The Moonlit Road, Part Two

Part Two of our adaptation of one of American's literature's most famous ghost stories - a chilling tale from Ambrose Bierce detailing a murder from three perspectives, including the victim herself.  

Part Two, STATEMENT OF CASPAR GRATTAN

For more strange Southern folktales, including stories not on the podcast, visit https://themoonlitroad.com

Follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/themoonlitroad and X/Twitter https://www.x.com/themoonlitroad

"The Moonlit Road, Part Two" was told by Thomas E. Fuller

Audio Production: Henry Howard

Music: Michael Thomas Roe

The Moonlit Road Podcast is a production of The Moonlit Road, LLC.

 

Episode Transcript

(00:17):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Statement of Caspar Grotten Today I am said
to live.
Tomorrow, here in this room, will lie a
senseless shape of clay that all too long
was I.
If anyone left the cloth in the face
of that unpleasant thing, it will be in

(00:38):
gratification of mere morbid curiosity.
Some doubtless will go further and inquire, who
was he?
In this writing I supply the only answer
I am able to make.
Caspar Grotten.
Of him who shall find this paper, I

(01:00):
must beg a little consideration.
It is not the history of my life.
The knowledge to write that has denied me.
This is only a record of broken and
apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct
and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread,

(01:21):
others remote and strange, having the character of
crimson dreams with inner spaces blank and black,
which fires glowing still and red in a
great desolation.
I know that my life spans only twenty
years.

(01:41):
Yet I am an old man.
One does not remember one's birth, one has
to be told.
But with me it was different.
Life came to me full hand and endowed
me with all my faculties and powers.
Of a previous existence, I know no more

(02:03):
than others, for all have stammering intimations that
may be memories and may be dreams.
I know only that my first consciousness was
of maturity in body and mind, a consciousness
accepted without surprise or conjecture.
I merely found myself walking in a forest,

(02:24):
half clad, foot sore, unutterably weary and hungry.
Seeing a farmhouse, I approached and asked for
food, which was given to me by one
who inquired my name.
I did not know, yet knew that all
had names.

(02:46):
Greatly embarrassed, I retreated, the night coming on,
lay down in the forest and slept.
The next day I entered a large town
which I shall not name, nor shall I
recount further incidents of the life that is
now to end, a life of wandering, always

(03:09):
and everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of
crime in punishment of wrong, and of terror
in punishment of crime.
Let me see if I can reduce it
to narrative.
I seem once to have lived near a

(03:31):
great city, a prosperous planter married to a
woman who I loved and distrusted.
We had, it sometimes seems, one child, a
youth of brilliant parts and promise.
He is at all times a vague figure,
never clearly drawn, frequently altogether out of the

(03:54):
picture.
One luckless evening, it occurred to me to
test my wife's fidelity in a vulgar, commonplace
way, familiar to anyone who has acquaintance with
the literature of fact and fiction.
I went to the city, telling my wife

(04:15):
that I should be absent until the following
afternoon, but I returned before daybreak and went
to the rear of the house, proposing to
enter by a door with which I had
secretly so tampered that it would seem to
lock, yet not actually fasten.
As I approached it, I heard it gently

(04:37):
open and close, and saw a man steal
away into the darkness with murder in my
heart.
I sprung after him, but he had vanished
without even the bad luck of identification.
Sometimes now I cannot even persuade myself it
was a human being.
Crazed with jealousy and rage, blind and bestial

(05:00):
with all the elemental passions of insulted manhood,
I entered the house and sprang up the
stairs to the door of my wife's chamber.
It was closed, but having also tampered with
its lock, I easily entered.
Despite the black darkness stood by the side
of her bed, my groping hands told me

(05:22):
that although it was disarranged, it was unoccupied.
She is below, I thought, and terrified by
my entrance has evaded me in the darkness
of the hall.
With the purpose of seeking her, I turned
to leave the room, but took a wrong
direction.
The right one.
My foot struck her, cowering in a corner

(05:43):
of the room.
Instantly my hands were at her throat, stifling
a shriek.
My knees were upon her struggling body, and
there, in the darkness, without a word of
accusation or reproach, I strangled her until she
died.
There ends the dream.

(06:04):
I have related it in the past tense,
but the present would be the fitter form,
for again and again the somber tragedy re
-enacts itself in my consciousness.
Over and over I lay the plan.
I suffer the confirmation.
I redress the wrong.

(06:24):
Then all is blank, and afterward the rains
beat against the grimy windowpanes, or the snows
fall upon my scant attire.
The wheels rattle in squalid streets, where my
life lies in poverty and mean employment.
If there is ever sunshine, I do not

(06:47):
recall it.
If there are birds, they do not sing.
There is another dream, another vision of the
night.
I stand among the shadows on a moonlit
road.
I am aware of another presence, but whose

(07:08):
I cannot rightly determine.
In the shadow of a great dwelling, I
catch the gleam of white garments.
Then a figure of a woman confronts me
in the road.
My murdered wife!
There is death in the face.
There are marks upon the throat.
The eyes are fixed on mine with infinite
gravity, which is not reproach, nor hate, nor
menace, nor anything less terrible than recognition.

(07:31):
Before this awful apparition, I retreat in terror.
The terror that is upon me is irate.
I can no longer rightly shape the words.
See, they, they.
Now, now I am calm, but truly there

(07:54):
is no more to tell.
The incident ends where it began, in darkness
and in doubt.
Yes, I am again in control of myself,
the captain of my soul.
That is not respite.

(08:14):
It is another stage and phase of expiation.
My penance, constant in degree, is mutable and
kind.
One of its variants is tranquility.
After all, it is only a life sentence.

(08:35):
To hell for life!
That is a foolish penalty.
The culprit chooses the duration of his punishment.
Today, my term expires.
To each and all the peace that was

(08:56):
not mine.