The fourth was empty. A door in it led to a bathroom. He turned the hot water on. It still was at boiling-point, and as he waited till it had cooled he shaved with a good sharp razor someone had left on the dressing-table.
Penderby, despite the luxury of steam and soap and water to his chin, did not linger in the bath. He had begun to hurry. For what? He did not know. But the cool sheets soothed him. The comfort of the bed was so exquisite that, to sense it as long as possible, he tried to stay awake. The sleep into which he soon fell was dreamless, and lasted till 7 p.m.
He made tea in the big kitchen, below street-level, and brought butter and cold roast chicken from a refrigerator and fine bread from a chrome-and-white cupboard. When he left the hotel, he was munching a sandwich made of remnants of the meal.
The Strand was gray and, in corners and gaping store-fronts here and there, black. Rain had made scattered pools that gave the street a shabby, defeated look. The only light they reflected was the little in the sky. All the street-lamps had failed now, and the store-lights that had outlived the day were few and ineffectual.
It was as Penderby looked round Trafalgar Square, somber and a little frightening, that he felt his first bewilderment, apart from the shocks of surprise, of the day. He sat on a balustrade outside South Africa House, and tried to plan the suddenly monstrous-appearing future.
He could not stay in the vast charnelhouse London had become. A day or two more, as he already had warned himself, and plague would ride every breath of air. But his food was in London; he could not turn farmer at short notice, and the supplies in stores and hotels would last very long.
The Continent? But he hardly could manage a boat even on the short Dover-Calais voyage, could he? Then, he had not heard nor seen aircraft since the afternoon before. If air-liners had come from France and other countries, and landed at a dead airdrome, the pilots, undoubtedly, would have flown from Croydon on to London. Had everyone in France, Germany, Spain, Italy died? Was he the only one spared? Were there French, German, Spanish, Italian Edward Penderbys?
The Square was cold, lonesome. He left his perch stiffly, and turned onto the Strand once more. He tumbled over a body now and then. Clouds that had scudded from the west broke in a short, heavy shower, and it brought a damp smell from the heaps of wet clothes on every side.
The hotel was in darkness, and he leaned against a bronze-encased pillar outside and began to smoke a cigar he had found in the bedroom. The dead he did not fear, but he was uneasy in the midst of so vast a number of them; besides, the excitement of the day had left him a little nervous. And hours of wakefulness would be the price of his evening’s sleep.
Penderby began to wonder about the Thames. What had happened to the ships on the river, the men who had lived in them? A street nearby led to the water, and in five minutes he was leaning over the wall and trying to count the vessels in the dark. Two were little holiday steamers, heeled over slightly. One of the four or five motorboats had rubbed along the wall as the tide ebbed, and was held in the angle of the nearer bridge.
Warehouses and other buildings beyond the river were forbidding masses that added to the gloom of the water and hid all but a few mud-gleams, here and there.
Penderby was sorry for having come. The scene was the most mournful the dead city had shown him. But he would not go back to the hotel yet. Approach of night seemed to have sharpened his senses, and the early-afternoon restlessness had returned.
A body lay sixty or seventy yards away, in the direction of Trafalgar Square. It was the only one in sight. The spread-eagled symmetry of it stirred his curiosity, and he walked quickly toward it. But something held him back, and his pace became slow, then very slow. And then he was trembling.
He stooped over the body. Recognition came without a shock. He was looking at Edward Penderby, lanky, ill-shaven, in ragged clothes. But the eyes, wide open, were quiet, and the lines beside the mouth had softened.
The man who had lived dropped on one knee, and touched the angular forehead with an objective pity.
“So you went, too,” he said.
* * * *
There still were some traces of what had been London when life came back to the Earth; green, creeper-tied heaps of concrete and steel, for instance, and flooded steel vaults beneath banks, and a few big guns in arsenals, and presses, now in rust, under Fleet Street ruins. Rain, wind, heat, and cold had seen to the rest, and the two bodies—one well-dressed, the other shabbily—on a street beside the Thames had been dust many a year.
