Can Such Things Be?

The apparition confronting the dreamer in the haunted wood—­the thing so like, yet so unlike his mother—­was horrible!  It stirred no love nor longing in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past—­inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear.  He tried to turn and run from before it, but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet from the ground.  His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the lusterless orbs of the apparition, which he knew was not a soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted wood—­a body without a soul!  In its blank stare was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—­nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy.  “An appeal will not lie,” he thought, with an absurd reversion to professional slang, making the situation more horrible, as the fire of a cigar might light up a tomb.

For a time, which seemed so long that the world grew gray with age and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood within a pace, regarding him with the mindless malevolence of a wild brute; then thrust its hands forward and sprang upon him with appalling ferocity!  The act released his physical energies without unfettering his will; his mind was still spellbound, but his powerful body and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well.  For an instant he seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator—­such fancies are in dreams; then he regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert and fierce as that of its hideous antagonist.

But what mortal can cope with a creature of his dream?  The imagination creating the enemy is already vanquished; the combat’s result is the combat’s cause.  Despite his struggles—­despite his strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, he felt the cold fingers close upon his throat.  Borne backward to the earth, he saw above him the dead and drawn face within a hand’s breadth of his own, and then all was black.  A sound as of the beating of distant drums—­a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing all to silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.