Speaker 1: The Valley where dead men live by Harold ward One,
I have passed through the valley where dead men live.
My eyes have looked upon sights which God did not
intend that man should see. My life must pay the
forfeit as a man of science. You may be interested
in hearing what I have to say, and I must
unburden myself to someone before I pass out into the
great unknown. But five days have passed since I said
good bye to old Sourdough Jamison. It seems as many centuries.
Professor Palmally gave the speaker a quick glance. Did I
understand you to say that you left Jamiesons five days ago?
Are you sure about that? The man on the cot
nodded on the twentieth of June to be exact. There
is no possibility of your being mistaken none whatever My
diary will prove it. I made my last entry the
night before I left Sourdough's place on the nineteenth. The
professor sat silent for a second. There is something wrong
with your story, Blake. The nearest route over the mountains
from here is by way of Chickahoochee Pass, which would
make the distance from this point to sourdough Jamieson's cabin,
a matter of over one hundred and fifty miles. This
is the twenty fifth of June. A well man couldn't
do it. It is impossible for you to have made
it in five days in your weakened condition. Not that
I wish to dispute your word, but the sick man
smiled Wanly, don't you see, professor, that your own statement
helps to support my story. I tell you that I
wandered into an undiscovered route through the mountains. You say
that you picked me up half an hour ago, lying
exhausted and unconscious, a few rods from your camp. That
being the case, the entrance to the valley where dead
men live on this side of the range must be
near at hand. You'll say I'm crazy when I tell
you that I have seen living dead men, dead men
who do not know they are dead. Can you imagine it? No?
Neither could I if I had not seen it myself.
I've been through the Valley of the living dead and
come out alive. I've seen them living dead men by
the millions and millions, fighting, stabbing, shooting, tearing at each
other's throats like me, maddened beasts and beasts. They are
maddened by blood. Blood flows in the rivers in the
valley where the dead men live. It's the rage they
were in when they died. They carry it on with
them beyond the grave, and they're fighting it out in there.
Can you hear the rumble of cannon? Listen? You think
that it is thunder, but it's not. And those flashes
that you notice just over the brow of the mountain,
the flashes of the big guns man spirit guns. No, no,
it's not lightning. I'm telling you the truth. I know
that you think I'm insane. I don't blame you. He
stopped suddenly, his nostrils dilating. Take a whiff of that breeze, professor,
don't you smell anything? Parmally sniffed. The air from the
mountains does have a peculiar, acrid odor. It's reminiscent of
something gunpowder, by George, That's what it is. Somebody must
have fired a weapon close at hand. And yet why
didn't we hear the report? The scientist gazed out the
tent door. It was none of my party. They are
all accounted for. Yet I could have sworn that there
is not another human being within fifty miles, Blake smiled again.
I merely called it to your attention, professor, so that
you would give more credence to my story. It is
so strange, this story of the living dead, that it
will stretch your imagination to the utmost. I am a
sick man. I doubt if I survived the day, you,
as a scientific man, may be able to discover the
solution to the puzzle. Perhaps you may even be able
to do something to help release those poor devils in
there from the tie of hatred that is binding them
to this earth. At any rate, I would like to
tell you my yarn. If you care to listen. Just
give me another sip of that moose broth, will you?
Raising the sick man's head, Professor palmily fed him a
small quantity of the warm soup. Then he sat down
again beside the cot in an attitude of attention. Two.
You are going to put me down as the greatest
liar since the world began, Blake said wearily. Yet every
word that I tell you is the absolute truth. My
mind was never clearer than at the present time. So
don't think that what I say to you is the
raving of a disordered brain. Either you have heard the
theory advanced by believers in spiritualism that some people who
die suddenly persist in keeping in touch with the earth,
while others go directly to their reward. I have seen
enough to prove, but I digress. My time is short.
Let me start at the beginning. When the war broke out,
I attempted to enlist, but I was rejected on account
of my physical condition nerves. But I finally succeeded in
hooking up with the Red Cross and got over. I
was gassed and later got a dose of shell shock.
