12 Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter one of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Recording by Anne Boulet. Creepy Tales by
Edgar Allan Poe. The tell Tale Heart true, nervous, very

(00:27):
very dreadfully nervous. I had been and am. But why
will you say that I am mad? The disease had
sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all
was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things
in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many
things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken and observe,

(00:50):
how healthily, how calmly? I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how the first idea entered
my brain, But once conceived, it haunted me day and night.
Object there was none passion, there was none. I loved
the old man. He had never wronged me, he had
never given me insult for his gold. I had no desire.

(01:15):
I think it was his eye, Yes, it was this.
He had the eye of a vulture, A pale blue
eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me,
my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually
I made up my mind to take the life of
the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

(01:38):
Now this is the point you fancy me mad. Madmen
know nothing, But you should have seen me. You should
have seen how wisely I proceeded, with what caution, with
what foresight, with what dissimulation I went to work. I
was never kinder to the old man than during the
whole week before I killed him. And every night, about

(02:00):
midnight I turned the latch of his door and opened
it oh so gently. And then when I had made
an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a
dark lantern, all closed closed that no light shone out.
And then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would
have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in.

(02:22):
I moved slowly, very very slowly, so that I might
not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an
hour to place my whole head within the opening, so
far that I could see him as he lay upon
his bed. Hah, would a mad man have been so
wise as this? And then when my head was well

(02:43):
in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously, oh so
cautiously cautiously, for the hinges creaked. I undid it just
so much that a single thin ray fell upon the
vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights,
every night, just at midnight. But I found the eye
was always closed, and so it was impossible to.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Do the work.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
For it was not the old man who vexed me,
but his evil eye. And every morning, when the day broke,
I went boldly into the chamber and spoke courageously to him,
calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring
how he has passed the night. So you see, he
would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to

(03:28):
suspect that every night, just at twelve I looked in
upon him while he slept. Upon the eighth night, I
was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A
watch's minute hand moved more quickly than mine did. Never
before that night had I felt the extent of my
own powers, of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my

(03:49):
feelings of triumph to think that their eye was opening
the door little by little, And he had not even
to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly
chuckled at the idea, and perhaps he heard me, for
he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now
you may think that I drew back, but no. His

(04:09):
room was as dark as pitch, with the thick darkness,
for the shutters were close, fastened through fear of robbers,
and so I knew that he could not see the
opening of the door, and I kept pushing on it, steadily, steadily.
I had my head in and was about to open
the lantern when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening,

(04:29):
and the old man sprang up in bed, crying, Who's there.
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour,
I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime
I did not hear him lie down. He was still
sitting up in the bed, listening, just as I have
done night after night, hearkening to the death watches in

(04:50):
the wall. Presently I heard a slight groan, and I
knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was
not a groan of pain or of grief, Oh no,
it was the low, stifled sound that arises from the
bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew
the sound well many a night, just at midnight, when

(05:12):
all the world slept, It has welled up from my
own bosom, deepening with its dreadful echo the terrors that
distracted me. I say, I knew it well. I knew
what the old man felt and pitied him, although I
chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying
awake ever since the first slight noise when he had

(05:33):
turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since
growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless,
but could not. He had been saying to himself, it
is nothing but the wind in the chimney. It is
only a mouse crossing the floor. Or it's merely a
cricket which has made a single chirp. Yes, he had

(05:54):
been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions, but he
had found all in vain.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
In vain because death.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
In approaching him, had stalked with his black shadow before
him and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful
influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel,
although he never saw nor heard, to feel the presence
of my head within the room. When I had waited
a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down,

(06:23):
I resolved to open a little, a very very little
crevice in the lantern. So I opened it. You cannot
imagine how stealthily, stealthily, until at length a single dim ray,
like the thread of the spider, shot from out of
the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye. It was open, wide,

(06:45):
wide open, and I grew furious as I gazed upon it.
I saw it with perfect distinctness, all a dull blue,
with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very
marrow in my bones. But I could see nothing else
of the old man's face or person, for I had
directed the ray, as if by instinct, precisely upon the

(07:06):
damned spot. And have I not told you that what
you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the sense.
Now I say, there came to my ears a low, dull,
quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.
I knew that sound well too. It was the beating
of the old man's heart. It increased my fury as

(07:28):
the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed.
I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I
could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime, the hellish
tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker,
and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror

(07:52):
must have been extreme. It grew louder, I say, louder
every moment. Do you mark me well? I have told
told you that I am nervous. So I am. And now,
at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful
silence of that old house, so strange a noise as
this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet for some minutes

(08:14):
longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew
louder louder. I thought the heart must burst. And now
a new anxiety seized me. The sound would be heard
by a neighbor. The old man's hour had come. With
a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped
into the room. He shrieked once once, only in an instant.

(08:38):
I dragged him to the floor and pulled the heavy
bed over him. I then smiled gaily to find the
deed so far done. But for many minutes the heart
beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not
vex me. It would not be heard through the wall.
At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I

(08:59):
removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone,
stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and
held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He
was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.
If still you think me mad, you will think so
no longer. When I describe the wise precautions I took

(09:21):
for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and
I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all, I
dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head, and the
arms and the legs. And then I took up three
planks from the flooring of the chamber and deposited all
between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly,

(09:42):
so cunningly, that no human eye, not even his, could
have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out,
no stain of any kind, no blood spot. Whatever I
had been too wary for that a tub had caught
all ha. When I had made an end of these labors,
it was four o'clock, still dark as midnight. As the

(10:05):
bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the
street door. I went down to open it with a
light heart, for what had I now to fear? There
entered three men, who introduced themselves with perfect suavity as
officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by
a neighbor during the night, suspicion of foul play had
been aroused, information had been lodged at the police office,

(10:28):
and they the officers, had been deputed to search the premises.
I smiled, for what had I to fear? I bade
the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own
in a dream. The old man I mentioned was absent
in the country. I took my visitors all over the house.
I bade them search, search well. I'd led them at

(10:51):
length to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure undisturbed.
In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chares into
the room and desired them here to rest from their fatigues,
while I myself in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph.
Placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which

(11:12):
reposed the corpse of the victim. The officers were satisfied
my manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease.
They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of
familiar things. But ere long I felt myself getting pale
and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied

(11:32):
a ringing in my ears, But still they sat and
still chatted. The ringing became more distinct. It continued and
became more distinct. I talked more freely to get rid
of the feeling, but it continued and gained definiteness, until
at length I found that the noise was not within
my ears, no doubt. I now grew very pale. But

(11:56):
I talked more fluently and with a heightened voice. Yet
the sound increased, and what could I do? It was
a low, dull, quick sound, much such a sound as
a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath,
and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly,
more vehemently, but the noise steadily increased. I arose and

(12:19):
argued about trifles in a high key and with violent ejesculations.
But the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone?
I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides,
as if excited to fury by the observations of the men.
But the noise steadily increased. Oh God, what could I do?

(12:40):
I foamed, I raved, I swore. I swung the chair
upon which I had been sitting and grated it upon
the boards. But the noise arose over all and continually increased.
It grew louder, louder louder. And yet the men shouted
pleasantly and smiled. Was it possible they heard, not, Almighty God, No, no,

(13:04):
they heard. They suspected, they knew. They were making a
mockery of my horror. This I thought, and this I think.
But anything was better than this agony, Anything was more
tolerable than this derision. I could bear these hypocritical smiles.
No longer I felt that I must scream or die.
And now again hark louder, louder, louder, louder, villains, I shrieked, dissemble,

(13:32):
no more, I admit the deed, tear up the planks.
Here here it is the beating of his hideous heart.
End of the Telltale Heart.

Speaker 3 (13:50):
Chapter two of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Pole. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox coordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Recording by Pamela Krantz. Creepy Tales by

(14:13):
Edgar Allan Poe. The Facts in the Case of m Valdemar.
Of course, I shall not pretend to consider it any
matter for wonder that the extraordinary case of mister Valdemar
has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had
it not, especially under the circumstances through the desire of

(14:36):
all parties concerned to keep the affair from the public,
at least for the present, or until we had farther
opportunities for investigation. Through our endeavors to effect this, a
garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society and
became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations, and very naturally,

(14:57):
of a great deal of disbelief. It is now rendered
necessary that I give the facts, as far as I
comprehend them myself. They are succinctly these. My attention for
the last three years had been repeatedly drawn to the
subject of mesmerism, and about nine months ago it occurred

(15:21):
to me quite suddenly that in the series of experiments
made hitherto there had been a very remarkable and most
unaccountable omission. No person had as yet been mesmerized in
articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first whether in

(15:41):
such condition there existed in the patient any susceptibility to
the magnetic influence. Secondly, whether, if any existed, it was
impaired or increased by the condition. Thirdly, to what extent,
or for how long a period the encroachments of death
might be arrested by the process. There were other points

(16:04):
to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity, the
last and especial from the immensely important character of its consequences.
In looking around me for some subject by whose means
I might test these particulars, I was brought to think
of my friend mister Ernest Valdemar, the well known compiler

(16:27):
of the Bibliotheca Forensica and author, under the nom de
plume of Isachar Marx, of the Polish versions of Vallenstein
and Gargantua. Mister Valdemar, who has resided principally at Harlem,
New York since the year eighteen thirty nine. Is Or
was particularly noticeable for the extreme spareness of his person,

(16:52):
his lower limbs much resembling those of John Randolph, and
also for the whiteness of his whiskers in violent contrast
to the blackness of his hair, the latter, in consequence
being very generally mistaken for a whig. His temperament was
markedly nervous, and rendered him a good subject from Americ experiment.

(17:15):
On two or three occasions I had put him to
sleep with little difficulty, but was disappointed in other results,
which his peculiar constitution had naturally led me to anticipate.
His will was at no period positively or thoroughly under
my control, and in regard to clairvoyance I could accomplish

(17:36):
with him nothing to be relied upon. I always attributed
my failure at these points to the disordered state of
his health. For some months previous to my becoming acquainted
with him, his physicians had declared him in a confirmed thesis.
It was his custom, indeed, to speak calmly of his
approaching dissolution as a matter neither to be avoided nor regretted.

(18:01):
When the ideas to which I have alluded first occurred
to me, it was of course very natural that I
should think of mister Valdemar. I knew the steady philosophy
of the man too well to apprehend any scruples from him,
and he had no relatives in America who would be
likely to interfere. I spoke to him frankly upon the subject,
and to my surprise, his interests seemed vividly excited. I

(18:26):
say to my surprise, for although he had always yielded
his person freely to my experiments, he had never before
given me any tokens of sympathy with what I did.
His disease was of that character which would admit of
exact calculation in respect to the epoch of its termination
and death. And it was finally arranged between us that

(18:47):
he would send for me about twenty four hours before
the period announced by his physicians as that of his decease.
It is now rather more than seven months since I
received from mister Valdemar himself the subjoined note, my dear
p you may as well come now, d and f

(19:07):
are agreed that I cannot hold out beyond tomorrow midnight,
and I think they have hit the time very nearly.
Valdemar I received this note within half an hour after
it was written, and in fifteen minutes more I was
in the dying man's chamber. I had not seen him
for ten days, and was appalled by the fearful alteration

(19:29):
which the brief interval had wrought in him. His face
wore a leaden hue, the eyes were utterly lustreless, and
the emaciation was so extreme that the skin had been
broken through by the cheek bones. His expectoration was excessive,
the pulse was barely perceptible. He retained, nevertheless, in a

(19:50):
very remarkable manner, both his mental power and a certain
degree of physical strength. He spoke with distinctness, took some
pa medicines without aid, and when I entered the room
was occupied in penciling memoranda in a pocket book. He
was propped up in the bed by pillows. Doctors D

(20:11):
and F were in attendance. After pressing Valdemar's hand, I
took these gentlemen aside and obtained from them a minute
account of the patient's condition. The left lung had been
for eighteen months in a semi ashous or cartilaginous state,
and was of course entirely useless for all purposes of vitality.

(20:33):
The right in its upper portion was also partially, if
not thoroughly, ossified, while the lower region was merely a
mass of prurulent tubercles running one into another. Several extensive
perforations existed, and at one point permanent adhesion to the
ribs had taken place. These appearances in the right lobe

(20:55):
were of comparatively recent date. The ossification had proceeded with
very unusual rapidity. No sign of it had discovered a
month before, and the adhesion had only been observed during
the three previous days. Independently of the thesis, the patient
was suspected of aneurism of the aorda, but on this

(21:16):
point the ascous symptoms rendered an exact diagnosis impossible. It
was the opinion of both physicians that mister Valdemar would
die about midnight on the morrow Sunday. It was then
seven o'clock on Saturday evening. On quitting the invalid's bedside
to hold conversation with myself, Doctors D and F had

(21:39):
bidden him a final farewell. It had not been their
intention to return, but at my request they agreed to
look in upon the patient. About ten the next night,
when they had gone, I spoke freely with mister Valdemar
on the subject of his approaching dissolution, as well as,
more particularly of the experiment proposed. He still professed himself

(22:01):
quite willing and even anxious to have it made, and
urged me to commence it at once. A male and
a female nurse were in attendance. But I did not
feel myself altogether at liberty to engage in a task
of this character with no more reliable witnesses than these
people in case of sudden accident might prove. I therefore

(22:23):
postponed operations until about eight the next night, when the
arrival of a medical student with whom I had some acquaintance,
mister Theodore L. L, relieved me from farther embarrassment. It
had been my design originally to wait for the physicians,
but I was induced to proceed, first by the urgent
entreaties of mister Valdemar, and secondly by my conviction that

(22:46):
I had not a moment to lose, as he was
evidently sinking fast. Mister l L was so kind as
to accede to my desire that he would take notes
of all it occurred, and it is from his memory
that what I now have to relate is, for the
most part, either condensed or copied verbatim. It wanted about

(23:09):
five minutes of eight. When taking the patient's hand, I
begged him to state, as distinctly as he could to
mister l L. Whether he, Mister Valdemar, was entirely willing
that I should make the experiment of mesmerizing him in
his then condition. He replied, feebly, yet quite audibly, Yes,

(23:30):
I wish to be. I fear you have mesmerized, adding
immediately afterwards diverd it too long while he spoke. Thus,
I commenced the passes which I had already found most
effectual in subduing him. He was evidently influenced with the

(23:51):
first lateral stroke of my hand across his forehead. But
although I exerted all my powers, no farther perceptible effect
was induced until some minutes after ten o'clock, when doctors
D and F called according to appointment. I explained to
them in a few words what I designed, and as

(24:12):
they opposed no objection, saying that the patient was already
in the death agony. I proceeded without hesitation, exchanging, however,
the lateral passes for downward ones, and directing my gaze
entirely into the right eye of the sufferer. By this
time his pulse was imperceptible, and his breathing was stertorous,

(24:34):
and at intervals of half a minute. This condition was
nearly unaltered for a quarter of an hour. At the
expiration of this period, however, unnatural, although a very deep
sigh escaped the bosom of the dying man, and the
stertorous breathing ceased, that is to say, its stertorousness was
no longer apparent. The intervals were undiminished. The patient's extremities

(24:59):
were of an icy coldness. At five minutes before eleven,
I perceived unequivocal signs of the mesmeric influence. The glassy
roll of the eye was changed for that expression of
uneasy inward examination, which is never seen except in cases
of sleep waking, and which it is quite impossible to mistake.

(25:22):
With a few rapid lateral passes, I made the lids
quiver as in incipient sleep, and with a few more,
I closed them altogether. I was not satisfied, however, with this,
but continued the manipulations vigorously and with the fullest exertion
of the will, until I had completely stiffened the limbs
of the slumberer. After placing them in a seemingly easy position.

(25:45):
The legs were at full length, the arms were nearly so,
and reposed on the bed at a moderate distance from
the loin. The head was very slightly elevated. When I
had accomplished this, it was fully midnight, and I requested
the gentleman present to examine mister Valdemar's condition. After a

(26:05):
few experiments, they admitted him to be an unusually perfect
state of mesmeric trance. The curiosity of both the physicians
was greatly excited. Doctor D resolved at once to remain
with the patient all night, while doctor F took leave
with a promise to return at daybreak. Mister l L
and the nurses remained. We left mister Valdemar entirely undisturbed

(26:30):
until about three o'clock in the morning, when I approached
him and found him in precisely the same condition as one.
Doctor F went away, that is to say, he lay
in the same position. The pulse was imperceptible, the breathing
was gentle, scarcely noticeable unless through the application of a
mirror to the lips. The eyes were closed naturally, and

(26:53):
the limbs were as rigid and as cold as marble. Still,
the general appearance was certainly not that of death. As
I approached mister Valdemar, I made a kind of half
effort to influence his right arm into pursuit of my own,
as I passed the latter gently to and fro above
his person. In such experiments with this patient had never

(27:17):
perfectly succeeded before, and assuredly I had little thought of
succeeding now. But to my astonishment, his arm very readily,
although feebly, followed every direction I assigned it with mine.
I determined to hazard a few words of conversation. Mister Valdemar,
I said, are you asleep? He made no answer, but

(27:40):
I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus
induced to repeat the question again and again. At its
third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very
slight shivering. The eyelids unclosed themselves so far as to
display a white line of the ball. The lips moved sluggishly,

(28:01):
and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued
the words.

Speaker 4 (28:06):
Yes, sleep now, do not wake me, Let me die.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
So I here felt the limbs and found them as
rigid as ever. The right arm, as before, obeyed the
direction of my hand. I questioned the sleep waker again,
do you still feel pain in the breast, mister Valdemar.
The answer now was immediate, but even less audible than before,

(28:37):
No pain, I am dying. I did not think it
advisable to disturb him farther just then, and nothing more
was said or done until the arrival of doctor f
who came a little before sunrise and expressed unbounded astonishment
at finding the patient still alive. After feeling the pulse

(28:59):
and applying a mirror to the lips, he requested me
to speak to the sleep waker again. I did so, saying,
mister Valdemar, do you still sleep? As before? Some minutes
elapsed ere a reply was made, and during the interval
the dying man seemed to be collecting his energies to speak.

(29:20):
At my fourth repetition of the question, he said, very faintly,
almost inaudibly, yes, still sleep dying. It was now the opinion,
or rather the wish, of the physicians, that mister Valdemar
should be suffered to remain undisturbed in his present apparently

(29:42):
tranquil condition until death should supervene, and this, it was
generally agreed, must now take place within a few minutes.
I concluded, however, to speak to him once more, and
merely repeated my previous question. While I spoke ok there
came a marked change over the countenance of the sleep waker.

(30:04):
The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the pupils disappearing upwardly.
The skin generally assumed a cadaverous hue, resembling not so
much parchment as white paper, and the circular, hectic spots
which hitherto had been strongly defined in the center of
each cheek went out at once. I used this expression

(30:28):
because the suddenness of their departure put me in mind
of nothing so much as the extinguishment of a candle
by a puff of the breath. The upper lip, at
the same time writhed itself away from the teeth, which
it had previously covered completely, while the lower jaw fell
with an audible jerk, leaving the mouth widely extended, and

(30:50):
disclosing in full view the swollen and blackened tongue. I
presumed that no member of the party then present had
been unaccustomed to deathbed horrors. But so hideous beyond conception
was the appearance of mister Valdemar at this moment, that
there was a general shrinking back from the region of
the bed. I now feel that I have reached a

(31:14):
point of this narrative at which every reader will be
startled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply
to proceed. There was no longer the faintest sign of
vitality in mister Valdemar, and concluding him to be dead,
we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses,

(31:36):
when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue.
This continued for perhaps a minute. At the expiration of
this period, there issued from the distended and motionless jaws
of voice, such as it would be madness in me
to attempt describing. There are indeed two or three epithets

(31:58):
which might be considered as applicat to it. In part,
I might say, for example, that the sound was harsh
and broken and hollow, But the hideous whole is indescribable
for the simple reason that no similar sounds have ever
jarred upon the ear of humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless,

(32:20):
which I thought then and still think might fairly be
stated as characteristic of the intonation, as well adapted to
convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place,
the voice seemed to reach our ears, at least mine,
from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within

(32:41):
the earth. In the second place, it impressed me I fear, indeed,
that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended as
gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch. I
have spoken both of sound and of voice. I mean
to say that the sound was one of distinct, of

(33:02):
even wonderfully thrillingly distinct syllabification. Mister Valdemar spoke obviously in
reply to the question I had propounded him a few
minutes before. I had asked him it will be remembered
if he still slept. He now said, yes, no, I

(33:24):
have been sleeping. Now how I am dead? No person
present even affected to deny or attempted to repress the
unutterable shuddering horror which these few words thus uttered were

(33:44):
so well calculated to convey. Mister l L. The student swooned.
The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not be
induced to return my own impressions. I would not pretend
to render intelligible to the reader. For nearly an hour
we busied ourselves silently, without the utterance of a word,

(34:06):
in endeavors to revive mister l. L. When he came
to himself, we addressed ourselves again to an investigation of
mister Valdemar's condition. It remained in all respects as I
have last described it, with the exception that the mirror
no longer afforded evidence of respiration. An attempt to draw

(34:27):
blood from the arm failed. I should mention too, that
this limb was no farther subject to my will. I
endeavored in vain to make it follow the direction of
my hand. The only real indication, indeed, of the mesmeric influence,
was now found in the vibratory movement of the tongue.
Whenever I addressed mister Valdemar a question, he seemed to

(34:51):
be making an effort to reply, but had no longer
sufficient volition to queries put to him by any other
person than myself. He seemed utter insensible, Although I endeavored
to place each member of the company in mesmeric rapport
with him. I believe that I have now related all
that is necessary to an understanding of the sleep waker's state.

(35:13):
At this epoch, other nurses were procured, and at ten
o'clock I left the house in company with the two
physicians and mister l l. In the afternoon, we all
called again to see the patient. His condition remained precisely
the same. We had now some discussion as to the

(35:34):
propriety and feasibility of awakening him, but we had little
difficulty in agreeing that no good purpose would be served
by so doing. It was evident that so far death,
or what is usually termed death, had been arrested by
the mesmeric process. It seemed clear to us all that
to awaken mister Valdemar would be merely to insure his instant,

(35:57):
or at least his speedy dissolution. From this period until
the close of last week, an interval of nearly seven months,
we continued to make daily calls at mister Valdemar's house,
accompanied now and then by medical and other friends. All
this time the sleeper Waker remained exactly as I have

(36:18):
last described him. The nurse's attentions were continual. It was
on Friday last that we finally resolved to make the
experiment of awakening, or attempting to awaken him. And it
is the perhaps unfortunate result of this latter experiment which
has given rise to so much discussion in private circles,

(36:40):
to so much of what I cannot help thinking unwarranted
popular feeling. For the purpose of relieving mister Valdemar from
the mesmeric trance, I made use of the customary passes. These,
for a time were unsuccessful. The first indication of revival
was afforded by a partial descent of the iris. It

(37:02):
was observed as especially remarkable that this lowering of the
pupil was accompanied by the profuse outflowing of a yellowish
ichor from beneath the lids of a pungent and highly
offensive odor. It was now suggested that I should attempt
to influence the patient's arm as heretofore. I made the

(37:24):
attempt and failed. Doctor f then intimated a desire to
have me put a question. I did so as follows,
Mister Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your
feelings or wishes? Now there was an instant return of
the hectic circles on the cheeks. The tongue quivered, or
rather rolled violently in the mouth, although the jaws and

(37:46):
lips remained rigid as before. And at length, the same
hideous voice which I have already described broke forth.

Speaker 4 (37:56):
For God's sake, quick quirk, I made you sleep? Or
quick waken me quick, I say to you that I
am dead.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided
what to do. At first, I made an endeavor to
recompose the patient, but failing in this through total abeyance
of the will, I retraced my steps, and as earnestly
struggled to awaken him in this attempt, I soon saw
that I should be successful, or at least I soon

(38:29):
fancied that my success would be complete. And I am
sure that all in the room were prepared to see
the patient awaken. For what really occurred, However, it is
quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared
as I rapidly made, the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of

(38:49):
dead dead, absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from
the lips of the sufferer. His whole frame at once,
within the space of a single minute or even less, shrunk, crumbled,
absolutely rotted away. Beneath my hands, upon the bed before

(39:11):
that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of
loathsome of detestable putridity. End of the facts in the
case of M. Valdemar. Recording by Pamela.

Speaker 5 (39:29):
Krantz, Chapter three of Twelve Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Twelve Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe,

(39:51):
Chapter three, The Black Cat. For the most wild yet
most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I
neither expect nor solicit belief, mad Indeed would I be
to expect it in a case where my very senses
reject their own evidence. Yet, mad Am, I not, and
very surely do I not dream. But tomorrow I die,

(40:13):
and today I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose
is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment,
a series of mere household events and their consequences. These
events have terrified, have tortured, have destroyed me. Yet I
will not attempt to expound them.

