A Dreadful Night by Edwin Lester Arnold

“A Dreadful Night” is a short tale of fear taken from the Edwin L. Arnold story collection The Story of Ulla and Other Tales (1895). Although it’s rarely reprinted, “A Dreadful Night” was included in the mixed-author anthologies Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror (1975) and Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Horror and Supernatural of the 19th Century (1983).

About Edwin Lester Arnold

Edwin Lester Lindon Arnold (14 May 1857 – 1 March 1935) was and English writer who mostly wrote speculative fiction. Son of the poet and journalist Edwin Arnold,  he was born in Swanscombe, Kent; but spent most of his early life in India. Arnold later returned to Britain to study agriculture and ornithology.

In 1893, Arnold embarked on a career in journalist, and also authored the non-fiction books A Holiday in Scandinavia and Bird Life in England, both of which were published in 1887.

In 1890, Arnold published his first novel, The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician. This was followed by two further novels Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of Today (1901) and Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905). Also known as Gulliver of Mars, the latter proved to be Arnold’s most successful novel. His shorter works of fiction include, “The Splendid Dead” (1893), “A Stranger Woman” (1894), and “A Fair Puritan” (1894), most of which were included in his anthology The Story of Ulla and Other Tales (1895).

 

A Dreadful Night

A Hunter’s Tale Retold by Edwin Lester Arnold

Only he who has been haunted by a dream, a black horror of the night so real and terrible that many days of repugnance and effort are needed to purge the mind of its ugly details, can understand how a dream that was a fact — a horrible waking fantasy, grotesque and weird, a repetition in hard actuality of the ingenious terrors of sleep — clings to him who, with his faculties about him and all his senses on the alert, has experienced it.

Some five years ago I was hunting in the south-west corner of Colorado, where the great mountain spurs slope down in rocky ravines and gullies from the inland ranges towards the green plains along the course of the Rio San Juan. I had left my camp, late one afternoon, in charge of my trusty comrade, Will Hartland — a braver or more faithful little fellow by the way never put foot into a Mexican stirrup — and had wandered off alone into the scrub. Some five or six miles from the tents I stalked and wounded a prong-buck. He was so hard hit that I already smelt venison in the supper pot, and followed the broad trail he had left with the utmost eagerness. We crossed a couple of stony ridges with their deep intervening hollows, and came at last into a wild desolate gorge, full of loose rocks and bushes, and ribboned with game tracks, but otherwise a most desolate and God-forsaken place, where no man had been, or might come for fifty years. Here I sighted my venison staggering down the glen and dashed after it as fast as I could foot it, through the bushy tangles, and the dry, slippery, summer grass. In a few hundred yards the valley became a pass, and in a score more the steep bare sides had drawn in until they were walls on either hand, and the way trailed along the bottom of what was little better than a knife-cleft in the hills. I was a good runner, and the hunter blood was hot within me; my moccasins flashed through the yellow herbage; my cheeks burnt with excitement; I dropped my gun to be the freer — the quarry was plunging along only ten yards ahead and seemed a certain victim!

In front was the outing of that narrow ravine — the long reaches of the silver San Juan twining in countless threads through interminable leagues of pasture and forest beyond — I saw it all like a beautiful picture in the narrow black frame of the rocks; the evening wind blew softly up the canon,[1] and the sky was already gorgeous and livid with the streaks of sunset! Another ten yards and we were flying down the narrowest part of the defile, the beast-path under our feet hardly a foot wide, and almost hidden by long, wiry dead grass. Suddenly the wounded buck, now within my grasp, staggered up on to its hind legs in a mad fit of terror, just as, with a shout of triumph, I leapt up to it, and in half a breathing space — in less time than it takes to write, but too late to stop my fatal rush — I and the stag were reeling on the very brink of a horrible funnel, a slippery yellow slope that had opened suddenly before us, leading down to a cavernous mouth, gaping, dark and dreadful in the heart of the earth.

