entered the southwest chamber, set the lamp which she carried on the bureau, and began moving about the rooms pulling down the curtains, taking off the nice white counterpane of the bed, and preparing generally for the night.

As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she became conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were foreign to her. She began remembering what she could not have remembered, since she was not then born: the trouble over her mother’s marriage, the bitter opposition, the shutting the door upon her, the ostracizing her from heart and home. She became aware of a most singular sensation as of bitter resentment herself, and not against the mother and sister who had so treated her own mother, but against her own mother, and then she became aware of a like bitterness extended to her own self. She felt malignant toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though she could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora. Evil suggestions surged in her brain – suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which still fascinated her. And all the time by a sort of double consciousness she knew that what she thought was strange and not due to her own volition. She knew that she was thinking the thoughts of some other person, and she knew who. She felt herself possessed.

But there was tremendous strength in the woman’s nature. She had inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the evil strength of her ancestors. They had turned their own weapons against themselves. She made an effort which seemed almost mortal, but was conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her. She thought her own thoughts. Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything supernatural about the terrific experience. “I am imagining everything,” she told herself. She went on with her preparations; she went to the bureau to take down her hair. She looked in the glass and saw, instead of her softly parted waves of hair, harsh lines of iron-gray under the black borders of an old-fashioned head-dress. She saw instead of her smooth, broad forehead, a high one wrinkled with the intensest concentration of selfish reflections of a long life; she saw instead of her steady blue eyes, black ones with depths of malignant reserve, behind a broad meaning of ill will; she saw instead of her firm, benevolent mouth one with a hard, thin line, a network of melancholic wrinkles. She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and good to see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to come. She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well-known dress!

Sophia Gill left the room. She went into the one which she shared with her sister Amanda. Amanda looked up and saw her standing there. She had set the lamp on a table, and she stood holding a handkerchief over her face. Amanda looked at her with terror.

“What is it? What is it, Sophia?” she gasped.

Sophia still stood with the handkerchief pressed to her face.

“Oh, Sophia, let me call somebody. Is your face hurt? Sophia, what is the matter with your face?” fairly shrieked Amanda.

Suddenly Sophia took the handkerchief from her face.

“Look at me, Amanda Gill,” she said in an awful voice.

Amanda looked, shrinking.

“What is it? Oh, what is it? You don’t look hurt. What is it, Sophia?”

“What do you see?”

“Why, I see you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What did you think I would see?”

Sophia Gill looked at her sister. “Never as long as I live will I tell you what I thought you would see, and you must never ask me,” said she.

“Well, I never will, Sophia,” replied Amanda, half weeping with terror.

“You won’t try to sleep in that room again, Sophia?”

“No,” said Sophia; “and I am going to sell this house.”

The Doom of the Griffiths

Elizabeth Gaskell

Chapter I

I have always been much interested by the traditions which are scattered up and down North Wales relating to Owen Glendower (Owain Glendwr is the national spelling of the name), and I fully enter into the feeling which makes the Welsh peasant still look upon him as the hero of his country. There was great joy among many of the inhabitants of the principality, when the subject of the Welsh prize poem at Oxford, some fifteen or sixteen years ago, was announced to be ‘Owain Glendwr.’ It was the most proudly national subject that had been given for years.

Perhaps, some may not be aware that this redoubted chieftain is, even in the present days of enlightenment, as famous among his illiterate countrymen for his magical powers as for his patriotism. He says himself – or Shakespeare says it for him, which is much the same thing –

‘At my nativity

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes

Of burning cressets…

…I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’

And few among the lower orders in the principality would think of asking Hotspur’s irreverent question in reply.

Among other traditions preserved relative to this part of the Welsh hero’s character, is the old family prophecy which gives title to this tale. When Sir David Gam, ‘as black a traitor as if he had been born in Builth,’ sought to murder Owen at Machynlleth, there was one with him whose name Glendwr little dreamed of having associated with his enemies. Rhys ap Gryfydd, his ‘old familiar friend,’ his relation, his more than brother, had consented unto his blood. Sir David Gam might be forgiven, but one whom he had loved, and who had betrayed him, could never be forgiven. Glendwr was too deeply read in the human heart to kill him. No, he let him live on, the loathing and scorn of his compatriots, and the victim of bitter remorse. The mark of Cain was upon him.

But before he went forth – while he yet stood a prisoner, cowering beneath his conscience before Owain Glendwr – that chieftain passed a doom upon him and his race:

“I doom thee to live, because I know thou wilt pray for death. Thou shalt live on beyond the natural term of the life of man, the scorn of all good men. The very children shall point to thee with hissing tongue, and say, ‘There goes one who would have shed a brother’s blood!’ For I loved thee more than a brother, oh Rhys ap Gryfydd! Thou shalt live on to see all of thy house, except the weakling in arms, perish by the sword. Thy race shall be accursed. Each generation shall see their lands melt away like snow; yea their wealth shall vanish, though they may labour night and day to heap up gold. And when nine generations have passed from the face of the earth, thy blood shall no longer flow in the veins of any human being. In those days the last male of thy race shall avenge me. The son shall slay the father.”

Such was the traditionary account of Owain Glendwr’s speech to his once-trusted friend. And it was declared that the doom had been fulfilled in all things; that live in as miserly a manner as they would, the Griffiths never were wealthy and prosperous – indeed that their worldly stock diminished without any visible cause.

But the lapse of many years had almost deadened the wonder-inspiring power of the whole curse. It was only brought forth from the hoards of Memory when some untoward event happened to the Griffiths family; and in the eighth generation the faith in the prophecy was nearly destroyed, by the marriage of the Griffiths of that day, to a Miss Owen, who, unexpectedly, by the death of a brother, became an heiress – to no considerable amount, to be sure, but enough to make the prophecy appear reversed. The heiress and her husband removed from his small patrimonial estate in Merionethshire, to her heritage in Caernarvonshire, and for a time the prophecy lay dormant.

If you go from Tremadoc to Criccaeth, you pass by the parochial church of Ynysynhanarn, situated in a boggy valley running from the mountains, which shoulder up to the Rivals, down to Cardigan Bay. This tract of land has every appearance of having been redeemed at no distant period of time from the sea, and has all the desolate rankness often attendant upon such marshes. But the valley beyond, similar in character, had yet more of gloom at the time of which I write. In the higher part there were large plantations of firs, set too closely to attain any size, and remaining stunted in height and scrubby in appearance. Indeed, many of the smaller and more weakly had died, and the bark had fallen down on the brown soil neglected and unnoticed. These trees had a ghastly appearance, with their white trunks, seen by the dim light which struggled through the thick boughs above. Nearer to the sea, the valley assumed a more open, though hardly a more cheerful character; it looked dark and overhung by sea-fog through the greater part of the year, and even a farm-house, which usually imparts something of cheerfulness to a landscape, failed to do so here. This valley formed the greater part of the estate to which Owen Griffiths became entitled by right of his wife. In the higher part of the valley was situated the family mansion, or rather dwelling-house, for ‘mansion’ is too grand a word to apply to the clumsy, but substantially-built Bodowen. It was square and heavy-looking, with just that much pretension to ornament necessary to distinguish it from the mere farm-house.

In this dwelling Mrs. Owen Griffiths bore her husband two sons – Llewellyn, the future Squire, and Robert, who was early destined for the Church. The only difference in their situation, up to the time when Robert was entered at Jesus College, was, that the elder was invariably indulged by all around him, while Robert was thwarted and indulged by turns; that Llewellyn never learned anything from the poor Welsh parson, who was nominally his private tutor; while occasionally Squire Griffiths made a great point of enforcing Robert’s diligence, telling him that, as he had his bread to earn, he must pay attention to his learning. There is no knowing how far the very irregular education he had received would have carried Robert through his college examinations; but, luckily for him in this respect, before such a trial of his learning came round, he heard of the death of his elder brother, after a short illness, brought on by a hard drinking-bout. Of course, Robert was summoned home, and it seemed quite as much of course, now that there was no necessity for him to ‘earn his bread by his learning,’ that he should not return to Oxford. So the half-educated, but not unintelligent, young man continued at home, during the short remainder of his parent’s lifetime.

His was not an uncommon character. In general he was mild, indolent, and easily managed; but once thoroughly roused, his passions were vehement and fearful. He seemed, indeed, almost afraid of himself, and in common hardly dared to give way to justifiable anger – so much did he dread losing his self-control. Had he been judiciously educated, he would, probably, have distinguished himself in those branches of literature which call for taste and imagination, rather than any exertion of reflection or judgment. As it was, his literary taste showed itself in making collections of Cambrian antiquities of every description, till his stock of Welsh MSS. would have excited the envy of Dr. Pugh himself, had he been alive at the time of which I write.

There is one characteristic of Robert Griffiths which I have omitted to note, and which was peculiar among his class. He was no hard drinker; whether it was that his head was easily affected, or that his partially-refined taste led him to dislike intoxication and its attendant circumstances, I cannot say; but at five-and-twenty Robert Griffiths was habitually sober – a thing so rare in Llyn, that he was almost shunned as a churlish, unsociable being, and paused much of his time in solitude.

About this time, he had to appear in some case that was tried at the Caernarvon assizes; and while there, was a guest at the house of his agent, a shrewd, sensible Welsh attorney, with one daughter, who had charms enough to captivate Robert Griffiths. Though he remained only a few days at her father’s house, they were sufficient to decide his affections, and short was the period allowed to elapse before he brought home a mistress to Bodowen. The new Mrs. Griffiths was a gentle, yielding person, full of love toward her husband, of whom, nevertheless, she stood something in awe, partly arising from the difference in their ages, partly from his devoting much time to studies of which she could understand nothing.

She soon made him the father of a blooming little daughter, called Augharad after her mother. Then there came several uneventful years in the household of Bodowen; and when the old women had one and all declared that the cradle would not rock again, Mrs. Griffiths bore the son and heir. His birth was soon followed by his mother’s death: she had been ailing and low-spirited during her pregnancy, and she seemed to lack the buoyancy of body and mind requisite to bring her round after her time of trial. Her husband, who loved her all the more from having few other claims on his affections, was deeply grieved by her early death, and his only comforter was the sweet little boy whom she had left behind. That part of the squire’s character, which was so tender, and almost feminine, seemed called forth by the helpless situation of the little infant, who stretched out his arms to his father with the same earnest cooing that happier children make use of to their mother alone. Augharad was almost neglected, while the little Owen was king of the house; still next to his father, none tended him so lovingly as his sister. She was so accustomed to give way to him that it was no longer a hardship. By night and by day Owen was the constant companion of his father, and increasing years seemed only to confirm the custom. It was an unnatural life for the child, seeing no bright little faces peering into his own (for Augharad was, as I said before, five or six years older, and her face, poor motherless girl! was often anything but bright), hearing no din of clear ringing voices, but day after day sharing the otherwise solitary hours of his father, whether in the dim room, surrounded by wizard-like antiquities, or pattering his little feet to keep up with his ‘tada’ in his mountain rambles or shooting excursions. When the pair came to some little foaming brook, where the stepping-stones were far and wide, the father carried his little boy across with the tenderest care; when the lad was weary, they rested, he cradled in his father’s arms, or the Squire would lift him up and carry him to his home again. The boy was indulged (for his father felt flattered by the desire) in his wish of sharing his meals and keeping the same hours. All this indulgence did not render Owen unamiable, but it made him wilful, and not a happy child. He had a thoughtful look, not common to the face of a young boy. He knew no games, no merry sports; his information was of an imaginative and speculative character. His father delighted to interest him in his own studies, without considering how far they were healthy for so young a mind.

Of course Squire Griffiths was not unaware of the prophecy which was to be fulfilled in his generation. He would occasionally refer to it when among his friends, with sceptical levity; but in truth it lay nearer to his heart than he chose to acknowledge. His strong imagination rendered him peculiarly impressible on such subjects; while his judgment, seldom exercised or fortified by severe thought, could not prevent his continually recurring to it. He used to gaze on the half-sad countenance of the child, who sat looking up into his face with his large dark eyes, so fondly yet so inquiringly, till the old legend swelled around his heart, and became too painful for him not to require sympathy. Besides, the overpowering love he bore to the child seemed to demand fuller vent than tender words; it made him like, yet dread, to upbraid its object for the fearful contrast foretold. Still Squire Griffiths told the legend, in a half-jesting manner, to his little son, when they were roaming over the wild heaths in the autumn days, ‘the saddest of the year,’ or while they sat in the oak-wainscoted room, surrounded by mysterious relics that gleamed strangely forth by the flickering fire-light. The legend was wrought into the boy’s mind, and he would crave, yet tremble, to hear it told over and over again, while the words were intermingled with caresses and questions as to his love. Occasionally his loving words and actions were cut short by his father’s light yet bitter speech – “Get thee away, my lad; thou knowest not what is to come of all this love.”

When Augharad was seventeen, and Owen eleven or twelve, the rector of the parish in which Bodowen was situated, endeavoured to prevail on Squire Griffiths to send the boy to school. Now, this rector had many congenial tastes with his parishioner, and was his only intimate; and, by repeated arguments, he succeeded in convincing the Squire that the unnatural life Owen was leading was in every way injurious. Unwillingly was the father wrought to part from his son; but he did at length send him to the Grammar School at Bangor, then under the management of an excellent classic. Here Owen showed that he had more talents than the rector had given him credit for, when he affirmed that the lad had been completely stupefied by the life he led at Bodowen. He bade fair to do credit to the school in the peculiar branch of learning for which it was famous. But he was not popular among his schoolfellows. He was wayward, though, to a certain degree, generous and unselfish; he was reserved but gentle, except when the tremendous bursts of passion (similar in character to those of his father) forced their way.

On his return from school one Christmas-time, when he had been a year or so at Bangor, he was stunned by hearing that the undervalued Augharad was about to be married to a gentleman of South Wales, residing near Aberystwith. Boys seldom appreciate their sisters; but Owen thought of the many slights with which he had requited the patient Augharad, and he gave way to bitter regrets, which, with a selfish want of control over his words, he kept expressing to his father, until the Squire was thoroughly hurt and chagrined at the repeated exclamations of ‘What shall we do when Augharad is gone?’ ‘How dull we shall be when Augharad is married!’ Owen’s holidays were prolonged a few weeks, in order that he might be present at the wedding; and when all the festivities were over, and the bride and bridegroom had left Bodowen, the boy and his father really felt how much they missed the quiet, loving Augharad. She had performed so many thoughtful, noiseless little offices, on which their daily comfort depended; and now she was gone, the household seemed to miss the spirit that peacefully kept it in order; the servants roamed about in search of commands and directions, the rooms had no longer the unobtrusive ordering of taste to make them cheerful, the very fires burned dim, and were always sinking down into dull heaps of grey ashes. Altogether Owen did not regret his return to Bangor, and this also the mortified parent perceived. Squire Griffiths was a selfish parent.

Letters in those days were a rare occurrence. Owen usually received one during his half-yearly absences from home, and occasionally his father paid him a visit. This half-year the boy had no visit, nor even a letter, till very near the time of his leaving school, and then he was astounded by the intelligence that his father was married again.

Then came one of his paroxysms of rage; the more disastrous in its effects upon his character because it could find no vent in action. Independently of slight to the memory of the first wife which children are so apt to fancy such an action implies, Owen had hitherto considered himself (and with justice) the first object of his father’s life. They had been so much to each other; and now a shapeless, but too real something had come between him and his father there for ever. He felt as if his permission should have been asked, as if he should have been consulted. Certainly he ought to have been told of the intended event. So the Squire felt, and hence his constrained letter which had so much increased the bitterness of Owen’s feelings.

With all this anger, when Owen saw his stepmother, he thought he had never seen so beautiful a woman for her age; for she was no longer in the bloom of youth, being a widow when his father married her. Her manners, to the Welsh lad, who had seen little of female grace among the families of the few antiquarians with whom his father visited, were so fascinating that he watched her with a sort of breathless admiration. Her measured grace, her faultless movements, her tones of voice, sweet, till the ear was sated with their sweetness, made Owen less angry at his father’s marriage. Yet he felt, more than ever, that the cloud was between him and his father; that the hasty letter he had sent in answer to the announcement of his wedding was not forgotten, although no allusion was ever made to it. He was no longer his father’s confidant – hardly ever his father’s companion, for the newly-married wife was all in all to the Squire, and his son felt himself almost a cipher, where he had so long been everything. The lady herself had ever the softest consideration for her stepson; almost too obtrusive was the attention paid to his wishes, but still he fancied that the heart had no part in the winning advances. There was a watchful glance of the eye that Owen once or twice caught when she had imagined herself unobserved, and many other nameless little circumstances, that gave him a strong feeling of want of sincerity in his stepmother. Mrs. Owen brought with her into the family her little child by her first husband, a boy nearly three years old. He was one of those elfish, observant, mocking children, over whose feelings you seem to have no control: agile and mischievous, his little practical jokes, at first performed in ignorance of the pain he gave, but afterward proceeding to a malicious pleasure in suffering, really seemed to afford some ground to the superstitious notion of some of the common people that he was a fairy changeling.

Years passed on; and as Owen grew older he became more observant. He saw, even in his occasional visits at home (for from school he had passed on to college), that a great change had taken place in the outward manifestations of his father’s character; and, by degrees, Owen traced this change to the influence of his stepmother; so slight, so imperceptible to the common observer, yet so resistless in its effects. Squire Griffiths caught up his wife’s humbly advanced opinions, and, unawares to himself, adopted them as his own, defying all argument and opposition. It was the same with her wishes; they met their fulfilment, from the extreme and delicate art with which she insinuated them into her husband’s mind, as his own. She sacrificed the show of authority for the power. At last, when Owen perceived some oppressive act in his father’s conduct toward his dependants, or some unaccountable thwarting of his own wishes, he fancied he saw his stepmother’s secret influence thus displayed, however much she might regret the injustice of his father’s actions in her conversations with him when they were alone. His father was fast losing his temperate habits, and frequent intoxication soon took its usual effect upon the temper. Yet even here was the spell of his wife upon him. Before her he placed a restraint upon his passion, yet she was perfectly aware of his irritable disposition, and directed it hither and thither with the same apparent ignorance of the tendency of her words.

Meanwhile Owen’s situation became peculiarly mortifying to a youth whose early remembrances afforded such a contrast to his present state. As a child, he had been elevated to the consequence of a man before his years gave any mental check to the selfishness which such conduct was likely to engender; he could remember when his will was law to the servants and dependants, and his sympathy necessary to his father: now he was as a cipher in his father’s house; and the Squire, estranged in the first instance by a feeling of the injury he had done his son in not sooner acquainting him with his purposed marriage, seemed rather to avoid than to seek him as a companion, and too frequently showed the most utter indifference to the feelings and wishes which a young man of a high and independent spirit might be supposed to indulge.

Perhaps Owen was not fully aware of the force of all these circumstances; for an actor in a family drama is seldom unimpassioned enough to be perfectly observant. But he became moody and soured; brooding over his unloved existence, and craving with a human heart after sympathy.

This feeling took more full possession of his mind when he had left college, and returned home to lead an idle and purposeless life. As the heir, there was no worldly necessity for exertion: his father was too much of a Welsh squire to dream of the moral necessity, and he himself had not sufficient strength of mind to decide at once upon abandoning a place and mode of life which abounded in daily mortifications; yet to this course his judgment was slowly tending, when some circumstances occurred to detain him at Bodowen.

It was not to be expected that harmony would long be preserved, even in appearance, between an unguarded and soured young man, such as Owen, and his wary stepmother, when he had once left college, and come, not as a visitor, but as the heir to his father’s house. Some cause of difference occurred, where the woman subdued her hidden anger sufficiently to become convinced that Owen was not entirely the dupe she had believed him to be. Henceforward there was no peace between them. Not in vulgar altercations did this show itself; but in moody reserve on Owen’s part, and in undisguised and contemptuous pursuance of her own plans by his stepmother. Bodowen was no longer a place where, if Owen was not loved or attended to, he could at least find peace, and care for himself: he was thwarted at every step, and in every wish, by his father’s desire, apparently, while the wife sat by with a smile of triumph on her beautiful lips.

So Owen went forth at the early day dawn, sometimes roaming about on the shore or the upland, shooting or fishing, as the season might be, but oftener ‘stretched in indolent repose’ on the short, sweet grass, indulging in gloomy and morbid reveries. He would fancy that this mortified state of existence was a dream, a horrible dream, from which he should awake and find himself again the sole object and darling of his father. And then he would start up and strive to shake off the incubus. There was the molten sunset of his childish memory; the gorgeous crimson piles of glory in the west, fading away into the cold calm light of the rising moon, while here and there a cloud floated across the western heaven, like a seraph’s wing, in its flaming beauty; the earth was the same as in his childhood’s days, full of gentle evening sounds, and the harmonies of twilight – the breeze came sweeping low over the heather and blue-bells by his side, and the turf was sending up its evening incense of perfume. But life, and heart, and hope were changed for ever since those bygone days!

Or he would seat himself in a favourite niche of the rocks on Moel Gest, hidden by a stunted growth of the whitty, or mountain-ash, from general observation, with a rich-tinted cushion of stone-crop for his feet, and a straight precipice of rock rising just above. Here would he sit for hours, gazing idly at the bay below with its back-ground of purple hills, and the little fishing-sail on its bosom, showing white in the sunbeam, and gliding on in such harmony with the quiet beauty of the glassy sea; or he would pull out an old school-volume, his companion for years, and in morbid accordance with the dark legend that still lurked in the recesses of his mind – a shape of gloom in those innermost haunts awaiting its time to come forth in distinct outline – would he turn to the old Greek dramas which treat of a family foredoomed by an avenging Fate. The worn page opened of itself at the play of the Oedipus Tyrannus, and Owen dwelt with the craving disease upon the prophecy so nearly resembling that which concerned himself. With his consciousness of neglect, there was a sort of self-flattery in the consequence which the legend gave him. He almost wondered how they durst, with slights and insults, thus provoke the Avenger.

The days drifted onward. Often he would vehemently pursue some sylvan sport, till thought and feeling were lost in the violence of bodily exertion. Occasionally his evenings were spent at a small public-house, such as stood by the unfrequented wayside, where the welcome, hearty, though bought, seemed so strongly to contrast with the gloomy negligence of home – unsympathising home.

One evening (Owen might be four or five-and-twenty), wearied with a day’s shooting on the Clenneny Moors, he passed by the open door of ‘The Goat’ at Penmorfa. The light and the cheeriness within tempted him, poor self-exhausted man, as it has done many a one more wretched in worldly circumstances, to step in, and take his evening meal where at least his presence was of some consequence. It was a busy day in that little hostel. A flock of sheep, amounting to some hundreds, had arrived at Penmorfa, on their road to England, and thronged the space before the house. Inside was the shrewd, kind-hearted hostess, bustling to and fro, with merry greetings for every tired drover who was to pass the night in her house, while the sheep were penned in a field close by. Ever and anon, she kept attending to the second crowd of guests, who were celebrating a rural wedding in her house. It was busy work to Martha Thomas, yet her smile never flagged; and when Owen Griffiths had finished his evening meal she was there, ready with a hope that it had done him good, and was to his mind, and a word of intelligence that the wedding-folk were about to dance in the kitchen, and the harper was the famous Edward of Corwen.

Owen, partly from good-natured compliance with his hostess’s implied wish, and partly from curiosity, lounged to the passage which led to the kitchen – not the every-day, working, cooking kitchen, which was behind, but a good-sized room, where the mistress sat, when her work was done, and where the country people were commonly entertained at such merry-makings as the present. The lintels of the door formed a frame for the animated picture which Owen saw within, as he leaned against the wall in the dark passage. The red light of the fire, with every now and then a falling piece of turf sending forth a fresh blaze, shone full upon four young men who were dancing a measure something like a Scotch reel, keeping admirable time in their rapid movements to the capital tune the harper was playing. They had their hats on when Owen first took his stand, but as they grew more and more animated they flung them away, and presently their shoes were kicked off with like disregard to the spot where they might happen to alight. Shouts of applause followed any remarkable exertion of agility, in which each seemed to try to excel his companions. At length, wearied and exhausted, they sat down, and the harper gradually changed to one of those wild, inspiring national airs for which he was so famous. The thronged audience sat earnest and breathless, and you might have heard a pin drop, except when some maiden passed hurriedly, with flaring candle and busy look, through to the real kitchen beyond. When he had finished his beautiful theme on The March of the men of Harlech, he changed the measure again to Tri chant o’ bunnan (Three hundred pounds), and immediately a most unmusical-looking man began chanting ‘Pennillion,’ or a sort of recitative stanzas, which were soon taken up by another, and this amusement lasted so long that Owen grew weary, and was thinking of retreating from his post by the door, when some little bustle was occasioned, on the opposite side of the room, by the entrance of a middle-aged man, and a young girl, apparently his daughter. The man advanced to the bench occupied by the seniors of the party, who welcomed him with the usual pretty Welsh greeting, ‘Pa sut mae dy galon?’ (‘How is thy heart?’) and drinking his health passed on to him the cup of excellent cwrw. The girl, evidently a village belle, was as warmly greeted by the young men, while the girls eyed her rather askance with a half-jealous look, which Owen set down to the score of her extreme prettiness. Like most Welsh women, she was of middle size as to height, but beautifully made, with the most perfect yet delicate roundness in every limb. Her little mob-cap was carefully adjusted to a face which was excessively pretty, though it never could be called handsome. It also was round, with the slightest tendency to the oval shape, richly coloured, though somewhat olive in complexion, with dimples in cheek and chin, and the most scarlet lips Owen had ever seen, that were too short to meet over the small pearly teeth. The nose was the most defective feature; but the eyes were splendid. They were so long, so lustrous, yet at times so very soft under their thick fringe of eyelash! The nut-brown hair was carefully braided beneath the border of delicate lace: it was evident the little village beauty knew how to make the most of all her attractions, for the gay colours which were displayed in her neckerchief were in complete harmony with the complexion.

Owen was much attracted, while yet he was amused, by the evident coquetry the girl displayed, collecting around her a whole bevy of young fellows, for each of whom she seemed to have some gay speech, some attractive look or action. In a few minutes young Griffiths of Bodowen was at her side, brought thither by a variety of idle motives, and as her undivided attention was given to the Welsh heir, her admirers, one by one, dropped off, to seat themselves by some less fascinating but more attentive fair one. The more Owen conversed with the girl, the more he was taken; she had more wit and talent than he had fancied possible; a self-abandon and thoughtfulness, to boot, that seemed full of charms; and then her voice was so clear and sweet, and her actions so full of grace, that Owen was fascinated before he was well aware, and kept looking into her bright, blushing face, till her uplifted flashing eye fell beneath his earnest gaze.

While it thus happened that they were silent – she from confusion at the unexpected warmth of his admiration, he from an unconsciousness of anything but the beautiful changes in her flexile countenance – the man whom Owen took for her father came up and addressed some observation to his daughter, from whence he glided into some commonplace though respectful remark to Owen, and at length engaging him in some slight, local conversation, he led the way to the account of a spot on the peninsula of Penthryn, where teal abounded, and concluded with begging Owen to allow him to show him the exact place, saying that whenever the young Squire felt so inclined, if he would honour him by a call at his house, he would take him across in his boat. While Owen listened, his attention was not so much absorbed as to be unaware that the little beauty at his side was refusing one or two who endeavoured to draw her from her place by invitations to dance. Flattered by his own construction of her refusals, he again directed all his attention to her, till she was called away by her father, who was leaving the scene of festivity. Before he left he reminded Owen of his promise, and added –

“Perhaps, sir, you do not know me. My name is Ellis Pritchard, and I live at Ty Glas, on this side of Moel Gest; anyone can point it out to you.”

When the father and daughter had left, Owen slowly prepared for his ride home; but encountering the hostess, he could not resist asking a few questions relative to Ellis Pritchard and his pretty daughter. She answered shortly but respectfully, and then said, rather hesitatingly –

“Master Griffiths, you know the triad, ‘Tri pheth tebyg y naill i’r llall, ysgnbwr heb yd, mail deg heb ddiawd, a merch deg heb ei geirda’ (Three things are alike: a fine barn without corn, a fine cup without drink, a fine woman without her reputation).” She hastily quitted him, and Owen rode slowly to his unhappy home.

Ellis Pritchard, half farmer and half fisherman, was shrewd, and keen, and worldly; yet he was good-natured, and sufficiently generous to have become rather a popular man among his equals. He had been struck with the young Squire’s attention to his pretty daughter, and was not insensible to the advantages to be derived from it. Nest would not be the first peasant girl, by any means, who had been transplanted to a Welsh manor-house as its mistress; and, accordingly, her father had shrewdly given the admiring young man some pretext for further opportunities of seeing her.

As for Nest herself, she had somewhat of her father’s worldliness, and was fully alive to the superior station of her new admirer, and quite prepared to slight all her old sweethearts on his account. But then she had something more of feeling in her reckoning; she had not been insensible to the earnest yet comparatively refined homage which Owen paid her; she had noticed his expressive and occasionally handsome countenance with admiration, and was flattered by his so immediately singling her out from her companions. As to the hint which Martha Thomas had thrown out, it is enough to say that Nest was very giddy, and that she was motherless. She had high spirits and a great love of admiration, or, to use a softer term, she loved to please; men, women, and children, all, she delighted to gladden with her smile and voice. She coquetted, and flirted, and went to the extreme lengths of Welsh courtship, till the seniors of the village shook their heads, and cautioned their daughters against her acquaintance. If not absolutely guilty, she had too frequently been on the verge of guilt.

Even at the time, Martha Thomas’s hint made but little impression on Owen, for his senses were otherwise occupied; but in a few days the recollection thereof had wholly died away, and one warm glorious summer’s day, he bent his steps toward Ellis Pritchard’s with a beating heart; for, except some very slight flirtations at Oxford, Owen had never been touched; his thoughts, his fancy, had been otherwise engaged.

Ty Glas was built against one of the lower rocks of Moel Gest, which, indeed, formed a side to the low, lengthy house. The materials of the cottage were the shingly stones which had fallen from above, plastered rudely together, with deep recesses for the small oblong windows. Altogether, the exterior was much ruder than Owen had expected; but inside there seemed no lack of comforts. The house was divided into two apartments, one large, roomy, and dark, into which Owen entered immediately; and before the blushing Nest came from the inner chamber (for she had seen the young Squire coming, and hastily gone to make some alteration in her dress), he had had time to look around him, and note the various little particulars of the room. Beneath the window (which commanded a magnificent view) was an oaken dresser, replete with drawers and cupboards, and brightly polished to a rich dark colour. In the farther part of the room Owen could at first distinguish little, entering as he did from the glaring sunlight, but he soon saw that there were two oaken beds, closed up after the manner of the Welsh: in fact, the dormitories of Ellis Pritchard and the man who served under him, both on sea and on land. There was the large wheel used for spinning wool, left standing on the middle of the floor, as if in use only a few minutes before; and around the ample chimney hung flitches of bacon, dried kids’-flesh, and fish, that was in process of smoking for winter’s store.

Before Nest had shyly dared to enter, her father, who had been mending his nets down below, and seen Owen winding up to the house, came in and gave him a hearty yet respectful welcome; and then Nest, downcast and blushing, full of the consciousness which her father’s advice and conversation had not failed to inspire, ventured to join them. To Owen’s mind this reserve and shyness gave her new charms.

It was too bright, too hot, too anything to think of going to shoot teal till later in the day, and Owen was delighted to accept a hesitating invitation to share the noonday meal. Some ewe-milk cheese, very hard and dry, oat-cake, slips of the dried kids’-flesh broiled, after having been previously soaked in water for a few minutes, delicious butter and fresh butter-milk, with a liquor called ‘diod griafol’ (made from the berries of the Sorbus aucuparia, infused in water and then fermented), composed the frugal repast; but there was something so clean and neat, and withal such a true welcome, that Owen had seldom enjoyed a meal so much. Indeed, at that time of day the Welsh squires differed from the farmers more in the plenty and rough abundance of their manner of living than in the refinement of style of their table.

At the present day, down in Llyn, the Welsh gentry are not a wit behind their Saxon equals in the expensive elegances of life; but then (when there was but one pewter-service in all Northumberland) there was nothing in Ellis Pritchard’s mode of living that grated on the young Squire’s sense of refinement.

Little was said by that young pair of wooers during the meal; the father had all the conversation to himself, apparently heedless of the ardent looks and inattentive mien of his guest. As Owen became more serious in his feelings, he grew more timid in their expression, and at night, when they returned from their shooting-excursion, the caress he gave Nest was almost as bashfully offered as received.

This was but the first of a series of days devoted to Nest in reality, though at first he thought some little disguise of his object was necessary. The past, the future, was all forgotten in those happy days of love.

And every worldly plan, every womanly wile was put in practice by Ellis Pritchard and his daughter, to render his visits agreeable and alluring. Indeed, the very circumstance of his being welcome was enough to attract the poor young man, to whom the feeling so produced was new and full of charms. He left a home where the certainty of being thwarted made him chary in expressing his wishes; where no tones of love ever fell on his ear, save those addressed to others; where his presence or absence was a matter of utter indifference; and when he entered Ty Glas, all, down to the little cur which, with clamorous barkings, claimed a part of his attention, seemed to rejoice. His account of his day’s employment found a willing listener in Ellis; and when he passed on to Nest, busy at her wheel or at her churn, the deepened colour, the conscious eye, and the gradual yielding of herself up to his lover-like caress, had worlds of charms. Ellis Pritchard was a tenant on the Bodowen estate, and therefore had reasons in plenty for wishing to keep the young Squire’s visits secret; and Owen, unwilling to disturb the sunny calm of these halcyon days by any storm at home, was ready to use all the artifice which Ellis suggested as to the mode of his calls at Ty Glas. Nor was he unaware of the probable, nay, the hoped-for termination of these repeated days of happiness. He was quite conscious that the father wished for nothing better than the marriage of his daughter to the heir of Bodowen; and when Nest had hidden her face in his neck, which was encircled by her clasping arms, and murmured into his ear her acknowledgment of love, he felt only too desirous of finding some one to love him for ever. Though not highly principled, he would not have tried to obtain Nest on other terms save those of marriage: he did so pine after enduring love, and fancied he should have bound her heart for evermore to his, when they had taken the solemn oaths of matrimony.

There was no great difficulty attending a secret marriage at such a place and at such a time. One gusty autumn day, Ellis ferried them round Penthryn to Llandutrwyn, and there saw his little Nest become future Lady of Bodowen.

How often do we see giddy, coquetting, restless girls become sobered by marriage? A great object in life is decided; one on which their thoughts have been running in all their vagaries, and they seem to verify the beautiful fable of Undine. A new soul beams out in the gentleness and repose of their future lives. An indescribable softness and tenderness takes place of the wearying vanity of their former endeavours to attract admiration. Something of this sort took place in Nest Pritchard. If at first she had been anxious to attract the young Squire of Bodowen, long before her marriage this feeling had merged into a truer love than she had ever felt before; and now that he was her own, her husband, her whole soul was bent toward making him amends, as far as in her lay, for the misery which, with a woman’s tact, she saw that he had to endure at his home. Her greetings were abounding in delicately-expressed love; her study of his tastes unwearying, in the arrangement of her dress, her time, her very thoughts.

No wonder that he looked back on his wedding-day with a thankfulness which is seldom the result of unequal marriages. No wonder that his heart beat aloud as formerly when he wound up the little path to Ty Glas, and saw – keen though the winter’s wind might be-that Nest was standing out at the door to watch for his dimly-seen approach, while the candle flared in the little window as a beacon to guide him aright.

The angry words and unkind actions of home fell deadened on his heart; he thought of the love that was surely his, and of the new promise of love that a short time would bring forth, and he could almost have smiled at the impotent efforts to disturb his peace.

A few more months, and the young father was greeted by a feeble little cry, when he hastily entered Ty Glas, one morning early, in consequence of a summons conveyed mysteriously to Bodowen; and the pale mother, smiling, and feebly holding up her babe to its father’s kiss, seemed to him even more lovely than the bright gay Nest who had won his heart at the little inn of Penmorfa.

But the curse was at work! The fulfilment of the prophecy was nigh at hand!

Chapter II

It was the autumn after the birth of their boy; it had been a glorious summer, with bright, hot, sunny weather; and now the year was fading away as seasonably into mellow days, with mornings of silver mists and clear frosty nights. The blooming look of the time of flowers, was past and gone; but instead there were even richer tints abroad in the sun-coloured leaves, the lichens, the golden blossomed furze; if it was the time of fading, there was a glory in the decay.

Nest, in her loving anxiety to surround her dwelling with every charm for her husband’s sake, had turned gardener, and the little corners of the rude court before the house were filled with many a delicate mountain-flower, transplanted more for its beauty than its rarity. The sweetbrier bush may even yet be seen, old and grey, which she and Owen planted a green slipling beneath the window of her little chamber. In those moments Owen forgot all besides the present; all the cares and griefs he had known in the past, and all that might await him of woe and death in the future. The boy, too, was as lovely a child as the fondest parent was ever blessed with; and crowed with delight, and clapped his little hands, as his mother held him in her arms at the cottage-door to watch his father’s ascent up the rough path that led to Ty Glas, one bright autumnal morning; and when the three entered the house together, it was difficult to say which was the happiest. Owen carried his boy, and tossed and played with him, while Nest sought out some little article of work, and seated herself on the dresser beneath the window, where now busily plying the needle, and then again looking at her husband, she eagerly told him the little pieces of domestic intelligence, the winning ways of the child, the result of yesterday’s fishing, and such of the gossip of Penmorfa as came to the ears of the now retired Nest. She noticed that, when she mentioned any little circumstance which bore the slightest reference to Bodowen, her husband appeared chafed and uneasy, and at last avoided anything that might in the least remind him of home. In truth, he had been suffering much of late from the irritability of his father, shown in trifles to be sure, but not the less galling on that account.

While they were thus talking, and caressing each other and the child, a shadow darkened the room, and before they could catch a glimpse of the object that had occasioned it, it vanished, and Squire Griffiths lifted the door-latch and stood before them. He stood and looked – first on his son, so different, in his buoyant expression of content and enjoyment, with his noble child in his arms, like a proud and happy father, as he was, from the depressed, moody young man he too often appeared at Bodowen; then on Nest – poor, trembling, sickened Nest! – who dropped her work, but yet durst not stir from her seat, on the dresser, while she looked to her husband as if for protection from his father.

The Squire was silent, as he glared from one to the other, his features white with restrained passion. When he spoke, his words came most distinct in their forced composure. It was to his son he addressed himself:

“That woman! Who is she?”

Owen hesitated one moment, and then replied, in a steady, yet quiet voice:

“Father, that woman is my wife.”

He would have added some apology for the long concealment of his marriage; have appealed to his father’s forgiveness; but the foam flew from Squire Owen’s lips as he burst forth with invective against Nest –

“You have married her! It is as they told me! Married Nest Pritchard yr buten! And you stand there as if you had not disgraced yourself for ever and ever with your accursed wiving! And the fair harlot sits there, in her mocking modesty, practising the mimming airs that will become her state as future Lady of Bodowen. But I will move heaven and earth before that false woman darken the doors of my father’s house as mistress!”

All this was said with such rapidity that Owen had no time for the words that thronged to his lips. “Father!” (he burst forth at length) “Father, whosoever told you that Nest Pritchard was a harlot told you a lie as false as hell! Ay! A lie as false as hell!” he added, in a voice of thunder, while he advanced a step or two nearer to the Squire. And then, in a lower tone, he said –

“She is as pure as your own wife; nay, God help me! As the dear, precious mother who brought me forth, and then left me – with no refuge in a mother’s heart – to struggle on through life alone. I tell you Nest is as pure as that dear, dead mother!”

“Fool – poor fool!”

At this moment the child – the little Owen – who had kept gazing from one angry countenance to the other, and with earnest look, trying to understand what had brought the fierce glare into the face where till now he had read nothing but love, in some way attracted the Squire’s attention, and increased his wrath.

“Yes,” he continued, “poor, weak fool that you are, hugging the child of another as if it were your own offspring!” Owen involuntarily caressed the affrighted child, and half smiled at the implication of his father’s words. This the Squire perceived, and raising his voice to a scream of rage, he went on:

“I bid you, if you call yourself my son, to cast away that miserable, shameless woman’s offspring; cast it away this instant – this instant!”

In this ungovernable rage, seeing that Owen was far from complying with his command, he snatched the poor infant from the loving arms that held it, and throwing it to his mother, left the house inarticulate with fury.

Nest – who had been pale and still as marble during this terrible dialogue, looking on and listening as if fascinated by the words that smote her heart – opened her arms to receive and cherish her precious babe; but the boy was not destined to reach the white refuge of her breast. The furious action of the Squire had been almost without aim, and the infant fell against the sharp edge of the dresser down on to the stone floor.

Owen sprang up to take the child, but he lay so still, so motionless, that the awe of death came over the father, and he stooped down to gaze more closely. At that moment, the upturned, filmy eyes rolled convulsively – a spasm passed along the body – and the lips, yet warm with kissing, quivered into everlasting rest.

A word from her husband told Nest all. She slid down from her seat, and lay by her little son as corpse-like as he, unheeding all the agonizing endearments and passionate adjurations of her husband. And that poor, desolate husband and father! Scarce one little quarter of an hour, and he had been so blessed in his consciousness of love! The bright promise of many years on his infant’s face, and the new, fresh soul beaming forth in its awakened intelligence. And there it was; the little clay image, that would never more gladden up at the sight of him, nor stretch forth to meet his embrace; whose inarticulate, yet most eloquent cooings might haunt him in his dreams, but would never more be heard in waking life again! And by the dead babe, almost as utterly insensate, the poor mother had fallen in a merciful faint – the slandered, heart-pierced Nest! Owen struggled against the sickness that came over him, and busied himself in vain attempts at her restoration.

It was now near noon-day, and Ellis Pritchard came home, little dreaming of the sight that awaited him; but though stunned, he was able to take more effectual measures for his poor daughter’s recovery than Owen had done.

By-and-by she showed symptoms of returning sense, and was placed in her own little bed in a darkened room, where, without ever waking to complete consciousness, she fell asleep. Then it was that her husband, suffocated by pressure of miserable thought, gently drew his hand from her tightened clasp, and printing one long soft kiss on her white waxen forehead, hastily stole out of the room, and out of the house.

Near the base of Moel Gest – it might be a quarter of a mile from Ty Glas – was a little neglected solitary copse, wild and tangled with the trailing branches of the dog-rose and the tendrils of the white bryony. Toward the middle of this thicket a deep crystal pool – a clear mirror for the blue heavens above – and round the margin floated the broad green leaves of the water-lily, and when the regal sun shone down in his noonday glory the flowers arose from their cool depths to welcome and greet him. The copse was musical with many sounds; the warbling of birds rejoicing in its shades, the ceaseless hum of the insects that hovered over the pool, the chime of the distant waterfall, the occasional bleating of the sheep from the mountaintop, were all blended into the delicious harmony of nature.

It had been one of Owen’s favourite resorts when he had been a lonely wanderer – a pilgrim in search of love in the years gone by. And thither he went, as if by instinct, when he left Ty Glas; quelling the uprising agony till he should reach that little solitary spot.

It was the time of day when a change in the aspect of the weather so frequently takes place; and the little pool was no longer the reflection of a blue and sunny sky: it sent back the dark and slaty clouds above, and, every now and then, a rough gust shook the painted autumn leaves from their branches, and all other music was lost in the sound of the wild winds piping down from the moorlands, which lay up and beyond the clefts in the mountain-side. Presently the rain came on and beat down in torrents.

But Owen heeded it not. He sat on the dank ground, his face buried in his hands, and his whole strength, physical and mental, employed in quelling the rush of blood, which rose and boiled and gurgled in his brain as if it would madden him.

The phantom of his dead child rose ever before him, and seemed to cry aloud for vengeance. And when the poor young man thought upon the victim whom he required in his wild longing for revenge, he shuddered, for it was his father!

Again and again he tried not to think; but still the circle of thought came round, eddying through his brain. At length he mastered his passions, and they were calm; then he forced himself to arrange some plan for the future.

He had not, in the passionate hurry of the moment, seen that his father had left the cottage before he was aware of the fatal accident that befell the child. Owen thought he had seen all; and once he planned to go to the Squire and tell him of the anguish of heart he had wrought, and awe him, as it were, by the dignity of grief. But then again he durst not – he distrusted his self-control – the old prophecy rose up in its horror – he dreaded his doom.

At last he determined to leave his father for ever; to take Nest to some distant country where she might forget her firstborn, and where he himself might gain a livelihood by his own exertions.

But when he tried to descend to the various little arrangements which were involved in the execution of this plan, he remembered that all his money (and in this respect Squire Griffiths was no niggard) was locked up in his escritoire at Bodowen. In vain he tried to do away with this matter-of-fact difficulty; go to Bodowen he must: and his only hope – nay his determination – was to avoid his father.

He rose and took a by-path to Bodowen. The house looked even more gloomy and desolate than usual in the heavy down-pouring rain, yet Owen gazed on it with something of regret – for sorrowful as his days in it had been, he was about to leave it for many many years, if not for ever. He entered by a side door opening into a passage that led to his own room, where he kept his books, his guns, his fishing-tackle, his writing materials, et cetera.

Here he hurriedly began to select the few articles he intended to take; for, besides the dread of interruption, he was feverishly anxious to travel far that very night, if only Nest was capable of performing the journey. As he was thus employed, he tried to conjecture what his father’s feelings would be on finding that his once-loved son was gone away for ever. Would he then awaken to regret for the conduct which had driven him from home, and bitterly think on the loving and caressing boy who haunted his footsteps in former days? Or, alas! Would he only feel that an obstacle to his daily happiness – to his contentment with his wife, and his strange, doting affection for the child – was taken away? Would they make merry over the heir’s departure? Then he thought of Nest – the young childless mother, whose heart had not yet realized her fullness of desolation. Poor Nest! So loving as she was, so devoted to her child – how should he console her? He pictured her away in a strange land, pining for her native mountains, and refusing to be comforted because her child was not.

Even this thought of the home-sickness that might possibly beset Nest hardly made him hesitate in his determination; so strongly had the idea taken possession of him that only by putting miles and leagues between him and his father could he avert the doom which seemed blending itself with the very purposes of his life as long as he stayed in proximity with the slayer of his child.

He had now nearly completed his hasty work of preparation, and was full of tender thoughts of his wife, when the door opened, and the elfish Robert peered in, in search of some of his brother’s possessions. On seeing Owen he hesitated, but then came boldly forward, and laid his hand on Owen’s arm, saying,

“Nesta yr buten! How is Nest yr buten?”

He looked maliciously into Owen’s face to mark the effect of his words, but was terrified at the expression he read there. He started off and ran to the door, while Owen tried to check himself, saying continually, “He is but a child. He does not understand the meaning of what he says. He is but a child!” Still Robert, now in fancied security, kept calling out his insulting words, and Owen’s hand was on his gun, grasping it as if to restrain his rising fury.

But when Robert passed on daringly to mocking words relating to the poor dead child, Owen could bear it no longer; and before the boy was well aware, Owen was fiercely holding him in an iron clasp with one hand, while he struck him hard with the other.

In a minute he checked himself. He paused, relaxed his grasp, and, to his horror, he saw Robert sink to the ground; in fact, the lad was half-stunned, half-frightened, and thought it best to assume insensibility.

Owen – miserable Owen – seeing him lie there prostrate, was bitterly repentant, and would have dragged him to the carved settle, and done all he could to restore him to his senses, but at this instant the Squire came in.

Probably, when the household at Bodowen rose that morning, there was but one among them ignorant of the heir’s relation to Nest Pritchard and her child; for secret as he tried to make his visits to Ty Glas, they had been too frequent not to be noticed, and Nest’s altered conduct – no longer frequenting dances and merry-makings – was a strongly corroborative circumstance. But Mrs. Griffiths’ influence reigned paramount, if unacknowledged, at Bodowen, and till she sanctioned the disclosure, none would dare to tell the Squire.

Now, however, the time drew near when it suited her to make her husband aware of the connection his son had formed; so, with many tears, and much seeming reluctance, she broke the intelligence to him – taking good care, at the same time, to inform him of the light character Nest had borne. Nor did she confine this evil reputation to her conduct before her marriage, but insinuated that even to this day she was a ‘woman of the grove and brake’– for centuries the Welsh term of opprobrium for the loosest female characters.

Squire Griffiths easily tracked Owen to Ty Glas; and without any aim but the gratification of his furious anger, followed him to upbraid as we have seen. But he left the cottage even more enraged against his son than he had entered it, and returned home to hear the evil suggestions of the stepmother. He had heard a slight scuffle in which he caught the tones of Robert’s voice, as he passed along the hall, and an instant afterwards he saw the apparently lifeless body of his little favourite dragged along by the culprit Owen – the marks of strong passion yet visible on his face. Not loud, but bitter and deep were the evil words which the father bestowed on the son; and as Owen stood proudly and sullenly silent, disdaining all exculpation of himself in the presence of one who had wrought him so much graver – so fatal an injury – Robert’s mother entered the room. At sight of her natural emotion the wrath of the Squire was redoubled, and his wild suspicions that this violence of Owen’s to Robert was a premeditated act appeared like the proven truth through the mists of rage. He summoned domestics as if to guard his own and his wife’s life from the attempts of his son; and the servants stood wondering around – now gazing at Mrs. Griffiths, alternately scolding and sobbing, while she tried to restore the lad from his really bruised and half-unconscious state; now at the fierce and angry Squire; and now at the sad and silent Owen. And he – he was hardly aware of their looks of wonder and terror; his father’s words fell on a deadened ear; for before his eyes there rose a pale dead babe, and in that lady’s violent sounds of grief he heard the wailing of a more sad, more hopeless mother. For by this time the lad Robert had opened his eyes, and though evidently suffering a good deal from the effects of Owen’s blows, was fully conscious of all that was passing around him.

Had Owen been left to his own nature, his heart would have worked itself to doubly love the boy whom he had injured; but he was stubborn from injustice, and hardened by suffering. He refused to vindicate himself; he made no effort to resist the imprisonment the Squire had decreed, until a surgeon’s opinion of the real extent of Robert’s injuries was made known. It was not until the door was locked and barred, as if upon some wild and furious beast, that the recollection of poor Nest, without his comforting presence, came into his mind. Oh! thought he, how she would be wearying, pining for his tender sympathy; if, indeed, she had recovered the shock of mind sufficiently to be sensible of consolation! What would she think of his absence? Could she imagine he believed his father’s words, and had left her, in this her sore trouble and bereavement? The thought maddened him, and he looked around for some mode of escape.

He had been confined in a small unfurnished room on the first floor, wainscoted, and carved all round, with a massy door, calculated to resist the attempts of a dozen strong men, even had he afterward been able to escape from the house unseen, unheard. The window was placed (as is common in old Welsh houses) over the fire-place; with branching chimneys on either hand, forming a sort of projection on the outside. By this outlet his escape was easy, even had he been less determined and desperate than he was. And when he had descended, with a little care, a little winding, he might elude all observation and pursue his original intention of going to Ty Glas.

The storm had abated, and watery sunbeams were gilding the bay, as Owen descended from the window, and, stealing along in the broad afternoon shadows, made his way to the little plateau of green turf in the garden at the top of a steep precipitous rock, down the abrupt face of which he had often dropped, by means of a well-secured rope, into the small sailing-boat (his father’s present, alas! in days gone by) which lay moored in the deep sea-water below. He had always kept his boat there, because it was the nearest available spot to the house; but before he could reach the place – unless, indeed, he crossed a broad sun-lighted piece of ground in full view of the windows on that side of the house, and without the shadow of a single sheltering tree or shrub – he had to skirt round a rude semicircle of underwood, which would have been considered as a shrubbery had any one taken pains with it. Step by step he stealthily moved along – hearing voices now, again seeing his father and stepmother in no distant walk, the Squire evidently caressing and consoling his wife, who seemed to be urging some point with great vehemence, again forced to crouch down to avoid being seen by the cook, returning from the rude kitchen-garden with a handful of herbs. This was the way the doomed heir of Bodowen left his ancestral house for ever, and hoped to leave behind him his doom. At length he reached the plateau – he breathed more freely. He stooped to discover the hidden coil of rope, kept safe and dry in a hole under a great round flat piece of rock: his head was bent down; he did not see his father approach, nor did he hear his footstep for the rush of blood to his head in the stooping effort of lifting the stone; the Squire had grappled with him before he rose up again, before he fully knew whose hands detained him, now, when his liberty of person and action seemed secure. He made a vigorous struggle to free himself; he wrestled with his father for a moment – he pushed him hard, and drove him on to the great displaced stone, all unsteady in its balance.

Down went the Squire, down into the deep waters below – down after him went Owen, half consciously, half unconsciously, partly compelled by the sudden cessation of any opposing body, partly from a vehement irrepressible impulse to rescue his father. But he had instinctively chosen a safer place in the deep seawater pool than that into which his push had sent his father. The Squire had hit his head with much violence against the side of the boat, in his fall; it is, indeed, doubtful whether he was not killed before ever he sank into the sea. But Owen knew nothing save that the awful doom seemed even now present. He plunged down, he dived below the water in search of the body which had none of the elasticity of life to buoy it up; he saw his father in those depths, he clutched at him, he brought him up and cast him, a dead weight, into the boat, and exhausted by the effort, he had begun himself to sink again before he instinctively strove to rise and climb into the rocking boat. There lay his father, with a deep dent in the side of his head where the skull had been fractured by his fall; his face blackened by the arrested course of the blood. Owen felt his pulse, his heart – all was still. He called him by his name.

“Father, father!” he cried, “Come back! Come back! You never knew how I loved you! How I could love you still – if – Oh God!”

And the thought of his little child rose before him. “Yes, father,” he cried afresh, “you never knew how he fell – how he died! Oh, if I had but had patience to tell you! If you would but have borne with me and listened! And now it is over! Oh father! Father!”

Whether she had heard this wild wailing voice, or whether it was only that she missed her husband and wanted him for some little every-day question, or, as was perhaps more likely, she had discovered Owen’s escape, and come to inform her husband of it, I do not know, but on the rock, right above his head, as it seemed, Owen heard his stepmother calling her husband.

He was silent, and softly pushed the boat right under the rock till the sides grated against the stones, and the overhanging branches concealed him and it from all not on a level with the water. Wet as he was, he lay down by his dead father the better to conceal himself; and, somehow, the action recalled those early days of childhood – the first in the Squire’s widowhood – when Owen had shared his father’s bed, and used to waken him in the morning to hear one of the old Welsh legends. How long he lay thus – body chilled, and brain hard-working through the heavy pressure of a reality as terrible as a nightmare – he never knew; but at length he roused himself up to think of Nest.

Drawing out a great sail, he covered up the body of his father with it where he lay in the bottom of the boat. Then with his numbed hands he took the oars, and pulled out into the more open sea toward Criccaeth. He skirted along the coast till he found a shadowed cleft in the dark rocks; to that point he rowed, and anchored his boat close in land. Then he mounted, staggering, half longing to fall into the dark waters and be at rest – half instinctively finding out the surest foot-rests on that precipitous face of rock, till he was high up, safe landed on the turfy summit. He ran off, as if pursued, toward Penmorfa; he ran with maddened energy. Suddenly he paused, turned, ran again with the same speed, and threw himself prone on the summit, looking down into his boat with straining eyes to see if there had been any movement of life – any displacement of a fold of sail-cloth. It was all quiet deep down below, but as he gazed the shifting light gave the appearance of a slight movement. Owen ran to a lower part of the rock, stripped, plunged into the water, and swam to the boat. When there, all was still – awfully still! For a minute or two, he dared not lift up the cloth. Then reflecting that the same terror might beset him again – of leaving his father unaided while yet a spark of life lingered – he removed the shrouding cover. The eyes looked into his with a dead stare! He closed the lids and bound up the jaw. Again he looked. This time he raised himself out of the water and kissed the brow.

“It was my doom, father! It would have been better if I had died at my birth!”

Daylight was fading away. Precious daylight! He swam back, dressed, and set off afresh for Penmorfa. When he opened the door of Ty Glas, Ellis Pritchard looked at him reproachfully, from his seat in the darkly-shadowed chimney-corner.

“You’re come at last,” said he. “One of our kind (i.e., station) would not have left his wife to mourn by herself over her dead child; nor would one of our kind have let his father kill his own true son. I’ve a good mind to take her from you for ever.”

“I did not tell him,” cried Nest, looking piteously at her husband; “he made me tell him part, and guessed the rest.”

She was nursing her babe on her knee as if it was alive. Owen stood before Ellis Pritchard.

“Be silent,” said he, quietly. “Neither words nor deeds but what are decreed can come to pass. I was set to do my work, this hundred years and more. The time waited for me, and the man waited for me. I have done what was foretold of me for generations!”

Ellis Pritchard knew the old tale of the prophecy, and believed in it in a dull, dead kind of way, but somehow never thought it would come to pass in his time. Now, however, he understood it all in a moment, though he mistook Owen’s nature so much as to believe that the deed was intentionally done, out of revenge for the death of his boy; and viewing it in this light, Ellis thought it little more than a just punishment for the cause of all the wild despairing sorrow he had seen his only child suffer during the hours of this long afternoon. But he knew the law would not so regard it. Even the lax Welsh law of those days could not fail to examine into the death of a man of Squire Griffith’s standing. So the acute Ellis thought how he could conceal the culprit for a time.

“Come,” said he; “don’t look so scared! It was your doom, not your fault;” and he laid a hand on Owen’s shoulder.

“You’re wet,” said he, suddenly. “Where have you been? Nest, your husband is dripping, drookit wet. That’s what makes him look so blue and wan.”

Nest softly laid her baby in its cradle; she was half stupefied with crying, and had not understood to what Owen alluded, when he spoke of his doom being fulfilled, if indeed she had heard the words.

Her touch thawed Owen’s miserable heart.

“Oh, Nest!” said he, clasping her in his arms; “Do you love me still – can you love me, my own darling?”

“Why not?” asked she, her eyes filling with tears. “I only love you more than ever, for you were my poor baby’s father!”

“But, Nest – Oh, tell her, Ellis! You know.”

“No need, no need!” said Ellis. “She’s had enough to think on. Bustle, my girl, and get out my Sunday clothes.”

“I don’t understand,” said Nest, putting her hand up to her head. “What is to tell? And why are you so wet? God help me for a poor crazed thing, for I cannot guess at the meaning of your words and your strange looks! I only know my baby is dead!” and she burst into tears.

“Come, Nest! Go and fetch him a change, quick!” and as she meekly obeyed, too languid to strive further to understand, Ellis said rapidly to Owen, in a low, hurried voice –

“Are you meaning that the Squire is dead? Speak low, lest she hear. Well, well, no need to talk about how he died. It was sudden, I see; and we must all of us die; and he’ll have to be buried. It’s well the night is near. And I should not wonder now if you’d like to travel for a bit; it would do Nest a power of good; and then – there’s many a one goes out of his own house and never comes back again; and – I trust he’s not lying in his own house – and there’s a stir for a bit, and a search, and a wonder – and, by-and-by, the heir just steps in, as quiet as can be. And that’s what you’ll do, and bring Nest to Bodowen after all. Nay, child, better stockings nor those; find the blue woollens I bought at Llanrwst fair. Only don’t lose heart. It’s done now and can’t be helped. It was the piece of work set you to do from the days of the Tudors, they say. And he deserved it. Look in yon cradle. So tell us where he is, and I’ll take heart of grace and see what can be done for him.”

But Owen sat wet and haggard, looking into the peat fire as if for visions of the past, and never heeding a word Ellis said. Nor did he move when Nest brought the armful of dry clothes.

“Come, rouse up, man!” said Ellis, growing impatient. But he neither spoke nor moved.

“What is the matter, father?” asked Nest, bewildered.

Ellis kept on watching Owen for a minute or two, till on his daughter’s repetition of the question, he said –

“Ask him yourself, Nest.”

“Oh, husband, what is it?” said she, kneeling down and bringing her face to a level with his.

“Don’t you know?” said he, heavily. “You won’t love me when you do know. And yet it was not my doing: it was my doom.”

“What does he mean, father?” asked Nest, looking up; but she caught a gesture from Ellis urging her to go on questioning her husband.

“I will love you, husband, whatever has happened. Only let me know the worst.”

A pause, during which Nest and Ellis hung breathless.

“My father is dead, Nest.”

Nest caught her breath with a sharp gasp.

“God forgive him!” said she, thinking on her babe.

“God forgive me!” said Owen.

“You did not –” Nest stopped.

“Yes, I did. Now you know it. It was my doom. How could I help it? The devil helped me – he placed the stone so that my father fell. I jumped into the water to save him. I did, indeed, Nest. I was nearly drowned myself. But he was dead – dead – killed by the fall!”

“Then he is safe at the bottom of the sea?” said Ellis, with hungry eagerness.

“No, he is not; he lies in my boat,” said Owen, shivering a little, more at the thought of his last glimpse at his father’s face than from cold.

“Oh, husband, change your wet clothes!” pleaded Nest, to whom the death of the old man was simply a horror with which she had nothing to do, while her husband’s discomfort was a present trouble.

While she helped him to take off the wet garments which he would never have had energy enough to remove of himself, Ellis was busy preparing food, and mixing a great tumbler of spirits and hot water. He stood over the unfortunate young man and compelled him to eat and drink, and made Nest, too, taste some mouthfuls – all the while planning in his own mind how best to conceal what had been done, and who had done it; not altogether without a certain feeling of vulgar triumph in the reflection that Nest, as she stood there, carelessly dressed, dishevelled in her grief, was in reality the mistress of Bodowen, than which Ellis Pritchard had never seen a grander house, though he believed such might exist.

By dint of a few dexterous questions he found out all he wanted to know from Owen, as he ate and drank. In fact, it was almost a relief to Owen to dilute the horror by talking about it. Before the meal was done, if meal it could be called, Ellis knew all he cared to know.

“Now, Nest, on with your cloak and haps. Pack up what needs to go with you, for both you and your husband must be half way to Liverpool by tomorrow’s morn. I’ll take you past Rhyl Sands in my fishing-boat, with yours in tow; and, once over the dangerous part, I’ll return with my cargo of fish, and learn how much stir there is at Bodowen. Once safe hidden in Liverpool, no one will know where you are, and you may stay quiet till your time comes for returning.”

“I will never come home again,” said Owen, doggedly. “The place is accursed!”

“Hoot! Be guided by me, man. Why, it was but an accident, after all! And we’ll land at the Holy Island, at the Point of Llyn; there is an old cousin of mine, the parson, there – for the Pritchards have known better days, Squire – and we’ll bury him there. It was but an accident, man. Hold up your head! You and Nest will come home yet and fill Bodowen with children, and I’ll live to see it.”

“Never!” said Owen. “I am the last male of my race, and the son has murdered his father!”

Nest came in laden and cloaked. Ellis was for hurrying them off. The fire was extinguished, the door was locked.

“Here, Nest, my darling, let me take your bundle while I guide you down the steps.” But her husband bent his head, and spoke never a word. Nest gave her father the bundle (already loaded with such things as he himself had seen fit to take), but clasped another softly and tightly.

“No one shall help me with this,” said she, in a low voice.

Her father did not understand her; her husband did, and placed his strong helping arm round her waist, and blessed her.

“We will all go together, Nest,” said he. “But where?” and he looked up at the storm-tossed clouds coming up from windward.

“It is a dirty night,” said Ellis, turning his head round to speak to his companions at last. “But never fear, we’ll weather it?” And he made for the place where his vessel was moored. Then he stopped and thought a moment.

“Stay here!” said he, addressing his companions. “I may meet folk, and I shall, maybe, have to hear and to speak. You wait here till I come back for you.” So they sat down close together in a corner of the path.

“Let me look at him, Nest!” said Owen.

She took her little dead son out from under her shawl; they looked at his waxen face long and tenderly; kissed it, and covered it up reverently and softly.

“Nest,” said Owen, at last, “I feel as though my father’s spirit had been near us, and as if it had bent over our poor little one. A strange chilly air met me as I stooped over him. I could fancy the spirit of our pure, blameless child guiding my father’s safe over the paths of the sky to the gates of heaven, and escaping those accursed dogs of hell that were darting up from the north in pursuit of souls not five minutes since.

“Don’t talk so, Owen,” said Nest, curling up to him in the darkness of the copse. “Who knows what may be listening?”

The pair were silent, in a kind of nameless terror, till they heard Ellis Pritchard’s loud whisper. “Where are ye? Come along, soft and steady. There were folk about even now, and the Squire is missed, and madam in a fright.”

They went swiftly down to the little harbour, and embarked on board Ellis’s boat. The sea heaved and rocked even there; the torn clouds went hurrying overhead in a wild tumultuous manner.

They put out into the bay; still in silence, except when some word of command was spoken by Ellis, who took the management of the vessel. They made for the rocky shore, where Owen’s boat had been moored. It was not there. It had broken loose and disappeared.

Owen sat down and covered his face. This last event, so simple and natural in itself, struck on his excited and superstitious mind in an extraordinary manner. He had hoped for a certain reconciliation, so to say, by laying his father and his child both in one grave. But now it appeared to him as if there was to be no forgiveness; as if his father revolted even in death against any such peaceful union. Ellis took a practical view of the case. If the Squire’s body was found drifting about in a boat known to belong to his son, it would create terrible suspicion as to the manner of his death. At one time in the evening, Ellis had thought of persuading Owen to let him bury the Squire in a sailor’s grave; or, in other words, to sew him up in a spare sail, and weighting it well, sink it for ever. He had not broached the subject, from a certain fear of Owen’s passionate repugnance to the plan; otherwise, if he had consented, they might have returned to Penmorfa, and passively awaited the course of events, secure of Owen’s succession to Bodowen, sooner or later; or if Owen was too much overwhelmed by what had happened, Ellis would have advised him to go away for a short time, and return when the buzz and the talk was over.

Now it was different. It was absolutely necessary that they should leave the country for a time. Through those stormy waters they must plough their way that very night. Ellis had no fear – would have had no fear, at any rate, with Owen as he had been a week, a day ago; but with Owen wild, despairing, helpless, fate-pursued, what could he do?

They sailed into the tossing darkness, and were never more seen of men.

The house of Bodowen has sunk into damp, dark ruins; and a Saxon stranger holds the lands of the Griffiths.

Swim At Your Own Risk

Matthew Gorman

The trip to Rome had been a bumpy one. Overcome by exhaustion, Mrs. Worthington flopped onto the gilded bedspread and affixed her sleeping mask while her husband paced neurotically about the spacious suite commenting upon its amenities.

“Darling, please,” she scolded him. “The flight was simply atrocious, and if I don’t get a nap in before dinner I’ll be a complete disaster.”

“Well, don’t sleep too long, turtle dove, we have reservations at Il Paradiso at 8, and you know how much I’ve been dying to try their taglierini con tarufi,” Mr. Worthington said, over pronouncing the Italian like he always did.

“Yes, I am well aware of our reservation, darling.”

“It’s supposed to be the best in all of Rome, even better than the one they do at La Pergola. Did you know they actually have the truffles sent in daily from Alba, dear? That certainly must cost them a pretty penny.”

“Chester Worthington,” she said, speaking as if a mother to a wayward child. “Surely, there is something with which you might occupy your time while I take a short rest. Doesn’t this hotel have a casino or something, darling?”

“I’m afraid there are no casinos within Rome, my dear. In fact, I believe that there are only five land-based casinos in all of Italy and, sadly, none of them here in the city. A shame, as you do know how much I enjoy my baccarat.”

“Yes, yes. Well, something then, darling. I really must sleep and that’s quite impossible to do with you standing there yammering on and on about gold-plated bathroom fixtures and imported truffles. Surely, you must see that?”

“Yes, my dear, I’m sorry, my love. Actually, I’d thought I’d be up for a little swim. Did you know that the Palazzo d’Oro boasts one of the first indoor Olympic-sized swimming pools in the world? In fact, several members of the Italian national swimming team even used the hotel pool as a training ground in their preparation for the 1960 Summer Games right here in Rome. Quite fascinating, wouldn’t you say?”

“I most certainly would not. A pool’s a pool. So go, go, swim, swim,” Mrs. Worthington mumbled, the half of a valium she had taken at check-in already starting to work its magic.

“Of course, dear,” Mr. Worthington said, and went to fetch his swimming trunks.

By the time he left the hotel suite, shutting the door gently behind him, his wife was already snoring peacefully away.

* * *

Mr. Worthington made his way to the basement level of the hotel where the pool was housed. A few dozen laps ought to be the very thing to work up an appetite for the rich pasta that he planned to consume at Il Paradiso tonight.

He located a small but richly appointed changing room just off the pool’s main entrance and there he traded his shoes, shirt, and linen trousers for a pair of electric blue swimming trunks with a red racing stripe down either thigh. He drew his fitted neoprene swimming cap over his balding head, attached his purple silicone nose clip, and donned his anti fog goggles before leaving for the pool. Mr. Worthington was a rather capable swimmer and with all his fancy accoutrements he felt he truly looked the part.

Ready to swim, he stepped out barefoot into the pool’s natatorium and found himself instantly struck with awe. As the Chief Financial Officer for a Fortune 500 company for nearly two decades before his retirement, Mr. Worthington was accustomed to a certain standard of luxury, particularly when he traveled Europe, but the opulence of the pool and its environs were far and away above most that he had seen.

Inlaid pillars of pink marble rose high to meet the vaulted ceiling adorned with intricate frescoes of cherubs and angels that called to mind – quite intentionally, no doubt – those of the Sistine Chapel as they gazed down upon the water below. The floor surrounding the pool was wrought in a chessboard pattern of alternating Italy pink marble and stunning white Calcutta marble veined with gold, while potted palms thrust their fronds from intermittent alcoves along the walls to lend a hint of lushness to the massive room of metamorphic rock.

And the pool, itself, was a perfect shimmering field of turquoise blue that stretched the length of the enormous space with wispy white tendrils of steam rising up from its heated water.

But despite the grandeur of the room, there was an unsettling quality about it that Mr. Worthington couldn’t quite put his finger on. It certainly didn’t help that the only source of light came from a pair of crystal chandeliers suspended from the muraled ceiling high above. They bathed the room in a subdued and somber light where shadows hung from the corners like dark draperies. Nor did it help that he appeared to be the room’s sole occupant. It seemed rather odd to him that none of the hotel’s other guests had been up for a mid-afternoon swim.

And then there was the sign.

Affixed to the far wall was a white metal signboard, oddly unremarkable amidst the lavish décor, which provided a familiar warning in Italian:

NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY. SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.

It was a notice he’d seen in many languages and at many a pool throughout the world, but here for some strange reason it struck an ominous chord.

But Mr. Worthington was here to swim, and he wasn’t about to let some silly sense of unease put a stop to his plans. It was likely to pass once he found himself in the water, anyway.

The soles of his bare feet padding against the ornate tile, he approached the edge of the pool. Even with his nose guard in place, the smell of chlorinated water hung heavy in the air. It filled his mind with fond memories of a childhood spent swimming in the pool at his grandfather’s estate in Portola Valley, and did much to assuage his unquiet nerves.

He dangled one foot over the edge and plunged his toes into the water to test its warmth. Olympic racing pools were generally heated at anywhere from 77 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit, and it seemed the Palazzo’s pool certainly fell somewhere within this ballpark. It would make for an undoubtedly pleasant swim.

Taking care – though still strong of upper body, his knees weren’t what they used to be – Mr. Worthington lowered himself into a sitting position with his legs submerged before sliding his buttocks across the tile to come to a full stand upon the bottom of the pool’s shallow end.

He stood there for a moment enjoying the heat of the water against the paunch of his belly, his palms fanning to and fro across its surface. The far end of the pool looked truly far away and he was deciding whether it was best to swim his laps by employing the less exhausting breaststroke or by sticking with his usual forward crawl when he heard a child’s voice addressing him from somewhere nearby.

“You going for a swim, mister?”

Startled, he spun in the direction of the sound, the water churning up around him like a boat’s wake. There, he was surprised to find a young girl, no older than 8 or 9, seated demurely upon the edge of a waterproof chaise lounge staring down at him from poolside. Where had she come from? he wondered. Had he simply missed her when he’d first come in, or had she been hiding until now as part of some frolicsome child’s game?

“Uh…hello,” Mr. Worthington said.

“Hello,” the girl replied. Her eyes were wide and prepossessing but somehow quite sad.

“You’re American?”

“Yes,” she said. “From Philadelphia.”

“Myself as well,” he told her, smiling as warmly as he could. He’d never been too comfortable around children. “From the Bay Area. In California.”

“Oh, I always wanted to go to California, but we never did.”

“Well, you’re young, still plenty of time for that, I’d wager. Besides, you’re in Rome, that must be very exciting,” he said, trying his best to sound encouraging.

When the girl declined to reply, Mr. Worthington felt his uneasiness begin to grow once more. It was more than just the usual awkwardness he felt in the presence of the very young; there was something most peculiar about this particular little girl.

For one thing, her skin was unusually pale. In fact, it appeared almost translucent in places, the light blue veins in her forehead visible beneath the flesh. He wondered somewhat morosely if the poor thing might actually suffer from anemia. His former company had once manufactured a ferrous gluconate supplement to help combat the disease, and he’d become familiar with its symptoms.

A head of jet-black hair pulled tightly back from her face by an elastic tie or some similar device offset her milk-white skin, and the one-piece bathing suit she wore was a similar shade of ebony. Mr. Worthington thought her swimming attire appeared to be well made but – his snobbery getting the better of him – horribly out of fashion. Quite possibly she hailed from one of those formerly affluent families whose wealth was now in a state of gradual decline.

“Are you here with your parents?” he asked, uncomfortable with the silence.

“I came here with my grandmother, only I don’t know where she is right now.”

How wholly irresponsible, he thought, to leave a child so young completely unattended in a foreign country. And by a pool, no less. Of course, he could recall plenty of unsupervised swims at his grandfather’s pool when he wasn’t much older than this one.

“I’m sure she’ll be along shortly. What’s your name, child?”

“Elise.”

“Why, that’s a lovely name, isn’t it? Well, Elise, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is Chester.”

“Pleased to meet you, Chester.”

Such proper manners, he thought, perhaps there was indeed still hope for the youth of today. It seemed a shame that such a polite little girl ought to appear so lonesome and dejected. But that was hardly his concern.

“Well, it’s been lovely chatting with you, Elise, but I really must get my daily regimen of exercise now. At my age, this isn’t getting any smaller,” he said, patting his gut beneath the water.

“If you’re going for a swim, Chester, you should stay away from the deep end.”

“Is that what your grandmother told you? I do suppose that’s rather sound advice for little girls, Elise. But you see, I’m a grown up, and grown ups are allowed to swim in the deep end.”

“It doesn’t matter. You just shouldn’t go down there.”

“And why is that, sweetheart?”

“Because that’s where the bad man lives.”

Children and their fanciful imaginations, he thought. Still, he couldn’t blame her for making up some sort of game to pass the time while she waited for her grandmother to return. Chances were the old woman was sitting half-soused on gin martinis or Campari sanguineas in the hotel lounge.

“That’s funny because I don’t see anyone down there now, Elise,” he said, electing to play along.

“He hides,” she whispered.

“Well, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for him,” Mr. Worthington said with a chuckle, hoping to lighten the mood.

But the girl only stared at him with her sorrowful eyes.

Having had his fill of this conversation and wishing to begin his swim, he bid her a pleasant day and turned to face the length of the pool. But as he prepared to shove off from the wall, a thought occurred to him. Perhaps he should help the poor child in locating her neglectful grandmother, maybe giving the old woman a piece of his mind in the bargain. He was certain that the friendly, if overly talkative, front desk attendant could aid him easily in this endeavor. He’d have to change back into his clothing, of course – it certainly wouldn’t do to have him go traipsing around the Palazzo in his swim wear especially with a strange little girl in tow. But despite the minor inconvenience, it seemed the proper thing to do.

“Elise?” he said, turning back around to offer his proposal.

To his astonishment, the girl was gone.

He’d had his back to her for but a moment, he thought; not nearly long enough for her to make an exit. Besides, he was quite sure he would have heard the pitter-patter of her tiny feet against the tile. Even within the heated water, a chill fluttered up his spine like a wriggling tadpole.

He scanned the room and its contents, searching for any sign of her behind the pleather upholstered furniture and fancy potted palms. But she was nowhere to be found.

There had to be some rational explanation, Mr. Worthington decided. Maybe he’d simply been lost in thought for far longer than he’d surmised and the girl’s grandmother had appeared at the pool’s entrance to collect her. His wife had so often accused him of failing to ‘be present’ whenever he set to wandering too long inside his head. And really, that had to be it, he reasoned, as no other scenario made the least amount of sense.

A bit shaken but satisfied that everything had worked itself out somehow, he shrugged off this somewhat unusual encounter and returned his focus to the task at hand.

Deciding upon the breaststroke, he immersed himself completely before pushing off from the wall and letting his body glide beneath the water for the first several meters. As his head broke the surface he began the frog-like stroke that would carry him to the pool’s opposite end.

With each successive stroke Mr. Worthington came up for air at the start of the motion and then plunged his head below the water as he propelled himself forward during the stroke’s second half. It wasn’t long before he began to relax, fully engulfed by the near hypnotic movements of his own body.

Each time he rose for a breath, he was afforded a view of the room’s far end. It was somewhere around the mid-way point of his 50 meter long course that he thought he saw something moving down there.

It was subtle and gone in an instant, the way an errant sunbeam might render a well-placed spider’s web briefly visible, no more than a swirl within the shadows. But he was almost certain of what he’d seen. His brow furrowed beneath his swimming cap as his head went under.

When he came up again there was nothing there.

Probably just some trick of the light, he thought, nothing to get himself all worked up about. Or maybe it was the girl, Elise, far more proficient at hiding than he’d assumed, and waiting to play a prank upon an unsuspecting old man. He’d definitely be having a discussion with her grandmother if that were the case.

He continued on, soon becoming lost once again in the rhythmic movements of his own limbs as he crossed into the deeper end of the pool. So much so that he failed to notice when the chandeliers began to flicker high above.

At just ten meters from the far wall, he came up for air and saw something again. This time it was no flash of movement but a clearly discernible form: the black silhouette of a man standing bathed in the shadows of the room’s far corner. The sight was so jarring it caused him to gasp as the forward momentum of his stroke brought him face down into the pool.

He resurfaced sputtering, expelling the sharp tang of chlorinated water from his mouth and throat. He looked once more at where the figure had been and saw nothing. Even still, Elise’s words seemed to echo instantly through his mind.

Because that’s where the bad man lives.

Treading water, Mr. Worthington tried to wrap his brain around what he’d just witnessed. The rational part of him was already blaming it all on jet lag or his aging vision, but even these simple explanations didn’t seem to sit well. Whatever it was that was happening here, he was giving serious thought to cutting short his swim. This place was really starting to get to him.

He nearly turned himself around and swam all the way back to the shallow end, but he was so close to the deep end wall that it seemed foolish not to finish his meager half a lap before calling it quits. Somewhat reluctantly, he resumed his stroke. And with each rise for oxygen, he watched the wall grow closer. When, at last, his hands made contact, something terrible occurred.

The water all around him turned to icy cold. So sudden, in fact, he felt his chest seize up. But as his mind roiled with the panicked thoughts of a possible heart attack, Mr. Worthington looked up to find something far more terrifying standing there above him.

Towering over him was the figure of a man, dark and diaphanous as if fashioned from smoke or from the very shadows themselves. It glared down at him with a pair of coal black eyes that seemed to swim with unspeakable madness. It was hard to make out its other features but it seemed to have a mouth as well, the lips peeled back in a snarl of rage.

Mr. Worthington screamed, his cries echoing back at him from the marble walls.

The figured lunged at him, its arm reaching out, the hand landing upon the top of his swimming cap. And with one powerful motion, it thrust his head below the water.

Arms thrashing, he struggled against it, bubbles of precious oxygen erupting from his mouth. He tried to lock onto the shadow’s arm but his frenzied grasping found no purchase. It was as if there was nothing there but the water and the air above it. And yet he could still feel the weight of its hand upon him, its fingers pressed hard into the sides of his skull.

As his eyes bulged beneath the turquoise depths, he watched in horror as the water turned as red as blood around him. Was it his? Was he the one who was bleeding? he scarcely had time to wonder before the shadow pressed him deeper and deeper below the surface, its arm seeming to grow to an impossible length.

He kicked and fought to escape its grip in the crimson liquid now surrounding him but could not break its hold. The shadow’s hand had pushed him nearly to the bottom and he could do nothing to stop it. This was the end he could never have imagined.

Soon, his struggles grew faint. His kicking feet slowed to a lazy treading. His limbs went slack. He watched as the last of his oxygen became a flurry of blood red bubbles rising quickly to the surface. Then his lungs began to fill with pool water and the darkness settled in.

* * *

Mrs. Worthington awoke several hours later annoyed to find her husband had yet to return. She leaned over and grabbed her bag from the side of the bed, produced her Cartier and checked the time. It was only 45 minutes until their reservation! Chester hadn’t come back to wake her and now it would be a small slice of hell to get dressed, do her make-up, catch a cab and make it halfway across town before their table was given away to a more dedicated pair of diners. One simply did not show up late at Il Paradiso.

Somewhat vexed, she rose and went to her luggage. With some expediency and a little luck, she thought she might just be able to pull off an ensemble and a full face in time to get downstairs and have the bellboys hail them a cabbie who wouldn’t get them there late. But all that was contingent upon her husband whose whereabouts were currently unknown. Probably still lollygagging about the pool like some silly little boy, she thought.

By the time she had finished dressing, Chester still had not returned. With a slow simmering anger, Mrs. Worthington snatched up her bag and room key, left the suite loudly and rode the elevator down to the lobby.

Behind the enormous marble check-in desk, she found the same attendant who had checked them in was still on duty. A well-pressed young man with a thin mustache whom she had deemed more than a little chatty upon their first encounter.

“Signora Worthington! Come posso aiutarti?” he greeted her.

“English, please,” Mrs. Worthington said, rolling her eyes.

“But, yes, of course, Signora Worthington. How may I help you?”

“I need you to point me in the direction of your pool. My husband went for a swim, and now we are running late for our reservation.”

“Oh, I’m sure your husband would have found that quite impossible, Signora.”

“Impossible?” Mrs. Worthington said, one eyebrow arching up at him. It was not a word she was used to hearing.

“Oh yes, Signora, our pool here at the Palazzo has not been open for many years. Perhaps Signore Worthington is in the lounge. Or perhaps the spa?”

“Not likely,” she said, fixing him with an icy glare. “My husband does not drink before dinner nor waste time in spas. And what do you mean the pool has not been open for years?”

“I mean exactly that, Signora. The pool has been drained and locked up for many, many years now.”

“And for what reason does a hotel of this supposed caliber not maintain its pool?”

“Well…there were troubles. Troubles with the pool.”

“What do you mean troubles?”

The young attendant leaned in closer, adopting a conspiratorial tone. “I maybe shouldn’t tell this, Signora, but you see…there was a big story, on the front page even of Il Messaggero, back in the ‘70s. It made quite a big deal out of what happened at the pool. After that, the owners, they decide it’s better just to close the pool.”

“You’ve told me absolutely nothing. What happened at the pool?”

The clerk took a quick look over one shoulder, then leaned in closer still. “There was a murder, Signora.”

“How ghastly,” Mrs. Worthington said, taken aback.

“Yes, and that’s not the worst part, Signora.”

“And why is that?”

“It was a little girl, Signora. An American girl. The one who was murdered.”

“That is positively dreadful. I certainly pray they caught the killer.”

“Well, it was bad for the hotel, Signora.”

“I can imagine.”

“It was especially bad because the man who did it, Signora, he worked here at the hotel at the time. He was…how do you say, sick in the head? Yes?”

“Yes.”

“He drowned the girl, and then cut his own throat,” the clerk said, dragging his index finger across the front of his neck to illustrate. “They found both of them floating in the pool.”

“Well, that’s certainly an awful story. Probably one I’d refrain from telling future guests.”

“Perhaps, Signora, but some of them actually come for the ghosts.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Some people say…the hotel, she is haunted, Signora.”

“Hogwash!” Mrs. Worthington said.

And with that, she turned sharply upon her Manolo heels and went to search the grand hotel for her ridiculous husband.

Edward Randolph’s Portrait

Nathaniel Hawthorne

THE OLD legendary guest of the Province House abode in my remembrance from mid-summer till January. One idle evening, last winter, confident that he would be found in the snuggest corner of the bar-room, I resolved to pay him another visit, hoping to deserve well of my country by snatching from oblivion some else unheard-of fact of history. The night was chill and raw, and rendered boisterous by almost a gale of wind, which whistled along Washington street, causing the gas-lights to flare and flicker within the lamps. As I hurried onward, my fancy was busy with a comparison between the present aspect of the street, and that which it probably wore when the British Governors inhabited the mansion whither I was now going. Brick edifices in those times were few, till a succession of destructive fires had swept, and swept again, the wooden dwellings and ware-houses from the most populous quarters of the town. The buildings stood insulated and independent, not, as now, merging their separate existences into connected ranges, with a front of tiresome identity, – but each possessing features of its own, as if the owner’s individual taste had shaped it, – and the whole presenting a picturesque irregularity, the absence of which is hardly compensated by any beauties of our modern architecture. Such a scene, dimly vanishing from the eye by tile ray of here and there a tallow candle, glimmering through the small panes of scattered windows, would form a sombre contrast to the street, as I beheld it, with the gas-lights blazing from corner to corner, flaming within the shops, and throwing a noon-day brightness through the huge plates of glass.

