Various

“ I stopped with a shudder.
“What is life after all but one long death?” he went on, with sudden violence. “Our pleasures, our hopes, our youth are all dying; ambition dies, and even desire at last; our passions and tastes will die, or will live only to mourn their dead opportunity. The happiness of love dies with the loss of the loved, and, worst of all, love itself grows old in our hearts and dies. Why should we shrink only from the one death which can free us from all the others?”
“It is not true, Alan!” ”

“ No change that I could detect had taken place in that twisted goldwork; but there, clear in the sight of us both, stood forth the words of the magic motto:
“Pure blood shed by the blood-stained knife
Ends Mervyn shame, heals Mervyn strife.”
In low steady tones Alan read out the lines, and then there was silence—on my part of stunned bewilderment, the bewilderment of a spirit overwhelmed beyond the power of comprehension by rushing, conflicting emotions. Alan pressed me closer to him, while the silence seemed to throb with the beating of his heart and the panting of his breath. ”

“ The giant breath of the blizzard rattled the windows. The snow flung itself wrathfully against the panes. Outside it was bitter cold.
“I can’t bear to think of a cat outside on a night like this,” continued Myra.
“Forget it!” exclaimed David, arousing himself. “You are continually thinking of cats. All that I hear from you is cats. You dream of cats, you occupy your mind with cats. I heard no cat crying outside. It is only your imagination.”
“No; I heard a cat—I am sure,” insisted Myra. ”

“ Death is not; there is only a changing from shape to shape, from life to life.
“Mayhap the despised animal, walking in the dust of the road, was one time King of Ind, or the consort of Ghengis Khan.
“Do me no harm. Protect me, O Man, and I will protect thee. Feed me, O Man, and I will feed thee. Love me, O Man, and I will love thee. Hate me, and I will hate thee. Slay me, and I will slay thee.
“We be brothers, O Man, thou and I, from life to life, from death to death, until Nirvana be won.” ”

“ I pray that death instead of shame may be the portion of the next generation, and I look at George’s boys only to wonder which of them is the happy one who shall some day lie dead at his brother’s feet. Are you surprised at my resolution never to marry? The fatal prophecy is rich in its fulfillment; none of our name and blood are safe; and the day might come when I too should have to call upon my children to curse me for their birth,—should have to watch while the burden which I could no longer bear alone pressed the life from their mother’s heart. ”

“ Before he could find it, however, the Thing again whispered its warning of death in his ear and scorched his face with its icy breath.
Almost mad with terror, Peret threw himself backward and crashed against a chair with such violence that he was almost knocked senseless. For a second he lay still, to gather his forces and to fill his bursting lungs with air. His clothes were wet with perspiration, and his body cold and numb.
Expecting each instant to feel the vise-like grip of the Thing on his throat, he staggered to his feet and made another frantic effort to find the push-button. ”

“ What a monster it is! How the rank breath gurgles through his throat in his drunken sleep. The eyes are closed now, but I know them too; their odious leer, and the venomous hatred with which they can glare at me from their bloodshot setting. But the time has come at last. Never again shall their passion insult me, or their fury degrade me in slavish terror. There he lies; there at my mercy, the man who for fifteen years has made God’s light a shame to me, and His darkness a terror. ”

“ I felt the bed rebound as she jumped to the floor, and there I heard the soft padding of her feet down the passageway.
I awoke with a shriek. My forehead was damp with sweat. My teeth were chattering. I looked and saw that my door was wide open. I leaped out of bed and turned on the light. Was it a hideous dream, a fearful nightmare?
I do not know. But, lying there on the coverlet, was the wet muddy body of Toi Wah’s kitten.
A live and famished man-eating tiger in the room could not have inspired me with greater terror. I dared not touch the cold dead thing. ”

“ Ma foi! well do I know whereof I speak, Monsieur, for I heard the ‘whisper’ and felt the ‘breath’ of the Thing myself. The bat that was loosed in my room last night gave me the fright of my life. When its wings brushed against the wall it sounded like a whisper of the devil himself, and when its wings fanned the air against my face, I thought a corpse was breathing death into my soul. No coward am I, monsieur, but the ‘whispering’ and ‘breathing’ were so terribly real—which only goes to show what suggestion will do to a vivid imagination. ”

“ Gresham was becoming strangely excited, and his voice rose almost shrilly above the roar of the train.
“I have seen them,” he went on. “I have crossed the Mountains of Fear, whose summits tower as high as from the earth to the moon, and I have watched the stars dance at night upon their glaciers. I have starved upon the dead plains of Dzun-Sz’chuen, and I have swum the River of Death. I have slept in the Caves of Nganhwiu, where the hot winds never cease and the dead light their campfires on their journey to Nirvana. ”