With a shout louder than my yell of triumph, staring at that horrible place, I threw up my hands and tried in vain to stop, it was too late, I felt my feet slip from under me, and the horrible attraction of that cruel trap drew me away, and in a second, shouting and plunging, and clutching at the rotten herbage, I was flying downwards. I caught a last glimpse of the San Juan twining pearly-pink under the sunset through leagues of green velvet verdure, and the blaze of the sky overhead crimson and green and sapphire, and then I was spinning into darkness, horrible Egyptian darkness, through which I fell for a giddy, senseless moment or two, and then landed with a thud which ought to have killed me but did not, bruised and nearly senseless, on a soft quaggy mound of something that seemed to sink under my weight like a feather bed.

So impossible does it seem to give an adequate idea in honest black and white of what followed, that I am half inclined to leave the task unattempted. Yet I will try, for my experiences were so strange and terrible that they deserve telling however poorly.

My first sensation on recovering consciousness was that of an overpowering smell, a sickly, deadly taint in the air that there was no growing accustomed to, and which, after a few gasps, seemed to have run its deadly venom into every corner of my frame, and, turning my blood yellow, to have transformed my constitution into keeping with its own accursed nature. It was a damp, musty, charnel-house smell, stale and wicked, with the breath of the slaughter-pit in it, an aroma of blood and corruption infinitely discomforting. I sat up and glared about in the gloom, and then I carefully felt my limbs up and down. All were safe and sound, and I was unhurt, though as sore and bruised as though my body had stood a long day’s pummelling. Next I groped round me in the pitchy dark, and soon touched the still warm body of the dead buck I had shot, and on which indeed I was sitting. Still feeling about, on the other side was something soft and furry too; I touched and patted it, and in a minute recognised with a start that my fingers were deep in the curly mane of a bull bison. I pulled, and the curly mane came off in stinking tufts, for that bull bison had been lying there six months or more. All about me, wherever I felt, was cold, clammy fur and hair and hoofs and bare ribs and bones mixed in dim confusion, and as that wilderness of death unfolded itself in the darkness to me, and the fetid close atmosphere mounted to my head, my strong nerves began to tremble like harp-strings in a storm, and my heart, that I had always thought terror-proof, to patter like a girl’s.

Plunging and slipping I got upon my feet, and then became conscious of a dim circle of twilight far above, representing the hole through which my luckless self had fallen. It was fading in the twilight outside every moment, and was already so slightly luminous that my hand, held in front of me, looked ghostly and scarcely discernible. With a groan I began to explore slowly round the walls of my prison, and with a heart that grew sicker and sicker and sensations that you can imagine better than I can describe, I traced the jagged but unbroken circle of a great chamber in the underground, a hundred feet long, perhaps, by fifty across — a chamber with cruel, remorseless walls, that rose, sloping gently inwards from an uneven, horrible floor of hides and bones, to that narrow neck far overhead, where the stars were already twinkling in a cloudless sky. By this time I was fairly frightened, and alas! that it should be written, the cold. perspiration of dread began to stand in beads upon my forehead.

A fancy then seized me that someone might be within hearing above. I shouted again and again, and listened acutely each time as the echoes of my shout died away. I could have sworn something like the clash of ghostly teeth on teeth, something like the rattle of jaws in an ague fit, fell on the silence behind. With beating heart, and an undescribable dread creeping over me, I crouched down in the gloom and listened.

There was water dripping out in the dark, monotonous and dismal: and a sound like the breath from many husky throats away in the distance of the cavern came fitfully to my ears, though so uncertainly, that at first I thought it might have been only the rustle of the wind in the grass far overhead. It was cowardly to be scared at one’s own fancies, and again mustering all my resolution, I shouted until the darkness rang, then listened eagerly with every faculty on stretch, and again from the dim came that tremulous gnashing of teeth, and that wavering, long-drawn breath, with something infinitely woeful and pathetic in it. Then my hair fairly stood on end, and in a minute my eyes were fixed with breathless wonder in front of me, for out of the remotest gloom, where the corruption of the floor was already beginning to glow with pale blue wavering phosphorescent light as the night fell, rose — glimmering itself with that ghastly lustre — something slim and tall and tremulous, that was full of life and yet was not quite of human form, and reared itself against the dark wall all agleam until its top, set with hollow eyes, was nine or ten feet from the ground, and oscillated and wavered, and seemed to feel about as I had done, for an opening, and then on a sudden collapsed in a writhing heap upon the ground, and I distinctly heard the fall of its heavy body as it disappeared into the blue inferno that burnt below!

