In relating the circumstances which have led
to my confinement within this refuge for the
demented, I am aware that my present position
will create a natural doubt of the authenticity
of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact
that the bulk of humanity is too limited in
its mental vision to weigh with patience and
intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen
and felt only by a psychologically sensitive
few, which lie outside its common experience.
Men of broader intellect know that there is
no sharp distinction betwixt the real and
the unreal; that all things appear as they
do only by virtue of the delicate individual
physical and mental media through which we
are made conscious of them; but the prosaic
materialism of the majority condemns as madness
the flashes of super-sight which penetrate
the common veil of obvious empiricism.
My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest
childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.
Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial
life, and temperamentally unfitted for the
formal studies and social recreations of my
acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms
apart from the visible world; spending my
youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known
books, and in roaming the fields and groves
of the region near my ancestral home. I do
not think that what I read in these books
or saw in these fields and groves was exactly
what other boys read and saw there; but of
this I must say little, since detailed speech
would but confirm those cruel slanders upon
my intellect which I sometimes overhear from
the whispers of the stealthy attendants around
me. It is sufficient for me to relate events
without analysing causes.
I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible
world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone.
This no human creature may do; for lacking
the fellowship of the living, he inevitably
draws upon the companionship of things that
are not, or are no longer, living. Close by
my home there lies a singular wooded hollow,
in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my
time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down
its moss-covered slopes my first steps of
infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely
gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood
were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding
dryads of those trees, and often have I watched
their wild dances in the struggling beams
of a waning moon—but of these things I must
not now speak. I will tell only of the lone
tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets;
the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and
exalted family whose last direct descendant
had been laid within its black recesses many
decades before my birth.
The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite,
weathered and discoloured by the mists and
dampness of generations. Excavated back into
the hillside, the structure is visible only
at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and
forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted
iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly
sinister way by means of heavy iron chains
and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion
of half a century ago. The abode of the race
whose scions are here inurned had once crowned
the declivity which holds the tomb, but had
long since fallen victim to the flames which
sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lightning.
Of the midnight storm which destroyed this
gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the
region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy
voices; alluding to what they call “divine
wrath” in a manner that in later years vaguely
increased the always strong fascination which
I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre.
One man only had perished in the fire. When
the last of the Hydes was buried in this place
of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of
ashes had come from a distant land; to which
the family had repaired when the mansion burned
down. No one remains to lay flowers before
the granite portal, and few care to brave
the depressing shadows which seem to linger
strangely about the water-worn stones.
I shall never forget the afternoon when first
I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death.
It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of
Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to
one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green;
when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated
with the surging seas of moist verdure and
the subtly indefinable odours of the soil
and the vegetation. In such surroundings the
mind loses its perspective; time and space
become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a
forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently
upon the enthralled consciousness. All day
I had been wandering through the mystic groves
of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not
discuss, and conversing with things I need
not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen
and heard many wonders unknown to the throng;
and was oddly aged in certain respects. When,
upon forcing my way between two savage clumps
of briers, I suddenly encountered the entrance
of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I
had discovered. The dark blocks of granite,
the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal
carvings above the arch, aroused in me no
associations of mournful or terrible character.
Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much,
but had on account of my peculiar temperament
been kept from all personal contact with churchyards
and cemeteries. The strange stone house on
the woodland slope was to me only a source
of interest and speculation; and its cold,
damp interior, into which I vainly peered
through the aperture so tantalisingly left,
contained for me no hint of death or decay.
But in that instant of curiosity was born
the madly unreasoning desire which has brought
me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on
by a voice which must have come from the hideous
soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the
beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous
chains which barred my passage. In the waning
light of day I alternately rattled the rusty
impediments with a view to throwing wide the
stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight
form through the space already provided; but
neither plan met with success. At first curious,
I was now frantic; and when in the thickening
twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn
to the hundred gods of the grove that at any
cost I would some day force an entrance to
the black, chilly depths that seemed calling
out to me. The physician with the iron-grey
beard who comes each day to my room once told
a visitor that this decision marked the beginning
of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final
judgment to my readers when they shall have
learnt all.
