Vida to slay me (for I assume he did not know of your presence here, Tom), he determined to come himself—accompanied by the dread thing—to achieve his purpose. The rest you know."
Years have passed. Vida and I have long been happily married and my uncle is dead. He never again spoke of his theory regarding good and evil and the possibility of a material operation on the brain controlling these qualities. Indeed, he retired from all active practise or even experiment following the downfall of his enemy.
Vida and I try to believe it was all a case of hypnosis developed to the nth degree. The other thing, in spite of what I saw, we can not accept. Sufficient unto their time the foul practises of those remote sorcerers of which, perchance, the man I saw slain was an unholy revenant. Steeped in blood, made hideous by sacrifices of diabolic cruelty, wrapped in the smoke from laurel, cypress and alder, protected by the magic circle of evocation and with altars crowned with asphodel and vervain, they worked their spells mayhap in the dim and shadowy past. Today they have no place, and I, for one, refuse to accept, in this respect, even the evidence of my own senses.
MEMORIES
By A. LESLIE
Out of the shuddering past they come,
Croaking with ghastly mirth,
And the dry wind flutters in rags o' shroud
From the graves that gave them birth—
(Oh the white of the stars and moon tonight
Is the ash of bleached-out bones)—
And they mutter and gibber of this and that
In noseless and toothy tones:
Raw red gold—raw red of lust—
Shards of a shattered shrine;
Shadows of stars on an upturned face:
God! and that face was mine!
Shadow shapes in the empty dark;
Grim things that I may not tell;
And a woman's lips stained scarlet
With the bloody wine of hell!
