Terror by Night

by Ambrose Bierce

  The staff officer drew back a pace, the orderly two paces.

  ‘What are you doing here, my man?’ said the colonel, unmoved.

  ‘This house belongs to me, sir,’ was the reply, civilly delivered.

  ‘To you? Ah, I see! And these?’

  ‘My wife and child. I am Captain Coulter.’

  An Unfinished Race

  James Burne Worson was a shoemaker who lived in Leamington, Warwickshire, England. He had a little shop in one of the byways leading off the road to Warwick. In his humble sphere he was esteemed an honest man, although like many of his class in English towns he was somewhat addicted to drink. When in liquor he would make foolish wagers. On one of these too frequent occasions he was boasting of his prowess as a pedestrian and athlete, and the outcome was a match against nature. For a stake of one sovereign he undertook to run all the way to Coventry and back, a distance of something more than forty miles. This was on the 3rd day of September in 1873. He set out at once, the man with whom he had made the bet – whose name is not remembered – accompanied by Barham Wise, a linen draper, and Hamerson Burns, a photographer, I think, following in a light cart or wagon.

  For several miles Worson went on very well, at an easy gait, without apparent fatigue, for he had really great powers of endurance and was not sufficiently intoxicated to enfeeble them. The three men in the wagon kept a short distance in the rear, giving him occasional friendly ‘chaff’ or encouragement, as the spirit moved them. Suddenly – in the very middle of the roadway, not a dozen yards from them, and with their eyes full upon him – the man seemed to stumble, pitched headlong forward, uttered a terrible cry and vanished! He did not fall to the earth – he vanished before touching it. No trace of him was ever discovered.

  After remaining at and about the spot for some time, with aimless irresolution, the three men returned to Leamington, told their astonishing story and were afterward taken into custody. But they were of good standing, had always been considered truthful, were sober at the time of the occurrence, and nothing ever transpired to discredit their sworn account of their extraordinary adventure, concerning the truth of which, nevertheless, public opinion was divided, throughout the United Kingdom. If they had something to conceal, their choice of means is certainly one of the most amazing ever made by sane human beings.

  Charles Ashmore’s Trail

  The family of Christian Ashmore consisted of his wife, his mother, two grown daughters, and a son of sixteen years. They lived in Troy, New York, were well-to-do, respectable persons, and had many friends, some of whom, reading these lines, will doubtless learn for the first time the extraordinary fate of the young man. From Troy the Ashmores moved in 1871 or 1872 to Richmond, Indiana, and a year or two later to the vicinity of Quincy, Illinois, where Mr Ashmore bought a farm and lived on it. At some little distance from the farmhouse was a spring with a constant flow of clear, cold water, whence the family derived its supply for domestic use at all seasons.

  On the evening of the 9th of November in 1878, at about nine o’clock, young Charles Ashmore left the family circle about the hearth, took a tin bucket and started toward the spring. As he did not return, the family became uneasy, and going to the door by which he had left the house, his father called without receiving an answer. He then lighted a lantern and with the eldest daughter, Martha, who insisted on accompanying him, went in search. A light snow had fallen, obliterating the path, but making the young man’s trail conspicuous; each footprint was plainly defined. After going a little more than halfway – perhaps seventy-five yards – the father, who was in advance, halted, and elevating his lantern stood peering intently into the darkness ahead.

  ‘What is the matter, father?’ the girl asked.

  This was the matter: the trail of the young man had abruptly ended, and all beyond was smooth, unbroken snow. The last footprints were as conspicuous as any in the line; the very nail-marks were distinctly visible. Mr Ashmore looked upward, shading his eyes with his hat held between them and the lantern. The stars were shining; there was not a cloud in the sky; he was denied the explanation which had suggested itself, doubtful as it would have been – a new snowfall with a limit so plainly defined. Taking a wide circuit round the ultimate tracks, so as to leave them undisturbed for further examination, the man proceeded to the spring, the girl following, weak and terrified. Neither had spoken a word of what both had observed. The spring was covered with ice, hours old.

