The Macabre Megapack

by Various Writers

  Two or three days after this event, the Tellemarke, free trader, arrived in Bergen from Iceland, and reported, “that but for a strong northerly breeze, she would have been sucked into the Maelstroom; that a little before sunset, when within two leagues of the whirlpool, a small boat was seen drifting, empty; and that soon after another, the smallest and strangest built boat that ever was seen passed close under their bows, to windward, paddling in the direction of the Maelstroom; that two mariners were in it; he at the helm of an exceedingly tall stature, and singular countenance; that the other cried out for help; upon which the ship lay to, and manned a boat with four rowers; but that with all their exertions they were unable to gain upon the little boat, which was worked by a single paddle; and that the boatmen, fearing they might be drawn into the whirlpool, returned to the ship; and that, just at sunset, they could descry the small boat, by the help of their glasses, steering right across the Maelstroom, as if it had been a small pond.” Of all which extraordinary facts, the master of the Tellemarke made a deposition before the chief magistrate who filled the chair after Carl Bluven had disappeared in so miraculous a manner.

  THE PREDICTION, by George Henry Borrow

  (1826)

  ‘Let’s talk of graves.’ —Shakespeare

  On the south-west coast of the principality of Wales stands a romantic little village, inhabited chiefly by the poorer class of people, consisting of small farmers and oyster dredgers, whose estates are the wide ocean, and whose ploughs are the small craft, in which they glide over its interminable fields in search of the treasures which they wring from its bosom; it is built on the very top of a hill, commanding on the one side, a view of an immense bay, and on the other, of the peaceful green fields and valleys, cultivated by the greater number of its quiet inhabitants. The approach to it from the nearest town was by a road which branched away into lanes and wooded walks, and from the sea by a beautiful little bay, running up far into the land; both sides of which, and indeed all the rest of the coast, were guarded by craggy and gigantic rocks, some of them hollowed into caverns, into which none of the inhabitants, from motives of superstition, had ever dared to penetrate. There were, at the period of which we are about to treat, no better sort of inhabitants in the little village just described, none of those so emphatically distinguished as ‘quality’ by the country people; they had neither parson, lawyer, nor doctor among them, and of course there was a tolerable equality amongst the residents. The farmer, who followed his own plough in the spring, singing the sweet wild national chant of the season, and bound up with his own hands his sheaves in the autumn, was not richer, greater, nor finer than he who, bare-legged on the strand, gathered in the hoar weed for the farmer in the spring, or dared the wild winds of autumn and the wrath of the winter in his little boat, to earn with his dredging net a yet harder subsistence for his family. Distinctions were unknown in the village; every man was the equal of his neighbor.

  But, though rank and its polished distinctions were strange in the village of N—, the superiority of talent was felt and acknowledged almost without a pause or a murmur. There was one who was as a king amongst them, by the mere force of a mightier spirit than those with whom he sojourned had been accustomed to feel among them: he was a dark and moody, a stranger, evidently of a higher order than those around him, who had but a few months before, without any apparent object, settled among them: he was poor, but had no occupation—he lived frugally, but quite alone—and his sole enjoyments were to read during the day, and wander out unaccompanied into the fields or by the beach during the night. Sometimes indeed he would relieve a suffering child or rheumatic old man by medicinal herbs, reprove idleness and drunkenness in the youth, and predict to all the good and evil consequences of their conduct; and his success in some cases, his foresight in others, and his wisdom in all, won for him a high reputation among the cottagers, to which his taciturn habits contributed not a little, for, with the vulgar as with the educated, no talker was ever seriously taken for a conjurer, though a silent man is often decided to be a wise one.

  There was but one person in N— at all disposed to rebel against the despotic sovereignty which Rhys Meredith was silently establishing over the quiet village, and that was precisely the person most likely to effect a revolution; she was a beautiful maiden, the glory and boast of the village, who had been the favorite of, and to a certain degree educated by, the late lady of the lord of the manor; but she had died, and her pupil, with a full consciousness of her intellectual superiority, had returned to her native village, where she determined to have an empire of her own, which no rival could dispute: she laughed at the maidens who listened to the predictions of Rhys, and she refused her smiles to the youths who consulted him upon their affairs and their prospects; and as the beautiful Ruth was generally beloved, the silent Rhys was soon in danger of being abandoned by all save doting men and paralytic women, and feeling himself an outcast in the village of N—.

