Gaslit Nightmares

by Lamb, Hugh;

  He had no thought of the resistance he should encounter. In a moment the Jew, despite his age and seizure, had him broken and powerless. The fury of blood blazed down upon him from the unearthly eyes.

  ‘Beast! that I might tear you! But the Nameless is your refuge. You must be chained – you must be chained. Come!’

  Half dragging, half bearing, he forced his captive across the room to the corner where the flask of topaz liquid stood.

  ‘Sleep!’ he shrieked, and caught up the glass vessel and dashed it down upon Rose’s mouth.

  The blow was a stunning one. A jagged splinter tore the victim’s lip and bought a gush of blood; the yellow fluid drowned his eyes and suffocated his throat. Struggling to hold his faculties, a startled shock passed through him, and he dropped insensible on the floor.

  VI

  ‘Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’

  Where had he read these words before? Now he saw them as scrolled in lightning upon a dead sheet of night.

  There was a sound of feet going on and on.

  Light soaked into the gloom, faster – faster; and he saw –

  The figure of a man moved endlessly forward by town and pasture and the waste places of the world. But though he, the dreamer, longed to outstrip and stay the figure and look searchingly in its face, he could not, following, close upon the intervening space; and its back was ever towards him.

  And always as the figure passed by populous places, there rose long murmurs of blasphemy to either side, and bestial cries: ‘We are weary! the farce is played out! He reveals Himself not, nor ever will! Lead us – lead us, against Heaven, against hell; against any other, or against ourselves! The cancer of life spreads, and we cannot enjoy nor can we think cleanly. The sins of the fathers have accumulated to one vast mount of putrefaction. Lead us, and we follow!’

  And, uttering these cries, swarms of hideous half-human shapes would emerge from holes and corners and rotting burrows, and stumble a little way with the figure, cursing and jangling, and so drop behind, one by one, like glutted flies shaken from a horse.

  And the dreamer saw in him, who went ever on before, the sole existent type of a lost racial glory, a marvellous survival, a prince over monstrosities; and he knew him to have reached, through long ages of evil introspection, a terrible belief in his own self-acquired immortality and lordship over all abased peoples that must die and pass; and the seed of his blasphemy he sowed broadcast in triumph as he went; and the ravenous horrors of the earth ran forth in broods and devoured it like birds, and trod one another underfoot in their gluttony.

  And he came to a vast desolate plain, and took his stand upon a barren drift of sand; and the face the dreamer longed and feared to see was yet turned from him.

  And the figure cried in a voice that grated down the winds of space: ‘Lo! I am he that cannot die! Lo! I am he that has eaten of the Tree of Life; who am the Lord of Time and of the races of the earth that shall flock to my standard!’

  And again: ‘Lo! I am he that God was impotent to destroy because I had eaten of the fruit! He cannot control that which He hath created. He hath builded His temple upon His impotence, and it shall fall and crush Him. The children of his misrule cry out against Him. There is no God but Antichrist!’

  Then from all sides came hurrying across the plain vast multitudes of the degenerate children of men, naked and unsightly; and they leaped and mouthed about the figure on the hillock, like hounds baying a dead fox held aloft; and from their swollen throats came one cry:

  ‘There is no God but Antichrist!’

  And thereat the figure turned about – and it was Cartaphilus the Jew.

  VII

  ‘There is no death! What seems so is transition.’

  Uttering an incoherent cry, Rose came to himself with a shock of agony and staggered to his feet. In the act he traversed no neutral ground of insentient purposelessness. He caught the thread of being where he had dropped it – grasped it with an awful and sublime resolve that admitted no least thought of self-interest.

  If his senses were for the moment amazed at their surroundings – the silence, the perfumed languor, the beauty and voluptuousness of the room – his soul, notwithstanding, stood intent, unfaltering – waiting merely the physical capacity for action.

