The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes

‘Adnah!’ wailed the young man, in a heartbroken voice. ‘Turn from him to me! Take refuge in my love. Oh, it is natural, I swear. It asks nothing of you but to accept the gift – to renew yourself in it, if you will; to deny it, if you will, and chain it for your slave. Only to save you and die for you, Adnah!’

He felt the hand in his shudder slightly; but no least knowledge of him did she otherwise evince.

He clasped her convulsively, released her, mumbled her slack white fingers with his lips. He might have addressed the dead.

In the midst, the figure before them swayed with a rising throe – turned – staggered across to the couch, and cast itself down before the crucifix on the wall.

‘Jesu, Son of God,’ it implored, through a hurry of piercing groans, ‘forbear Thy hand: Christ, register my atonement! My punishment – eternal – and oh, my mortal feet already weary to death! Jesu, spare me! Thy justice, Lawgiver – let it not be vindictive, oh, in Thy sacred name! lest men proclaim it for a baser thing than theirs. For a fault of ignorance – for a word of scorn where all reviled, would they have singled one out, have made him, most wretched, the scapegoat of the ages? Ah, most holy, forgive me! In mine agony I know not what I say. A moment ago I could have pronounced it something seeming less than divine that Thou couldst so have stultified with a curse Thy supreme hour of self-sacrifice – a moment ago, when the rising madness prevailed. Now, sane once more – Nazarene, oh, Nazarene! not only retribution for my deserts, but pity for my suffering – Nazarene, that Thy slanderers, the men of little schisms, be refuted, hearing me, the very witness to Thy mercy, testify how the justice of the Lord triumphs supreme through that His superhuman prerogative – that they may not say, He can destroy, even as we; but can He redeem? The sacrifice – the yearling lamb; – it awaits Thee, Master, the proof of my abjectness and my sincerity. I, more curst than Abraham, lift my eyes to Heaven, the terror in my heart, the knife in my hand. Jesu – Jesu!’

He cried and grovelled. His words were frenzied, his abasement fulsome to look upon. Yet it was impressed upon one of the listeners, with a great horror, how unspeakable blasphemy breathed between the lines of the prayer – the blasphemy of secret disbelief in the Power it invoked, and sought, with its tongue in its cheek, to conciliate.

Bitter indignation in the face of nameless outrage transfigured Rose at this moment into something nobler than himself. He feared, but he upheld his manhood. Conscious that the monstrous situation was none of his choosing, he had no thought to evade its consequences so long as the unquestioning credulity of his co-witness seemed to call for his protection. Nerveless, sensitive natures, such as his, not infrequently give the lie to themselves by accesses of an altruism that is little less than self-effacement.

‘This is all bad,’ he struggled to articulate. ‘You are hipped by some devilish cantrip. Oh, come – come! – in Christ’s name I dare to implore you – and learn the truth of love!’

As he spoke, he saw that the apparition was on its feet again – that it had returned, and was standing, its face ghastly and inhuman, with one hand leaned upon the marble table.

‘Adnah!’ it cried, in a strained and hollow voice. ‘The moment for which I prepared you approaches. Even now I labour. I had thought to take up the thread on the further side; but it is ordained otherwise, and we must part.’

‘Part!’ The word burst from her in a sigh of lost amazement.

‘The holocaust, Adnah!’ he groaned – ‘the holocaust with which every seventieth year my expiation must be punctuated! This time the cross is on thy breast, beloved; and tomorrow – oh! thou must be content to tread on lowlier altitudes than those I have striven to guide thee by.’

‘I cannot – I cannot, I should die in the mists. Oh, heart of my heart, forsake me not!’

‘Adnah – my selma, my beautiful – to propitiate—’

‘Whom? Thou hast eaten of the Tree, and art a God!’

‘Hush!’ He glanced round with an awed visage at the dim hanging Calvary; then went on in a harsher tone, ‘It is enough – it must be.’ (His shifting face, addressed to Rose, was convulsed into an expression of bitter scorn). ‘I command thee, go with him. The sacrifice – oh, my heart, the sacrifice! And I cry to Jehovah, and He makes no sign; and into thy sweet breast the knife must enter.’

Amos sprang to his feet with a loud cry.

‘I take no gift from you. I will win or lose her by right of manhood!’

The girl’s face was white with despair.

‘I do not understand,’ she cried in a piteous voice.

‘Nor I,’ said the young man, and he took a threatening step forward. ‘We have no part in this – this lady and I. Man or devil you may be; but—’

‘Neither!’

