Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/154

 warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, "Warren, are you there?" and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more—heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapors—heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulcher as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.

And this is what it said:

"You fool, Warren is DEAD!"





OST men fear and dread death, especially if they allow themselves to contemplate it when they are in no apparent danger of experiencing it. The law's final punishment is death. The pangs of death have been held up before us by the supreme artists as the most frightful of human calamities.

But is death the terrible thing that human imagination pictures it? Is the moment of the separation of body and soul as dreadful as we suppose?

The evidence of observers, from remote antiquity until the present, indicates that we poor humans, when faced by the prospect of death, and when plunged into the terror that thought of personal extinction always brings along with it, confuse death itself with what may come after. We really fear, not the wrench that pulls the reluctant soul from the agonized body, but we fear the destiny that awaits us beyond the grave. And death itself is usually painless and unregarded by the dying.

Aristotle and Cicero affirm that death brought about by old age is without pain; and Plato tells us that death caused by syncope is accompanied by pleasant sensations. He goes farther and asserts that even violent death is not wholly lacking in pleasurable elements. The Greeks were more or less indifferent to death; but in some respects, popular superstitions gave rise among them to peculiar dread of certain forms of death. Drowning was peculiarly abhorrent to them, either because they believed that the souls of those who died in this way had to wander without rest for a hundred years; or because, conceiving the soul to be of a fiery nature, they believed that its greatest enemy was water, and that water would quench or at least seriously damage the subtle fiery essence of their being. Drowning is, however, regarded as one of the pleasantest forms of death, and men who have been dragged from the water unconscious and on the very threshold