  But to be such was not the object of Meredith; he was an idle man, and the gifts of the villagers contributed to spare him from exertion; he knew, too, that in another point of view this ascendancy was necessary to his purposes; and as he had failed to establish it by wisdom and benevolence, he determined to try the effect of fear. The character of the people with whom he sojourned was admirably calculated to assist his projects; his predictions were now uttered more clearly, and his threats denounced in sterner tones and stronger and plainer words; and when he predicted that old Morgan Williams, who had been stricken with palsy, would die at the turn of the tide, three days from that on which he spoke, and that the light little boat of gay Griffy Morris, which sailed from the bay in a bright winter’s morning, should never again make the shore; and the man died, and the storm arose, even as he had said; men’s hearts died within them, and they bowed down before his words, as if he had been their general fate and the individual destiny of each.

  Ruth’s rosy lip grew pale for a moment as she heard of these things; in the next her spirit returned, and ‘I will make him tell my fortune,’ she said, as she went with a party of laughers to search out and deride the conjurer. He was alone when they broke in upon him, and their mockeries goaded his spirits; but his anger was deep, not loud; and while burning with wrath, he yet could calmly consider the means of vengeance: he knew the master spirit with which he had to contend; it was no ordinary mind, and would have smiled at ordinary terrors. To have threatened her with sickness, misfortune, or death, would have been to call forth the energies of that lofty spirit, and prepare it to endure, and it would have gloried in manifesting its powers of endurance; he must humble it therefore by debasement; he must ruin its confidence in itself; and to this end he resolved to threaten her with crime. His resolution was taken and effected, his credit was at stake; he must daunt his enemy, or surrender to her power: he foretold sorrows and joys to the listening throng, not according to his passion, but according to his judgement, and he drew a blush upon the cheek of one, by revealing a secret which Ruth herself, and another, alone knew, and which prepared the former to doubt of her own judgement, as it related to this extraordinary man.

  Ruth was the last who approached to hear the secret of her destiny. The wizard paused as he looked upon her—opened his book—shut it—paused—and again looked sadly and fearfully upon her; she tried to smile, but felt startled, she knew not why; the bright inquiring glance of her dark eye could not change the purpose of her enemy. Her smile could not melt, nor even temper, the hardness of his deep-seated malice: he again looked sternly upon her brow, and then coldly wrung out the slow soul-withering words, ‘Maiden, thou art doomed to be a murder!’

  From that hour Rhys Meredith became the destiny of Ruth Tudor. At first she spurned at his prediction, and alternately cursed and laughed at him for the malice of his falsehood: but when she found that none laughed with her, that men looked upon her with suspicious eyes, women shrunk from her society, and children shrieked in her presence, she felt that these were signs of tr
uth, and her high spirit no longer struggled against the conviction; a change came over her mind when she had known how horrid it was to be alone. Abhorring the prophet, she yet clung to his footsteps, and while she sat by his side, felt as if he alone could avert that evil destiny which he alone had foreseen. With him only was she seen to smile; elsewhere, sad, silent, stern, it seemed as if she were ever occupied in nerving her mind for that which she had to do, and her beauty, already of the majestic cast, grew absolutely awful, as her perfect features assumed an expression which might have belonged to the angel of vengeance or death.

  But there were moments when her naturally strong spirit, not yet wholly subdued, struggled against her conviction, and endeavored to find modes of averting her fate: it was in one of these, perhaps, that she gave her hand to a wooer, from a distant part of the country, a sailor, who either had not hear, or did not regard the prediction of Rhys, upon condition that he should remove her far from her native village to the home of his family and friends, for she sometimes felt as if the decree which had gone forth against her could not be fulfilled except upon the spot where she had heard it, and that her heart would be lighter if men’s eyes would again look upon her in kindliness, and she no longer sat beneath the glare of those who knew so well the secret of her soul. Thus thinking, she quitted N— with her husband; and the tormentor, who had poisoned her repose, soon after her departure, left the village as secretly and as suddenly as he had entered it.