Speaker 6 (40:30):
To me.

Speaker 5 (40:31):
They have presented little but horror to many. They will
seem less terrible than baroques. Hereafter, perhaps some intellect may
be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace,
some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable
than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I
detail with awe nothing more than an ordinary succession of

(40:53):
very natural causes and effects. From my infancy, I was
noted for the docility and humanity of my disposes position.
My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to
make me the jest of my companions. I was especially
fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with
a great variety of pets. With these I spent most
of my time, and never was so happy as when

(41:15):
feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with
my growth and in my manhood. I derived from it
one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who
have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog,
I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the
nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There
is something in the unselfish and self sacrificing love of

(41:37):
a brute which goes directly to the heart of him
who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship
and gossamer fidelity of mere man. I married early, and
was able to find in my wife a disposition not
uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets,
she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most

(41:57):
agreeable kind. We had heard scoldfish, a fine dog, rabbits,
a small monkey, and a cat. This latter was a
remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to
an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife,
who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition,
made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion which regarded

(42:21):
all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she
was ever serious upon this point, and I mentioned the
matter at all for no better reason than that it
happens just now to be remembered. Pluto, this was the
cat's name, was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone
fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about
the house. It was even with difficulty that I could

(42:43):
prevent him from following me through the streets. Our friendship
lasted in this manner for several years, during which my
general temperament and character, through the instrumentality of the fiend
in temperance had I blushed to confess, it, experienced a
radical alteration for the worse. I grew day by day
more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others.

(43:05):
I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife
at length. I even offered her personal violence. My pets,
of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition.
I not only neglected but ill used them. For Pluto, however,
I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him,
as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey,

(43:26):
or even the dog, when by accident or through affection.
They came in my way, but my disease grew upon me.
For what disease is like alcohol, and at length even Pluto,
who was now becoming old and consequently somewhat peevish, Even
Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.
One night, returning home, much intoxicated from one of my

(43:47):
haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence.
I seized him, when, in his fright at my violence,
he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth.
The fury of the demon instantly possessed me. I knew
myself no longer. My original soul seemed at once to
take its flight from my body, and a more fiendish
benevolence gin nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I

(44:11):
took from my waistcoat pocket a penknife. Opened it, grasped
the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one
of the eyes from the socket. I blush, I burn,
I shudder while I penned the damnable atrocity. When reason
returned with the morning, when I had slept off the
fumes of the Knight's debauch. I experienced a sentiment half

(44:31):
of horror, half of remorse for the crime of which
I had been guilty, But it was at best a
feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I
again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all
memory of the deed. In the meantime, the cat slowly
recovered the socket of the lost eye, presented, it is true,

(44:53):
a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer
any pain. He went about the house as usual, but
as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach.
I had so much of my old heart left as
to be first grieved by this evident dislike on the
part of the creature which had once so loved me.

(45:13):
But this feeling soon gave place to irritation, and then came,
as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow the spirit
of perverseness. Of this spirit, philosophy takes no account. Yet
I am not more sure that my soul lives than
I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses
of the human heart, one of the indivisible primary faculties

(45:35):
or sentiments which give direction to the character of man
who has not a hundred times found himself committing a
vile or a silly action for no other reason than
because he knows he should not have. We not a
perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best judgment to
violate that which is law, merely because we understand it
to be. Such the spirit of perverseness, I say, came

(45:56):
to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of
the soul to vex itself, to offer violence to its
own nature, to do wrong for the wrong's sake, only
that urged me to continue, and finally to consummate the
injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning
in cool blood, I slipped the noose about its neck
and hung it to the limb of a tree. Hung

(46:18):
it with the tears streaming from my eyes and with
the bitterest remorse at my heart. Hung it because I
knew that it had loved me, and because I felt
it had given me no reason of offense. Hung it
because I knew that in so doing I was committing
a sin, a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my
immortal soul as to place it, if such a thing
were possible, even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy

(46:41):
of the most merciful and most terrible God. On the
night of the day on which this cruel deed was done,
I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire.
The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole
house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife,
a servant, and myself made our escape from the conflagration.
The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up,

(47:05):
and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair. I am above
the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause
and effect between the disaster and the atrocity. But I
am detailing a chain of facts, and wished not to
leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding
the fire, I visited the ruins the walls, with one

(47:25):
exception had fallen in. This exception was found in a
compartment wall not very thick, which stood about the middle
of the house, and against which had rested the head
of my bed. The plastering had here in great measure
resisted the action of the fire. A fact, which I
attributed to its having been recently spread about this wall.
A dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to

(47:47):
be examining a particular portion of it with varying minute
and eager attention. The words strange, singular, and other similar
expressions excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if
graven in boss relief, upon the white surface, the figure
of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an

(48:07):
accuracy truly marvelous. There was a rope about the animal's neck.
When I first beheld this apparition, for I could scarcely
regard it as less. My wonder and my terror were extreme,
But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat
I remembered had been hung in a garden adjacent to
the house. Upon the alarm of fire, This garden had
been immediately filled by the crowd by some one of

(48:30):
whom the animal must have been cut from the tree
and thrown through an open window into my chamber. This
had probably been done with the view of arousing me
from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the
victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly
spread laster, the lime of which, with the flames and
the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture
as I saw it. Although I thus readily accounted to

(48:53):
my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the
startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail
to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months
I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat,
and during this period there came back into my spirit
a half sentiment that seemed but was not remorse. I
went so far as to regret the loss of the animal,

(49:15):
and to look about me among the vile haunts which
I now habitually frequented, or another pet of the same species,
and of somewhat similar appearance with which to supply its place.
One night, as I sat half stupefied in a den
of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to
some black object reposing upon the head of one of
the immense hogsheads of gin or of rum, which constituted

(49:39):
the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking
steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes,
and what now caused me surprise was the fact that
I had not sooner perceived the object. Thereupon I approached
it and touched it with my hand. It was a
black cat, a very large one, fully as large as Pluto,
and closely resembling him an every respect but one. Pluto

(50:02):
had not a white hair upon any portion of his body,
but this cat had a large, although indefinite, splotch of
white covering nearly the whole region of the breast. Upon
my touching him, he immediately arose pur loudly, rubbed against
my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then,
was the very creature of which I was in search.
I at once offered to purchase it from the landlord,

(50:24):
but this person made no claim to it, knew nothing
of it, had never seen it before. I continued my caresses,
and when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced
a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so,
occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it
reached the house, it domesticated itself at once and became
immediately a great favorite with my wife. For my own part,

(50:48):
I soon found a dislike to it. Arising within me.
This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated.
But I know not how or why. It was its
evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees,
these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness
of hatred. I avoided the creature, a certain sense of

(51:10):
shame in the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty,
preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not for
some weeks striker otherwise violently ill use it. But gradually,
very gradually, I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing,
and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from

(51:30):
the breath of a pestilence. What added no doubt to
my hatred of the beast was the discovery, on the
morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it
also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however,
only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have
already said, possessed in a high degree the humanity of feeling,
which had once been my distinguishing trait and the source

(51:53):
of many of my simplest and purest pleasures With my
aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for me myself
seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity
which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend.
Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or
sprang upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses.

(52:16):
If I arose to walk, it would get between my
feet and thus nearly throw me down, or fastening its
long and sharp claws in my dress, clamor in this
manner to my breast. At such times, although I longed
to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld
from doing so, partly by a memory of my former crime.
But chiefly let me confess it at once. I absolute

(52:38):
dread of the beast. This dread was not exactly a
dread of physical evil. And yet I should be at
a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost
ashamed to own. Yes, even in this felon cell, I
am almost ashamed to own that the terror and horror
with which the animal inspired me had been heightened by
one of the merest chimeras. It would be possible to

(53:01):
conceive my wife had called my attention more than once
to the character of the mark of white hair of
which I have spoken, and which constituted the so visible
difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed.
The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had
been originally very indefinite, but by slow degrees degrees nearly imperceptible,

(53:24):
and which for a long time my reason struggled to
reject as fanciful, it had at length assumed a rigorous
distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an
object that I shudder to name, And for this above
all I loathed and dreaded, and would have rid myself
of the monster had I dared. It was now, I say,
the image of a hideous, of a ghastly thing, of

(53:47):
the gallows, oh mournful and terrible engine of horror and
of crime, of agony and of death. And now was
I indeed wretched upon the wretchedness of mere humanity, and
a brute beast whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed, A
brute beast to work out for me for me, a
man fashioned in the image of the High God, so

(54:09):
much of insufferable woe, alas neither by day nor by
night knew I the blessing of rest any more. During
the former, the creature left me no moment alone, and
in the latter I started hourly from dreams of unutterable
fear to find the hot breath of the thing upon
my face, in its vast weight, an incarnate nightmare that

(54:31):
I had no power to shake off, incumbent eternally upon
my heart. Beneath the pressure of torments such as these,
the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil
thoughts became my sole intimates, the darkest and most evil
of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to
hatred of all things and of all mankind, while from

(54:52):
the sudden, frequent and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to
which I now blindly abandoned myself. My uncomplaining wife, Alas,
was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.
One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand into
the cellar of an old building which our poverty had
compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the

(55:14):
steep stairs, and nearly throwing me. Had long exasperated me
to madness, uplifting an axe and forgetting in my wrath
the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand. I
aimed a blow at the animal, which of course would
have proved instantly fatal, had it descended as I wished.
But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife.

(55:35):
Goaded by the interference into a rage more than deem aniacal,
I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the
axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot
without a groan. This hideous murder accomplished. I set myself
forthwith and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing
the body. I knew that I could not remove it
from the house, either by day or by night, without

(55:57):
the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects
entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting
the corpse into minute fragments and destroying them by fire.
At another I resolved to dig a grave for it
in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about
casting it in the will of the yard, about packing
it in a box as if merchandise, with the usual arrangements,

(56:19):
and so getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally,
I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient
than either of these. I determined to wall it up
in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages
are recorded to have walled up their victims for a
purpose such as this. The cellar was well adapted. Its
walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout

(56:40):
with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere
had prevented from hardening. More Over, in one of the
walls was a projection caused by a false chimney or
fireplace that had been filled up and made to resemble
the red of the cellar. I made no doubt that
I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert
the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so

(57:01):
that no eye could detect anything suspicious. And in this
calculation I was not deceived by means of a crowbar.
I easily dislodged the bricks, and having carefully deposited the
body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position,
while with little trouble, I relayed the whole structure as
it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand and hair. With

(57:23):
every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not
be distinguished from the old, and with this I, very
careful went over the new brickwork. When I had finished,
I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did
not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. My
rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care.

(57:43):
I looked around triumphantly and said to myself, here, at least,
then my labor has not been in vain. My next
step was to look for the beast which had been
the cause of so much wretchedness, For I had at
length firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I
been able to meet with it at the moment, there
could be no doubt of its fate. But it appeared

(58:04):
that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence
of my previous anger, and forbore to present itself in
my present mood. It is impossible to describe or to
imagine the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the
absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It
did not make its appearance during the night, and thus
for one night, at least since the introduction into the house,

(58:26):
I soundly and tranquility slept. I slept, even with the
burden of murder upon my soul. The second and the
third day passed, and still my tormentor came not once again.
I breathed as a free man. The monster and terror
had fled the premises, forever I should behold it no more.
My happiness was supreme. The guilt of my dark deed

(58:48):
disturbed me but little. Some few inquiries had been made,
but these had been readily answered. Even a search had
been instituted, but of course nothing was to be discovered.
I looked upon my future felicity as secured. Upon the
fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police
came very unexpectedly into the house and proceeded again to
make rigorous investigation of the premises secure. However, in the

(59:11):
inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever.
The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They
left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the
third or fourth time they descended into the cellar. I
quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as
that of one whose slumbers and innocence. I walked the
cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon

(59:34):
my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police
were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at
my heart was too strong to be restrained. I burned
to say, if but one word by way of triumph,
and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness. Gentlemen,
I said at last, as the party ascended the steps,

(59:55):
I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you
all health and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentleman,
this this is a very well constructed house, and the
rabbit desire to say something easily. I scarcely knew what
I uttered at all. I may say, an excellently well
constructed house. These walls are you going, gentlemen? These walls

(01:00:16):
are solidly put together. And here, through the mere frenzy
of bravado, I rapped heavily with a cane, which I
held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brickwork,
behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs
of the arch fiend. No sooner had the reverberation of

(01:00:37):
my blows sunk into silence than I was answered by
a voice from within the tomb, by a cry, at
first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child,
and then quickly swelling into one long, loud and continuous scream,
utterly anomalous and inhuman, a howl, a wailing shriek, half
of horror and half of triumph, such as might have

(01:00:58):
arisen only out of hell, conjointly with the throats of
the damned in their agony, and of the demons that
exulted the damnation of my own thoughts. At his folly
to speak, swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For
one instant, the party upon the stairs remained motionless through
extremity of terror and of awe. In the next a
dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily.

(01:01:22):
A corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood
erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head,
with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat
the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder,
and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman.
I had walled the monster up within the tomb and

(01:01:45):
of the black Cat.

Speaker 6 (01:01:54):
Section four of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to find out how
you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by

(01:02:15):
Eden Ray Hedrick. Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Section four,
The Fall of the House of Usher Saincoeur Eston luth
suspendu siteaux juan les toouche il resonnais de Berengar. During

(01:02:37):
the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in
the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively
low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on
horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at
length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew
on within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I

(01:03:01):
know not how it was, but with the first glimpse
of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.
I say insufferable, for the feeling was unrelieved by any
of that half pleasurable, because poetic sentiment, with which the
mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the
desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me,

(01:03:25):
upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of
the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye
like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a
few white trunks of decayed trees, with an utter depression
of soul, which I can compare to no earthly sensation
more properly than to the after dream of the reveler.

(01:03:46):
Upon opium, the bitter lapse into every day life, the
hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness,
a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness
of thought, which no goading of them genation could torture
into aught of the sublime. What was it, I paused
to think, What was it that so unnerved me in

(01:04:07):
the contemplation of the house of Usher. It was a
mystery all insoluble. Nor could I grapple with the shadowy
fancies that crowded upon me. As I pondered, I was
forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that, while
beyond doubt there are combinations of very simple natural objects
which have the power of thus effecting us, still the

(01:04:28):
analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our debt.
It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement
of the particulars of the scene, of the details of
the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate,
its capacity for sorrowful impression. And acting upon this idea,
I rained my horse to the precipitous bank of a

(01:04:50):
black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by
the dwelling, and gazed down for with a shudder, even
more thrilling than before, upon the remodeled and inverted image
of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and
the vagant and i like windows. Nevertheless, in this mansion
of gloom, I now proposed to myself a sojourn of

(01:05:10):
some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderic Usher, had been one of
my boon companions in boyhood, but many years had elapsed
since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached
me in a distant part of the country, a letter
from him, which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted
of no other than a personal reply. The uness gave

(01:05:32):
evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness,
of a mental disorder which pressed him, and of an
earnest desire to see me as his best and indeed
his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by
the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady.
It was the manner in which all this, and much

(01:05:52):
more was said. It was the apparent heart that went
with his request, which allowed me no room for hesitation,
and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a
very singular summons. Although as boys we had been even
intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend.
His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however,

(01:06:17):
that his very ancient family had been noted time out
of mind for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself
through long ages in many works of exalted art, and
manifested of late in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity,
as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies,
perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable

(01:06:39):
beauties of musical science. I had learned too, the very
remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time,
honored as it was, had put forth at no period
any enduring branch. In other words, that the entire family
lay in the direct line of descent, and had always
with very trifling and very temporary veryation so lain. It

(01:07:03):
was this deficiency I considered, while running over in thought
the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with
the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon
the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse
of centuries might have exercised upon the other. It was
this deficiency, perhaps of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating

(01:07:23):
transmission from sire to son of the patrimony with the
name which had at length so identified the two as
to merge the original title of the estate in the
quaint and equivocal appellation of the House of Usher, an
appellation which seemed to include in the minds of the
peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

(01:07:45):
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat
childish experiment, that of looking within the tarn, had been
to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no
doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition,
for why should I not so term it, served mainly
to accelerate the increase itself. Such I have long known
is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as

(01:08:08):
a basis. And it might have been for this reason
only that when I again uplifted my eyes to the
house itself from its image in the pool, there grew
on my mind a strange fancy, a fancy so ridiculous, indeed,
that I but mention it to show the vivid force
of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked
upon my imagination as to really believe that about the

(01:08:30):
whole mansion in domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to
themselves in their immediate vinsity, an atmosphere which had no
affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reaped
up from the decayed trees and the gray wall and
the silent tarn, a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish,
faintly discernible, and leaden hued. Shaking off from my spirit

(01:08:53):
what must have been a dream. I scanned more narrowly
the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed
to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of
ages had been great, minute fungi overspread the whole exterior,
hanging in a fine tangled webwork from the eaves. Yet
all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion

(01:09:15):
of the masonry had fallen, when there appeared to be
a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts
and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this
there was much that reminded me of the speciest totality
of old woodwork, which had rotted for long years in
some neglected vault with no disturbance from the breath of
the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however,

(01:09:39):
the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye
of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible
fissure which extending from the roof of the building in front,
made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction
until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to

(01:10:00):
the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and
I entered the gothic archway of the hall. A valet
of stealthy step thence conducted me in silence through many
dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio
of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed.
I know not how to heighten the vague sentiment of

(01:10:22):
which I have already spoken, While the objects around me,
while the carvings of the ceiling, the somber tapestries of
the walls, the ebb and blackness of the floors, and
the phantasmogoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were
but matters to which, or to such as which I
had been accustomed from my infancy. While I hesitated not
to acknowledge how familiar was all this, I still wondered

(01:10:45):
to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images
were stirring up On one of the staircases, I met
the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore
a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He costed
me with trepidation and passed on the valet. Now threw
open a door and ushered me into the presence of

(01:11:06):
his master. The room in which I found myself was
very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow and pointed,
and at so vast a distance from the black oaken
floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams
of in crimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes,
and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around.

(01:11:30):
The eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter
angles of the chamber or the recesses of the vaulted
and fretted ceiling. Dark tapestries hung upon the walls. The
general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and sattered. Many books
and musical instruments they scattered about, but failed to give
any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed

(01:11:51):
an out sphere of sorrow, an air of stern, deep
and irredeemable gloom. Hung over and pervaded all. Upon my entrance,
Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been
lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious
warmth which had much in it. I at first thought
of an overdose of cordiality, of the constrained effort of

(01:12:11):
the annune man of the world. A glance, however, upon
his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down,
and for some moments while he spoke not I gazed
upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe.
Surely man had never before so terribly altered in so
brief a period, As said Roderic Usher, it was with

(01:12:33):
difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity
of the wan being before me with the companion of
my early boyhood. Yet the character of his faith had
been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion, an
eye large, liquid and luminous beyond comparison, lips somewhat thin
and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve, the

(01:12:54):
nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth
of nostril. Unusual and similar formations, a finely molded chin
speaking in its want of prominence, of a want of
moral energy, hair of a more than weblike softness and tenuity.
These features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of
the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to

(01:13:14):
be forgotten. And now, in the mere exaggeration of the
prevailing character of these features and of the expression they
were wont to convey, lay so much of change that
I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor
of the skin, and the now miraculous luster of the
eye above all things startled and even awe in me.
The silken hair, too had been suffered to grow all unheeded,

(01:13:37):
and as in its wild gossamer texture it floated rather
than fell about the face. I could not, even with effort,
connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity
in the manner of my friend, I was at once
struck with an incoherence, an inconsistency, And I soon found
this to arise from a series of feeble and futile

(01:13:58):
struggles to overcome a habit, stual trepidency, an excessive nervous
agitation for something of this nature. I had indeed been
prepared no less by his letter than by reminiscences of
certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar
physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen.
His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision when the

(01:14:21):
animal spirit seemed utterly in abeyance, to that species of
energetic concision, that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow sounding enunciation,
that leaden self balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which
may be observed in the lost drunkard or the irreclaimable
eater of opium. During the periods of his most intense excitement,

(01:14:42):
it was thus that he spoke of the object of
my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and
of the solace he expected me to afford him. He
entered at some length into what he conceived to be
the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a
constitutional and family evil, and one for which he despaired
to find a remedy. A mere nervous affectation, he immediately added,

(01:15:03):
which would undoubtedly soon pass off. He displayed itself in
a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he
detailed them, interested and bewildered me, Although perhaps the terms
and the general manner of their narration had their weight.
He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses.
The more insipid food was alone endurable. He could wear

(01:15:24):
only garments of certain texture. The odors of all flowers
were oppressive. His eyes were tortured by even a faint light.
And there were but peculiar sounds, and these from streamed
instruments that did not inspire him with horror. To an
animalous species of terror, I found him abounded slave. I
shall perish, he said, I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus,

(01:15:49):
thus and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread
the events of the future, not in themselves, but in
their results. I shudder at the thought of any even
the most trivial incident, which may operate upon this intolerable
agitation of soul. I have indeed no abhorrence of danger,
except in its absolute effect of terror. In this unnerved

(01:16:13):
in this pitiable condition, I feared that the period will
sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and
reason altogether. In some struggle with the grim phantasm fear,
I learned moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints,
of another singular feature of his mental condition. He was

(01:16:34):
enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling
which he tenanted, and whence for many years he had
never ventured forth in regard to an influence whose superstitious
force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be
re stated, an influence which some peculiarities in the mere
form and substance of his family mansion had, by dint

(01:16:54):
of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit, an
effect which the physique of the ray walls and words,
and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down,
had at length brought about upon the morale of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the
peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to

(01:17:15):
a more natural and far more palpable origin, to the
severe and long continued illness, indeed, to the evidently approaching
dissolution of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion, for
long years, his last and only relative on earth. Her decease,
he said, with the bitterness which I can never forget,
would leave him him the hopeless and the frail, the

(01:17:36):
last of the ancient race of the Ushers. While he spoke,
the Lady Madeline, for so she was called, passed slowly
through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having
noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment,
not unmingled with dread. And yet I found it impossible
to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor press

(01:18:00):
me as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a
door at length closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively
and eagerly the countenance of the brother, But he had
buried his face in his hands, and I could only
perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread
the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears. The

(01:18:20):
disease of the Lady Madeleine had long baffled the skill
of her physicians. A subtle apathy, a gradual wasting away
of the person, and frequent, although transient, affectations of a
partially cataleptical character were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto, she had
steadily worn up against the pressure of her malady, and
had not taken herself finally to bed. But on the

(01:18:42):
closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house,
she succumbed, as her brother told me at night, with
inexpressible agitation, to the prostrating powers of the destroyer. And
I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her
person would thus probably be the last I should obtain.
That the lady, at least while living, would be seen
by me no more. For several days ensuing, her name

(01:19:06):
was unmentioned either by Usher or myself, And during this
period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the
melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together, or
I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild
improvisations of his speaking guitar, and thus, as a closer
and still closer intimacy emitted me more unreservedly into the

(01:19:27):
recesses of his spirit. The more bitterly did I perceive
the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from
which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth
upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in
one unceasing radiation of gloom. I shall ever bear about
me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus

(01:19:47):
spent alone with the Master of the House of Usher.
Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an
idea of the exact character of the studies or of
the occupations in which he involved me, or led me
the way an excited and highly distempered ideality threw a
sulfurous luster over all. His long improvised dirges will ring

(01:20:08):
for ever in my ears. Among other things, I hold
painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of
the wild air of the last Waltz of von Weber,
from the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded and
which grew touch by touch, and a vagueness at which
I shuddered the more thrillingly because I shuddered, knowing not why.

(01:20:29):
From these paintings, vivid as their images now are before me,
I would in vain endeavor to reduce more than a
small portion which should lie within the compass of merely
written words, by the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of
his designs, he arrested in overaught attention, if ever mortal
painted an idea that mortal was robbery usher for me,

(01:20:50):
at least in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose
out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to
throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe, no
shadow of which felt I ever. Yet, in the contemplation
of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuselli,
one of the phantasmogoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not

(01:21:14):
so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth,
although feebly in words. The small picture presented the interior
of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with
low walls, smooth white, and without interruption or device. Certain
accessory points of the design served well to convey the

(01:21:35):
idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below
the surface of the Earth. No outlet was observed in
any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or
other artificial source of light was discernible. Yet a flood
of intense rays rolled throughout and bathed the whole in
a ghastly and inappropriate splendor. I have just spoken of
that morbid condition of the auditory nerve, which rendered all

(01:21:58):
music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain
effects of stringed instruments. It was perhaps the narrow limits
to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar which
gave birth in great measure to the fantastic character of
his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could
not be so accounted, for they must have been and

(01:22:19):
were in the notes as well as in the words
of his wild fantasies, for he not unfrequently accompanied himself
with rhymed verbal improvisations, the result of that intense mental
collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded, as
observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement.
The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered.

