The Dead City

The city without life lay handsomely along a river in the early sunlight of a September morning.  Death had seemingly not been long upon it, nor had it made any scar.  No breach or rent or disorder or sign of violence could be seen.  The long, shaded streets breathed the still airs of utter peace and quiet.  From the half-circle around which the broad river bent its moody current, the neat houses, set in cool, green gardens, were terraced up the high hill, and from the summit of this a stately marble temple, glittering of newness, towered far above them in placid benediction.

Mile after mile the streets lay silent, along the river-front, up to the hilltop, and beyond into the level; no sound nor motion nor sign of life throughout their length.  And when they had run their length, and the outlying fields were reached, there, too, was the same brooding spell as the land stretched away in the hush and haze.  The yellow grain, heavy-headed with richness, lay beaten down and rotting, for there were no reapers.  The city, it seemed, had died calmly, painlessly, drowsily, as if overcome by sleep.

From a skiff in mid-river, a young man rowing toward the dead city rested on his oars and looked over his shoulder to the temple on the hilltop.  There was something very boyish in the reverent eagerness with which his dark eyes rested upon the pile, tracing the splendid lines from its broad, gray base to its lofty spire, radiant with white and gold.  As he looked long and intently, the colour of new life flushed into a face that was pinched and drawn.  With fresh resolution, he bent again to his oars, noting with a quick eye that the current had carried him far down-stream while he stopped to look upon the holy edifice.

Landing presently at the wharf, he was stunned by the hush of the streets.  This was not like the city of twenty thousand people he had left three months before.  In blank bewilderment he stood, turning to each quarter for some solution of the mystery.  Perceiving at length that there was really no life either way along the river, he started wonderingly up a street that led from the waterside, - a street which, when he had last walked it, was quickening with the rush of a mighty commerce.

Soon his expression of wonder was darkened by a shade of anxiety.  There was an unnerving quality in the trance-like stillness; and the mystery of it pricked him to forebodings.  He was now passing empty workshops, hesitating at door after door with ever-mounting alarm.  Then he began to call, but the sound of his voice served only to aggravate the silence.

Growing bolder, he tried some of the doors and found them to yield, letting him into a kind of smothered, troubled quietness even more oppressive than that outside.  He passed an empty ropewalk, the hemp strewn untidily about, as if the workers had left hurriedly.  He peered curiously at idle looms and deserted spinning-wheels - deserted apparently but the instant before he came.  It seemed as if the people were fled maliciously just in front, to leave him in this fearfullest of all solitudes.  He wondered if he did not hear their quick, furtive steps, and see the vanishing shadows of them.

He entered a carpenter’s shop.  On the bench was an unfinished door, a plane left where it had been shoved half the length of its edge, the fresh pine shaving still curling over the side.  He left with an uncanny feeling that the carpenter, breathing softly, had watched him from some hiding-place, and would now come stealthily out to push his plane again.

He turned into a baker’s shop and saw freshly chopped kindling piled against the oven, and dough actually on the kneading-tray.  In a tanner’s vat he found fresh bark.  In a blacksmith’s shop he entered next the fire was out, but there was coal heaped beside the forge, with the ladling-pool and the crooked water-horn, and on the anvil was a horseshoe that had cooled before it was finished.

With something akin to terror, he now turned from this street of shops into one of those with the pleasant dwellings, eager to find something alive, even a dog to bark an alarm.  He entered one of the gardens, clicking the gate-latch loudly after him, but no one challenged.  He drew a drink from the well with its loud-rattling chain and clumsy, water-sodden bucket, but no one called.  At the door of the house he whistled, stamped, pounded, and at last flung it open with all the noise he could make.  Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes, the barren husks of his own clamour.  There was no curt voice of a man, no quick, questioning tread of a woman.  There were dead white ashes on the hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by the dumb household gods.