But the black, lowering sky, as I turned my eyes upward, wore, doubtless, the same visage as when it frowned upon the ante-revolutionary New Englanders. The wintry blast had the same shriek that was familiar to their ears. The Old South Church, too, still pointed its antique spire into the darkness, and was lost between earth and heaven; and as I passed, its clock, which had warned so many generations how transitory was their life-time, spoke heavily and slow the same unregarded moral to myself. ‘Only seven o’clock,’ thought I. “My old friend’s legends will scarcely kill the hours ’twixt this and bed-time.”

Passing through the narrow arch, I crossed the court-yard, the confined precincts of which were made visible by a lantern over the portal of the Province House. On entering the bar-room, I found, as I expected, the old tradition-monger seated by a special good fire of anthracite, compelling clouds of smoke from a corpulent cigar. He recognized me with evident pleasure; for my rare properties as a patient listener invariably make me a favorite with elderly gentlemen and ladies, of narrative propensities. Drawing a chair to the fire, I desired mine host to favor us with a glass a-piece of whiskey punch, which was speedily prepared, steaming hot, with a slice of lemon at the bottom, a dark-red stratum of port wine upon the surface, and a sprinkling of nutmeg strewn over all. As we touched our glasses together, my legendary friend made himself known to me as Mr. Bela Tiffany; and I rejoiced at the oddity of the name, because it gave his image and character a sort of individuality in my conception. The old gentleman’s draught acted as a solvent upon his memory, so that it overflowed with tales, traditions, anecdotes of famous dead people, and traits of ancient manners, some of which were childish as a nurse’s lullaby, while others might have been worth the notice of the grave historian. Nothing impressed me more than a story of a black, mysterious picture, which used to hang in one of the chambers of the Province House, directly above the room where we were now sitting. The following is as correct a version of the fact as the reader would be likely to obtain from any other source; although, assuredly, it has a tinge of romance approaching to the marvellous.

In one of the apartments of the Province House there was long preserved an ancient picture, the frame of which was as black as ebony, and the canvas itself so dark with age, damp, and smoke, that not a touch of the painter’s art could be discerned. Time had thrown an impenetrable veil over it, and left to tradition, and fable, and conjecture, to say what had once been there portrayed. During the rule of many successive governors, it had hung, by prescriptive and undisputed right, over the mantel-piece of the same chamber; and it still kept its place when Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson assumed the administration of the province, on the departure of Sir Francis Bernard.

The Lieutenant-Governor sat, one afternoon, resting his head against the carved back of his stately arm chair, and gazing up thoughtfully at the void blackness of the picture. It was scarcely a time for such inactive musing, when affairs of the deepest moment required the ruler’s decision; for, within that very hour, Hutchinson had received intelligence of the arrival of a British fleet, bringing three regiments from Halifax to overawe the insubordination of the people. These troops awaited his permission to occupy the fortress of Castle William, and the town itself. Yet, instead of affixing his signature to an official order, there sat the Lieutenant-Governor, so carefully scrutinizing the black waste of canvass, that his demeanour attracted the notice of two young persons who attended him. One, wearing a military dress of buff, was his kinsman, Francis Lincoln, the Provincial Captain of Castle William; the other, who sat on a low stool beside his chair, was Alice Vane, his favorite niece.

She was clad entirely in white, a pale, ethereal creature, who, though a native of New England, had been educated abroad, and seemed not merely a stranger from another clime, but almost a being from another world. For several years, until left an orphan, she had dwelt with her father in sunny Italy, and there had acquired a taste and enthusiasm for sculpture and painting, which she found few opportunities of gratifying in the undecorated dwellings of the colonial gentry. It was said that the early productions of her own pencil exhibited no inferior genius, though, perhaps, the rude atmosphere of New England had cramped her hand, and dimmed the glowing colors of her fancy. But observing her uncle’s steadfast gaze, which appeared to search through the mist of years to discover the subject of the picture, her curiosity was excited.

“Is it known, my dear uncle,” inquired she, “what this old picture once represented? Possibly, could it be made visible, it might prove a masterpiece of some great artist – else why has it so long held such a conspicuous place?”

As her uncle, contrary to his usual custom, (for he was as attentive to all the humors and caprices of Alice as if she had been his own best beloved child,) did not immediately reply, the young Captain of Castle William took that office upon himself.

“This dark old square of canvas, my fair cousin,” said he, ‘has been an heir-loom in the Province House from time immemorial. As to the painter, I can tell you nothing; but, if half the stories told of it be true, not one of the great Italian masters has ever produced so marvellous a piece of work, as that before you.’

Captain Lincoln proceeded to relate some of the strange fables and fantasies, which, as it was impossible to refute them by ocular demonstration, had grown to be articles of popular belief, in reference to this old picture. One of the wildest, and at the same time the best accredited accounts, stated it to be an original and authentic portrait of the Evil One, taken at a witch meeting near Salem; and that its strong and terrible resemblance had been confirmed by several of the confessing wizards and witches, at their trial, in open court. It was likewise affirmed that a familiar spirit, or demon, abode behind the blackness of the picture, and had shown himself, at seasons of public calamity, to more than one of the royal governors. Shirley, for instance, had beheld this ominous apparition, on the eve of General Abercrombie’s shameful and bloody defeat under the walls of Ticonderoga. Many of the servants of the Province House had caught glimpses of a visage frowning down upon them, at morning or evening twilight, – or in the depths of night, while raking up the fire that glimmered on the hearth beneath; although, if any were bold enough to hold a torch before the picture, it would appear as black and undistinguishable as ever. The oldest inhabitant of Boston recollected that his father, in whose days the portrait had not wholly faded out of sight, had once looked upon it, but would never suffer himself to be questioned as to the face which was there represented. In connection with such stories, it was remarkable that over the top of the frame there were some ragged remnants of black silk, indicating that a veil had formerly hung down before the picture, until the duskiness of time had so effectually concealed it. But, after all, it was the most singular part of the affair, that so many of the pompous governors of Massachusetts had allowed the obliterated picture to remain in the state-chamber of the Province House.

“Some of these fables are really awful,” observed Alice Vane, who had occasionally shuddered, as well as smiled, while her cousin spoke. “It would be almost worth while to wipe away the black surface of the canvas, since the original picture can hardly be so formidable as those which fancy paints instead of it.”

“But would it be possible,” inquired her cousin, “to restore this dark picture to its pristine hues?”

“Such arts are known in Italy,” said Alice.

The Lieutenant-Governor had roused himself from his abstracted mood, and listened with a smile to the conversation of his young relatives. Yet his voice had something peculiar in its tones, when he undertook the explanation of the mystery.

“I am sorry, Alice, to destroy your faith in the legends of which you are so fond,” remarked he; “but my antiquarian researches have long since made me acquainted with the subject of this picture – if picture it can be called – which is no more visible, nor ever will be, than the face of the long buried man whom it once represented. It was the portrait of Edward Randolph, the founder of this house, a person famous in the history of New England.”

“Of that Edward Randolph,” exclaimed Captain Lincoln, “who obtained the repeal of the first provincial charter, under which our forefathers had enjoyed almost democratic privileges! He that was styled the arch enemy of New England, and whose memory is still held in detestation, as the destroyer of our liberties!”

“It was the same Randolph,” answered Hutchinson, moving uneasily in his chair. “It was his lot to taste the bitterness of popular odium.”

“Our annals tell us,” continued the Captain of Castle William, “that the curse of the people followed this Randolph wherever he went, and wrought evil in all the subsequent events of his life, and that its effect was seen likewise in the manner of his death. They say, too, that the inward misery of that curse worked itself outward, and was visible on the wretched man’s countenance, making it too horrible to be looked upon. If so, and if this picture truly represented his aspect, it was in mercy that the cloud of blackness has gathered over it.”

“These traditions are folly, to one who has proved, as I have, how little of historic truth lies at the bottom,” said the Lieutenant-Governor. “As regards the life and character of Edward Randolph, too implicit credence has been given to Dr. Cotton Mather, who – I must say it, though some of his blood runs in my veins – has filled our early history with old women’s tales, as fanciful and extravagant as those of Greece or Rome.”

“And yet,” whispered Alice Vane, “may not such fables have a moral; And methinks, if the visage of this portrait be so dreadful, it is not without a cause that it has hung so long in a chamber of the Province House. When the rulers feel themselves irresponsible, it were well that they should be reminded of the awful weight of a People’s curse.”

The Lieutenant-Governor started, and gazed for a moment at his niece, as if her girlish fantasies had struck upon some with mortal affairs, half in caprice, yet with a sensibility to human weal or woe. As he held the door for her to pass, Alice beckoned to the picture and smiled.

“Come forth, dark and evil Shape!” cried she. “It is thine hour!”

In the evening, Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson sat in the same chamber where the foregoing scene had occurred, surrounded by several persons whose various interests had summoned them together. There were the Selectmen of Boston, plain, patriarchal fathers of the people, excellent representatives of the old puritanical founders, whose sombre strength had stamped so deep an impress upon the New England character. Contrasting with these were one or two members of the Council, richly dressed in the white wigs, the embroidered waistcoats and other magnificence of the time, and making a somewhat ostentatious display of courtier-like ceremonial. In attendance, likewise, was a major of the British army, awaiting the Lieutenant-Governor’s orders for the landing of the troops, which still remained on board the transports. The Captain of Castle William stood beside Hutchinson’s chair, with folded arms, glancing rather haughtily at the British officer, by whom he was soon to be superseded in his command. On a table, in the centre of the chamber, stood a branched silver candlestick, throwing down the glow of half a dozen wax lights upon a paper apparently ready for the Lieutenant-Governor’s signature.

Partly shrouded in the voluminous folds of one of the window-curtains, which fell from the ceiling to the floor, was seen the white drapery of a lady’s robe. It may appear strange that Alice Vane should have been there, at such a time; but there was something so child-like, so wayward, in her singular character, so apart from ordinary rules, that her presence did not surprise the few who noticed it. Meantime, the chairman of the Selectmen was addressing to the Lieutenant-Governor a long and solemn protest against the reception of the British troops into the town.

“And if your Honor,” concluded this excellent, but somewhat prosy old gentleman, “shall see fit to persist in bringing these mercenary sworders and musketeers into our quiet streets, not on our heads be the responsibility. Think, sir, while there is yet time, that if one drop of blood be shed, that blood shall be an eternal stain upon your Honor’s memory. You, sir, have written, with an able pen, the deeds of our forefathers. The more to be desired is it, therefore, that yourself should deserve honorable mention, as a true patriot and upright ruler, when your own doings shall be written down in history.”

“I am not insensible, my good sir, to the natural desire to stand well in the annals of my country,” replied Hutchinson, controlling his impatience into courtesy, “nor know I any better method of attaining that end than by withstanding the merely temporary spirit of mischief, which, with your pardon, seems to have infected elder men than myself. Would you have me wait till the mob shall sack the Province House, as they did my private mansion? Trust me, sir, the time may come when you will be glad to flee for protection to the King’s banner, the raising of which is now so distasteful to you.”

“Yes,” said the British major, who was impatiently expecting the Lieutenant-Governor’s orders. “The demagogues of this Province have raised the devil, and cannot lay him again. We will exorcise him, in God’s name and the King’s.”

“If you meddle with the devil, take care of his claws!” answered the Captain of Castle William, stirred by the taunt against his countrymen.

“Craving your pardon, young sir,” said the venerable Selectman, “let not an evil spirit enter into your words. We will strive against the oppressor with prayer and fasting, as our forefathers would have done. Like them, moreover, we will submit to whatever lot a wise Providence may send us, always, after our own best exertions to amend it.”

“And there peep forth the devil’s claws!” muttered Hutchinson, who well understood the nature of Puritan submission. “This matter shall be expedited forthwith. When there shall be a sentinel at every corner, and a court of guard before the town-house, a loyal gentleman may venture to walk abroad. What to me is the outcry of a mob, in this remote province of the realm? The King is my master, and England is my country! Upheld by their armed strength, I set my foot upon the rabble, and defy them!”

He snatched a pen, and was about to affix his signature to the paper that lay on the table, when the Captain of Castle William placed his hand upon his shoulder. The freedom of the action, so contrary to the ceremonious respect which was then considered due to rank and dignity, awakened general surprise, and in none more than in the Lieutenant-Governor himself. Looking angrily up, he perceived that his young relative was pointing his finger to the opposite wall. Hutchinson’s eye followed the signal; and he saw, what had hitherto been unobserved, that a black silk curtain was suspended before the mysterious picture, so as completely to conceal it. His thoughts immediately recurred to the scene of the preceding afternoon; and, in his surprise, confused by indistinct emotions, yet sensible that his niece must have had an agency in this phenomenon, he called loudly upon her.

“Alice! – Come hither, Alice!”

No sooner had he spoken than Alice Vane glided from her station, and pressing one hand across her eyes, with the other snatched away the sable curtain that concealed the portrait. An exclamation of surprise burst from every beholder; but the Lieutenant-Governor’s voice had a tone of horror.

“By Heaven,” said he, in a low, inward murmur, speaking rather to himself than to those around him, “if the spirit of Edward Randolph were to appear among us from the place of torment, he could not wear more of the terrors of hell upon his face!”

“For some wise end,” said the aged Selectman, solemnly, “hath Providence scattered away the mist of years that had so long hid this dreadful effigy. Until this hour no living man hath seen what we behold!”

Within the antique frame, which so recently had enclosed a sable waste of canvas, now appeared a visible picture, still dark, indeed, in its hues and shadings, but thrown forward in strong relief. It was a half-length figure of a gentleman in a rich, but very old-fashioned dress of embroidered velvet, with a broad cuff and a beard, and wearing a hat, the brim of which overshadowed his forehead. Beneath this cloud the eyes had a peculiar glare, which was almost life-like. The whole portrait started so distinctly out of the background, that it had the effect of a person looking down from the wall at the astonished and awe-stricken spectators. The expression of the face, if any words can convey an idea of it, was that of a wretch detected in some hideous guilt, and exposed to the bitter hatred, and laughter, and withering scorn, of a vast surrounding multitude. There was the struggle of defiance, beaten down and overwhelmed by the crushing weight of ignominy. The torture of the soul had come forth upon the countenance. It seemed as if the picture, while hidden behind the cloud of immemorial years, had been all the time acquiring an intenser depth and darkness of expression, till now it gloomed forth again, and threw its evil omen over the present hour. Such, if the wild legend may be credited, was the portrait of Edward Randolph, as he appeared when a people’s curse had wrought its influence upon his nature.

“’Twould drive me mad – that awful face!” said Hutchinson, who seemed fascinated by the contemplation of it.

“Be warned, then!” whispered Alice. “He trampled on a people’s rights. Behold his punishment – and avoid a crime like his!”

The Lieutenant-Governor actually trembled for an instant; but, exerting his energy – which was not, however, his most characteristic feature – he strove to shake off the spell of Randolph’s countenance.

“Girl!” cried he, laughing bitterly, as he turned to Alice, “have you brought hither your painter’s art – your Italian spirit of intrigue – your tricks of stage-effect – and think to influence the councils of rulers and the affairs of nations, by such shallow contrivances? See here!”

“Stay yet awhile,” said the Selectman, as Hutchinson again snatched the pen; “for if ever mortal man received a warning from a tormented soul, your Honor is that man!”

“Away!” answered Hutchinson fiercely. “Though yonder senseless picture cried ‘Forbear!’ – it should not move me!”

Casting a scowl of defiance at the pictured face, (which seemed, at that moment, to intensify the horror of its miserable and wicked look,) he scrawled on the paper, in characters that betokened it a deed of desperation, the name of Thomas Hutchinson. Then, it is said, he shuddered, as if that signature had granted away his salvation.

‘It is done,’ said he; and placed his hand upon his brow.

‘May Heaven forgive the deed,’ said the soft, sad accents of Alice Vane, like the voice of a good spirit flitting away.

When morning came there was a stilled whisper through the household, and spreading thence about the town, that the dark, mysterious picture had started from the wall, and spoken face to face with Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson. If such a miracle had been wrought, however, no traces of it remained behind; for within the antique frame, nothing could be discerned, save the impenetrable cloud, which had covered the canvass since the memory of man. If the figure had, indeed, stepped forth, it had fled back, spirit-like, at the day-dawn, and hidden itself behind a century’s obscurity. The truth probably was, that Alice Vane’s secret for restoring the hues of the picture had merely effected a temporary renovation. But those who, in that brief interval, had beheld the awful visage of Edward Randolph, desired no second glance, and ever afterwards trembled at the recollection of the scene, as if an evil spirit had appeared visibly among them. And as for Hutchinson, when, far over the ocean, his dying hour drew on, he gasped for breath, and complained that he was choking with the blood of the Boston Massacre; and Francis Lincoln, the former Captain of Castle William, who was standing at his bedside, perceived a likeness in his frenzied look to that of Edward Randolph. Did his broken spirit feel, at that dread hour, the tremendous burthen of a People’s curse?

At the conclusion of this miraculous legend I inquired of mine host whether the picture still remained in the chamber over our heads, but Mr. Tiffany informed me that it had long since been removed, and was supposed to be hidden in some out-of-the-way corner of the New England Museum. Perchance some curious antiquary may light upon it there, and, with the assistance of Mr. Howorth, the picture-cleaner, may supply a not unnecessary proof of the authenticity of the facts here set down. During the progress of the story a storm had been gathering abroad, and raging and rattling so loudly in the upper regions of the Province-House, that it seemed as if all the old Governors and great men were running riot above stairs, while Mr. Bela Tiffany babbled of them below. In the course of generations, when many people have lived and died in an ancient house, the whistling of the wind through its crannies, and the creaking of its beams and rafters, become strangely like the tones of the human voice, or thundering laughter, or heavy footsteps treading the deserted chambers. It is as if the echoes of half a century were revived. Such were the ghostly sounds that roared and murmured in our ears, when I took leave of the circle round the fireside of the Province House, and plunging down the door-steps, fought my way homeward against a drifting snow-storm.

The Voice in the Night

William Hope Hodgson

It was a dark, starless night. We were becalmed in the Northern Pacific. Our exact position I do not know; for the sun had been hidden during the course of a weary, breathless week, by a thin haze which had seemed to float above us, about the height of our mastheads, at whiles descending and shrouding the surrounding sea.

With there being no wind, we had steadied the tiller, and I was the only man on deck. The crew, consisting of two men and a boy, were sleeping forrard in their den; while Will – my friend, and the master of our little craft – was aft in his bunk on the port side of the little cabin.

Suddenly, from out of the surrounding darkness, there came a hail:

“Schooner, ahoy!”

The cry was so unexpected that I gave no immediate answer, because of my surprise.

It came again – a voice curiously throaty and inhuman, calling from somewhere upon the dark sea away on our port broadside:

“Schooner, ahoy!”

“Hullo!” I sung out, having gathered my wits somewhat. “What are you? What do you want?”

“You need not be afraid,” answered the queer voice, having probably noticed some trace of confusion in my tone. “I am only an old man.”

The pause sounded oddly; but it was only afterwards that it came back to me with any significance.

“Why don’t you come alongside, then?” I queried somewhat snappishly; for I liked not his hinting at my having been a trifle shaken.

“I – I – can’t. It wouldn’t be safe. I –” The voice broke off, and there was silence.

“What do you mean?” I asked, growing more and more astonished. “Why not safe? Where are you?”

I listened for a moment; but there came no answer. And then, a sudden indefinite suspicion, of I knew not what, coming to me, I stepped swiftly to the binnacle, and took out the lighted lamp. At the same time, I knocked on the deck with my heel to waken Will. Then I was back at the side, throwing the yellow funnel of light out into the silent immensity beyond our rail. As I did so, I heard a slight, muffled cry, and then the sound of a splash as though someone had dipped oars abruptly. Yet I cannot say that I saw anything with certainty; save, it seemed to me, that with the first flash of the light, there had been something upon the waters, where now there was nothing.

“Hullo, there!” I called. “What foolery is this!”

But there came only the indistinct sounds of a boat being pulled away into the night.

Then I heard Will’s voice, from the direction of the after scuttle:

“What’s up, George?”

“Come here, Will!” I said.

“What is it?” he asked, coming across the deck.

I told him the queer thing which had happened. He put several questions; then, after a moment’s silence, he raised his hands to his lips, and hailed:

“Boat, ahoy!”

From a long distance away there came back to us a faint reply, and my companion repeated his call. Presently, after a short period of silence, there grew on our hearing the muffled sound of oars; at which Will hailed again.

This time there was a reply:

“Put away the light.”

“I’m damned if I will,” I muttered; but Will told me to do as the voice bade, and I shoved it down under the bulwarks.

“Come nearer,” he said, and the oar-strokes continued. Then, when apparently some half-dozen fathoms distant, they again ceased.

“Come alongside,” exclaimed Will. “There’s nothing to be frightened of aboard here!”

“Promise that you will not show the light?”

“What’s to do with you,” I burst out, “that you’re so infernally afraid of the light?”

“Because –” began the voice, and stopped short.

“Because what?” I asked quickly.

Will put his hand on my shoulder.

“Shut up a minute, old man,” he said, in a low voice. “Let me tackle him.”

He leant more over the rail.

“See here, Mister,” he said, “this is a pretty queer business, you coming upon us like this, right out in the middle of the blessed Pacific. How are we to know what sort of a hanky-panky trick you’re up to? You say there’s only one of you. How are we to know, unless we get a squint at you – eh? What’s your objection to the light, anyway?”

As he finished, I heard the noise of the oars again, and then the voice came; but now from a greater distance, and sounding extremely hopeless and pathetic.

“I am sorry – sorry! I would not have troubled you, only I am hungry, and – so is she.”

The voice died away, and the sound of the oars, dipping irregularly, was borne to us.

“Stop!” sung out Will. “I don’t want to drive you away. Come back! We’ll keep the light hidden, if you don’t like it.”

He turned to me:

“It’s a damned queer rig, this; but I think there’s nothing to be afraid of?”

There was a question in his tone, and I replied.

“No, I think the poor devil’s been wrecked around here, and gone crazy.”

The sound of the oars drew nearer.

“Shove that lamp back in the binnacle,” said Will; then he leaned over the rail and listened. I replaced the lamp, and came back to his side. The dipping of the oars ceased some dozen yards distant.

“Won’t you come alongside now?” asked Will in an even voice. “I have had the lamp put back in the binnacle.”

“I – I cannot,” replied the voice. “I dare not come nearer. I dare not even pay you for the – the provisions.”

“That’s all right,” said Will, and hesitated. “You’re welcome to as much grub as you can take –.” Again he hesitated.

“You are very good,” exclaimed the voice. “May God, Who understands everything, reward you –” it broke off huskily.

“The – the lady?” said Will abruptly. “Is she –”

“I have left her behind upon the island,” came the voice.

“What island?” I cut in.

“I know not its name,” returned the voice. “I would to God –!” it began, and checked itself as suddenly.

“Could we not send a boat for her?” asked Will at this point.

“No!” said the voice, with extraordinary emphasis. “My God! No!” There was a moment’s pause; then it added, in a tone which seemed a merited reproach:

“It was because of our want I ventured – because her agony tortured me.”

“I am a forgetful brute,” exclaimed Will. “Just wait a minute, whoever you are, and I will bring you up something at once.”

In a couple of minutes he was back again, and his arms were full of various edibles. He paused at the rail.

“Can’t you come alongside for them?” he asked.

“No – I dare not,” replied the voice, and it seemed to me that in its tones I detected a note of stifled craving – as though the owner hushed a mortal desire. It came to me then in a flash, that the poor old creature out there in the darkness, was suffering for actual need of that which Will held in his arms; and yet, because of some unintelligible dread, refraining from dashing to the side of our little schooner, and receiving it. And with the lightning-like conviction, there came the knowledge that the Invisible was not mad; but sanely facing some intolerable horror.

“Damn it, Will!” I said, full of many feelings, over which predominated a vast sympathy. “Get a box. We must float off the stuff to him in it.”

This we did – propelling it away from the vessel, out into the darkness, by means of a boathook. In a minute, a slight cry from the Invisible came to us, and we knew that he had secured the box.

A little later, he called out a farewell to us, and so heartful a blessing, that I am sure we were the better for it. Then, without more ado, we heard the ply of oars across the darkness.

“Pretty soon off,” remarked Will, with perhaps just a little sense of injury.

“Wait,” I replied. “I think somehow he’ll come back. He must have been badly needing that food.”

“And the lady,” said Will. For a moment he was silent; then he continued:

“It’s the queerest thing ever I’ve tumbled across, since I’ve been fishing.”

“Yes,” I said, and fell to pondering.

And so the time slipped away – an hour, another, and still Will stayed with me; for the queer adventure had knocked all desire for sleep out of him.

The third hour was three parts through, when we heard again the sound of oars across the silent ocean.

“Listen!” said Will, a low note of excitement in his voice.

“He’s coming, just as I thought,” I muttered.

The dipping of the oars grew nearer, and I noted that the strokes were firmer and longer. The food had been needed.

They came to a stop a little distance off the broadside, and the queer voice came again to us through the darkness:

“Schooner, ahoy!”

“That you?” asked Will.

“Yes,” replied the voice. “I left you suddenly; but – but there was great need.”

“The lady?” questioned Will.

“The – lady is grateful now on earth. She will be more grateful soon in – in heaven.”

Will began to make some reply, in a puzzled voice; but became confused, and broke off short. I said nothing. I was wondering at the curious pauses, and, apart from my wonder, I was full of a great sympathy.

The voice continued:

“We – she and I, have talked, as we shared the result of God’s tenderness and yours –”

Will interposed; but without coherence.

“I beg of you not to – to belittle your deed of Christian charity this night,” said the voice. “Be sure that it has not escaped His notice.”

It stopped, and there was a full minute’s silence. Then it came again:

“We have spoken together upon that which – which has befallen us. We had thought to go out, without telling any, of the terror which has come into our – lives. She is with me in believing that tonight’s happenings are under a special ruling, and that it is God’s wish that we should tell to you all that we have suffered since – since –”

“Yes?” said Will softly.

“Since the sinking of the Albatross.”

“Ah!” I exclaimed involuntarily. “She left Newcastle for ‘Frisco some six months ago, and hasn’t been heard of since.”

“Yes,” answered the voice. “But some few degrees to the North of the line she was caught in a terrible storm, and dismasted. When the day came, it was found that she was leaking badly, and, presently, it falling to a calm, the sailors took to the boats, leaving – leaving a young lady – my fiancée – and myself upon the wreck.

“We were below, gathering together a few of our belongings, when they left. They were entirely callous, through fear, and when we came up upon the deck, we saw them only as small shapes afar off upon the horizon. Yet we did not despair, but set to work and constructed a small raft. Upon this we put such few matters as it would hold including a quantity of water and some ship’s biscuit. Then, the vessel being very deep in the water, we got ourselves on to the raft, and pushed off.

“It was later, when I observed that we seemed to be in the way of some tide or current, which bore us from the ship at an angle; so that in the course of three hours, by my watch, her hull became invisible to our sight, her broken masts remaining in view for a somewhat longer period. Then, towards evening, it grew misty, and so through the night. The next day we were still encompassed by the mist, the weather remaining quiet.

“For four days we drifted through this strange haze, until, on the evening of the fourth day, there grew upon our ears the murmur of breakers at a distance. Gradually it became plainer, and, somewhat after midnight, it appeared to sound upon either hand at no very great space. The raft was raised upon a swell several times, and then we were in smooth water, and the noise of the breakers was behind.

“When the morning came, we found that we were in a sort of great lagoon; but of this we noticed little at the time; for close before us, through the enshrouding mist, loomed the hull of a large sailing-vessel. With one accord, we fell upon our knees and thanked God; for we thought that here was an end to our perils. We had much to learn.

“The raft drew near to the ship, and we shouted on them to take us aboard; but none answered. Presently the raft touched against the side of the vessel, and, seeing a rope hanging downwards, I seized it and began to climb. Yet I had much ado to make my way up, because of a kind of grey, lichenous fungus which had seized upon the rope, and which blotched the side of the ship lividly.

“I reached the rail and clambered over it, on to the deck. Here I saw that the decks were covered, in great patches, with grey masses, some of them rising into nodules several feet in height; but at the time I thought less of this matter than of the possibility of there being people aboard the ship. I shouted; but none answered. Then I went to the door below the poop deck. I opened it, and peered in. There was a great smell of staleness, so that I knew in a moment that nothing living was within, and with the knowledge, I shut the door quickly; for I felt suddenly lonely.

“I went back to the side where I had scrambled up. My – my sweetheart was still sitting quietly upon the raft. Seeing me look down she called up to know whether there were any aboard of the ship. I replied that the vessel had the appearance of having been long deserted; but that if she would wait a little I would see whether there was anything in the shape of a ladder by which she could ascend to the deck. Then we would make a search through the vessel together. A little later, on the opposite side of the decks, I found a rope side-ladder. This I carried across, and a minute afterwards she was beside me.

“Together we explored the cabins and apartments in the after part of the ship; but nowhere was there any sign of life. Here and there within the cabins themselves, we came across odd patches of that queer fungus; but this, as my sweetheart said, could be cleansed away.

“In the end, having assured ourselves that the after portion of the vessel was empty, we picked our ways to the bows, between the ugly grey nodules of that strange growth; and here we made a further search which told us that there was indeed none aboard but ourselves.

“This being now beyond any doubt, we returned to the stern of the ship and proceeded to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. Together we cleared out and cleaned two of the cabins: and after that I made examination whether there was anything eatable in the ship. This I soon found was so, and thanked God in my heart for His goodness. In addition to this I discovered the whereabouts of the fresh-water pump, and having fixed it I found the water drinkable, though somewhat unpleasant to the taste.

“For several days we stayed aboard the ship, without attempting to get to the shore. We were busily engaged in making the place habitable. Yet even thus early we became aware that our lot was even less to be desired than might have been imagined; for though, as a first step, we scraped away the odd patches of growth that studded the floors and walls of the cabins and saloon, yet they returned almost to their original size within the space of twenty-four hours, which not only discouraged us, but gave us a feeling of vague unease.

“Still we would not admit ourselves beaten, so set to work afresh, and not only scraped away the fungus, but soaked the places where it had been, with carbolic, a can-full of which I had found in the pantry. Yet, by the end of the week the growth had returned in full strength, and, in addition, it had spread to other places, as though our touching it had allowed germs from it to travel elsewhere.

“On the seventh morning, my sweetheart woke to find a small patch of it growing on her pillow, close to her face. At that, she came to me, so soon as she could get her garments upon her. I was in the galley at the time lighting the fire for breakfast.

“Come here, John,” she said, and led me aft. When I saw the thing upon her pillow I shuddered, and then and there we agreed to go right out of the ship and see whether we could not fare to make ourselves more comfortable ashore.

“Hurriedly we gathered together our few belongings, and even among these I found that the fungus had been at work; for one of her shawls had a little lump of it growing near one edge. I threw the whole thing over the side, without saying anything to her.

“The raft was still alongside, but it was too clumsy to guide, and I lowered down a small boat that hung across the stern, and in this we made our way to the shore. Yet, as we drew near to it, I became gradually aware that here the vile fungus, which had driven us from the ship, was growing riot. In places it rose into horrible, fantastic mounds, which seemed almost to quiver, as with a quiet life, when the wind blew across them. Here and there it took on the forms of vast fingers, and in others it just spread out flat and smooth and treacherous. Odd places, it appeared as grotesque stunted trees, seeming extraordinarily kinked and gnarled – the whole quaking vilely at times.

“At first, it seemed to us that there was no single portion of the surrounding shore which was not hidden beneath the masses of the hideous lichen; yet, in this, I found we were mistaken; for somewhat later, coasting along the shore at a little distance, we descried a smooth white patch of what appeared to be fine sand, and there we landed. It was not sand. What it was I do not know. All that I have observed is that upon it the fungus will not grow; while everywhere else, save where the sand-like earth wanders oddly, path-wise, amid the grey desolation of the lichen, there is nothing but that loathsome greyness.

“It is difficult to make you understand how cheered we were to find one place that was absolutely free from the growth, and here we deposited our belongings. Then we went back to the ship for such things as it seemed to us we should need. Among other matters, I managed to bring ashore with me one of the ship’s sails, with which I constructed two small tents, which, though exceedingly rough-shaped, served the purpose for which they were intended. In these we lived and stored our various necessities, and thus for a matter of some four weeks all went smoothly and without particular unhappiness. Indeed, I may say with much of happiness – for – for we were together.

“It was on the thumb of her right hand that the growth first showed. It was only a small circular spot, much like a little grey mole. My God! How the fear leapt to my heart when she showed me the place. We cleansed it, between us, washing it with carbolic and water. In the morning of the following day she showed her hand to me again. The grey warty thing had returned. For a little while, we looked at one another in silence. Then, still wordless, we started again to remove it. In the midst of the operation she spoke suddenly.

“‘What’s that on the side of your face, dear?’ Her voice was sharp with anxiety. I put my hand up to feel.

“‘There! Under the hair by your ear. A little to the front a bit.’ My finger rested upon the place, and then I knew.

“‘Let us get your thumb done first,’ I said. And she submitted, only because she was afraid to touch me until it was cleansed. I finished washing and disinfecting her thumb, and then she turned to my face. After it was finished we sat together and talked awhile of many things for there had come into our lives sudden, very terrible thoughts. We were, all at once, afraid of something worse than death. We spoke of loading the boat with provisions and water and making our way out on to the sea; yet we were helpless, for many causes, and – and the growth had attacked us already. We decided to stay. God would do with us what was His will. We would wait.

“A month, two months, three months passed and the places grew somewhat, and there had come others. Yet we fought so strenuously with the fear that its headway was but slow, comparatively speaking.

“Occasionally we ventured off to the ship for such stores as we needed. There we found that the fungus grew persistently. One of the nodules on the maindeck became soon as high as my head.

“We had now given up all thought or hope of leaving the island. We had realized that it would be unallowable to go among healthy humans, with the things from which we were suffering.

“With this determination and knowledge in our minds we knew that we should have to husband our food and water; for we did not know, at that time, but that we should possibly live for many years.

“This reminds me that I have told you that I am an old man. Judged by the years this is not so. But – but –”

He broke off; then continued somewhat abruptly:

“As I was saying, we knew that we should have to use care in the matter of food. But we had no idea then how little food there was left of which to take care. It was a week later that I made the discovery that all the other bread tanks – which I had supposed full – were empty, and that (beyond odd tins of vegetables and meat, and some other matters) we had nothing on which to depend, but the bread in the tank which I had already opened.

“After learning this I bestirred myself to do what I could, and set to work at fishing in the lagoon; but with no success. At this I was somewhat inclined to feel desperate until the thought came to me to try outside the lagoon, in the open sea.

“Here, at times, I caught odd fish; but so infrequently that they proved of but little help in keeping us from the hunger which threatened.

It seemed to me that our deaths were likely to come by hunger, and not by the growth of the thing which had seized upon our bodies.

“We were in this state of mind when the fourth month wore out. When I made a very horrible discovery. One morning, a little before midday. I came off from the ship with a portion of the biscuits which were left. In the mouth of her tent I saw my sweetheart sitting, eating something.

“‘What is it, my dear?’ I called out as I leapt ashore. Yet, on hearing my voice, she seemed confused, and, turning, slyly threw something towards the edge of the little clearing. It fell short, and a vague suspicion having arisen within me, I walked across and picked it up. It was a piece of the grey fungus.

“As I went to her with it in my hand, she turned deadly pale; then rose red.

“I felt strangely dazed and frightened.

“‘My dear! My dear!’ I said, and could say no more. Yet at words she broke down and cried bitterly. Gradually, as she calmed, I got from her the news that she had tried it the preceding day, and – and liked it. I got her to promise on her knees not to touch it again, however great our hunger. After she had promised she told me that the desire for it had come suddenly, and that, until the moment of desire, she had experienced nothing towards it but the most extreme repulsion.

“Later in the day, feeling strangely restless, and much shaken with the thing which I had discovered, I made my way along one of the twisted paths – formed by the white, sand-like substance – which led among the fungoid growth. I had, once before, ventured along there; but not to any great distance. This time, being involved in perplexing thought, I went much further than hitherto.

“Suddenly I was called to myself by a queer hoarse sound on my left. Turning quickly I saw that there was movement among an extraordinarily shaped mass of fungus, close to my elbow. It was swaying uneasily, as though it possessed life of its own. Abruptly, as I stared, the thought came to me that the thing had a grotesque resemblance to the figure of a distorted human creature. Even as the fancy flashed into my brain, there was a slight, sickening noise of tearing, and I saw that one of the branch-like arms was detaching itself from the surrounding grey masses, and coming towards me. The head of the thing – a shapeless grey ball, inclined in my direction. I stood stupidly, and the vile arm brushed across my face. I gave out a frightened cry, and ran back a few paces. There was a sweetish taste upon my lips where the thing had touched me. I licked them, and was immediately filled with an inhuman desire. I turned and seized a mass of the fungus. Then more and – more. I was insatiable. In the midst of devouring, the remembrance of the morning’s discovery swept into my mazed brain. It was sent by God. I dashed the fragment I held to the ground. Then, utterly wretched and feeling a dreadful guiltiness, I made my way back to the little encampment.

“I think she knew, by some marvellous intuition which love must have given, so soon as she set eyes on me. Her quiet sympathy made it easier for me, and I told her of my sudden weakness; yet omitted to mention the extraordinary thing which had gone before. I desired to spare her all unnecessary terror.

“But, for myself, I had added an intolerable knowledge, to breed an incessant terror in my brain; for I doubted not but that I had seen the end of one of those men who had come to the island in the ship in the lagoon; and in that monstrous ending I had seen our own.

“Thereafter we kept from the abominable food, though the desire for it had entered into our blood. Yet our drear punishment was upon us; for, day by day, with monstrous rapidity, the fungoid growth took hold of our poor bodies. Nothing we could do would check it materially, and so – and so – we who had been human, became – well, it matters less each day. Only – only we had been man and maid!

“And day by day the fight is more dreadful, to withstand the hungerlust for the terrible lichen.

“A week ago we ate the last of the biscuit, and since that time I have caught three fish. I was out here fishing tonight when your schooner drifted upon me out of the mist. I hailed you. You know the rest, and may God, out of His great heart, bless you for your goodness to a – a couple of poor outcast souls.”

There was the dip of an oar – another. Then the voice came again, and for the last time, sounding through the slight surrounding mist, ghostly and mournful.

“God bless you! Goodbye!”

“Goodbye,” we shouted together, hoarsely, our hearts full of many emotions.

I glanced about me. I became aware that the dawn was upon us.

The sun flung a stray beam across the hidden sea; pierced the mist dully, and lit up the receding boat with a gloomy fire. Indistinctly I saw something nodding between the oars. I thought of a sponge – a great, grey nodding sponge – The oars continued to ply. They were grey – as was the boat – and my eyes searched a moment vainly for the conjunction of hand and oar. My gaze flashed back to the – head. It nodded forward as the oars went backward for the stroke. Then the oars were dipped, the boat shot out of the patch of light, and the – the thing went nodding into the mist.

Worms of the Earth

Robert E. Howard

Chapter I

“Strike in the nails, soldiers, and let our guest see the reality of our good Roman justice!”

The speaker wrapped his purple cloak closer about his powerful frame and settled back into his official chair, much as he might have settled back in his seat at the Circus Maximus to enjoy the clash of gladiatorial swords. Realization of power colored his every move. Whetted pride was necessary to Roman satisfaction, and Titus Sulla was justly proud; for he was military governor of Eboracum and answerable only to the emperor of Rome. He was a strongly built man of medium height, with the hawk-like features of the pure-bred Roman. Now a mocking smile curved his full lips, increasing the arrogance of his haughty aspect. Distinctly military in appearance, he wore the golden-scaled corselet and chased breastplate of his rank, with the short stabbing sword at his belt, and he held on his knee the silvered helmet with its plumed crest. Behind him stood a clump of impassive soldiers with shield and spear – blond titans from the Rhineland.

Before him was taking place the scene which apparently gave him so much real gratification – a scene common enough wherever stretched the far-flung boundaries of Rome. A rude cross lay flat upon the barren earth and on it was bound a man – half-naked, wild of aspect with his corded limbs, glaring eyes and shock of tangled hair. His executioners were Roman soldiers, and with heavy hammers they prepared to pin the victim’s hands and feet to the wood with iron spikes.

Only a small group of men watched this ghastly scene, in the dread place of execution beyond the city walls: the governor and his watchful guards; a few young Roman officers; the man to whom Sulla had referred as “guest” and who stood like a bronze image, unspeaking. Beside the gleaming splendor of the Roman, the quiet garb of this man seemed drab, almost somber.

He was dark, but he did not resemble the Latins around him. There was about him none of the warm, almost Oriental sensuality of the Mediterranean which colored their features. The blond barbarians behind Sulla’s chair were less unlike the man in facial outline than were the Romans. Not his were the full curving red lips, nor the rich waving locks suggestive of the Greek. Nor was his dark complexion the rich olive of the south; rather it was the bleak darkness of the north. The whole aspect of the man vaguely suggested the shadowed mists, the gloom, the cold and the icy winds of the naked northern lands. Even his black eyes were savagely cold, like black fires burning through fathoms of ice.

His height was only medium but there was something about him which transcended mere physical bulk – a certain fierce innate vitality, comparable only to that of a wolf or a panther. In every line of his supple, compact body, as well as in his coarse straight hair and thin lips, this was evident – in the hawk-like set of the head on the corded neck, in the broad square shoulders, in the deep chest, the lean loins, the narrow feet. Built with the savage economy of a panther, he was an image of dynamic potentialities, pent in with iron self-control.

At his feet crouched one like him in complexion – but there the resemblance ended. This other was a stunted giant, with gnarly limbs, thick body, a low sloping brow and an expression of dull ferocity, now clearly mixed with fear. If the man on the cross resembled, in a tribal way, the man Titus Sulla called guest, he far more resembled the stunted crouching giant.

“Well, Partha Mac Othna,” said the governor with studied effrontery, “when you return to your tribe, you will have a tale to tell of the justice of Rome, who rules the south.”

“I will have a tale,” answered the other in a voice which betrayed no emotion, just as his dark face, schooled to immobility, showed no evidence of the maelstrom in his soul.

“Justice to all under the rule of Rome,” said Sulla. “Pax Romana! Reward for virtue, punishment for wrong!” He laughed inwardly at his own black hypocrisy, then continued: “You see, emissary of Pictland, how swiftly Rome punishes the transgressor.”

“I see,” answered the Pict in a voice which strongly-curbed anger made deep with menace, “that the subject of a foreign king is dealt with as though he were a Roman slave.”

“He has been tried and condemned in an unbiased court,” retorted Sulla.

“Aye! And the accuser was a Roman, the witnesses Roman, the judge Roman! He committed murder? In a moment of fury he struck down a Roman merchant who cheated, tricked and robbed him, and to injury added insult – aye, and a blow! Is his king but a dog, that Rome crucifies his subjects at will, condemned by Roman courts? Is his king too weak or foolish to do justice, were he informed and formal charges brought against the offender?”

“Well,” said Sulla cynically, “you may inform Bran Mak Morn yourself. Rome, my friend, makes no account of her actions to barbarian kings. When savages come among us, let them act with discretion or suffer the consequences.”

The Pict shut his iron jaws with a snap that told Sulla further badgering would elicit no reply. The Roman made a gesture to the executioners. One of them seized a spike and placing it against the thick wrist of the victim, smote heavily. The iron point sank deep through the flesh, crunching against the bones. The lips of the man on the cross writhed, though no moan escaped him. As a trapped wolf fights against his cage, the bound victim instinctively wrenched and struggled. The veins swelled in his temples, sweat beaded his low forehead, the muscles in arms and legs writhed and knotted. The hammers fell in inexorable strokes, driving the cruel points deeper and deeper, through wrists and ankles; blood flowed in a black river over the hands that held the spikes, staining the wood of the cross, and the splintering of bones was distinctly heard. Yet the sufferer made no outcry, though his blackened lips writhed back until the gums were visible, and his shaggy head jerked involuntarily from side to side.

The man called Partha Mac Othna stood like an iron image, eyes burning from an inscrutable face, his whole body hard as iron from the tension of his control. At his feet crouched his misshapen servant, hiding his face from the grim sight, his arms locked about his master’s knees. Those arms gripped like steel and under his breath the fellow mumbled ceaselessly as if in invocation.

The last stroke fell; the cords were cut from arm and leg, so that the man would hang supported by the nails alone. He had ceased his struggling that only twisted the spikes in his agonizing wounds. His bright black eyes, unglazed, had not left the face of the man called Partha Mac Othna; in them lingered a desperate shadow of hope. Now the soldiers lifted the cross and set the end of it in the hole prepared, stamped the dirt about it to hold it erect. The Pict hung in midair, suspended by the nails in his flesh, but still no sound escaped his lips. His eyes still hung on the somber face of the emissary, but the shadow of hope was fading.

“He’ll live for days!” said Sulla cheerfully. “These Picts are harder than cats to kill! I’ll keep a guard of ten soldiers watching night and day to see that no one takes him down before he dies. Ho, there, Valerius, in honor of our esteemed neighbor, King Bran Mak Morn, give him a cup of wine!”

With a laugh the young officer came forward, holding a brimming wine cup, and rising on his toes, lifted it to the parched lips of the sufferer. In the black eyes flared a red wave of unquenchable hatred; writhing his head aside to avoid even touching the cup, he spat full into the young Roman’s eyes. With a curse Valerius dashed the cup to the ground, and before any could halt him, wrenched out his sword and sheathed it in the man’s body.

Sulla rose with an imperious exclamation of anger; the man called Partha Mac Othna had started violently, but he bit his lip and said nothing. Valerius seemed somewhat surprized at him as he sullenly cleansed his sword. The act had been instinctive, following the insult to Roman pride, the one thing unbearable.

“Give up your sword, young sir!” exclaimed Sulla. “Centurion Publius, place him under arrest. A few days in a cell with stale bread and water will teach you to curb your patrician pride in matters dealing with the will of the empire. What, you young fool, do you not realize that you could not have made the dog a more kindly gift? Who would not rather desire a quick death on the sword than the slow agony on the cross? Take him away. And you, centurion, see that guards remain at the cross so that the body is not cut down until the ravens pick bare the bones. Partha Mac Othna, I go to a banquet at the house of Demetrius – will you not accompany me?”

The emissary shook his head, his eyes fixed on the limp form which sagged on the black-stained cross. He made no reply. Sulla smiled sardonically, then rose and strode away, followed by his secretary who bore the gilded chair ceremoniously, and by the stolid soldiers, with whom walked Valerius, head sunken.

The man called Partha Mac Othna flung a wide fold of his cloak about his shoulder, halted a moment to gaze at the grim cross with its burden, darkly etched against the crimson sky, where the clouds of night were gathering. Then he stalked away, followed by his silent servant.

Chapter II

In an inner chamber of Eboracum, the man called Partha Mac Othna paced tigerishly to and fro. His sandaled feet made no sound on the marble tiles.

“Grom!” he turned to the gnarled servant. “Well I know why you held my knees so tightly – why you muttered aid of the Moon-Woman – you feared I would lose my self-control and make a mad attempt to succor that poor wretch. By the gods, I believe that was what the dog Roman wished – his iron-cased watchdogs watched me narrowly, I know, and his baiting was harder to bear than ordinarily.

“Gods black and white, dark and light!” He shook his clenched fists above his head in the black gust of his passion. “That I should stand by and see a man of mine butchered on a Roman cross – without justice and with no more trial than that farce! Black gods of R’lyeh, even you would I invoke to the ruin and destruction of those butchers! I swear by the Nameless Ones, men shall die howling for that deed, and Rome shall cry out as a woman in the dark who treads upon an adder!”

“He knew you, master,” said Grom.

The other dropped his head and covered his eyes with a gesture of savage pain.

“His eyes will haunt me when I lie dying. Aye, he knew me, and almost until the last, I read in his eyes the hope that I might aid him. Gods and devils, is Rome to butcher my people beneath my very eyes? Then I am not king but dog!”

“Not so loud, in the name of all the gods!” exclaimed Grom in affright. “Did these Romans suspect you were Bran Mak Morn, they would nail you on a cross beside that other.”

“They will know it ere long,” grimly answered the king. “Too long I have lingered here in the guise of an emissary, spying upon mine enemies. They have thought to play with me, these Romans, masking their contempt and scorn only under polished satire. Rome is courteous to barbarian ambassadors, they give us fine houses to live in, offer us slaves, pander to our lusts with women and gold and wine and games, but all the while they laugh at us; their very courtesy is an insult, and sometimes – as today – their contempt discards all veneer. Bah! I’ve seen through their baitings – have remained imperturbably serene and swallowed their studied insults. But this – by the fiends of Hell, this is beyond human endurance! My people look to me; if I fail them – if I fail even one – even the lowest of my people, who will aid them? To whom shall they turn? By the gods, I’ll answer the gibes of these Roman dogs with black shaft and trenchant steel!”

“And the chief with the plumes?” Grom meant the governor and his gutturals thrummed with the blood-lust. “He dies?” He flicked out a length of steel.

Bran scowled. “Easier said than done. He dies – but how may I reach him? By day his German guards keep at his back; by night they stand at door and window. He has many enemies, Romans as well as barbarians. Many a Briton would gladly slit his throat.”

Grom seized Bran’s garment, stammering as fierce eagerness broke the bonds of his inarticulate nature.

“Let me go, master! My life is worth nothing. I will cut him down in the midst of his warriors!”

Bran smiled fiercely and clapped his hand on the stunted giant’s shoulder with a force that would have felled a lesser man.

“Nay, old war-dog, I have too much need of thee! You shall not throw your life away uselessly. Sulla would read the intent in your eyes, besides, and the javelins of his Teutons would be through you ere you could reach him. Not by the dagger in the dark will we strike this Roman, not by the venom in the cup nor the shaft from the ambush.”

The king turned and paced the floor a moment, his head bent in thought. Slowly his eyes grew murky with a thought so fearful he did not speak it aloud to the waiting warrior.

“I have become somewhat familiar with the maze of Roman politics during my stay in this accursed waste of mud and marble,” said he. “During a war on the Wall, Titus Sulla, as governor of this province, is supposed to hasten thither with his centuries. But this Sulla does not do; he is no coward, but the bravest avoid certain things – to each man, however bold, his own particular fear. So he sends in his place Caius Camillus, who in times of peace patrols the fens of the west, lest the Britons break over the border. And Sulla takes his place in the Tower of Trajan. Ha!”

He whirled and gripped Grom with steely fingers.

“Grom, take the red stallion and ride north! Let no grass grow under the stallion’s hoofs! Ride to Cormac na Connacht and tell him to sweep the frontier with sword and torch! Let his wild Gaels feast their fill of slaughter. After a time I will be with him. But for a time I have affairs in the west.”

Grom’s black eyes gleamed and he made a passionate gesture with his crooked hand – an instinctive move of savagery.

Bran drew a heavy bronze seal from beneath his tunic.

“This is my safe-conduct as an emissary to Roman courts,” he said grimly. “It will open all gates between this house and Baal-dor. If any official questions you too closely – here!”

Lifting the lid of an iron-bound chest, Bran took out a small, heavy leather bag which he gave into the hands of the warrior.

“When all keys fail at a gate,” said he, “try a golden key. Go now!”

There were no ceremonious farewells between the barbarian king and his barbarian vassal. Grom flung up his arm in a gesture of salute; then turning, he hurried out.

Bran stepped to a barred window and gazed out into the moonlit streets.

“Wait until the moon sets,” he muttered grimly. “Then I’ll take the road to – Hell! But before I go I have a debt to pay.”

The stealthy clink of a hoof on the flags reached him.

“With the safe-conduct and gold, not even Rome can hold a Pictish reaver,” muttered the king. “Now I’ll sleep until the moon sets.”

With a snarl at the marble frieze-work and fluted columns, as symbols of Rome, he flung himself down on a couch, from which he had long since impatiently torn the cushions and silk stuffs, as too soft for his hard body. Hate and the black passion of vengeance seethed in him, yet he went instantly to sleep. The first lesson he had learned in his bitter hard life was to snatch sleep any time he could, like a wolf that snatches sleep on the hunting trail. Generally his slumber was as light and dreamless as a panther’s, but tonight it was otherwise.

He sank into fleecy gray fathoms of slumber and in a timeless, misty realm of shadows he met the tall, lean, white-bearded figure of old Gonar, the priest of the Moon, high counselor to the king. And Bran stood aghast, for Gonar’s face was white as driven snow and he shook as with ague. Well might Bran stand appalled, for in all the years of his life he had never before seen Gonar the Wise show any sign of fear.

“What now, old one?” asked the king. “Goes all well in Baal-dor?”

“All is well in Baal-dor where my body lies sleeping,” answered old Gonar. “Across the void I have come to battle with you for your soul. King, are you mad, this thought you have thought in your brain?”

“Gonar,” answered Bran somberly, “this day I stood still and watched a man of mine die on the cross of Rome. What his name or his rank, I do not know. I do not care. He might have been a faithful unknown warrior of mine, he might have been an outlaw. I only know that he was mine; the first scents he knew were the scents of the heather; the first light he saw was the sunrise on the Pictish hills. He belonged to me, not to Rome. If punishment was just, then none but me should have dealt it. If he were to be tried, none but me should have been his judge. The same blood flowed in our veins; the same fire maddened our brains; in infancy we listened to the same old tales, and in youth we sang the same old songs. He was bound to my heartstrings, as every man and every woman and every child of Pictland is bound. It was mine to protect him; now it is mine to avenge him.”

“But in the name of the gods, Bran,” expostulated the wizard, “take your vengeance in another way! Return to the heather – mass your warriors – join with Cormac and his Gaels, and spread a sea of blood and flame the length of the great Wall!”

“All that I will do,” grimly answered Bran. “But now – now – I will have a vengeance such as no Roman ever dreamed of! Ha, what do they know of the mysteries of this ancient isle, which sheltered strange life long before Rome rose from the marshes of the Tiber?”

“Bran, there are weapons too foul to use, even against Rome!”

Bran barked short and sharp as a jackal.

“Ha! There are no weapons I would not use against Rome! My back is at the wall. By the blood of the fiends, has Rome fought me fair? Bah! I am a barbarian king with a wolfskin mantle and an iron crown, fighting with my handful of bows and broken pikes against the queen of the world. What have I? The heather hills, the wattle huts, the spears of my shock-headed tribesmen! And I fight Rome – with her armored legions, her broad fertile plains and rich seas – her mountains and her rivers and her gleaming cities – her wealth, her steel, her gold, her mastery and her wrath. By steel and fire I will fight her – and by subtlety and treachery – by the thorn in the foot, the adder in the path, the venom in the cup, the dagger in the dark; aye,” his voice sank somberly, “and by the worms of the earth!”

“But it is madness!” cried Gonar. “You will perish in the attempt you plan – you will go down to Hell and you will not return! What of your people then?”

“If I can not serve them I had better die,” growled the king.

“But you can not even reach the beings you seek,” cried Gonar. “For untold centuries they have dwelt apart. There is no door by which you can come to them. Long ago they severed the bonds that bound them to the world we know.”

“Long ago,” answered Bran somberly, “you told me that nothing in the universe was separated from the stream of Life – a saying the truth of which I have often seen evident. No race, no form of life but is close-knit somehow, by some manner, to the rest of Life and the world. Somewhere there is a thin link connecting those I seek to the world I know. Somewhere there is a Door. And somewhere among the bleak fens of the west I will find it.”

Stark horror flooded Gonar’s eyes and he gave back crying, “Woe! Woe! Woe! To Pictdom! Woe to the unborn kingdom! Woe, black woe to the sons of men! Woe, woe, woe, woe!”

Bran awoke to a shadowed room and the starlight on the window-bars. The moon had sunk from sight though its glow was still faint above the house tops. Memory of his dream shook him and he swore beneath his breath.

Rising, he flung off cloak and mantle, donning a light shirt of black mesh-mail, and girding on sword and dirk. Going again to the iron-bound chest he lifted several compact bags and emptied the clinking contents into the leathern pouch at his girdle. Then wrapping his wide cloak about him, he silently left the house. No servants there were to spy on him – he had impatiently refused the offer of slaves which it was Rome’s policy to furnish her barbarian emissaries. Gnarled Grom had attended to all Bran’s simple needs.

The stables fronted on the courtyard. A moment’s groping in the dark and he placed his hand over a great stallion’s nose, checking the nicker of recognition. Working without a light he swiftly bridled and saddled the great brute, and went through the courtyard into a shadowy side street, leading him. The moon was setting, the border of floating shadows widening along the western wall. Silence lay on the marble palaces and mud hovels of Eboracum under the cold stars.

Bran touched the pouch at his girdle, which was heavy with minted gold that bore the stamp of Rome. He had come to Eboracum posing as an emissary of Pictdom, to act the spy. But being a barbarian, he had not been able to play his part in aloof formality and sedate dignity. He retained a crowded memory of wild feasts where wine flowed in fountains; of white-bosomed Roman women, who, sated with civilized lovers, looked with something more than favor on a virile barbarian; of gladiatorial games; and of other games where dice clicked and spun and tall stacks of gold changed hands. He had drunk deeply and gambled recklessly, after the manner of barbarians, and he had had a remarkable run of luck, due possibly to the indifference with which he won or lost. Gold to the Pict was so much dust, flowing through his fingers. In his land there was no need of it. But he had learned its power in the boundaries of civilization.

Almost under the shadow of the northwestern wall he saw ahead of him loom the great watchtower which was connected with and reared above the outer wall. One corner of the castle-like fortress, farthest from the wall, served as a dungeon. Bran left his horse standing in a dark alley, with the reins hanging on the ground, and stole like a prowling wolf into the shadows of the fortress.

The young officer Valerius was awakened from a light, unquiet sleep by a stealthy sound at the barred window. He sat up, cursing softly under his breath as the faint starlight which etched the window-bars fell across the bare stone floor and reminded him of his disgrace. Well, in a few days, he ruminated, he’d be well out of it; Sulla would not be too harsh on a man with such high connections; then let any man or woman gibe at him! Damn that insolent Pict! But wait, he thought suddenly, remembering: what of the sound which had roused him?

“Hsssst!” it was a voice from the window.

Why so much secrecy? It could hardly be a foe – yet, why should it be a friend? Valerius rose and crossed his cell, coming close to the window. Outside all was dim in the starlight and he made out but a shadowy form close to the window.

“Who are you?” he leaned close against the bars, straining his eyes into the gloom.

His answer was a snarl of wolfish laughter, a long flicker of steel in the starlight. Valerius reeled away from the window and crashed to the floor, clutching his throat, gurgling horribly as he tried to scream. Blood gushed through his fingers, forming about his twitching body a pool that reflected the dim starlight dully and redly.

Outside Bran glided away like a shadow, without pausing to peer into the cell. In another minute the guards would round the corner on their regular routine. Even now he heard the measured tramp of their iron-clad feet. Before they came in sight he had vanished and they clumped stolidly by the cell-window with no intimation of the corpse that lay on the floor within.

Bran rode to the small gate in the western wall, unchallenged by the sleepy watch. What fear of foreign invasion in Eboracum? – and certain well organized thieves and women-stealers made it profitable for the watchmen not to be too vigilant. But the single guardsman at the western gate – his fellows lay drunk in a nearby brothel – lifted his spear and bawled for Bran to halt and give an account of himself. Silently the Pict reined closer. Masked in the dark cloak, he seemed dim and indistinct to the Roman, who was only aware of the glitter of his cold eyes in the gloom. But Bran held up his hand against the starlight and the soldier caught the gleam of gold; in the other hand he saw a long sheen of steel. The soldier understood, and he did not hesitate between the choice of a golden bribe or a battle to the death with this unknown rider who was apparently a barbarian of some sort. With a grunt he lowered his spear and swung the gate open. Bran rode through, casting a handful of coins to the Roman. They fell about his feet in a golden shower, clinking against the flags. He bent in greedy haste to retrieve them and Bran Mak Morn rode westward like a flying ghost in the night.

Chapter III

Into the dim fens of the west came Bran Mak Morn. A cold wind breathed across the gloomy waste and against the gray sky a few herons flapped heavily. The long reeds and marsh-grass waved in broken undulations and out across the desolation of the wastes a few still meres reflected the dull light. Here and there rose curiously regular hillocks above the general levels, and gaunt against the somber sky Bran saw a marching line of upright monoliths – menhirs, reared by what nameless hands?

As a faint blue line to the west lay the foothills that beyond the horizon grew to the wild mountains of Wales where dwelt still wild Celtic tribes – fierce blue-eyed men that knew not the yoke of Rome. A row of well-garrisoned watchtowers held them in check. Even now, far away across the moors, Bran glimpsed the unassailable keep men called the Tower of Trajan.

These barren wastes seemed the dreary accomplishment of desolation, yet human life was not utterly lacking. Bran met the silent men of the fen, reticent, dark of eye and hair, speaking a strange mixed tongue whose long-blended elements had forgotten their pristine separate sources. Bran recognized a certain kinship in these people to himself, but he looked on them with the scorn of a pure-blooded patrician for men of mixed strains.

Not that the common people of Caledonia were altogether pure-blooded; they got their stocky bodies and massive limbs from a primitive Teutonic race which had found its way into the northern tip of the isle even before the Celtic conquest of Britain was completed, and had been absorbed by the Picts. But the chiefs of Bran’s folk had kept their blood from foreign taint since the beginnings of time, and he himself was a pure-bred Pict of the Old Race. But these fenmen, overrun repeatedly by British, Gaelic and Roman conquerors, had assimilated blood of each, and in the process almost forgotten their original language and lineage.

For Bran came of a race that was very old, which had spread over western Europe in one vast Dark Empire, before the coming of the Aryans, when the ancestors of the Celts, the Hellenes and the Germans were one primal people, before the days of tribal splitting-off and westward drift.

Only in Caledonia, Bran brooded, had his people resisted the flood of Aryan conquest. He had heard of a Pictish people called Basques, who in the crags of the Pyrenees called themselves an unconquered race; but he knew that they had paid tribute for centuries to the ancestors of the Gaels, before these Celtic conquerors abandoned their mountain-realm and set sail for Ireland. Only the Picts of Caledonia had remained free, and they had been scattered into small feuding tribes – he was the first acknowledged king in five hundred years – the beginning of a new dynasty – no, a revival of an ancient dynasty under a new name. In the very teeth of Rome he dreamed his dreams of empire.

He wandered through the fens, seeking a Door. Of his quest he said nothing to the dark-eyed fenmen. They told him news that drifted from mouth to mouth – a tale of war in the north, the skirl of war-pipes along the winding Wall, of gathering-fires in the heather, of flame and smoke and rapine and the glutting of Gaelic swords in the crimson sea of slaughter. The eagles of the legions were moving northward and the ancient road resounded to the measured tramp of the iron-clad feet. And Bran, in the fens of the west, laughed, well pleased.

In Eboracum, Titus Sulla gave secret word to seek out the Pictish emissary with the Gaelic name who had been under suspicion, and who had vanished the night young Valerius was found dead in his cell with his throat ripped out. Sulla felt that this sudden bursting flame of war on the Wall was connected closely with his execution of a condemned Pictish criminal, and he set his spy system to work, though he felt sure that Partha Mac Othna was by this time far beyond his reach. He prepared to march from Eboracum, but he did not accompany the considerable force of legionaries which he sent north. Sulla was a brave man, but each man has his own dread, and Sulla’s was Cormac na Connacht, the black-haired prince of the Gaels, who had sworn to cut out the governor’s heart and eat it raw. So Sulla rode with his ever-present bodyguard, westward, where lay the Tower of Trajan with its warlike commander, Caius Camillus, who enjoyed nothing more than taking his superior’s place when the red waves of war washed at the foot of the Wall. Devious politics, but the legate of Rome seldom visited this far isle, and what of his wealth and intrigues, Titus Sulla was the highest power in Britain.

And Bran, knowing all this, patiently waited his coming, in the deserted hut in which he had taken up his abode.

One gray evening he strode on foot across the moors, a stark figure, blackly etched against the dim crimson fire of the sunset. He felt the incredible antiquity of the slumbering land, as he walked like the last man on the day after the end of the world. Yet at last he saw a token of human life – a drab hut of wattle and mud, set in the reedy breast of the fen.

A woman greeted him from the open door and Bran’s somber eyes narrowed with a dark suspicion. The woman was not old, yet the evil wisdom of ages was in her eyes; her garments were ragged and scanty, her black locks tangled and unkempt, lending her an aspect of wildness well in keeping with her grim surroundings. Her red lips laughed but there was no mirth in her laughter, only a hint of mockery, and under the lips her teeth showed sharp and pointed like fangs.

“Enter, master,” said she, “if you do not fear to share the roof of the witch-woman of Dagon-moor!”

Bran entered silently and sat him down on a broken bench while the woman busied herself with the scanty meal cooking over an open fire on the squalid hearth. He studied her lithe, almost serpentine motions, the ears which were almost pointed, the yellow eyes which slanted curiously.

“What do you seek in the fens, my lord?” she asked, turning toward him with a supple twist of her whole body.

“I seek a Door,” he answered, chin resting on his fist. “I have a song to sing to the worms of the earth!”

She started upright, a jar falling from her hands to shatter on the hearth.

“This is an ill saying, even spoken in chance,” she stammered.

“I speak not by chance but by intent,” he answered.

She shook her head. “I know not what you mean.”

“Well you know,” he returned. “Aye, you know well! My race is very old – they reigned in Britain before the nations of the Celts and the Hellenes were born out of the womb of peoples. But my people were not first in Britain. By the mottles on your skin, by the slanting of your eyes, by the taint in your veins, I speak with full knowledge and meaning.”

Awhile she stood silent, her lips smiling but her face inscrutable.

“Man, are you mad,” she asked, “that in your madness you come seeking that from which strong men fled screaming in old times?”

“I seek a vengeance,” he answered, “that can be accomplished only by Them I seek.”

She shook her head.

“You have listened to a bird singing; you have dreamed empty dreams.”

“I have heard a viper hiss,” he growled, “and I do not dream. Enough of this weaving of words. I came seeking a link between two worlds; I have found it.”

“I need lie to you no more, man of the North,” answered the woman. “They you seek still dwell beneath the sleeping hills. They have drawn apart, farther and farther from the world you know.”

“But they still steal forth in the night to grip women straying on the moors,” said he, his gaze on her slanted eyes. She laughed wickedly.

“What would you of me?”

“That you bring me to Them.”

She flung back her head with a scornful laugh. His left hand locked like iron in the breast of her scanty garment and his right closed on his hilt. She laughed in his face.

“Strike and be damned, my northern wolf! Do you think that such life as mine is so sweet that I would cling to it as a babe to the breast?”

His hand fell away.

“You are right. Threats are foolish. I will buy your aid.”

“How?” the laughing voice hummed with mockery.

Bran opened his pouch and poured into his cupped palm a stream of gold.

“More wealth than the men of the fen ever dreamed of.”

Again she laughed. “What is this rusty metal to me? Save it for some white-breasted Roman woman who will play the traitor for you!”

“Name me a price!” he urged. “The head of an enemy –”

“By the blood in my veins, with its heritage of ancient hate, who is mine enemy but thee?” she laughed and springing, struck catlike. But her dagger splintered on the mail beneath his cloak and he flung her off with a loathsome flit of his wrist which tossed her sprawling across her grass-strewn bunk. Lying there she laughed up at him.

“I will name you a price, then, my wolf, and it may be in days to come you will curse the armor that broke Atla’s dagger!” She rose and came close to him, her disquietingly long hands fastened fiercely into his cloak. “I will tell you, Black Bran, king of Caledon! Oh, I knew you when you came into my hut with your black hair and your cold eyes! I will lead you to the doors of Hell if you wish – and the price shall be the kisses of a king!

“What of my blasted and bitter life, I, whom mortal men loathe and fear? I have not known the love of men, the clasp of a strong arm, the sting of human kisses, I, Atla, the were-woman of the moors! What have I known but the lone winds of the fens, the dreary fire of cold sunsets, the whispering of the marsh grasses? – the faces that blink up at me in the waters of the meres, the foot-pad of night – things in the gloom, the glimmer of red eyes, the grisly murmur of nameless beings in the night!

“I am half-human, at least! Have I not known sorrow and yearning and crying wistfulness, and the drear ache of loneliness? Give to me, king – give me your fierce kisses and your hurtful barbarian’s embrace. Then in the long drear years to come I shall not utterly eat out my heart in vain envy of the white-bosomed women of men; for I shall have a memory few of them can boast – the kisses of a king! One night of love, oh king, and I will guide you to the gates of Hell!”

Bran eyed her somberly; he reached forth and gripped her arm in his iron fingers. An involuntary shudder shook him at the feel of her sleek skin. He nodded slowly and drawing her close to him, forced his head down to meet her lifted lips.

Chapter IV

The cold gray mists of dawn wrapped King Bran like a clammy cloak. He turned to the woman whose slanted eyes gleamed in the gray gloom.

“Make good your part of the contract,” he said roughly. “I sought a link between worlds, and in you I found it. I seek the one thing sacred to Them. It shall be the Key to opening the Door that lies unseen between me and Them. Tell me how I can reach it.”

“I will,” the red lips smiled terribly. “Go to the mound men call Dagon’s Barrow. Draw aside the stone that blocks the entrance and go under the dome of the mound. The floor of the chamber is made of seven great stones, six grouped about the seventh. Lift out the center stone – and you will see!”

“Will I find the Black Stone?” he asked.

“Dagon’s Barrow is the Door to the Black Stone,” she answered, “if you dare follow the Road.”

“Will the symbol be well guarded?” He unconsciously loosened his blade in its sheath. The red lips curled mockingly.

“If you meet any on the Road you will die as no mortal man has died for long centuries. The Stone is not guarded, as men guard their treasures. Why should They guard what man has never sought? Perhaps They will be near, perhaps not. It is a chance you must take, if you wish the Stone. Beware, king of Pictdom! Remember it was your folk who, so long ago, cut the thread that bound Them to human life. They were almost human then – they overspread the land and knew the sunlight. Now they have drawn apart. They know not the sunlight and they shun the light of the moon. Even the starlight they hate. Far, far apart have they drawn, who might have been men in time, but for the spears of your ancestors.”

The sky was overcast with misty gray, through which the sun shone coldly yellow when Bran came to Dagon’s Barrow, a round hillock overgrown with rank grass of a curious fungoid appearance. On the eastern side of the mound showed the entrance of a crudely built stone tunnel which evidently penetrated the barrow. One great stone blocked the entrance to the tomb. Bran laid hold of the sharp edges and exerted all his strength. It held fast. He drew his sword and worked the blade between the blocking stone and the sill. Using the sword as a lever, he worked carefully, and managed to loosen the great stone and wrench it out. A foul charnel house scent flowed out of the aperture and the dim sunlight seemed less to illuminate the cavern-like opening than to be fouled by the rank darkness which clung there.

Sword in hand, ready for he knew not what, Bran groped his way into the tunnel, which was long and narrow, built up of heavy joined stones, and was too low for him to stand erect. Either his eyes became somewhat accustomed to the gloom, or the darkness was, after all, somewhat lightened by the sunlight filtering in through the entrance. At any rate he came into a round low chamber and was able to make out its general dome-like outline. Here, no doubt, in old times, had reposed the bones of him for whom the stones of the tomb had been joined and the earth heaped high above them; but now of those bones no vestige remained on the stone floor. And bending close and straining his eyes, Bran made out the strange, startlingly regular pattern of that floor: six well-cut slabs clustered about a seventh, six-sided stone.

He drove his sword-point into a crack and pried carefully. The edge of the central stone tilted slightly upward. A little work and he lifted it out and leaned it against the curving wall. Straining his eyes downward he saw only the gaping blackness of a dark well, with small, worn steps that led downward and out of sight. He did not hesitate. Though the skin between his shoulders crawled curiously, he swung himself into the abyss and felt the clinging blackness swallow him.

Groping downward, he felt his feet slip and stumble on steps too small for human feet. With one hand pressed hard against the side of the well he steadied himself, fearing a fall into unknown and unlighted depths. The steps were cut into solid rock, yet they were greatly worn away. The farther he progressed, the less like steps they became, mere bumps of worn stone. Then the direction of the shaft changed sharply. It still led down, but at a shallow slant down which he could walk, elbows braced against the hollowed sides, head bent low beneath the curved roof. The steps had ceased altogether and the stone felt slimy to the touch, like a serpent’s lair. What beings, Bran wondered, had slithered up and down this slanting shaft, for how many centuries?

The tunnel narrowed until Bran found it rather difficult to shove through. He lay on his back and pushed himself along with his hands, feet first. Still he knew he was sinking deeper and deeper into the very guts of the earth; how far below the surface he was, he dared not contemplate. Then ahead a faint witch-fire gleam tinged the abysmal blackness. He grinned savagely and without mirth. If They he sought came suddenly upon him, how could he fight in that narrow shaft? But he had put the thought of personal fear behind him when he began this hellish quest. He crawled on, thoughtless of all else but his goal.

And he came at last into a vast space where he could stand upright. He could not see the roof of the place, but he got an impression of dizzying vastness. The blackness pressed in on all sides and behind him he could see the entrance to the shaft from which he had just emerged – a black well in the darkness. But in front of him a strange grisly radiance glowed about a grim altar built of human skulls. The source of that light he could not determine, but on the altar lay a sullen night-black object – the Black Stone!

Bran wasted no time in giving thanks that the guardians of the grim relic were nowhere near. He caught up the Stone, and gripping it under his left arm, crawled into the shaft. When a man turns his back on peril its clammy menace looms more grisly than when he advances upon it. So Bran, crawling back up the nighted shaft with his grisly prize, felt the darkness turn on him and slink behind him, grinning with dripping fangs. Clammy sweat beaded his flesh and he hastened to the best of his ability, ears strained for some stealthy sound to betray that fell shapes were at his heels. Strong shudders shook him, despite himself, and the short hair on his neck prickled as if a cold wind blew at his back.

When he reached the first of the tiny steps he felt as if he had attained to the outer boundaries of the mortal world. Up them he went, stumbling and slipping, and with a deep gasp of relief, came out into the tomb, whose spectral grayness seemed like the blaze of noon in comparison to the stygian depths he had just traversed. He replaced the central stone and strode into the light of the outer day, and never was the cold yellow light of the sun more grateful, as it dispelled the shadows of black-winged nightmares of fear and madness that seemed to have ridden him up out of the black deeps. He shoved the great blocking stone back into place, and picking up the cloak he had left at the mouth of the tomb, he wrapped it about the Black Stone and hurried away, a strong revulsion and loathing shaking his soul and lending wings to his strides.

A gray silence brooded over the land. It was desolate as the blind side of the moon, yet Bran felt the potentialities of life – under his feet, in the brown earth – sleeping, but how soon to waken, and in what horrific fashion?

He came through the tall masking reeds to the still deep men called Dagon’s Mere. No slightest ripple ruffled the cold blue water to give evidence of the grisly monster legend said dwelt beneath. Bran closely scanned the breathless landscape. He saw no hint of life, human or unhuman. He sought the instincts of his savage soul to know if any unseen eyes fixed their lethal gaze upon him, and found no response. He was alone as if he were the last man alive on earth.

Swiftly he unwrapped the Black Stone, and as it lay in his hands like a solid sullen block of darkness, he did not seek to learn the secret of its material nor scan the cryptic characters carved thereon. Weighing it in his hands and calculating the distance, he flung it far out, so that it fell almost exactly in the middle of the lake. A sullen splash and the waters closed over it. There was a moment of shimmering flashes on the bosom of the lake; then the blue surface stretched placid and unrippled again.

Chapter V

The were-woman turned swiftly as Bran approached her door. Her slant eyes widened.

“You! And alive! And sane!”

“I have been into Hell and I have returned,” he growled. “What is more, I have that which I sought.”

“The Black Stone?” she cried. “You really dared steal it? Where is it?”

“No matter; but last night my stallion screamed in his stall and I heard something crunch beneath his thundering hoofs which was not the wall of the stable – and there was blood on his hoofs when I came to see, and blood on the floor of the stall. And I have heard stealthy sounds in the night, and noises beneath my dirt floor, as if worms burrowed deep in the earth. They know I have stolen their Stone. Have you betrayed me?”

She shook her head.

“I keep your secret; they do not need my word to know you. The farther they have retreated from the world of men, the greater have grown their powers in other uncanny ways. Some dawn your hut will stand empty and if men dare investigate they will find nothing – except crumbling bits of earth on the dirt floor.”

Bran smiled terribly.

“I have not planned and toiled thus far to fall prey to the talons of vermin. If They strike me down in the night, They will never know what became of their idol – or whatever it be to Them. I would speak with Them.”

“Dare you come with me and meet them in the night?” she asked.

“Thunder of all gods!” he snarled. “Who are you to ask me if I dare? Lead me to Them and let me bargain for a vengeance this night. The hour of retribution draws nigh. This day I saw silvered helmets and bright shields gleam across the fens – the new commander has arrived at the Tower of Trajan and Caius Camillus has marched to the Wall.”

That night the king went across the dark desolation of the moors with the silent were-woman. The night was thick and still as if the land lay in ancient slumber. The stars blinked vaguely, mere points of red struggling through the unbreathing gloom. Their gleam was dimmer than the glitter in the eyes of the woman who glided beside the king. Strange thoughts shook Bran, vague, titanic, primeval. Tonight ancestral linkings with these slumbering fens stirred in his soul and troubled him with the phantasmal, eon-veiled shapes of monstrous dreams. The vast age of his race was borne upon him; where now he walked an outlaw and an alien, dark-eyed kings in whose mold he was cast had reigned in old times. The Celtic and Roman invaders were as strangers to this ancient isle beside his people. Yet his race likewise had been invaders, and there was an older race than his – a race whose beginnings lay lost and hidden back beyond the dark oblivion of antiquity.

Ahead of them loomed a low range of hills, which formed the easternmost extremity of those straying chains which far away climbed at last to the mountains of Wales. The woman led the way up what might have been a sheep-path, and halted before a wide black gaping cave.

“A door to those you seek, oh king!” her laughter rang hateful in the gloom. “Dare ye enter?”

His fingers closed in her tangled locks and he shook her viciously.

“Ask me but once more if I dare,” he grated, “and your head and shoulders part company! Lead on.”

Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom. They passed into the cave and Bran struck flint and steel. The flicker of the tinder showed him a wide dusty cavern, on the roof of which hung clusters of bats. Lighting a torch, he lifted it and scanned the shadowy recesses, seeing nothing but dust and emptiness.

“Where are They?” he growled.

She beckoned him to the back of the cave and leaned against the rough wall, as if casually. But the king’s keen eyes caught the motion of her hand pressing hard against a projecting ledge. He recoiled as a round black well gaped suddenly at his feet. Again her laughter slashed him like a keen silver knife. He held the torch to the opening and again saw small worn steps leading down.

“They do not need those steps,” said Atla. “Once they did, before your people drove them into the darkness. But you will need them.”

She thrust the torch into a niche above the well; it shed a faint red light into the darkness below. She gestured into the well and Bran loosened his sword and stepped into the shaft. As he went down into the mystery of the darkness, the light was blotted out above him, and he thought for an instant Atla had covered the opening again. Then he realized that she was descending after him.

The descent was not a long one. Abruptly Bran felt his feet on a solid floor. Atla swung down beside him and stood in the dim circle of light that drifted down the shaft. Bran could not see the limits of the place into which he had come.

“Many caves in these hills,” said Atla, her voice sounding small and strangely brittle in the vastness, “are but doors to greater caves which lie beneath, even as a man’s words and deeds are but small indications of the dark caverns of murky thought lying behind and beneath.”

And now Bran was aware of movement in the gloom. The darkness was filled with stealthy noises not like those made by any human foot. Abruptly sparks began to flash and float in the blackness, like flickering fireflies. Closer they came until they girdled him in a wide half-moon. And beyond the ring gleamed other sparks, a solid sea of them, fading away in the gloom until the farthest were mere tiny pin-points of light. And Bran knew they were the slanted eyes of the beings who had come upon him in such numbers that his brain reeled at the contemplation – and at the vastness of the cavern.

Now that he faced his ancient foes, Bran knew no fear. He felt the waves of terrible menace emanating from them, the grisly hate, the inhuman threat to body, mind and soul. More than a member of a less ancient race, he realized the horror of his position, but he did not fear, though he confronted the ultimate Horror of the dreams and legends of his race. His blood raced fiercely but it was with the hot excitement of the hazard, not the drive of terror.

“They know you have the Stone, oh king,” said Atla, and though he knew she feared, though he felt her physical efforts to control her trembling limbs, there was no quiver of fright in her voice. “You are in deadly peril; they know your breed of old – oh, they remember the days when their ancestors were men! I can not save you; both of us will die as no human has died for ten centuries. Speak to them, if you will; they can understand your speech, though you may not understand theirs. But it will avail not – you are human – and a Pict.”

Bran laughed and the closing ring of fire shrank back at the savagery in his laughter. Drawing his sword with a soul-chilling rasp of steel, he set his back against what he hoped was a solid stone wall. Facing the glittering eyes with his sword gripped in his right hand and his dirk in his left, he laughed as a blood-hungry wolf snarls.

“Aye,” he growled, “I am a Pict, a son of those warriors who drove your brutish ancestors before them like chaff before the storm! – who flooded the land with your blood and heaped high your skulls for a sacrifice to the Moon-Woman! You who fled of old before my race, dare ye now snarl at your master? Roll on me like a flood now, if ye dare! Before your viper fangs drink my life I will reap your multitudes like ripened barley – of your severed heads will I build a tower and of your mangled corpses will I rear up a wall! Dogs of the dark, vermin of Hell, worms of the earth, rush in and try my steel! When Death finds me in this dark cavern, your living will howl for the scores of your dead and your Black Stone will be lost to you forever – for only I know where it is hidden and not all the tortures of all the Hells can wring the secret from my lips!”

Then followed a tense silence; Bran faced the fire-lit darkness, tensed like a wolf at bay, waiting the charge; at his side the woman cowered, her eyes ablaze. Then from the silent ring that hovered beyond the dim torchlight rose a vague abhorrent murmur. Bran, prepared as he was for anything, started. Gods, was that the speech of creatures which had once been called men?

Atla straightened, listening intently. From her lips came the same hideous soft sibilances, and Bran, though he had already known the grisly secret of her being, knew that never again could he touch her save with soul-shaken loathing.

She turned to him, a strange smile curving her red lips dimly in the ghostly light.

“They fear you, oh king! By the black secrets of R’lyeh, who are you that Hell itself quails before you? Not your steel, but the stark ferocity of your soul has driven unused fear into their strange minds. They will buy back the Black Stone at any price.”

“Good,” Bran sheathed his weapons. “They shall promise not to molest you because of your aid of me. And,” his voice hummed like the purr of a hunting tiger, “they shall deliver into my hands Titus Sulla, governor of Eboracum, now commanding the Tower of Trajan. This They can do – how, I know not. But I know that in the old days, when my people warred with these Children of the Night, babes disappeared from guarded huts and none saw the stealers come or go. Do They understand?”

Again rose the low frightful sounds and Bran, who feared not their wrath, shuddered at their voices.

“They understand,” said Atla. “Bring the Black Stone to Dagon’s Ring tomorrow night when the earth is veiled with the blackness that foreruns the dawn. Lay the Stone on the altar. There They will bring Titus Sulla to you. Trust Them; They have not interfered in human affairs for many centuries, but They will keep their word.”

Bran nodded and turning, climbed up the stair with Atla close behind him. At the top he turned and looked down once more. As far as he could see floated a glittering ocean of slanted yellow eyes upturned. But the owners of those eyes kept carefully beyond the dim circle of torchlight and of their bodies he could see nothing. Their low hissing speech floated up to him and he shuddered as his imagination visualized, not a throng of biped creatures, but a swarming, swaying myriad of serpents, gazing up at him with their glittering unwinking eyes.

He swung into the upper cave and Atla thrust the blocking stone back in place. It fitted into the entrance of the well with uncanny precision; Bran was unable to discern any crack in the apparently solid floor of the cavern. Atla made a motion to extinguish the torch, but the king stayed her.

“Keep it so until we are out of the cave,” he grunted. “We might tread on an adder in the dark.”

Atla’s sweetly hateful laughter rose maddeningly in the flickering gloom.

Chapter VI

It was not long before sunset when Bran came again to the reed-grown marge of Dagon’s Mere. Casting cloak and sword-belt on the ground, he stripped himself of his short leathern breeches. Then gripping his naked dirk in his teeth, he went into the water with the smooth ease of a diving seal. Swimming strongly, he gained the center of the small lake, and turning, drove himself downward.

The mere was deeper than he had thought. It seemed he would never reach the bottom, and when he did, his groping hands failed to find what he sought. A roaring in his ears warned him and he swam to the surface.

Gulping deep of the refreshing air, he dived again, and again his quest was fruitless. A third time he sought the depth, and this time his groping hands met a familiar object in the silt of the bottom. Grasping it, he swam up to the surface.

The Stone was not particularly bulky, but it was heavy. He swam leisurely, and suddenly was aware of a curious stir in the waters about him which was not caused by his own exertions. Thrusting his face below the surface, he tried to pierce the blue depths with his eyes and thought to see a dim gigantic shadow hovering there.

He swam faster, not frightened, but wary. His feet struck the shallows and he waded up on the shelving shore. Looking back he saw the waters swirl and subside. He shook his head, swearing. He had discounted the ancient legend which made Dagon’s Mere the lair of a nameless water-monster, but now he had a feeling as if his escape had been narrow. The time-worn myths of the ancient land were taking form and coming to life before his eyes. What primeval shape lurked below the surface of that treacherous mere, Bran could not guess, but he felt that the fenmen had good reason for shunning the spot, after all.

