The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

  face confronted the fire, and seemed to pant and swell, as

  the blaze alternately spread upward and collapsed. He had

  fallen again among his blue devils, and was thinking of retiring from the Bench, and of fifty other gloomy things.

  But the Doctor, who was an energetic son of Aisculapius,

  would listen to no croaking, told the Judge he was full of

  gout, and in his present condition no judge even of his own

  case, but promised him leave to pronounce on all those melancholy questions, a fortnight later.

  In the meantime the Judge must be very careful. He was

  over-charged with gout, and he must not provoke an attack,

  till the waters of Buxton should do that office for him, in their

  own salutary way.

  The Doctor did not think him perhaps quite so well as he

  pretended, for he told him he wanted rest, and would be

  better if he went forthwith to his bed.

  Mr. Gemingham, his valet, assisted him, and gave him his

  drops; and the Judge told him to wait in his bedroom till he

  should go to sleep.

  Three persons that night had specially odd stories to tell.

  The housekeeper had got rid of the trouble of amusing her

  little girl at this anxious time, by giving her leave to run about

  the sitting-rooms and look at the pictures and china, on the

  usual condition of touching nothing. It was not until the last

  gleam of sunset had for some time faded, and the twilight

  had so deepened that she could no longer discern the colours

  on the china figures on the chimneypiece or in the cabinets,

  that the child returned to the housekeeper’s room to find her

  mother.

  To her she related, after some prattle about the china, and

  the pictures, and the Judge’s two grand wigs in the dressing-

  room off the library, an adventure of an extraordinary kind.

  Mr. Justice Harbottle

  247

  In the hall was placed, as was customary in those times,

  the sedan-chair which the master of the house occasionally

  used, covered with stamped leather, and studded with gilt

  nails, and with its red silk blinds down. In this case, the

  doors of this old-fashioned conveyance were locked, the windows up, and, as I said, the blinds down, but not so closely that the curious child could not peep underneath one of them,

  and see into the interior.

  A parting beam from the setting sun, admitted through the

  window of a back room, shot obliquely through the open

  door, and lighting on the chair, shone with a dull transparency through the crimson blind.

  To her surprise, the child saw in the shadow a thin man,

  dressed in black, seated in it; he had sharp dark features; his

  nose, she fancied, a little awry, and his brown eyes were

  looking straight before him; his hand was on his thigh, and

  he stirred no more than the waxen figure she had seen at

  Southwark fair.

  A child so often lectured for asking questions, and on the

  propriety of silence, and the superior wisdom of its elders,

  that it accepts most things at last in good faith; and the little

  girl acquiesced respectfully in the occupation of the chair by

  this mahogany-faced person as being all right and proper.

  It was not until she asked her mother who this man was,

  and observed her scared face as she questioned her more

  minutely upon the appearance of the stranger, that she began

  to understand that she had seen something unaccountable.

  Mrs. Carwell took the key of the chair from its nail over

  the footman’s shelf, and led the child by the hand up to the

  hall, having a lighted candle in her other hand. She stopped

  at a distance from the chair, and placed the candlestick in the

  child’s hand.

  “ Peep in, Margery, again, and try if there’s anything

  there,’’ she whispered; “ hold the candle near the blind so as

  to throw its light through the curtain.”

  The child peeped, this time with a very solemn face, and

  intimated at once that he was gone.

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  J. Sheridan Le Fanu

  “ Look again, and be sure,” urged her mother.

  The little girl was quite certain; and Mrs. Carwell, with

  her mob-cap of lace and cherry-coloured ribbons, and her

  dark brown hair, not yet powdered, over a very pale face,

  unlocked the door, looked in, and beheld emptiness.

  “ All a mistake, child, you see.”

  “ There! ma’am! see there! He’s gone round the comer,”

  said the child.

  “ Where?” said Mrs. Carwell, stepping backward a step.

  “ Into that room.”

  “ Tit, child! ’twas the shadow,” cried Mrs. Carwell, angrily, because she was frightened. “ I moved the candle.”

  But she clutched one of the poles of the chair, which leant

  against the wall in the comer, and pounded the floor furiously

  with one end of it, being afraid to pass the open door the

  child had pointed to.

  The cook and two kitchen-maids came running upstairs,

  not knowing what to make of the unwonted alarm.

  They all searched the room; but it was still and empty, and

  no sign of any one’s having been there.

