The dying man took no notice of her, and she opened his gown and put her cheek to his heart, calling him again. There had never been more perfect union; how could the bond still be so strong if he were not at the other end of it? He was there, her other part; until dead he must be living. There was no intermediate state. Why should he be as entombed and unresponding as if the screws were in the lid? But the faintly beating heart did not quicken beneath her lips. She extended her arms suddenly, describing eccentric lines, above, about him, rapidly opening and closing her hands as if to clutch some escaping object; then sprang to her feet, and went to the window. She feared insanity. She had asked to be left alone with her dying husband, and she did not wish to lose her reason and shriek a crowd of people about her.
The green plots in the yards were not apparent, she noticed. Something heavy, like a pall, rested upon them. Then she understood that the day was over and that night was coming.
She returned swiftly to the bedside, wondering if she had remained away hours or seconds, and if he were dead. His face was still discernible, and Death had not relaxed it. She laid her own against it, then withdrew it with shuddering flesh, her teeth smiting each other as if an icy wind had passed.
She let herself fall back in the chair, clasping her hands against her heart, watching with expanding eyes the white sculptured face which, in the glittering dark, was becoming less defined of outline. Did she light the gas it would draw mosquitoes, and she could not shut from him the little air he must be mechanically grateful for. And she did not want to see the opening eye—the falling jaw.
Her vision became so fixed that at length she saw nothing, and closed her eyes and waited for the moisture to rise and relieve the strain. When she opened them his face had disappeared; the humid waves above the house-tops put out even the light of the stars, and night was come.
Fearfully, she approached her ear to his lips; he still breathed. She made a motion to kiss him, then threw herself back in a quiver of agony—they were not the lips she had known, and she would have nothing less.
His breathing was so faint that in her half-reclining position she could not hear it, could not be aware of the moment of his death. She extended her arm resolutely and laid her hand on his heart. Not only must she feel his going, but, so strong had been the comradeship between them, it was a matter of loving honor to stand by him to the last.
She sat there in the hot heavy night, pressing her hand hard against the ebbing heart of the unseen, and awaited Death. Suddenly an odd fancy possessed her. Where was Death? Why was he tarrying? Who was detaining him? From what quarter would he come? He was taking his leisure, drawing near with footsteps as measured as those of men keeping time to a funeral march. By a wayward deflection she thought of the slow music that was always turned on in the theatre when the heroine was about to appear, or something eventful to happen. She had always thought that sort of thing ridiculous and inartistic. So had He.
She drew her brows together angrily, wondering at her levity, and pressed her relaxed palm against the heart it kept guard over. For a moment the sweat stood on her face; then the pent-up breath burst from her lungs. He still lived.
Once more the fancy wantoned above the stunned heart. Death—where was he? What a curious experience: to be sitting alone in a big house—she knew that the cook had stolen out—waiting for Death to come and snatch her husband from her. No; he would not snatch, he would steal upon his prey as noiselessly as the approach of Sin to Innocence—an invisible, unfair, sneaking enemy, with whom no man’s strength could grapple. If he would only come like a man, and take his chances like a man! Women had been known to reach the hearts of giants with the dagger’s point. But he would creep upon her.
She gave an exclamation of horror. Something was creeping over the window-sill. Her limbs palsied, but she struggled to her feet and looked back, her eyes dragged about against her own volition. Two small green stars glared menacingly at her just above the sill; then the cat possessing them leaped downward, and the stars disappeared.
She realized that she was horribly frightened. “Is it possible?” she thought. “Am I afraid of Death, and of Death that has not yet come? I have always been rather a brave woman; He used to call me heroic; but then with him it was impossible to fear anything. And I begged them to leave me alone with him as the last of earthly boons. Oh, shame!”
But she was still quaking as she resumed her seat, and laid her hand again on his heart. She wished that she had asked Mary to sit outside the door; there was no bell in the room. To call would be worse than desecrating the house of God, and she would not leave him for one moment. To return and find him dead—gone alone!
Her knees smote each other. It was idle to deny it; she was in a state of unreasoning terror. Her eyes rolled apprehensively about; she wondered if she should see It when It came; wondered how far off It was now. Not very far; the heart was barely pulsing. She had heard of the power of the corpse to drive brave men to frenzy, and had wondered, having no morbid horror of the dead. But this! To wait—and wait—and wait—perhaps for hours—past the midnight—on to the small hours—while that awful, determined, leisurely Something stole nearer and nearer.
