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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 6, Spring 1945
Page 129
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 129 inherited a house that is reputedly haunted. His aunt, the former owner, is said to have practised black magic; and neighbors say that strange sounds are still to be heard there, even though it is now empty. D'Ardeche, the owner, is persuaded by the narrator and two friends to spend a night in the place, that all may verify for themselves the truth of the neighborhood rumours. D'Ardeche agrees, and after a brief exploration of the place, the party splits up, each man going to one of a group of rooms opening on a common corridor. They shout back and forth to one another from time to time as the evening wears on, finally desisting, since the sound echoes unpleasantly in the rooms. As the hours pass the group becomes silent. The narrator becomes ever more drowsy and numb, as though with cold. Suddenly he discovers that he has lost nearly all the power to move---or, even, to cry out. Then gradually, little by little, the flame in his lantern grows dimmer...dimmer...and is extinguished.... Then the end began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,---awful eyes, like a dead dream. ...I could not have moved my eyes had I possessed the power: the devoured the fearful, beautiful things that grew slowly, slowly larger, fixed on me, advancing, growing more beautiful with white flakes of light sweeping more swiftly into the blazing vortices the awful fascination deepening in its insane intensity as the white, vibrating eyes grew nearer, larger. Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the Unknown Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous, terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, its charnel-house deadliness. Immovable, the luckless man strains every physical and mental fiber in a vain effort to cry aloud, to be freed of this utter terror of the mind... Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless, jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror began slowly to draw my life from me...as enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept sinuously around me...the wet sucking mass closed over my face... The man awakens in a hospital bed. His friends, when he did answer their repeated calls, went to his room---and discovered the door shut and bolted from within. Battering it open, ...they leaped into the room and fell over my body in the middle of the floor. They lighted one of the lanterns, and saw...that the floor and walls to the height of about six feet were running with something that seemed like stagnant water, thick, glutinous, sickening. As for me, I was drenched in the same cursed liquid. Yet the cause of this horrible happening is destined to remain a mystery forever, as the house in Rue M. le Prince is that very night guttered by fire, and the chamber where doom so nearly overtook the narrator is destroyed with it... This tale seems a trifle less artistic than "The Dead Valley," yet it is more powerful, and represents the high-water mark of Ralph Adams Cram in the realm of supernatural fiction as a forgotten creator of ghosts.
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 129 inherited a house that is reputedly haunted. His aunt, the former owner, is said to have practised black magic; and neighbors say that strange sounds are still to be heard there, even though it is now empty. D'Ardeche, the owner, is persuaded by the narrator and two friends to spend a night in the place, that all may verify for themselves the truth of the neighborhood rumours. D'Ardeche agrees, and after a brief exploration of the place, the party splits up, each man going to one of a group of rooms opening on a common corridor. They shout back and forth to one another from time to time as the evening wears on, finally desisting, since the sound echoes unpleasantly in the rooms. As the hours pass the group becomes silent. The narrator becomes ever more drowsy and numb, as though with cold. Suddenly he discovers that he has lost nearly all the power to move---or, even, to cry out. Then gradually, little by little, the flame in his lantern grows dimmer...dimmer...and is extinguished.... Then the end began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,---awful eyes, like a dead dream. ...I could not have moved my eyes had I possessed the power: the devoured the fearful, beautiful things that grew slowly, slowly larger, fixed on me, advancing, growing more beautiful with white flakes of light sweeping more swiftly into the blazing vortices the awful fascination deepening in its insane intensity as the white, vibrating eyes grew nearer, larger. Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the Unknown Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous, terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, its charnel-house deadliness. Immovable, the luckless man strains every physical and mental fiber in a vain effort to cry aloud, to be freed of this utter terror of the mind... Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless, jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror began slowly to draw my life from me...as enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept sinuously around me...the wet sucking mass closed over my face... The man awakens in a hospital bed. His friends, when he did answer their repeated calls, went to his room---and discovered the door shut and bolted from within. Battering it open, ...they leaped into the room and fell over my body in the middle of the floor. They lighted one of the lanterns, and saw...that the floor and walls to the height of about six feet were running with something that seemed like stagnant water, thick, glutinous, sickening. As for me, I was drenched in the same cursed liquid. Yet the cause of this horrible happening is destined to remain a mystery forever, as the house in Rue M. le Prince is that very night guttered by fire, and the chamber where doom so nearly overtook the narrator is destroyed with it... This tale seems a trifle less artistic than "The Dead Valley," yet it is more powerful, and represents the high-water mark of Ralph Adams Cram in the realm of supernatural fiction as a forgotten creator of ghosts.
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