Bran donned his garments, mounted the black stallion and rode across the fens in the desolate crimson of the sunset’s afterglow, with the Black Stone wrapped in his cloak. He rode, not to his hut, but to the west, in the direction of the Tower of Trajan and the Ring of Dagon. As he covered the miles that lay between, the red stars winked out. Midnight passed him in the moonless night and still Bran rode on. His heart was hot for his meeting with Titus Sulla. Atla had gloated over the anticipation of watching the Roman writhe under torture, but no such thought was in the Pict’s mind. The governor should have his chance with weapons – with Bran’s own sword he should face the Pictish king’s dirk, and live or die according to his prowess. And though Sulla was famed throughout the provinces as a swordsman, Bran felt no doubt as to the outcome.

Dagon’s Ring lay some distance from the Tower – a sullen circle of tall gaunt stones planted upright, with a rough-hewn stone altar in the center. The Romans looked on these menhirs with aversion; they thought the Druids had reared them; but the Celts supposed Bran’s people, the Picts, had planted them – and Bran well knew what hands reared those grim monoliths in lost ages, though for what reasons, he but dimly guessed.

The king did not ride straight to the Ring. He was consumed with curiosity as to how his grim allies intended carrying out their promise. That They could snatch Titus Sulla from the very midst of his men, he felt sure, and he believed he knew how They would do it. He felt the gnawings of a strange misgiving, as if he had tampered with powers of unknown breadth and depth, and had loosed forces which he could not control. Each time he remembered that reptilian murmur, those slanted eyes of the night before, a cold breath passed over him. They had been abhorrent enough when his people drove Them into the caverns under the hills, ages ago; what had long centuries of retrogression made of them? In their nighted, subterranean life, had They retained any of the attributes of humanity at all?

Some instinct prompted him to ride toward the Tower. He knew he was near; but for the thick darkness he could have plainly seen its stark outline tusking the horizon. Even now he should be able to make it out dimly. An obscure, shuddersome premonition shook him and he spurred the stallion into swift canter.

And suddenly Bran staggered in his saddle as from a physical impact, so stunning was the surprize of what met his gaze. The impregnable Tower of Trajan was no more! Bran’s astounded gaze rested on a gigantic pile of ruins – of shattered stone and crumbled granite, from which jutted the jagged and splintered ends of broken beams. At one corner of the tumbled heap one tower rose out of the waste of crumpled masonry, and it leaned drunkenly as if its foundations had been half-cut away.

Bran dismounted and walked forward, dazed by bewilderment. The moat was filled in places by fallen stones and broken pieces of mortared wall. He crossed over and came among the ruins. Where, he knew, only a few hours before the flags had resounded to the martial tramp of iron-clad feet, and the walls had echoed to the clang of shields and the blast of the loud-throated trumpets, a horrific silence reigned.

Almost under Bran’s feet, a broken shape writhed and groaned. The king bent down to the legionary who lay in a sticky red pool of his own blood. A single glance showed the Pict that the man, horribly crushed and shattered, was dying.

Lifting the bloody head, Bran placed his flask to the pulped lips and the Roman instinctively drank deep, gulping through splintered teeth. In the dim starlight Bran saw his glazed eyes roll.

“The walls fell,” muttered the dying man. “They crashed down like the skies falling on the day of doom. Ah Jove, the skies rained shards of granite and hailstones of marble!”

“I have felt no earthquake shock,” Bran scowled, puzzled.

“It was no earthquake,” muttered the Roman. “Before last dawn it began, the faint dim scratching and clawing far below the earth. We of the guard heard it – like rats burrowing, or like worms hollowing out the earth. Titus laughed at us, but all day long we heard it. Then at midnight the Tower quivered and seemed to settle – as if the foundations were being dug away –”

A shudder shook Bran Mak Morn. The worms of the earth! Thousands of vermin digging like moles far below the castle, burrowing away the foundations – gods, the land must be honeycombed with tunnels and caverns – these creatures were even less human than he had thought – what ghastly shapes of darkness had he invoked to his aid?

“What of Titus Sulla?” he asked, again holding the flask to the legionary’s lips; in that moment the dying Roman seemed to him almost like a brother.

“Even as the Tower shuddered we heard a fearful scream from the governor’s chamber,” muttered the soldier. “We rushed there – as we broke down the door we heard his shrieks – they seemed to recede – into the bowels of the earth! We rushed in; the chamber was empty. His bloodstained sword lay on the floor; in the stone flags of the floor a black hole gaped. Then – the – towers – reeled – the – roof – broke; – through – a – storm – of – crashing – walls – I – crawled –”

A strong convulsion shook the broken figure.

“Lay me down, friend,” whispered the Roman. “I die.”

He had ceased to breathe before Bran could comply. The Pict rose, mechanically cleansing his hands. He hastened from the spot, and as he galloped over the darkened fens, the weight of the accursed Black Stone under his cloak was as the weight of a foul nightmare on a mortal breast.

As he approached the Ring, he saw an eery glow within, so that the gaunt stones stood etched like the ribs of a skeleton in which a witch-fire burns. The stallion snorted and reared as Bran tied him to one of the menhirs. Carrying the Stone he strode into the grisly circle and saw Atla standing beside the altar, one hand on her hip, her sinuous body swaying in a serpentine manner. The altar glowed all over with ghastly light and Bran knew someone, probably Atla, had rubbed it with phosphorus from some dank swamp or quagmire.

He strode forward and whipping his cloak from about the Stone, flung the accursed thing on to the altar.

“I have fulfilled my part of the contract,” he growled.

“And They, theirs,” she retorted. “Look! – They come!”

He wheeled, his hand instinctively dropping to his sword. Outside the Ring the great stallion screamed savagely and reared against his tether. The night wind moaned through the waving grass and an abhorrent soft hissing mingled with it. Between the menhirs flowed a dark tide of shadows, unstable and chaotic. The Ring filled with glittering eyes which hovered beyond the dim illusive circle of illumination cast by the phosphorescent altar. Somewhere in the darkness a human voice tittered and gibbered idiotically. Bran stiffened, the shadows of a horror clawing at his soul.

He strained his eyes, trying to make out the shapes of those who ringed him. But he glimpsed only billowing masses of shadow which heaved and writhed and squirmed with almost fluid consistency.

“Let them make good their bargain!” he exclaimed angrily.

“Then see, oh king!” cried Atla in a voice of piercing mockery.

There was a stir, a seething in the writhing shadows, and from the darkness crept, like a four-legged animal, a human shape that fell down and groveled at Bran’s feet and writhed and mowed, and lifting a death’s-head, howled like a dying dog. In the ghastly light, Bran, soul-shaken, saw the blank glassy eyes, the bloodless features, the loose, writhing, froth-covered lips of sheer lunacy – gods, was this Titus Sulla, the proud lord of life and death in Eboracum’s proud city?

Bran bared his sword.

“I had thought to give this stroke in vengeance,” he said somberly. “I give it in mercy – Vale Cosar!”

The steel flashed in the eery light and Sulla’s head rolled to the foot of the glowing altar, where it lay staring up at the shadowed sky.

“They harmed him not!” Atla’s hateful laugh slashed the sick silence. “It was what he saw and came to know that broke his brain! Like all his heavy-footed race, he knew nothing of the secrets of this ancient land. This night he has been dragged through the deepest pits of Hell, where even you might have blenched!”

“Well for the Romans that they know not the secrets of this accursed land!” Bran roared, maddened, “with its monster-haunted meres, its foul witch-women, and its lost caverns and subterranean realms where spawn in the darkness shapes of Hell!”

“Are they more foul than a mortal who seeks their aid?” cried Atla with a shriek of fearful mirth. “Give them their Black Stone!”

A cataclysmic loathing shook Bran’s soul with red fury.

“Aye, take your cursed Stone!” he roared, snatching it from the altar and dashing it among the shadows with such savagery that bones snapped under its impact. A hurried babel of grisly tongues rose and the shadows heaved in turmoil. One segment of the mass detached itself for an instant and Bran cried out in fierce revulsion, though he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had only a brief impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen, dwarfish body that seemed – mottled – all set off by those unwinking reptilian eyes. Gods! – the myths had prepared him for horror in human aspect, horror induced by bestial visage and stunted deformity – but this was the horror of nightmare and the night.

“Go back to Hell and take your idol with you!” he yelled, brandishing his clenched fists to the skies, as the thick shadows receded, flowing back and away from him like the foul waters of some black flood. “Your ancestors were men, though strange and monstrous – but gods, ye have become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in scorn! Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right – there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!”

He sprang from the Ring as a man flees the touch of a coiling snake, and tore the stallion free. At his elbow Atla was shrieking with fearful laughter, all human attributes dropped from her like a cloak in the night.

“King of Pictland!” she cried, “King of fools! Do you blench at so small a thing? Stay and let me show you real fruits of the pits! Ha! ha! ha! Run, fool, run! But you are stained with the taint – you have called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they will come to you again!”

He yelled a wordless curse and struck her savagely in the mouth with his open hand. She staggered, blood starting from her lips, but her fiendish laughter only rose higher.

Bran leaped into the saddle, wild for the clean heather and the cold blue hills of the north where he could plunge his sword into clean slaughter and his sickened soul into the red maelstrom of battle, and forget the horror which lurked below the fens of the west. He gave the frantic stallion the rein, and rode through the night like a hunted ghost, until the hellish laughter of the howling were-woman died out in the darkness behind.

The Mezzotint

M.R. James

Some time ago I believe I had the pleasure of telling you the story of an adventure which happened to a friend of mine by the name of Dennistoun, during his pursuit of objects of art for the museum at Cambridge.

He did not publish his experiences very widely upon his return to England; but they could not fail to become known to a good many of his friends, and among others to the gentleman who at that time presided over an art museum at another University. It was to be expected that the story should make a considerable impression on the mind of a man whose vocation lay in lines similar to Dennistoun’s, and that he should be eager to catch at any explanation of the matter which tended to make it seem improbable that he should ever be called upon to deal with so agitating an emergency. It was, indeed, somewhat consoling to him to reflect that he was not expected to acquire ancient MSS. for his institution; that was the business of the Shelburnian Library. The authorities of that institution might, if they pleased, ransack obscure corners of the Continent for such matters. He was glad to be obliged at the moment to confine his attention to enlarging the already unsurpassed collection of English topographical drawings and engravings possessed by his museum. Yet, as it turned out, even a department so homely and familiar as this may have its dark corners, and to one of these Mr. Williams was unexpectedly introduced.

Those who have taken even the most limited interest in the acquisition of topographical pictures are aware that there is one London dealer whose aid is indispensable to their researches. Mr. J.W. Britnell publishes at short intervals very admirable catalogues of a large and constantly changing stock of engravings, plans, and old sketches of mansions, churches, and towns in England and Wales. These catalogues were, of course, the ABC of his subject to Mr. Williams: but as his museum already contained an enormous accumulation of topographical pictures, he was a regular, rather than a copious, buyer; and he rather looked to Mr. Britnell to fill up gaps in the rank and file of his collection than to supply him with rarities.

Now, in February of last year there appeared upon Mr. Williams’s desk at the museum a catalogue from Mr. Britnell’s emporium, and accompanying it was a typewritten communication from the dealer himself. This latter ran as follows:

Dear Sir,

We beg to call your attention to No. 978 in our accompanying catalogue, which we shall be glad to send on approval.

Yours faithfully,

J.W. Britnell.

To turn to No. 978 in the accompanying catalogue was with Mr. Williams (as he observed to himself) the work of a moment, and in the place indicated he found the following entry:

978. – Unknown. Interesting mezzotint: View of a manor-house, early part of the century. 15 by 10 inches; black frame. £2 2s.

It was not specially exciting, and the price seemed high. However, as Mr. Britnell, who knew his business and his customer, seemed to set store by it, Mr. Williams wrote a postcard asking for the article to be sent on approval, along with some other engravings and sketches which appeared in the same catalogue. And so he passed without much excitement of anticipation to the ordinary labours of the day.

A parcel of any kind always arrives a day later than you expect it, and that of Mr. Britnell proved, as I believe the right phrase goes, no exception to the rule. It was delivered at the museum by the afternoon post of Saturday, after Mr. Williams had left his work, and it was accordingly brought round to his rooms in college by the attendant, in order that he might not have to wait over Sunday before looking through it and returning such of the contents as he did not propose to keep. And here he found it when he came in to tea, with a friend.

The only item with which I am concerned was the rather large, black-framed mezzotint of which I have already quoted the short description given in Mr. Britnell’s catalogue. Some more details of it will have to be given, though I cannot hope to put before you the look of the picture as clearly as it is present to my own eye. Very nearly the exact duplicate of it may be seen in a good many old inn parlours, or in the passages of undisturbed country mansions at the present moment. It was a rather indifferent mezzotint, and an indifferent mezzotint is, perhaps, the worst form of engraving known. It presented a full-face view of a not very large manor-house of the last century, with three rows of plain sashed windows with rusticated masonry about them, a parapet with balls or vases at the angles, and a small portico in the centre. On either side were trees, and in front a considerable expanse of lawn. The legend A.W.F. sculpsit was engraved on the narrow margin; and there was no further inscription. The whole thing gave the impression that it was the work of an amateur. What in the world Mr. Britnell could mean by affixing the price of £2 2s. to such an object was more than Mr. Williams could imagine. He turned it over with a good deal of contempt; upon the back was a paper label, the left-hand half of which had been torn off. All that remained were the ends of two lines of writing; the first had the letters – ngley Hall; the second – ssex.

It would, perhaps, be just worth while to identify the place represented, which he could easily do with the help of a gazetteer, and then he would send it back to Mr. Britnell, with some remarks reflecting upon the judgement of that gentleman.

He lighted the candles, for it was now dark, made the tea, and supplied the friend with whom he had been playing golf (for I believe the authorities of the University I write of indulge in that pursuit by way of relaxation); and tea was taken to the accompaniment of a discussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves, but which the conscientious writer has no right to inflict upon any non-golfing persons.

The conclusion arrived at was that certain strokes might have been better, and that in certain emergencies neither player had experienced that amount of luck which a human being has a right to expect. It was now that the friend – let us call him Professor Binks – took up the framed engraving and said:

“What’s this place, Williams?”

“Just what I am going to try to find out,” said Williams, going to the shelf for a gazetteer. “Look at the back. Somethingley Hall, either in Sussex or Essex. Half the name’s gone, you see. You don’t happen to know it, I suppose?”

“It’s from that man Britnell, I suppose, isn’t it?” said Binks. “Is it for the museum?”

“Well, I think I should buy it if the price was five shillings,” said Williams; “but for some unearthly reason he wants two guineas for it. I can’t conceive why. It’s a wretched engraving, and there aren’t even any figures to give it life.”

“It’s not worth two guineas, I should think,” said Binks; “but I don’t think it’s so badly done. The moonlight seems rather good to me; and I should have thought there were figures, or at least a figure, just on the edge in front.”

“Let’s look,” said Williams. “Well, it’s true the light is rather cleverly given. Where’s your figure? Oh, yes! Just the head, in the very front of the picture.”

And indeed there was – hardly more than a black blot on the extreme edge of the engraving – the head of a man or woman, a good deal muffled up, the back turned to the spectator, and looking towards the house.

Williams had not noticed it before.

“Still,” he said, “though it’s a cleverer thing than I thought, I can’t spend two guineas of museum money on a picture of a place I don’t know.”

Professor Binks had his work to do, and soon went; and very nearly up to Hall time Williams was engaged in a vain attempt to identify the subject of his picture. “If the vowel before the ng had only been left, it would have been easy enough,” he thought; “but as it is, the name may be anything from Guestingley to Langley, and there are many more names ending like this than I thought; and this rotten book has no index of terminations.”

Hall in Mr. Williams’s college was at seven. It need not be dwelt upon; the less so as he met there colleagues who had been playing golf during the afternoon, and words with which we have no concern were freely bandied across the table – merely golfing words, I would hasten to explain.

I suppose an hour or more to have been spent in what is called common-room after dinner. Later in the evening some few retired to Williams’s rooms, and I have little doubt that whist was played and tobacco smoked. During a lull in these operations Williams picked up the mezzotint from the table without looking at it, and handed it to a person mildly interested in art, telling him where it had come from, and the other particulars which we already know.

The gentleman took it carelessly, looked at it, then said, in a tone of some interest:

“It’s really a very good piece of work, Williams; it has quite a feeling of the romantic period. The light is admirably managed, it seems to me, and the figure, though it’s rather too grotesque, is somehow very impressive.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Williams, who was just then busy giving whisky and soda to others of the company, and was unable to come across the room to look at the view again.

It was by this time rather late in the evening, and the visitors were on the move. After they went Williams was obliged to write a letter or two and clear up some odd bits of work. At last, some time past midnight, he was disposed to turn in, and he put out his lamp after lighting his bedroom candle. The picture lay face upwards on the table where the last man who looked at it had put it, and it caught his eye as he turned the lamp down. What he saw made him very nearly drop the candle on the floor, and he declares now if he had been left in the dark at that moment he would have had a fit. But, as that did not happen, he was able to put down the light on the table and take a good look at the picture. It was indubitable – rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o’clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.

I do not know what is the ideal course to pursue in a situation of this kind, I can only tell you what Mr. Williams did. He took the picture by one corner and carried it across the passage to a second set of rooms which he possessed. There he locked it up in a drawer, sported the doors of both sets of rooms, and retired to bed; but first he wrote out and signed an account of the extraordinary change which the picture had undergone since it had come into his possession.

Sleep visited him rather late; but it was consoling to reflect that the behaviour of the picture did not depend upon his own unsupported testimony. Evidently the man who had looked at it the night before had seen something of the same kind as he had, otherwise he might have been tempted to think that something gravely wrong was happening either to his eyes or his mind. This possibility being fortunately precluded, two matters awaited him on the morrow. He must take stock of the picture very carefully, and call in a witness for the purpose, and he must make a determined effort to ascertain what house it was that was represented. He would therefore ask his neighbour Nisbet to breakfast with him, and he would subsequently spend a morning over the gazetteer.

Nisbet was disengaged, and arrived about 9.20. His host was not quite dressed, I am sorry to say, even at this late hour. During breakfast nothing was said about the mezzotint by Williams, save that he had a picture on which he wished for Nisbet’s opinion. But those who are familiar with University life can picture for themselves the wide and delightful range of subjects over which the conversation of two Fellows of Canterbury College is likely to extend during a Sunday morning breakfast. Hardly a topic was left unchallenged, from golf to lawn-tennis. Yet I am bound to say that Williams was rather distraught; for his interest naturally centred in that very strange picture which was now reposing, face downwards, in the drawer in the room opposite.

The morning pipe was at last lighted, and the moment had arrived for which he looked. With very considerable – almost tremulous – excitement he ran across, unlocked the drawer, and, extracting the picture – still face downwards – ran back, and put it into Nisbet’s hands.

“Now,” he said, “Nisbet, I want you to tell me exactly what you see in that picture. Describe it, if you don’t mind, rather minutely. I’ll tell you why afterwards.”

“Well,” said Nisbet, “I have here a view of a country-house – English, I presume – by moonlight.”

“Moonlight? You’re sure of that?”

“Certainly. The moon appears to be on the wane, if you wish for details, and there are clouds in the sky.”

“All right. Go on. I’ll swear,” added Williams in an aside, “there was no moon when I saw it first.”

“Well, there’s not much more to be said,” Nisbet continued. “The house has one – two – three rows of windows, five in each row, except at the bottom, where there’s a porch instead of the middle one, and –“

“But what about figures?” said Williams, with marked interest.

“There aren’t any,” said Nisbet; “but –“

“What! No figure on the grass in front?”

“Not a thing.”

“You’ll swear to that?”

“Certainly I will. But there’s just one other thing.”

“What?”

“Why, one of the windows on the ground-floor – left of the door – is open.”

“Is it really so? My goodness! He must have got in,” said Williams, with great excitement; and he hurried to the back of the sofa on which Nisbet was sitting, and, catching the picture from him, verified the matter for himself.

It was quite true. There was no figure, and there was the open window. Williams, after a moment of speechless surprise, went to the writing-table and scribbled for a short time. Then he brought two papers to Nisbet, and asked him first to sign one – it was his own description of the picture, which you have just heard – and then to read the other which was Williams’s statement written the night before.

”What can it all mean?” said Nisbet.

“Exactly,” said Williams. “Well, one thing I must do – or three things, now I think of it. I must find out from Garwood”– this was his last night’s visitor –“what he saw, and then I must get the thing photographed before it goes further, and then I must find out what the place is.”

“I can do the photographing myself,” said Nisbet, “and I will. But, you know, it looks very much as if we were assisting at the working out of a tragedy somewhere. The question is, has it happened already, or is it going to come off? You must find out what the place is. Yes,” he said, looking at the picture again, “I expect you’re right: he has got in. And if I don’t mistake, there’ll be the devil to pay in one of the rooms upstairs.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Williams: “I’ll take the picture across to old Green” (this was the senior Fellow of the College, who had been Bursar for many years). “It’s quite likely he’ll know it. We have property in Essex and Sussex, and he must have been over the two counties a lot in his time.”

“Quite likely he will,” said Nisbet; “but just let me take my photograph first. But look here, I rather think Green isn’t up today. He wasn’t in Hall last night, and I think I heard him say he was going down for the Sunday.”

“That’s true, too,” said Williams; “I know he’s gone to Brighton. Well, if you’ll photograph it now, I’ll go across to Garwood and get his statement, and you keep an eye on it while I’m gone. I’m beginning to think two guineas is not a very exorbitant price for it now.”

In a short time he had returned, and brought Mr. Garwood with him. Garwood’s statement was to the effect that the figure, when he had seen it, was clear of the edge of the picture, but had not got far across the lawn. He remembered a white mark on the back of its drapery, but could not have been sure it was a cross. A document to this effect was then drawn up and signed, and Nisbet proceeded to photograph the picture.

“Now what do you mean to do?” he said. “Are you going to sit and watch it all day?”

“Well, no, I think not,” said Williams. “I rather imagine we’re meant to see the whole thing. You see, between the time I saw it last night and this morning there was time for lots of things to happen, but the creature only got into the house. It could easily have got through its business in the time and gone to its own place again; but the fact of the window being open, I think, must mean that it’s in there now. So I feel quite easy about leaving it. And besides, I have a kind of idea that it wouldn’t change much, if at all, in the daytime. We might go out for a walk this afternoon, and come in to tea, or whenever it gets dark. I shall leave it out on the table here, and sport the door. My skip can get in, but no one else.”

The three agreed that this would be a good plan; and, further, that if they spent the afternoon together they would be less likely to talk about the business to other people; for any rumour of such a transaction as was going on would bring the whole of the Phasmatological Society about their ears.

We may give them a respite until five o’clock.

At or near that hour the three were entering Williams’s staircase. They were at first slightly annoyed to see that the door of his rooms was unsported; but in a moment it was remembered that on Sunday the skips came for orders an hour or so earlier than on weekdays. However, a surprise was awaiting them. The first thing they saw was the picture leaning up against a pile of books on the table, as it had been left, and the next thing was Williams’s skip, seated on a chair opposite, gazing at it with undisguised horror. How was this? Mr. Filcher (the name is not my own invention) was a servant of considerable standing, and set the standard of etiquette to all his own college and to several neighbouring ones, and nothing could be more alien to his practice than to be found sitting on his master’s chair, or appearing to take any particular notice of his master’s furniture or pictures. Indeed, he seemed to feel this himself. He started violently when the three men were in the room, and got up with a marked effort. Then he said:

“I ask your pardon, sir, for taking such a freedom as to set down.”

“Not at all, Robert,” interposed Mr. Williams. “I was meaning to ask you some time what you thought of that picture.”

“Well, sir, of course I don’t set up my opinion against yours, but it ain’t the pictur I should ’ang where my little girl could see it, sir.”

“Wouldn’t you, Robert? Why not?”

“No, sir. Why, the pore child, I recollect once she see a Door Bible, with pictures not ’alf what that is, and we ’ad to set up with her three or four nights afterwards, if you’ll believe me; and if she was to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying off the pore baby, she would be in a taking. You know ’ow it is with children; ’ow nervish they git with a little thing and all. But what I should say, it don’t seem a right pictur to be laying about, sir, not where anyone that’s liable to be startled could come on it. Should you be wanting anything this evening, sir? Thank you, sir.”

With these words the excellent man went to continue the round of his masters, and you may be sure the gentlemen whom he left lost no time in gathering round the engraving. There was the house, as before under the waning moon and the drifting clouds. The window that had been open was shut, and the figure was once more on the lawn: but not this time crawling cautiously on hands and knees. Now it was erect and stepping swiftly, with long strides, towards the front of the picture. The moon was behind it, and the black drapery hung down over its face so that only hints of that could be seen, and what was visible made the spectators profoundly thankful that they could see no more than a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs. The head was bent down, and the arms were tightly clasped over an object which could be dimly seen and identified as a child, whether dead or living it was not possible to say. The legs of the appearance alone could be plainly discerned, and they were horribly thin.

From five to seven the three companions sat and watched the picture by turns. But it never changed. They agreed at last that it would be safe to leave it, and that they would return after Hall and await further developments.

When they assembled again, at the earliest possible moment, the engraving was there, but the figure was gone, and the house was quiet under the moonbeams. There was nothing for it but to spend the evening over gazetteers and guide-books. Williams was the lucky one at last, and perhaps he deserved it. At 11.30 p.m. he read from Murray’s Guide to Essex the following lines:

16–1/2 miles, Anningley. The church has been an interesting building of Norman date, but was extensively classicized in the last century. It contains the tomb of the family of Francis, whose mansion, Anningley Hall, a solid Queen Anne house, stands immediately beyond the churchyard in a park of about 80 acres. The family is now extinct, the last heir having disappeared mysteriously in infancy in the year 1802. The father, Mr. Arthur Francis, was locally known as a talented amateur engraver in mezzotint. After his son’s disappearance he lived in complete retirement at the Hall, and was found dead in his studio on the third anniversary of the disaster, having just completed an engraving of the house, impressions of which are of considerable rarity.

This looked like business, and, indeed, Mr. Green on his return at once identified the house as Anningley Hall.

“Is there any kind of explanation of the figure, Green?” was the question which Williams naturally asked.

“I don’t know, I’m sure, Williams. What used to be said in the place when I first knew it, which was before I came up here, was just this: old Francis was always very much down on these poaching fellows, and whenever he got a chance he used to get a man whom he suspected of it turned off the estate, and by degrees he got rid of them all but one. Squires could do a lot of things then that they daren’t think of now. Well, this man that was left was what you find pretty often in that country – the last remains of a very old family. I believe they were Lords of the Manor at one time. I recollect just the same thing in my own parish.”

“What, like the man in Tess o’ the d’Urbervilles?” Williams put in.

“Yes, I dare say; it’s not a book I could ever read myself. But this fellow could show a row of tombs in the church there that belonged to his ancestors, and all that went to sour him a bit; but Francis, they said, could never get at him – he always kept just on the right side of the law – until one night the keepers found him at it in a wood right at the end of the estate. I could show you the place now; it marches with some land that used to belong to an uncle of mine. And you can imagine there was a row; and this man Gawdy (that was the name, to be sure – Gawdy; I thought I should get it – Gawdy), he was unlucky enough – poor chap! – to shoot a keeper. Well, that was what Francis wanted, and grand juries – you know what they would have been then – and poor Gawdy was strung up in double-quick time; and I’ve been shown the place he was buried in, on the north side of the church – you know the way in that part of the world: anyone that’s been hanged or made away with themselves, they bury them that side. And the idea was that some friend of Gawdy’s – not a relation, because he had none, poor devil! He was the last of his line: kind of spes ultima gentis – must have planned to get hold of Francis’s boy and put an end to his line, too. I don’t know – it’s rather an out-of-the-way thing for an Essex poacher to think of – but, you know, I should say now it looks more as if old Gawdy had managed the job himself. Booh! I hate to think of it! Have some whisky, Williams!”

The facts were communicated by Williams to Dennistoun, and by him to a mixed company, of which I was one, and the Sadducean Professor of Ophiology another. I am sorry to say that the latter when asked what he thought of it, only remarked: “Oh, those Bridgeford people will say anything”– a sentiment which met with the reception it deserved.

I have only to add that the picture is now in the Ashleian Museum; that it has been treated with a view to discovering whether sympathetic ink has been used in it, but without effect; that Mr. Britnell knew nothing of it save that he was sure it was uncommon; and that, though carefully watched, it has never been known to change again.

Casting the Runes

M.R. James

April 15th, 190–

Dear Sir,

I am requested by the Council of the –– Association to return to you the draft of a paper on The Truth of Alchemy, which you have been good enough to offer to read at our forthcoming meeting, and to inform you that the Council do not see their way to including it in the programme.

I am,

Yours faithfully,

– Secretary.

* * *

April 18th

Dear Sir,

I am sorry to say that my engagements do not permit of my affording you an interview on the subject of your proposed paper. Nor do our laws allow of your discussing the matter with a Committee of our Council, as you suggest. Please allow me to assure you that the fullest consideration was given to the draft which you submitted, and that it was not declined without having been referred to the judgement of a most competent authority. No personal question (it can hardly be necessary for me to add) can have had the slightest influence on the decision of the Council.

Believe me (ut supra).

* * *

April 20th

The Secretary of the –– Association begs respectfully to inform Mr. Karswell that it is impossible for him to communicate the name of any person or persons to whom the draft of Mr. Karswell’s paper may have been submitted; and further desires to intimate that he cannot undertake to reply to any further letters on this subject.

* * *

“And who is Mr. Karswell?” inquired the Secretary’s wife. She had called at his office, and (perhaps unwarrantably) had picked up the last of these three letters, which the typist had just brought in.

“Why, my dear, just at present Mr. Karswell is a very angry man. But I don’t know much about him otherwise, except that he is a person of wealth, his address is Lufford Abbey, Warwickshire, and he’s an alchemist, apparently, and wants to tell us all about it; and that’s about all – except that I don’t want to meet him for the next week or two. Now, if you’re ready to leave this place, I am.”

“What have you been doing to make him angry?” asked Mrs. Secretary.

“The usual thing, my dear, the usual thing: he sent in a draft of a paper he wanted to read at the next meeting, and we referred it to Edward Dunning – almost the only man in England who knows about these things – and he said it was perfectly hopeless, so we declined it. So Karswell has been pelting me with letters ever since. The last thing he wanted was the name of the man we referred his nonsense to; you saw my answer to that. But don’t you say anything about it, for goodness’ sake.”

“I should think not, indeed. Did I ever do such a thing? I do hope, though, he won’t get to know that it was poor Mr. Dunning.”

“Poor Mr. Dunning? I don’t know why you call him that; he’s a very happy man, is Dunning. Lots of hobbies and a comfortable home, and all his time to himself.”

“I only meant I should be sorry for him if this man got hold of his name, and came and bothered him.”

“Oh, ah! Yes. I dare say he would be poor Mr. Dunning then.”

The Secretary and his wife were lunching out, and the friends to whose house they were bound were Warwickshire people. So Mrs. Secretary had already settled it in her own mind that she would question them judiciously about Mr. Karswell. But she was saved the trouble of leading up to the subject, for the hostess said to the host, before many minutes had passed, “I saw the Abbot of Lufford this morning.” The host whistled. “Did you? What in the world brings him up to town?” “Goodness knows; he was coming out of the British Museum gate as I drove past.” It was not unnatural that Mrs. Secretary should inquire whether this was a real Abbot who was being spoken of. “Oh no, my dear: only a neighbour of ours in the country who bought Lufford Abbey a few years ago. His real name is Karswell.” “Is he a friend of yours?” asked Mr. Secretary, with a private wink to his wife. The question let loose a torrent of declamation. There was really nothing to be said for Mr. Karswell. Nobody knew what he did with himself: his servants were a horrible set of people; he had invented a new religion for himself, and practised no one could tell what appalling rites; he was very easily offended, and never forgave anybody; he had a dreadful face (so the lady insisted, her husband somewhat demurring); he never did a kind action, and whatever influence he did exert was mischievous. “Do the poor man justice, dear,” the husband interrupted. “You forget the treat he gave the school children.” “Forget it, indeed! But I’m glad you mentioned it, because it gives an idea of the man. Now, Florence, listen to this. The first winter he was at Lufford this delightful neighbour of ours wrote to the clergyman of his parish (he’s not ours, but we know him very well) and offered to show the school children some magic-lantern slides. He said he had some new kinds, which he thought would interest them. Well, the clergyman was rather surprised, because Mr. Karswell had shown himself inclined to be unpleasant to the children – complaining of their trespassing, or something of the sort; but of course he accepted, and the evening was fixed, and our friend went himself to see that everything went right. He said he never had been so thankful for anything as that his own children were all prevented from being there: they were at a children’s party at our house, as a matter of fact. Because this Mr. Karswell had evidently set out with the intention of frightening these poor village children out of their wits, and I do believe, if he had been allowed to go on, he would actually have done so. He began with some comparatively mild things. Red Riding Hood was one, and even then, Mr. Farrer said, the wolf was so dreadful that several of the smaller children had to be taken out: and he said Mr. Karswell began the story by producing a noise like a wolf howling in the distance, which was the most gruesome thing he had ever heard. All the slides he showed, Mr. Farrer said, were most clever; they were absolutely realistic, and where he had got them or how he worked them he could not imagine. Well, the show went on, and the stories kept on becoming a little more terrifying each time, and the children were mesmerized into complete silence. At last he produced a series which represented a little boy passing through his own park – Lufford, I mean – in the evening. Every child in the room could recognize the place from the pictures. And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly. Mr. Farrer said it gave him one of the worst nightmares he ever remembered, and what it must have meant to the children doesn’t bear thinking of. Of course this was too much, and he spoke very sharply indeed to Mr. Karswell, and said it couldn’t go on. All he said was: ‘Oh, you think it’s time to bring our little show to an end and send them home to their beds? Very well!’ And then, if you please, he switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling noise which sent the children nearly mad, and of course they stampeded. A good many of them were rather hurt in getting out of the room, and I don’t suppose one of them closed an eye that night. There was the most dreadful trouble in the village afterwards. Of course the mothers threw a good part of the blame on poor Mr. Farrer, and, if they could have got past the gates, I believe the fathers would have broken every window in the Abbey. Well, now, that’s Mr. Karswell: that’s the Abbot of Lufford, my dear, and you can imagine how we covet his society.”

“Yes, I think he has all the possibilities of a distinguished criminal, has Karswell,” said the host. “I should be sorry for anyone who got into his bad books.”

“Is he the man, or am I mixing him up with someone else?” asked the Secretary (who for some minutes had been wearing the frown of the man who is trying to recollect something). “Is he the man who brought out a History of Witchcraft some time back – ten years or more?”

“That’s the man; do you remember the reviews of it?”

“Certainly I do; and what’s equally to the point, I knew the author of the most incisive of the lot. So did you: you must remember John Harrington; he was at John’s in our time.”

“Oh, very well indeed, though I don’t think I saw or heard anything of him between the time I went down and the day I read the account of the inquest on him.”

“Inquest?” said one of the ladies. “What has happened to him?”

“Why, what happened was that he fell out of a tree and broke his neck. But the puzzle was, what could have induced him to get up there. It was a mysterious business, I must say. Here was this man – not an athletic fellow, was he? and with no eccentric twist about him that was ever noticed – walking home along a country road late in the evening – no tramps about – well known and liked in the place – and he suddenly begins to run like mad, loses his hat and stick, and finally shins up a tree – quite a difficult tree – growing in the hedgerow: a dead branch gives way, and he comes down with it and breaks his neck, and there he’s found next morning with the most dreadful face of fear on him that could be imagined. It was pretty evident, of course, that he had been chased by something, and people talked of savage dogs, and beasts escaped out of menageries; but there was nothing to be made of that. That was in ’89, and I believe his brother Henry (whom I remember as well at Cambridge, but you probably don’t) has been trying to get on the track of an explanation ever since. He, of course, insists there was malice in it, but I don’t know. It’s difficult to see how it could have come in.”

After a time the talk reverted to the History of Witchcraft. “Did you ever look into it?” asked the host.

“Yes, I did,” said the Secretary. “I went so far as to read it.”

“Was it as bad as it was made out to be?”

“Oh, in point of style and form, quite hopeless. It deserved all the pulverizing it got. But, besides that, it was an evil book. The man believed every word of what he was saying, and I’m very much mistaken if he hadn’t tried the greater part of his receipts.”

“Well, I only remember Harrington’s review of it, and I must say if I’d been the author it would have quenched my literary ambition for good. I should never have held up my head again.”

“It hasn’t had that effect in the present case. But come, it’s half-past three; I must be off.”

On the way home the Secretary’s wife said, “I do hope that horrible man won’t find out that Mr. Dunning had anything to do with the rejection of his paper.” “I don’t think there’s much chance of that,” said the Secretary. “Dunning won’t mention it himself, for these matters are confidential, and none of us will for the same reason. Karswell won’t know his name, for Dunning hasn’t published anything on the same subject yet. The only danger is that Karswell might find out, if he was to ask the British Museum people who was in the habit of consulting alchemical manuscripts: I can’t very well tell them not to mention Dunning, can I? It would set them talking at once. Let’s hope it won’t occur to him.”

However, Mr. Karswell was an astute man.

* * *

This much is in the way of prologue. On an evening rather later in the same week, Mr. Edward Dunning was returning from the British Museum, where he had been engaged in research, to the comfortable house in a suburb where he lived alone, tended by two excellent women who had been long with him. There is nothing to be added by way of description of him to what we have heard already. Let us follow him as he takes his sober course homewards.

* * *

A train took him to within a mile or two of his house, and an electric tram a stage farther. The line ended at a point some three hundred yards from his front door. He had had enough of reading when he got into the car, and indeed the light was not such as to allow him to do more than study the advertisements on the panes of glass that faced him as he sat. As was not unnatural, the advertisements in this particular line of cars were objects of his frequent contemplation, and, with the possible exception of the brilliant and convincing dialogue between Mr. Lamplough and an eminent K.C. on the subject of Pyretic Saline, none of them afforded much scope to his imagination. I am wrong: there was one at the corner of the car farthest from him which did not seem familiar. It was in blue letters on a yellow ground, and all that he could read of it was a name – John Harrington – and something like a date. It could be of no interest to him to know more; but for all that, as the car emptied, he was just curious enough to move along the seat until he could read it well. He felt to a slight extent repaid for his trouble; the advertisement was not of the usual type. It ran thus:

‘In memory of John Harrington, F.S.A., of The Laurels, Ashbrooke. Died Sept. 18th, 1889. Three months were allowed.’

The car stopped. Mr. Dunning, still contemplating the blue letters on the yellow ground, had to be stimulated to rise by a word from the conductor. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I was looking at that advertisement; it’s a very odd one, isn’t it?” The conductor read it slowly. “Well, my word,” he said, “I never see that one before. Well, that is a cure, ain’t it? Someone bin up to their jokes ’ere, I should think.” He got out a duster and applied it, not without saliva, to the pane and then to the outside. “No,” he said, returning, “that ain’t no transfer; seems to me as if it was reg’lar in the glass, what I mean in the substance, as you may say. Don’t you think so, sir?” Mr. Dunning examined it and rubbed it with his glove, and agreed. “Who looks after these advertisements, and gives leave for them to be put up? I wish you would inquire. I will just take a note of the words.” At this moment there came a call from the driver: “Look alive, George, time’s up.” “All right, all right; there’s something else what’s up at this end. You come and look at this ’ere glass.” “What’s gorn with the glass?” said the driver, approaching. “Well, and oo’s ’Arrington? What’s it all about?” “I was just asking who was responsible for putting the advertisements up in your cars, and saying it would be as well to make some inquiry about this one.” “Well, sir, that’s all done at the Company’s office, that work is: it’s our Mr. Timms, I believe, looks into that. When we put up tonight I’ll leave word, and per’aps I’ll be able to tell you tomorrer if you ‘appen to be coming this way.”

This was all that passed that evening. Mr. Dunning did just go to the trouble of looking up Ashbrooke, and found that it was in Warwickshire.

Next day he went to town again. The car (it was the same car) was too full in the morning to allow of his getting a word with the conductor: he could only be sure that the curious advertisement had been made away with. The close of the day brought a further element of mystery into the transaction. He had missed the tram, or else preferred walking home, but at a rather late hour, while he was at work in his study, one of the maids came to say that two men from the tramways was very anxious to speak to him. This was a reminder of the advertisement, which he had, he says, nearly forgotten. He had the men in – they were the conductor and driver of the car – and when the matter of refreshment had been attended to, asked what Mr. Timms had had to say about the advertisement. “Well, sir, that’s what we took the liberty to step round about,” said the conductor. “Mr. Timms ’e give William ’ere the rough side of his tongue about that: ’cordin’ to ’im there warn’t no advertisement of that description sent in, nor ordered, nor paid for, nor put up, nor nothink, let alone not bein’ there, and we was playing the fool takin’ up his time. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘if that’s the case, all I ask of you, Mr. Timms,’ I says, ‘is to take and look at it for yourself,’ I says. ‘Of course if it ain’t there,’ I says, ‘you may take and call me what you like.’ ‘Right,’ he says, ‘I will’: and we went straight off. Now, I leave it to you, sir, if that ad., as we term ’em, with ’Arrington on it warn’t as plain as ever you see anythink – blue letters on yeller glass, and as I says at the time, and you borne me out, reg’lar in the glass, because, if you remember, you recollect of me swabbing it with my duster.” “To be sure I do, quite clearly – well?” “You may say well, I don’t think. Mr. Timms he gets in that car with a light – no, he telled William to ’old the light outside. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘where’s your precious ad. what we’ve ’eard so much about?’ ‘’Ere it is,’ I says, ‘Mr. Timms,’ and I laid my ’and on it.” The conductor paused.

“Well,” said Mr. Dunning, “it was gone, I suppose. Broken?”

“Broke! – not it. There warn’t, if you’ll believe me, no more trace of them letters – blue letters they was – on that piece o’ glass, than – well, it’s no good me talkin’. I never see such a thing. I leave it to William here if – but there, as I says, where’s the benefit in me going on about it?”

“And what did Mr. Timms say?”

“Why ’e did what I give ’im leave to – called us pretty much anythink he liked, and I don’t know as I blame him so much neither. But what we thought, William and me did, was as we seen you take down a bit of a note about that – well, that letterin’ –”

“I certainly did that, and I have it now. Did you wish me to speak to Mr. Timms myself, and show it to him? Was that what you came in about?”

“There, didn’t I say as much?” said William. “Deal with a gent if you can get on the track of one, that’s my word. Now perhaps, George, you’ll allow as I ain’t took you very far wrong tonight.”

“Very well, William, very well; no need for you to go on as if you’d ’ad to frog’s-march me ’ere. I come quiet, didn’t I? All the same for that, we ’adn’t ought to take up your time this way, sir; but if it so ’appened you could find time to step round to the Company orfice in the morning and tell Mr. Timms what you seen for yourself, we should lay under a very ’igh obligation to you for the trouble. You see it ain’t bein’ called – well, one thing and another, as we mind, but if they got it into their ’ead at the orfice as we seen things as warn’t there, why, one thing leads to another, and where we should be a twelvemunce ’ence – well, you can understand what I mean.”

Amid further elucidations of the proposition, George, conducted by William, left the room.

The incredulity of Mr. Timms (who had a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Dunning) was greatly modified on the following day by what the latter could tell and show him; and any bad mark that might have been attached to the names of William and George was not suffered to remain on the Company’s books; but explanation there was none.

Mr. Dunning’s interest in the matter was kept alive by an incident of the following afternoon. He was walking from his club to the train, and he noticed some way ahead a man with a handful of leaflets such as are distributed to passers-by by agents of enterprising firms. This agent had not chosen a very crowded street for his operations: in fact, Mr. Dunning did not see him get rid of a single leaflet before he himself reached the spot. One was thrust into his hand as he passed: the hand that gave it touched his, and he experienced a sort of little shock as it did so. It seemed unnaturally rough and hot. He looked in passing at the giver, but the impression he got was so unclear that, however much he tried to reckon it up subsequently, nothing would come. He was walking quickly, and as he went on glanced at the paper. It was a blue one. The name of Harrington in large capitals caught his eye. He stopped, startled, and felt for his glasses. The next instant the leaflet was twitched out of his hand by a man who hurried past, and was irrecoverably gone. He ran back a few paces, but where was the passer-by? and where the distributor?

It was in a somewhat pensive frame of mind that Mr. Dunning passed on the following day into the Select Manuscript Room of the British Museum, and filled up tickets for Harley 3586, and some other volumes. After a few minutes they were brought to him, and he was settling the one he wanted first upon the desk, when he thought he heard his own name whispered behind him. He turned round hastily, and in doing so, brushed his little portfolio of loose papers on to the floor. He saw no one he recognized except one of the staff in charge of the room, who nodded to him, and he proceeded to pick up his papers. He thought he had them all, and was turning to begin work, when a stout gentleman at the table behind him, who was just rising to leave, and had collected his own belongings, touched him on the shoulder, saying, “May I give you this? I think it should be yours,” and handed him a missing quire. “It is mine, thank you,” said Mr. Dunning. In another moment the man had left the room. Upon finishing his work for the afternoon, Mr. Dunning had some conversation with the assistant in charge, and took occasion to ask who the stout gentleman was. “Oh, he’s a man named Karswell,” said the assistant; “he was asking me a week ago who were the great authorities on alchemy, and of course I told him you were the only one in the country. I’ll see if I can catch him: he’d like to meet you, I’m sure.”

“For heaven’s sake don’t dream of it!” said Mr. Dunning, “I’m particularly anxious to avoid him.”

“Oh! Very well,” said the assistant, “he doesn’t come here often: I dare say you won’t meet him.”

More than once on the way home that day Mr. Dunning confessed to himself that he did not look forward with his usual cheerfulness to a solitary evening. It seemed to him that something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped in between him and his fellow-men – had taken him in charge, as it were. He wanted to sit close up to his neighbours in the train and in the tram, but as luck would have it both train and car were markedly empty. The conductor George was thoughtful, and appeared to be absorbed in calculations as to the number of passengers. On arriving at his house he found Dr. Watson, his medical man, on his doorstep. “I’ve had to upset your household arrangements, I’m sorry to say, Dunning. Both your servants hors de combat. In fact, I’ve had to send them to the Nursing Home.”

“Good heavens! what’s the matter?”

“It’s something like ptomaine poisoning, I should think: you’ve not suffered yourself, I can see, or you wouldn’t be walking about. I think they’ll pull through all right.”

“Dear, dear! Have you any idea what brought it on?” “Well, they tell me they bought some shell-fish from a hawker at their dinner-time. It’s odd. I’ve made inquiries, but I can’t find that any hawker has been to other houses in the street. I couldn’t send word to you; they won’t be back for a bit yet. You come and dine with me tonight, anyhow, and we can make arrangements for going on. Eight o’clock. Don’t be too anxious.” The solitary evening was thus obviated; at the expense of some distress and inconvenience, it is true. Mr. Dunning spent the time pleasantly enough with the doctor (a rather recent settler), and returned to his lonely home at about 11.30. The night he passed is not one on which he looks back with any satisfaction. He was in bed and the light was out. He was wondering if the charwoman would come early enough to get him hot water next morning, when he heard the unmistakable sound of his study door opening. No step followed it on the passage floor, but the sound must mean mischief, for he knew that he had shut the door that evening after putting his papers away in his desk. It was rather shame than courage that induced him to slip out into the passage and lean over the banister in his nightgown, listening. No light was visible; no further sound came: only a gust of warm, or even hot air played for an instant round his shins. He went back and decided to lock himself into his room. There was more unpleasantness, however. Either an economical suburban company had decided that their light would not be required in the small hours, and had stopped working, or else something was wrong with the meter; the effect was in any case that the electric light was off. The obvious course was to find a match, and also to consult his watch: he might as well know how many hours of discomfort awaited him. So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being. I do not think it is any use to guess what he said or did; but he was in a spare room with the door locked and his ear to it before he was clearly conscious again. And there he spent the rest of a most miserable night, looking every moment for some fumbling at the door: but nothing came.

The venturing back to his own room in the morning was attended with many listenings and quiverings. The door stood open, fortunately, and the blinds were up (the servants had been out of the house before the hour of drawing them down); there was, to be short, no trace of an inhabitant. The watch, too, was in its usual place; nothing was disturbed, only the wardrobe door had swung open, in accordance with its confirmed habit. A ring at the back door now announced the charwoman, who had been ordered the night before, and nerved Mr. Dunning, after letting her in, to continue his search in other parts of the house. It was equally fruitless.

The day thus begun went on dismally enough. He dared not go to the Museum: in spite of what the assistant had said, Karswell might turn up there, and Dunning felt he could not cope with a probably hostile stranger. His own house was odious; he hated sponging on the doctor. He spent some little time in a call at the Nursing Home, where he was slightly cheered by a good report of his housekeeper and maid. Towards lunch-time he betook himself to his club, again experiencing a gleam of satisfaction at seeing the Secretary of the Association. At luncheon Dunning told his friend the more material of his woes, but could not bring himself to speak of those that weighed most heavily on his spirits. “My poor dear man,” said the Secretary, “what an upset! Look here: we’re alone at home, absolutely. You must put up with us. Yes! no excuse: send your things in this afternoon.” Dunning was unable to stand out: he was, in truth, becoming acutely anxious, as the hours went on, as to what that night might have waiting for him. He was almost happy as he hurried home to pack up.

His friends, when they had time to take stock of him, were rather shocked at his lorn appearance, and did their best to keep him up to the mark. Not altogether without success: but, when the two men were smoking alone later, Dunning became dull again. Suddenly he said, “Gayton, I believe that alchemist man knows it was I who got his paper rejected.” Gayton whistled. “What makes you think that?” he said. Dunning told of his conversation with the Museum assistant, and Gayton could only agree that the guess seemed likely to be correct. “Not that I care much,” Dunning went on, “only it might be a nuisance if we were to meet. He’s a bad-tempered party, I imagine.” Conversation dropped again; Gayton became more and more strongly impressed with the desolateness that came over Dunning’s face and bearing, and finally – though with a considerable effort – he asked him point-blank whether something serious was not bothering him. Dunning gave an exclamation of relief. “I was perishing to get it off my mind,” he said. “Do you know anything about a man named John Harrington?” Gayton was thoroughly startled, and at the moment could only ask why. Then the complete story of Dunning’s experiences came out – what had happened in the tramcar, in his own house, and in the street, the troubling of spirit that had crept over him, and still held him; and he ended with the question he had begun with. Gayton was at a loss how to answer him. To tell the story of Harrington’s end would perhaps be right; only, Dunning was in a nervous state, the story was a grim one, and he could not help asking himself whether there were not a connecting link between these two cases, in the person of Karswell. It was a difficult concession for a scientific man, but it could be eased by the phrase “hypnotic suggestion”. In the end he decided that his answer tonight should be guarded; he would talk the situation over with his wife. So he said that he had known Harrington at Cambridge, and believed he had died suddenly in 1889, adding a few details about the man and his published work. He did talk over the matter with Mrs. Gayton, and, as he had anticipated, she leapt at once to the conclusion which had been hovering before him. It was she who reminded him of the surviving brother, Henry Harrington, and she also who suggested that he might be got hold of by means of their hosts of the day before. “He might be a hopeless crank,” objected Gayton. “That could be ascertained from the Bennetts, who knew him,” Mrs. Gayton retorted; and she undertook to see the Bennetts the very next day.

* * *

It is not necessary to tell in further detail the steps by which Henry Harrington and Dunning were brought together.

* * *

The next scene that does require to be narrated is a conversation that took place between the two. Dunning had told Harrington of the strange ways in which the dead man’s name had been brought before him, and had said something, besides, of his own subsequent experiences. Then he had asked if Harrington was disposed, in return, to recall any of the circumstances connected with his brother’s death. Harrington’s surprise at what he heard can be imagined: but his reply was readily given.

“John,” he said, “was in a very odd state, undeniably, from time to time, during some weeks before, though not immediately before, the catastrophe. There were several things; the principal notion he had was that he thought he was being followed. No doubt he was an impressionable man, but he never had had such fancies as this before. I cannot get it out of my mind that there was ill-will at work, and what you tell me about yourself reminds me very much of my brother. Can you think of any possible connecting link?”

“There is just one that has been taking shape vaguely in my mind. I’ve been told that your brother reviewed a book very severely not long before he died, and just lately I have happened to cross the path of the man who wrote that book in a way he would resent.”

“Don’t tell me the man was called Karswell.”

“Why not? that is exactly his name.”

Henry Harrington leant back. “That is final to my mind. Now I must explain further. From something he said, I feel sure that my brother John was beginning to believe – very much against his will – that Karswell was at the bottom of his trouble. I want to tell you what seems to me to have a bearing on the situation. My brother was a great musician, and used to run up to concerts in town. He came back, three months before he died, from one of these, and gave me his programme to look at – an analytical programme: he always kept them. ‘I nearly missed this one,’ he said. ‘I suppose I must have dropped it: anyhow, I was looking for it under my seat and in my pockets and so on, and my neighbour offered me his, said “might he give it me, he had no further use for it,” and he went away just afterwards. I don’t know who he was – a stout, clean-shaven man. I should have been sorry to miss it; of course I could have bought another, but this cost me nothing.’ At another time he told me that he had been very uncomfortable both on the way to his hotel and during the night. I piece things together now in thinking it over. Then, not very long after, he was going over these programmes, putting them in order to have them bound up, and in this particular one (which by the way I had hardly glanced at), he found quite near the beginning a strip of paper with some very odd writing on it in red and black – most carefully done – it looked to me more like Runic letters than anything else. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘this must belong to my fat neighbour. It looks as if it might be worth returning to him; it may be a copy of something; evidently someone has taken trouble over it. How can I find his address?’ We talked it over for a little and agreed that it wasn’t worth advertising about, and that my brother had better look out for the man at the next concert, to which he was going very soon. The paper was lying on the book and we were both by the fire; it was a cold, windy summer evening. I suppose the door blew open, though I didn’t notice it: at any rate a gust – a warm gust it was – came quite suddenly between us, took the paper and blew it straight into the fire: it was light, thin paper, and flared and went up the chimney in a single ash. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can’t give it back now.’ He said nothing for a minute: then rather crossly, ‘No, I can’t; but why you should keep on saying so I don’t know.’ I remarked that I didn’t say it more than once. ‘Not more than four times, you mean,’ was all he said. I remember all that very clearly, without any good reason; and now to come to the point. I don’t know if you looked at that book of Karswell’s which my unfortunate brother reviewed. It’s not likely that you should: but I did, both before his death and after it. The first time we made game of it together. It was written in no style at all – split infinitives, and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge rise. Then there was nothing that the man didn’t swallow: mixing up classical myths, and stories out of the Golden Legend with reports of savage customs of today – all very proper, no doubt, if you know how to use them, but he didn’t: he seemed to put the Golden Legend and the Golden Bough exactly on a par, and to believe both: a pitiable exhibition, in short. Well, after the misfortune, I looked over the book again. It was no better than before, but the impression which it left this time on my mind was different. I suspected – as I told you – that Karswell had borne ill-will to my brother, even that he was in some way responsible for what had happened; and now his book seemed to me to be a very sinister performance indeed. One chapter in particular struck me, in which he spoke of ‘casting the Runes’ on people, either for the purpose of gaining their affection or of getting them out of the way – perhaps more especially the latter: he spoke of all this in a way that really seemed to me to imply actual knowledge. I’ve not time to go into details, but the upshot is that I am pretty sure from information received that the civil man at the concert was Karswell: I suspect – I more than suspect – that the paper was of importance: and I do believe that if my brother had been able to give it back, he might have been alive now. Therefore, it occurs to me to ask you whether you have anything to put beside what I have told you.”

By way of answer, Dunning had the episode in the Manuscript Room at the British Museum to relate.

“Then he did actually hand you some papers; have you examined them? No? Because we must, if you’ll allow it, look at them at once, and very carefully.”

They went to the still empty house – empty, for the two servants were not yet able to return to work. Dunning’s portfolio of papers was gathering dust on the writing-table. In it were the quires of small-sized scribbling paper which he used for his transcripts: and from one of these, as he took it up, there slipped and fluttered out into the room with uncanny quickness, a strip of thin light paper. The window was open, but Harrington slammed it to, just in time to intercept the paper, which he caught. “I thought so,” he said; “it might be the identical thing that was given to my brother. You’ll have to look out, Dunning; this may mean something quite serious for you.”

A long consultation took place. The paper was narrowly examined. As Harrington had said, the characters on it were more like Runes than anything else, but not decipherable by either man, and both hesitated to copy them, for fear, as they confessed, of perpetuating whatever evil purpose they might conceal. So it has remained impossible (if I may anticipate a little) to ascertain what was conveyed in this curious message or commission. Both Dunning and Harrington are firmly convinced that it had the effect of bringing its possessors into very undesirable company. That it must be returned to the source whence it came they were agreed, and further, that the only safe and certain way was that of personal service; and here contrivance would be necessary, for Dunning was known by sight to Karswell. He must, for one thing, alter his appearance by shaving his beard. But then might not the blow fall first? Harrington thought they could time it. He knew the date of the concert at which the ‘black spot’ had been put on his brother: it was June 18th. The death had followed on Sept. 18th. Dunning reminded him that three months had been mentioned on the inscription on the car-window. “Perhaps,” he added, with a cheerless laugh, “mine may be a bill at three months too. I believe I can fix it by my diary. Yes, April 23rd was the day at the Museum; that brings us to July 23rd. Now, you know, it becomes extremely important to me to know anything you will tell me about the progress of your brother’s trouble, if it is possible for you to speak of it.” “Of course. Well, the sense of being watched whenever he was alone was the most distressing thing to him. After a time I took to sleeping in his room, and he was the better for that: still, he talked a great deal in his sleep. What about? Is it wise to dwell on that, at least before things are straightened out? I think not, but I can tell you this: two things came for him by post during those weeks, both with a London postmark, and addressed in a commercial hand. One was a woodcut of Bewick’s, roughly torn out of the page: one which shows a moonlit road and a man walking along it, followed by an awful demon creature. Under it were written the lines out of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ (which I suppose the cut illustrates) about one who, having once looked round –

Walks on,

And turns no more his head,

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

The other was a calendar, such as tradesmen often sends. My brother paid no attention to this, but I looked at it after his death, and found that everything after Sept. 18 had been torn out. You may be surprised at his having gone out alone the evening he was killed, but the fact is that during the last ten days or so of his life he had been quite free from the sense of being followed or watched.”

The end of the consultation was this. Harrington, who knew a neighbour of Karswell’s, thought he saw a way of keeping a watch on his movements. It would be Dunning’s part to be in readiness to try to cross Karswell’s path at any moment, to keep the paper safe and in a place of ready access.

They parted. The next weeks were no doubt a severe strain upon Dunning’s nerves: the intangible barrier which had seemed to rise about him on the day when he received the paper, gradually developed into a brooding blackness that cut him off from the means of escape to which one might have thought he might resort. No one was at hand who was likely to suggest them to him, and he seemed robbed of all initiative. He waited with inexpressible anxiety as May, June, and early July passed on, for a mandate from Harrington. But all this time Karswell remained immovable at Lufford.

At last, in less than a week before the date he had come to look upon as the end of his earthly activities, came a telegram: “Leaves Victoria by boat train Thursday night. Do not miss. I come to you tonight. Harrington.”

He arrived accordingly, and they concocted plans. The train left Victoria at nine and its last stop before Dover was Croydon West. Harrington would mark down Karswell at Victoria, and look out for Dunning at Croydon, calling to him if need were by a name agreed upon. Dunning, disguised as far as might be, was to have no label or initials on any hand luggage, and must at all costs have the paper with him.

Dunning’s suspense as he waited on the Croydon platform I need not attempt to describe. His sense of danger during the last days had only been sharpened by the fact that the cloud about him had perceptibly been lighter; but relief was an ominous symptom, and, if Karswell eluded him now, hope was gone: and there were so many chances of that. The rumour of the journey might be itself a device. The twenty minutes in which he paced the platform and persecuted every porter with inquiries as to the boat train were as bitter as any he had spent. Still, the train came, and Harrington was at the window. It was important, of course, that there should be no recognition: so Dunning got in at the farther end of the corridor carriage, and only gradually made his way to the compartment where Harrington and Karswell were. He was pleased, on the whole, to see that the train was far from full.

Karswell was on the alert, but gave no sign of recognition. Dunning took the seat not immediately facing him, and attempted, vainly at first, then with increasing command of his faculties, to reckon the possibilities of making the desired transfer. Opposite to Karswell, and next to Dunning, was a heap of Karswell’s coats on the seat. It would be of no use to slip the paper into these – he would not be safe, or would not feel so, unless in some way it could be proffered by him and accepted by the other. There was a handbag, open, and with papers in it. Could he manage to conceal this (so that perhaps Karswell might leave the carriage without it), and then find and give it to him? This was the plan that suggested itself. If he could only have counselled with Harrington! but that could not be. The minutes went on. More than once Karswell rose and went out into the corridor. The second time Dunning was on the point of attempting to make the bag fall off the seat, but he caught Harrington’s eye, and read in it a warning.

Karswell, from the corridor, was watching: probably to see if the two men recognized each other. He returned, but was evidently restless: and, when he rose the third time, hope dawned, for something did slip off his seat and fall with hardly a sound to the floor. Karswell went out once more, and passed out of range of the corridor window. Dunning picked up what had fallen, and saw that the key was in his hands in the form of one of Cook’s ticket-cases, with tickets in it. These cases have a pocket in the cover, and within very few seconds the paper of which we have heard was in the pocket of this one. To make the operation more secure, Harrington stood in the doorway of the compartment and fiddled with the blind. It was done, and done at the right time, for the train was now slowing down towards Dover.

In a moment more Karswell re-entered the compartment. As he did so, Dunning, managing, he knew not how, to suppress the tremble in his voice, handed him the ticket-case, saying, “May I give you this, sir? I believe it is yours.” After a brief glance at the ticket inside, Karswell uttered the hoped-for response, “Yes, it is; much obliged to you, sir,” and he placed it in his breast pocket.

Even in the few moments that remained – moments of tense anxiety, for they knew not to what a premature finding of the paper might lead – both men noticed that the carriage seemed to darken about them and to grow warmer; that Karswell was fidgety and oppressed; that he drew the heap of loose coats near to him and cast it back as if it repelled him; and that he then sat upright and glanced anxiously at both. They, with sickening anxiety, busied themselves in collecting their belongings; but they both thought that Karswell was on the point of speaking when the train stopped at Dover Town. It was natural that in the short space between town and pier they should both go into the corridor.

At the pier they got out, but so empty was the train that they were forced to linger on the platform until Karswell should have passed ahead of them with his porter on the way to the boat, and only then was it safe for them to exchange a pressure of the hand and a word of concentrated congratulation. The effect upon Dunning was to make him almost faint. Harrington made him lean up against the wall, while he himself went forward a few yards within sight of the gangway to the boat, at which Karswell had now arrived. The man at the head of it examined his ticket, and, laden with coats he passed down into the boat. Suddenly the official called after him, “You, sir, beg pardon, did the other gentleman show his ticket?” “What the devil do you mean by the other gentleman?” Karswell’s snarling voice called back from the deck. The man bent over and looked at him. “The devil? Well, I don’t know, I’m sure,” Harrington heard him say to himself, and then aloud, “My mistake, sir; must have been your rugs! Ask your pardon.” And then, to a subordinate near him, “’Ad he got a dog with him, or what? Funny thing: I could ’a’ swore ’e wasn’t alone. Well, whatever it was, they’ll ’ave to see to it aboard. She’s off now. Another week and we shall be gettin’ the ’oliday customers.” In five minutes more there was nothing but the lessening lights of the boat, the long line of the Dover lamps, the night breeze, and the moon.

Long and long the two sat in their room at the ‘Lord Warden’. In spite of the removal of their greatest anxiety, they were oppressed with a doubt, not of the lightest. Had they been justified in sending a man to his death, as they believed they had? Ought they not to warn him, at least? “No,” said Harrington; “if he is the murderer I think him, we have done no more than is just. Still, if you think it better – but how and where can you warn him?” “He was booked to Abbeville only,” said Dunning. “I saw that. If I wired to the hotels there in Joanne’s Guide, ‘Examine your ticket-case, Dunning,’ I should feel happier. This is the 21st: he will have a day. But I am afraid he has gone into the dark.” So telegrams were left at the hotel office.

It is not clear whether these reached their destination, or whether, if they did, they were understood. All that is known is that, on the afternoon of the 23rd, an English traveller, examining the front of St Wulfram’s Church at Abbeville, then under extensive repair, was struck on the head and instantly killed by a stone falling from the scaffold erected round the north-western tower, there being, as was clearly proved, no workman on the scaffold at that moment: and the traveller’s papers identified him as Mr. Karswell.

Only one detail shall be added. At Karswell’s sale a set of Bewick, sold with all faults, was acquired by Harrington. The page with the woodcut of the traveller and the demon was, as he had expected, mutilated. Also, after a judicious interval, Harrington repeated to Dunning something of what he had heard his brother say in his sleep: but it was not long before Dunning stopped him.

Merry-Go-Round, Never Broke Down

Jason L. Kawa

“Come on, hurry up!” your daughter yells, tugging desperately at your hand. “I want to ride the merry-go-round!”

“I know, I know. Stop pulling” you say to her – dragging yourself along on tired, aching legs. “We’re going, calm down!”

“But they’re closing soon,” she pleads. “We have to get there before they stop!”

Happy that the day is finally coming to an end, you figure one last ride can’t hurt. Right? Besides, it’s only the merry-go-round. This is the easy one. Not like the nauseating tilt-a-whirl, the rickety roller coaster, or the demonic, gut-wrenching pirate ship. No, this will be nice and relaxing to finish off the day.

As you’re led along past the countless parents, crying children, and loitering teens, the big domed pavilion housing the carousel looms over the center of the park. You hear the calliope music penetrating through the crowds; the sound mixing with the smell of popcorn, cotton candy, and the bright flashing lights. All of them assault your eyes and senses – all add to the carnival-like atmosphere of the small amusement park.

“Last call,” yells the ticket-taker over a loudspeaker.

“Come on!” your daughter cries again. This time her yank hurts, making you wince in pain.

She leads you towards the Fast-Track lane to the left of the main queue.

Glad you paid that extra five bucks now, aren’t you?

The doe-eyed ticket collector looks at your arm band and waves you on through. The carousel slows, the poled horses stop cranking just as the machine grinds to a halt. The happy music continues to pump out of the decorative band-machine within the middle of the contraption.

“Yay!” your daughter yells with delight, hopping onto the wooden platform. “We made it just in time.”

You follow her onboard and towards two open horses near the inner potion of the ride. The beating of the base drum, the crashing of the cymbals, the rolling of the snares, and the piping organ echo about the canopy – making it hard to think let alone communicate. The festive music compliments both the corniness and the timelessness of this old ride.

“This one, this one’s open. I want this one!” she jumps up and down, pointing to one of the poled horses. You help her hop up upon the saddle of the ornamental animal, all the while observing at the detail applied to the ancient fixture. “Right there, right there – get on,” she demands, indicating the open horse for you just next to hers.

Hoping to have enjoyed the ride from on one of the non-moving benches, you comply with her wish with a shrug, hulling your aching bones up onto the horse and tightly grabbing hold of the thick brass pole. You look about at the old carousel. Acrylic paintings surrounding the top of the machine depict all types of circus animals – elephants balancing on balls, lions jumping through rings of fire, bears riding tricycles, monkeys dancing. You marvel at the skill applied by the hands of some long-gone artist.

In the center area of the ride, the non-moving portion, you spy the band-machine, playing the calliope tunes from punch-paper fed rolls. It sort-of reminds you of a player piano in one of those old western movies. A flywheel at the top of the machine turns the floppy, dried-out belts and greasy gears – pumping the drums, crashing the cymbals, and keying-up the registers on the organ’s pipes and bells.

Wurlitzer 146-B Automatic Band Machine – North Towanda, NY – 1924, the name plate reads.

Glancing to your right, you see a little girl and her mother sitting on the horses next to you. The little girl stares at you with blank expressionless eyes. You smile at her, but she doesn’t respond – she simply leans her head against the pole. Poor little thing, you think. She’s so tired but must get in this one last ride. Then you peer over at her mother. She has the same worn look on her face. She cocks a small friendly smile your way and tries to say something, but stops before uttering a word. To your left and just behind your daughter, is a young teenage couple, sitting hand in hand on one of the motionless coaches – the one you wish you were occupying this very moment. They’re holding hands and staring at each other, yet they aren’t smiling, as one would expect of a couple in love.

Your attention on the young lovers is broken by the carousel operator. He walks up over the platform, past you and your daughter and the other patrons, then steps down in the middle near the control lever. He’s an old man with white hair and a big belly bulging through a dirty, worn-out blue work shirt. Seriously, by the looks of this guy I would say he’s even older than the carousel, you think to yourself. He glances up at you with cold eyes, as if he heard your thoughts. Then, without a word, he pulls on the lever engaging the transmission. The great machine groans and slowly starts moving. Your daughter screams and laughs in delight as the horses start cranking up and down with the accelerating platform. The pulsating hiss of compressed air joins in with the music as you roll about the circle.

“Here we go! Here we go!” she shouts happily.

You smile as the cool breeze generated by the turning carousel swirls up through the canopy. The smell of carnival food, together with the sounds of your daughter’s joy make you feel like a child yourself once again. Closing your eyes, you absorb the motion of the old ride swinging you around and around with the music – the way it has for generation upon generation.

Half expecting the acceleration to stop, you notice that the carousel continues to move faster and faster. The music becomes more rapid, louder, distorted. You feel the beat of the base drum in your chest and the whistling of the pipes echoing through your mind, like some distant memory. Opening your eyes, you get a weird feeling; like you no longer have a sense of time – a feeling that you don’t know how long you’ve been riding. The outside world seems to slip away. Your daughter shrieks in joy beside you.

But something is changing.

Something on the ride is different. Things start to move around you in abnormal ways. The park outside becomes a blur, then dark, then invisible. Looking up to the paintings above you – the animals – the animals begin to trot and swing about. They dance hypnotically to the pulsating music. Lions are jumping through hoops. Elephants are balancing on one leg atop balls. Bears wearing little fez hats are riding tricycles about in rhythmic figure-eight patterns.

Your daughter laughs manically with pleasure. The carousel moves faster, the horses crank up and down – their heads kick around and they whinny and snort.

Feeling as though you’re hallucinating you look over to the other people on the ride. They are staring back at you. Their eyes are sunken into their heads. Their hair is long, dirty and matted. Their skin is pale and dusty. The little girl on your right – the one with the blank expression…she is old, far older than you. Her back is hunched over at an impossible angle, her shoulders are resting upon the pole, her mouth hangs agape, reveling missing teeth. Her mother beside her is nothing more than a shrunken mass of a skeleton. With another climbing motion of the horse, her bones crumble and fall to platform floor – dust rising as they pile like dry-rotted kindling.

Your daughter laughs. “Faster! Faster!” she yells, “How fast do you think we can go? Just how fast can it go?”

You try to focus as the carousel screams around its circular track – the Wurlitzer pounding the hokey tunes. The ornamental horses’ legs begin to march – hooves beating against the wooden boards in step with the bass drum, like some horrible march towards a wasteland eternity.

Looking past your daughter you see the teenage couple, still hand in hand, but now no longer gazing at each other. Instead, their stares are trained directly towards you. They are pointing and laughing hideously at you. Their eyes, bulging and inhuman, have become red and white swirls, spiraling circularly towards vacant pupils.

Jerking your head away from the terrible sight, you try to let go but can’t – your hands are welded to the brass pole. You cannot move – your whole body is fused to the ceramic horse. Feeling that you are going to be sick, you begin to wonder just how long you’ve been on this ride.

Hours? Months? Years?

You look back to the grotesque little being to your right – she is raising a bony hand towards you, mouthing something but no sound escaping her dusty jaws. Even if it could, it would never drown out the insane music. She tries to lean towards you but instead falls off the horse, crashing to the ground in a heap of dust and rags – just like her mother only moments before.

Was it only moments before? Or was it decades, or centuries in the past?

The merry music keeps playing, the carousel keeps turning.

Looking back up you see all the other riders reaching out to you, pleading for help. But you can’t help them – you can’t even help yourself. You are stuck on the ride, like a mouse on a glue-trap. You make eye-contact again with the operator – he is grinning a wide toothless smile towards you. His eyes too have become like the teenagers – bulging red and white and swirling wildly. They momentarily enthrall you in a hypnotic trance, but you break free with all your strength.

The top of the carousel pavilion has disappeared into a swirling vortex of black clouds – funneling so far into the sky you can’t tell where the ride ends and forever begins. You fear that any moment that you, your daughter, and the whole lot of riders will be sucked up into the heavens above.

Or is it Hell above?

Part of you wants it to happen.

Your daughter again screams out in delight. “Giddy-up! Giddy-up!” she yells to her horse, slapping in across the back. The horse whinnies and its legs kick out in rapid running motions, all the while as it moves up and down along its pole.

You feel you can no longer hold on – you feel the darkness creeping towards you. The cyclonic motion of the carousel is sucking the very life out of your body. But just when the last bit of energy is taken from you. Just when you are about to give up and lean against the brass pole and sleep, the carousel begins to slow. You feel the drive-shaft release and the platform begins to coast in free motion. Then the brake is applied and the machine slowly slides to a smooth stop – the Wurlitzer playing its tunes all along.

You take a deep breath. You try to remove yourself from the horse but can’t – you’re too weak to move a muscle. All you can do is lean your forehead against the cold brass pole in front of you and take deep breaths.

“Again, again,” your daughter yells out from beside you. You want to say ‘no’. You want to say that you must go now while the ride is stopped, but you have no strength – no ability to do any of the sorts.

Slowly turning your head, you see a father and son step forth to the two open horses next to you – those which the ancient mother and daughter had just fallen from. They move up and he lifts the boy onto the horse directly beside you, stepping on piles of rags and bones that were once a little girl and an adult woman – he doesn’t seem to notice.

The little boy bounces up and down in anticipation, as his father takes the horse beside him. The boy turns, looking at you. He waves and smiles, but you can’t wave back, you can’t do anything except stare blankly back at him.

The operator slowly shuffles back across the platform, turning and twisting to avoid bumping his big belly against the horses and poles. Momentarily making eye contact with him, you see his eyes are normal once again; you see the regret in them, the sorrow, the age. He quickly looks away and steps down to the controls. Yanking the great lever, he puts the carousel back in gear and the ride lurches forward. The band machine switches music rolls and a new march begins to play.

“Yay,” yells the little boy beside you.

His father laughs at his son’s enthusiasm. “Yay, here we go buddy.”

You can no longer look at them.

The snare drums crack and the organs pipe up as the eternal machine again picks up speed.

Round and round we go…Where we – No – When we stop, nobody knows.

Beside you, your daughter screams out in joy. But it’s different, something has changed – her voice is no longer the same. It’s deeper, raspy, more mature.

You turn your head and look to her. You make eye contact with your daughter – your little girl. But the face looking back to you is no longer the child you once knew – the wild eyes, the long silky hair, the soft innocent skin. No, the face looking back to you is that of a mirror – that of a person as old as you were when the two of you first boarded the ride.

Twenty-seven years ago.

And the bass drum continues to beat, the cymbals crash, and the organ pipes out a happy festive tune. The way it has since your daughter was young, since you were young, since the previous century was new. And the way it will long after you’ve turned to dust, just like all the others. Because at this place, in this time, the Merry-go-Round will never break down.

The Murmur of Its Name

Stephen Kotowych

Takeda stalked the dim hallways of Maku Castle, katana drawn, each step bringing him closer to his revenge.

His arm brushed an oozing wooden wall, and he pulled away with a hiss, gripping the iron amulet hanging around his neck. The old onmyoji had incanted it as protection against the corruptions the traitor, Lord Nishino, welcomed into their land. Wrinkling his nose at the fetid slime on the lacquered shoulder of his armor, Takeda said a prayer to his family gods that the amulet would be enough.

Indistinct silhouettes of men with swords dashed past on the other side of the shoji screens dividing the rooms and Takeda went still, listening as their footfalls disappeared down the hallway. From elsewhere in the castle sounded the din of blade on blade and men dying. Eddies of acrid yellow smoke whorled around Takeda, stinging eyes and nose. The fires his men set throughout the castle spread fast.

All around him spread the corruption the Aramitama invaders brought from across the sea. They were men not unlike himself Takeda had been told, but seeing the state of the castle he wondered.

Crusty unnatural lichens grew in corners and crept up walls, peeling and flaking like dead skin. The air was thick and moist, the tatami floor mats reeking of mildew. Even the shoji seemed wrong, as if the translucent screens were not rice paper but thin flesh stretched taught.

He shook off his hesitation. Nishino lurked nearby, and Takeda would have his revenge.

Perhaps it was the restless spirit of his slain daimyo, Lord Tennoji, that guided him. Or perhaps Takeda’s own hatred for Nishino and his treachery gave preternatural power to sense his villainy was near. Whatever the source, Takeda knew his long wait was at an end.

Oh, and how they had waited.

After Nishino betrayed their master to the Aramitama invaders, Takeda and the most loyal of the daimyo’s men swore secret oaths to avenge him. While Lord Nishino did the bidding of the Aramitama’s Great Khan and waged war on the Shogun, Lord Tennoji’s men dispersed and waited.

Some took up roles as tradesmen or monks to dissuade Lord Nishino’s spies that they intended revenge. Takeda played the part of the dissipated samurai, consorting with geishas and stumbling home from sake houses in the small hours, debasing his honour in the hope of lulling Lord Nishino into complacency.

He knew how people looked at him, the disapproval they whispered behind his back about how far the daimyo’s chief retainer had fallen. How he must never have had any real honour at all if this was how he behaved.

But he bore it all, silently, letting people think what he wanted them to. If only they knew how bitter was the sake, how hollow the laughter of the geishas! Though it pained his honor, his honor – and that of his murdered master – demanded no less.

In truth, he had not thought to make it as far as he had; none of them did. The main gate was only lightly defended, the guards easily overcome. Takeda’s men scaled the outer stone walls in two places without resistance. Where were the patrols of archers? There were some fighting men and a few of Lord Nishino’s samurai, but where were the rest? The bulk of Nishino’s forces were away at war, yes, but Takeda’s men spent a year scouting the castle. They had counted more men than this in Nishino’s personal guard.

And what of the women and children, nowhere to be found? Likewise, Takeda expected servants of all kinds in a grand castle such as Maku, yet none mustered to put out the fires.

Two more shapes hustled past on the other side of the shoji divider, and Takeda paused. Once they passed Takeda padded softly down the hall, but after only a few steps a chill ran down the back of his neck. Instinct sent him pivoting on the ball of his foot, turning his back to the solid wooden walls, readying his sword.

The two men crashed through the wood-and-membrane screen from the adjacent hallway, swords drawn and screaming “Iä! Iä! Fhtagn!”

With a graceful step to his left, Takeda slashed his katana in a vicious arc that split the near man from grin to groin. Making a sound like a braying donkey he fell and was still.

Takeda rushed in a backward run to the far end of the hall, keeping the second swordsman in sight. He threw his sedge hat spinning through the air as his opponent charged, and the man slashed it in two, in midair, without breaking stride. “Iä!” he shouted as he closed.

Was it an Aramitama word? Takeda wondered. A faint smile twinged at the edge of his mouth. Here, at last, was a worthy opponent in Lord Nishino’s employ.

The clash of steel as their blades met sent harsh vibrations through Takeda’s hands and arms, a familiar sting that fired his heart and made him think of long years spent in the service of his daimyo.

The fight ranged up and down the hallway, swords ringing, as first Takeda and then the swordsman gained temporary advantage. He spun through kata after kata – Opening Lotus, Snow Rolling Down Mountain, Leaves Falling on Water – only to be matched again and again.

A space opened between them, and there was the briefest of pauses as each man caught his breath. Their eyes stayed locked, sword tips dancing a hair’s breadth apart, each searching for a clue as to his opponent’s next move and a way to seek advantage.

Takeda centered himself, focused on his breathing. Every sword fight is a dance, he remembered from his earliest lessons. Your opponent’s footwork will lead you. Look to the centre of mass: a man may feint, his eyes may lie, but his chest will always betray his movements before he makes them.

In his peripheral vision Takeda saw the subtle change in the man’s footing, the shifting of his weight to his leading leg. The swordsman angled his torso almost imperceptibly, and Takeda had him. Anticipating the moment the swordsman sprang at him Takeda was already collapsing backwards in the Bending Reed kata, absorbing the man’s attack and using his own momentum against him.

They smashed through a shoji, landing hard on the floor on the other side. Takeda’s katana was buried to the hilt in the swordsman’s chest, and it took all his strength to push the dead man off him.

He crouched on one knee, catching his breath. The dual lasted no more than a minute, but Takeda had almost forgotten the fatigue after a battle, of the toll that total mind and body commitment to swordcraft took on the serious student.

Panting, he acknowledged how much he’d missed it.

His eyes searched the darkness for some suggestion of where he was. Slowly the gloom resolved into the faint outlines of a wide, low-ceilinged gallery, with a staircase to a higher level at its centre and a single exit on the north wall. The place smelled damp and sour, like fresh turned earth and rot.

Drums started pounding somewhere in the castle, drums more felt than heard as their deep throoming reverberating through the floorboards and the walls. Did the tinny sound of cymbals join them, or was that more swordplay? The voices of many drums competed against one another, and Takeda couldn’t tell if it was a simple cacophony or some weird rhythm lost on him.

He stood, and was taken aback by an eerie glow coming from the room’s central staircase, which revealed itself overgrown by thick vines pocked here and there with putrid-smelling flowers. Their queer petals gave off a phosphorescent glow that grew in intensity as Takeda moved toward them.

The strange plants grew down the staircase from the level above, making the way impassable. They anchored themselves into the wood using a tangle of thin tendrils Takeda could not describe in his mind, even though he looked right at them. They were something like the runners sent out by climbing plants, but something too like the many-fingered coral polyps he had seen exposed at low tide.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Why did it hurt to look at the plants and to think of them?

The flowers glowed like green coals, and the sickly light gave enough illumination to reveal stranger flora lining the walls. Every few feet stood low wooden tables or narrow stone pedestals topped by grotesque bonsai, not one of which Takeda could mistake for a tree. Some had trunks, yes, but instead of tiny leaves or pads of fine pine needles, small sacks hung like pustules from withered-looking branches.

Others could only be described as stalks which sprouted vicious-looking mushroom things, swollen with spores. Takeda put a sleeve to his face and backed away.

This was an interior room, receiving no sunlight. What kind of plants grew in such darkness?

The drumming continued, sounding louder through the door on the north wall. The hallway beyond glowed with fox fire, as if disturbed by his presence. He paused there in the doorway, sword in hand, and felt the spectre of doubt and trepidation creep upon him.

Lining the hall were more bizarre plants. The hallway was so pregnant with the stench of rotting vegetation that Takeda tasted it on the air and gagged. Within, it was as humid as a summer’s day though it was still only early spring. Terrible fungi covered floor and wall and ceiling alike. Many pulsed and glowed with unnatural colors that Takeda had never seen in nature. Others hissed and fizzed with a sound like cold water dashed against hot stones.

Takeda steeled his resolve anew. Beyond this hallway, wherever the drums were drumming, he knew he would find Lord Nishino. Would he let a few bizarre plants undo his courage? Had he not vowed his life to avenge his master?

He turned back to the room of unnatural vegetation and spat upon the floor.

With a grunt he dashed down the overgrown hallway, winding through dim passageways as the boom of drums grew louder. He held his breath as long as he could so as not to breathe in the reek, all the while avoiding looking too long at any one spot, for doing so meant seeing patterns, like kanji characters, begin to resolve among the fungi. Was it the language of the Aramitama, or something older, some dead tongue? The words were unintelligible to Takeda, but in his bones was the certainty they spoke of dread and terrible things.

Fear rose again in his heart. What had Lord Nishino done here? What was the price of service to the Great Khan?

* * *

Takeda emerged from the darkness of the castle into a low-walled courtyard enclosing a stone garden. Thunderous drumming that shook his whole frame came from two dozen taiko of various sizes atop the low walls. Each was manned by drummers wearing only loincloth and hachimaki tied around their heads.

At the garden’s center, amidst fresh-raked ripples in fine gravel, knelt Lord Nishino, arrayed in white breeches and matching haori jacket. A tanto dagger lay before him on a block of polished wood. Using a long brush he was intently writing a death poem on a war fan. His lone attendant knelt nearby, preparing a final tea ceremony.

The chill of an early spring evening was already in the air, and the scene was lit by the golden light of a dying day. Looming over the scene was the great height of Castle Maku, yellow-black smoke and tongues of flame licking skyward from its wooden hulk. The tang of smoke mingled with the perfumes of flowers.

A pair of guards stood on either side of the passageway, foolishly facing inward toward the garden to witness their lord’s suicide. The drumming drowning out all sound, they didn’t hear Takeda approach until he was on top of them.

Takeda slipped his katana between the first guard’s ribs before the man could even get his feet set, and then whirled to avoid a vicious swipe the second guard made with his long-bladed polearm. Takeda jump-stepped to within a foot of the guard. Catching the polearm’s shaft under his left arm and pinning it, Takeda thrust his sword through the second guard’s throat before the man could even react. He died in a spray of gore.

