Speaker 1: 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.