She bent to him who had been her protector with a spasm of anger. Where was the indomitable spirit that had held her all these years with such strong and loving clasp? How could he leave her? How could he desert her? Her head fell back and moved restlessly against the cushion; moaning with the agony of loss, she recalled him as he had been. Then fear once more took possession of her, and she sat erect, rigid, breathless, awaiting the approach of Death.
Suddenly, far down in the house, on the first floor, her strained hearing took note of a sound—a wary, muffled sound, as if some one were creeping up the stair, fearful of being heard. Slowly! It seemed to count a hundred between the laying down of each foot. She gave a hysterical gasp. Where was the slow music?
Her face, her body, were wet—as if a wave of death-sweat had broken over them. There was a stiff feeling at the roots of her hair; she wondered if it were really standing erect. But she could not raise her hand to ascertain. Possibly it was only the coloring matter freezing and bleaching. Her muscles were flabby, her nerves twitched helplessly.
She knew that it was Death who was coming to her through the silent deserted house; knew that it was the sensitive ear of her intelligence that heard him, not the dull, coarse-grained ear of the body.
He toiled up the stair painfully, as if he were old and tired with much work. But how could he afford to loiter, with all the work he had to do? Every minute, every second, he must be in demand to hook his cold, hard finger about a soul struggling to escape from its putrefying tenement. But probably he had his emissaries, his minions: for only those worthy of the honor did he come in person.
He reached the first landing and crept like a cat down the hall to the next stair, then crawled slowly up as before. Light as the footfalls were, they were squarely planted, unfaltering; slow, they never halted.
Mechanically she pressed her jerking hand closer against the heart; its beats were almost done. They would finish, she calculated, just as those footfalls paused beside the bed.
She was no longer a human being; she was an Intelligence and an EAR. Not a sound came from without, even the Elevated appeared to be temporarily off duty; but inside the big quiet house that footfall was waxing louder, louder, until iron feet crashed on iron stairs and echo thundered.
She had counted the steps—one—two—three—irritated beyond endurance at the long deliberate pauses between. As they climbed and clanged with slow precision she continued to count, audibly and with equal precision, noting their hollow reverberation. How many steps had the stair? She wished she knew. No need! The colossal trampling announced the lessening distance in an increasing volume of sound not to be misunderstood. It turned the curve; it reached the landing; it advanced—slowly—down the hall; it paused before her door. Then knuckles of iron shook the frail panels. Her nerveles
s tongue gave no invitation. The knocking became more imperious; the very walls vibrated. The handle turned, swiftly and firmly. With a wild instinctive movement she flung herself into the arms of her husband.
* * * *
When Mary opened the door and entered the room she found a dead woman lying across a dead man.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
GRANT ALLEN (1848-1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, and a successful upholder of the theory of evolution. He was also a pioneer in science fiction, with the 1895 novel The British Barbarians. This book, published about the same time as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (which includes a mention of Allen),[8] also described time travel, although the plot is quite different. His short story “The Thames Valley Catastrophe” (published 1901 in The Strand Magazine) describes the destruction of London by a sudden and massive volcanic eruption.
H. F. ARNOLD (1902 – 1963) was, according to the Weird Fiction Review, “an American pulp-era writer who wrote only three published stories. Despite this low output, ‘The Night Wire’ (1926), first published in Weird Tales, is considered the most popular story from the first golden age of that magazine. H.P. Lovecraft is said to have loved this story.”
GERTRUDE ATHERTON (1857–1948) was a prominent and prolific American author, many of whose novels are based in her home state, California. Her best-seller Black Oxen (1923) was made into a silent movie of the same name. In addition to novels, she wrote short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on such issues as feminism, politics, and war. She was strong-willed, independent-minded, and sometimes controversial.
J. Y. AYERMAN (1806–1873) is best known as an English antiquarian specializing mainly in numismatics. He also wrote fiction under his own name and the pseudonym Paul Pindar.
JOHN BUCHAN (1875–1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began both his writing career and his political and diplomatic career, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in Southern Africa. Although best known for his adventure novels, he wrote in many genres, including fantasy and horror.