THE FOND NIGHTMARE, by Colin Azariah-Kribbs
J’implore ta pitié, Toi, l’unique que j’aime…
I beg of thy mercy, Thou, the sole one whom I love…
—Charles Baudelaire, “De profundis clamavi”
*
I was far from any sound save the pattering rustle of wren wings amidst withered leaves and the steady rise and fall of the crickets’ vespers, marking off the minutes in cascading cadences. My breath slackened, then hastened, to match every lull, every quickening of that insect litany and I was insensible to the time when my senses at last dulled—muted—and I passed into sleep. I do not know what it is that I dreamt; but I recall a succession of searing lights followed by gaping darkness so that I had the same impression as one who blinks rapidly into the very face of the sun until he is blind.
When I awoke, it was quite dark with only the moonlight above, its light obscured and fragmented by the intervening branches and subtly illuminating the depths of the forest. And there, quite close beside me where I lay, you stood with your eyes fast upon me. Would that I had not stirred; that you had not known that I had awakened; for you then knelt noiseless by me and I was forced to meet your gaze. It was something like looking at the glimmer of a silver piece beneath the surface of a stream; I felt myself dizzied but could not shut my own eyes to exorcise that bright, flickering presence.
I stirred with the intention of rising; but you put out your hand and drew me down again upon the brambles and dew-fresh moss. My breath rose like an exhumed vapor against your face and I found myself possessed with a sudden, sharp chilliness altogether unlike the balmy heat of the early evening. With a moving shock, I felt your hand touch first upon my throat; then above my racing heart. Closer you came as though to feel my breath upon your face—as though that were some rich sustenance which caused your eyes to flicker with a look of rare delight as my own soul recoiled within me. Perceiving my disquiet, your gaze grew full of a tenderly malefic contemplation such as that with which the python might regard the smothered bird within his manifold embrace and thus you spake in soft, dripping words which filled my heart with an unutterable dread:
“As thou hast, dear one, presumed to wander within this forest wherein I am both shade and warden, thou art by nature under mine governance for the remainder of this night. Do not pale so; I shall not be an unkind regent and ask for naught but thy soul and the possession thereof for the short while that I have thee. There is no more fulsome bounty, no holier manna, than the movings and quickenings of a spirit and I would fain have thine to savor.”
I lay still and motionless with a tightened heart, my mouth as parched as though I lay in a windless desert, so absolute was the consummation of my fear. I attempted to speak, to supplicate as you looked down upon me with a silent, implacable desire. I promised—all in vain!—that I would never return, that I would heed what I had been told of the haunted nature of the forest. Better would it have been had I wept at the stone feet of a gargoyle, so bitterly useless were all my tears and oaths. At length you put an end to even this as you brought your horribly cold mouth upon mine, your arms going about and beneath me, drawing me close against your form.
At first, I attempted to resist this familiarity, but I found that I could not match your strength; nor did it seem to improve my situation, for your kisses waxed all the more languorous as though to match my horror. With fingers twined in my loose hair, clinging and caressing with an amatory meticulousness, you held
me helpless in your arms. I felt a strange darkness come over me as though my eyes were dimming and my sentience fading. All around me, the world became a distant nothing and I felt as though my very soul were lifted like a struggling creature out of my corporeal being. Somewhere ahead in the darkness, I discerned a shadow stretching before and behind me with an immeasurable interminability and I wondered at it. Then I remembered your words and awoke with a terrible start.
Your lips had left mine and though you still held me, your hands were now clasped at the back of my throat, lifting my face closer to your own. Your visage held something of an elated rapture and I had the sudden impression that you were drawing upon my breath as it came out hurried and ragged after my near-swoon and nightmare. Seeing that I had awakened, you loosened your grasp about my throat somewhat and regarded me with a dark examination. I moved, shuddering in the night breeze that drifted over us, but found that my limbs ached with a breathless tightness. Your formerly cold fingers trailed burningly against my lips and smoothed and ruffled the hair at my brow as you spoke in words that fell upon me with an asphyxiating softness like melting ashes:
“I shall not attempt again for a time. It does not please me to gain thee so easily, simply through weariness.”
