Dream Tales and Prose Poems eBook

I turned my head in the direction in which her trembling hand was pointing, and discerned something ... something horrible indeed.

This something was the more horrible that it had no definite shape.  Something bulky, dark, yellowish-black, spotted like a lizard’s belly, not a storm-cloud, and not smoke, was crawling with a snake-like motion over the earth.  A wide rhythmic undulating movement from above downwards, and from below upwards, an undulation recalling the malignant sweep of the wings of a vulture seeking its prey; at times an indescribably revolting grovelling on the earth, as of a spider stooping over its captured fly....  Who are you, what are you, menacing mass?  Under her influence, I saw it, I felt it—­all sank into nothingness, all was dumb....  A putrefying, pestilential chill came from it.  At this chill breath the heart turned sick, and the eyes grew dim, and the hair stood up on the head.  It was a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is subject, which, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all, knows all, and like a bird of prey picks out its victims, like a snake, stifles them and stabs them with its frozen sting....

‘Alice!  Alice!’ I shrieked like one in frenzy.  ‘It is death! death itself!’

The wailing sound I had heard before broke from Alice’s lips; this time it was more like a human wail of despair, and we flew.  But our flight was strangely and alarmingly unsteady; Alice turned over in the air, fell, rushed from side to side like a partridge mortally wounded, or trying to attract a dog away from her young.  And meanwhile in pursuit of us, parting from the indescribable mass of horror, rushed sort of long undulating tentacles, like outstretched arms, like talons....  Suddenly a huge shape, a muffled figure on a pale horse, sprang up and flew upwards into the very heavens....  Still more fearfully, still more desperately Alice struggled.  ‘She has seen!  All is over!  I am lost!’ I heard her broken whisper.  ’Oh, I am miserable!  I might have profited, have won life,... and now....  Nothingness, nothingness!’ It was too unbearable....  I lost consciousness.

XXV

When I came to myself, I was lying on my back in the grass, feeling a dull ache all over me, as from a bad bruise.  The dawn was beginning in the sky:  I could clearly distinguish things.  Not far off, alongside a birch copse, ran a road planted with willows:  the country seemed familiar to me.  I began to recollect what had happened to me, and shuddered all over directly my mind recalled the last, hideous apparition....

‘But what was Alice afraid of?’ I thought.  ’Can she too be subject to that power?  Is she not immortal?  Can she too be in danger of annihilation, dissolution?  How is it possible?’

A soft moan sounded close by me.  I turned my head.  Two paces from me lay stretched out motionless a young woman in a white gown, with thick disordered tresses, with bare shoulders.  One arm was thrown behind her head, the other had fallen on her bosom.  Her eyes were closed, and on her tightly shut lips stood a fleck of crimson stain.  Could it be Alice?  But Alice was a phantom, and I was looking upon a living woman.  I crept up to her, bent down....