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Post by Jagathara on Oct 4, 2005 23:02:44 GMT -7
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot
BY AMBROSE BIERCE
It is well known that the old Manton house is haunted. In all the rural district near about, and even in the town of Marshall, a mile away, not one person of unbiased mind entertains a doubt of it; incredulity is confined to those opinionated persons who will be called 'cranks' as soon as the useful word shall have penetrated the intellectual demesne of the Marshall Advance. The evidence that the house is haunted is of two kinds: the testimony of disinterested witnesses who have had ocular proof, and that of the house itself. The former may be disregarded and ruled out on any of the various grounds of objection which may be urged against it by the ingenious; but facts within the observation of all are material and controlling. In the first place, the Manton house has been unoccupied by mortals for more than ten years, and with its outbuildings is slowly falling into decay - a circumstance which in itself the judicious will hardly venture to ignore. It stands a little way off the loneliest reach of the Marshall and Harriston road, in an opening which was once a farm and is still disfigured with strips of rotting fence and half covered with brambles overrunning a stony and sterile soil long unacquainted with the plough. The house itself is in tolerably good condition, though badly weather-stained and in dire need of attention from the glazier, the smaller male population of the region having attested in the manner of its kind its disapproval of dwelling without dwellers. It is two stories in height, nearly square, its front pierced by a single doorway flanked on each side by a window boarded up to the very top. Corresponding windows above, not protected, serve to admit light and rain to the rooms of the upper floor. Grass and weeds grow pretty rankly all about, and a few shade trees, somewhat the worse for wind, and leaning all in one direction, seem to be making a concerted effort to run away. In short, as the Marshall town humorist explained in the columns of the Advance, 'the proposition that the Manton house is badly haunted is the only logical conclusion from the premises.' The fact that in this dwelling Mr. Manton thought it expedient one night some ten years ago to rise and cut the throats of his wife and two small children, removing at once to another part of the country, has no doubt done its share in directing public attention to the fitness of the place for supernatural phenomena.
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To this house, one summer evening, came four men in a wagon. Three of them promptly alighted, and the one who had been driving hitched the team to the only remaining post of what had been a fence. The fourth remained seated in the wagon. 'Come,' said one of his companions, approaching him, while the others moved away in the direction of the dwelling - 'this is the place.' The man addressed did not move. 'By God!' he said harshly, 'this is a trick, and it looks to me as if you were in it.' 'Perhaps I am,' the other said, looking him straight in the face and speaking in a tone which had something of contempt in it. 'You will remember, however, that the choice of place was with your own assent left to the other side. Of course if you are afraid of spooks -- ' 'I am afraid of nothing,' the man interrupted with another oath, and sprang to the ground. The two then joined the others at the door, which one of them had already opened with some difficulty, caused by rust of lock and hinge. All entered. Inside it was dark, but the man who had unlocked the door produced a candle and matches and made a light. He then unlocked a door on their right as they stood in the passage. This gave them entrance to a large, square room that the candle but dimly lighted. The floor had a thick carpeting of dust, which partly muffled their footfalls. Cobwebs were in the angles of the walls and depended from the ceiling like strips of rotting lace, making undulatory movements in the disturbed air. The room had two windows in adjoining sides, but from neither could anything be seen except the rough inner surfaces of boards a few inches from the glass. There was no fireplace, no furniture; there was nothing: besides the cobwebs and the dust, the four men were the only objects there which were not a part of the structure. Strange enough they looked in the yellow light of the candle. The one who had so reluctantly alighted was especially spectacular - he might have been called sensational. He was of middle age, heavily built, deep-chested and broad-shouldered. Looking at his figure, one would have said that he had a giant's strength; at his features, that he would use it like a giant. He was clean-shaven, his hair rather closely cropped and grey. His low forehead was seamed with wrinkles above the eyes, and over the nose these became vertical. The heavy black brows followed the same law, saved from meeting only by an upward turn at what would otherwise have been the point of contact. Deeply sunken beneath these glowed in the obscure light a pair of eyes of uncertain colour, but obviously enough too small. There was something forbidding in their expression, which was not bettered by the cruel mouth and wide jaw. The nose was well enough, as noses go; one does not expect much of noses. All that was sinister in the man's face seemed accentuated by an unnatural pallor - he appeared altogether bloodless.
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The appearance of the other men was sufficiently commonplace: they were such persons as one meets and forgets that he met. All were younger than the man described, between whom and the eldest of the others, who stood apart, there was apparently no kindly feeling. They avoided looking at each other. 'Gentlemen,' said the man holding the candle and keys,' I believe everything is right. Are you ready, Mr. Rosser?' The man standing apart from the group bowed and smiled. 'And you, Mr. Grossmith?' The heavy man bowed and scowled. 'You will be pleased to remove your outer clothing.' Their hats, coats, waistcoats and neckwear were soon removed and thrown outside the door, in the passage. The man with the candle now nodded, and the fourth man - he who had urged Grossmith to leave the wagon - produced from the pocket of his overcoat two long, murderous-looking bowie-knives, which he drew now from their leather scabbards. 'They are exactly alike,' he said, presenting one to each of the two principals - for by this time the dullest observer would have understood the nature of this meeting. It was to be a duel to the death. Each combatant took a knife, examined it critically near the candle and tested the strength of blade and handle across his lifted knee. Their persons were then searched in turn, each by the second of the other. 'If it is agreeable to you, Mr. Grossmith,' said the man holding the light,' you will place yourself in that corner.' He indicated the angle of the room farthest from the door, whither Grossmith retired, his second parting from him with a grasp of the hand which had nothing of cordiality in it. In the angle nearest the door Mr. Rosser stationed himself, and after a whispered consultation his second left him, joining the other near the door. At that moment the candle was suddenly extinguished, leaving all in profound darkness. This may have been done by the draught from the opened door; whatever the cause, the effect was startling. 'Gentlemen,' said a voice which sounded strangely unfamiliar in the altered condition affecting the relations of the senses - 'gentlemen, you will not move until you hear the closing of the outer door.' A sound of trampling ensued, then the closing of the inner door; and finally the outer one closed with a concussion which shook the entire building.
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A few minutes afterward a belated farmer's boy met a light wagon which was being driven furiously toward the town of Marshall. He declared that behind the two figures on the front seat stood a third, with its hands upon the bowed shoulders of the others, who appeared to struggle vainly to free themselves from its grasp. This figure, unlike the others, was clad in white, and had undoubtedly boarded the wagon as it passed the haunted house. As the lad could boast a considerable former experience with the supernatural thereabouts his word had the weight justly due to the testimony of an expert. The story (in connection with the next day's events) eventually appeared in the Advance, with some slight literary embellishments and a concluding intimation that the gentlemen referred to would be allowed the use of the paper's columns for their version of the night's adventure. But the privilege remained without a claimant. The events that led up to this 'duel in the dark' were simple enough. One evening three young men of the town of Marshall were sitting in a quiet corner of the porch of the village hotel, smoking and discussing such matters as three educated young men of a Southern village would naturally find interesting. Their names were King, Sancher and Rosser. At a little distance, within easy hearing, but taking no part in the conversation, sat a fourth. He was a stranger to the others. They merely knew that on his arrival by the stage-coach that afternoon he had written in the hotel register the name Robert Grossmith. He had not been observed to speak to anyone except the hotel clerk. He seemed, indeed, singularly fond of his own company - or, as the personnel of the Advance expressed it, 'grossly addicted to evil associations.' But then it should be said in justice to the stranger that the personnel was himself of a too convivial disposition fairly to judge one differently gifted, and had, moreover, experienced a slight rebuff in an effort at an 'interview.' 'I hate any kind of deformity in a woman,' said King, 'whether natural or - acquired. I have a theory that any physical defect has its correlative mental and moral defect.' 'I infer, then,' said Rosser gravely, 'that a lady lacking the moral advantage of a nose would find the struggle to become Mrs. King an arduous enterprise.'
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'Of course you may put it that way,' was the reply; 'but, seriously, I once threw over a most charming girl on learning quite accidentally that she had suffered amputation of a toe. My conduct was brutal if you like, but if I had married that girl I should have been miserable for life and should have made her so.' 'Whereas,' said Sancher, with a light laugh, 'by marrying a gentleman of more liberal views she escaped with a parted throat.' 'Ah, you know to whom I refer. Yes, she married Manton, but I don't know about his liberality; I'm not sure but he cut her throat because he discovered that she lacked that excellent thing in woman, the middle toe of the right foot.' 'Look at that chap!' said Rosser in a low voice, his eyes fixed upon the stranger. 'That chap' was obviously listening intently to the conversation. 'Damn his impudence!' muttered King - ' what ought we to do?' 'That's an easy one,' Rosser replied, rising. 'Sir,' he continued, addressing the stranger, 'I think it would be better if you would remove your chair to the other end of the veranda. The presence of gentlemen is evidently an unfamiliar situation to you.' The man sprang to his feet and strode forward with clenched hands, his face white with rage. All were now standing. Sancher stepped between the belligerents. 'You are hasty and unjust,' he said to Rosser; 'this gentleman has done nothing to deserve such language.' But Rosser would not withdraw a word. By the custom of the country and the time there could be but one outcome to the quarrel. 'I demand the satisfaction due to a gentleman,' said the stranger, who had become more calm. 'I have not an acquaintance in this region. Perhaps you, sir,' bowing to Sancher, 'will be kind enough to represent me in this matter.' Sancher accepted the trust - somewhat reluctantly it must be confessed, for the man's appearance and manner were not at all to his liking. King, who during the colloquy had hardly removed his eyes from the stranger's face and had not spoken a word, consented with a nod to act for Rosser, and the upshot of it was that, the principals having retired, a meeting was arranged for the next evening. The nature of the arrangements has been already disclosed. The duel with knives in a dark room was once a commoner feature of south-western life than it is likely to be again. How thin a veneering of 'chivalry' covered the essential brutality of the code under which such encounters were possible we shall see.
