The imagination, unchecked by reason, began its reign—a reign sometimes so full of beauty and joy, that we sigh to awaken to a perception of that which is, instead of remaining in the world of dreams.
Jacob Gray’s visions, however, took the shuddering ghastly complexion of his waking thoughts and recollections.
From memory’s deepest cells would these creep forth one by one in hideous distinctness—remembrances that were maddening, and scenes would be enacted over and over again within the busy chambers of the brain, that in his waking moments he would shun the faintest reminiscence of, as he would the terrors of a pestilence.
The smithy at Learmont rose up before him, black and heavy as it appeared among the drifting snow. Then he would hear the howling of the wind even as it howled on that eventful night, when the storm was just commencing—momentarily it increased in fury, and Jacob Gray felt that all the awful events of that night were to do again; why or wherefore he knew not.
Then the smith, he thought, took him by the throat and threw him down upon a ghastly rotting corpse, and the long bony arms closed over him, while he felt his own warm living face in hideous contact with the slimy rottenness of the grave, he heard then, as he had heard it on that dreadful night, the cry of fire! And he strove with frantic efforts to free himself from the embrace of death—but ’twas all in vain.
* * * * *
The flames then waved around him like a sea, and the skeleton arms grew to a white heat, and burnt into his flesh, and a hot pestilential breath seemed to come from the grinning jaws of the dead—still he could not move. His struggles were as those of an infant in that awful clutch, and he prayed for death to terminate his agony.
Then a voice said, “No! You will remain thus till time is no more.”
With a scream Jacob Gray awoke, and starting wildly from his couch, he sunk on his knees, shrieking—
“Mercy—mercy! Spare me, Heaven!”