You know what that means, nerves pure and simple. It
is needless to tell you that I suffered all of
the torments of hell, so will pass up and go on.
I landed in the States a physical wreck. The doctor
sent me to the mountains. I am a wealthy man,
but it suited my mood to travel light and alone.
I wandered here and there until I finally reached this
north country. I studied geology once, and while I didn't
need the money, I decided to do a little prospecting.
A week or so ago, I reached the cabin of
Sourdough Jamison, having canoed up the river nearly two hundred miles.
I remained with the old man three days, rested up,
then announced my intention of striking off directly into the mountains.
Jamison tried his best to dissuade me. He claimed that
the Indians had a legend that there was a valley
located somewhere in the middle of the range which was
the abiding place of spirits, the valley where dead men lived,
they called it, and that nobody who entered it ever
came back alive. I've been through it and I'm out
of it. But I'm no better than a dead man.
So the old legend holds good. But I hope when
I do pass out that my soul can rest in peace. God.
I don't want to spend an eternity in that hell
hole back yonder. I will not bore you with the
details of my trip up the mountains, for I started
early next morning in spite of Jamison's objections. That night,
I camped half way up the side of the range.
The next morning, that would be four days ago, I
chanced upon a little canyon that wound in and out.
Among the rocks. There were signs of gold, and I
determined to explore it thoroughly before going further. As I continued,
the air grew colder. From somewhere ahead came a dull,
indescribable roar. I put it down to a waterfall somewhere
in the distance. Suddenly, after a two hours tramp, I
reached the end of the narrow pathway and found myself
on the edge of a steep decline, ice covered, slippery,
a veritable man trap, which seemed to surround a huge,
deep basin. The entire place was buried under the pall
of smoke, which hid everything from view. On all sides
rose the mountains, rugged, their peaks covered with snow, offering
an impassable barrier. The path by which I had entered
seemed to be the only means of getting in or out.
Up out of the basin, there came to my ears
a steady, rumbling boom. The air was filled with it.
The earth seemed to tremble under my feet at frequent intervals.
Sometimes the noise would die out for a second, only
to start again with renewed violence. There was nothing to
be frightened at, yet I confessed that the goose pipples
came to the surface, and I felt the icy chills
running up and down my spine. My hair stood up
like the quills of a porcupine. The very atmosphere seemed
filled with despair, with a vague something the human mind
could not grasp. Suddenly the wind brought to my ears
a shout. Then came a shrill, piercing, agonizing scream of
a woman, a shriek that was filled with terror and helplessness.
Again and again it assailed my ears, shouting in answer.
I ran along the edge of the precipice, looking for
the pathway that would lead me to the rescue of her,
who called. As I ran along the narrow shelf of ice,
I threw off my heavy pack and carried only my rifle.
Then I slipped and lost my footing. My gun flew
from my grip. I struggled to save myself, but without
avail over the slippery edge, I slid down, down, down.
It seemed to me that I rolled for miles. There
was absolutely nothing which I could grasp to stop my
wild plunge, nothing but ice, ice, ice, cold and smooth
as glass. Faster and faster I went, until my speed
was that of an express train. I almost lost consciousness.
I could not think. Suddenly I struck the bottom with
a force that knocked me senseless. Three. I was awakened
from my stupor by a peculiar rat tat tat that
sounded like the rattle of a drum. I opened my eyes.
The air was filled with acrid smoke. It hung over
me like a great gray blanket. Was I dead? I
raised myself on my elbows and looked about me. For
an instant I imagined I was back in Flanders. Then
I remembered my fall. But where was I? The ground
was covered with bodies, heaped up in grotesque attitudes, lying
in odd shaped piles. It was a veritable charnel house,
a page torn from Dante's Inferno, and such bodies peculiar, transparent, crystalline.
I could see through them as one looks through a
heavy plate glass. Heavens, it was horrible, hideous. The blood,
the blood everywhere. The air rang with shrieks and groans
and laughter, wild haunting laughter that froze the marrow in
my bones. Close beside me, a machine gun was rattling,
served by a sergeant and two privates wearing the olive drab.