< 6 >
In the blaze of a midsummer noonday the old Manton house was hardly true to its traditions. It was of the earth, earthy. The sunshine caressed it warmly and affectionately, with evident disregard of its bad reputation. The grass greening all the expanse in its front seemed to grow, not rankly, but with a natural and joyous exuberance, and the weeds blossomed quite like plants. Full of charming lights and shadows and populous with pleasant-voiced birds, the neglected shade trees no longer struggled to run away, but bent reverently beneath their burden of sun and song. Even in the glassless upper windows was an expression of peace and contentment, due to the light within. Over the stony fields the visible heat danced with a lively tremor incompatible with the gravity which is an attribute of the supernatural. Such was the aspect under which the place presented itself to Sheriff Adams and two other men who had come out from Marshall to look at it. One of these men was Mr. King, the sheriff's deputy; the other, whose name was Brewer, was a brother of the late Mrs. Manton. Under a beneficent law of the State relating to property which had been for a certain period abandoned by an owner whose residence cannot be ascertained, the sheriff was legal custodian of the Manton farm and appurtenances thereunto belonging. His present visit was in mere perfunctory compliance with some order of a court in which Mr. Brewer had an action to get possession of the property as heir to his deceased sister. By a mere coincidence, the visit was made on the day after the night that Deputy King had unlocked the house for another and very different purpose. His presence now was not of his own choosing: he had been ordered to accompany his superior, and at the moment could think of nothing more prudent than simulated alacrity in obedience to the command. Carelessly opening the front door, which to his surprise was not locked, the sheriff was amazed to see, lying on the floor of the passage into which it opened, a confused heap of men's apparel. Examination showed it to consist of two hats, and the same number of coats, waistcoats and scarves, all in a remarkably good state of preservation, albeit somewhat defiled by the dust in which they lay. Mr. Brewer was equally astonished, but Mr. King's emotion is not on record. With a new and lively interest in his own actions the sheriff now unlatched and pushed open the door on the right, and the three entered. The room was apparently vacant - no; as their eyes became accustomed to the dimmer light something was visible in the farthest angle of the wall. It was a human figure - that of a man crouching close in the corner. Something in the attitude made the intruders halt when they had barely passed the threshold. The figure more and more clearly defined itself. The man was upon one knee, his back in the angle of the wall, his shoulders elevated to the level of his ears, his hands before his face, palms outward, the fingers spread and crooked like claws; the white face turned upward on the retracted neck had an expression of unutterable fright, the mouth half open, the eyes incredibly expanded. He was stone dead. Yet, with the exception of a bowie-knife, which had evidently fallen from his own hand, not another object was in the room.
< 7 >
In thick dust that covered the floor were some confused footprints near the door and along the wall through which it opened. Along one of the adjoining walls, too, past the boarded-up windows, was the trail made by the man himself in reaching his corner. Instinctively in approaching the body the three men followed that trail. The sheriff grasped one of the out-thrown arms; it was as rigid as iron, and the application of a gentle force rocked the entire body without altering the relation of its parts. Brewer, pale with excitement, gazed intently into the distorted face. 'God of mercy!' he suddenly cried, 'it is Manton! ' 'You are right,' said King, with an evident attempt at calmness: 'I knew Manton. He then wore a full beard and his hair long, but this is he.' He might have added: 'I recognized him when he challenged Rosser. I told Rosser and Sancher who he was before we played him this horrible trick. When Rosser left this dark room at our heels, forgetting his outer clothing in the excitement, and driving away with us in his shirt sleeves - all through the discreditable proceedings we knew whom we were dealing with, murderer and coward that he was!' But nothing of this did Mr. King say. With his better light he was trying to penetrate the mystery of the man's death. That he had not once moved from the corner where he had been stationed; that his posture was that of neither attack nor defence; that he had dropped his weapon; that he had obviously perished of sheer horror of something that he saw - these were circumstances which Mr. King's disturbed intelligence could not rightly comprehend. Groping in intellectual darkness for a clue to his maze of doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one who ponders momentous matters, fell upon something which, there, in the light of day and in the presence of living companions, affected him with terror. In the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor - leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton's crouching corpse - were three parallel lines of footprints - light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman's. From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one way. Brewer, who had observed them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an attitude of rapt attention, horribly pale.
< 8 >
'Look at that!' he cried, pointing with both hands at the nearest print of the woman's right foot, where she had apparently stopped and stood. 'The middle toe is missing - it was Gertrude!' Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister of Mr. Brewer. Taken from- www.short-stories.co.uk/
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Post by Jagathara on Oct 4, 2005 23:09:33 GMT -7
A sort of 19th century American Psycho. More obviously humorous and satirical - but equally grim. (Humour) My Favorite Murderby Ambrose Bierce Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was arrested and put upon my trial, which lasted seven years. In charging the jury, the judge of the Court of Acquittal remarked that it was one of the most ghastly crimes that he had ever been called upon to explain away. At this, my attorney rose and said: "May it please your Honor, crimes are ghastly or agreeable only by comparison. If you were familiar with the details of my client's previous murder of his uncle you would discern in his later offence (if offence it may be called) something in the nature of tender forbearance and filial consideration for the feelings of the victim. The appalling ferocity of the former assassination was indeed inconsistent with any hypothesis but that of guilt; and had it not been for the fact that the honorable judge before whom he was tried was the president of a life insurance company that took risks on hanging, and in which my client held a policy, it is hard to see how he could decently have been acquitted. If your Honor would like to hear about it for instruction and guidance of your Honor's mind, this unfortunate man, my client, will consent to give himself the pain of relating it under oath." The district attorney said: "Your Honor, I object. Such a statement would be in the nature of evidence, and the testimony in this case is closed. The prisoner's statement should have been introduced three years ago, in the spring of 1881." "In a statutory sense," said the judge, "you are right, and in the Court of Objections and Technicalities you would get a ruling in your favor. But not in a Court of Acquittal. The objection is overruled." "I except," said the district attorney. "You cannot do that," the judge said. "I must remind you that in order to take an exception you must first get this case transferred for a time to the Court of Exceptions on a formal motion duly supported by affidavits. A motion to that effect by your predecessor in office was denied by me during the first year of this trial. Mr. Clerk, swear the prisoner." The customary oath having been administered, I made the following statement, which impressed the judge with so strong a sense of the comparative triviality of the offence for which I was on trial that he made no further search for mitigating circumstances, but simply instructed the jury to acquit, and I left the court, without a stain upon my reputation: < 2 > "I was born in I856 in Kalamakee, Mich., of honest and reputable parents, one of whom Heaven has mercifully spared to comfort me in my later years. In I867 the family came to California and settled near black person Head, where my father opened a road agency and prospered beyond the dreams of avarice. He was a reticent, saturnine man then, though his increasing years have now somewhat relaxed the austerity of his disposition, and I believe that nothing but his memory of the sad event for which I am now on trial prevents him from manifesting a genuine hilarity. "Four years after we had set up the road agency an itinerant preacher came along, and having no other way to pay for the night's lodging that we gave him, favored us with an exhortation of such power that, praise God, we were all converted to religion. My father at once sent for his brother the Hon. William Ridley of Stockton, and on his arrival turned over the agency to him, charging him nothing for the franchise nor plant - the latter consisting of a Winchester rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, and an assortment of masks made out of flour sacks. The family then moved to Ghost Rock and opened a dance house. It was called 'The Saints' Rest Hurdy-Gurdy,' and the proceedings each night began with prayer. It was there that my now sainted mother, by her grace in the dance, acquired the sobriquet of 'The Bucking Walrus.' "In the fall of '75 I had occasion to visit Coyote, on the road to Mahala, and took the stage at Ghost Rock. There were four other passengers. About three miles beyond black person Head, persons whom I identified as my Uncle William and his two sons held up the stage. Finding nothing in the express box, they went through the passengers. I acted a most honorable part in the affair, placing myself in line with the others, holding up my hands and permitting myself to be deprived of forty dollars and a gold watch. From my behavior no one could have suspected that I knew the gentlemen who gave the entertainment. A few days later, when I went to black person Head and asked for the return of my money and watch my uncle and cousins swore they knew nothing of the matter, and they affected a belief that my father and I had done the job ourselves in dishonest violation of commercial good faith. Uncle William even threatened to retaliate by starting an opposition dance house at Ghost Rock. As 'The Saints' Rest' had become rather unpopular, I saw that this would assuredly ruin it and prove a paying enterprise, so I told my uncle that I was willing to overlook the past if he would take me into the scheme and keep the partnership a secret from my father. This fair offer he rejected, and I then perceived that it would be better and more satisfactory if he were dead. < 3 > "My plans to that end were soon perfected, and communicating them to my dear parents I had the gratification of receiving their approval. My father said he was proud of me, and my mother promised that although her religion forbade her to assist in taking human life I should have the advantage of her prayers for my success. As a preliminary measure looking to my security in case of detection I made an application for membership in that powerful order, the Knights of Murder, and in due course was received as a member of the Ghost Rock commandery. On the day that my probation ended I was for the first time permitted to inspect the records of the order and learn who belonged to it - all the rites of initiation having been conducted in masks. Fancy my delight when, in looking over the roll of membership, I found the third name to be that of my uncle, who indeed was junior vice-chancellor of the order! Here was an opportunity exceeding my wildest dreams - to murder I could add insubordination and treachery. It was what my good mother would have called 'a special Providence.' "At about this time something occurred which caused my cup of joy, already full, to overflow on all sides, a circular cataract of bliss. Three men, strangers in that locality, were arrested for the stage robbery in which I had lost my money and watch. They were brought to trial and, despite my efforts to clear them and fasten the guilt upon three of the most respectable and worthy citizens of Ghost Rock, convicted on the clearest proof. The murder would now be as wanton and reasonless as I could wish. "One morning I shouldered my Winchester rifle, and going over to my uncle's house, near black person Head, asked my Aunt Mary, his wife, if he were at home, adding that I had come to kill him. My aunt replied with her peculiar smile that so many gentleman called on that errand and were afterward carried away without having performed it that I must excuse her for doubting my good faith in the matter. She said I did not look as if I would kill anybody, so, as a proof of good faith I levelled my rifle and wounded a Chinaman who happened to be passing the house. She said she knew whole families that could do a thing of that kind, but Bill Ridley was a horse of another color. She said, however, that I would find him over on the other side of the creek in the sheep lot; and she added that she hoped the best man would win. < 4 > "My Aunt Mary was one of the most fair-minded women that I have ever met. "I found my uncle down on his knees engaged in skinning a sheep. Seeing that he had neither gun nor pistol handy I had not the heart to shoot him, so I approached him, greeted him pleasantly and struck him a powerful blow on the head with the butt of my rifle. I have a very good delivery and Uncle William lay down on his side, then rolled over on his back, spread out his fingers and shivered. Before he could recover the use of his limbs I seized the knife that he had been using and cut his hamstrings. You know, doubtless, that when you sever the Achilles tendon, the patient has no further use of his leg; it is just the same as if he had no leg. Well, I parted them both, and when he revived he was at my service. As soon as he comprehended the situation, he said: " 'Samuel, you have got the drop on me and can afford to be generous. I have only one thing to ask of you, and that is that you carry me to the house and finish me in the