It is, I confess, with considerable diffidence, that I approach the
strange narrative which I am about to relate. The events which I purpose
detailing are of so extraordinary a character that I am quite prepared
to meet with an unusual amount of incredulity and scorn. I accept all
such beforehand. I have, I trust, the literary courage to face unbelief.
I have, after mature consideration resolved to narrate, in as simple and
straightforward a manner as I can compass, some facts that passed under
my observation, in the month of July last, and which, in the annals of
the mysteries of physical science, are wholly unparalleled.
I live at No. ---- Twenty-sixth Street, in New York. The house is in some
respects a curious one. It has enjoyed for the last two years the
reputation of being haunted. It is a large and stately residence,
surrounded by what was once a garden, but which is now only a green
enclosure used for bleaching clothes. The dry basin of what has been a
fountain, and a few fruit trees ragged and unpruned, indicate that this
spot in past days was a pleasant, shady retreat, filled with fruits and
flowers and the sweet murmur of waters.
The house is very spacious. A hall of noble size leads to a large spiral
staircase winding through its center, while the various apartments are
of imposing dimensions. It was built some fifteen or twenty years since
by Mr. A----, the well-known New York merchant, who five years ago threw
the commercial world into convulsions by a stupendous bank fraud. Mr.
A----, as everyone knows, escaped to Europe, and died not long after, of
a broken heart. Almost immediately after the news of his decease reached
this country and was verified, the report spread in Twenty-sixth Street
that No. ---- was haunted. Legal measures had dispossessed the widow of
its former owner, and it was inhabited merely by a caretaker and his
wife, placed there by the house agent into whose hands it had passed for
the purposes of renting or sale. These people declared that they were
troubled with unnatural noises. Doors were opened without any visible
agency. The remnants of furniture scattered through the various rooms
were, during the night, piled one upon the other by unknown hands.
Invisible feet passed up and down the stairs in broad daylight,
accompanied by the rustle of unseen silk dresses, and the gliding of
viewless hands along the massive balusters. The caretaker and his wife
declared they would live there no longer. The house agent laughed,
dismissed them, and put others in their place. The noises and
supernatural manifestations continued. The neighborhood caught up the
story, and the house remained untenanted for three years. Several
persons negotiated for it; but, somehow, always before the bargain was
closed they heard the unpleasant rumors and declined to treat any
further.
It was in this state of things that my landlady, who at that time kept a
boarding-house in Bleecker Street, and who wished to move further up
town, conceived the bold idea of renting No. ---- Twenty-sixth Street.
Happening to have in her house rather a plucky and philosophical set of
boarders, she laid her scheme before us, stating candidly everything she
had heard respecting the ghostly qualities of the establishment to which
she wished to remove us. With the exception of two timid persons,--a
sea-captain and a returned Californian, who immediately gave notice that
they would leave,--all of Mrs. Moffat's guests declared that they would
accompany her in her chivalric incursion into the abode of spirits.
Our removal was effected in the month of May, and we were charmed with
our new residence. The portion of Twenty-sixth Street where our house is
situated, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is one of the pleasantest
localities in New York. The gardens back of the houses, running down
nearly to the Hudson, form, in the summer time, a perfect avenue of
verdure. The air is pure and invigorating, sweeping, as it does,
straight across the river from the Weehawken heights, and even the
ragged garden which surrounded the house, although displaying on washing
days rather too much clothesline, still gave us a piece of greensward to
look at, and a cool retreat in the summer evenings, where we smoked our
cigars in the dusk, and watched the fireflies flashing their dark
lanterns in the long grass.
Of course we had no sooner established ourselves at No. ---- than we
began to expect ghosts. We absolutely awaited their advent with
eagerness. Our dinner conversation was supernatural. One of the
boarders, who had purchased Mrs. Crowe's _Night Side of Nature_ for his
own private delectation, was regarded as a public enemy by the entire
household for not having bought twenty copies. The man led a life of
supreme wretchedness while he was reading this volume. A system of
espionage was established, of which he was the victim. If he
incautiously laid the book down for an instant and left the room, it was
immediately seized and read aloud in secret places to a select few. I
found myself a person of immense importance, it having leaked out that I
was tolerably well versed in the history of supernaturalism, and had
once written a story the foundation of which was a ghost. If a table or
a wainscot panel happened to warp when we were assembled in the large
drawing-room, there was an instant silence, and everyone was prepared
for an immediate clanking of chains and a spectral form.