All three were of the same peculiar grayish cast of pellucidness,
as were the bodies lying around on all sides. Guns
were booming, the ground rocked beneath them. Was I dreaming?
Was I the victim of a horrible nightmare in which
my subconscious mind was again living the scenes I had
gone through across the seas. I pinched myself to make sure.
I was at a loss for an explanation. I shook
like an aspen leaf. I was filled with supernatural terror.
Then something happened that gave me a better light on
the matter. Just at my right was a small knoll,
scarred and pitted with machine gun nests. Through the drab,
smoky haze, I could see the ill fitting German uniforms
on the men who manned them. Across the gap which
separated them from me, a man was crawling, dragging himself
along on hands and knees. He turned his head toward me.
For an instant I recognized Howard Preston, an old friend,
a captain of infantry, who had been killed at the
Argonne after silencing a number of German guns which had
stopped the American advance. Did he still live? But no?
I had seen his body the day it was buried.
Was I crazy? My head whirled. I was unable to move,
so transfixed was I by what was going on around me.
Suddenly I saw Preston leap forward. A dozen guns opened
on him, yet they failed to stop him. I saw
him fire from the hip. Then he leapt among the
Germans with the butt end of his rifle. A second
later he hurled the weapon aside, and drawing his automatic
from its hulster, he sprang into a second nest. The
man seemed to bear a charmed life. The Germans swarmed
over him time after time, but after each effort he
emerged triumphant. His clothes hung on him in tatters. He
was bleeding from a dozen moons. His face was a
red smear through which his eyes gleamed like burning coals.
A German officer, a great, hulking blonde man, fired a
pistol point blank at him. It failed to stop his rush.
Both reached for their trench knives. They came together, locked
in a death struggle, their weapons plying like mad. Slowly,
the German dropped to the ground, a peculiar dazed look
on his flat, round face. Preston turned wearily away and beckoned,
as if waving for his men to move forward. Then
he crumbled up and fell forward across his victim's body.
Then I knew the truth, the horrible truth. The legend
of the Indians was not fiction. This was the valley
where dead men lived. Here, men who could not break
their earthly ties came back to fight on and on
until their berserker rage had expended itself. Here they were enacting,
over and over again the final tragedy of their lives. God,
it was the most diabolical thing that a human mind
could imagine. Think of it. All Over that vast plain,
in the midst of that ice bound valley, similar tragedies
were being enacted by men. Dead men, raiths were grappling here, there,
and everywhere. The peculiar feature of it all was that
I seemed to be able to see each individual feet
of valor at the same time, although they had transpired
over miles of territory. It was like looking at an
immense moving picture which unreeled itself before me. I can
liken it to nothing better than one of the huge,
old fashioned panoramas that were in vogue a few years
after the Civil War, some few of which still remain
in southern cities. I seemed to be floating over the
entire basin. The guns seemed to be real guns, shooting
real bullets. The cannons were monsters of steel that I
had seen in France. Yet I swear that several times
I passed directly through barrages unscathed. The weapons, like the
men who served them, were only phantoms God in heaven.
It was the most horrible scene of carnage I have
ever witnessed, more awful than the hell of France and Belgium,
for every detail was the result of the terrible ire
under which the combatants labored. When they met their death,
as fast as they had played their parts, they started
in at the beginning and went through it again and again,
over and over, like automatons, held to their posts by
a divine decree of some kind. Words fail me. It
was so unspeakably ghastly weird, a futuristic nightmare, a bedlam
of noise and infusion, a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of light and color.
Death walked everywhere. Remember, Professor, on a battlefield, the men
do not die in great numbers and lie around in
heaps hours, days, sometimes weeks pass without carnage. Even in
the heat of conflict, only a small percentage of those
engaged meet death. Here it was different for miles. In
every direction there was death, death, death, nothing but cold,
stark death. Explain, I can't. My idea is as I
stated before, that man must work out his own salvation,
That those who die and the heat of anger must
work that hatred off before their spirits can quit this earth. God,
in his infinite wisdom, did not care to inflict the
horror upon the entire world, So he set aside this
barren hole as a place where dead men might sever
the ties which bind them here, and, with their passion cooled,
pass on to a better life. No, the man never
lived who could describe it, that cold, ice bound hell,
the air tingled with madness, and the look of awful
malignancy on the faces of those poor souls as they
went on and on and on through the same monotonous
performance of killing and being killed. It was butchery. The
place was a slaughter house. Ah, the deeds of valor
that I saw performed wonderful, magnificent. History will never be
able to record the actual happenings, The cold blooded bravery
through the hazy heavens. Phantom airplane manned by ghostly pilots
dipped and maneuvered, dodging, falling to earth in tangled masses,
often burning gigantic balloons in flames tossed across the clouds.
Among a heap of stones, the remains of what had
once been a tiny church located in the center of
an ancient graveyard, a sniper carried on his nefarious trade,
his hiding place, a tomb from which the bodies had
been hurled aside, I saw a group approach the place,
grim determination written on their faces. Their beloved colonel had
been the victim of the sniper's bullets. They found him
after a long search. A youngster he had been the
colonel's orderly leapt upon him. A knife plunged up, down, up, down, slowly, monotonously,
while the screams of him, into whose body it was sinking,
made the night hideous. And when he had completed his
work on the dead thing with the glassy eyes that
gazed upward unseeingly, the youngster calmly wiped his weapon on
the tunic of the vanquished foe. Oh the look of
vengeance that was upon the countenances of that little group.
A shell came screaming through the heavens. They attempted to dodge,
to cover, but too late, and so the awful drama
went on and on and on. There is no rest
for those who dwell in the valley where dead men live.
Men fought with the ferocity of wild beasts. They were
blood mad, frenzied. A little detachment of Englishmen were laboring
with automatic rifles. Just at the edge of the wood hoods.
In front of them was a tiny veil through which
wound a sunken road. On the opposite side of the
valley was another thicket, in which were a seemingly equal
number of Germans. It was a duel to the death
between the two groups. Both seemed to exhaust their ammunition
at the same time. By what appeared to be mutual consent,
they left their guns and charged at each other. Meeting
in the middle of what had once been a peaceful
little dell. There were not over twenty men on either
side grappling. They fought hand to hand, using knives, clubs, stones,
their revolvers, their bare hands. They were like cave dwellers,
giving no quarter and asking none At the end, there
was no one left on either side, only a heap
of dead and dying. When it was all over, the
dead arose and again went through the monotonous performance. Four.
I was hypnotized, held by a spell I could not break,
try as I would, I seemed unable to drag myself
away from the ghastly sights. I don't know how long
I remained in the Valley of horrors. You say it
was four days. Look at my hair snow white. When
I left Sourdough's cabin. My locks were dark. I am
just past thirty years of age, yet from my appearance
one would swear that I had passed threescore years and
ten allotted to men. I have not slept for the
hellish panorama continued on and on and on. Only at
night a different group of actors filled the stage. The
darkness was hideous, with the roar of the big guns,
the screeching of shells. Signal rockets filled the air, as
if by magic. Trenches appeared here and there, little sectors,
each with its own melancholy drama of life and death.
Here was a stretch of no man's land, with its
grisly tenants. Men hung on barbed wire entanglements, their clothes
in tatters, swaying to and fro in the breeze like
scarecrows in a farmer's field. Once I lost consciousness fainted.
I suppose much of the time I wandered about in
a daze. I knew not which way to turn. Dead
men living dead men everywhere. I dragged myself into a
tiny house that seemed to stand in the center of
the valley. It was empty. I threw myself on the floor,
thinking to gain a minute's respite from the horrors around me.
I dropped into a deep sleep. I was awakened by
the sound of voices. I crouched further back in the
darkness of the corner, frightened, not daring to make a move.
What was I frightened of? I do not know. One
need not fear specters, need he There was a sound
of a match being scratched, and then a candle flared up.