Again that spectral thing rose laboriously, this time many paces nearer to me, to twice the height of a man, and wavered and tossed about, and then sank down like the fall of heavy draperies, as though the energy that had lifted it suddenly expired. Nearer and nearer it came, travelling round the circuit of the walls in that strange way, and awed and bewildered, I crept out into the open to let that dreadful thing go by. And presently to my relief, it did travel away, still wavering and writhing in silent, spectral discontent, and I breathed again.

As that luminous shadow faded into the remote, I shouted once more for the pleasure it must have been of hearing my own voice — again there was that gnashing of teeth — and the instant afterwards such a hideous chorus of yells from the other side of the cavern, such a commingled howl of lost spirits, such an infernal moan of sorrow, and shame, and misery, rising and falling on the stillness of the night, that, for an instant, lost to everything but that dreadful sound, I leapt to my feet — with the stagnant blood cold as ice within me, my body pulseless for the moment — and mingled my mad shouting with the voices of those unseen devils, till the cave thundered with that hideous chorus! Then my manhood came back with a rush upon me, and judgment and sense, and I recognized in the trembling echoes a cry that I had often listened to in happier circumstances, and knew that uproar came from the throats of wolves entrapped like myself. But “were they alive?” I asked in fascinated wonder — how could they be in this horrible pit? — and if they were not — picture oneself cornered in such a trap, with a pack of wolfish spirits — it would not bear thinking of! Already my fancy saw constellations of fierce yellow eyes everywhere, and herds of wicked grey backs racing to and fro in the shadows, and with a tremulous hand I felt in my pocket for a match, and found I had two — and two only!

By this time the moon was up and a great disc of silver light, broad and bright, was creeping down the walls of our prison, but I would not wait for it. I struck the match with feverish eagerness, and held it overhead. It burned brightly for a moment, and I saw I was indeed in a natural crypt, with no outlet anywhere but by the narrow neck above, and all chance of reaching that was impossible, as the walls sloped inwards everywhere as they rose to it. All the floor on every hand was piled thigh deep with a ghastly tangle of animal remains in every state of return to their native earth, from the bare bones that would have crumbled at a touch, to the hide, still glossy and sleek — of the stag that had fallen in only a week or two before. Such a carnage place I never saw, such furs, such trophies, such heads and horns there were all around, as raised the envy of my hunter spirit even in that emergency.

But what held me spell-bound and rooted my eyes into the shadows was, twenty paces off, lying full stretch along the glossy, undulating path which the incessant feet of new victims had worn, month after month, over the hill and valley of dead bodies along under the walls, was a splendid eighteen-foot python — he whose ghostly rambles and ineffectual attempts to scale the walls had first scared me in that place of horrors. I turned round, for the match was short, and scarcely noticing a score or two of dejected rats, who squeaked and scrambled amongst lesser snakes and strange reptiles, looked hard across the cave. There, on their haunches, in a huddle against the far wall, staring at me with dull gold eyes, were five of the biggest, ugliest wolves ever mortal saw. I had often met wolves above ground, but never any like those cavern ghouls. All the pluck and grace and savage vigour of their kind had gone from them; their bodies, gorged with carrion, were vast, swollen and hideous: their shaggy fur was hanging in tatters from their red and mangy skins, the saliva streamed from their jaws in yellow ribbons, their blear eyes were drowsy and dull, their great throats, as they opened them to howl in sad chorus at the handful of purple night above, were dry and yellow, and there was about them such an air of disgusting misery and woebegoneness, that, with a shudder and a cry I could not suppress, I let the last embers of the burning match fall to the ground.