(01:22:43):
I was perhaps the more forcibly impressed with it as
he gave it, because in the under or misty current
of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for
the first time, a full consciousness on the very part
of usher of the tottering of his lofty reason upon
her throne. The verses which were entitled the Haunted Palace

(01:23:04):
ran very nearly, if not accurately. Thus one in the
greenest of our valleys by good angels tenanted, once a
fair and stealthy palace, radiant palace reared its head in
the monarch's thoughts dominion it stood there never seraphs spread
opinion over fabric half so fair, two banners, yellow, glorious,

(01:23:28):
golden on its roof did float and flow. This all
this was in the olden time, long ago. And every
gentle air that dallied in that sweet day along the ramparts,
plumed and pallid, a wing and odor went away. Three
wanderers in that happy valley, through two luminous windows, saw

(01:23:50):
spirits moving musically to elutes, well tuned law round about
a throne, where sitting or firey gene in state his glory,
well befitting the ruler of the realm was seen. Four
and all with pearl and ruby glowing was the fair
palace door, through which came flowing, flowing, flowing, and sparkling evermore,

(01:24:12):
a troop of echoes, whose sweet duty was but to
sing in voices of surpassing beauty, the wit and wisdom
of their king. Five, But evil things in robes of
sorrow assailed the monarch's high estate. Ah Let us morn,
for never morrow shall dawn upon him, desolate and round

(01:24:33):
about his home. The glory that blushed and bloomed is
but a dim remembered story of the old time entuned six.
And travelers now within that valley, through the red liten
windows see vast forms that move fantastically to a discordant melody,
While like a rapid, ghastly river through the pale door,

(01:24:55):
a hideous throng rush out forever and laugh, but smile
no more. I well remember that suggestions arising from this
ballad led us into a train of thought, wherein there
became manifest an opinion of ushers, which I mention not
so much on account of its novelty, for other men
have thought thus, as on account of the pertinacity with

(01:25:16):
which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form
was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But
in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more
daring character and trespassed under certain conditions upon the kingdom
of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent
or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however,

(01:25:40):
was connected, as I have previously hinted, with the gray
stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of
the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the
method of collocation of these stones and the order of
their arrangement, as well as in that of the many
fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which
stood around. Above all in a long and disturbed endurance

(01:26:02):
of this arrangement, and named its duplication in the still
waters of the Tarn, its evidence, the evidence of the
sentience was to be seen, he said. And here I started,
as he spoke, in the gradual yet certain condensation of
an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls.
The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet

(01:26:24):
importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had molded the
destinies of his family, and which made him what I
saw him now, what he was. Such opinions need no comment,
and I will make none. Our books, the books which
for years had formed no small portion of the mental

(01:26:44):
existence of the invalid were, as might be supposed, in
strict keeping with this character of phantasm, we poured together
over such works as the Verveis e Chatrius of Dreseilles,
the Bellefegor of Machiavelli, The Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg,
the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Clem by Holberg, the Chiromancy

(01:27:07):
of Robert Flood, of Jon and Dagenet and of De
la Chambre, The Journey into the Blue Distance Tieck, and
the City of the Sun by Campanella. One favorite volume
was a small octavio edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium by
the Dominican Heinrich de Gueron, and there were passages in

(01:27:30):
Pomponius Mela about the old African satyrs and Oegapans, over
which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however,
was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and
curious book in Quarto Gothic, the manual of a forgotten Church,
the Vigilats Mortuorum Secundum quorum Ecclesias. Magantene I could not

(01:27:57):
help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and
of its probable influence on the hypochondriac. When one evening,
having informed me abruptly that the Lady Madeleine was no more,
he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a
fortnight previously to its final interment in one of the
numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The

(01:28:18):
worldly reason, however, assigned to this singular proceeding, was one
which I did not feel of liberty to dispute. The
brother had been led to his resolution, so he told
me my consideration of the unusual character of marmalady of
the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the
part of her medical men, and of the remote and

(01:28:39):
exposed situation of the burial ground of the family, I
will not deny that when I called to mind the
sinister countenance of the person whom I had met upon
the staircase on the day of my arrival at the house,
I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as
at best but a harmless and by no means an
unnatural precaution. At the request of Usher, I personally aided

(01:29:02):
him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body
having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest.
The vault in which we placed it, and which had
been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in
its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation, was small, damp,
and entirely without means of admission for light. Lying at

(01:29:26):
great depth immediately beneath that portion of the building in
which was my own sleeping apartment, it had been used,
apparently in remote feudal times for the worst purposes of
a don John keep, and in later days as a
place of deposit for powder or some other highly combustible substance.
As a portion of its floor and the whole interior

(01:29:47):
of a long archway through which we reached it were
carefully sheathed with copper. The door of massive iron had
been also similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually
sharp grating sound as it moved upon its hinges. Having
deposited our mournful burden upon trestles within this region of horror,

(01:30:09):
we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin,
and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking
similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention,
and usher divining perhaps my thoughts, murmured out some few words,
from which I learned that the deceased and himself had
been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature

(01:30:32):
had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not
long upon the dead, for we could not regard her unawed.
The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the
maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies
of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint
blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously

(01:30:54):
lingering smile upon the lip, which is so terrible in death.
We were placed and screwed down the lid, and having
secured the door of iron, made our way with toil
into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion
of the house. And now some days of bitter grief
having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of

(01:31:16):
the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had
vanished his ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed
from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal and objectless step.
The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a
more ghastly hue, but the luminousness in his eye had

(01:31:37):
utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone
was heard no more in a tremulous quaver, as if
of extreme terror. Habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed,
when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with
some oppressive secret who divulged which he struggled for the

(01:31:58):
necessary courage. At times again, I was obliged to resolve
all into the mere, inexplicable vaggaries of madness. For I
beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an
attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some
imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified,

(01:32:19):
that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by
slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own
fantastic yet impressive superstitions. It was especially upon retiring to
bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth
day after the placing of Lady Madeleine within the Donjon,

(01:32:40):
that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep
came not near my couch. While the hours waned and
waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which
had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much,
if not all, of what I felt, was due to
the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room,

(01:33:00):
of the dark walls and tattered tapestries, which tortured into
motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully
to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about
the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless.
An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame, and at length
there sat upon my very heart and incumpass of utterly

(01:33:23):
causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle,
I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within
the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened. I know not why,
except that an instinctive spirit prompted me to certain low
and indefinite sounds which came through the pauses of the
storm at long intervals, I knew not whence, overpowered by

(01:33:48):
an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw
on my clothes with haste, for I felt that I
should sleep no more during the night, and endeavored to
arouse myself from the pity condition into which I had fallen.
By pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment. I
had taken but a few turns in this manner when

(01:34:09):
a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention,
I presently recognized it as that of Usher in an
instant afterward, he rapped with a gentle touch at my door,
and entered bearing a lamp. His countenance was as usual
cadaverously wan, but moreover, there was a species of mad

(01:34:29):
hilarity in his eyes, and evidently restrained hysteria in his
whole demeanor. There appalled me, but anything was preferable to
the solitude which I had so long endured, and I
even welcomed his presence as a relief. And have you
not seen it? He said abruptly, after having stared about
him for some moments in silence. Have you not then

(01:34:50):
seen it? But stay you shall? Thus speaking, and having
carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the
casements and threw it freely open to the storm. The
impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from
our feet. It was indeed a tempestuous, yet sternly beautiful night,

(01:35:10):
and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty.
A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vinsity,
for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction
of the wind. And the exceeding density of the clouds,
which hung so low as to press upon the turrets
of the house, did not prevent our perceiving the lifelike
velocity with which they flew, careering from all points against

(01:35:32):
each other, without passing away into the distance. I say
that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this.
Yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars,
nor was there any flashing force of the lightning. But
under the surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor,
as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were

(01:35:54):
glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and
distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.
You must not, you shall not behold this, said I,
shudderingly to Usher, as I led him with a gentle
violence from the window to a seat. These appearances which

(01:36:14):
bewilder you are merely electrical phenomena, not uncommon. Or it
may be that they have their ghastly origin in the
rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement.
The air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here
is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and
you shall listen, and so we will pass away this
terrible night together. The antique volume which I had taken

(01:36:37):
up was The Mad Tryst of Sir Launcelot Cannon. But
I had called it a favorite of ushers more in
sad jest than in earnest, for in truth there was
little in its uncouth and unimaginative perlexity which could have
had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend.
It was, however, the only book immediately at hand, and

(01:36:58):
I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now
agitated the hypochondriac might find relief, For the history of
mental disorder is full of similar anomalies. Even in the
extremeness of the folly which I should read, could I
have judged indeed, by the wild, overstrained air of vivacity
with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened to the words

(01:37:20):
of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon
the success of my design. I had arrived at that
well known portion of the story when Ethelred, the hero
of the Tryst, having sought in vain for peaceable admission
into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good
an entrance by force. Here it will be remembered the

(01:37:41):
words of the narrative run thus, and Ethelred, who was
by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now
mighty withal on account of the powerfulness of the wine
which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley
with the hermit, who in sooth was of an obstinate
and maliceful turn. But feeling the rain upon his shoulders,

(01:38:02):
and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright,
and with blows made quickly room in the plankings of
the door for his gauntleted hand, and now pulling their
wits sturdily, he so cracked and ripped and tore all
asunder that the noise of the dry and hollow sounding
wood alarmed and reverberated throughout the forest. At the termination

(01:38:24):
of this sentence, I started, and for a moment paused,
for it appeared to me, although I at once concluded
that my excited fancy had deceived me, it appeared to
me that from some very remote portion of the mansion
there came, indistinctly to my ears, what might have been,
in its exact similarity of character, the echo, but a

(01:38:44):
stifled and dull one, certainly of the very cracking and
ripping sound which Sir Launcelot so particularly described. It was,
beyond doubt the mere coincidence alone which had arrested my attention,
For amid the rattling of the sashes of the casement
and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm,
the sound in itself had nothing surely which should have

(01:39:07):
interested or disturbed me. I continued the story. But the
good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore,
enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit,
But instead thereof a dragon, of a scaly and prodigious demeanor,
and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before
a palace of gold with a floor of silver, and

(01:39:29):
upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass,
with this legend in written, who entereth herein a conqueror
hath been who slayeth the dragon the shield he shall win.
And Ethelred uplifted his mace and struck upon the hedge
of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up
his pesty breath with a shriek so horrid and harsh,

(01:39:50):
and withal so piercing that Ethelred had fain to close
his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it,
the like whereof was never heard before. Here Again, I
paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement,
for there could be no doubt whatever that in this
instance I did actually hear, although from what direction it

(01:40:10):
proceeded I found it impossible to say. A low and
apparently distant but harsh, protracted, and a most unusual screaming
or grating sound, the exact counterpart of what my fancy
had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as
described by the romancer. Oppressed as I certainly was upon
the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence by

(01:40:34):
a thousand conflicting sensations in which wonder and extreme terror
were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to
avoid exciting by any observation the sensitive nervousness of my companion.
I was by no means certain that he had noticed
the sounds in question, although assuredly a strange alteration had,

(01:40:54):
during the last few minutes taken place in his demeanor.
From a position from my own, he had gradually brought
round his chair so as to sit with his face
to the door of the chamber, and thus I could
but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his
lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly, his head
had dropped upon his breast. Yet I knew that he

(01:41:16):
was not asleep from the wide and rigid opening of
the eye, as I caught a glance of it in profile.
The motion of his body, too was at variance with
this idea, for he rocked from side to side, so
gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice
of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot,

(01:41:36):
which thus proceeded. And now the champion, having escaped from
the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the
brazen shield and of the breaking up of the enchantment
which was upon it, removed the carcase from out of
the way before him, and approached devalorously over the silver
pavement of the castle, to where the shield was hung
upon the wall, which in sous tarried not for his

(01:41:59):
full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the
silver floor with a mighty, great and terrible ringing sound.
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips than as
if a shield of brass had, Indeed, at that moment
fallen heavily upon a floor of silver, I became aware
of a distinct hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation.

(01:42:23):
Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet, but the measure
rocking movement of usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the
chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly
before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a
stony rigidity. But as I placed my hand upon his shoulder,
there came a strong shudder over his whole person. A

(01:42:43):
sickly smile quivered about his lips, and I saw that
he spoke in a low, hurried and gibbering murmur, as
if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I
at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

Speaker 5 (01:42:59):
Not hear it?

Speaker 6 (01:43:00):
Yes, I hear it, and have heard it long, long, long,
many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard it?
Yet I dared not. Oh, pity me, miserable wretch that
I am. I dared not. I dared not speak. We
have put her living in the tomb, said I not
that my senses were acute. I now tell you that

(01:43:21):
I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin.
I heard them many many days ago. Yet I dared not.
I dared not speak. And now to night hathred ha ha,
the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death cry
of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield. Say rather,
the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the
iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the

(01:43:43):
coppered archway of the vault. Oh, whither shall I fly?
Will she not be here? Anon? Is she not hurrying
to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard
a footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that
heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman? Here he
sprang furious to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables,
as if in the effort he were giving up his soul.

Speaker 7 (01:44:05):
Madman, I tell you that she now stands without the door,
as if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there
had been found the potency of a spell.

Speaker 6 (01:44:15):
The huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw
slowly back upon the instant their ponderous and ebony jaw.
It was the work of the rushing gust. But then
without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded
figure of the lady madline of usher. There was blood

(01:44:36):
upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter
struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a
moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon
the threshold. Then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily
inward upon the person of her brother, and in her
violent and now final death, agonies bore him to the floor,

(01:44:57):
a corpse and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber and from that mansion. I fled aghast.
The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as
I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot
along the path a wild light, and I turned to
see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued For

(01:45:19):
the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me.
The radiance was that of the full setting in blood
red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely
discernible fissure of which I have spoken as extending from
the roof of the building in its exact direction to
the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened, there

(01:45:39):
came a fierce breath of the whirlwind. The entire orb
of the satellite burst once upon my sight. My brain
reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder. There
was a long tumultus shouting, sound like the voice of
a thousand waters, and the deep and dank tarred at
my feet, closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of
the House of Usher. End of the Fall of the

(01:46:04):
House of.

Speaker 8 (01:46:04):
Usher, Chapter five of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please

(01:46:28):
visit LibriVox dot org. Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe.
The Mask of the Red Death. The Red Death had
long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so
fatal or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its zeal,

(01:46:49):
the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp
pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the
pores with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body, and
especially upon the face of the victim were the pest
ban which shut him out from the aid and from

(01:47:09):
the sympathy of his fellow men. And the whole seizure,
progress and termination of the disease worthy incidents of half
an hour. But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless
and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned
to his presence a thousand hail and light hearted friends

(01:47:32):
from among the knights and dames of his court, and
with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of
his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure,
the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste.
A strong and lofty wall girdled it.

Speaker 3 (01:47:52):
In.

Speaker 8 (01:47:52):
This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered,
brought furnaces and massy hammers, and welded the bolts. They
resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to
the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within.
The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions, the courtiers

(01:48:16):
might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take
care of itself. In the meantime. It was folly to
grieve or to think the prince had provided all the
appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatory there
were ballet dancers, there were musicians, There was beauty, there

(01:48:39):
was wine. All these and security were within. Without was
the red death. It was toward the close of the
fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the
pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained

(01:49:00):
his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most
unusual magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene that masquerade. But
first let me tell you of the rooms in which
it was held. There was seven an imperial suite. In
many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista,

(01:49:22):
while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls
on either hand, so that the view of the whole
extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different,
as might have been expected from the Duke's love of
the bazaar. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the
vision embraced but little more than one at a time.

(01:49:45):
There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards,
and did each turn a novel effect to the right
and left. In the middle of each wall, a tall
and narrow gothic window looked out upon a cli closed
corridor which pursued the windings of the sweet These windows
were of stained glass, whose color varied in accordance with

(01:50:09):
the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into
which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung,
for example, in blue, and vividly blue were its windows.
The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries,
and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout,

(01:50:31):
and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and
lighted with orange, the fifth with white, the sixth with violet.
The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries
that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls,
falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same

(01:50:52):
material and hue. But in this chamber only the color
of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The
panes here were scarlet, a deep blood color. Now in
no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp
or candelabrum. Amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay

(01:51:14):
scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There
was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or
candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors
that followed the suite there stood opposite to each window
a heavy tripod bearing a brazure of fire that projected

(01:51:36):
its rays through the tinted glass, and so glaringly illumined
the room, and thus were produced a multitude of gaudy
and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber,
the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark
hangings through the blood tinted panes was ghastly in the extreme,

(01:51:59):
and produced so wild to look upon the countenances of
those who entered, that there were few of the company
bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.
It was in this apartment also that there stood against
the western wall a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum
swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang,

(01:52:23):
And when the minute hand made the circuit of the
face and the hour was to be stricken, there came
from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which
was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but
of so peculiar a note and emphasis, that at each

(01:52:43):
lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were
constrained to pause momentarily in their performance to hearken to
the sound. And thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions,
and there was a brief des concert of the whole
gay company. And while the chimes of the clock yet rang,

(01:53:06):
it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the
more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows,
as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the
echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded
the assembly. The musicians looked at each other and smiled,

(01:53:27):
as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made
whispering vows each to the other that the next chiming
of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion.
And then after the lapse of sixty minutes, which embraced
three thousand and six hundred seconds of the time that flies,

(01:53:47):
there came yet another chiming of the clock. And then
were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.
But in spite of these things, it was a gay
and magnificent revel The tastes of the Duke were peculiar.
He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He

(01:54:09):
disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold
and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric luster. There
are some who would have thought him mad. His followers
felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear,
and see and touch him to be sure that he
was not. He had directed in great part the movable

(01:54:33):
embellishments of the Seven Chambers upon occasion of this great fate,
and it was his own guiding taste which had given
character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There
were much glare and glitter, and piquancy and phanfasm, much

(01:54:53):
of what has been seen in her Nanni. There were
Arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and ointments. There were delirious fancies,
such as the Madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful,
much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of
the terrible, and not a little of that which might

(01:55:14):
have excited disgust to and fro In the Seven Chambers,
they are stalked. In fact, a multitude of dreams, and
these the dreams writhed in and about, taking hue from
the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra
to seem as the echo of their steps. And anon

(01:55:37):
there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall
of the velvet. And then for a moment all is still,
and all is silent save the voice of the clock.
The dreams are stiff, frozen as they stand, but the
echoes of the chime die away they have endured. But

(01:55:58):
an instant and light, half subdued laughter floats after them
as they depart. And now again the music swells, and
the dreams live and writhe to and fro more merrily
than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through
which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber,

(01:56:21):
which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now
none of the maskers who venture, for the night is
waning away, and there flows a ruddier light through the
blood colored panes, and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls,
And to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet,

(01:56:42):
there comes from the near clock of Ebony, a muffled
peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears
who indulge in the more remote gayeties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them
beat feverishly the heart of life, and the revel went

(01:57:04):
whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of
midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as
I have told, and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted,
and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before.
But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by

(01:57:25):
the bell of the clock. And thus it happened, perhaps
that more of thought crept, with more of time, into
the meditations of the thoughtful among those who reveled. And
thus too it happened, perhaps that before the last echoes
of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there

(01:57:47):
were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure
to become aware of the presence of a masked figure
which had arrested the attention of no single individual before.
And the rumor of this new presence, having spread itself
whisperingly around there, arose at length from the whole company

(01:58:08):
a buzz or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise, then
finally of terror, of horror, and of disgust. In an
assembly of phanfasms such as I have painted, it may
well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited

(01:58:32):
such sensation. In truth, the masquerade license of the night
was nearly unlimited, but the figure in question had out
heroded herod, and had gone beyond the bounds of even
the Prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts
of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.

(01:58:56):
Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death
are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest
can be made. The whole company indeed seemed now deeply
to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger,
neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt,

(01:59:18):
and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of
the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made
so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse
that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting
the cheat.

Speaker 9 (01:59:35):
And yet all.

Speaker 8 (01:59:36):
This might have been endured if not approved by the
mad revelers around. But the mummer had gone so far
as to assume the type of the red death. His
vesture was dabbled in blood, and his broad brow, with
all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the

(01:59:58):
scarlet horror. When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon
this spectral image, with which a slow and solemn movement,
as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to
and fro among the waltzers, he was seen to be convulsed,
in the first moment with a strong shudder, either of

(02:00:19):
terror or distaste. But in the next his brow reddened
with rage. Who dares, he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers
who stood near him, who dares insult us with this
blasphemous mockery, Seize him and unmask him, that we may
know whom we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements.

(02:00:44):
It was in the Eastern or blue chamber, in which
stood the Prince Prospero. As he uttered these words, they
rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly. For the
Prince was a bold and robust man, and the music
had become hushed at the waving of his hand. It
was in the Blue room where stood the Prince, with

(02:01:07):
a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first,
as he spoke, there was a slight, rushing movement of
this group in the direction of the intruder, who at
the moment was also near at hand, and now, with
deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker.
But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad

(02:01:30):
assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there
were found none who put forth hand to seize him,
so that unimpeded he passed with any yard of the
Prince's person, And while the vast assembly, as if with
one impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms to

(02:01:50):
the walls. He made his way uninterruptedly, but with the
same solemn and measured step which had disguised him, from
the first through the blue chamber to the purple, through
the purple to the green, through the green to the orange,
through this again to the white, and even thence to

(02:02:11):
the violet ere a decided movement had been made to
arrest him. It was then however, that the Prince Prospero,
maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice,
rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him
on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all.

(02:02:33):
He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached in
rapid impetuosity to within three or four feet of the
retreating figure. When the latter, having attained the extremity of
the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There
was a sharp cry, and the dagger dropped, gleaming upon

(02:02:57):
the sable carpet, upon which instantly afterwards fell prostrate in death.
The Prince Prospero, then, summoning the wild courage of despair,
a throng of the revelers at once threw themselves into
the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure

(02:03:18):
stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock,
gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave seerments and
corpselike mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness
untenanted by any tangible form, and now was acknowledged the

(02:03:40):
presence of the Red Death. He had come like a
thief in the night, and one by one dropped the
revelers in the blood bedewed halls of their revel and
died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And
the life of the ebony clock went out. With that,
the last of the gay and the flames of the

(02:04:03):
tripods expired, and darkness and decay, and the Red Death
held illimitable dominion over all. End of the Mask of
the Red Death. Recording by Ronda Fetterman.

Speaker 10 (02:04:24):
Chapter six of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Recording by Elisabeth Klett. Creepy Tales by

(02:04:46):
Edgar Allan Poe. The Cask of a Montiado the thousand
injuries of Fortunatto I had borne as best I could,
But when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You,
who so well know the nature of my soul, will
not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat

(02:05:08):
at length I would be revenged This was a point
definitively settled, but the very definitiveness with which it was
resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish,
but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution
overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger

(02:05:31):
fails to make himself felt as such to him who
has done the wrong. It must be understood that neither
by word nor deed had I given Fortinato cause to
doubt my good will. I continued, as was my wont
to smile in his face, and he did not perceive
that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.

(02:05:53):
He had a weak point, this Fortinatto. Although in other
regards he was a man to be respected and even feared,
he prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians
have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part, their
enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity to

(02:06:14):
practice imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires in painting
and gemmery. Fortin Otto, like his countryman, was a quack,
but in the matter of old wines he was sincere
in this respect. I did not differ from him materially.
I was skillful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought
largely whenever I could. It was about dusk one evening,

(02:06:39):
during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I
encountered my friend. He accosted me with excessive warmth, for
he had been drinking much. The man wore motley, he
had on a tight fitting party striped dress, and his
head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I
was so pleased to see him that I thought I

(02:07:02):
should never have done wringing his hand. I said to him,
my dear Fortunato, you are luckily met, how remarkably well
you are looking to day. But I have received a
pipe of what passes for a montiado, and I have
my doubts, how said he, A montiado a pipe impossible,

(02:07:26):
and in the middle of the carnival. I have my doubts,
I replied, And I was silly enough to pay the
full a montiado price without consulting you in the matter.
You were not to be found, and I was fearful
of losing a bargain. A Montiado. I have my doubts
a Montiado, and I must satisfy them, a Montiado, as

(02:07:52):
you are engaged. I am on my way to Lucesy.
If any one has a critical turn, it is he.
He will tell me Caizy cannot tell a Montiado from sherry,
and yet some fools will have it that his taste
is a match for your own. Come, let us go
whither to your vaults, my friend. No, I will not

(02:08:15):
impose upon your good nature. I perceive you have an engagement. Lucaesi,
I have no engagement. Come, my friend. No, it is
not the engagement but the severe cold with which I
perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp, they
are encrusted with niter.