The drummers saw the battle at last and faltered, their unsettling rhythm failing. As the drumming died, Takeda heard the trickle of water from the garden, the sounds of battle from the parapets, and roaring above it all the castle burning.

“Nishino!” Takeda screamed, brandishing his sword above his head. He strode out into the garden, feeling the crunch of bone-white gravel beneath his feet. He could fight on it if he must, but it would be unsure footing at best. The fight may start here, he decided, but he would lead the traitor back to solid ground to finish it.

Lord Nishino looked up from his reverie, confused for a moment, and blanched. Takeda understood why. Nishino had only the dagger before him and was without his swords, his only armed guards dead by Takeda’s hand.

Takeda advanced over a small wooden bridge spanning an ornamental pond. Instead of hungry koi, small jellyfish-like creatures pulsed through the babbling water.

Standing at last in the center of the garden, only a sword-length from his enemy, Takeda saw the full corruption of the place. Bizarre plants like those in the castle filled the space, but many times taller. In place of the traditional stone lantern stood one of the invaders terrible altars, its pale limestone slick and stained black. It stank of sacrifice.

Takeda sheathed his blade, and went to his knees. He bowed low from the waist, keeping his eyes on Nishino at all times. It pained him to show such formal deference, but the man was a daimyo, rightful or not, and honor demanded no less. It would show this ronin a true samurai.

“I am Takeda, a samurai of the Hayashi clan. I am retainer to Lord Tennoji Kiyotsuna, the rightful daimyo of this province, whom you betrayed to the Aramitama. My men and I have pledged to avenge him. It is we who have defeated you.”

Nishino gave a slow nod. “It would seem you have.”

There was coldness behind Nishino’s eyes that unsettled Takeda. He tried to shake off the feeling. It had been a day for such things.

“Odd that you should pledge loyalty to a dead man. Surely you know the Aramitama will win,” said Nishino. “There is no hope for those who oppose them. You are ronin. If you seek new masters, the promises the Aramitama make to loyal servants –”

“Be silent, traitor!” Takeda’s blade hissed as he drew it half from the scabbard. “Remember that I came here to kill you, Nishino-san. I have seen the horrors within your household, the ones for which you abandoned honor and country. Your very soul! It brings me comfort that I cannot fathom why you have done what you have.”

“Then I am undone.” Nishino bowed low from the waist, his eyes downcast. “I am already arrayed for death. I beg you: permit me the final honor of seppuku, that I may die as a samurai.”

“Shall I give you more consideration than you gave my master!”

Takeda’s recurring nightmare was of the horrors his master had suffered upon an Aramitama altar, butchered alive by one of their foul priests because of Nishino’s treachery. He always woke screaming when, in the dream, the priest gazed into a bowl of his master’s blood and Takeda’s own face stared back.

Nishino remained bowed low, the roar of the fire behind them filling the space between the two men for a long moment.

“Honour demands no less,” said Takeda, hating the words as he spoke them. “Even for a wretch like you.” Nishino straightened up, a look of gratitude on his face.

“Do not think me so selfless,” Takeda said. “I still intend to make your head a gift to Shogun. Only then will I consider my vendetta complete. And I permit you seppuku only if you use this blade.” From a small scabbard in his belt, Takeda withdrew a tanto, holding the cold steel out on his fingertips for Nishino to examine.

“This is my master’s knife. I would see you die upon it.”

Nishino gave a grim smile. “Most fitting.”

Takeda cast a skeptical eye at Nishino’s reedy attendant. “Where is your second?”

“I have no second,” Nishino said.

Takeda straightened, shocked at the thought. He bowed low again.

“Then I shall do it.”

Nishino nodded. “Do not strike until the last moment. The suffering is important.”

Takeda thought this an odd thing to say, but nodded his ascent. He would not begrudge the traitor all the suffering on earth. Standing, he positioned himself to the man’s left and drew his sword, ready to decapitate Nishino when the pain of suicide became too great to bear.

Nishino drank his final cup of tea with a slurping sound of appreciation. At this, one of the drummers gave a cry and the taiko sprang to life again, their cacophonous rhythm accompanied by clanging symbols all out of time.

Takeda stood impassive as Nishino opened his haori wide, picked up the tanto and, drawing a deep breath, plunged it into his belly. He dragged the knife across and up through his abdomen, his face red and twisting in agony. He made only the slightest grunts as he widened the cut.

A few sharp intakes of breath and Nishino exclaimed through gritted teeth: “Truly, this gives relish to the tea!” He slumped forward with a gurgling noise.

It was Takeda’s cue, but as he raised his sword a powerful salty smell overcame him, drowning out the stench of blood and bowel. It was like the fishy scents he remembered from his childhood on the southern coast.

As red, steaming rivers of Nishino’s life flowed upon the ground, so too did a thick, viscous mucous. Coils spilled from the daimyo’s slit belly, not the reds and pinks of a man’s innards but greys, and cold blues and greens. They flared from beneath the slumped corpse with a wet, sticky sound revealing themselves as unearthly feelers and protuberances, thrashing and probing the air.

Takeda staggered backward, crunching Nishino’s war fan underfoot. What devilry was this? Looking down at the man’s death poem it was not kanji but the dread symbols from the fungi staring back at him in dark ink.

This was never about death with honor, he realized, but about birthing something terrible into the world.

High above the drummers on the wall, all around Castle Maku coiled fearful limbs like those that burst from Nishino’s body, but vastly larger. Seeming immune to the fire, they thrashed here and there striking at Takeda’s men through the smoke, hurling them from catwalks and parapets or crushing them within their terrible coils.

The gruesome limbs in the garden writhed and flailed as they slithered toward the blackened altar, dragging Nishino’s corpse along like the shell of some terrible crustacean.

This garden was where the women and children had gone, and the servants, and even Nishino’s own fighting men. All to sate these terrible gods of the Aramitama. Takeda looked to his feet, understanding at last the true nature of the crushed matter he stood upon.

He was screaming but the drums drowned it out.

The creature heaved itself upon the stone altar, its rotund hulk sluicing free of the corpse. Takeda dropped his sword, his sanity destroyed by the unfathomable sight he beheld.

From a beak-mouth the creature made horrible, guttural vocalizations in a dead language that never was.

At the murmur of its name Takeda’s knees buckled. He bowed low and from a deep and primal terror he worshipped the thing.

The Shunned House

H.P. Lovecraft

Chapter I

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street – the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette – and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman’s home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John’s, whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world’s greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side-hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was – and for that matter still is – of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century – the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panelling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street – at first called Back Street – was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with door and two windows above ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.

The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off the weather-beaten front door with its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.

What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved out some twenty years after building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of the dampness and fungous growth in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts of the hallways, or the quality of the well and pump water. These things were bad enough, and these were all that gained belief among the persons whom I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer surmises which formed an undercurrent of folklore among old-time servants and humble folk; surmises which never travelled far, and which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern population.

The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community as in any real sense ‘haunted’. There were no widespread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the house was ‘unlucky’, but that is as far as even they went. What was really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or more accurately, had died there, since after some peculiar happenings over sixty years ago the building had become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all cut off suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, so that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may have naturally had. And those who did not die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption, and sometimes a decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building. Neighbouring houses, it must be added, seemed entirely free from the noxious quality.

This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to shew me the notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled, and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass, and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wallpaper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.

But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For one thing, the bad odour of the house was strongest there; and for another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside, were truly horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other situation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading windows.

We never – even in our wildest Hallowe’en moods – visited this cellar by night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially when the day was dark and wet. There was also a subtler thing we often thought we detected – a very strange thing which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor – a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed, and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk – a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.

Chapter II

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had collected concerning the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane, conservative physician of the old school, and for all his interest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts toward the abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realised that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy’s fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations.

The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and a local historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one manservant in a Georgian homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on a steep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather – a cousin of that celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt His Majesty’s armed schooner Gaspee in 1772 – had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp, low-ceiled library with the musty white panelling, heavy carved overmantel, and small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics and records of his ancient family, among which were many dubious allusions to the shunned house in Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not far distant – for Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court-house along the precipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.

When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate. The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and after a certain night in that house he did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentle soul whose long years were filled only with honour, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning. I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John’s churchyard – the place that Poe loved – the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.

The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace of the sinister either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family who built it. Yet from the first a taint of calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was apparent. My uncle’s carefully compiled record began with the building of the structure in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount of detail. The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah, born in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born in 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After Brown’s death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. made him master of the brig Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus enabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his marriage.

The site he had chosen – a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable Back Street, which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside – was all that could be wished, and the building did justice to the location. It was the best that moderate means could afford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child which the family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half.

The next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died before the month was over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following June. Eli Liddeason, the other servant, constantly complained of weakness; and would have returned to his father’s farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year – a sad year indeed, since it marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband’s death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house; her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation – or at least, with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years’ space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumour which later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenas Low.

It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann’s tongue was perniciously active, and within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son’s temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian-Lane near the new college building. The boy would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despite his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to Providence upon his honourable discharge in the following year.

The young soldier’s return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter’s once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay, so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor – qualities shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg’s son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William’s wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the boy’s property, nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulphur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths of four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.

Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman, and served with distinction on the Vigilant under Capt. Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in 1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815, when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman’s son.

Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to rent – perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt old age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque centre of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has gone.

Chapter III

It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in Nature as I had known it; an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This impression was confirmed by my uncle’s less systematic array of miscellaneous data – legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings from the papers, copies of death-certificates by fellow-physicians, and the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice by their recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous and malodorous cellar of the house a vast supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants – Ann White especially – who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches of mould in that region. These latter narratives interested me profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires – the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living – whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann’s dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain other things – the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something ‘sucked his breath’ at night; the death-certificates of fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr. Chad Hopkins, and shewing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris’s ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house – one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of October 27, 1845 – each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case which put an end to the renting of the house – a series of anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.

This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practice; and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims – ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others – would babble maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return from the war, to the first-hand account of Drs. Chase and Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and that he was glad of my own interest – an open-minded and sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and macabre.

For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to accumulate as much more as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916; and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I asked them what connexion with France or its language the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son Welcome’s death in battle by two years, had not himself known the legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird significance to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris, which she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy’s last moments, but he had soon forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer’s son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my experience.

Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shewn in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site from its very settlement in 1636 – or even before, if any Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the start, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became very assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street was later run. It had, a rumour indeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.

Then suddenly I came – by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the main body of records and might easily have been missed – upon something which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease, in 1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last the French element had appeared – that, and another deeper element of horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading – and I feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting through and partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had half expected, that where the shunned house now stood the Roulets had laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage, and that no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed, ended in much confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library before I could find a local door which the name Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find something; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set about at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and excited minuteness.

The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much opposition before the Providence selectmen allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rumour said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which involved other French settlers with the English in rivalries which not even Governor Andros could quell. But their ardent Protestantism – too ardent, some whispered – and their evident distress when virtually driven from the village down the bay, had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here the strangers had been granted a haven; and the swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast’s wharf, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been a riot of some sort later on – perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet’s death – and no one seemed to hear of the family after that.

For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport. Etienne’s son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins. What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legends realised that additional link with the terrible which my wide reading had given me; that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned to death as a daemoniac but afterward saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some drastic and frightened action – indeed, might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the Roulets from the town?

I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris’s permission, I fitted a key to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs, ground floor hall, and front door could give. There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts – only the same depressing mustiness and faint suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor – and I fancy that many pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.

At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle’s, I decided to try the spot nocturnally; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw – or thought I saw – amidst the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the ‘huddled form’ I had suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented – and as I watched I seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy afternoon so many years before.

Above the anthropomorphic patch of mould by the fireplace it rose; a subtle, sickish, almost luminous vapour which as it hung trembling in the dampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with a foetor in its wake. It was truly horrible, and the more so to me because of what I knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I watched it fade – and as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible. When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tense hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing in his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our relation to it, he insisted that we both test – and if possible destroy – the horror of the house by a joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.

Chapter IV

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington Harris which did not include surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned house two camp chairs and a folding camp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight and intricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paper and planning to return in the evening for our first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor; and having a key to the outside cellar door, we were prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus – which we had obtained secretly and at great cost – as many days as our vigils might need to be protracted. It was our design to sit up together till very late, and then watch singly till dawn in two-hour stretches, myself first and then my companion; the inactive member resting on the cot.

The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from the laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armoury, and instinctively assumed direction of our venture, was a marvellous commentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a man of eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived according to the hygienic laws he had preached as a physician, and but for what happened later would be here in full vigour today. Only two persons suspect what did happen – Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris because he owned the house and deserved to know what had gone out of it. Then too, we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my uncle’s going that he would understand and assist me in some vitally necessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to help me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.

To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.

In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts pointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of the ill-favoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity – dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror – their recorded history seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more of them – notably the sinister Paul Roulet – which obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried by the mob, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching community?

Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissues and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity.

What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might encounter the thing. No sane person had even seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely. It might be pure energy – a form ethereal and outside the realm of substance – or it might be partly material; some unknown and equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous approximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled states. The anthropomorphic patch of mould on the floor, the form of the yellowish vapour, and the curvature of the tree-roots in some of the old tales, all argued at least a remote and reminiscent connexion with the human shape; but how representative or permanent that similarity might be, none could say with any kind of certainty.

We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the world-war, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction – for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing’s heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mould had taken strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by the way, was only faintly visible when we placed our furniture and instruments, and when we returned that evening for the actual vigil. For a moment I half doubted that I had ever seen it in the more definitely limned form – but then I thought of the legends.

Our cellar vigil began at 10 p.m., daylight saving time, and as it continued we found no promise of pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, shewed the dripping stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, foetid, and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins and chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed the past presence of hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven – these things, and our austere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate destructive machinery we had brought.

We had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street unlocked; so that a direct and practical path of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond our power to deal with. It was our idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign entity lurked there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of the thing with one or the other of our provided means as soon as we had recognised and observed it sufficiently. How long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing, we had no notion. It occurred to us, too, that our venture was far from safe; for in what strength the thing might appear no one could tell. But we deemed the game worth the hazard, and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking of outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat our entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we talked – far into the night, till my uncle’s growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his two-hour sleep.

Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone – I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. My uncle breathed heavily, his deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside, and punctuated by another nerve-racking sound of distant dripping water within – for the house was repulsively damp even in dry weather, and in this storm positively swamp-like. I studied the loose, antique masonry of the walls in the fungus-light and the feeble rays which stole in from the street through the screened windows; and once, when the noisome atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door and looked up and down the street, feasting my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on the wholesome air. Still nothing occurred to reward my watching; and I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of apprehension.

Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he was breathing with unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the qualities of a choking moan. I turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face averted, so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its relative triviality. It must have been merely the association of any odd circumstance with the sinister nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle’s facial expression, disturbed no doubt by the strange dreams which our situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and seemed not at all characteristic of him. His habitual expression was one of kindly and well-bred calm, whereas now a variety of emotions seemed struggling within him. I think, on the whole, that it was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in increasing perturbation and with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one but many men, and suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.

All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth and teeth as he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable, and then – with a tremendous start – I recognised something about them which filled me with icy fear till I recalled the breadth of my uncle’s education and the interminable translations he had made from anthropological and antiquarian articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes. For the venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering in French, and the few phrases I could distinguish seemed connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous Paris magazine.

Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper’s forehead, and he leaped abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, “My breath, my breath!” Then the awakening became complete, and with a subsidence of facial expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and began to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I could only surmise with a kind of awe.

He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it – a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon another; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one might use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.

Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down on him. Again he seemed to be in the interior of a house – an old house, apparently – but the details and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in just as great a state of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer – damnably queer – and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And all the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes. I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes, worn as they were by eighty-one years of continuous functioning, in conflict with unknown forces of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid; but in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable visions could be, at most, no more than my uncle’s reaction to the investigations and expectations which had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.

Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in time I yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed his period of watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours. Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison where I lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle’s face came to me with less pleasant associations than in waking hours, and I recall many futile struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek which clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness in which every actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and reality.

Chapter V

I had been lying with my face away from my uncle’s chair, so that in this sudden flash of awakening I saw only the door to the street, the more northerly window, and the wall and floor and ceiling toward the north of the room, all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain in a light brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong enough to read an average book by. But it cast a shadow of myself and the cot on the floor, and had a yellowish, penetrating force that hinted at things more potent than luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently assailed. For on my ears rang the reverberations of that shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place. My mind, as alert as my senses, recognised the gravely unusual; and almost automatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we had left trained on the mouldy spot before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for the scream had been in my uncle’s voice, and I knew not against what menace I should have to defend him and myself.

Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light, yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half-human and half-monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes – wolfish and mocking – and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in conscious retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form. At the time it was to me only a seething, dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object to which all my attention was focussed. That object was my uncle – the venerable Elihu Whipple – who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.

It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and focussed toward that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongest ether radiations which man’s art can arouse from the spaces and fluids of Nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness was only that of contrast, and that the waves from the machine had no effect whatever.

Then, in the midst of that daemoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering toward that unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men I brought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes all description, and in which there played across his vanishing face such changes of identity as only madness can conceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen – a score – a hundred – aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange and yet not strange.

I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile, and other features old and young, coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen in the School of Design Museum, and another time I thought I caught the raw-boned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in Carrington Harris’s house. It was frightful beyond conception; toward the last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickered close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought against themselves, and strove to form contours like those of my uncle’s kindly face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he tried to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed a farewell from my own parched throat as I lurched out into the street; a thin stream of grease following me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk.

The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking street, and in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemed to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then grey dawn unfolded wetly from the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and beckoning me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in the end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and entered that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I dared not speak.

The grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled-up form in nitre. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I could scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knew that I had witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me just what had happened, and how I might end the horror, if indeed it had been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivable by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic emanation; some vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over certain churchyards? This I felt was the clue, and again I looked at the floor before the fireplace where the mould and nitre had taken strange forms. In ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for home, where I bathed, ate, and gave by telephone an order for a pickaxe, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulphuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my mood.

At 11 a.m. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather, and I was glad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought, there was more fear in the thought of telling anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because he had heard odd tales from old people which disposed him ever so little toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious thoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind, and this seemed to me one of them.

My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in the large hole I had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, the evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what it would look like – what its form and substance would be, and how big it might have waxed through long ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging the great carboys of acid around and near two sides, so that when necessary I might empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I dumped earth only along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered, and made a motion as if to climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then courage returned, and I scraped away more dirt in the light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy – a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter. Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole and away from the filthy thing; frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitating their corrosive contents one after another down that charnel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.

The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuously up from that hole as the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory. All along the hill people tell of the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the factory waste dumped in the Providence River, but I know how mistaken they are as to the source. They tell, too, of the hideous roar which at the same time came from some disordered water-pipe or gas main underground – but again I could correct them if I dared. It was unspeakably shocking, and I do not see how I lived through it. I did faint after emptying the fourth carboy, which I had to handle after the fumes had begun to penetrate my mask; but when I recovered I saw that the hole was emitting no fresh vapours.

The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and after a time I felt it safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I was done, but fear had gone out of the place. The dampness was less foetid, and all the strange fungi had withered to a kind of harmless greyish powder which blew ash-like along the floor. One of earth’s nethermost terrors had perished forever; and if there be a hell, it had received at last the daemon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I patted down the last spadeful of mould, I shed the first of the many tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle’s memory.

The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned house’s terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It is still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

An Idle Dream, Quite Gone Now

G.L. McDorman

Fifteen years ago we held a funeral for Prof. Binford. This morning, he died.

It began about a month ago, at the start of term, when the evenings were still warm, and the sky was sometimes blue, and students and faculty alike could hardly contain the eagerness with which they greeted the return to regularity. Early one morning, the third or fourth day of the term, the groundskeeper entered the chapel and found a mound of cutlery covering the altar. Everyone assumed that it was a prank or some sort of initiation to one of the dining societies, and while I must admit that it did strike me as a bit sacrilegious, it seemed harmless enough. But, as you will imagine, Prof. Sleatham found nothing amusing about it, and he very badly attempted to carry out an investigation. He must have questioned every woman in the college twice, but when no one admitted to having anything to do with it he gave up and turned instead to haranguing the students from the lectern. “This conduct is expected from pubescent boys,” he scolded them, “but is not becoming of either a lady or a young scholar, and certainly not of someone who is both.” I’m sure he thought his speech was the pinnacle of erudition, but no one took him seriously, and the students continue to mock the phrase, even after all that has happened. He has changed much from that terrifying embodiment of discipline we knew, and when I see him now, I can scarcely believe that we were once so frightened of him. This business went on for only a few days, and when it was over the term began in earnest. Really, the whole affair was quite silly to everyone except for Prof. Sleatham, and if I didn’t know how this sad tale ends, I wouldn’t even have connected the episode to the horrifying events that followed.

It was perhaps not quite a week later when the murder occurred. Well, murder is what we called it then. I know better now – but I’m getting ahead of myself. The University tried to keep the affair confined within the Walls, but of course that effort was doomed from the start, and you will have read about this in the newspapers. It was a weekend, and a pair of students had stayed until last call at the Silver Prince at Claytemple. I don’t know what they were doing so far from the Hall, and it doesn’t matter except that it meant they came back alone very late – the porter didn’t even see them come in, and was probably asleep. The poor man was fired, of course, though whether he was awake or asleep or whether there had been an army of porters wouldn’t have made any difference. According to Mary, as they were passing the chapel, they heard a crackle, like a stack of wood suddenly igniting and then right in front of them there was a man. He vanished as suddenly as he had appeared, and then Mary, too startled even to move, saw that Jane had fallen to the ground. I will spare you any of the gruesome details (the newspapers didn’t!), but when the porter arrived with a light it became obvious that Jane had been stabbed and, unable to speak, she died within minutes.

Jane wasn’t especially interested in science, and as a Third Year, she was studying Ancient Literature, but in her first year I had been one of her tutors. She was bright and energetic and engaged. She did a very good paper on the theory of comets in the philosophical poetry of Carus, which I read over again in the days after her death. So much potential, all of it gone now, and to no end. Well, the University Police came and discovered nothing. There was no physical evidence except for Jane’s blood and the wound from which it came. There was simply no indication that anyone had been in the portico except for Jane and Mary, and after carrying out a series of interviews with everyone in the college and then throughout the whole University they simply gave up and issued a statement suggesting that students should try harder not to get murdered. Jane’s father is an important solicitor at some firm of important solicitors, and he attempted to bring in a private detective, but Vice-Chancellor Plompter wouldn’t allow it. This is when Jane’s father went to the newspapers, at which point the Metropolitan Police demanded entry to the University in order to carry out their own investigation. Again the Vice-Chancellor refused, and the Metropolitan Police came up with a suspect, an escaped prisoner, and insisted that the Charter only granted immunity in purely internal matters.

This was a tense time for everyone. The whole University was engaged in an internal debate about whether a centuries-old charter should really govern the policies of an institution in the modern world. You will agree, I think, that this is a valid discussion, but of course the matter was really just an attempt to politely express frustration that the administration was more interested in its own survival than a girl’s murder and the potential threat to the community. Faculty and students alike were divided on the issue, and among the students in particular the question took on a measure of debate about the value of the peerage. There was a fight in the Exham dining hall that would have resulted in a duel had not another student informed the college. It was at this point that the Duke of Ilchester decided to intervene in his capacity as Chancellor, and the Commissioner quickly backed down in the face of a public fight with the Savior of the Empire. But behind the scenes some compromise was reached, and the private detective was brought in after all. He was an exceedingly charming man, and I don’t doubt that if someone had been hiding information, he would have discovered it. He stayed on for about a week, finding nothing of course, but I think doing a great deal to repair the reputation and mental state of Mary, both of which had been deeply bruised by the University Police.

During this time something strange began to happen in my rooms. One evening after a late night at high table, I came back home and could not open my door. The key worked fine and the knob turned, but it simply would not budge. It took two porters several minutes, but eventually they were able to force the door open enough to permit me to slip through and see what was the matter. Every single book – hundreds of them – had been removed from the shelves and stacked neatly against the door. Another prank, I thought, though I couldn’t imagine how anyone had managed to pull it off, as the only other exit was one of the two windows that led nowhere but straight down to the quad seven stories below.

Of course, I should have been angry at such an invasion of my privacy, but these weren’t my books – they were Prof. Binford’s. Since I took over his rooms when I came back to the Hall, I had never touched his books, or used his desk, or even just stood there and looked at the office. Once the damage from the accident had been repaired, I set up an office of my own in the laboratory, and for fifteen years this room where we once spent so many hours has been nothing more than a dark hallway through which I hurry to reach my bed. But now here were his books in front of me, demanding my attention and forcing met to light a candle on his desk. I’m certain the sudden appearance of sentiment was, in part at least, the product of too much after-dinner brandy, but I dismissed the porters and set about returning the books to their proper place, remembering those happy years. I wish you had been there with me.

There is no need to tell you that I slept neither well enough nor long enough that night, and so the next evening I retired early. In the middle of the night, I awoke as if it was morning, though it could scarcely have been later than two. As I lay there weighing the virtues of forced sleep or putting the quiet hours to some productive purpose, I began to feel as if I was no longer alone. There was no fear or dread or sense of danger. It wasn’t at all like one of those childhood moments when you awake in the night with the certainty that something malicious is under your bad, but rather it was like one of those childhood moments when you’ve woken after an hour or so of sleep and can sense that your father has finally come home and is in the kitchen speaking to your mother and you want to get up and embrace him. I took that feeling as an encouragement to give up on sleeping, and I began to look forward to sneaking down to the kitchens to put on some coffee without waking the rest of the college. As I was hovering at my door, making sure that I had with me everything I would want for the day, I glanced at the window and saw there the silhouetted head of a man who must have been seated at the desk. I was startled, and I’m embarrassed to say that I shrieked. He stood up, and I saw that he wasn’t so much a man as a black figure in the shape of a man without any visible features, like a shadow given substance. And then there was a crackle and a low hiss and he was just gone.

I should have gone into the stairwell right then. I was at the door, there was a threat in my rooms, and I should have gone out. But I didn’t. My first instinct wasn’t to flee from the danger, but to see it, to classify it, to understand it. Just as I was fumbling around with a candle, I heard a door open and shut, and the heavy footsteps and even heavier breathing of Prof. Curtis as he tried to bound up the stairs. Mercifully, he had a candle with him, and together we looked around the rooms, first to make sure the intruder was really gone, and then to see if he had left behind any evidence. We found only one thing: the word HELP carved into the desk.

Naturally, the investigation was on again, but, again, nothing positive came of it. Save for the inscription, there was no evidence that anyone besides me had been in my rooms that evening. No one said anything to me directly, but I was aware that people thought I had fabricated the whole episode, and the word ‘hysteria’ was bandied about when people thought I wasn’t listening. Yet, I had only to endure this for two days, when once more the chapel became the focus of this strange business.

Just before tea, a gigantic thud followed by a piercing shriek reached the ears of everyone in the Hall. I stopped what I was doing in the lab and looked around at the post-graduates who had also paused in their tasks. The sound came again, and then a third time. By the time we reached the quad almost everyone else was already there, hovering around the entrance to the chapel. The iron doors were dented and the ornate embossments that decorated them had been smoothed away, as if someone had taken a battering ram to them. While we stood there transfixed, it happened again. We all watched the doors cave further inward, and we covered our ears against the grating of metal as the hinges tried to hold on. At first, it did appear that something was striking the doors, but as I stepped closer it became clear (to me, at least) that something was tugging at them from the inside. The bell in the steeple began to ring, at first slowly, and then faster and faster until noise and echo elided into one painful cacophony. After a few more seconds, the doors were ripped from their hinges and they flew into the church and smashed against the altar, where they clung like nails to a magnet. The bell kept clanging, and then it slowed and then the doors collapsed to the chapel floor and everything went silent.

I expected Prof. Sleatham to close the college on the spot, but instead he commanded everyone to go about their business as if nothing had happened. How he thought anyone could do that, I do not know, but I decided that ‘normal business’ included some hours spent with my students over pints at the Bitter Huntsman and left the Hall immediately. We took it as a given that the altar had become highly magnetized, and while none of our explanations as to how such a thing could happen were in any way satisfactory, it was nonetheless a relief to speculate about the cause. When I returned to my rooms, I found all of Prof. Binford’s books strewn about on the floor, mostly opened, some upturned, as if someone had been hastily searching for something. They were piled high, and I was faced with the option of picking up or stepping on them to get into the bedroom. The sight of the mess wearied me, and not for the first time I wished I kept a cot in the laboratory. It occurred to me to alert the University Police or Prof. Sleatham or even just a porter, but what I really wanted was to go to sleep and awake in the morning to discover that all of it had been a dream. But this is when I found the key to the whole affair.

Presumably on the assumption that no one would ever wish to consult the book, Prof. Binford had hollowed out his copy of Waterhouse’s Principles of Analytical Calculation and made a place suitable for securing his private journal. When I removed the little book from its hiding place I felt immediately connected to it, and I remembered seeing it resting on the corner of his desk. My desk, now. For the first time, I actually sat in his chair and looked at the room from his perspective. Somehow it seemed right, but at the same time I felt as if I were getting away with something. I am sitting there now, Beth, as I write to you about these things. That night, I stayed awake almost until sunrise, reading through his journal, and in the end finally able to formulate a hypothesis.

I am certain that you will have already guessed the source of this strange haunting, but if you have not, it will all become clear to you now. It began during our second year, at that magnetism conference the Society hosted. No doubt, you recall as vividly as I do the poor reception of Prof. Binford’s paper and the unnecessarily harsh rebuttal that Fisher gave in his comment. At the time, I too was unconvinced by his arguments for treating light, electricity, and magnetism as different manifestations of a single phenomenon, but I could not believe that other scientists could behave so brutally. He bore it so graciously and with so much dignity. Do you remember how he took us aside afterward and told us that when we had professorships of our own, we would have to make a choice about how to treat our colleagues? I think about that conversation often, and it has become almost like a bit of scripture upon which I reflect when I am fighting my own instincts to berate a colleague. I remember expecting that he would divert all of our efforts toward proving his suppositions correct, but instead he simply announced that the Academy had spoken and that therefore we should work on some other problem. And that was that.

Except that it wasn’t. This journal records his continued work on the project, in secret so that he would avoid the type of serious criticism that might jeopardize his position. During our last year of study, he merely tinkered with formulae, but when we were gone and he did not take on any more students, he began a series of practical experiments. The work is excellent, Beth, and quite sound. I will show it to you next month, and then we can decide what to do with it. But that’s another matter entirely. There was some sort of mishap early on, and Prof. Binford’s investigation into the matter led, ultimately, to the accident fifteen years ago, his own death, and to the death of Jane Caxton.

It began when an unexpected power surge caused an overload in an electrical-field generator he was using. He records that a stepladder he had left in the middle of the field vanished from sight and then returned a few seconds later. ‘Blinked out’ is how he describes it in the journal. It took him months to recreate the power surge, but when he did, he became able to make objects disappear for several minutes at a time. He proceeded quite scientifically from this point, and the journal is full of detailed records of everything he put into the field, how long each object ‘blinked out,’ and whether anything at all was different when the objects returned. Moreover, he has nearly endless pages speculating about the nature of the phenomenon, ranging from the impact of the electrical field on the behavior of light waves to some brief alteration of the passage of time. When he couldn’t be alone in the laboratory, he devoted his time to expanding his theoretical model to include time, and even began to question the nature of light. There are some notes regarding the construction of a device that might allow one to perceive light as a physical property, and I think we will want to follow up on that.

At night, when he had solitary access to the laboratory, Prof. Binford continued to expose objects to the field. Eventually, one returned slightly altered. The bottom of the wooden crate was now stained reddish-brown, as if it had been sitting in mud for the hour it had been gone. His journal at this point overflows with excitement, and an almost childish impatience as he was forced to wait several days before he could begin again. This next time, the crate came back covered in the reddish-brown mud, and with three symmetrical claw marks on one side. At this point, he put aside all of his work on light and time, and assumed that the objects were being moved across space to another location, that he had accidentally discovered a means of transporting objects over great distances instantaneously – a sort of matter transmitter. At this point, he began to spend his days on long walks in search of the reddish-brown mud, first only in the University quarter, and then throughout the City. Eventually he found an alley in Clearchurch that he thought must surely be the place – it had reddish-brown soil that turned muddy when exposed to water, and seemed also to house a number of stray cats. He hired a pair of local boys to look out for his next crate and to mark it with an X when they saw it. But none of his crates ever returned with their mark, and they insisted that, although they had stayed up very late looking for crates, they never saw any.

You can guess what the next step was. Prof. Binford determined to transmit himself through the field. When I read this, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this had caused the accident, but I was wrong. He successfully transmitted himself seven times before the accident destroyed the laboratory, and on his last three journeys he was gone for over a month. Much of the journal is an account of his expeditions, and if I hadn’t seen for myself, I would have thought this the record of a brilliant man’s descent into madness. I present for you here some of the early entries so you can observe the same evidence that I have. You will want to read the other accounts next month.

* * *

January 13, 1834 10:37:21 PM

Return: 10:38:29 PM

My first trip through the field. The process of transmission is unpleasant, almost painful. Every part of my being felt as if it were burning from the inside, and all around me was a blue lightning that almost blinded me. It is hard to say how long that process lasted, but since I was gone for only a little more than a minute, it must have been merely a matter of seconds each way. It seemed much longer. When the lights and the pain stopped, I found myself outside at night in a featureless landscape. Below me was dirt or hard sand, above me a sky full of stars – but they were all wrong. Supposition: I must have traveled to some remote location in the southern hemisphere.

* * *

January 16, 1834 11:02:33 p.m.

Return: January 17, 1834 03:17:54 a.m.

Four hours! Alas, four tedious hours, as the wasteland seems to stretch infinitely in all directions. Yet, much excitement, for I brought with me another journal in which to transcribe the constellations, and I have now checked them against Mr. Webb’s Southern Star Atlas and they do not match. Wherever I have traveled, it is not on this world. I will travel again in a few days, and this time I will return with samples of the soil and atmosphere.

* * *

January 28, 1834 08:42:29 p.m.

Return: February 7, 1834 06:51:18 a.m.

Over a week this time, and again I returned to the chapel instead of the laboratory. And the process of solidification is taking even longer – nearly ten minutes now. Several experiments have borne fruit, though mostly of a bitter sort. It is certain now that I am not appearing in precisely the same location each time, but at seemingly random points within a square mile, or something close to it. Everything I brought with me returned at the same time as I did or slightly earlier, even the items I buried. It does not appear to be possible to create a stockpile of tools and supplies, and I will have to bring everything I need each time. At least it is always warm.

* * *

The source of all our current trouble was suddenly obvious to me, as it will be to you. For fifteen years, Prof. Binford had been at this other place (whatever that might mean), and somehow was now in the process of returning. Setting aside my panic, I approached the problem as clinically as possible, but I was not able to come to any conclusions that would be helpful in fully returning Prof. Bindford to us. But before I allowed myself a few hours of sleep, I determined not to make the fatal mistake of attempting anything further alone. I have no doubt that we could have assembled a team of researchers to bring him home safely, if only I had found his journal sooner.

I awoke the next morning to the sound of the chapel bell. At first, I thought it was happening again, but the noise was rhythmic, jut the morning bell, so I determined to ignore it. As I tried to return to sleep, I realized it was a Summoning, and I hurried out of bed, made a bad show of descending the stairs while trying to put on shoes, and joined the rest of the college in the chapel. The doors had been removed since the episode on the previous day, but the altar remained, badly damaged from the impact. Prof. Sleatham addressed us from the lectern. As is his custom, he went on for far too long before coming to the point, but he was about to announce the temporary closure of the college when the lectern began to lose its shape. It started with, or at least was most obvious with, the beak of the eagle, which slowly liquefied and drooped toward the floor. The clock near the organ pipes behaved similarly, and soon every piece of metal in the chapel began to liquefy and twist and bend. There was something quietly horrifying about watching common objects lose their form, but we were all transfixed – until we were snapped out of it by the sudden shattering of the windows. For a few seconds, time paused, and shards of colored glass hung in the air, and then, just as suddenly, the passage of time resumed, and the glass rained onto the floor. There was a horrible crackling, like being on top of a mountain in the middle of a summer storm, and then a deafening burst like thunder and a figure appeared atop the altar.

Now there was a general panic, and everyone rushed to get out of the chapel. I won’t say that I was unafraid, but because I now knew what was happening, even if I didn’t understand it, I was able to remain calm, and I saw Prof. Binford stretch out his hand and smile and then collapse. When the chapel had cleared I hurried to the altar. He was alive and awake, but only barely. “Esther,” he muttered. It was a question. He was surprised to see me, or perhaps he wasn’t sure if that was really my name. I took his hand and tried to reassure him, but blood began to trickle from his ears and his nose, and then from his eyes. “It is not for us,” he told me, and then he stopped breathing.

For a few hours very late last night, I thought he was going to return to us, I thought we were going to get him back, but it was all a cruel joke. Something of this will be in the newspapers soon, but I wanted you to hear the full story from me. If I hurry now, I can post this today, so I will save any further comments for when you arrive. I was already looking forward to seeing you, of course, but now more than ever.

Give my love to Eric and the boys.

The Pool of the Stone God

A. Merrit

This is Professor James Marston’s story. A score of learned bodies have courteously heard him tell it, and then among themselves have lamented that so brilliant a man should have such an obsession. Professor Marston told it to me in San Francisco, just before he started to find the island that holds his pool of the stone god and – the wings that guard it. He seemed to me very sane. It is true that the equipment of his expedition was unusual, and not the least curious part of it are the suits of fine chain mail and masks and gauntlets with which each man of the party is provided.

* * *

The five of us, said Professor Marston, sat side by side on the beach. There was Wilkinson the first officer, Bates and Cassidy the two seamen, Waters the pearler and myself. We had all been on our way to New Guinea, I to study the fossils for the Smithsonian. The Moranus had struck the hidden reef the night before and had sunk swiftly. We were then, roughly, about five hundred miles northeast of the Guinea coast. The five of us had managed to drop a lifeboat and get away. The boat was well stocked with water and provisions. Whether the rest of the crew had escaped we did not know. We had sighted the island at dawn and had made for her. The lifeboat was drawn safely up on the sands.

“We’d better explore a bit, anyway,” said Waters. “This may be a perfect place for us to wait rescue. At least until the typhoon season is over. We’ve our pistols. Let’s start by following this brook to its source, look over the place and then decide what we’ll do.”

The trees began to thin out. We saw ahead an open space. We reached it and stopped in sheer amazement. The clearing was perfectly square and about five hundred feet wide. The trees stopped abruptly at its edges as though held back by something unseen.

But it was not this singular impression that held us. At the far end of the square were a dozen stone huts clustered about one slightly larger. They reminded me powerfully of those prehistoric structures you see in parts of England and France. I approach now the most singular thing about this whole singular and sinister place. In the center of the space was a pool walled about with huge blocks of cut stone. At the side of the pool rose a great stone figure, carved in the semblance of a man with outstretched hands. It was at least twenty feet high and was extremely well executed. At the distance the statue seemed nude and yet it had a peculiar effect of drapery about it. As we drew nearer we saw that it was covered from ankles to neck with the most extraordinary carved wings. They looked exactly like bat wings when they were folded.

There was something extremely disquieting about this figure. The face was inexpressibly ugly and malignant. The eyes, Mongol-shaped, slanted evil. It was not from the face, though, that this feeling seemed to emanate. It was from the body covered with wings – and especially from the wings. They were part of the idol and yet they gave one the idea that they were clinging to it.

Cassidy, a big brute of a man, swaggered up to the idol and laid his hand on it. He drew it away quickly, his face white, his mouth twitching. I followed him and conquering my unscientific repugnance, examined the stone. It, like the huts and in fact the whole place, was clearly the work of that forgotten race whose monuments are scattered over the Southern Pacific. The carving of the wings was wonderful. They were batlike, as I have said, folded and each ended in a little ring of conventionalized feathers. They ranged in size from four to ten inches. I ran my fingers over one. Never have I felt the equal of the nausea that sent me to my knees before the idol. The wing had felt like smooth, cold stone, but I had the sensation of having touched back of the stone some monstrous obscene creature of a lower world. The sensation came of course, I reasoned, only from the temperature and texture of the stone – and yet this did not really satisfy me.

Dusk was soon due. We decided to return to the beach and examine the clearing further on the morrow. I desired greatly to explore the stone huts.

We started back through the forest. We walked some distance and then night fell. We lost the brook. After a half hour’s wandering we heard it again. We started for it. The trees began to thin out and we thought we were approaching the beach. Then Waters clutched my arm. I stopped. Directly in front of us was the open space with the stone god leering under the moon and the green water shining at his feet!

We had made a circle. Bates and Wilkinson were exhausted. Cassidy swore that devils or no devils he was going to camp that night beside the pool!

The moon was very bright. And it was so very quiet. My scientific curiosity got the better of me and I thought I would examine the huts. I left Bates on guard and walked over to the largest. There was only one room and the moonlight shining through the chinks in the wall illuminated it clearly. At the back were two small basins set in the stone. I looked in one and saw a faint reddish gleam reflected from a number of globular objects. I drew a half dozen of them out. They were pearls, very wonderful pearls of a peculiarly rosy hue. I ran toward the door to call Bates – and stopped!

My eyes had been drawn to the stone idol. Was it an effect of the moonlight or did it move? No, it was the wings! They stood out from the stone and waved – they waved, I say, from the ankles to the neck of that monstrous statue.

Bates had seen them, too. He was standing with his pistol raised. Then there was a shot. And after that the air was filled with a rushing sound like that of a thousand fans. I saw the wings loose themselves from the stone god and sweep down in a cloud upon the four men. Another cloud raced up from the pool and joined them. I could not move. The wings circled swiftly around and about the four. All were now on their feet and I never saw such horror as was in their faces.

Then the wings closed in. They clung to my companions as they had clung to the stone.

I fell back into the hut. I lay there through the night insane with terror. Many times I heard the fan-like rushing about the enclosure, but nothing entered my hut. Dawn came, and silence, and I dragged myself to the door. There stood the stone god with the wings carved upon him as we had seen him ten hours before!

I ran over to the four lying on the grass. I thought that perhaps I had had a nightmare. But they were dead. That was not the worst of it. Each man was shrunken to his bones! They looked like collapsed white balloons. There was not a drop of blood in them. They were nothing but bones wrapped around in thin skin!

Mastering myself, I went close to the idol. There was something different about it. It seemed larger – as though, the thought went through my mind, as though it had eaten. Then I saw that it was covered with tiny drops of blood that had dropped from the ends of the wings that clothed it!

I do not remember what happened afterward. I awoke on the pearling schooner Luana which had picked me up, crazed with thirst as they supposed in the boat of the Moranus.

This Time, Forever

Michelle Muenzler

Time is funny, the way it slips past when you’re not watching.

“Look at me,” Ell rasps. The air around her is sour, like turned milk. Thick enough to coat my tongue.

I bite my lip. Wince as the dry skin cracks. I want to look at her – I want to – but the moment my eyes leave the seconds hand of the clock on the wall, I know I’ll lose her. Every ounce of me is focused on that clock hand, on keeping it still. Time will not take Ell from me.

Not again.

“Look at me, Lexi, look at me,” she repeats, and almost, almost my eyes peel away.

In that half glance, the seconds hand slips forward an extra breath.

“No,” I say. “I won’t. If I do –”

“We all have to die sometime.” Her hand slides over mine. Wet. Slimy. “You can’t keep taking that away from me.”

I suppress a shudder, but my eyes remain glued to the clock. To the tick of time. Slow and methodical. Not racing like my heart. Not unraveling in a tidal rush like the rest of the world.

Ell doesn’t understand. How could she?

Outside the apartment a siren wails, and for the briefest moment my attention darts toward the window, toward the black-out drapes.

It’s enough.

Ell gurgles something, her words lost in a wet bubbling, and by the time I jerk my gaze back to the clock, it claims an hour has passed and again – again – Ell is gone.

* * *

I should never have kept the box.

“Hey,” Ell says, swiping the black lacquered box from the pile of junk on the kitchen bar and shaking it against her ear. Its contents swish dryly. “What’s this?”

I snatch it back. “Nothing. Just a…a thing from my grandmother.”

Even before my grandmother died last month, my apartment was a wreck. Like it plowed through a junkyard, dragging the whole mess behind it before cramming itself back atop the three-story complex I call home. Now there is just that much more junk, all half unpacked and shoved into every space available.

Ell stares at the box, eyes glittering like a crow’s. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well, what’s in it?”

I curl the box against my stomach. “I told you, nothing. It’s just a box.”

She doesn’t believe me, but after a few moments she gives in, flumphs irreverently onto the stack of papers on the couch, and pulls out her phone. “So,” she says, “what’ll it be for dinner tonight? Pizza? Thai?”

I set the box back on the counter. My fingers tremble against its cool surface. “How about we go out tonight?”

Ell’s nose wrinkles. “We went out last night. And the night before.”

“I know.” I cross my arms. Uncross them. “I just…I just don’t want to be home right now. Not with all this” – I gesture at the chaos filling the space, a dead woman’s life splayed out for display – “this.”

“Oh,” she says. Her breathing slows. “Of course. We’ll go out, however many times you need.”

As she smiles, my fingers clutch harder at the box.

But then she pushes off the couch and swoops past me, grabbing her keys off the counter and planting a kiss on my cheek as she blows past. The door swings open and she leans against the jamb.

“You coming?”

I peel my fingers from the box. “Yeah.”

Half an hour later, we’re downing street tacos by the half dozen at a busy intersection while the wind freezes our noses solid.

The box, I’m certain by this point, is long forgotten.

* * *

I love Ell. I do.

My mother never understood. Said it was unnatural. An abomination, even. She said a lot of things before I left. Probably even more after.

But my grandmother understood, or at least didn’t complain. Which I guess is why she left me the box.

I really wish she hadn’t.

* * *

The cancer shouldn’t have happened. Not to Ell. I can think of half a dozen people more deserving.

“Come on, Ell,” I say as she stumbles up the breezeway stairwell beside me. “You can do it.”

“I can’t,” she says. Her breath rasps, dry and papery thin. Stolen by the endless rounds of chemo. “I need to rest a moment.”

“But we’re almost there. Just a few more steps.”

It doesn’t matter what I say, though. Her legs crumple beneath her, and I help settle her atop a concrete step before she tumbles down.

She leans back against the stairs, face inches from a discarded cigarette. The parking lot is half empty, a wrought iron fence separating the complex from the strip mall next door. Vehicles honk and squeal as they vie for position at the nearby intersection, and two women scream at each other on the sidewalk.

We sit. Watch the world speed past while clinging desperately to each other and trying not to drown.

Finally, Ell speaks. “I think I’m done,” she says, and I know she’s not talking about this brief respite.

I told myself I wouldn’t cry when she finally said the words. I promised myself.

But that’s the problem with promises: they’re easier to make than to keep.

* * *

I’m nine when I first see the black lacquered box.

My mother’s left me at my grandmother’s again, like a spare puzzle piece she doesn’t know what to do with. Grandmother’s house is a two-bedroom 1950s cottage on what used to be the outskirts of town. The town, of course, eventually caught up, and what was once a sleepy street grew busy with impatient drivers blasting past and the sounds of the nearby interstate. Still, it feels perfect to me. Hidden.

Grandmother collects containers – old glass bottles of every shape and color, tiny wicker baskets crammed with even tinier wicker baskets…and boxes. So many boxes. I spend hours unearthing strange box after strange box from beneath piles of linens untouched for decades or stacks of empty photo frames. Wooden boxes with variegated bands, small hinged tins still dusted with powder, and more oriental-styled jewelry boxes than any one person could possibly use. Nestled like little secrets just waiting for me to discover them.

Even so, I know the black lacquered box is different as soon as I touch it.

I find it in Grandmother’s bedroom wardrobe, buried under a pile of dead moths and a black derby hat. My skin itches as I brush the moths from its surface and wipe away the dust.

Just as my fingers close around it, though, my grandmother’s stern voice explodes behind me.

“Alexandra Lee Jenkins, you get your hands off of that!”

I startle atop my wobbly pile of cardboard boxes and tumble to the floor onto a mess of old papers.

Grandmother scoops me up and settles me on my feet, staring me straight in the eyes the entire time. “Alexandra,” she says, “I don’t want to find you in this wardrobe again, you hear?”

The tears well up behind my eyes, but crying is for kids and I’m trying so hard to not be a kid anymore.

She shakes me hard enough my knees knock together. “Do you hear?”

“Yes ma’am,” I say, snot beginning to dribble out my nose. I sniffle, still vainly fighting back the tears.

But even as I say them, I know the words are a lie. In the short time touching it, the box has wormed its way into me, much like a tick. My grandmother may have pinched out the body with her quick actions, but the head is still there, buried beneath my skin.

Waiting. Watching.

And nothing short of death will pluck it free again.

* * *

Death.

Such a plain word for so ugly an event.

My grandmother died, a bullet through her mouth and the rest of her painted across the teal bathroom tiles. No note, no warning. Nothing.

Ell, snot and foam dribbling from her mouth, a whimper clinging desperately to her lips, is just as inconsiderate.

“At least I left a note,” she gurgles the first time I shape her back into the world.

At that, I slap her. Wet Ell-bits go flying. Burrow into the brown carpet. Slither across the kitchen linoleum like fat slugs.

“It’s not enough,” I say, and unable to stand looking at her anymore, quickly lose her to the flush of time.

Next time, I’ll be better prepared.

Next time.

* * *

Thirteen petals.

Black, veined in deepest violet. Wrinkled, brittle. Dry.

They smell like waking up only to discover you’ve left something behind.

That’s what was in the box when I started.

Now there are only three.

* * *

My grandmother is sunk into her chair, the underskirts of her eyes puffy and gray. She’s old, older than I remember.

“Nana?” I tread carefully as I approach. She’s tired, my grandmother, moreso every time I see her.

Not that I see her often anymore. I’ve met a new girl, Ellen. Well, Ell, actually. She hates the name Ellen. Says it reminds her of prim dresses and formal dinner parties where everyone has to ask for permission to sit or to stand or just to scratch their nose.

My grandmother’s eyelids flutter groggily and with difficulty peel open. “Alexandra? Is that you?”

She doesn’t see so well anymore. Or walk. Or anything, really.

“You okay, Nana?”

Her eyes sink shut again. “Wilford, dear,” she mumbles, “get the door will you? I think the postman’s come.”

With a sigh, I settle in at her feet and snuggle against her legs like I’m nine again.

But it’s not the same. Not anymore.

When she begins to snore, I slip away to her bedroom. I try on old jewelry for a while, clunky and tarnished, but it only delays the inevitable. Eventually, I find myself at the wardrobe.

The black lacquered box is where it always is.

Carefully, I slip it from its shelf, huddle atop a giant oaken chest at the foot of the bed, and pry open the lid. The first whiff is just as I remember. My skull lightens, and it feels like time is stretching in every direction at once. A minute passes, an hour – or maybe only a single breath – and then the scent dissipates, once more replaced by that musty moldy smell that permeates the house.

I reach into the box. Hand trembling. Brush my fingers ever so lightly against one of the petals.

It’s like velveteen. Like moss.

The phone rings, an old handset still perched on the kitchen wall. I hear my grandmother startle awake in the other room and shuffle her way toward the belligerently ringing phone.

By the time she answers it, it’s stopped ringing.

“Hey, Nana,” I say, emerging from her bedroom with a dusty quilt. “I just came by to see how you were doing. You were asleep when I came in, though, so I went to grab something to cover you up.”

She stares at me, confused a moment. Then her eyes brighten and she smiles. “Oh, Maria, I wasn’t expecting you by today! Wilford will be so pleased you’ve come to visit.”

My chest stretches tight, heaves like a ship at sea.

It takes ten minutes to extricate myself, ten agonizingly long minutes that seem to spread into hours. But eventually my grandmother falls asleep again, and I slip quietly away, locking the door behind me.

* * *

The door is deadbolted.

More to keep things out, though, than to keep things in.

“Why?” I ask, a wary distance from Ell. I haven’t got her hands down quite right yet, but she’s surprised me before with less.

Ell struggles to heave herself upward, but without a solid bone structure to support her, she slumps back to the carpet in a pile. I’ve set the clock beside her this time so I can watch both her and it.

“I told you,” she gurgles. Saliva dribbles down her chin. “It hurt too much. I was done with it. With all the pain. With the living. The box just made that clearer.”

Beside her, the clock’s hands press forward. They’re like needles in my skull, drilling their way slowly out. The black lacquered box sits beside me, lid hinged open.

Two petals remain.

“Well,” I say, squinting against the press of time, trying to hold those hands in place just a few seconds longer, “maybe I wasn’t done. Maybe I still needed you.”

Ell tries to shrug. Ripples instead. “I’m sorry.”

It’s too much. The clock’s hands snap in half against the pressure, and their stubs spring into motion even as the ends fall to the towels I’ve set below Ell.

By the time I clench my teeth, Ell is gone and only the steaming flesh-stained towels remain.

I toss the entire mess into a trash bag and haul it to the dumpster before it can stink up the place.

* * *

I can’t get back Grandmother’s face. I saw the pictures after her death, read the reports. When I sleep, she haunts me with that meaty pit, with those mangled lips.

The coroner said she actually survived the initial shot.

I think on it too much, on that final flinch. Of the blood throbbing free, pooling around her feet. Of the billions upon billions of nerves screaming for release.

When I bring her back – the only time I bring her back – they’re still screaming.

Thankfully, her time slips by fast.

* * *

“Why would you keep this from me?” Ell’s fist is clenched. The black lacquered box’s contents are spilled atop the bedsheets. “This is…fantastic. It’s the best I’ve felt in months!”

Anger wells up inside of me. The box isn’t for Ell. It’s my secret. My escape.

I reach for the box, but she blocks the way.

Any other day, and she’d be easy to topple over. She’s so fragile now. So brittle.

“Close it back,” I say.

She stares at me like I’m insane.

“Close it back,” I repeat, hating the low whine lingering in the request, “or it won’t work anymore.”

She considers. Already, its effects are wearing off, though, her slow-time draining away, the crush of her body pressing into the void. She steps aside. Stumbles.

I catch her before she falls completely. Help her to the floor.

“What are they?” she whispers as I collect the petals back into their box, counting carefully to ensure all twelve are still there.

“Time everlasting,” I say, though that isn’t the whole truth. Or likely even half of it.

It’s more than I got from my grandmother, though.

It’s not enough.

* * *

The last time I see my grandmother alive, she’s on her knees atop the dingy kitchen linoleum, hunched like some mad beast. Beside her, a plastic bag of potpourri spills its contents. With one hand she clutches a brass pocket watch. With the other, she digs out a petal of deepest ruby red, so red it’s almost black, and wads it into her mouth.

“Nana?”

She startles, looks at me with frightened eyes. “Alexandra? Alexandra, is that you?”

The wet petal dribbles from her lip.

I kneel beside her. Wrap my arms around her frail frame.

“I just wanted Wilford back,” she says. She quivers in my arms. “Why won’t he come back?”

It’s only then I notice the pile of loose hairs and fingernail clippings at her knees, topped with saliva-soaked petal after saliva-soaked petal.

Black hairs, straight. Not my grandmother’s frazzled gray.

“Just one more time,” my grandmother whispers as she clings to me. “Just one more time before I forget how.”

I put her to bed, clean up the mess.

But I can’t stop thinking about the potpourri petals.

So dark.

So black.

So wet.

* * *

“How many?” The right side of Ell’s face droops as she speaks, but the left side is solid. It’s my best shaping yet. She even has a functioning hand, though the bones are more like cartilage and her grip is weak.

Still, I clasp that hand. “One. Just one.”

I haven’t cried since the fourth. I’m not going to cry now.

“Good,” she gurgles, wet petal barely clinging to her cheek. “Soon you can move on.”

I glance away, losing a few seconds. I’ve surrounded her with analog clocks. Clocks in every corner, clocks in every niche. Everywhere I look, there is a clock. Flimsy hands bat away at time. And yet it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

I squeeze her putty fingers. “I’ll never move on.”

“Hush.” Her throat wheezes, and for a moment, the sound of it reminds me of my grandmother, air swooshing free.

“I mean it,” I say. “I’m going to join you soon. I just wanted to let you know that.”

In the ensuing silence, one of the clocks manages to press time forward another second.

I slide my gaze back to Ell. Lose another second in the exchange. “Well? Aren’t you going to try to stop me?”

The right side of her face droops further. “I was broken, Lexi. And so tired. It was the only way.”

Gently, I wipe a bit of foam from her lips. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m tired too, now. Did you ever think of that?”

She doesn’t answer, and eventually, our time runs out.

Again.

* * *

I sniff deeply, desperate to capture every last trace of scent remaining in the box. One petal remains. One more summoning, and then I’ll never see Ell again.

I should stop. I know I should stop.

But I won’t.

Because I have to see Ell one more time. I have to.

No matter how much it hurts.

* * *

The funny thing about time is that it’s neither as fast nor as slow as you think. And no matter how hard you watch it, it always has its way with you in the end.

That’s what I wrote in my note, at least. My final words of wisdom, written atop a stained sheet of paper in two colors of ink only because my first pen ran out. I lay on a tatty beach towel atop the brown carpet, the room ticking around me. Mirrors line every space that isn’t filled with clocks. I’m trapped in a box filled with nothing but time and space. A hundred Lexis, and soon a hundred Ells.

In my right hand, a few final pieces of Ell’s hair, ripped out of her hairbrush. In my left, the last petal.

The black lacquered box lays discarded beside me, useless now. Empty.

Slowly, gently, I press the petal atop my tongue. Crush it against the roof of my mouth. I follow it with the hairs, but instead of spitting them to the floor like all the previous, I gag the entire mess down.

“Come on back,” I say as my stomach begins to rumble. I picture her beginning to unfold inside me. A piece of me now in a way she never has been before. “Come on back to me one last time, Ell. And this time, let’s make it last forever.”

The Power of Darkness

Edith Nesbit

It was an enthusiastic send-off. Half the students from her atelier were there, and twice as many more from other studios. She had been the belle of the Artists’ Quarter in Montparnasse for three golden months. Now she was off to the Riviera to meet her people, and everyone she knew was at the Gare de Lyon to catch the last glimpse of her. And, as had been more than once said late of an evening, ‘to see her was to love her’. She was one of those agitating blondes, with the naturally rippled hair, the rounded rose-leaf cheeks, the large violet-blue eyes, that looked all things and meant Heaven alone knew how little. She held her court like a queen, leaning out of the carriage window and receiving bouquets, books, journals, long last words, and last longing looks. All eyes were on her, and her eyes were for all – and her smile. For all but one, that is. Not a single glance went Edward’s way, and Edward – tall, lean, gaunt, with big eyes, straight nose, and the mouth somewhat too small, too beautiful – seemed to grow thinner and paler before one’s eyes. One pair of eyes at least saw the miracle worked, the paling of what had seemed absolute pallor, the revelation of the bones of a face that seemed already covered but by the thinnest possible veil of flesh.

And the man whose eyes saw this rejoiced, for he loved her, like the rest, or not like the rest, and he had had Edward’s face before him for the last month, in that secret shrine where we set the loved and the hated, the shrine that is lighted by a million lamps kindled at the soul’s flame, the shrine that leaps into dazzling glow when the candles are out and one lies alone on hot pillows to outface the night and the light as best one may.

“Oh, goodbye; goodbye, all of you,” said Rose. “I shall miss you. Oh, you don’t know how I shall miss you all!”

She gathered the eyes of her friends and her worshippers in a glance, as one gathers jewels on a silken string. The eyes of Edward alone seemed to escape her.

“En voiture, messieurs et dames!”

Folk drew back from the train. There was a whistle.

And then at the very last little moment of all, as the train pulled itself together for the start, her eyes met Edward’s eyes. And the other man saw the meeting, and he knew – which was more than Edward did.

So when, the light of life having been borne away in the retreating train, the broken-hearted group dispersed, the other man – whose name, by the way, was Vincent – linked his arm in Edward’s and asked, cheerily:

“Whither away, sweet nymph?”

“I’m off home,” said Edward. “The seven-twenty to Calais.”

“Sick of Paris?”

“One has to see one’s people sometimes, don’t you know, hang it all!” was Edward’s way of expressing the longing that tore him for the old house among the brown woods of Kent.

“No attraction here now, eh?”

“The chief attraction has gone, certainly,” Edward made himself say.

“But there are as good fish in the sea –”

“Fishing isn’t my trade,” said Edward.

“The beautiful Rose!” said Vincent.

Edward raised hurriedly the only shield he could find. It happened to be the truth as he saw it.

“Oh,” he said, “of course, we’re all in love with her – and all hopelessly.”

Vincent perceived that this was truth, as Edward saw it. “What are you going to do till your train goes?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Café, I suppose, and a vilely early dinner.”

“Let’s look in at the Musée Grévin,” said Vincent.

The two were friends. They had been schoolfellows, and this is a link that survives many a strain too strong to be resisted by more intimate and vital bonds. And they were fellow-students, though that counts for little or much – as you take it. Besides, Vincent knew something about Edward that no one else of their age and standing even guessed. He knew that Edward was afraid of the dark, and why. He had found it out that Christmas which the two had spent at an English country house. The house was full; there was a dance. There were to be theatricals.

Early in the new year the hostess meant to ‘move house’ to an old convent, built in Tudor times, a beautiful palace with terraces and clipped yew trees, castellated battlements, a moat, swans, and a ghost story.

“You boys,” she said, “must put up with a shake-down in the new house. I hope the ghost won’t worry you. She’s an old lady in a figured satin dress. Comes and breathes softly on the back of your neck when you’re shaving. Then you see her in the glass, and as often as not you cut your throat.” She laughed. So did Edward and Vincent and the other young men. There were seven or eight of them.

But that night, when sparse candles had lighted ‘the boys’ to their rooms, when the last pipe had been smoked, the last ‘Goodnight’ said, there came a fumbling with the handle of Vincent’s door. Edward came in, an unwieldy figure, clasping pillows, trailing blankets.

“What the deuce?” queried Vincent, in natural amazement.

“I’ll turn in here on the floor if you don’t mind,” said Edward. “I know it’s beastly rot, but I can’t stand it. The room they’ve put me into, it’s an attic as big as a barn – and there’s a great door at the end, eight feet high, and it leads into a sort of horror hole – bare beams and rafters, and black as night. I know I’m an abject duffer, but there it is – I can’t face it.”

Vincent was sympathetic; though he had never known a night terror that could not be exorcized by pipe, book, and candle.

“I know, old chap. There’s no reasoning about these things,” said he, and so on.

“You can’t despise me more than I despise myself,” Edward said. “I feel a crawling hound. But it is so. I had a scare when I was a kid, and it seems to have left a sort of brand on me. I’m branded ‘coward’, old man, and the feel of it’s not nice.”

Again Vincent was sympathetic, and the poor little tale came out. How Edward, eight years old, and greedy as became his little years, had sneaked down, night-clad, to pick among the outcomings of a dinner party, and how, in the hall, dark with the light of an “artistic” coloured glass lantern, a white figure had suddenly faced him – leaned towards him, it seemed, pointed lead-white hands at his heart. That next day, finding him weak from his fainting fit, had shown the horror to be but a statue, a new purchase of his father’s, had mattered not one whit.

Edward shared Vincent’s room, and Vincent, alone of all men, shared Edward’s secret.

And now, in Paris, Rose speeding away towards Cannes, Vincent said:

“Let’s look in at the Musée Grévin.”

The Musée Grévin is a waxwork show. Your mind, at the word, flies instantly to the excellent exhibition founded by the worthy Mme. Tussaud. And you think you know what waxworks mean. But you are wrong. The Musée Grévin contains the work of artists for a nation of artists. Wax-modelled and retouched till it seems as near life as death is: this is what one sees at the Musée Grévin.

“Let’s look in at the Musée Grévin,” said Vincent. He remembered the pleasant thrill the Musée had given him, and wondered what sort of a thrill it would give his friend.

“I hate museums,” said Edward.

“This isn’t a museum,” Vincent said, and truly; “it’s just waxworks.”

“All right,” said Edward, indifferently. And they went.

They reached the doors of the Musée in the grey-brown dusk of a February evening.

One walks along a bare, narrow corridor, much like the entrance to the stalls of the Standard Theatre, and such daylight as there may be fades away behind one, and one finds oneself in a square hall, heavily decorated, and displaying with its electric lights Loie Fuller in her accordion-pleated skirts, and one or two other figures not designed to quicken the pulse.

“It’s very like Mme. Tussaud’s,” said Edward.

“Yes,” Vincent said; “isn’t it?”

Then they passed through an arch, and beheld a long room with waxen groups life-like behind glass – the coulisses of the Opera, Kitchener at Fashoda – this last with a desert background lit by something convincingly like desert sunlight.

“By Jove!” said Edward. “That’s jolly good.”

“Yes,” said Vincent again; “isn’t it?”

Edward’s interest grew.

The things were so convincing, so very nearly alive. Given the right angle, their glass eyes met one’s own, and seemed to exchange with one meaning glances.

Vincent led the way to an arched door labelled ‘Galerie de la Révolution.’

There one saw – almost in the living, suffering body – poor Marie Antoinette in prison in the Temple, her little son on his couch of rags, the rats eating from his platter, the brutal Simon calling to him from the grated window. One almost heard the words: ‘Holà, little Capet! – Are you asleep?’

One saw Marat bleeding in his bath, the brave Charlotte eyeing him; the very tiles of the bathroom, the glass of the windows, with, outside, the very sunlight, as it seemed, of 1793, on that ‘yellow July evening, the thirteenth of the month.’

The spectators did not move in a public place among waxwork figures. They peeped through open doors into rooms where history seemed to be relived. The rooms were lighted each by its own sun or lamp or candle. The spectators walked among shadows that might have oppressed a nervous person.

“Fine, eh?” said Vincent.

“Yes,” said Edward; “it’s wonderful.” A turn of a comer brought them to a room. Marie Antoinette fainting, supported by her ladies; poor, fat Louis by the window looking literally sick.

“What’s the matter with them all?” said Edward.

“Look at the window,” said Vincent.

There was a window to the room. Outside was sunshine – the sunshine of 1792 – and gleaming in it, blonde hair flowing, red mouth half-open, what seemed the just-severed head of a beautiful woman. It was raised on a pike, so that it seemed to be looking in at the window.

“I say,” said Edward, and the head on the pike seemed to sway before his eyes.

“Mme. de Lamballe. Good thing, isn’t it?” said Vincent.

“It’s altogether too much of a good thing,” said Edward. “Look here – I’ve had enough of this.”

“Oh, you must just see the Catacombs,” said Vincent; “nothing gruesome, you know. Only early Christians being married and baptized, and all that.”

He led the way down some clumsy steps to the cellars which the genius of a great artist has transformed into the exact semblance of the old Catacombs at Rome. The same rough hewing of rock, the same sacred tokens engraved strongly and simply; and among the arches of these subterranean burrowings the life of the early Christians, their sacraments, their joys, their sorrows – all expressed in groups of waxwork as like life as death is.

“But this is very fine, you know,” said Edward, getting his breath again after Mme. de Lamballe, and his imagination loved the thought of the noble sufferings and refrainings of these first lovers of the crucified Christ.

“Yes,” said Vincent, for the third time; “isn’t it?”

They passed the baptism and the burying and the marriage. The tableaux were sufficiently lighted, but little light strayed to the narrow passage where the two men walked, and the darkness seemed to press, tangible as a bodily presence, against Edward’s shoulder. He glanced backward.

“Come,” he said; “I’ve had enough.”

“Come on, then,” said Vincent.

They turned the corner, and a blaze of Italian sunlight struck at their eyes with positive dazzlement. There lay the Coliseum – tier on tier of eager faces under the blue sky of Italy. They were level with the arena. In the arena were crosses; from them drooped bleeding figures. On the sand beasts prowled, bodies lay. They saw it all through bars. They seemed to be in the place where the chosen victims waited their turn, waited for the lions and the crosses, the palm and the crown. Close by Edward was a group – an old man, a woman, and children. He could have touched them with his hand. The woman and the man stared in an agony of terror straight in the eyes of a snarling tiger, ten feet long, that stood up on its hind feet and clawed through the bars at them. The youngest child only, unconscious of the horror, laughed in the very face of it. Roman soldiers, unmoved in military vigilance, guarded the group of martyrs. In a low cage to the left more wild beasts cringed and seemed to growl, unfed. Within the grating, on the wide circle of yellow sand, lions and tigers drank the blood of Christians. Close against the bars a great lion sucked the chest of a corpse, on whose bloodstained face the horror of the death-agony was printed plain.

“Good heavens!” said Edward. Vincent took his arm suddenly, and he started with what was almost a shriek.

“What a nervous chap you are!” said Vincent, complacently, as they regained the street where the lights were, and the sound of voices and the movement of live human beings – all that warms and awakens nerves almost paralysed by the life in death of waxen immobility.

“I don’t know,” said Edward. “Let’s have a vermouth, shall we? There’s something uncanny about those wax things. They’re like life – but they’re much more like death. Suppose they moved? I don’t feel at all sure that they don’t move, when the lights are all out and there’s no one there.”

He laughed.

“I suppose you were never frightened, Vincent?”

“Yes, I was once,” said Vincent, sipping his absinthe. “Three other men and I were taking turns by twos to watch by a dead man. It was a fancy of his mother’s. Our time was up, and the other watch hadn’t come. So my chap – the one who was watching with me, I mean – went to fetch them. I didn’t think I should mind. But it was just like you say.”

“How?”

“Why,” I kept thinking, “Suppose it should move. It was so like life. And if it did move, of course it would have been because it was alive, and I ought to have been glad, because the man was my friend. But all the same, if he had moved I should have gone mad.”

“Yes,” said Edward, “that’s just exactly it.”

Vincent called for a second absinthe.

“But a dead body’s different to waxworks,” he said. “I can’t understand anyone being frightened of them.”

“Oh, can’t you?” The contempt in the other’s tone stung him. “I bet you wouldn’t spend a night alone in that place.”

“I bet you five pounds I do!”

“Done,” said Edward, briskly. “At least, I would if you’d got five pounds.”

“But I have. I’m simply rolling. I’ve sold my Dejanira; didn’t you know? I shall win your money though, anyway. But you couldn’t do it, old man. I suppose you’ll never outgrow that childish scare.”

“You might shut up about that,” said Edward, shortly.

“Oh, it’s nothing to be ashamed of; some women are afraid of mice or spiders. I say, does Rose know you’re a coward?”

“Vincent!”

“No offence, old boy. One may as well call a spade a spade. Of course, you’ve got tons of moral courage and all that. But you are afraid of the dark – and waxworks!”

“Are you trying to quarrel with me?”

“Heaven in its mercy forbid. But I bet you wouldn’t spend a night in the Musée Grévin and keep your senses.”

“What’s the stake?”

“Anything you like.”

“Make it that if I do you’ll never speak to Rose again, and, what’s more, that you’ll never speak to me,” said Edward, white-hot, knocking down a chair as he rose.

“Done,” said Vincent. “But you’ll never do it. Keep your hair on. Besides, you’re off home.”

“I shall be back in ten days. I’ll do it then,” said Edward, and was off before the other could answer.

Then Vincent, left alone, sat still, and over his third absinthe remembered how, before she had known Edward, Rose had smiled on him more than the others, he thought. He thought of her wide, lovely eyes, her wild-rose cheeks, the scented curves of her hair, and then and there the devil entered into him.

In ten days Edward would undoubtedly try to win his wager. He would try to spend the night in the Musée Grévin. Perhaps something could be arranged before that. If one knew the place thoroughly! A little scare would serve Edward right for being the man to whom that last glance of Rose’s had been given.

Vincent dined lightly, but with conscientious care – and as he dined he thought. Something might be done by tying a string to one of the figures and making it move when Edward was going through that impossible night among the effigies that are so like life – so like death. Something that was not the devil said:

“You may frighten him out of his wits.”

And the devil answered: “Nonsense; do him good. He oughtn’t to be such a schoolgirl.”

Anyway, the five pounds might as well be won tonight as any other night. He would take a greatcoat, sleep sound in the place of horrors, and the people who opened it in the morning to sweep and dust would bear witness that he had passed the night there. He thought he might trust to the French love of a sporting wager to keep him from any bother with the authorities.

So he went in among the crowd, and looked about among the waxworks for a place to hide in. He was not in the least afraid of these lifeless images. He had always been able to control his nervous tremors in his time. He was not even afraid of being frightened, which, by the way, is the worst fear of all.

As one looks at the room of the poor little Dauphin one sees a door to the left. It opens out of the room on to blackness. There were few people in the gallery. Vincent watched, and, in a moment when he was alone, stepped over the barrier and through this door. A narrow passage ran round behind the wall of the room. Here he hid, and when the gallery was deserted he looked out across the body of little Capet to the gaoler at the window. There was a soldier at the window too. Vincent amused himself with the fancy that this soldier might walk round the passage at the back of the room and tap him on the shoulder in the darkness. Only the head and shoulders of the soldier and the gaoler showed, so, of course, they could not walk, even if they were something that was not waxwork.

Presently he himself went along the passage and round to the window where they were. He found that they had legs. They were full-sized figures, dressed completely in the costume of the period.

“Thorough the beggars are, even the parts that don’t show – artists, upon my word,” said Vincent, and went back to his doorway, thinking of the hidden carving behind the capitals of Gothic cathedrals.

But the idea of the soldier who might come behind him in the dark stuck in his mind. Though still a few visitors strolled through the gallery, the closing hour was near. He supposed it would be quite dark. Then – and now he had allowed himself to be amused by the thought of something that should creep up behind him in the dark – he might possibly be nervous in that passage round which, if waxworks could move, the soldier might have come.

“By Jove!” he said; “One might easily frighten oneself by just fancying things. Suppose there were a back way from Marat’s bathroom, and instead of the soldier Marat came out of his bath with his wet towels stained with blood and dabbed them against your neck!”

When next the gallery was deserted he crept out. Not because he was nervous, he told himself, but because one might be, and because the passage was draughty, and he meant to sleep.

He went down the steps into the Catacombs, and here he spoke the truth to himself.

“Hang it all,” he said, “I was nervous. That fool Edward must have infected me. Mesmeric influences or something.”

“Chuck it and go home,” said common sense.

“I’m hanged if I do,” said Vincent.

There were a good many people in the Catacombs at the moment. Live people. He sucked confidence from their nearness, and went up and down looking for a hiding place.

Through rock-hewn arches he saw a burial scene – a corpse on a bier surrounded by mourners; a great pillar cut off half the still lying figure. It was all still and unemotional as a Sunday-school oleograph. He waited till no one was near, then slipped quickly through the mourning group and hid behind the pillar. Surprising – heartening, too, to find a plain rush-chair there, doubtless set for the resting of tired officials. He sat down in it, comforted his hand with the commonplace lines of its rungs and back. A shrouded waxen figure just behind him to the left of his pillar worried him a little, but the corpse left him unmoved as itself. A far better place, this, than that draughty passage where the soldier with legs kept intruding on the darkness that is always behind one.

Custodians went along the passages issuing orders. A stillness fell. Then, suddenly, all the lights went out.

“That’s all right,” said Vincent, and composed himself to sleep. But he seemed to have forgotten what sleep was like. He firmly fixed his thoughts on pleasant things – the sale of his picture, dances with Rose, merry evenings with Edward and the others. But the thoughts rushed by him like motes in sunbeams – he could not hold a single one of them, and presently it seemed that he had thought of every pleasant thing that had ever happened to him, and that now, if he thought at all, he must think of the things one wants most to forget. And there would be time in this long night to think much of many things. But now he found that he could no longer think.

The draped effigy just behind him worried him again. He had been trying, at the back of his mind, behind the other thoughts, to strangle the thought of it. But it was there, very close to him. Suppose it put out its hand, its wax hand, and touched him? But it was of wax. It could not move. No, of course not. But suppose it did?

He laughed aloud, a short, dry laugh, that echoed through the vaults. The cheering effect of laughter has been overestimated perhaps. Anyhow, he did not laugh again.

The silence was intense, but it was a silence thick with rustlings and breathings, and movements that his ear, strained to the uttermost, could just not hear. Suppose, as Edward had said, when all the lights were out these things did move. A corpse was a thing that had moved, given a certain condition – life. What if there were a condition, given which these things could move? What if such conditions were present now? What if all of them – Napoleon, yellow-white from his death sleep; the beasts from the amphitheatre, gore dribbling from their jaws; that soldier with the legs – all were drawing near to him in this full silence? Those death masks of Robespierre and Mirabeau – they might float down through the darkness till they touched his face. That head of Mme. de Lamballe on the pike might be thrust at him from behind the pillar. The silence throbbed with sounds that could not quite be heard.

“You fool,” he said to himself; “your dinner has disagreed with you with a vengeance. Don’t be an ass. The whole lot are only a set of big dolls.”

He felt for his matches and lighted a cigarette. The gleam of the match fell on the face of the corpse in front of him. The light was brief, and it seemed, somehow, impossible to look by its light in every corner where one would have wished to look. The match burnt his fingers as it went out. And there were only three more matches in the box.

It was dark again, and the image left on the darkness was that of the corpse in front of him. He thought of his dead friend. When the cigarette was smoked out he thought of him more and more, till it seemed that what lay on the bier was not wax. His hand reached forward and drew back more than once. But at last he made it touch the bier and through the blackness travel up along a lean, rigid arm to the wax face that lay there so still. The touch was not reassuring. Just so, and not otherwise, had his dead friend’s face felt, to the last touch of his lips. Cold, firm, waxen. People always said the dead were ‘waxen’. How true that was! He had never thought of it before. He thought of it now.

He sat still – so still that every muscle ached; because if you wish to hear the sounds that infest silence you must be very still indeed. He thought of Edward, and of the string he had meant to tie to one of the figures.

“That wouldn’t be needed,” he told himself. And his ears ached with listening, listening for the sound that, it seemed, must break at last from that crowded silence.

He never knew how long he sat there. To move, to go up, to batter at the door and clamour to be let out – that one could have done if one had had a lantern or even a full matchbox. But in the dark, not knowing the turnings, to feel one’s way among these things that were so like life and yet were not alive – to touch, perhaps, these faces that were not dead and yet felt like death! His heart beat heavily in his throat at the thought.

No; he must sit still till morning. He had been hypnotized into this state, he told himself, by Edward, no doubt; it was not natural to him.

Then, suddenly, the silence was shattered. In the dark something moved, and, after those sounds that the silence teemed with, the noise seemed to him thunder – loud. Yet it was only a very, very little sound, just the rustling of drapery, as though something had turned in its sleep. And there was a sigh – not far off.

Vincent’s muscles and tendons tightened like fine-drawn wire. He listened. There was nothing more. Only the silence, the thick silence.

The sound had seemed to come from a part of the vault where long ago, when there was light, he had seen a grave being dug for the body of a young girl martyr.

“I will get up and go out,” said Vincent. “I have three matches. I am off my head. I shall really be nervous presently if I don’t look out.”

He got up and struck a match, refused his eyes the sight of the corpse whose waxen face he had felt in the blackness, and made his way through the crowd of figures. By the match’s flicker they seemed to make way for him, to turn their heads to look after him. The match lasted till he got to a turn of the rock-hewn passage. His next match showed him the burial scene. The little, thin body of the martyr, palm in hand, lying on the rock-floor in patient waiting, the grave-digger, the mourners. Some standing, some kneeling, one crouched on the ground.

This was where that sound had come from, that rustle, that sigh. He had thought he was going away from it. Instead he had come straight to the spot where, if anywhere, his nerves might be expected to play him false.

“Bah!” he said, and he said it aloud. “The silly things are only wax. Who’s afraid?”

His voice sounded loud in the silence that lives with the wax people.

“They’re only wax,” he said again, and touched with his foot contemptuously the crouching figure in the mantle.

And, as he touched it, it raised its head and looked vacantly at him, and its eyes were bright and alive. He staggered back against another figure and dropped the match. In the new darkness he heard the crouching figure move towards him. Then the darkness fitted in round him very closely.

“What was it exactly that sent poor Vincent mad – you’ve never told me?” Rose asked the question. She and Edward were looking out over the pines and tamarisks across the blue Mediterranean. They were very happy, because it was their honeymoon.

He told her about the Musée Grévin and the wager, but he did not state the terms of it.

“But why did he think you would be afraid?”

He told her why.

“And then what happened?”

“Why, I suppose he thought there was no time like the present – for his five pounds, you know – and he hid among the waxworks. And I missed my train, and, I thought, there was no time like the present. In fact, dear, I thought if I waited I should have time to make certain of funking it. So I hid there, too. And I put on my big black capuchon, and sat down right in one of the waxwork groups – they couldn’t see me from the gallery where you walk. And after they put the lights out I simply went to sleep. And I woke up – and there was a light, and I heard someone say:

“They’re only wax,” and it was Vincent. “He thought I was one of the wax people till I looked at him; and I expect he thought I was one of them even then, poor chap. And his match went out, and while I was trying to find my railway reading lamp that I’d got near me he began to scream. And the night-watchman came running. And now he thinks everyone in the asylum is made of wax, and he screams if they come near him. They have to put his food near him while he’s asleep. It’s horrible. I can’t help feeling as if it were my fault somehow.”

“Of course it’s not,” said Rose. “Poor Vincent! Do you know, I never really liked him.”

There was a pause. Then she said:

“But how was it you weren’t frightened?”

“I was,” he said, “horribly frightened. It – it – sounds idiotic, but I was really. And yet I had to go through with it. And then I got among the figures of the people in the Catacombs, the people who died for – for things, don’t you know, died in such horrible ways. And there they were, so calm – and believing it was all right. So I thought about what they’d gone through. It sounds awful rot, I know, dear, but I expect I was sleepy. Those wax people, they sort of seemed as if they were alive, and were telling me there wasn’t anything to be frightened about. I felt as if I was one of them – and they were all my friends, and they’d wake me if anything went wrong. So I just went to sleep.”

“I think I understand,” she said. But she didn’t.

“And the odd thing is,” he went on, “I’ve never been afraid of the dark since. Perhaps his calling me a coward had something to do with it.”

“I don’t think so,” said she. And she was right. But she would never have understood how, nor why.

The Wondersmith

Fitz-James O’Brien

Golosh Street and its People

A small lane, the name of which I have forgotten, or do not choose to remember, slants suddenly off from Chatham Street, (before that headlong thoroughfare reaches into the Park), and retreats suddenly down towards the East River, as if it were disgusted with the smell of old clothes, and had determined to wash itself clean. This excellent intention it has, however, evidently contributed towards the making of that imaginary pavement mentioned in the old adage; for it is still emphatically a dirty street. It has never been able to shake off the Hebraic taint of filth which it inherits from the ancestral thoroughfare. It is slushy and greasy, as if it were twin brother of the Roman Ghetto.

I like a dirty slum; not because I am naturally unclean – I have not a drop of Neapolitan blood in my veins – but because I generally find a certain sediment of philosophy precipitated in its gutters. A clean street is terribly prosaic. There is no food for thought in carefully swept pavements, barren kennels, and vulgarly spotless houses. But when I go down a street which has been left so long to itself that it has acquired a distinct outward character, I find plenty to think about. The scraps of sodden letters lying in the ash-barrel have their meaning: desperate appeals, perhaps, from Tom, the baker’s assistant, to Amelia, the daughter of the dry-goods retailer, who is always selling at a sacrifice in consequence of the late fire. That may be Tom himself who is now passing me in a white apron, and I look up at the windows of the house (which does not, however, give any signs of a recent conflagration) and almost hope to see Amelia wave a white pocket-handkerchief. The bit of orange-peel lying on the sidewalk inspires thought. Who will fall over it? who but the industrious mother of six children, the eldest of which is only nine months old, all of whom are dependent on her exertions for support? I see her slip and tumble. I see the pale face convulsed with agony, and the vain struggle to get up; the pitying crowd closing her off from all air; the anxious young doctor who happened to be passing by; the manipulation of the broken limb, the shake of the head, the moan of the victim, the litter borne on men’s shoulders, the gates of the New York Hospital unclosing, the subscription taken up on the spot. There is some food for speculation in that three-year-old, tattered child, masked with dirt, who is throwing a brick at another three-year-old, tattered child, masked with dirt. It is not difficult to perceive that he is destined to lurk, as it were, through life. His bad, flat face – or, at least, what can be seen of it – does not look as if it were made for the light of day. The mire in which he wallows now is but a type of the moral mire in which he will wallow hereafter. The feeble little hand lifted at this instant to smite his companion, half in earnest, half in jest, will be raised against his fellow-beings forevermore.

Golosh Street – as I will call this nameless lane before alluded to – is an interesting locality. All the oddities of trade seem to have found their way thither and made an eccentric mercantile settlement. There is a bird-shop at one corner, wainscoted with little cages containing linnets, waxwings, canaries, blackbirds, Mino-birds, with a hundred other varieties, known only to naturalists. Immediately opposite is an establishment where they sell nothing but ornaments made out of the tinted leaves of autumn, varnished and gummed into various forms. Farther down is a second-hand book-stall, which looks like a sentry-box mangled out flat, and which is remarkable for not containing a complete set of any work. There is a small chink between two ordinary-sized houses, in which a little Frenchman makes and sells artificial eyes, specimens of which, ranged on a black velvet cushion, stare at you unwinkingly through the window as you pass, until you shudder and hurry on, thinking how awful the world would be, if every one went about without eyelids. There are junk-shops in Golosh Street that seem to have got hold of all the old nails in the Ark and all the old brass of Corinth. Madame Filomel, the fortune-teller, lives at No. 12 Golosh Street, second story front, pull the bell on the left-hand side. Next door to Madame is the shop of Herr Hippe, commonly called the Wondersmith.