After a month of psychological excitement, it was with the utmost
dissatisfaction that we were forced to acknowledge that nothing in the
remotest degree approaching the supernatural had manifested itself. Once
the black butler asseverated that his candle had been blown out by some
invisible agency while he was undressing himself for the night; but as I
had more than once discovered this colored gentleman in a condition when
one candle must have appeared to him like two, thought it possible that,
by going a step further in his potations, he might have reversed this
phenomenon, and seen no candle at all where he ought to have beheld one.
Things were in this state when an accident took place so awful and
inexplicable in its character that my reason fairly reels at the bare
memory of the occurrence. It was the tenth of July. After dinner was
over I repaired, with my friend Dr. Hammond, to the garden to smoke my
evening pipe. Independent of certain mental sympathies which existed
between the Doctor and myself, we were linked together by a vice. We
both smoked opium. We knew each other's secret, and respected it. We
enjoyed together that wonderful expansion of thought, that marvelous
intensifying of the perceptive faculties, that boundless feeling of
existence when we seem to have points of contact with the whole
universe,--in short, that unimaginable spiritual bliss, which I would
not surrender for a throne, and which I hope you, reader, will
never--never taste.
Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in
secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly
smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While
smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and
calmest channels of thought. We talked of the East, and endeavored to
recall the magical panorama of its glowing scenery. We criticized the
most sensuous poets,--those who painted life ruddy with health, brimming
with passion, happy in the possession of youth and strength and beauty.
If we talked of Shakespeare's _Tempest_, we lingered over Ariel, and
avoided Caliban. Like the Guebers, we turned our faces to the East, and
saw only the sunny side of the world.
This skillful coloring of our train of thought produced in our
subsequent visions a corresponding tone. The splendors of Arabian
fairyland dyed our dreams. We paced the narrow strip of grass with the
tread and port of kings. The song of the _Rana arborea_, while he clung
to the bark of the ragged plum-tree, sounded like the strains of divine
musicians. Houses, walls, and streets melted like rain clouds, and
vistas of unimaginable glory stretched away before us. It was a
rapturous companionship. We enjoyed the vast delight more perfectly
because, even in our most ecstatic moments, we were conscious of each
other's presence. Our pleasures, while individual, were still twin,
vibrating and moving in musical accord.
On the evening in question, the tenth of July, the Doctor and myself
drifted into an unusually metaphysical mood. We lit our large
meerschaums, filled with fine Turkish tobacco, in the core of which
burned a little black nut of opium, that, like the nut in the fairy
tale, held within its narrow limits wonders beyond the reach of kings;
we paced to and fro, conversing. A strange perversity dominated the
currents of our thought. They would _not_ flow through the sun-lit
channels into which we strove to divert them. For some unaccountable
reason, they constantly diverged into dark and lonesome beds, where a
continual gloom brooded. It was in vain that, after our old fashion, we
flung ourselves on the shores of the East, and talked of its gay
bazaars, of the splendors of the time of Haroun, of harems and golden
palaces. Black afreets continually arose from the depths of our talk,
and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper
vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision.
Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force that swayed us, and indulged
in gloomy speculation. We had talked some time upon the proneness of the
human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the terrible,
when Hammond suddenly said to me. "What do you consider to be the
greatest element of terror?"
The question puzzled me. That many things were terrible, I knew.