“ The shadow that lay on his soul did not penetrate to mine, but it hung round me nevertheless, a cloud which I felt powerless to disperse.
After a moment he went on,—“Provided that they are distant enough, how little, after all, do we think of the results of our actions! There are few men who would deliberately instill into a child a love of drink, or wilfully deprive him of his reason; and yet a man with drunkenness or madness in his blood thinks nothing of bringing children into the world tainted us deeply with the curse as if he had inoculated them with it directly. ”

“ I have ceased to struggle. I have given up. Like the Oriental, I say, “Who can escape his fate?”
For I shall die by Chinese justice, a Buddhist revenge for killing the Tartar cat, Toi Wah. Toi Wah that I hated and feared, and have hated and feared through all the lives that the two of us have lived, far, far back to that time when the yellow sabre-toothed tiger seized my first-born and fled with him among the reeds and ferns of the Paleozoic marshes, a dainty morsel for her kitten. ”

“ I heard the bedroom door slam behind her, heard the key turn in the lock.
As she rushed past me and up the stairs, the patter of her feet fell on my ears like the soft padding of Toi Wah’s footsteps that had filled my youthful years with fear. My blood chilled at this old, until now, forgotten sound.
What craven fear was this? I tried to pull myself together, to reason rationally. Fear of a cat long dead, whose mouldering bones were upstairs on the attic floor! What was there to fear? ”

“ You can’t, until you become Toi Wah again, and then it will be about your neck. Read what it says! It is in your accursed tongue!
“But you shall never live to madden me again with fear, to make my life a hell of peering eyes and padding feet, and then to suck my breath at last! I killed you once, I can do it again! And again and yet again in any shape the devils in hell may send you to prey upon honest men!”
And I seized her by her beautiful throat. I meant to choke her until those cruel yellow eyes started from their sockets, and then laugh as I saw her gasping in the last agony of death. ”

“ As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing place. We both saw a large, pale light—as large as the human figure, but shapeless and unsubstantial—move before us, and ascend the stairs that led from the landing into the attics. ”

“ One would never have suspected from his manner or appearance that, eight hours previously, he had battled with an invisible menace in the narrow confines of a darkened room, and had felt stark terror grip his soul before he emerged triumphant from the most harrowing experience of his adventurous career. No one would ever have suspected that, because, to all outward appearance, Peret was at peace with the world and had no thought on his mind of greater weight than the aroma of the cigarette between his lips. ”

“ Here, mounted gems of unrivaled quality and size abounded, most of them proving that the Ataruipe as jewelers were equally at home in precious stones and gold.
The apparel of the men in our party was filled to overflowing with the scintillant fragments; Zangaree, in pure Afric joy, tossed a handful into the air and in the unusual light of the cavern they sparkled like fireworks as they fell. From the walls, lustrous opals flashed at us their iridescent rays; there were gems underfoot, cleverly laid in fantastic mosaics such as the mind of modern man never had conceived. ”

“ That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe; some material force must have killed my dog; the same force might, for aught I know, have sufficed to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog,—had my intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing resistance in my will.”
“It killed your dog,—that is fearful! Indeed it is strange that no animal can be induced to stay in that house; not even a cat. Rats and mice are never found in it.” ”

“ I drew my breath sharply.
“The cat—Toi Wah?” I asked the housekeeper, who watched beside the dead. “Where is she?”
“Under the bed,” she answered. “The poor creature is that distracted she would not eat, and had to be driven from your grandmother’s side in order that we might compose the body. She would not leave the room, but darted under the bed there, snarling and spitting. It’s afraid of her I am.”
I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. Crouched in the farthest corner was Toi Wah, and her great yellow eyes glared at me in terror and defiance. ”

“ We looked at each other a single instant. The same thought seized both,—some human agency might be detected here. I rushed in first, my servant followed. A small, blank, dreary room without furniture; a few empty boxes and hampers in a corner; a small window; the shutters closed; not even a fireplace; no other door but that by which we had entered; no carpet on the floor, and the floor seemed very old, uneven, worm-eaten, mended here and there, as was shown by the whiter patches on the wood; but no living being, and no visible place in which a living being could have hidden. ”

“ But Kenton was not to be baffled.
“With what weapon was the man killed?” he asked doggedly.
Captain Dolan gazed at the contorted face of the man at his feet.
“With one of the oldest weapons in the world,” he answered. “A weapon which has caused the death of many a brave man—aye, braver and more powerful than Terence here.”
The waves lapped saltily against the rotting piles at the far end of the warehouse. In the darkness a rat squeaked, and the cat, interrupting its toilet, darted out of the circle of light and vanished. In the darkness was heard the sound of a speeding motor. ”