bosom of my family.' "I told him I thought that a pretty reasonable request and I would do so if he would let me put him into a wheat sack; he would be easier to carry that way and if we were seen by the neighbors en route it would cause less remark. He agreed to that, and going to the barn I got a sack. This, however, did not fit him; it was too short and much wider than he; so I bent his legs, forced his knees up against his breast and got him into it that way, tying the sack above his head. He was a heavy man and I had all that I could do to get him on my back, but I staggered along for some distance until I came to a swing that some of the children had suspended to the branch of an oak. Here I laid him down and sat upon him to rest, and the sight of the rope gave me a happy inspiration. In twenty minutes my uncle, still in the sack, swung free to the sport of the wind. < 5 > "I had taken down the rope, tied one end tightly about the mouth of the bag, thrown the other across the limb and hauled him up about five feet from the ground. Fastening the other end of the rope also about the mouth of the sack, I had the satisfaction to see my uncle converted into a large, fine pendulum. I must add that he was not himself entirely aware of the nature of the change that he had undergone in his relation to the exterior world, though in justice to a good man's memory I ought to say that I do not think he would in any case have wasted much of my time in vain remonstrance. "Uncle William had a ram that was famous in all that region as a fighter. It was in a state of chronic constitutional indignation. Some deep disappointment in early life had soured its disposition and it had declared war upon the whole world. To say that it would butt anything accessible is but faintly to express the nature and scope of its military activity: the universe was its antagonist; its methods that of a projectile. It fought like the angels and devils, in mid-air, cleaving the atmosphere like a bird, describing a parabolic curve and descending upon its victim at just the exact angle of incidence to make the most of its velocity and weight. Its momentum, calculated in foot-tons, was something incredible. It had been seen to destroy a four year old bull by a single impact upon that animal's gnarly forehead. No stone wall had ever been known to resist its downward swoop; there were no trees tough enough to stay it; it would splinter them into matchwood and defile their leafy honors in the dust. This irascible and implacable brute - this incarnate thunderbolt - this monster of the upper deep, I had seen reposing in the shade of an adjacent tree, dreaming dreams of conquest and glory. It was with a view to summoning it forth to the field of honor that I suspended its master in the manner described. "Having completed my preparations, I imparted to the avuncular pendulum a gentle oscillation, and retiring to cover behind a contiguous rock, lifted up my voice in a long rasping cry whose diminishing final note was drowned in a noise like that of a swearing cat, which emanated from the sack. Instantly that formidable sheep was upon its feet and had taken in the military situation at a glance. In a few moments it had approached, stamping, to within fifty yards of the swinging foeman, who, now retreating and anon advancing, seemed to invite the fray. Suddenly I saw the beast's head drop earthward as if depressed by the weight of its enormous horns; then a dim, white, wavy streak of sheep prolonged itself from that spot in a generally horizontal direction to within about four yards of a point immediately beneath the enemy. There it struck sharply upward, and before it had faded from my gaze at the place whence it had set out I heard a horrid thump and a piercing scream, and my poor uncle shot forward, with a slack rope higher than the limb to which he was attached. Here the rope tautened with a jerk, arresting his flight, and back he swung in a breathless curve to the other end of his arc. The ram had fallen, a heap of indistinguishable legs, wool and horns, but pulling itself together and dodging as its antagonist swept downward it retired at random, alternately shaking its head and stamping its fore-feet. When it had backed about the same distance as that from which it had delivered the assault it paused again, bowed its head as if in prayer for victory and again shot forward, dimly visible as before - a prolonging white streak with monstrous undulations, ending with a sharp ascension. Its course this time was at a right angle to its former one, and its impatience so great that it struck the enemy before he had nearly reached the lowest point of his arc. In consequence he went flying round and round in a horizontal circle whose radius was about equal to half the length of the rope, which I forgot to say was nearly twenty feet long. His shrieks, crescendo in approach and diminuendo in recession, made the rapidity of his revolution more obvious to the ear than to the eye. He had evidently not yet been struck in a vital spot. His posture in the sack and the distance from the ground at which he hung compelled the ram to operate upon his lower extremities and the end of his back. Like a plant that has struck its root into some poisonous mineral, my poor uncle was dying slowly upward. < 6 > "After delivering its second blow the ram had not again retired. The fever of battle burned hot in its heart; its brain was intoxicated with the wine of strife. Like a pugilist who in his rage forgets his skill and fights ineffectively at half-arm's length, the angry beast endeavored to reach its fleeting foe by awkward vertical leaps as he passed overhead, sometimes, indeed, succeeding in striking him feebly, but more frequently overthrown by its own misguided eagerness. But as the impetus was exhausted and the man's circles narrowed in scope and diminished in speed, bringing him nearer to the ground, these tactics produced better results, eliciting a superior quality of screams, which I greatly enjoyed. "Suddenly, as if the bugles had sung truce, the ram suspended hostilities and walked away, thoughtfully wrinkling and smoothing its great aquiline nose, and occasionally cropping a bunch of grass and slowly munching it. It seemed to have tired of war's alarms and resolved to beat the sword into a plowshare and cultivate the arts of peace. Steadily it held its course away from the field of fame until it had gained a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile. There it stopped and stood with its rear to the foe, chewing its cud and apparently half asleep. I observed, however, an occasional slight turn of its head, as if its apathy were more affected than real. "Meantime Uncle William's shrieks had abated with his motion, and nothing was heard from him but long, low moans, and at long intervals my name, uttered in pleading tones exceedingly grateful to my ear. Evidently the man had not the faintest notion of what was being done to him, and was inexpressibly terrified. When Death comes cloaked in mystery he is terrible indeed. Little by little my uncle's oscillations diminished, and finally he hung motionless. I went to him and was about to give him the coup de grace, when I heard and felt a succession of smart shocks which shook the ground like a series of light earthquakes, and turning in the direction of the ram, saw a long cloud of dust approaching me with inconceivable rapidity and alarming effect! At a distance of some thirty yards away it stopped short, and from the near end of it rose into the air what I at first thought a great white bird. Its ascent was so smooth and easy and regular that I could not realize its extraordinary celerity, and was lost in admiration of its grace. To this day the impression remains that it was a slow, deliberate movement, the ram - for it was that animal - being upborne by some power other than its own impetus, and supported through the successive stages of its flight with infinite tenderness and care. My eyes followed its progress through the air with unspeakable pleasure, all the greater by contrast with my former terror of its approach by land. Onward and upward the noble animal sailed, its head bent down almost between its knees, its fore-feet thrown back, its hinder legs trailing to rear like the legs of a soaring heron. < 7 > "At a height of forty or fifty feet, as fond recollection presents it to view, it attained its zenith and appeared to remain an instant stationary; then, tilting suddenly forward without altering the relative position of its parts, it shot downward on a steeper and steeper course with augmenting velocity, passed immediately above me with a noise like the rush of a cannon shot and struck my poor uncle almost squarely on the top of the head! So frightful was the impact that not only the man's neck was broken, but the rope too; and the body of the deceased, forced against the earth, was crushed to pulp beneath the awful front of that meteoric sheep! The concussion stopped all the clocks between Lone Hand and Dutch Dan's, and Professor Davidson, a distinguished authority in matters seismic, who happened to be in the vicinity, promptly explained that the vibrations were from north to southwest. "Altogether, I cannot help thinking that in point of artistic atrocity my murder of Uncle William has seldom been excelled." [/color][/size][/font] Taken from- www.short-stories.co.uk/
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 5, 2005 0:03:03 GMT -7
A more modern story- The LoverBy James Wood She was glad of the lake. It's soft, dark water helped to soothe and quiet her mind. It took her away from the noisy, squawkish world of the cat-walk and let her lie untroubled at its side, listening only to the gentle lapping of its waves. She felt at peace. Alone. Unhindered and free. Free to do nothing but watch and listen and dream. London, Paris, New York - names, only names. Names that had once meant excitement, then boredom, then frustration, then slavery. Names that had brought her to the edge of a breakdown and left her doubting her own sanity. But here everything was at peace. The lake, the trees, the cottage. And she was at one with them. Here she could stay for the rest of her life. Here she would be happy to die. Across the sun hurried a darkening filter of cloud; the advance guard of a larger and even graver army. The ripples on the water, chased by a freshening wind, pushed their way anxiously from the far side of the lake until they almost bounced at her feet. Way above her a solitary rook cawed its way home - a lonely, troubled sound. And in the East there was thunder. Quickly she gathered her things together and made for the cottage. But already the rain flecked the water behind her and pattered the leaves as she raced beneath the trees. Sodden and breathless, she ran for the cottage door, and, as she opened it, the storm burst. And there on the hearth, gaunt and unwelcome, stood a man. 'Hello!' It was an odd way to greet a complete stranger who had invaded her home, but it was all she could think of to say. A casual greeting to someone who seemed to be expecting her, waiting for her. Maybe it was the way they did things down here? 'I suppose you had to shelter from the storm too?' she asked. The man said nothing. She ought to have been angry at this rude intrusion on her privacy, but anger somehow seemed pointless. It was as if the cottage was his, the hearth was his, and she had come out of the storm to seek refuge at his door. She watched him, cautiously; waiting for an explanation. He said nothing. Not a word. < 2 > 'Did you get wet?' she asked. He stood, huddled by the open fire, gazing at the dying embers. She walked over, brushing against him as she bent to stir the logs into life, but still he did not move. Erratically the flames burst forth, lighting up the sadness in his dark eyes. 'And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up and all the cottage warm . . . ' The words , spoken by him in a quiet, toneless voice, took her by surprise. 'Pardon?' she said. But he seemed not to hear. Only the shiver of wind in the trees and the tittering of rain on the thatched roof broke that eerie silence. She tried once more. 'It looks as if it's set in for the evening. Would you like to sit down for a while?' His eyes followed her as she moved to take off her coat and brush out her hair. '...............................and from her form Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall . . . ' Poetry. He was quoting poetry. He looked vaguely like a poet; lean, distressed, with a certain bitterness in his eyes and hopelessness in his form. And his voice was deep and languid, like the middle of the lake where the water ran darkest. Yet those were not his lines. The words were not created by him. They were somehow familiar. Half remembered. Surely she had heard them before? 'Did you write that?' she asked, forcing herself to make conversation. He smiled, a pitiful smile, but did not answer. As she watched him she had the feeling that he'd let himself into the cottage knowing that she would return. He'd been waiting for her. Expecting her. She was sure of it. And, for the first time, she was afraid. She turned towards the window. No one was outside. Just the rain beating unceasingly. She knew she'd never make it to the village, and no one would hear if she cried out. She was alone, completely alone with this frighteningly silent stranger. A sudden renting sound outside made her jump: a splintering of wood followed by a crashing to the ground. 'It tore the elm tops down for spite And did its worst to vex the lake . . . ' < 3 > That poem again! That same poem! What was it? Why did it fit the scene so perfectly? And why couldn't she remember it? 'What an awful wind,' she said as casually as possibly. 'Perhaps I ought to make sure that --- ' She had been working her way towards the door when he turned and slowly shook his head. She stopped. Hypnotised. Unable to take another step away from him. Destiny, her mind told her. This is your destiny; what you were created for. London, Paris, New York - no matter where you went you had to return here. To this cottage. To this man. Quietly he walked towards her, past her, and on towards the heavy oak door. The key twisted in the lock, the shutters closed silently over the windows. Gently, very gently, he took her arm and led her back to the hearth and the blazing fire. They were alone and she wanted to scream, but she couldn't. ' And last she sat down by my side And called me . . . . . ' That poem! That damned poem! How did it go? Please God, how did it go? Please, please let her remember! ' . . . when no voice replied She put my arm about her waist And made her smooth white shoulder bare . . . ' His left arm held her tightly, the slender fingers biting into her skin, while his right hand caressed the softness of her fair hair. 'But passion sometimes would prevail Nor could tonight's happy feast restrain A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her . . . . . . .' Love? This wasn't love! This was madness. Insanity. He was crazy. He'd taken something of beauty and twisted it into macabre reality. 'Be sure I looked up at her eyes . . . ' His own eyes shone with a maniacal fervour. 'Happy and proud at last I knew Porphyria worshipped me . . . ' Porphyria! Browning's poem! She knew it! Oh my god, no! No! No! 'That moment she was mine, mine fair Perfectly pure and good . . . ' She wanted to scream. She tried to scream. But she couldn't. His fingers were about her throat and no sound emerged. She fought for air but she could feel her body falling, falling. Her mind struggled to escape from the darkness but all she could hear was a voice, a distant voice, fading, ecstatic . . . . < 4 > ' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around And strangled her . . . . www.short-stories.co.uk/The Poem-