Stumbling over a corpse in the dark; beholding, as I once did, a woman
floating down a deep and rapid river, with wildly lifted arms, and
awful, upturned face, uttering, as she drifted, shrieks that rent one's
heart while we, spectators, stood frozen at a window which overhung the
river at a height of sixty feet, unable to make the slightest effort to
save her, but dumbly watching her last supreme agony and her
disappearance. A shattered wreck, with no life visible, encountered
floating listlessly on the ocean, is a terrible object, for it suggests
a huge terror, the proportions of which are veiled. But it now struck
me, for the first time, that there must be one great and ruling
embodiment of fear,--a King of Terrors, to which all others must
succumb. What might it be? To what train of circumstances would it owe
its existence?
"I confess, Hammond," I replied to my friend, "I never considered the
subject before. That there must be one Something more terrible than any
other thing, I feel. I cannot attempt, however, even the most vague
definition."
"I am somewhat like you, Harry," he answered. "I feel my capacity to
experience a terror greater than anything yet conceived by the human
mind;--something combining in fearful and unnatural amalgamation
hitherto supposed incompatible elements. The calling of the voices in
Brockden Brown's novel of _Wieland_ is awful; so is the picture of the
Dweller of the Threshold, in Bulwer's _Zanoni_; but," he added, shaking
his head gloomily, "there is something more horrible still than those."
"Look here, Hammond," I rejoined, "let us drop this kind of talk, for
Heaven's sake! We shall suffer for it, depend on it."
"I don't know what's the matter with me to-night," he replied, "but my
brain is running upon all sorts of weird and awful thoughts. I feel as
if I could write a story like Hoffman, to-night, if I were only master
of a literary style."
"Well, if we are going to be Hoffmanesque in our talk, I'm off to bed.
Opium and nightmares should never be brought together. How sultry it is!
Good-night, Hammond."
"Good-night, Harry. Pleasant dreams to you."
"To you, gloomy wretch, afreets, ghouls, and enchanters."
We parted, and each sought his respective chamber. I undressed quickly
and got into bed, taking with me, according to my usual custom, a book,
over which I generally read myself to sleep. I opened the volume as soon
as I had laid my head upon the pillow, and instantly flung it to the
other side of the room. It was Goudon's _History of Monsters_,--a
curious French work, which I had lately imported from Paris, but which,
in the state of mind I had then reached, was anything but an agreeable
companion. I resolved to go to sleep at once; so, turning down my gas
until nothing but a little blue point of light glimmered on the top of
the tube, I composed myself to rest.
The room was in total darkness. The atom of gas that still remained
alight did not illuminate a distance of three inches round the burner. I
desperately drew my arm across my eyes, as if to shut out even the
darkness, and tried to think of nothing. It was in vain. The confounded
themes touched on by Hammond in the garden kept obtruding themselves on
my brain. I battled against them. I erected ramparts of would-be
blackness of intellect to keep them out. They still crowded upon me.
While I was lying still as a corpse, hoping that by a perfect physical
inaction I should hasten mental repose, an awful incident occurred. A
Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest,
and the next instant I felt two bony hands encircling my throat,
endeavoring to choke me.
I am no coward, and am possessed of considerable physical strength. The
suddenness of the attack, instead of stunning me, strung every nerve to
its highest tension. My body acted from instinct, before my brain had
time to realize the terrors of my position. In an instant I wound two
muscular arms around the creature, and squeezed it, with all the
strength of despair, against my chest. In a few seconds the bony hands
that had fastened on my throat loosened their hold, and I was free to
breathe once more. Then commenced a struggle of awful intensity.
Immersed in the most profound darkness, totally ignorant of the nature
of the Thing by which I was so suddenly attacked, finding my grasp
slipping every moment, by reason, it seemed to me, of the entire
nakedness of my assailant, bitten with sharp teeth in the shoulder,
neck, and chest, having every moment to protect my throat against a pair
of sinewy, agile hands, which my utmost efforts could not
confine,--these were a combination of circumstances to combat which
required all the strength, skill, and courage that I possessed.