The months following my discovery were spent
in futile attempts to force the complicated
padlock of the slightly open vault, and in
carefully guarded inquiries regarding the
nature and history of the structure. With
the traditionally receptive ears of the small
boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness
caused me to tell no one of my information
or my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning
that I was not at all surprised or terrified
on learning of the nature of the vault. My
rather original ideas regarding life and death
had caused me to associate the cold clay with
the breathing body in a vague fashion; and
I felt that the great and sinister family
of the burned-down mansion was in some way
represented within the stone space I sought
to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites
and godless revels of bygone years in the
ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest
in the tomb, before whose door I would sit
for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust
a candle within the nearly closed entrance,
but could see nothing save a flight of damp
stone steps leading downward. The odour of
the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt
I had known it before, in a past remote beyond
all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of
the body I now possess.
The year after I first beheld the tomb, I
stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of
Plutarch’s Lives in the book-filled attic
of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I
was much impressed by that passage telling
of the great stone beneath which the boyish
hero was to find his tokens of destiny whenever
he should become old enough to lift its enormous
weight. This legend had the effect of dispelling
my keenest impatience to enter the vault,
for it made me feel that the time was not
yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow
to a strength and ingenuity which might enable
me to unfasten the heavily chained door with
ease; but until then I would do better by
conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.
Accordingly my watches by the dank portal
became less persistent, and much of my time
was spent in other though equally strange
pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly
in the night, stealing out to walk in those
churchyards and places of burial from which
I had been kept by my parents. What I did
there I may not say, for I am not now sure
of the reality of certain things; but I know
that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble
I would often astonish those about me with
my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for
many generations. It was after a night like
this that I shocked the community with a queer
conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated
Squire Brewster, a maker of local history
who was interred in 1711, and whose slate
headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones,
was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment
of childish imagination I vowed not only that
the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen
the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and
satin small-clothes of the deceased before
burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully
inanimate, had turned twice in his mound-covered
coffin on the day after interment.
But the idea of entering the tomb never left
my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the
unexpected genealogical discovery that my
own maternal ancestry possessed at least a
slight link with the supposedly extinct family
of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I
was likewise the last of this older and more
mysterious line. I began to feel that the
tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot
eagerness to the time when I might pass within
that stone door and down those slimy stone
steps in the dark. I now formed the habit
of listening very intently at the slightly
open portal, choosing my favourite hours of
midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the
time I came of age, I had made a small clearing
in the thicket before the mould-stained facade
of the hillside, allowing the surrounding
vegetation to encircle and overhang the space
like the walls and roof of a sylvan bower.
This bower was my temple, the fastened door
my shrine, and here I would lie outstretched
on the mossy ground, thinking strange thoughts
and dreaming strange dreams.
The night of the first revelation was a sultry
one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue,
for it was with a distinct sense of awakening
that I heard the voices. Of those tones and
accents I hesitate to speak; of their quality
I will not speak; but I may say that they
presented certain uncanny differences in vocabulary,
pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every
shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth
syllables of the Puritan colonists to the
precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed
represented in that shadowy colloquy, though
it was only later that I noticed the fact.
At the time, indeed, my attention was distracted
from this matter by another phenomenon; a
phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take
oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that
as I awoke, a light had been hurriedly extinguished
within the sunken sepulchre. I do not think
I was either astounded or panic-stricken,
but I know that I was greatly and permanently
changed that night. Upon returning home I
went with much directness to a rotting chest
in the attic, wherein I found the key which
next day unlocked with ease the barrier I
had so long stormed in vain.
It was in the soft glow of late afternoon
that I first entered the vault on the abandoned
slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped
with an exultation I can but ill describe.
As I closed the door behind me and descended
the dripping steps by the light of my lone
candle, I seemed to know the way; and though
the candle sputtered with the stifling reek
of the place, I felt singularly at home in
the musty, charnel-house air. Looking about
me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins,
or the remains of coffins. Some of these were
sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished,
leaving the silver handles and plates isolated
amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust.