O. M. CABRAL (1909-1997) was one of the first genre fantasy and horror writers, appearing in the pulps Weird Tales, Strange Stories, and Thrilling Mystery. She also wrote children’s books and poetry.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799– 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Eça de Queirós, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
JEAN-MARIE-MATHIAS-PHILIPPE-AUGUSTE, COMTE DE VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM (1838–1889) was a French symbolist writer. Villiers’ works, in the romantic style, are often fantastic in plot and filled with mystery and horror.
EDGAR FAWCETT (1847–1904) was an American novelist and poet. His remarkable novels Solarion (about a dog given human intelligence) and Douglas Duane (1885, on scientific body-switching) as well as The Ghost of Guy Thryle (1895, which has astral projection as a means of interplanetary travel) deserve to be better known.
LAFCADIO HEARN (1850–1904) is best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan and Some Chinese Ghosts. In the United States, Hearn is also known for his writings about the city of New Orleans based on his ten-year stay in that city.
W. W. JACOBS (1863– 1943), was an English author of short stories and novels. Although much of his work was humorous, he is most famous for his horror story “The Monkey’s Paw.”
JEROME K. JEROME (1859– 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel (a sequel to ).
JACK LONDON (born John Griffith Chaney, 1876– 1916)was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire”, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “Love of Life.” He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen,” and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.
CATULLE MENDÈS (1841–1909) was a French poet and man of letters. Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, Mendès was born in Bordeaux. After childhood and adolescence in Toulouse, he arrived in Paris in 1859 and quickly became one of the proteges of the poet Théophile Gautier. He promptly attained notoriety with the publication in the La Revue fantaisiste (1861) of his Roman d’une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month’s imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs. He was allied with Parnassianism from the beginning of the movement and displayed extraordinary metrical skill in his first volume of poems, Philoméla (1863).
OUIDA (1839– 1908) was the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé (although she preferred to be known as Marie Louise de la Ramée). During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, children’s books, and collections of short stories and essays. She was an animal lover and rescuer, and at times owned as many as thirty dogs.
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.
MARCEL PRÉVOST (1862– 1941) was a French author and dramatist. He was born in Paris and educated at Jesuit schools in Bordeaux and Paris, entering the École polytechnique in 1882. He published a story in the Clairon as early as 1881, but for some years after the completion of his studies he applied his technical knowledge to the manufacture of tobacco.
BRAINARD GARDNER SMITH was a popular writer at the turn of the 20th Century. His most successful book was Reading and Speaking: Familiar Talks to Young Men Who Would Speak Well in Public.
We have no information on T. G. ATKINSON, MORRIS W. GOWEN HARRY HOW, and MARY KEEGAN.
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
THE MEGAPACK SERIES
THE WALTZ, by Morris W. Gowen
THREE AT TABLE, by W.W. Jacobs
VERA, by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
A LOST DAY, by Edgar Fawcett
METZENGERSTEIN, by Edgar Allan Poe
A TRAGEDY OF HIGH EXPLOSIVES, by Brainard Gardner Smith
THE LEGEND OF TCHI-NIU, by Lafcadio Hearn
THE OUTGOING OF THE TIDE,[1] by John Buchan
A STRANGE REUNION, by T. G. Atkinson
A WORK OF ACCUSATION, by Harry How
THE NIGHT WIRE, by H. F. Arnold
THE ELIXIR OF LIFE, by Honoré de Balzac
THE MIRROR, by Catulle Mendès
THE WOMAN AND THE CAT, by Marcel Prevost
A LEMON-TREE, by Ouida
TWILIGHT ZONE, by Mary Keegan
UNHALLOWED HOLIDAY, by O. M. Cabral
THE ETERNITY OF FORMS, by Jack London
WOLVERDEN TOWER, by Grant Allen
THE MAGIC PHIAL, by J. Y. A
yerman
THE HAUNTED MILL, by Jerome K. Jerome
THE GROVE OF ASHTAROTH, by John Buchan
THE WELL, by W. W. Jacobs
THE OBLONG BOX, by Edgar Allan Poe
DEATH AND THE WOMAN, by Gertrude Atherton
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
The Third Macabre Megapack Page 34
