The Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack, Volume 4 by Nictzin Dyalhis

Author:Nictzin Dyalhis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: weird tales, fantasy, adventure, short stories, horror
ISBN: 9781479405633
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE RED WITCH

Originally published in Weird Tales, April 1932.

Is there a past, a present, and a future; or are they in reality all the same state, being merely differing phases of the same eternal “Now”?

Are our lives and deaths and the interludes between them naught but illusion; and are we ever the same beings, yet capable, even though we do not recognize the fact, of experiencing two or more states of consciousness of personal identity—I mean, under certain exceptional conditions?

Times there are when my recent terrific experience impels me to adopt that hypothesis. How else may I explain the events wherein I played so strange a part—together with another who is far dearer to me than aught else in the universe?

Am I Randall Crone, a scientist connected with a great public museum, or am I Ran Kron, a youthful warrior of a savage tribe in the eon-old Ice Age? Is my wife, Rhoda—the gently nurtured, highly cultured Rhoda Day—the modern product of this Twentieth Century; or is she Red Dawn, the flaming-haired daughter of a red-headed witch-priestess of a devil-worshipping tribe of skin-clad Anthropophagi in that same remote Ice Age?

What is true, and what false? By what strange laws are we governed, we mortals, that we can see neither ahead nor backward, and are only aware of a limited “Here”?

My brain reels as I seek to solve the mystery—and to what account? Truly has a great poet said:

Of all my seeking, this is all my gain—

No agony of any mortal brain

Shall wrest the secret of the life of man,

The search has taught me that the search is vain!

* * * *

I first saw her in the museum where I was on duty, and hard-headed scientist that I prided myself on being, I admit that my heart did a flip-flop, and I knew I beheld the one woman for whom I’d ever truly care. But that is a mild word for the love I felt. Love, I say; and I mean just that. In the holy emotion that possessed me there was no faintest throb of passion, no taint of desire. Beautiful? Yes, the most superbly beautiful woman on earth, I thought then, and still do think, and will continue so to think long after wrinkles and gray hair and decrepitude shall cause others to say “Old Hag”, should that ever come to pass.

For soul has spoken to soul, and we twain know that we belong to each other; and though menaced as we were by the frightful ghost of the implacable savage chieftain, Athak the Terrible, yet we have overcome his menace, and no longer has he the power to afflict and harass our love and happiness through his eon-old malicious hatred.

Yet while he still had the power, he surely availed himself of it, measure full and running over; as my beloved knew from her early childhood up to the time we were married; and as I myself had several samples of, after that event; although, thanks to some benignant power, Athak’s final attack was his undoing.

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