Can Such Things Be?

Ambrose Bierce disappeared into the Mexican desert in 1914, falling off the face of the Earth, quite possibly following the trail of revolutionary Pancho Villa. The fate of Bierce has been variously rumored to be every bit as comic and grotesque, as ironic and macabre as the sorry fates of those he wrote about in such stories as "A Diagnosis of Death." One apocryphal tale has him being preserved in a giant bottle of formaldehyde by a rather tender-hearted group of South Pacific natives. We suppose there is some truth in that.

During his life, Bierce was known to be a curmudgeonly bastard, a man given to cynical, bitter, not to say MISANTHROPIC extremes of opinion--but one who wrapped his obvious disdain or disgust for the human condition in a comic cloak of pity. If beneath his black heart was any deeper, kinder, or more human emotion, we cannot say; it IS said that he bent over the coffin of his suicided son and told him, "You made the right choice." Maybe he truly was every bit the fire-breathing dragon he portrayed.

His most famous work, undoubtedly, is the Devil's Dictionary, a faux encyclopedic index of man's foibles, in both the material and spiritual spheres, all commented upon slyly by Bierce's crusty and unmistakably bitter, and uncanny wit. He outpaces Mark Twain, perhaps, in the art of the barbed satirical jab.

He was also a Civil War veteran, basing much of his writings around his expedition as part of Hazen's Brigade to the various encampments of the Federal Troops. A near-fatal brain injury felled him at the Battle of Kennesewa. He used this as raw material for many of his tales, juxtaposing the horrors of war against the fear of the unknown.

His greatest book, as far as THIS author is concerned, however, is one he has read multiple times, the 1893 classic book of ghost and supernatural horror yarns he titled Can Such Things Be? perhaps hinting at the germ or kernel of truth behind each various story, but at the very least playing coyly with the reader's sense of what is possible and impossible, truth and falsehood. Weaving through the tales is a strong vein of commentary upon the variant foibles afflicting man, both as a creator of his destruction, often through cowardice or sheer hypocrisy ("as in "Moxon's Master"), as well as as a pawn or unwitting plaything for forces from the Other Side.

There is often a dream-like quality to stories such as "The Death of Halpin Frayser," wherein the opening sentence, having a man awake with the name, "Catherine Larue" on his lips, begins a framed story that beguiles and intentionally misleads, leaving the reader open to confusion (and, finally, shock once the realization of the "hidden" or missing pieces of the story's puzzle begins to fall into place.

Frayser is a young man who journeys to California from his ancestral home, and leaves behind a mother to who he was so attached that they were often mistaken for "lovers." This woman ends up brutally murdered, using the name "Catherine Larue," by a man we are told was using the name "Frayser." The suggestion of incest and matricide here remain unspoken, so monstrous an inference that the reader will, most likely, not even grasp what is suggested.

"The Moonlit Road," and the "Secret of Macarger's Gulch," both give us traditional ghostly yarns. "Road" has the revenant of a woman murdered by a jealous husband over a mistaken belief she has been unfaithful reappear one dark, lonely night on a forest lane. She disappears into the Void with her killer, whose fate is ironic considering he killed an innocent woman. "Macarger's Gulch" is another brutal and traditional campfire chiller, the story of a transplanted Scottish couple, the murder of the wife by the husband, and the spectral reply of this scene before the discovery of the moldering bones buried beneath the floorboards.

The tale of "Moxon's Master" gives us a long, rambling discourse by Moxon to the unnamed narrator, chiefly concerning the sentient properties of both plant life as well as "inert matter". The denouement of the tale sees the narrator spying on Moxon as he plays chess with a homicidal automaton. A quasi-dream-like "Act of God" destroys the scene with a lightning bolt. "A Tough Tussle" has a young Civil War soldier becoming increasingly paranoid and delusional about the seemingly malevolent, reanimated properties of a nearby cadaver.

"The Little Tramp" has the poignant plot of a displaced ragamuffin journeying to return and DIE on the grave of his ghostly (of course, clad in spectral white) mother. "A Diagnosis of Death" has the ghost appear with a portent of doom for the man who sees him (it is suggested he was his killer); "The Night Doing at Deadman's" gives us a crazed California prospector who readily admits to having been insane "for nine years," recounting the curious tale of a barkeep and his Chinese servant. The narrator of the tale himself seems unreliable, as the crazy old coot accuses HIM of poisoning the barkeep. The reader is left wondering whom to believe about and what the story is driving at, except for the fact that Bierce enjoys pulling the ugly bandage away and revealing the often nasty, cankerous underbelly, or perhaps even the weird, hidden, rotten little corners and crevices wherein hide the delusional, the hypocrites and liars, the homicidally insane.

Another tale is even more grotesque, even more debased by modern, politically correct standards, having the spirit or even resurrected body of a murdered Chinese fly up from the floorboards of a lonely mountain cabin to reclaim his ponytail, which has been nailed to the ceiling long before. Mr. Death joins him with a stopwatch, no less. Of course, being a man of his era, Bierce relies on racial stereotypes often. He may have perceived them as humorous, or he may be setting bigotry on its ear slyly; either way, these wouldn't pass muster today.

"Beyond the Wall" (which must have inspired the title of H.P. Lovecraft's much later "Beyond the Wall of Sleep") is a perfect little ghostly tale of a man who becomes infatuated with a young woman who dies, only to have her ghost "rap", in true seance fashion, on the wall of his tower home. Stephen King once described (in his excellent early non-fiction book Danse Macabre) the short horror tale as a "kiss from a lover in the dark." In the case of this tale, and so much of Bierce's writing, this description is one hundred percent applicable and very, very apt.

"The Damned Thing," a classic story about an invisible creature or force that devours men, was inspired by the strange, supposedly true case of Orion Williamson, who is said to have vanished "while crossing a field" (Bierce wrote another piece on Williamson, with this title), and whose weird, invisible calls for help could be heard by his astounded family for a long period afterward, even though Williamson had seemingly vanished [see note]. Bierce postulates, with wry, black humor, the existence of a Lovecraftian nightmare of such a color beyond the visible spectrum of human sight, and "Oh! The Damned Thing is of such a color." Bierce's macabre sense of humor is in evidence here in the titles of the individual sections of the story. For instance, the first section is titled, "One Does Not Always Eat What is On the Table." The chapterette reveals that it is about a BODY laid out on a table, for an inquest.

Bierce himself is said to have ended up, quite possibly, in a giant pickle jar in South America, sort of like the fabled severed head of Joaquin Murieta. Which you certainly don't believe (do you?) but seems a fitting end somehow. At any rate, Bierce would have enjoyed the macabre irony of his demise.

Note. Bierce personally investigated, as a reporter, the story of Williamson, and found it to be hogwash. The tall tale has been retold in various forms over the decades as that of Oliver Lerch and others. I'd say more but I'm afraid an invisible nasty would whisk me away to another dimension.