The Third Macabre Megapack

by Various Writers

  Her father, in despair, yielded.

  It seemed to him as if he were cutting the throat of a friend. Then he approached the tree to carry it away. He had called in one of his fellow-carters to help to move it, for it was too heavy for one man. With difficulty it was forced through the narrow, low door and down the steep stair, its leaves brushing the walls with a sighing sound, and its earthen jar grinding on the stone of the steps. Lizina watched it go without a sigh, without a tear. Her eyes were dry and shining; her little body was quivering; her face was red and pale in quick, uneven changes.

  “It goes where it will be better than with us,” said Fringuello, in a vague apology to it, as he lifted it out of the entrance of the house.

  He had sold it to a gardener in a villa near at hand.

  “Oh yes, it will be better off,” he said feverishly, in the doubtful yet aggressive tone of one who argues that which he knows is not true. “With rich people instead of poor; out in a fine garden half the year, and in a beautiful airy wooden house all winter. Oh yes, it will be much better off. Now it has grown so big it was choked where it stood in my little place; no light, no air, no sun, nothing which it wanted. It will be much better off where it goes; it will have rich, new earth and every sort of care.”

  “It has done well enough with you,” said his comrade carelessly, as he helped to shove the vase on to the hand-cart.

  “Yes, yes,” said Fringuello impatiently, “but it will do better where it goes. It has grown too big for a room. It would starve with me.”

  “Well, it is your own business,” said the other man.

  “Yes, it is his own business,” said the neighbours, who were standing to see it borne away as if it were some rare spectacle. “But the tree was always there; and the money you get will go,” they added, in their collective wisdom.

  He took up the handles of the little cart and placed the yoke of cord over his shoulders, and began to drag it away. He bent his head down very low so that the people should not see the tears which were running down his cheeks.

  When he came back to his home he carried its price in his hands—thirty francs in three paper notes. He held them out to Lizina.

  “All is well with it; it is to stand in a beautiful place, close to falling water, half in shade, half in sun, as it likes best. Oh, all is well with it, dear! do not be afraid.” Then his voice failed him, and he sobbed aloud.

  The child took the money. She had a little bundle in her hand, and she had put on the only pair of shoes she possessed.

  “Clean yourself, father, and come—come quickly,” she said in a little hard, dry, panting voice.

  “Oh wait, wait, my angel!” he cried piteously through his sobs.

  “I cannot wait,” said the child, “not a minute, not a minute. Clean yourself and come.”

  * * * *

  In an hour’s time they were in the train. The child did everything—found the railway-station, asked the way, paid their fares, took their seats, pushing her father hither and thither as if he were a blind man. He was dumb with terror and regret; he resisted nothing. Having sold the tree, there seemed to him nothing left for him to do. Lizina obeyed him no more—she commanded.

  People turned to look after this little sick girl with death written on her face, who spoke and moved with such feverish decision, and dragged after her this thin dumb man, her small lean hand shut with nervous force upon his own. All the way she ate nothing; she only drank thirstily of water whenever the train stopped.

  The novelty and strangeness of the transit, the crowd, and haste, and noise, the unfamiliar scenes, the pressure of unknown people, and the stare of unknown eyes—all which was so bewildering and terrible to her father, had no effect upon her. All she thought of was to get to the place of which the name was written on the scrap of paper which she had shown at the ticket-office, and which she continued to show mutely to anyone who spoke to her. It said everything to her; she thought it must say everything to everyone else.

  Nothing could alarm her or arrest her attention. Her whole mind was set on her goal.

  “Your little lady is very ill!” said more than one in a crowded railway-waggon, where they jammed one on to another, thick as herrings in a barrel.