How long I crouched in the darkness against the wall, with those hideous serenaders grinding their foam-flecked teeth and bemoaning our common fate in hideous unison, I do not know. Nor have I space to tell the wild, horrible visions which filled my mind for the next hour or two, but presently the wolves had been silent for a time and the moonlight had come down off the wall and was spread at my feet in a silver carpet, and as I sullenly watched the completion of that arena of light, I was aware that the brutes were moving. Very slowly they came forward out of the darkness, led by the biggest and ugliest, until they were all in the silver circle, gaunt, spectral, and vile, every mangy tuft of loose hair upon their sore-marked backs clear as daylight. Then those pot-bellied, phosphorescent undertakers began the strangest movements, and after watching them for a moment or two in fascinated wonder, I saw they had come to me in their despair to solicit my companionship and countenance, and I could not have believed it possible dumb brutes could have made their meaning so clear as those poor shaggy scoundrels did. They halted ten yards off, and with humble heads sagged down and averted eyes, slowly wagged their blood-matted tails. Then they came a few steps further and whined and fawned, and then another pace, and lay down upon their stomachs, putting their noses between their paws like dogs who watch and doze, while they regarded me steadfastly with sad, great eyes, forlorn and terrible.

Foot by foot, grey and silver in the moonlight, they advanced with the offer of their dreadful friendship, until at last I was fairly bewitched, and when the big wolf came forward till he was reeking at my knees, a horrible epitome of corruption, and licked my hand with his great burning tongue, I submitted to the caress as readily as though he were my favourite hound, and henceforth the pack seemed to think the compact was sealed, and thrust their odious company upon me, trotting at my heels, howling when I shouted, and nuzzling down to me, putting their heavy paws upon my feet, and their great reeking jaws upon my chest whenever in despair and weariness I tried to snatch a moment’s sleep.

But it would be impossible to go step by step through the infinitely painful hours of that night. Not only was the place full of spectral forms and strange cries, but presently legions of unclean things of a hundred kinds, that had lived on those dead beasts when they too were living, swarmed out in thousands and assailed us, adding a new terror to inferno, ravaging us who still kept body and soul together till our flesh seemed burning on our bones.

There was no rest for man or brute: the light was a mockery and the silence hideous! Round and round we pattered for hours, I and the gaunt wolves, over the dim tracks worn by the feet of disappointment and suffering; wading knee deep through a wavering sea of steamy blue flame, that rose from the remains and bespattered us from head to heel; stumbling and tripping and groping, and cursing our fates, each in his separate tongue, while the night waned, the dew fell clammy and cold into our prison, and the great yellow stars looking down in turn upon us from the free purple sky overhead, made a dim twilight in our cell.

I was blundering and staggering round the walls for the hundredth time, feeling about with my hands in the hopeless search for some cleft or opening, when the grimmest thing of the whole evening happened. In a lonely corner of the den, in a little recess not searched before, pattering about in the dark, I suddenly touched with my hand — think with what an electric shock it thrilled me — the cloth-clad shoulder of a man.

With a gasp and a cry I leapt back, and stood trembling and staring into the shadows, scarcely daring to breathe. Much as I had suffered in that hideous place, nothing affected me half so much as — with all my nerves already stretched to their utmost — dropping my hand like that upon that dreadful shoulder. Heaven knows we were all cowards down there, but for a minute I was the biggest coward of any, and felt to the full those strange throes of superstitious terror that I had often wondered before to hear weaker men describe. Then I mustered my wavering spirit, and with the gaunt wolves squatting in a luminous circle around me, went into the recess again and put my hand once more upon my grim companion. The coat upon him was dry and rough with age, and beneath it — I could tell by the touch — there was nothing but bare, rattling bones! I stood still, grimly waiting for the flutter of my physical cowardice to subside, and then I bethought me of that second match, and in a minute of keen intensity, with such care as you may imagine, struck it against the wall. It lit, and at my feet, in ragged miner garb, sitting against the wall with his knees drawn up and his chin upon them, was the skeleton of a man so bleached and dry that it must have been like that for fifty years at least. At his side lay his miner’s pick and pannikin, an old dusty pocket bible, the fragments of a grass hat, and a pair of heavy boots still neatly side by side, just as the luckless fellow had placed those well-worn things when he last put them by.

