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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 6, Spring 1945
Page 127
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 127 great, watery moon lift itself slowly above the palpitating sea, vast and vague in the gathering mist." The two flee in desperate fear, keeping as far from the rising whiteness as possible, and at length gain the brink of the surrounding foothills, and thence the outward path leading to safety. The effect of the strange phosphorescent mist is to inflict both youths with a severe brain-fever, from which Nils recovers with a memory completely blank as far as his part in the strange experience is concerned. Because of this the narrator himself is beset with doubts as to the authenticity of the supposed adventure. Was it indeed a dream, some vivid nightmare born of the delirium of illness? Determined to answer the question, he decides to revisit the fateful valley. This he sets out to do in the late summer some weeks later. After wandering along the familiar paths of the countryside he at length comes upon the place in the late afternoon. It lies before him, a smooth oval depression, the grass on the surrounding hillsides fading from green to brown and then to ashy white as the ground dips downward. The valley itself is utterly barren---a vast stretch of dead earth, glistening here and there with pale alkali-crystals. In its very center rises the gaunt skeleton of a great dead tree; and driven by an overwhelming curiosity he trudges toward it, noticing that as he walks over the hard earth the woodland noises of birds and insects die away completely, leaving and all-pervading ominous silence reminiscent of the horror of the night he shared in the valley with Nils... "As I drew near the skeleton tree, I noticed the glint of sunlight on a kind of white mound around the roots, and I wondered curiously. It was not until I came close that I saw its nature. "All around the roots and barkless trunk was heaped a wilderness of little bones. Tiny skulls of rodents and of birds, thousands of them, rising about the dead tree and streaming off for several yards in all directions, until the dreadful pile ended in isolated skulls and scattered skeletons. Here and there a larger bone appeared,---the thigh of a sheep, the hoofs of a horse, and to one side, grinning slowly, a human skull." Horror overwhelms him, and a strange numbness; and then, seeing that the sun is sinking redly behind the near-by hill-tops, he quickly sets off for the distant valley-wall whence he came. "...my feet seemed clogged as in a nightmare. I could hardly drag them over the barren earth. And then I felt the slow chill creeping through me. I looked down. Out of the earth a thin mist was rising, collecting little pools that grew ever larger until they joined here and there, their currents swirling slowly like thin blue smoke. ...The silence pursued me like dumb ghosts, the still air held my breath, the hellish fog caught at my feet like cold hands." And not a moment too soon, he crawls up the desolate slope on hands and knees, the fog undulating pallidly just behind; and in the growing twilight he hears, as before, the same ghastly cry, unmistakable in its horrible intensity. But by now the brow of the friendly hills is at hand, and he leaps down the far slope just as total darkness shuts down on the lifeless gray silence of the Dead Valley.
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 127 great, watery moon lift itself slowly above the palpitating sea, vast and vague in the gathering mist." The two flee in desperate fear, keeping as far from the rising whiteness as possible, and at length gain the brink of the surrounding foothills, and thence the outward path leading to safety. The effect of the strange phosphorescent mist is to inflict both youths with a severe brain-fever, from which Nils recovers with a memory completely blank as far as his part in the strange experience is concerned. Because of this the narrator himself is beset with doubts as to the authenticity of the supposed adventure. Was it indeed a dream, some vivid nightmare born of the delirium of illness? Determined to answer the question, he decides to revisit the fateful valley. This he sets out to do in the late summer some weeks later. After wandering along the familiar paths of the countryside he at length comes upon the place in the late afternoon. It lies before him, a smooth oval depression, the grass on the surrounding hillsides fading from green to brown and then to ashy white as the ground dips downward. The valley itself is utterly barren---a vast stretch of dead earth, glistening here and there with pale alkali-crystals. In its very center rises the gaunt skeleton of a great dead tree; and driven by an overwhelming curiosity he trudges toward it, noticing that as he walks over the hard earth the woodland noises of birds and insects die away completely, leaving and all-pervading ominous silence reminiscent of the horror of the night he shared in the valley with Nils... "As I drew near the skeleton tree, I noticed the glint of sunlight on a kind of white mound around the roots, and I wondered curiously. It was not until I came close that I saw its nature. "All around the roots and barkless trunk was heaped a wilderness of little bones. Tiny skulls of rodents and of birds, thousands of them, rising about the dead tree and streaming off for several yards in all directions, until the dreadful pile ended in isolated skulls and scattered skeletons. Here and there a larger bone appeared,---the thigh of a sheep, the hoofs of a horse, and to one side, grinning slowly, a human skull." Horror overwhelms him, and a strange numbness; and then, seeing that the sun is sinking redly behind the near-by hill-tops, he quickly sets off for the distant valley-wall whence he came. "...my feet seemed clogged as in a nightmare. I could hardly drag them over the barren earth. And then I felt the slow chill creeping through me. I looked down. Out of the earth a thin mist was rising, collecting little pools that grew ever larger until they joined here and there, their currents swirling slowly like thin blue smoke. ...The silence pursued me like dumb ghosts, the still air held my breath, the hellish fog caught at my feet like cold hands." And not a moment too soon, he crawls up the desolate slope on hands and knees, the fog undulating pallidly just behind; and in the growing twilight he hears, as before, the same ghastly cry, unmistakable in its horrible intensity. But by now the brow of the friendly hills is at hand, and he leaps down the far slope just as total darkness shuts down on the lifeless gray silence of the Dead Valley.
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