'Twixt Dog and Wolf (Valancourt Classics) Read online

  When I did at last a sea of blackness seemed to lie all round: the sky itself was reft of light. Yet was this blackness not so black but that it had ruddy gleams. Nor was it steady any more than the bright pile before my face. It, too, seemed to pulse as pulses the smoke of a fire. And the blackest blackness of all was moving towards me.

  Yes, because there were—what? People coming out of the shadow. Yea, indeed, shapes of men moving on to the front to where I stood. A mighty company, and my eyes, better used now to the exchange of light and dark, recognised them: these were men and women whom I had seen somewhere before.

  That old woman with a wisp of grey hair alongside her parchment face, her jaw fallen side-wise in a fashion that had a hint of comedy mingling with its infinite terror. There was the man with blotchy nose, his glassy eyes still looking stupidly at one as though through his cups he had slipped into a sounder sleep; the thin-faced girl: she alone had the true look of despair upon her face; the toothless old man who had just a streak of black blood behind his black lips. I had seen all these before. They were crowding up from the back of the church: from whence?

  From the Morgue. It was there I had seen those who headed the march. First came the newest dead: then followed troops upon troops of earlier victims. I had indeed happened upon the night of the Black Mass. The late-comers made me the sign and I was obliged to enter the church.

  The church was dark. What wailing sound was that as of the wind through the masts and the rotting cordage of innumerable wrecks? Was I indeed within the church or out upon some barren marsh hard by the sea? Was that moaning the voice of the organ only? What demon was it who touched the stops?

  More unearthly still when the organ ceased its prelude and the chant began. All men joined in it, with wide speculativeless eyes and wider jaws, jaws fallen all apart, now to this side, now to that.

  ‘Exurge, Domine,’[9] I heard, ‘Salvum me fac, Satanas.’[10] Though their eyes looked no whither and their mouths could not shut they sang deafeningly loud. And there were such crowds and crowds of them. I thought I had entered only at the very end of the church. Now, there were blue faces and fallen jaws before me, behind, on every side. It was too dark to see how far they extended.

  ‘O, how shall I ever escape,’ I thought, and my tongue clove to my lips; when turning round I saw one dead who was looking at me. He made me the sign to go on and sing with the rest.

  At last the dreadful chant was over. A cowled priest mounted the pulpit stairs. Him I could see plainly while all else was so dim. Perhaps he carried a light. That which he held in his hand—a lantern?—no, now I saw it was an hour-glass, but the sands in it were glowing with heat. How he bent as if he bore some load! The light from the hour-glass flashed upon something over his shoulder, and when he straighted himself in the pulpit I heard a clang as of steel. But still his cowl was down, the red light glowing thereon left only a black hole where his face was. Then at last he threw back his cowl and there was a murmur as if of applause all through the vast church, a sighing murmur and a rattle as of jaws loosely meeting. Nor was I surprised to see at length the face of the preacher—that it was Old Death himself.

  How could either surprise or terror be any greater with me than they were now? How the fellow grinned and nodded over the pulpit-cushion! Yet, had I known what was to follow I could have wished that sermon to go on for ever.

  They had already begun to hand the basket down the church. Yes, in the dimness, as of a man looking out over a moonlit landscape, I could see hands stretched out, the bread distributed, the pain beni.[11] The basket-edge shone white in the dim moonlight. But it is black bread that they have got inside. Truly a black mass. It was coming nearer and nearer, the fatal basket. Ugh! Was it bread at all that it contained? Ah, no; my nose told me what it was.

  ‘And you must eat of it,’ cried at that moment a voice behind me.

  ‘It is flesh of our flesh, flesh of the Morgue; flesh of the girl who has been betrayed to ruin, of the man who has been ground down to drink and death. Of that you too shall be.’

  ‘Christ save us!’

  It broke the spell. I was no longer rooted to the spot. I turned to rush from the church.

  Whereupon a death-like yell rose from all that vast multitude. Hands were held out to stop me. But I saw that the owners of them were sightless.

  Yet the sound of that great cry went on reverberating in my head, and it echoes still.

  X—The Skeletons

  I opine that it was in Surrey, because of the character of the scenery which is indelibly impressed on my memory, as you may suppose when you hear the sequel. An endless road, hard, straight, well-made, stretched between a border of dark fir trees. To what distance on either side the road the fir-wood extended I knew not; for I walked but little. My uncles seldom or never went for walks; and I had no other companions save them and my dog, Plato. The one object which my uncles held up before themselves and me in those earliest days was the getting rid of Time and Space. Geography, therefore, was not a subject to be encouraged; and that is why I do not know to this day what part of England (supposing it to have been England) we lived in. What I remember and shall ever remember is the straight white wood sloping for a long way (an endless way it seemed when I was very young) up hill. When you had reached the top of the slope you gazed over a very considerable country, thickly wooded still chiefly by firs; and a long way off traces of human habitations, brown hamlets and dim-discovered spires. Just at this point, the top of the slope, our long white road was joined by another, which was divided into two branches, thereby enclosing a triangular patch of fir-wood, small, but very thickly planted, so that save on an exceptionally bright day you could scarcely see into the middle of it.

