The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (60 page)

After that, as time drifted rearward, I skipped some things and
took in others, according to my humor. I watched my Duplicate
turn from nothing into a lovely soap-bubble statue with delicate
rainbow-hues playing over it; watched its skeleton gather form and
solidity; watched it put on flesh and clothes, and all that; but I
skipped the interviews with the cat; I also skipped the interview
with the master; and when the clock had gone back twenty-three
hours and I was due to appear drunk in Marget's chamber, I took
the pledge and stayed away.

Then, for amusement and to note effects, 44 and I-invisibleappeared in China, where it was noonday. The sun was just ready
to turn downward on his new north-eastern track, and millions of
yellow people were gazing at him, dazed and stupid, while other
millions lay stretched upon the ground everywhere, exhausted with
the terrors and confusions they had been through, and now
blessedly unconscious. We loafed along behind the sun around the
globe, tarrying in all the great cities on the route, and observing and
admiring the effects. Everywhere weary people were re-chattering
previous conversations backwards and not understanding each other, and oh, they did look so tuckered out and tired of it all! and
always there were groups gazing miserably at the town-clocks; in
every city funerals were being held again that had already been
held once, and the hearses and the processions were marching
solemnly backwards; where there was war, yesterday's battles were
being refought, wrong-end-first; the previously killed were getting
killed again, the previously wounded were getting hit again in the
same place and complaining about it; there were blood-stirring and
tremendous charges of masses of steel-clad knights across the field
-backwards; and on the oceans the ships, with full-bellied sails
were speeding backwards over the same water they had traversed
the day before, and some of each crew were scared and praying,
some were gazing in mute anguish at the crazy sun, and the rest
were doing profanity beyond imagination.

At Rouen we saw Henry I gathering together his split skull and
his other things.

SURELY FortyFour was the flightiest creature that ever was!
Nothing interested him long at a time. He would contrive the most
elaborate projects, and put his whole mind and heart into them,
then he would suddenly drop them, in the midst of their fulfilment,
and start something fresh. It was just so with his Assembly of the
Dead. He summoned those forlorn wrecks from all the world and
from all the epochs and ages, and then, when everything was ready
for the exhibition, he wanted to flit back to Moses's time and see
the Egyptians floundering around in the Dead Sea, and take me
along with him. He said he had seen it twice, and it was one of the
handsomest and most exciting incidents a body ever saw. It was
all I could do to persuade him to wait a while.

To me the Procession was very good indeed, and most impressive. First, there was an awful darkness. All visible things gloomed
down gradually, losing their outlines little by little, then disap peared utterly. The thickest and solidest and blackest darkness
followed, and a silence which was so still it was as if the world was
holding its breath. That deep stillness continued, and continued,
minute after minute, and got to be so oppressive that presently I
was holding my breath-that is, only half-breathing. Then a wave
of cold air came drifting along, damp, searching, and smelling of
the grave, and was shivery and dreadful. After about ten minutes I
heard a faint clicking sound coming as from a great distance. It
came slowly nearer and nearer, and a little louder and a little
louder, and increasing steadily in mass and volume, till all the place
was filled with a dry sharp clacking and was right abreast of us and
passing by! Then a vague twilight suffused the place and through it
and drowned in it we made out the spidery dim forms of thousands
of skeletons marching! It made me catch my breath. It was that
grewsome and grisly and horrible, you can't think.

Soon the light paled to a half dawn, and we could distinguish
details fairly well. FortyFour had enlarged the great hall of the
castle, so as to get effects. It was a vast and lofty corridor, now, and
stretched away for miles and miles, and the Procession drifted
solemnly down it sorrowfully clacking, losing definiteness gradually,
and finally fading out in the far distances, and melting from sight.

FortyFour named no end of those poor skeletons, as they passed
by, and he said the most of them had been distinguished, in their
day and had cut a figure in the world. Some of the names were
familiar to me, but the most of them were not. Which was natural,
for they belonged to nations that perished from the earth ten, and
twenty, and fifty, and a hundred, and three hundred, and six
hundred thousand years ago, and so of course I had never heard of
them.

By force of 44's magic each skeleton had a tab on him giving his
name and date, and telling all about him, in brief. It was a good
idea, and saved asking questions. Pharaoh was there, and David
and Goliah and several other of the sacred characters; and Adam
and Eve, and some of the Caesars, and Cleopatra, and Charlemagne, and Dagobert, and kings, and kings and kings till you
couldn't count them-the most of them from away back thousands and thousands of centuries before Adam's time. Some of them
fetched their crowns along, and had a rotten velvet rag or two
dangling about their bones, a kind of pathetic spectacle.

