We were both of us horribly frightened after our extraordinary experience, and sat up discussing it all night long, while little Marguerite, all unsuspecting, lay sleeping peacefully upstairs.
The gruesome illusion hung over our spirits for days. Neither one of us dared to leave the other for a moment alone. The shadows were peopled with ghosts, and dark places became hideous with the hidden menace.
I had all the mirrors in the house removed, and when we went out into the streets I hurried my wife past shop windows with averted eyes, afraid to see in some chance looking-glass the spectre that had become the terror of our lives.
I awoke each morning afraid to look into her eyes; I went to sleep beside her with dread in my miserable soul. For always the terror haunted us, that some day I should look into her face and see without the mirror's baleful aid that festering putrefaction of flesh and bone.
XI
We sent Marguerite to a convent near Montreal, so that she, poor child, might be spared the agonies that kept us fearful and eternal company.
Then, at last, the menace that for so many weeks had hung over us took tangible shape.
We had been trying to talk lightly together one evening, trying pitifully to avoid the one subject uppermost in our minds.
I was sitting close to my wife with an arm about her waist. Suddenly I felt her body shiver slightly under my touch.
"What is it?" I asked. "Are you cold?"
The answer came to me in halting, distorted words, as if she were speaking with very great difficulty.
"You'll not escape from me if I have to follow you from the grave!" But the voice that spoke was not the voice of my wife. Labored, painwracked though it was, I could recognize it. It was the voice of my old tutor, James Shirley!
I leaped from my chair, and in the horror that was written in my face my wife needed no mirror to see that at last the dreaded visitation had come and that the fleshly metamorphosis had taken place.
For one agonizing moment I caught the look of pain, of unutterable agony in her eyes, then, with a strangled scream, she fled from me to hide the loathsome body which had taken possession of her from my sight.
I followed wildly to her bedroom, pounding ineffectually upon the door. I could hear her inside, screaming and jabbering meaningless noises. She must have gone completely out of her mind.
Then followed the sound of something falling and the smash of breaking glass. I knew that the lamp had been overturned. A moment later the smell of burning came to me through the door.
My desperate efforts finally succeeded in getting the door open.
I found the room ablaze, the oil from the lamp having spread all over the carpet. The window curtains had caught fire and the place was thick with smoke.
But writhing on the floor, a mass of leaping, venomous flame, my wife Jay, filling the choking air with agonizing shrieks and heart-rending groans.
I seized her with one arm, attempting with the other hand to beat out the flames; but they only leaped about her more triumphantly than before.
By this time the conflagration had spread about us and I was obliged to carry her downstairs and out into the street.
I found shelter for my melancholy burden with some kind neighbors. Meanwhile my home was given over to the flames.
XII
Angela never spoke again. Her charred and mutilated body was buried, but I alone knew what it was which we had put into the grave. For the malignity which had pursued her, finding an easier entry into her passive mind, did not rest with her death. The evil spirit transferred itself to me I
In the phantom-haunted, grisly years that followed, through nights of fiendish mental torture and of bodily agony I learned a terrible intimacy with her ghostly murderer.
What I have found out will be incredible and preposterous to those who know nothing of spirit visitation or possession; to those narrow-minded skeptics who brush aside all evidence of psychic phenomena as the unhinged ravings of the insane.
Scrimgeour, who has known me intimately during the last few months, can vouch, however, for my sanity and my reason.
But I have other evidences to support my statements. I have the testimony of a host of scientific investigators as well as the indisputable experiences of countless men and women who have given years to the study of this extraordinary mystery.
And more than all these, I know! — I know! I, who write these lines, trembling with fear at the fate awaiting me, lurking here in my very room! Waiting patiently, craftiness, cunning incarnate. Sometimes he sits in that far-off corner leering at me, contorting his ghastliness into still more loathsome expressions. There he taunts me, dares me, whispering to me words so lewd, so obscene, so frightful that I wonder the very walls do not tumble about us at their lascivious echoes.
And I know that, soon, soon, he will come nearer, he will dare to come nearer as he dared with my wife's most beautiful body. He will take possession of me as he took possession of her.
Already I have seen his shadow in the glass, and I know that it is the beginning of the end.
James Shirley, who lived a life of crime, of loathsome debauch and lasciviousness upon earth; James Shirley, whose body has long lain putrescent in its convict's grave, will creep at last into my soul, my brain; will take possession of my very body, leaving me only his rotting carcass which lies mouldering in its tomb…
XIII
Here the manuscript ended. The papers dropped from my fingers and fell rustling to the floor.
Between us for several moments there was complete silence. The girl's cheeks were white as marble; her eyes big with terror.
Through the open window the quiet hum of the street traffic reached us, borne on the summer breeze. There the day's occupation spent itself in calm, unhurrying routine…
I could hear a messenger boy whistling merrily…
A young girl laughed.
The clanging of insistent bells mingled with the occasional drone of motor horns. Life, with its unimaginative sameness, was near, was all about us, yet we had no part in it.
Robbed by death of his earth body, James Shirley had killed twice in his feverish yearning to live again. I seemed to feel the presence of his malevolent spirit hovering about us, an eidolon, reaching out lustful, discarnate arms, trying, longing, aching for life.
Marguerite Broome, transcendently beautiful, with all the delicate aroma, the fresh intoxication of flowers about her, sat before me under the shadow of an impending doom. And I, old, withered, ridiculous in my new-found emotions, I who loved her, I who worshipped her, could only stare at her, impotent and pitifully afraid…
The man who would not die
by Harold Ward
I
A woman, young, handsome, richly dressed, lay dead on<the sidewalk. Over her stood a young man, hatless, his hair mussed, his face bruised and bleeding. Around them — the living and the dead — the crowd surged, held back by a little cordon of blue-coated policemen. A police automobile, its gong clanging raucously, dashed up to the curb and a tall, broad-shouldered man in plain clothes leaped out and elbowed his way through the throng of curiosity seekers to the sergeant in charge.
"Great Heavens, Casey!" he exclaimed, as his glance fell upon the face of the woman. "Do you know who she is?"