Terror by Night

by Ambrose Bierce

  The Assassin now advanced and displaying the blade laid it against the victim’s throat. That is to say, the man became at first dimly, then definitely, aware of an impressive coincidence – a relation – a parallel between the face on the card and the name on the headboard. The one was disfigured, the other described a disfiguration. The thought took hold of him and shook him. It transformed the face that his imagination had created behind the coffin lid; the contrast became a resemblance; the resemblance grew to identity. Remembering the many descriptions of Scarry’s personal appearance that he had heard from the gossips of his camp-fire he tried with imperfect success to recall the exact nature of the disfiguration that had given the woman her ugly name; and what was lacking in his memory fancy supplied, stamping it with the validity of conviction. In the maddening attempt to recall such scraps of the woman’s history as he had heard, the muscles of his arms and hands were strained to a painful tension, as by an effort to lift a great weight. His body writhed and twisted with the exertion. The tendons of his neck stood out as tense as whip-cords, and his breath came in short, sharp gasps. The catastrophe could not be much longer delayed, or the agony of anticipation would leave nothing to be done by the coup de grâce of verification. The scarred face behind the lid would slay him through the wood.

  A movement of the coffin diverted his thought. It came forward to within a foot of his face, growing visibly larger as it approached. The rusted metallic plate, with an inscription illegible in the moonlight, looked him steadily in the eye. Determined not to shrink, he tried to brace his shoulders more firmly against the end of the excavation, and nearly fell backward in the attempt. There was nothing to support him; he had unconsciously moved upon his enemy, clutching the heavy knife that he had drawn from his belt. The coffin had not advanced and he smiled to think it could not retreat. Lifting his knife he struck the heavy hilt against the metal plate with all his power. There was a sharp, ringing percussion, and with a dull clatter the whole decayed coffin lid broke in pieces and came away, falling about his feet. The quick and the dead were face to face – the frenzied, shrieking man – the woman standing tranquil in her silences. She was a holy terror!

  5

  Some months later a party of men and women belonging to the highest social circles of San Francisco passed through Hurdy-Gurdy on their way to the Yosemite Valley by a new trail. They halted for dinner and during its preparation explored the desolate camp. One of the party had been at Hurdy-Gurdy in the days of its glory. He had, indeed, been one of its prominent citizens; and it used to be said that more money passed over his faro table in any one night than over those of all his competitors in a week; but being now a millionaire engaged in greater enterprises, he did not deem these early successes of sufficient importance to merit the distinction of remark. His invalid wife, a lady famous in San Francisco for the costly nature of her entertainments and her exacting rigour with regard to the social position and ‘antecedents’ of those who attended them, accompanied the expedition. During a stroll among the shanties of the abandoned camp Mr Porfer directed the attention of his wife and friends to a dead tree on a low hill beyond Injun Creek.

  ‘As I told you,’ he said, ‘I passed through this camp in 1852, and was told that no fewer than five men had been hanged here by vigilantes at different times, and all on that tree. If I am not mistaken, a rope is dangling from it yet. Let us go over and see the place.’

  Mr Porfer did not add that the rope in question was perhaps the very one from whose fatal embrace his own neck had once had an escape so narrow that an hour’s delay in taking himself out of that region would have spanned it.

  Proceeding leisurely down the creek to a convenient crossing, the party came upon the cleanly picked skeleton of an animal which Mr Porfer after due examination pronounced to be that of an ass. The distinguishing ears were gone, but much of the inedible head had been spared by the beasts and birds, and the stout bridle of horsehair was intact, as was the riata, of similar material, connecting it with a picket pin still firmly sunken in the earth. The wooden and metallic elements of a miner’s kit lay nearby. The customary remarks were made, cynical on the part of the men, sentimental and refined by the lady. A little later they stood by the tree in the cemetery and Mr Porfer sufficiently unbent from his dignity to place himself beneath the rotten rope and confidently lay a coil of it about his neck, somewhat, it appeared, to his own satisfaction, but greatly to the horror of his wife, to whose sensibilities the performance gave a smart shock.

  An exclamation from one of the party gathered them all about an open grave, at the bottom of which they saw a confused mass of human bones and the broken remnants of a coffin. Coyotes and buzzards had performed the last sad rites for pretty much all else. Two skulls were visible and in order to investigate this somewhat unusual redundancy one of the younger men had the hardihood to spring into the grave and hand them up to another before Mrs Porfer could indicate her marked disapproval of so shocking an act, which, nevertheless, she did with considerable feeling and in very choice words. Pursuing his search among the dismal debris at the bottom of the grave the young man next handed up a rusted coffin plate, with a rudely cut inscription, which with difficulty Mr Porfer deciphered and read aloud with an earnest and not altogether unsuccessful attempt at the dramatic effect which he deemed befitting to the occasion and his rhetorical abilities:

  MANUELITA MURPHY

  Born at the Mission San Pedro

  Died in Hurdy-Gurdy, Aged 47

  Hell’s full of such

  In deference to the piety of the reader and the nerves of Mrs Porfer’s fastidious sisterhood of both sexes let us not touch upon the painful impression produced by this uncommon inscription, further than to say that the elocutionary powers of Mr Porfer had never before met with so spontaneous and overwhelming recognition.