  There was a tragic history connected with this little triangular patch of fir: though that has nothing to do with my history. Years ago two of my uncles, Simon and Caspar, had been walking along by that copse and noticed an evil smell. Their noses led them to penetrate the thicket, and in the very centre they found two bodies, both showing marks of violence, but now evidently dead some days and much decomposed. They were the bodies of two brothers. The dark story connected with their death had never been fully told me. It hinted, as I now understand, at an unholy love between a brother and sister, and the punishment therefor at the hands of the other brother, who, after he had killed the offender, committed suicide. Wherefore the triangular patch of wood was always a haunted spot to me. Even in the brightest sunshine I grew cold as I reached the summit of the long slope, and my appreciation of the wide champaign which lay beyond was always dimmed by the uneasy feeling which made me from time to time glance sideways at the dark thicket. To have advanced farther still and have left that thicket between me and home was beyond my courage in those days. And I must have gone alone; for nowadays none of my uncles ever adventured so far, until——

  My uncles. I called each of them ‘uncle’ alike; though to which I was really related, or whether I were actually related by blood to any, I am in some doubt. Uncle Simon, Uncle Caspar, Uncle Melchior, Uncle Balthasar: thus were they called. Curious names for English old bachelors, which is what I take them to have been. Each lived in his separate cottage, two on one side of the road, two on the other. All the four cottages stood a little back from the road and among the fir trees; but not all at equal distances from it. No one was visible from any of the others. These four cottages were the only dwelling-places with which I had a near acquaintance. I myself belonged to all or none of them; might sleep in any one that I chose, but never in a quite properly constituted bed; on a sofa in the sitting-room in one; in another, on a settee; in a third, in a shakedown in an alcove, just behind the kitchen chimney, while in the kitchen itself the old housekeeper snored. She ‘did for’ all my uncles. They dined by rotation in the four parlours of the four cottages—their only living rooms.

  If my daylight reminiscences
are connected mostly with the long white road and some portions of the fir-wood on either side, my evening visions are of one or another of these four cottage parlours, and of my uncles, after supper had been cleared away, sitting round the square table covered with its checked table-cloth, reading aloud and arguing. One candle for the reader and no more. The candle threw huge shadows of my uncles’ four heads upon the four walls, made deep lines under their eyes, or illuminated the under portions of their faces only, when as rarely they raised their chins to laugh, and threw their foreheads into shade.

  I must have had a wonderful memory, for I carried away whole conversations without comprehending a word of them. ‘Time’ and ‘Space’ figured much in their argumentations, ‘Subjectivity,’ ‘Objectivity,’ ‘Reason,’ and ‘Understanding,’ the ‘Categories.’ Then there was much of ‘Causality’ and the ‘Categorical Imperative,’ along with a many other things, with whose names, reft of all meaning to me, I got familiar enough. At last I began to attach some idea of my own finding to this jargon of names and terms. For instance, as I saw Uncle Caspar—of the grey hair and mild blue eyes—often passing a hand now down one side of his head now down another, I settled it in my own mind that one grey tuft was ‘Time,’ the other ‘Space,’ and that he was smoothing them out of existence in that fashion. As between Reason and Understanding, Caspar and Balthasar were for my imagination on the side of the first, Simon and Melchior—bald-headed Uncle Melchior—the partisans of the second. Simon would represent the ‘Ultimate Truth in Being,’ Melchior the ‘Ultimate Truth in Causation,’ Balthasar the ‘Ultimate Truth in Knowledge,’ or ‘Logic,’ Caspar the ‘Ultimate Truth in Action,’ or ‘Ethic.’ What these phrases meant I know now as well as I did then; that is to say, not at all. But that I use them rightly, in so far as my uncles did so, I have no sort of doubt.

  Then came the change. It followed, I believe, the importation of some fresh books into the colony; or perhaps I only guess this from my later knowledge of things. But I know that quite a new set of words began to pass from mouth to mouth about the square tables and across the checked table-cloths. Now the talk was first of the difference between ‘Vivid and Faint Ideas,’ between ‘Reality’ and ‘Dreams.’ There was much of ‘the continued redistribution of matter and motion.’ Then such words as ‘Nerve Ganglions,’ ‘Protein Substance,’ ‘Protein Threads,’ ‘Granular Protoplasm,’ never heard among us before, began to make their appearance. And from that time ‘Ultimate Truth,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘Understanding,’ and the old set of phrases were heard no more. I was not now told to get rid of notions of Time and Space. But, if I hinted at an intention of going to walk with Plato along the road, my uncles would shake their heads sadly, and intimate that this word ‘intention’ had no ‘correlation in reality,’ and that if a certain molecular change took place in my brain, I should go out; if it did not take place, I should stay at home. They themselves went out less and less, and indeed seemed to exert themselves in every way less and less. In consequence they lost their appetites and grew visibly thinner. But if I said, ‘It is because you never come out of doors,’ they only smiled still more pityingly, and intimated that they were waiting for the ‘molecular changes’ that would send them out of doors without their going through the pretence of intending to go.

