can such things be - ambrose bierce

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Title: Can Such Things Be?

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Release Date: August, 2003 [Etext #4366][Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule][This file was first posted on January 17, 2002]

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CAN SUCH THINGS BE?


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Contents:

The death of Halpin FrayserThe secret of Macarger's GulchOne summer nightThe moonlit roadA diagnosis of deathMoxon's masterA tough tussleOne of twinsThe haunted valleyA jug of sirupStaley Fleming's hallucinationA resumed identityHazen's brigadeA baby trampThe night-doings at "Deadman's"A story that is untrueBeyond the wallA psychological shipwreck

The middle toe of the right footJohn Mortonson's funeralThe realm of the unrealJohn Bartine's watchA story by a physicianThe damned thingHaita the shepherdAn inhabitant of CarcosaThe Stranger

THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER

I

For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereasin general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and issometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the bodyit bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without thespirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering whohave lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no naturalaffection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is knownthat some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil

altogether.--Hali.

One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in aforest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments intothe blackness, said: "Catherine Larue." He said nothing more; noreason was known to him why he should have said so much.

The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but where helives now is uncertain, for he is dead. One who practices sleeping


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in the woods with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the dampearth, and nothing over him but the branches from which the leaveshave fallen and the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hopefor great longevity, and Frayser had already attained the age ofthirty-two. There are persons in this world, millions of persons,and far and away the best persons, who regard that as a very advancedage. They are the children. To those who view the voyage of lifefrom the port of departure the bark that has accomplished anyconsiderable distance appears already in close approach to thefarther shore. However, it is not certain that Halpin Frayser cameto his death by exposure.

He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley, looking fordoves and such small game as was in season. Late in the afternoon ithad come on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and althoughhe had only to go always downhill--everywhere the way to safety whenone is lost--the absence of trails had so impeded him that he wasovertaken by night while still in the forest. Unable in the darknessto penetrate the thickets of manzanita and other undergrowth, utterlybewildered and overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near the rootof a large madrono and fallen into a dreamless sleep. It was hourslater, in the very middle of the night, that one of God's mysteriousmessengers, gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his companionssweeping westward with the dawn line, pronounced the awakening word

in the ear of the sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew notwhy, a name, he knew not whose.

Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a scientist. Thecircumstance that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst ofa forest, he had spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory andhardly had in mind did not arouse an enlightened curiosity toinvestigate the phenomenon. He thought it odd, and with a littleperfunctory shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption thatthe night was chill, he lay down again and went to sleep. But hissleep was no longer dreamless.

He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the

gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, andwhy he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple andnatural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bedsurprises cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon hecame to a parting of the ways; leading from the highway was a roadless traveled, having the appearance, indeed, of having been longabandoned, because, he thought, it led to something evil; yet heturned into it without hesitation, impelled by some imperiousnecessity.

As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was haunted byinvisible existences whom he could not definitely figure to his mind.From among the trees on either side he caught broken and incoherent

whispers in a strange tongue which yet he partly understood. Theyseemed to him fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracyagainst his body and soul.

It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest throughwhich he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point ofdiffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. Ashallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as froma recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped andplunged his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood!


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Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growingrankly by the roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big,broad leaves. Patches of dry dust between the wheelways were pittedand spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks of the treeswere broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew fromtheir foliage.

All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible withthe fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that itwas all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of hisguilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteriesof his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly hesought by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment ofhis sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into hismind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it inconfusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of whathe sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who hasmurdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was thesituation--the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful amenace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent areinvested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in hissight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about cameso audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures soobviously not of earth--that he could endure it no longer, and with a

great effort to break some malign spell that bound his faculties tosilence and inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his lungs!His voice broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliarsounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches ofthe forest, died into silence, and all was as before. But he hadmade a beginning at resistance and was encouraged. He said:

"I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are notmalignant traveling this accursed road. I shall leave them a recordand an appeal. I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that Iendure--I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!"Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent: in his dream.

Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook, one-half ofwhich was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without apencil. He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of bloodand wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched the paper with the point ofhis twig when a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measurelessdistance away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching evernearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of theloon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminatedin an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slowgradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawnover the verge of the world whence it had come. But the man feltthat this was not so--that it was near by and had not moved.

A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body andhis mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses wasaffected; he felt it rather as a consciousness--a mysterious mentalassurance of some overpowering presence--some supernaturalmalevolence different in kind from the invisible existences thatswarmed about him, and superior to them in power. He knew that ithad uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approachinghim; from what direction he did not know--dared not conjecture. Allhis former fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror thatnow held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one thought: to


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complete his written appeal to the benign powers who, traversing thehaunted wood, might some time rescue him if he should be denied theblessing of annihilation. He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twigin his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of asentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell tohis sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out,he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, deadeyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments ofthe grave!

II

In his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his parents in Nashville,Tennessee. The Fraysers were well-to-do, having a good position insuch society as had survived the wreck wrought by civil war. Theirchildren had the social and educational opportunities of their timeand place, and had responded to good associations and instructionwith agreeable manners and cultivated minds. Halpin being theyoungest and not over robust was perhaps a trifle "spoiled." He hadthe double disadvantage of a mother's assiduity and a father'sneglect. Frayser pere was what no Southern man of means is not--apolitician. His country, or rather his section and State, madedemands upon his time and attention so exacting that to those of hisfamily he was compelled to turn an ear partly deafened by the thunder

of the political captains and the shouting, his own included.

Young Halpin was of a dreamy, indolent and rather romantic turn,somewhat more addicted to literature than law, the profession towhich he was bred. Among those of his relations who professed themodern faith of heredity it was well understood that in him thecharacter of the late Myron Bayne, a maternal great-grandfather, hadrevisited the glimpses of the moon--by which orb Bayne had in hislifetime been sufficiently affected to be a poet of no small Colonialdistinction. If not specially observed, it was observable that whilea Frayser who was not the proud possessor of a sumptuous copy of theancestral "poetical works" (printed at the family expense, and longago withdrawn from an inhospitable mar This site is prohibited b

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can such things be - ambrose bierce

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