Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

Arkwright shivered. These scenes were awful. He suffered from them almost as much as she did. People in other rooms might hear her, too, and would think they were quarreling. The idea tortured him. He dreaded scenes. He hated anything disorderly, and his resentment at such times made him almost brutal.

“That’s nonsense,” he told her sharply. “You’re giving way to an absurd extent, and as things are you’ve no right to let anything upset you. Every doctor has told you that.”

She regained control with an effort, and they sat silently for a time on the side of his bed. She was a tall woman, with a fine figure and still finer face; and it seemed strangely incongruous to see her clinging for support to this frail man beside her.

He was her second husband, and was, both physically and mentally, typical of those who commonly fulfill that function. He was slight, orderly and decorous; he combined a love of comfort with a complete inability to earn the wherewithal to achieve it; and he had, therefore, for this rich woman he had married, a genuine sentiment of affection not entirely unmixed with gratitude.

Of the two, she was clearly the better man. Her black hair hung down in two thick plaits, framing a dead-white face from which her eyes, deep, dark and intensely vital, stared out above a nose and chin more like a man’s than a woman’s in the strength and boldness of their outlines.

She scarcely spoke again, but continued to gaze rigidly before her; and gradually her habitual control asserted itself, and her momentary panic left her. But she did not return to her own bedroom. She could not bring herself to that yet. She spent the few hours that were left till morning, lying immobile by her husband’s side, hoping with agonized intensity that in the hands of this new doctor she would at last be freed from her torment.

For it was no exaggeration to say that of late this dream had made her life unbearable. It had occurred for the first time shortly after she knew she was to be a mother, and as time went on it had recurred, exact in every detail, at rapidly increasing intervals.

In it she seemed to be walking on a long and lonely road. She was barefooted, for she could feel the rough stones upon the soles of her feet and a cold wind upon her ankles. She was not afraid, though she seemed strangely aware none the less that some dreadful thing was to occur; and on this point, in describing her dream, she was always quite clear and insistent.

“It seems as though it just had to happen,” she would say; and the distinction between that conviction and the emotion of fear was in some way real to her. Then, after what seemed to her an age-long journey down that road of pain, hemmed in on either side with an almost tangible darkness, she would come at length to a point where, on her left-hand side, the blackness seemed less dense.

And it was here that she felt the first real access of overmastering terror. Through this gap, far away in the darkness, she saw that which froze the blood in her veins and filled her with an indescribable convulsion of horror.

“Great jets of smoke and flame, tearing up the sky,” she would say, when attempting to depict it later.

It seemed as though Hell gaped at her; and she knew, with that awful prescience so typical of dreams, that it was to Hell indeed that her bare feet were leading her — pitifully driven by some relentless urge — along that desolate road, alone.

She would stand there awhile, staring with agonized intensity at this appalling sight, and swept with a complexity of emotions she was always powerless to describe later. Horror, loneliness and self-pity seemed to strive with a feeling of overmastering tenderness towards some one whom she could not identify; till she would turn at length in her anguish to remove that horror from her view.

So she would stand for a moment, her back to those leaping flames, and feeling in some way throughout her being unutterably deserted and defiled. Suddenly as she stood there she was freed, as by magic, from her anguish. She seemed now to be afraid no longer; but was filled instead with a sense of courage and companionship, as though she were protecting some one dearer and weaker than herself.

So encouraged, she would lift her head, and there — lighted as it seemed by those gigantic flames behind her — her eyes would rest upon the outline of a Cross. Filled now with a subtle sense of strength and purpose, and feeling no longer lonely or afraid, she would begin her painful progress down the road again; and as she did so she emerged, invariably, into the waking state.

This nightmare, for so she had at first described it, would have been terrible enough as a single event; but its recurrence had made it of late a thing to poison her hours of rest and reduce her to a point of genuine nervous exhaustion.