PORPHYRIA'S LOVER
by: Robert Browning (1812-1889)
THE rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; Which done, she rose, and from her form Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side And called me. When no voice replied, She put my arm about her waist, And made her smooth white shoulder bare And all her yellow hair displaced, And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair, Murmuring how she loved me--she Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor, To set its struggling passion free From pride, and vainer ties dissever, And give herself to me forever. But passion sometimes would prevail, Nor could to-night's happy feast restrain A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her, and all in vain: So, she was come through wind and rain. Be sure I looked up at her eyes Happy and proud; at last I knew Porphyria worshiped me; surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew While I debated what to do. That moment she was mine, mine, fair, Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain. As a shut bud that holds a bee, I warily oped her lids: again Laughed the blue eyes without a stain. And I untightened next the tress About her neck; her cheek once more Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss: I propped her head up as before, Only, this time by shoulder bore Her head, which droops upon it still: The smiling rosy little head, So glad it has its utmost will, That all it scorned at once is fled, And I, its love, am gained instead! Porphyria's love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard. And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 22, 2005 23:51:27 GMT -7
Horror Stories by Kailleaugh Andersson If you dislike reading horror stories on the computer screen, why not listen to horror stories on MP3 instead Dolls<<<< Link "Dolls" By Kailleaugh Andersson That was when I hit the fucker. I hit him hard and square on the bridge of the nose; with a hammer, and watched in delight as his funny, laughing face caved in and gushed red-black blood. I smiled, knowing that I had finally killed him. And that was when he started laughing at me, his wicked pink plastic face melding back together from the blow I'd dealt him. Giggling as I let out a deep sigh and reached for the hacksaw amidst the pile of torture implements scattered on the table. I bought him for my daughter's fourth birthday. I remember walking into the toy section of Wal-Mart, sweating under those phosphorescent lights as I turned a corner and faced a thousand "My Pal" dolls smiling deviantly from the windows of their bright pink boxes. Out of the corners of my eyes I even saw them turn their tiny heads and grin at me through little pairs of fangs as I walked past them. frig, I hate them! Ever since I was a kid, I was all too aware of the truth behind dolls. I was five and my parents had let me stay up late to watch "Fantasy Island" on T.V. You know, the one with the midget named "Tattoo"? And in that episode I was made aware that dolls came to life a midnight and ran amok. I took the hacksaw in my hand and pondered over the little guy bound in the tiny red plastic chair where he had been drinking tea next to the teddy bear before my wife and daughter went to church. Fucking dolls! Forget what you think you know about dolls. Never mind that bear, he's okay in my book and he doesn't say much; but dolls .... They sleep during the day and wake up when everyone is asleep. Plastic ones, porcelain (those are the worst!), cloth, wood or whatever, the whole lot of them come to life at night like the little vampires they really are. Forget the hacksaw! They walk around houses and streets at night doing god knows what! I think they even have their own social system. I plug in the skill-saw, open the throttle full bore and taunt the blade at Pal's face as I grin over him. "Now you're really gonna get it!" I cackle. I swear it! Remember when you were a little kid and you used to talk to your toys? They'd answer you back, wouldn't they? Don't tell me that they didn't because you and I both know that they did! I put the saw up to Pal's neck and he starts to scream as the blade rips through his chin and bright red, blood mingled, pink plastic sawdust sprays the room and I grin as Pal's head falls off the bloody pink stump of his neck onto the floor. I give his head a strong kick for good measure and watch it streak across the playroom and bounce off the wall. "Take that, pal!" I laugh, and downstairs I go to grab a cold one after a hard day's work. I slump in my chair and click on the tube to watch baseball, but quickly change it to "In Search Of ..." hosted by "Spock" from Star Trek when a "Talking Tina" commercial comes on. I must have drifted off to sleep from the boredom. It was dark outside when I awoke and saw the car keys on the table and could hear my wife loudly snoring in bed. I checked my watch. It was 12:02. I crept up the stairs quietly and gently pushed on the half open door of my daughter's room. My daughter was sleeping quietly and there clutched in her tiny arms was Pal. He slowly turned his head, grinned at me with a mouthful of sharp teeth and gave me a short, knowing wave with his tiny arm. I let out a deep sigh, felt a knot in my stomach and slowly closed the door. Tonight I won't sleep, and maybe tomorrow I'll have to try the garbage disposal. Copyright 2000 by Kailleaugh Andersson *
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 23, 2005 0:46:32 GMT -7
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack feel to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners -- two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest -- a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground -- a gentle slope topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway up the slope between the bridge and fort were the spectators -- a single company of infantry in line, at "parade rest," the butts of their rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good -- a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well fitting frock coat. He wore a moustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgement as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his "unsteadfast footing," then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift -- all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by -- it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatience and -- he knew not why -- apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in wartime. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure to perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One evening while Fahrquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Fahrquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.
"The Yanks are repairing the railroads," said the man, "and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels, or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order."
"How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?" Fahrquhar asked.
"About thirty miles."
"Is there no force on this side of the creek?"
"Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge."
"Suppose a man -- a civilian and student of hanging -- should elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel," said Fahrquhar, smiling, "what could he accomplish?"
The soldier reflected. "I was there a month ago," he replied. "I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tinder."
The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout.
III
As Peyton Fahrquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened -- ages later, it seemed to him -- by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fullness -- of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river! -- the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface -- knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. "To be hanged and drowned," he thought, "that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair."
He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort! -- what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water snake. "Put it back, put it back!" He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire, his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf -- he saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies' wings, the strokes of the water spiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat -- all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.
He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire; the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic.
Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the water smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels with his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.
A counter-swirl had caught Fahrquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking at the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the lieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning's work. How coldly and pitilessly -- with what an even, calm intonation, presaging, and enforcing tranquility in the men -- with what accurately measured interval fell those cruel words:
"Company! . . . Attention! . . . Shoulder arms! . . . Ready! . . . Aim! . . . Fire!"
Fahrquhar dived -- dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dull thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.
As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under water; he was perceptibly farther downstream -- nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.
The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning:
"The officer," he reasoned, "will not make that martinet's error a second time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He has probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!"
An appalling splash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound, DIMINUENDO, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps! A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken an hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.
"They will not do that again," he thought; "the next time they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me -- the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun."
Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round -- spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men, all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color -- that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream -- the southern bank -- and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of AEolian harps. He had not wish to perfect his escape -- he was content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken.
A whiz and a rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman's road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.
By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famished. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which -- once, twice, and again -- he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.
His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue -- he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene -- perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon -- then all is darkness and silence!
Peyton Fahrquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 28, 2005 22:47:45 GMT -7
The Screaming Tunnel retold by S. E. Schlosser
A Ghost Story from Ontario
There is a tunnel under the old railroad tracks just to the west of the Queen Elizabeth Way in Niagara Falls. It is known locally as the Screaming Tunnel. A path wanders through the tunnel and then up to an empty field on the hill. But the field was not always empty.
At one time, a large farm house stood in the field at the top of the hill, and in it lived a happy family. Then one night, the house caught fire. A young daughter was trapped in the house, and the only way to escape was through a wall of flames. The brave young girl covered her face with her arms and ran into the fiery doorway. Her long hair and her long nightgown began to smolder as she burst through the flames and rushed out of the house.
When the night air struck her smoldering clothing, it burst into flames, enveloping the girl in a raging inferno. The girl screamed in agony and ran blindly down the hill, away from the fire-stricken house. She staggered into the tunnel under the train tracks, her screams echoing and re-echoing through the night. Overcome by the flames, the girl fell to the floor of the tunnel, wailing in agony. She rolled frantically on the floor of the tunnel, trying to douse the flames, but her efforts were weak and ineffective. She was quickly overcome, and burned to death in the tunnel under the tracks.
After that night, anyone that dares strike a match in the tunnel under the tracks will hear the agonized death screams of the burning girl, and a ghostly wind will instantly blow out the match.
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 28, 2005 22:53:48 GMT -7
Blackbeard's Ghost retold by S. E. Schlosser
A Ghost Story from North Carolina
The nefarious pirate Blackbeard (who's real name was Edward Teach) was a tall man with a very long black beard that covered most of his face and extended down to his waist. He tied his beard up in pigtails adorned with black ribbons. He wore a bandolier over his shoulders with three braces of pistols and sometimes he would hang two slow-burning cannon fuses from his fur cap that wreathed his head in black smoke. Occasionally, he would set fire to his rum using gunpowder, and he would drink it, flames and all. Many people thought he was the Devil incarnate.
