The Last Miracle

by M. P. Shiel

At that moment Dr Burton had lashed himself into a really painful pitch of heat. He was tacking to and fro in short runs, rather like lions at the moment when they spy their keeper coming with meat, and loudly he cried out in his brogue: "ye crucify him afresh! Oh, the poor, bleeding hands—so nailed. Oh, the poor, bleeding side—so pierced. Oh, the ravished lamb, oh, the violated dove, oh, the crushed Christ! Have ye, then, no pity? no entrails of compassion? ye dry eyes? ye hard hearts? ye tearless teats? Have ye become men of wood? worm-eaten? loth as death? chill as the silver ye gloat on? sallow as the gold ye clutch? May God put fire into you, if it were half hell-fire, ye Monophysites, ye modern men of pure Polar snow! Oh, look—oh, see: that lip—so sucked: Is there no lust about you that you don't bind it with wild community to your mouth? Those eyeballs ooze a whey of blood: is there no heart in all the Sahara of your vulgar gullets to weep and groan and weep?... Yes, it was pitiful: he was kind, and he was killed, he was good, and he was galled, he was meek, and he was mangled. And will you crucify him afresh? In the name of Holy Church, I call the Eternal God this night——"

But at this point Dr Burton stopped with a gasp, gaping upward all in wonderment; and from his mouth, from mine, from the mouths of us all in the church, there burst a sound.

Yonder in mid-air—under the roof of the central aisle—hung the crucified himself.

That sight will never tend to fade or be blurred in the memory of those who beheld it; if there be memory in Eternity, then always still in Eternity that sight, I think, will be with me.

It was not an optical error—that was the first certainty at which the brain, on waking a little from its deadness, arrived; it was not some magic illusion: a real man crucified on a real cross stood there revealed. From three points of the thorn-dented forehead I, with my eye of flesh, saw a trickle creep, and pause, and creep.

I found myself on my knees on the tiles, with my hands clasped. I forgot Langler—I forgot my love, his sister—and all things else. From the bowed knot of men and women in front of me came groan on groan.

At last! The heavens had spoken....

Yet it was faintly seen, and though I raised my head, and forced my eyes to search the divine horror, the light was most dim, and the revelation seemed rather the spectre of a thing than the thing itself. Only, each detail was perfect, and it was the crudeness of these details which proved its reality to the mind with proof a hundred times sure. The haggard crucifixions of Dürer and Spagnoletto—all the macabre dreams of a painter, graver, sculptor, heaped into one massacre of flesh and of grinning bone—would seem like a child's fancy in comparison with that fact. Still in my dreams I see the sideward hang of that under-lip, and that hollow between ribs and hips drawn out into shocking length, and the irregular drip from the hands, the left of which had been ripped to the finger-roots, and the crown of sorrow, and the dead drop of that tragic brow, it cannot be told....

Perhaps I alone examined details; the rest knelt bowed down; only Dr Burton, with his neck stretched back, stared as if in vision straight upward upon heaven. In myself I felt a kind of rapture, and also of peace; and the words which I murmured to myself were these: "at last."

All at once, without ascent, descent, or movement, the image vanished.