“Oh, so you found it, did you? Of course. Go on, admit it, you wrote it!”
My sister, I remember, was very interested to see what it was, so she took the paper and read the poem aloud. When they had heard it, the others came to the conclusion that a child could not have written it. But who had? No one knew, and we never found out. This was the poem:
The Lady and the Traveler
In a place far away where river meets plain
And the desert is left to the fox and the mouse,
A foot-weary traveler, bearing his pain,
Came on a ruin that once was a house.
And gazing upon it as fast fled the light,
Sunk deep in the briars, with nettles o’ergrown,
He thought: Could it be for the span of one night
A place that might serve as shelter and home?
‘Twas no cheery sight that greeted his eye
As he stepped o’er the threshold and into the room.
His mind turned away from the spirits that fly
To places like this from the chill of the tomb.
The hat-stand was bent, a table leg gone
The bed on its last legs, the shelves hanging down,
A stove that was rusted, a windowpane yawned,
An overturned chest lay there on the ground.
The fireplace was gloomy and hung o’er the grate
That was empty and cold, no log there did burn.
From the stones of the walls crept the shadows of fate,
Watching and waiting and biding their turn.
Under the mass of the ceiling’s dark beam,
To the left of the hearth, on a piece of crude iron
Slantwise hung a portrait in the day’s dying gleam:
It was of a lady in noble attire.
She was almost alive, to him it did seem,
As she gently looked down on the traveler now,
And lo! In a manner well-bred, like a queen,
She leaned from her frame and made him a bow!
At once from the stones, from the cracks in the wall,
A miasma began to creep over the floor,
Its tendrils and wisps in a sinuous crawl
Towards the trembling traveler who inched towards the door.
“Am I to remain in this place until dawn?
Ah, no, I must instantly leave or be lost!”
And glancing once more at both lady and gown,
Heard the squeaking of planks as the floorboards he crossed.
But just as the door was in reach of his grasp,
The hat-stand thought otherwise, that much was clear,
For it leaped to forestall him, as his hand touched the hasp:
“You’re not going anywhere this night, my dear!”
It stood there before him, barring the way,
As steadily winding about him unfurled
The wraiths of the mist closing in on their prey,
And: “Too late, too late!” was the last that he heard.
A faint cry went up – ‘twas more like a keen –
No help, no escape, no hope for his soul,
And dreadful indeed was the hideous scene
As the fog wrapped around him and swallowed him whole.
His last conscious thought was to call down a curse
On the house and its inmates forever amen,
That demons and devils would see them dispersed
Before they could lure a poor victim again.
The phantoms crept back to their infernal lairs
In the moldering walls, the fissures between.
The hat-stand, as usual, gave himself airs
For his part in enlivening the nightly routine.
Now the weeds grow apace round the door, while the dust
Blows carelessly in through the broken glass pane,
Where a portrait on nail, half-eaten by rust,
In solitude waits for a stranger again.
* * *
I lay there for a few minutes, my eyes shut. When at last I looked around, I noticed that the light in the room was considerably weaker than before. I couldn’t explain this, as the rays of the sun where still pouring through the glass of the window. The anti-field generator was working, but the portrait… it didn’t seem to have a frame. Grandfather’s head was in the middle of the grey surface of the wall; there was nothing else: just the wall and the head. I got up from the bed to take a closer look, as the light was making it hard to see in the room.
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends