The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes. Bernard Capes

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СКАЧАТЬ heart, the sacrifice! And I cry to Jehovah, and He makes no sign; and into thy sweet breast the knife must enter.’

      Amos sprang to his feet with a loud cry.

      ‘I take no gift from you. I will win or lose her by right of manhood!’

      The girl’s face was white with despair.

      ‘I do not understand,’ she cried in a piteous voice.

      ‘Nor I,’ said the young man, and he took a threatening step forward. ‘We have no part in this – this lady and I. Man or devil you may be; but—’

      ‘Neither!’

      The stranger, as he uttered the word, drew himself erect with a tortured smile. The action seemed to kilt the skin of his face into hideous plaits.

      ‘I am Cartaphilus,’ he said, ‘who denied the Nazarene shelter.’

      ‘The Wandering Jew!’

      The name of the old strange legend broke involuntarily from Rose’s lips.

      ‘Now you know him!’ he shrieked then. ‘Adnah, I am here! Come to me!’

      Tears were running down the girl’s cheeks. She lifted her hands with an impassioned gesture; then covered her face with them.

      But Cartaphilus, penetrating the veil with eyes no longer human, cried suddenly, so that the room vibrated with his voice, ‘Bismillah! Wilt thou dare the Son of Heaven, questioning if His sentence upon the Jew – to renew, with his every hundredth year, his manhood’s prime – was not rather a forestalling through His infinite penetration, of the consequences of that Jew’s finding and eating of the Tree of Life? Is it Cartaphilus first, or Christ?’

      The girl flung herself forward, crushing her bosom upon the marble floor, and lay blindly groping with her hands.

      ‘He was a God and vindictive!’ she moaned. ‘He was a man and He died. The cross – the cross!’

      The lost cry pierced Rose’s breast like a knife. Sorrow, rage, and love inflamed his passion to madness. With one bound he met and grappled with the stranger.

      He had no thought of the resistance he should encounter. In a moment the Jew, despite his age and seizure, had him broken and powerless. The fury of blood blazed down upon him from the unearthly eyes.

      ‘Beast! that I might tear you! But the Nameless is your refuge. You must be chained – you must be chained. Come!’

      Half-dragging, half-bearing, he forced his captive across the room to the corner where the flask of topaz liquid stood.

      ‘Sleep!’ he shrieked, and caught up the glass vessel and dashed it down upon Rose’s mouth.

      The blow was a stunning one. A jagged splinter tore the victim’s lip and brought a gush of blood; the yellow fluid drowned his eyes and suffocated his throat. Struggling to hold his faculties, a startled shock passed through him, and he dropped insensible on the floor.

      VI

      ‘Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’

      Where had he read these words before? Now he saw them as scrolled in lightning upon a dead sheet of night.

      There was a sound of feet going on and on.

      Light soaked into the gloom, faster – faster; and he saw—

      The figure of a man moved endlessly forward by town and pasture and the waste places of the world. But though he, the dreamer, longed to outstrip and stay the figure and look searchingly in its face, he could not, following, close upon the intervening space; and its back was ever towards him.

      And always as the figure passed by populous places, there rose long murmurs of blasphemy to either side, and bestial cries: ‘We are weary! the farce is played out! He reveals Himself not, nor ever will! Lead us – lead us, against Heaven, against hell; against any other, or against ourselves! The cancer of life spreads, and we cannot enjoy nor can we think cleanly. The sins of the fathers have accumulated to one vast mound of putrefaction. Lead us, and we follow!’

      And, uttering these cries, swarms of hideous half-human shapes would emerge from holes and corners and rotting burrows, and stumble a little way with the figure, cursing and jangling, and so drop behind, one by one, like glutted flies shaken from a horse.

      And the dreamer saw in him, who went ever on before, the sole existent type of a lost racial glory, a marvellous survival, a prince over monstrosities; and he knew him to have reached, through long ages of evil introspection, a terrible belief in his own self-acquired immortality and lordship over all abased peoples that must die and pass; and the seed of his blasphemy he sowed broadcast in triumph as he went; and the ravenous horrors of the earth ran forth in broods and devoured it like birds, and trod one another underfoot in their gluttony.

      And he came to a vast desolate plain, and took his stand upon a barren drift of sand; and the face the dreamer longed and feared to see was yet turned from him.

      And the figure cried in a voice that grated down the winds of space: ‘Lo! I am he that cannot die! Lo! I am he that has eaten of the Tree of Life; who am the Lord of Time and of the races of the earth that shall flock to my standard!’

      And again: ‘Lo! I am he that God was impotent to destroy because I had eaten of the fruit! He cannot control that which He hath created. He hath builded His temple upon His impotence, and it shall fall and crush Him. The children of His misrule cry out against Him. There is no God but Antichrist!’

      Then from all sides came hurrying across the plain vast multitudes of the degenerate children of men, naked and unsightly; and they leaped and mouthed about the figure on the hillock, like hounds baying a dead fox held aloft; and from their swollen throats came one cry:

      ‘There is no God but Antichrist!’

      And thereat the figure turned about – and it was Cartaphilus the Jew.

      VII

       There is no death! What seems so is transition.

      Uttering an incoherent cry, Rose came to himself with a shock of agony and staggered to his feet. In the act he traversed no neutral ground of insentient purposelessness. He caught the thread of being where he had dropped it – grasped it with an awful and sublime resolve that admitted no least thought of self-interest.

      If his senses were for the moment amazed at their surroundings – the silence, the perfumed languor, the beauty and voluptuousness of the room – his soul, notwithstanding, stood intent, unfaltering – waiting merely the physical capacity for action.

      The fragments of the broken vessel were scattered at his feet; the blood of his wound had hardened upon his face. He took a dizzy step forward, and another. The girl lay as he had seen her cast herself down – breathing, he could see; her hair in disorder; her hands clenched together in terror or misery beyond words.

      Where was the other?

      Suddenly his vision cleared. He saw that the silken curtains of the alcove were closed.

      A poniard in a jewelled sheath СКАЧАТЬ