At last, after a silent, deadly, exhausting struggle, I got my assailant
under by a series of incredible efforts of strength. Once pinned, with
my knee on what I made out to be its chest, I knew that I was victor. I
rested for a moment to breathe. I heard the creature beneath me panting
in the darkness, and felt the violent throbbing of a heart. It was
apparently as exhausted as I was; that was one comfort. At this moment I
remembered that I usually placed under my pillow, before going to bed, a
large yellow silk pocket handkerchief. I felt for it instantly; it was
there. In a few seconds more I had, after a fashion, pinioned the
creature's arms.
I now felt tolerably secure. There was nothing more to be done but to
turn on the gas, and, having first seen what my midnight assailant was
like, arouse the household. I will confess to being actuated by a
certain pride in not giving the alarm before; I wished to make the
capture alone and unaided.
Never losing my hold for an instant, I slipped from the bed to the
floor, dragging my captive with me. I had but a few steps to make to
reach the gas-burner; these I made with the greatest caution, holding
the creature in a grip like a vice. At last I got within arm's length of
the tiny speck of blue light which told me where the gas-burner lay.
Quick as lightning I released my grasp with one hand and let on the full
flood of light. Then I turned to look at my captive.
I cannot even attempt to give any definition of my sensations the
instant after I turned on the gas. I suppose I must have shrieked with
terror, for in less than a minute afterward my room was crowded with the
inmates of the house. I shudder now as I think of that awful moment. _I
saw nothing_! Yes; I had one arm firmly clasped round a breathing,
panting, corporeal shape, my other hand gripped with all its strength a
throat as warm, as apparently fleshy, as my own; and yet, with this
living substance in my grasp, with its body pressed against my own, and
all in the bright glare of a large jet of gas, I absolutely beheld
nothing! Not even an outline,--a vapor!
I do not, even at this hour, realize the situation in which I found
myself. I cannot recall the astounding incident thoroughly. Imagination
in vain tries to compass the awful paradox.
It breathed. I felt its warm breath upon my cheek. It struggled
fiercely. It had hands. They clutched me. Its skin was smooth, like my
own. There it lay, pressed close up against me, solid as stone,--and
yet utterly invisible!
I wonder that I did not faint or go mad on the instant. Some wonderful
instinct must have sustained me; for, absolutely, in place of loosening
my hold on the terrible Enigma, I seemed to gain an additional strength
in my moment of horror, and tightened my grasp with such wonderful force
that I felt the creature shivering with agony.
Just then Hammond entered my room at the head of the household. As soon
as he beheld my face--which, I suppose, must have been an awful sight to
look at--he hastened forward, crying, "Great heaven, Harry! what has
happened?"
"Hammond! Hammond!" I cried, "come here. O, this is awful! I have been
attacked in bed by something or other, which I have hold of; but I can't
see it,--I can't see it!"
Hammond, doubtless struck by the unfeigned horror expressed in my
countenance, made one or two steps forward with an anxious yet puzzled
expression. A very audible titter burst from the remainder of my
visitors. This suppressed laughter made me furious. To laugh at a human
being in my position! It was the worst species of cruelty. _Now_, I can
understand why the appearance of a man struggling violently, as it would
seem, with an airy nothing, and calling for assistance against a vision,
should have appeared ludicrous. _Then_, so great was my rage against the
mocking crowd that had I the power I would have stricken them dead
where they stood.
"Hammond! Hammond!" I cried again, despairingly, "for God's sake come to
me. I can hold the--the thing but a short while longer. It is
overpowering me. Help me! Help me!"
"Harry," whispered Hammond, approaching me, "you have been smoking too
much opium."
"I swear to you, Hammond, that this is no vision," I answered, in the
same low tone. "Don't you see how it shakes my whole frame with its
struggles? If you don't believe me, convince yourself. Feel it,--touch
it."
Hammond advanced and laid his hand in the spot I indicated. A wild cry
of horror burst from him. He had felt it!
In a moment he had discovered somewhere in my room a long piece of cord,
and was the next instant winding it and knotting it about the body of
the unseen being that I clasped in my arms.
"Harry," he said, in a hoarse, agitated voice, for, though he preserved
his presence of mind, he was deeply moved, "Harry, it's all safe now.
You may let go, old fellow, if you're tired. The Thing can't move."