The stranger, as he uttered the word, drew himself erect with a tortured smile. The action seemed to kilt the skin of his face into hideous plaits.

‘I am Cartaphilus,’ he said, ‘who denied the Nazarene shelter.’

‘The Wandering Jew!’

The name of the old strange legend broke involuntarily from Rose’s lips.

‘Now you know him!’ he shrieked then. ‘Adnah, I am here! Come to me!’

Tears were running down the girl’s cheeks. She lifted her hands with an impassioned gesture; then covered her face with them.

But Cartaphilus, penetrating the veil with eyes no longer human, cried suddenly, so that the room vibrated with his voice, ‘Bismillah! Wilt thou dare the Son of Heaven, questioning if His sentence upon the Jew – to renew, with his every hundredth year, his manhood’s prime – was not rather a forestalling through His infinite penetration, of the consequences of that Jew’s finding and eating of the Tree of Life? Is it Cartaphilus first, or Christ?’

The girl flung herself forward, crushing her bosom upon the marble floor, and lay blindly groping with her hands.

‘He was a God and vindictive!’ she moaned. ‘He was a man and He died. The cross – the cross!’

The lost cry pierced Rose’s breast like a knife. Sorrow, rage, and love inflamed his passion to madness. With one bound he met and grappled with the stranger.

He had no thought of the resistance he should encounter. In a moment the Jew, despite his age and seizure, had him broken and powerless. The fury of blood blazed down upon him from the unearthly eyes.

‘Beast! that I might tear you! But the Nameless is your refuge. You must be chained – you must be chained. Come!’

Half-dragging, half-bearing, he forced his captive across the room to the corner where the flask of topaz liquid stood.

‘Sleep!’ he shrieked, and caught up the glass vessel and dashed it down upon Rose’s mouth.

The blow was a stunning one. A jagged splinter tore the victim’s lip and brought a gush of blood; the yellow fluid drowned his eyes and suffocated his throat. Struggling to hold his faculties, a startled shock passed through him, and he dropped insensible on the floor.

VI

‘Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’

Where had he read these words before? Now he saw them as scrolled in lightning upon a dead sheet of night.

There was a sound of feet going on and on.

Light soaked into the gloom, faster – faster; and he saw—

The figure of a man moved endlessly forward by town and pasture and the waste places of the world. But though he, the dreamer, longed to outstrip and stay the figure and look searchingly in its face, he could not, following, close upon the intervening space; and its back was ever towards him.

And always as the figure passed by populous places, there rose long murmurs of blasphemy to either side, and bestial cries: ‘We are weary! the farce is played out! He reveals Himself not, nor ever will! Lead us – lead us, against Heaven, against hell; against any other, or against ourselves! The cancer of life spreads, and we cannot enjoy nor can we think cleanly. The sins of the fathers have accumulated to one vast mound of putrefaction. Lead us, and we follow!’

And, uttering these cries, swarms of hideous half-human shapes would emerge from holes and corners and rotting burrows, and stumble a little way with the figure, cursing and jangling, and so drop behind, one by one, like glutted flies shaken from a horse.

And the dreamer saw in him, who went ever on before, the sole existent type of a lost racial glory, a marvellous survival, a prince over monstrosities; and he knew him to have reached, through long ages of evil introspection, a terrible belief in his own self-acquired immortality and lordship over all abased peoples that must die and pass; and the seed of his blasphemy he sowed broadcast in triumph as he went; and the ravenous horrors of the earth ran forth in broods and devoured it like birds, and trod one another underfoot in their gluttony.

And he came to a vast desolate plain, and took his stand upon a barren drift of sand; and the face the dreamer longed and feared to see was yet turned from him.

And the figure cried in a voice that grated down the winds of space: ‘Lo! I am he that cannot die! Lo! I am he that has eaten of the Tree of Life; who am the Lord of Time and of the races of the earth that shall flock to my standard!’

And again: ‘Lo! I am he that God was impotent to destroy because I had eaten of the fruit! He cannot control that which He hath created. He hath builded His temple upon His impotence, and it shall fall and crush Him. The children of His misrule cry out against Him. There is no God but Antichrist!’

Then from all sides came hurrying across the plain vast multitudes of the degenerate children of men, naked and unsightly; and they leaped and mouthed about the figure on the hillock, like hounds baying a dead fox held aloft; and from their swollen throats came one cry: