Mystery & Suspense - Daily Short Stories

Visions of the Night - Ambrose Bierce

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Duration:: 24m
Broadcast on:: 25 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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And here's the best part. Your insurance may cover 100% of the cost of your medication. So go to TryLifeMD.com to have your eligibility checked right now. Get started today at TryLifeMD.com. That's T-R-Y-L-I-F-E-M-D.com. [Music] Visions of the Night by Ambrose Beers. I hold the belief that the gift of dreams is a valuable literary endowment. That if by some art not now understood the elusive fancies that it supplies could be caught and fixed and made to serve. We should have a literature exceeding fare. In captivity and domestication, the gift could doubtless be wonderfully improved as animals bred to service acquire new capacities and powers. By taming our dreams, we shall double our working hours and our most fruitful labor will be done in sleep. Even as matters are, Dreamland is a tributary province as witness Kubla Khan. What is a dream, a loose and lawless collocation of memories, a disorderly succession of matters once present in the waking consciousness? It is a resurrection of the dead. Pelmel, ancient and modern, the just and unjust, springing from their cracked tombs each in his habit as he lived. Pressing forward, confusedly to have an audience of the master of the revel and snatching one another's garments as they run. Master? No. He has abdicated his authority and they have their will of him. His own is dead and does not rise with the rest. His judgment, too, is gone, and with it the capacity to be surprised. Pained as he may be and pleased, terrified and charmed, but wonder he cannot feel. The monstrous, the preposterous, the unnatural, these all are simple, right and reasonable. The ludicrous does not amuse, nor the impossible amaze. The dreamer is your only true poet. He is of imagination all compact. Imagination is merely memory. Try to imagine something that you have never observed, experienced, heard of, or read about. Try to conceive an animal, for example, without body, head, limbs, or tail. A house, without walls or roof. But when awake, having assistance of will and judgment, we can somewhat control and direct. We can pick and choose from memory's store, taking that which serves, excluding, though sometimes with difficulty, what is not to the purpose. A sleep, our fancies inherit us. They come so grouped, so blended, and compounded, the one with another, so wrought of one another's elements, that the whole seems new. But the old familiar units of conception are there, and none beside. Waking or sleeping, we get from imagination nothing new, but new adjustments. The stuff that dreams are made on, has been gathered by the physical senses and stored in memory, as squirrels hoard nuts. But one, at least, of the senses contributes nothing to the fabric of the dream. No one ever dreamed an odor. Sight, hearing, feeling, possibly taste are all workers, making provision for our nightly entertainment. But sleep is without a nose. It surprises that those keen observers, the ancient poets, did not so describe the drowsy god, and that their obedient servants, the ancient sculptors, did not so represent him. Perhaps these latter worthies, working for posterity, reasoned that time and mischance would inevitably revise their work in this regard, conforming it to the facts of nature. Who can so relate a dream that it shall seem one? No poet has so light a touch. As well try to write the music of an aolian harp. There is a familiar species of the genus Vore, Penetrata in Tolar Abilis, who, having read a story, perhaps by some master of style, is at the pains elaborately to expound its plot for your edification and delight. Then thinks good soul, that now you need not read it. Under substantially similar circumstances and conditions, as the interstate commerce law hath it, I should not be guilty of the like offense, but I propose herein to set forth the plots of certain dreams of my own, the circumstances and conditions being as I conceive dissimilar isn't this, that the dreams themselves are not accessible to the reader. In endeavoring to make record of their poorer parts, I do not indulge the hope of a higher success. I have no salt to put upon the tale of a dream's elusive spirit. I was walking at dusk through a great forest of unfamiliar trees. Once and with her I did not know. I had a sense of the vast extent of the wood, a consciousness that I was the only living thing in it. I was obsessed by some awful spell in expiation of a forgotten crime committed, as I vaguely surmised against the sunrise. Mechanically and without hope, I moved under the arms of the giant trees along a narrow trail, penetrating the haunted solitudes of the forest. I came at length to a brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path, and saw that it was blood. Turning to the right I followed it up a considerable distance, and soon came to a small circular opening in the forest, filled with a dim, unreal light by which I saw in the center of the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was filled with blood, and the stream that I had followed up was its outlet. All round the tank between it and the enclosing forest, a space of perhaps ten feet in breath, paved with immense slabs of marble, were the dead bodies of men, a score. Though I did not count them, I knew that the number had some significant and pretentious relation to my crime. Possibly they marked the time, in centuries, since I had committed it. I only recognized the fitness of the number and knew it without counting. The bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank, radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet were outward, the heads hanging over the edge of the tank, each lay upon its back, its throat cut, blood slowly dripping from the wound. I looked on all this unmoved. It was a natural and necessary result of my offense, and it did not affect me. But there was something that filled me with apprehension and terror. A monstrous pulsation beating with a slow, inevitable recurrence. I do not know which of the senses it addressed, or if it made its way to the consciousness through some avenue unknown to science and experience. The pitiless regularity of this vast rhythm was maddening. I was conscious that it pervaded the entire forest, and was a manifestation of some gigantic and implacable malevolence. Of this dream, I have no further recollection. Probably overcome by a terror which doubtless had its origin in the discomfort of an impeded circulation, I cried out and was awakened by the sound of my own voice. The dream whose skeleton I shall now present occurred in my early youth. I could not have been more than sixteen. I am considerably more now, yet I recall the incidents as vividly