  Returning to the house they noted the appearance of the snow on both sides of the trail its entire length. No tracks led away from it.

  The morning light showed nothing more. Smooth, spotless, unbroken, the shallow snow lay everywhere.

  Four days later the grief-stricken mother herself went to the spring for water. She came back and related that in passing the spot where the footprints had ended she had heard the voice of her son and had been eagerly calling to him, wandering about the place, as she had fancied the voice to be now in one direction, now in another, until she was exhausted with fatigue and emotion.

  Questioned as to what the voice had said, she was unable to tell, yet averred that the words were perfectly distinct. In a moment the entire family was at the place, but nothing was heard, and the voice was believed to be an hallucination caused by the mother’s great anxiety and her disordered nerves. But for months afterward, at irregular intervals of a few days, the voice was heard by the several members of the family, and by others. All declared it unmistakably the voice of Charles Ashmore; all agreed that it seemed to come from a great distance, faintly, yet with entire distinctness of articulation; yet none could determine its direction, nor repeat its words. The intervals of silence grew longer and longer, the voice fainter and farther, and by midsummer it was heard no more.

  If anybody knows the fate of Charles Ashmore it is probably his mother. She is dead.

  Staley Fleming’s Hallucination

  Of two men who were talking one was a physician.

  ‘I sent for you, Doctor,’ said the other, ‘but I don’t think you can do me any good. Maybe you can recommend a specialist in psychopathy. I fancy I’m a bit loony.’

  ‘You look all right,’ the physician said.

  ‘You shall judge – I have hallucinations. I wake every night and see in my room, intently watching me, a big black Newfoundland dog with a white forefoot.’

  ‘You say you wake; are you sure about that? “Hallucinations” are sometimes only dreams.’

  ‘Oh, I wake, all right. Sometimes I lie still a long time, looking at the dog as earnestly as the dog looks at me – I always leave the light going. When I can’t endure it any longer I sit up in bed – and nothing is there!’

  ‘ ’M, ’m – what is the beast’s expression?’

  ‘It seems to me sinister. Of course I know that, except in art, an animal’s face in repose has always the same expression. But this is not a real animal. Newfoundland dogs are pretty mild-looking, you know; what’s the matter with this one?’

  ‘Really, my diagnosis would have no value: I am not going to treat the dog.’

  The physician laughed at his own pleasantry, but narrowly watched his patient from the corner of his eye. Presently he said: ‘Fleming, your description of the beast fits the dog of the late Atwell Barton.’

  Fleming half-rose from his chair, sat again and made a visible attempt at indifference. ‘I remember Barton,’ he said; ‘I believe he was – it was reported that – wasn’t there something suspicious in his death?’

  Looking squarely now into the eyes of his patient, the physician said: ‘Three years ago the body of your old enemy, Atwell Barton, was found in the woods near his house and yours. He had been stabbed to death. There have been no arrests; there was no clue. Some of us had “theories”. I had one. Have you?’

  ‘I? Why, bless your soul, what could I know about it? You remember that I left for Europe almost immediately afterward – a considerable time afterward. In the few weeks since my return you could not expect me t
o construct a “theory”. In fact, I have not given the matter a thought. What about his dog?’

  ‘It was first to find the body. It died of starvation on his grave.’

  We do not know the inexorable law underlying coincidences. Staley Fleming did not, or he would perhaps not have sprung to his feet as the night wind brought in through the open window the long wailing howl of a distant dog. He strode several times across the room in the steadfast gaze of the physician; then, abruptly confronting him, almost shouted: ‘What has all this to do with my trouble, Dr Halderman? You forget why you were sent for.’