  Some people may suppose that the direction given to her

  thoughts by this odd little incident will account for a very

  strange illusion which Mrs. Carwell herself experienced about

  two hours later.

  IX The J u d g e Leaves His House

  Mrs. Flora Carwell was going up the great staircase with

  a posset for the Judge in a china bowl, on a little silver tray.

  Across the top of the well-staircase there runs a massive

  oak rail; and, raising her eyes accidentally, she saw an extremely odd-looking stranger, slim and long, leaning carelessly over with a pipe between his finger and thumb. Nose, lips, and chin seemed all to droop downward into extraordinary length, as he leant his odd peering face over the banis­

  Mr. Justice Harbottle

  249

  ter. In his other hand he held a coil of rope, one end of which

  escaped from under his elbow and hung over the rail.

  Mrs. Carwell, who had no suspicion at the moment, that

  he was not a real person, and fancied that he was some one

  employed in cording the Judge’s luggage, called to know what

  he was doing there.

  Instead of answering, he turned about, and walked across

  the lobby, at about the same leisurely pace at which she was

  ascending, and entered a room, into which she followed him.

  It was an uncarpeted and unfurnished chamber. An open

  trunk lay upon the floor empty, and beside it the coil of rope;

  but except herself there was no one in the room.

  Mrs. Carwell was very much frightened, and now concluded that the child must have seen the same ghost that had just appeared to her. Perhaps, when she was able to think it

  over, it was a relief to believe so; for the face, figure, and

  dress described by the child were awfully like Pyneweck; and

  this certainly was not he.

  Very much scared and very hysterical, Mrs. Carwell ran

  down to her room, afraid to look over her shoulder, and got

  some companions about her, and wept, and talked, and drank

  more than one cordial, and talked and wept again, a
nd so

  on, until, in those early days, it was ten o’clock, and time to

  go to bed.

  A scullery-maid remained up finishing some of her scouring and “ scalding” for some time after the other servants—

  who, as I said, were few in number—that night had got to

  their beds. This was a low-browed, broad-faced, intrepid

  wench with black hair, who did not “ vally a ghost not a

  button,” and treated the housekeeper’s hysterics with measureless scom.

  The old house was quiet now. It was near twelve o ’clock,

  no sounds were audible except the muffled wailing of the

  wintry winds, piping high among the roofs and chimneys, or

  rumbling at intervals, in under gusts, through the narrow

  channels of the street.

  The spacious solitudes of the kitchen level were awfully

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  J. Sheridan Le Fanu

  dark, and this sceptical kitchen-wench was the only person

  now up and about in the house. She hummed tunes to herself,

  for a time; and then stopped and listened; and then resumed

  her work again. At last, she was destined to be more terrified

  than even was the housekeeper.

  There was a back kitchen in this house, and from this she

  heard, as if coming from below its foundations, a sound like

  heavy strokes, that seemed to shake the earth beneath her

  feet. Sometimes a dozen in sequence, at regular intervals;

  sometimes fewer. She walked out softly into the passage, and

  was surprised to see a dusky glow issuing from this room, as

  if from a charcoal fire.

  The room seemed thick with smoke.

  Looking in she very dimly beheld a monstrous figure, over

  a furnace, beating with a mighty hammer the rings and rivets

  of a chain.

  The strokes, swift and heavy as they looked, sounded hollow and distant. The man stopped, and pointed to something on the floor, that, through the smoky haze, looked, she

  thought, like a dead body. She remarked no more; but the

  servants in the room close by, startled from their sleep by a

  hideous scream, found her in a swoon on the flags, close to

  the door, where she had just witnessed this ghastly vision.

  Startled by the girl’s incoherent asseverations that she had

  seen the Judge’s corpse on the floor, two servants having first

  searched the lower part of the house, went rather frightened

  up-stairs to inquire whether their master was well. They found

  him, not in his bed, but in his room. He had a table with

  candles burning at his bedside, and was getting on his clothes

  again; and he swore and cursed at them roundly in his old

  style, telling them that he had business, and that he would

  discharge on the spot any scoundrel who should dare to disturb him again.

  So the invalid was left to his quietude.

  In the morning it was rumoured here and there in the street

  that the Judge was dead. A servant was sent from the house

  Mr. Justice Harbottle

  251

  three doors away, by Counsellor Traverse, to inquire at Judge

  Harbottle’s hall-door.