  But, though Ruth could depart from his corporeal presence, and look upon his cruel visage no more, yet the eye of her soul was fixed upon his shadow, and his airy form, the creation of her sorrow, still sat by her side; the blight that he had breathed upon her peace had withered her heart, and it was in vain that she sought to forget or banish the recollection from her brain. Men and women smiles upon her as before in the days of her joy, the friends of her husband welcomed her to their bosoms, but they could give no peace to her heart: she shrunk from their friendship, she shivered equally at their neglect, she dreaded any cause that might lead to that which, it had been said, she must do; nightly she sat alone and thought, and dwelt upon the characters of those around her, and shuddered that in some she violence and selfishness enough to cause injury, which she might be supposed to resent to blood. Then she wept bitter tears and thought of her native village, whose inhabitants were so mild, and whose previous knowledge of her hapless destiny might induce them to avoid all that might hasten its completion, and sighed to think she had ever left it in the mistaken hope of finding peace elsewhere. Again, her sick fancy would ponder upon the modes of murder, and wonder how her victim would fall. Against the use of actual violence she had disabled herself; she had never struck a blow, her small hand would have suffered injury in the attempt; she understood not the usage of firearms, she was ignorant of what were poisons, and a knife she never allowed herself, even for the most necessary purposes: how then could she slay? At times she took comfort from thoughts like these, and at others, in the blackness of despair, she would cry, ‘If it must be, oh let it come, and there miserable anticipations cease; then I shall, at least, destroy but one; now, in my incertitude, I am the murderer of many!’

  Her husband went forth and returned upon the voyages which made up the avocation and felicity of his life, without noticing the deep-rooted sorrow of his wife; he was a common man, and of a common mind; his eye had not seen the awful beauty of her whom he had chosen; his spirit had not felt her power; and, if he had marked, he would not have understood her grief; so she ministered to him as a duty. She was a silent and obedient wife, but she saw him come home without joy, and witnessed his departure without regret; he had neither added to nor diminished her sorrow; but destiny had one solitary blessing in store for the victim of its decrees,—a child was born to the hapless Ruth, a lovely little girl soon slept upon her bosom, and, coming as it did, the one lone and lovely rosebud in her desolate garden, she welcomed it with a warmer joy and cherished it with a kindlier hope.

  A few years went by unsoiled by the wretchedness which had marked the preceding; the joy of the mother softened the anguish of the condemned, and sometimes when she looked upon her daughter she ceased to despair: but destiny had not forgotten her claim, and soon her hand pressed heavily upon her victim; the giant ocean rolled over the body of her husband, poverty visited the cottage of the widow, and famine’s gaunt figure was visible in the distance. Oppression came with these, for arrears of rent were demanded, and he who asked was brutal in his anger and harsh in his language to the sufferers. Ruth shuddered as she heard him speak, and trembled for him, and for herself; the unforgotten prophecy arose in her mind, and she preferred even witnesses to his brutality and her degradation, rather than encounter his anger and her own dark thoughts alone.

  Thus goaded, she saw but one thing that could save her. She fled from her persecutors to the home of her youth, and, leading her little Rachel by the hand, threw herself into the arms of her kin: they received her with distant kindness, and assured her that she should not want: in this they kept their promise, but it was all they did for Ruth and her daughter; a miserable subsistence was given to them, and that was embittered by distrust, and the knowledge that it was yielded unwillingly.

  Among the villagers, although she was no longer shunned as formerly, her story was not forgotten; if it had been, her terrific beauty, the awful flashing of her eyes, her large black curls hanging like thunderclouds over her stern and stately brow and marble throat, her majestic stature and solemn movements, would have recalled it to their recollections. She was a marked being, and all believed (though each would have pitied her had they not been afraid) that her evil destiny was not to be averted; she looked like one fated to do some wonderful deed. They saw she was not of them, and though they did not directly avoid her, yet they never threw themselves in her way, and thus the hapless Ruth had ample leisure to contemplate and grieve over her fate. One night she sat alone in her wretched hovel, and, with many bitter ruminations, was watching the happy sleep of her child, who slumbered tranquilly on their only bed: midnight had long passed, yet Ruth was not disposed to rest; she trimmed her dull light, and said mentally, ‘Were I not poor, such a temptation might not assail me, riches would procure me deference; but poverty, or the wrongs it brings, may drive me to do this evil; were I above want it would be less likely to be. O my child, for thy sake would I avoid this doom more than mine own, for if it should bring death to me, what will it not hurl on thee?—infamy, agony, scorn.’