Speaker 3 (02:08:33):
Let us go.

Speaker 10 (02:08:33):
Nevertheless, the cold is nothing Montiado, you have been imposed upon.
And as for Lucaesi, he cannot distinguish sherry from a Montiado.
Thus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm, putting on
a mask of black silk, and drawing a Roclaire closely
about my person. I suffered him to hurry me to

(02:08:55):
my palazzo. There were no attendants at home. They had
absconded to make Mary in honor of the time. I
had told them that I should not return until the morning,
and had given them explicit orders not to stir from
the house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to
insure their immediate disappearance one and all. As soon as
my back was turned, I took from their sconces two flambeaux, and,

(02:09:19):
giving one to Fortunato, bowed him through several suites of
rooms to the archway that led into the vaults. I
passed down a long and winding staircase, requesting him to
be cautious as he followed. We came at length to
the foot of the descent, and stood together on the
damp ground of the catacombs of the Montresor. The gate
of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his

(02:09:42):
cap jingled. As he strode the pipe. He said, it
is farther on, said I, but observed the white web
work which gleams from these cavern walls. He turned towards
me and looked into my eyes with two filmy orbs
that distilled the room of intoxication. Kniter, he asked at length, Kniter,

(02:10:04):
I replied, how long have you had that cough. My
poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes.
It is nothing, he said. At last, come, I said,
with decision, we will go back. Your health is precious.

(02:10:27):
You are rich, respected, admired, beloved. You are happy as
I once was. You are a man to be missed
for me. It is no matter. We will go back.
You will be ill, and I cannot be responsible. Besides,
there is Lucaysey enough, he said. The cough is a
mere nothing. It will not kill me. I shall not

(02:10:47):
die of a cough. True, true, I replied, And indeed
I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily, but you
should use all proper caution. A draft of the medock
will defend us from the damps. Here I knocked off
the neck of a bottle, which I drew from a
long row of its fellows that lay upon the mold. Drink,

(02:11:09):
I said, presenting him the wine. He raised it to
his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to
me familiarly, while his bells jingled. I drink, he said,
to the buried that repose around us, and I to
your long life. He again took my arm, and we

(02:11:30):
proceeded these vaults, he said, are extensive. The Montresors, I replied,
were a great and numerous family. I forget your arms.
A huge human foot door in a field azure the
foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are embedded in

(02:11:51):
the heel, and the motto new mommee impune lacha set good,
he said. The wine sparkled in his eyes, and the
bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm. With the meddock.
We had passed through walls of piled bones, with casks
and puncheons, intermingling into the inmost recesses of the catacombs.

(02:12:16):
I paused again, and this time I made bold to
seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow. The niter,
I said, see it increases. It hangs like moss upon
the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops
of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go
back ere. It is too late, your cough, it is nothing,

(02:12:38):
he said. Let us go on, But first another draft
of the meadock I broke and reached him a flagon
of de grave. He emptied it at a breath. His
eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed, and through
the bottle upwards with a gesticulation. I did not understand.
I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the moon movement,

(02:13:00):
a grotesque one. You do not comprehend, he said, not I,
I replied, Then you are not of the brotherhood. How
you are not of the Masons? Yes, yes, I said, yes, yes,
you impossible a Mason, A Mason, I replied, A sign,

(02:13:25):
he said, it is this, I answered, producing a trowel
from beneath the folds of my rock. Laire, you jest,
he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. But let us proceed
to the Amontiado. Be it, so, I said, replacing the
tool beneath the cloak, and again offering him my arm.

(02:13:46):
He leaned upon it heavily. We continued our route in
search of the Amontiado. We passed through a range of
low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again. Arrived at
a deep crypt, in which the bowlness of the air
caused our flambeaux rather to glow than flame. At the
most remote end of the crypt there appeared another, less spacious.

(02:14:09):
Its walls had been lined with human remains piled to
the vault overhead, in the fashion of the Great Catacombs
of Paris. Three sides of this interior crypt were still
ornamented in this manner. From the fourth the bones had
been thrown down and lay promiscuously upon the earth, forming
at one point a mound of some size. Within the wall.

(02:14:30):
Thus exposed by the displacing of the bones, we perceived
a still interior recess in depth about four feet in
width three in height six or seven. It seemed to
have been constructed for no especial use in itself, but
formed merely the interval between two of the colossal supports
of the roof of the catacombs, and was backed by

(02:14:51):
one of their circumscribing walls of solid granite. It was
in vain that fortin Otto, uplifting his dull torch, endeavored
to pry into the depths of the recess its termination.
The feeble light did not enable us to see proceed.
I said, herein is the amontiado. As for Lucchesi, he

(02:15:14):
is an ignoramis interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward,
while I followed immediately at his heels. In an instant
he had reached the extremity of the niche, and, finding
his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A
moment more, and I had fettered him to the granite.
In its surface were two iron staples, distant from each other,

(02:15:37):
about two feet horizontally. From one of these defended a
short chain from the other a padlock. Throwing the links
about his waist, it was but the work of a
few seconds to secure it. He was much too astounded
to resist. Withdrawing the key, I stepped back from the recess.
Pass your hand, I said over the wall. You cannot

(02:16:00):
help feeling the niter. Indeed, it is very damp. Once more,
let me implore you to return. No, then I must
positively leave you. But I must first render you all
the little attentions in my power. The Amontiado ejaculated my friend,
not yet recovered from his astonishment. True, I replied the Amontiado.

(02:16:27):
As I said these words, I busied myself among the
pile of bones of which I have spoken before, throwing
them aside. I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone
and mortar. With these materials, and with the aid of
my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance
of the niche. I had scarcely laid the first tear
of my masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of

(02:16:50):
Fortunato had in a great measure worn off. The earliest
indication I had of this was a low, moaning cry
from the depth of the recess. It was not the
cry of a drunken man. There was then a long
and obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the
third and the fourth, and then I heard the furious

(02:17:12):
vibrations of the chain. The noise lasted for several minutes,
during which that I might hearken to it with the
more satisfaction, I ceased my labors and sat down upon
the bones. When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed
the trowel and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth,

(02:17:32):
and the seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon
a level with my breast. I again paused, and, holding
the flambeaux over the mason work, threw a few feeble
rays upon the figure. Within a succession of loud and
shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form,
seemed to thrust me violently back for a brief moment,

(02:17:55):
I hesitated, I trembled, unsheathing my rapier. I began to
grope with it about the recess, but the thought of
an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the
solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached
the wall. I replied to the yells of him who clamored.

(02:18:16):
I re echoed, I aided. I surpassed them in volume
and in strength. I did this, and the clamorer grew still.
It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to
a close. I had completed the eighth, the ninth, and
the tenth tear. I had finished a portion of the

(02:18:36):
last and the eleventh. There remained but a single stone
to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled with its weight.
I placed it partially in its destined position. But now
there came from out the niche a low laugh that
erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by
a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as

(02:18:56):
that of the noble Fortunato. The voice said, ha ha
ha ah, A very good joke, indeed an excellent jest.
We will have many a rich laugh about it at
the palazzo. Ha ha ha over our wine, ha ha

(02:19:19):
the Amontiado, I said, ha ha, Yes, the Amontiado. But
is it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting
us at the palazzo, the lady Fortunato and the rest.
Let us be gone? Yes, I said, Let us be

(02:19:41):
gone for the love of God montresor yes, I said,
for the love of God. But to these words I
hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I
called aloud Fortunato. No answer. I called again for Tonato.

(02:20:06):
No answer. Still I thrust a torch through the remaining
aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in
return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick.
On account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened
to make an end of my labor. I forced the
last stone into its position. I plastered it up against

(02:20:30):
the new masonry. I re erected the old rampart of bones.
For the half of a century, no mortal has disturbed them.
In pache Rekieskat End of the Cask of a Montiado.

Speaker 11 (02:20:53):
Chapter seven of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information not to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Recording by Peter Yearsley Creepy Tales by
Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial. There are certain themes

(02:21:18):
of which the interest is all absorbing, but which are
too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These
the mere romanticist must eschew if he do not wish
to offend or to discust. They are with propriety handled
only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and

(02:21:41):
sustain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense
of pleasurable pain, over the accounts of the passage of
the Beresina, of the earthquake at Lisbon, of the plague
at London, of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or of
the stifling of the one hundred and twenty three prisoners
and a black hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts

(02:22:04):
it is the fact, it is the reality. It is
the history which excites as inventions. We should regard them
with simple abhorrence. I have mentioned some few of the
more prominent and august calamities on record, But in these
it is the extent, not less than the character of

(02:22:25):
the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need
not remind the reader that from the long and weird
catalog of human miseries I might have selected many individual
instances more replete with essential suffering than any of these
vast generalities of disaster. The true wretchedness, indeed the ultimate woe,

(02:22:49):
is particular not diffuse, that the ghastly extremes of agony
are endured by man the unit, and never by man
the mass. For this let us thank a merciful God.
To be buried while alive is beyond question. The most

(02:23:11):
terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the
lot of mere mortality, that it has frequently, very frequently
so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think
the boundaries which divide life from death are at best
shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends

(02:23:33):
and where the other begins. We know that there are
diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent
functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are
merely suspensions, properly so called, they are only temporary pauses
in the incomprehensible mechanism, A certain period elapses, and some

(02:23:58):
unseen mysterious prince again sets in motion the magic pinions
and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for
ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken, but where
meantime was the soul. Apart, however, from the inevitable conclusion

(02:24:21):
a priori that such causes must produce such effects, that
the well known occurrence of such cases of suspended animation
must naturally give rise now and then to premature interments.
Apart from this consideration, we have the direct testimony of
medical and ordinary experience to prove that a vast number

(02:24:45):
of such interments have actually taken place. I might refer
at once, if necessary, to a hundred well authenticated instances.
One of very remarkable character, and of which the circle
instances may be fresh in the memory of some of
my readers. Occurred not very long ago in the neighboring

(02:25:07):
city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense and
widely extended excitement. The wife of one of the most
respectable citizens, a lawyer of eminence and a member of Congress,
was seized with a sudden and unaccountable illness which completely
baffled the skill of her physicians. After much suffering, she died,

(02:25:31):
or was supposed to die. No one suspected, indeed, or
had reason to suspect, that she was not actually dead.
She presented all the ordinary appearances of death. The face
assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline, The lips were
of the usual marble pallor, the eyes were lustreless. There

(02:25:56):
was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased for three days. The
body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a
stony rigidity. The funeral, in short, was hastened on account
of the rapid advance of what was supposed to be decomposition.
The lady was deposited in her family vault, which for

(02:26:18):
three subsequent years was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term,
it was opened for the reception of a sarcophagus, but
alas how fearful, a shock awaited the husband, who personally
threw open the door as its portals swung outwardly back.

(02:26:41):
Some white apparelled object fell rattling within his arms. It
was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmolded shroud.
A careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived
within two days after her entombment, that herr buckles within
the coffin had caused it to fall from a ledge

(02:27:03):
or shelf to the floor, where it was so broken
as to permit her escape. A lamp which had been
accidentally left full of oil within the tomb was found empty.
It might have been exhausted, however, by evaporation. On the
uttermost of the steps which led down into the dread
chamber was a large fragment of the coffin, with which

(02:27:27):
it seemed that she had endeavored to arrest attention by
striking the iron door. While thus occupied, she probably swooned
or possibly died through sheer terror, and in failing her
shroud became entangled in some iron work which projected interiorly.
Thus she remained, and thus she rotted erect. In the

(02:27:53):
year eighteen ten, a case of living inhumation happened in France,
attended with circumstances which go far to warrant the assertion
that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The heroine of
the story was a mademoiselle Victorine la Fourcarde, a young
girl of illustrious family, of wealth, and of great personal beauty.

(02:28:17):
Among her numerous suitors was Juliens Bossuet, a poor literatur
or journalist of Paris. His talents and general amiability had
recommended him to the notice of the heiress by whom
he seemed to have been truly beloved, But her pride
of birth decided her finally to reject him and to

(02:28:38):
wed a monsieur Ronelle, a banker and a diplomatist of
some eminence. After marriage, however, this gentleman neglected and perhaps
even more positively ill treated her. Having passed with him
some wretched years, she died, at least, her condition so

(02:28:58):
closely resembled death as to deceive everyone who saw her.
She was buried not in a vault, but in an
ordinary grave in the village of her nativity. Filled with
despair and still inflamed by the memory of a profound attachment,
the lover journeys from the capital to the remote province

(02:29:19):
in which the village lies, with the romantic purpose of
disinterring the corpse and possessing himself of its luxuriant tresses.
He reaches the grave at midnight. He unearths the coffin,
opens it, and is in the act of detaching the
hair when he is arrested by the unclosing of the

(02:29:42):
beloved eyes. In fact, the lady had been buried alive,
vitality had not altogether departed, and she was aroused by
the caresses of her lover from the lethargy which had
been mistaken for death. He bore her frantically to his
lodgings in the village. He employed so and powerful restoratives
suggested by no little medical learning. In fine she revived.

(02:30:06):
She recognized her preserver. She remained with him until, by
slow degrees, she fully recovered her original health. Her woman's
heart was not adamant, and this last lesson of love
sufficed to soften it. She bestowed it upon Bossuet. She
returned no more to her husband, but concealing from him

(02:30:28):
her resurrection, fled with her lover to America. Twenty years afterward,
the two returned to France in the persuasion that time
had so greatly altered the lady's appearance that her friends
would be unable to recognize her. They were mistaken, however,
for at the first meeting, Monsieur Ronelle did actually recognize

(02:30:50):
and make claim to his wife. This claim she resisted,
and a judicial tribunal sustained her in her resistance, deciding
that the peculiar circumstances, with the long lapse of years,
had extinguished not only equitably but legally the authority of
the husband. The Chururgical Journal of Leipsic, a periodical of

(02:31:16):
high authority and merit, which some American bookseller would do
well to translate and republish, records in a late number.
A very distressing event of the character in question. An
officer of artillery, a man of gigantic stature and of
robust health, being thrown from an unmanageable horse, received a

(02:31:37):
very severe contusion upon the head, which rendered him insensible
at once. The skull was slightly fractured, but no immediate
danger was apprehended. Trepanning was accomplished successfully, he was bled,
and many other of the ordinary means of relief were adopted. Gradually, However,
he fell into a more and more hopeless state of

(02:31:59):
stule and Finally it was thought that he died. The
weather was warm, and he was buried with indecent haste
in one of the public cemeteries. His funeral took place
on Thursday. On the Sunday following, the grounds of the
cemetery were, as usual much thronged with visitors, and about
noon an intense excitement was created by the declaration of

(02:32:23):
a peasant that, while sitting upon the grave of the officer,
he had distinctly felt a commotion of the earth, as
if occasioned by one struggling beneath. At first, little attention
was paid to the man's asseveration, but his evident terror
and the dogged obstinacy with which he persisted in his
story had at length their natural effect upon the crowd.

(02:32:47):
Spades were hurriedly procured, and the grave, which was shamefully shallow,
was in a few minutes so far thrown open that
the head of its occupant appeared. He was then seemingly dead,
but he he sat nearly erect within his coffin, the
lid of which in his furious struggles he had partially uplifted.

(02:33:07):
He was forthwith conveyed to the nearest hospital, and there
pronounced to be still living, although in an asphytic condition.
After some hours he revived, recognized individuals of his acquaintance,
and in broken sentences, spoke of his agonies in the grave.

(02:33:29):
From what he related, it was clear that he must
have been conscious of life for more than an hour
while inhumed, before lapsing into insensibility. The grave was carelessly
and loosely filled with an exceedingly porous soil, and thus
some air was necessarily admitted. He heard the footsteps of
the crowd overhead, and endeavored to make himself heard in turn.

(02:33:52):
It was the tumult within the grounds of the cemetery,
he said, which appeared to awaken him from a deep sleep.
But no sooner was here than he became fully aware
of the awful horrors of his position. This patient, it
is recorded, was doing well and seemed to be in
a fair way of ultimate recovery, but fell a victim

(02:34:13):
to the quackeries of medical experiment. The galvanic battery was applied,
and he suddenly expired in one of those ecstatic paroxysms
which occasionally its superinduces. The mention of the galvanic battery
nevertheless recalls to my memory, a well known and very
extraordinary case in point where its action proved the means

(02:34:36):
of restoring to animation a young attorney of London who
had been interred for two days. This occurred in eighteen
thirty one, and created at the time a very profound
sensation wherever it was made to the subject of converse.
The patient, mister Edward Stapleton, had died apparently of typhus fever,

(02:34:58):
accompanied with some a nominal as symptoms which had excited
the curiosity of his medical attendants. Upon his seeming decease,
his friends were requested to sanction a post mortem examination,
but declined to permit it. As often happens when such
refusals are made, the practitioners resolved to disinter the body

(02:35:19):
and dissect it at leisure in private. Arrangements were easily
affected with some of the numerous core of body snatches
with which London abounds, and upon the third night after
the funeral, the supposed corpse was unearthed from a grave
eight feet deep and deposited in the opening chamber of
one of the private hospitals. An incision of some extent

(02:35:43):
had actually been made in the abdomen when the fresh
and undecayed appearance of the subject suggested an application of
the battery. One experiment succeeded another, and the customary effects supervened,
with nothing to characterize them in any respect, except upon
one or two occasions a more than ordinary degree of

(02:36:05):
lifelikeness in the convulsive action. It grew late, the day
was about to dawn, and it was thought expedient at
length to proceed at once to the dissection. A student, however,
was especially desirous of testing a theory of his own,
and insisted upon applying the battery to one of the
pectoral muscles. A rough gash was made and a wire

(02:36:28):
hastily brought in contact. When the patient, with a hurried
but quite unconvulsive movement, arose from the table, stepped into
the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for
a few seconds, and then spoke. What he said was unintelligible,
but words were uttered, the syllabification was distinct. Having spoken,

(02:36:50):
he fell heavily to the floor. For some moments all
were paralyzed with awe, but the urgency of the case
soon restored them their presence of mind. It was seen
that mister Stapleton was alive, although in a swoon. Upon
exhibition of ether, he revived and was rapidly restored to
health and to the society of his friends, from whom, however,

(02:37:13):
all knowledge of his resuscitation was withheld until a relapse
was no longer to be apprehended. Their wonder, their rapturous astonishment,
may be conceived. The most thrilling peculiarity of this incident, nevertheless,
is involved in what mister s himself asserts. He declares
that at no period was he altogether insensible, that dully

(02:37:38):
and confusedly, he was aware of everything which happened to him,
from the moment in which he was pronounced dead by
his physicians to that in which he fell swooning to
the floor of the hospital. I am alive, were the
uncomprehended words, which, upon recognizing the locality of the dissecting room,

(02:37:59):
he had endeavored in his extremity to utter. It were
an easy matter to multiply such histories as these, But
I forbear for indeed, we have no need of such
to establish the fact that premature interments occur when we reflect,
how very rarely, from the nature of the case. We

(02:38:21):
have it in our power to detect them, we must
admit that they may frequently occur without our cognizance. Scarcely
in truth is a graveyard ever encroached upon for any purpose,
to any great extent, that skeletons are not found in
postures which suggest the most fearful of suspicions. Fearful indeed

(02:38:45):
the suspicion, but more fearful the doom. It may be
asserted without hesitation that no event is so terribly well
adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental
distress as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of
the lungs, the stifling fumes from the damp earth, the

(02:39:09):
clinging to the death garments, the rigid embrace of the
narrow house, the blackness of the absolute night, the silence
like a sea that overwhelms, the unseen but palpable presence
of the conqueror worm. These things, with the thoughts of
the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends

(02:39:31):
who would fly to save us, if but informed of
our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate, they
can never be informed that our hopeless portion is that
of the really dead. These considerations I say, carry into
the heart which still palpitates a degree of appalling and

(02:39:54):
intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil.
We know of nothing so so agonizing upon earth. We
can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms
of the nethermost hell. And thus all narratives upon this
topic have an interest profound, an interest nevertheless, which, through

(02:40:15):
the sacred awe of the topic itself, very properly and
very peculiarly depends upon our conviction of the truth of
the matter narrated. What I have now to tell is
of my own actual knowledge, of my own positive and
personal experience. For several years I had been subject to

(02:40:40):
attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to
term catalepsy in default of a more definitive title. Although
both the immediate and the predisposing causes, and even the
actual diagnosis of this disease are still mysterious, its obvious
and apparent characters sufficiently well understood. Its variations seem to

(02:41:03):
be chiefly of degree. Sometimes the patient lies for a
day only, or even for a shorter period in a
species of exaggerated lethargy, he is senseless and externally motionless,
but the pulsation of the heart is still faintly perceptible.
Some traces of warmth remain a slight color lingers within

(02:41:24):
the center of the cheek, and upon application of a
mirror to the lips, we can detect a torpid, unequal
and vacillating action of the lungs. Then again, the duration
of the trance is for weeks, even for months. While
the closest scrutiny and the most rigorous medical tests fail

(02:41:44):
to establish any material distinction between the state of the
sufferer and what we conceive of absolute death. Very usually
he is saved from premature interment solely by the knowledge
of his friends that he has been previously subt to catalepsy,
by the consequent suspicion excited, and above all by the

(02:42:05):
non appearance of decay. The advances of the malady are
luckily gradual. The first manifestations, although marked, are unequivocal. The
fits grow successively more and more distinctive, and endure each
for a longer term than the preceding. In this lies
the principled security from inhumation. The unfortunate, whose first attack

(02:42:31):
should be of the extreme character, which is occasionally seen,
would almost inevitably be consigned alive to the tomb. My
own case differed in no important particular from those mentioned
in medical books. Sometimes without any apparent cause, I sank
little by little into a condition of hemi syncope or

(02:42:54):
half swoon. And in this condition, without pain, without ability
to stir, or strictly speaking, to think, but with a dull,
lethargic consciousness of life and of the presence of those
who surrounded my bed, I remained until the crisis of
the disease restored me suddenly to perfect sensation. At other

(02:43:17):
times I was quickly and impetuously smitten. I grew sick
and numb, and chilly and dizzy, and so fell prostrate
at once. Then for weeks all was void and black
and silent, and nothing became the universe. Total annihilation could

(02:43:38):
be no more. From these latter attacks. I awoke, however,
with a gradation slow in proportion to the suddenness of
the seizure, Just as the day dawns to the friendless
and houseless beggar who roams the streets throughout the long
desolate winter night, just so tardily, just so wearily, just

(02:44:01):
so cheerily came back the light of the soul to me.
Apart from the tendency to trance, however, my general health
appeared to be good, nor could I perceive that it
was at all affected by the one prevalent malady, unless indeed,
an idiosyncrasy in my ordinary sleep may be looked upon
as superinduced. Upon awaking from slumber, I could never gain

(02:44:25):
at once thorough possession of my senses, and always remained
for many minutes in much bewilderment and perplexity. The mental
faculties in general, but the memory in especial, being in
a condition of absolute abeyance. In all that I endured,
there was no physical suffering, but of moral distress an infinitude.

(02:44:49):
My fancy grew charnel. I talked of worms, of tombs
and epitaphs. I was lost in reveries of death, and
the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain.
The ghastly danger to which I was subjected haunted me
day and night. In the former the torture of meditation

(02:45:12):
was excessive. In the latter supreme when the grim darkness
overspread the earth, then with every horror of thought, I shook, shook,
as the quivering plumes upon the hearse, when nature could
endure wakefulness no longer. It was with a struggle that
I consented to sleep, for I shuddered to reflect that

(02:45:35):
upon waking I might find myself the tenant of a grave.
And when finally I sank into slumber, it was only
to rush at once into a world of phanfasms, above which,
with vast sable overshadowing wing hovered predominant the one sepulchral
idea from the innumerable images of gloom, which thus oppressed

(02:46:01):
me in dreams, I select for record, but a solitary vision, methought.
I was immersed in a cataleptic trance of more than
usual duration and profundity. Suddenly there came an icy hand
upon my forehead, and an impatient, gibbering voice whispered the
word arise within my ear. I sat erect. The darkness

(02:46:26):
was total. I could not see the figure of him
who had aroused me. I could call to mind, neither
the period at which I had fallen into the trance,
nor the locality in which I then lay. While I
remained motionless and busied in endeavors to collect my thought.
The cold hand grasped me fiercely by the wrist, shaking
it petulantly, while the gibbering voice said again, arise. Did

(02:46:50):
I not bid thee arise? And who I demanded?

Speaker 6 (02:46:55):
Art?

