Dead Man

“ I could picture to myself the dead man, lover of nature that he evidently was from all that I heard of him, coming up here in the early morning, full of the strange and weird charm of the lonely heights, standing for awhile to gaze round him across the vast stretch of unawakened life, and being struck down to death, unawares. ”

“ Some fling themselves prostrate beside the corpse and sob as if their very hearts would break. They take the dead man by the hand, they stroke him, they straighten out the poor feet which are already growing cold. ”

“ It was soon done, for the murderers had hurried their victim into a shallow tomb. In a few minutes the body of the dead man was exposed to view. Decay had not commenced, and death had given fresh depth and beauty to the serenity which had been their habitual expression in life. ”

“ If a man has died, and his friends are sitting about the corpse lamenting, the would-be medicine-man suddenly begins to shiver and to rub his knee with his folded hands, while he utters a monotonous sound. Gradually he falls into an ecstasy, and if his whole body shakes convulsively, the spirit of the dead man is supposed to have entered into him, and he becomes a medicine-man. ”

“ Looking down upon the dead face, touching the cold hand, lifting up the leaden arm, one cannot help feeling how utterly dead a dead man looks, an impression enormously deepened, as a rule, by the circumstances of the last days. ”

“ As he lay pondering it all, the grim idea came into his head of dragging the dead man through the tunnel, and hoisting him up outside, and leaving him propped up among the boulders where they would be sure to find him.
He knew how arrantly superstitious they were, most of them. They had been brought up on ghosts and witches and evil spirits, and, fearless as they might be of things mortal and natural, all that bordered on the unknown and uncanny held for them unimaginable terrors. The dead man might serve a useful purpose after all ”

“ There was also a dark lantern, and various implements used by burglars. The Dead Man then proceeded to adjust a mask over his hideous face, which so completely disguised him, that not one of his most intimate acquaintances would have known him. The mask was formed of certain flexible materials, and being colored with singular truthfulness to nature, bore a most wonderful resemblance to a human face. The Dead Man, who, without it, carried in his countenance the loathsome appearance of a putrefying corpse, with it was transformed into a person of comely looks. ”

“ He had seen men drowned, men who had frozen to death, men accidentally shot to death, and men who had died naturally and comfortably in their beds. It was, therefore, not the sight of death that startled him, but the horror and tragic appeal in the dead man's staring eyes. ”

“ With the howl of a wild beast, he threw himself upon his victim.
But ere he could strike the deadly blow, he was writhing and struggling in the powerful grasp of a tall, stout man, who at that crisis rushed into the dungeon.
'Now, reptile, I have thee!' muttered the Doctor, (for it was he) as with mighty and resistless strength he dashed the miscreant to the floor and deprived him of his knife.
But the Dead Man struggled with all the fury of desperation; with his iron hand he made rapid and savage passes at the head of his assailant, knowing that a single well-directed blow would stun him. ”

“ But this is fearsome, to die that my body may become the home of the ghost of a dead man, who perchance, having entered it, will abide there, leaving my spirit houseless, or perchance will shut up the doors of my heart in such fashion that they never can be opened. ”

“ Do you think a dead man can stand on his legs?' After much colloquy of this sort, the men quit the place, leaving the two travellers not only with the dead body, but with bones and human skeletons, revealed by the light of the lantern, on every side! ”

“ If anything could have rendered so dreadful a sight as the corpse of the murderer with his blackened temples, clenched hands, and cold meaningless glare of eye, in any degree ridiculous, it would have been to see the little player cast upon the ground beside the vast bulk of the dead man, striving to imitate the position in which he lay ”

“ Let us suppose that these corpses do not actually stir from their tombs, but only the ghosts or spirits appear to the living. Wherefore do these phantoms present themselves and what is it that energizes them? Is it actually the soul of the dead man which has not yet departed to its final destination? ”

“ So a dead man, for the single reason that he is dead, does not repel me, and, though I knew that there was no hope that this man was alive, still, for decency's sake, I felt his pulse, and, while I kept my ears alert for any sound from the floors above me, I pulled open his shirt and placed my hand upon his heart. ”

“ It is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. ”

“ As I mentally review that portentous hour it seems that it must have originated with my first glimpse of that funeral scene, silently strengthening its grip with a subtle insidiousness. A baleful malignant influence that seemed to emanate from the corpse itself held me with magnetic fascination. My whole being seemed charged with some ecstatic electrifying force, and I felt my form straighten without conscious volition. My eyes were trying to burn beneath the closed lids of the dead man's and read some secret message they concealed. ”

“ CHAPTER IV THE MURDERED MAN There may be folk in the world to whom the finding of a dead man, lying grim and stark by the roadside, with the blood freshly run from it and making ugly patches of crimson on the grass and the gravel, would be an ordinary thing ”

“ More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! ”

“ To give them Christian, decent burial would be treason to man, sacrilege to the Church, and impiety to God!'
Thus perished the 'Dead Man,' a villain so stupendous, so bloodthirsty and so desperate that it may well be doubted whether such a monster ever could have existed. But this diabolical character is not entirely drawn from the author's imagination; neither is it highly exaggerated;—for the annals of crime will afford instances of villainy as deep and as monstrous as any that characterized the career of the 'Dead Man' of our tale. ”

“ A man finds a corpse lying unburied, and out of pure philanthropy procures interment for it at great personal inconvenience. Later he is met by the ghost of the dead man, who in many cases promises him help on condition of receiving, in return, half of whatever he gets. ”