For twenty-seven months, Blackbeard terrorized the sailors of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, ambushing ships and stealing their cargo, killing those who opposed him, often attacking in the dim light of dawn or dusk when his pirate ship was most difficult to see. He would sail under the flag of a country friendly to the nationality of the ship he was attacking, and then hoist his pirate flag at the last moment. When prisoners surrendered willingly, he spared them. When they did not, his magnanimity failed. One man refused to give up a diamond ring he was wearing and the pirate cut the ring off, finger and all. Once Blackbeard blockaded Charleston, South Carolina with his ships, taking many wealthy citizens hostage until the townspeople met his ransom. Later, Blackbeard ran one of his ships - the Queen Anne's Revenge - aground. Some say he did it on purpose because he wanted to break up the pirate fleet and steal the booty for himself.
In November of 1718, Blackbeard retreated to his favorite hideaway -- called Teach's Hole -- off Ocracoke Island. There, he hosted a wild pirate party with drinking, dancing and large bonfires. The party lasted for days, and several North Carolina citizens sent word to Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia. Governor Spotswood immediately ordered two sloops, commanded by Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy, to go to Ocracoke and capture the pirate.
On November 21, 1718, Maynard engaged Blackbeard in a terrible battle. One of Maynard's ships were between Blackbeard and freedom. Blackbeard sailed his ship - the Adventure - in towards shore. It looked like the pirate was going to crash his ship, but at the last second the ship eased through a narrow channel. One of the pursuing Navy ships went aground on a sand bar when they tried to pursue the Adventure. Blackbeard fired his cannons at the remaining ship and many of Maynard's men were killed. The rest he ordered below the deck under cover of the gun smoke, hoping to fool the pirates into thinking they had won. When the pirates boarded the ship, Maynard and his men attacked the pirates.
Outnumbered, the pirates put up a bloody fight. Blackbeard and Maynard came face to face. They both shot at each other. Blackbeard's shot missed Maynard, but Maynard's bullet hit the pirate. Blackbeard swung his cutlass and managed to snap off Maynard's sword blade near the hilt. As Blackbeard prepared to deliver the death-blow, one of Maynard's men cut Blackbeard's throat from behind. Blackbeard's blow missed its mark, barely skinning Maynard's knuckles. Infuriated, Blackbeard fought on as the blood spouted from his neck. Maynard and his men rushed the pirate. It took a total of five gunshots and about twenty cuts before Blackbeard fell down dead.
Maynard seemed to think that the only way to ensure that Blackbeard was dead was to remove his head. They hung the head from the bowsprit and threw the pirate's body overboard. As the body hit the water, the head hanging from the bowsprit shouted: "Come on Edward" and the headless body swam three times around the ship before sinking to the bottom.
From that day to this, Blackbeard's ghost has haunted Teach's Hole, forever searching for his missing head. Sometimes, the headless ghost floats on the surface of the water, or swims around and around and around Teach's Hole, glowing just underneath the water. Sometimes, folks see a strange light coming from the shore on the Pamlico Sound side of Ocracoke Island and know that it is "Teach's light". On night's that the ghost light appears, if the wind is blowing inland, you can still hear Blackbeard's ghost tramping up and down and roaring: 'Where's my head?'
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 28, 2005 22:58:23 GMT -7
The Black Dog of Hanging Hills retold by S. E. Schlosser
A Ghost Story from Connecticut
He smiled as his sipped at his coffee. It had been an excellent hike. He was glad his friend had recommended coming to the Hanging Hills in Connecticut; not the first place that had come to his mind when considering a vacation. But it was beautiful here. When his friend arrived tomorrow they would tackle some of the more challenging terrain.
“Did you have a nice hike?” asked the innkeeper as she refilled his cup.
“Yes indeed. I had some unexpected company,” he said with a smile.
“Really? I thought you were the only one crazy enough to go hiking in the rain,” she teased.
“It was a little black dog,” he said. “Cute fellow. Followed me all the way up the mountain and down again.”
He looked up from his coffee to see the innkeeper’s face had gone pale.
“A black dog?” she asked. “That’s not good.”
“Why not?”
“We have a saying around here,” she replied. “’And if a man shall meet the Black Dog once, it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time, he shall die.’” He laughed. “That’s just superstition.”
“That’s what Mr. Pynchon said. He saw the black dog twice. The second time he saw the dog, the friend he was climbing with fell to his death. And later, Mr. Pynchon decided to climb the same mountain, and he died too. Everyone here believes he saw the dog just before he fell.”
“Nonsense. It was just a cute stray,” he said uneasily. She shrugged and took the coffee pot over to her other customers.
His friend arrived the next morning and they both laughed about the story of the black dog. They set out on their climb. About halfway up the mountain, he looked up and saw the black dog.
“There’s the dog,” he called to his friend.
And then his foot slipped and he plunged down the side of the hill, desperately grabbing at saplings and rocks, trying to halt his descent. It seemed to take forever for him to stop sliding. There was a stabbing pain in his leg. When he looked at it, his head swimming, it was bent at an odd angle. They had to send in a mountain rescue team to get him down. At the hospital, they told him his leg was broken in two places and he was very lucky it wasn’t worse.
“You know, that was a very strange fall,” said his friend uneasily. “You don’t really think it had anything to do with that black dog?”
He looked down at the cast that extended all the way up to his hip.
“I don’t know. But I don’t really want to find out. Next time, let’s go to Colorado.”
His friend agreed.
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 28, 2005 23:03:35 GMT -7
The Bloodstain retold by S. E. Schlosser
A Ghost Story from California
The Phelps place was an old, abandoned property with a monstrous, decrepit Victorian house that was supposed to be haunted. It should have been a good resting place for the local deer hunters, but they would not go near it. A few that tried came away before midnight with tales of ghostly thumping noises, gasps, moans, and a terrible wet bloodstain that appeared on the floor of the front porch and could not be wiped away.
Phelps was an Englishman who had purchased land some 20 miles off the Mendocino coast in the 1880s. He had built a huge, fancy Victorian house all covered with gingerbread trimmings and surrounded by lovely gardens. When everything was arranged to his liking, he sent out party invitations to everyone within messenger range. It was the biggest social event of the year, with music and dancing and huge amounts of food. Sawhorse tables were set up with refreshments, and drinks were set out on the front porch. People came from miles around. The only one missing was old man McInturf's son-in-law. They had had a terrible fight that afternoon, and the boy had stalked off in a rage, threatening to get even with the old man.
Around midnight, the musicians took a recess and old man McInturf went out on the front porch with some friends. Suddenly there came the thunder of hooves rushing up the lane. A cloaked figure rode towards the lantern-lit porch. McInturf put down his drink. "That will be my son-in-law," he told his friends as he went down the steps. The cloaked figure stopped his horse just outside the pool of lantern-light. There was a sharp movement and two loud shots from a gun. Old man McInturf staggered backwards, shot in the throat and the chest. The cloaked man wheeled his horse and fled down the lane as friends ran to the assistance of the old man.
They laid McInturf down on the porch. He was bleeding heavily and they were afraid to move him much. There was some talk of fetching the doctor, but everyone knew it was too late. So much blood was pouring from the old man's wounds that it formed a pool underneath his head. McInturf coughed, once, twice; a hideous, gurgling, strangling sound that wrenched at the hearts of all who heard it. Then he died.
McInturf's body was laid out on the sofa, and the once-merry guests left in stricken silence. The servants came and wiped the red-brown bloodstain off the floorboards. The next day, a wagon was brought to the front of the house and McInturf's body was carried out onto the porch. As the men stepped across the place where McInturf had died, blood began to pool around their boots, forming a wet stain in exactly the pattern that had been wiped up by the servants the night before. The men gasped in fear. One of them staggered and almost dropped the body. They hurriedly laid McInturf in the back of the wagon, and a pale Phelps ordered the servants to clean up the fresh bloodstain.
From that day forward, the Phelps could not keep that part of the porch clean. Every few weeks, the damp bloodstain would reappear. They tried repainting the porch a few times, but the bloodstain would always leak through. In the county jail, McInturf's son-in-law died of a blot clot in the brain. A few months later, one of the Phelps servants went mad after seeing a "terrible sight" that made his head feel like it was going to exploded. Folks started saying the house was being haunted by the ghost of McInturf, seeking revenge. The property was resold several times but each resident was driven out by the terrible, gasping ghost of McInturf reliving his last moments and by the bloodstain that could not be removed from the porch. The house was eventually abandoned.
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 28, 2005 23:08:05 GMT -7
The White Lady retold by S. E. Schlosser
A Ghost Story from New York
In the early 1800s, the White Lady and her daughter were supposed to have lived on the land where the Durand Eastman Park -- part of Irondequoit and Rochester -- now stands. One day, the daughter disappeared. Convinced that the girl had been raped and murdered by a local farmer, the mother searched the marshy lands day after day, trying to discover where her child's body was buried. She took with her two German shepherd dogs to aid in her search, but she never found a trace of her daughter. Finally, in her grief, the mother threw herself off a cliff into lake Ontario and died. Her dogs pined for their mistress and shortly joined her in the grave.
After death, the mother's spirit returned to continue the search for her child. People say that on foggy nights, the White Lady rises from the small Durand Lake which faces Lake Ontario. She is accompanied by her dogs and together they roam through the Durand Eastman park, still searching for her missing daughter.
The White Lady is not a friendly spirit. She dislikes men and often seeks vengeance against the males visiting the park on her daughter's behalf . There have been reports of the White Lady chasing men into the lake, shaking their cars, and making their lives miserable until they leave the park. She has never touched any females accompanying these unfortunate fellows
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 28, 2005 23:11:20 GMT -7
The Cut-off retold by S. E. Schlosser
A Ghost Story from Louisiana
The devil was in the Mississippi River that night. You could feel it with every eddy swirling against the helm of the boat. You could hear it in every jangle of the bell. You could see it in the dim light of the lantern as it tried to pierce the swirling fog. You could sense it in the sound of the chugging engine. The devil was in the river. It was a bad night to be out in a paddleboat. But he had sworn when he set out that nothing could make him turn back.
No other pilot dared brave the Mississippi that night. They were all huddled in the tavern, gossiping. After an evening of listening to their empty boasts, he had made one himself. He knew the Mississippi River so well that he could guide his paddleboat on his run even through the thickness of the night's fog. When the other pilots heard his boast, they laughed and told him he would be back before midnight. He had grown angry at their jeers, and had sworn in front of them all that he would not turn back this night for any reason, should the Devil bar the way!
The paddle wheeler was rocking oddly under the strange eddies of the river. But he knew every turn and guided her along despite the fog. He was almost to Raccourci when he saw shore where no shore had ever been before.
He turned the boat this way and that. It could not be! The river ran straight through on this branch. He had guided his paddleboat through this place a hundred times.
But the devil must have been listening at the tavern and had heard his boast, for the Mississippi had shifted! He swore every curse he knew, and kept searching for a way through. He had vowed to complete his run without turning back and he was determined to carry out his vow. He would never go back. Never! He would stay there until daybreak, and beyond if need be.
Suddenly, the paddleboat gave a massive jerk. The engine stalled. The boat shuddered and overturned. When the fog lifted the next day, they found his paddleboat sunk to the bottom with a gaping hole in its side, and the pilot drowned.
On foggy nights, you can still hear the ring of the bell, the sound of the engine and the curses of the ghost captain trying to complete his run.
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 24, 2006 1:25:00 GMT -7
Playboy Magazine, January 1979
INTERLUDE WITH THE UNDEAD
The author of 'Interview With the Vampire' reveals for the first time an all-too-human aspect of her singular subject.
By ANNE RICE
In the book "Interview with the Vampire," Louis, who has been a member of the living dead for some 200 years, tells the story of his life to the interviewer, a young radio reporter in San Francisco. But the book as published represents only a portion of the tapes of that interview made by the reporter. Louis told the young man much that was not included, particularly with regard to the master vampire, Armand, whom he had met in Paris. One tale was Armand's account of his methods of seduction; that is, the art of the vampire at its peak in the year 1876.
ARMAND'S LESSON:
As I've told you, Louis, each vampire selects his victims in his own way. The world is a veritable wilderness of singular beauties and each night too precious to allow for the slightest waste. Each night is a wedding, really, and the vampire is wed to the unique and alluring charms of that victim as surely as he is wed to that victim's life. You hold the spirit incarnate in your arms. For some of us, monstrous breed that we are, and such a discerning and voracious company, it is the struggle that holds the quintessential fulfillment, the thrashing of the waning lover seems to soothe the preternatural soul. This is nonsense, really. These innocent and unsuspecting victims can't really struggle against a power such as our own. What lurks beneath these gentlemanly trappings is a strength that is unconquerable. Yet there are vampires who crave the semblance of battle, saying that it is the human spirit they love, its endurance, its faith. I have no taste for violence, voluptuous as it may sometimes appear. It is the seduction that is perfectly in tune with this monster's heart. But do not mistake my meaning. It is not I who seduce the lovely beauties whom I take as my brides. It is they who seduce me through their dreams. You see, they all want the embrace. There is a kernel in all of them that is "half in love with easeful death" and as I wander through the late-night streets in the chill hours, I can hear their plaintive sighs, a muted chorus rising from those beds, its rhythms penetrating the very walls. They summon me. They long for me. Gentleman Death, that has been my epithet, and I so treasure it. What gentleman can refuse a lady, after all? Imagine her, my victim, caught in the maw of mortal life and so given to dreaming. She wants an extraordinary passion, something she's only glimpsed before and lost. The memory pricks her, a flicker in the recesses of her soul, a searing rapture known but for an instant when mortal and mortal intertwine. It is for her summons thhat I listen, being myself sometimes the silent siren of death that can evoke that plea from her even as I quietly pass by. No one hears my steps. I do not hear them. It seems until she offers that faint murmer, I am not even there. These winding, narrow medieval streets shroud me, no moon cuts between the jutting roofs and I am cold, cold for her as I wander, waiting with a lover's devotion for that perfect call. You know that our preternatural flesh cannot dispel the icy air that settles on our limbs. Ours is the chill of the wind howling through eternity. So you can well imagine the ineffable sweetness of th moment of selection, of moving out of that damp and merciless night into the bedchamber. No two of them are the same. I need not see her. I know she's there A warmth emanates from her living flesh and, drawing near, I can see the shape of that warmth--tender, helpless, prone. There is something melancholy, sad about her nestled among the trinkets of her mortal life, the soft bed, her loose and fragrant garments, remnants of girlhood--she sleeps with the trusting sleep of the child. I tell you if I were not the monster, I would be touched. But back to the pliant treasure herself, breathing deeply in her dreams. Is it more vivid, that dream, as I draw close to her? It seems I see her eyelids flutter, she shapes a name with her lips. I tell you, she knows that the object of her inexpressible longing is there. She feels these eyes on her naked shoulders, this hand on the pale-petal flesh of her soft thigh. It is seduction, remember. There is never violence. I tell you that all embraces, no matter how tender, are surfeited with violence. Violence is the throbbing of the unsatisfied heart. Violence is the desperate pulsing of that tender fold between the legs, that precious cleft that shapes its own emptiness; violence is the restless turning of her limbs. This is the heart and core of all violence for which the rest is rude metaphor, rough deceiving, a lie born of abused passion and broken dreams. You want the true violence? Neglect her. Then bend your head to her breasts and rest it there, to hear that awful moan. "Half in love with easeful death" is half in love with life still. She awakes shivering and I feel my lips surrender to a smile. I know too well that I might quiet her with the stroke of my hand even as its coldness shocks her, but let her wake just a little to the crude world of lamps and torn realities. Let her see her demon lover. Let her see these eyes adoring her. Let her know that in serving me she will make me utterly and completely her slave. Have I ever failed? It's a natural enough, that question. The world is rife with passionate women, so you wonder have they ever drawn back from me, fought, begged for reprieve? Has some dim alarm ever sounded in the depths of those heaving breasts? Weren't these women just a little frightened by this fervent gaze? Never. Forgive my laughter, you don't understand the promise of my caress. They have struggled too long in vain for union, these succulent mortal beauties, they've known the prisons of their own flesh too well. Observe the flare of those narrow hips, the subtle curve of the buttocks; these are but the contours of a dungeon cell. See how their love acts have so often resembled the quarrel, how they've thrashed and, alone afterward, lain uneasy in half sleep.. Mine is the embrace that will penetrate that isolation, mine is the kiss that will delve to the route of the soul. She knows it, my bride; she knows it without my saying it; she knows it with an instinct that is all too human and that we immortals too quickly forget. Imagine her splendid terror and how easily it melts to languor in my arms. She is meek, pliant, on the verge of some awesome awakening. She hardly feels the little tear. The breath hisses low from between her pearl-white teeth, her eyelids show the barest gleam beneath the dark lash. She cannot know how my pulse quickens with her pulse, how my heart feeds upon her heart, how pulling me toward her, I draw the heated perfumed elixir from her with my own soul, pulling the cords of her being through her veins. She is so warm. Do I have to tell you how that smooth tight flesh of her arching back burns my fingers, how those taut nipples brand my chest? She is listless, fading. One arm drops to her side, hands close weakly on the lost coverlet and, turning from me even as she is given over to me, her eyes are veiled with her silken hair. And yet my monster's eye charts her swoon. This is the union she has longed for, and with the cunning of the beast, I have let her go too soon. I measure her, I hold her, I tingle with the life she's given me and see her moist limbs as the vessel of my mounting passion, alive as I am with her life and soothed and tormented as she is with mine. Nothing divides us now. Her fingers prod. I savor the groans, those piquant and spirited utterances. She's mine. Ah, but you know the price of this modulation, this rhythm. She cannot imagine my thirst for her. If she placed her hand on the marble stone in the churchyard at midnight, she might begin to understand this harrowing loneliness and, with it, she would come to know my art. I draw back from her, aching for her. I hold her, this struggling sparrow in my easy grip. How long will that taste of her content me? It is sweet to touch her bent neck, her tousled hair. But she's given me her life's blood; what am I to give in return? Yes, I said the word, return. Perhaps all along, you've thought me some hard and simple monster who would trick her in her sublime pleasure and give her only darkness finally as her reward? You underestimate me, you fail to understand the fire and the fiber of my own dreams. And she's too tender to me, little bride. You misunderstand the whole affair. Rather, I become the fount of secrets. I let her part the open shirt with her own hands. I can feel her kips, quivering, virginal, that touching eagerness, I let her taste, I let her drink, and she is wild. Now I can see the incandescence of a vampire in her eyes, a shimmer to that beguiling form. Even a languor to her throbbing need. The clock ticks, the wind whispers in the passage. There is much for her to learn. But she is spent now with the first undulating wave and I am in no great haste to bring this to its close. Rather, I lie like the bridegroom with her, as if accustomed to these mortal beds and their trappings, and I have time for mortal dreams. You know we never forger it. Vampire, Nosferatu, Verdilak. What have we all in common? What separates our cloaked and smiling figures from other unholy inhabitants of the monster realm? Simply this: that we were all and still are men. So let me dream for a while. Let me be young. Let me become some anxious, urgent creature riding as I did in the days of brief life through the open country fields. I feel the horse under me, his striding power. The wheat blows in the wind. And through the shifting trees, I see the sun again, warm as my bride's blood; it falls on my face, on my hands. It is her blood that makes this real as I lie there, but even as the sky is shot with those swift gold-edged clouds, it's fading, fading. I must wake. I would know greater secrets, I would lead my fledgling further on. And she? She dreams as a vampire now. She stirs. And limp and somnolent, she falls into my waiting arms. What would you have now? That is, if you were I? Should I usher her into the timeless life on my own? I think not. Look at that superb young form; what does it cry for, if not for another woman equally as beautiful; if not for the craft of another lady-love, supple, scented and schooled by me? And waiting on tjhese dreary winter nights as she always waits for the fledglings that I bring her, for what is always best when shared. This is a dance for three. Imagine the patience of such a lady-love, dark haired, succulent; is she petulant when she sees my new bride? What of the postulant herself in such encounters; does she spurn the skilled and nurtured woman to whom I present her? What do you think? Must I instruct my ladylove to flaunt her treasures? Oh, no. She bends with an unconcealed abandon and I see my new bride, afflicted, helplessly drawn. I wonder, would it give the master a little more pleasure if they did not go so willingly into each other's perfumed arms? A cold agony comes over me in watching the soft crush of breast to breast. I see their drinking one from the other with a mortal urgency I'd forgotten; they moan with some submissive sentiment I no longer know. I cannot bear it any longer, I cannot be content with a feast only for my eyes. This is what I've waited for too long, slaves shaped to the will of the master, they may command me. I feel the prick of the hot skin again, that searing luxuriant gush, one and then the other of them, and back again, first my dark and sultry ladylove, then my shimmering bride. When will it ever end, when will I be permitted to rest? It seems these hearts so perfectly turned now to my own will not release me, they will not permit me to withdraw. My mistresses are merciless. I was a kinder master. "Do you love me?" comes the plaintive question as I lead them. "Do you love me/" as I gaze into those glittering eyes. Their lips are blood red, fledgling teeth tease the tender flesh. "Do you love me?' comes the desperate entreaty as I gather them against my monstrous and lonely breast, lonely, lonely beyond their dazzling preternatural dreams. "Do you love me?" comes the whisper again, even as the sun disolves the shadows. But their mute and smiling faces are pitiless. And, my anguishes complete, "Do you love me?' I implore them again.