  “Ay, ay, she is very ill,” he answered stupidly; and they did not know whether he was unfeeling or daft. He was dizzy and sick with the unwonted motion of the train, the choking dust, the giddy landscape which seemed to run past him, earth and sky together; but on Lizina they made no impression, except that she coughed almost incessantly. She seemed to ail nothing and to perceive nothing. He was seized with a panic of dread lest they should be taken in some wrong direction, even out of the world altogether; dreaded fire, accident, death, treachery; felt himself caught up by strong, invisible hands, and whirled away, the powers of heaven or hell alone knew where. His awful fear grew on him every moment greater and greater; and he would have given his soul to be back safe on the sand of the river at his home.

  But Lizina neither showed nor felt any fear whatever.

  The journey took the whole day and part of the ensuing night; for the slow cheap train by which they travelled gave way to others, passed hours motionless, thrust aside and forgotten, and paused at every little station on the road. They suffered from hunger and thirst, and heat and draught, and fatigue and contusion, as the poor cattle suffered in the trucks beside them. But the child did not seem to feel either exhaustion or pain, or to want anything except to be there—to be there. The towns, the mountains, the sea, the coast, all so strange and wonderful to untravelled eyes, had no wonder for her. She only wanted to get beyond them, to where it was that Cecco lay. Every now and then she opened her bundle and looked at the little twig of the lemon-tree.

  Alarmed at her aspect, and the racking cough, their companions shrank away from them as far as the crowding of the waggon allowed of, and they were left unquestioned and undisturbed, whilst the day wore on and the sun went down into the sea and the evening deepened into night.

  It was dawn when they were told to descend; they had reached their destination—a dull, sun-baked, fever-stricken little port, with the salt water on one side of it, and the machia and marsh on the other.

  Lizina got down from the train, holding her little bundle in one hand and in the other her father’s wrist. Their limbs were bruised, aching, trembling, their spines felt broken, their heads seemed like empty bladders, in which their brains went round and round; but she did not faint or fall—she went straight onward as though the place was familiar to her.

  Close to the desolate, sand-strewn station there was a fort of decaying yellow stone, high walls with loopholes, mounds of sand with sea-thistle and bryony growing in them; before these was the blue water, and a long stone wall running far out into the water. To the iron rings in it a few fisher boats were moored by their cables. The sun was rising over the inland wilderness, where wild boars and buffalo dwelt under impenetrable thickets. Lizina led her father by the hand past the fortifications to a little desolate church with crumbling belfry, where she knew the burial-ground must be. There were four lime-washed walls, with a black iron door, through the bars of which the graves within and the rank grass around them could be seen. The gate was locked; the child sat down on a stone before it and waited. She motioned to her father to do the same. He was like a poor steer landed after a long voyage in which he has neither eaten nor drank, but has been bruised, buffeted, thrown to and fro, galled, stunned, tormented. They waited, as she wished, in the cool dust of the breaking day. The bell above in the church steeple was tolling for the first Mass.

  In a little while a sacristan came out of the presbytery near the church, and began to turn a great rusty key in the church door. He saw the two sitting there by the graveyard, and looking at them over his shoulder, said to them, “You are strangers—what would you?”

  Lizina rose and answered him: “Will you open to me? I come to see my Cecco, who lies here. I have something to give him.”

 
; The sacristan looked at her father.

  “Cecco?” he repeated, in a doubtful tone.

  “A lad of Royezzano, a soldier who died here,” said Fringuello, hoarsely and faintly, for his throat was parched and swollen, and his head swam. “He and my child were playmates. Canst tell us, good man, where his grave is made?”

  The sacristan paused, standing before the leathern curtain of the church porch, trying to remember. Save for soldiers and the fisher folk, there was no one who either lived or died there; his mind went back over the winter and autumn months, to the last summer, in which the marsh fever and the pestilential drought had made many sicken and some die in the fort and in the town.

  “Cecco? Cecco?” he said doubtfully. “A Tuscan lad? A conscript? Ay, I do recall him now. He got the tertian fever and died in barracks. His reverence wrote about him to his family. Yes, I remember. There were three soldier lads died last year, all in the summer. There are three crosses where they lie. I put them there; his is the one nearest the wall. Yes, you can go in; I have the key.”

