I
For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas
in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is
sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body
it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the
spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who
have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural
affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known
that some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil
altogether.—_Hali_.
ONE dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a
forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the
blackness, said: “Catherine Larue.” He said nothing more; no reason was
known to him why he should have said so much.
The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but where he lives
now is uncertain, for he is dead. One who practices sleeping in the
woods with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the damp earth, and
nothing over him but the branches from which the leaves have fallen and
the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for great longevity,
and Frayser had already attained the age of thirty-two. There are
persons in this world, millions of persons, and far and away the best
persons, who regard that as a very advanced age. They are the children.
To those who view the voyage of life from the port of departure the bark
that has accomplished any considerable distance appears already in close
approach to the farther shore. However, it is not certain that Halpin
Frayser came to his death by exposure.
He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley, looking for
doves and such small game as was in season. Late in the afternoon it had
come on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and although he had
only to go always downhill—everywhere the way to safety when one is
lost—the absence of trails had so impeded him that he was overtaken by
night while still in the forest. Unable in the darkness to penetrate the
thickets of manzanita and other undergrowth, utterly bewildered and
overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near the root of a large madroño
and fallen into a dreamless sleep. It was hours later, in the very
middle of the night, that one of God’s mysterious messengers, gliding
ahead of the incalculable host of his companions sweeping westward with
the dawn line, pronounced the awakening word in the ear of the sleeper,
who sat upright and spoke, he knew not why, a name, he knew not whose.
Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a scientist. The
circumstance that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of a
forest, he had spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory and hardly
had in mind did not arouse an enlightened curiosity to investigate the
phenomenon. He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory shiver, as
if in deference to a seasonal presumption that the night was chill, he
lay down again and went to sleep. But his sleep was no longer dreamless.
He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the
gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why
he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and natural, as
is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from
troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon he came to a parting of the
ways; leading from the highway was a road less traveled, having the
appearance, indeed, of having been long abandoned, because, he thought,
it led to something evil; yet he turned into it without hesitation,
impelled by some imperious necessity.
As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was haunted by
invisible existences whom he could not definitely figure to his mind.
From among the trees on either side he caught broken and incoherent
whispers in a strange tongue which yet he partly understood. They seemed
to him fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against his body
and soul.
It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest through
which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of
diffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A
shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a
recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged
his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then
observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growing rankly by the
roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big, broad leaves.
Patches of dry dust between the wheelways were pitted and spattered as
with a red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees were broad maculations
of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their foliage.
All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the
fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it was all
in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could
not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings
the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought by tracing life
backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin; scenes and
incidents came crowding tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing
another, or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity, but nowhere
could he catch a glimpse of what he sought. The failure augmented his
terror; he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor
why. So frightful was the situation—the mysterious light burned with so
silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common
consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in
his sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about came
so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously
not of earth—that he could endure it no longer, and with a great effort
to break some malign spell that bound his faculties to silence and
inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his lungs! His voice
broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went
babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the forest, died
into silence, and all was as before. But he had made a beginning at
resistance and was encouraged. He said:
“I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are not malignant
traveling this accursed road. I shall leave them a record and an appeal.
I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I endure—I, a helpless
mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!” Halpin Frayser was a poet only
as he was a penitent: in his dream.
Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook, one-half of
which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without a
pencil. He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of blood and
wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched the paper with the point of his
twig when a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measureless
distance away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a
soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the loon, solitary
by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated in an unearthly
shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations, as if the
accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the world
whence it had come. But the man felt that this was not so—that it was
near by and had not moved.
A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and his
mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses was affected;
he felt it rather as a consciousness—a mysterious mental assurance of
some overpowering presence—some supernatural malevolence different in
kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about him, and superior
to them in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And
now it seemed to be approaching him; from what direction he did not
know—dared not conjecture. All his former fears were forgotten or merged
in the gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he
had but one thought: to complete his written appeal to the benign powers
who, traversing the haunted wood, might some time rescue him if he should
be denied the blessing of annihilation. He wrote with terrible rapidity,
the twig in his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle
of a sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell
to his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out, he
found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of
his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!