  She wept aloud as she spoke, and scarcely seemed to notice the singularity (at that late hour) of someone without, attempting to open the door; she heard, but the circumstance made little impression; she knew that as yet her doom was unfulfilled, and that, therefore, no danger could reach her; she was no coward at any time, but now despair had made her brave; the door opened and a stranger entered, without either alarming or disturbing her, and it was not till he had stood face to face with Ruth, and she discovered his features to be those of Rhys Meredith, that she sprung up from her seat and gazed wildly and earnestly upon him.

  Meredith gave her no time to question; ‘Ruth Tudor,’ said he, ‘behold the cruelest of thy foes comes sueing to thy pity and mercy; I have embittered thy existence, and doomed thee to a terrible lot; what first was dictated by vengeance and malice became truth as I uttered it, for what I spoke I believed. Yet, take comfort, some of my predictions have failed, and why may not this be false? In my own fate I have ever been deceived; perhaps I may be equally so in thine; in the meantime have pity upon him who was thy enemy, but who, when his vengeance was uttered, instantly became thy friend. I was poor, and thy scorn might have robbed me of subsistence in danger, and thy contempt might have given me up. Beggared by many disastrous events, hunted by creditors, I fled from my wife and son because I could no longer bear to contemplate their suffering; I sought fortune always since we parted, and always she eluded my grasp until last night, when she rather tempted than smiled upon me. At an idle
fair I met the steward of this estate drunk and stupid, but loaded with gold; he traveled towards home alone; I could not, did not wrestle with the fiend that possessed me, but hastened to overtake him in his lonely ride.—Start not! No hair of his head was harmed by me; of his gold I robbed him, but not of his life, though, had I been the greater villain, I should now be in less danger, since he saw and marked my person: three hundred pounds is the meed of my daring, and I must keep it now or die. Ruth, thou art too poor and forsaken, but thou art faithful and kind, and wilt not betray me to justice; save me, and I will not enjoy my riches alone; thou knowest all the caves in all the rocks, those hideous hiding-places, where no foot save thine has dared to tread; conceal me in these till the pursuit be past, and I will give thee one half of my wealth, and return with the other to gladden my wife and son.’

  The hand of Ruth was already opened, and in imagination she grasped the wealth he promised; oppression and poverty had somewhat clouded the nobleness, but not the fierceness of her spirit. She saw that riches could save her from wrath, perhaps from blood, and, as the means to escape so mighty an evil, she was not scrupulous respecting a lesser: independently of this, she felt a great interest in the safety of Rhys; her own fate seemed to hang upon his; she hid the ruffian in the caves and supplied him with light and food.

  There was a happiness now in the heart of Ruth—a joy in her thoughts as she sat all day long upon the deserted settle of her wretched fireside, to which they had for many years been strangers. Many times during the past years of her sorrow she had thought of Rhys, and longed to look upon his face and sit beneath his shadow, as one whose presence could preserve her from the evil fate which he himself had predicted. She had long since forgiven him his prophecy; she believed he had spoken truth, and this gave her a wild confidence in his power; a confidence that sometimes thought, ‘if he can foreknow, can he not also avert?’ She said mentally, without any reference to the temporal good he had promised her, ‘I have a treasure in those caves; he is there; he who hath foreseen and may oppose my destiny; he hath shadowed my days with sorrow, and forbidden me, like ordinary beings, to hope: yet he is now in my power; his life is in my hands; he says so, yet I believe him not, for I cannot betray him if I would; were I to lead the officers of justice to the spot where he lies crouching, he would be invisible to their sight or to mine; or I should become speechless ere I should say, “Behold him.” No, he cannot die by me!’