The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith Page B

through and beyond them into a shadowy gulf, in which swam the face of Elise.
    From that time onward, the appearances of the face were more frequent day by day; till the hour came when he saw it continually. For awhile, he drank soddenly; he sought the anodyne of drugs; but without losing the specter even in the ultimate delirium of his intoxication. Then his mind succumbed to a fear that was utterly beyond reason; and he dwelt henceward in a hell of fantasmal and superstitious terrors. The thing was no longer a mere hallucination, it had come back from the cryptic realms of the dead, from a gulf beyond mortal perception, to freeze his blood and his brain with ghastly intimations of all that is hidden in the depths of death. Perhaps his mind had already given way; for he soon lost the fear of madness in a greater and more abysmal fear of the woman herself, and the unknown world into which he had precipitated her by his crime. In his heedlessness of anything but the apparition, he would stumble against people on the street; and he was often in danger from passing vehicles. But in some miraculous manner, like a somnambulist, he would avoid them without ever knowing his peril or his escape.
    The face was nearer now. It sat opposite him at every table, it moved before him along the pavements, it stood at the feet of his bed through the night-time. It was always the same, with widely staring eyes, and lips that were parted in an eternal gasp. Sylen was no longer conscious of what he did or where he went. It was some automatic portion of his brain which enabled him to continue the daily movements and actions of life. He was wholly obsessed by the image of Elise, he lived in a kind of mental catalepsy. Held by a dreadful hypnosis, he watched all day in open sun or rain or shadowy rooms, the thing that was stamped upon his vision; and he watched it during the night, by lamplight or in utter darkness. He slept very little, and when he did sleep, Elise hovered before him in the vistas of his dreams. It was mostly at night, lying awake, that he became aware of the abyss that lay behind and beneath her face—an abyss in which he could see the slow sinking of dim, macabre forms, of corpse-like or skeleton-like things that appeared always to fall and decompose in unfathomable gloom. But the face itself never sank into the abyss.
    Sylen knew nothing of time. The moment in which he had last seen Elise was re-lived by him in a virtual eternity through the perpetuation of her visual image. And he knew nothing of the cities through which he passed, nor the route by which he returned on a latter evening, still oblivious of his whereabouts, to the city and the river-side of his crime. He knew only that the face was leading him somewhere, to an end which his palsied faculties could not even imagine.
    He stared about him with sightless eyes. Here, in the dusk, beneath the unheeded willows, beside the unrecognized flowing of the Sacramento, the face drew nearer still. The phantom throat was within arms’ length for the first time—even as when he had loosed his fingers from the living throat of Elise and had pushed her back toward the water in a sullen twilight many months before.
    Sylen did not perceive that he was standing close to the river-brink. He saw only the features of Elise, knew only that her throat was within seeming reach of his fingers once more. It was a mad impulse of frantic fear, of ultimate desperation, which made him clutch at the white phantom, with its changeless eyes and mouth, and the livid, never-fading marks below its chin. . . .
    He still saw the face for a little while, when he sank beneath the water. It seemed to swim on a fathomless abyss, where human bones and cadavers were slowly drowning in a darkness that was like the deliquescence of the world and of all past years and eras. The face was very close to him as he went down . . . and then it began to recede in a lessening