By its uncertain light. I made out the figures of
two men wearing the German uniform. They groped about until
they found a trap door cut in the floor. Raising it,
they lowered themselves through the opening, Seized by some impulse
which Even now I am unable to explain. I determined
to follow them. The events that transpired are inexplicable to me.
The only solution that I have for the puzzle is that,
for the time being, I was someone else, some poor
devil who lost his life in the attempt to avert
a German surprise on ver Dunn. For I swear that
I was propelled by some force stronger than my own will.
Cautiously I waited until I heard their voices trailing off
in the distance. Then I sprang to the trap, and
a second later dropped through into the darkness of the cellar.
I stumbled about until I found the wall, Following it
with my hands, I came to an opening far ahead.
In the darkness, I saw a tiny speck of light
bobbing up and down. It was the candle carried by
the man I was following. Without thought of the future,
I followed in their wake. On on on they went.
Then suddenly the passageway widened out into a huge cavern.
Relying on the darkness, I crept closer until I was
only a few yards away from them, Hiding behind a
huge pile of boxes and barrels heaped up at one side.
I listened to their conversation. At first I was unable
to understand what they were about to do. Then, with
a murmured shh, one of them cautiously drew aside a
small block of what appeared to be solid rock and
peeping out over my hiding place, I gazed through the
little opening into a brilliantly lighted passageway. I caught a
glimpse of uniforms. Through the opening came scraps of conversation
in French. The truth flashed over me. I was looking
into the underground defenses of their dune. The Germans had
tunneled up to them and were waiting only for the
minute that the defenders were the fewest to break down
the tiny barrier which held them back and throw their
hordes into the very vitals of the French defense. Even
as the thought came to me, a watcher closed the
opening softly, and with a muttered word to his companion,
lighted a lander and waved it across his body like
a signal. Torch and a signal it was for Instantly,
a distant whistle sounded. Then lights leapt up as far
as the eye could see, and from the distance came
the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet. I forgot that
I was dealing with phantoms. The thing was too horribly real.
I searched about me for a weapon, for some way
to warn the unsuspecting men on the other side of
that frail partition. In the semi darkness to which I
was rapidly growing accustomed, my eyes fell upon an open box.
It was heaped up with hand grenades. I made out
the markings of other boxes. I almost shouted for joy,
for the pile was a huge ammunition dump, placed there
by the invaders in readiness for the crucial moment. Seizing
a grenade in either hand, I pulled the pins with
my teeth and held them in readiness. Closer and closer
came the German hordes. The whole cavern and passageway was
filled with them. There were thousands, it seemed. The air
was thick and heavy with the odor of their sweat. Then,
just as the head of the column reached me, I
hurled the bombs, not at the advancing enemy, but straight
into the big pile of ammunition. Though leaders heard me
saw me, they came at me with a rush. The
ground trembled a concussion. I felt myself being hurled through
the air. Around me rang screams and cries of mortal agony.
Then came oblivion. There is nothing more that I can
tell you how I came here. I have no recollection.
Evidently my mind a blank. I found some exit on
this side of the valley. I only know that you
found me here outside. My secret is yours. As a
man of science, you will probably try and find the
way into the place from which I have come. Take
my advice and stay away. Now. I am tired. Professor,
I must rest. Five extract from the report of Professor
Phineas Parmally A B. L. L. D. Et cetera. Mister
Blake passed away shortly after completing his strange narrative. The
members of the Parmly Scientific Expedition spent nearly a week
searching the vicinity in the hope of discovering the opening
through which he came from the valley, but our efforts
were fruitless. I would be tempted to put his story
of the Valley where Dead Men Live down as an
hallucination resulting from his terrible experiences during the war, But
for one thing, I sent a courier by way of
Chickahoochee Pass to interview Jamieson. The letter says that the
date given by Blake was correct. He crossed the mountains,
as he stated, in five days. I confessed myself puzzled.
We buried poor Blake where we found him, Rescayot in Pas,
the end of the valley where dead men live. By
Harald Ward