  The next morsel that rewarded the ghoul in the grave was a long tangle of black hair defiled with clay: but this was such an anticlimax that it received little attention. Suddenly, with a short exclamation and a gesture of excitement, the young man unearthed a fragment of greyish rock, and after a hurried inspection handed it up to Mr Porfer. As the sunlight fell upon it it glittered with a yellow lustre – it was thickly studded with gleaming points. Mr Porfer snatched it, bent his head over it a moment and threw it lightly away with the simple remark: ‘Iron pyrites – fool’s gold.’

  The young man in the discovery shaft was a trifle disconcerted, apparently.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Porfer, unable longer to endure the disagreeable business, had walked back to the tree and seated herself at its root. While rearranging a tress of golden hair which had slipped from its confinement she was attracted by what appeared to be and really was the fragment of an old coat. Looking about to assure herself that so unladylike an act was not observed, she thrust her jewelled hand into the exposed breast pocket and drew out a mouldy pocket-book. Its contents were as follows:

  One bundle of letters, postmarked ‘Elizabethtown, New Jersey’.

  One circle of blonde hair tied with a ribbon.

  One photograph of a beautiful girl.

  One ditto of same, singularly disfigured.

  One name on back of photograph – ‘Jefferson Doman’.

  A few moments later a group of anxious gentlemen surrounded Mrs Porfer as she sat motionless at the foot of the tree, her head dropped forward, her fingers clutching a crushed photograph. Her husband raised her head, exposing a face ghastly white, except the long, deforming cicatrice, familiar to all her friends, which no art could ever hide, and which now traversed the pallor of her countenance like a visible curse.

  Mary Matthews Porfer had the bad luck to be dead.

  A Diagnosis of Death

  ‘I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians – men of science, as you are pleased to be called,’ said Hawver, replying to an accusation that had not been made. ‘Some of you – only a few, I confess – believe in the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions which you have
not the honesty to call ghosts. I go no further than a conviction that the living are sometimes seen where they are not, but have been – where they have lived so long, perhaps so intensely, as to have left their impress on everything about them. I know, indeed, that one’s environment may be so affected by one’s personality as to yield, long afterward, an image of one’s self to the eyes of another. Doubtless the impressing personality has to be the right kind of personality as the perceiving eyes have to be the right kind of eyes – mine, for example.’

  ‘Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations to the wrong kind of brain,’ said Dr Frayley, smiling.

  ‘Thank you; one likes to have an expectation gratified; that is about the reply that I supposed you would have the civility to make.’

  ‘Pardon me. But you say that you know. That is a good deal to say, don’t you think? Perhaps you will not mind the trouble of saying how you learned.’

  ‘You will call it an hallucination,’ Hawver said, ‘but that does not matter.’ And he told the story.

  ‘Last summer I went, as you know, to pass the hot weather term in the town of Meridian. The relative at whose house I had intended to stay was ill, so I sought other quarters. After some difficulty I succeeded in renting a vacant dwelling that had been occupied by an eccentric doctor of the name of Mannering, who had gone away years before, no-one knew where, not even his agent. He had built the house himself and had lived in it with an old servant for about ten years. His practice, never very extensive, had after a few years been given up entirely. Not only so, but he had withdrawn himself almost altogether from social life and become a recluse. I was told by the village doctor, about the only person with whom he held any relations, that during his retirement he had devoted himself to a single line of study, the result of which he had expounded in a book that did not commend itself to the approval of his professional brethren, who, indeed, considered him not entirely sane. I have not seen the book and cannot now recall the title of it, but I am told that it expounded a rather startling theory. He held that it was possible in the case of many a person in good health to forecast his death with precision, several months in advance of the event. The limit, I think, was eighteen months. There were local tales of his having exerted his powers of prognosis, or perhaps you would say diagnosis; and it was said that in every instance the person whose friends he had warned had died suddenly at the appointed time, and from no assignable cause. All this, however, has nothing to do with what I have to tell; I thought it might amuse a physician.

