A wireless message by Ambrose Pierce. In the summer of eighteen ninety six,
mister 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. Mister Holt had had trouble with his wife, from whom he
had been parted a year before. Whether the trouble was anything more serious than
incompatibility of temperament, 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 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 and connection with what is said, 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 was passing 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 he had come. Before he had gone
far, he observed that the landscape was growing more distinct, was brightening.
Everything was so fused 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 trixy 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 each point of the horizon. Always
the shadow was before always the light behind, and still and awful. Red
Holt was astonished. Dumbfounded is the word 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 intensity,
an almost blinding splendor, flushing the entire sky, extinguishing the stars,
and throwing the monstrous shadow of himself and toward the landscape. In that unearthly
illumination, he saw near him, but apparently in the air, at 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 him
with an expression which he afterward professed himself unable to aim or describe further than
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 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
in an upper window, her child in her arms. There she had stood
motionless, apparently dazed, just as the fireman arrived at the latter. The
floor gave way, and she was seen no more. The moment of this
culminating horror was eleven o'clock and twenty five minutes standard time, the end of
a wireless message by Ambrose Bierce.