Speaker 11 (02:46:55):
Thou? I have no name in the regions which I
Inabboit replied the voice mournfully. I was mortal, but am fiend.
I was merciless, but am pitiful. Thou dost feel that
I shudder, my teeth chatter as I speak. Yet it

(02:47:15):
is not with the chilliness of the night, of the
night without end, But this hideousness is insufferable. How canst
thou tranquility sleep? I cannot rest for the cry of
these great agonies, these sights some more than I can bear.
Get THEE up, Come with me into the outer night,

(02:47:38):
and let me unfold to thee the graves? Is this
not a spectacle of woe? Behold? I look'd and the
unseen figure, which still grasped me by the wrist, had
caused to be thrown open the graves of all mankind,
and from each issued the faint, shosphoric radiance of decay,

(02:48:02):
so that I could see into the innermost recesses and
there view the shrouded bodies in their sad and sullen
slumbers with the worm. But alas the real sleepers were
fewer by many millions than those who slumbered not at all.
And there was a feeble struggling, and there was a

(02:48:24):
general sad unrest, And from out the depths of the
countless pits there came a melancholy rustling from the garments
of the buried, and of those who seemed tranquility to repose.
I saw that a vast number had changed in a
greater or less degree, the rigid and uneasy position in

(02:48:45):
which they had originally been entombed. And the voice again
said to me, as I gazed, is it not, Oh,
is it not a pitiful sight? But before I could
find words to reply, the figure had ceased to grasp
my wrist, The phosphoric lights expired, and the graves were

(02:49:06):
closed with a sudden violence, while from out them arose
a tumult of despairing cries, saying, again, is it not,
O God? Is it not a very pitiful sight? Fantasies
such as these, presenting themselves at night, extended their terrific

(02:49:27):
influence far into my waking hours. My nerves became thoroughly unstrung,
and I fell a prey to perpetual horror. I hesitated
to ride, or to walk, or to indulge in any
exercise that would carry me from home. In fact, I
no longer dared trust myself out of the immediate presence

(02:49:48):
of those who were aware of my proneness to catalepsy.
Lest falling into one of my usual fits, I should
be buried before my real condition could be ascertained. I
doubted the care the fidelity of my dearest friends. I
dreaded that, in some trance of more than customary duration,
they might be prevailed upon to regard me as irrecoverable.

(02:50:11):
I even went so far as to fear that as
I occasioned much trouble, they might be glad to consider
any very protracted attack as sufficient excuse for getting rid
of me altogether. It was in vain they endeavored to
reassure me by the most solemn promises. I exacted the
most sacred oaths that under no circumstances they would bury

(02:50:33):
me until decomposition had so materially advanced as to render
farther preservation impossible, and even then my mortal terrors would
listen to no reason, would accept no consolation. I entered
into a series of elaborate precautions. Among other things, I
had the family vault so remodeled as to admit of

(02:50:54):
being readily opened from within. The slightest pressure upon a
long lever that extended far into the tomb would cause
the iron portal to fly back. There were arrangements also
for the free admission of air and light, and convenient
receptacles for food and water, with within immediate reach of
the coffin intended for my reception. This coffin was warmly

(02:51:16):
and softly padded, and was provided with a lid fashioned
upon the principle of the vault door, with the addition
of springs so contrived that the feeblest movement of the
body would be sufficient to set it at liberty. Beside
all this, there was suspended from the roof of the
tomb a large bell, the rope of which it was
designed should extend through a hole in the coffin, and

(02:51:38):
so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse.
But alas what avails the vigilance against the destiny of man,
not even these well contrived securities sufficed to save from
the uttermost agonies of living inhumation, a wretch to these
agonies fore doomed. There arrived an epoch, as often before

(02:52:05):
there had arrived, in which I found myself emerging from
total unconsciousness into the first feeble and indefinite sense of existence. Slowly,
with a tortoise gradation approached the faint gray dawn of
the cycle day, a torpid uneasiness, an apathetic endurance of

(02:52:26):
dull pain, no care, no hope, no effort. Then, after
a long interval, a ringing in the ears, then after
a lapse still longer, a prickling or tingling sensation in
the extremities. Then a seemingly eternal period of pleasurable quiescence,
during which the awakening feelings are struggling into thought. Then

(02:52:50):
a brief re sinking into nonentity, then a sudden recovery
at length, the slight quivering of an eyelid, And immediately
there are an electric shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite,
which sends the blood in torrents from the temples to
the heart. And now the first positive effort to think,
and now the first endeavor to remember, And now a

(02:53:14):
partial and evanescent success. And now the memory has so
far regained its dominion that in some measure I am
cognizant of my state. I feel that I am not
awaking from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been
subject to catalepsy, and now, at last, as if by
the rush of an ocean, my shuddering spirit is overwhelmed

(02:53:37):
by the one grim danger, by the one spectral and
ever prevalent idea. For some minutes after this fancy possessed me,
I remained without motion. And why I could not summon
courage to move, I dared not make the effort which
was to satisfy me of my fate. And yet there

(02:53:57):
was something at my heart which was but me. It
was sure despair, such as no other species of wretchedness
ever calls into being. Despair alone urged me, after long
irresolution to uplift the heavy lids of my eyes. I
uplifted them. It was dark, all dark. I knew that

(02:54:19):
the fit was over. I knew that the crisis of
my disorder had long passed. I knew that I had
now fully recovered the use of my visual faculties. And
yet it was dark, all dark. The intense and utter
raylessness of the night that endureth for evermore. I endeavored

(02:54:40):
to shriek, and my lips and my parched tongue moved
convulsively together in the attempt, But no voice issued from
the cavernous lungs, which oppressed, as if by the weight
of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated with the heart
at every elaborate and struggling inspiration. The movement of the

(02:55:01):
jaws in this effort to cry aloud showed me that
they were bound up, as is usual with the dead.
I felt, too, that I lay upon some hard substance,
and by something similar, my sides were also closely compressed.
So far I had not ventured to stir any of
my limbs. But now I violently threw up my arms,

(02:55:21):
which had been lying at length with the wrists crossed.
They struck a solid, wooden substance which extended above my person,
at an elevation of not more than six inches from
my face. I could no longer doubt that I reposed
within a coffin. At last, and now amid all my
infinite miseries, came sweetly the cherub hope. For I thought

(02:55:44):
of my precautions. I writhed and made spasmodic exertions to
force open the lid. It would not move. I felt
my wrists for the bell rope. It was not to
be found. And now the comforter fled for ever, and
a still sterner, dis bare reigned triumphant, for I could
not help perceiving the absence of the paddings which I

(02:56:06):
had so carefully prepared. And then too, there came suddenly
to my nostrils the strong, peculiar odor of moist earth.
The conclusion was irresistible. I was not within the vault.
I had fallen into a trance while absent from home,
while among strangers. When or how I could not remember.
And it was they who had buried me as a dog,

(02:56:29):
nailed up in some common coffin, and thrust deep, deep,
and for ever into some ordinary and nameless grave. As
this awful conviction forced itself thus into the innermost chambers
of my soul, I once again struggled to cry aloud,
And in this second endeavor I succeeded. A long, wild

(02:56:50):
and continuous shriek or yell of agony resounded through the
realms of the subterranean night. Hello, Hello, there said a
gruff voice in a reply, What the devil's the matter now?
Said a second? Get out O that, said a third,
What do you mean by yowling in that ere kind
of style like a cattymount? Said a fourth. And hereupon

(02:57:13):
I was seized and shaken without ceremony for several minutes
by a junto of very rough looking individuals. They did
not arouse me from my slumber, for I was wide
awake when I screamed, but they restored me to the
full possession of my memory. This adventure occurred near Richmond
in Virginia. Accompanied by a friend, I had proceeded upon

(02:57:36):
a gunning expedition some miles down by the banks of
the James River. Night approached and we were overtaken by
a storm. The cabin of a small sloop, lying at
anchor in the stream and laden with garden mold, afforded
us the only available shelter. We made the best of
it and passed the night on board. I slept in

(02:57:56):
one of the only two berths in the vessel, and
the berths of a slop hoop of sixty or twenty
tons need scarcely be described. That which I occupied had
no bedding of any kind. Its extreme width was eighteen inches,
the distance of its bottom from the deck overhead was
precisely the same. I found it a matter of exceeding
difficulty to squeeze myself in. Nevertheless, I slept soundly, and

(02:58:20):
the whole of my vision, for it was no dream
and no nightmare, arose naturally from the circumstances of my position,
from my ordinary bias of thought, and from the difficulty
to which I have alluded of collecting my senses, and
especially of regaining my memory for a long time after
awaking from slumber. The men who shook me were the

(02:58:42):
crew of the sloop and some laborers engaged to unload it.
From the load itself came the earthy smell. The bandage
about the jaws was a silk handkerchief in which I
had bound up my head in default of my customary nightcap.
The tortures endured, however, were indubitably quite equal for the

(02:59:03):
time to those of actual sepulture. They were fearfully, they
were inconceivably hideous, but out of evil proceeded good. For
their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion.
My soul acquired tone acquired temper. I went abroad, I

(02:59:23):
took vigorous exercise, I breathed the free air of heaven.
I thought upon other subjects than death. I discarded my
medical books, Buchan I burned. I read no Knight thoughts,
no Fustian about churchyards, no bugaboo tales such as this.
In short, I became a new man and lived a

(02:59:45):
man's life. From that memorable night, I dismissed forever my
charnel apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder of
which perhaps they had been less the consequence than the cause.
There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason,
the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance

(03:00:07):
of a hell. But the imagination of man is no
carathis to explore with impunity at every cavern alas the
grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful.
But like the demons in whose company afrasiab made his
journey down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will

(03:00:29):
devour us. They must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.
End of the premature Burial.

Speaker 12 (03:00:50):
Chapter eight of Creepy Tales by Edgalan Poe. This is
a Libervox recording or Libervox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or a volunteer, please visit librovox dot org.
Recording by Blake curran Worth with ninety four Creepy Tales
by Edgar Allan Poe Berenice. The epigraph reads the chiabant

(03:01:11):
mihi sodales sees a podkem aamichaeo visitarum kurdathmaeus ali quantulumfo
de levatus eban zayat in English, this is my companions
told me I might find some alleviation of my misery
visiting the grave of my beloved. Misery is manifold. The
wretchedness of earth is multiform, overreaching the wide horizon as

(03:01:32):
the rainbow. Its hues are as various as the hues
of that arch as distinct too, it is intimately blended,
overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow. How is it
that from butture I have derived a type of unloveliness
from the covenant of peace, a similar of sorrow, But
as in ethics evel as a consequence of good, so
in fact out of joy is sorrow born either the

(03:01:53):
memory of past pliss is the anguish of to day,
or the agnes of which are have their origin ecstasies
which might have been my butpismal name is a jais
that of my family. I will not mention. There are
no towers in the land more time honored than my gloomy,
gray hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race
of visionaries, and in many striking particulars in the character
of the family mansion, in the frescoes of the chief saloon,

(03:02:16):
in the tapestries of the dormitories, in the chiseling of
some buttresses in the armory, but more especially in the
gallery of antique paintings, in the fashion of the library chamber,
and lastly, in the very peculiar nature the library's contents.
There is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief
the recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber,
and with its volumes, of which latter I will say
no more. Here died my mother. Herein was I born.

(03:02:39):
But it is mere ardness to say that I had
not lived before that the soul has no previous existence.
You deny it. Let us not argue the matter convince myself,
I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance
of aerial forms, of spiritual and meaning, eyes of sounds
musical yet sad, A remembrance which will not be excluded,
a memory like a shadow vyue, a variable and definite, unsteady,

(03:03:02):
and like a shadow too in the impossibility of my
getting rid of it, while the sunlight of my reason
shall exist in that chamber. Was I born thus, awaking
from the long night of what seemed but was not
non entity, at once into the very regions of fairyland,
into a palace of imagination, into the wild dominions of
monastic thought and erudition. It is not singular that I

(03:03:22):
gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye, that
I loitered away my boyhood in books and dissipated my
youth in reverie. But it is singular that as years
rolled away and the noon of manhood found me storn
the mansion of my father's It is wonderful what stagnation
there fell upon the springs of my life. Wonderful how
total an inversion took place in the character of my
commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions,

(03:03:45):
and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the
land of dreams became in turn not the material of
my everyday existence, but in very deed that existence utterly
and solely in itself. Berenice and I were cousins, and
we grew together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we
grew I ill of health and buried in gloom. She agile, graceful,

(03:04:07):
and overflowing with energy, hers to ramble on the hillside
mind the studies of the cloister. I living within my
own heart, an addicted body and soul to the most
intense and painful meditation. She roaming carelessly through life, with
no thought of the shadows in her path or the
silent flight of the raven winged owers. Bererenice, I call
upon her name, Berenice, and from the gray ruins of memory,

(03:04:31):
a thousand tumultuous recollections startled at the sound Ah. Vividly
is her image before me now as in the early
days of her lightheartedness and joy, Oh gorgeous yet fantastic beauty,
Oh sylph amid the shrubberies of Ahnheim ow nigh among
its foundations. And then then always mystery and terror, and
a tale which should not be told. Disease, a fatal disease,

(03:04:52):
fell like the simoon upon her frame, And even while
I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her,
pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and in
a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the
identity of her person Alas the destroyer came and went,
and the victim where is she? I knew her not,
or knew her no longer as Berenice. Among the numerous

(03:05:16):
train of maladies super induced by that fatal and primary
one which affected a revolution of so horrible a kind
in the moral and physical being of my cousin, I've
mentioned as the most distressing opposinate in its nature, a
species of epilepsy, not unfrequently terminating in trance itself, trance
very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner
of recovery was in most instances startlingly abrupt. In the meantime,

(03:05:38):
my own disease, for I had been told that I
should call it by no other appellation. My own disease
then grew rapidly upon me and assumed finally, a monomoniac
character of a novel and extraordinary form, hourly and momently
gaining vigor, and at length obtaining over me the most
incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it,
consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the

(03:05:59):
mind out of physical science termed the attentive. It is
more than probable that I am not understood, but I
fear indeed that it is in no manner possible to
convey to the mind of the merely general reader an
adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which,
in my case, the powers of meditation, not to speak,
technically busied and buried themselves in the contemplation of even

(03:06:20):
the most ordinary objects of the universe. To muse for long,
unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some frivolous device
on the margin or the typography of a book, to
become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day
in a quaint shadow, falling a slant upon the tapestry
or upon the floor, to lose myself for an entire night,
in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the
embers of a fire, to dream away whole days over

(03:06:43):
the perfume of a flower, To repeat monotonously some common
word until the sound, by dint frequent repetition, ceased to
convey any idea whatever to the mind, To lose all
sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute
bodily quiescence, long and obstinately persevered in such a few
of the most common and least punishes, vaggeries induced by
condition of the mental faculties, not indeed altogether unparalleled, but

(03:07:07):
certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation. Yet,
let me not be misapprehended. The undue, earnest and morbid
attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous,
must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity
common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by
persons of ardent imagination. It was not, even as might
be at first supposed, an extreme condition or exaggeration of

(03:07:29):
such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In
the one instance, the dreamer or enthusiast, being interested by
an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly lose the sight of
this object. In the wilderness of deductions and suggestions, issuing
therefrom until the conclusion of a daydream often replete with luxury,
he finds the incitimentum, or first cause of his musings

(03:07:49):
entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object
was invariably frivolous. Although assuming that the medium of my
distempered vision are refracted and unreal importance, deductions if any,
were made, and those few pertinaciously returning in upon their
regional object as a center, the meditations were never pleasurable,
and at the termination of the reverie, the first cause,

(03:08:10):
so far from being out of sight, had attained that
supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease.
In a word, the powers of mind, more particularly exercised,
were with me, as I have said before, the attentive
and are with the day dreamer. The speculative. My books
at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to
irritate the disorder, partook what we perceived largely in their
imaginative and inconsequential nature of the characteristic qualities of the

(03:08:33):
disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of
the noble Italian Colias Secundus curio de amplitudeneer bade uragnude
Saint Austin's great work The City of God, and to
Italian's De cardin a Christi, in which the paradoxical sentence
mortuus s de philus gribele esquia and neptum est at
sepultus verser exit certatum esquea impossibile est occupy my undivided

(03:08:57):
time for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation. Thus
it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by
trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean crag
spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestian, which steadily resists in the
attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the
waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of
the flower called aspidel. And although to a careless thinker
it might appear the matter beyond doubt that the alteration

(03:09:19):
produced by her unhappy malady in the moral condition of
Breonese would afford me many objects of the exercise of
that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been
at some trouble in explaining. Yet such did not in
any degree the case. In lucid intervals of my infirmity.
Her calamity indeed gave me pain, and taking deep got
a heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle
life did not fall upon her frequently and bitterly, upon

(03:09:40):
the wonder working means by which so strange a revolution
had been so suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections
partogno the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and wereas such as
would have occurred under similar circumstances to the ordinary mass
of mankind, true to its own character. My disorder reveled
in the less important, but more startling changes wrought in
the physical frame of Bereonese, in the singular and most
abpooring distortion of her p identity during the brightest days

(03:10:02):
of her unparalleled beauty. Most surely I had never loved her.
In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me
had never been of the heart. My passion always were
of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning,
among the trailis shadows of the forest at noonday, and
in the silence of my library at night, she had
flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her not
as the living and breathing Barrenice, but as the Berenice

(03:10:23):
of a dream, Not as a being of the earth earthy,
but as the abstraction of such a being. Not as
a thing to admire but to analyze, not as an
object of love, but as a theme of the most
obstruse although desultory speculation. And now now I shuddered in
her presence, and grew pale at her approach. Yet bitterly
lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind
that she had loved me long, and in an evil

(03:10:43):
moment I spoke to her of marriage, and at length
the period of our nuptials was approaching. When upon an
afternoon in the winter of the year, one of those
unseasonably warm, calm and misty days which were the nurse
of the beautiful Halcion, I sat and sat, as I
thought alone in the inner apartment of the library. My
eyes I saw that Bereonice stood before me. Was it
my own excited imagination, or the misty influence of the

(03:11:05):
atmosphere of the uncertain twiret of the chamber, or the
gray draperies which fell around her figure that causing it
so vacillating an indistinct an outline, I could not tell.
She spoke no word, and I not for worlds could
I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill run through
my frame. A sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me. I
consuming curiously pervaded my soul, and sinking back upon the chair,

(03:11:28):
I remained for some time, breathless and motionless, with my
eyes riveted upon her person alas its emaciation was excessive,
and not one vestige of the former being lurked in
any single line of the contour. My burning glances at
length fell upon the face. The forehead was high and
very pale and singularly placid, and the once jetty hair
fell partially over it and overshaded the hollow temples, with

(03:11:48):
the numeral ringlets now vivid yellow and jarring discordantly in
their fantastic character. With the raining melancholy of the countenance,
the eyes were lifeless and lustreless and seemingly pupiliss and
I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation
of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted, and in
a smile of peculiar meaning. The teeth of the changed

(03:12:09):
Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view, would to God
that I had never beheld them, or that having done so,
I had died. The shutting of the door disturbed me,
and looking up, I found that my cousin had departed
from the chamber, but from the disordered chamber of my
brain had not a last departed, and would not be
driven away. The white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth,
and a speck on their surface, not a shade in

(03:12:29):
their enamel, not indenturing their edges. But what that period
of her smile had sufficed to bread in upon my memory.
I saw them now, even more unequivocally than I behold them.

Speaker 6 (03:12:38):
Then.

Speaker 9 (03:12:39):
The teeth, Oh, the teeth.

Speaker 12 (03:12:40):
They were here and there and everywhere, and visibly and
pappably before me, long, narrow and excessively white, with the
pale lips arriving about them. Was in the very moment
of their first terrible development. Then came the full few
of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against its
strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the
external world. I had no thoughts but for them teeth.

(03:13:00):
For these I longed with their frenzied desire. All other
matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They,
they alone, were present to the mental eye, and they,
in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life.
I held them in every light, I turned them in
every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities.

(03:13:21):
I pondered upon their confirmation. I mused upon the alteration
in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to the
imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and every when unassisted
by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle Salle.
It has been well said, getot say pay untiny day
say anymore, And of Baronice, I more seriously believed, getute

(03:13:42):
say day at tainy day a day, day a day ah.
Here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me day a
day ah. Therefore it was that I covered them so madly.
I felt that their possession could ever alone restore me
to peace, and giving them back to reason. And the
evening closed in upon me. Thus, and in the darkness
came and tarried and went, and the day again dawned

(03:14:03):
in the midst of a second them were now gathering around,
and still I sat motionless in that solitary room, slic
sat buried in meditation, and still the phantasma of the
teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as with the most vivid,
hideous distinctness. It flushed about amid the changing lights and
shadows of the chamber. At length they broke in upon
my dreams, the cries of horror and dismay. And thereun

(03:14:23):
too after a pause succeeded the sound of troubled voices,
intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow or of pain.
I arose from my seat and thrown open one of
the doors of the library. Still standing out in the
antechamber of servant Maiden, all in tears, who told me
that Beronice was no more. She had been seized at
epilepsy in the early morning, and now at the closing
in of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant,

(03:14:45):
and all preparations for the burial were completed. I found
myself sitting in the library, and again, sitting there alone,
it seemed that I had nearly awakened from a confused
and exciting dream. Knew that it was now midnight, and
I was well aware that since the setting of the sun,
Baroness had been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened,
I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension. Yet

(03:15:06):
its memory was replete with horror. Horror more horrible from
being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was
a fearful page in the record of my existence, written
all over with dim and hideous and u intelligible recollections.
I strived to decipher them, but in vain while ever
and anon like the spirit of a departed sound, the
shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to
be ringing in my ears. I had done indeed, what

(03:15:29):
was it? And asked myself the question aloud, and the
whispering because of the chamber answered me what was it?
On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near
it lay a little box. It was if no remarkable character,
and I had seen it frequently before, for it was
the property of the family physician. But how came it
there upon my table? And why did I shudder in
regarding it. These things were in no manner to be

(03:15:49):
accounted for, And my eyes at length dropped to the
open pages of a book into a sentence underscored therein
the words with the singular but simple ones of the
poet Evan's. Yet did she want me? He said, i'd
as see supportedtam amckay a visitardum cordas maeus a equantulum
fo de levatus. Why then, as I perused them, did
the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and
the butt of my body become congured within my veins.

(03:16:10):
There came a light tap at the library door, and
pale as a tenant of a tomb a monile, entered
upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he
spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low.
What said he? Some broken sentences I heard? He thought
of a wild cry, disturbing the silence of the night,
of the gathering together of the household, of a search
in the direction of the sound. And his tones grew

(03:16:32):
thrilling and distinct, as he whispered me of a violet grave,
or disfigured body enthrouded its still breathing, still palpitating, still alive.
He pointed to garments fell muddy and clotted with gore.
I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand.
It was indented with the impressive human nails. He directed
my attention to some object against the wall. I looked
at it for some minutes. It was a spade with

(03:16:55):
a shriek. I bound to the table and grasped the
box that lay upon it, but I could not force
it open, and in my tremor, it flipped from my
hands and fell heavily and burst into paces. And from it,
with a rattling sound, they rolled up some instruments of
gentle surgery, intermingled with thirty two small white and ivory
looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
End of Bereonese recorded by Blake Curran where it's mid

(03:17:17):
ninety four. My blog is Theotherblake dot WordPress dot com.

Speaker 13 (03:17:27):
Chapter nine of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Recording by novella Serena Creepy Tales by

(03:17:49):
Edgar Allan Poe, Chapter nine, Lie Jeer and the will
therein lieth, which dieth not, who knoweth the mysteries of
the will with its vigor, For God is but a
great will, pervading all things. By nature of its intentness.

(03:18:10):
Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto
death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.
Joseph Glanville. I cannot, for my soul remember how when,
or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the
lady Lydia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory

(03:18:33):
is feeble through much suffering. Or perhaps I cannot now
bring these points to mind, because in truth, the character
of my beloved her rare learning, her singular yet placid
cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of
her low musical language, made their way into my heart

(03:18:57):
by paces so steadily and stealthy, progressive that they have
been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met
her first and most frequently, in some large, old, decaying
city near the rhine of her family. I have surely
her to speak that it is of a remotely ancient

(03:19:18):
date cannot be doubted. Lygia Ligia in studies of a
nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of
the outward world. It is by that sweet word, alone,
by Ligia, that I bring before mine eyes in fancy
the image of her, who is no more. And now,

(03:19:41):
while I write a recollection, flashes upon me that I
have never known the paternal name of her, who was
my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner
of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom.
Was it a playful charge on the part of my Lygia,
or was it a test of my strength of affection

(03:20:01):
that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? Or
was it rather a caprice of my own, a wildly
romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion.
I but indistinctly recall the fact itself. What wonder that
I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or tended it.

(03:20:22):
And indeed, if ever she the wan and misty winged
ash to fete of idolatrous Egypt, presided as they tell
over marriage is ill omened, then most surely she presided
over mine. There is one dear topic, however, on which
my memory falls me not. It is the person of Lygia.