  The fragments of the broken vessel were scattered at his feet; the blood of his wound had hardened upon his face. He took a dizzy step forward, and another. The girl lay as he had seen her cast herself down – breathing, he could see; her hair in disorder; her hands clenched together in terror or misery beyond words.

  Where was the other?

  Suddenly his vision cleared. He saw that the silken curtains of the alcove were closed.

  A poniard in a jewelled sheath lay, with other costly trifles, on a settle hard by. He seized and, drawing it, cast the scabbard clattering on the floor. His hands would have done; but this would work quicker.

  Exhaling a quick sigh of satisfaction, he went forward with a noiseless rush and tore apart the curtains.

  Yes – he was there – the Jew – the breathing enormity, stretched silent and motionless. The shadow of the young man’s lifted arm ran across his white shirt front like a bar sinister.

  To rid the world of something monstrous and abnormal – that was all Rose’s purpose and desire. He leaned over to strike. The face, stiff and waxen as a corpse’s, looked up into his with a calm impenetrable smile – looked up, for all its eyes were closed. And this was a horrible thing, that, though the features remained fixed in that one inexorable expression, something beneath them seemed alive and moving – something that clouded or revealed them, as when a sheet of paper glowing in the fire wavers between ashes and flame. Almost he could have thought that the soul, detached from its envelope, struggled to burst its way to the light.

  An instant he dashed his left palm across his eyes; then shrieking, ‘Let the fruit avail you now!’ drove the steel deep into its neck with a snarl.

  In the act, for all his frenzy, he had a horror of the spurting blood that he knew must foul his hand obscenely, and sprinkle his face, perhaps, as when a finger half plugs a flowing water-tap.

  None came! The fearful white wound seemed to suck at the steel, making a puckered mouth of derision.

  A thin sound, like the whinny of a dog, issued from Rose’s lips. He pulled out the blade – it came with a crackling noise, as if it had been drawn through parchment.

  Incredulous – mad – in an ecstasy of horror, he stabbed again and again. He might as fruitfully have struck at water. Then slashed and gaping wounds closed up so soon as he withdrew the steel, leaving not a scar.

  With a scream he dashed the unstained weapon on the floor and sprang back into the room. He stumbled and almost fell over the prostrate figure of the girl.

  A strength as of delirium stung and prickled in his arms. He stopped and forcibly raised her – held her against his breast – addressed her in a hurried passion of entreaty.

  ‘In the name of God, come with me! In the name of God, divorce yourself from this horror! He is the abnormal – the deathless – the Antichrist!’

  Her lids were closed; but she listened.

  ‘Adnah, you have given me myself. My reason cannot endure the gift alone. Have mercy and be pitiful, and share the burden!’

  At last she turned on him her swimming gaze.

  ‘Oh! I am numbed and lost! What would you do with me?’

  With a sob of triumph he wrapped his arms hard about her, and sought her lips with his. In the very moment of their meeting, she drew herself away, and stood panting and gazing with wide eyes over his shoulder. He turned.

  A young man of elegant appearance was standing by the table where he had lately leaned.

  In the face of the new-comer the animal and the fanatic were mingled, characteristics inseparable in pseudo-revelation.

  He was unmistakably a Jew, of the finest primitive type – such as might have existed in preneuroti
c days. His complexion was of a smooth golden russet; his nose and lips were cut rather in the lines of sensuous cynicism; the look in his polished brown eyes was of defiant self-confidence, capable of the extremes of devotion or of obstinacy. Short curling black hair covered his scalp, and his moustache and small crisp beard were of the same hue.

  ‘Thanks, stranger,’ he said, in a somewhat nasal but musical voice. ‘Your attack – a little cowardly, perhaps, for all its provocation – has served to release me before my time. Thanks – thanks indeed!’

  Amos sent a sick and groping glance towards the alcove. The curtain was pulled back – the couch was empty. His vision returning, caught sight of Adnah still standing motionless.

  ‘No, no!’ he screeched in a suffocated voice, and clasped his hands convulsively.