Herr Hippe’s shop is the largest in Golosh Street, and to all appearance is furnished with the smallest stock. Beyond a few packing-cases, a turner’s lathe, and a shelf laden with dissected maps of Europe, the interior of the shop is entirely unfurnished. The window, which is lofty and wide, but much begrimed with dirt, contains the only pleasant object in the place. This is a beautiful little miniature theatre, – that is to say, the orchestra and stage. It is fitted with charmingly painted scenery and all the appliances for scenic changes. There are tiny traps, and delicately constructed ‘lifts,’ and real footlights fed with burning-fluid, and in the orchestra sits a diminutive conductor before his desk, surrounded by musical manikins, all provided with the smallest of violoncellos, flutes, oboes, drums, and such like. There are characters also on the stage. A Templar in a white cloak is dragging a fainting female form to the parapet of a ruined bridge, while behind a great black rock on the left one can see a man concealed, who, kneeling, levels an arquebuse at the knight’s heart. But the orchestra is silent; the conductor never beats the time, the musicians never play a note. The Templar never drags his victim an inch nearer to the bridge, the masked avenger takes an eternal aim with his weapon. This repose appears unnatural; for so admirably are the figures executed, that they seem replete with life. One is almost led to believe, in looking on them, that they are resting beneath some spell which hinders their motion. One expects every moment to hear the loud explosion of the arquebuse – to see the blue smoke curling, the Templar falling, – to hear the orchestra playing the requiem of the guilty.

Few people knew what Herr Hippe’s business or trade really was. That he worked at something was evident; else why the shop? Some people inclined to the belief that he was an inventor, or mechanician. His workshop was in the rear of the store, and into that sanctuary no one but himself had admission. He arrived in Golosh Street eight or ten years ago, and one fine morning, the neighbors, taking down their shutters, observed that No. 13 had got a tenant. A tall, thin, sallow-faced man stood on a ladder outside the shop-entrance, nailing up a large board, on which ‘Herr Hippe, Wondersmith,’ was painted in black letters on a yellow ground. The little theatre stood in the window, where it stood ever after, and Herr Hippe was established.

But what was a Wondersmith? people asked each other. No one could reply. Madame Filomel was consulted, but she looked grave, and said that it was none of her business. Mr. Pippel, the bird-fancier, who was a German, and ought to know best, thought it was the English for some singular Teutonic profession; but his replies were so vague, that Golosh Street was as unsatisfied as ever. Solon, the little humpback, who kept the odd-volume book-stall at the lowest corner, could throw no light upon it. And at length people had to come to the conclusion, that Herr Hippe was either a coiner or a magician, and opinions were divided.

A Bottleful of Souls

IT was a dull December evening. There was little trade doing in Golosh Street, and the shutters were up at most of the shops. Hippe’s store had been closed at least an hour, and the Mino-birds and Bohemian waxwings at Mr. Pippel’s had their heads tucked under their wings in their first sleep.

Herr Hippe sat in his parlor, which was lit by a pleasant wood-fire. There were no candles in the room, and the flickering blaze played fantastic tricks on the pale gray walls. It seemed the festival of shadows. Processions of shapes, obscure and indistinct, passed across the leaden-hued panels and vanished in the dusk corners. Every fresh blaze flung up by the wayward logs created new images. Now it was a funeral throng, with the bowed figures of mourners, the shrouded coffin, the plumes that waved like extinguished torches; now a knightly cavalcade with flags and lances, and weird horses, that rushed silently along until they met the angle of the room, when they pranced through the wall and vanished.

On a table close to where Herr Hippe sat was placed a large square box of some dark wood, while over it was spread a casing of steel, so elaborately wrought in an open arabesque pattern that it seemed like a shining blue lace which was lightly stretched over its surface.

Herr Hippe lay luxuriously in his arm-chair, looking meditatively into the fire. He was tall and thin, and his skin was of a dull saffron hue. Long, straight hair, sharply cut, regular features, a long, thin moustache, that curled like a dark asp around his mouth – the expression of which was so bitter and cruel that it seemed to distil the venom of the ideal serpent – and a bony, muscular form, were the prominent characteristics of the Wondersmith.

The profound silence that reigned in the chamber was broken by a peculiar scratching at the panel of the door, like that which at the French court was formerly substituted for the ordinary knock, when it was necessary to demand admission to the royal apartments. Herr Hippe started, raised his head, which vibrated on his long neck like the head of a cobra when about to strike, and after a moment’s silence uttered a strange guttural sound. The door unclosed, and a squat, broad-shouldered woman, with large, wild, Oriental eyes, entered softly.

“Ah! Filomel, you are come!” said the Wondersmith, sinking back in his chair. “Where are the rest of them?”

“They will be here presently,” answered Madame Filomel, seating herself in an arm-chair much too narrow for a person of her proportions, and over the sides of which she bulged like a pudding.

“Have you brought the souls?” asked the Wondersmith.

“They are here,” said the fortune-teller, drawing a large pot-bellied black bottle from under her cloak. “Ah! I have had such trouble with them!”

“Are they of the right brand, – wild, tearing, dark, devilish fellows? We want no essence of milk and honey, you know. None but souls bitter as hemlock or scorching as lightning will suit our purpose.”

“You will see, you will see, Grand Duke of Egypt! They are ethereal demons, every one of them. They are the pick of a thousand births. Do you think that I, old midwife that I am, don’t know the squall of the demon child from that of the angel child, the very moment they are delivered? Ask a musician, how he knows, even in the dark, a note struck by Thalberg from one struck by Listz!”

“I long to test them,” cried the Wondersmith, rubbing his hands joyfully. “I long to see how the little devils will behave when I give them their shapes. Ah! it will be a proud day for us when we let them loose upon the cursed Christian children! Through the length and breadth of the land they will go; wherever our wandering people set foot, and wherever they are, the children of the Christians shall die. Then we, the despised Bohemians, the gypsies, as they call us, will be once more lords of the earth, as we were in the days when the accursed things called cities did not exist, and men lived in the free woods and hunted the game of the forest. Toys indeed! Ay, ay, we will give the little dears toys! Toys that all day will sleep calmly in their boxes, seemingly stiff and wooden and without life – but at night, when the souls enter them, will arise and surround the cots of the sleeping children, and pierce their hearts with their keen, envenomed blades! Toys indeed! Oh, yes! I will sell them toys!”

And the Wondersmith laughed horribly, while the snaky moustache on his upper lip writhed as if it had truly a serpent’s power and could sting.

“Have you got your first batch, Herr Hippe?” asked Madame Filomel. “Are they all ready?”

“Oh, ay! They are ready,” answered the Wondersmith with gusto, opening, as he spoke, the box covered with the blue steel lace-work; “they are here.”

The box contained a quantity of exquisitely carved wooden manikins of both sexes, painted with great dexterity so as to present a miniature resemblance to Nature. They were, in fact, nothing more than admirable specimens of those toys which children delight in placing in various positions on the table, – in regiments, or sitting at meals, or grouped under the stiff green trees which always accompany them in the boxes in which they are sold at the toy-shops.

The peculiarity, however, about the manikins of Herr Hippe was not alone the artistic truth with which the limbs and the features were gifted; but on the countenance of each little puppet the carver’s art had wrought an expression of wickedness that was appalling. Every tiny face had its special stamp of ferocity. The lips were thin and brimful of malice; the small black bead-like eyes glittered with the fire of a universal hate. There was not one of the manikins, male or female, that did not hold in his or her hand some miniature weapon. The little men, scowling like demons, clasped in their wooden fingers swords delicate as a housewife’s needle. The women, whose countenances expressed treachery and cruelty, clutched infinitesimal daggers, with which they seemed about to take some terrible vengeance.

“Good!” said Madame Filomel, taking one of the manikins out of the box, and examining it attentively; “you work well, Duke Balthazar! These little ones are of the right stamp; they look as if they had mischief in them. Ah! here come our brothers.”

At this moment the same scratching that preceded the entrance of Madame Filomel was heard at the door, and Herr Hippe replied with a hoarse, guttural cry. The next moment two men entered. The first was a small man with very brilliant eyes. He was wrapt in a long shabby cloak, and wore a strange nondescript species of cap on his head, such a cap as one sees only in the low billiard-rooms in Paris. His companion was tall, long-limbed, and slender; and his dress, although of the ordinary cut, either from the disposition of colors, or from the careless, graceful attitudes of the wearer, assumed a certain air of picturesqueness. Both the men possessed the same marked Oriental type of countenance which distinguished the Wondersmith and Madame Filomel. True gypsies they seemed, who would not have been out of place telling fortunes, or stealing chickens in the green lanes of England, or wandering with their wild music and their sleight-of-hand tricks through Bohemian villages.

“Welcome, brothers!” said the Wondersmith; “you are in time. Sister Filomel has brought the souls, and we are about to test them. Monsieur Kerplonne, take off your cloak. Brother Oaksmith, take a chair. I promise you some amusement this evening; so make yourselves comfortable. Here is something to aid you.”

And while the Frenchman Kerplonne, and his tall companion, Oaksmith, were obeying Hippe’s invitation, he reached over to a little closet let into the wall, and took thence a squat bottle and some glasses, which he placed on the table.

“Drink, brothers!” he said; “it is not Christian blood, but good stout wine of Oporto. It goes right to the heart, and warms one like the sunshine of the South.”

“It is good,” said Kerplonne, smacking his lips with enthusiasm.

“Why don’t you keep brandy? Hang wine!” cried Oaksmith, after having swallowed two bumpers in rapid succession.

“Bah! Brandy has been the ruin of our race. It has made us sots and thieves. It shall never cross my threshold,” cried the Wondersmith, with a sombre indignation.

“A little of it is not bad, though, Duke,” said the fortune-teller. “It consoles us for our misfortunes; it gives us the crowns we once wore; it restores to us the power we once wielded; it carries us back, as if by magic, to that land of the sun from which fate has driven us; it darkens the memory of all the evils that we have for centuries suffered.”

“It is a devil; may it be cursed!” cried Herr Hippe, passionately. “It is a demon that stole from me my son, the finest youth in all Courland. Yes! my son, the son of the Waywode Balthazar, Grand Duke of Lower Egypt, died raving in a gutter, with an empty brandy-bottle in his hands. Were it not that the plant is a sacred one to our race, I would curse the grape and the vine that bore it.”

This outburst was delivered with such energy that the three gypsies kept silence. Oaksmith helped himself to another glass of Port, and the fortune-teller rocked to and fro in her chair, too much overawed by the Wondersmith’s vehemence of manner to reply. The little Frenchman, Kerplonne, took no part in the discussion, but seemed lost in admiration of the manikins, which he took from the box in which they lay, handling them with the greatest care. After the silence had lasted for about a minute, Herr Hippe broke it with the sudden question –

“How does your eye get on, Kerplonne?”

“Excellently, Duke. It is finished. I have it here.” And the little Frenchman put his hand into his breeches-pocket and pulled out a large artificial human eye. Its great size was the only thing in this eye that would lead any one to suspect its artificiality. It was at least twice the size of life; but there was a fearful speculative light in its iris, which seemed to expand and contract like the eye of a living being, that rendered it a horrible staring paradox. It looked like the naked eye of the Cyclops, torn from his forehead, and still burning with wrath and the desire for vengeance.

The little Frenchman laughed pleasantly as he held the eye in his hand, and gazed down on that huge dark pupil, that stared back at him, it seemed, with an air of defiance and mistrust.

“It is a devil of an eye,” said the little man, wiping the enamelled surface with an old silk pocket-handkerchief; “it reads like a demon. My niece – the unhappy one – has a wretch of a lover, and I have a long time feared that she would run away with him. I could not read her correspondence, for she kept her writing-desk closely locked. But I asked her yesterday to keep this eye in some very safe place for me. She put it, as I knew she would, into her desk, and by its aid I read every one of her letters. She was to run away next Monday, the ungrateful! but she will find herself disappointed.”

And the little man laughed heartily at the success of his stratagem, and polished and fondled the great eye until that optic seemed to grow sore with rubbing.

“And you have been at work, too, I see, Herr Hippe. Your manikins are excellent. But where are the souls?”

“In that bottle,” answered the Wondersmith, pointing to the pot-bellied black bottle that Madame Filomel had brought with her. “Yes, Monsieur Kerplonne,” he continued, “my manikins are well made. I invoked the aid of Abigor, the demon of soldiery, and he inspired me. The little fellows will be famous assassins when they are animated. We will try them tonight.”

“Good!” cried Kerplonne, rubbing his hands joyously. “It is close upon New Year’s Day. We will fabricate millions of the little murderers by New Year’s Even, and sell them in large quantities; and when the households are all asleep, and the Christian children are waiting for Santa Claus to come, the small ones will troop from their boxes and the Christian children will die. It is famous! Health to Abigor!”

“Let us try them at once,” said Oaksmith. “Is your daughter, Zonela, in bed, Herr Hippe? Are we secure from intrusion?”

“No one is stirring about the house,” replied the Wondersmith, gloomily.

Filomel leaned over to Oaksmith, and said, in an undertone –

“Why do you mention his daughter? You know he does not like to have her spoken about.”

“I will take care that we are not disturbed,” said Kerplonne, rising. “I will put my eye outside the door, to watch.”

He went to the door and placed his great eye upon the floor with tender care. As he did so, a dark form, unseen by him or his second vision, glided along the passage noiselessly and was lost in the darkness.

“Now for it!” exclaimed Madam Filomel, taking up her fat black bottle. “Herr Hippe, prepare your manikins!”

The Wondersmith took the little dolls out, one by one, and set them upon the table. Such an array of villanous countenances was never seen. An army of Italian bravos, seen through the wrong end of a telescope, or a band of prisoners at the galleys in Lilliput, will give some faint idea of the appearance they presented. While Madame Filomel uncorked the black bottle, Herr Hippe covered the dolls over with a species of linen tent, which he took also from the box. This done, the fortune-teller held the mouth of the bottle to the door of the tent, gathering the loose cloth closely round the glass neck. Immediately, tiny noises were heard inside the tent. Madame Filomel removed the bottle, and the Wondersmith lifted the covering in which he had enveloped his little people.

A wonderful transformation had taken place. Wooden and inflexible no longer, the crowd of manikins were now in full motion. The beadlike eyes turned, glittering, on all sides; the thin, wicked lips quivered with bad passions; the tiny hands sheathed and unsheathed the little swords and daggers. Episodes, common to life, were taking place in every direction. Here two martial manikins paid court to a pretty sly-faced female, who smiled on each alternately, but gave her hand to be kissed to a third manikin, an ugly little scoundrel, who crouched behind her back. There a pair of friendly dolls walked arm in arm, apparently on the best terms, while, all the time, one was watching his opportunity to stab the other in the back.

“I think they’ll do,” said the Wondersmith, chuckling, as he watched these various incidents. “Treacherous, cruel, bloodthirsty. All goes marvellously well. But stay! I will put the grand test to them.”

So saying, he drew a gold dollar from his pocket, and let it fall on the table in the very midst of the throng of manikins. It had hardly touched the table, when there was a pause on all sides. Every head was turned towards the dollar. Then about twenty of the little creatures rushed towards the glittering coin. One, fleeter than the rest, leaped upon it, and drew his sword. The entire crowd of little people had now gathered round this new centre of attraction. Men and women struggled and shoved to get nearer to the piece of gold. Hardly had the first Liliputian mounted upon the treasure, when a hundred blades flashed back a defiant answer to his, and a dozen men, sword in hand, leaped upon the yellow platform and drove him off at the sword’s point. Then commenced a general battle. The miniature faces were convulsed with rage and avarice. Each furious doll tried to plunge dagger or sword into his or her neighbor, and the women seemed possessed by a thousand devils.

“They will break themselves into atoms,” cried Filomel, as she watched with eagerness this savage melee. “You had better gather them up, Herr Hippe. I will exhaust my bottle and suck all the souls back from them.”

“Oh, they are perfect devils! They are magnificent little demons!” cried the Frenchman, with enthusiasm. “Hippe, you are a wonderful man. Brother Oaksmith, you have no such man as Hippe among your English gypsies.”

“Not exactly,” answered Oaksmith, rather sullenly, “not exactly. But we have men there who can make a twelve-year-old horse look like a four-year-old, – and who can take you and Herr Hippe up with one hand, and throw you over their shoulders.”

“The good God forbid!” said the little Frenchman. “I do not love such play. It is incommodious.”

While Oaksmith and Kerplonne were talking, the Wondersmith had placed the linen tent over the struggling dolls, and Madame Filomel, who had been performing some mysterious manipulations with her black bottle, put the mouth once more to the door of the tent. In an instant the confused murmur within ceased. Madame Filomel corked the bottle quickly. The Wondersmith withdrew the tent, and, lo! The furious dolls were once more wooden-jointed and inflexible; and the old sinister look was again frozen on their faces.

“They must have blood, though,” said Herr Hippe, as he gathered them up and put them into their box. “Mr. Pippel, the bird-fancier, is asleep. I have a key that opens his door. We will let them loose among the birds; it will be rare fun.”

“Magnificent!” cried Kerplonne. “Let us go on the instant. But first let me gather up my eye.”

The Frenchman pocketed his eye, after having given it a polish with the silk handkerchief; Herr Hippe extinguished the lamp; Oaksmith took a last bumper of Port; and the four gypsies departed for Mr. Pippel’s, carrying the box of manikins with them.

Solon

THE shadow that glided along the dark corridor, at the moment that Monsieur Kerplonne deposited his sentinel eye outside the door of the Wondersmith’s apartment, sped swiftly through the passage and ascended the stairs to the attic. Here the shadow stopped at the entrance to one of the chambers and knocked at the door. There was no reply.

“Zonela, are you asleep?” said the shadow, softly.

“Oh, Solon, is it you?” replied a sweet low voice from within. “I thought it was Herr Hippe. Come in.”

The shadow opened the door and entered. There were neither candles nor lamp in the room; but through the projecting window, which was open, there came the faint gleams of the starlight, by which one could distinguish a female figure seated on a low stool in the middle of the floor.

“Has he left you without light again, Zonela?” asked the shadow, closing the door of the apartment. “I have brought my little lantern with me, though.”

“Thank you, Solon,” answered she called Zonela; “you are a good fellow. He never gives me any light of an evening, but bids me go to bed. I like to sit sometimes and look at the moon and the stars, – the stars more than all; for they seem all the time to look right back into my face, very sadly, as if they would say, ‘We see you, and pity you, and would help you, if we could.’ But it is so mournful to be always looking at such myriads of melancholy eyes! And I long so to read those nice books that you lend me, Solon!”

By this time the shadow had lit the lantern and was a shadow no longer. A large head, covered with a profusion of long blonde hair, which was cut after that fashion known as a l’enfants d’Edouard; a beautiful pale face, lit with wide, blue, dreamy eyes; long arms and slender hands, attenuated legs, and – an enormous hump; – such was Solon, the shadow. As soon as the humpback had lit the lamp, Zonela arose from the low stool on which she had been seated, and took Solon’s hand affectionately in hers.

Zonela was surely not of gypsy blood. That rich auburn hair, that looked almost black in the lamp-light, that pale, transparent skin, tinged with an under-glow of warm rich blood, the hazel eyes, large and soft as those of a fawn, were never begotten of a Zingaro. Zonela was seemingly about sixteen; her figure, although somewhat thin and angular, was full of the unconscious grace of youth. She was dressed in an old cotton print, which had been once of an exceedingly boisterous pattern, but was now a mere suggestion of former splendor; while round her head was twisted, in fantastic fashion, a silk handkerchief of green ground spotted with bright crimson. This strange headdress gave her an elfish appearance.

“I have been out all day with the organ, and I am so tired, Solon! – Not sleepy, but weary, I mean. Poor Furbelow was sleepy, though, and he’s gone to bed.”

“I’m weary, too, Zonela – not weary as you are, though, for I sit in my little book-stall all day long, and do not drag round an organ and a monkey and play old tunes for pennies – but weary of myself, of life, of the load that I carry on my shoulders;” and, as he said this, the poor humpback glanced sideways, as if to call attention to his deformed person.

“Well, but you ought not to be melancholy amidst your books, Solon. Gracious! If I could only sit in the sun and read as you do, how happy I should be! But it’s very tiresome to trudge round all day with that nasty organ, and look up at the houses, and know that you are annoying the people inside; and then the boys play such bad tricks on poor Furbelow, throwing him hot pennies to pick up, and burning his poor little hands; and oh! sometimes, Solon, the men in the street make me so afraid, – they speak to me and look at me so oddly! – I’d a great deal rather sit in your book-stall and read.”

“I have nothing but odd volumes in my stall,” answered the humpback. “Perhaps that’s right, though; for, after all, I’m nothing but an odd volume myself.”

“Come, don’t be melancholy, Solon. Sit down and tell me a story. I’ll bring Furbelow to listen.”

So saying, she went to a dusk corner of the cheerless attic-room, and returned with a little Brazilian monkey in her arms, – a poor, mild, drowsy thing, that looked as if it had cried itself to sleep. She sat down on her little stool, with Furbelow in her lap, and nodded her head to Solon, as much as to say, “Go on; we are attentive.”

“You want a story, do you?” said the humpback, with a mournful smile. “Well, I’ll tell you one. Only what will your father say, if he catches me here?”

“Herr Hippe is not my father,” cried Zonela, indignantly. “He’s a gypsy, and I know I’m stolen; and I’d run away from him, if I only knew where to run to. If I were his child, do you think that he would treat me as he does? make me trudge round the city, all day long, with a barrel-organ and a monkey – though I love poor dear little Furbelow – and keep me up in a garret, and give me ever so little to eat? I know I’m not his child, for he hates me.”

“Listen to my story, Zonela, and we’ll talk of that afterwards. Let me sit at your feet;” – and, having coiled himself up at the little maiden’s feet, he commenced:

“There once lived in a great city, just like this city of New York, a poor little hunchback. He kept a second-hand book-stall, where he made barely enough money to keep body and soul together. He was very sad at times, because he knew scarce any one, and those that he did know did not love him. He had passed a sickly, secluded youth. The children of his neighborhood would not play with him, for he was not made like them; and the people in the streets stared at him with pity, or scoffed at him when he went by. Ah! Zonela, how his poor heart was wrung with bitterness when he beheld the procession of shapely men and fine women that every day passed him by in the thoroughfares of the great city! How he repined and cursed his fate as the torrent of fleet-footed firemen dashed past him to the toll of the bells, magnificent in their overflowing vitality and strength! But there was one consolation left him, one drop of honey in the jar of gall, so sweet that it ameliorated all the bitterness of life. God had given him a deformed body, but his mind was straight and healthy. So the poor hunchback shut himself into the world of books, and was, if not happy, at least contented. He kept company with courteous paladins, and romantic heroes, and beautiful women; and this society was of such excellent breeding that it never so much as once noticed his poor crooked back or his lame walk. The love of books grew upon him with his years. He was remarked for his studious habits; and when, one day, the obscure people that he called father and mother – parents only in name – died, a compassionate book-vendor gave him enough stock in trade to set up a little stall of his own. Here, in his book-stall, he sat in the sun all day, waiting for the customers that seldom came, and reading the fine deeds of the people of the ancient time, or the beautiful thoughts of the poets that had warmed millions of hearts before that hour, and still glowed for him with undiminished fire. One day, when he was reading some book, that, small as it was, was big enough to shut the whole world out from him, he heard some music in the street. Looking up from his book, he saw a little girl, with large eyes, playing an organ, while a monkey begged for alms from a crowd of idlers who had nothing in their pockets but their hands. The girl was playing, but she was also weeping. The merry notes of the polka were ground out to a silent accompaniment of tears. She looked very sad, this organ-girl, and her monkey seemed to have caught the infection, for his large brown eyes were moist, as if he also wept. The poor hunchback was struck with pity, and called the little girl over to give her a penny, – not, dear Zonela, because he wished to bestow alms, but because he wanted to speak with her. She came, and they talked together. She came the next day, – for it turned out that they were neighbors, – and the next, and, in short, every day. They became friends. They were both lonely and afflicted, with this difference, that she was beautiful, and he – was a hunchback.”

“Why, Solon,” cried Zonela, “that’s the very way you and I met!”

“It was then,” continued Solon, with a faint smile, “that life seemed to have its music. A great harmony seemed to the poor cripple to fill the world. The carts that took the flour-barrels from the wharves to the store-houses seemed to emit joyous melodies from their wheels. The hum of the great business-streets sounded like grand symphonies of triumph. As one who has been travelling through a barren country without much heed feels with singular force the sterility of the lands he has passed through when he reaches the fertile plains that lie at the end of his journey, so the humpback, after his vision had been freshened with this blooming flower, remembered for the first time the misery of the life that he had led. But he did not allow himself to dwell upon the past. The present was so delightful that it occupied all his thoughts. Zonela, he was in love with the organ-girl.”

“Oh, that’s so nice!” said Zonela, innocently, – pinching poor Furbelow, as she spoke, in order to dispel a very evident snooze that was creeping over him. “It’s going to be a love-story.”

“Ah! But, Zonela, he did not know whether she loved him in return. You forget that he was deformed.”

“But,” answered the girl, gravely, “he was good.”

A light like the flash of an aurora illuminated Solon’s face for an instant. He put out his hand suddenly, as if to take Zonela’s and press it to his heart; but an unaccountable timidity seemed to arrest the impulse, and he only stroked Furbelow’s head, upon which that individual opened one large brown eye to the extent of the eighth of an inch, and, seeing that it was only Solon, instantly closed it again, and resumed his dream of a city where there were no organs and all the copper coin of the realm was iced.

“He hoped and feared,” continued Solon, in a low, mournful voice; “but at times he was very miserable, because he did not think it possible that so much happiness was reserved for him as the love of this beautiful, innocent girl. At night, when he was in bed, and all the world was dreaming, he lay awake looking up at the old books that hung against the walls, thinking how he could bring about the charming of her heart. One night, when he was thinking of this, with his eyes fixed upon the mouldy backs of the odd volumes that lay on their shelves, and looked back at him wistfully, as if they would say – ‘We also are like you, and wait to be completed’ – it seemed as if he heard a rustle of leaves. Then, one by one, the books came down from their places to the floor, as if shifted by invisible hands, opened their worm-eaten covers, and from between the pages of each the hunchback saw issue forth a curious throng of little people that danced here and there through the apartment. Each one of these little creatures was shaped so as to bear resemblance to some one of the letters of the alphabet. One tall, long-legged fellow seemed like the letter A; a burly fellow, with a big head and a paunch, was the model of B; another leering little chap might have passed for a Q; and so on through the whole. These fairies – for fairies they were – climbed upon the hunchback’s bed, and clustered thick as bees upon his pillow. ‘Come!’ they cried to him, ‘we will lead you into fairy-land.’ So saying, they seized his hand, and he suddenly found himself in a beautiful country, where the light did not come from sun or moon or stars, but floated round and over and in everything like the atmosphere. On all sides he heard mysterious melodies sung by strangely musical voices. None of the features of the landscape were definite; yet when he looked on the vague harmonies of color that melted one into another before his sight, he was filled with a sense of inexplicable beauty. On every side of him fluttered radiant bodies which darted to and fro through the illumined space. They were not birds, yet they flew like birds; and as each one crossed the path of his vision, he felt a strange delight flash through his brain, and straightway an interior voice seemed to sing beneath the vaulted dome of his temples a verse containing some beautiful thought. The little fairies were all this time dancing and fluttering around him, perching on his head, on his shoulders, or balancing themselves on his finger-tips. ‘Where am I?’ he asked, at last, of his friends, the fairies. ‘Ah! Solon,’ he heard them whisper, in tones that sounded like the distant tinkling of silver bells, ‘this land is nameless; but those whom we lead hither, who tread its soil, and breathe its air, and gaze on its floating sparks of light, are poets forevermore!’ Having said this, they vanished, and with them the beautiful indefinite land, and the flashing lights, and the illumined air; and the hunchback found himself again in bed, with the moonlight quivering on the floor, and the dusty books on their shelves, grim and mouldy as ever.”

“You have betrayed yourself. You called yourself Solon,” cried Zonela. “Was it a dream?”

“I do not know,” answered Solon; “but since that night I have been a poet.”

“A poet?” screamed the little organ-girl, – “a real poet, who makes verses which every one reads and every one talks of?”

“The people call me a poet,” answered Solon, with a sad smile. “They do not know me by the name of Solon, for I write under an assumed title; but they praise me, and repeat my songs. But, Zonela, I can’t sing this load off of my back, can I?”

“Oh, bother the hump!” said Zonela, jumping up suddenly. “You’re a poet, and that’s enough, isn’t it? I’m so glad you’re a poet, Solon! You must repeat all your best things to me, won’t you?”

Solon nodded assent.

“You don’t ask me,” he said, “who was the little girl that the hunchback loved.”

Zonela’s face flushed crimson. She turned suddenly away, and ran into a dark corner of the room. In a moment she returned with an old hand-organ in her arms.

“Play, Solon, play!” she cried. “I am so glad that I want to dance. Furbelow, come and dance in honor of Solon the Poet.”

It was her confession. Solon’s eyes flamed, as if his brain had suddenly ignited. He said nothing; but a triumphant smile broke over his countenance. Zonela, the twilight of whose cheeks was still rosy with the setting blush, caught the lazy Furbelow by his little paws; Solon turned the crank of the organ, which wheezed out as merry a polka as its asthma would allow, and the girl and the monkey commenced their fantastic dance. They had taken but a few steps when the door suddenly opened, and the tall figure of the Wondersmith appeared on the threshold. His face was convulsed with rage, and the black snake that quivered on his upper lip seemed to rear itself as if about to spring upon the hunchback.

The Manikins and the Minos

THE four gypsies left Herr Hippe’s house cautiously, and directed their steps towards Mr. Pippel’s bird-shop. Golosh Street was asleep. Nothing was stirring in that tenebrous slum, save a dog that savagely gnawed a bone which lay on a dust-heap, tantalizing him with the flavor of food without its substance. As the gypsies moved stealthily along in the darkness, they had a sinister and murderous air that would not have failed to attract the attention of the policeman of the quarter, if that worthy had not at the moment been comfortably ensconced in the neighboring ‘Rainbow’ bar-room, listening to the improvisations of that talented vocalist, Mr. Harrison, who was making impromptu verses on every possible subject, to the accompaniment of a cithern which was played by a sad little Italian in a large cloak, to whom the host of the ‘Rainbow’ gave so many toddies and a dollar for his nightly performance.

Mr. Pippel’s shop was but a short distance from the Wondersmith’s house. A few moments, therefore, brought the gypsy party to the door, when, by aid of a key which Herr Hippe produced, they silently slipped into the entry. Here the Wondersmith took a dark-lantern from under his cloak, removed the cap that shrouded the light, and led the way into the shop, which was separated from the entry only by a glass door, that yielded, like the outer one, to a key which Hippe took from his pocket. The four gypsies now entered the shop and closed the door behind them.

It was a little world of birds. On every side, whether in large or small cages, one beheld balls of various-colored feathers standing on one leg and breathing peacefully. Love-birds, nestling shoulder to shoulder, with their heads tucked under their wings and all their feathers puffed out, so that they looked like globes of malachite; English bullfinches, with ashen-colored backs, in which their black heads were buried, and corselets of a rosy down; Java sparrows, fat and sleek and cleanly; troupials, so glossy and splendid in plumage that they looked as if they were dressed in the celebrated armor of the Black Prince, which was jet, richly damascened with gold; a cock of the rock, gleaming, a ball of tawny fire, like a setting sun; the Campanero of Brazil, white as snow, with his dilatable tolling-tube hanging from his head, placid and silent; – these, with a humbler crowd of linnets, canaries, robins, mocking-birds, and phoebes, slumbered calmly in their little cages, that were hung so thickly on the wall as not to leave an inch of it visible.

“Splendid little morsels, all of them!” exclaimed Monsieur Kerplonne. “Ah we are going to have a rare beating!”

“So Pippel does not sleep in his shop,” said the English gypsy, Oaksmith.

“No. The fellow lives somewhere up one of the avenues,” answered Madame Filomel. “He came, the other evening, to consult me about his fortune. I did not tell him,” she added, with a laugh, “that he was going to have so distinguished a sporting party on his premises.”

“Come,” said the Wondersmith, producing the box of manikins, “get ready with souls, Madame Filomel. I am impatient to see my little men letting out lives for the first time.”

Just at the moment that the Wondersmith uttered this sentence, the four gypsies were startled by a hoarse voice issuing from a corner of the room, and propounding in the most guttural tones the intemperate query of “What’ll you take?” This sottish invitation had scarce been given, when a second extremely thick voice replied from an opposite corner, in accents so rough that they seemed to issue from a throat torn and furrowed by the liquid lava of many barrooms, “Brandy and water.”

“Hollo! Who’s here?” muttered Herr Hippe, flashing the light of his lantern round the shop.

Oaksmith turned up his coat-cuffs, as if to be ready for a fight; Madame Filomel glided, or rather rolled, towards the door; while Kerplonne put his hand into his pocket, as if to assure himself that his supernumerary optic was all right.

“What’ll you take?” croaked the voice in the corner, once more.

“Brandy and water,” rapidly replied the second voice in the other corner. And then, as if by a concerted movement, a series of bibular invitations and acceptances were rolled backwards and forwards with a volubility of utterance that threw Patter versus Clatter into the shade.

“What the Devil can it be?” muttered the Wondersmith, flashing his lantern here and there. “Ah! It is those Minos.”

So saying, he stopped under one of the wicker cages that hung high up on the wall, and raised the lantern above his head, so as to throw the light upon that particular cage. The hospitable individual who had been extending all these hoarse invitations to partake of intoxicating beverages was an inhabitant of the cage. It was a large Mino-bird, who now stood perched on his cross-bar, with his yellowish orange bill sloped slightly over his shoulder, and his white eye cocked knowingly upon the Wondersmith. The respondent voice in the other corner came from another Mino-bird, who sat in the dusk in a similar cage, also attentively watching the Wondersmith. These Mino-birds, I may remark, in passing, have a singular aptitude for acquiring phrases.

“What’ll you take?” repeated the Mino, cocking his other eye upon Herr Hippe.

“Mon Dieu! What a bird!” exclaimed the little Frenchman. “He is, in truth, polite.”

“I don’t know what I’ll take,” said Hippe, as if replying to the Mino-bird; “but I know what you’ll get, old fellow! Filomel, open the cage-doors, and give me the bottle.”

Filomel opened, one after another, the doors of the numberless little cages, thereby arousing from slumber their feathered occupants, who opened their beaks, and stretched their claws, and stared with great surprise at the lantern and the midnight visitors.

By this time the Wondersmith had performed the mysterious manipulations with the bottle, and the manikins were once more in full motion, swarming out of their box, sword and dagger in hand, with their little black eyes glittering fiercely, and their white teeth shining. The little creatures seemed to scent their prey. The gypsies stood in the centre of the shop, watching the proceedings eagerly, while the Liliputians made in a body towards the wall and commenced climbing from cage to cage. Then was heard a tremendous flittering of wings, and faint, despairing ‘quirks’ echoed on all sides. In almost every cage there was a fierce manikin thrusting his sword or dagger vigorously into the body of some unhappy bird. It recalled the antique legend of the battles of the Pygmies and the Cranes. The poor love-birds lay with their emerald feathers dabbled in their hearts’ blood, shoulder to shoulder in death as in life. Canaries gasped at the bottom of their cages, while the water in their little glass fountains ran red. The bullfinches wore an unnatural crimson on their breasts. The mocking-bird lay on his back, kicking spasmodically, in the last agonies, with a tiny sword-thrust cleaving his melodious throat in twain, so that from the instrument which used to gush with wondrous music only scarlet drops of blood now trickled. The manikins were ruthless. Their faces were ten times wickeder than ever, as they roamed from cage to cage, slaughtering with a fury that seemed entirely unappeasable. Presently the feathery rustlings became fewer and fainter, and the little pipings of despair died away; and in every cage lay a poor murdered minstrel, with the song that abode within him forever quenched; in every cage but two, and those two were high up on the wall; and in each glared a pair of wild, white eyes; and an orange beak, touch as steel, pointed threateningly down. With the needles which they grasped as swords all wet and warm with blood, and their beadlike eyes flashing in the light of the lantern, the Liliputian assassins swarmed up the cages in two separate bodies, until they reached the wickets of the habitations in which the Minos abode. Mino saw them coming, – had listened attentively to the many death-struggles of his comrades, and had, in fact, smelt a rat. Accordingly he was ready for the manikins. There he stood at the barbican of his castle, with formidable beak couched like a lance. The manikins made a gallant charge. “What’ll you take?” was rattled out by the Mino, in a deep bass, as with one plunge of his sharp bill he scattered the ranks of the enemy, and sent three of them flying to the floor, where they lay with broken limbs. But the manikins were brave automata, and again they closed and charged the gallant Mino. Again the wicked white eyes of the bird gleamed, and again the orange bill dealt destruction. Everything seemed to be going on swimmingly for Mino, when he found himself attacked in the rear by two treacherous manikins, who had stolen upon him from behind, through the lattice-work of the cage. Quick as lightning the Mino turned to repel this assault, but all too late; two slender quivering threads of steel crossed in his poor body, and he staggered into a corner of the cage. His white eyes closed, then opened; a shiver passed over his body, beginning at his shoulder-tips and dying off in the extreme tips of the wings; he gasped as if for air, and then, with a convulsive shudder, which ruffled all his feathers, croaked out feebly his little speech, “What’ll you take?” Instantly from the opposite corner came the old response, still feebler than the question – a mere gurgle, as it were, of “Brandy and water.” Then all was silent. The Mino-birds were dead.

“They spill blood like Christians,” said the Wondersmith, gazing fondly on the manikins. “They will be famous assassins.”

Tied Up

HERR HIPPE stood in the doorway, scowling. His eyes seemed to scorch the poor hunchback, whose form, physically inferior, crouched before that baneful, blazing glance, while his head, mentally brave, reared itself, as if to redeem the cowardice of the frame to which it belonged. So the attitude of the serpent: the body pliant, yielding, supple; but the crest thrown aloft, erect, and threatening. As for Zonela, she was frozen in the attitude of motion – a dancing nymph in colored marble; agility stunned; elasticity petrified.

Furbelow, astonished at this sudden change, and catching, with all the mysterious rapidity of instinct peculiar to the lower animals, at the enigmatical character of the situation, turned his pleading, melancholy eyes from one to another of the motionless three, as if begging that his humble intellect (pardon me, naturalists, for the use of this word ‘intellect’ in the matter of a monkey!) should be enlightened as speedily as possible. Not receiving the desired information, he, after the manner of trained animals, returned to his muttons; in other words, he conceived that this unusual entrance, and consequent dramatic tableau, meant ‘shop.’ He therefore dropped Zonela’s hand and pattered on his velvety little feet over towards the grim figure of the Wondersmith, holding out his poor little paw for the customary copper. He had but one idea drilled into him, – soulless creature that he was, – and that was, alms. But I have seen creatures that professed to have souls, and that would have been indignant, if you had denied them immortality, who took to the soliciting of alms as naturally as if beggary had been the original sin, and was regularly born with them, and never baptized out of them. I will give these Bandits of the Order of Charity this credit, however, that they knew the best highways and the richest founts of benevolence – unlike to Furbelow, who, unreasoning and undiscriminating, begged from the first person that was near. Burbelow, owing to this intellectual inferiority to the before-mentioned Alsatians, frequently got more kicks than coppers, and the present supplication which he indulged in towards the Wondersmith was a terrible confirmation of the rule. The reply to the extended pleading paw was what might be called a double-barrelled kick – a kick to be represented by the power of two when the foot touched the object, multiplied by four when the entire leg formed an angle of 45 deg. with the spinal column. The long, nervous leg of the Wondersmith caught the little creature in the centre of the body, doubled up his brown, hairy form, till he looked like a fur driving-glove, and sent him whizzing across the room into a far corner, where he dropped senseless and flaccid.

This vengeance which Herr Hippe executed upon Furbelow seemed to have operated as a sort of escape-valve, and he found voice. He hissed out the question, “Who are you?” to the hunchback; and in listening to that essence of sibilation, it really seemed as if it proceeded from the serpent that curled upon his upper lip.

“Who are you? Deformed dog, who are you? What do you here?”

“My name is Solon,” answered the fearless head of the hunchback, while the frail, cowardly body shivered and trembled inch by inch into a corner.

“So you come to visit my daughter in the night-time, when I am away?” continued the Wondersmith, with a sneering tone that dropped from his snake-wreathed mouth like poison. “You are a brave and gallant lover, are you not? Where did you win that Order of the Curse of God that decorates your shoulders? The women turn their heads and look after you in the street, when you pass, do they not? lost in admiration of that symmetrical figure, those graceful limbs, that neck pliant as the stem that moors the lotus! Elegant, conquering Christian cripple, what do you here in my daughter’s room?”

Can you imagine Jove, limitless in power and wrath, hurling from his vast grasp mountain after mountain upon the struggling Enceladus – and picture the Titan sinking, sinking, deeper and deeper into the earth, crushed and dying, with nothing visible through the super-incumbent masses of Pelion and Ossa, but a gigantic head and two flaming eyes, that, despite the death which is creeping through each vein, still flash back defiance to the divine enemy? Well, Solon and Herr Hippe presented such a picture, seen through the wrong end of a telescope, reduced in proportion, but alike in action. Solon’s feeble body seemed to sink into utter annihilation beneath the horrible taunts that his enemy hurled at him, while the large, brave brow and unconquered eyes still sent forth a magnetic resistance.

Suddenly the poor hunchback felt his arm grasped. A thrill seemed to run through his entire body. A warm atmosphere, invigorating and full of delicious odor, surrounded him. It appeared as if invisible bandages were twisted all about his limbs, giving him a strange strength. His sinking legs straightened. His powerless arms were braced. Astonished, he glanced round for an instant, and beheld Zonela, with a world of love burning in her large lambent eyes, wreathing her round white arms about his humped shoulders. Then the poet knew the great sustaining power of love. Solon reared himself boldly.

“Sneer at my poor form,” he cried, in strong vibrating tones, flinging out one long arm and one thin finger at the Wondersmith, as if he would have impaled him like a beetle. “Humiliate me, if you can. I care not. You are a wretch, and I am honest and pure. This girl is not your daughter. You are like one of those demons in the fairy tales that held beauty and purity locked in infernal spells. I do not fear you, Herr Hippe. There are stories abroad about you in the neighborhood, and when you pass, people say that they feel evil and blight hovering over their thresholds. You persecute this girl. You are her tyrant. You hate her. I am a cripple. Providence has cast this lump upon my shoulders. But that is nothing. The camel, that is the salvation of the children of the desert, has been given his hump in order that he might bear his human burden better. This girl, who is homeless as the Arab, is my appointed load in life, and, please God, I will carry her on this back, hunched though it may be. I have come to see her, because I love her, because she loves me. You have no claim on her; so I will take her from you.”

Quick as lightning, the Wondersmith had stridden a few paces, and grasped the poor cripple, who was yet quivering with the departing thunder of his passion. He seized him in his bony, muscular grasp, as he would have seized a puppet, and held him at arm’s length gasping and powerless; while Zonela, pale, breathless, entreating, sank half-kneeling on the floor.

“Your skeleton will be interesting to science when you are dead, Mr. Solon,” hissed the Wondersmith. “But before I have the pleasure of reducing you to an anatomy, which I will assuredly do, I wish to compliment you on your power of penetration, or sources of information; for I know not if you have derived your knowledge from your own mental research or the efforts of others. You are perfectly correct in your statement, that this charming young person, who day after day parades the streets with a barrel-organ and a monkey – the last unhappily indisposed at present – listening to the degrading jokes of ribald boys and depraved men – you are quite correct, Sir, in stating that she is not my daughter. On the contrary, she is the daughter of an Hungarian nobleman who had the misfortune to incur my displeasure. I had a son, crooked spawn of a Christian! A son, not like you, cankered, gnarled stump of life that you are, but a youth tall and fair and noble in aspect, as became a child of one whose lineage makes Pharaoh modern, a youth whose foot in the dance was as swift and beautiful to look at as the golden sandals of the sun when he dances upon the sea in summer. This youth was virtuous and good; and being of good race, and dwelling in a country where his rank, gypsy as he was, was recognized, he mixed with the proudest of the land. One day he fell in with this accursed Hungarian, a fierce drinker of that Devil’s blood called brandy. My child until that hour had avoided this bane of our race. Generous wine he drank, because the soul of the sun our ancestor palpitated in its purple waves. But brandy, which is fallen and accursed wine, as devils are fallen and accursed angels, had never crossed his lips, until in an evil hour he was reduced by this Christian hog, and from that day forth his life was one fiery debauch, which set only in the black waves of death. I vowed vengeance on the destroyer of my child, and I kept my word. I have destroyed his child – not compassed her death, but blighted her life, steeped her in misery and poverty, and now, thanks to the thousand devils, I have discovered a new torture for her heart. She thought to solace her life with a love-episode! Sweet little epicure that she was! She shall have her little crooked lover, shan’t she? Oh, yes! She shall have him, cold and stark and livid, with that great, black, heavy hunch, which no back, however broad, can bear, Death, sitting between his shoulders!”

There was something so awful and demoniac in this entire speech and the manner in which it was delivered, that it petrified Zonela into a mere inanimate figure, whose eyes seemed unalterably fixed on the fierce, cruel face of the Wondersmith. As for Solon, he was paralyzed in the grasp of his foe. He heard, but could not reply. His large eyes, dilated with horror to far beyond their ordinary size, expressed unutterable agony.

The last sentence had hardly been hissed out by the gypsy when he took from his pocket a long, thin coil of whipcord, which he entangled in a complicated mesh around the cripple’s body. It was not the ordinary binding of a prisoner. The slender lash passed and repassed in a thousand intricate folds over the powerless limbs of the poor humpback. When the operation was completed, he looked as if he had been sewed from head to foot in some singularly ingenious species of network.

“Now, my pretty lop-sided little lover,” laughed Herr Hippe, flinging Solon over his shoulder, as a fisherman might fling a net-full of fish, “we will proceed to put you into your little cage until your little coffin is quite ready. Meanwhile we will lock up your darling beggar-girl to mourn over your untimely end.”

So saying, he stepped from the room with his captive, and securely locked the door behind him.

When he had disappeared, the frozen Zonela thawed, and with a shriek of anguish flung herself on the inanimate body of Furbelow.

The Poisoning of the Swords

IT was New Year’s Eve, and eleven o’clock at night. All over this great land, and in every great city in the land, curly heads were lying on white pillows, dreaming of the coming of the generous Santa Claus. Innumerable stockings hung by countless bedsides. Visions of beautiful toys, passing in splendid pageantry through myriads of dimly lit dormitories, made millions of little hearts palpitate in sleep. Ah! What heavenly toys those were that the children of this soil beheld, that mystic night, in their dreams! Painted cars with orchestral wheels, making music more delicious than the roll of planets. Agile men of cylindrical figure, who sprang unexpectedly out of meek-looking boxes, with a supernatural fierceness in their crimson cheeks and fur-whiskers. Herds of marvellous sheep, with fleeces as impossible as the one that Jason sailed after; animals entirely indifferent to grass and water and ‘rot’ and ‘ticks.’ Horses spotted with an astounding regularity, and furnished with the most ingenious methods of locomotion. Slender foreigners, attired in painfully short tunics, whose existence passed in continually turning heels over head down a steep flight of steps, at the bottom of which they lay in an exhausted condition with dislocated limbs, until they were restored to their former elevation, when they went at it again as if nothing had happened. Stately swans, that seemed to have a touch of the ostrich in them; for they swam continually after a piece of iron which was held before them, as if consumed with a ferruginous hunger. Whole farm-yards of roosters, whose tails curled the wrong way – a slight defect, that was, however, amply atoned for by the size and brilliancy of their scarlet combs, which, it would appear, Providence had intended for pen-wipers. Pears, that, when applied to youthful lips, gave forth sweet and inspiring sounds. Regiments of soldiers, that performed neat, but limited evolutions on cross-jointed contractile battle-fields. All these things, idealized, transfigured, and illuminated by the powers and atmosphere and colored lamps of Dreamland, did the millions of dear sleeping children behold, the night of the New Year’s Eve of which I speak.

It was on this night, when Time was preparing to shed his skin and come out young and golden and glossy as ever – when, in the vast chambers of the universe, silent and infallible preparations were making for the wonderful birth of the coming year – when mystic dews were secreted for his baptism, and mystic instruments were tuned in space to welcome him, – it was at this holy and solemn hour that the Wondersmith and his three gypsy companions sat in close conclave in the little parlor before mentioned.

There was a fire roaring in the grate. On a table, nearly in the centre of the room, stood a huge decanter of Port wine, that glowed in the blaze which lit the chamber like a flask of crimson fire. On every side, piled in heaps, inanimate, but scowling with the same old wondrous scowl, lay myriads of the manikins, all clutching in their wooden hands their tiny weapons. The Wondersmith held in one hand a small silver bowl filled with a green, glutinous substance, which he was delicately applying, with the aid of a camel’s-hair brush, to the tips of tiny swords and daggers. A horrible smile wandered over his sallow face – a smile as unwholesome in appearance as the sickly light that plays above reeking graveyards.

“Let us drink great draughts, brothers,” he cried, leaving off his strange anointment for a while, to lift a great glass, filled with sparkling liquor, to his lips. “Let us drink to our approaching triumph. Let us drink to the great poison, Macousha. Subtle seed of Death, swift hurricane that sweeps away Life, vast hammer that crushes brain and heart and artery with its resistless weight – I drink to it.”

“It is a noble decoction, Duke Balthazar,” said the old fortune-teller and mid-wife, Madame Filomel, nodding in her chair as she swallowed her wine in great gulps. “Where did you obtain it?”

“It is made,” said the Wondersmith, swallowing another great goblet-full of wine ere he replied, “in the wild woods of Guiana, in silence and in mystery. But one tribe of Indians, the Macoushi Indians, know the secret. It is simmered over fires built of strange woods, and the maker of it dies in the making. The place, for a mile around the spot where it is fabricated, is shunned as accursed. Devils hover over the pot in which it stews; and the birds of the air, scenting the smallest breath of its vapor from far away, drop to earth with paralyzed wings, cold and dead.”

“It kills, then, fast?” asked Kerplonne, the artificial eyemaker – his own eyes gleaming, under the influence of the wine, with a sinister lustre, as if they had been fresh from the factory, and were yet untarnished by use.

“Kills?” echoed the Wondersmith, derisively; “it is swifter than thunderbolts, stronger than lightning. But you shall see it proved before we let forth our army on the city accursed. You shall see a wretch die, as if smitten by a falling fragment of the sun.”

“What? Do you mean Solon?” asked Oaksmith and the fortune-teller together.

“Ah! You mean the young man who makes the commerce with books?” echoed Kerplonne. “It is well. His agonies will instruct us.”

“Yes! Solon,” answered Hippe, with a savage accent. “I hate him, and he shall die this horrid death. Ah! how the little fellows will leap upon him, when I bring him in, bound and helpless, and give their beautiful wicked souls to them! How they will pierce him in ten thousand spots with their poisoned weapons, until his skin turns blue and violet and crimson, and his form swells with the venom, – until his hump is lost in shapeless flesh! He hears what I say, every word of it. He is in the closet next door, and is listening. How comfortable he feels! How the sweat of terror rolls on his brow! How he tries to loosen his bonds, and curses all earth and heaven when he finds that he cannot! Ho! ho! Handsome lover of Zonela, will she kiss you when you are livid and swollen? Brothers, let us drink again, drink always. Here, Oaksmith, take these brushes – and you, Filomel – and finish the anointing of these swords. This wine is grand. This poison is grand. It is fine to have good wine to drink, and good poison to kill with; is it not?” and, with flushed face and rolling eyes, the Wondersmith continued to drink and use his brush alternately.

The others hastened to follow his example. It was a horrible scene: those four wicked faces; those myriads of tiny faces, just as wicked; the certain unearthly air that pervaded the apartment; the red, unwholesome glare cast by the fire; the wild and reckless way in which the weird company drank the red-illumined wine.

The anointing of the swords went on rapidly, and the wine went as rapidly down the throats of the four poisoners. Their faces grew more and more inflamed each instant; their eyes shone like rolling fireballs; their hair was moist and dishevelled. The old fortune-teller rocked to and fro in her chair, like those legless plaster figures that sway upon convex loaded bottoms. All four began to mutter incoherent sentences, and babble unintelligible wickednesses. Still the anointing of the swords went on.

“I see the faces of millions of young corpses,” babbled Herr Hippe, gazing, with swimming eyes, into the silver bowl that contained the Macousha poison, “all young, all Christians, and the little fellows dancing, dancing, and stabbing, stabbing. Filomel, Filomel, I say!”

“Well, Grand Duke,” snored the old woman, giving a violent lurch.

“Where’s the bottle of souls?”

“In my right-hand pocket, Herr Hippe”; and she felt, so as to assure herself that it was there. She half drew out the black bottle, before described in this narrative, and let it slide again into her pocket – let it slide again, but it did not completely regain its former place. Caught by some accident, it hung half out, swaying over the edge of the pocket, as the fat midwife rolled backwards and forwards in her drunken efforts at equilibrium.

“All right,” said Herr Hippe, “perfectly right! Let’s drink.”

He reached out his hand for his glass, and, with a dull sigh, dropped on the table, in the instantaneous slumber of intoxication. Oaksmith soon fell back in his chair, breathing heavily. Kerplonne followed. And the heavy, stertorous breathing of Filomel told that she slumbered also; but still her chair retained its rocking motion, and still the bottle of souls balanced itself on the edge of her pocket.

Let Loose

SURE enough, Solon heard every word of the fiendish talk of the Wondersmith. For how many days he had been shut up, bound in the terrible net, in that dark closet, he did not know; but now he felt that his last hour was come. His little strength was completely worn out in efforts to disentangle himself. Once a day a door opened, and Herr Hippe placed a crust of bread and a cup of water within his reach. On this meagre fare he had subsisted. It was a hard life; but, bad as it was, it was better than the horrible death that menaced him. His brain reeled with terror at the prospect of it. Then, where was Zonela? Why did she not come to his rescue? But she was, perhaps, dead. The darkness, too, appalled him. A faint light, when the moon was bright, came at night through a chink far up in the wall; and the only other hole in the chamber was an aperture through which, at some former time, a stove-pipe had been passed. Even if he were free, there would have been small hope of escape; but, laced as it were in a network of steel, what was to be done? He groaned and writhed upon the floor, and tore at the boards with his hands, which were free from the wrists down. All else was as solidly laced up as an Indian papoose. Nothing but pride kept him from shrieking aloud, when, on the night of New Year’s Eve, he heard the fiendish Hippe recite the programme of his murder.

While he was thus wailing and gnashing his teeth in darkness and torture, he heard a faint noise above his head. Then something seemed to leap from the ceiling and alight softly on the floor. He shuddered with terror. Was it some new torture of the Wondersmith’s invention? The next moment, he felt some small animal crawling over his body, and a soft, silky paw was pushed timidly across his face. His heart leaped with joy.

“It is Furbelow!” he cried. “Zonela has sent him. He came through the stove-pipe hole.”

It was Furbelow, indeed, restored to life by Zonela’s care, and who had come down a narrow tube, that no human being could have threaded, to console the poor captive. The monkey nestled closely into the hunchback’s bosom, and, as he did so, Solon felt something cold and hard hanging from his neck. He touched it. It was sharp. By the dim light that struggled through the aperture high up in the wall, he discovered a knife, suspended by a bit of cord. Ah! How the blood came rushing through the veins that crossed over and through his heart, when life and liberty came to him in this bit of rusty steel! With his manacled hands he loosened the heaven-sent weapon; a few cuts were rapidly made in the cunning network of cord that enveloped his limbs, and in a few seconds he was free! – cramped and faint with hunger, but free! – free to move, to use the limbs that God had given him for his preservation, free to fight – to die fighting, perhaps – but still to die free. He ran to the door. The bolt was a weak one, for the Wondersmith had calculated more surely on his prison of cords than on any jail of stone, and more; and with a few efforts the door opened. He went cautiously out into the darkness, with Furbelow perched on his shoulder, pressing his cold muzzle against his cheek. He had made but a few steps when a trembling hand was put into his, and in another moment Zonela’s palpitating heart was pressed against his own. One long kiss, an embrace, a few whispered words, and the hunchback and the girl stole softly towards the door of the chamber in which the four gypsies slept. All seemed still; nothing but the hard breathing of the sleepers, and the monotonous rocking of Madame Filomel’s chair broke the silence. Solon stooped down and put his eye to the keyhole, through which a red bar of light streamed into the entry. As he did so, his foot crushed some brittle substance that lay just outside the door; at the same moment a howl of agony was heard to issue from the room within. Solon started; nor did he know that at that instant he had crushed into dust Monsieur Kerplonne’s supernumerary eye, and the owner, though wrapt in a drunken sleep, felt the pang quiver through his brain.

While Solon peeped through the keyhole, all in the room was motionless. He had not gazed, however, for many seconds, when the chair of the fortune-teller gave a sudden lurch, and the black bottle, already hanging half out of her wide pocket, slipped entirely from its resting-place, and, falling heavily to the ground, shivered into fragments.

Then took place an astonishing spectacle. The myriads of armed dolls, that lay in piles about the room, became suddenly imbued with motion. They stood up straight, their tiny limbs moved, their black eyes flashed with wicked purposes, their thread-like swords gleamed as they waved them to and fro. The villanous souls imprisoned in the bottle began to work within them. Like the Liliputians, when they found the giant Gulliver asleep, they scaled in swarms the burly sides of the four sleeping gypsies. At every step they took, they drove their thin swords and quivering daggers into the flesh of the drunken authors of their being. To stab and kill was their mission, and they stabbed and killed with incredible fury. They clustered on the Wondersmith’s sallow cheeks and sinewy throat, piercing every portion with their diminutive poisoned blades. Filomel’s fat carcass was alive with them. They blackened the spare body of Monsieur Kerplonne. They covered Oaksmith’s huge form like a cluster of insects.

Overcome completely with the fumes of wine, these tiny wounds did not for a few moments awaken the sleeping victims. But the swift and deadly poison Macousha, with which the weapons had been so fiendishly anointed, began to work. Herr Hippe, stung into sudden life, leaped to his feet, with a dwarf army clinging to his clothes and his hands – always stabbing, stabbing, stabbing. For an instant, a look of stupid bewilderment clouded his face; then the horrible truth burst upon him. He gave a shriek like that which a horse utters when he finds himself fettered and surrounded by fire, a shriek that curdled the air for miles and miles.

“Oaksmith! Kerplonne! Filomel! Awake! awake! We are lost! The souls have got loose! We are dead! Poisoned! Oh, accursed ones! Oh, demons, ye are slaying me! Ah! Fiends of Hell!”

Aroused by these frightful howls, the three gypsies sprang also to their feet, to find themselves stung to death by the manikins. They raved, they shrieked, they swore. They staggered round the chamber. Blinded in the eyes by the ever-stabbing weapons – with the poison already burning in their veins like red-hot lead, their forms swelling and discoloring visibly every moment – their howls and attitudes and furious gestures made the scene look like a chamber in Hell.

Maddened beyond endurance, the Wondersmith, half-blind and choking with the venom that had congested all the blood-vessels of his body, seized dozens of the manikins and dashed them into the fire, trampling them down with his feet.

“Ye shall die too, if I die,” he cried, with a roar like that of a tiger. “Ye shall burn, if I burn. I gave ye life, I give ye death. Down! Down! Burn! Flame! Fiends that ye are, to slay us! Help me, brothers! Before we die, let us have our revenge!”

On this, the other gypsies, themselves maddened by approaching death, began hurling manikins, by handfuls, into the fire. The little creatures, being wooden of body, quickly caught the flames, and an awful struggle for life took place in miniature in the grate. Some of them escaped from between the bars and ran about the room, blazing, writhing in agony, and igniting the curtains and other draperies that hung around. Others fought and stabbed one another in the very core of the fire, like combating salamanders. Meantime, the motions of the gypsies grew more languid and slow, and their curses were uttered in choked guttural tones. The faces of all four were spotted with red and green and violet, like so many egg-plants. Their bodies were swollen to a frightful size, and at last they dropped on the floor, like over-ripe fruit shaken from the boughs by the winds of autumn.

The chamber was now a sheet of fire. The flames roared round and round, as if seeking for escape, licking every projecting cornice and sill with greedy tongues, as the serpent licks his prey before he swallows it. A hot, putrid breath came through the keyhole and smote Solon and Zonela like a wind of death. They clasped each other’s hands with a moan of terror, and fled from the house.

The next morning, when the young Year was just unclosing its eyes, and the happy children all over the great city were peeping from their beds into the myriads of stockings hanging near by, the blue skies of heaven shone through a black network of stone and charred rafters. These were all that remained of the habitation of Herr Hippe, the Wondersmith.

William Wilson

Edgar Allan Poe

What say of it? What say conscience grim,

That spectre in my path?

Chamberlain’s Pharronida

Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn – for the horror – for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! To the earth art thou not for ever dead? To its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? And a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?

I would not, if I could, here or today, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This epoch – these later years – took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What chance – what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy – I had nearly said for the pity – of my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have them allow – what they cannot refrain from allowing – that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before – certainly, never thus fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?

I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions. Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions.

My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep.

It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. Steeped in misery as I am – misery, alas! Only too real – I shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in the weakness of a few rambling details. These, moreover, utterly trivial, and even ridiculous in themselves, assume, to my fancy, adventitious importance, as connected with a period and a locality when and where I recognise the first ambiguous monitions of the destiny which afterwards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then remember.

The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week – once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the neighboring fields – and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast – could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!

At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions already mentioned; then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery – a world of matter for solemn remark, or for more solemn meditation.

The extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many capacious recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted the play-ground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well remember it had no trees, nor benches, nor any thing similar within it. Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small parterre, planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred division we passed only upon rare occasions indeed – such as a first advent to school or final departure thence, or perhaps, when a parent or friend having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the Christmas or Midsummer holydays.

But the house! How quaint an old building was this! To me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable – inconceivable – and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity. During the five years of my residence here, I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars.

The school-room was the largest in the house – I could not help thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and a ceiling of oak. In a remote and terror-inspiring angle was a square enclosure of eight or ten feet, comprising the sanctum, ‘during hours’, of our principal, the Reverend Dr. Bransby. It was a solid structure, with massy door, sooner than open which in the absence of the ‘Dominie’, we would all have willingly perished by the peine forte et dure. In other angles were two other similar boxes, far less reverenced, indeed, but still greatly matters of awe. One of these was the pulpit of the ‘classical’ usher, one of the ‘English and mathematical’. Interspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions at the other.

Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my first mental development had in it much of the uncommon – even much of the outre. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray shadow – a weak and irregular remembrance – an indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals.

Yet in fact – in the fact of the world’s view – how little was there to remember! The morning’s awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its intrigues – these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-stirring. “Oh, le bon temps, que ce siecle de fer!”

In truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and by slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself – over all with a single exception. This exception was found in the person of a scholar, who, although no relation, bore the same christian and surname as myself – a circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those every-day appellations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson – a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake alone, of those who in school-phraseology constituted ‘our set’, presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class – in the sports and broils of the play-ground – to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will – indeed, to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever. If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the despotism of a master-mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits of its companions.

Wilson’s rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment; the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I feared him, and could not help thinking the equality which he maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true superiority; since not to be overcome cost me a perpetual struggle. Yet this superiority – even this equality – was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it. Indeed, his competition, his resistance, and especially his impertinent and dogged interference with my purposes, were not more pointed than private. He appeared to be destitute alike of the ambition which urged, and of the passionate energy of mind which enabled me to excel. In his rivalry he might have been supposed actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart, astonish, or mortify myself; although there were times when I could not help observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner. I could only conceive this singular behavior to arise from a consummate self-conceit assuming the vulgar airs of patronage and protection.

Perhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson’s conduct, conjoined with our identity of name, and the mere accident of our having entered the school upon the same day, which set afloat the notion that we were brothers, among the senior classes in the academy. These do not usually inquire with much strictness into the affairs of their juniors. I have before said, or should have said, that Wilson was not, in the most remote degree, connected with my family. But assuredly if we had been brothers we must have been twins; for, after leaving Dr. Bransby’s, I casually learned that my namesake was born on the nineteenth of January, 1813 – and this is a somewhat remarkable coincidence; for the day is precisely that of my own nativity.

It may seem strange that in spite of the continual anxiety occasioned me by the rivalry of Wilson, and his intolerable spirit of contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate him altogether. We had, to be sure, nearly every day a quarrel in which, yielding me publicly the palm of victory, he, in some manner, contrived to make me feel that it was he who had deserved it; yet a sense of pride on my part, and a veritable dignity on his own, kept us always upon what are called ‘speaking terms’, while there were many points of strong congeniality in our tempers, operating to awake in me a sentiment which our position alone, perhaps, prevented from ripening into friendship. It is difficult, indeed, to define, or even to describe, my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture – some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity. To the moralist it will be unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson and myself were the most inseparable of companions.

It was no doubt the anomalous state of affairs existing between us, which turned all my attacks upon him, (and they were many, either open or covert) into the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavors on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitutional disease, would have been spared by any antagonist less at his wit’s end than myself – my rival had a weakness in the faucial or guttural organs, which precluded him from raising his voice at any time above a very low whisper. Of this defect I did not fail to take what poor advantage lay in my power.

Wilson’s retaliations in kind were many; and there was one form of his practical wit that disturbed me beyond measure. How his sagacity first discovered at all that so petty a thing would vex me, is a question I never could solve; but having discovered, he habitually practised the annoyance. I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian prænomen. The words were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition, who would be constantly in my presence, and whose concerns, in the ordinary routine of the school business, must inevitably, on account of the detestable coincidence, be often confounded with my own.

The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of person and outline of feature. I was galled, too, by the rumor touching a relationship, which had grown current in the upper forms. In a word, nothing could more seriously disturb me, (although I scrupulously concealed such disturbance,) than any allusion to a similarity of mind, person, or condition existing between us. But, in truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself) this similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed at all by our schoolfellows. That he observed it in all its bearing, and as fixedly as I, was apparent; but that he could discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance, can only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary penetration.

His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own.

How greatly this most exquisite portraiture harassed me (for it could not justly be termed a caricature), I will not now venture to describe. I had but one consolation – in the fact that the imitation, apparently, was noticed by myself alone, and that I had to endure only the knowing and strangely sarcastic smiles of my namesake himself. Satisfied with having produced in my bosom the intended effect, he seemed to chuckle in secret over the sting he had inflicted, and was characteristically disregardful of the public applause which the success of his witty endeavors might have so easily elicited. That the school, indeed, did not feel his design, perceive its accomplishment, and participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see), gave but the full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and chagrin.

I have already more than once spoken of the disgusting air of patronage which he assumed toward me, and of his frequent officious interference with my will. This interference often took the ungracious character of advice; advice not openly given, but hinted or insinuated. I received it with a repugnance which gained strength as I grew in years. Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion when the suggestions of my rival were on the side of those errors or follies so usual to his immature age and seeming inexperience; that his moral sense, at least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom, was far keener than my own; and that I might, today, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised.

As it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme under his distasteful supervision, and daily resented more and more openly what I considered his intolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first years of our connexion as schoolmates, my feelings in regard to him might have been easily ripened into friendship; but, in the latter months of my residence at the academy, although the intrusion of his ordinary manner had, beyond doubt, in some measure, abated, my sentiments, in nearly similar proportion, partook very much of positive hatred. Upon one occasion he saw this, I think, and afterwards avoided, or made a show of avoiding me.

It was about the same period, if I remember aright, that, in an altercation of violence with him, in which he was more than usually thrown off his guard, and spoke and acted with an openness of demeanor rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied I discovered, in his accent, his air, and general appearance, a something which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions of my earliest infancy – wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me, than by saying that I could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago – some point of the past even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded rapidly as it came; and I mention it at all but to define the day of the last conversation I there held with my singular namesake.

The huge old house, with its countless subdivisions, had several large chambers communicating with each other, where slept the greater number of the students. There were, however, (as must necessarily happen in a building so awkwardly planned) many little nooks or recesses, the odds and ends of the structure; and these the economic ingenuity of Dr. Bransby had also fitted up as dormitories; although, being the merest closets, they were capable of accommodating but a single individual. One of these small apartments was occupied by Wilson.

One night, about the close of my fifth year at the school, and immediately after the altercation just mentioned, finding everyone wrapped in sleep, I arose from bed, and, lamp in hand, stole through a wilderness of narrow passages from my own bedroom to that of my rival. I had long been plotting one of those ill-natured pieces of practical wit at his expense in which I had hitherto been so uniformly unsuccessful. It was my intention, now, to put my scheme in operation, and I resolved to make him feel the whole extent of the malice with which I was imbued. Having reached his closet, I noiselessly entered, leaving the lamp, with a shade over it, on the outside. I advanced a step, and listened to the sound of his tranquil breathing. Assured of his being asleep, I returned, took the light, and with it again approached the bed. Close curtains were around it, which, in the prosecution of my plan, I slowly and quietly withdrew, when the bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his countenance. I looked – and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were these – these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if with a fit of the ague, in fancying they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed – while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared – assuredly not thus – in the vivacity of his waking hours. The same name! The same contour of person! The same day of arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation of my gait, my voice, my habits, and my manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation? Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I extinguished the lamp, passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the halls of that old academy, never to enter them again.

After a lapse of some months, spent at home in mere idleness, I found myself a student at Eton. The brief interval had been sufficient to enfeeble my remembrance of the events at Dr. Bransby’s, or at least to effect a material change in the nature of the feelings with which I remembered them. The truth – the tragedy – of the drama was no more. I could now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses; and seldom called up the subject at all but with wonder at the extent of human credulity, and a smile at the vivid force of the imagination which I hereditarily possessed. Neither was this species of skepticism likely to be diminished by the character of the life I led at Eton. The vortex of thoughtless folly into which I there so immediately and so recklessly plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past hours, ingulfed at once every solid or serious impression, and left to memory only the veriest levities of a former existence.

I do not wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy here – a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of the night; for our debaucheries were to be faithfully protracted until morning. The wine flowed freely, and there were not wanting other and perhaps more dangerous seductions; so that the gray dawn had already faintly appeared in the east, while our delirious extravagance was at its height. Madly flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the act of insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity, when my attention was suddenly diverted by the violent, although partial unclosing of the door of the apartment, and by the eager voice of a servant from without. He said that some person, apparently in great haste, demanded to speak with me in the hall.

Wildly excited with wine, the unexpected interruption rather delighted than surprised me. I staggered forward at once, and a few steps brought me to the vestibule of the building. In this low and small room there hung no lamp; and now no light at all was admitted, save that of the exceedingly feeble dawn which made its way through the semi-circular window. As I put my foot over the threshold, I became aware of the figure of a youth about my own height, and habited in a white kerseymere morning frock, cut in the novel fashion of the one I myself wore at the moment. This the faint light enabled me to perceive; but the features of his face I could not distinguish. Upon my entering, he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me by the arm with a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words “William Wilson!” in my ear.

I grew perfectly sober in an instant.

There was that in the manner of the stranger, and in the tremulous shake of his uplifted finger, as he held it between my eyes and the light, which filled me with unqualified amazement; but it was not this which had so violently moved me. It was the pregnancy of solemn admonition in the singular, low, hissing utterance; and, above all, it was the character, the tone, the key, of those few, simple, and familiar, yet whispered syllables, which came with a thousand thronging memories of by-gone days, and struck upon my soul with the shock of a galvanic battery. Ere I could recover the use of my senses he was gone.

Although this event failed not of a vivid effect upon my disordered imagination, yet was it evanescent as vivid. For some weeks, indeed, I busied myself in earnest inquiry, or was wrapped in a cloud of morbid speculation. I did not pretend to disguise from my perception the identity of the singular individual who thus perseveringly interfered with my affairs, and harassed me with his insinuated counsel. But who and what was this Wilson? And whence came he? And what were his purposes? Upon neither of these points could I be satisfied – merely ascertaining, in regard to him, that a sudden accident in his family had caused his removal from Dr. Bransby’s academy on the afternoon of the day in which I myself had eloped. But in a brief period I ceased to think upon the subject, my attention being all absorbed in a contemplated departure for Oxford. Thither I soon went, the uncalculating vanity of my parents furnishing me with an outfit and annual establishment, which would enable me to indulge at will in the luxury already so dear to my heart – to vie in profuseness of expenditure with the haughtiest heirs of the wealthiest earldoms in Great Britain.

Excited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were absurd to pause in the detail of my extravagance. Let it suffice, that among spendthrifts I out-Heroded Herod, and that, giving name to a multitude of novel follies, I added no brief appendix to the long catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute university of Europe.

It could hardly be credited, however, that I had, even here, so utterly fallen from the gentlemanly estate, as to seek acquaintance with the vilest arts of the gambler by profession, and, having become an adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a means of increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the weak-minded among my fellow-collegians. Such, nevertheless, was the fact. And the very enormity of this offence against all manly and honorable sentiment proved, beyond doubt, the main if not the sole reason of the impunity with which it was committed. Who, indeed, among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the clearest evidence of his senses, than have suspected of such courses, the gay, the frank, the generous William Wiison – the noblest and most liberal commoner at Oxford – him whose follies (said his parasites) were but the follies of youth and unbridled fancy – whose errors but inimitable whim – whose darkest vice but a careless and dashing extravagance?

I had been now two years successfully busied in this way, when there came to the university a young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning – rich, said report, as Herodes Atticus – his riches, too, as easily acquired. I soon found him of weak intellect, and, of course, marked him as a fitting subject for my skill. I frequently engaged him in play, and contrived, with the gambler’s usual art, to let him win considerable sums, the more effectually to entangle him in my snares. At length, my schemes being ripe, I met him (with the full intention that this meeting should be final and decisive) at the chambers of a fellow-commoner (Mr. Preston), equally intimate with both, but who, to do him justice, entertained not even a remote suspicion of my design. To give to this a better coloring, I had contrived to have assembled a party of some eight or ten, and was solicitously careful that the introduction of cards should appear accidental, and originate in the proposal of my contemplated dupe himself. To be brief upon a vile topic, none of the low finesse was omitted, so customary upon similar occasions, that it is a just matter for wonder how any are still found so besotted as to fall its victim.

We had protracted our sitting far into the night, and I had at length effected the manœuvre of getting Glendinning as my sole antagonist. The game, too, was my favorite ecarte. The rest of the company, interested in the extent of our play, had abandoned their own cards, and were standing around us as spectators. The parvenu, who had been induced by my artifices in the early part of the evening, to drink deeply, now shuffled, dealt, or played, with a wild nervousness of manner for which his intoxication, I thought, might partially, but could not altogether account. In a very short period he had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating – he proposed to double our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned show of reluctance, and not until after my repeated refusal had seduced him into some angry words which gave a color of pique to my compliance, did I finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove how entirely the prey was in my toils: in less than an hour he had quadrupled his debt. For some time his countenance had been losing the florid tinge lent it by the wine; but now, to my astonishment, I perceived that it had grown to a pallor truly fearful. I say, to my astonishment. Glendinning had been represented to my eager inquiries as immeasurably wealthy; and the sums which he had as yet lost, although in themselves vast, could not, I supposed, very seriously annoy, much less so violently affect him. That he was overcome by the wine just swallowed, was the idea which most readily presented itself; and, rather with a view to the preservation of my own character in the eyes of my associates, than from any less interested motive, I was about to insist, peremptorily, upon a discontinuance of the play, when some expressions at my elbow from among the company, and an ejaculation evincing utter despair on the part of Glendinning, gave me to understand that I had effected his total ruin under circumstances which, rendering him an object for the pity of all, should have protected him from the ill offices even of a fiend.

What now might have been my conduct it is difficult to say. The pitiable condition of my dupe had thrown an air of embarrassed gloom over all; and, for some moments, a profound silence was maintained, during which I could not help feeling my cheeks tingle with the many burning glances of scorn or reproach cast upon me by the less abandoned of the party. I will even own that an intolerable weight of anxiety was for a brief instant lifted from my bosom by the sudden and extraordinary interruption which ensued. The wide, heavy folding doors of the apartment were all at once thrown open, to their full extent, with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished, as if by magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in dying, enabled us just to perceive that a stranger had entered, about my own height, and closely muffled in a cloak. The darkness, however, was now total; and we could only feel that he was standing in our midst. Before any one of us could recover from the extreme astonishment into which this rudeness had thrown all, we heard the voice of the intruder.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in a low, distinct, and never-to-be-forgotten whisper which thrilled to the very marrow of my bones, “Gentlemen, I make no apology for this behavior, because in thus behaving, I am but fulfilling a duty. You are, beyond doubt, uninformed of the true character of the person who has tonight won at ecarte a large sum of money from Lord Glendinning. I will therefore put you upon an expeditious and decisive plan of obtaining this very necessary information. Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper.”

While he spoke, so profound was the stillness that one might have heard a pin drop upon the floor. In ceasing, he departed at once, and as abruptly as he had entered. Can I – shall I describe my sensations? Must I say that I felt all the horrors of the damned? Most assuredly I had little time for reflection. Many hands roughly seized me upon the spot, and lights were immediately re-procured. A search ensued. In the lining of my sleeve were found all the court cards essential in ecarte, and, in the pockets of my wrapper, a number of packs, facsimiles of those used at our sittings, with the single exception that mine were of the species called, technically, arrondees; the honors being slightly convex at the ends, the lower cards slightly convex at the sides. In this disposition, the dupe who cuts, as customary, at the length of the pack, will invariably find that he cuts his antagonist an honor; while the gambler, cutting at the breadth, will, as certainly, cut nothing for his victim which may count in the records of the game.

Any burst of indignation upon this discovery would have affected me less than the silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure, with which it was received.

“Mr. Wilson,” said our host, stooping to remove from beneath his feet an exceedingly luxurious cloak of rare furs, “Mr. Wilson, this is your property.” (The weather was cold; and, upon quitting my own room, I had thrown a cloak over my dressing wrapper, putting it off upon reaching the scene of play.) “I presume it is supererogatory to seek here (eyeing the folds of the garment with a bitter smile) for any farther evidence of your skill. Indeed, we have had enough. You will see the necessity, I hope, of quitting Oxford – at all events, of quitting instantly my chambers.”

Abased, humbled to the dust as I then was, it is probable that I should have resented this galling language by immediate personal violence, had not my whole attention been at the moment arrested by a fact of the most startling character. The cloak which I had worn was of a rare description of fur; how rare, how extravagantly costly, I shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic invention; for I was fastidious to an absurd degree of coxcombry, in matters of this frivolous nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached me that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near the folding-doors of the apartment, it was with an astonishment nearly bordering upon terror, that I perceived my own already hanging on my arm (where I had no doubt unwittingly placed it,) and that the one presented me was but its exact counterpart in every, in even the minutest possible particular. The singular being who had so disastrously exposed me, had been muffled, I remembered, in a cloak; and none had been worn at all by any of the members of our party, with the exception of myself. Retaining some presence of mind, I took the one offered me by Preston; placed it, unnoticed, over my own; left the apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance; and, next morning ere dawn of day, commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and of shame.

I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation, and proved, indeed, that the exercise of its mysterious dominion had as yet only begun. Scarcely had I set foot in Paris, ere I had fresh evidence of the detestable interest taken by this Wilson in my concerns. Years flew, while I experienced no relief. Villain! At Rome, with how untimely, yet with how spectral an officiousness, stepped he in between me and my ambition! At Vienna too – at Berlin – and at Moscow! Where, in truth, had I not bitter cause to curse him within my heart? From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain.

And again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions “Who is he? – whence came he? – and what are his objects?” But no answer was there found. And now I scrutinized, with a minute scrutiny, the forms, and the methods, and the leading traits of his impertinent supervision. But even here there was very little upon which to base a conjecture. It was noticeable, indeed, that, in no one of the multiplied instances in which he had of late crossed my path, had he so crossed it except to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb those actions, which, if fully carried out, might have resulted in bitter mischief. Poor justification this, in truth, for an authority so imperiously assumed! Poor indemnity for natural rights of self-agency so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied!

I had also been forced to notice that my tormentor, for a very long period of time (while scrupulously and with miraculous dexterity maintaining his whim of an identity of apparel with myself), had so contrived it, in the execution of his varied interference with my will, that I saw not, at any moment, the features of his face. Be Wilson what he might, this, at least, was but the veriest of affectation, or of folly. Could he, for an instant, have supposed that, in my admonisher at Eton – in the destroyer of my honor at Oxford – in him who thwarted my ambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris, my passionate love at Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in Egypt – that in this, my arch-enemy and evil genius, I could fail to recognise the William Wilson of my school-boy days – the namesake, the companion, the rival – the hated and dreaded rival at Dr. Bransby’s? Impossible! But let me hasten to the last eventful scene of the drama.

Thus far I had succumbed supinely to this imperious domination. The sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, with which certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter weakness and helplessness, and to suggest an implicit, although bitterly reluctant submission to his arbitrary will. But, of late days, I had given myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening influence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more and more impatient of control. I began to murmur – to hesitate – to resist. And was it only fancy which induced me to believe that, with the increase of my own firmness, that of my tormentor underwent a proportional diminution? Be this as it may, I now began to feel the inspiration of a burning hope, and at length nurtured in my secret thoughts a stern and desperate resolution that I would submit no longer to be enslaved.

It was at Rome, during the Carnival of 18–, that I attended a masquerade in the palazzo of the Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio. I had indulged more freely than usual in the excesses of the wine-table; and now the suffocating atmosphere of the crowded rooms irritated me beyond endurance. The difficulty, too, of forcing my way through the mazes of the company contributed not a little to the ruffling of my temper; for I was anxiously seeking (let me not say with what unworthy motive) the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting Di Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she had previously communicated to me the secret of the costume in which she would be habited, and now, having caught a glimpse of her person, I was hurrying to make my way into her presence. At this moment I felt a light hand placed upon my shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper within my ear.

In an absolute frenzy of wrath, I turned at once upon him who had thus interrupted me, and seized him violently by the collar. He was attired, as I had expected, in a costume altogether similar to my own; wearing a Spanish cloak of blue velvet, begirt about the waist with a crimson belt sustaining a rapier. A mask of black silk entirely covered his face.

“Scoundrel!” I said, in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable I uttered seemed as new fuel to my fury; “Scoundrel! Impostor! Accursed villain! You shall not – you shall not dog me unto death! Follow me, or I stab you where you stand!” – and I broke my way from the ballroom into a small ante-chamber adjoining, dragging him unresistingly with me as I went.

Upon entering, I thrust him furiously from me. He staggered against the wall, while I closed the door with an oath, and commanded him to draw. He hesitated but for an instant; then, with a slight sigh, drew in silence, and put himself upon his defence.

The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the wainscoting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.

At that instant some person tried the latch of the door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror – so at first it seemed to me in my confusion – now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.

Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist – it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment – not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!

It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:

“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead – dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist – and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

The Vampyre

John Polidori

It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. In spite of the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion, though its form and outline were beautiful, many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection: Lady Mercer, who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage, threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice – though in vain: when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon hers, still it seemed as if they were unperceived – even her unappalled impudence was baffled, and she left the field. But though the common adultress could not influence even the guidance of his eyes, it was not that the female sex was indifferent to him: yet such was the apparent caution with which he spoke to the virtuous wife and innocent daughter, that few knew he ever addressed himself to females. He had, however, the reputation of a winning tongue; and whether it was that it even overcame the dread of his singular character, or that they were moved by his apparent hatred of vice, he was as often among those females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues, as among those who sully it by their vices.

About the same time, there came to London a young gentleman of the name of Aubrey: he was an orphan left with an only sister in the possession of great wealth, by parents who died while he was yet in childhood. Left also to himself by guardians, who thought it their duty merely to take care of his fortune, while they relinquished the more important charge of his mind to the care of mercenary subalterns, he cultivated more his imagination than his judgment. He had, hence, that high romantic feeling of honour and candour, which daily ruins so many milliners’ apprentices. He believed all to sympathise with virtue, and thought that vice was thrown in by Providence merely for the picturesque effect of the scene, as we see in romances: he thought that the misery of a cottage merely consisted in the vesting of clothes, which were as warm, but which were better adapted to the painter’s eye by their irregular folds and various coloured patches. He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life. He was handsome, frank, and rich: for these reasons, upon his entering into the gay circles, many mothers surrounded him, striving which should describe with least truth their languishing or romping favourites: the daughters at the same time, by their brightening countenances when he approached, and by their sparkling eyes, when he opened his lips, soon led him into false notions of his talents and his merit. Attached as he was to the romance of his solitary hours, he was startled at finding, that, except in the tallow and wax candles that flickered, not from the presence of a ghost, but from want of snuffing, there was no foundation in real life for any of that congeries of pleasing pictures and descriptions contained in those volumes, from which he had formed his study. Finding, however, some compensation in his gratified vanity, he was about to relinquish his dreams, when the extraordinary being we have above described, crossed him in his career.