His nervousness increased.  So vividly did his memory people the streets and shops and houses that the air was vibrant with sound, - low-toned conversations, shouts, calls, laughter, the voices of children, the creaking of wagons, pounding hammers, the clangour of many works; yet all muffled away from him, as if coming from some phantom-land.  His eyes, too, were kept darting from side to side by vague forms that flitted privily near by, around corners, behind him, lurking always a little beyond his eyes, turn them quickly as he would.  Now, facing the street, he shouted, again and again, from sheer nervousness; but the echoes came back alone.

He recalled a favourite day-dream of boyhood, - a dream in which he became the sole person in the world, wandering with royal liberty through strange cities, with no voice to chide or forbid, free to choose and partake, as would a prince, of all the wonders and delights that boyhood can picture; his own master and the master of all the marvels and treasures of earth.  This was like the dream come true; but it distressed him.  It was necessary to find the people at once.  He had a feeling that his instant duty was to break some malign spell that lay upon the place - or upon himself.  For one of them was surely bewitched.

Out he strode to the middle of the street, between two rows of yellowing maples, and there he shouted again and still more loudly to evoke some shape or sound of life, sending a full, high, ringing call up the empty thoroughfare.  Between the shouts he scanned the near-by houses intently.

At last, half-way up the next block, even as his lungs filled for another peal, he thought his eyes caught for a short half-second the mere thin shadow of a skulking figure.  It had seemed to pass through a grape arbour that all but shielded from the street a house slightly more pretentious than its neighbours.  He ran toward the spot, calling as he went.  But when he had vaulted over the low fence, run across the garden and around the end of the arbour, dense with the green leaves and clusters of purple grapes, the space in front of the house was bare.  If more than a trick-phantom of his eye had been there, it had vanished.

He stood gazing blankly at the front door of the house.  Was it fancy that he had heard it shut a second before he came? that his nerves still responded to the shock of its closing?  He had already imagined so many noises of the kind, so many misty shapes fleeing before him with little soft rustlings, so many whispers at his back and hushed cries behind the closed doors.  Yet this door had seemed to shut more tangibly, with a warmer promise of life.  He went quickly up the three wooden steps, turned the knob, and pushed it open - very softly this time.  No one appeared.  But, as he stood on the threshold, while the pupils of his eyes dilated to the gloom of the hall into which he looked, his ears seemed to detect somewhere in the house a muffled footfall and the sound of another door closed softly.

He stepped inside and called.  There was no answer, but above his head a board creaked.  He started up the stairs in front of him, and, as he did so, he seemed to hear cautious steps across a bare floor above.  He stopped climbing; the steps ceased.  He started up, and the steps came again.  He knew now they came from a room at the head of the stairs.  He bounded up the remaining steps and pushed open the door with a loud “Halloo!”

The room was empty.  Yet across it there was the indefinable trail of a presence, - an odour, a vibration, he knew not what, - and where a bar of sunlight cut the gloom under a half-raised curtain, he saw the motes in the air all astir.  Opposite the door he had opened was another, leading, apparently, to a room at the back of the house.  From behind it, he could have sworn came the sounds of a stealthily moved body and softened breathing.  A presence, unseen but felt, was all about.  Not without effort did he conquer the impulse to look behind him at every breath.

Determined to be no longer eluded, he crossed the room on tiptoe and gently tried the opposite door.  It was locked.  As he leaned against it, almost in a terror of suspense, he knew he heard again those little seemings of a presence a door’s thickness away.  He did not hesitate.  Still holding the turned knob in his hand, he quickly crouched back and brought his flexed shoulder heavily against the door.  It flew open with a breaking sound, and, with a little gasp of triumph, he was in the room to confront its unknown occupant.

To his dismay, he saw no one.  He peered in bewilderment to the farther side of the room, where light struggled dimly in at the sides of a curtained window.  There was no sound, and yet he could acutely feel that presence; insistently his nerves tingled the warning of another’s nearness.  Leaning forward, still peering to sound the dim corners of the room, he called out again.

Then, from behind the door he had opened, a staggering blow was dealt him, and, before he could recover, or had done more than blindly crook one arm protectingly before his face, he was borne heavily to the floor, writhing in a grasp that centered all its crushing power about his throat.