~*~
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Post by RAIVEN on Oct 24, 2006 1:35:46 GMT -7
LOST SOULS
By Clive Barker
Everything the blind woman had told Harry she'd seen was undeniably real. Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed-that extraordinary skill that allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on Seventy-fifth-that eye was as sharp as any knife juggler's. Here was the derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the brick. Here was the dead dog that she'd described, lying on the sidewalk as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the shy and sublimely malignant Cha'Chat.
The house was not, Harry thought, a likely place for a desperado of Cha'Chat's elevation to be in residence. Though the infernal brethren could be a loutish lot, to be certain, it was Christian propaganda which sold them as dwellers in excrement and ice. The escaped demon was more likely to be downing fly eggs and vodka at the Waldorf-Astoria than concealing itself amongst such wretchedness.
But Harry had gone to the blind clairvoyant in desperation, having failed to locate Cha'Chat by any means conventionally available to a private eye such as himself. He was, he had admitted to her, responsible for the fact that the demon was loose at all. It seemed he'd never learned, in his all too frequent encounters with the Gulf and its progeny, that Hell possessed a genius for deceit. Why else had he believed in the child that had tottered into view just as he'd leveled his gun at Cha'Chat?-a child, of course, which had evaporated into a cloud of tainted air as soon as the diversion was redundant and the demon had made its escape.
Now, after almost three weeks of vain pursuit, it was almost Christmas in New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air like salt in wounds; Mammon in glory. A more perfect playground for Cha'Chat's despite could scarcely be imagined. Harry had to find the demon quickly, before it did serious damage; find it and return it to the pit from which it had come. In extremis he would even use the binding syllables which the late Father Hesse had vouchsafed to him once, accompanying them with such dire warnings that Harry had never even written them down. Whatever it took. Just as long as Cha'Chat didn't see Christmas Day this side of the Schism.
It seemed to be colder inside the house on Ridge Street than out. Harry could feel the chill creep through both pairs of socks and start to numb his feet. He was making his way along the second landing when he heard the sigh. He turned, fully expecting to see Cha'Chat standing there, its eye cluster looking a dozen ways at once, its cropped fur rippling. But no. Instead a young woman stood at the end of the corridor. Her undernourished features suggested Puerto Rican extraction, but that-and the fact that she was heavily pregnant-was all Harry had time to grasp before she hurried away down the stairs.
Listening to the girl descend, Harry knew that Norma had been wrong. If Cha'Chat had been here, such a perfect victim would not have been allowed to escape with her eyes in her head. The demon wasn't here.
Which left the rest of Manhattan to search.
The night before, something very peculiar had happened to Eddie Axel. It had begun with his staggering out of his favorite bar, which was six blocks from the grocery store he owned on Third Avenue. He was drunk, and happy; and with reason. Today he had reached the age of fifty-five. He had married three times in those years; he had sired four legitimate children and a handful of bastards; and-perhaps most significantly-he'd made Axel's Superette a highly lucrative business. All was well with the world.
But Jesus, it was chilly! No chance, on a night threatening a second Ice Age, of finding a cab. He would have to walk home.
He'd got maybe half a block, however, when-miracle of miracles-a cab did indeed cruise by. He'd flagged it down, eased himself in, and the weird times had begun.
For one, the driver knew his name.
"Home, Mr. Axel?" he'd said. Eddie hadn't questioned the godsend. Merely mumbled, "Yes," and assumed this was a birthday treat, courtesy of someone back at the bar. Perhaps his eyes had flickered closed; perhaps he'd even slept. Whatever, the next thing he knew the cab was driving at some speed through streets he didn't recognize. He stirred himself from his doze. This was the Village,surely; an area Eddie kept clear of. His neighborhood was the high Nineties, close to the store. Not for him the decadence of the Village, where a shop sign offered "Ear piercing. With or without pain" and young men with suspicious hips lingered in doorways.
"This isn't the right direction," he said, rapping on the Perspex between him and the driver. There was no word of apology or explanation forthcoming, however, until the cab made a turn toward the river, drawing up in a street of warehouses, and the ride was over.
"This is your stop," said the chauffeur. Eddie didn't need a more explicit invitation to disembark.
As he hauled himself out the cabbie pointed to the murk of an empty lot between two benighted warehouses. "She's been waiting for you," he said, and drove away. Eddie was left alone on the sidewalk.
Common sense counseled a swift retreat, but what now caught his eye glued him to the spot. There she stood-the woman of whom the cabbie had spoken-and she was the most obese creature Eddie had ever set his sight upon. She had more chins than fingers, and her fat, which threatened at every place to spill from the light summer dress she wore, gleamed with either oil or sweat.
"Eddie," she said. Everybody seemed to know his name tonight. As she moved toward him, tides moved in the fat of her torso and along her limbs.
"Who are you?" Eddie was about to inquire, but the words died when he realized the obesity's feet weren't touching the ground. She was floating.
Had Eddie been sober he might well have taken his cue then and fled, but the drink in his system mellowed his trepidation. He stayed put.
"Eddie," she said. "Dear Eddie. I have some good news and some bad news. Which would you like first?"
Eddie pondered this one for a moment. "The good," he concluded.
"You're going to die tomorrow," came the reply, accompanied by the tiniest of smiles.
"That's good?" he said.
"Paradise awaits your immortal soul..." she murmured. "Isn't that a joy?"
"So what's the bad news?"
She plunged her stubby-fingered hand into the crevasse between her gleaming tits. There came a little squeal of complaint, and she drew something out of hiding. It was a cross between a runty gecko and a sick rat, possessing the least fetching qualities of both. Its pitiful limbs pedaled at the air as she held it up for Eddie's perusal. "This," she said, "is your immortal soul."
She was right, thought Eddie: the news was not good.
"Yes," she said. "It's a pathetic sight, isn't it?" The soul drooled and squirmed as she went on. "It's undernourished. It's weak to the point of expiring altogether. And why?" She didn't give Eddie a chance to reply. "A paucity of good works..."
Eddie's teeth had begun to chatter. "What am I supposed to do about it?" he asked.
"You've got a little breath left. You must compensate for a lifetime of rampant profiteering-"
"I don't follow."
"Tomorrow, turn Axel's Superette into a Temple of Charity, and you may yet put some meat on your soul's bones."
She had begun to ascend, Eddie noticed. In the darkness above her, there was sad, sad music, which now wrapped her up in minor chords until she was entirely eclipsed.
The girl had gone by the time Harry reached the street. So had the dead dog. At a loss for options, he trudged back to Norma Paine's apartment, more for the company than the satisfaction of telling her she had been wrong.
"I'm never wrong," she told him over the din of the five televisions and as many radios that she played perpetually. The cacophony was, she claimed, the only sure way to keep those of the spirit world from incessantly intruding upon her privacy: the babble distressed them. "I saw power in that house on Ridge Street," she told Harry, "sure as shit."
Harry was about to argue when an image on one of the screens caught his eye. An outside news broadcast pictured a reporter standing on a sidewalk across the street from a store ("Axel's Superette," the sign read) from which bodies were being removed.
"What is it?" Norma demanded.
"Looks like a bomb went off," Harry replied, trying to trace the reporter's voice through the din of the various stations.
"Turn up the sound," said Norma. "I like a disaster."
It was not a bomb that had wrought such destruction, it emerged, but a riot. In the middle of the morning a fight had begun in the packed grocery store; nobody quite knew why. It had rapidly escalated into a bloodbath. A conservative estimate put the death toll at thirty, with twice as many injured. The report, with its talk of a spontaneous eruption of violence, gave fuel to a terrible suspicion in Harry.
"Cha'Chat..." he murmured.
Despite the noise in the little room, Norma heard him speak. "What makes you so sure?" she said.
Harry didn't reply. He was listening to the reporter's recapitulation of the events, hoping to catch the location of Axel's Superette. And there it was. Third Avenue, between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth.
"Keep smiling," he said to Norma, and left her to her brandy and the dead gossiping in the bathroom.
Linda had gone back to the house on Ridge Street as a last resort, hoping against hope that she'd find Bolo there. He was, she vaguely calculated, the likeliest candidate for father of the child she carried, but there'd been some strange men in her life at that time; men with eyes that seemed golden in certain lights; men with sudden, joyless smiles. Anyway, Bolo hadn't been at the house, and here she was-as she'd known she'd be all along-alone. All she could hope to do was lie down and die.
But there was death and death. There was that extinction she prayed for nightly, to fall asleep and have the cold claim her by degrees; and there was that other death, the one she saw whenever fatigue drew her lids down. A death that had neither dignity in the going nor hope of a Hereafter; a death brought by a man in a gray suit whose face sometimes resembled a half-familiar saint, and sometimes a wall of rotting plaster.
Begging as she went, she made her way uptown toward Times Square. Here, amongst the traffic of consumers, she felt safe for a while. Finding a little deli, she ordered eggs and coffee, calculating the meal so that it just fell within the begged sum. The food stirred the baby. She felt it turn in its slumber, close now to waking. Maybe she should fight on a while longer, she thought. If not for her sake, for that of the child.
She lingered at the table, turning the problem over, until the mutterings of the proprietor shamed her out onto the street again.
It as late afternoon, and the weather was worsening. A woman was singing nearby, in Italian; some tragic aria. Tears close, Linda turned from the pain the song carried, and set off again in no particular direction.
As the crowd consumed her, a man in a gray suit slipped away from the audience that had gathered around the street-corner diva, sending the youth he was with ahead through the throng to be certain they didn't lose their quarry.
Marchetti regretted having to forsake the show. The singing much amused him. Her voice, long ago drowned in alcohol, was repeatedly that vital semitone shy of its intended target-a perfect testament to imperfectibility-rendering Verdi's high art laughable even as it came within sight of transcendence. He would have to come back here when the beast had been dispatched. Listening to that spoiled ecstasy brought him closer to tears that he'd been for months; and he liked to weep.
Harry stood across Third Avenue from Axel's Superette and watched the watchers. They had gathered in their hundreds in the chill of the deepening night, to see what could be seen; nor were they disappointed. The bodies kept coming out: in bags, in bundles; there was even something in a bucket.
"Does anybody know exactly what happened?" Harry asked his fellow spectators.
A man turned, his face ruddy with the cold.
"The guy who ran the place decided to give the stuff away," he said, grinning at this absurdity. "And the store was friggin' swamped. Someone got killed in the crush-"
"I heard the trouble started over a can of meat," another offered. "Somebody got beaten to death with a can of meat."
