The Other Passenger by John Keir Cross

Author:John Keir Cross [Cross, John Keir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror & Supernatural, weird fiction
Google: dqb3MgEACAAJ
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1961-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

The dead are quickly buried

bury the dead

with tall white candles for remembrance.

Yet let us forget the candles after all

after all we have only a moment.

It is all an approximation.

I could say:

‘‘Do you remember this, remember that?”

But the poignancy is rare and is not to be conjured: the poignancy is rare and is not to be perjured.

The dead are better buried the candles are easily blown out and the room is easily darkened...

(My thoughts went wandering away as the deep slow voice went on. As they so often did chose days they circled round Vera. I had a vision of her rising in the morning with her hair in a little pink net: of her cheerfully preparing breakfast: of her dusting those hideous Parts. She goes out for a morning shopping expedition - Kolensky still abed. She returns. She climbs the inner stairway and mounts the glorified ladder at the top of the house. She faces the Blue Door. She puts out her soft smooth hand to grasp without a tremor that pale unyielding waxen Thing ... Ugh! I shudder - and wonder. She accepts. She accepts! ...)

The voice went on:

O you and I were meant for other things indeed, there was a destiny for us a shade of something glorious: some hint and echo from a greater height for other men to cling to!

Our banner waves diaphanous is, as it were, an ancient tattered map, long scrawled upon but splendid, of countries from an old lunatic dream and stories never ended...

(Vera with a Woolworth’s feather duster. As she works perhaps she whistles or hums a tune - a hymn tune from the Wimbledon prayer meetings or the Sunday School in which she was surely a teacher. We Are But Little Children Weak or Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam. She buys some flowers - anemones I fancy. She sets them in the Breast. She steps back with her head cocked to one side like a bird’s to admire the effect. She accepts, she accepts ...)

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