(03:20:45):
In stature, she was tall, somewhat slender, and in her
latter days even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to
betray the majesty, the quiet ease of her demeanor, or
the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came
and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware

(03:21:06):
of her entrance into my close study, save by the
dear music of her low, sweet voice, as she placed
her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face,
no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of
an opium dream, an airy and spirit lifting vision, more
wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered vision about the

(03:21:27):
slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features
were not of that regular mold which we have been
falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the Heathen.
There is no exquisite beauty, says Bacon Lord Verulin, speaking
truly of all the forms in genera of beauty without

(03:21:47):
some strangeness in the proportion. Yet, although I saw that
the features of Lygia were not of a classic regularity,
although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed exquisite, and
felt that there was much of strangeness pervading it, Yet
I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and

(03:22:07):
to trace home my own perception of the strange. I
examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead. It
was faultless, how cold indeed, that word, when applied to
a majesty, so divine the skin, rivaling the purest ivory,
the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the

(03:22:30):
regions above the temples, and then the raven black, the glossy,
the luxuriance, and naturally curling tresses, setting forth the full
force of the Homeric epithet Hyacinthine. I looked at the
delicate outlines of the nose, and nowhere but in the
graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection.

(03:22:53):
There were the same luxurious smoothness of the surface, the
same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously
curved nostrils. Speaking the free spirit, I regarded the sweet mouth.
Here was, indeed the triumph of all things heavenly, the
magnificent turn of the short upper lip, the soft, voluptuous

(03:23:16):
slumber of the under, the dimples which sported, and the
color which spoke the teeth glancing back with the brilliancy,
almost startling every ray of the holy light which fell
upon them. In her serene and placid, yet most exultingly
radiant of smiles, I scrutinized the formation of the chin.

(03:23:37):
And here too I found the gentleness of breath, the
softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality of
the Greek, the contour which the god Apollo revealed, but
in a dream to Cleomenes, the sun of the Athenian.
And then I peered into the large eyes of Lygia,
for eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.

(03:24:00):
It might have been too, that in these days of
my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Ferulem eludes.
They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary
eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than
the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of
the valley of Nordjiahad. Yet it was only at intervals,

(03:24:21):
in moments of intense excitement, that this peculiarity became more
than slightly noticeable in Nigia. And at such moments was
her beauty in my heated fancy. Thus it appeared, perhaps
the beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth,
the beauty of the fabulous hurry of the Turk. The
hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black,

(03:24:44):
and far over them hung jetty lashes of great length.
The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint.
The strangeness, however, which I found in the eyes, was
of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color,
or the brilliancy of the features, And must after all

(03:25:05):
be referred to in the expression ah word of no meaning,
behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our
ignorance of so much of the spiritual. The expression of
the eyes of Lygia. How for long hours I have
pondered upon it, How have I, through the whole of
the midsummer night, struggled to fathom it?

Speaker 9 (03:25:26):
What was it?

Speaker 13 (03:25:27):
That something more profound than the well of Democritus, which
lay far within the pupils of my beloved.

Speaker 2 (03:25:33):
What was it?

Speaker 13 (03:25:35):
I was possessed with a passion to discover those eyes,
those large, those shining, those divine orbs. They became to
me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest
of astrologers. There is no point among the many incomprehensible
anomalies of the signs of mind more thrillingly exciting than

(03:25:56):
the fact never I believe noticed in the school that
in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten,
we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance,
without being able in the end to remember. And thus,
how frequently in my intense scrutiny of Lygia's eyes have

(03:26:17):
I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression, felt
it approaching, yet not quite be mine, And so at
length entirely depart and strange, O strangest mystery of all
I found in the commonest objects of the universe a
circle of analogies to that expression. I mean to say that,

(03:26:39):
subsequently to the period when Lygia's beauty passed into my spirit,
their dwelling as in a shrine I derived from many existences.
In the material world, a sentiment such as I felt
always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs.
Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, nor analyze,

(03:27:01):
nor even steadily view it. I recognized it. Let me repeat,
sometimes in the survey of a rapidly growing vine, in
the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a
stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean,
in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it
in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are

(03:27:24):
one or two stars in heaven, one especially a star
of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found
near the large star in Lyra. In a telescopic scrutiny
of which I have been made aware of the feeling,
I have been filled with it by certain sounds from
stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among

(03:27:48):
innumerable other instances. I well remember something in a volume
of Joseph Glanville, which, perhaps merely from its quaintness, who
shall say, never failed to inspecre tsire me with the
sentiment and the will therein lieth, which dieth not who
knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor, For

(03:28:11):
God is but a great will, pervading all things. By
nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to
the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the
weakness of his feeble will. Length of years and subsequent
reflection have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection

(03:28:33):
between this passage in the English Moralist and a portion
of the character of Ligia. An intensity in thought, action,
or speech was possibly in her a result, or at
least an index, of that gigantic volition, which, during our
long intercourse failed to give other and more immediate evidence

(03:28:53):
of its existence. Of all the women whom I have
ever known, she the outwardly calm, the ever placid Lygia,
was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures
of stern passion. And of such passion I could form
no estimate save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes,

(03:29:14):
which at once so delighted and aphalled me, by the
almost magical melody modulation, distinctness and placidity of her very
low voice, and by the fierce energy rendered doubly effective
by contrast with her manner of utterance of the wild
words which she habitually uttered. I have spoken of the
learning of Lygia. It was immense, such as I have

(03:29:37):
never known in woman. In the classical tongues. She was
deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended
in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have
never known her at fault, indeed upon any theme of
the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the
boasted airy udition of the academy, have I ever found

(03:29:58):
Lygia at fault? How singularly, how thrillingly, this one point
in the nature of my wife has forced itself at
this late period only upon my attention. I said, her
knowledge was such as I have never known in woman.
But where breathed the man who was traversed and successfully
all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science.

(03:30:22):
I saw not then what I now clearly perceived. That
the acquisitions of Lygia were gigantic, were astounding. Yet I
was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself
with a childlike confidence to her guidance through the chaotic
world of metaphysical investigation, at which I was most busily

(03:30:43):
occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how
vast a triumph, with how vivid a delight? With how
much of all that is ethereal in hope did I
feel as she bent over me in studies, but little
sought but less known that vicious vista, by slow degrees
expanding before me down those long, gorgeous and all untrodden path,

(03:31:06):
I might at length pass onward to the goal of
a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden. How poignant,
then must have been the grief with which, after some
years I beheld my well grounded expectations take wings to
themselves and fly away. Without Ligia, I was but as
a child groping benight it. Her presence, her readings alone

(03:31:29):
rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in
which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant luster of her eyes.
Letters lambent and golden grew duller than Saturnian lead. And
now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the
pages over which I poured Lygia grew ill the wild

(03:31:52):
eyes blazed with a too too glorious effulgence. The pale
fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave,
and the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and
sank impetuously with the tides of the gentle emotion. I
saw that she must die, and I struggled desperately in

(03:32:12):
spirit with the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the
passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than
my own. There had been much in her stern nature
to impress me with the belief that to her death
would have come without its terrors.

Speaker 3 (03:32:28):
But not so.

Speaker 13 (03:32:30):
Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the
fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the shadow.
I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would
have soothed, I would have reasoned, but in the intensity
of her wild desire for life, for life, but for life,

(03:32:50):
solace and reason were the uttermost folly. Yet not until
the last instance, amid the most convulsive writhings of her
fierce lias, spirit was shaken the external placidity of her demeanor.
Her voice grew more gentle grew more low. Yet I
would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of

(03:33:11):
the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened,
entranced to a melody more than mortal, to assumptions and
aspirations which mortality had never before known. That she loved me,
I should not have doubted, and I might have been

(03:33:31):
easily aware that in a bosom such as hers, love
would have reigned no ordinary passion. But in death only
was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.
For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out
before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than
passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to

(03:33:55):
be so blessed by such confessions? How had I deserved
to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved
in the hour of her making them? But upon this
subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only
that eligious more than womanly abandonment to a love alas
all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed. I at length recognized the

(03:34:19):
principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire
for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away.
It is this wild longing. It is this eager vehemence
of desire for life, but for life, that I have
no power to portray, no utterance capable of expressing. At
high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning

(03:34:41):
me peremptorily to her side, she bade me repeat certain
verses composed by herself not many days before I obeyed her.
They were these lo tis a gala night within the
lonesome latter years, an angel throng, bewinged the dight in veils,
and drowned in tears, sit in a theater to see

(03:35:04):
a play of hopes and fears, while the orchestra breathes
fitfully the music of the spheres. Minds in the form
of God on high mutter and mumble low, and hither
and thither fly mere puppets, they who come and go
at bidding of vast, formless things that shift the scenery

(03:35:27):
to and fro, flapping from out their condor wings invisible.
Woe that motley drama. Oh, be sure it shall not
be forgot with its phantom chaste for evermore by a
crowd that sees it not through a circle that ever
returneth thin to the self same spot, and much of

(03:35:47):
madness and more of sin and horror the soul of
the plot. But see amid the mimic rout, a crawling sheep, intrude,
a blood red thing that writhes from out the sea solitude.
It rise, it writhes with mortal pangs. The mimes become
its food, and the seraphs sob at vermin fangs in

(03:36:10):
human gore imbued out Out are the lights out all
and over each quivering form the curtain. A funeral pall
comes down with the rush of a storm, and the
angels all pallid and wan uprising unveiling, affirm that the
play is the tragedy man and its hero the conqueror worm.

(03:36:37):
Oh God, half shrieked Idea, leaping to her feet and
extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement. As I
made an end of these lines, O God, O Divine Father,
shall these things be undeviatingly, so shall this conqueror be
not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in thee?

(03:36:59):
Who who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its
vigor man doth not yield him to the angels, nor
unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his
feeble will. And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she
suffered her white arms to fall, and returned solemnly to
her bed of death. And as she breathed her last sighs,

(03:37:21):
there came mingled with them, a low murmur from her lips.
I bent to them my ear and distinguished again the
concluding words of the passage in Glanville. Man doth not
yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save
only through the weakness of his feeble will. She died,

(03:37:42):
and I crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could
no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in
the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had
no lack of what the world calls well. Lijia had
brought me far more, very, far more than ordinarily falls
to the lot. After a few months therefore, of weary

(03:38:03):
and aimless wandering, I purchased and put in some repair
an abbey which I shall not name, in one of
the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England, the
gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage
aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time honored
memories connected with both had much in unison with the

(03:38:26):
feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that
remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet, although the
external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered
but little alteration, I gave way with a childlike perversity,
and perchance, with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows

(03:38:47):
to a display of more than regal magnificence within. For
such follies, even in childhood I had imbibed a taste,
and now they came back to me as if in
the dotage of grief. Alas I feel how much even
of the incipient madness might have been discovered in the
gorgeous and fantastic draperies in the sullen carvings of Egypt,

(03:39:09):
in the wild cornices and furniture, in the bedlam patterns
of the carpets of tupped at Gold. I had become
a bounden slave in the trammels of Opium, and my
labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams.
But these absurdities must not pause to detail. Let me
speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither in

(03:39:32):
a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar
as my bride, as the successor of the unforgotten Nigia,
the fair haired and blue eyed lady Rohenna Trevanion of Tremaine.
There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration
of that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me.

(03:39:53):
Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride,
when through thirst of gold they permitted to pass the
threshold of an apartment so bitdecked a maiden and a
daughter so beloved. I have said that I minutely remember
the details of the chamber, Yet I am sadly forgetful
on topics of deep moment.

Speaker 5 (03:40:13):
And here there was no.

Speaker 13 (03:40:14):
System, no keeping in the fantastic display to take hold
upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret
of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape and of
capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon
was the sole window, an immense sheet of unbroken glass
from venice, a single pane and tinted of a leaden hue,

(03:40:38):
so that the rays of either the sun or moon
passing through it fell with a ghastly luster on the
objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window
extended the trellis work of an aged vine, which clambered
up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling of
gloomy looking oak was excessively lofty, vaulted and elaborately fretted

(03:41:01):
with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi Gothic,
semi druidical device. From out the most central recess of
this melancholy vaulting depended by a single chain of gold
with long links. A huge censor of the same metal,
saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that

(03:41:22):
there writhed in and out of them, as if endued
with a serpent vitality. A continual succession of parti colored fires.
Some few ottomans and golden candelabra of Eastern figure were
in various stations about, And there was the couch, too,
bridal couch of an Indian model, and low and sculptured

(03:41:42):
of solid ebony, with a pall like canopy above. In
each of the angles of the chamber stood on end
a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite from the tombs of
the kings, over against lucer, with their aged lids full
of the immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the
apartment lay alas the chief fantasy of all. The lofty walls,

(03:42:06):
gigantic in height, even unproportionably so, were hung from summit
to foot in vast folds with the heavy and massive
looking tapestry. Tapestry of a material which was found alike
as carpet on the floor, as a covering for the
ottomans and the ebony bed, and as a canopy for
the bed, and as the gorgeous fallutes of the curtains

(03:42:28):
which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest
cloth of gold. It was spotted all over at regular
intervals with Arabesque figures about a foot in diameter, and
wrought upon the cloth and patterns of the most jetty black.
But these figures partook of the true character of the
Arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view,

(03:42:51):
by a contrivance now common and indeed traceable to a
very remote period of antiquity. They were made changeable in
aspect to one entering the room, they bore the appearance
of simple monstrosities, but upon a farther advance, this appearance
gradually departed, and step by step, as the visitor moved

(03:43:12):
his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by
an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belonged to
the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty
slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened
by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of
wind behind the draperies, giving a hideous and uneasy animation

(03:43:35):
to the whole in halls such as these. In a
bridal chamber such as this, I passed with the Lady Tremaine,
the unhallowed hours of the first month of our marriage
passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded
the fierce moodiness of my temper, that she shunned me
and loved me but little I could not help perceiving.

(03:43:59):
But it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed
her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man.
My memory flew back, Oh, with what intensity of regret,
till Igia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed.
I reveled in recollections of her purity, of her wisdom,

(03:44:20):
of her lofty, her ethereal nature, of her passionate, her
idolatrous love. Now then did my spirit fully and freely
burn with more than all the fires of her own
in the excitement of my opium dreams. For I was
habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug. I would
call aloud upon her name during the silence of the night,

(03:44:41):
or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day,
as if through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the
consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could
restore her to the pathway she had abandoned. Ah, could
it be forever upon the earth. About the commencement of
the second month of the marriage, the lady Rowena was

(03:45:02):
attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was slow.
The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy, and
in her perturbed state of half slumber, she spoke of
sounds and of motions in and about the chamber of
the Church, which I concluded had no origin save in
the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric

(03:45:24):
influences of the chamber itself. She became at length convalescent,
finally well, Yet but a brief period elapsed ere a second,
more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering,
and from this attack her frame at all times feeble,
never altogether recovered. Her illnesses were after this epoch of

(03:45:46):
alarming character and of more alarming recurrence, defying alike the
knowledge and the great exertions of her physicians. With the
increase of the chronic disease, which had thus apparently taken
too sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated by
human means, I could not fall to observe a similar
increase in the nervousy irritation of her temperament and in

(03:46:08):
her excitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again,
and now more frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds, of
the slight sounds, and of the unusual motions among the
tapestries to which she had formerly alluded. One night, near
the closing in of September. She pressed this distressing subject

(03:46:29):
with more than usual emphasis upon my attention. She had
just awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been watching,
with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the
workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat by the side
of her ebony bed, upon one of the ottomans of India.
She partly arose and spoke in an earnest, low whisper,

(03:46:52):
of the sounds which she then heard, but which I
could not hear, Of motions which she then saw, but
which I could not perceived. The wind was rushing hurriedly
behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her what
let me confess it. I could not all believe that
those almost inarticulate breathings and those very gentle variations of

(03:47:14):
the figures upon the wall were but the natural effects
of that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly
pallor overspreading her face had proved to me that my
exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to
be fainting, and no attendants were within call. I remember
there was deposited a decanter of light wine which had

(03:47:36):
been ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber
to procure it. But as I stepped beneath the light
of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature attracted
my attention. I had felt that some palpable, although invisible, object,
had passed lightly by my person, and I saw that
there lay upon the golden carpet in the very middle

(03:47:57):
of the rich luster, thrown from the censer shadow, a faint,
indefinite shadow of angelic aspect, such as might be fancied
for the shadow of a shade. But I was wild
with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and
heated these things but little, And heated these things but little,
nor spoke of them to Rowenna. Having found the wine,

(03:48:21):
I recrossed the chamber and poured out a gobletful, which
I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She
had now partially recovered, however, and took the vessel herself,
while I sank upon an ottoman near me, with my
eyes fastened upon her purson. It was then that I
became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet,

(03:48:41):
and near the couch, and in a second thereafter, as
Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to
her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I
saw fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible
spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four
large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If

(03:49:02):
this I saw not so, Rowena she swallowed the wine unhesitatingly,
and I forbore to speak to her of a circumstance
which must, after all, I considered, have been but the
suggestion of a vivid imagination rendered morbidly active by the
terror of the lady, by the opium, and by the hour.
Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that

(03:49:26):
immediately subsequent to the fall of the ruby drops, a
rapid change for the worst took place in the disorder
of my wife, so that on the third subsequent night,
the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb,
and on the fourth I sat alone with her shrouded
body in that fantastic chamber which had received her as
my bride. Wild visions opium engendered flitted shadowlike before me.

(03:49:52):
I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophage in the
angles of the room, upon the varying figures of the drapery,
and upon the rye of the party colored fires, and
the censer overhead. My eyes then fell, as I called
to mind the circumstances of a former night, to the
spot beneath the glare of the censer, where I had
seen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however,

(03:50:15):
no longer, and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my
glances to the pallid and rigid figure upon the bed.
Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Lygia, and
then came back upon my heart with the turbulent violence
of a flood, the whole of that unutterable woe with
which I had regarded her thus enshrouded. The night, waned

(03:50:37):
and still with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of
the one only and supremely beloved. I remained gazing upon
the body of Rowenna. It might have been at midnight,
or perhaps earlier or later, for I had taken no
note of time. When a sob low, gentle, but very
distinct startled me from my reverie. I felt that it

(03:51:00):
came from the bed of ebony, the bed of death.
I listened in an agony of superstitious terror, but there
was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision
to detect any motion in the corpse, but there was
not the slightest perceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived.
I had heard the noise, however, faint, and my soul

(03:51:20):
was awakened within me. I resolutely and perseveringly kept my
attention riveted upon the body. Many minutes elapsed before any
circumstance occurred, tending to throw light upon the mystery. At length,
it became evident that a slight, a very feeble and
barely noticeable tinge of color, had flushed up within the

(03:51:40):
cheeks and along the sunken small veins of the eyelids,
through a species of unutterable horror and awe for which
the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression. I
felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid
where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated
to restore my self possession. I could no longer doubt

(03:52:03):
that we had been precipitate in our preparations, that Rowena
still lived. It was necessary that some immediate exertion be made.
Yet churred was altogether apart from the portion of the
abbey tenanted by the servants, there were none within call.
I had no means of summoning them to my aid
without leaving the room for many minutes, and this I
could not venture to do. I therefore struggled alone in

(03:52:26):
my endeavors to call back the spirit ill hovering. In
a short period, it was certain, however, that a relapse
had taken place. The color disappeared from both eyelid and cheek,
leaving a wanness even more than that of marble. The
lips became doubly shriveled and pinched up in the ghastly
expression of death. A repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly

(03:52:49):
the surface of the body, and all the usual rigorous
illness immediately supervened. I fell back, with a shudder upon
the couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused,
and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of Lygia.
An hour thus elapsed to win. Could it be possible?
I was a second time aware of some vague sound

(03:53:11):
issuing from the region of the bed. I listened in
extremity of horror. The sound came again. It was a
sigh rushing to the corpse. I saw, distinctly saw a
tremor upon the lips. In a minute afterward, they relaxed,
disclosing a bright line of the pearly teeth. Amazement now
struggled in my bosom with the profound awe which had

(03:53:33):
hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim,
that my reason wandered, And it was only by a
violent effort that I at length succeeded in nerving myself
to the task which duty thus once more had pointed out.
There was now a partial glow upon the forehead, and
upon the cheek and throat. A perceptible warmth pervaded the

(03:53:53):
whole frame. There was even a slight pulsation at the heart.
The lady leaved, and with redouble order, I betook myself
to the task of restoration. I chafed and bathed the
temples and the hands, and used every exertion which experience
and no little medical reading could suggest.

Speaker 5 (03:54:11):
But in vain.

Speaker 13 (03:54:13):
Suddenly the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed
the expression of the dead, and in an instant afterward,
the whole body took upon itself the icy chillingness, the
livid hue, the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and all
the loathsome peculiarities of that which has been for many
days a tenant of the tomb. And again I sunk

(03:54:36):
into visions of Lygia. And again what marvel? Did I shudder?
While I write? Again? There reached my ears a low
sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why
shall I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night?
Why shall I pause to relate how time after time,
until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous
drama of revivocation was repeated, How each terrific relapsed was

(03:55:00):
only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death. How
each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some
invisible foe, And how each struggle was succeeded by I
know not what of a wild change in the personal
appearance of the corpse. Let me hurry to a conclusion.
The greater part of the fearful night had worn away,

(03:55:22):
and she who had been dead once again stirred, and
now more vigorously than hitherto. Although arousing from a dissolution
more appalling in its utter hopelessness than any, I had
long ceased to struggle or to move, and remained sitting
rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl
of violent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the

(03:55:44):
least terrible, the least consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred,
and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life
flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance. The limbs relaxed,
and save that the eyelids we yet pressed heavily together,
and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still
imparted their charnel character to the figure. I might have

(03:56:07):
dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off utterly fetters of death.
But if this idea was not even then altogether adopted,
I could at least doubt no longer. When arising from
the bed, tottering with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and
with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the
thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the

(03:56:31):
middle of the apartment. I trembled, not, I stirred, not
for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air,
the stature, the demeanor of the figure rushed hurriedly through
My brain had paralyzed, had chilled me into stone. I
stirred not, but gazed upon the apparition. There was a

(03:56:51):
mad disorder in my thoughts, a tumult unappeasable. Could it
indeed be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it
indeed be Rowena at all? The fair haired, the blue
eyed lady, Rowena Trevanian of Tremaine. Why why should I
doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth. But

(03:57:14):
then might it not be the mouth of the breathing
lady of Tremaine. And the cheeks there were the roses
in her noon of life? Yes, these might indeed be
the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And
the chin, with its dimples as in health? Might it
not be hers? But had she then grown taller since
her malady? What inexpressible maddness seized me with that thought?

(03:57:39):
One bound? And I had reached her feet. Shrinking from
my touch, she let fall from her head unloosened the
ghastly servants which had confined it, and there streamed forth
into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of
long and disheveled hair. It was blacker than the raven
wings of the midnight, and now slowly opened the eyes

(03:58:03):
of the figure which stood before me. Here then at least,
I shrieked aloud, Can I never can I never be mistaken?
These are the fool and the black and the wild
eyes of my lost love, of the lady, of the
Lady Lygia, and of Lygia. Recording by Novella Serena.

Speaker 9 (03:58:38):
Chapter ten of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Recording by Nicholas Knear. Creepy Tales by
Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe, hop Frog. I

(03:59:05):
never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as
the King was. He seemed to live only for joking,
to tell a good story of the joke kind, and
to tell it well was the surest road to his favor.
Thus it happened that his seven ministers were all noted
for their accomplishments as jokers. They all took after the

(03:59:27):
king too, in being large, corpulent, oily men, as well
as inimitable jokers. Whether people grow fat by joking, or
whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to
a joke, I have never been quite able to determine,
But certain it is that a lean joker is a

(03:59:49):
rara avis in terras about the refinements, or as he
called them, the ghost of wit. The king troubled himself
very little. He had an especial admir for breadth in
a jest, and would often put up with length for
the sake of it. Over niceties wearied him. He would
have preferred Rabelais's Gargantua to the Zadig of Voltaire, and

(04:00:14):
upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better
than verbal ones. At the date of my narrative, professing
jesters had not altogether gone out of fashion at court.
Several of the great continental powers still retained their fools,
who were motley with caps and bells, and who were

(04:00:34):
expected to be always ready with sharp witticisms at a
moment's notice. In consideration of the crumbs that fell from
the royal table. Our King, as a matter of course,
retained his fool. The fact is he required something in
the way of folly, if only to counterbalance the heavy
wisdom of the seven wise men who were his ministers,

(04:00:55):
not to mention himself. His fool or professional jester was
not only a fool, however, his value was trebled in
the eyes of the king by the fact of his
also being a dwarf and a cripple. Dwarfs were as
common at court in those days as fools, and many
monarchs would have found it difficult to get through their days.