He watched him; and the very impossibility of forming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact: allowing his imagination to picture every thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed this object into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him. He became acquainted with him, paid him attentions, and so far advanced upon his notice, that his presence was always recognised. He gradually learnt that Lord Ruthven’s affairs were embarrassed, and soon found, from the notes of preparation in –Street, that he was about to travel. Desirous of gaining some information respecting this singular character, who, till now, had only whetted his curiosity, he hinted to his guardians, that it was time for him to perform the tour, which for many generations has been thought necessary to enable the young to take some rapid steps in the career of vice towards putting themselves upon an equality with the aged, and not allowing them to appear as if fallen from the skies, whenever scandalous intrigues are mentioned as the subjects of pleasantry or of praise, according to the degree of skill shewn in carrying them on. They consented: and Aubrey immediately mentioning his intentions to Lord Ruthven, was surprised to receive from him a proposal to join him. Flattered by such a mark of esteem from him, who, apparently, had nothing in common with other men, he gladly accepted it, and in a few days they had passed the circling waters.

Hitherto, Aubrey had had no opportunity of studying Lord Ruthven’s character, and now he found, that, though many more of his actions were exposed to his view, the results offered different conclusions from the apparent motives to his conduct. His companion was profuse in his liberality – the idle, the vagabond, and the beggar, received from his hand more than enough to relieve their immediate wants. But Aubrey could not avoid remarking, that it was not upon the virtuous, reduced to indigence by the misfortunes attendant even upon virtue, that he bestowed his alms – these were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers; but when the profligate came to ask something, not to relieve his wants, but to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity. This was, however, attributed by him to the greater importunity of the vicious, which generally prevails over the retiring bashfulness of the virtuous indigent. There was one circumstance about the charity of his Lordship, which was still more impressed upon his mind: all those upon whom it was bestowed, inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they were all either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery. At Brussels and other towns through which they passed, Aubrey was surprised at the apparent eagerness with which his companion sought for the centres of all fashionable vice; there he entered into all the spirit of the faro table: he betted, and always gambled with success, except where the known sharper was his antagonist, and then he lost even more than he gained; but it was always with the same unchanging face, with which he generally watched the society around: it was not, however, so when he encountered the rash youthful novice, or the luckless father of a numerous family; then his very wish seemed fortune’s law – this apparent abstractedness of mind was laid aside, and his eyes sparkled with more fire than that of the cat whilst dallying with the half-dead mouse. In every town, he left the formerly affluent youth, torn from the circle he adorned, cursing, in the solitude of a dungeon, the fate that had drawn him within the reach of this fiend; whilst many a father sat frantic, amidst the speaking looks of mute hungry children, without a single farthing of his late immense wealth, wherewith to buy even sufficient to satisfy their present craving. Yet he took no money from the gambling table; but immediately lost, to the ruiner of many, the last gilder he had just snatched from the convulsive grasp of the innocent: this might but be the result of a certain degree of knowledge, which was not, however, capable of combating the cunning of the more experienced. Aubrey often wished to represent this to his friend, and beg him to resign that charity and pleasure which proved the ruin of all, and did not tend to his own profit; – but he delayed it – for each day he hoped his friend would give him some opportunity of speaking frankly and openly to him; however, this never occurred. Lord Ruthven in his carriage, and amidst the various wild and rich scenes of nature, was always the same: his eye spoke less than his lip; and though Aubrey was near the object of his curiosity, he obtained no greater gratification from it than the constant excitement of vainly wishing to break that mystery, which to his exalted imagination began to assume the appearance of something supernatural.

They soon arrived at Rome, and Aubrey for a time lost sight of his companion; he left him in daily attendance upon the morning circle of an Italian countess, whilst he went in search of the memorials of another almost deserted city. Whilst he was thus engaged, letters arrived from England, which he opened with eager impatience; the first was from his sister, breathing nothing but affection; the others were from his guardians, the latter astonished him; if it had before entered into his imagination that there was an evil power resident in his companion, these seemed to give him sufficient reason for the belief. His guardians insisted upon his immediately leaving his friend, and urged, that his character was dreadfully vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society. It had been discovered, that his contempt for the adultress had not originated in hatred of her character; but that he had required, to enhance his gratification, that his victim, the partner of his guilt, should be hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation: in fine, that all those females whom he had sought, apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze.

Aubrey determined upon leaving one, whose character had not yet shown a single bright point on which to rest the eye. He resolved to invent some plausible pretext for abandoning him altogether, purposing, in the meanwhile, to watch him more closely, and to let no slight circumstances pass by unnoticed. He entered into the same circle, and soon perceived, that his Lordship was endeavouring to work upon the inexperience of the daughter of the lady whose house he chiefly frequented. In Italy, it is seldom that an unmarried female is met with in society; he was therefore obliged to carry on his plans in secret; but Aubrey’s eye followed him in all his windings, and soon discovered that an assignation had been appointed, which would most likely end in the ruin of an innocent, though thoughtless girl. Losing no time, he entered the apartment of Lord Ruthven, and abruptly asked him his intentions with respect to the lady, informing him at the same time that he was aware of his being about to meet her that very night. Lord Ruthven answered, that his intentions were such as he supposed all would have upon such an occasion; and upon being pressed whether he intended to marry her, merely laughed. Aubrey retired; and, immediately writing a note, to say, that from that moment he must decline accompanying his Lordship in the remainder of their proposed tour, he ordered his servant to seek other apartments, and calling upon the mother of the lady, informed her of all he knew, not only with regard to her daughter, but also concerning the character of his Lordship. The assignation was prevented. Lord Ruthven next day merely sent his servant to notify his complete assent to a separation; but did not hint any suspicion of his plans having been foiled by Aubrey’s interposition.

Having left Rome, Aubrey directed his steps towards Greece, and crossing the Peninsula, soon found himself at Athens. He then fixed his residence in the house of a Greek; and soon occupied himself in tracing the faded records of ancient glory upon monuments that apparently, ashamed of chronicling the deeds of freemen only before slaves, had hidden themselves beneath the sheltering soil or many coloured lichen. Under the same roof as himself, existed a being, so beautiful and delicate, that she might have formed the model for a painter wishing to pourtray on canvass the promised hope of the faithful in Mahomet’s paradise, save that her eyes spoke too much mind for anyone to think she could belong to those who had no souls. As she danced upon the plain, or tripped along the mountain’s side, one would have thought the gazelle a poor type of her beauties; for who would have exchanged her eye, apparently the eye of animated nature, for that sleepy luxurious look of the animal suited but to the taste of an epicure. The light step of Ianthe often accompanied Aubrey in his search after antiquities, and often would the unconscious girl, engaged in the pursuit of a Kashmere butterfly, show the whole beauty of her form, floating as it were upon the wind, to the eager gaze of him, who forgot the letters he had just decyphered upon an almost effaced tablet, in the contemplation of her sylph-like figure. Often would her tresses falling, as she flitted around, exhibit in the sun’s ray such delicately brilliant and swiftly fading hues, it might well excuse the forgetfulness of the antiquary, who let escape from his mind the very object he had before thought of vital importance to the proper interpretation of a passage in Pausanias. But why attempt to describe charms which all feel, but none can appreciate? It was innocence, youth, and beauty, unaffected by crowded drawing-rooms and stifling balls. Whilst he drew those remains of which he wished to preserve a memorial for his future hours, she would stand by, and watch the magic effects of his pencil, in tracing the scenes of her native place; she would then describe to him the circling dance upon the open plain, would paint, to him in all the glowing colours of youthful memory, the marriage pomp she remembered viewing in her infancy; and then, turning to subjects that had evidently made a greater impression upon her mind, would tell him all the supernatural tales of her nurse. Her earnestness and apparent belief of what she narrated, excited the interest even of Aubrey; and often as she told him the tale of the living vampyre, who had passed years amidst his friends, and dearest ties, forced every year, by feeding upon the life of a lovely female to prolong his existence for the ensuing months, his blood would run cold, whilst he attempted to laugh her out of such idle and horrible fantasies; but Ianthe cited to him the names of old men, who had at last detected one living among themselves, after several of their near relatives and children had been found marked with the stamp of the fiend’s appetite; and when she found him so incredulous, she begged of him to believe her, for it had been, remarked, that those who had dared to question their existence, always had some proof given, which obliged them, with grief and heartbreaking, to confess it was true. She detailed to him the traditional appearance of these monsters, and his horror was increased, by hearing a pretty accurate description of Lord Ruthven; he, however, still persisted in persuading her, that there could be no truth in her fears, though at the same time he wondered at the many coincidences which had all tended to excite a belief in the supernatural power of Lord Ruthven.

Aubrey began to attach himself more and more to Ianthe; her innocence, so contrasted with all the affected virtues of the women among whom he had sought for his vision of romance, won his heart; and while he ridiculed the idea of a young man of English habits, marrying an uneducated Greek girl, still he found himself more and more attached to the almost fairy form before him. He would tear himself at times from her, and, forming a plan for some antiquarian research, he would depart, determined not to return until his object was attained; but he always found it impossible to fix his attention upon the ruins around him, whilst in his mind he retained an image that seemed alone the rightful possessor of his thoughts. Ianthe was unconscious of his love, and was ever the same frank infantile being he had first known. She always seemed to part from him with reluctance; but it was because she had no longer anyone with whom she could visit her favourite haunts, whilst her guardian was occupied in sketching or uncovering some fragment which had yet escaped the destructive hand of time. She had appealed to her parents on the subject of Vampyres, and they both, with several present, affirmed their existence, pale with horror at the very name. Soon after, Aubrey determined to proceed upon one of his excursions, which was to detain him for a few hours; when they heard the name of the place, they all at once begged of him not to return at night, as he must necessarily pass through a wood, where no Greek would ever remain, after the day had closed, upon any consideration. They described it as the resort of the vampyres in their nocturnal orgies, and denounced the most heavy evils as impending upon him who dared to cross their path. Aubrey made light of their representations, and tried to laugh them out of the idea; but when he saw them shudder at his daring thus to mock a superior, infernal power, the very name of which apparently made their blood freeze, he was silent.

Next morning Aubrey set off upon his excursion unattended; he was surprised to observe the melancholy face of his host, and was concerned to find that his words, mocking the belief of those horrible fiends, had inspired them with such terror. When he was about to depart, Ianthe came to the side of his horse, and earnestly begged of him to return, ere night allowed the power of these beings to be put in action; he promised. He was, however, so occupied in his research, that he did not perceive that daylight would soon end, and that in the horizon there was one of those specks which, in the warmer climates, so rapidly gather into a tremendous mass, and pour all their rage upon the devoted country. He at last, however, mounted his horse, determined to make up by speed for his delay: but it was too late. Twilight, in these southern climates, is almost unknown; immediately the sun sets, night begins: and ere he had advanced far, the power of the storm was above – its echoing thunders had scarcely an interval of rest – its thick heavy rain forced its way through the canopying foliage, whilst the blue forked lightning seemed to fall and radiate at his very feet. Suddenly his horse took fright, and he was carried with dreadful rapidity through the entangled forest. The animal at last, through fatigue, stopped, and he found, by the glare of lightning, that he was in the neighbourhood of a hovel that hardly lifted itself up from the masses of dead leaves and brushwood which surrounded it. Dismounting, he approached, hoping to find someone to guide him to the town, or at least trusting to obtain shelter from the pelting of the storm. As he approached, the thunders, for a moment silent, allowed him to hear the dreadful shrieks of a woman mingling with the stifled, exultant mockery of a laugh, continued in one almost unbroken sound; he was startled, but, roused by the thunder which again rolled over his head, he, with a sudden effort, forced open the door of the hut. He found himself in utter darkness: the sound, however, guided him. He was apparently unperceived; for, though he called, still the sounds continued, and no notice was taken of him. He found himself in contact with someone, whom he immediately seized; when a voice cried, “Again baffled!” to which a loud laugh succeeded; and he felt himself grappled by one whose strength seemed superhuman: determined to sell his life as dearly as he could, he struggled; but it was in vain: he was lifted from his feet and hurled with enormous force against the ground: his enemy threw himself upon him, and kneeling upon his breast, had placed his hands upon his throat; when the glare of many torches penetrating through the hole that gave light in the day, disturbed him; he instantly rose, and, leaving his prey, rushed through the door, and in a moment the crashing of the branches, as he broke through the wood, was no longer heard. The storm was now still; and Aubrey, incapable of moving, was soon heard by those without. They entered; the light of their torches fell upon the mud walls, and the thatch loaded on every individual straw with heavy flakes of soot. At the desire of Aubrey they searched for her who had attracted him by her cries; he was again left in darkness; but what was his horror, when the light of the torches once more burst upon him, to perceive the airy form of his fair conductress brought in a lifeless corse. He shut his eyes, hoping that it was but a vision arising from his disturbed imagination; but he again saw the same form, when he unclosed them, stretched by his side. There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there: upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein – to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, “A Vampyre! A Vampyre!” A litter was quickly formed, and Aubrey was laid by the side of her who had lately been to him the object of so many bright and fairy visions, now fallen with the flower of life that had died within her. He knew not what his thoughts were – his mind was benumbed and seemed to shun reflection, and take refuge in vacancy – he held almost unconsciously in his hand a naked dagger of a particular construction, which had been found in the hut. They were soon met by different parties who had been engaged in the search of her whom a mother had missed. Their lamentable cries, as they approached the city, forewarned the parents of some dreadful catastrophe. To describe their grief would be impossible; but when they ascertained the cause of their child’s death, they looked at Aubrey, and pointed to the corpse. They were inconsolable; both died broken-hearted.

Aubrey being put to bed was seized with a most violent fever, and was often delirious; in these intervals he would call upon Lord Ruthven and upon Ianthe – by some unaccountable combination he seemed to beg of his former companion to spare the being he loved. At other times he would imprecate maledictions upon his head, and curse him as her destroyer. Lord Ruthven, chanced at this time to arrive at Athens, and, from whatever motive, upon hearing of the state of Aubrey, immediately placed himself in the same house, and became his constant attendant. When the latter recovered from his delirium, he was horrified and startled at the sight of him whose image he had now combined with that of a Vampyre; but Lord Ruthven, by his kind words, implying almost repentance for the fault that had caused their separation, and still more by the attention, anxiety, and care which he showed, soon reconciled him to his presence. His lordship seemed quite changed; he no longer appeared that apathetic being who had so astonished Aubrey; but as soon as his convalescence began to be rapid, he again gradually retired into the same state of mind, and Aubrey perceived no difference from the former man, except that at times he was surprised to meet his gaze fixed intently upon him, with a smile of malicious exultation playing upon his lips: he knew not why, but this smile haunted him. During the last stage of the invalid’s recovery, Lord Ruthven was apparently engaged in watching the tideless waves raised by the cooling breeze, or in marking the progress of those orbs, circling, like our world, the moveless sun – indeed, he appeared to wish to avoid the eyes of all.

Aubrey’s mind, by this shock, was much weakened, and that elasticity of spirit which had once so distinguished him now seemed to have fled for ever. He was now as much a lover of solitude and silence as Lord Ruthven; but much as he wished for solitude, his mind could not find it in the neighbourhood of Athens; if he sought it amidst the ruins he had formerly frequented, Ianthe’s form stood by his side – if he sought it in the woods, her light step would appear wandering amidst the underwood, in quest of the modest violet; then suddenly turning round, would show, to his wild imagination, her pale face and wounded throat, with a meek smile upon her lips. He determined to fly scenes, every feature of which created such bitter associations in his mind. He proposed to Lord Ruthven, to whom he held himself bound by the tender care he had taken of him during his illness, that they should visit those parts of Greece neither had yet seen. They travelled in every direction, and sought every spot to which a recollection could be attached: but though they thus hastened from place to place, yet they seemed not to heed what they gazed upon. They heard much of robbers, but they gradually began to slight these reports, which they imagined were only the invention of individuals, whose interest it was to excite the generosity of those whom they defended from pretended dangers. In consequence of thus neglecting the advice of the inhabitants, on one occasion they travelled with only a few guards, more to serve as guides than as a defence. Upon entering, however, a narrow defile, at the bottom of which was the bed of a torrent, with large masses of rock brought down from the neighbouring precipices, they had reason to repent their negligence; for scarcely were the whole of the party engaged in the narrow pass, when they were startled by the whistling of bullets close to their heads, and by the echoed report of several guns. In an instant their guards had left them, and, placing themselves behind rocks, had begun to fire in the direction whence the report came. Lord Ruthven and Aubrey, imitating their example, retired for a moment behind the sheltering turn of the defile: but ashamed of being thus detained by a foe, who with insulting shouts bade them advance, and being exposed to unresisting slaughter, if any of the robbers should climb above and take them in the rear, they determined at once to rush forward in search of the enemy. Hardly had they lost the shelter of the rock, when Lord Ruthven received a shot in the shoulder, which brought him to the ground. Aubrey hastened to his assistance; and, no longer heeding the contest or his own peril, was soon surprised by seeing the robbers’ faces around him – his guards having, upon Lord Ruthven’s being wounded, immediately thrown up their arms and surrendered.

By promises of great reward, Aubrey soon induced them to convey his wounded friend to a neighbouring cabin; and having agreed upon a ransom, he was no more disturbed by their presence – they being content merely to guard the entrance till their comrade should return with the promised sum, for which he had an order. Lord Ruthven’s strength rapidly decreased; in two days mortification ensued, and death seemed advancing with hasty steps. His conduct and appearance had not changed; he seemed as unconscious of pain as he had been of the objects about him: but towards the close of the last evening, his mind became apparently uneasy, and his eye often fixed upon Aubrey, who was induced to offer his assistance with more than usual earnestness: “Assist me! You may save me – you may do more than that – I mean not my life, I heed the death of my existence as little as that of the passing day; but you may save my honour, your friend’s honour.”

“How? Tell me how? I would do any thing,” replied Aubrey.

“I need but little – my life ebbs apace – I cannot explain the whole – but if you would conceal all you know of me, my honour were free from stain in the world’s mouth – and if my death were unknown for some time in England – I – I – but life.”

“It shall not be known.”

“Swear!” cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence, “Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that, for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see. “

His eyes seemed bursting from their sockets: “I swear!” said Aubrey; he sunk laughing upon his pillow, and breathed no more.

Aubrey retired to rest, but did not sleep; the many circumstances attending his acquaintance with this man rose upon his mind, and he knew not why; when he remembered his oath a cold shivering came over him, as if from the presentiment of something horrible awaiting him. Rising early in the morning, he was about to enter the hovel in which he had left the corpse, when a robber met him, and informed him that it was no longer there, having been conveyed by himself and comrades, upon his retiring, to the pinnacle of a neighbouring mount, according to a promise they had given his lordship, that it should be exposed to the first cold ray of the moon that rose after his death. Aubrey astonished, and taking several of the men, determined to go and bury it upon the spot where it lay. But, when he had mounted to the summit he found no trace of either the corpse or the clothes, though the robbers swore they pointed out the identical rock on which they had laid the body. For a time his mind was bewildered in conjectures, but he at last returned, convinced that they had buried the corpse for the sake of the clothes.

Weary of a country in which he had met with such terrible misfortunes, and in which all apparently conspired to heighten that superstitious melancholy that had seized upon his mind, he resolved to leave it, and soon arrived at Smyrna. While waiting for a vessel to convey him to Otranto, or to Naples, he occupied himself in arranging those effects he had with him belonging to Lord Ruthven. Amongst other things there was a case containing several weapons of offence, more or less adapted to ensure the death of the victim. There were several daggers and ataghans. Whilst turning them over, and examining their curious forms, what was his surprise at finding a sheath apparently ornamented in the same style as the dagger discovered in the fatal hut – he shuddered – hastening to gain further proof, he found the weapon, and his horror may be imagined when he discovered that it fitted, though peculiarly shaped, the sheath he held in his hand. His eyes seemed to need no further certainty – they seemed gazing to be bound to the dagger; yet still he wished to disbelieve; but the particular form, the same varying tints upon the haft and sheath were alike in splendour on both, and left no room for doubt; there were also drops of blood on each.

He left Smyrna, and on his way home, at Rome, his first inquiries were concerning the lady he had attempted to snatch from Lord Ruthven’s seductive arts. Her parents were in distress, their fortune ruined, and she had not been heard of since the departure of his lordship. Aubrey’s mind became almost broken under so many repeated horrors; he was afraid that this lady had fallen a victim to the destroyer of Ianthe. He became morose and silent; and his only occupation consisted in urging the speed of the postilions, as if he were going to save the life of someone he held dear. He arrived at Calais; a breeze, which seemed obedient to his will, soon wafted him to the English shores; and he hastened to the mansion of his fathers, and there, for a moment, appeared to lose, in the embraces and caresses of his sister, all memory of the past. If she before, by her infantine caresses, had gained his affection, now that the woman began to appear, she was still more attaching as a companion.

Miss Aubrey had not that winning grace which gains the gaze and applause of the drawing-room assemblies. There was none of that light brilliancy which only exists in the heated atmosphere of a crowded apartment. Her blue eye was never lit up by the levity of the mind beneath. There was a melancholy charm about it which did not seem to arise from misfortune, but from some feeling within, that appeared to indicate a soul conscious of a brighter realm. Her step was not that light footing, which strays where’er a butterfly or a colour may attract – it was sedate and pensive. When alone, her face was never brightened by the smile of joy; but when her brother breathed to her his affection, and would in her presence forget those griefs she knew destroyed his rest, who would have exchanged her smile for that of the voluptuary? It seemed as if those eyes – that face were then playing in the light of their own native sphere. She was yet only eighteen, and had not been presented to the world, it having been thought by her guardians more fit that her presentation should be delayed until her brother’s return from the continent, when he might be her protector. It was now, therefore, resolved that the next drawing-room, which was fast approaching, should be the epoch of her entry into the ‘busy scene’. Aubrey would rather have remained in the mansion of his fathers, and fed upon the melancholy which overpowered him. He could not feel interest about the frivolities of fashionable strangers, when his mind had been so torn by the events he had witnessed; but he determined to sacrifice his own comfort to the protection of his sister. They soon arrived in town, and prepared for the next day, which had been announced as a drawing-room.

The crowd was excessive – a drawing-room had not been held for a long time, and all who were anxious to bask in the smile of royalty, hastened thither. Aubrey was there with his sister. While he was standing in a corner by himself, heedless of all around him, engaged in the remembrance that the first time he had seen Lord Ruthven was in that very place – he felt himself suddenly seized by the arm, and a voice he recognized too well, sounded in his ear – “Remember your oath.” He had hardly courage to turn, fearful of seeing a spectre that would blast him, when he perceived, at a little distance, the same figure which had attracted his notice on this spot upon his first entry into society. He gazed till his limbs almost refusing to bear their weight, he was obliged to take the arm of a friend, and forcing a passage through the crowd, he threw himself into his carriage, and was driven home. He paced the room with hurried steps, and fixed his hands upon his head, as if he were afraid his thoughts were bursting from his brain. Lord Ruthven again before him – circumstances started up in dreadful array – the dagger – his oath. He roused himself, he could not believe it possible – the dead rise again! He thought his imagination had conjured up the image his mind was resting upon. It was impossible that it could be real – he determined, therefore, to go again into society; for though he attempted to ask concerning Lord Ruthven, the name hung upon his lips, and he could not succeed in gaining information. He went a few nights after with his sister to the assembly of a near relation. Leaving her under the protection of a matron, he retired into a recess, and there gave himself up to his own devouring thoughts. Perceiving, at last, that many were leaving, he roused himself, and entering another room, found his sister surrounded by several, apparently in earnest conversation; he attempted to pass and get near her, when one, whom he requested to move, turned round, and revealed to him those features he most abhorred. He sprang forward, seized his sister’s arm, and, with hurried step, forced her towards the street: at the door he found himself impeded by the crowd of servants who were waiting for their lords; and while he was engaged in passing them, he again heard that voice whisper close to him – “Remember your oath!” He did not dare to turn, but, hurrying his sister, soon reached home.

Aubrey became almost distracted. If before his mind had been absorbed by one subject, how much more completely was it engrossed, now that the certainty of the monster’s living again pressed upon his thoughts. His sister’s attentions were now unheeded, and it was in vain that she intreated him to explain to her what had caused his abrupt conduct. He only uttered a few words, and those terrified her. The more he thought, the more he was bewildered. His oath startled him – was he then to allow this monster to roam, bearing ruin upon his breath, amidst all he held dear, and not avert its progress? His very sister might have been touched by him. But even if he were to break his oath, and disclose his suspicions, who would believe him? He thought of employing his own hand to free the world from such a wretch; but death, he remembered, had been already mocked. For days he remained in this state; shut up in his room, he saw no one, and ate only when his sister came, who, with eyes streaming with tears, besought him, for her sake, to support nature. At last, no longer capable of bearing stillness and solitude, he left his house, roamed from street to street, anxious to fly that image which haunted him. His dress became neglected, and he wandered, as often exposed to the noon-day sun as to the midnight damps. He was no longer to be recognized; at first he returned with the evening to the house; but at last he laid him down to rest wherever fatigue overtook him. His sister, anxious for his safety, employed people to follow him; but they were soon distanced by him who fled from a pursuer swifter than any – from thought. His conduct, however, suddenly changed. Struck with the idea that he left by his absence the whole of his friends, with a fiend amongst them, of whose presence they were unconscious, he determined to enter again into society, and watch him closely, anxious to forewarn, in spite of his oath, all whom Lord Ruthven approached with intimacy. But when he entered into a room, his haggard and suspicious looks were so striking, his inward shudderings so visible, that his sister was at last obliged to beg of him to abstain from seeking, for her sake, a society which affected him so strongly. When, however, remonstrance proved unavailing, the guardians thought proper to interpose, and, fearing that his mind was becoming alienated, they thought it high time to resume again that trust which had been before imposed upon them by Aubrey’s parents.

Desirous of saving him from the injuries and sufferings he had daily encountered in his wanderings, and of preventing him from exposing to the general eye those marks of what they considered folly, they engaged a physician to reside in the house, and take constant care of him. He hardly appeared to notice it, so completely was his mind absorbed by one terrible subject. His incoherence became at last so great, that he was confined to his chamber. There he would often lie for days, incapable of being roused. He had become emaciated, his eyes had attained a glassy lustre; the only sign of affection and recollection remaining displayed itself upon the entry of his sister; then he would sometimes start, and, seizing her hands, with looks that severely afflicted her, he would desire her not to touch him. “Oh, do not touch him – if your love for me is aught, do not go near him!” When, however, she inquired to whom he referred, his only answer was, “True! True!” and again he sank into a state, whence not even she could rouse him. This lasted many months: gradually, however, as the year was passing, his incoherences became less frequent, and his mind threw off a portion of its gloom, whilst his guardians observed, that several times in the day he would count upon his fingers a definite number, and then smile.

The time had nearly elapsed, when, upon the last day of the year, one of his guardians entering his room, began to converse with his physician upon the melancholy circumstance of Aubrey’s being in so awful a situation, when his sister was going next day to be married. Instantly Aubrey’s attention was attracted; he asked anxiously to whom. Glad of this mark of returning intellect, of which they feared he had been deprived, they mentioned the name of the Earl of Marsden. Thinking this was a young Earl whom he had met with in society, Aubrey seemed pleased, and astonished them still more by his expressing his intention to be present at the nuptials, and desiring to see his sister. They answered not, but in a few minutes his sister was with him. He was apparently again capable of being affected by the influence of her lovely smile; for he pressed her to his breast, and kissed her cheek, wet with tears, flowing at the thought of her brother’s being once more alive to the feelings of affection. He began to speak with all his wonted warmth, and to congratulate her upon her marriage with a person so distinguished for rank and every accomplishment; when he suddenly perceived a locket upon her breast; opening it, what was his surprise at beholding the features of the monster who had so long influenced his life. He seized the portrait in a paroxysm of rage, and trampled it under foot. Upon her asking him why he thus destroyed the resemblance of her future husband, he looked as if he did not understand her – then seizing her hands, and gazing on her with a frantic expression of countenance, he bade her swear that she would never wed this monster, for he – but he could not advance – it seemed as if that voice again bade him remember his oath – he turned suddenly round, thinking Lord Ruthven was near him but saw no one. In the meantime the guardians and physician, who had heard the whole, and thought this was but a return of his disorder, entered, and forcing him from Miss Aubrey, desired her to leave him. He fell upon his knees to them, he implored, he begged of them to delay but for one day. They, attributing this to the insanity they imagined had taken possession of his mind, endeavoured to pacify him, and retired.

Lord Ruthven had called the morning after the drawing-room, and had been refused with everyone else. When he heard of Aubrey’s ill health, he readily understood himself to be the cause of it; but when he learned that he was deemed insane, his exultation and pleasure could hardly be concealed from those among whom he had gained this information. He hastened to the house of his former companion, and, by constant attendance, and the pretence of great affection for the brother and interest in his fate, he gradually won the ear of Miss Aubrey. Who could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and toils to recount – could speak of himself as of an individual having no sympathy with any being on the crowded earth, save with her to whom he addressed himself; could tell how, since he knew her, his existence, had begun to seem worthy of preservation, if it were merely that he might listen to her soothing accents; in fine, he knew so well how to use the serpent’s art, or such was the will of fate, that he gained her affections. The title of the elder branch falling at length to him, he obtained an important embassy, which served as an excuse for hastening the marriage (in spite of her brother’s deranged state), which was to take place the very day before his departure for the continent.

Aubrey, when he was left by the physician and his guardians, attempted to bribe the servants, but in vain. He asked for pen and paper; it was given him; he wrote a letter to his sister, conjuring her, as she valued her own happiness, her own honour, and the honour of those now in the grave, who once held her in their arms as their hope and the hope of their house, to delay but for a few hours that marriage, on which he denounced the most heavy curses. The servants promised they would deliver it; but giving it to the physician, he thought it better not to harass any more the mind of Miss Aubrey by, what he considered, the ravings of a maniac. Night passed on without rest to the busy inmates of the house; and Aubrey heard, with a horror that may more easily be conceived than described, the notes of busy preparation. Morning came, and the sound of carriages broke upon his ear. Aubrey grew almost frantic. The curiosity of the servants at last overcame their vigilance, they gradually stole away, leaving him in the custody of an helpless old woman. He seized the opportunity, with one bound was out of the room, and in a moment found himself in the apartment where all were nearly assembled. Lord Ruthven was the first to perceive him: he immediately approached, and, taking his arm by force, hurried him from the room, speechless with rage. When on the staircase, Lord Ruthven whispered in his ear – “Remember your oath, and know, if not my bride today, your sister is dishonoured. Women are frail!” So saying, he pushed him towards his attendants, who, roused by the old woman, had come in search of him. Aubrey could no longer support himself; his rage not finding vent, had broken a blood-vessel, and he was conveyed to bed. This was not mentioned to his sister, who was not present when he entered, as the physician was afraid of agitating her. The marriage was solemnized, and the bride and bridegroom left London.

Aubrey’s weakness increased; the effusion of blood produced symptoms of the near approach of death. He desired his sister’s guardians might be called, and when the midnight hour had struck, he related composedly what the reader has perused – he died immediately after.

The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a Vampyre!

Tracks in the Snow

Cody Schroeder

Alex stood in front of the glass door sipping hot chocolate. “Welcome to winter in Missouri. If you don’t like it, wait ten minutes.”

Kim looked up from her book and blanket. “What? You don’t like snow?”

“Oh I love snow. We’re gonna go play in it as soon as I finish this. It’s more the fact it was 70 and windy two days ago and now we have eight inches of snow on the ground. Here’s to consistency.” He raised his mug, slurping the dregs of the cocoa.

Kim glared at him. “I don’t play in the snow.” She settled further under her blanket on the couch.

“Yeah you do.” Alex passed the couch on his way to the sink. He snatched off her blanket and ran into the kitchen, giggling like an idiot.

“Hey!” Kim leapt up after him, her dark ponytail lashing back and forth. “Come on Alex. I’m already cold.”

He set his mug in the sink and flipped up the faucet handle, letting the mug fill with water. Kim grabbed for the blanket, but he held it behind his back where she couldn’t reach. An all too common game.

“Oh you’ll be fine babe. Just come out for an hour. Throw some snowballs. Maybe build a snowman. We can make snow angels.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her foot. “Pass.”

He locked his hands together in front of her, dropping the blanket. “Please. Tell you what, you come out for an hour and I’ll clean up after dinner tonight.”

Kim ceased her tapping. She eyed him with suspicion. “Everything? Dishes and all?”

“Every last crumb gorgeous.”

“Fine. One hour. Not a second more.”

“Good enough.” Alex scooped up the blanket and slapped her ass as he passed her.

“Alex!”

“Grab your coat!”

Alex led the way. He grabbed his coat from the closet by the front door, fished his gloves and scarf out of the pockets, and bundled up. He even found his wooly hat that looked like a Viking helmet.

The instant they stepped through the front door, Kim gasped. “Crap it’s cold out here.”

“Well there is snow on the ground.” He gathered a handful from the porch railing and packed it into a ball.

Kim backed away, her arms raised. “Alex if you hit me with a single snowball you’re sleeping on the couch for a month.”

He held the snowball before his face, turning the ball as if studying it. “Hmm.”

“What are you doing?”

He rubbed at his stubbly chin. “Deciding if it’d be worth it.”

Kim smacked the back of his hand. His own snowball hit him on the nose. Kim hopped down the steps while he sputtered. She turned to face him as he lobbed the snowball well over her head.

Snow and ice covered the woods surrounding the house. Towering evergreens drooped with the extra weight. Tiny birds hopped about on the white blanket.

A scene from a Christmas card.

“Wow. This is beautiful,” she said.

Alex came down the steps rubbing his nose with a fluffy mitten and trying to blow the snow out of his nose. “Told you so.”

“What are you seven?”

He shrugged. “Ish.”

Only the warm house escaped the weather’s wrath. Kim’s little car looked like a misshapen igloo. The dark windows of his SUV stared out of the snow, gray empty eyes.

Kim headed toward the trees, trudging through the snow. She stopped halfway. “Alex?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you already been out this morning?”

“Nope. Why?”

She pointed to the ground. “There’s footprints here. Big ones.”

“Ooh. Maybe we have a Bigfoot.” He hustled over to join her.

“No.” Kim leaned over the tracks. “These look weird.”

“Whoa.” He leaned closer as well.

Each print consisted of a wide circle pressed right down to the wet grass with six smaller circles around it.

Kim sidestepped to the next print. Whatever made them had a wider stride than her.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Got me. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

She looked at him with a mischievous grin. “Let’s follow them. See where they lead.”

“Or not Miss Mystery Novel. These could be bear tracks for all we know.”

“I’ve never seen a bear in Ripley County. Besides they’re all hibernating.”

Alex opened his mouth to speak.

“Come on Alex, you’re the one who begged me to come outside.”

He groaned. “Damn it. Fine. But I’m using you as a meat shield if whatever made these tries to eat us.”

Kim marched into the woods ahead of him.

“Or if it turns out to be some our hillbilly neighbors hopped up on eggnog, waving their guns around.”

She didn’t reply but kept walking.

The tracks followed a vague path for the first hundred yards or so. Then they swerved into the trees.

“Babe check it out.” Alex pointed to a clump of cedar trees growing right on top of each other.

Something had passed through the middle of them, dislodging the snow and snapping branches. Something big. Branches were broken a good ten feet from the ground.

The tracks continued on the other side of the trees.

“Are we sure we want to follow these things?” Alex pulled his hat lower on his head.

“Are we sure you’re the husband in this relationship?” Kim shook her head and kept going.

He’d never hear the end of it if he chickened out and went home.

Not far beyond the cedar trees, the strange prints led to a stream and stopped at the water’s edge.

“Where?” Kim searched the ground nearby. “They vanished.”

Alex about faced. “Oh well time to go home. We came, we saw, moving on.”

“Wait.” She grabbed his sleeve. “Look, there.”

Maybe fifty yards upstream a small tree the size of his arm had been snapped over the water. Its yellow innards stuck out against the white snow.

Kim clambered up the bank toward the tree. Alex, plotting ways to use this against her later, followed.

She reached the broken tree and stood on her tiptoes trying to reach the exposed section. Kim stood a solid 5’ 5” but was too short.

“What could do this?” she asked.

“Giant beavers? Paul Bunyan?”

Kim glared at him.

“I don’t know. Nothing friendly.”

“Alex look, more tracks.”

The new prints led away from the stream toward a small hill. Kim took off after them. Alex jogged along behind her. She stopped. He slipped and fell trying not to run into her.

“Ugh. Why?” He shook snow off arms and brushed muck off his chest.

Kim flapped her hand at him. “Alex.”

He got on his feet, grumbling. “What now?”

“A cave. I had no idea this was here.”

“There are caves all over the place around here, not exactly news.” He wiped a bit of mud off his jeans. “Oh and look, the weirdo tracks go right into it. Great. We know where they lead. Now can we go?”

Kim headed for the entrance. “Are you nuts? Let’s check it out.”

Alex sighed. “Shoulda spent the day playing video games like a reasonable person.”

He followed Kim through the narrow opening in the hillside.

Moist, earthy air assaulted his nose. In the slice of light coming through the entrance he saw Kim kneeling over a shadowy shape.

“What’d you find now?”

She pulled her ever present cell phone from her pocket and tapped the screen. White-blue light burst from the phone, illuminating the pile of bones at her feet.

Kim yelped and scurried back. “Gross!”

Alex took a step closer. The most obvious bone was what appeared to be a cow’s skull. Also represented were deer, rabbit, small birds, and perhaps even a cat.

Kim moved behind him. “This is horrible.”

“No kidding.”

As she shoved her phone back in her pocket the glow of the screen glinted off something at the back of the cave.

“What the?” Alex moved toward the spot.

“Alex?”

“Not sure. Get your phone out again.”

“Why didn’t you bring yours?”

“Because mine isn’t surgically attached to my hand.”

He felt her stare without turning to face her.

Kim took out her phone and turned the light on again.

In the glare Alex found the source of the reflection: a piece of metal against the back of cave. He reached down to pick it up but the metal seemed to be imbedded in the wall.

Alex dug his fingers in behind the metal and tugged with both hands. The hunk shifted a bit.

“Bigger than I expected. Give me a hand babe?”

Kim nodded and, holding her phone in her left hand, grabbed the piece of metal right above his hands.

“On three. One, two, three. Pull.”

They tugged the metal forward, shifting a large portion of the wall in the process.

“A door?” Kim stepped back, holding her phone up high.

Alex examined the metal. He rapped his knuckles against it. Dents and scrapes covered the whole piece.

“It’s like a piece of sheet metal someone beat flat with their feet.”

He leaned into the tunnel behind the door.

“See anything?”

“Nothing. It’s too dark.”

“I’m not sure about this Alex, maybe we should leave.”

“Oh now you wanna go back? Freaky prints in the snow are fine but secret door in a cave is too spooky?”

“Freaky prints might be a cool animal. Secret door might be a serial killer.”

Alex held out his and for her phone. “Then I’ll go first. While he’s killing me, you can run away.”

She handed him the phone with shaking hands. “Comforting Alex, real comforting.”

He flashed her his most reassuring smile and turned down the tunnel. He moved slow, shining the light in slow circles around the walls, ceiling, and floor.

“This looks like it was dug recently,” Kim said.

Alex nodded. The tunnel reeked of fresh turned earth. “But by who?”

A few feet further on a familiar sound reached their ears.

“Water?” Kim asked.

“I think so.”

Alex raised the phone higher. At the edge of the light beam he saw movement. Another couple steps revealed a flowing stream. The roar of water reached deafening levels as they drew closer.

Alex paused at the water’s edge, scanning about with the light. Upstream water poured from the dirt ceiling, while downstream it swept around a bend in the tunnel. As he swept the light over the ledge running parallel to the stream, Kim gasped.

He spotted them too.

More of the weird tracks on the muddy stone. They followed the ledge. On right after the other.

Alex held the phone in front of him. He reached back and took Kim’s hand in his.

“Be careful,” she muttered.

He nodded and led the way onto the ledge.

Precarious didn’t begin to describe it. Aside from being soaking wet, the ledge was maybe a foot wide. After a couple ungainly steps, Alex had to let go of Kim’s hand. He leaned his right hand against the dripping wall for better balance. Walking like amateur tight-rope artists, they reached the bend in the tunnel.

Alex stopped to wipe the soggy phone on his jacket. Not that it did any good. His jacket was soaked through.

He glanced over his shoulder to check on Kim. She flashed him a small smile from between curtains of sopping hair. Alex returned her smile and trudged on.

The ledge turned into a ramp on the other side of the bend. Alex struggled to stay upright. Kim slipped twice almost immediately.

Alex turned to help her. She glared up at him, wiping the muck from her hands on her already stained jeans. Alex held out a hand to help her up.

“Come on,” he said, hoisting her up with a grunt. “Got to go slow and careful.”

Kim started to snark back but slipped again. Alex watched the switch in her eyes. She knew what was about to happen. Alex dropped the phone and grabbed for her, but he was too late. His chilled fingers grabbed at wet, muddy clothes and nothing else.

Kim plunged sideways into the rushing stream.

“KIM!” He snatched up the phone and aimed the light at the stream.

He expected her to hit the water and resurface instantly. Alex waited several eternal seconds, sweeping the phone’s light up and down the stream.

The stream must have carried her away.

Alex slid and skidded down until the ground leveled out again. Here the roar of the water calmed. Instead of a turbulent stream beside him, Alex swept the light out over a sprawling subterranean lake.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed, “KIM!”

The only response was his own echo.

“Come on, come on, come on.” He began to pace at the water’s edge, sweeping the light over the lake in wide arcs. “Come on. Where are you?”

“KIM!”

Alex swore and kicked a stone into the water.

“KIM!”

He spotted something, a flash of white in the water. He moved the light back in a slow sweep.

The phone beeped.

The sound of the battery dying.

10% power. Enough to last a few more minutes.

The light moved over a patch of white in the dark water. One of Kim’s socks.

She floated face down in the water.

“No. No. No. KIM!” Alex stripped off his jacket, dropped the phone, and dove into the water.

He swam to her in the dark, grabbed her, rolled her over. Alex listened for her breathing.

Nothing. Her skin already felt cold.

He kicked back, pulling her toward solid ground and the light pointing uselessly at the ceiling.

“Please, please Kim.”

His fingers and toes were numb.

The cell phone beeped again.

Alex struck something with his foot. Something solid. In open water.

He halted for a moment, gasping, his chest on fire.

Nothing. The cavern and lake were empty.

He kicked again, harder, the shore drawing closer.

The phone beeped again.

His right hand brushed a rough surface, like softer sandpaper. He whipped his head around but saw nothing.

A thick coil snared his right foot, jerking him down. Alex yelped, grabbing Kim for dear life. He kicked away but the coil tightened. A tentacle as wide as his forearm.

He struck at the snare on his leg but its grip grew stronger.

The phone beeped again.

Alex spun in the water, hoping to kick at the tentacle’s owner. The chill in his bones went straight to his heart.

Two white oval eyes stared back at him.

In a frenzy, Alex tore free of the monster’s grasp. He pulled Kim’s lifeless form to shore.

The cellphone beeped again as his hand slapped wet stone. Alex pulled himself up next to his jacket and heaved Kim up behind him. He had her halfway out of the water when something jerked her back.

Another pair of pale oval eyes glared back up at him.

Not just one pair.

Six pairs of eyes glowed in the dark water. All moving toward him with alarming speed.

The phone beeped again.

He lunged back, hugging Kim from behind.

The monster in the lake tugged hard.

A second set of eyes stopped near the first.

Before Alex had a chance to react, the two creatures ripped Kim from his numb hands and pulled her under.

The phone beeped again.

“KIM!”

More eyes settled below, peering up at him.

A tumultuous splashing tore the water nearby. Out of the turbulence crawled a nightmare creature. Six round legs ending in a circle of spines that gouged the rock propelled the monster toward him.

Alex scrabbled back, slipping on his jacket.

The phone beeped again.

Pale, glowing eyes at least ten feet high bore down on him. A thick crab’s claw swiped at his feet, its owner emitting angry clicking sounds.

Alex retreated further down the shore, the stone ledge narrowing with every step. The crustacean creature gave chase, crawling along the wall at an odd tilt. Its colossal claws snapped at him, missing by millimeters.

The ledge became too thin. Alex shuffled further, his back against the wall. His feet slipped on the wet stone.

The monster stopped.

The phone beeped in the darkness.

The creature’s pincers snapped at him, unable to reach.

Alex sighed, even allowed a nervous chuckle.

It couldn’t reach him.

The monster tried to scuttle closer but its clumsy legs stumbled on the slick stone.

Alex checked the lake to his right. His heat stopped. His breath caught in his throat.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of glowing oval eyes stared up at him from under the water.

If one came up out of the water in front of him…

Something heavy brushed against his ankle through his jeans. A tentacle extended from among the landward creature’s legs. The tendril slithered around his legs and jerked him forward in its iron grip.

The creature leapt into the lake, pulling him along. Alex scraped at wet stone as he slipped into the water.

The phone beeped again.

John Johnson

Oliver Smith

Kerenza sits on the Loor-Stone waiting: waiting and watching for John Johnson to come home over the grey-green ocean. Her pretty silk dress is all raggedy now: she is ripe with the smell of old seaweed, the smell of the drowned, the smell of flotsam on the sand. Kerenza watches the lonely reef: bare shattered rocks and granite teeth poke through the surging green water and flying foam. An old tattered cormorant tumbles down into the waves dressed in oily black feathers, hunting for the pipefish and rockling and blenny in the kelp-beds – black fish, black weed, black birds on the water: This is all she has without John Johnson.

The cormorant sits on the shredders and biters and witches’ hat towers and hangs his ragged wings out to dry like threadbare flags in the rolling wind. He laughs at her loss and Kerenza curses the harsh, wicked bird.

In her hunger for John Johnson, Kerenza reaches out for God who keeps him, reaches out for the love he brought her, reaches out for the sea that took him away. Either God, or love, or the sea sends a gift over the waves. It sends a little boat that rides the white tops beyond the granite spikes – a skiff blown on the wild south-westerly wind. John Johnson calls her with the voice of the breaking surf. John Johnson calls her with the voice of the gulls. John Johnson calls her.

A freak roller catches the boat and lifts it over the reef and rocks; the sea leaves it close to the beach where it waltzes with the shore and the sands. Karenza wonders if it could carry her to John Johnson. She lifts her ragged skirt out of reach of the waves as she trots down the beach, she splashes through the shallows, then gathers her hem about her thighs and hauls herself into the boat before the tide should take it away again. The boat has been on the sea a long time: the keel has grown thick with barnacles and weed, the inside has grown with anemones and limpets in the deep pooled-water below the rower’s bench. Crouching beneath the tiller is the dried out husk of a seaman. His coat is all rags, his hand rests on the tiller to keep the rudder steady, his skull smiles kindly at Kerenza.

“Hello,” she says, “will you take me to John Johnson.”

But the sailor is silent on the matter.

Kerenza lies in the driest part of the boat as the grey gulls rise up to paradise. She lies in the bows, away from her bony companion and waits for the tide and winds to carry them both back to John Johnson. Her father told her it was an unlucky match, told her John Johnson was a Jonah; five times he sailed out and five ships had sunk. She didn’t care. She knew no Cornishman nor Englishman nor Landsman like John Johnson, no-one as tall and brave and strong as her pale, fair man out of the north. She told her father she would have no other, and loving her as he did her father relented. But poor Kerenza – just one night they lay together before the sea took him from her.

The boat lifts from the sand beneath her. It washes forward and catches the ground again but a big snake-wave hisses in from the ocean to tear it clear of the beach and carries her out to sea again. Soon she will see John Johnson.

When they reach the witch’s-hat rocks there is a grind and snap as the black blades of granite punctures the weak wood. Splinters swirl in the bilges and the boat refuses to stay above the water. She is caught in the tide but Kerenza is a strong swimmer. The waves try to press her under, the current tries to drag her out, but she emerges from the sea with water dripping from her wet hair, she spits salt water from her mouth, she wades to the beach like a new born goddess, and she runs through the waves back to her place on the Loor-Stone. No matter: she will wait, wait for his return.

* * *

It is summer again and bright-painted mackerel boats bob on the blue waves on their way back to Penkaryth in the warm evening. In the distance a great man-o-war creeps across the reddening horizon, her sails billow as she turns to catch the wind and she heads out into the Atlantic. Kerenza waits on the Loor-Stone. Her long hair blows a white storm in the breeze. John Johnson must return for her now, return to save her from the second wedding. Seven years have gone since her first and seven years is as good as dead they say. Seven years a widow to the sea and the landsman Ross Trevelyan has waited those seven years in her father’s house. He has eaten her father’s meat and drunk his wine. He has worked in her farther’s shop and learnt his trade – he has learnt the landsman’s art of smithing silver and hammering gold.

She stands on the smooth table of the Loor-Stone and calls, “come home Johnny, come back from the sea, come home John Johnson and save me.”

John Johnson answers with the voice of wind beating in canvas. John Johnson answers in the lonely grey voice of a gull. John Johnson answers in no voice at all. His face is reflected in the green mirror as she reaches down into the rock pool but his face breaks apart in her fingers.

All the gulls wheel and cry in the lonely grey sky. They tell her, ‘you must not betray him with this new man.’

And there is Trevelyan coming down the beach to find her. She chooses a rock for Trevelyan, a pretty stone for him to remember their betrothal by. She finds a good sharp piece of granite freed by a storm. She leaves him in the water for the fishes and gulls.

“Oh, when will you return John Johnson?”

The people of Penmaby do not find Trevelyan. When they notice he is missing they search the shore. They pass her sitting on the Loor-Stone. “Bless you Karenza, he will return, you shall have your wedding,” they say.

When he does not return the vicar comes from Penkaryth to bless the sea (for where else would he have gone), to lay Trevelyan’s ghost to rest. She is poor Karenza now. What suitor would want her with two dead husbands? She does not care: what suitor would she accept? – None but John Johnson.

* * *

A voice seems to hiss and whisper in the winter white-foam tongues reaching up the beach “wait for me here pretty Karenza.”

Then again perhaps it’s just sea, just the wind, just the lonely cry of the gulls. Perhaps it is no voice at all. She takes candles from the church and lanterns from the harbour. She builds a fire of driftwood and sets all the lights along the shore to guide him home through the darkness and storms. She calls all the ships on the ocean to come to her in case he is aboard, she calls them to bring her Johnny home.

Kerenza’s lights lure a great ship in from the ocean. She stands atop the Loor-Stone with and her hair flickers like white fire in the storm and the ship leaps and rolls and runs like a wild pony on the hills and valleys and mountains of water. In the darkness the great ship breaks on the reef and a sailor struggles ashore illuminated in the blue flames of the lightening. Kerenza wades out into the insane black storm-waves, into the spray that flies horizontal in the breath of the gale, and Kerenza catches him in her strong hands. She drags him from the waves; she pumps the water from his lungs, and blows life into his cold lips. She wraps him in her arms and warms him with her body and when he wakes she asks him, “Tell me sailor boy, tell me where my John Johnson is.”

“I don’t know John Johnson,” says the boy his face buried in her long hair.

“Tell me,” she says, “He’s a sailor and he is proper tall and strong and fair, you must know my John Johnson, sweet boy.”

“I don’t know any John Johnson,” he says holding her closer to share her warmth in the face of the storm.

“Who would not know a man like John Johnson? Who could sail on his ocean and not know?” All she wants is for him to tell her where John Johnson is. She cries and weeps, “tell me.”

“I do not know,” he replies, “but for such as you I would be him if I could,” and she feels his warm lips on hers.

She wraps her long hair about his face, covers him in it, enfolds him, twines it about his neck and pulls it tight. She takes back her gift of life, sucks the breath back from his lungs and returns him to the waves.

They, the people of Penmaby, find the lanterns and candles and fire, they find the boy. They see how he was strangled and know there is a wrecker among them. They do not call the magistrate from Roscaven. They know the magistrate, Sir William Welland, and he will hang every Jack as a wrecker and send every Jill to die in the Indies if they cannot produce the culprit. Instead they hide the dead, erase the signs of fire, and take what they can of the salvage to make the best of a bad night.

* * *

The years turn and another summer comes round. She thought she was safe when they called her Mad Kerenza, thought they would never find her another, but already there is a new man in her father’s house. Jago Marreck labours hard at the workbench while Kerenza sits on her rock among the bone-white barnacles and the green-haired limpets, above the shadows where the blue-black mussels cluster with the darker wracks and red weed and sly red eyes that wait for darkness and tides.

While Jago Marreck sits safe in her father’s house she is on the beach singing to John Johnson as she weaves him a shirt of seaweed: weaves a shirt ready for his return.

Before Jago’s seven years are up her father is carried out in a fine black coffin with a featherman walking before with a board and ostrich plumes. He has twenty paid mourners and a fine marble headstone. Sir William Welland himself reads the will and Jago is pronounced the heir to her father’s house. And when her seven years are up Jago Marreck comes to the beach keeping a promise to her poor father, he comes to lay her a fine white dress on the sand before her stone.

“Your father said I should bring this here for you Kerenza Roberts,” he says.

Kerenza answers with a shove that sends him into the waves. She places a strong brown foot on his head and holds him under the water and shouts, “I am promised to John Johnson and I will have no other.”

Her legs are stronger than his arms, her wish for his death is stronger than his wish for his life and soon the vicar is back from Penkaryth to bless the sea.

No-one lives now in her father’s house. No more suitors. It is an unlucky house, three fine young men lost, and then poor Karenza…

* * *

There is no one to carry on Master Roberts’ trade. They leave the house to the rats. Leave it to the beggars. They leave poor Kerenza on the shore to wait for John Johnson’s return.

The wait is too long. In the darkness of a winter night with a hard north wind whipping the sea into horses Kerenza takes the lanterns and candles and builds another driftwood fire. She lures another ship. Caught on the reef the ship splits in two, spills her sailors into the water. The waters are rough and cold but no storm blows tonight and a dozen find their way ashore. Karenza has grown strong in her love of John Johnson, stronger than the half drowned mariners. She wades among them asking, “Is John there. Have you seen John?”

When they lie to her and say they do not know she breaks them so they splinter. When they say it again she beats them so they bleed. When they deny her a third time she takes their beating heart and crushes it before their liar’s eyes. As she plucks the last heart out to break in her fair fingers the wind carries the shouts and oaths of the villagers to her ears. Five strong fishermen run across the sands to apprehend her. She turns and flees from them but they see her and know her and name her. She hides deep in the cliff-side. They search all along the shore. They do not find her so they march around the bay beating pots and pans to drive her away. They bring the vicar to pronounce ex-communication and anathema and exorcism.

The five fishermen of Penmaby saw her face; they recognized her from the portrait that hangs in her father’s empty house. The portrait is put to the fire and they swear no more girls will be christened Kerenza in Penmaby. When ships burst on the reef they blame Kerenza, when a child is drowned the rock pools they blame Kerenza. Her father’s house burns and the ruins are left to the weeds and gulls and they blame Kerenza.

* * *

Still she waits as frost changes to sun and the turning seasons change sun back to frost again. Kerenza sits on the Loor-Stone and waits for John Johnson. The wooden ships pass by on their way to war, they return again to trade. Then a new ship appears out among the sails, a low black craft that runs fast against the wind with no sail, but tall chimneys that leak black smoke into the sky. Kerenza sits on her rock, on the old Loor-Stone. She is so tired now, and the years spin by making her quite dizzy, but soon she will sleep, when John Johnson returns, then she they can both return to their marriage bed in father’s house and sleep in each other’s arms, then they will wake in the bright sunlight of a new day and begin their lives anew. Their funnels belch black smoke and turn the stones black. Once all boats sailed on the water, now some boats sail under the waves and others sail through the air. She hears them buzz like wasps overhead. Some drop fire on the distant port towns and after that all the villages fall silent and dark. Still John Johnson has not come back although she has waited an age for his return. There are no more Englishmen or Cornishmen, there are only landsmen now in Penmaby.

She looks for lights to set but the town is still dark at night, so she sets her driftwood fires in case he has signed aboard the metal ship but John Johnson does not return and the metal ships out in the fog refuse to be lured. They sail on by poor Kerenza. She weeps with loneliness. Her eyes are hollow with the flood of tears so again she builds her fires. Through the swirling fog a lone soldier comes to investigate her lights. He has a long gun on his shoulder and is dressed in drab bags of cloth hung with pouches and pockets. He seems uncertain as he trudges through the sand and shingle, the water of the rock pools soak up his mud-coloured trousers, his heavy boots slip on the weed. He calls to her as she sits on her stone in a coat of white mist illuminated by the yellow flames of her driftwood fire.

“Put that light out,” he shouts.

Karenza obliges with a snap of her fingers. They are alone together in the cold fog barely lit by a dim and distant moon. Her pale hair floats like the mist as she takes his arm and leads him along the beach and asks him nicely so he’ll tell her, asks him softly so not to startle him, asks him gently in his cold ear with her hand laid close across his heart. Kerenza knows he has brought her the answer, “have you seen John Johnson?” she says.

Magdala Amygdala

Lucy A. Snyder

I was bound, though I have not bound.

I was not recognized. But I have recognized
that the All is being dissolved,
both the earthly and the heavenly.

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

“So how are you feeling?” Dr. Shapiro’s pencil hovers over the CDC risk evaluation form clamped to her clipboard.

“Pretty good.” When I talk, I make sure my tongue stays tucked out of sight. I smile at her in a way that I hope looks friendly, and not like I’m baring my teeth. The exam-room mirror reflects the back of the good doctor’s head. Part of me wishes the silvered glass were angled so I could check my expression; the rest of me is relieved that I can’t see myself.

Nothing existed before this. The present and recent past keep blurring together in my mind, but I’ve learned to take a moment before I reply to questions, speak a little more slowly to give myself the chance to sort things out before I utter something that might sound abnormal. My waking world seems to have been taken apart and put back together so that everything is just slightly off, the geometries of reality deranged.

Most of my memories before the virus are as insubstantial as dreams; the strongest of them feel like borrowed clothing. The sweet snap of peas fresh from my garden. The crush of hot perfumed bodies against mine at the club and the thud of the bass from the huge speakers. The pleasant twin burns of the sun on my shoulders and the exertion in my legs as I pedal my bike up the mountainside.

The life I had in those memories is gone forever. I don’t know why this is happening to humanity. To me. I’d like to think there’s some greater purpose, some meaning in all this, but God help me, I just can’t see it.

“So is the new job going well? Are you able to sleep?” My doctor shines a penlight in my eyes and nostrils and marks off a couple of boxes. Thankfully, she doesn’t ask to see my tongue. It’s the same set of questions every week; I’d have to be pretty far gone to answer badly and get myself quarantined. The endless doctor-visits wear down other Type Threes, but I hang onto the belief that someday there might be actual help for me here.

I nod. “It’s fine. I have blackout curtains; sleep’s not a problem. They seem pretty happy with my work.”

My new supervisor is a friendly guy, but he always has an excuse for why he can’t meet with me in person, preferring to call me on his cell phone for our weekly chats. I used to bounce from building to building, repairing computers, spending equal amounts of time swapping gossip and hardware. After I got out of the hospital, I went on the graveyard shift in the company’s cold network operations center. These nights, I’m mostly raising processes from the dead, watching endless scrolling green text on cryptic black screens. I’m pretty sure the company discreetly advised my quiet coworkers to carry tasers and mace just in case.

“Do you feel that you’re able to see your old friends and family often enough?” Dr. Shapiro asks.

“Sure,” I lie. “We meet online for games and we talk in Vent. It’s fun.”

For the sake of his own health, my boyfriend took a job and apartment in another state; we speak less and less on the phone. What is there to say to him now? We can’t even chat about anything as simple as food or wine; I must subsist on bananas, rice, apple juice, and my meager allotment of six Bovellum capsules per day. The law says I can’t go to crowded places like theaters and concerts. I only glimpse the sun when I’m hurrying from the shelter of my car’s darkly tinted windows to monthly eight a.m. appointments with my court-ordered physician.

So I’m striding up the street to Dr. Shapiro’s office, my head down, squinting behind sunglasses, when suddenly I hear a man in the park across the street shouting violent nonsense. Or he used to be a man, anyhow; he’s wearing construction boots, ragged Carhartt’s work overalls and a dirty grey T-shirt, all freshly spattered with the blood of the woman whose head he is enthusiastically cracking open against the curb. He howls at the sky, and I can see he’s missing some teeth. Probably whatever he did for a living didn’t pay him enough to see a dentist. But his skin looks flush and smooth, so much healthier than mine, and for a moment I envy him.

He stops howling and meets my shadowed stare, breaking into a gory, gap-toothed smile. The kind of grin you give an old, dear friend. I’ve never laid eyes on this wreck before, and the woman beneath him is beyond anyone’s help. They both are. I don’t want to be outed, not here, not like this, so I pretend I don’t even see him and stride on.

A few seconds later, I hear the spat of rifle fire and the thud of a meaty body hitting the pavement, and I know that the SWAT team just took out Ragged Carhartts. They’re never far away, not in this part of town. And once they’ve taken out one Type Three, they don’t need much excuse to kill another, even if you’re just trying to see your doctor like a good citizen.

“Oh, God,” a lady says. She and another fortyish woman are standing in the doorway of an art gallery, staring horrified at the scene behind me. They’re both wearing batik dresses and lots of handmade jewelry. “That’s the third one this month.”

“If this keeps up, we’ll have to close.” The other woman shakes her head, looking grey-faced. “Nobody will want to come here. The whole downtown will die. Not just us. The theaters, the museums, churches – everything.”

“I heard something on NPR about a new kind of gel to keep the virus from spreading,” the first woman replies, sounding hopeful.

I keep moving. Her voice fades away. People still talk about contagion control as if it matters, as if masks and sanitizers and prayers can stop the future.

The truth is, unless you’ve been living in some isolated Tibetan monastery, you’ve already been exposed to Polymorphic Viral Gastroencephalitis. Maybe it gave you a bit of a headache and some nausea, but after a few days’ bed rest you were going out for Thai again. Congratulations! You’re Type One and you probably don’t even know it.

But maybe the headache turned into the worst you’ve ever had, and you started vomiting up blood and then your stomach lining, and when you came out of the hospital you’d lost the ability to digest most foods and to make certain proteins. And in the absence of those proteins, your body has trouble growing and healing. The enzymes your DNA uses to repair itself don’t work very well anymore.

Sunlight is no longer your friend. Neither are x-rays. Even if you quit smoking and keep yourself covered up like a virgin in the Rub’ Al Khali, your skin cracks and your body sprouts tumors. Your brain begins to degenerate; you start talking to yourself in second person. Sooner or later, you develop lesions on your frontal lobe and hippocampus that cause a variety of behaviors which will lead to your friendly neighborhood SWAT team putting a .308 bullet through your skull. That means you’re a Type Two, or maybe a Type Three, like me.

If you’re Type Four, we aren’t having this conversation. Unless you’re a ghost. You aren’t a ghost, are you? I don’t think I believe in them. But if you were a Type Four, your whole GI tract got stripped. I hope you were lucky and had a massive brain bleed right when it got really bad, and you never woke up.

I’m pretty sure I woke up.

“Do you find yourself having any unwanted thoughts or violent fantasies?” Dr. Shapiro asks.

“Of course not.” I try to sound mildly indignant.

There’s one upside, if it can be called that. If you lived past all the pain and vomiting, the symptoms of your chronic disease can be alleviated, if you consume sufficient daily quantities of one of a couple of raw protein sources.

If the best protein source for you is fresh human blood, congratulations, you are a Type Two! Provided you have a fat bank account, or decent health insurance, or are quick with a razor and fast on your feet, you can resume puberty or your athletic career. Watch out for HIV; it’s a killer.

If, however, the best source for you comes from sweet, custard-like brains…you are a Type Three. Your situation is much more problematic. And expensive. You better have a wealthy family or truly excellent insurance. Or mob connections. Otherwise, sooner or later, you’ll end up trying to crack open someone’s skull in public. The only question then is if you’ll get that one moment of true gustatory bliss right before you die.

I have excellent health insurance. There’s no bliss for me. What I and every other upstanding, gainfully-employed, fully-covered Type Three citizen gets is an allotment of refrigerated capsules containing an unappetizing grey paste. Mostly it’s cow brains and antioxidant vitamins with just the barest hint of pureed cadaver white matter. It’s enough to keep your skin and brains from ulcerating. It’s enough to keep your nose from rotting off. It’s enough to help you think clearly enough to function at your average white-collar job.

It is not enough to keep you from constantly wishing you could taste the real thing.

“I was wondering about something,” I say, as Dr. Shapiro begins to copy the contents of her survey into the exam room computer.

She stops typing and gives me a wary smile. “Yes, what is it?”

“My medication. I feel okay, you know? But I think I could feel…better. If I could have a little more?” I’m choosing my words as carefully as possible. My tongue feels thick, twitchy.

I can’t talk about the cravings I’m feeling. I can’t mention wanting more energy, because nobody in charge wants someone like me feeling energetic.

I wonder if there’s a sniper watching from behind the mirror on the wall; has he tightened his grip on his rifle? Are gas canisters waiting to blow in the air conditioner vent above me? My skin itches in dread anticipation.

Dr. Shapiro hedges. “Well, I know there’s been a shortage of raw materials these days.”

I swallow down my impatience and worry. The capsules are ninety-eight percent cow brains, for God’s sake. Probably they can squeeze a single human brain for thousands of doses. I can’t imagine the pharmaceutical companies are running short of anything.

“Could you check, just the same? Could you ask for me?” I sound meek. Pathetic. The opposite of hostile. That’s good.

She gives me a pitying look and sighs. The mirror doesn’t explode in gunfire. Gas doesn’t burst from the vents.

“I’ll see what I can do,” my doctor says.

I try to believe she’ll come through for me.

* * *

I go home. I take my capsules with some Mott’s apple juice. I rinse my mouth out with peroxide and don’t look at my tongue. I rub salve on the places my clothes have rubbed raw, and I climb naked into my bed. Sometime later, the alarm goes off, and I rise, shower, dress, and drive to work in darkness.

My shift is dull-clockwork, until just after grey drizzling dawn, when one of the new tech leads comes in to talk to my coworker George about some of the emergency server protocols. I haven’t seen this young man before; he’s wearing snug jeans and the sleeves of his black polo shirt are tight over biceps tattooed with angels and devils. His blond hair is cut close over a smooth, high-browed skull. He starts talking about database errors, but he’s thinking about a gig he has with his band on Friday night, and it suddenly hits me not just that I know what he’s thinking but that I know because I can smell the sweet chemicals shifting inside his brain. The chemicals tell me his name is Devin.

I am filled with Want in the marrow of my bones. I am filled with Need from eyeballs to soles. I excuse myself and hurry out into the mutagenic morning and punch Betty’s number into my cell. Soon after we met, she made me promise not to save her details in my phone, just in case anything went wrong.

It’s early for her. But she answers on the third ring. Speaking in the casual code we’ve used since we met online, we agree to meet that evening. It’s her turn to host.

I sleep fitfully. When my alarm goes off, I call in sick, shower, dress, and check my phone. Betty’s texted a cryptic string of letters and numbers for my directions. And so I drive out to a hotel we’ve never visited before, drinking Aquafinas the whole way. It’s a dark old place, once grand, now crumbling away in a forgotten corner of downtown. I wonder if she’s running short of money or if the extra anonymity of the place was crucial to her.

Still, as I get out my car and double-check my locks in the pouring rain, I can’t help but peer out into the oppressive black spaces in the parking lot, trying to figure out if any of the shadows between the other vehicles could be lurking cops or CDC agents. The darkness doesn’t move, so I hurry to the front door, head down, hands jammed in my raincoat pockets, my stomach roiling with worry and anticipation. I avoid making eye contact with any of the damp, tired-looking prostitutes smoking outside the hotel’s front doors. None of them pay any attention to me.

My phone chimes as Betty texts me the room number. I take the creaking, urine-stinking elevator up four floors. My pace slows as I walk down the stained hallway carpet, and I pause for a moment before I knock on the door of Room 512. What if the watchers tapped Betty’s phone? What if she’s not here at all? My poised hand quivers as my heart seems to pound out “A trap – a trap – a trap.”

I swallow. Knock twice. Step back. A moment later, Betty answers the door, wearing her Audrey Hepburn wig and a black cocktail dress that hangs limply from her skeletal shoulders. It’s appalling how much weight she’s lost; her eyes have turned entirely black, the whites permanently stained by repeated hemorrhages.

But she smiles at me, and I find myself smiling back, warmed by the first spark of real human feeling I’ve had in months. I have to believe that we’re still human. I have to.

“You ready?” Her question creaks like the hinge of a forgotten gate.

“Absolutely.” My own voice is the dry fluttering of moth wings.

She locks the door behind me. “I’m sorry this place is such a pit, but the guy at the Holiday Inn started asking all kinds of questions, and this was the best I could do on short notice.”

“It’s okay.” The room isn’t as seedy as the lobby and exterior led me to expect it to be, and it’s got a couch in addition to the queen-sized bed. Betty has already covered the couch and the carpet in front of it with a green plastic tarpaulin. Her stainless steel spritzer bottle leans against a couch arm.

“Want some wine?” She gestures toward an unopened bottle of Yellow Tail shiraz on the dresser.

“Thanks, but no…I couldn’t drink it right now. Maybe after.”

She nods. “There’s a really good Italian restaurant around the corner. Kind of a Goodfellas hangout, but everything’s homemade. Great garlic bread.”

Betty pulls off the wig. Before she got the virus, she could grow her thick chestnut hair clear down to her waist. I’ve never seen it except in pictures; her bare scalp gleams pale in the yellow light from the chandelier.

The scar circumscribing her skull looks red, inflamed; I wonder if she’s been seeing other Type Threes. I quickly tamp down my pang of jealousy. We never agreed to an exclusive arrangement. And maybe she just had to go to the hospital instead; she told me she’s got some kind of massive tumor on her pituitary.

She looks so frail. I can’t possibly begrudge her what comfort she can get. I should just be grateful that she agrees to see me when I need her.

And, oh sweet Lord, do I need her tonight.

Betty pulls me down to her for a kiss. Her hands are icy, but her lips are warm. She slips her tongue into my mouth, and I can taste sweet cerebrospinal fluid mingled in her saliva. The tumor must have cracked the bony barriers in her skull. Before I have a chance to try to pull away, my own tongue is swelling, toothed pores opening and nipping at her slippery flesh.

She squeaks in pain and we separate.

“Sorry,” I try to whisper. But my tongue is continuing to engorge and lengthen, curling back on itself and slithering down my own throat; I can feel the tiny maws rasping against my adenoids.

“It’s okay.” Her wan smile is smeared with blood. “We better get started.”

She kisses the palm of my hand and begins to take my clothes off. I stare up at the tawdry chandelier, watching a fly buzz among the dusty baubles and bulbs. When I’m naked, she slips off her cocktail dress and leads me to the tarp-covered couch.

“Be gentle.” She presses a short oyster knife into my hand and sits me down, the plastic crackling beneath me. I nod, barely keeping my lips closed over my shuddering tongue, and spread my legs.

With slow exhalation, Betty settles between my thighs, her back to me. She’s a tiny woman, her head barely clearing my chin when we’re seated, so this position works best. Her skin is already covered in goose bumps. The anticipation is killing both of us.

I carefully run the tip of the sharp oyster knife through the red scar around her skull; there’s relatively little blood as I cut through the tissue. Betty gives a little gasp and grips my knees, her whole body tensed. The bone has only stitched back together in a few places; I use the side-to-side motion she showed me to gently pry the lid of her skull free.

She moans when I expose her brain; it’s the most beautiful thing I could hope to see. Her dura mater glistens with a half-inch slick of golden jelly. Brain honey. When I breathe in the smell of her, I feel my blood pressure rise hard and fast.

I set the bowl of skin and bone aside and present the knife to her in my outstretched left hand. With a flick of her wrist, she slits the vein in the crook of my arm and presses her mouth against my bleeding flesh. I wrap my cut arm around her head and pull her tight to my breast.

I open my mouth and let my tongue unwind like an eel into her brainpan. It wriggles there, purple and gnarled, the tiny maw sucking down her golden jelly. It’s delicious, better than caviar, better than ice cream, better than anything I’ve had in my mouth before. Sweet and salty and tangy and perfect.

The jelly gives me flashes of her memories and dreams; she’s been with other Type Threes. She’s helped them murder people. I don’t care. I keep drinking her in, my tongue probing all the corners of her skull and sheathed wrinkles of her brain to get every last gooey drop.

I can control my tongue, but just barely. It’s hard to keep it from doing the one thing I’d dearly love, which is to drive it through her membrane deep between her slippery lobes. But that would be the end of her. The end of us. No more, all over, bye bye.

A little of what my body and soul craves is better than nothing at all. Isn’t it?

My arm aches, and I’m starting to feel lightheaded on top of the high. We’re both running dry. I release her, spritz her brain with saline and carefully put the top of her head back into place. She’s full of my blood, and already her scalp is sealing back together. We’ve done well; we spilled hardly anything on the tarp this time. But my face feels sticky, and I’ve probably even gotten her in my hair.

She daintily wipes my blood from the corners of her mouth and smiles at me. Her skin is pink and practically glowing, and her boniness seems chic rather than diseased. “Want to go to that Italian place after we get cleaned up?”

“Sure.” I’m probably glowing, too. My stomach feels strong enough for pepperoncinis.

I head to the bathroom to wash my face, but when I push open the door –

– I find myself in Dr. Shapiro’s office. She’s staring down at an MRI scan of somebody’s chest. The monochrome bones look strange, distorted.

“There’s definitely a mass behind your ribs and spine. It’s growing fast, but I can’t definitely say it’s cancer.”

I’m dizzy with terror. How did I get here? What mass? How long have I had a mass?

“What should we do?” I stammer.

She looks up at me with eyes as solidly black as Betty’s. “I think we should wait and see.”

I back away, turn, push through her office door –

– and I’m back in a rented room. But not the downtown dive with the dusty chandelier. It’s a suburban motel someplace. Have I been here before?

The green tarp on the king-sized bed is covered in blood and bits of skull. There’s a body wrapped in black trash bags, stuffed between the bed and the writing desk. Did I do that? What have I done?

Oh, God, please make this stop. I have to lean against the wall to keep myself from tumbling backward.

Betty comes out of the bathroom, dressed in a spattered silk negligee. I think it used to be white. There’s gore in her wig. Her eyes go wide.

“I told you not to come here!” She grabs me by my arm, surprising me with her strength. In the distance, I can hear sirens. “They’ll be here any minute – get away from here, fast as you can!”

She presses a set of rental car keys into my palm, hauls me to the door and pushes me out into the hallway –

– and I’m stepping into the elevator at work.

Handsome blond Devin is in there. A look of surprised fear crosses his face, and I know the very sight of me repels him. His hand goes to his jeans pocket. I see the outline of something that’s probably a canister of pepper spray. It’s too small to be a taser.

But then he pauses, smiles at me. “Hey, you going up to that training class?”

I nod mechanically, and try to say “Sure,” but my lungs spasm and suddenly I’m doubled over, coughing into my hands. When did simply breathing start hurting this much?

“You okay?” Devin asks.

I try to nod, but there’s bright blood on my palms. A long-forgotten Bible verse surfaces in the swamp of my memory: Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.

I look up and see my reflection in the chromed elevator walls – my face is gaunt, but my body is grotesquely swollen. I’ve turned into some kind of hunchback. How long have I had the mass?

Instead of the pepper spray, Devin’s pulled his cell phone out. I can smell his mind. He’s torn between wanting to run away and wanting to help. “Should I call someone? Should I call 911?”

The elevator is filled with the scent of him. Despite my pain and sickness, the Want returns with a vengeance. Adrenaline rises along with my blood pressure. My tongue is twitching, and something in my back, too. I can feel it tearing my ribs away from my spine. It hurts more than I can remember anything ever hurting. Maybe childbirth would be like this.

Betty. I need Betty. How long has it been since I’ve seen her? Oh God.

“Call 911,” I try to say, but I can’t take a breath, can’t speak around the tongue writhing backward down my throat.

“What can I do?” Devin touches my shoulder.

And the feel of his hand against my bony flesh is far too much for me to bear.

I rise up under him, grab him by the sides of his head, kissing him. My tongue goes straight down his throat, choking him. He hits me, trying to shake me off, but as strong as he is, my Want is stronger.

When he’s unconscious, I let him fall and hit the emergency stop button. The Want has me wrapped tightly in its ardor, burning away all my human qualms. The alarm is an annoyance, and I know I don’t have as much time as I want. Still. As I lift his left eyelid, I take a moment to admire his perfect bluebonnet iris.

And then I plunge my tongue into his eye. The ball squirts off to the side as my organ drills deeper, the tiny mouths rasping through the thin socket bone into his sweet frontal lobe. After the first wash of cerebral fluid I’m into the creamy white meat of him, and –

– Oh, God. This is more beautiful than I imagined.

I’m devouring his will. Devouring his memories. Living him, through and through. His first taste of wine. His first taste of a woman. The first time he stood onstage. He’s at the prime of his life, and oh, it’s been a wonderful life, and I am memorizing every second of it as I swallow down the contents of his lovely skull.

When he’s empty, I rise from his shell and feel my new wings break free from the cage of my back. As I spread them wide in the elevator, I realize I can hear the old gods whispering to me from their thrones in the dark spaces between the stars.

I smile at myself in the distorted chrome walls. Everything is clear to me now. I have been chosen. I have a purpose. Through the virus, the old gods tested me, and deemed me worthy of this holiest of duties. There are others like me; I can hear them gathering in the caves outside the city. Some died, yes, like the ragged man, but my Becoming is almost complete. Nothing as simple as a bullet will stop me then.

The Earth is ripe, human civilization at its peak. I and the other archivists will preserve the memories of the best and brightest as we devour them. We will use the blood of this world to write dark, beautiful poetry across the walls of the universe.

For the first time in my life, I don’t need faith. I know what I am supposed to do in every atom in every cell of my body. I will record thousands of souls before my masters allow me to join them in the star-shadows, and I will love every moment of my mission.

I can hear the SWAT team rush into the foyer three stories below. Angry ants. I can hear Betty and the others calling to me from the hollow hills. Smiling, I open the hatch in the top of the elevator and prepare to fly.

My Brother Tom

Mariah Southworth

I don’t really remember when Tom first started to get sick. I do remember when it got worse though. He stopped getting out of bed, and Mother and Father talked about him in furtive whispers. The overly sweet smell of cough syrup invaded the entire house, and for three long days Mother didn’t sleep at all. She just sat at Tom’s bedside while he thrashed around in delirious dreams.

I tried to stay out of the way, but I remember watching him, his cheeks flushed red in a constant blush, his hair damp with sweat. Father called in every hour from work, and spent all evening on the phone with his brother, the nurse. When he came home, his arms were always full of special foods and candy-colored medicine.

We couldn’t afford a doctor back then. Mother was out of work, and Father had only the two part-time jobs. There was no extra money, and worse, no medical insurance. Towards the end of Tom’s fever, Mother and Father were seriously considering sliding a little further into debt so that they could have a doctor look at him.

Then Tom seemed to get better. His fever went away, at least. He was stiff and pale, but he wasn’t mumbling incoherently anymore. On the contrary, I remember him being very quiet. He didn’t speak, and he didn’t eat. He was very weak and had a constant glazed, dreamy expression. At least he was out of bed, though.

I avoided him. Maybe I was still frightened by the effects of the fever, but it hadn’t scared me before. I just didn’t want to be around him. I did want to be around my parents, for comfort more than anything. That was why I was creeping along the hallway that night when I overheard Father making plans.

“Look,” Father said. I remember him clearly, standing under the fluorescent light of the kitchen, wearing his robe, slippers, and boxer shorts. Mother was sitting at the table, rubbing at her head like she had a headache. “Look,” he repeated. “He’s still not better, that much is obvious. But he’s well enough to travel now. I want to take him to my brother. Robbie’s been helping us as best he can over the phone, but I really want him to actually take a look at Tom. And the seaside air will be good for him; good for all of us, really.”

Looking back, I suppose my parents had been desperate for something to do, because once they had found a plan that was within their power, everything happened very quickly. The very next day we all piled into the car, me in my little pink jacket, Tom in his dark blue coat and knitted blue ski cap. Mother had to dress Tom, and I remember her having a difficult time of it. She didn’t complain, and neither did Tom, but you could see how hard it was for her to bend his arms. It was as if she were dressing a large, stiff doll.

We all got into the car, and I heard Mother say to Father, “I’m worried about him, Hector. He’s so cold now.”

Father just put a reassuring hand on her shoulder and smiled. “Robbie will know what to do,” he assured her.

Father started the car and off we went, heading for the coast, where Uncle Robert the Nurse lived. Out of the three healthy members of the family, Mother had been through the most the past week, and she promptly fell asleep. Tom stared listlessly out the back window and I tried to read my chapter books. I was in third grade, and quite proud of my reading skills, but I couldn’t concentrate on Charlie and his adventures in the chocolate factory; not with Tom sitting so close to me.

There was something so very wrong about him. I kept looking over him, trying to discover what it was that made my skin crawl. He didn’t look like Tom now – he looked like those wax statues in that museum that Father had taken us to the previous Spring. Pale, staring, fake – they had given me nightmares for weeks afterward. Tom looked just like one of them, except for his skin. It wasn’t even skin colored. It was as white as the candles that Mother liked to buy.

The car heated up quickly, and I pulled off my jacket. Tom didn’t – he just remained where he was, staring out at the rolling farmland that we drove through. I don’t remember seeing him blink once.

It was stuffy in that car, stuffy and bad-smelling, like the way the fridge smelled when the meat drawer needed to be cleaned. I knew immediately that the smell was coming from Tom.

Disgust surged through me, and I suddenly wanted to be as far away from Tom as possible.

“Daddy, Tom stinks,” I called.

“That’s not a nice thing to say honey,” Father said, not taking his eyes off the road.

“But he does Daddy!”

“Quiet, you’ll wake your mother.”

I kept at it, trying everything I could think of to get him to pull over so I could get out of the car. Finally, after multiple claims that I had to pee, he pulled over in front of an old farm house.

“Here,” he said. “We can ask to use their bathroom.”

I was out of my seat-belt as soon as the car stopped, and out onto the gravel drive before the engine had even been turned off.

“Hold on, hold on,” Father called as he helped Tom out of the car. Mother was still dead asleep. “You forgot your jacket.”

Father retrieved my jacket and helped me get it on. I could have done it myself, but I let him as soon as I saw Tom walking stiffly away towards the farmhouse. I wanted Tom to get as far away as possible.

Eventually, Father looked up and saw where Tom was. “Tom!” he yelled. Tom didn’t stop, or turn around. I can still remember that moment – how bright the blue of Tom’s clothes looked against the pale gravel and the dull paint of the farmhouse, the way the little bob on his ski cap bounced with every step. I remember being afraid before anything happened, afraid and guilty that I had wanted Tom to go away.

Tom collapsed all at once, like a marionette with its strings cut. “Tom!” Father shouted, picking me up and running for the body. His footsteps were loud in the gravel drive, like a giant crunching and grinding bones between his teeth.

Father got to Tom and set me down at the exact moment the farmhouse door slammed open. Out of the house came a tall, old man, with iron gray hair and a large white mustache. In my memory, he looks exactly like Mark Twain, though I can’t tell you how accurate that is.

The old man took the whole scene in at once, and came rushing to my father’s side. “Here, let me. I’m a doctor,” he said. “Give him air.”

Father was making little choking sounds, but moved aside to give the man some room.

The doctor turned Tom over and checked his neck for a pulse. He frowned, his mustache exaggerating the expression, and peeled back Tom’s upper lip to look at his gums. They were white-candle pale, just like the rest of him. The Doctor looked at Tom’s eyes, then poked and prodded him in various places. He even stuck his finger in Tom’s mouth, though I don’t know why.

Finally he looked up at Father, his expression grave. “Did you find him here?” he asked.

Father looked almost as pale as Tom. “What? Yes, he just fell down,” Father said, his voice panicked. “Is he going to be okay?”

The doctor’s frown turned puzzled. “This boy has been dead for at least a day.”

That was when Tom spoke.

He didn’t move anything but his mouth. He just kept lying in the twisted, broken doll position that the doctor had left him in when he’d turned him over.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “So sorry. I was late in taking him.”

The doctor and my father looked down at Tom. Father looked confused and scared, but the doctor…I don’t think I will ever forget the expression of horror that was on his face. He had gone all pale and green, like spoiled milk, and his eyes were wide, his pupils narrowed to pinpricks.

I just stood there, watching silently. I don’t remember being scared or even shocked. It was as if the whole thing was quite expected and natural – more natural than sitting in the car with Tom had been.

“It must have been so hard,” Tom continued. Except it wasn’t Tom’s voice. The cadence was wrong, and the solemn monotone was nothing like Tom. “So upsetting for you, having him walking around like this. I should have taken him two days ago, but the truth is that I’ve been going through some things, and well…” Tom trailed off, his lips falling closed, his glassy eyes staring unblinking at the sky.

“Tom,” Father said weakly, fingers going out to brush against his son’s cheek.

That was when I got scared. “Daddy, no!” I shrieked, making both of the adults flinch. “No Daddy, no! Don’t touch him!”

Father stopped, fingers only a few inches from Tom’s cold face. “Honey…” he said.

He looked hurt, but I knew what the other two did not, and it didn’t matter if I hurt his feelings. Maybe I was young enough that my primal instincts were still there – if that is a real thing. It may have just been intuition, but I knew exactly what would happen if father touched Tom just then, and it filled me with a deep, hysterical fear.

Tom’s eyes rolled in their sockets until they pointed in my direction. They were dull, empty eyes, like smoked marbles.