  He stepped across the road and unlocked the gate. He looked wonderingly on Lizina as he did so. “Poor little one!” he muttered, in compassion. “How small, how ill, to come so far!”

  Neither she nor her father seemed to hear him. The child pressed through the aperture as soon as the door was drawn ajar, and Fringuello followed her. The burial-ground was small and crowded, covered with rank grass, and here and there sea-lavender was growing. The sacristan led them to a spot by the western wall where there were three rude crosses made of unbarked sticks nailed across one another. The rank grass was growing amongst the clods of sun-baked yellow clay; the high white wall rose behind the crossed sticks; the sun beat down on the place: there was nothing else.

  The sacristan motioned to the cross nearest the wall, and then went back to the church, being in haste, as it was late for matins. Lizina stood by the two poor rude sticks, once branches of the hazel, which were all that marked the grave of Cecco.

  Her father, uncovering his head, fell on his knees.

  The child’s face was illuminated with a strange and holy rapture. She kissed the lemon bough which she held in her hand, and then laid it gently down upon the grass and clay under the wall.

  “I have remembered, dear,” she said softly, and knelt on the ground and joined her hands in prayer. Then the weakness of her body overcame the strength of her spirit; she leaned forward lower and lower until her face was bowed over the yellow grass. “I came to lie with you,” she said under her breath; and then her lips parted more widely with a choking sigh, the blood gushed from her mouth, and in a few minutes she was dead.

  They laid her there in the clay and the sand and the tussocks of grass, and her father went back alone to his native place and empty room.

  * * * *

  One day on the river-bank a man said to him:

  “It is odd, but that lemon-tree which you sold to my master never did well; it died within the week—a fine, strong, fresh young tree. Were there worms at its root, think you, or did the change to the open air kill it?”

  Fringuello, who had always had a scared, wild, dazed look on his face since he returned from the sea-coast, looked at the speaker stupidly, not with any wonder, but like one who hears what he has long known but only imperfectly understands.

  “It knew Lizina was dead,” he said simply; and then thrust his spade into the sand and dug.

  He would never smile nor sing any more, nor any more know any joys of life; but he still worked on from that habit which is the tyrant and saviour of the poor.

  TWILIGHT ZONE, by Mary Keegan

  Dr. Bealby bent over the bed. He stretched an arm across the knees of the man just dead and touched Mrs. Webster on the shoulder. He touched her very gently, and when she raised her head and lifted her haggard gaze to his, his head bent slowly.

  The young wife, beautiful even in her misery, looked up at him with eyes bloodshot and wild from many nights and days of watching. Her white lips drew back across her teeth. She shook her head. Dr. Bealby turned away.

  Mary rose from her knees by the bed and lay down beside the dead man. She kissed him. She loosened her long, dark hair and spread it over his head and face. Under this warm canopy she pressed her face to his.

  “Godfrey!” she whispered. “Godfrey!”

  Dr. Bealby spoke in an undertone to Miss Gunter, the nurse. Then he went out.

  “Mrs. Webster,” said Miss Gunter, “let me take you to your room.”

  “Godfrey,” whispered Mary, “Godfrey, I’m here! I’m with you! Can’t you feel how warm my arms are?”

  “Mrs. Webster! Mrs. Webster!” Miss Gunter spoke kindly but firmly, “let me take you to your room.”

  “Godfrey, Godfrey, come back! I want you to come back! Come back! It’s Mary calling you, Godfrey! I can’t live without you—and I want to live! Godfrey, come back!”

  “Mrs, Webster,” whispered Miss Gunter, trying to lift Mary, “you must come with me.”

  Mary pushed her back.

  “There are things to be done, Mrs. Webster, and you ought not to be here.”

  “Leave me alone,” said Mary violently.

  “I am disobeying Dr. Bealby’s orders, Mrs. Webster, if I leave you.”

  “This is my house,” said Mary; “leave me.” She pressed her face against the dead man. “Godfrey!”

  Miss Gunter went out and closed the door, remaining on the other side of it.