  Rising, the physician laid his hand upon his patient’s arm and said, gently: ‘Pardon me. I cannot diagnose your disorder offhand – tomorrow, perhaps. Please go to bed, leaving your door unlocked; I will pass the night here with your books. Can you call me without rising?’

  ‘Yes, there is an electric bell.’

  ‘Good. If anything disturbs you push the button without sitting up. Good-night.’

  Comfortably installed in an armchair the man of medicine stared into the glowing coals and thought deeply and long, but apparently to little purpose, for he frequently rose and opening a door leading to the staircase, listened intently; then resumed his seat. Presently, however, he fell asleep, and when he woke it was past midnight. He stirred the failing fire, lifted a book from the table at his side and looked at the title. It was Denneker’s Meditations. He opened it at random and began to read:

  Forasmuch as it is ordained of God that all flesh hath spirit and thereby taketh on spiritual powers, so, also, the spirit hath powers of the flesh, even when it is gone out of the flesh and liveth as a thing apart, as many a violence performed by wraith and lemure sheweth. And there be who say that man is not single in this, but the beasts have the like evil inducement, and –

  The reading was interrupted by a shaking of the house, as by the fall of a heavy object. The reader flung down the book, rushed from the room and mounted the stairs to Fleming’s bedchamber. He tried the door, but contrary to his instructions it was locked. He set his shoulder against it with such force that it gave way. On the floor near the disordered bed, in his nightclothes, lay Fleming gasping away his life.

  The physician raised the dying man’s head from the floor and observed a wound in the throat. ‘I should have thought of this,’ he said, believing it suicide.

  When the man was dead an examination disclosed the unmistakeable marks of an animal’s fangs deeply sunken into the jugular vein.

  But there was no animal.

  The Night-Doings at ‘Deadman’s’

  A story that is untrue

  It was a singularly sharp night, and clear as the heart of a diamond. Clear nights have a trick of being keen. In darkness you may be cold and not know it; when you see, you suffer. This night was bright enough to bite like a serpent. The moon was moving mysteriously along behind the giant pines crowning the South Mountain, striking a cold sparkle from the crusted snow, and bringing out against the black west the ghostly outlines of the Coast Range, beyond which lay the invisible Pacific. The snow had piled itself, in the open spaces along the bottom of the gulch, into long ridges that seemed to heave, and into hills that appeared to toss and scatter spray. The spray was sunlight, twice reflected: dashed once from the moon, once from the snow.

  In this snow many of the shanties of the abandoned mining camp were obliterated (a sailor might have said they had gone down), and at irregular intervals it had overtopped the tall trestles which had once supported a river called a flume; for, of course, ‘flume’ is flumen. Among the advantages of which the mountains cannot deprive the gold-hunter is the privilege of speaking Latin. He says of his dead neighbour, ‘He has gone up the flume.’ This is not a bad way to say, ‘His life has returned to the Fountain of Life.’

  While putting on its armour against the assaults of the wind, this snow had neglected no coign of vantage. Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions; where it can get a foothold it makes a stand; where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall. The devious old road, hewn out of the mountain side, was full of it. Squadron upon squadron had struggled to escape by this line, when suddenly pursuit had ceased. A more desolate and dreary spot than Deadman’s Gulch in a winter midnight it is impossible to imagine. Yet Mr Hiram Beeson elected to live there, the sole inhabitant.

  Away up the side of the North Mountain his little pine-log shanty projected from its single pane of glass a long, thin beam of light, and looked not altogether unlike a black beetle fastened to the hillside with a bright new pin. Within it sat Mr Beeson himself, before a roaring fire, staring into its hot heart as if he had never before seen such a thing in all his life. He was not a comely man. He was grey; he was ragged and slovenly in his attire; his face was wan and haggard; his eyes were too bright. As to his age, if one had attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then corrected himself and said seventy-four. He was really twenty-eight. Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he dared be, with a needy undertaker at Bentley’s Flat and a new and enterprising coroner at Sonora. Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone. It is dangerous to make a third in that kind of sandwich.

