gone—back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt. Here, let's have the chandelier going.
Don't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't ask me, either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how damned lifelike Pickman's paintings were—how we all wondered where he got those faces.
Well—that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using—and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life.
Obliteration
When the fires are burned to ashes,
And the hearth is gray and cold,
When the final sound of thunder
From the battlefield has rolled;
When the heart at length is silenced,
And the brain at last is stark,
Let me go then like a candle
Quenched and stifled in the dark
To a long sleep, and a deep one,
With no soul's unsteady light
Burning like a candle guttering
In the fearfulness of night.
For a candle flame in midnight
Is a mockery of the noon,
And its shadows stand out ghoulish
In the starlight or the moon.
But the slumberer is restful
Lost in darknesses profound,
All unconscious of black shadows
That may hover close around.
Oh, a long sleep, and a deep one!
With no soul's, uncertain glow
To arouse the spectral vapors
Of the Border. . . . when I go.