“ Presiding over this ghastly revel, was a gigantic skeleton, arrayed in what had once been a splendid theatrical dress, and grasping in its fleshless hand a large gilt goblet; this figure was seated on a sort of throne, made of rough boards.
These were the skeletons of those who had died in the Vaults, as well as of those persons who, having fallen into the power of the band of villains, had been murdered in that dungeon, by starvation or torture. With infernal ingenuity, the Dead Man had arrayed the skeletons in fanciful costumes, which had been plundered from the wardrobe of a theatre ”

“ Does a dead Man talk and walk? I wish I may never meet with more frightful Ghosts than you are. Pa.Ay, indeed, you make a Jest of it; but for all that, you kill poor me, and more cruelly too, than if you stuck a Dagger in my Breast. For now I, poor Wretch as I am, die a lingering Death. Ma.Prithee tell me, how many Women with Child have miscarried at the Sight of thee? Pa.My Paleness shews I have no more Blood in my Body than a Ghost. ”

“ Therefore, when a dead man is buried in effigy, with all due formality, that man is dead and buried beyond a doubt, and his ghost is as harmless as it is in the nature of ghosts to be.’ But sometimes such burial by proxy was premature, for the man was not really dead ”

“ A man, living in Manchester, resolved to play corpse, for this laudable object. His wife was privy to the plot, of course,—and gave notice, in proper form, of her bereavement. The agent of the society made the customary domiciliary visit. There the body lay—stiff and stark—and a very straight and proper corpse it was—the jaw decently tied up. The visitor, well convinced, and quite touched by the widow’s anguish, was turning on his heel to depart, when a slight motion of the dead man’s eyelid arrested his attention: he began to smell—not of the body, like the bear in Æsop—but a rat. ”

“ Sometimes the vanquished in battle resort to a curious ruse for the purpose of avenging themselves on the victors by means of a ghost. They take the sleeping-mat of one of the slain, roll it up in a bundle along with his loin-cloth, apron, netted bag, or head-rest, and give the bundle to two cripples to carry. Then they steal quietly to the landing-place of their foes, peering warily about lest they should be observed. The bundle represents the dead man, and the cripples who carry it reel to and fro, and finally sink to the ground with their burden. ”

“ No sooner had the doctor cast an eye upon his fallen patient, but he presently calls out to the lady, “Lord, Madam, what mean you to send for a physician to a dead man?, For shame, keep him not above ground any longer. Upon my word, madam, he has been dead so long, that he stinks again, and if you don’t bury him quickly, the very scent of his corps will breed a plague in your family” “I have had a coffin in the home some time, replied the lady, but was loth to have him buried so soon, for fear he should come to life again.” ”

“ Sometimes the last request which a dying man addresses to his kinsfolk is that they will kill this or that sorcerer who has killed him; and he enforces the injunction by threats of the terrible things he will do to them in his disembodied state if they fail to avenge his death on his imaginary murderer. As all the relatives of a dead man stand in fear of his ghost, the body may not be buried until all of them have had an opportunity of paying their respects to it. ”

“ Not so; it is notorious that there are people who recognize no such theory but who nevertheless deposit offerings with the dead. Affectionate fancy or symbolism, a horror of the association of death leading the survivors to get rid of anything that even suggests the dreadful thought, a desire to abandon the dead man’s property, an idea that the hovering ghost may take pleasure in or make use of the gifts left for him, all these are or may be efficient motives. ”

“ There he sees two evil men dragging a corpse from its coffin, and pays his all that it may be buried. He is joined by the ghost of the dead man, who accompanies him. They get three rods from an old woman, who is healed by the comrade's salve, and they come to a city, where they get a sword from a showman, whose puppets are made alive by the salve. They come to a mountain, where the companion cuts off the wings of a great white swan and carries them along. They come at length to the city of the beautiful princess, who is a witch. ”

“ Ladies, I am called the Dead Man, and have the honor to be your most obedient servant. Now to business.'
The Dead Man proceeded to relate those circumstances with which the reader is already acquainted, connected with his visit to the tomb of Mr. Franklin, and the manner in which he had come to the knowledge of that gentleman's murder. He omitted, however, to state that he had shut up the rector in the tomb, for he firmly believed in his own mind that Dr. Sinclair had perished. ”

“ The second 193theory is that the soul of a dead man goes out from its buried corpse and sucks the blood of living men. The victim becomes thin, languid, and bloodless, falls into a rapid decline and dies. Here again is actual experience, but a new fancy is developed to complete the idea. The corpse thus supplied by its returning soul with blood, is imagined to remain unnaturally fresh and supple and ruddy; and accordingly the means of detecting a vampire is to open his grave, where the reanimated corpse may be found to bleed when cut, and even to move and shriek. ”

“ It remains to find out what the ghost will take to relax his clutch on the sick man, it may be a mash of yams, a fish, a pig, or perhaps a human substitute. The question is put and answered as before; and whatever the oracle declares to be requisite is offered on the dead man's grave. Thus the ghost is appeased and the sufferer is made whole.614 In these islands a common cause of illness is believed to be an unwarrantable intrusion on premises occupied by a ghost, who punishes the trespasser by afflicting him with bodily pains and ailments, or it may be by carrying off his soul. ”

“ Then he went to the fire and warmed his hand, and laid it on his face, but the dead man remained cold. He took him out of the coffin, sat down by the fire, and took him on his knees, and rubbed his arms to make the blood circulate.
But it was all no good. Next, it came into his head that if two people were in bed together, they warmed each other. So he put the dead man in the bed, covered him up, and lay down beside him.
After a time the dead man grew warm, and began to move. ”

“ Two Danish variants present a curious but not inexplicable combination of The Grateful Dead with Puss in Boots, as was noted by Köhler.25 Danish I. relates how a youth pays three marks, which is his all, to bury the body of a dead man, for whose interment the priest has demanded payment in advance. He is then joined by another youth, who is the ghost of the dead, and goes to a certain city. ”