Upon one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey
Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and
died here a few years later. In a conspicuous
alcove was one fairly well-preserved and untenanted
casket, adorned with a single name which brought
to me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse
caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish
my candle, and lie down within the vacant
box.
In the grey light of dawn I staggered from
the vault and locked the chain of the door
behind me. I was no longer a young man, though
but twenty-one winters had chilled my bodily
frame. Early-rising villagers who observed
my homeward progress looked at me strangely,
and marvelled at the signs of ribald revelry
which they saw in one whose life was known
to be sober and solitary. I did not appear
before my parents till after a long and refreshing
sleep.
Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night;
seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never
reveal. My speech, always susceptible to environmental
influences, was the first thing to succumb
to the change; and my suddenly acquired archaism
of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a
queer boldness and recklessness came into
my demeanour, till I unconsciously grew to
possess the bearing of a man of the world
despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly
silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy
grace of a Chesterfield or the godless cynicism
of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition
utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore
over which I had pored in youth; and covered
the flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu
epigrams which brought up suggestions of Gay,
Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan
wits and rimesters. One morning at breakfast
I came close to disaster by declaiming in
palpably liquorish accents an effusion of
eighteenth-century Bacchanalian mirth; a bit
of Georgian playfulness never recorded in
a book, which ran something like this:
Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of
ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For ’tis eating and drinking that bring
us relief:
So fill up your glass,
For life will soon pass;
When you’re dead ye’ll ne’er drink to
your king or your lass!
Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;
But what’s a red nose if ye’re happy and
gay?
Gad split me! I’d rather be red whilst I’m
here,
Than white as a lily—and dead half a year!
So Betty, my miss,
Come give me a kiss;
In hell there’s no innkeeper’s daughter
like this!
Young Harry, propp’d up just as straight
as he’s able,
Will soon lose his wig and slip under the
table;
But fill up your goblets and pass ’em around—
Better under the table than under the ground!
So revel and chaff
As ye thirstily quaff:
Under six feet of dirt ’tis less easy to
laugh!
The fiend strike me blue! I’m scarce able
to walk,
And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!
Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;
I’ll try home for a while, for my wife is
not there!
So lend me a hand;
I’m not able to stand,
But I’m gay whilst I linger on top of the
land!
About this time I conceived my present fear
of fire and thunderstorms. Previously indifferent
to such things, I had now an unspeakable horror
of them; and would retire to the innermost
recesses of the house whenever the heavens
threatened an electrical display. A favourite
haunt of mine during the day was the ruined
cellar of the mansion that had burned down,
and in fancy I would picture the structure
as it had been in its prime. On one occasion
I startled a villager by leading him confidently
to a shallow sub-cellar, of whose existence
I seemed to know in spite of the fact that
it had been unseen and forgotten for many
generations.
At last came that which I had long feared.
My parents, alarmed at the altered manner
and appearance of their only son, commenced
to exert over my movements a kindly espionage
which threatened to result in disaster. I
had told no one of my visits to the tomb,
having guarded my secret purpose with religious
zeal since childhood; but now I was forced
to exercise care in threading the mazes of
the wooded hollow, that I might throw off
a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I
kept suspended from a cord about my neck,
its presence known only to me. I never carried
out of the sepulchre any of the things I came
upon whilst within its walls.
One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb
and fastened the chain of the portal with
none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent
thicket the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely
the end was near; for my bower was discovered,
and the objective of my nocturnal journeys
revealed. The man did not accost me, so I
hastened home in an effort to overhear what
he might report to my careworn father. Were
my sojourns beyond the chained door about
to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my
delighted astonishment on hearing the spy
inform my parent in a cautious whisper that
I had spent the night in the bower outside
the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon
the crevice where the padlocked portal stood
ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been
thus deluded? I was now convinced that a supernatural
agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sent
circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness
in going to the vault; confident that no one
could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted
to the full the joys of that charnel conviviality
which I must not describe, when the thing
happened, and I was borne away to this accursed
abode of sorrow and monotony.
