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The Lady in GrayDuring the whole of my life, the hours from sunset to sunrise, when other people sleep, have been oppressive with fear. Since early childhood, I have been subject to terrifying dreams, from which neither physicians nor psychologists have been able to offer me the slightest relief. Doctors could find no organic derangement save for a few minor troubles such as are common to all men. My life has been singularly free of accidents, shocks, tragedies, and misfortunes. Financial worries have never beset me. I have pursued my career, at which success came steadily. Psychiatrists have devoted months to analyzing me, probing my life, my emotional development, my conscious and subconscious minds, hypnotizing me, making innumerable tests, and searching for secret fears or obsessions that might account for my nightmares, but in vain. Sedatives, opiates, dieting, travel, rest: these have been urged upon me at one time or another, and I have tried them without success. To doctors, I am a healthy man of thirty-four. To psychiatrists, I am a mentally sound, normal, and balanced person whose extraordinary dreams they either discount or discredit. This is no comfort for me. I have come to dread the hours when night approaches. I would gladly expend my fortune if I could be relieved of the visions that possess my nocturnal mind, but the great diagnosticians of America and the foremost psychiatrists of Europe have alike labored in vain. As I sit here now, writing these last words, a calm and a despair burden me, though my head seems clear as seldom before, despite the horror, the loathing, the terror, the revulsion, and the fear that combined in the first, and I believe final, profound shock which annihilated only a few minutes ago, and in full daylight, what hopes I had of fulfilling my life. That dreadful thing is at my elbow while I write; and when I have written, I shall destroy. Let me go back for many years. I have been, I repeat, subject since early childhood to hideous dreams. Disembodied heads that rolled after me; cities of colossal and alien statuary; fire that burned and beasts that leaped; falls downward from titanic precipices; falls skyward up from pits of ancient evil; the old ones, waiting and waiting; flights through eternal blackness from nothing or something I only sensed; the grind of infernal torture machines against my flesh; monsters all of flowers and animals, fish and birds and stones, wood and metal and gas united incredibly; the pale avengers; descent into necrophilic regions; the leering of a bodiless eye in the midst of vast and forlorn plains; a corpse that rose and turned upon me the visage of a friend, with tentacles and ribbons of tattered black flesh writhing outward as though blown by gusts of wind; the little ones who pattered toward me with strange supplications; sunlight upon an oak-covered hill, sunlight whose malignance, nameless color, pulse, and odor instilled in me the unreasoning hate that is allied with madness; orchids lifting blooms like children’s faces, and sipping blood; the dead ones who came, and came again; that awful moment when I drowned, and a fat thing swam out of the sea-depths to nibble; mewing blades of grass which purred avidly as my feet trod upon them; these and countless other such nightmares, inflicted through slumber as far back as I can remember, bred in me a deep and rooted aversion to sleep. Yet sleep I must, like all mortal men. And what shall I say of those darker dreams, those fantasmal processions that did not and do not correspond with any knowledge I possess? What of the city beneath the sea, all of vermilion marble and corroded bronze, in whose queerly curved geometry rest the glowing configurations of things that earth never bore? What of the whisperer in darkness, and the call of Cthulhu? I saw the seven deaths of Commoriom, and the twenty-three sleepers where Hali raises its black spires in Carcosa. Who else has witnessed the dead titans waken, or the color out of space, or the ichor of stone gods? These, these tormented me and wakened me to fever and to sweat in the hours past midnight, and the silence before the gray of dawn. But they were small things, old dreams, compared with those of late. I can not now narrate the events leading up to my acquaintance with Miriam, nor the brief but boundless love that we enjoyed, the eternal marriage we planned, and her tragic death when the airplane in which she was nearing the city from a visit to her parents fell upon the eve of our wedding. Perhaps the shock of that waking nightmare completed the slow devastation to which sleeping nightmares had almost brought my mind. I am not the one to say. Miriam was dead, all her strange beauty, the gray of her eyes, the gray and subdued mood of her personality, the pallor of her cheeks, the haunted and roving spirit prisoned within her, gone. I thought of her as the lady in gray, as she lay in her bier, like a woman from Poe, or an eery creature out of The Turn of the Screw. So lovely, so unreal, so alien, and yet so eerily sweet. Dead, and not for me. Even the day was gray, that wild, autumnal afternoon, and the leaves that the wind blew rustled with a dry, sad sound, until the rain began falling later, and the world turned to a duller gray where the noise of slashing drops rivalled the sodden howl of gusts, and I was alone with my loneliness. In the sanctuary of my chamber that night, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed that Miriam came to me, and took my hand, and led me forth. Now we came to a great and slimy sea, whose frightful color appalled me more than its stench. The blackness of the sea, its viscidity, and the universal atmosphere of decay, made me sick before ever she led me into it, so that the touch of that fluid brought a double horror. Far out in the sea, as I struggled with choking lungs, the lady in gray, who floated luminous above its surface, turned without reason or warning, and guided me back. I could not account, in the morning, for the awful stuff that coated me, or the mephitic smell in my chamber. Only after arduous labors was I able to remove it from my person, and I was compelled to burn every article that the slimy, sticky, nauseating stuff had stained. That night, I dreamed merely of skies of flame, and lands whose sinister red masses of rock soared from sere valleys where nothing lived and no plant flourished toward a cyclopean metropolis suspended in the heavens; and thus, for many nights, my old dreams recurred, until there came a time when I visioned again the lady in gray; and in my sleep, she took me by the hand, and raised me from my bed. We walked across plains of dusty-gray, and she led me to a pillar. Now there