And overhead was something scratched upon a flat face of the rock. Hastily I snatched a scrap of paper from my pocket, and, lighting it at the expiring match, read on the stone:

 

“Monday,”

“Tuesday,”

‘Wednesd—,”

 

— there was nothing but that and even the “Wednesday unfinished, dying away in a shaky uncertain scrawl, that spoke infinitely more plainly than many words would have done, of the growing feebleness of the hand that traced it — then all was darkness again.

I crept back to my distant corner, and crouched like the dead man against the wall, with my chin upon my knees, and kept repeating to myself the horrible simplicity of that diary — “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday!”

“Poor, nameless Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday!’ And this was to be my fate?” I laughed bitterly, I would begin such another record with the first streak of dawn, and in the meantime I would sleep, whatever befell, and sleep I did, with those restless blue wolves cantering round the well-worn paths of the charnel-house to their own hideous music, the silent unknown away in the distance, and the opal eyes of the great serpent staring at me. like baleful planets, cold, sullen and cruel, from between the dead man’s feet.

It was a shout that woke me next morning, a clear ringing shout, that thrilled me down to my innermost fibre, and jerked me from dreadful dreams like a stone from a catapult. I scrambled to my feet and saw from the bright pavement of light about me that it was day above, and while I still staggered and wandered stupidly, again came that shout. I stared up overhead where the sunlight was making the neck of the trap a disc of intolerable brightness and there, when my eyes grew accustomed to that shine, was a round something that presently resolved itself into the blessed face of my steadfast chum, Will Hartland — “Trusty Will” they called him on the plains.

There is no need to say more. With the help of the strong cow-rope at his saddle-bow, and a round point of earth-embedded rock as purchase, he had me out of that accursed hole in an incredibly, ridiculously short space of time. And there I was leaning on his shoulder, free again, in the first flush of as glorious a morning as you could wish for, with the San Juan away in the distance, still winding in a sapphire streak through miles of emerald forests, a sweet blue sky above, and under foot the earth, wet with morning mist, smelling like a wine cooler, and every bent and twig gemmed with glittering prismatic dewdrops. I sat down on a stone, and after a long pull at Will’s flask, told him something like the narrative I have just told you. And when the tale was done I paused a minute, and then said somewhat shyly: “And now I am going back, Will, old man! Back for those poor devils down yonder, who haven’t a chance for their lives unless I do.”

Will, who had listened to my narrative with horror and wonder flitting across his honest brown face, started up at this as though he thought the night’s adventure had fairly turned my head. But he was a good fellow, tender of heart under his Mexican jacket, and speedily acknowledging that I was right, set to work to help me.

Down I went back into the pit, the very sight and shadow of which now made me sick, and with the noose end of Will’s lasso, (he holding the other end above) set to work to secure those poor beasts who whined, and crowded round my legs, in hideous glee to have me back again amongst them. ‘Twas easy work! They were stupid and heavy, and seemed to have some idea of my intentions. And thus I noosed them one at a time, and whenever a wolf was fast, shouted to Will, who hauled away with scant ceremony, and up the grey ghoul went into that sunshine he had not seen for many weeks, spinning, and struggling, and yelping, truly a wonderful sight. But nothing would move the python! I followed him round and round, trying all I knew to get his cruel cynical head through the noose, and then, when he had refused it a dozen times, I grew wroth, and cursing him in the name of the ancient Mother of my kind, gathered up all the tortoises, lizards, and lesser beasts I could find into my waist-band, and ascended into the sweet outer air once more.

An hour or two afterwards, a heavy blasting charge fetched from a neighbouring mine was dangling by a string just inside the mouth of the detestable trap, with its fuse burning brightly. A few minutes of suspense, a mighty crash, a cloud of white smoke hanging over the green hill-top, and one of the most treacherous places that ever marred the face of Nature’s sweet earth was a harmless heap of dust and tumbled stones.

Edwin Lester Arnold (18857 – 1935)

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1. Canon initially appears to be a typo. The word canyon (a deep narrow valley with steep sides, and a river or stream at the bottom) is more fitting. However, it’s not uncommon for older texts to contain the Spanish spelling of the word (cañon), so it may be that canon is the correct word, but the tilde has been omitted.

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