A WIRELESS MESSAGE
In the summer of 1896
Mr. William Holt, a wealthy manufacturer of Chicago, was living temporarily in
a little town of central New York, the name of which the writer’s memory has
not retained. Mr. Holt had had “trouble with his wife,” from whom he had parted
a year before. Whether the trouble was anything more serious than
“incompatibility of temper,” he is probably the only living person that knows:
he is not addicted to the vice of confidences. Yet he has related the incident
herein set down to at least one person without exacting a pledge of secrecy. He
is now living in Europe.
One
evening he had left the house of a brother whom he was visiting, for a stroll
in the country. It may be assumed - whatever the value of the assumption in
connection with what is said to have occurred - that his mind was occupied with
reflections on his domestic infelicities and the distressing changes that they
had wrought in his life.
Whatever
may have been his thoughts, they so possessed him that he observed neither the
lapse of time nor whither his feet were carrying him; he knew only that he had
passed far beyond the town limits and was traversing a lonely region by a road
that bore no resemblance to the one by which he had left the village. In brief,
he was “lost.”
Realizing his
mischance, he smiled; central New York is not a region of perils, nor does one
long remain lost in it. He turned about and went back the way that he had come.
Before he had gone far he observed that the landscape was growing more distinct
- was brightening. Everything was suffused with a soft, red glow in which he
saw his shadow projected in the road before him. “The moon is rising,” he said
to himself. Then he remembered that it was about the time of the new moon, and
if that tricksy orb was in one of its stages of visibility it had set long
before. He stopped and faced about, seeking the source of the rapidly
broadening light. As he did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road in
front of him as before. The light still came from behind him. That was
surprising; he could not understand. Again he turned, and again, facing
successively to every point of the horizon. Always the shadow was before -
always the light behind, “a still and awful red.”
Holt
was astonished - “dumfounded” is the word that he used in telling it - yet
seems to have retained a certain intelligent curiosity. To test the intensity
of the light whose nature and cause he could not determine, he took
out his watch to see if he could make out the figures on the dial. They were
plainly visible, and the hands indicated the hour of eleven o’clock and
twenty-five minutes. At that moment the mysterious illumination suddenly flared
to an intense, an almost blinding splendor, flushing the entire sky,
extinguishing the stars and throwing the monstrous shadow of himself athwart
the landscape. In that unearthly illumination he saw near him, but apparently
in the air at a considerable elevation, the figure of his wife, clad in her
night-clothing and holding to her breast the figure of his child. Her eyes were
fixed upon his with an expression which he afterward professed himself unable
to name or describe, further than that it was “not of this life.”
The
flare was momentary, followed by black darkness, in which, however, the
apparition still showed white and motionless; then by insensible degrees it
faded and vanished, like a bright image on the retina after the closing of the
eyes. A peculiarity of the apparition, hardly noted at the time, but afterward
recalled, was that it showed only the upper half of the woman’s figure: nothing
was seen below the waist.
The
sudden darkness was comparative, not absolute, for gradually all objects of his
environment became again visible.
In
the dawn of the morning Holt found himself entering the village at a point
opposite to that at which he had left it. He soon arrived at the house of his
brother, who hardly knew him. He was wild-eyed, haggard, and gray as a rat.
Almost incoherently, he related his night’s experience.
“Go
to bed, my poor fellow,” said his brother, “and - wait. We shall hear more of
this.”
An
hour later came the predestined telegram. Holt’s dwelling in one of the suburbs
of Chicago had been destroyed by fire. Her escape cut off by the flames, his
wife had appeared at an upper window, her child in her arms. There she had
stood, motionless, apparently dazed. Just as the firemen had arrived with a
ladder, the floor had given way, and she was seen no more.
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