  There was an adoring expression in her wet eyes that grew and grew. In another moment she had thrown herself at the stranger’s feet.

  ‘Master,’ she cried, in a rich and swooning voice: ‘O Lord and Master – as blind love foreshadowed thee in these long months!’

  He smiled down upon her.

  ‘A tender welcome on the threshold,’ he said softly, ‘that I had almost renounced. The young spirit is weak to confirm the self-sacrifice of the old. But this ardent modern, Adnah, who, it seems, has slipped his opportunity?’

  Passionately clasping the hands of the young Jew, she turned her face reluctant.

  ‘He has blood on him,’ she whispered. ‘His lip is swollen like a schoolboy’s with fighting. He is not a man, sane, self-reliant and glorious – like you, O my heart!’

  The Jew gave a high, loud laugh, which he checked in mid-career.

  ‘Sir,’ he said derisively, ‘we will wish you a very pleasant good-morning.’

  How – under what pressure or by what process of self-effacement – he reached the street, Amos could never remember. His first sense of reality was in the stinging cold, which made him feel, by reaction, preposterously human.

  It was perhaps six o’clock of a February morning, and the fog had thinned considerably, giving place to a wan and livid glow that was but half-measure of dawn.

  He found himself going down the ringing pavement that was talcous with a sooty skin of ice, a single engrossing resolve hammering time in his brain to his footsteps.

  The artificial glamour was all past and gone – beaten and frozen out of him. The rest was to do – his plain duty as a Christian, as a citizen – above all, as a gentleman. He was, unhypnotized, a law-abiding young man, with a hatred of notoriety and a detestation of the abnormal. Unquestionably his forebears had made a huge muddle of his inheritance.

  About a quarter to seven he walked (rather unsteadily) into Vine Street Police Station and accosted the inspector on duty.

  ‘I want to lay an information.’

  The officer scrutinised him, professionally, from the under side, and took up a pen.

  ‘What’s the charge?’

  ‘Administering a narcotic, attempted murder, abduction, profanity, trading under false pretences, wandering at large – great heavens! what isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll say. Name of accused?’

  ‘Cartaphilus.’

  ‘Any other?’

  ‘The Wandering Jew.’

  The Inspector laid down his pen and leaned forward, bridging his finger-tips under his chin.

  ‘If you take my advice,’ he said, ‘you’ll go and have a Turkish bath.’

  The young man gasped and frowned.

  ‘You won’t take my information?’

  ‘Not in that form. Come again by-and-by.’

  Amos walked straight out of the building and retraced his steps to Wardour Street.

  ‘I’ll watch for his coming out,’ he thought, ‘and have him arrested, on one charge only, by the constable on the beat. Where’s the place?’

  Twice he walked the length of the street and back, with dull increasing amazement. The sunlight had edged its way into the fog by this time, and every door and window stood out sleek and self-evident. But amongst them all was none that corresponded to the door or window of his adventure.

  He hung about till day was bright in the air, and until it occurred to him that his woeful and bloodstained appearance was beginning to excite unflattering comment. At that he trudged for the third time the entire length to and fro, and so coming out into Oxford Street stood on the edge of the pavement, as though it were the brink of Cocytus.

  ‘Well, she called me a boy,’ he muttered; ‘what does it matter?’

  He hailed an early hansom and jumped in.

  The Vengeance Of The Dead

  ROBERT BARR

  Robert Barr (1850 – 1912) took up writing after an early career as a schoolmaster and a reporter and it was as an author that he achieved lasting success.

  Born in Glasgow, Barr emigrated to Canada with his parents at the age of four. He must have been a bright child; he became headmaster of a public school in Windsor, Ontario, in his teens, and then hopped just over the border to Detroit, America, where he became a reporter on that city’s Free Press. Barr was very successful on the paper, so much so that it sent him to England in 1881 to establish a British edition. Whatever happened to that British edition is uncertain, but one thing is for sure: Barr liked his country of origin so much he decided to stay, and set about building his own publishing concern.

