“The Ash Tree” By M.R. James (Narrated by Jeffrey LeBlanc)
However, all that she is reported to have said were the seemingly meaningless words: ‘There will be guests at the Hall.’ Which she repeated more than once in an undertone.
However, all that she is reported to have said were the seemingly meaningless words: ‘There will be guests at the Hall.’ Which she repeated more than once in an undertone.
MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, –as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? –from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty and mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming; and I threw the searchlight’s beam about in eager quest.
“Slumber, watcher, till the spheres
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv’d, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o’er
Shall the past disturb thy door.”
Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
It snatched beyond his reach at one fell swoop all that he most loved and enjoyed, destroying a thousand dreams, and painting the future a dull drab colour without hope. He was an idealist at heart, hating the sordid routine of the life he led as a business underling. His dreams were of the open air, of mountains, forests, and great plains, of the sea, and of the lonely
places of the world.
Yon shadowy bark hath been to that wreck,
And the dim blue fire that lights her deck
Doth play on as pale and livid a crew
As ever yet drank the churchyard dew!
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
I have heard it said, that, when any strange, supernatural, and necromantic adventure has occurred to a human being, that being, however desirous he may be to conceal the same, feels at certain periods torn up as it were by an intellectual earthquake, and is forced to bare the inner depths of his spirit to another.
A sailor without rudder or compass, tossed on a stormy sea–a traveller lost on a wide-spread heath, without landmark or star to him–such have I been: more lost, more hopeless than either. A nearing ship, a gleam from some far cot, may save them; but I have no beacon except the hope of death.
In literature I have walked the midnight paths with Poe or crept amidst the shadows with
Machen; combed the realms of horrific stars with Baudelaire, or steeped myself with earth’s inner madness amidst the tales of ancient lore.
In that same silver paradise of shimmering night, as an alligator bellowed, mosquitos hummed, and green tree frogs chirped….a million crickets rubbed their wings together and sang.
Before the horror of the vampire, reason fled.
Quiet is here and all in me. A hellish house breaks you soul and kills you. A boy pleads and literally bleeds to be a vampire. A mad driver has a little road rage while you duel for the road. And a looming disease turns humanity into the undead. This are just some of the […]
“An eldritch tale of stark horror and a terrible rendezvous in a hidden mausoleum.”