The Tomb

In relating thecircumstances which have led to my confinement within this
refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position willcreate a
natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is anunfortunate fact
that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision toweigh with
patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and feltonly by a
psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its commonexperience. Men of
broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixtthe real and
the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue ofthe delicate
individual physical and mental media through which we are madeconscious of
them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns asmadness the
flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obviousempricism.
My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have beena dreamer
and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commerciallife, and
temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and socialrecreation of my
acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visibleworld;
spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little knownbooks, and in
roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestralhome. I do not
think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields andgroves was
exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I mustsay little, since
detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon myintellect which I
sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendantsaround me. It is
sufficient for me to relate events without analyzing causes.
I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I havenot said
that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lackingthe fellowship of
the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of thingsthat are not,
or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singularwooded hollow,
in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading,thinking, and
dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancywere taken, and
around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies ofboyhood were woven.
Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, andoften have I
watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waningmoon but of these
things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb inthe darkest of
the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old andexalted family
whose last direct descendant had been laid within its blackrecesses many
decades before my birth.
The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered anddiscolored
by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into thehillside, the
structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderousand forbidding
slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastenedajar in a queerly
sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks,according to a gruesome
fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scionsare here
inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, buthad long since
fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a stroke oflightning. Of the
midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the olderinhabitants of the
region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding towhat they call
`divine wrath' in a manner that in later years vaguely increasedthe always
strong fascination which I had felt for the forest-darkenedsepulcher. One man
only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes wasburied in this
place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had comefrom a distant
land, to which the family had repaired when the mansion burneddown. No one
remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care tobrave the
depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-wornstones.
I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the
half-hidden house of death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemyof nature
transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almosthomogeneous mass of
green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surgingseas of moist
verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and thevegetation. In such
surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and spacebecome trivial and
unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beatinsistently upon the
enthralled consciousness.
All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of thehollow;
thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with thingsI need not
name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wondersunknown to the
throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, uponforcing my way
between two savage clumps of briars, I suddenly encountered theentrance of the
vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The darkblocks of granite,
the door so curiously ajar, and the funeral carvings above thearch, aroused in
me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of gravesand tombs I knew
and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperamentbeen kept from
all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strangestone house on
the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest andspeculation; and its
cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through theaperture so
tantalizingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay.But in that
instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire whichhas brought me
to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which musthave come from the
hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoninggloom in spite of
the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning lightof day I
alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwingwide the stone
door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the spacealready provided;
but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was nowfrantic; and when
in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn tothe hundred
gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force anentrance to the
black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physicianwith the
iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room, once told avisitor that this
decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I willleave final
judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.
The months following my discovery were spent in futile attemptsto force the
complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefullyguarded
inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. Withthe
traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much;though an
habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my informationor my resolve.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised orterrified on
learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideasregarding life and
death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathingbody in a
vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister family ofthe burned-down
mansion was in some way represented within the stone space Isought to explore.
Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygoneyears in the
ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the tomb,before whose door
I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candiewithin the
nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight ofdamp stone steps
leading downward. The odor of the place repelled yet bewitched me.I felt I had
known it before, in a past remote beyond all recollection; beyondeven my
tenancy of the body I now possess.
The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten
translation of Plutarch's Lives in the book-filled attic of myhome. Reading the
life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling ofthe great stone
beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destinywhenever he
should become old enough to lift its enormous weight. The legendhad the effect
of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for itmade me feel that
the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow toa strength and
ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily chaineddoor with ease;
but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed thewill of Fate.
Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent,and much
of my time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits. Iwould sometimes
rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in thosechurch-yards and
places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What Idid there I
may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certainthings; but I know
that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I would oftenastonish those about
me with my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for manygenerations. It was
after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queerconceit about
the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker oflocal history
who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing agraven skull and
crossbones, was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment ofchildish imagination
I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolenthe
silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of thedeceased
before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate,had turned
twice in his mound-covered coffin on the day after interment.
But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; beingindeed
stimulated by the unexpected genealogical discovery that my ownmaternal
ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposediyextinct family of
the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last ofthis older and
more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, andto look
forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might pass withinthat stone door
and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed thehabit of
listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing myfavorite hours
of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came ofage, I had made a
small clearing in the thicket before the mold-stained facade ofthe hillside,
allowing the surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang thespace like the
walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, thefastened door my
shrine, and here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground,thinking strange
thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.
The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must havefallen
asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense ofawakening that I heard
the voices. Of these tones and accents I hesitate to speak; oftheir quality I
will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain uncannydifferences in
vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade ofNew England
dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists tothe precise
rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in that shadowycolloquy, though
it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed,my attention was
distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenonso fleeting that
I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that asI awoke, a
light had been hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulcher.I do not
think I was either astounded or panic-stricken, but I know that Iwas greatly
and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I wentwith much
directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found thekey which next
day unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.
It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first enteredthe vault on
the abandoned slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leapedwith an exultation
I can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me anddescended the
dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to knowthe way; and
though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place,I felt
singularly at home in the musty, charnel-house air. Looking aboutme, I beheld
many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains of coffins.Some of these were
sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving thesilver handles
and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust.Upon one plate
I read the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in1640 and died
here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was one fairlywell preserved
and untenanted casket, adorned with a single name which broughtme both a smile
and a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broadslab, extinguish
my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.
In the gray light of dawn I staggered from the vault and lockedthe chain of
the door behind me. I was no longer a young man, though buttwenty-one winters
had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who observedmy homeward
progress looked at me strangely, and marveled at the signs ofribald revelry
which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober andsolitary. I did not
appear before my parents till after a long and refreshing sleep.
Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, anddoing
things I must never recall. My speech, always susceptible toenvironmental
influences, was the first thing to succumb to the change; and mysuddenly
acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later aqueer boldness and
recklessness came into my demeanor, till I unconsciously grew topossess the
bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. Myformerly silent
tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or thegodless
cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterlyunlike the
fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; andcovered the
fly-leaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams whichbrought up
suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustanwits and
rimesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster bydeclaiming in
palpably liquorish accents an effusion of Eighteenth Centurybacchanalian mirth,
a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ransomething like
this:

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For `tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
  So fill up your glass,
  For life will soon pass;
When you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!
Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;
But what's a red nose if ye're happy and gay?
Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here,
Than white as a lily and dead half a year!
  So Betty, my miss,
  Come give me kiss;
In hell there's no innkeeper's daughter like this!
Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able,
Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table,
But fill up your goblets and pass `em around
Better under the table than under the ground!
  So revel and chaff
  As ye thirstily quaff:
Under six feet of dirt `tis less easy to laugh!
The fiend strike me blue! l'm scarce able to walk,
And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!
Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;
l'll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!
  So lend me a hand;
  I'm not able to stand,
But I'm gay whilst I linger on top of the land!

About this time I conceived my present fear of fire andthunderstorms.
Previously indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakablehorror of them;
and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house wheneverthe heavens
threatened an electrical display. A favorite haunt of mine duringthe day was
the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and infancy I would
picture the structure as it had been in its prime. On oneoccasion I startled a
villager by leading him confidently to a shallow subcellar, ofwhose existence I
seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had been unseen andforgotten for
many generations.
At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed atthe
altered manner and appearance of their only son, commenced toexert over my
movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result indisaster. I had told
no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purposewith religious
zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care inthreading the
mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possiblepursuer. My key to
the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck, itspresence known only to
me. I never carried out of the sepulcher any of the things I cameupon whilst
within its walls.
One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened thechain of the
portal with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicketthe dreaded
face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower wasdiscovered, and the
objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did notaccost me, so I
hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to mycareworn
father. Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to beproclaimed to the
world? Imagine my delighted astonishment on hearing the spyinform my parent in
a cautious whisper that I had spent the night in the boweroutside the tomb; my
sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlockedportal stood ajar!
By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was nowconvinced that a
supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sentcircumstance, I
began to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confidentthat no one
could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full joysof that charnel
conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing happened,and I was borne
away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.
I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint ofthunder was in
the clouds, and a hellish phosphoresence rose from the rank swampat the bottom
of the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was different. Insteadof the hillside
tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of the slope whosepresiding demon
beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged from anintervening grove upon
the plain before the ruin. I beheld in the misty moonlight athing I had always
vaguely expected. The mansion, gone for a century, once morereared its stately
height to the raptured vision; every window ablaze with thesplendor of many
candles. Up the long drive rolled the coaches of the Bostongentry, whilst on
foot came a numerous assemblage of powdered exquisites from theneighboring
mansions. With this throng I mingled, though I knew I belongedwith the hosts
rather than with the guests. Inside the hall were music,laughter, and wine on
every hand. Several faces I recognized; though I should haveknown them better
had they been shriveled or eaten away by death and decomposition.Amidst a wild
and reckless throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. Gayblasphemy poured
in torrents from my lips, and in shocking sallies I heeded no lawof God, or
nature.
Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of theswinish
revelry, clave the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon theboisterous
company. Red tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfedthe house; and
the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamitywhich seemed to
transcend the bounds of unguided nature, fled shrieking into thenight. I alone
remained, riveted to my seat by a groveling fear which I hadnever felt before.
And then a second horror took possession of my soul. Burnt aliveto ashes, my
body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tombof the Hydesi
Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had I not a right to rest tilleternity
amongst the descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claimmy heritage of
death, even though my soul go seeking through the ages foranother corporeal
tenement to represent it on that vacant slab in the alcove of thevault. Jervas
Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!
As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myselfscreaming and
struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spywho had
followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, andupon the
southern horizon were flashes of lightning that had so latelypassed over our
heads. My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood by as Ishouted my demands
to be laid within the tomb, frequently admonishing my captors totreat me as
gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor of theruined cellar told
of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from this spot a groupof curious
villagers with lanterns were prying a small box of antiqueworkmanship, which
the thunderbolt had brought to light.
Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched thespectators as
they viewed the treasure-trove, and was permitted to share intheir discoveries.
The box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which hadunearthed it,
contained many papers and objects of value, but I had eyes forone thing alone.
It was the porcelain miniature of a young man in a smartly curledbag-wig, and
bore the initials `J. H.' The face was such that as I gazed, Imight well have
been studying my mirror.
On the following day I was brought to this room with the barredwindows, but
I have been kept informed of certain things through an aged andsimple-minded
servitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who, likeme, loves the
churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within thevault has
brought me only pitying smiles. My father, who visits mefrequently, declares
that at no time did I pass the chained portal, and swears thatthe rusted
padlock had not been touched for fifty years when he examined it.He even says
that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that Iwas often
watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim facade, my half-openeyes fixed
on the crevice that leads to the interior. Against theseassertions I have no
tangible proof to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost inthe struggle on
that night of horrors. The strange things of the past which Ihave learned
during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as thefruits of my
lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes ofthe family
library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should haveby this time
become quite convinced of my madness.
But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has donethat which
impels me to make public at least part of my story. A week ago heburst open the
lock which chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, anddescended with a
lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove he found anold but empty
coffin whose tarnished plate bears the single word: Jervas. Inthat coffin and
in that vault they have promised me I shall be buried.