Death trap

“ The mourning caused by that hateful death-trap, the Cold Storage Building, is known to all the world; the recklessness, the heroism, the strict obedience to orders in the face of death, the horror, the suffering, the loss of gallant lives, all these are known ”

“ Fear and industry conceived them. They were safe enough at ordinary times, but death-traps in an attack; a man at the bottom of a steep pit stood little chance against an enemy at the door with a bomb. ”

“ One of our younger novelists, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, in his recent novel, La Pata de la Raposa, has told us that the idea of death is the trap, and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness ”

“ Stepping across the earth, which is but a broad executioner's block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters the larva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reaches down into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead are pictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation, the white shapelessness of revolting terror, passes by each unsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes from the crumbled eye, as a corpse bleeds when its murderer approaches." ”

“ So, a suicide, who goes to cast himself headlong into the river, may run in a panic from a falling beam, and be consistent, too; for his compact is with death—not mutilation.
Be that as it may, I know that for the moment terror so snapped at my heel that, under the very teeth of it, I leaped up the scaffold steps—with the wild idea of swarming to the beam above the knife and thence defying my pursuers, should they nose and bay me seated there at refuge—and stood with a white desperate face, scarcely daring to pant out the constriction of my lungs. ”

“ In truth, they had the impression, since no living being had entered, that death itself had stepped over the threshold, crossed the room to the man, struck him in their presence with its invisible hand, and then gone away, leaving the murderous weapon in the corpse. ”

“ Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab, are the standing elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you come down to that. Your staring looks, your blood, your "chirking," are accidentals. They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase) , but the horror of sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands. ”

“ But if they had seen, as I have, the remains of men, women and innocent babes horribly mutilated, burnt, butchered, and hacked to pieces, they too, if they knew such a fate awaited them beyond the possibility of a doubt if captured alive, would unhesitatingly court death by their own hands, suddenly and immediately, rather than wait for the other, a few hours or days more remote, perhaps, but certain, and horrible in its prolonged agony. ”

“ The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him where to strike. The fatal blow is given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin’s purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard! ”

“ The presence of death, in its most fearful shapes, seemed palpable to the senses, and we, crouching in the gloom on the roof, to which as the safest place we had returned, had before our mental vision the mutilated bodies in the rooms close below us, with the ghastly probability, almost the certainty, that another hour or two would join us in their horrid fate. ”

“ A great number of forms of the fall-trap, as it is called, are to be found in different parts of the world, and trappers of fur-bearing animals avail themselves extensively of the use of engines of this description. From the largest bear to the tiny ermine the drop or deadfall produces death, just as we see the common slide-door cage successfully used in taking alive either the royal Bengal tiger or the pilfering kitchen mouse. Deadfall traps are especially valuable to the northern trapper, who, with axe, knife, and rifle, penetrates vast solitudes in search of furs. ”

“ A prey to a mad terror which every moment that passed doubled, the wretched man galloped haphazard, without object or idea, following no direction, but flying straight before him, pursued by the hideous phantom of the death which, for an hour that was as long as an age, had bent over his shoulders, and had already stretched forth its skeleton hand to seize him, when a miraculous accident sent a liberator. ”

“ Strong as dying men sometimes are in the last flickering up of life in the speedily dissolving frame, the lowering of this trap, and, above all, the drawing of it back into place, which I instinctively felt would be the hardest act of the two, would be beyond the utmost fire or force conceivable in a dying man. No, even if he, as a member of the family, knew of this subterranean retreat, he could not have made use of it. I did not even accept the possibility sufficiently to approach the place again with this new inquiry in mind. ”

“ Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. ”

“ And mark me, Don Carlos, I have but one regret. It is that my weapon deals an instantaneous death. Such revenge is poor and flavourless after all. I have heard of poisons whose least drop, mingling with the blood, ensures a slow agonizing death--time to learn what torture means, and to drain to the dregs the cup filled for others--to curse God and man ere he dies. ”

“ Does not each tick of the second-hand mark the death rattle of thousands of men? In order to hear the hell raging yonder on the other side of the thick wall of air, is it not enough to know of chins blown off, throats cut open, and corpses locked in a death embrace? ”

“ To kill a man!
What other way was there? The proof that it had taken Hilton Travers years to obtain, the proof on which the Tocsin's life depended, was destroyed utterly, irreparably. It could never be duplicated—Hilton Travers was dead—MURDERED. Murder! That thought again! It was their own weapon! Murder! Would one kill a venomous reptile in whose fangs was death? ”

“ Hundreds, after a dreadful fight for air, became unconscious and died where they lay—a death of hideous torture, with the frothing bubbles gurgling in their throats and the foul liquid welling up in their lungs. ”

“ Sooner than submit to your filthy embraces, I will dare exposure, and death itself! Think not to force me to a compliance with your wishes—I will resist you while life animates my frame. I fear you not, low villain that you are.'
The Dead Man raised his iron hand as if to dash out her brains for her temerity.—But he checked himself, and surveyed her with a sort of calm ferocity, as he said [Pg 195] —'Young lady, since you are determined to oppose my wishes, I will not force you. Neither will I kill you; yet my vengeance shall be more terrible than death. ”