  His first book of stories, STRANGE HAPPENINGS (1883), appeared under the name Luke Sharp, Barr’s journalistic nom-de-plume, and from then on he produced many short stories, mostly detective fiction but with the occasional (and welcome) macabre work among them. He founded, with Jerome K. Jerome, The Idler magazine in 1892, which ran for over eighteen years, until Barr’s retirement.

  Barr’s most quoted work is THE TRIUMPHS OF EUGENE VALMONT (1906), reputed to be the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Certainly, his detective stories have received wider reprinting than his tales of terror. But these lesser-known works were just as good, as this story will show, I hope. It comes from REVENGE! (1896), a fine set of stories all amply explained by the book’s title. This particular piece of revenge is probably the most peculiar of the book, but neat and enjoyable all the same.

  It is a bad thing for a man to die with an unsatisfied thirst for revenge parching his soul. David Allen died, cursing Bernard Heaton and lawyer Grey; hating the lawyer who had won the case even more than the man who was to gain by the winning. Yet if cursing were to be done, David should rather have cursed his own stubbornness and stupidity.

  To go back for some years, this is what had happened. Squire Heaton’s only son went wrong. The squire raged, as was natural. He was one of a long line of hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-swearing squires, and it was maddening to think that his only son should deliberately take to books and cold water, when there was manly sport on the countryside and old wine in the cellar. Yet before now such blows have descended upon deserving men, and they have to be borne as best they may. Squire Heaton bore it badly, and when his son went off on a Government scientific expedition around the world the squire drank harder and swore harder than ever, but never mentioned the boy’s name.

  Two years after, young Heaton returned, but the doors of the Hall were closed against him. He had no mother to plead for him, although it was not likely that would have made any difference, for the squire was not a man to be appealed to and swayed this way or that. He took his hedges, his drinks, and his course in life straight. The young man went to India, where he was drowned. As there is no mystery in this matter, it may as well be stated here that young Heaton ultimately returned to England, as drowned men have ever been in the habit of doing, when their return will mightily inconvenience innocent persons who have taken their places. It is a disputed question whether the sudden disappearance of a man, or his reappearance after a lapse of years, is the more annoying.

  If the old squire felt remorse at the supposed death of his only son he did not show it. The hatred which had been directe
d against his unnatural offspring redoubled itself and was bestowed on his nephew David Allen, who was now the legal heir to the estate and its income. Allen was the impecunious son of the squire’s sister who had married badly. It is hard to starve when one is heir to a fine property, but that is what David did, and it soured him. The Jews would not lend on the security – the son might return – so David Allen waited for a dead man’s shoes, impoverished and embittered.

  At last the shoes were ready for him to step into. The old squire died as a gentleman should, of apoplexy, in his armchair, with a decanter at his elbow; David Allen entered into his belated inheritance, and his first act was to discharge every servant, male and female, about the place and engage others who owed their situations to him alone. Then were the Jews sorry they had not trusted him.

  He was now rich but broken in health, with bent shoulders, without a friend on the earth. He was a man suspicious of all the world, and he had a furtive look over his shoulder as if he expected Fate to deal him a sudden blow – as indeed it did.

  It was a beautiful June day, when there passed the porter’s lodge and walked up the avenue to the main entrance of the Hall a man whose face was bronzed by a torrid sun. He requested speech with the master and was asked into a room to wait.

  At length David Allen shuffled in, with his bent shoulders, glaring at the intruder from under his bushy eyebrows. The stranger rose as he entered and extended his hand.

  ‘You don’t know me, of course. I believe we have never met before. I am your cousin.’

  Allen ignored the outstretched hand.

  ‘I have no cousin,’ he said.

  ‘I am Bernard Heaton, the son of your uncle.’

  ‘Bernard Heaton is dead.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, he is not. I ought to know, for I tell you I am he.’

  ‘You lie!’