(04:01:17):
Days are rather long at court than elsewhere without both
a jester to laugh with and a dwarf to laugh at.
But as I have already observed, your jesters in ninety
nine cases out of a hundred, are fat, round and unwieldy,
so that it was no small source of self gratulation
with our King that in hop Frog this was the

(04:01:39):
fool's name. He possessed a triplicate treasure in one person.
I believe the name hop Frog was not that given
to the dwarf by his sponsors at baptism, but it
was conferred upon him by general consent of the several
ministers on account of his inability to walk as other
men do. In fact, hop Frog could only get along

(04:02:01):
by a sort of interjectional gait, something between a leap
and a wriggle, a movement that afforded illimitable amusement and
of course consolation to the king, for notwithstanding the protuberance
of his stomach and a constitutional swelling of the head,
the King by his whole court was accounted a capital figure.

(04:02:23):
But although hop Frog, through the distortion of his legs,
could move only with great pain and difficulty along a
road or floor, the prodigious muscular power which nature seemed
to have bestowed upon his arms by way of compensation
for deficiency in the lower limbs, enabled him to perform
many feats of wonderful dexterity where trees or ropes were

(04:02:44):
in question, or anything else to climb. At such exercises,
he certainly much more resembled a squirrel or a small
monkey than a frog. I am not able to say
with precision from what country hop Frog originally came. It
was from some barbarous region. However, that no person ever
heard of a vast distance from the court of our King. Hoprog,

(04:03:08):
and a young girl, very little less dwarfish than himself,
although of exquisite proportions and a marvelous answer, had been
forcibly carried off from their respective homes in adjoining provinces
and sent as presents to the King by one of
his ever victorious generals. Under these circumstances, it is not
to be wondered at that a close intimacy arose between

(04:03:31):
the two little captives. Indeed, they soon became sworn friends. Hoprog, who,
although he made a great deal of sport, was by
no means popular, had it not in his power to
render Tripetta many services. But she, on account of her
grace and exquisite beauty, although a dwarf, was universally admired

(04:03:53):
and petted, So she possessed much influence and never failed
to use it whenever she could for the benefit of
hop Frog on some grand state occasion. I forgot what
the King determined to have a masquerade, And whenever a
masquerade or anything of that kind occurred at our court,
then the talents both of hop Frog and Trepetta were

(04:04:15):
sure to be called into play. Hop Frog in a
special was so inventive in the way of getting up pageants,
suggesting novel characters, and arranging costumes for masked balls, that
nothing could be done, it seems, without his assistance. The
night appointed for the feat had arrived, a gorgeous hall

(04:04:36):
had been fitted up under Trepetta's eye with every kind
of device which could possibly give a clet to a masquerade.
The whole court was in a fever of expectation. As
for costumes and characters, it might well be supposed that
everybody had come to a decision on such points. Many
had made up their minds as to what roles they

(04:04:57):
should assume a week or even a month in advance,
And in fact there was not a particle of indecision
anywhere except in the case of the King and his
seven ministers. Why they hesitated I never could tell, unless
they did it by way of a joke. More probably,
they found it difficult, on account of being so fat

(04:05:19):
to make up their minds at all events. Time flew
and as a last resort they sent for Tripetta and
hop Frog. When the two little friends obeyed the summons
of the king, They found him sitting at his wine
with the seven members of his cabinet council. But the
monarch appeared to be in a very ill humor. He

(04:05:40):
knew that hop Frog was not fond of wine, for
it excited the poor cripple almost to madness, and madness
is no comfortable feeling. But the King loved his practical
jokes and took pleasure in forcing hop Frog to drink.
And as the King called it to be merry, come here,
hop Frog said he as the jesture and his friends

(04:06:02):
entered the room. Swallow this bumper to the health of
your absent friends here, hop Frog sighed. And then let
us have the benefit of your invention. We want characters, characters,
man something novel out of the way. We are wearied
with this everlasting sameness. Come drink the wine will brighten

(04:06:24):
your wits. Hop Frog endeavored, as usual to get up
a jest in reply to these advances from the king,
but the effort was too much. It happened to be
the poor dwarf's birthday, and the command to drink to
his absent friends forced the tears to his eyes. Many
large bitter drops fell into the goblet as he took

(04:06:46):
it humbly from the hand of the tyrant. Ah ha ha,
roared the latter, as the dwarf reluctantly drained the beaker.
See what a glass of good wine can do? Why
you our eyes are shining already, poor fellow, His large
eyes gleamed rather than shone, for the effect of wine

(04:07:08):
on his excitable brain was not more powerful than instantaneous.
He placed the goblet nervously on the table and looked
round upon the company with a half insane stare. They
all seemed highly amused at the success of the King's joke.
And now to business, said the Prime Minister, A very

(04:07:30):
fat man, Yes, said the King. Come lend us your assistance. Characters,
my fine fellow, we stand in need of characters, all
of us.

Speaker 6 (04:07:42):
Ha ha ha.

Speaker 9 (04:07:44):
And as this was seriously meant for a joke, his
laugh was chorused by the seven hop Frog also laughed,
although feebly and somewhat vacantly. Come, Come, said the King, impatiently.
Have you nothing to suggest? I am endeavoring to think
of something novel, replied the dwarf abstractedly, for he was

(04:08:07):
quite bewildered by the wine. Endeavoring cried the tyrant fiercely,
What do you mean by that? Ah, I perceive you
are sulky and want more wine? Here, drink this, and
he poured out another gobletful and offered it to the cripple,
who merely gazed at it, gasping for breath. Drink, I say,

(04:08:31):
shouted the monster, or by the fiends. The dwarf hesitated.
The king grew purple with rage. The courtier smirked. Tripetta,
pale as a corpse, advanced to the monarch's seat, and,
falling on her knees before him, implored him to spare
her friend. The tyrant regarded her for some moments in

(04:08:54):
evident wonder at her audacity. He seemed quite at a
loss what to do or say, how most becomingly to
express his indignation. At last, without uttering a syllable, he
pushed her violently from him, and threw the contents of
the brimming goblet in her face. The poor girl got

(04:09:15):
up the best she could, and, not daring even to sigh,
resumed her position at the foot of the table. There
was a dead silence for about half a minute, during
which the falling of a leaf or of a feather
might have been heard, It was interrupted by a low,
but harsh and protracted, grating sound, which seemed to come

(04:09:36):
at once from every corner of the room. What what
what are you making that noise? For, demanded the King,
turning furiously to the dwarf. The latter seemed to have
recovered in great measure from his intoxication, and, looking fixedly
but quietly into the tyrant's face, merely ejaculated. I I

(04:09:58):
how could it have been?

Speaker 2 (04:09:59):
Meet?

Speaker 9 (04:10:02):
The sound appeared to come from without, observed one of
the courtiers. I fancy it was the parrot at the window,
wetting his bill upon his cage wires. True, replied the monarch,
as if much relieved by the suggestion. But on the
honor of a knight, I could have sworn that it
was the gritting of this vagabond's teeth. Hereupon, the dwarf laughed.

(04:10:27):
The king was too confirmed a joker to object to
anyone's laughing, and displayed a set of large, powerful, and
very repulsive teeth. Moreover, he avowed his perfect willingness to
swallow as much wine as desired. The monarch was pacified, and,
having drained another bumper with no very perceptible ill effect,

(04:10:48):
hop Frog entered at once and with spirit into the
plans for the masquerade. I cannot tell what was the
association of idea, observed he very trained, as if he
had never tasted wine in his life. But just after
your majesty had struck the girl and thrown the wine
in her face, just after your majesty had done this,

(04:11:11):
and while the parrot was making that odd noise outside
the window, there came into my mind a capital diversion,
one of my own country frolics, often enacted among us
at our masquerades. But here it will be new altogether. Unfortunately, however,
it requires a company of eight persons, and here we are,

(04:11:33):
cried the King, laughing at his acute discovery of the coincidence.
Eight to a fraction. I and my seven ministers come.
What is the diversion? We call it, replied the cripple
the eight chained orangutangs. And it really is excellent sport,
if well enacted, we will enact it, remarked the King,

(04:11:57):
drawing himself up and lowering his eyelids. The beauty of
the game continued hop Frog. Lies in the fright it
occasions among the women. Capital roared in chorus the monarch
and his ministry, I will equip you as orangutangs, proceeded
the dwarf. Leave all that to me. The resemblance shall

(04:12:20):
be so striking that the company of masqueraders will take
you for real beasts, and of course they will be
as much terrified as astonished. Oh this is quite exquisite,
exclaimed the King hop Frog. I will make a man
of you. The chains are for the purpose of increasing

(04:12:42):
the confusion. By their jangling you are supposed to have
escaped en masse from your keepers. Your majesty cannot conceive
the effect produced at a masquerade by eight chained orangutangs,
imagined to be real ones by most of the company,
and rushing in with the savage cries among the crowd

(04:13:02):
delicately and gorgeously habited men and women. The contrast is inevitable,
it must be said. The King and the council arose hurriedly,
as it was growing late, to put in execution the
scheme of hop Frog. His mode of equipping the party
as orangutangs was very simple, but effective enough for his purposes.

(04:13:25):
The animals in question had, at the epoch of my story,
verily rarely been seen in any part of the civilized world.
And as the imitations made by the dwarf were sufficiently
beastlike and more than sufficiently hideous, their truthfulness to nature
was thus thought to be secured. The King and his

(04:13:46):
ministers were first encased in tight fitting stockinet shirts and drawers.
They were then saturated with tar. At this stage of
the process, some one of the parties suggested feathers, but
the suggestion was at once overruled by the dwarf, who
soon convinced the eight by ocular demonstration that the hair

(04:14:08):
of such a brute as the orangutang was much more
efficiently represented by flu. A thick coating of the latter
was accordingly plastered upon the coating of tar. A long
chain was now procured. First it was passed about the
waist of the king, and tied then about another of
the party, and also tied then about awe successively in

(04:14:32):
the same manner. When this chaining arrangement was complete, and
the party stood as far apart from each other as possible,
they formed a circle, and to make all things appear natural,
hop frog passed the residue of the chain in two
diameters at right angles across the circle, after the fashion
adopted at the present day by those who captured chimpanzees

(04:14:55):
or other large gnapes. In Borneo. The grand Salution in
which the masquerade was to take place was a circular room,
very lofty and receiving the light of the sun only
through a single window at top. At night, the season
for which the apartment was especially designed. It was illuminated
principally by a large chandelier, depending by a chain from

(04:15:19):
the center of the skylight, and lowered or elevated by
means of a counterbalance. As usual, but in order not
to look unsightly, this latter passed outside the copula and
over the roof. The arrangements of the room had been
left to Torpetta's superintendence, but in some particulars it seems
she had been guided by the calmer judgment of her

(04:15:41):
friend the Dwarf, at his suggestion. It was that on
this occasion the chandelier was removed its waxen drippings, which,
in whether so warm it was quite impossible to prevent,
would have been seriously detrimental to the rich dresses of
the guests, who, on account of the crowded state of
the s saloon could not all be expected to keep

(04:16:02):
from out its center, that is to say, from under
the chandelier. Additional sconces were set in various parts of
the hall out of the war, and a flambeau emitting
a sweet odor, was placed in the right hand of
each of the caryates that stood against the wall, some
fifty or sixty altogether. The eight Orangutangs, taking hop Frog's advice,

(04:16:25):
waited patiently until midnight, when the room was thoroughly filled
with masqueraders, before making their appearance. No sooner had the
clocks ceased striking, however, than they rushed, or rather rolled
in all together, for the impediments of their chains caused
most of the party to fall and all to stumble
as they entered. The excitement among the masqueraders was prodigious

(04:16:50):
and filled the heart of the king with glee. As
had been anticipated, there were not a few of the
guests who supposed the ferocious looking creature to be beasts
of some kind in reality, if not precisely Orangutang's. Many
of the women swooned with affright, and had not the
king taken the precaution to exclude all weapons from the saloon,

(04:17:13):
his party might soon have expiated their frolic in their blood.
As it was, a general rush was made for the doors,
but the King had ordered them to be locked immediately
upon his entrance, and at the Dwarf's suggestion, the keys
had been deposited with him. While the tumult was at
its height, and each masquerader attentive only to his own safety,

(04:17:36):
for in fact there was much real danger from the
pressure of the excited crowd. The chain by which the
chandelier ordinarily hung, and which had been drawn up on
its removal, might have been seen very gradually to descend
until its hooked extremity came within three feet of the floor.
Soon after this, the king and his seven friends, having

(04:17:59):
reeled about the hall in all directions, found themselves at
length in its center, and of course in immediate contact
with the chain. While they were thus situated, the dwarf,
who had followed noiselessly at their heels, inciting them to
keep up the commotion, took hold of their own chain
at the intersection of the two portions which crossed the

(04:18:22):
circle diametrically and at right angles. Here, with the rapidity
of thought, he inserted the hook from which the chandelier
had been wonted to depend, and in an instant by
some unseen agency, the chandelier chain was drawn so far
upward as to take the hook out of reach, and
as an inevitable consequence, to drag the orangutans together in

(04:18:46):
close connection and face to face. The masqueraders, by this
time had recovered in some measure from their alarm, and
beginning to regard the whole matter as a well contrived pleasantry,
set up a loud shout of laughter at the predicament
of the apes. Leave them to me now, screamed hop Frog,

(04:19:07):
his shrill voice making itself easily heard through all the
dim Leave them to me. I fancy I know them.
If I can only get a good look at them,
I can soon tell who they are here. Scrambling over
the heads of the crowd, he managed to get to
the wall when seizing a flambo from one of the caryatides.

(04:19:28):
He returned as he went to the center of the room,
leaping with the agility of a monkey upon the king's head,
and thence clambered a few feet up the chain, holding
down the torch to examine the group of orangutangs, and
still screaming, I shall soon find out who they are.
And now, while the whole assembly, the apes included, were

(04:19:51):
convulsed with laughter, the jester suddenly uttered a shrill whistle
when the chain flew violently up for about thirty dragging
with it the dismayed and struggling orangutan's, and leaving them
suspended in mid air between the skylight and the floor.
Hop Frog, clinging to the chain as it rose, still

(04:20:13):
maintained his relative position in respect to the eight maskers,
and still, as if nothing were the matter, continued to
thrust his torch down toward them, as though endeavoring to
discover who they were. So thoroughly astonished was the whole
company at this ascent that a dead silence of about
a minute's duration ensued. It was broken by such a low, harsh,

(04:20:37):
grating sound as had before attracted the attention of the
King and his counselors when the former threw the wine
in the face of Tripetta. But on the present occasion
there could be no question as to whence the sound issued.
It came from the fanglike teeth of the dwarf, who
ground them and gnashed them as he foamed at the

(04:20:58):
mouth and glared laired with an expression of maniacal rage
into the upturned countenances of the king and his seven companions,
Aha said, at length, the infuriated gesture, aha, I begin
to see who these people are now here pretending to

(04:21:19):
scrutinize the king more closely, he held the flambeaux to
the flaxen coat which enveloped him, and which instantly burst
into a sheet of vivid flame. In less than half
a minute, the whole eight orangutans were blazing fiercely amid
the shrieks of the multitude, who gazed at them from below,
horror stricken, and without the power to render them the

(04:21:42):
slightest assistance. At length, the flames, suddenly increasing in virulence,
forced the gesture to climb higher up the chain to
be out of their reach, And as he made this movement,
the crowd again sank for a brief instant into silence.
The dwarf seized the upper tunity and once more spoke.

(04:22:02):
I now see distinctly, he said, what manner of people
these maskers are. They are a great king and his
seven privy councilors, a king who does not scruple to
strike a defenseless girl and his seven counselors, who are
bet him in this outrage. As for myself, I am

(04:22:23):
simply hop Frog, the jester, and this is my last jest.
Owing to the high combustibility of both the flax and
the tar to which it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely
made an end of his brief speech. Before the work
of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in their

(04:22:44):
chains a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass. The cripple
hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling,
and disappeared through the skylight. It is supposed that Tripetta,
stationed on the roof of the saloon, had been the
accomplice of her friend in this fiery revenge, and that

(04:23:06):
together they affected their escape to their own country, for
neither was seen again. End of hop Frog recording by
Nicholas Kinnear, Dayton, Ohio.

Speaker 2 (04:23:26):
Chapter eleven of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org recording by Pietrnt. Creepy Tales by Edgar
Allam Poe the Raven. Once upon a midnight dreary, while

(04:23:53):
I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and
curious volume of forgotten lore. While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping,
at my chamber door. The sun visitor, I muttered, tapping
at my chamber door. Only this and nothing more, Ah, Distinctly,

(04:24:17):
I remember. It was in the bleak December, and each
separate dying amber rotte its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly
I wished to morrow. Vainly I had sought to borrow
from my books a sease of sorrow, sorrow for the
lost Lenore, for the rare and radiant maiden whom the
angels named leonor nameless here for evermore. And the silken

(04:24:43):
said uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me, filled
me with fantastic terrors never felt before, So that now
to still the beating of my heart, I stood, repeating
the son visitor in treating entrance at my cham with door.
Some late visitor in treating entrance at my chamber door.

(04:25:03):
This it is, and nothing more. Presently my soul grew stronger, hesitating,
Then no longer sir, said I, or madam, truly your forgiveness,
I implore. But the fact is I was napping, and
so gently you came rapping, and so faintly you came
tapping tapping at my chamber door, that I scarce was

(04:25:25):
sure I heard you.

Speaker 6 (04:25:27):
Here.

Speaker 2 (04:25:28):
I opened wide the door. Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness, beering long, I stood there, one dring, fearing, doubting,
dreaming dreams no more to ever dared to dream before.
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,

(04:25:50):
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word lenor.
This eye whispered, and an echo maurmured back to word lenor.
Merely this and nothing more back into the chamber, turning
all my soul within me burning. Soon I heard again tapping,

(04:26:12):
somewhat louder than before. Surely said I surely that is
something in my window, lettice. Let me see then what
there it is, and this mystery explore. Let my heart
be still a moment, and this mystery explore, t is
the wind, and nothing more open here I've flung the shutter,

(04:26:32):
when with many a flirt and flutter in their step,
less stately raven of the saint three days of yore,
not the least appeasance made he not an instant stopped
or stayed. He but with mien of Lord or lady,
perched above my chamber door, perched upon a bust of palace,
just above my chamber door, perched and said, and nothing

(04:26:57):
more then this ebony bar beguiling my sad fancy into
smiling by the grave and stern decorum of the countenance.
It war though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,
I said, art shore, no craven, ghastly grim and ancient
raven wandering from the nightly shore. Tell me what thy

(04:27:18):
lordly name is on the night's plutonian shore, quoth the
raven never more.

Speaker 6 (04:27:27):
Much.

Speaker 2 (04:27:28):
I'm marveled this ungainly fowl to hear the course so plainly,
though its answer little mean, little relevancy bore. For we
cannot help agreeing that no living human being ever yet
was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door, bird
or beast upon the sculpted bust above his chamber door,

(04:27:48):
with such name as never more. But the raven, sitting
lonely on the placid dust, spoke only that one word,
as if his soul in that one word he did
out pour nothing further than he uttered, not a feather
than he fluttered, till I scarcely more than muttered other

(04:28:10):
friends have flown before. On the morrow, he will leave me,
as my hopes have flown before. Then, the bird said
never more. Startled at the stillness, broken by replies so
aptly spoken, doubtless, said I what it utters is its

(04:28:31):
only stop and store, cut from some unhappy master whom
unmerciful disaster followed fast, and followed faster till his songs
one burden bore till the dirges of his hope, that
melancholy birden bore of never never more. But the raven
still beguiling all my said soul into smiling straight, I

(04:28:55):
wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and vast,
and then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to
linking fancy and to fancy, thinking, what this ominous bird
of your what this grim, ungainly, ghastly gaunt and ominous

(04:29:16):
bird of your meant in croaking. Never more, this, I said,
engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing to the fowl,
whose fiery eyes now burnt into my bosom. Score this
and more, I said, divining with my head at east,
reclining on the cushion's velvet lining, that the lamplight gloated.

(04:29:38):
Or but whose velvet violet lining with the lamp like gloating,
oar she shall press Never more? Then me thought the
air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censor, swung by
angels whose faint footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. Wretch,

(04:29:58):
I cried, God, hath lent thee by these angels. He
hath sent thee respite, respite and nepenthe from thy memories
of Lenore. Quoth oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget
this lost Lenore, quoth the raven. Never more, Prophet said

(04:30:19):
I think of evil, Prophet. Still, if bird or devil,
whether tempest send, or whether tempest does the here ashore desolate,
Yet all daunted on this desert land, enchanted on this
home by horror, haunted, tell me truly, I implore, is
there is there Balm and Gilead, tell me, tell me,

(04:30:43):
I implore, quoth the raven never more? Prophet said, I
think of evil. Prophet. Still, if bird or devil, by
that heaven that bends above us, by that god, we
both don't tell this soul with sorrow laden. If within

(04:31:04):
the distant aiden it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom
the angels namelen, or clasp a rare and radiant maiden
whom the angel's name lenor quoth the raven never more
be that word or sign of parting bird or fiend.
I shrieked up, starting, get thee back into the tempest

(04:31:27):
and the nice plutonium shore. Leave no black bloom as
a token of that light that soul hath spoken, Leave
my loneliness unbroken. Quit the bust above my door. Takes
thy peak from out my heart, and take thy form
from of my door, quoth the raven never more, And

(04:31:50):
the raven never flitting still is sitting still, is sitting
on the pallid bust of palace just above my chamber door.
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's
that is dreaming, And the lump light o'er him streaming
throws his shadow on the floor, and my soul from

(04:32:12):
out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall
be lifted nevermore and of the Raven.

Speaker 6 (04:32:27):
Section twelve of Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to find out how
you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by
Eden Ray Hedrick. Creepy Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Section twelve.

(04:32:54):
The Pit and the Pendulum Cyndia tortorum most hicturba forores
sanguinis inocuai non setieta aloit sousptae non patria facto nonfuneres
tro mars ubi here of fruit vita salusque patent quatred

(04:33:17):
composed for the gates of a market to be erected
upon the site of the Jacobin clubhouse at Paris. I
was sick, sick unto death with that long agony. And
when they at length unbound me and I was permitted
to sit, I felt that my sentence were leaving me,
the sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last

(04:33:39):
distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound
of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy, indeterminate hum.
It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution, perhaps
from its association in fantasy with the burr of a
mill wheel. This only for a brief period, for presently

(04:34:01):
I heard no more. Yet for a while I saw,
but with how terrible an exaggeration, I saw the lips
of the black robe judges. They appeared to me white,
whiter than the sheet upon which I traced these words,
and thin even to grotesqueness. Thin with the intensity of
their expression of firmness, of immovable resolution, of stern contempt

(04:34:25):
of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what
to me was fate were still issuing from those lips.
I saw them arise with the delicate locution. I saw
them fashion the syllables of my name, and I shuddered,
because no sounds exceeded. I saw, too, for a few
moments of delirious horror, the salt and nearly imperceptible waving

(04:34:48):
of the sable draperies which enrapped the walls of the apartment,
and then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles
upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity,
and seemed white and slender angels who would save me.
But then all at once there came a most deadly
nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fiber in

(04:35:09):
my frame thrill, as if I touched the wire of
a galvanic battery. While the angel farmers became meaningless specters
with heads of flame, and I saw that from them
there would be no help. And there stole into my fancy,
like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet
rest there must be in the grave. The thought came

(04:35:29):
gently and steadily, and it seemed long before it attained
full appreciation. But just as my spirit came at length
properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the
judges vanished, as if magically from before me. The tall
candles sank into nothingness. Their flames went out utterly, the
blackness of darkness supervened. All sensations appeared, swallowed up in

(04:35:51):
a mad, rushing descent as of the soul, into hades
in silence and stillness. Night were universal. I had swooned,
but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost.
What of it there remained, I will not attempt to
define or even to describe. Yet all was not lost

(04:36:15):
in the deepest slumber. No in delirium, no is swoon.
No in death, no even in the grave, all is
not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing
from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer
web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, so

(04:36:37):
frail may that web have been, We remember not that
we have dreamed. In the return to life from the swoon.
There are two stages, first that of the sense of
mental or spiritual, secondly that of the sense of physical existence.
It seems probable that, if upon reaching the second stage
we could recall the impressions of the first, we should

(04:36:59):
find his impressions eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond.
And that gulf is what how at least shall we
distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb. But if
the impressions of what I have termed the first stage
are not at will recalled, yet after long interval, do

(04:37:19):
they not come unbidden? While we marvel? Whence they come?
He who has never swooned. Is not he who finds
strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow.
Is not he who beholds, floating in mid air the
sad visions that many may not view. Is not he
who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower. Is
not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of

(04:37:41):
some musical case which has never before arrested his attention.
Amid frequent and thoughtful endeavors to remember, made earnest struggles
to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness
into which my soul had lapsed. There have been moments
when I have dreamed to success. There have been brief,
very brief periods when I have conjured up remembrances which

(04:38:03):
the lucid reason of a later epoch assures me could
have had reference only to that condition of seeming unconsciousness.
These shadows of memory tell indistinctly of tall figures that
lifted and bore me in silence, down, down, still down,
till a hideous dizziness suppressed me at the mere idea
of the interminableness of the descent. They tell also of

(04:38:26):
a vague horror of my heart on account of that
heart's unnatural stillness. Then comes a sense of sudden motionlessness
throughout all things, as if those who bore me a
ghastly train had outrun in their descent the limits of
limitless and paused from the wearisomeness of their toil. After
this I call to mind flatness and dampness, And then

(04:38:49):
Wholla's madness, the madness of a memory which busies itself
among forbidden things. Very suddenly there came back to my soul.
Motion and sound, the tumultus motion of the heart, and
in my ears the sound of its beating. Then a
pause in which all was blank. Then again sound and motion,

(04:39:10):
and touch, a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the
mere consciousness of existence without thought, a condition which lasted long.
Then very suddenly thought and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor
to comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to
lapse into insensibility. Then a rushing revival of soul and

(04:39:33):
a successful effort to move, And now a full memory
of the trial of the judges, of the sable draperies,
of the sentence, of the sickness of the swoon then
entire forgetfulness of all that followed, of all that A
later day and much earnestness of endeavor have enabled me
vaguely to recall. So far I had not opened my eyes.

