I felt as though I could not live until the mystery was cleared. And then my eyes fell on one of the pictures which hung with its face to the wall. Pelegin no longer could protest at my looking. So I turned the picture and eagerly gazed upon it.
It was a picture of a sandstorm, a picture exactly like the one he had just painted for me. And every other picture in the room was of the same subject. Fully a hundred there were in that room. No wonder Pelegin had complained of the repetition of life!
An hour later I was in John Steppling's room at The Logue Club.
"Old man," cried Steppling, "what's the trouble? You look as though you had seen a ghost."
I told him what had happened.
"And when I left," I ended breathlessly, "I brought his diary with me. Perhaps it will help clear up the mystery."
But when we opened the diary we found that it was completely blank except for a few lines which were scrawled on the first page.
"Guard thy secret from another," it vead, "entrust it not, for he who hath entrusted a secret hath lost it."
The papers the next morning gave several columns to the account of Pele-gin's death. Suicide, they called it, for it seems that in Pelegin's pocket they found a note saying that he intended to die since life had grown wearisome to him. John Steppling smiled as he read the story.
"Pelegin always curried that paper in his pocket," he said. "He hated to live, but he could never summon up sufficient courage to die."
And there the matter must rest. I have never been able to solve the mystery.
Lotario Pelegin was wrong when he said one can not repeat an emotion for I have lived the horror of that night a thousand times over. Sometimes I wake in the hush of the night, my forehead dank with a cold sweat, and I seem to feel a draught against my face as though x window is open. Perhaps I am developing nerves, but nevertheless I am beginning to think, as Pelegin did, that death lurks in open windows.
THE CATALEPTIC
By Charles Layng
Down the road there comes a tombstone,
Restless on Saint Swithin's night;
White and ghastly in the shadows,
Gleaming bleakly in the light.
Passing by, I chanced to meet it,
Looked into its eyes of flame,
Then I paused with horror stricken,
For on its face it bore my name.
Horrified, I wandered homeward,
Frightened, palsied, groaning loud,
While my limbs could scarce support me
Agonized, I donned a shroud.
Then a casket rose before me,
Finely wrought in bronze and gold,
It was lovely, for a coffin,
But its sides were dewed with mold.
Haltingly I clambered in it,
Into my unearthly bed,
How vile the smell of funeral lilies,
As they clustered round my head.
Lump by lump, the clods are falling,
Dimmer, dimmer grows the light,
A trumpet blast! Oh, sound appalling,
I am dead, and it is night.