  The servant who opened it was pale and reserved, and

  would only say that the Judge was ill. He had had a dangerous

  accident; Doctor Hedstone had been with him at seven

  o’clock in the morning.

  There were averted looks, short answers, pale and frowning faces, and all the usual signs that there was a secret that sat heavily upon their minds, and the time for disclosing

  which had not yet come. That time would arrive when the

  coroner had arrived, and the mortal scandal that had befallen

  the house could be no longer hidden. For that morning Mr.

  Justice Harbottle had been found hanging by the neck from

  the banister at the top of the great staircase, and quite dead.

  There was not the smallest sign of any struggle or resistance. There had not been heard a cry or any other noise in the slightest degree indicative of violence. There was medical

  evidence to show that, in his atrabilious state, it was quite on

  the cards that he might have made away with himself. The

  jury found accordingly that it was a case of suicide. But to

  those who were acquainted with the strange story which Judge

  Harbottle had related to at least two persons, the fact that the

  catastrophe occurred on the morning of March 10th seemed

  a startling coincidence.

  A few days after, the pomp of a great funeral attended him

  to the grave; and so, in the language of Scripture, “ the rich

  man died, and was buried.”

  Ray Bradbury

  The Crowd

  For just over a decade, from the early 1940s to the late

  1950s, Ray Bradbury produced an extraordinary body

  of work in the short story form, stories of science fiction,

  fantasy and horror, work that was quickly recognized as

  a significant contribution to American literature. The

  thread of dark fantasy is woven throughout his works.

  His first book, the collection Dark Carnival (Arkham

  House, 1947), was primarily supernatural horror fiction

  and his later masterpieces, The Martian Chronicles

  (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples

  of the Sun (1953), The October Country (1955) and

  Something Wicked This W ay Comes (1959), all contain

  horror stories in his characteristic mode: overt moral

  consciousness in the face of evil. The ordinary man is

  faced with an evil just too big and organized to overcome. It is interesting to compare “The Crowd” to Harlan Ellison’s "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.”

  Mr. Spallner put his hands over his face.

  There was the feeling of movement in space, the

  beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the

  car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and

  him hurled out of it. Then—silence.

  The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard

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  The Crowd

  253

  them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by

  the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and

  on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street, and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with senseless

  centrifuge.

  Where the crowd came from he didn’t know. He struggled

  to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon

  him, hung over him like the large glowing leaves of down-

  bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a

  moon-dial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out

  upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing

  any more ever.

  How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an

  eye compressing in out of nowhere.

  A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from

  his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, “ Is he dead?” And someone else said, “ No, he’s not dead.” And a third person said, “ He won’t die, he’s not

  going to die.” And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond

  him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he

  wo
uldn’t die. And that was strange. He saw a man’s face,

  thin, bright, pale; the man swallowed and bit his lips, very

  sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too

  much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a

  freckled face. Others’ faces. An old man with a wrinkled

  upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They

  had all come from—where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the

  immediate and the accident-shocked world. Out of alleys and

  out of hotels and out of streetcars and seemingly out of nothing they came.

  The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and

  did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them.

  He couldn’t put his finger on it. They were far worse than

  this machine-made thing that happened to him now.

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  Ray Bradbury

  The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he

  saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always

  came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down,

  to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil

  the privacy of a man’s agony by their frank curiosity.

  The ambulance drove off. He sank back and their faces

  still stared into his face, even with his eyes shut.

  The car wheels spun in his mind for days. One wheel, four

  wheels, spinning, spinning, and whirring, around and around.

  He knew it was wrong. Something wrong with the wheels

  and the whole accident and the running of feet and the curiosity. The crowd faces mixed and spun into the wild rotation of the wheels.

  He awoke.

  Sunlight, a hospital room, a hand taking his pulse.

  “ How do you feel?” asked the doctor.

  The wheels faded away. Mr. Spallner looked around.

  “ Fine—I guess.”

  He tried to find words. About the accident. “ Doctor?”

  “ Yes?”

  “ That crowd—was it last night?”

  “ Two days ago. You’ve been here since Thursday. You’re

  all right, though. You’re doing fine. Don’t try and get up.”

  “ That crowd. Something about wheels, too. Do accidents

  make people, well, a—little off?”

  “ Temporarily, sometimes.”

  He lay staring up at the doctor. “ Does it hurt your time

  sense?”

  “ Panic sometimes does.”