"Bierce, Ambrose - Can Such Things Be" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bierce Ambrose)

tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing another,
or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity,
but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of
what he sought. The failure augmented his terror;
he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not
knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situation--
the mysterious light burned with so silent
and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees
that by common consent are invested with a melancholy
or baleful character, so openly in his sight
conspired against his peace; from overhead and all
about came so audible and startling whispers and
the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth--
that he could endure it no longer, and with a great
effort to break some malign spell that bound his
faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted with the
full strength of his lungs! His voice, broken, it
seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar
sounds, went babbling and stammering away into
the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence,
and all was as before. But he had made a beginning
at resistance and was encouraged. He said:
Page 3
Bierce, Ambrose - Can Such Things Be
'I will not submit unheard. There may be powers
that are not malignant travelling this accursed road.
I shall leave them a record and an appeal. I shall
relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I endure--
I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending
poet!' Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was
a penitent: in his dream.
Taking from his clothing a small red-leather
pocket-book one half of which was leaved for memoranda,
he discovered that he was without a pencil.
He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool
of blood and wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched
the paper with the point of his twig when a low, wild
peal of laughter broke out at a measureless distance
away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching
ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous
laugh, like that of the loon, solitary by the lakeside
at midnight; a laugh which culminated in an
unearthly shout close at hand, then died away
by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that
uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the
world whence it had come. But the man felt that
this was not so--that it was near by and had not
moved.
A strange sensation began slowly to take possession
of his body and his mind. He could not have