“ The practice of opening graves and mutilating dead bodies is quite common, and arises in general from the notion that persons who die impenitent and without extreme unction, including suicides and victims to delirium tremens, apoplexy, and other forms of sudden death, as well as schismatics, sorcerers, and witches, come forth from their graves and wander about as vampires, sucking the blood of individuals during sleep and inflicting misery upon entire communities by producing drought, famine, and pestilence. ”

“ So stated it is inexplicable, so ruthless, so blundering — this death that we must die. It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared. It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters. ”

“ If man could do it, they knew he would.
Each silently prayed that he might make good his escape, instead of coming to their assistance now. He could do no good at present, and should he fall into their hands his doom was sealed at once. No power on earth could prevent their taking summary vengeance upon him. The Death-Dealer had sent too many of their braves to the spirit-land, for them to spare him, should they once get him into their clutches.
The work of securing their captives had hardly been completed, when one of them caught a glimpse of the scout surveying the scene before him. ”

“ After all, one would expect a trap-door to be bolted. He wondered if it would be of any use to knock. Did it give on to a street, a courtyard, or a house?
He rapped on it with the end of his electric torch, softly and then loudly. He went on rapping, and knew the fear that assails the assaulter of impregnable, unyielding silence, the panic of him who calls aloud in an empty house and is answered only by the tiny sounds of creaking, scuffling, and whispering that cause the skin to creep, the blood to curdle, the marrow to freeze, the heart to stop, and the spirit to be poured out like water. ”

“ The ghosts and their followers always took delight in torture, in cruel and unusual punishments. For the infraction of most of their laws, death was the penalty—death produced by stoning and by fire. Sometimes, when man committed only murder, he was allowed to flee to some city of refuge. Murder was a crime against man. ”

“ The air echoes with the sound of the death-whoop, and of arms. The savage aspect of the combatants; their faces painted black and red, and some streaming with blood, and their frightful yells, make them appear like demons risen from the world beneath. The victims, too late aroused, spring from their fatal slumber, and foreseeing the dreadful fate which awaits them if taken prisoners, make almost superhuman struggles for deliverance. ”

“ It may, however, be worth considering whether this apparent trifling with life may not have for its source dread of the grim reaper in such blind and ignorant excess as to lead to killing to save from dying—to cheat death in fact, and enable the cunning cannibal to slink out of the world unmissed and unquestioned as to the errors of his life. ”

“ CHAPTER XXII Showing the Desperate and Bloody Combat which took place in the Dark Vaults.
'You will pray for death in vain; death shall not come to your relief for years,' were the words of the miscreant who had shut up poor Frank in that loathsome dungeon;—and like a weight of lead, that awful doom oppressed and crushed the heart of our hero, as he lay stretched upon the stone floor of the cell, with the maniac Dwarf gibbering beside him, and staring at him with its serpent-like and malignant eyes. ”

“ Between them there is nothing but bloody scaffolds, gallows, wheels, stakes and countless horrible instruments of death and torture, which cause men to die slowly, as by a thousand deaths. The company is composed altogether of bodies burned, drowned, beheaded or otherwise murdered; so that our footsteps must tread through the midst of skulls and dead men’s bones ”

“ From the strange mixture of the material and spiritual common to men in that barbarian condition, the bodies or the blood of the slain appear to be the essentials of these requirements. Thus, also, the utmost horror is felt at decapitation, or at the severing of limbs from the body after death. ”

“ It may be cut, by denying the supposed connexion between the Vampyr visit and the supervention of death-trance in the second party. Nor is the explanation thus obtained devoid of plausibility. There is no reason why death-trance should not, in certain seasons and places, be epidemic. Then the persons most liable to it would be those of weak and irritable nervous systems. ”

“ At the appointed moment a screw is suddenly turned by the executioner, stationed behind the condemned, and instantaneous death follows. This would seem to be more merciful than hanging, whereby death is produced by the lingering process of suffocation, to say nothing of the many mishaps which so often occur upon the gallows. ”

“ As if the hermit were more immune from death than the hunter! Overhead hover fearful fire-breathing demons bearing beautiful women head downwards to their doom. Towards the centre of the entire picture, of which this forms but a half, sweeps Death, a sombre flying figure with a great scythe, whom cripples and the sorrowful invoke in vain; underneath are his slain, upon whose bodies swoop demons with long pitchforks and angels with long crosses, fighting furiously for the spoil, in a game of pull devil, pull angel. ”

“ Men entered, voluntarily or otherwise, in good health. If they did so, determined to achieve suicide, or were driven in by the government with a view of putting them to death, the end soon came, and was, if we may believe what we read, welcomed with alacrity. After rapid, painful, and unresisted decay, the sufferer saw as his last hour approached, the cinders strewn on the ground in the shape of a cross; a thin scattering of straw was made upon the cinders, and that was the death-bed upon which every Trappist expired. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The common ordeal is to drink some poisonous concoction and if it does not produce vertigo the accused is adjudged innocent; but if he staggers or falls he is guilty, and the people, all standing around and looking on with spears and swords in their hands, immediately rush upon him and kill him, usually cutting the body to pieces. Far more women than men die this death. ”