(04:39:58):
I felt that I lay upon my back unbound. I
reached out my hand, and it fell heavily upon something
damp and hard. There I suffered it to remain for
many minutes, while I strove to imagine where and what
I could be. I longed, yet dared not impoly my vision.
I dreaded the first glance at objects around me. It

(04:40:19):
was not that I feared to look upon things horrible,
but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing
to see. At length, With a wild desperation in my heart,
I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts then were confirmed.
The blackness of eternal light encompassed me. I struggled for breath.
The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me.

(04:40:41):
The atmosphere was intolerably close. I still lay quietly and
made effort to exercise my reason. I brought to mind
the inquisitorial proceedings, and attempted from that point to deduce
my real condition, The sentence had passed, and it appeared
to me that a very long interval of time had
since elapse. Yet not for a moment did I suppose

(04:41:02):
myself actually dead. Such a supposition, notwithstanding what we read
in fiction, is altogether inconsistent with real existence. But where
and in what state was I The condemned to death
I knew perished usually at the auto Staffe, and one
of those had been held on the very night of
the day of my trial.

Speaker 12 (04:41:23):
Had I been.

Speaker 6 (04:41:23):
Remanded to my dungeon to await the next sacrifice, which
would not take place for many months, This I at
once saw could not be. Victims had been in immediate demand. Moreover,
my dungeon, as well as all the condemned cells at Toledo,
had stone floors, and light was not altogether excluded. A

(04:41:43):
fearful idea now suddenly drove the blood in torrents upon
my heart, and for a brief period I once more
relapsed into insensibility. Upon recovering, I at once started to
my feet, trembling convulsively in every fiber. I thrust my
arms wildly above and around me in all directions. I
felt nothing, yet dreaded to move a step lest I
should be impeded by the walls of a tomb. Perspiration

(04:42:06):
burst from every pore and stood in cold, big beads
upon my forehead. The agony of suspense grew at length intolerable,
and I cautiously moved forward, with my arms extended and
my eyes straining from their sockets, in hope of catching
some faint red light. I proceeded for many paces, but
still all was blackness and vacancy. I breathed more freely.

(04:42:29):
It seemed evident that mine was not at least the
most hideous and fates. And now as I still continued
to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection
a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo, of
the dungeons. There had been strange things, nrited fables I

(04:42:49):
had always deemed them, but yet strange and too ghastly
to repeat save in a whisper. Was I left to
perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness? Or
what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me that the
result would be death, and a death of more than
customary bitterness. I knew too well the characters of my

(04:43:10):
judges to doubt, the mode and the hour were all
that occupied or distracted me. My outstretched hands, at length
encountered some solid obstruction. It was a wall, seemingly of
stone masonry, very smooth, slimy, and cold. I followed it up,
stepping with all the careful distrust with which certain antique

(04:43:31):
narratives had inspired me. This process, however, afforded me no
means of ascertaining the dimensions of my dungeon, as I
might make its circuit and return to the point whence
I had set out, without being aware of the fact,
so perfectly uniform seemed the wall. I therefore sought the
knife which had been in my pocket, which led into
the inquisitorial chamber, But it was gone. My clothes had

(04:43:53):
been exchanged for a wrapper of coarse surge. I had
thought of forcing the blade in some minute crevice of
the masonry, so as to identify my point of departure.
The difficulty, nevertheless, was but trivial, although in the disorder
of my fancy it seemed at first insuperable. I tore
a part of the hem from the robe, and placed
the fragment at full length and at right angles with

(04:44:15):
the wall. In groping my way around the prison, I
could not fail to encounter this rag upon completing the circuit,
so at least, I thought. But I had not counted
upon the extent of the dungeon, or upon my own weakness.
The ground was moist and slippery. I staggered onward for
some time. When I stumbled and fell. My excessive fatigue

(04:44:37):
induced me to remain prostrate, and sleep soon overtook me.
As I lay. Upon awakening and stretching forth an arm
I found beside me a loaf and a pitcher with water.
I was too much exhausted to reflect upon the circumstance,
but ate and drank with avidity. Shortly afterward I resumed
my tour round the prison, and with much toil, came

(04:44:58):
at last upon the fragment of the urge. Up to
the period when I fell, I had counted fifty two paces,
and upon resuming my walk I had counted forty eight more.
When I arrived at the rag, there were in all
then a hundred paces, and admitting two paces to the yard,
I presumed the dungeon to be fifty yard in circuit.
I had met, however, with many angles in the walls,

(04:45:21):
and thus I could form no guess at the shape
of the vault. For vault, I could not help supposing
it to be. I had little object, certainly no hope
in these researches, but a vague curiosity prompted me to
continue them. Quitting the wall, I resolved to cross the
area of the enclosure. At first, I proceeded with extreme caution,

(04:45:41):
for the floor, although seemingly of solemn material, was treacherous
with slime. At length, however, I took courage and did
not hesitate to step firmly, endeavoring to cross in as
straight a line as possible. I had advanced some ten
or twelve paces in this manner when the remnant of
the torn hem of my robe became entangled between my legs.
I stepped on it and fell violently on my face.

(04:46:05):
In the confusion attending my fall, I did not immediately
apprehend a somewhat startling circumstance, which, yet, in a few
seconds afterward, and while I still lay prostrate, arrested my attention.
It was this My chin rested upon the floor of
the prison, but my lips and the upper portion of
my head, although seemingly at less elevation than the chin

(04:46:26):
touched nothing. At the same time, my forehead seemed bathed
in a clammy vapor, and a peculiar smile of decayed
fungus arose to my nostrils. I put forward my arm
and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the
very brink of a circular pit, whose extent, of course,
I had no means of ascertaining at the moment. Groping
about the masonry just below the margin, I succeeded in

(04:46:49):
dislodging a small fragment and let it fall into the abyss.
For many seconds, I hearkened to its reverberations as it
dashed against the sides of the chasm in its descent.
At length, there was a sullen plunge in water, succeeded
by loud echoes. At the same moment, there came a
sound resembling the quick opening and as rapid closing of

(04:47:10):
a door overhead, while a faint gleam of light flashed
suddenly through the gloom, and as suddenly faded away, I
saw clearly the dew which had been prepared for me,
and congratulated myself upon the timely accident. By which I
had escaped another step before my fall, and the world
had seen me no more. And the death just avoided

(04:47:31):
was of that dary character which I had regarded as
fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition. To
the victims of its tyranny. There was the choice of
death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its
most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the
latter by long suffering. My nerves had been unstrung until

(04:47:52):
I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and
had become in every respect a fitting subject for the
species of torture which awaited me. Shaking in every limb,
I groped my way back to the wall, resolving there
to perish rather than risk the terrors of the wells
of which my imagination now pictured many in various positions
about the dungeon. In other conditions of mind, I might

(04:48:14):
have had courage to end my misery at once by
a plunge into one of these abysses. But now I
was the veriest of cowards. Neither could I forget what
I had read of these pits, that the sudden extinction
of life formed no part of their most horrible plan.
Agitation of spirit kept me awake for many long hours,
But at length I again slumbered upon a browsing I

(04:48:36):
found on my side, as before, a loaf and a
pitcher of water. A burning thirst consumed me, and I
emptied the vessel at a draft. It must have been drugged,
for scarcely had I drunk before I became irresistibly drowsy.
A deep sleep fell upon me, asleep.

Speaker 13 (04:48:53):
Like that of death.

Speaker 6 (04:48:54):
How long it lasted, of course, I know not. But
when once again I unclosed my eyes, the objects around
me were visible by a wild, sulfurous luster, the origin
of which I could not at first determine. I was
enabled to see the extent and aspect of the prison.
In its size, I had been greatly mistaken. The whole

(04:49:15):
circuit of its walls did not exceed twenty five yards.
For some minutes, this fact occasioned me a world of
vain trouble. Vain indeed, for what could be of less
importance under the terrible circumstances which environed me than the
mere dimensions of my dungeon. But my soul took wild
interest in trifles, and I busied myself in endeavors to
account for the error I had committed in my measurement.

(04:49:37):
The truth at length flashed upon me. In my first
attempt at exploration, I had counted fifty two paces up
to the period when I fell. I must have then
been within a pace or two of the fragment of surge.
In fact, I had nearly performed the circuit of the vault.
I then slept, and upon awaking I must have returned
upon my steps, thus supposing the circuit nearly double what

(04:49:59):
it acted. Truly was. My confusion of mind prevented me
from observing that I had begun my tour with the
wall to the left and ended it with the wall
to the right. I had been deceived too, in respect
to the shape of the enclosure. In feeling my way,
I had found many angles, and thus deduced an idea
of great irregularity. So potent is the effect of total

(04:50:21):
darkness upon one arousing from lethargy or sleep. The angles
were simply those of a few slight depressions or niches
at odd intervals. The general shape of the prison was square.
What I had taken from masonry seemed now to be
iron or some other metal. In huge plates whose sutras
or joints occasioned the depression. The entire surface of this

(04:50:43):
metallic enclosure was rudely daubed in all the hideous and
impulsive devices to which the Charnel superstition of the monks
has given rise figures of fiends and aspects of menace,
with skeleton forms and other more really fearful images overspread
and disfigured the walls. I observed that the outlines of
these monstrosities were sufficiently distinct, but that the color seemed

(04:51:04):
faded and blurred, as if from the effects of a
damp atmosphere. I now noticed the floor, too, which was
of stone, in the center, beyond the circular pit from
whose jaws I had escaped, But it was the only
one in the dungeon. All this I saw indistinctly, and
by much effort, for my personal condition had been greatly

(04:51:26):
changed during slumber. I now lay upon my back at
its full length, on a species of low framework of wood.
To this I was securely bound by a long strap
resembling a surcingle. It passed in many convolutions about my
limbs and body, leaving at liberty only my head and
my left arm to such extent that I could, by

(04:51:47):
dint of much exertion, supply myself with food from an
earthen dish, which lay by my side on the floor.
I saw to my horror that the pitcher had been removed,
I said, to my horror, for I was consumed with
an intall thirst. This thirst, it appeared to be the
design of my persecutors to stimulate, for the food in
the dish was meat pungently seasoned. Looking upward, I surveyed

(04:52:11):
the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or
forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls.
In one of its panels, a very singular figure riveted
my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time,
as he is commonly represented, save that in lieu of
a scythe He held what, at a casual glance I
supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum,

(04:52:34):
such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however,
in the appearance of this machine, which caused me to
regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it,
for its position was immediately over my own, I fancied
that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward,
the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief and of

(04:52:54):
course slow. I watched it for some minutes, somewhat in fear,
but more in one. Wearied at length with observing its
dull movement, I turned my eyes upon the other objects
in the cell. A slight noise attracted my notice, and
looking to the floor, I saw several enormous racks traversing it.

(04:53:14):
They had issued from the well, which lay just within
view to my right. Even then, while I gazed, they
came in troops, hurriedly with ravenous eyes, allured by the
scent of the meat. From this, it required much effort
and attention to scare them away. It might have been
half an hour, perhaps even an hour, for I could
take but imperfect amot of time before I again cast

(04:53:37):
my eyes upward. What I then saw confounded and amazed me.
The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by
nearly a yard. As natural consequence, its velocity was also
much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea
that it had perceptibly descended. I now observed with what horror.

(04:53:59):
It is needless to say that its nether extremity was
formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot
in length from horn to horn, the horns upward, and
the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.
Like a raiser. Also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapered
from the edge into a solid and broad structure. Above
it was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and

(04:54:21):
the whole hissed as it swung through the air. I
could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by
Monkish ingenuity and torture. By cognizance of the pit had
become known to the inquisitorial agents, the pit whose horrors
had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself,
the pit typical of hell, and regarded by rumor as
the oltima fool of all their punishments. The plunge into

(04:54:44):
this pit I had avoided by the merest of accidents.
I knew that surprise or entrapment into torture formed an
important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths.
Having failed to fall, it was no part of the
demon plan to hurl me into the abyss, and thus
there being no alternative, A different and a milder destruction
awaited me. Milder. I half smiled in my agony as

(04:55:07):
I thought of such application of such a term. What
boots it to tell of the long, long hours of
horror more than mortal, during which I counted the rushing
vibrations of the steel inch by inch, line by line,
with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed ages
down and still down. It came, days passed. It might

(04:55:29):
have been that many days passed. Ere it swept so
closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath.
The odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils.
I prayed, I wearied Heaven with my prayer for its
more speedy descent. I grew frantically mad, and struggled to
force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar.
And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at

(04:55:52):
the glittering death as a child at some rare bauble.
There was another interval of utter insensibility. It was brief,
for upon again lapsing into life, there had been no
perceptible descent in the pendulum, but it might have been long,
for I know there were demons who took note of
my swoon, and who could have arrested the vibration at pleasure.

(04:56:14):
Upon my recovery, too, I felt very who inexpressibly sick
and weak, as if through long in a nation. Even
amid the agonies of that period, the human nature craved
food with painful effort. I outstretched my left arms as
far as my bonds permitted, and took possession of the
small remnant which had been spared me by the rats.

(04:56:36):
As I put a portion of it within my lips,
there rushed to my mind a half formed thought of joy,
of hope. Yet what business had I with hope? It was,
as I say, a half formed thought. Man has many
such which are never completed. I felt that it was
of joy of hope, but felt also that it had
perished in its formation in vain. I struggled to perfect

(04:56:59):
to regain it. Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my
ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile, an idiot.
The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to
my length. I saw that the crescent was designed to
cross the region of the heart. It would fray the
surge of my robe. It would return and repeat its

(04:57:19):
operations again and again, notwithstanding terrifically wide sweeps some thirty
feet or more, and the hissing vigor of its descent
sufficient to sunder the very walls of iron. Still, the
fraying of my robe would be all that, for several
minutes it would accomplish. And at this thought I paused.
I dared not go further than this reflection. I dwelt

(04:57:40):
upon it with a pertinacity of attention, as if in
so dwelling I could arrest here at the descent of
the steel. I forced myself to ponder upon the sound
of the crescent as it should pass across the garment,
upon a peculiar thrilling sensation which the friction of cloth
produces on the nerves. I pondered upon all this frivolity
until my teeth were on edge. Down steadily, down it crept,

(04:58:04):
I took a frenzied pleasure. In contrastance downward, with its
lateral velocity to the right, to the left, far and wide,
with the shriek of a damned spirit. To my heart
was the stealthy pace of the tiger. I ultimately laughed
and howled as one or the other idea grew predominant, Down, certainly,

(04:58:25):
relentlessly down. It vibrated within three inches of my bosom.
I struggled violently, furiously to free my left arm. This
was free only from the elbow to the hand. I
could reach the latter from the platter beside me to
my mouth with great effort. But no further could I
have broken the fastenings above the elbow. I would have
seized and attempted to arrest the pendulum. I might as

(04:58:46):
well have attempted to arrest an avalanche. Down Still, unceasingly, still,
inevitably down, I gasped and struggled at each vibration. I
shrank convulsively at its every sweep. My eyes followed its
outward or upward whirls with the eagerness of the most
unmeaning despair. They closed themselves spasmodically at the descent. Although

(04:59:07):
death would have been a relief, oh how unspeakable, Still
I quivered in every nerve to think how slight a
sinking of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening axe
upon my bosom. It was hope that prompted the nerve
to quiver, the frame to shrink. It was hope, the
hope that triumphs on the rack that whispers to the
death condemned even in the dungeons of the inquisition, I

(04:59:29):
saw that some ten or twelve vibrations would bring the
steel in actual contact with my robe. And with this
observation there suddenly came over my spirit all the keen
collected calmness of despair. For the first time during many
hours or perhaps days, I thought it now occurred to
me that the bandage or surcingle which enveloped me was unique.

(04:59:52):
I was tied by no separate cord. The first stroke
of the razorlike crescent athwart any portion of the band
would so detach it that it might be unwhite from
my person by means of my left hand. But how
fearful in that case the proximity of the steel the
result of the slightest struggle, how deadly.

Speaker 5 (05:00:09):
Was it likely?

Speaker 6 (05:00:10):
Moreover, the minions of the torturer had not foreseen and
provided for this possibility. Was it probable that the bandage
crossed my bosom in track of the pendulum, ready to
find my faint And as it seemed, last hope. Frustrated,
I so far elevated my head as to obtain a
distinct view of my breast. The surcingle enveloped my limbs
and body close in all directions save in the path

(05:00:33):
of the destroying crescent. Scarcely had I dropped my head
back into its original position, when there flashed upon my
mind what I cannot better describe than as the half
formed idea of deliverance to which I had previously alluded,
and of which a moiety only floated indeterminately through my
brain when I raised food to my burning lips. The
whole thought was now present, feeble, scarcely sane, scarcely definite,

(05:00:57):
but still entire. I proceeded at once, with the nervous
energy of despair, to attempt its execution. For many hours,
the immediate vincity of the low framework upon which I
lay had been literally swarming with rats. They were wild, bold, ravenous,
their red eyes glaring upon me as if they waited
but for motionlessness on my part, to make me their

(05:01:19):
prey to what food? I thought have they been accustomed
in the well they had devoured in spite of all
my efforts to prevent them all but a small remnant
of the contents of the dish I had fallen into
an habitual sea saw or wave of the hand about
the platter, and at length the unconscious uniformity of the
movement deprived it of effect. In their veracity, the vermin

(05:01:41):
frequently fastened their sharp fangs in my fingers. With the
particles of the oily and spicy viand which now remained,
I thoroughly rubbed the bandage wherever I could reach it. Then,
raising my hand from the floor, I lay breathlessly still.
At first, the ravenous animals were still bottled and terrified
at the change. As a cessation of movement, they shrank

(05:02:04):
alarmedly back many salt well. But this was only for
a moment. I had not counted in vain upon their veracity.
Observing that I remained without motion, one or two of
the bolts leapt upon the framework and smelt the surging bill.
This seemed the signal for a general rush forth from
the well. They hurried in fresh troops. They clung into

(05:02:25):
the wood, they overran it, and leapt in hundreds upon
my person. The measured movement of the pendulum disturbed them,
not at all, avoiding its strokes. They busied themselves with
the anointed bandage. They pressed. They swarmed upon me, in
never accumulating heaps. They writhed upon my throat, Their cold
lips sought my own. I was half stifled by their
thronging pressure. Disgust for which the world has no name,

(05:02:49):
swelled my bosom and chilled with the heavy clamminess my heart.
Yet one minute and I felt that the struggle would
be over. Plainly I perceived the loosening of the bandage.
I knew that in more than one place it must
already be severed with a more than human resolution. I
lay still, nor had I erred in my calculations, nor

(05:03:11):
had I endured in vain. I at length felt that
I was free. The certingle hung in ribbons from my body.
But the stroke of the pendulum already pressed upon my bosom.
It had divided the surge of the robe, It had
cut through the linen beneath twice again it swung, and
a sharp sense of pain shot through every nerve. But
the moment of escape had arrived at a wave of

(05:03:31):
my hand. My deliverers hurried tumultuously away, with the steady movement,
cautious silent, shrinking and slow, I slid from the embrace
of the bandage and beyond the reach of the scimitar.
For the moment at least I was free. Free, and
in the grasp of the inquisition. I had scarcely stepped

(05:03:52):
from my wooden bed of horror upon the stone floor
of the prison when the motion of the hellish machine ceased,
and I beheld it drawn up by some invisible force
through the ceiling. This was a lesson which I took
desperately to heart. My every motion was undoubtedly watched. Free,
I had but escaped death in one form of agony,
to be delivered unto worse than death in some other.

(05:04:14):
With that thought, I rolled my eyes nervously around on
the barriers of iron that hemmed me in something unusual,
some change which at first I could not appreciate. Distinctly,
it was obvious, had taken place in the apartment. During
this period I became aware for the first time of
the origin of the sulfurous light which illumined the cell.

(05:04:35):
It proceeded from a fissure about half an inch in
width extending entirely around the prison at the base of
the walls, which thus appeared and were completely separated from
the floor. I endeavored, but of course in vain to
look through the aperture. As I arose from the attempt,
the mystery of the alteration in the chamber broke at

(05:04:55):
once upon my understanding, I have observed that although though
the outlines of the figures upon the walls were sufficiently distinct,
yet the colors seemed blurred and indefinite. These colors had
now assumed and were momentarily assuming a startling and most
brilliant intensity that gave to the spectral and fiendish portraitures,
an aspect that might have thrilled even firmer nerves than

(05:05:17):
my own. Demon eyes of a wild and ghastly vivacity
glared upon me in a thousand directions where none had
been visible before, and gleamed with the lurid luster of
a fire that I could not force my imagination to
regard as unreal. Unreal. Even while I breathed, there came
to my nostrils the breadth of the vapor of heated iron.

(05:05:38):
A suffocating odor pervaded the prison, a deeper glow, subtle
each moment in the eyes that glared at my agonies,
A richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the picture
horrors of blood. I panted, I gasped for breath. There
could be no doubt that the design of my tormentors, Oh,
most unrelenting, hoh, most demoniac of men. I shrank from
the glowing metal to the center of the cell. Amid

(05:05:59):
the thought of the fiery destruction that impended the idea
of the coolness of the well came over my soul.
Like the ball, I rushed to its deadly brink. I
threw my straining vision below. The glare from the enkindled
roof illumined its inmost recesses. Yet for a wild moment
did my spirit refuse to comprehend the meaning of what
I saw. At length, It forced, it rested its way

(05:06:20):
into my soul. It burned itself in upon my shuddering reason.
Oh for a voice to speak, Oh horror, Oh, any horror.
But this with a shriek. I rushed from the margin
and buried my face and my hands, weeping bitterly. The
heat rapidly increased, and once again I looked up, shuddering,
as if with a fit of the og. There had
been a second change in the cell, and Now the

(05:06:42):
change was obviously in the form as before. It was
in vain that I at first endeavored to appreciate or
understand what was taking place. But not long was I
left in doubt. The inquisitorial vengeance had been hurried by
my too full escape, and there would be no more
dally with the King of terrors. The room had been square,

(05:07:04):
I saw that two of its iron angles were now acute,
two consequently obtuse. The fearful difference quickly increased with a
low rumbling or moaning sound. In an instant the apartment
had shifted from its form into that of a lozenge.
But the alteration stopped not here. I neither hoped nor
desired it to stop. I could have clasped the red

(05:07:24):
walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. Death,
I said, any death, but that of the pit. Fool
Might I have not known that into the pit was
the object the burning iron to urge me. Could I
resist its glow? Or if even that could I withstand
its pressure? And now flatter and flatter grew the lozenge
with a rapidity that left me no time for contemplation.

(05:07:47):
Its center, and of course its greatest width came just
over the yawning gulf. I shrank back, but the closing
walls pressed me resistlessly onward. At length from my seared
and writhing body. There was no longer an inch foothold
on the firm floor of the prison. I struggled no more,
but the agony of my soul found vent in one long,
loud and final scream of despair. I felt that I

(05:08:09):
tottered upon the brink. I averted my eyes. There was
a discordant hum of human voices. There was a loud
blast as of many trumpets. There was a harsh grating,
as of a thousand thunders. The fiery walls rushed back.
An outstretched on caught my own as I fell, fainting
into the abyss. It was that of General Lessalle. The
French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the

(05:08:31):
hands of its enemies. End of the Pit and the
Pendulant End of Creepy Tales by edgarl and Poe