This rumor was contested by a number of others; all had versions of events.
Harry was about to try and sort fact from fiction when an exchange to his right diverted him.
A boy of nine or ten had buttonholed a companion. "Did you smell her?" he wanted to know. The other nodded vigorously. "Gross, huh?" the first ventured. "Smelled better shit," came the reply, and the two dissolved into conspiratorial laughter.
Harry looked across at the object of their mirth. A huge overweight woman, underdressed for the season, stood on the periphery of the crowd and watched the disaster scene with tiny, glittering eyes.
Harry had forgotten the questions he was going to ask the watchers. What he remembered, clear as yesterday, was the way his creams conjured the infernal brethren. It wasn't their curses he recalled, nor even the deformities they paraded: it was the smell off them. Of burning hair and halitosis; of veal left to rot in the sun. Ignoring the debate around him, he started in the direction of the woman.
She saw him coming, the rolls of fat at her neck furrowing as she glanced across at him.
It was Cha'Chat, of that Harry had no doubt. And to prove the point, the demon took off at a run, the limbs and prodigious buttocks stirred to a fandango with every step. By the time Harry had cleared his way through the crowd the demon was already turning the corner into Ninety-fifth Street, but its stolen body was not designed for speed, and Harry rapidly made up the distance between them. The lamps were out in several places along the street, and when he finally snatched at the demon, and heard the sound of tearing, the gloom disguised the vile truth for fully five seconds until he realized that Cha'Chat had somehow sloughed off its usurped flesh, leaving Harry holding a great coat of ectoplasm, which was already melting like overripe cheese. The demon, its burden shed, was away; slim as hope and twice as slippery. Harry dropped the coat of filth and gave chase, shouting Hesse's syllables as he did so.
Surprisingly, Cha'Chat stopped in its tracks, and turned to Harry. The eyes looked all ways but Heavenward; the mouth was wide and attempting laughter. It sounded like someone vomiting down an elevator shaft.
"Words, D'Amour?" it said, mocking Hesse's syllables. "You think I can be stopped with words?"
"No," said Harry, and blew a hole in Cha'Chat's abdomen before the demon's many eyes had even found the gun.
"Bastard!" it wailed, "Cocksucker!" and fell to the ground, blood the color of piss throbbing from the hole. Harry sauntered down the street to where it lay. It was almost impossible to slay a demon of Cha'Chat's elevation with bullets; but a scar was shame enough amongst their clan. Two, almost unbearable.
"Don't," it begged when he pointed the gun at its head. "Not the face."
"Give me one good reason why not."
"You'll need the bullets," came the reply.
Harry had expected bargains and threats. This answer silenced him. "There's something going to get loose tonight, D'Amour," Cha'Chat said. The blood that was pooling around it had begun to thicken and grow milky, like melted wax. "Something wilder that me."
"Name it," said Harry.
The demon grinned. "Who knows?" it said. "It's a strange season, isn't it? Long nights. Clear skies. Things get born on nights like this, don't you find?"
"Where?" said Harry, pressing the gun to Cha'Chat's nose.
"You're a bully, D'Amour," it said reprovingly. "You know that?"
"Tell me..."
The thing's eyes grew darker; its face seemed to blur.
"South of here, I'd say..." it replied. "A hotel..." The tone of its voice was changing subtly; the features losing their solidity. Harry's trigger finger itched to give the damned thing a wound that would keep it from a mirror for life, but it was still talking, and he couldn't afford to interrupt its flow. "...on Forty-fourth," it said. "Between Sixth...Sixth and Broadway." The voice was indisputably feminine now. "Blue blinds," it murmured. "I can see blue blinds..."
As it spoke the last vestiges of its true features fled, and suddenly it was Norma who was bleeding on the sidewalk at Harry's feet.
"You wouldn't shoot an old lady, would you?" she piped up.
The trick lasted seconds only, but Harry's hesitation was all that Cha'Chat needed to fold itself between one plane and the next, and flit. He'd lost the creature, for the second time in a month.
And to add discomfort to distress, it had begun to snow.
The small hotel that Cha'Chat had described had seen better years; even the light that burned in the lobby seemed to tremble on the brink of expiring. There was nobody at the desk. Harry was about to start up the stairs when a young man whose pate was shaved as bald as an egg, but for a single kiss curl that was oiled to his scalp, stepped out of the gloom and took hold of his arm.
"There's nobody here," he informed Harry.
In better days Harry might have cracked the egg open with his bare fists, and enjoyed doing so. Tonight he guessed he would come off the worse. So he simply said, "Well, I'll find another hotel then, eh?"
Kiss Curl seemed placated; the grip relaxed. In the next instant Harry's hand found his gun, and the gun found Kiss Curl's chin. An expression of bewilderment crossed the boy's face as he fell back against the wall, spitting blood.
As Harry started up the stairs, he heard the youth yell, "Darrieux!" from below.
Neither the shout nor the sound of the struggle had roused any response from the rooms. The place was empty. It had been elected, Harry began to comprehend, for some purpose other than hostelry.
As he started along the landing a woman's cry, begun but never finished, came to meet him. He stopped dead. Kiss Curl was coming up the stairs behind him two or three at a time; ahead, someone was dying. This couldn't end well, Harry suspected.
Then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and suspicion became plain fact. A man in a gray suit was standing on the threshold, skinning off a pair of bloodied surgical gloves. Harry knew him vaguely; indeed had begun to sense a terrible pattern in all of this from the moment he'd heard Kiss Curl call his employer's name. This was Darrieux Marchetti; also called the Cankerist; one of the whispered order of theological assassins whose directives came from Rome, or Hell, or both.
"D'Amour," he said.
Harry had to fight the urge to be flattered that he had been remembered.
"What happened here?" he demanded to know, taking a step toward the open door.
"Private business," the Cankerist insisted. "Please, no closer."
Candles burned in the little room, and by their generous light, Harry could see the bodies laid out on the bare bed. The woman from the house on Ridge Street, and her child. Both had been dispatched with Roman efficiency.
"She protested," said Marchetti, not overly concerned that Harry was viewing the results of his handiwork. "All I needed was the child."
"What was it?" Harry demanded. "A demon?"
Marchetti shrugged. "We'll never know," he said. "But at this time of year there's usually something that tries to get in under the wire. We like to be safe rather than sorry. Besides, there are those-I number myself amongst them-that believe there is such a thing as a surfeit of Messiahs-"
"Messiahs?" said Harry. He looked again at the tiny body.
"There was power there, I suspect," said Marchetti. "But it could have gone either way. Be thankful, D'Amour. Your world isn't ready for revelation." He looked past Harry to the youth, who was at the top of the stairs. "Patrice. Be an angel, will you, bring the car over? I'm late for Mass."
He threw the gloves back onto the bed.
"You're not above the law," said Harry.
"Oh please," the Cankerist protested. "let's have no nonsense. It's too late at night."
Harry felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull, and a trace of heat where blood was running.
"Patrice thinks you should go home, D'Amour. And so do I."
The knife point was pressed a little deeper.
"Yes?" said Marchetti.
"Yes," said Harry.
"He was here," said Norma, when Harry called back at the house.
"Who?"
"Eddie Axel; of Axel's Superette. He came through, clear as daylight."
"Dead?"
"Of course dead. He killed himself in his cell. Asked me if I'd seen his soul."
"And what did you say?"
"I'm a telephonist, Harry; I just make the connections. I don't pretend to understand the metaphysics." She picked up the bottle of brandy Harry had set on the table beside her chair. "How sweet of you," she said. "Sit down. Drink."
"Another time, Norma. When I'm not so tired." He went to the door. "By the way, " he said. "You were right. There was something on Ridge Street..."
"Where is it now?"
"Gone...home."
"And Cha'Chat?"
"Still out there somewhere. In a foul temper..."
"Manhattan's seen worse, Harry."
It was little consolation, but Harry muttered his agreement as he closed the door.
The snow was coming on more heavily all the time.
He stood on the step and watched the way the flakes spiraled in the lamplight. No two, he had read somewhere, were ever alike. When such variety was available to the humble snowflake, could he be surprised that events had such unpredictable faces?
Each moment was its own master, he mused, as he put his head between the blizzard's teeth, and he would have to take whatever comfort he could find in the knowledge that between this chilly hour and dawn there were innumerable such moments-blind maybe, and wild and hungry-but all at least eager to be born.
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Post by RAIVEN on Sept 22, 2007 0:05:44 GMT -7
Ghost Train A Story From Alberta ~~retold by S. E. Schlosser I was a railway fireman back in those days, working on the CPR line in Alberta. I did a hard day's work and earned me a fair wage. I was young then, and my pretty little bride was just setting up housekeeping in the little cottage that was all we could afford. Life was good, and I thought everything would continue rolling along that way. Then came that fateful day in May of 1908. I was working nights that month, and my buddy Twohey was the engineer. We were about three kilometers out of Medicine Hat when a blazing light appeared in front of the engine. It was another train on a collision course with us. Twohey yelled at me to jump, but there was no time. The light was right on top of us. I thought we were dead. Then the oncoming train veered off to the right and ran passed us, its whistle blowing and the passengers staring at us through the windows. But there was only a single track in that stretch of hills, and it was the one we were on. I looked over at the shrieking, rumbling Ghost Train and saw that the wheels were not touching the ground! Well, we were mighty spooked by the incident. Twohey decided to take some time off from engineering and began working in the yard; but I kept working the night shift as a fireman, not wanting some Ghost Train to drive me away a job I enjoyed. A few weeks later, I was stoking the fire for an engineer named Nicholson when we heard the shrill whistle blast through the calm night air. We were on the same single track just outside of Medicine Hat, and the brilliant light of the Ghost Train burst out of nowhere, blinding us. Nicholson gave a shout of terror and I thought my heart would stop. As before, the Ghost Train veered off to the right at the last possible second. I saw it race passed us on tracks that did not exist, its passengers staring curiously at Nicholson and I from out of the windows. That did it. I wasn't about to go back on the tracks after that. I did yard work for the rest of the month of May and a few weeks in June. Finally, I decided that enough was enough, and I gritted my teeth and resumed my role as fireman. I was firing up an engine in the yard one evening in early July when the report of an accident came in. The Spokane Flyer and a Lethbridge passenger train had a head-on collision on the single track three kilometers outside of Medicine Hat, on the exact spot where the Ghost Train had appeared. The Lethbridge locomotive had derailed and its baggage car was destroyed. Seven people were killed in the accident, including the two engineers. One was my buddy Twohey, and the other was Nicholson. More Canadian Ghost Stories
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