  As Mr Beeson sat there, with his ragged elbows on his ragged knees, his lean jaws buried in his lean hands, and with no apparent intention of going to bed, he looked as if the slightest movement would tumble him to pieces. Yet during the last hour he had winked no fewer than three times.

  There was a sharp rapping at the door. A rap at that time of night and in that weather might have surprised an ordinary mortal who had dwelt two years in the gulch without seeing a human face, and could not fail to know that the country was impassable; but Mr Beeson did not so much as pull his eyes out of the coals. And even when the door was pushed open he only shrugged a little more closely into himself, as one does who is expecting something that he would rather not see. You may observe this movement in women when, in a mortuary chapel, the coffin is borne up the aisle behind them.

  But when a long old man in a blanket overcoat, his head tied up in a handkerchief and nearly his entire face in a muffler, wearing green goggles and with a complexion of glittering whiteness where it could be seen, strode silently into the room, laying a hard, gloved hand on Mr Beeson’s shoulder, the latter so far forgot himself as to look up with an appearance of no small astonishment; whomever he may have been expecting, he had evidently not counted on meeting anyone like this. Nevertheless, the sight of this unexpected guest produced in Mr Beeson the following sequence: a feeling of astonishment; a sense of gratification; a sentiment of profound good will. Rising from his seat, he took the knotty hand from his shoulder, and shook it up and down with a fervour quite unaccountable; for in the old man’s aspect was nothing to attract, much to repel. However, attraction is too general a property for repulsion to be without it. The most attractive object in the world is the face we instinctively cover with a cloth. When it becomes still more attractive – fascinating – we put seven feet of earth above it.

  ‘Sir,’ said Mr Beeson, releasing the old man’s hand, which fell passively against his thigh with a quiet clack, ‘it is an extremely disagreeable night. Pray be seated; I am very glad to see you.’

  Mr Beeson spoke with an easy good breeding that one would hardly have expected, considering all things. Indeed, the contrast between his appearance and his manner was sufficiently surprising to be one of the commonest of social phenomena in the mines. The old man advanced a step toward the fire, glowing cavernously in the green goggles. Mr Beeson resumed: ‘You bet your life I am!’

  Mr Beeson’s elegance was not too refined; it had made reasonable concessions to local taste. He paused a moment, letting his eyes drop from the muffled head of his guest, down along the row of mouldy buttons confining the blanket overcoat, to the greenish cowhide boots powdered with snow, which had begun to melt and run
along the floor in little rills. He took an inventory of his guest, and appeared satisfied. Who would not have been? Then he continued: ‘The cheer I can offer you is, unfortunately, in keeping with my surroundings; but I shall esteem myself highly favoured if it is your pleasure to partake of it, rather than seek better at Bentley’s Flat.’

  With a singular refinement of hospitable humility Mr Beeson spoke as if a sojourn in his warm cabin on such a night, as compared with walking fourteen miles up to the throat in snow with a cutting crust, would be an intolerable hardship. By way of reply, his guest unbuttoned the blanket overcoat. The host laid fresh fuel on the fire, swept the hearth with the tail of a wolf, and added: ‘But I think you’d better skedaddle.’

  The old man took a seat by the fire, spreading his broad soles to the heat without removing his hat. In the mines the hat is seldom removed except when the boots are. Without further remark Mr Beeson also seated himself in a chair which had been a barrel, and which, retaining much of its original character, seemed to have been designed with a view to preserving his dust if it should please him to crumble. For a moment there was silence; then, from somewhere among the pines, came the snarling yelp of a coyote; and simultaneously the door rattled in its frame. There was no other connection between the two incidents than that the coyote has an aversion to storms, and the wind was rising; yet there seemed somehow a kind of supernatural conspiracy between the two, and Mr Beeson shuddered with a vague sense of terror. He recovered himself in a moment and again addressed his guest.