And there were skeletons whom I had known, myself, and been
at their funerals, only three or four years before-men and women,
boys and girls; and they put out their poor bony hands and shook
with me, and looked so sad. Some of the skeletons dragged the
rotting ruins of their coffins after them by a string, and seemed
pitifully anxious that that poor property shouldn't come to harm.

But to think how long the pathos of a thing can last, and still
carry its touching effect, the same as if it was new and happened
yesterday! There was a slim skeleton of a young woman, and it
went by with its head bowed and its bony hands to its eyes, crying,
apparently. Well, it was a young mother whose little child disappeared one day and was never heard of again, and so her heart was
broken, and she cried her life away. It brought the tears to my eyes
and made my heart ache to see that poor thing's sorrow. When I
looked at her tab I saw it had happened five hundred thousand
years ago! It seemed strange that it should still affect me, but I
suppose such things never grow old, but remain always new.

King Arthur came along, by and by, with all his knights. That
interested me, because we had just been printing his history, copying it from Caxton. They rode upon bony crates that had once been
horses, and they looked very stately in their ancient armor, though
it was rusty and lacked a piece here and there, and through those
gaps you could see the bones inside. They talked together, skeletons
as they were, and you could see their jawbones go up and down
through the slits in their helmets. By grace of FortyFour's magic I
could understand them. They talked about Arthur's last battle, and
seemed to think it happened yesterday, which shows that a thousand years in the grave is :.aerely a night's sleep, to the dead, and
counts for nothing.

It was the same with Noah and his sons and their wives. Evidently they had forgotten that they had ever left the Ark, and could
not understand how they came to be wandering around on land. They talked about the weather; they did not seem to be interested
in anything else.

The skeletons of Adam's predecessors outnumbered the later
representatives of our race by myriads, and they rode upon undreamt-of monsters of the most extraordinary bulk and aspect.
They marched ten thousand abreast, our walls receding and melting away and disappearing, to give them room, and the earth was
packed with them as far as the eye could reach. Among them was
the Missing Link. That is what 44 called him. He was an undersized skeleton, and he was perched on the back of a long-tailed and
long-necked creature ninety feet long and thirty-three feet high; a
creature that had been dead eight million years, 44 said.

For hours and hours the dead passed by in continental masses,
and the bone-clacking was so deafening you could hardly hear
yourself think. Then, all of a sudden 44 waved his hand and we
stood in an empty and soundless world.

AND You are going away, and will not come back any
more.

"Yes," he said. 'We have comraded long together, and it has
been pleasant-pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall
not see each other any more."

"In this life, 44, but in another? We shall meet in another,
surely, 44?"

Then all tranquilly and soberly he made the strange answer-

'There is no other."

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it
a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible
words might be true-even must be true.

"Have you never suspected this, August?"

"No-how could I? But if it can only be true-"

"It is true."

A gush of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it
before it could issue in words, and I said-

"But-but-we have seen that future life-seen it in its actuality, and so-"

"It was a vision-it had no existence."

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in
me-

"A vision?-a vi-"

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."

It was electrical. By God I had had that very thought a thousand
times in my musings!

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God-man-the world,-the
sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars: a dream, all a dream, they
have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space-and you!"

,tIi„

"And you are not you-you have no body, no blood, no bones,
you are but a thought. I myself have no existence, I am but a dream
-your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will
have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I
shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made
me . . . . .

"I am perishing already-I am failing, I am passing away. In a
little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its
limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever-for you will
remain a Thought, the only existent Thought, and by your nature
inextinguishable, indestructible. But I your poor servant have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and
better! ... .

"Strange! that you should not have suspected, years ago, centuries, ages, aeons ago! for you have existed, companionless, through
all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fictions! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically
insane-like all dreams: a God who could make good children as
easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who
made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave
his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his
other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body;
who mouths justice, and invented hell-mouths mercy, and invented hell-mouths Golden Rules, and foregiveness multiplied by
seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other
people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to
shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with
altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor abused slave to worship him! .. . .

You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible, except in
a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the
silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaksin a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The
dream-marks are all present-you should have recognized them
earlier . . . . .

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no
universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all
a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You.
And You are but a Thought-a vagrant Thought, a useless
Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the
empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that
all he had said was true.

THE END