“Gain me?” my bruised and faltering lips returned and you then said, your eyes shining with a malignant tenderness as I shrank under your familiar caress:
“Can it be that thou dost not remember me?”
I denied this suggestion with sickened certainty as you murmured: “It is as I thought; thou who art mortal and have drunk of the forgetfulness of Lethe would not remember those dim, distant centuries, whilst I who am blessed with immortality and cursed with memory recall all. Most clearly do I remember the nights in woodlands still warm from the noon sun’s radiance, much like this particular night, when thou and the others would burn sweetened sap upon bonfires and call forth my name upon the windswept, fragrant air. And when I came and when the supplications had been offered to my name that I might visit horror upon any against whom enmity was borne, dost thou remember how afterwards thou and I, in the cool and silence of the evening, would lay amongst the trampled leaves and moss, thou with thy face against my throat and I with my lips upon thy hair?”
I asked in a voice of faint, fearful wonder: “What are you?”
As wistful as the wandering, homeless wind amongst the boughs above us, you replied: “I am one of the cursed, cast out from Heaven with Lucifer—yet as the rest of my comrades fell below Earth, heedless in their defiant damnation, I chanced to cast my eyes back upwards towards Heaven and, appalled at what through foolish pride and beguiled iniquity I had lost, I hung back ’twixt Heaven and Hell and found myself here, amidst these lonely forests, alone and seeming without hope.
“Yet did I find that there were others of mine kindred who had done the same as I and that throughout the span of this world they still wander, neither angel nor daemon, visiting ill or beneficence upon mankind according to their own solitary lights. We are the Unseelie Court and so we have been even before man’s Fall—and so we shall remain, until the Day of Wrath when we shall be judged and it shall be determined which of us shall be borne to Paradise or to flaming Hell, depending upon Our Savior’s compassion. Many of us have chanced to encounter mortals and, as we have kept certain of our old powers which we possessed before our disgrace, many of these mortals are wont to both worship and seek succor from us for the fulfilling of certain favors.
“I was and still am the master of certain dreams of terror and wonder which I may visit upon mankind when it is my wont to do so—and so I must, for there is a strange succulence to be gained through breathing upon the quickened breath of a nightmare’s victim. In the far, distant past, those who swore themselves as my devotees would ask that I visit upon their enemy such tormenting visions and thus I would.”
You paused for a moment in strange thought. Then you said, “But thou, dear one, though thou wert of my thralldom, asked for no such favors. Rather, with a simple, innocent devotion, devoid of all such complications as arose within the rest, wouldst thou join the rest in their rites as I, impossibly, grew to love thee with a steady, insatiate fixedness that would admit of no wavering or equivocation. I shall not trouble to recount the noons, evenings, or fog-wrapped nights—nor how we spent them, for thou wouldst not remember.
“But when thou finally died at the hand of some mortal spawned of Cain’s ilk, my grief was such that it equaled nearly in full measure the searing pain I felt at the loss of Heaven—and I visited upon thy murderer dreams of such swallowing, frightful concentration—of such monstrous, gaping terror and mortal wretchedness—that he feared more than Death itself to succumb to sleep. In but a fortnight’s time, his mind was but a mass of twitching, tattered nerves through which my dreams still shredded with a merciless haste to ravage; and when he died at last in his sleep, they said that he screamed and begged aloud for some hand to awaken him from his dreadful repose. So died that damned wretch that rifted thy soul from mine. And yet,” you finished, your eyes full and dark with subtle contemplation. “Yet here thou art once again; thy soul returned to this world centuries after all this: the same one whom I loved, do love, and shalt always love. What change hast been wrought, dear one, that hast turned thy love to dread?”
And I said once more, “I do not remember these things. Nor do I know if what you say is true or is meant to tempt me.” Within, I felt the vague stirring of remembrance of such a former life, like the passing stir of a breath; but I could not be sure whether some supernatural guile was at work within my heart. A dim look of sorrow arose within your eyes and you said, “Then I shall depart if thou canst not find it in thy heart to love me as before.”