  ‘The house was furnished, just as he had lived in it. It was a rather gloomy dwelling for one who was neither a recluse nor a student, and I think it gave something of its character to me – perhaps some of its former occupant’s character; for always I felt in it a certain melancholy that was not in my natural disposition, nor, I think, due to loneliness. I had no servants that slept in the house, but I have always been, as you know, rather fond of my own society, being much addicted to reading, though little to study. Whatever was the cause, the effect was dejection and a sense of impending evil; this was especially so in Dr Mannering’s study, although that room was the lightest and most airy in the house. The doctor’s life-size portrait in oil hung in that room, and seemed completely to dominate it. There was nothing unusual in the picture; the man was evidently rather good looking, about fifty years old, with iron-grey hair, a smooth-shaven face and dark, serious eyes. Something in the picture always drew and held my attention. The man’s appearance became familiar to me, and rather “haunted” me.

  ‘One evening I was passing through this room to my bedroom, with a lamp – there is no gas in Meridian. I stopped as usual before the portrait, which seemed in the lamplight to have a new expression, not easily named, but distinctly uncanny. It interested but did not disturb me. I moved the lamp from one side to the other and observed the effects of the altered light. While so engaged I felt an impulse to turn round. As I did so I saw a man moving across the room directly toward me! As soon as he came near enough for the lamplight to illuminate the face I saw that it was Dr Mannering himself; it was as if the portrait were walking!

  ‘ “I beg your pardon,” I said, somewhat coldly, “but if you knocked I did not hear.”

  ‘He passed me, within an arm’s length, lifted his right forefinger, as in warning, and without a word went on out of the room, though I observed his exit no more than I had observed his entrance.

  ‘Of course, I need not tell you that this was what you will call an hallucination and I call an apparition. That room had only two doors, of which one was locked; the other led into a bedroom, from which there was no exit. My feeling on realising this is not an important part of the incident.

  ‘Doubtless this seems to you a very commonplace “ghost story” – one constructed on the regular lines laid down by the old masters of the art. If that were so I should not have related it, even if it were true. The man was not dead; I met him today in Union Street. He passed me in a crowd.’

  Hawver had finished his story and both men were silent. Dr Frayley absently drummed on the table with his fingers.

  ‘Did he say anything today?’ he asked – ‘anything from which you inferred that he was not dead?’

  Hawver stared and did not reply.

  ‘Perhaps,’ continued Frayley, ‘he made a sign, a gesture – lifted a finger, as in warning. It’s a trick he had – a habit when saying something serious – announcing the result of a diagnosis, for example.’

  ‘Yes, he did – just as his apparition had done. But, good God! did you ever know him?’

  Hawver was apparently growing nervous.

  ‘I knew him. I have read his book, as will every physician some day. It is one of the most striking and important of the century’s contributions to medical science. Yes, I knew him; I attended him in an illness three years ago. He died.’

  Hawver sprang from his chair, manifestly disturbed. He strode forward and back across the room; then approached his friend, and in a voice not altogether steady, said: ‘Doctor, have you anything to say to me – as a physician?’

  ‘No, Hawver; you are the healthiest man I ever knew. As a friend I advise you to go to your room. You play the violin like an angel. Play it; play something light and lively. Get this cursed bad business off your mind.’

  The next day Hawver was found dead in his room, the violin at his neck, the bow upon the strings, his music open before him at Chopin’s funeral march.

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  TERROR BY NIGHT

  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

  The Moonlit Road

  Haita the Shepherd

  The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch

  The Eyes of the Panther

  The Stranger

  An Inhabitant of Carcosa

  The Applicant

  The Death of Halpin Frayser

  A Watcher by the Dead

  An Imperfect Conflagration

  The Man and the Snake

  John Mortonson’s Funeral

  Moxon’s Master

  The Damned Thing

  The Realm of the Unreal

  Chickamauga

  A Fruitless Assignment

  A Vine on a House

  One of Twins

  Present at a Hanging

  A Wireless Message

  One of the Missing

  An Arrest

  A Jug of Sirup

  The Isle of Pines

  At Old Man Eckert’s

  Three and One are One

  The Spook House

  The Middle Toe of the Right Foot

  The Thing at Nolan

  The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

  The Affair at Coulter’s Notch

  An Unfinished Race

  Charles Ashmore’s Trail

  Staley Fleming’s Hallucination

  The Night-Doings at ‘Deadman’s’

  A Baby Tramp

  A Psychological Shipwreck

 
A Cold Greeting

  Beyond the Wall

  John Bartine’s Watch

  The Man out of the Nose

  An Adventure at Brownville

  The Mocking-Bird

  The Suitable Surroundings

  The Boarded Window

  A Lady from Redhorse

  The Famous Gilson Bequest

  A Holy Terror

  A Diagnosis of Death