Round the Block: An American Novel

by John Bell Bouton

CHAPTER III.

THE CLASHING ORBS.

The rain had ceased, and the moon was out. The dark, massy clouds that floated between her and the earth were doing their ghostly, phantasmagoric work. At one moment, clear, white light, like a shroud; at another moment, darkness, like a pall. An owl, lighting on the spire of Grace Church in his flight over the city, might have seen the white edge of the shroud, or the black edge of the pall, advancing in well-defined lines over the housetops, and the parks, and the two rivers, swiftly succeeding each other.

It was as if the mighty invisible demons of the night were capriciously trying the effects of cerements on the sleeping city. It was as if they were perplexed between the soft beauty of the shroud and the sombre majesty of the pall. A woman could not have tried on two shawls more often and more indecisively, before making up her mind to buy.

Little Pet's sleeping room, like every room that faced the south, that night, was full of strange, spectral effects. The scrolls and the roses on the cheap yellow curtains that hung in the windows, were changed to hideous faces of variable size and ugliness. Their grotesque shadows on the floor mingled with other faces--horrible as antique masks--wrought by the magic of the moon from the gigantic flowers that adorned the narrow strip of carpet by the bedside. Her dresses, suspended from a row of hooks in the corner--and showing, in gentle swells and curves, the lithe, graceful form of the little wearer, like moulds,--would have looked to any open eye, that dreadful night, like women hanging against the wall. This startling idea would have been helped along by two or three shadowy bonnets depending from pegs above them. The white somethings carelessly tossed over a chair near the head of the bed, were no longer the garments of youth, beauty, and innocence, but graveclothes, cold, shining, shuddering, in that deathly light. The touch of the moon, like the presence of a sexton, suggested mortality.

The narrow, single bed, with its four black posts, looked like the fatal trestle, or bier. The slender body which lay upon it was still as death. The head nestled motionless in a deep indentation of the pillow. A slanting ray of the moon, coming between one of the window curtains and the window, fell upon the face, and showed it white and waxen; the lips, still red, parted to the gleaming teeth; and the eyes not quite covered by the lids. One beautiful round arm curved above her head, and some of her soft brown hair rested in the little open palm. The other stretched down toward the centre of the bed, as if fearlessly to invite the touch of those weird things with which imagination peoples the solemn night--which the wakeful eye, in the still, small hours, sees moving in the darker corners, or passing swiftly by the bedside, or hovering in the air, wearing the semblance of one's dead friends, or filling large portions of the room with some formless presence of unutterable malignity and woe.

It was only sleep to which the moon thus gave the pale polish of death. The gentle murmur of a childish breath broke the silence. The heavy bedclothes slowly rose and fell with the mysterious pulsations of warm life beneath. At intervals, a shudder shook the little figure of the sleeper, her breath came louder and quicker, and her arms moved with sudden starts. Pet was dreaming, under the joint influences of an excess of blankets and a cup of strong tea.

She was alone in infinite space. Above, below, on all sides, was a leaden atmosphere. Neither sun, nor moon, nor stars illumined it, but only some dull, phosphorescent light, which seemed to be born of the murky, stagnant air. It was such a strange, sickly, wavering gleam as she had seen above decaying wood, fish, and other substances. All around was absolute stillness. Not a swallow waved his wing nor an insect hummed in that barren immensity. Nature was hushed by some deadly spell.

Yet the dread silence portended the near approach of HORRORS. She knew what they were, for she had been in this frightful region often before, and was familiar with its dread phenomena. They came. They were only two little black specks--like motes in the sunbeams--scarcely visible to her strained vision at first. She gazed upon them with the fascination of a charmed bird on the two small jet eyes of a serpent; but with this difference, that she knew the terrible peril that they brought. The moment that these two motes became visible to her in that dimly lighted mist, they commenced revolving around each other.

They revolved slowly, and increased in size as they rolled on. The slowness of the motion and the swelling of the motes were elements of horror. But she could not take her eyes from those two black objects revolving like binary stars, until her breath should cease to come and go, and her heart to beat. As the motes enlarged, their orbits widened. And they grew and-grew, performing greater and more awful circuits--still slowly, still noiselessly. The eternal, unbroken silence was another element of horror. The doomed spectatress of this solemn, maddening whirl would fain have shrieked, or even whispered, to break the silence, but she could not. Either her powers of articulation had disappeared in that region of universal dumbness, or the dead atmosphere was waveless, and could vibrate to no sound. She knew, by harrowing experience, the scene that was to come, and she prayed inwardly to God to strengthen her for it.