dwelt in this pillar a great white worm, yet not a worm; a fat thing, like a slug, all gray, and with the face, if I may call the hideous thing such, of a rational creature; a horned visage whose red, white and gray pulp sickened me; but Miriam commanded, and I obeyed. I strode to the pillar, and lo, it fell apart. Out of those shards rose the loathly worm, and I gathered it in my arms. It curled. Then my lady in gray led me across that tremendous and desolate plain to my chamber, where she left me, committing to my care the dweller of the pillar. Over me she bent, and the gray thing kissed the gray woman with its beaked mouth; and then she leaned above me and caressed my lips, and she drifted upon her way, like a fog, soundless, and without visible steps. I was frightened in the morning when I discovered that huge and horrible slug beside me. As I remember, I leaped from bed and with the tongs from my fireplace I beat and crushed it to a froth. Then I wrapped the pulp in the stained sheets, and burned it in the furnace. Then I bathed. Then I found the gray dust on my shoes, as I was dressing, and fear came to me anew. There is, indeed, in Afterglow Cemetery, where they had buried Miriam, a kind of ashy soil; and though the grass grows green, and tall grow the wild flowers, they have never conquered the soil; so that in spring the gray shows through, and in autumn the dust lies lightly upon dead leaf and dying blade. But I would not go there to find my tracks; for if I found my prints, I would have the horror of somnambulism added to my delirium; and if I did not find my footsteps, I would have a more poignant fear. Where had I been? Whence came the gigantic worm? Thereafter, for many nights, so many nights that the loss of Miriam became a dull ache partly obliterated in time and memory, I dreamed the old dreams, of falling and fleeing and cities beneath the sea; of torture, of unknown beasts, and of unsocketed eyes. Then the lady in gray came again one night in early winter, when I was beginning to forget, as much as I could. That night was yesternight. All the day, the snow had been falling, and the northwest wind, with a prolonged wail, had driven it onward, and whipped it into drifts, while the branches of naked trees ground and soughed mournfully together, so that, as the bleakness of evening drew near, I became a prey to melancholy, and depressed by thoughts of Miriam, who was dead. The frozen scream of the wind shrilled higher, and to that far-away cry I fell asleep. And when I slept, she came to me, to lead me forth. Through the desolate plains she led me, and into the shadows of a forest, whither we penetrated deeper and deeper with the boles of tremendous trees rising ever taller around us; and thus we reached the cavern that she entered; and I followed after, striving to approach her, yet unable to close by one inch the distance between us. Now a strange thing happened, for the cavern swept sharply downward, until it became vertical, plunging toward the bowels of earth; and now a stranger thing happened, for we sank, as though falling gently, and yet we must make an effort, as though we were walking normally, but the horizontal had become the vertical. And slowly I drew closer at last to Miriam, until after age-long falling, we came to rest far, far, incredibly far beneath the surface of earth. And now I found us in the midst of a vault whose ceiling swept onward in arches of ever vaster scope and huger curves, while the walls receded like the naves of a cosmic and buried cathedral; and so I followed her down the aisle of that spacious edifice; and ghostly tapers, rising like giant torches beside our way, cast, in the little damp gusts of wind which fretfully stirred them, grotesque and wavering shadows upon the floor; and the gray robes of Miriam, the gray death-garments, fluttered behind her, streaming almost to my face as the distance between us lessened. Thus we came to the blackwood door, which swung wide and silent upon its great hinges as we approached; and the lady in gray drifted within, and I followed. Now I found myself within a crypt, whose three red tapers, guttering to their end, cast a somber and sinister glow; one at her head, and one at her feet, and one dripping scarlet drops upon her breast. For there lay Miriam, my lady in gray, in repose upon everlasting marble. At her head, a bowl of the slime of the black sea; at her feet, the white worm resurrected; and in her hands, folded across her breast, one the taper, and one a gardenia, whose fragrance, spicy and virginal, overpowered the odor of the chamber of death. Now in my dream, with the queer logic of dreams, I thought this natural and had no fear; so I went to my lady in gray, and lo, at my coming, the bowl spilled over, but I brushed it aside, and the great worm rose, but I trampled it under, while the candles guttered out, and the gardenia glowed weirdly phosphorescent. By that luminescence, faint as it was, I saw that Miriam stirred, and a sigh passed across her, and I lifted her in my arms. Now the gardenia palely lighted my way, and through the rustling darkness I carried her, and the gray of her robes swept downward and around my ankles as I walked; until I came to the gusty corridor, and the tapers that flared, and the stately march of arches in cathedralesque tiers. So, with the curious illogic of dreams, the vertical corridor disappeared, and I walked onward through the vast chamber, until I emerged upon the plain. The gray dust rose, but the gray robes of Miriam fell about me, and the dust passed away. The heavens were empty of stars. In blackness I walked, save for the single flower whose scent sweetened the air, and whose glow lighted a path. Thus I clung to Miriam, and carried my lady in gray to my chamber. Only a little ago, I wakened from my dream. I stared and stared for all eternity, with cycles of oppressive and wildly swirling circles of frozen blackness alternating with red holocausts of flame to shatter the tranquility of my mind, and forever. Not again for me the ways of man, or the mortal habitations of earth, or the transitory and ephemeral uncertainties of life. I have written, and now I shall die, of my own hand, and by my own choice. For, when I wakened, I wakened to see the lady in gray seated beside my bed. In her face were the rotting vestiges of the grave, and her robes hung tattered and moldy; but these three things corrupted me from being: the fresh gardenia in her hands; her finger-nails, long and yellow, as only the finger-nails of those dead and buried six months or more have ever grown; and the dreadful way in which her hands were twirling the flower, while her black, liquescent eyes centered upon me! |
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