In
relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this
refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create
a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate
fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh
with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt
only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience.
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt
the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue
of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are
made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns
as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of
obvious empricism.
My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been
a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial
life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreation
of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible
world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little known books,
and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home.
I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and
groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must
say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders
upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy
attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without
analyzing causes.
I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have
not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking
the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship
of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there
lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of
my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes
my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled
oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know
the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild
dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon but of these things I must
not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the
hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family
whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many
decades before my birth.
The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discolored
by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside,
the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and
forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened
ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks,
according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the
race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which
holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang
up from a stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this
gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in
hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call 'divine wrath' in
a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination
which I had felt for the forest-darkened sepulcher. One man only had perished
in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade
and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land, to
which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains
to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing
shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.
I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the
half-hidden house of death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of nature
transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass
of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas
of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and the vegetation.
In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become
trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently
upon the enthralled consciousness.
All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow;
thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need
not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown
to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing
my way between two savage clumps of briars, I suddenly encountered the
entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The
dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funeral carvings
above the arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character.
Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my
peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards
and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me
only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior,
into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalizingly left,
contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity
was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell
of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous
soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of
the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day
I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide
the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space
already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious,
I was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my
home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would
some day force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling
out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to
my room, once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of
a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgment to my readers when
they shall have learnt all.
The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to
force the complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully
guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. With
the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though
an habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or
my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised
or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original
ideas regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay
with the breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great and
sinister family of the burned-down mansion was in some way represented
within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird
rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me
a new and potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for
hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candie within the nearly closed
entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading
downward. The odor of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had
known it before, in a past remote beyond all recollection; beyond even
my tenancy of the body I now possess.
The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten
translation of Plutarch's Lives in the book-filled attic of my home.
Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling
of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens
of destiny whenever he should become old enough to lift its enormous weight.
The legend had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter
the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I
told myself, I should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable
me to unfasten the heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would
do better by conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.
Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent,
and much of my time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits.
I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk
in those church-yards and places of burial from which I had been kept by
my parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the
reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal
ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics
almost forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that
I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich
and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred
in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones,
was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed
not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled
shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of the deceased before burial;
but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his
mound-covered coffin on the day after interment.
But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed
stimulated by the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own maternal
ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposediy extinct family
of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this
older and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine,
and to look forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might pass within
that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed
the habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing
my favorite hours of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time
I came of age, I had made a small clearing in the thicket before the mold-stained
facade of the hillside, allowing the surrounding vegetation to encircle
and overhang the space like the walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This
bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I would lie
outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking strange thoughts and dreaming
strange dreams.
The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen
asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that
I heard the voices. Of these tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of
their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain
uncanny differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance.
Every shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan
colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented
in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact.
At the time, indeed, my attention was distracted from this matter by another
phenomenon; a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take oath upon its
reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been hurriedly
extinguished within the sunken sepulcher. I do not think I was either astounded
or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed
that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting
chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with
ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.
It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the
vault on the abandoned slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped
with an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind
me and descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed
to know the way; and though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek
of the place, I felt singularly at home in the musty, charnel-house air.
Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains
of coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly
vanished, leaving the silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain
curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey
Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later.
In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well preserved and untenanted casket,
adorned with a single name which brought me both a smile and a shudder.
An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish my candle,
and lie down within the vacant box.
In the gray light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the
chain of the door behind me. I was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one
winters had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who observed
my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marveled at the signs
of ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober
and solitary. I did not appear before my parents till after a long and
refreshing sleep.
Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and
doing things I must never recall. My speech, always susceptible to environmental
influences, was the first thing to succumb to the change; and my suddenly
acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer boldness
and recklessness came into my demeanor, till I unconsciously grew to possess
the bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly
silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the
godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly
unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and
covered the fly-leaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which
brought up suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan
wits and rimesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by
declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of Eighteenth Century
bacchanalian mirth, a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book,
which ran something like this:
Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
So fill up your glass,
For life will soon pass;
When you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!
Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;
But what's a red nose if ye're happy and gay?
Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here,
Than white as a lily and dead half a year!
So Betty, my miss,
Come give me a kiss;
In hell there's no innkeeper's daughter like this!
Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able,
Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table,
But fill up your goblets and pass 'em around
Better under the table than under the ground!
So revel and chaff
As ye thirstily quaff:
Under six feet of dirt 'tis less easy to laugh!
The fiend strike me blue! l'm scarce able to walk,
And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!
Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;
l'll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!
So lend me a hand;
I'm not able to stand,
But I'm gay whilst I linger on top of the land!
About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms.
Previously indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakable horror
of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house whenever
the heavens threatened an electrical display. A favorite haunt of mine
during the day was the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down,
and in fancy I would picture the structure as it had been in its prime.
On one occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shallow
subcellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that
it had been unseen and forgotten for many generations.
At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at
the altered manner and appearance of their only son, commenced to exert
over my movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster.
I had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purpose
with religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care
in threading the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible
pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck,
its presence known only to me. I never carried out of the sepulcher any
of the things I came upon whilst within its walls.
One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain
of the portal with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket
the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower was
discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man
did not accost me, so I hastened home in an effort to overhear what he
might report to my careworn father. Were my sojourns beyond the chained
door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonishment
on hearing the spy inform my parent in a cautious whisper that I had
spent the night in the bower outside the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes
fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked portal stood ajar! By what miracle
had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced that a supernatural
agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sent circumstance, I began
to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confident that no one
could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full joys of that
charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing happened,
and I was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.
I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder
was in the clouds, and a hellish phosphoresence rose from the rank swamp
at the bottom of the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was different.
Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of
the slope whose presiding demon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As
I emerged from an intervening grove upon the plain before the ruin, I beheld
in the misty moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The mansion,
gone for a century, once more reared its stately height to the raptured
vision; every window ablaze with the splendor of many candles. Up the long
drive rolled the coaches of the Boston gentry, whilst on foot came a numerous
assemblage of powdered exquisites from the neighboring mansions. With this
throng I mingled, though I knew I belonged with the hosts rather than with
the guests. Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine on every hand.
Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better had
they been shriveled or eaten away by death and decomposition. Amidst a
wild and reckless throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy
poured in torrents from my lips, and in shocking sallies I heeded no law
of God, or nature.
Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish
revelry, clave the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon the boisterous
company. Red tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed the house;
and the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamity which
seemed to transcend the bounds of unguided nature, fled shrieking into
the night. I alone remained, riveted to my seat by a groveling fear which
I had never felt before. And then a second horror took possession of my
soul. Burnt alive to ashes, my body dispersed by the four winds, I might
never lie in the tomb of the Hydes! Was not my coffin prepared for me?
Had I not a right to rest till eternity amongst the descendants of Sir
Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim my heritage of death, even though my
soul go seeking through the ages for another corporeal tenement to represent
it on that vacant slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas Hyde should never
share the sad fate of Palinurus!
As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming
and struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who
had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon
the southern horizon were flashes of lightning that had so lately passed
over our heads. My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood by as I shouted
my demands to be laid within the tomb, frequently admonishing my captors
to treat me as gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor of
the ruined cellar told of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from this
spot a group of curious villagers with lanterns were prying a small box
of antique workmanship, which the thunderbolt had brought to light.
Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched the spectators
as they viewed the treasure-trove, and was permitted to share in their
discoveries. The box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which
had unearthed it, contained many papers and objects of value, but I had
eyes for one thing alone. It was the porcelain miniature of a young man
in a smartly curled bag-wig, and bore the initials 'J. H.' The face was
such that as I gazed, I might well have been studying my mirror.
On the following day I was brought to this room with the barred windows,
but I have been kept informed of certain things through an aged and simple-minded
servitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who, like me, loves
the churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within the vault
has brought me only pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently,
declares that at no time did I pass the chained portal, and swears that
the rusted padlock had not been touched for fifty years when he examined
it. He even says that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb,
and that I was often watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim facade,
my half-open eyes fixed on the crevice that leads to the interior. Against
these assertions I have no tangible proof to offer, since my key to the
padlock was lost in the struggle on that night of horrors. The strange
things of the past which I have learned during those nocturnal meetings
with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous
browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not
been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite
convinced of my madness.
But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has done
that which impels me to make public at least part of my story. A week ago
he burst open the lock which chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar,
and descended with a lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove
he found an old but empty coffin whose tarnished plate bears the single
word: Jervas. In that coffin and in that vault they have promised me I
shall be buried.