I thanked you, then, with trembling ardor, all hope and relief returning as you, without a plea or word of complaint arose and departed, vanishing into the shadows as utterly as a fallen stone into the depths of the sea upon a moonless night. I longed for daylight to return and for the lights of the village that I had wandered so far from, that I might forget all that had occurred and all the doubts within me that they had exhumed.
I returned to my cottage, with its dulled linen curtains and ancient clocks with their golden hands covering their cracked faces, and I lay upon the white bedspread in my chamber. I saw without my window, past the crooked rows of cottages and shops, past the well and past my garden, the waving boughs of the forest within the wind. And as I sunk into sleep, I saw a quick, flashing glimpse of pale light and murky darkness, such as I would see if I were looking upon a reflection of the moon in a pool of water into which were thrown a steady succession of pebbles.
Like the sudden parting of twin veils, this vision ceased and I found myself lying upon the cold marble of a bare alcove; and there, not two feet away, you stood. The world about us wavered and undulated as though we stood not on land but under the sea and I knew then that I was asleep.
“I believed you to be gone forever,” I said.
You looked upon my disquiet with a gentle, maleficent patience, replying as you drew near to take my hand, “And so I am, for I shall never visit thee again as I did upon Earth. But dost thou forget that every night in sleep, willing or unwilling, thou enterest my domain as thou didst within that woodland? Is it not meet then that I, who have done as thou wished and departed from thy world, should linger with thee when thou encroachest upon my realm?”
And with this irrefutable logic, you drew me once more into your arms upon the cold surface of the alcove and, as I felt your lips again upon me, I closed my eyes to the undulating world, the breadthless darkness of the eternity that hung full-flown about and before me.
THE RESIDENCE AT WHITMINSTER, by M.R. James
Dr. Ashton—Thomas Ashton, Doctor of Divinity—sat in his study, habited in a dressing-gown, and with a silk cap on his shaven head—his wig being for the time taken off and placed on its block on a side table. He was a man of some fifty-five years, strongly made, of a sanguine comp
lexion, an angry eye, and a long upper lip. Face and eye were lighted up at the moment when I picture him by the level ray of an afternoon sun that shone in upon him through a tall sash window, giving on the west. The room into which it shone was also tall, lined with book-cases, and, where the wall showed between them, panelled. On the table near the doctor’s elbow was a green cloth, and upon it what he would have called a silver standish—a tray with inkstands—quill pens, a calf-bound book or two, some papers, a churchwarden pipe and brass tobacco-box, a flask cased in plaited straw, and a liqueur glass. The year was 1730, the month December, the hour somewhat past three in the afternoon.
I have described in these lines pretty much all that a superficial observer would have noted when he looked into the room. What met Dr. Ashton’s eye when he looked out of it, sitting in his leather arm-chair? Little more than the tops of the shrubs and fruit-trees of his garden could be seen from that point, but the red brick wall of it was visible in almost all the length of its western side. In the middle of that was a gate—a double gate of rather elaborate iron scroll-work, which allowed something of a view beyond. Through it he could see that the ground sloped away almost at once to a bottom, along which a stream must run, and rose steeply from it on the other side, up to a field that was park-like in character, and thickly studded with oaks, now, of course, leafless. They did not stand so thick together but that some glimpse of sky and horizon could be seen between their stems. The sky was now golden and the horizon, a horizon of distant woods, it seemed, was purple.
But all that Dr. Ashton could find to say, after contemplating this prospect for many minutes, was: “Abominable!”
A listener would have been aware, immediately upon this, of the sound of footsteps coming somewhat hurriedly in the direction of the study. By the resonance he could have told that they were traversing a much larger room. Dr. Ashton turned round in his chair as the door opened and looked expectant. The incomer was a lady—a stout lady in the dress of the time. Though I have made some attempt at indicating the doctor’s costume, I will not enterprise that of his wife—for it was Mrs. Ashton who now entered. She had an anxious, even a sorely distracted, look, and it was in a very disturbed voice that she almost whispered to Dr. Ashton, putting her head close to his, “He’s in a very sad way, love, worse, I’m afraid.”
The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories Page 30