I should not have ventured out that night;
for the taint of thunder was in the clouds,
and a hellish phosphorescence rose from the
rank swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The
call of the dead, too, was different. Instead
of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar
on the crest of the slope whose presiding
daemon beckoned to me with unseen fingers.
As I emerged from an intervening grove upon
the plain before the ruin, I beheld in the
misty moonlight a thing I had always vaguely
expected. The mansion, gone for a century,
once more reared its stately height to the
raptured vision; every window ablaze with
the splendour of many candles. Up the long
drive rolled the coaches of the Boston gentry,
whilst on foot came a numerous assemblage
of powdered exquisites from the neighbouring
mansions. With this throng I mingled, though
I knew I belonged with the hosts rather than
with the guests. Inside the hall were music,
laughter, and wine on every hand. Several
faces I recognised; though I should have known
them better had they been shrivelled or eaten
away by death and decomposition. Amidst a
wild and reckless throng I was the wildest
and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy poured in
torrents from my lips, and in my shocking
sallies I heeded no law of God, Man, or Nature.
Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even
above the din of the swinish revelry, clave
the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon
the boisterous company. Red tongues of flame
and searing gusts of heat engulfed the house;
and the roysterers, struck with terror at
the descent of a calamity which seemed to
transcend the bounds of unguided Nature, fled
shrieking into the night. I alone remained,
riveted to my seat by a grovelling fear which
I had never felt before. And then a second
horror took possession of my soul. Burnt alive
to ashes, my body dispersed by the four winds,
I might never lie in the tomb of the Hydes!
Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had I not
a right to rest till eternity amongst the
descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would
claim my heritage of death, even though my
soul go seeking through the ages for another
corporeal tenement to represent it on that
vacant slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas
Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!
As the phantom of the burning house faded,
I found myself screaming and struggling madly
in the arms of two men, one of whom was the
spy who had followed me to the tomb. Rain
was pouring down in torrents, and upon the
southern horizon were flashes of the lightning
that had so lately passed over our heads.
My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood
by as I shouted my demands to be laid within
the tomb; frequently admonishing my captors
to treat me as gently as they could. A blackened
circle on the floor of the ruined cellar told
of a violent stroke from the heavens; and
from this spot a group of curious villagers
with lanterns were prying a small box of antique
workmanship which the thunderbolt had brought
to light. Ceasing my futile and now objectless
writhing, I watched the spectators as they
viewed the treasure-trove, and was permitted
to share in their discoveries. The box, whose
fastenings were broken by the stroke which
had unearthed it, contained many papers and
objects of value; but I had eyes for one thing
alone. It was the porcelain miniature of a
young man in a smartly curled bag-wig, and
bore the initials “J. H.” The face was
such that as I gazed, I might well have been
studying my mirror.
On the following day I was brought to this
room with the barred windows, but I have been
kept informed of certain things through an
aged and simple-minded servitor, for whom
I bore a fondness in infancy, and who like
me loves the churchyard. What I have dared
relate of my experiences within the vault
has brought me only pitying smiles. My father,
who visits me frequently, declares that at
no time did I pass the chained portal, and
swears that the rusted padlock had not been
touched for fifty years when he examined it.
He even says that all the village knew of
my journeys to the tomb, and that I was often
watched as I slept in the bower outside the
grim facade, my half-open eyes fixed on the
crevice that leads to the interior. Against
these assertions I have no tangible proof
to offer, since my key to the padlock was
lost in the struggle on that night of horrors.
The strange things of the past which I learnt
during those nocturnal meetings with the dead
he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong
and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient
volumes of the family library. Had it not
been for my old servant Hiram, I should have
by this time become quite convinced of my
madness.
But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith
in me, and has done that which impels me to
make public at least a part of my story. A
week ago he burst open the lock which chains
the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and
descended with a lantern into the murky depths.
On a slab in an alcove he found an old but
empty coffin whose tarnished plate bears the
single word “Jervas”. In that coffin and
in that vault they have promised me I shall
be buried.