as when the dream was of an hour's age, and I lie cowering beneath the bed covering and trembling with terror from the memory. I was alone on a boundless level. In the night, in my bad dreams, I am always alone, and it is usually night. No trees were anywhere in sight, no habitations of men, no streams nor hills. The earth seemed to be covered with a short, coarse vegetation that was black and stubbly, as if the plane had been swept by fire. My way was broken here and there, as I went forward with I know not what purpose, by small pools of water, occupying shallow depressions, as if the fire had been succeeded by rain. These pools were on every side and kept vanishing and appearing again, as dark, heavy clouds drove athwart these parts of the sky which they neglected, and passing on disclosed again the steely glitter of the stars, in whose cold light the waters shone with a black luster. My coarse lay toward the west, where low along the horizon burned a crimson light beneath long strips of cloud, giving that effect of a measureless distance that I have since learned to look for in Dory's pictures, where every touch of his hand has laid a portent and a curse. As I moved, I saw outlined against this uncanny background, a silhouette of battlements and towers, which, expanding with every mile of my journey, grew at last to an unthinkable height and breadth, till the building subtended a wide angle of vision, yet seemed no nearer than before. Heartless and hopeless, I struggled on over the blasted and forbidding plane, and still the mighty structure grew until I could no longer compass it with a look, and its towers shut out the stars directly overhead. Then I passed in at an open portal, between columns of cyclopian masonry, whose single stones were larger than my father's house. Within all was vacancy. Everything was coated with the dust of desertion. A dim light, the lawless light of dreams, sufficient unto itself, enabled me to pass from corridor to corridor, and from room to room, every door yielding to my hand. In the rooms it was a long walk from wall to wall. Of no corridor did I ever reach an end. My footfalls gave out that strange hollow sound that has never heard but in abandoned dwellings, and tenanted tombs. For hours I wandered in this awful solitude, conscious of a seeking purpose, yet knowing not what I sought. At last, in what I conceived to be an extreme angle of the building, I entered a room of the ordinary dimensions, having a single window. Through this I saw the same crimson light still lying along the horizon in the measureless reaches of the west, like a visible doom, and knew it for the lingering fire of eternity. Looking upon the red menace of its sullen and sinister glare, there came to me the dreadful truth. Which years later, as an extravagant fancy, I endeavored to express in verse. Man is long ages dead in every zone. The angels all are gone to graves unknown. The devils too are cold enough at last, and God lies dead before the great white throne. The light was powerless to dispel the obscurity of the room, and it was some time before I discovered, in the farthest angle, the outlines of a bed, and approached it with oppressions of ill. I felt that here, somehow, the bad business of my adventure was to end with some horrible climax, yet could not resist the spell that urged me to the fulfillment. Upon the bed, partly clothed, lay the dead body of a human being. It lay upon its back, the arms straight along the sides, by bending over it, which I did with loathing, but no fear. I could see that it was dreadfully decomposed. The ribs protruded from the leather and flesh. Through the skin of the sunken belly could be seen the protuberances of the spine. The face was black and shriveled, and the lips drawn away from the yellow teeth cursed it with a ghastly grin. A fullness under the closed lids seemed to indicate that the eyes had survived the general wreck, and this was true, for as I bent above them they slowly opened and gazed into mine with a tranquil, steady regard. Imagine my horror how you can. No words of mine can assist the conception. The eyes were my own. That vestigial fragment of a vanished race, that unspeakable thing which neither time nor eternity had wholly effaced, that hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after death of God and the angels was I. There are dreams that repeat themselves. Of this class is one of my own, which seems sufficiently singular to justify its narration. Though truly I fear the reader will think the realms of sleep are anything but a happy hunting ground for my night wandering soul. This is not true. The greater number of my incursions into dreamland, and I suppose those of most others are attended with the happiest results. My imagination returns to the body like a bee to the hive, loaded with spoil, which reason assisting, is transmuted to honey and stored away in the cells of memory to be a joy forever. But the dream which I am about to relate has a double character. It is strangely dreadful in the experience, but the horror it inspires is so ludicrously disproportionate to the one incident producing it, that in retrospection, the fantasy amuses. I am passing through an open glade in a thinly wooded country. Through the belt of scattered trees that bound the irregular space, there are glimpses of cultivated fields and the homes of strange intelligences. It must be near daybreak, for the moon, nearly as full, is low in the west, showing blood red through the mists with which the landscape is fantastically freaked. The grass under my feet is heavy with dew, and the whole scene is that of a morning in early summer, glimmering in the unfamiliar light of a setting full moon. Near my path is a horse, visibly and audibly cropping the urbage. It lifts its head as I am about to pass, regards me motionless for a moment, then walks toward me. It is milky white, mild of mean and amiable in look. I say to myself, "This horse is a gentle soul, and paws to caress it. It keeps its eyes fixed upon my own, approaches and speaks to me in a human voice with human words. This does not surprise, but terrifies, and instantly I return to this our world." The horse always speaks my own tongue, but I never know what it says. I suppose I vanish from the land of dreams before it finishes expressing what it has in mind, leaving it no doubt as greatly terrified by my sudden disappearance as I by its manner of accosting me. I would give value to know the purpose of its communication. Perhaps some morning I shall understand and return no more to this our world. End of Visions of the Night. Save on O'Reilly Break Parts Cleaner. Get two cans of O'Reilly Break Parts Cleaner for just $8, valid in store only at O'Reilly Auto Parts. To the teachers' assistance and support staff who see potential in every child, Grand Canyon University recognizes you. 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