M. Valdemar

"The expiration of the cataleptic patient! how uneventful! how languid!—how utterly oppressed beneath the incubus of torpor! His eyes, dull, sluggish, and lustreless, rivet themselves to my own, as if they would look into my very soul.”

M. Valdemar, or the putrescent remains of him, burbling and bubbling atop the yellowed, dripping sheets, oozes like a slick of mud onto the floor boards.

I had just commenced a series of interrogations as to whether or not that, in his curious state, which seemed to hover anywhere between the bridge of life and the jaws of death--I say, I had asked him, pointedly, if he at last felt pain. This was a matter the specification of which I was most eager to ascertain. For, if the hypnotic or mesmeric reverie could sustain life (or rather, in this case, suspend death) then was it also not completely reasonable to assume that it could furthermore render the uncomfortableness of pain a moot point?

But, alas, a swift and ready, a comprehensible answer, was not forthcoming M. Valdemar, the white-haired and dignified old gent that he was, implored me, in a sepulchral voice I found most jarring, truly, to put an end to his torment--as, "I am dead! Dead! Dead!"

He seemed to be in an insufferable state of agitation. He had lingered for many long weeks in this bizarre, borderland state, this boundry that was neither life nor death, but undeadness, for lack of a better term. The servants declined, or outright refused, to serve him, and it was unnecessary at any rate, for the sickness had rendered him unable to eat or take of any food, save for a little water or breath; so that his form was a skeletal, emaciated horror even prior to his expiration. But now, the clock had ticked upon his final hour, and death had rendered him a most fitting subject for the mesmeric trance upon him which I had imposed.

But releasing him from this (and it was an action that I was more than reluctant to pursue) had somehow triggered that metabolic response the likes of which is our cadaveric, inert form, succumbing to the rigors of decay. Forsooth, we had staved off grave worm and bluebottle alike with our methodical and expert mesmeric attentions, and thus, the natural course of bodily decay had been arrested.

His tongue had lolled in his mouth grotesquely--eyes had rolled upward into their sockets, so that only the hideous pale orbs shone like twin and exquisite moons of religious suffering--he was going to His God, or The Devil, one or the other. But I can assure you, as for his body, it was simply turning to a lavatorial sludge.

Soon, the flesh dissipated, the fat and filth dripping still from the mantle, puddling into congealed pools of fat and yellow ichor on the floor; the whole abominable, grotesque, and repellent mess gave off a sickening, pestilential stench that filled the room. It was almost as if the butchered remains of some foul beast had been put in a state of refrigerated suspension, and then violently exposed to a blast of thermal warmth sufficient to melt it's frigid exterior, exposing what lie beneath the surface to the natural progression of biologic putrefaction.

In other words, our ice block of entrails had been left out in the burning sun until their rotten loops of detestable offal turned to a watery, dripping, stinking murk.

And from somewhere in the slime of that forgotten man, that lonely sojourner on the borderland between life and its inexorable end, I can still hear his voice cry out to me, “I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.”

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My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce and the Machinery of Dread by Tom Baker

My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels by C. Augustine

Ebook of Silent Scream