“This is upsetting you too,” Tom said. “So sorry. Just wanted to explain myself. I’ll take him now – I’ve other work to catch up on.”

Tom closed his marble eyes and was silent. He did not speak again.

* * *

No one talks about my brother Tom now. Well, they do, but they don’t talk about the different Tom, the one at the farm house.

They talk about the Tom who played T ball, and caught newts in the creek out back. They don’t talk about the way he died, or what he said afterwards. Sometimes I wonder if Father has forgotten about what happened. He may have blocked it out, or convinced himself that it was a dream, choosing to only remember the living Tom.

The funny thing is, I’m just the opposite. I don’t really remember the Tom who supposedly made mud pies with me, or got into cereal fights with me. I guess I was too young to really remember that Tom.

I do remember those glass marble eyes looking into mine, and the way his mouth moved while the rest of him lay still. I remember the smell of old, rotting blood in the stuffy car. Most of all, I remember that voice.

Sometimes I wonder when I will hear it again.

The Judge’s House

Bram Stoker

When the time for his examination drew near Malcolm Malcolmson made up his mind to go somewhere to read by himself. He feared the attractions of the seaside, and also he feared completely rural isolation, for of old he knew its charms, and so he determined to find some unpretentious little town where there would be nothing to distract him. He refrained from asking suggestions from any of his friends, for he argued that each would recommend some place of which he had knowledge, and where he had already acquaintances. As Malcolmson wished to avoid friends he had no wish to encumber himself with the attention of friends’ friends, and so he determined to look out for a place for himself. He packed a portmanteau with some clothes and all the books he required, and then took ticket for the first name on the local time-table which he did not know.

When at the end of three hours’ journey he alighted at Benchurch, he felt satisfied that he had so far obliterated his tracks as to be sure of having a peaceful opportunity of pursuing his studies. He went straight to the one inn which the sleepy little place contained, and put up for the night. Benchurch was a market town, and once in three weeks was crowded to excess, but for the remainder of the twenty-one days it was as attractive as a desert. Malcolmson looked around the day after his arrival to try to find quarters more isolated than even so quiet an inn as ‘The Good Traveller’ afforded. There was only one place which took his fancy, and it certainly satisfied his wildest ideas regarding quiet; in fact, quiet was not the proper word to apply to it – desolation was the only term conveying any suitable idea of its isolation. It was an old rambling, heavy-built house of the Jacobean style, with heavy gables and windows, unusually small, and set higher than was customary in such houses, and was surrounded with a high brick wall massively built. Indeed, on examination, it looked more like a fortified house than an ordinary dwelling. But all these things pleased Malcolmson. “Here,” he thought, “is the very spot I have been looking for, and if I can get opportunity of using it I shall be happy.” His joy was increased when he realised beyond doubt that it was not at present inhabited.

From the post-office he got the name of the agent, who was rarely surprised at the application to rent a part of the old house. Mr. Carnford, the local lawyer and agent, was a genial old gentleman, and frankly confessed his delight at anyone being willing to live in the house.

“To tell you the truth,” said he, “I should be only too happy, on behalf of the owners, to let anyone have the house rent free for a term of years if only to accustom the people here to see it inhabited. It has been so long empty that some kind of absurd prejudice has grown up about it, and this can be best put down by its occupation – if only,” he added with a sly glance at Malcolmson, “by a scholar like yourself, who wants its quiet for a time.”

Malcolmson thought it needless to ask the agent about the ‘absurd prejudice’; he knew he would get more information, if he should require it, on that subject from other quarters. He paid his three months’ rent, got a receipt, and the name of an old woman who would probably undertake to ‘do’ for him, and came away with the keys in his pocket. He then went to the landlady of the inn, who was a cheerful and most kindly person, and asked her advice as to such stores and provisions as he would be likely to require. She threw up her hands in amazement when he told her where he was going to settle himself.

“Not in the Judge’s House!” she said, and grew pale as she spoke. He explained the locality of the house, saying that he did not know its name. When he had finished she answered:

“Aye, sure enough – sure enough the very place! It is the Judge’s House sure enough.” He asked her to tell him about the place, why so called, and what there was against it. She told him that it was so called locally because it had been many years before – how long she could not say, as she was herself from another part of the country, but she thought it must have been a hundred years or more – the abode of a judge who was held in great terror on account of his harsh sentences and his hostility to prisoners at Assizes. As to what there was against the house itself she could not tell. She had often asked, but no one could inform her; but there was a general feeling that there was something, and for her own part she would not take all the money in Drinkwater’s Bank and stay in the house an hour by herself. Then she apologised to Malcolmson for her disturbing talk.

“It is too bad of me, sir, and you – and a young gentlemen, too – if you will pardon me saying it, going to live there all alone. If you were my boy – and you’ll excuse me for saying it – you wouldn’t sleep there a night, not if I had to go there myself and pull the big alarm bell that’s on the roof!” The good creature was so manifestly in earnest, and was so kindly in her intentions, that Malcolmson, although amused, was touched. He told her kindly how much he appreciated her interest in him, and added:

“But, my dear Mrs. Witham, indeed you need not be concerned about me! A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious ‘somethings’, and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow of his having any corner in his mind for mysteries of any kind. Harmonical Progression, Permutations and Combinations, and Elliptic Functions have sufficient mysteries for me!” Mrs. Witham kindly undertook to see after his commissions, and he went himself to look for the old woman who had been recommended to him. When he returned to the Judge’s House with her, after an interval of a couple of hours, he found Mrs. Witham herself waiting with several men and boys carrying parcels, and an upholsterer’s man with a bed in a car, for she said, though tables and chairs might be all very well, a bed that hadn’t been aired for mayhap fifty years was not proper for young bones to lie on. She was evidently curious to see the inside of the house; and though manifestly so afraid of the ‘somethings’ that at the slightest sound she clutched on to Malcolmson, whom she never left for a moment, went over the whole place.

After his examination of the house, Malcolmson decided to take up his abode in the great dining-room, which was big enough to serve for all his requirements; and Mrs. Witham, with the aid of the charwoman, Mrs. Dempster, proceeded to arrange matters. When the hampers were brought in and unpacked, Malcolmson saw that with much kind forethought she had sent from her own kitchen sufficient provisions to last for a few days. Before going she expressed all sorts of kind wishes; and at the door turned and said:

“And perhaps, sir, as the room is big and draughty it might be well to have one of those big screens put round your bed at night – though, truth to tell, I would die myself if I were to be so shut in with all kinds of – of ‘things’, that put their heads round the sides, or over the top, and look on me!” The image which she had called up was too much for her nerves, and she fled incontinently.

Mrs. Dempster sniffed in a superior manner as the landlady disappeared, and remarked that for her own part she wasn’t afraid of all the bogies in the kingdom.

“I’ll tell you what it is, sir,” she said; “bogies is all kinds and sorts of things – except bogies! Rats and mice, and beetles; and creaky doors, and loose slates, and broken panes, and stiff drawer handles, that stay out when you pull them and then fall down in the middle of the night. Look at the wainscot of the room! It is old – hundreds of years old! Do you think there’s no rats and beetles there! And do you imagine, sir, that you won’t see none of them? Rats is bogies, I tell you, and bogies is rats; and don’t you get to think anything else!”

“Mrs. Dempster,” said Malcolmson gravely, making her a polite bow, “you know more than a Senior Wrangler! And let me say, that, as a mark of esteem for your indubitable soundness of head and heart, I shall, when I go, give you possession of this house, and let you stay here by yourself for the last two months of my tenancy, for four weeks will serve my purpose.”

“Thank you kindly, sir!” she answered, “but I couldn’t sleep away from home a night. I am in Greenhow’s Charity, and if I slept a night away from my rooms I should lose all I have got to live on. The rules is very strict; and there’s too many watching for a vacancy for me to run any risks in the matter. Only for that, sir, I’d gladly come here and attend on you altogether during your stay.”

“My good woman,” said Malcolmson hastily, “I have come here on purpose to obtain solitude; and believe me that I am grateful to the late Greenhow for having so organised his admirable charity – whatever it is – that I am perforce denied the opportunity of suffering from such a form of temptation! Saint Anthony himself could not be more rigid on the point!”

The old woman laughed harshly. “Ah, you young gentlemen,” she said, “you don’t fear for naught; and belike you’ll get all the solitude you want here.” She set to work with her cleaning; and by nightfall, when Malcolmson returned from his walk – he always had one of his books to study as he walked – he found the room swept and tidied, a fire burning in the old hearth, the lamp lit, and the table spread for supper with Mrs. Witham’s excellent fare. “This is comfort, indeed,” he said, as he rubbed his hands.

When he had finished his supper, and lifted the tray to the other end of the great oak dining-table, he got out his books again, put fresh wood on the fire, trimmed his lamp, and set himself down to a spell of real hard work. He went on without pause till about eleven o’clock, when he knocked off for a bit to fix his fire and lamp, and to make himself a cup of tea. He had always been a tea-drinker, and during his college life had sat late at work and had taken tea late. The rest was a great luxury to him, and he enjoyed it with a sense of delicious, voluptuous ease. The renewed fire leaped and sparkled, and threw quaint shadows through the great old room; and as he sipped his hot tea he revelled in the sense of isolation from his kind. Then it was that he began to notice for the first time what a noise the rats were making.

“Surely,” he thought, “they cannot have been at it all the time I was reading. Had they been, I must have noticed it!” Presently, when the noise increased, he satisfied himself that it was really new. It was evident that at first the rats had been frightened at the presence of a stranger, and the light of fire and lamp; but that as the time went on they had grown bolder and were now disporting themselves as was their wont.

How busy they were! And hark to the strange noises! Up and down behind the old wainscot, over the ceiling and under the floor they raced, and gnawed, and scratched! Malcolmson smiled to himself as he recalled to mind the saying of Mrs. Dempster, “Bogies is rats, and rats is bogies!” The tea began to have its effect of intellectual and nervous stimulus, he saw with joy another long spell of work to be done before the night was past, and in the sense of security which it gave him, he allowed himself the luxury of a good look round the room. He took his lamp in one hand, and went all around, wondering that so quaint and beautiful an old house had been so long neglected. The carving of the oak on the panels of the wainscot was fine, and on and round the doors and windows it was beautiful and of rare merit. There were some old pictures on the walls, but they were coated so thick with dust and dirt that he could not distinguish any detail of them, though he held his lamp as high as he could over his head. Here and there as he went round he saw some crack or hole blocked for a moment by the face of a rat with its bright eyes glittering in the light, but in an instant it was gone, and a squeak and a scamper followed. The thing that most struck him, however, was the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof, which hung down in a corner of the room on the right-hand side of the fireplace. He pulled up close to the hearth a great high-backed carved oak chair, and sat down to his last cup of tea. When this was done he made up the fire, and went back to his work, sitting at the corner of the table, having the fire to his left. For a little while the rats disturbed him somewhat with their perpetual scampering, but he got accustomed to the noise as one does to the ticking of a clock or to the roar of moving water; and he became so immersed in his work that everything in the world, except the problem which he was trying to solve, passed away from him.

He suddenly looked up, his problem was still unsolved, and there was in the air that sense of the hour before the dawn, which is so dread to doubtful life. The noise of the rats had ceased. Indeed it seemed to him that it must have ceased but lately and that it was the sudden cessation which had disturbed him. The fire had fallen low, but still it threw out a deep red glow. As he looked he started in spite of his sang froid.

There on the great high-backed carved oak chair by the right side of the fireplace sat an enormous rat, steadily glaring at him with baleful eyes. He made a motion to it as though to hunt it away, but it did not stir. Then he made the motion of throwing something. Still it did not stir, but showed its great white teeth angrily, and its cruel eyes shone in the lamplight with an added vindictiveness.

Malcolmson felt amazed, and seizing the poker from the hearth ran at it to kill it. Before, however, he could strike it, the rat, with a squeak that sounded like the concentration of hate, jumped upon the floor, and, running up the rope of the alarm bell, disappeared in the darkness beyond the range of the green-shaded lamp. Instantly, strange to say, the noisy scampering of the rats in the wainscot began again.

By this time Malcolmson’s mind was quite off the problem; and as a shrill cock-crow outside told him of the approach of morning, he went to bed and to sleep.

He slept so sound that he was not even waked by Mrs. Dempster coming in to make up his room. It was only when she had tidied up the place and got his breakfast ready and tapped on the screen which closed in his bed that he woke. He was a little tired still after his night’s hard work, but a strong cup of tea soon freshened him up and, taking his book, he went out for his morning walk, bringing with him a few sandwiches lest he should not care to return till dinner time. He found a quiet walk between high elms some way outside the town, and here he spent the greater part of the day studying his Laplace. On his return he looked in to see Mrs. Witham and to thank her for her kindness. When she saw him coming through the diamond-paned bay window of her sanctum she came out to meet him and asked him in. She looked at him searchingly and shook her head as she said:

“You must not overdo it, sir. You are paler this morning than you should be. Too late hours and too hard work on the brain isn’t good for any man! But tell me, sir, how did you pass the night? Well, I hope? But my heart! Sir, I was glad when Mrs. Dempster told me this morning that you were all right and sleeping sound when she went in.”

“Oh, I was all right,” he answered smiling, “the ‘somethings’ didn’t worry me, as yet. Only the rats; and they had a circus, I tell you, all over the place. There was one wicked looking old devil that sat up on my own chair by the fire, and wouldn’t go till I took the poker to him, and then he ran up the rope of the alarm bell and got to somewhere up the wall or the ceiling – I couldn’t see where, it was so dark.”

“Mercy on us,” said Mrs. Witham, “an old devil, and sitting on a chair by the fireside! Take care, sir! Take care! There’s many a true word spoken in jest.”

“How do you mean? ‘Pon my word I don’t understand.”

“An old devil! The old devil, perhaps. There! Sir, you needn’t laugh,” for Malcolmson had broken into a hearty peal. “You young folks thinks it easy to laugh at things that makes older ones shudder. Never mind, sir! Never mind! Please God, you’ll laugh all the time. It’s what I wish you myself!” and the good lady beamed all over in sympathy with his enjoyment, her fears gone for a moment.

“Oh, forgive me!” said Malcolmson presently. “Don’t think me rude; but the idea was too much for me – that the old devil himself was on the chair last night!” And at the thought he laughed again. Then he went home to dinner.

This evening the scampering of the rats began earlier; indeed it had been going on before his arrival, and only ceased whilst his presence by its freshness disturbed them. After dinner he sat by the fire for a while and had a smoke; and then, having cleared his table, began to work as before. Tonight the rats disturbed him more than they had done on the previous night. How they scampered up and down and under and over! How they squeaked, and scratched, and gnawed! How they, getting bolder by degrees, came to the mouths of their holes and to the chinks and cracks and crannies in the wainscoting till their eyes shone like tiny lamps as the firelight rose and fell. But to him, now doubtless accustomed to them, their eyes were not wicked; only their playfulness touched him. Sometimes the boldest of them made sallies out on the floor or along the mouldings of the wainscot. Now and again as they disturbed him Malcolmson made a sound to frighten them, smiting the table with his hand or giving a fierce “Hsh, hsh”, so that they fled straightway to their holes.

And so the early part of the night wore on; and despite the noise Malcolmson got more and more immersed in his work.

All at once he stopped, as on the previous night, being overcome by a sudden sense of silence. There was not the faintest sound of gnaw, or scratch, or squeak. The silence was as of the grave. He remembered the odd occurrence of the previous night, and instinctively he looked at the chair standing close by the fireside. And then a very odd sensation thrilled through him.

There, on the great old high-backed carved oak chair beside the fireplace sat the same enormous rat, steadily glaring at him with baleful eyes.

Instinctively he took the nearest thing to his hand, a book of logarithms, and flung it at it. The book was badly aimed and the rat did not stir, so again the poker performance of the previous night was repeated; and again the rat, being closely pursued, fled up the rope of the alarm bell. Strangely too, the departure of this rat was instantly followed by the renewal of the noise made by the general rat community. On this occasion, as on the previous one, Malcolmson could not see at what part of the room the rat disappeared, for the green shade of his lamp left the upper part of the room in darkness, and the fire had burned low.

On looking at his watch he found it was close on midnight; and, not sorry for the divertissement, he made up his fire and made himself his nightly pot of tea. He had got through a good spell of work, and thought himself entitled to a cigarette; and so he sat on the great oak chair before the fire and enjoyed it. Whilst smoking he began to think that he would like to know where the rat disappeared to, for he had certain ideas for the morrow not entirely disconnected with a rat-trap. Accordingly he lit another lamp and placed it so that it would shine well into the right-hand corner of the wall by the fireplace. Then he got all the books he had with him, and placed them handy to throw at the vermin. Finally he lifted the rope of the alarm bell and placed the end of it on the table, fixing the extreme end under the lamp. As he handled it he could not help noticing how pliable it was, especially for so strong a rope, and one not in use. “You could hang a man with it,” he thought to himself. When his preparations were made he looked around, and said complacently:

“There now, my friend, I think we shall learn something of you this time!” He began his work again, and though as before somewhat disturbed at first by the noise of the rats, soon lost himself in his propositions and problems.

Again he was called to his immediate surroundings suddenly. This time it might not have been the sudden silence only which took his attention; there was a slight movement of the rope, and the lamp moved. Without stirring, he looked to see if his pile of books was within range, and then cast his eye along the rope. As he looked he saw the great rat drop from the rope on the oak arm-chair and sit there glaring at him. He raised a book in his right hand, and taking careful aim, flung it at the rat. The latter, with a quick movement, sprang aside and dodged the missile. He then took another book, and a third, and flung them one after another at the rat, but each time unsuccessfully. At last, as he stood with a book poised in his hand to throw, the rat squeaked and seemed afraid. This made Malcolmson more than ever eager to strike, and the book flew and struck the rat a resounding blow. It gave a terrified squeak, and turning on his pursuer a look of terrible malevolence, ran up the chair-back and made a great jump to the rope of the alarm bell and ran up it like lightning. The lamp rocked under the sudden strain, but it was a heavy one and did not topple over. Malcolmson kept his eyes on the rat, and saw it by the light of the second lamp leap to a moulding of the wainscot and disappear through a hole in one of the great pictures which hung on the wall, obscured and invisible through its coating of dirt and dust.

“I shall look up my friend’s habitation in the morning,” said the student, as he went over to collect his books. “The third picture from the fireplace; I shall not forget.” He picked up the books one by one, commenting on them as he lifted them. “Conic Sections he does not mind, nor Cycloidal Oscillations, nor the Principia, nor Quaternions, nor Thermodynamics. Now for the book that fetched him!’ Malcolmson took it up and looked at it. As he did so he started, and a sudden pallor overspread his face. He looked round uneasily and shivered slightly, as he murmured to himself:

“The Bible my mother gave me! What an odd coincidence.” He sat down to work again, and the rats in the wainscot renewed their gambols. They did not disturb him, however; somehow their presence gave him a sense of companionship. But he could not attend to his work, and after striving to master the subject on which he was engaged gave it up in despair, and went to bed as the first streak of dawn stole in through the eastern window.

He slept heavily but uneasily, and dreamed much; and when Mrs. Dempster woke him late in the morning he seemed ill at ease, and for a few minutes did not seem to realise exactly where he was. His first request rather surprised the servant.

“Mrs. Dempster, when I am out today I wish you would get the steps and dust or wash those pictures – specially that one the third from the fireplace – I want to see what they are.”

Late in the afternoon Malcolmson worked at his books in the shaded walk, and the cheerfulness of the previous day came back to him as the day wore on, and he found that his reading was progressing well. He had worked out to a satisfactory conclusion all the problems which had as yet baffled him, and it was in a state of jubilation that he paid a visit to Mrs. Witham at ‘The Good Traveller’. He found a stranger in the cosy sitting-room with the landlady, who was introduced to him as Dr. Thornhill. She was not quite at ease, and this, combined with the doctor’s plunging at once into a series of questions, made Malcolmson come to the conclusion that his presence was not an accident, so without preliminary he said:

“Dr. Thornhill, I shall with pleasure answer you any question you may choose to ask me if you will answer me one question first.”

The doctor seemed surprised, but he smiled and answered at once, “Done! What is it?”

“Did Mrs. Witham ask you to come here and see me and advise me?”

Dr. Thornhill for a moment was taken aback, and Mrs. Witham got fiery red and turned away; but the doctor was a frank and ready man, and he answered at once and openly.

“She did: but she didn’t intend you to know it. I suppose it was my clumsy haste that made you suspect. She told me that she did not like the idea of your being in that house all by yourself, and that she thought you took too much strong tea. In fact, she wants me to advise you if possible to give up the tea and the very late hours. I was a keen student in my time, so I suppose I may take the liberty of a college man, and without offence, advise you not quite as a stranger.”

Malcolmson with a bright smile held out his hand. “Shake! As they say in America,” he said. “I must thank you for your kindness and Mrs. Witham too, and your kindness deserves a return on my part. I promise to take no more strong tea – no tea at all till you let me – and I shall go to bed tonight at one o’clock at latest. Will that do?”

“Capital,” said the doctor. “Now tell us all that you noticed in the old house,” and so Malcolmson then and there told in minute detail all that had happened in the last two nights. He was interrupted every now and then by some exclamation from Mrs. Witham, till finally when he told of the episode of the Bible the landlady’s pent-up emotions found vent in a shriek; and it was not till a stiff glass of brandy and water had been administered that she grew composed again. Dr. Thornhill listened with a face of growing gravity, and when the narrative was complete and Mrs. Witham had been restored he asked:

“The rat always went up the rope of the alarm bell?”

“Always.”

“I suppose you know,” said the Doctor after a pause, “what the rope is?”

“No!”

“It is,” said the Doctor slowly, “the very rope which the hangman used for all the victims of the Judge’s judicial rancour!” Here he was interrupted by another scream from Mrs. Witham, and steps had to be taken for her recovery. Malcolmson having looked at his watch, and found that it was close to his dinner hour, had gone home before her complete recovery.

When Mrs. Witham was herself again she almost assailed the Doctor with angry questions as to what he meant by putting such horrible ideas into the poor young man’s mind. “He has quite enough there already to upset him,” she added. Dr. Thornhill replied:

“My dear madam, I had a distinct purpose in it! I wanted to draw his attention to the bell rope, and to fix it there. It may be that he is in a highly overwrought state, and has been studying too much, although I am bound to say that he seems as sound and healthy a young man, mentally and bodily, as ever I saw – but then the rats – and that suggestion of the devil.” The doctor shook his head and went on. “I would have offered to go and stay the first night with him but that I felt sure it would have been a cause of offence. He may get in the night some strange fright or hallucination; and if he does I want him to pull that rope. All alone as he is it will give us warning, and we may reach him in time to be of service. I shall be sitting up pretty late tonight and shall keep my ears open. Do not be alarmed if Benchurch gets a surprise before morning.”

“Oh, Doctor, what do you mean? What do you mean?”

“I mean this; that possibly – nay, more probably – we shall hear the great alarm bell from the Judge’s House tonight,” and the Doctor made about as effective an exit as could be thought of.

When Malcolmson arrived home he found that it was a little after his usual time, and Mrs. Dempster had gone away – the rules of Greenhow’s Charity were not to be neglected. He was glad to see that the place was bright and tidy with a cheerful fire and a well-trimmed lamp. The evening was colder than might have been expected in April, and a heavy wind was blowing with such rapidly-increasing strength that there was every promise of a storm during the night. For a few minutes after his entrance the noise of the rats ceased; but so soon as they became accustomed to his presence they began again. He was glad to hear them, for he felt once more the feeling of companionship in their noise, and his mind ran back to the strange fact that they only ceased to manifest themselves when that other – the great rat with the baleful eyes – came upon the scene. The reading-lamp only was lit and its green shade kept the ceiling and the upper part of the room in darkness, so that the cheerful light from the hearth spreading over the floor and shining on the white cloth laid over the end of the table was warm and cheery. Malcolmson sat down to his dinner with a good appetite and a buoyant spirit. After his dinner and a cigarette he sat steadily down to work, determined not to let anything disturb him, for he remembered his promise to the doctor, and made up his mind to make the best of the time at his disposal.

For an hour or so he worked all right, and then his thoughts began to wander from his books. The actual circumstances around him, the calls on his physical attention, and his nervous susceptibility were not to be denied. By this time the wind had become a gale, and the gale a storm. The old house, solid though it was, seemed to shake to its foundations, and the storm roared and raged through its many chimneys and its queer old gables, producing strange, unearthly sounds in the empty rooms and corridors. Even the great alarm bell on the roof must have felt the force of the wind, for the rope rose and fell slightly, as though the bell were moved a little from time to time and the limber rope fell on the oak floor with a hard and hollow sound.

As Malcolmson listened to it he bethought himself of the doctor’s words, “It is the rope which the hangman used for the victims of the Judge’s judicial rancour,” and he went over to the corner of the fireplace and took it in his hand to look at it. There seemed a sort of deadly interest in it, and as he stood there he lost himself for a moment in speculation as to who these victims were, and the grim wish of the Judge to have such a ghastly relic ever under his eyes. As he stood there the swaying of the bell on the roof still lifted the rope now and again; but presently there came a new sensation – a sort of tremor in the rope, as though something was moving along it.

Looking up instinctively Malcolmson saw the great rat coming slowly down towards him, glaring at him steadily. He dropped the rope and started back with a muttered curse, and the rat turning ran up the rope again and disappeared, and at the same instant Malcolmson became conscious that the noise of the rats, which had ceased for a while, began again.

All this set him thinking, and it occurred to him that he had not investigated the lair of the rat or looked at the pictures, as he had intended. He lit the other lamp without the shade, and, holding it up went and stood opposite the third picture from the fireplace on the right-hand side where he had seen the rat disappear on the previous night.

At the first glance he started back so suddenly that he almost dropped the lamp, and a deadly pallor overspread his face. His knees shook, and heavy drops of sweat came on his forehead, and he trembled like an aspen. But he was young and plucky, and pulled himself together, and after the pause of a few seconds stepped forward again, raised the lamp, and examined the picture which had been dusted and washed, and now stood out clearly.

It was of a judge dressed in his robes of scarlet and ermine. His face was strong and merciless, evil, crafty, and vindictive, with a sensual mouth, hooked nose of ruddy colour, and shaped like the beak of a bird of prey. The rest of the face was of a cadaverous colour. The eyes were of peculiar brilliance and with a terribly malignant expression. As he looked at them, Malcolmson grew cold, for he saw there the very counterpart of the eyes of the great rat. The lamp almost fell from his hand, he saw the rat with its baleful eyes peering out through the hole in the corner of the picture, and noted the sudden cessation of the noise of the other rats. However, he pulled himself together, and went on with his examination of the picture.

The Judge was seated in a great high-backed carved oak chair, on the right-hand side of a great stone fireplace where, in the corner, a rope hung down from the ceiling, its end lying coiled on the floor. With a feeling of something like horror, Malcolmson recognised the scene of the room as it stood, and gazed around him in an awestruck manner as though he expected to find some strange presence behind him. Then he looked over to the corner of the fireplace – and with a loud cry he let the lamp fall from his hand.

There, in the Judge’s arm-chair, with the rope hanging behind, sat the rat with the Judge’s baleful eyes, now intensified and with a fiendish leer. Save for the howling of the storm without there was silence.

The fallen lamp recalled Malcolmson to himself. Fortunately it was of metal, and so the oil was not spilt. However, the practical need of attending to it settled at once his nervous apprehensions. When he had turned it out, he wiped his brow and thought for a moment.

“This will not do,” he said to himself. “If I go on like this I shall become a crazy fool. This must stop! I promised the doctor I would not take tea. Faith, he was pretty right! My nerves must have been getting into a queer state. Funny I did not notice it. I never felt better in my life. However, it is all right now, and I shall not be such a fool again.”

Then he mixed himself a good stiff glass of brandy and water and resolutely sat down to his work.

It was nearly an hour when he looked up from his book, disturbed by the sudden stillness. Without, the wind howled and roared louder than ever, and the rain drove in sheets against the windows, beating like hail on the glass; but within there was no sound whatever save the echo of the wind as it roared in the great chimney, and now and then a hiss as a few raindrops found their way down the chimney in a lull of the storm. The fire had fallen low and had ceased to flame, though it threw out a red glow. Malcolmson listened attentively, and presently heard a thin, squeaking noise, very faint. It came from the corner of the room where the rope hung down, and he thought it was the creaking of the rope on the floor as the swaying of the bell raised and lowered it. Looking up, however, he saw in the dim light the great rat clinging to the rope and gnawing it. The rope was already nearly gnawed through – he could see the lighter colour where the strands were laid bare. As he looked the job was completed, and the severed end of the rope fell clattering on the oaken floor, whilst for an instant the great rat remained like a knob or tassel at the end of the rope, which now began to sway to and fro. Malcolmson felt for a moment another pang of terror as he thought that now the possibility of calling the outer world to his assistance was cut off, but an intense anger took its place, and seizing the book he was reading he hurled it at the rat. The blow was well aimed, but before the missile could reach him the rat dropped off and struck the floor with a soft thud. Malcolmson instantly rushed over towards him, but it darted away and disappeared in the darkness of the shadows of the room. Malcolmson felt that his work was over for the night, and determined then and there to vary the monotony of the proceedings by a hunt for the rat, and took off the green shade of the lamp so as to insure a wider spreading light. As he did so the gloom of the upper part of the room was relieved, and in the new flood of light, great by comparison with the previous darkness, the pictures on the wall stood out boldly. From where he stood, Malcolmson saw right opposite to him the third picture on the wall from the right of the fireplace. He rubbed his eyes in surprise, and then a great fear began to come upon him.

In the centre of the picture was a great irregular patch of brown canvas, as fresh as when it was stretched on the frame. The background was as before, with chair and chimney-corner and rope, but the figure of the Judge had disappeared.

Malcolmson, almost in a chill of horror, turned slowly round, and then he began to shake and tremble like a man in a palsy. His strength seemed to have left him, and he was incapable of action or movement, hardly even of thought. He could only see and hear.

There, on the great high-backed carved oak chair sat the Judge in his robes of scarlet and ermine, with his baleful eyes glaring vindictively, and a smile of triumph on the resolute, cruel mouth, as he lifted with his hands a black cap. Malcolmson felt as if the blood was running from his heart, as one does in moments of prolonged suspense. There was a singing in his ears. Without, he could hear the roar and howl of the tempest, and through it, swept on the storm, came the striking of midnight by the great chimes in the market place. He stood for a space of time that seemed to him endless still as a statue, and with wide-open, horror-struck eyes, breathless. As the clock struck, so the smile of triumph on the Judge’s face intensified, and at the last stroke of midnight he placed the black cap on his head.

Slowly and deliberately the Judge rose from his chair and picked up the piece of the rope of the alarm bell which lay on the floor, drew it through his hands as if he enjoyed its touch, and then deliberately began to knot one end of it, fashioning it into a noose. This he tightened and tested with his foot, pulling hard at it till he was satisfied and then making a running noose of it, which he held in his hand. Then he began to move along the table on the opposite side to Malcolmson keeping his eyes on him until he had passed him, when with a quick movement he stood in front of the door. Malcolmson then began to feel that he was trapped, and tried to think of what he should do. There was some fascination in the Judge’s eyes, which he never took off him, and he had, perforce, to look. He saw the Judge approach – still keeping between him and the door – and raise the noose and throw it towards him as if to entangle him. With a great effort he made a quick movement to one side, and saw the rope fall beside him, and heard it strike the oaken floor. Again the Judge raised the noose and tried to ensnare him, ever keeping his baleful eyes fixed on him, and each time by a mighty effort the student just managed to evade it. So this went on for many times, the Judge seeming never discouraged nor discomposed at failure, but playing as a cat does with a mouse. At last in despair, which had reached its climax, Malcolmson cast a quick glance round him. The lamp seemed to have blazed up, and there was a fairly good light in the room. At the many rat-holes and in the chinks and crannies of the wainscot he saw the rats’ eyes; and this aspect, that was purely physical, gave him a gleam of comfort. He looked around and saw that the rope of the great alarm bell was laden with rats. Every inch of it was covered with them, and more and more were pouring through the small circular hole in the ceiling whence it emerged, so that with their weight the bell was beginning to sway.

Hark! It had swayed till the clapper had touched the bell. The sound was but a tiny one, but the bell was only beginning to sway, and it would increase.

At the sound the Judge, who had been keeping his eyes fixed on Malcolmson, looked up, and a scowl of diabolical anger overspread his face. His eyes fairly glowed like hot coals, and he stamped his foot with a sound that seemed to make the house shake. A dreadful peal of thunder broke overhead as he raised the rope again, whilst the rats kept running up and down the rope as though working against time. This time, instead of throwing it, he drew close to his victim, and held open the noose as he approached. As he came closer there seemed something paralysing in his very presence, and Malcolmson stood rigid as a corpse. He felt the Judge’s icy fingers touch his throat as he adjusted the rope. The noose tightened – tightened. Then the Judge, taking the rigid form of the student in his arms, carried him over and placed him standing in the oak chair, and stepping up beside him, put his hand up and caught the end of the swaying rope of the alarm bell. As he raised his hand the rats fled squeaking, and disappeared through the hole in the ceiling. Taking the end of the noose which was round Malcolmson’s neck he tied it to the hanging-bell rope, and then descending pulled away the chair.

* * *

When the alarm bell of the Judge’s House began to sound a crowd soon assembled. Lights and torches of various kinds appeared, and soon a silent crowd was hurrying to the spot. They knocked loudly at the door, but there was no reply. Then they burst in the door, and poured into the great dining-room, the doctor at the head.

There at the end of the rope of the great alarm bell hung the body of the student, and on the face of the Judge in the picture was a malignant smile.

The Bride

Angela Sylvaine

Something catches my hand, pulling me back toward the stall. I shriek, assaulted by images of tiny, porcelain hands clawing at me. My cheeks heat at the sight of my engagement ring caught on a piece of fabric.

I’ve been meaning to get the bent prong repaired, but the store clerk will give me that look. Eli promised he’ll get me a real diamond someday. I unhook myself from the delicate lace and freeze as I register the single article of clothing hung beside the black-eyed dolls with their matted hair.

A dress. My dress.

I close my eyes and imagine myself as a bride, my auburn hair piled on my head, curls spilling down my neck and tumbling over my shoulders. The Victorian style gown of delicate golden lace and fine beading shimmers under the lights. The boned corset nips in at the waist, giving way to a full skirt that bursts over my hips and flows to the floor.

The vision fades and I sag against the wall, gasping for breath. The sweet taste of cake and pleasant sting of champagne bubbles lingers on my tongue.

“Rose, you’re losing it,” I say to no one in particular. I’ve finally cracked. My pre-wedding jitters are morphing into full blown psychosis.

I lift the dress from its hook to check under each arm and inside the neckline for a price tag. My wallet holds fifty bucks cash and my bank account a measly two hundred, even with all the extra shifts I’ve been picking up at the restaurant. I clutch the dress to my chest and rush toward the front of the store.

A stick of an old man in a flannel shirt, unnecessary suspenders attached to his polyester pants, sits behind the counter. He runs a finger down the page of a ledger book, a pair of spectacles perched on his nose.

“Hello, sir? This doesn’t have a price tag.” I cringe at the frantic wobble in my voice.

He grunts and reaches toward me. I release my hold on the gown, letting him pull it across the counter. His hand shakes with tremors as he sweeps the dress for a tag.

“I already checked.” I rub my damp hands down the front of my jeans.

“Where’d ya get it?” he asks.

“Sorry?” Has the old guy gone senile and forgotten this is a store?

He glares at me over his glasses with eyes milky from cataracts. “Which stall?”

“Oh, right.” I point toward the back of the store. “The one with the dolls.”

“Widow Montgomery never was able to have kids of her own.” He tugs the ledger out from under the dress to flip through the pages. The binding of the book creaks with each movement and the musty smell of old paper tickles my nose. “Collected those damn dolls until they took her off to the home.”

I reach out, ready to yank the book from his hands and find the darn page myself, but stop myself. What in world has come over me? I paste on a smile.

He stops flipping and runs his finger down the page. “Nothin’ here.” His lips pull down at the corners, taking the rest of his face with them.

“Maybe it got moved from another stall.” I stand on my toes, craning my neck to see the ledger. “Could you please look in the other ones, sir?”

“I don’t remember no dress, and I know this place inside and out.” He slams the book closed, releasing a puff of dust into the air.

“Well, what would you want for it?” I swallow past the dryness in mouth and throat. “I don’t have much money, but I could make payments.” Please God, let me have this dress. I’ll do anything, pay any price.

“The folks who rent the stalls set the prices. Can’t sell it without knowing where it came from.” He begins to pull the gown fully over the counter.

“No, please.” I grab onto the skirt, curling my fingers in the layers of lace and taffeta. My eyes blur with tears.

He sneers and points one bony finger in my face. “Are you deaf or just stupid? Can’t sell it without a price.” He mumbles under his breath. “Whelp bitch needs to learn some respect.”

His words cut me like a switch against bare skin. I shove down my pride and ready myself to beg and plead, to promise anything if only he’ll give me the dress.

I open my mouth to speak, when the lights in the store flicker. A second later the bare bulb hanging behind the counter shatters with a pop, sending a sprinkling of glass shards through the air to land in the old man’s thinning gray hair. He cries out and swipes his hand across the back of his neck.

His fingertips come away smeared with blood.

I tug the dress out of his reach. Cradling the gown in my arms, I stroke my fingers across the bodice. I must protect it.

The old man glares at me.

“Are you hurt, sir?”

He pulls a rag from his pocket, wiping his fingers and neck. “Just a scratch, is all.” He reaches out for the gown. “Give it here.”

I shrink back and tighten my hold on the dress as the lights give another flicker and go out. A frosty chill settles over me and I suppress a shudder.

Sunlight streams through the glass front door of the shop, illuminating the area near the counter, but darkness encompasses the rear of the store. I take a step in that direction. “Hello? Is anyone back here?” The thought of being stuck alone in the pitch black with those creepy dolls sends a shiver up my spine.

The old man gasps. “Goddamn pacemaker.” He slips from his stool and clutches his chest with one hand, while grasping the countertop with the other. “Don’t just stand there gawkin’. Call 911.”

“Okay. You’re going to be okay.” I fish my phone from my pocket one handed and punch in the digits with my thumb. Stay calm, Rose, stay calm. “Help will be here soon.”

He hunches forward and thumps his fist against his chest. “Goddamn VA piece of garbage.”

I still cradle the dress in the crook of my left arm, and I swear it twists in my grip. My finger freezes above the send button. “So, how much did you say for the dress?”

The lights flip back on, bathing the store in light.

* * *

I lie the dress, wrapped in a clear plastic bag, in the trunk of my beat up Accord and close the lid. My entire body is numb as I walk around the car, open the door, and climb into the driver’s seat.

Red and blue lights flash atop the ambulance parked near the front of the store. The paramedics wheel the old man out on a gurney and slide him into the back of the vehicle, an oxygen mask covering his face.

I grip the steering wheel, hot from the sun, and try to stop my hands from shaking. My stomach churns, sending bile into my throat. I gag but manage to swallow it back down.

What the heck is wrong with me?

That man could have died all because I had to have the dress. I rest my forehead on the wheel and I cry. Not a little sniffle, but a shoulder shaking, snot dripping cry.

* * *

Parked in a space at the front of the lot beside my apartment building, I pop open my trunk. My heart skips at the sight of the dress. It’s really mine. A flicker of guilt nags me at how I manipulated the old man, but I push it away. He still got help, and I got my dress.

Arms wind around my waist from behind and I yelp.

“Relax Rosie-Posie, it’s just me.” Eli nuzzles my neck.

I giggle and spin around, slinging my arms around his neck. “You know I hate that nickname.” He gave it to me in foster care, after the nursery rhyme Ring Around the Rosie, and the darn thing stuck.

“Liar. You like it.” He grins, his brown eyes twinkling with laughter. His blond hair is a little long and flops into his eyes.

I try for a scowl but can’t pull it off. “What are you doing here?”

“Decided to use my lunch break to come see my girl.” He strokes his thumb across my cheek.

I push up on my tiptoes and plant a kiss on his lips. “Smooth talker.”

“What’s that?” He angles his head to peak over my shoulder.

I smile so big my face aches. “I found a dress.”

“It’s a miracle.” He wraps me in a hug and spins me in a circle.

I laugh and scream. “Put me down.”

He releases me and reaches into the trunk.

“No.” I back up, blocking him with my body. He’s going to try and take the dress, but I can’t let him. I have to protect it.

Eli crosses his arms. “Come on. I only want a peak.”

A nervous giggle escapes my throat. Of course, he wouldn’t take the dress. That’s ridiculous. “No peaking until the big day, you know that.” I lightly smack his chest. “Now get out of here. I still need to try it on.”

“Alright.” He places a kiss on the tip of my nose. “Love you, Rosie-Posie.”

“Love you, too.” I blow him a kiss.

Sitting on my bumper, I watch him walk away. I still can’t believe we’re getting married. He’s been the only good thing in my life for so long, and I get to keep him forever. I barely manage to suppress a squeal of joy, wrapping my arms around myself to hold it in.

Shaking my head, I return my attention to the dress and scoop it from the trunk.

My apartment is on the top floor of a rundown brick building which used to be a motel. There is no elevator, just outdoor concrete stairs that connect each floor.

Tucker, the little terrier belonging to Mrs. Patterson in 2D is tied to the railing at the bottom of the steps.

“Hey, little guy.” I stoop to pet him.

His muzzle wrinkles and he lunges forward, snapping his teeth and growling.

I gasp and stumble backward.

He growls and barks in my direction, tugging on his leash until I think it might snap.

“What’s wrong with you, grumpy?” I frown and tromp up the stairs, Tucker barking away in the background. My arms ache from the weight of the gown, but I make it up the four flights to my floor, sweat dripping down my back.

I manage to fumble my keys from my purse and open the door. The heat trapped inside hits me like a wall, and I flip on the ceiling fan before closing the door. Tenants are expected to furnish their own AC, but I can’t afford it.

My convertible sofa bed sits against the far wall of the single room apartment, and I lay the dress across the faded blue cushions. I cross back to the single window, next to the door, and tug the curtains closed to block out the sun. A small table next to the sofa holds a lamp and I flip it on.

I kneel before the dress and remove the protective garbage bag. Somehow, it’s even more beautiful than I remembered. Part of me panics a little. What if it doesn’t fit? I undress, discarding my hideous orange waitress uniform and apron in a pile on the floor. Parting the heavy layered skirt, I slip the dress over my head. The length is just right, the hem barely skimming the floor. The back lacing is tricky, but I manage to reach behind me and tug the ribbons tight.

The dress fits perfectly, as if custom made just for me. The bodice hugs my body, accentuating my chest and narrowing my waist, and the intricate beading along the top is beautiful, with just a few spots needing repairs.

A grin splits my face as I spin in the center of the room, the full skirts billowing like a blooming flower. My bare feet dance across the carpeted floor, and warmth fills my entire body. I will be the most beautiful bride anyone has ever seen.

This dress is going to be the perfect start to the rest of my life.

* * *

Something wrenches me awake.

“Hello, is anyone there?” I sit upright in my fold-out bed, clutching the sheet to my chest. My heart thumps and fear hums through my veins.

I feel eyes on me. I’m not alone.

A shaft of light from the street lamp pierces the darkness through a crack in the curtains. The front door is closed and my cramped kitchenette is empty and quiet. The bathroom door to my left sits wide open, giving full view of the small space. Empty.

My breath catches at the sight of my closet. The accordion-style doors are wide open, though I remember closing them. My dress lies in a heap on the floor, its hanger still swaying on the bar.

“Is anyone here?” There must be someone here, hiding. I lean over the side of the bed, my hair brushing the floor as I peer into the shadows. Nothing, and there is nowhere else to go.

Someone tried to break in and steal my dress.

They must have run away. Probably that old man from the antique store, deciding he wanted to keep the gown for himself just to spite me. Bastard.

I glance at the front door again. It’s locked with a chain, and no one could have disengaged that lock from the outside. Be reasonable, Rose. The old man was sick. He had more important things to think about than some dress. Besides, I paid in cash so he didn’t even know my name.

These wedding jitters are really starting to mess with my brain.

Pushing away my bedding, I shuffle to my closet and lift the dress by the shoulders to hold it aloft. A coldness passes over me, through me, chilling to the bone even in the summer heat. The draft follows me as I lay the dress out on one side of the bed, on top of the covers. Better to have the gown close so I can make sure it’s safe. I climb in on the other side, shivering from the cold, and pull the covers over me. I rest one hand on the bodice of the dress. If anyone tries to take it from me, I’ll be ready.

* * *

A buzzing sound coaxes me from a deep sleep. I try desperately to grasp the last vestiges of my dream. A blonde woman spins around and around before a mirror in my dress, her face glowing with happiness. The image flits through my mind and is gone.

I reach over and touch the satin and beading of the gown. Still here, still safe.

Buzz, buzz, buzz. I feel across the end table until I find my phone, which shows a missed call and voicemail from my best friend, Dinah. I hit play.

“Rose, where are you? We’re already a person short with Manny quitting. Get your ass in here,” she says.

“Crap.” I must have slept through my alarm or forgotten to set one. Morning sunlight streams through the crack in the curtains. Breakfast is the busiest time at the restaurant, and Dinah must be going crazy trying to handle it all herself. I should jump out of bed get and get down there as fast as possible. Lord knows I need the money.

My heartbeat flutters in my chest, a quick, staccato beat. I can’t leave, not now. I survey my apartment. Someone was here last night. What if they try to break in again? I pull the dress across the bed and settle it on my lap.

I text a quick reply to Dinah.

Sick as a dog so can’t come in. Sorry :(

Guilt churns through my stomach and I grimace. I’ve ever lied to her, but I have no choice. I must protect the dress.

The cold is back. It lays on top of me like a lead weight, sinking onto my chest, through my ribs, into my heart. Goosebumps break out across my arms and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.

I clutch the dress tighter, using it as a blanket, but the chill seems to get worse.

* * *

It’s taken me all day, but I’ve managed to mend every loose bead, every unraveling hem, every torn bit of lace. My fingertips are bloody and sore from the needle and I make sure to wrap them with bandages so no blood stains the delicate fabric of the dress.

It’s perfect, just as it was so many years ago.

My eyelids drift closed as the lilting melody of a waltz plays through my mind. The fair-haired bride is back, spinning and laughing. She’s thinking about her fiancée, about the look on his face when he sees her on their special day.

The music and laughter fade as the image transforms. Now the woman sits on a chaise lounge wearing an old-fashioned cotton nightgown. Silent sobs wrack her body and she rocks in place. She clutches the dress to her chest, knowing she’ll never get that chance to wear it. Why did her father have to be so cruel and send her dearest Brock away?

Don’t cry, Anna. Don’t cry.

A pounding noise wrenches me back to reality, and I blink back the tears brimming in my eyes.

“Rosie, it’s me.” Eli’s voice carries through the door.

The dress. He can’t be allowed to see it. I glance at the closet, at the empty hanger on the bar. The closet isn’t safe. I need to be able to see the gown, touch it.

A faint electrical buzzing sounds beside me and the lamp flickers off. I tap the bulb with my finger.

Thump, thump, thump. “You’re freaking me out, baby. Open up so I can see you’re okay.” His voice is tight, tense.

I creep across the apartment. Leaving the chain fastened, I open the door a crack and peek through.

Eli frowns. “Dinah said you called in sick.”

I cringe at the worry in his voice. “I caught some kind of bug.” The lie leaves a sour taste on my tongue.

“You should have called me.” He lifts the plastic grocery bag in his hand. “Anyway, I brought soup and cold medicine.”

I smile. Maybe I can put the gown away and let him in for a few minutes.

A buzz sounds behind me, and I glance over my shoulder. The lamp flickers on, seeming to get brighter, then goes off with a pop. The dress skirt hangs off the bed and ripples slightly, as if brushed by a breeze.

I peer up at Eli. “I don’t want to get you sick.”

“I’ll be fine.” He pushes against the door. “Come on, let me in.”

“No.” I clench the door jam, sending a sting of pain through my battered fingers. “I just need to get some rest.”

He backs up a step. “Oh…okay. I guess I’ll just leave this for you.” He puts the bag down. “Call me tomorrow?”

I flinch at the uncertainty in his voice. “I will. Promise.”

“Love you, Rosie.” He stands there staring at me, his shoulders slumped.

My throat tightens. “Love you, too.” I close the door and lean against it. Part of me wants to fling open the door and rush after him, do anything to wipe that look of hurt from his face, but I can’t leave. Not now. Once I’m sure the dress is safe, protected, I’ll make it up to him.

* * *

I don’t normally wear much makeup, but this is a special occasion. Eyeliner, shadow, mascara, and lipstick. I even take extra time to curl my auburn mane before piling it on my head. Finally, I’m ready. As I slip on the gown and lace up the back, tension melts from my muscles.

The sensation of being watched sends a quiver along my spine and I scan the room, my eyes darting into every corner, peering into every shadow. I’m all alone.

I should take off the dress, I know, but the thought of removing the gown makes my heart pound so hard it echoes through my bones. I’ll just wear it for a little while longer. I sway and turn in the center of the room, dancing to the music lilting through my mind.

The shard of sunlight streaming through the curtains dims then disappears, replaced by the light of the streetlamp as day turns to night. I’ve been dancing so long my feet ache and throb.

I should rest a minute. The dress will be fine as long as I’m careful. I lie back on my bed, on top of the covers.

I drift in and out of sleep, for how long, I’m not sure.

The shard of sunlight is back.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand.

Someone pounds on the door, shouting my name.

I barely register the disturbance.

The coldness is with me again. I turn my head and see the bride lying beside me on the bed. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Pale, alabaster skin. Blue eyes that sparkle like sapphires. Lips red as ripe strawberries. Golden hair fanned across the pillow.

“Anna,” I whisper. I want to reach out, but I’m afraid my touch will send her away.

She places her hand on my cheek. Her caress is ice, biting my skin, and the frost spreads through my body.

I want to pry her hand away, but I can’t move.

I can’t move.

Fear sends my heart galloping in my chest. I breathe faster and faster. Every inch of my skin is numb with cold.

She smiles and her skin cracks like old porcelain. Black sludge wells in the cracks, oozing out in thick drops. Her golden hair turns grey and begins to fall from her scalp in clumps as her eyes melt in a stream of yellowy puss that runs down her face. The red of her lips turns flaky and brown, like drying blood, and her teeth rot and crumble.

I try to scream but only manage a faint moan. Every inch of my body, inside and out, is frozen. My pulse slows as the blood in my veins turns to slush. Each breath a struggle, I gasp for air as arctic flames engulf my skin. A silent scream fills my throat.

My vision begins to blur at the edges. Hold on. Stay awake.

A faint pounding reaches my ears. The door. I can’t even open my mouth to cry out.

I love you, Eli.

A single teardrop freezes in the corner of my eye.

Anna wraps her arms around me and pulls me close. I try to thrash, to break free, but my body is no longer mine to control. I want to scream and beg, but my lungs are locked in ice. The rotten odor of death surrounds me.

* * *

The Daily Mirror

Local Bride Freezes to Death in Home

Police are searching for answers in the death of 21-year-old Rose Halloway, whose body was found in her apartment early yesterday morning. Police discovered the body after her fiancée reported hearing a struggle inside. Clothed in her wedding dress, Halloway was unconscious and not breathing when found. Attempts to revive her failed. The apparent cause of death is hypothermia, which has officials baffled. Investigators are calling the death of Halloway suspicious. Anyone with information should contact the police department.

The Floating Girls: A Documentary

Damien Angelica Walters

The floating girls are all but forgotten now. It’s easier to pretend they didn’t exist, to pretend it didn’t happen. But there are parents who still keep bedrooms captured in time, complete with clothes folded in bureau drawers and diaries tucked beneath pillows, everything in its place, waiting, and there are friends who still gaze at the sky, wondering how far the girls floated and if they ever fell.

Some of us haven’t forgotten. Some of us never will.

* * *

Twelve years ago, three hours after the sun set on the second of August, nearly 300,000 girls between the ages of eleven and seventeen vanished. Eyewitness reports state that the girls floated away, yet even now, many of those eyewitnesses have recanted their stories or simply refuse to talk about it at all.

The girls lived in cities, in the suburbs, in the country. They lived in first world and third world countries. They were only children; they were one of many siblings; they were of all ethnicities and religious backgrounds. They were everyone and anyone, and after that night in August, they were no more.

I’ve found plenty of evidence decrying the phenomenon, but there are lists, lists of the girls who disappeared. Those who claim it’s all bullshit provide other lists, girls who vanished and were found years later: the runaways; the girls involved in ugly custody battles, who were spirited away by either custodial or non-custodial parents; the girls whose decomposing bodies were recovered from forests, old drainpipes, beneath concrete patios.

But none of those girls were floating girls, only gone girls; the reports always conveniently leave that out.

I wonder about the evidence I haven’t found, that doesn’t exist; it seems like there should be so much more. And how many girls who vanished were never reported? And why just girls? Why just these girls?

As far as I can tell, very few scientists or statisticians studied the phenomenon itself. No one counseled the families; no one dug through the chaos to find the facts. Like certain religious or political scandals, everyone wanted to brush it under the rug.

Maybe it made a strange sort of sense at the time. I don’t know.

* * *

Jessie and I grew up next door in a tiny corner of suburbia. You know the sort: backyard cookouts, running through the sprinklers, drinking water from the hose, playing tag. Perfectly charming. The sort of childhood that screams ideal. The sort of childhood that could take place anywhere, in any town, not just our little corner of Baltimore, Maryland.

Our backyards were separated by a row of hedges with spaces in between perfectly sized for someone to walk through. We would flit from yard to yard – mine had the swing set and the sprinkler; hers the sandbox and hammock – and house to house, nearly inseparable, spinning circles and holding hands while we chanted Jessie and Tracy, best friends forever.

My strongest memory is how she and I spent countless hours catching fireflies. We’d keep them inside glass jars with holes poked in the lids so they wouldn’t die, and we’d invent stories that the fireflies were princesses trapped in the bodies and the lights were their way of calling for help because they couldn’t speak. And every night, we’d let them go, watching until they blinked out of sight, pretending they were off to find their mothers, their princes, the witches who’d cursed them.

I think you only truly make those sort of friendships in childhood; when you get older, you know better than to let people in. You know they’ll only disappoint you in the end.

* * *

Video interview with Karen Michaels of Monmouth, Oregon, March 17, 2010:

[A woman is sitting in a cramped, dingy kitchen, a lit cigarette clutched tightly between two fingers, an overflowing ashtray by her side. She grimaces at the camera and looks down at her cigarette. Her face is worn and heavily lined, her shoulders hunched forward.]

“Thank you for agreeing to talk to me, Mrs. Michaels. I know this is difficult.”

[Mrs. Michaels takes a drag from her cigarette. Exhales the smoke loudly.]

“Call me Karen, okay?”

“Okay, Karen. I know it’s been a long time, but can you tell me what happened that night, August second –”

[She waves the hand holding the cigarette.]

“I know what night you’re talking about.”

[Another inhale from her cigarette. Another exhale.]

“Nina had problems with sleepwalking when she was a kid. Used to drive me crazy. For a couple years, I had to lock her bedroom door from the outside to keep her in the house. You got kids?”

“No –”

“That’s right. You already told me you didn’t. Who knows, maybe you’re lucky. Anyway, that night, the night Nina floated, it had been years since she walked in her sleep. I heard her go down the steps, and I followed her. She went out the front door and stood on the lawn, staring down at her feet, like this.”

[Mrs. Michaels stubs out her cigarette and stands with her arms straight and her head down, her hands held out a few inches from her body.]

“I thought she was sleepwalking again, that’s all, so I stayed on the front porch. I was getting ready to go get her, grab her arm, and take her back in because I had to get up early in the morning. But then she went up, just up, like a balloon. I, I –”

[Video cuts off. Returns. Mrs. Michaels is wiping her eyes.]

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, sure, I’m fine. I, so she went up, and I thought…I don’t know what I thought. I ran and tried to grab her, but she was already up too far. I touched the side of her foot, but I guess, I guess I was just too late.”

[She grabs another cigarette and lights it. Her voice is barely audible when she speaks again.]

“I let her go. I didn’t know what else to do, so I let her go.”

[Her head snaps up. She looks straight into the camera.]

“Everyone told me not to talk about it. It’s like she never existed at all. But she did. She did. No one cared that she was gone. No one. Do you really think this thing, your project, will help?”

“I’d like to think it will, yes.”

[She makes a sound low in her throat.]

“Will you tell me what Nina was like?”

“She was like every other kid. Listened to her music too loud, left her dirty clothes on the floor, griped about her chores, but she didn’t run around wild or anything like that. She didn’t drink or do drugs.”

“And what was your relationship with Nina like?”

“Normal. I mean, we had fights, but nothing really serious. She was always in her room, reading or listening to music.”

“What about with her siblings, her father?”

“Everyone was fine. Everything was fine.”

[There’s a long pause, and she looks away with tears in her eyes. Video ends.]

* * *

Jessie’s father died the year we turned eight. I remember black clothing, tears, confusion, and the smell of flowers. At some point, she and I snuck out into her backyard and played in the sandbox. I don’t remember what we talked about or if we talked about anything at all, but I remember how we slipped out of our dress shoes and wriggled our toes through the warm top layer of sand to the cool beneath. I remember the scent of honeysuckle thick in the air.

* * *

Recording of a telephone interview, July 28, 2012:

“You’re not going to use my name, right? I don’t want you to use my name.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Good. Okay.”

“Tell me what you think happened on the night of August second.”

“All I can tell you is what I saw. The kid was hanging in the air in her backyard, looking like some kind of angel, only not the kind you can see through. I mean, she wasn’t wearing anything like an angel would. I think she had on some kind of dress, but nothing like you see in pictures of angels or anything like that. Then she went straight up. Craziest damn thing I ever saw. I kept thinking it was the beer. I only had a couple, maybe three, but…”

“Did you do anything?”

“What could I do? Hell, by the time I figured out my eyes wasn’t playing tricks, she was high up. I mean really high up.”

“And you told the authorities what you saw?”

“Yeah, I told them. Lot of good that did me. They said I was crazy. Or drunk. People can’t float. But I know what I saw, and that girl just floated up and away.”

“Did you know anything about her?”

“No, she was just the kid who lived next door. She kept to herself, the whole family did. I mean they were nice enough, just not real friendly.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to say?”

“You’re not going to use my name for this thing, right? I don’t want my name used.”

“No, sir. As I said before, I won’t use your name.”

* * *

Jessie and I started to drift apart the summer she turned eleven, about a year after her mom remarried. I’d ask her to come over and catch fireflies, and she’d say no. I’d invite her to spend the night. She’d say no. I spent countless nights crying, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, because best friends didn’t stop talking to each other unless something was wrong.

My mother said, “Tracy, honey, that’s what happens with friends sometimes. Don’t worry. Maybe she’s just going through a phase. You are becoming young women, you know.”

I know she was only trying to help, but I wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, not the way it was.

* * *

Video footage, dated August 2, 2002:

Video opens with a scene of a back yard, complete with a hot tub, a fire pit, and tables and chairs set up for a party. There’s a break in the video; when it returns, the sky is full dark and a party is in full swing. No children are present. The camera captures several people saying hello to the cameraman, there’s a break in the filming, and when it returns, the camera is stationary, capturing a wide view of the partygoers.

5 minutes, 06 seconds: A pale blotch can be seen in the far left corner, above a row of well-trimmed hedges.

5 minutes, 08 seconds: The pale blotch is larger, the shape completely visible over the hedge.

5 minutes, 10 seconds: While the partygoers continue to drink and laugh, the blotch continues to rise.

Video editing enhancement of the last few seconds before the blotch disappears from the film clearly shows a young girl in her early teens, her face solemn, rising up through the air.

[Note: Records state the video was taken by Jack Stevenson of Denver, Colorado. Repeated attempts to contact Mr. Stevenson have been unsuccessful.]

* * *

By the time I was twelve, the drift between Jessie and I had become a crevasse. We weren’t even on speaking terms. She was just a girl I used to know. As kids do, I’d made new friends and sure, her rejection of our friendship hurt and sometimes I’d look over the fence to see if she was outside, but I was a kid, just a stupid kid.

How was I supposed to know?

* * *

Photograph A: Photo shows a baobab tree and a girl beside it. On closer inspection, the girl’s feet are hovering about a foot from the ground. The girl is looking away from the camera. The back of the photograph reads August 2, Shurugwi, Zimbabwe.

[Note: Photograph provided by one of the girl’s family members, who asked to remain anonymous. For that reason, the name of the girl is also withheld.]

Photograph B: The central image is the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. On the far right of the photo, a girl is suspended in the air, her arms held in the distinct way described by many others, her face serene. Using the tower as a point of measure, she is approximately 1,050 feet in the air.

[Note: Image found on a website claiming it was manipulated digitally, however, no evidence of alteration can be found in the image itself. The girl in the photograph has not yet been identified.]

Photograph C: Photo of Trakai Castle, south of Vilnius, Lithuania, taken by Algimantas Serunis of Chicago, Illinois, while on vacation. A girl’s head and shoulders are visible above the westernmost tower of the castle.

[Note: The girl has been tentatively identified as Ruta Gremaila. Attempts to contact her family have been unsuccessful.]

* * *

When I was fourteen, Jessie showed up at the back door one night. I was blaring music and eating the last of the mint chocolate chip ice cream, knowing my dad would pretend to make a big deal about the empty container and my mom would roll her eyes at the both of us. My parents weren’t home, and yes, I’ve wondered more than once if it would’ve made a difference.

“Yeah?” I remember saying.

“I was wondering if maybe you’d want to hang out for a little bit?” she asked, her voice whisper-thin, her eyes all red, like she’d been crying. Behind the red, though, there was a strange emptiness, a hollow where laughter had once lived.

I remember being surprised, more at her request than her eyes. Although I’d made new friends, she hadn’t. She skulked through the halls at school like a ghost. She sat alone in the cafeteria at lunchtime and with her shoulders hunched in class. She wore baggy clothing and kept her head down so her hair almost covered her face. After school, she walked home alone.

“I can’t, sorry. I have a math test tomorrow I have to study for.”

“Oh, okay.” She stood for a minute, toeing the doormat with the tip of her shoe. “See you around then?”

“Sure.”

But I lied. There was no math test. I just didn’t want to talk to her.

* * *

Video footage of interview with Sheriff Joseph Miller, Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, September 9, 2008:

“No, none of it’s true. I have no idea why you’d even want to talk about it.”

“So why do you think everyone reported the same thing?”

“I don’t have an answer to that.”

“Maybe it’s because it really happened.”

[He glares into the camera.]

“Look, it didn’t happen. A bunch of kids ran away, a bunch more people got upset and invented some story about floating.”

“But didn’t three girls from your own town vanish?”

[His expression changes, and he crosses his arms over his chest.]

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you think that’s suspect?”

“Sometimes kids, especially girls, run away together. It happens.”

“And what if I told you those girls weren’t even friends, didn’t even go to the same schools?”

[He sighs heavily, looks at some spot in the distance, and shakes his head in dismissal.]

“We’re done here. Some of us have real work to do.”

* * *

On August 2, 2002, the summer Jessie and I were fifteen, I was in the back yard on a blanket, staring at the stars, waiting for one to fall so I could make a wish. My parents were out at the movies, and other than the crickets chirping, the neighborhood was quiet.

Jessie’s kitchen door opened – it had a funny little squeak that all the oil in the world wouldn’t fix – and Jessie walked out into the yard. All the lights in her house were off, and she was little more than a shadow flitting across the grass.

I hunched down on the blanket and watched through the hedges. She stood still in the middle of her yard for several minutes with her head down, her hands fisted at her sides. I thought about calling her name – I know I did – but then her hands relaxed, her arms extended slightly, and she lifted her chin to stare straight ahead. And then she lifted off the ground.

She was a foot in the air before I realized it wasn’t an illusion, before I was able to do anything other than blink. I scrambled to my feet, told her to stop, and raced through the hedges, scratching my upper arms all to hell in the process. I shouted her name and called out for my parents, for her parents, for anyone.

Jessie never looked down, not once. I stood right underneath her, waving my arms and yelling at her to come back, until my legs couldn’t hold me up anymore and my throat was too thick to speak.

My parents found me in the back yard when they got home. I was on the blanket, sitting with my grass-stained knees up to my chin, crying. I told them how Jessie just floated and kept floating until I couldn’t see her anymore, until she was gone.

I saw the disbelief in their eyes. My father went over to Jessie’s house, knocked on the door, and came back shrugging his shoulders after no one answered. My mom pressed her hand against my forehead, proclaimed I had a fever, and sent me to bed. I stayed there for three days.

Jessie’s parents told the police she ran away.

* * *

Video footage of an attempted interview on August 18, 2011 with John Gelvin from Brawley, California, whose daughter, Rosie, age thirteen, is still listed as missing. Documents show she was reported as a floating girl. Other documents show that Child Protective Services had been called on at least one occasion before Rosie’s disappearance, but no further action from CPS can be found.

“Sir, you said you saw Rosie float.”

“No. I didn’t. Sorry. You’re the one who’s mistaken. She ran away.”

“But I have a report here, a police report, that says –”

“Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.”

* * *

I tried to tell people the truth. My parents continued to blame the fever. When I told Jessie’s parents, her mother’s eyes filled with tears, the silent, terrifying kind; her stepfather told me to leave their house and never come back. They moved away a few months later and didn’t tell anyone where they were going.

People at school thought I was crazy, even after the other reports came out. Jessie was just another troubled kid who ran away. It happened every day. No big deal.

If I’d been an adult, if I hadn’t see Jessie float away, I wonder if I would’ve been as dismissive. Possibly. Probably.

I tried to tell the truth so many times, but no one would listen.

* * *

Graffiti on the side of a building in Rapid City, South Dakota, June 8, 2013, in the section of the city known as Art Alley:

SILENCE IS ITS OWN FORM OF HELIUM

[Note: According to a local artist, who asked not to be named, the graffiti was originally written on the building in September of 2002, and she’s been repainting it as needed ever since. When asked if she knew the identity of the original artist or thought that the statement was related to the floating girls, she declined to answer.]

* * *

Eventually I stopped talking about it, about Jessie. I didn’t forget her, but it was too hard to keep trying to explain what I saw to people who refused to believe it. I finished high school, moved out of state for college, dropped out in my second year, and came back home.

When my parents decided to sell their house and move to Florida, I found a box of photos in the attic, pictures of me and Jessie when we were young, pictures of us holding our firefly jars, grinning crazy kid smiles, those smiles that scream innocence. Our eyes were filled with laughter and happiness and hope.

And I remembered her eyes the night she came over, the night I turned her away. We all have a secret spot, a tiny light, inside us, and it doesn’t take much to make that light go out. It doesn’t take much to extinguish that light forever.

As I carried the photos out to my car, I decided to do something. I’m not sure if I decided to do it for Jessie or for the others or for me, but I don’t think it matters.

I’m not a fifteen year old girl anymore, and I’ve spent years digging for proof, searching for the truth. Maybe now people will listen, and maybe they’ll start talking.

* * *

Excerpt from ‘A Study into the Phenomenon of the Floating Girls’, dated November 2002, author not cited:

Given a lack of concrete evidence to the phenomenon, and with evidence that a percentage of the girls were from troubled homes and had a history of running away, we can only conclude there was no phenomenon, only a strange set of coincidental circumstances.

It is also noted that there was a heavy incident of fog in the northwestern states, which may explain the visual oddities noted there.

Reports from other countries are sketchy at best with most being reported well after the disappearances in the United States, leading this researcher to determine that they were copying the phenomenon, perhaps in hope of cashing in on the notoriety. More research is needed.

[Note: There is no evidence that any further research was conducted.]

* * *

I live twenty minutes away from the house I grew up in. Kids still play in sandboxes, they still catch fireflies and run through sprinklers. At night, I stare at the sky and wonder if the girls are still floating. I think they are, and we just can’t see them.

I tell Jessie I’m sorry, but the words seem so fucking inadequate. I should’ve been there for her. I should’ve listened. And after, I should’ve kept talking. Hell, I should’ve screamed and shouted. But I didn’t.

No one did.

For Jessie

Tracy Richardson, Director

The Floating Girls Project

Baltimore, Maryland

2014

The Final One Percent

Desmond Warzel

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Thomas Edison

In the room are two female personages: one, an ordinary woman; the other, something much more.

The woman fancies herself a playwright. A month ago, she was a poet; in the months preceding, a novelist, an essayist, a screenwriter. She suffers no shortage of ideas; half-filled pages litter the room in veritable snowdrifts, each bearing a few typed or handwritten lines as a memorial to an idea readily conceived but ultimately stillborn. Their strata, if excavated, would describe a sequential history of her short-lived literary obsessions, but taken as a whole, they are silent testament to her shortcomings: though not unintelligent, she is dismissive – a page, once set aside, will never be taken up again – and unreflective, abandoning each unsuccessful piece with no consideration of why it has failed.

Of late, her search for inspiration has her imitating her betters: she has begun this session with a spoken invocation of the Muses, cobbled together from Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Her fingertips have no sooner come to rest on the dusty keyboard when a sudden sensation of being watched suggests to her that this simple affectation has actually succeeded where other tactics – writing exercises, people-watching, meditation, drugs – have fallen short.

When she turns in her chair, the newcomer is there: a female form, perhaps the ideal female form, in a flowing garment of preternaturally pure white. She occupies the one bare place in the room, a roughly circular bit of wood floor showing through the carpet of papers. She does not speak, and her expression is unreadable.

This is a Muse in the divine flesh; of that, the woman is certain, even if she has no idea which one it is (the nine names and spheres of influence have fled her memory). But the mystery of the goddess’s identity is secondary to that of her presence in this place. The woman has always imagined the attentions of the Muses to manifest themselves indirectly: a stray sunbeam illuminating an ordinary object in an unusual way, say, or a snatch of peculiar conversation overheard by chance – intangible inspirations to be whimsically ascribed to a metaphorical deity. But this is no metaphor.

It may have been the woman’s invocation; perhaps she has accidentally hit upon the precise wording and tone to best attract the Muse’s notice and interest. It may be the mounds of discarded pages; perhaps the unfulfilled potential of all the false starts thereon inscribed, continually tugging at the edges of the Muse’s attention, has finally attained a critical mass that warrants direct intervention.

Whatever the cause, the perplexity that suddenly inhabits the Muse’s face, the cocked eyebrow forming a flawless arch, suggests that she is not accustomed to visibility in the eyes of mortals.

The woman springs to her feet, knocking over her chair. If there is protocol that applies here, she does not know it. All she can think to do is put forth her best work, on the notion that the Muse helps she who helps herself, and so she looks around desperately for a page to serve as the exemplar of her literary output. A few interminable seconds pass. Finally, with crushing regret at the negligence she has displayed toward her abandoned compositions, she gathers up an armload of papers at random and displays them before her visitor. It is a tentative gesture, part offering, part supplication.

The Muse has no need of it. Mediocrity pervades the room and everything in it like stale cigarette smoke, to a degree that offends her rarefied senses. That its author has laid eyes on her, by whatever agency, compounds the affront. The Muse will give her assessment with awful honesty.

In the past, the woman has placed her work before a parade of friends, colleagues, lovers, relations, the odd stranger. She has endured unconvincing flattery, polite dismissal, puzzled incredulity, and derisive laughter, and she has easily dismissed them all, if indeed she truly heard them.

But nothing can compare with the scorn of a genuine goddess. The Muse’s withering stare pins her against the worn lip of her desk, stripping away the barriers she has erected against the world’s mockery. It penetrates her to the core of her being, forces the breath from her body, scours the very thoughts from her mind. Her heart strains to beat against the pressure of that Olympian gaze. The pages she was holding drift to the floor.

The Muse’s dissection of her, the laying-out of her inadequacies before all the cosmos, continues for a full minute. It is the longest minute the woman will ever know.

The ordeal ends when the Muse withdraws her frightful attentions, not out of mercy but out of simple disdain. She has made her point.

In a minute or so, the burning in the woman’s chest grows insistent enough to penetrate the smothering emptiness inside her, and she remembers to breathe.

She pushes herself upward until she is standing once more, and – soaked in sweat, hands shaking, leaning on the desk for support – stares the Muse in the eye, at once bold and pathetic. The Muse’s lesson, it seems, has been wasted. Her contempt has receded, and it is the work of a moment for the woman to remake that which was swept away.

“Fine,” she says. The word leaves her throat reluctantly; she has not spoken aloud since she cloistered herself in this room two days ago. “My work is pedestrian. Derivative. Uninspired. But that only means you’ve been neglecting your duty, doesn’t it?”

(Her defiance would serve her well, if only it were coupled with talent.)

The Muse is perfectly capable of responding in English, but she will not sully her tongue by doing so. She answers the brazen charges with a single, insultingly simple image, which elbows its way effortlessly into the woman’s thoughts: a great, Niagara-like torrent, and a child’s outstretched hand bearing an empty cup hardly bigger than a thimble. The cup has only to touch the water and it is ripped from the tiny fingers and lost forever. The message is clear: My inspiration is for those with strength enough to endure it and talent enough to contain it.

This frank assessment has reached the woman in a way that past criticisms have not done; it takes over her entire consciousness, leaving no room for dissenting thoughts. When it finally passes, her confidence and certainty do not return. She sags against the desk, eyes cast downward. Her only comfort is that the Muse is done with her, that she is alone again; but when she looks up once more, she is denied even this consolation.

The Muse has not departed; her singular expression – divine consternation is quite a thing to behold – suggests that she cannot depart. She is evidently confined to the circle of bare floor where she has been standing; in attempting to cross this boundary, she resembles almost precisely a mime trapped in an invisible box. The discarded papers forming the circumference of her prison apparently function in the manner of Faust’s infamous pentagram, binding her within – or so it seems to the woman. She will never actually know, but she is certain of one thing: the comical tableau before her has dissipated whatever remaining awe she may have felt at keeping company with goddesses.

The tide thus turned, the woman addresses her captive. “Inspire me, and I’ll break the circle.” Once again she sees the raging waters in her mind, but the image has lost its potency. “I’ll take my chances. Inspire me.”

The Muse makes no further response; she is immortal, and patience will avail.

Emboldened by the shift in circumstances, and the realization that immortality does not imply invulnerability, the woman considers how she might take that which the Muse will not give.

She tests the circle with an outstretched foot, careful not to disturb the papers which make up its edge, and discovers that she can enter and leave the Muse’s prison unimpeded. As the woman advances, the goddess retreats – not in fear, but in distaste at a mortal daring such proximity – until her back rests against the invisible barrier. When the woman reaches out and grasps her by the arm, she does not resist – a vulgar scuffle does not become her – but remains defiantly passive. For the woman’s part, she is unsure how to proceed now that the Muse is in her clutches.

Simple perseverance assures the Muse’s eventual escape. Papers decay; buildings fall. The circle will be broken, and the Muse has, quite literally, all the time in the world. Therein lies the woman’s conundrum: she cannot hope to outplay her captive in the waiting game. She must act, immediately and decisively. But how to draw forth that which she desires, that intangible treasure bound up in the Muse’s very essence?

The phasing of the question itself precipitates a possible solution, and the woman leaves her home for the first time in days.

When she returns, she half-expects the room to be empty, but the Muse is still there. What, she wonders, does a Muse think about, left to herself?

She attacks in one quick motion, stepping into the circle, seizing the Muse’s arm once more (noting in passing how coarse her palm feels against that smooth, cool skin), searching for a vein.

There is no reason the Muse’s anatomy should mirror that of human beings, and no reason it should not. In any case, the vein is there; the woman draws a syringe (unwrapped outside for purposes of stealth) from her coat pocket, pierces the vein, draws the plunger outward. The blood comes: a bright, clear red. The Muse will not dignify this imposition by reacting to it.

The woman places a single drop of the blood on her fingertip and rubs it with her thumb; rather than smearing, it remains whole, like a bead of mercury. Its fragrance is floral, not metallic; it is sweet to the taste. But when she inserts the needle into her own arm and pushes the plunger home, it is as if she has pressed a hot iron to the spot.

She is sure she has poisoned herself, but the piercing heat in her limb quickly diffuses throughout her body, diluted to a pleasant, tingling warmth. She is considering repeating the procedure when suddenly the efficacy of a single dose demonstrates its sufficiency.

It is as though a great mass has collided with her mind and jarred it free of some impediment: her consciousness, in the space of an instant, expands to near-infinite breadth and depth. Her vocabulary – now increased a hundredfold – is no longer a set of child’s blocks, to be clumsily rearranged without thought; words suddenly have color, pitch, texture, and scent, and their proper, organic relationships have become obvious to her. Stray tatters of thought, once consigned to oblivion, now join together into vital, original concepts. Insight piles upon insight, with geometrically-increasing complexity. It is a state of pure inspiration.

It is not the overwhelming surge she was expecting, but a gentle, insistent pressure within her, whose relief will come only through expression. She must write.

She makes a mad dash for her desk but is immediately brought up short. At first, she thinks the Muse is somehow hindering her, but a frantic probing reveals that the circle is barring her progress.

Courtesy of her newly-acquired powers of discernment, understanding comes at once. In taking the Muse’s substance into herself, she has altered her own essence irrevocably. She and the goddess are now of like natures, and whatever force has imprisoned the one, now imprisons both.

When the barrier fails to yield to her fists, she rams it halfheartedly with her shoulder instead, but as the pointlessness of the exercise makes itself evident, she sinks wearily to the floor. A single, desperate hope – that she may have acquired the Muse’s immortality along with her blood – flickers into existence and is abruptly extinguished; the ache in her hands and shoulder, and the hunger pangs that until now she has ignored, are all too human.

With trepidation she gazes up at the Muse’s countenance, hoping to see an expression of commiseration, or at least pity; but there is only a devastatingly spiteful smile.

It is a small, but real, mercy that thirst takes the woman before she is driven mad by the continuous onslaught of ideas that she can never purge. Her landlord discovers her body. An unimaginative sort, he cannot see the other personage standing nearby; his experience of the Muse is limited to an uncanny, elusive sensation worrying at the outer edges of his awareness. The feeling persists until he disturbs the circle, whereupon it vanishes as though it had never been, and is soon forgotten.

The Flowering of the Strange Orchid

H.G. Wells

The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour. You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good luck, as your taste may incline. The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may be just a respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or perhaps – for the thing has happened again and again – there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? ‘John-smithia’! There have been worse names.

It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made Winter Wedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales – that hope, and also, maybe, the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest interest to do in the world. He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employments. He might have collected stamps or coins, or translated Horace, or bound books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it happened, he grew orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse.

“I have a fancy,” he said over his coffee, “that something is going to happen to me today.” He spoke – as he moved and thought – slowly.

“Oh, don’t say that!” said his housekeeper – who was also his remote cousin. For ‘something happening’ was a euphemism that meant only one thing to her.

“You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant…though what I do mean I scarcely know.

“Today,” he continued, after a pause, “Peters’ are going to sell a batch of plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see what they have. It may be I shall buy something good unawares. That may be it.”

He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.

“Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me of the other day?” asked his cousin, as she filled his cup.

“Yes,” he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.

“Nothing ever does happen to me,” he remarked presently, beginning to think aloud. “I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people. There is Harvey. Only the other week; on Monday he picked up sixpence, on Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came home from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle. What a whirl of excitement! – compared to me.”

“I think I would rather be without so much excitement,” said his housekeeper. “It can’t be good for you.”

“I suppose it’s troublesome. Still…you see, nothing ever happens to me. When I was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love as I grew up. Never married…I wonder how it feels to have something happen to you, something really remarkable.

“That orchid-collector was only thirty-six – twenty years younger than myself – when he died. And he had been married twice and divorced once; he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed a Malay once, and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart. And in the end he was killed by jungle-leeches. It must have all been very troublesome, but then it must have been very interesting, you know – except, perhaps, the leeches.”

“I am sure it was not good for him,” said the lady with conviction.

“Perhaps not.” And then Wedderburn looked at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes past eight. I am going up by the quarter to twelve train, so that there is plenty of time. I think I shall wear my alpaca jacket – it is quite warm enough – and my grey felt hat and brown shoes. I suppose –”

He glanced out of the window at the serene sky and sunlit garden, and then nervously at his cousin’s face.

“I think you had better take an umbrella if you are going to London,” she said in a voice that admitted of no denial. “There’s all between here and the station coming back.”

When he returned he was in a state of mild excitement. He had made a purchase. It was rare that he could make up his mind quickly enough to buy, but this time he had done so.

“There are Vandas,” he said, “and a Dendrobe and some Palaeonophis.” He surveyed his purchases lovingly as he consumed his soup. They were laid out on the spotless tablecloth before him, and he was telling his cousin all about them as he slowly meandered through his dinner. It was his custom to live all his visits to London over again in the evening for her and his own entertainment.

“I knew something would happen today. And I have bought all these. Some of them – some of them – I feel sure, do you know, that some of them will be remarkable. I don’t know how it is, but I feel just as sure as if some one had told me that some of these will turn out remarkable.

“That one” – he pointed to a shrivelled rhizome – “was not identified. It may be a Palaeonophis – or it may not. It may be a new species, or even a new genus. And it was the last that poor Batten ever collected.”

“I don’t like the look of it,” said his housekeeper. “It’s such an ugly shape.”

“To me it scarcely seems to have a shape.”

“I don’t like those things that stick out,” said his housekeeper.

“It shall be put away in a pot tomorrow.”

“It looks,” said the housekeeper, “like a spider shamming dead.”

Wedderburn smiled and surveyed the root with his head on one side. “It is certainly not a pretty lump of stuff. But you can never judge of these things from their dry appearance. It may turn out to be a very beautiful orchid indeed. How busy I shall be tomorrow! I must see tonight just exactly what to do with these things, and tomorrow I shall set to work.”

“They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp – I forget which,” he began again presently, “with one of these very orchids crushed up under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps are very unwholesome. Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by the jungle-leeches. It may be that very plant that cost him his life to obtain.”

“I think none the better of it for that.”

“Men must work though women may weep,” said Wedderburn with profound gravity.

“Fancy dying away from every comfort in a nasty swamp! Fancy being ill of fever with nothing to take but chlorodyne and quinine – if men were left to themselves they would live on chlorodyne and quinine – and no one round you but horrible natives! They say the Andaman islanders are most disgusting wretches – and, anyhow, they can scarcely make good nurses, not having the necessary training. And just for people in England to have orchids!”

“I don’t suppose it was comfortable, but some men seem to enjoy that kind of thing,” said Wedderburn. “Anyhow, the natives of his party were sufficiently civilised to take care of all his collection until his colleague, who was an ornithologist, came back again from the interior; though they could not tell the species of the orchid, and had let it wither. And it makes these things more interesting.”

“It makes them disgusting. I should be afraid of some of the malaria clinging to them. And just think, there has been a dead body lying across that ugly thing! I never thought of that before. There! I declare I cannot eat another mouthful of dinner.”

“I will take them off the table if you like, and put them in the window-seat. I can see them just as well there.”

The next few days he was indeed singularly busy in his steamy little hothouse, fussing about with charcoal, lumps of teak, moss, and all the other mysteries of the orchid cultivator. He considered he was having a wonderfully eventful time. In the evening he would talk about these new orchids to his friends, and over and over again he reverted to his expectation of something strange.

Several of the Vandas and the Dendrobium died under his care, but presently the strange orchid began to show signs of life. He was delighted, and took his housekeeper right away from jam-making to see it at once, directly he made the discovery.

“That is a bud,” he said, “and presently there will be a lot of leaves there, and those little things coming out here are aerial rootlets.”

“They look to me like little white fingers poking out of the brown,” said his housekeeper. “I don’t like them.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. They look like fingers trying to get at you. I can’t help my likes and dislikes.”

“I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think there are any orchids I know that have aerial rootlets quite like that. It may be my fancy, of course. You see they are a little flattened at the ends.”

“I don’t like ’em,” said his housekeeper, suddenly shivering and turning away. “I know it’s very silly of me – and I’m very sorry, particularly as you like the thing so much. But I can’t help thinking of that corpse.”

“But it may not be that particular plant. That was merely a guess of mine.”

His housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. “Anyhow I don’t like it,” she said.

Wedderburn felt a little hurt at her dislike to the plant. But that did not prevent his talking to her about orchids generally, and this orchid in particular, whenever he felt inclined.

“There are such queer things about orchids,” he said one day; “such possibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance; there are no insects known that can possibly fertilise them, and some of them have never been found with seed.”

“But how do they form new plants?”

“By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily explained. The puzzle is, what are the flowers for?

“Very likely,” he added, “my orchid may be something extraordinary in that way. If so I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as Darwin did. But hitherto I have not found the time, or something else has happened to prevent it. The leaves are beginning to unfold now. I do wish you would come and see them!”

But she said that the orchid-house was so hot it gave her the headache. She had seen the plant once again, and the aerial rootlets, which were now some of them more than a foot long, had unfortunately reminded her of tentacles reaching out after something; and they got into her dreams, growing after her with incredible rapidity. So that she had settled to her entire satisfaction that she would not see that plant again, and Wedderburn had to admire its leaves alone. They were of the ordinary broad form, and a deep glossy green, with splashes and dots of deep red towards the base He knew of no other leaves quite like them. The plant was placed on a low bench near the thermometer, and close by was a simple arrangement by which a tap dripped on the hot-water pipes and kept the air steamy. And he spent his afternoons now with some regularity meditating on the approaching flowering of this strange plant.

And at last the great thing happened. Directly he entered the little glass house he knew that the spike had burst out, although his great Paloeonophis Lowii hid the corner where his new darling stood. There was a new odour in the air, a rich, intensely sweet scent, that overpowered every other in that crowded, steaming little greenhouse.

Directly he noticed this he hurried down to the strange orchid. And, behold! The trailing green spikes bore now three great splashes of blossom, from which this overpowering sweetness proceeded. He stopped before them in an ecstasy of admiration.

The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals; the heavy labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a wonderful bluish purple mingled there with the gold. He could see at once that the genus was altogether a new one. And the insufferable scent! How hot the place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes.

He would see if the temperature was right. He made a step towards the thermometer. Suddenly everything appeared unsteady. The bricks on the floor were dancing up and down. Then the white blossoms, the green leaves behind them, the whole greenhouse, seemed to sweep sideways, and then in a curve upward.

* * *

At half-past four his cousin made the tea, according to their invariable custom. But Wedderburn did not come in for his tea.

“He is worshipping that horrid orchid,” she told herself, and waited ten minutes. “His watch must have stopped. I will go and call him.”

She went straight to the hothouse, and, opening the door, called his name. There was no reply. She noticed that the air was very close, and loaded with an intense perfume. Then she saw something lying on the bricks between the hot-water pipes.

For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless.

He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight, with their ends closely applied to his chin and neck and hands.

She did not understand. Then she saw from under one of the exultant tentacles upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.

With an inarticulate cry she ran towards him, and tried to pull him away from the leech-like suckers. She snapped two of these tentacles, and their sap dripped red.

Then the overpowering scent of the blossom began to make her head reel. How they clung to him! She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white inflorescence swam about her. She felt she was fainting, knew she must not. She left him and hastily opened the nearest door, and, after she had panted for a moment in the fresh air, she had a brilliant inspiration. She caught up a flower-pot and smashed in the windows at the end of the greenhouse. Then she re-entered. She tugged now with renewed strength at Wedderburn’s motionless body, and brought the strange orchid crashing to the floor. It still clung with the grimmest tenacity to its victim. In a frenzy, she lugged it and him into the open air.

Then she thought of tearing through the sucker rootlets one by one, and in another minute she had released him and was dragging him away from the horror.

He was white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.

The odd-job man was coming up the garden, amazed at the smashing of glass, and saw her emerge, hauling the inanimate body with red-stained hands. For a moment he thought impossible things.

“Bring some water!” she cried, and her voice dispelled his fancies. When, with unnatural alacrity, he returned with the water, he found her weeping with excitement, and with Wedderburn’s head upon her knee, wiping the blood from his face.

“What’s the matter?” said Wedderburn, opening his eyes feebly, and closing them again at once.

“Go and tell Annie to come out here to me, and then go for Dr. Haddon at once,” she said to the odd-job man so soon as he brought the water; and added, seeing he hesitated, “I will tell you all about it when you come back.”

Presently Wedderburn opened his eyes again, and, seeing that he was troubled by the puzzle of his position, she explained to him, “You fainted in the hothouse.”

“And the orchid?”

“I will see to that,” she said.

Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had suffered no very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink extract of meat, and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told her incredible story in fragments to Dr. Haddon. “Come to the orchid-house and see,” she said.

The cold outer air was blowing in through the open door, and the sickly perfume was almost dispelled. Most of the torn aerial rootlets lay already withered amidst a number of dark stains upon the bricks. The stem of the inflorescence was broken by the fall of the plant, and the flowers were growing limp and brown at the edges of the petals. The doctor stooped towards it, then saw that one of the aerial rootlets still stirred feebly, and hesitated.

The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent. The door banged intermittently in the morning breeze, and all the array of Wedderburn’s orchids was shrivelled and prostrate. But Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous upstairs in the glory of his strange adventure.

The Red Room

H.G. Wells

“I can assure you,” said I, “that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.” And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand.

“It is your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me askance.

“Eight-and-twenty years,” said I, “I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.”

The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open. “Ay,” she broke in; “and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There’s a many things to see, when one’s still but eight-and-twenty.” She swayed her head slowly from side to side. “A many things to see and sorrow for.”

I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual terrors of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty glass on the table and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the queer old mirror at the end of the room. “Well,” I said, “if I see anything tonight, I shall be so much the wiser. For I come to the business with an open mind.”

“It’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm once more.

I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an arm-chair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.

“I said – it’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, when the coughing had ceased for a while.

“It’s my own choosing,” I answered.

The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time, and threw his head back for a moment and sideways, to see me. I caught a momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he began to cough and splutter again.

“Why don’t you drink?” said the man with the withered arm, pushing the beer towards him. The man with the shade poured out a glassful with a shaky hand that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarce expected these grotesque custodians. There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one another.

“If,” said I, “you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will make myself comfortable there.”

The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under the shade; but no one answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one to the other.

“If,” I said a little louder, “if you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me.”

“There’s a candle on the slab outside the door,” said the man with the withered arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. “But if you go to the red room tonight –”

(“This night of all nights!” said the old woman.)

“You go alone.”

“Very well,” I answered. “And which way do I go?”

“You go along the passage for a bit,” said he, “until you come to a door, and through that is a spiral staircase, and half-way up that is a landing and another door covered with baize. Go through that and down the long corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the steps.”

“Have I got that right?” I said, and repeated his directions. He corrected me in one particular.

“And are you really going?” said the man with the shade, looking at me again for the third time, with that queer, unnatural tilting of the face.

(“This night of all nights!” said the old woman.)

“It is what I came for,” I said, and moved towards the door. As I did so, the old man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so as to be closer to the others and to the fire. At the door I turned and looked at them, and saw they were all close together, dark against the firelight, staring at me over their shoulders, with an intent expression on their ancient faces.

“Good-night,” I said, setting the door open.

“It’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm.

I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then I shut them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.

I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned, old-fashioned furniture of the housekeeper’s room in which they foregathered, affected me in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase. They seemed to belong to another age, an older age, an age when things spiritual were different from this of ours, less certain; an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond denying. Their very existence was spectral; the cut of their clothing, fashions born in dead brains. The ornaments and conveniences of the room about them were ghostly – the thoughts of vanished men, which still haunted rather than participated in the world of today. But with an effort I sent such thoughts to the right-about. The long, draughty subterranean passage was chilly and dusty, and my candle flared and made the shadows cower and quiver. The echoes rang up and down the spiral staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me, and one fled before me into the darkness overhead. I came to the landing and stopped there for a moment, listening to a rustling that I fancied I heard; then, satisfied of the absolute silence, I pushed open the baize-covered door and stood in the corridor.

The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight, coming in by the great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in vivid black shadow or silvery illumination. Everything was in its place: the house might have been deserted on the yesterday instead of eighteen months ago. There were candles in the sockets of the sconces, and whatever dust had gathered on the carpets or upon the polished flooring was distributed so evenly as to be invisible in the moonlight. I was about to advance, and stopped abruptly. A bronze group stood upon the landing, hidden from me by the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell with marvellous distinctness upon the white panelling, and gave me the impression of someone crouching to waylay me. I stood rigid for half a minute perhaps. Then, with my hand in the pocket that held my revolver, I advanced, only to discover a Ganymede and Eagle glistening in the moonlight. That incident for a time restored my nerve, and a porcelain Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head rocked silently as I passed him, scarcely startled me.

The door to the red room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy corner. I moved my candle from side to side, in order to see clearly the nature of the recess in which I stood before opening the door. Here it was, thought I, that my predecessor was found, and the memory of that story gave me a sudden twinge of apprehension. I glanced over my shoulder at the Ganymede in the moonlight, and opened the door of the red room rather hastily, with my face half turned to the pallid silence of the landing.

I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in the lock within, and stood with the candle held aloft, surveying the scene of my vigil, the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the young duke had died. Or, rather, in which he had begun his dying, for he had opened the door and fallen headlong down the steps I had just ascended. That had been the end of his vigil, of his gallant attempt to conquer the ghostly tradition of the place, and never, I thought, had apoplexy better served the ends of superstition. And there were other and older stories that clung to the room, back to the half-credible beginning of it all, the tale of a timid wife and the tragic end that came to her husband’s jest of frightening her. And looking around that large sombre room, with its shadowy window bays, its recesses and alcoves, one could well understand the legends that had sprouted in its black corners, its germinating darkness. My candle was a little tongue of light in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the room, and left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of light.

I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a hold upon me. After satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I began to walk about the room, peering round each article of furniture, tucking up the valances of the bed, and opening its curtains wide. I pulled up the blinds and examined the fastenings of the several windows before closing the shutters, leant forward and looked up the blackness of the wide chimney, and tapped the dark oak panelling for any secret opening. There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of sconces bearing candles, and on the mantelshelf, too, were more candles in china candlesticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was laid, an unexpected consideration from the old housekeeper, – and I lit it, to keep down any disposition to shiver, and when it was burning well, I stood round with my back to it and regarded the room again. I had pulled up a chintz-covered arm-chair and a table, to form a kind of barricade before me, and on this lay my revolver ready to hand. My precise examination had done me good, but I still found the remoter darkness of the place, and its perfect stillness, too stimulating for the imagination. The echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was no sort of comfort to me. The shadow in the alcove at the end in particular, had that undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking, living thing, that comes so easily in silence and solitude. At last, to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into it, and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. I stood that candle upon the floor of the alcove, and left it in that position.

By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension, although to my reason there was no adequate cause for the condition. My mind, however, was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that nothing supernatural could happen, and to pass the time I began to string some rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion, of the original legend of the place. A few I spoke aloud, but the echoes were not pleasant. For the same reason I also abandoned, after a time, a conversation with myself upon the impossibility of ghosts and haunting. My mind reverted to the three old and distorted people downstairs, and I tried to keep it upon that topic. The sombre reds and blacks of the room troubled, me; even with seven candles the place was merely dim. The one in the alcove flared in a draught, and the fire-flickering kept the shadows and penumbra perpetually shifting and stirring. Casting about for a remedy, I recalled the candles I had seen in the passage, and, with a slight effort, walked out into the moonlight, carrying a candle and leaving the door open, and presently returned with as many as ten. These I put in various knick-knacks of china with which the room was sparsely adorned, lit and placed where the shadows had lain deepest, some on the floor, some in the window recesses, until at last my seventeen candles were so arranged that not an inch of the room but had the direct light of at least one of them. It occurred to me that when the ghost came, I could warn him not to trip over them. The room was now quite brightly illuminated. There was something very cheery and reassuring in these little streaming flames, and snuffing them gave me an occupation, and afforded a helpful sense of the passage of time. Even with that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and the black shadow sprang back to its place there. I did not see the candle go out; I simply turned and saw that the darkness was there, as one might start and see the unexpected presence of a stranger. “By Jove!” said I aloud; “That draught’s a strong one!” and, taking the matches from the table, I walked across the room in a leisurely manner, to relight the corner again. My first match would not strike, and as I succeeded with the second, something seemed to blink on the wall before me. I turned my head involuntarily, and saw that the two candles on the little table by the fireplace were extinguished. I rose at once to my feet.

“Odd!” I said. “Did I do that myself in a flash of absent-mindedness?”

I walked back, relit one, and as I did so, I saw the candle in the right sconce of one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost immediately its companion followed it. There was no mistake about it. The flame vanished, as if the wicks had been suddenly nipped between a finger and a thumb, leaving the wick neither glowing nor smoking, but black. While I stood gaping, the candle at the foot of the bed went out, and the shadows seemed to take another step towards me.

“This won’t do!” said I, and first one and then another candle on the mantelshelf followed.

“What’s up?” I cried, with a queer high note getting into my voice somehow. At that the candle on the wardrobe went out, and the one I had relit in the alcove followed.

“Steady on!” I said. “These candles are wanted,” speaking with a half-hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match the while for the mantel candlesticks. My hands trembled so much that twice I missed the rough paper of the matchbox. As the mantel emerged from darkness again, two candles in the remoter end of the window were eclipsed. But with the same match I also relit the larger mirror candles, and those on the floor near the doorway, so that for the moment I seemed to gain on the extinctions. But then in a volley there vanished four lights at once in different corners of the room, and I struck another match in quivering haste, and stood hesitating whither to take it.

As I stood undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two candles on the table. With a cry of terror, I dashed at the alcove, then into the corner, and then into the window, relighting three, as two more vanished by the fireplace; then, perceiving a better way, I dropped the matches on the iron-bound deed-box in the corner, and caught up the bedroom candlestick. With this I avoided the delay of striking matches; but for all that the steady process of extinction went on, and the shadows I feared and fought against returned, and crept in upon me, first a step gained on this side of me and then on that. It was like a ragged storm-cloud sweeping out the stars. Now and then one returned for a minute, and was lost again. I was now almost frantic with the horror of the coming darkness, and my self-possession deserted me. I leaped panting and dishevelled from candle to candle, in a vain struggle against that remorseless advance.

I bruised myself on the thigh against the table, I sent a chair headlong, I stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in my fall. My candle rolled away from me, and I snatched another as I rose. Abruptly this was blown out, as I swung it off the table by the wind of my sudden movement, and immediately the two remaining candles followed. But there was light still in the room, a red light that staved off the shadows from me. The fire! Of course I could still thrust my candle between the bars and relight it!

I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing coals, and splashing red reflections upon the furniture, made two steps towards the grate, and incontinently the flames dwindled and vanished, the glow vanished, the reflections rushed together and vanished, and as I thrust the candle between the bars darkness closed upon me like the shutting of an eye, wrapped about me in a stifling embrace, sealed my vision, and crushed the last vestiges of reason from my brain. The candle fell from my hand. I flung out my arms in a vain effort to thrust that ponderous blackness away from me, and, lifting up my voice, screamed with all my might – once, twice, thrice. Then I think I must have staggered to my feet. I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit corridor, and, with my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a run for the door.

But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and struck myself heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was either struck or struck myself against some other bulky furniture. I have a vague memory of battering myself thus, to and fro in the darkness, of a cramped struggle, and of my own wild crying as I darted to and fro, of a heavy blow at last upon my forehead, a horrible sensation of falling that lasted an age, of my last frantic effort to keep my footing, and then I remember no more.

I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the man with the withered arm was watching my face. I looked about me, trying to remember what had happened, and for a space I could not recollect. I rolled my eyes into the corner, and saw the old woman, no longer abstracted, pouring out some drops of medicine from a little blue phial into a glass. “Where am I?” I asked; “I seem to remember you, and yet I cannot remember who you are.”

They told me then, and I heard of the haunted Red Room as one who hears a tale. “We found you at dawn,” said he, “and there was blood on your forehead and lips.”

It was very slowly I recovered my memory of my experience. “You believe now,” said the old man, “that the room is haunted?” He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but as one who grieves for a broken friend.

“Yes,” said I; “the room is haunted.”

“And you have seen it. And we, who have lived here all our lives, have never set eyes upon it. Because we have never dared …Tell us, is it truly the old earl who –”

“No,” said I; “it is not.”

“I told you so,” said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. “It is his poor young countess who was frightened –”

“It is not,” I said. “There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess in that room, there is no ghost there at all; but worse, far worse –”

“Well?” they said.

“The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man,” said I; “and that is, in all its nakedness – Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in the room –”

I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to my bandages.

Then the man with the shade sighed and spoke. “That is it,” said he. “I knew that was it. A power of darkness. To put such a curse upon a woman! It lurks there always. You can feel it even in the daytime, even of a bright summer’s day, in the hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind you however you face about. In the dusk it creeps along the corridor and follows you, so that you dare not turn. There is Fear in that room of hers – black Fear, and there will be – so long as this house of sin endures.”

Midnight Snack

Michaël Wertenberg

The winter wind swept through the forest, whistling through the bare branches, stirring the twigs and dirt on the ground. An owl turned its head and watched it pass. The insects stopped their nibbling and listened. In the distance, the howl of a lone wolf came to an abrupt stop.

The frosted dirt began to splinter like a windshield struck by a pebble, cracks spreading outward in all directions. From the epicenter, a small bulge formed, then a second. Two sharp, curved claws pierced the growing mounds, then a third and a fourth, wiggling, twisting, trying to break free.

Suddenly they stopped, then disappeared back into the ground.

A still silence overcame the forest, as if nature itself were holding its breath.

The ground began to rumble; grains of dirt bounced in agitation. A paw rose from the cracks, then a second. Between them, a head ripped through its earthly confines. Pebbles of debris landed like hail around the thing coming from the ground.

Its skull was covered, with patches of dried, leathery skin, cracked like arid land. Its eyelids opened to hollow orbits, dark as a starless night. Its nose was flat and wide with nostrils flaring, quivering as they took in the various scents the wind blew its way.

The animals of the forest brave enough for the winter cold were brave no longer. Some burrowed into the ground. Some climbed. Many fled. Even the moon didn’t dare look, and it summoned a thick grey cloud to hide behind.

Long, thin arms – the color of the dirt itself – stretched up to the sky, each paw sprawled out, letting a stream of dirt trickle to the ground. Then the arms came crashing down.

A shock wave shook the trees. A cloud of dirt rose from the ground. The head, as well, rose and the cloud dissipated, revealing the jaw, the mouth: the deviously wide mouth.

The creature’s teeth were short, jagged and numerous; one row hid another, which hid another, which hid another. Each row moved independently like an agitated swarm of sharpened bone. Its jaw protruded slightly, giving it the impression – not entirely erroneous – that the creature was led by its mouth. With its head arched back, arms pushing down on either side, it pulled itself out of the ground.

Maggots slithered out of its neck. Beatles and bugs poured out of its chest and back. The creature convulsed, spewing a horde of insects from its horrid, decomposing body.

The wind passed by the creature’s tremoring nostrils – so many scents, so many strong scents: dirt, worms and decay; the smell of smoke coming from the West, the smell of stagnant water from the East.

Its nostrils widened. Its whole being twitched in excitement. What a scent, what a wonderful, appetizing scent. From nearby, perhaps a mere thousand paces ahead, images were being conjured, words were being interpreted, emotions were being stirred, all in a majestic, mouth-watering frenzy.

The creature crouched, hands on the ground, head back, mouth wide open, and let out a roar that sent a flurry of thin branches to fall to the ground.

* * *

“Billy, it’s time to put the comic book down and get to bed,” Billy’s mother called out from the kitchen.

Curled up on the couch with a thick wool blanket, Billy looked up from the colored pages of the book he was cradling. He furrowed his brow. Judging by the melodious lilt in his mother’s call, he reckoned he still had a few more minutes of reading before he had to get to bed, really. Despite his mother’s repeated requests to the contrary, Billy had left the window directly behind him open. A thin stream of cool air crept in and touched the back of his neck, adding to the shivers the comic book was already providing.

His mother continued putting the dishes away. Billy wished she would do it more quietly. He was sure the clanking of the dishes, especially with the window open, could be heard from far away. We don’t want whatever lurks out there in the woods to know there are people here.

Billy jerked his head back toward the window. “Mom, did you hear that?”

His mother did not answer.

Kneeling on the couch, Billy leaned over to shut the window. He stopped for a moment, taking in a breath of the cold night air.

The moon had seemingly vanished in the cloudy sky, and he could see little more than darkness and the faint outline of tall, leafless trees. The absence of moonlight prevented him from seeing the tops of the trees, giving the illusion that they stretched up forever.

Billy listened again for the sound, but he could hear only the wind.

His mother had finally finished with the dishes and was presently on the phone with a friend. Billy decided he was brave; he didn’t have to be scared of the wind, and he didn’t have to listen to his mother. He left the window open, and not without hesitation, went back to his story.

* * *

The creature stood upright. It extended its arms to either side. Veins and muscles rippled with activity. It shook off the dust and the dirt, and took a step forward.

As it advanced, its dry skin cracked, releasing a puff of dust and dirt. Its rigid legs creaked forward, its joints grinding against bone like a rusty crank: “Creak, snap, thump. Creak, snap, thump.”

Its nostrils – almost creatures in their own right – curled outward, stretching and pulling as if their host were not moving fast enough. The scent was growing stronger and stronger, brain activity now nearer and more elaborate. Accompanying it was that sweet musk of fear, just a hint. A pool of moisture formed around the creature’s teeth, dripping long, thin lines of yellow slime.

Crows left their perches to find sanctuary in the sky. Insects hid under twigs, and the worms dug themselves even deeper into the earth.

The wind was the creature’s only accomplice, pushing it from behind with a gentle breeze, at the same time, wisping in a trail of odours from the front to guide its way.

* * *

“Billy, I thought I told you to put that away and go to bed. And why do you have the window open? It’s freezing.” Billy’s mother stood at the doorway, hands on her hips. A strong odor of chocolate and fudge swept in from the kitchen.

“What’s that smell, Mom?”

“Those are brownies.”

“Can I have one?”

“They’re for the picnic tomorrow. And it’s late. You need to get to bed.”

“Just one more minute, Mom. It’s getting to the end of the story.”

“Billy, it’s almost midnight. You can finish the story tomorrow.” She grabbed the comic from his hands and set it on the table.

“But Mom! The creature is just about to eat the little boy.”

Billy’s mother winced. “My goodness. Why would you want to read a story where a monster eats a little boy? That kind of thing will give you nightmares.”

Billy rolled his eyes.

She leaned over the couch, and shut the window. “Come on, sweetheart.” She took Billy by the hand. “It’s bedtime.”

“But Mom!”

He contested as he was being pulled off the couch. He contested as he was being led up the stairs. And he contested as he was being tucked into bed.

“But, Mom, how am I supposed to sleep if I don’t know how the story ends?”

“It ends with the good little boy doing what his nice mother tells him, and they all live happily ever after…Oh, and the monster dies.”

Billy scrunched up his nose and frowned.

“Pleasant dreams, my little pumpkin.” She gave Billy a kiss on his forehead, smiled and walked away.

When his mother left his room, Billy wiped the gross kiss mark off his forehead and slipped out of the overly warm covers. He lay in his bed and listened to his mother finish up downstairs then go to her room down the hall from his.

The house was frightfully still, yet as he strained, he could hear faint noises coming from outside in the woods. Something was out there; he could hear the snap of twigs, growing in frequency and in intensity. It’s probably just some animal, he told himself, but what animal?

* * *

With its nostrils leading the way, the creature trudged through the forest. Its arms now hung low, its sharp claws grazing the ground. It opened wide its mouth, tasting the air filled with promises of things to come.

A squirrel dared to stay but a few meters away from the creature whose nostrils pulled the head in the squirrel’s direction. A sniff, and the nostrils rippled. Hair particles stretched out from inside the dark cavities in hopes of procuring more of the scent. Brain activity low, was its assessment. Not worth the detour. Instead, the creature dropped to all fours and used its arms to propel forward faster. With each bound it was closer. With each bound it was more excited, and long strands of thick saliva hung from its jaw and waved in the wind. Not much farther. Brain activity intense. Sweet, nourishing brains!

* * *

Billy got out of bed and tiptoed down the hallway. He stopped at the top of the stairs and listened; not a creature was stirring, at least not in the house.

To avoid the creaking steps, he slid down the banister on his stomach, but landed with a thud much louder than he had hoped for. His heart skipped a beat, as he expected to hear his mother come out of her room to investigate.

After a motionless moment of silence, he breathed a sigh of relief. To his left he could spy the comic book on the table, to his right the kitchen. Comic book or brownies? Comic book or brownies?

The scent reached his nostrils and propelled him into action. He slipped into the kitchen and snagged a brownie – the smallest one so that his mother wouldn’t notice. He tiptoed back to the living room, picked up the comic book, grabbed his trusty flashlight from under the couch, and curled up to finish the story.

He put the brownie whole in his mouth, yet still managed a devious smile. As if not devious enough, he twisted his body around, leaned back and cracked open the window.

As he went from frame to frame, from page to page, he munched on the forbidden brownie, trying to pace himself so as to finish it and the story at the same time.

The last bit of brownie swallowed, Billy smacked his lips and wiped his mouth. He set the comic book down, not without slight disappointment. The boy is saved and the monster dies. I hate happy endings.

Billy got up from the couch, but when he saw the dark, empty staircase he was meant to take to go back to his room, he reconsidered. He talked himself into staying on the couch for the night, telling himself that it wasn’t out of fear, but rather that he was quite comfortable there, and that walking up those creaky stairs to go to his room would surely wake his mother.

Billy wrapped himself in the wool blanket and lay back down on the couch. The window was still open, but he convinced himself to leave it, since he was so brave. He imagined and re-imagined the story he had just read, trying his best to come up with a more satisfying ending: one where, for once, the monster wins. How’s that for happily ever after, Mom?

Content with his revision – a satiated and very much alive monster – Billy fell into a deep, peaceful slumber.

* * *

The trees gave way to a small clearing, and a bit farther still, stood a small house. Its ground-floor window was ajar, and the scent of brain activity was slowly streaming out. With each thought and each imagined event, an explosion of delectable odours came tantalizing the over-anxious nostrils. The creature was now at a sprint, its bones cracking in rapid succession like kindling being consumed by a fire.

It stopped just outside the window. The scent was so strong. The creature’s muscles pulsated in anticipation. It lifted its gums to expose the many rows of teeth, all waiting to be served.

The creature stood and flexed. The skin strained to cover what it could, but was ripped into a thousand thin flakes, raining down on the ground. It reached out to push the window fully open, and stuck its head inside. Just below, just at arm’s length below, lay a little boy: a little boy dreaming and cogitating and imagining. What a lovely marinade he is making.

As swift as a thought, the creature reached in and grabbed the boy by his little brain-basting skull. It pulled the head, with the little boy attached, up to its mouth, and just as the boy’s eyes opened, it sunk a legion of teeth into the savory shell. Little boy hair and little boy bone bits, with a touch of terror and adrenaline, greeted the creature’s mouth.

The creature sucked the skull dry, then unleashed a slither of tongues to lick it clean from the inside. So as not to waste even one drop, it rammed the hollow shell whole into its mouth. With a violent twist, it ripped it free of its little boy stem which it tossed back onto the couch.

The creature turned to face the forest. Munching on skull scraps, it began its slow walk back. When it reached the trees, it swallowed the last bit, and smacked its lips. It arched its head back and let out a roar of satisfaction.

The creature dropped to all fours and crawled back into the forest, a satiated and very much alive monster, ready for a deep, peaceful slumber.

The House of the Nightmare

Edward Lucas White

I FIRST caught sight of the house from the brow of the mountain as I cleared the woods and looked across the broad valley several hundred feet below me, to the low sun sinking toward the far blue hills. From that momentary viewpoint I had an exaggerated sense of looking almost vertically down. I seemed to be hanging over the checkerboard of roads and fields, dotted with farm buildings, and felt the familiar deception that I could almost throw a stone upon the house. I barely glimpsed its slate roof.

What caught my eyes was the bit of road in front of it, between the mass of dark-green shade trees about the house and the orchard opposite. Perfectly straight it was, bordered by an even row of trees, through which I made out a cinder side path and a low stone wall.

Conspicuous on the orchard side between two of the flanking trees was a white object, which I took to be a tall stone, a vertical splinter of one of the tilted limestone reefs with which the fields of the region are scarred.

The road itself I saw plain as a boxwood ruler on a green baize table. It gave me a pleasurable anticipation of a chance for a burst of speed. I had been painfully traversing closely forested, semi-mountainous hills. Not a farmhouse had I passed, only wretched cabins by the road, more than twenty miles of which I had found very bad and hindering. Now, when I was not many miles from my expected stopping-place, I looked forward to better going, and to that straight, level bit in particular.

As I sped cautiously down the sharp beginning of the long descent the trees engulfed me again, and I lost sight of the valley. I dipped into a hollow, rose on the crest of the next hill, and again saw the house, nearer, and not so far below.

The tall stone caught my eye with a shock of surprise. Had I not thought it was opposite the house next the orchard? Clearly it was on the left-hand side of the road toward the house. My self-questioning lasted only the moment as I passed the crest. Then the outlook was cut off again; but I found myself gazing ahead, watching for the next chance at the same view.

At the end of the second hill I only saw the bit of road obliquely and could not be sure, but, as at first, the tall stone seemed on the right of the road.

At the top of the third and last hill I looked down the stretch of road under the overarching trees, almost as one would look through a tube. There was a line of whiteness which I took for the tall stone. It was on the right.

I dipped into the last hollow. As I mounted the farther slope I kept my eyes on the top of the road ahead of me. When my line of sight surmounted the rise I marked the tall stone on my right hand among the serried maples. I leaned over, first on one side, then on the other, to inspect my tires, then I threw the lever.

As I flew forward I looked ahead. There was the tall stone – on the left of the road! I was really scared and almost dazed. I meant to stop dead, take a good look at the stone, and make up my mind beyond peradventure whether it was on the right or the left – if not, indeed, in the middle of the road.

In my bewilderment I put on the highest speed. The machine leaped forward; everything I touched went wrong; I steered wildly, slewed to the left, and crashed into a big maple.

When I came to my senses I was flat on my back in the dry ditch. The last rays of the sun sent shafts of golden green light through the maple boughs overhead. My first thought was an odd mixture of appreciation of the beauties of nature and disapproval of my own conduct in touring without a companion – a fad I had regretted more than once. Then my mind cleared and I sat up. I felt myself from the head down. I was not bleeding; no bones were broken; and, while much shaken, I had suffered no serious bruises.

Then I saw the boy. He was standing at the edge of the cinder-path, near the ditch. He was stocky and solidly built; barefoot, with his trousers rolled up to his knees; wore a sort of butternut shirt, open at the throat; and was coatless and hatless. He was tow-headed, with a shock of tousled hair; was much freckled, and had a hideous harelip. He shifted from one foot to the other, twiddled his toes, and said nothing whatever, though he stared at me intently.

I scrambled to my feet and proceeded to survey the wreck. It seemed distressingly complete. It had not blown up, nor even caught fire; but otherwise the ruin appeared hopelessly thorough. Everything I examined seemed worse smashed than the rest. My two hampers alone, by one of those cynical jokes of chance, had escaped – both had pitched clear of the wreckage and were unhurt, not even a bottle broken.

During my investigations the boy’s faded eyes followed me continuously, but he uttered no word. When I had convinced myself of my helplessness I straightened up and addressed him:

“How far is it to a blacksmith shop?”

“Eight mile,” he answered. He had a distressing case of cleft palate and was scarcely intelligible.

“Can you drive me there?” I inquired.

“Nary team on the place,” he replied; “nary horse, nary cow.”

“How far to the next house?” I continued.

“Six mile,” he responded.

I glanced at the sky. The sun had set already. I looked at my watch: it was going seven thirty-six.

“May I sleep in your house tonight?” I asked.

“You can come in if you want to,” he said, “and sleep if you can. House all messy; ma’s been dead three year, and dad’s away. Nothin’ to eat but buckwheat flour and rusty bacon.”

“I’ve plenty to eat,” I answered, picking up a hamper. “Just take that hamper, will you?”

“You can come in if you’re a mind to,” he said, “but you got to carry your own stuff.” He did not speak gruffly or rudely, but appeared mildly stating an inoffensive fact.

“All right,” I said, picking up the other hamper; “lead the way.”

The yard in front of the house was dark under a dozen or more immense ailanthus trees. Below them many smaller trees had grown up, and beneath these a dank underwood of tall, rank suckers out of the deep, shaggy, matted grass. What had once been, apparently, a carriage-drive left a narrow, curved track, disused and grass-grown, leading to the house. Even here were some shoots of the ailanthus, and the air was unpleasant with the vile smell of the roots and suckers and the insistent odor of their flowers.

The house was of gray stone, with green shutters faded almost as gray as the stone. Along its front was a veranda, not much raised from the ground, and with no balustrade or railing. On it were several hickory splint rockers. There were eight shuttered windows toward the porch, and midway of them a wide door, with small violet panes on either side of it and a fanlight above.

“Open the door,” I said to the boy.

“Open it yourself,” he replied, not unpleasantly nor disagreeably, but in such a tone that one could not but take the suggestion as a matter of course.

I put down the two hampers and tried the door. It was latched, but not locked, and opened with a rusty grind of its hinges, on which it sagged crazily, scraping the floor as it turned. The passage smelt moldy and damp. There were several doors on either side; the boy pointed to the first on the right.

“You can have that room,” he said.

I opened the door. What with the dusk, the interlacing trees outside, the piazza roof, and the closed shutters, I could make out little.

“Better get a lamp,” I said to the boy.

“Nary lamp,” he declared cheerfully. “Nary candle. Mostly I get abed before dark.”

I returned to the remains of my conveyance. All four of my lamps were merely scrap metal and splintered glass. My lantern was mashed flat. I always, however, carried candles in my valise. This I found split and crushed, but still holding together. I carried it to the porch, opened it, and took out three candles.

Entering the room, where I found the boy standing just where I had left him, I lit the candle. The walls were whitewashed, the floor bare. There was a mildewed, chilly smell, but the bed looked freshly made up and clean, although it felt clammy.

With a few drops of its own grease I stuck the candle on the corner of a mean, rickety little bureau. There was nothing else in the room save two rush-bottomed chairs and a small table. I went out on the porch, brought in my valise, and put it on the bed. I raised the sash of each window and pushed open the shutters. Then I asked the boy, who had not moved or spoken, to show me the way to the kitchen. He led me straight through the hall to the back of the house. The kitchen was large, and had no furniture save some pine chairs, a pine bench, and a pine table.

I stuck two candles on opposite corners of the table. There was no stove or range in the kitchen, only a big hearth, the ashes in which smelt and looked a month old. The wood in the wood-shed was dry enough, but even it had a cellary, stale smell. The ax and hatchet were both rusty and dull, but usable, and I quickly made a big fire. To my amazement, for the mid-June evening was hot and still, the boy, a wry smile on his ugly face, almost leaned over the flame, hands and arms spread out, and fairly roasted himself.

“Are you cold?” I inquired.

“I’m allus cold,” he replied, hugging the fire closer than ever, till I thought he must scorch.

I left him toasting himself while I went in search of water. I discovered the pump, which was in working order and not dry on the valves; but I had a furious struggle to fill the two leaky pails I had found. When I had put water to boil I fetched my hampers from the porch.

I brushed the table and set out my meal – cold fowl, cold ham, white and brown bread, olives, jam, and cake. When the can of soup was hot and the coffee made I drew up two chairs to the table and invited the boy to join me.

“I ain’t hungry,” he said; “I’ve had supper.”

He was a new sort of boy to me; all the boys I knew were hearty eaters and always ready. I had felt hungry myself, but somehow when I came to eat I had little appetite and hardly relished the food. I soon made an end of my meal, covered the fire, blew out the candles, and returned to the porch, where I dropped into one of the hickory rockers to smoke. The boy followed me silently and seated himself on the porch floor, leaning against a pillar, his feet on the grass outside.

“What do you do,” I asked, “when your father is away?”

“Just loaf ’round,” he said. “Just fool ’round.”

“How far off are your nearest neighbors?” I asked.

“Don’t no neighbors never come here,” he stated. “Say they’re afeared of the ghosts.”

I was not at all startled; the place had all those aspects which lead to a house being called haunted. I was struck by his odd matter-of-fact way of speaking – it was as if he had said they were afraid of a cross dog.

“Do you ever see any ghosts around here?” I continued.

“Never see ’em,” he answered, as if I had mentioned tramps or partridges. “Never hear ’em. Sort o’ feel ’em ’round sometimes.”

“Are you afraid of them?” I asked.

“Nope,” he declared. “I ain’t skeered o’ ghosts; I’m skeered o’ nightmares. Ever have nightmares?”

“Very seldom,” I replied.

“I do,” he returned. “Allus have the same nightmare – big sow, big as a steer, trying to eat me up. Wake up so skeered I could run to never. Nowheres to run to. Go to sleep, and have it again. Wake up worse skeered than ever. Dad says it’s buckwheat cakes in summer.”

“You must have teased a sow some time,” I said.

“Yep,” he answered. “Teased a big sow wunst, holding up one of her pigs by the hind leg. Teased her too long. Fell in the pen and got bit up some. Wisht I hadn’t ’a’ teased her. Have that nightmare three times a week sometimes. Worse’n being burnt out. Worse’n ghosts. Say, I sorter feel ghosts around now.”

He was not trying to frighten me. He was as simply stating an opinion as if he had spoken of bats or mosquitoes. I made no reply, and found myself listening involuntarily. My pipe went out. I did not really want another, but felt disinclined for bed as yet, and was comfortable where I was, while the smell of the ailanthus blossoms was very disagreeable. I filled my pipe again, lit it, and then, as I puffed, somehow dozed off for a moment.

I awoke with a sensation of some light fabric trailed across my face. The boy’s position was unchanged.

“Did you do that?” I asked sharply.

“Ain’t done nary thing,” he rejoined. “What was it?”

“It was like a piece of mosquito-netting brushed over my face.”

“That ain’t netting,” he asserted; “that’s a veil. That’s one of the ghosts. Some blow on you; some touch you with their long, cold fingers. That one with the veil she drags acrost your face – well, mostly I think it’s ma.”

He spoke with the unassailable conviction of the child in “We Are Seven.” I found no words to reply, and rose to go to bed.

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night,” he echoed. “I’ll set out here a spell yet.”

I lit a match, found the candle I had stuck on the corner of the shabby little bureau, and undressed. The bed had a comfortable husk mattress, and I was soon asleep.

I had the sensation of having slept some time when I had a nightmare – the very nightmare the boy had described. A huge sow, big as a dray horse, was reared up on her forelegs over the foot-board of the bed, trying to scramble over to me. She grunted and puffed, and I felt I was the food she craved. I knew in the dream that it was only a dream, and strove to wake up.

Then the gigantic dream-beast floundered over the foot-board, fell across my shins, and I awoke.

I was in darkness as absolute as if I were sealed in a jet vault, yet the shudder of the nightmare instantly subsided, my nerves quieted; I realized where I was, and felt not the least panic. I turned over and was asleep again almost at once. Then I had a real nightmare, not recognizable as a dream, but appallingly real – an unutterable agony of reasonless horror.

There was a Thing in the room; not a sow, nor any other namable creature, but a Thing. It was as big as an elephant, filled the room to the ceiling, was shaped like a wild boar, seated on its haunches, with its forelegs braced stiffly in front of it. It had a hot, slobbering, red mouth, full of big tusks, and its jaws worked hungrily. It shuffled and hunched itself forward, inch by inch, till its vast forelegs straddled the bed.

The bed crushed up like wet blotting-paper, and I felt the weight of the Thing on my feet, on my legs, on my body, on my chest. It was hungry, and I was what it was hungry for, and it meant to begin on my face. Its dripping mouth was nearer and nearer.

Then the dream-helplessness that made me unable to call or move suddenly gave way, and I yelled and awoke. This time my terror was positive and not to be shaken off.

It was near dawn: I could descry dimly the cracked, dirty window-panes. I got up, lit the stump of my candle and two fresh ones, dressed hastily, strapped my ruined valise, and put it on the porch against the wall near the door. Then I called the boy. I realized quite suddenly that I had not told him my name or asked his.

I shouted “Hello!” a few times, but won no answer. I had had enough of that house. I was still permeated with the panic of the nightmare. I desisted from shouting, made no search, but with two candles went out to the kitchen. I took a swallow of cold coffee and munched a biscuit as I hustled my belongings into my hampers. Then, leaving a silver dollar on the table, I carried the hampers out on the porch and dumped them by my valise.

It was now light enough to see to walk, and I went out to the road. Already the night-dew had rusted much of the wreck, making it look more hopeless than before. It was, however, entirely undisturbed. There was not so much as a wheel-track or a hoofprint on the road. The tall, white stone, uncertainty about which had caused my disaster, stood like a sentinel opposite where I had upset.

I set out to find that blacksmith shop. Before I had gone far the sun rose clear from the horizon, and almost at once scorching. As I footed it along I grew very much heated, and it seemed more like ten miles than six before I reached the first house. It was a new frame house, neatly painted and close to the road, with a whitewashed fence along its garden front.

I was about to open the gate when a big black dog with a curly tail bounded out of the bushes. He did not bark, but stood inside the gate wagging his tail and regarding me with a friendly eye; yet I hesitated with my hand on the latch, and considered. The dog might not be as friendly as he looked, and the sight of him made me realize that except for the boy I had seen no creature about the house where I had spent the night; no dog or cat; not even a toad or bird. While I was ruminating upon this a man came from behind the house.

“Will your dog bite?” I asked.

“Naw,” he answered; “he don’t bite. Come in.”

I told him I had had an accident to my automobile, and asked if he could drive me to the blacksmith shop and back to my wreckage.

“Cert,” he said. “Happy to help you. I’ll hitch up foreshortly. Where’d you smash?”

“In front of the gray house about six miles back,” I answered.

“That big stone-built house?” he queried.

“The same,” I assented.

“Did you go a-past here?” he inquired astonished. “I didn’t hear ye.”

“No,” I said; “I came from the other direction.”

“Why,” he meditated, “you must ’a’ smashed ’bout sunup. Did you come over them mountains in the dark?”

“No,” I replied; “I came over them yesterday evening. I smashed up about sunset.”

“Sundown!” he exclaimed. “Where in thunder’ve ye been all night?”

“I slept in the house where I broke down.”

“In that there big stone-built house in the trees?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Why,” he quavered excitedly, “that there house is haunted! They say if you have to drive past it after dark, you can’t tell which side of the road the big white stone is on.”

“I couldn’t tell even before sunset,” I said.

“There!” he exclaimed. “Look at that, now! And you slep’ in that house! Did you sleep, honest?”

“I slept pretty well,” I said. “Except for a nightmare, I slept all night.”

“Well,” he commented, “I wouldn’t go in that there house for a farm, nor sleep in it for my salvation. And you slep’! How in thunder did you get in?”

“The boy took me in,” I said.

“What sort of a boy?” he queried, his eyes fixed on me with a queer, countrified look of absorbed interest.

“A thick-set, freckle-faced boy with a harelip,” I said.

“Talk like his mouth was full of mush?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I said; “bad case of cleft palate.”

“Well!” he exclaimed. “I never did believe in ghosts, and I never did half believe that house was haunted, but I know it now. And you slep’!”

“I didn’t see any ghosts,” I retorted irritably.

“You seen a ghost for sure,” he rejoined solemnly. “That there harelip boy’s been dead six months.”

Manipulation

Trisha J. Wooldridge

The bathtub and suds were just for effect.

Imogene leaned over the white, molded plastic edge, gritted her teeth, and sliced the razor down her wrist. Quickly, she dropped her hand into the warm water bucket beside the tub. What was the use of a bath if you were going to sully it with blood?

She would have preferred a clawfoot of ivory porcelain, what most would call antique nowadays, even if it required boiling her own water. Modern bathtubs lacked romance.

The amphetamines made her hyperaware of the Timpani-like headache. Depressants may have dulled the pain, but it was faster this way. Faster, and she was awake, alert, ready. Last time, it had abandoned her too soon.

“He” was the wrong word, but ‘it’ was so impersonal. Her relationship with Death was far more intimate than ‘it’ – and the sexual ambiguity was part of what Imogene found so infatuating. She knew they belonged together, no matter what any grand Universal Laws said.

But lately…

Imogene didn’t want to think of ‘lately.’ While she was still conscious, she remembered the first time.

* * *

She felt dirty. The kind of dirty no shower could wash away.

Bastard! One hand clutched her debutante ball gown to her navel, as if its billowing skirts could armor what mattered. What he’d tried to feel through the layers of pastel taffeta, lace, petticoat, and crinoline. Goddamned bastard! She punched the white marble top of the vanity and cursed even harder. Rosettes of blood colored its surface and her just-as-pale knuckles. She pressed her fist to her lips, not wanting to stain her dress.

Her daddy had promised her this dress last year. He’d paid for it on her sixteenth birthday to ensure she’d have exactly what she wanted. It hadn’t mattered it would likely be out of style for her birthday party/debutante ball; it was exactly what Imogene had always dreamed of wearing. Her mother had been just about scandalized when it had arrived a month ago. Why would her little girl want to come out in last year’s fashion? But Imogene had locked herself in her room with the dress and had refused any food or water until her mother saw reason.

After all, Daddy was dead. Wouldn’t mother wish to let Imogene honor his memory by wearing the dress he’d gotten for her?

Her mother had relented after a week. Imogene had measured out her washing water for just such a siege from the woman; it hadn’t been the first time she’d needed to take such drastic measures. Before, Daddy would intercede. Since Daddy had died not even nine months ago – from a heart condition that the doctors said, ‘came out of nowhere’ – Imogene had suffered a few such standoffs with her mother.

But this – this – was an affront Imogene had not seen coming. This was unspeakable. She’d informed her mother of her displeasure with Mr. Beauchamp’s visits. Imogene certainly had no intent of letting him court her. He was old for one, and now this. How dare he attack her as he’d done! At her very own birthday ball!

For all her faults, surely her mother would see the sin of this man and throw him out. Publicly. With utmost humiliation to destroy any social standing he had.

Imogene very carefully cleaned her hand and lips, and found a spare set of lace gloves in a drawer. They would conceal the angry red cracks in her otherwise pristine hands. She left the darkening crimson smudges on the vanity; surely a grand story would come of that. Standing as tall as her petite frame allowed, she marched back out to her birthday cotillion to find her mother.

After enough practiced pleasant discourse, as was expected of her – though not a one of the attending gentlemen interested her in the least – she learned her mother was entertaining one of the guests out in the garden.

When she saw her mother, the widow-of-less-than-a-year, out in the garden and mostly hidden in an azalea alcove with Mr. Beauchamp – kissing Mr. Beauchamp – the débutante was left speechless. While he was old for her, he was but a babe compared to her mother! Her stomach twisted in a most unladylike way and she barely contained the regurgitation. She turned on her heel with a swish of her skirts and returned to the house.

She maintained her dignified, lady’s mask as she wove back through the party, making sure everyone would look fondly on their last interaction with her. They would say, Such a shame. What horrible thing could have caused such a tragedy? The delicate flower simply couldn’t take the loss of her father or the shame of her mother…

Shame of her mother? They’d ask.

Why yes! Do you not see how close that woman sits to such a young man…at her own daughter’s funeral? Not even a year after burying her husband?

Excusing herself from the presence of the mayor’s wife and eligible son with the promise of a dance later – if he wished to dance with a corpse, she mused – she wound her way up the curving wooden staircase.

In her mother’s bedroom she found the laudanum the doctor had prescribed “if she were to have any moments of overwhelm upon the death of her husband.” The bottle was half empty and there was a second Imogene hadn’t been expecting – was there an affair with the doctor, too? Such disgrace!

Imogene left, taking both bottles and one of the glasses from the Waterford decanter set. She’d briefly considered doing the deed in her mother’s bed – once her parents’ bed – but after what she’d seen in the garden, who knew what her mother may have done in those bed clothes since her father’s death!

No, she would do this entirely on her own terms.

In the sanctity of her own room, she bit her lip, tasting the leftover blood. The doctor had pulled her aside, telling her to keep close eye on her mother. It wasn’t very much that might…“well, just make sure she doesn’t take too much.”

When she poured the half bottle into the crystal glass, it didn’t look like very much. Maybe a finger width or two – the way her father had measured his Scotch Whiskey. Should she have also taken some of the brandy? The doctor had said alcohol enhanced its potency. No. She was not returning to that woman’s room.

Imogene took a whiff of the laudanum and wrinkled her nose. It smelled worse than Scotch Whiskey. Still, the longer she waited, the greater the chances of someone discovering her before she had made her point.

She lay on the bed and set the glass aside long enough to arrange her dress so it fell perfectly over her body. Next, she loosed her strawberry blonde hair to cascade and frame her face, like the Lady of Shalott in the painting in Daddy’s study.

Taking a deep breath, she drank the laudanum down in one swallow, as she’d seen her father do with his whiskey in moments of anger. Imogene managed not to gag; it would ruin the scene if there were any puke marring her visage!

As she suspected, the effects didn’t hit immediately. She had enough time to further arrange herself, even folding her hands over her chest.

I shall make for a beautiful, eligible debutante corpse.

Within a few moments, she was ever so tired. More tired than she’d felt in her whole life. A velvety darkness began to envelope her.

A breeze rippled in, moving a stray curl over her face.

Even in her growing stupor, Imogene felt her brow wrinkle. Was there a window open? How had she missed such a detail! Wind would surely undo her perfect stage.

The scent of rich earth permeated the air. Was someone gardening? Today? No…not just earth. The decay of fallen leaves. Of dead animals and manure. Strong, as if she were in the middle of it all.

Feeling like she were ungluing her lids, she opened her eyes. Though it felt like a weight had settled into her lungs, she sat up on her elbows.

A figure stood in front of the windows. It wore greyed shrouds wrapped around and cloaking itself. The person was sickly thin, worse than any poor field worker she’d seen. And she couldn’t see a face.

Perhaps because she was so close to her passing, she recognized the figure for what it was.

“You’re Death.” It wasn’t a question.

The figure cocked its head like a curious dog and angled its body to face her. Bony hands slipped from the ashen, frayed material and pulled the hood back some. Like its arms, Death’s face looked like a skeleton wrapped in skin.

A part of Imogene’s mind told her she ought to be horrified. Tilting her own head and jutting out her chin – though the effort felt as if she moved in vat of molasses – she narrowed her eyes and glared at the tiny dancing flames in Death’s hollow sockets. “Why did you take my Daddy?”

The smallest line appeared in the papery skin between Death’s eyes. It approached the bed. As it got closer, Imogene felt a little less heavy, a little more awake. She sat up, tucking her knees beneath her and leaning towards…Death.

Death stopped at the edge of the bed. Long black hair slipped from beneath the hood and over one shoulder. Not having studied skeletons in detail – what lady would? – Imogene could not tell if Death was man or woman. Most people, when they spoke of Death, said ‘he,’ but that just didn’t seem appropriate for what stood before her. Death’s closeness affected her like no man ever had.

“Well?” she demanded. “Can you speak?”

“I speak.” Death’s voice echoed like wind from a mausoleum. The hint of lips moved around the impression of teeth.

“Then answer my question.”

“You’re not afraid of me.” Death didn’t ask it as a question.

“I suppose I invited you. Why would I be afraid?”

Death’s blink was not a bat of eyelids but a momentary extinguishing of the flames that served as its eyes. “Many have invited me. They were all still afraid upon my arrival. Even if they didn’t fight. Even if their intent to summon me was true and they were done with living. There was still fear. Why not you?”

Imogene shrugged. “I didn’t expect I’d meet an actual you.”

“Most don’t. That’s not what makes you different.”

“Has no one else asked you why you took someone they love, either? Or did you not answer them, too?”

“They have, and I have. But they were shaking when they asked.” Tentatively, Death reached with skinbound hand bones and brushed one finger across the lace gloves that hid her bruised and cut knuckles. Pain burned for a moment, then a burning warmth spread from her hand through her body.

Imogene slowly pulled her hand away. She didn’t snatch it; she didn’t want to pull away either. But she wanted to show she was in control of herself. Even before Death.

“Is that why you haven’t answered my question?”

“No,” Death said.

Imogene found herself leaning closer to Death as it spoke. “Why did you take my Daddy?”

“I haven’t answered your question because it is a foolish question. I am rarely surprised, and I am disappointed that one who would surprise me would ask something so pedestrian. I took him for the same reason I have taken every life that has passed from this earth. Because it was his time.” Death leaned closer to Imogene, the hand it had brushed her knuckles with on the bed. “Should I continue with my usual, pedestrian process for you, or do you have any other surprises for me?”

The heavy sleepiness started to drape itself back over Imogene again. She fought it this time. Death’s closeness was making something radiate deeper inside her, a humming buzz that she wanted to keep. Swallowing, finding her mouth not as dry as she expected from the bitter laudanum, she brushed her fingers over Death’s bony knuckles.

Death’s flame gaze flared, giving the impression of the surprise-widened eyes of the living.

Imogene leaned even closer, letting her fingers cross and intertwine with Death’s. “Has anyone asked you for a kiss? A real one, not the way poets call what you do a ‘kiss of death’.”

“No.” The answer was barely a breeze’s whisper through dried lips, but Imogene heard it clearly.

“Would you kiss me?”

Death’s eye flames flickered and wavered like candles in a hurricane. Its jaw moved slightly, suggesting a swallow. It didn’t move its hand from beneath hers.

“I…have never done that.” Death’s breath – apparently Death breathed – tickled her face. Even that sensation heightened the fiery prickles erupting through her body. It made her feel more alive.

“Neither have I. Not like the way I want to kiss you.” There was no more sensation of drowsiness in her body; she felt no pain anywhere.

“I have never wanted to kiss someone.” Death radiated heat like a fever as it reached its other hand to her hair.

Imogene didn’t back away. As Death took a curl and wrapped it around its finger, she barely contained a shiver that went down her spine. After an intake of breath, she whispered back. “Never…including now?”

“Never…before.” Death filled the tiny space between them in even tinier hesitations. Finally, the softest brush. Dry, but soft. Less than a second’s blaze of fire.

Imogene followed Death’s lips before it could pull away, holding the kiss. She felt Death press a cheek to hers as it paused to gasp, then wrap a hand behind her neck as they kissed again. She held him close, letting her fingers tangle into black hair that felt like shredded silk strands.

* * *

It should have been awkward – she’d heard other girls’ stories about first kisses, the same stories over all the years – but it wasn’t. Clearly, they were meant to be.

Imogene looked down at her arm. Was she bleeding faster than usual, or had she taken too many drugs? Her memories were already getting dark around the edges, fading.

And she did not want that. She wanted to remember. After their kiss, despite how ‘pedestrian’ her question was, Death told her that her father had not died of heart complications. When she’d asked how her father had died, Death had pointed its fiery gaze to the glass beside her bed.

“He killed himself?” she’d asked, feeling her heart stop.

Death had shaken its head. No. That had been all she’d needed to know.

After she’d killed her mother and made it look as if her mother had poisoned Imogene and then killed herself, Death had awoken her in the family crypt.

Or, rather, she’d awoken with Death on the floor of her family crypt, shaking and gasping in waves of pleasure. Death had trembled beside her at its own rebellion of Law. Death had kissed her once more, before saying good bye and telling her to start a new life elsewhere.

A second chance.

Not even a year had passed in that second chance before Imogene had decided to summon Death once more.

* * *

“Why have you done this?” Death knelt beside a still-steaming tub.

Imogene liked how Death’s eye flames flicked from her eyes to her naked body, even as she struggled to stay awake from the drugs. She hadn’t been sure laudanum would work twice, and she’d wanted to see Death’s reaction to seeing her naked, so she’d slipped into the bath to ensure she’d bring Death. “I suppose I’m just full of surprises, aren’t I?”

“Is this what you want?” Death reached into the water and sat her up.

“To have you hold me again? Yes.”

“I mean, are you ready to die?”

“Is that the only way I can be with you?”

“You’re only with me until I take you to the afterlife.”

“Like Heaven and Hell?” That made her sit up more.

“Something like that.”

“And then what? I never see you again?”

Death didn’t answer.

“Then no, that’s not what I want. I just want to be with you.” As with her first time, just being near Death gave her clarity and strength, despite her drugged state. She reached out to caress its skin-wrapped jaw.

Death caught her hand, paused, then kissed her palm before pushing her away. “We shouldn’t be…It’s not right.”

She clutched Death’s hand, feeling each of the bones pressing into her flesh. “Neither of us have an explanation for why I’m not afraid of you…and why you feel the way you do for me. Perhaps it is right.”

“I know it’s not.” Death did not pull its hand free, though Imogene was certain it could if it wanted. “It’s against all Laws of Nature, the Universe. Everything.”

Imogene began kissing Death’s hand, small kisses from each of its finger tips to the back of its hand. When she heard and felt it sigh and shudder, she whispered against its papery skin. “I don’t believe that. I love you.”

Its eye sockets had been dark, as if it had closed them in pleasure. When she’d said that, said those words, Deaths eyes exploded back into flames. “No.” It pulled its hand back and stood.

“No what?”

“You don’t know what you’ve just said.”

Imogene took a deep breath, fighting the returning effects of the laudanum, and stood in the bath. “Yes, I do. I love you.”

Death shook its head. Its fluttering gravecloths and hood and hair gave away that it trembled.

Fighting to control her own shaking, Imogene clutched the tub and tried to step out. Her foot slipped –

And she was in Death’s arms again. She took advantage of the closeness, wrapped an arm around its neck, and kissed.

Death kissed back, taking her to her bed.

When they were both left trembling again, Death bid her good-bye with another ‘last’ kiss and told her to live.

* * *

Thus passed, to Imogene’s reckoning, over a hundred and twelve years. With the time between her summonings growing less and less.

But lately…

Lately still nagged at her brain, and she couldn’t push it away. Lately, Death had not been the same. Sometimes she would lose consciousness and wake alone. Like last time.

She could not, she would not let that happen again. She and Death had a special relationship, and nothing could take that away. After all, Death had to come when she summoned. That was its entire purpose.

Foreverness drifted by before the small bathroom filled with familiar sensation of warm breezes carrying the scent of ash, earth, and dampness. In front of the sink, but not reflected in the medicine cabinet’s mirror, grey-white linen fluttered, shrouding the form that was neither male nor female. Hair, dark as a freshly dug grave, danced on the crypt wind. The shower curtain trembled in the dead breath’s wake.

Death folded its arms. Skin-clad skeletal hands tapped blackened nails on the burial cloth robe. “I said we were through,” said the voice as androgynous as its form.

Imogene winced from eyes that still flamed emotion and pain. Between drugs and blood loss, she spoke with a shaking, slurring mouth. “…Had t-to see you again.”

“You always have to see me again.” The being paced, bony feet tapping on faux granite tiles. After the initial glare, it kept its eyes averted.

“I – I…st-still love you…” Why was the proximity of Death not relieving her symptoms, clearing her head?

“You cannot fathom love.” It stopped pacing and turned its back to her.

“I d-do. And you said I understood, like n-no one else. I’m not s-scared of you.” Imogene’s heart thrashed in her chest like a panicked bird. Beside the tub, she could not see her hand inside the bloody bucket. “Please?”

“Please, what?” Death spun and glared again. “Do my job? How long have I given in to your games? Must we have this dance for another century?”

“P-plea-hshe?” Darkness tinged the edges of her vision and deepened every shadow. Each breath was harder work than anything she’d done in life.

Now that it looked at her, she saw Death’s face soften. She saw the familiar twitch of its mouth, its worrying lips. She watched the clenching and releasing of its hands on its arms. Most of the bubbles in the bath had dissipated, and the flicker in Death’s eye revealed that it had noticed her bare still-perfect body. Another aspect of Death’s gifts and the frequent summonings – she had hardly aged since their first meeting.

“P-p-pls…”

It jerked its head away with a scowl of defeat, blinked out its eye flames, and stepped toward Imogene. Water sluiced Death’s form as it knelt into the tub to join the dying girl. Moisture darkened the shroud, pasted it to Death like a second skin. Its lips brushed her forehead first: a tickle of dried rose petals. Cool, bony fingers with sharp nails tenderly dragged damp locks of reddish blonde hair from Imogene’s face. She found energy to lift her chin, meet its hard lips, and taste the life it breathed into her. With a gasp, she sat up, entwining arms around the skeletal body and pushing away the wet shroud to reveal the taut skin over bones and the pulse of life that still throbbed within Death’s being.

Death lifted Imogene’s cut hand from the bucket and brought the wound to its lips with a kiss. The left-over blood lent color, like lipstick, and Imogene kissed those lips once more as Death’s other hand pulled her hips against itself. There was pressure against her sex, but she never looked – and had had no other lover for comparison. It didn’t matter; their love was their own. She could feel sharp nails recede as its fingers caressed inside her. Imogene moaned at Death’s touch and arched against it. It kissed down her cheek and throat, leaving water-color imprints of her blood down skin that was not as pale as its own.

Imogene tangled and untangled her fingers though thick, wet, black hair, and caressed her hands down the sharp edges of ribs, pelvis, and joints. Death’s breath rattled from its mouth. Imogene felt tingles down her spine as Death pressed its face against her neck and shoulder with gasps. She tightened her grip around Death. Its body felt so fragile, as if any bone could break or its paper-thin skin should tear. As it came, she felt the shifting corporeality, its substance based on the end of her life, fading as it returned life through their union.

Shaking, she clung to Death, lying her head against its angular shoulder. Her trembling lips brushed its ear and she whispered, “See? You can’t leave me. Not ever…” Death stiffened beneath her. “You need me as much as I need you.”

Death breathed deeply against her face. It pulled from her embrace and took the hand she had cut. Imogene reached for another kiss, only to gasp as fresh pain burned down her arm. Her blood streamed sullying red ribbons into the bathwater.

Betrayed, she watched Death shake its head slowly.

“No more games; I can’t take them any more. It’s over this time. We’re over.”

“No-oh,” she managed before the dark edges of the world overtook her. Not so fragile, Death caught her in strong arms and rocked her lovingly – and without apology.

Biographies & Sources

E.F. Benson

Caterpillars

(Originally Published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, Mills & Boon, 1912)

Edward Frederic (‘E.F.’) Benson (1867–1940) was born at Wellington College in Berkshire, England, where his father, the future Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson, was headmaster. Benson is widely known for being a writer of reminiscences, fiction, satirical novels, biographies and autobiographical studies. His first published novel, Dodo, initiated his success, followed by a series of comic novels such as Queen Lucia and Trouble for Lucia. Later in life, Benson moved to Rye where he was elected mayor. It was here that he was inspired to write several macabre ghost story and supernatural collections and novels, including Paying Guests and Mrs Ames.

Ambrose Bierce

The Boarded Window

(Originally Published in the San Francisco Examiner, 1889)

John Bartine’s Watch

(Originally Published in the San Francisco Examiner, 1893)

Ambrose Bierce (1824–c. 1914) was born in Meigs County, Ohio. He was a famous journalist and author known for writing The Devil’s Dictionary. After fighting in the American Civil War, Bierce used his combat experience to write stories based on the war, such as in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Following the separate deaths of his ex-wife and two of his three children he gained a sardonic view of human nature and earned the name ‘Bitter Bierce’. His disappearance at the age of 71 on a trip to Mexico remains a great mystery and continues to spark speculation.

Daniele Bonfanti

Bones of the Dead

(First Publication; edited in English by Jodi Renée Lester)

Daniele Bonfanti is a science fiction and horror author from Italy. His English debut, the novelette Game, was published in the 2016 Stoker-nominated anthology The Beauty of Death. His Italian publications include two novels, short stories, and scores of articles for the popular magazine Hera. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and also translates from English: works by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Keene, Jack Ketchum, Peter Straub, Poppy Z. Brite and Clive Barker. An adventure enthusiast – mountaineer, kayaker, trail runner – and beekeeper, Daniele lives on the slopes of Mount Resegone, in an ancient house in the woods haunted by a ghost, a piano, evil daughters, and a wife.

Robert W. Chambers

In the Court of the Dragon

(Originally Published in The King in Yellow, F. Tennyson Neely, 1895)

Robert William Chambers (1865–1933) was born in Brooklyn, New York. He started his career publishing illustrations in magazines like Life, Truth and Vogue before abruptly turning his attention strictly to fiction. He produced works in numerous genres including historical, romance, fantasy, science fiction and horror. His best-known works come from his short story collection The King in Yellow. Everett Franklin Bleiler, a respected scholar of science fiction and fantasy literature, described The King in Yellow as one of the most important works of American supernatural fiction.

Carolyn Charron

Crossroads

(First Publication)

Carolyn Charron is a Canadian writer whose short stories have appeared in two other Flame Tree anthologies: Murder Mayhem and Dystopia Utopia, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post and Enchanted Conversation. She writes all forms of speculative fiction, and is getting to know the editor’s side of the slush pile by reading for the Hugo-nominated Apex Magazine, and acting as a juror for a writer’s grant for the first time. She spends far too much time on Facebook and not enough on her blog or Twitter. She lives in Toronto with her family and is currently working on a novel blending Canadian history with clockworks and potato batteries.

E.E.W. Christman

The Mourning Woman

(First Publication)

E.E.W. Christman lives in Seattle, Washington. She’s been published in RASCAL Magazine and won New Delta Review’s Creative Nonfiction prize with her essay, ‘Me & His Old Lady’. Her work is strongly influenced by Octavia E. Butler, Shirley Jackson, Neil Gaiman, and John Carpenter. In her free time, she watches horror movies – everything from Hollywood classics to South Korean zombie films – plays video games where you get to fly through space and hang out with aliens, and reads fantasy novels.

Kay Chronister

The Fifth Gable

(Issue #29 of Shimmer, 2016)

Kay Chronister is from Tucson, Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer. She was the winner of the 2015 Dell Magazine Award, and is an alumna of the Alpha Workshop. As a graduate student in English Literature at the University of Arizona, her research interests include Gothic literature, folklore, and the politics of genre. She is currently at work on her first novel, a horror-western set in the American southwest. Find her online at kaychronister.com

Wilkie Collins

The Dream Woman

(Originally Published as ‘The Ostler’ in ‘The Holly-Tree Inn’, a jointly-authored group of linked stories that formed the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words, 1855)

Wilkie Collins (1824–89) was born in London’s Marylebone and he lived there almost consistently for 65 years. Writing over 30 major books, 100 articles, short stories and essays and a dozen or more plays, he is best known for The Moonstone, often credited as the first detective story, and The Woman in White. He was good friends with Charles Dickens, with whom he collaborated, as well as took inspiration from, to help write novels like The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. Finally becoming internationally reputable in the 1860s, Collins truly showed himself as the master of his craft as he wrote many profitable novels in less than a decade and earned himself the title of a successful English novelist, playwright and author of short stories.

F. Marion Crawford

The Upper Berth

(Originally Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894)

For the Blood is the Life

(Originally published in Colliers, 1905)

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy. He is well known for his classically weird and fantastical stories. Travelling to and from Italy, England, Germany and the United States, Crawford became an extraordinary linguist and his first novel Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India was an instant success. His body of work in the horror genre is immense, with H.P. Lovecraft praising ‘The Upper Berth’ as Crawford’s ‘weird masterpiece’ and ‘one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature’.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Lot No. 249

(Originally Published in Harper’s Magazine, 1892)

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. As a medical student Doyle was so impressed by his professor’s powers of deduction that he was inspired to create the illustrious and much-loved figure Sherlock Holmes. However, he became increasingly interested in spiritualism and the supernatural, leaving him keen to explore fantastical elements in his stories. Doyle’s vibrant and remarkable characters have breathed life into all of his stories, engaging readers throughout the decades.

Morgan Elektra

She’s Gone

(First Publication)

Morgan Elektra grew up in New York, penning stories of monsters at the dining room table. A former reviewer for genre website Dread Central, she now writes dark fiction, paranormal romance, and LGBTQ+ erotica. She lives near Savannah, Georgia with her husband, their cat Harlequin, and – if the rumours are to be believed (and she sincerely hopes they are) – an awful lot of ghosts. Her story ‘Swim Lessons’ appears in the 2016 Women in Horror Annual anthology. A Single Heartbeat, the first novella in her Out in the Shadows series, is currently available from MLR Press. Find her online at bymorganelektra.wordpress.com

Hanns Heinz Ewers

The Spider

(Originally Published in Die Besessenen, 1908; first translated into English in 1915)

A German actor, poet and writer of short fiction, Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871–1943) was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. Though his interest in theatre led to him founding his own acting company in the early 1900s, he soon gave up on that field to focus on writing occult and horror stories, which included a trilogy of novels. The second of these novels, Alarune, was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and became his most well-known and highly acclaimed work. He also wrote several poems, plays and short stories, and has been praised as an influential author in the history of the horror genre.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Carmilla

(Originally Published in The Dark Blue, 1871)

The remarkable father of Victorian ghost stories Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) was born in Dublin, Ireland. His gothic tales and mystery novels led to him become a leading ghost story writer of the nineteenth century. Three oft-cited works of his are Uncle Silas, Carmilla and The House by the Churchyard, which all are assumed to have influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Le Fanu wrote his most successful and productive works after his wife’s tragic death and he remained a relatively strong writer up until his own death.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

The Southwest Chamber

(Originally Published in Everybody’s Magazine, 1903)

The American author Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) was born in Randolph, Massachusetts. Most of Freeman’s works were influenced by her strict childhood, as her parents were orthodox Congregationalists and harboured strong religious views. While working as a secretary for the author Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., she was inspired to write herself. Supernatural topics kept catching her attention, and she began to write many short stories with a combination of supernatural and domestic realism, her most famous being ‘A New England Nun’. She wrote a number of ghost tales, which were turned into famous ghost story collections after her death.

Elizabeth Gaskell

The Doom of the Griffiths

(Originally Published in Harper’s Monthly, 1858)

Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) was born in London, England and is widely known for her biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë. In a family of eight children, only Elizabeth and her brother John survived past childhood. Her mother’s early death caused her to be raised by her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, a place that inspired her to later write her most famous work Cranford. Tragedy struck again when Gaskell’s only son died, and it was then that she began to write. All the misfortune in her life led her to write her many gothic and horror tales.

Matthew Gorman

Swim At Your Own Risk

(Originally Published in The Yellow Booke, 2016)

Matthew Gorman is a freelance author of horror and other speculative fiction residing in Seattle, Washington. A self-professed perfectionist, Matthew spent years honing his craft before he was ever satisfied enough to submit anything to a publisher. To date, his short stories have been published in several anthologies and he is currently hard at work upon his first full-length novel. Matthew is a huge fan of classic horror in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert W. Chambers, as well as a steadfast acolyte of such modern horror luminaries as Clive Barker and Stephen King.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Edward Randolph’s Portrait

(Originally Published in the Democratic Review, 1838)

The prominent American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was born in Salem, Massachusetts. His most famous novel The Scarlet Letter helped him become established as a writer in the 1850s. Most of his works were influenced by his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, as well as by his extended financial struggles. Hawthorne’s works often incorporated a dark romanticism that focused on the evil and sin of humanity. Some of his most famous works detailed supernatural presences or occurrences, as in his The House of the Seven Gables as well as many of his short stories.

William Hope Hodgson

The Voice in the Night

(Originally Published in The Blue Book Magazine, 1907)

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was born in Essex, England but moved several times with his family, including living for some time in County Galway, Ireland – a setting that would later inspire The House on the Borderland. Hodgson made several unsuccessful attempts to run away to sea, until his uncle secured him some work in the Merchant Marine. This association with the ocean would unfold later in his many sea stories. After some initial rejections of his writing, Hodgson managed to become a full-time writer of both novels and short stories, which form a fantastic legacy of adventure, mystery and horror fiction.

Robert E. Howard

Worms of the Earth

(Originally Published in Weird Tales, 1932)

Robert Ervin Howard (1906–36) was born in Peaster, Texas. He is responsible for forming the subgenre within fantasy known as ‘Sword and Sorcery’, establishing him as a pulp fiction writer. Being a very intellectual and athletic man, Howard wrote within the genres of westerns, boxing, historical and horror fiction as well, and created the famous pulp hero Conan the Cimmerian. Howard will perhaps always be known best for his association with the pulp magazine Weird Tales, in which he published many stories of an adventure, horror and fantasy nature.

M.R. James

The Mezzotint

(Originally Published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Arnold, 1904)

Casting the Runes

(Originally Published in More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Arnold, 1911)

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936), whose works are regarded as being at the forefront of the ghost story genre, was born in Kent, England. James dispensed with the traditional, predictable techniques of ghost story construction, instead using realistic contemporary settings for his works. He was also a British medieval scholar, so his stories often incorporated antiquarian elements. His stories often reflect his childhood in Suffolk and talented acting career, which both seem to have assisted in the build-up of tension and horror in his works.

Jason L. Kawa

Merry-Go-Round, Never Broke Down

(First Publication)

Jason L. Kawa is an author from New York City, where he works on the production side of a major film and television studio. He has stories that will appear in the upcoming anthology What Dwells Below from Sirens Call Publications, and the October edition of Ink Stains Anthology from Dark Alley Press. Some of his influences in the Horror genre include Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Michael Crichton, and Edgar Allan Poe; not to mention many other writers who have numerous speculative elements to their stories, such as Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, and Kurt Vonnegut. Find out more about Jason at jasonlkawa.wordpress.com

Stephen Kotowych

The Murmur of Its Name

(First Publication)

Stephen Kotowych is a winner of the Writers of the Future Grand Prize; Spain’s Ictineu Award; and a two-time finalist for Canada’s Aurora Award. His stories have appeared in Interzone, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show and numerous anthologies, and have been translated into a dozen languages. His first collection of short stories, Seven Against Tomorrow, is available now. He lives in Toronto with his family. He enjoys guitar, tropical fish, and writing about himself in the third person. For more information about Stephen and his writing visit his website www.kotowych.com

H.P. Lovecraft

The Shunned House

(Originally Published by Recluse Press, 1928)

Master of weird fiction Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Featuring unknown and otherworldly creatures, his stories were one of the first to mix science fiction with horror. Plagued by nightmares from an early age, he was inspired to write his dark and strange fantasy tales; and the isolation he must have experienced from suffering frequent illnesses, can be felt as a prominent theme in his work. Lovecraft inspired many other authors, and his most famous story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ has gone on to influence many aspects of popular culture.

Roger Luckhurst

Foreword: Supernatural Horror Short Stories

Roger Luckhurst is a professor in the School of Arts, at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is author of eight books, including The Mummy’s Curse (2012) and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015). He has also edited Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the collection Late Victorian Gothic Tales for the Oxford World’s Classics series. He also writes on film for Sight and Sound, and has written books on the films Alien and The Shining for the British Film Institute ‘Classics’ series.

G.L. McDorman

An Idle Dream, Quite Gone Now

(Originally Published in The Yellow Booke, 2016)

G.L. McDorman has served as a soldier, a spy, and a scholar. Following a passion for dead languages and mysterious ruins, he is in the process of earning his doctorate in medieval history at Princeton University, where he spends an inordinate amount of time mulling things over in the gothic chapel designed by weird-fiction writer Ralph Adams Cram. When G.L. McDorman isn’t writing, you’ll find him climbing mountains or ambling across wastelands in search of adventure and glory. His novella The Quality of Mercy is available now in print and digital.

A. Merritt

The Pool of the Stone God

(Originally Published under the pseudonym ‘W. Fenimore’ in American Weekly, 1923)

Abraham Merritt (1884–1943) was born in Beverly, New Jersey. A writer of speculative fiction as well as an inductee to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, Merritt wrote characteristic pulp fiction themes of lost civilizations, monsters and treacherous villains. Many of his short stories and novels were published in Argosy All-Story Weekly. His most famous novels are perhaps Burn Witch Burn, The Ship Ishtar and Dwellers in the Mirage. His writing was known for its excessive descriptive detail as well as the immense creativity of the alternative worlds he created.

Michelle Muenzler

This Time, Forever

(First Publication)

Michelle Muenzler, known at her local Texas SF/F conventions as ‘The Cookie Lady’, writes fiction both dark and strange to counterbalance the sweetness of her baking. Her short fiction and poetry can be read in numerous science fiction and fantasy magazines, and she takes immense joy in crinkling words like little foil puppets. Feel free to chase her down at a local SF/F convention where she will ply you with hundreds of home-baked cookies while gleefully describing the latest horror she’s written. You can also find her at michellemuenzler.com, but she finds electronic cookies far less tasty than real ones.

Edith Nesbit

The Power of Darkness

(Originally Published in The Strand Magazine, 1905)

Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) was born in Kennington, England. Nesbit established herself as a successful author and poet, writing a variety of literature ranging from children’s books to adult horror stories. She co-founded the Fabian Society and was also a strong political activist. Marrying young and frequently moving home, Nesbit made many friendships with other writers including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Although she gained most of her success from her children’s books, like the ever-popular The Railway Children, she was also a well-known horror writer, with such collections as Something Wrong and Grim Tales.

Fitz-James O’Brien

The Wondersmith

(Originally Published in Atlantic Monthly, 1859)

Born in County Cork in Ireland, Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–62) was an Irish-American poet and writer deeply involved in the genre of Gothic fiction and an early writer in the science fiction movement. He was the son of a lawyer and first worked in London as a journalist before moving to New York City to begin writing. Amongst his most famous short stories are ‘The Wondersmith’ and ‘The Diamond Lens’. O’Brien died after being wounded in the American Civil War, and H.P. Lovecraft said that O’Brien’s tragically young death ‘undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror’.

Edgar Allan Poe

William Wilson

(Originally Published in The Gift, a Christmas, New Year, and Birthday Present for 1840, 1839)

The versatile writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He is well known as an influential author, poet, editor and literary critic who wrote during the American Romantic Movement. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, and his works are famously filled with terror, mystery, death and hauntings. Some of his better-known works include his poems ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabel Lee’, and the short stories ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. The dark, mystifying characters of his tales have captured the public’s imagination and reflect the struggling, poverty-stricken lifestyle he lived his whole life.

John Polidori

The Vampyre

(Originally Published in New Monthly Magazine, 1819; it was falsely attributed to Lord Byron)

One of the first to write about the popular subject of vampires in English, John Polidori (1795–1821) was born in London, England and is deeply associated with both the Romantic and Gothic movements in literature. He was greatly influenced by the work of Lord Byron, for whom he worked as a personal physician. Polidori was with Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley on the night the group of writers gathered to write and share ghost stories. This is when Mary Shelley wrote the beginning for her novel Frankenstein, and where Polidori got the idea for The Vampyre.

Cody Schroeder

Tracks in the Snow

(First Publication)

Despite efforts to escape, Cody Schroeder has lived his life in the hills and forests of Gatewood, Missouri, USA. He has a lifelong love of all things strange, mysterious, and fantastic. Things most people find appalling. Today he devotes unreasonable amounts of time to writing about such subjects. Favourite writers include Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett among countless others. He graduated from Arkansas State University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He has previously had work published in The Literary Hatchet.

Oliver Smith

John Johnson

(First Publication)

Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. His writing developed from an interest in surrealism and as a result his stories and poetry generally involve the weird, fantastic, and speculative: a mermaid in the bath, pickled brains plotting in the pantry, and a giant flea where the housemate used to be. His prose has been included in anthologies from, among others, Inkermen Press and Ex Occidente Press. His poetry has appeared in Spectral Realms, Eye to the Telescope, and Illumen. Much of his previously published writing is included in his collection Basilisk Soup & Other Fantasies.

Lucy A. Snyder

Magdala Amygdala

(Originally Published in Dark Faith: Invocations, 2012)

Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of 10 books and about 100 published short stories. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Best Horror of the Year and podcast Pseudopod. She lives in Ohio and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter @LucyASnyder

Mariah Southworth

My Brother Tom

(First Publication)

Mariah Southworth lives in Northern California with her husband Gareth and their cat Beatrix. Mariah’s current day job is working as an office assistant in a bakery. Sometimes she sings songs from Sweeney Todd while working. She enjoys writing both short and long works of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. Her latest Science Fiction story will be appearing in Cuppatea Publications’ Humans Wanted anthology. To find inspiration for her horror writing, Mariah reads both classical and modern horror, but the best ideas come from nightmares.

Bram Stoker

The Judge’s House

(Originally Published in Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic Life’s Christmas annual Holly Leaves, 1891)

Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Dublin, Ireland. Often ill during his childhood, he spent a lot of time in bed listening to his mother’s grim stories, sparking his imagination. Striking up a friendship as an adult with the actor Henry Irving, Stoker eventually came to work and live in London, meeting notable authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. Stoker wrote several stories based on supernatural horror, such as the gothic masterpiece Dracula which has left an enduring and powerful impact on the genre, creating one of the most iconic figures that horror fiction has ever seen.

Angela Sylvaine

The Bride

(First Publication)

Angela Sylvaine still believes in monsters, both real and imagined, and always checks under the bed. She holds degrees in psychology and philosophy and will be published in the June 2016 issue of Disturbed Digest. North Dakotan by birth and Coloradoan by choice, she lives with her husband and four creepy cats on the front range of the Rockies. You can follow her on Facebook @authorangelasylvaine and Twitter @sylvaine_angela

Damien Angelica Walters

The Floating Girls: A Documentary

(Originally Published in Jamais Vu, 2014)

Damien Angelica Walters is the author of Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Publications, 2015), Paper Tigers (Dark House Press, 2016), and the forthcoming Cry Your Way Home (Apex Publications, 2017). Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the 2016 World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda’s Song, Cemetery Dance, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on the web at damienangelicawalters.com

Desmond Warzel

The Final One Percent

(Originally Published in Blood Rites, 2013)

Desmond Warzel is the author of a few dozen short stories. These have appeared in nifty magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction, at fancy websites like Tor.com, and on newfangled podcasts like Escape Pod. He lives in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Most of his tales are fantasy and science fiction, but he is occasionally tempted to subject his characters to something a little darker. When not writing, he spends his time rooting for the Cleveland Indians; this pastime generates the despair necessary for fashioning tales of true horror.

H.G. Wells

The Flowering of the Strange Orchid

(Originally Published in the Pall Mall Budget, 1894)

The Red Room

(Originally Published in The Idler, 1896)

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was born in Kent, England. Novelist, journalist, social reformer and historian, Wells is one of the greatest ever science fiction writers and, along with Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as a ‘founding father’ of the genre. With Aldous Huxley and, later, George Orwell, he defined the adventurous, social concern of early speculative fiction where the human condition was played out on a greater stage. Wells created over 50 novels, including his famous works The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of the Worlds, as well as a fantastic array of gothic short stories.

Michaël Wertenberg

Midnight Snack

(First Publication)

Michaël Wertenberg is a French-American writer with publishing credits in: The Literary Hatchet, The Scarlet Leaf Review, Page & Spine, Pulp Modern, The Fable Online, Unlost and the Blyant Publishing anthology Blaek. Inspired by his own struggles with depression and addiction, and his less-than-sane upbringing, he explores, through his writing, the many derivations of the mind, notably its fascinating yet frightening ability to rationalize and defend the irrational. His blog, My Disease-Ridden Mind, can be found at michaelwertenberg.wixsite.com/mysite

Edward Lucas White

The House of the Nightmare

(Originally Published in Smith’s Magazine, 1906)

Edward Lucas White (1866–1934) was born in Bergen, New Jersey. He attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and lived there for the rest of his life. Though he wrote poems and historical novels, he is best known for his horror stories, two of the most famous being ‘The House of the Nightmare’ and ‘Lukundoo’. Both stories were based on his nightmares and combine themes of ghosts, mysticism and the macabre. Throughout his life, a work he returned to again and again was his utopian novel Plus Ultra – it was never published, but is estimated to be around half a million words in length.

Trisha J. Wooldridge

Manipulation

(First Publication, with a flash fiction version having appeared online through Circlet Press in 2016)

Trisha J. Wooldridge, from Auburn, Massachusetts in the U.S., writes short stories, novellas, novels, magazine articles, and poetry about bad-ass faeries, carnivorous horses, social justice witches, Tarot cards, vengeful spirits—and mundane stuff like food, hay-eating horses, social justice debates, Goth bands, writer advice, and alcoholic spirits. As child-friendly T.J. Wooldridge, she’s published three scary children’s books. She’s a freelance editor of over fifty novels and two anthologies. She spends rare moments of mystical ‘free time’ with a very patient Husband-of-Awesome, a calico horse, a giant Bunny-of-Doom, and a bratty tabby cat. Join her adventures at www.anovelfriend.com

FLAME TREE PUBLISHING

New & Classic Writing

Flame Tree’s Gothic Fantasy books offer a carefully curated series of new titles, each with combinations of original and classic writing:

Chilling Horror Short Stories

Chilling Ghost Short Stories

Science Fiction Short Stories

Murder Mayhem Short Stories

Crime & Mystery Short Stories

Swords & Steam Short Stories

Dystopia Utopia Short Stories

Supernatural Horror Short Stories

Lost Worlds Short Stories

Time Travel Short Stories

Heroic Fantasy Short Stories

Pirates & Ghosts Short Stories

Agents & Spies Short Stories

Endless Apocalypse Short Stories

Alien Invasion Short Stories

Lost Souls Short Stories

Robots & Artificial Intelligence Short Stories

Companion titles offering rich collections of classic literature include:

H.G. Wells Short Stories

Lovecraft Short Stories

Sherlock Holmes Collection

Edgar Allan Poe Collection

Mary Shelley Horror Stories

Bram Stoker Horror Stories

Celtic Myths & Tales

Greek Myths & Tales

Norse Myths & Tales

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Introducing our new fiction list:

FLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS

Award-Winning Authors & Original Voices

Horror, Crime, Science Fiction & Fantasy
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Table of Contents

- Contents
- Foreword: Supernatural Horror Short Stories
- Caterpillars
- The Boarded Window
- John Bartine’s Watch
- Bones of the Dead
- In the Court of the Dragon
- Crossroads
- The Mourning Woman
- The Fifth Gable
- The Dream Woman
- The Upper Berth
- For the Blood is the Life
- Lot No. 249
- She’s Gone
- The Spider
- Carmilla
- The Southwest Chamber
- The Doom of the Griffiths
- Swim At Your Own Risk
- Edward Randolph’s Portrait
- The Voice in the Night
- Worms of the Earth
- The Mezzotint
- Casting the Runes
- Merry-Go-Round, Never Broke Down
- The Murmur of Its Name
- The Shunned House
- An Idle Dream, Quite Gone Now
- The Pool of the Stone God
- This Time, Forever
- The Power of Darkness
- The Wondersmith
- William Wilson
- The Vampyre
- Tracks in the Snow
- John Johnson
- Magdala Amygdala
- My Brother Tom
- The Judge’s House
- The Bride
- The Floating Girls: A Documentary
- The Final One Percent
- The Flowering of the Strange Orchid
- The Red Room
- Midnight Snack
- The House of the Nightmare
- Manipulation
- Biographies & Sources
- FLAME TREE PUBLISHING