  “Godfrey, you must come back!” commanded the young wife, pressing her body close to the stark figure on the bed. “You must feel my kisses, Godfrey—you must know! It is Mary who is kissing you, love—Mary!” She pushed the eyelids back from the sightless eyes. “Look at me, Godfrey! Ah, you are not—” She shuddered, then laughed softly. “You are pretending! You are a lazy boy! You are just sleeping!”

  A clock in the hall struck four. The room was dim, lighted only by a faint, shaded bulb over the bed. The silence of night and death weighed in the place. In the house there was movement; there were rapid footsteps, low and hurried voices, but Mary did not hear them. In the darks and shadows beneath her hair, she kissed her husband’s lips and looked into the narrow slits of gray blue, rapidly glazing under the stiffening lids. There was no gleam of life, no faintest response to the wild heartbeats thumping against his breast.

  The door opened softly. “Mrs. Webster,” whispered Miss Gunter, “you must come with me. I will take you to your room.” Miss Gunter paused a moment, “The men are waiting downstairs to—to— There are things to be done, Mrs. Webster.”

  “I don’t care,” said Mary; “go away.”

  Miss Gunter went out and closed the door. Distantly, Mary heard her saying: “I wish Dr. Bealby had not gone! Tell the men to wait.”

  With all the warmth of her young, strong body, Mary pressed the big, lifeless man beside her. She raised his broad shoulders a little and let him fall back again upon the bed. Then she looked into his eyes, peering down underneath the lids. She flung back her hair, the better to see.

  “Godfrey, Godfrey, I can tell by your eyes you can see me! Godfrey, Godfrey, I love you! Come back to me, Godfrey! I cannot bear the loneliness while you sleep! Come back to me! Come back! I don’t ask you—I don’t beg you—I just tell you that I love you and I need you—come back!”

  The awful stillness throbbed with its own intensity. Mary drew herself a little way from the stark body, leaning up upon her hands.

  Godfrey Webster opened his eyes.

  Mary screamed and fell unconscious.

  * * * *

  The door opened quickly and Miss Gunter came into the room. A housemaid followed.

  “Come—help me,” said Miss Gunter; “we will take her to her room.” She bent down and placed an arm under Mrs. Webster and raised her from the bed. She dropped her quickly with a sharp exclamation of fear. The housemaid ran screaming from the room.

  * * * *

  It was several weeks before the Websters left
town. They went to their house at Newport, out of season. They needed quiet to recover, for both were far from well. They had been so gay and happy there the season before, and again, the season before that—the first after their marriage—that baffled specialists hoped a quiet convalescence there might develop some sort of interest in things about them, and in life itself.

  But the weeks rolled into months and no change was visible. They were not ill; they were not well. They were no longer young. They were persons of non-descript age living together peaceably enough, without sympathy, without distractions; without interest in anything, in themselves, or in each other. When old friends called to see them, they left depressed, dismayed. Dr. Bealby, as an old family friend, sometimes took a run over to try to “shake them up,” as he expressed it, but he left, baffled; and when he had gone it was to them as if he had not been.

  Mary, who used to meet him with laughing face, light step and hands extended, came toward him now with slow, uncertain tread, one hand partly extended as from habit, and a face old and puzzled, and, perhaps, a trifle wistful.

  In spite of the passionate personal interest which Bealby took in the case, as a scientist it filled him with keen and impersonal fervor. Any hours that he could spare, and many that he should not have spared, were spent with the Websters, at Newport.

  He brought, from time to time, one after another, and sometimes in groups, most of the distinguished men of science of the present decade. Few liked to admit it, but the consensus of opinion reached was that the case was actually outside, and beyond, the pale of science it its present development. They were keenly interested, scientifically excited, but admittedly helpless.

  With Bealby, in his prime, it was a frenzy and had to be worked out. He had been twitted by some of his peers with having made a hurried pronouncement; found a man to be dead who was not dead, and so on. But the larger men saw farther—some of them farther than they would admit, or farther than they dared—in short, farther than they could follow.