  And when they talked it was still of reality that they spoke; and when they were silent—and now they sat silent for long spells—it seemed to be for reality that they were waiting, waiting. They cared less and less about their food; and, what was worse for their nephew, they extended their indifference from themselves to him. So that I often grew faint after my walks. For in spite of their dissent, or of their tacit disapproval, my dog Plato continued to tempt me to come out with him. Wherever we went now, into the wood or along the road, we two went alone. One day, faint from my meagre diet, I fell down in the roadway before I could get home again.

  What happened after that I scarcely know. I have an impression of being taken up by a man whom I instinctively called ‘the Tinker’; but why I gave him that name I cannot tell. All my sensations were so faint that I now realised fully, and for the first time, what my uncles had meant by their ‘vivid’ and ‘faint’ impressions. And from what I had gathered of their talk, I was, I knew, to regard these faint impressions as having no reality, as being no better than a dream. It was, therefore, in a dream that the Tinker (why ‘the Tinker,’ I wonder still) carried me off in his cart bowling along that great white road, that he gave me food, that I slept; that I was conscious of bowling along the white road once more. That the Tinker set me down again and said: ‘Now go and find your uncles,’ and then went on, a black patch he and his cart and the shadow of his cart, growing smaller and smaller as they passed toward the brow of the hill.

  I stood up. It was moonlight. Strange that I had not perceived it before. That, then, was why the Tinker and his cart looked so black upon the road. And, yes! this must be almost the very place I had fallen down upon, and here was Plato come up to lick my hand. And now I had turned into the path which led to Uncle Caspar’s house, and then from Uncle Caspar’s to Uncle Balthasar’s.

  I had passed the first house—for it was empty—and got in sight of the second. As I did this, its door opened, and there came out—four skeletons. But in each skeleton I recognised a something familiar, which made me at once know them for my Uncles Simon, Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar. This one had Caspar’s slight stoop, that had Melchior’s habit of placing his hands upon his hips, and that third still cracked his bony finger-joints as Uncle Simon did. Out they all four came—they did not see me—arm-in-arm, and marched in a long swinging step the score of yards or so which separated the house from the road. And when there, they all, as if in time, struck the bones of their feet against the hard road. ‘Ah, that’s solid, there’s something real in that,’ they said or croaked as the bones rattled. ‘Ganglions, nerve-centres? That, too, was all a set of rubbish, resolving itself, if you went far enough, to motion and heat, and I don’t know what not. But bones. There’s something solid in bones when all’s done. Bones, bones. There’s something solid in bones.’

  It came out in a clattering, gurgling sound, and yet with a sort of tune as if in a chorus, ‘Bones, bones. There’s something solid in bones,’ while their feet struck the ground in time as if they were dancing. And I could not choose but follow them. Thus we all passed on: these four in front and I behind. And still they went on, on, up the long white road, bathed in the moonlight; and still their feet beat a rattling time, and still they clattered and gurgled ‘Bones, bones. There’s something solid in bones’; until we reached the summit of the slope where the cross-road came, and where stood the dark triangular copse, now black as night. Then a sudden fear seized me and loosened the joints of my knees so that I could not go on. But I still watched them as they slowly dipped down over the brow of the hill; and I still heard them rattling and clattering, ‘Bones, bones. There’s something solid in bones.’

  [1]atelier: an atelier is an artist’s workshop or studio.

  [2]tablier: apron.

  [3]façon de parler: manner of speaking.

  [4]espiègle: impish or mischievous.

  [5]Père La Chaise: François de La Chaise (1624-1709), was father confessor to King Louis XIV of France. Named after him, Père Lachaise Cemetery remains the largest in the city of Paris.

  [6]Carlyle: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the Scottish historian and essayist.

  [7]Michelet: Jules Michelet (1798-1874), the French historian.

  [8]Wellingtonia Gigantea: the giant sequoia, or giant redwood.

  [9]Exurge, Domine: Latin: ‘Arise O Lord.’

  [10]Salvum me fac, Satanas: Latin: ‘Save me, Satan.’

  [11]pain beni: consecrated bread.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charles Francis Keary was born
in Stoke-on-Trent, England, in 1848. A man of vast erudition and multifarious interests, Keary wrote and published in many genres and on many topics, including works on Scandinavian mythology, numismatics, religion, history, and philosophy. He also wrote novels, poetry, verse dramas, and a handful of stories and sketches in the realm of weird fiction, which were collected in ’Twixt Dog and Wolf (1901). This book earned praise from critics and leading writers of the time such as John Buchan and Richard Le Gallienne, and Keary’s other works won the admiration of G. K. Chesterton and James Joyce, whose Dubliners is thought to have been influenced by one of Keary’s novels. Keary died of heart failure in 1917.