Read Online In the Shadow of the Master by Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Connelly - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Connelly
Tags: Fiction, General, thriller, Mystery & Detective, Horror, Short Stories, Horror Tales; American, Literary Collections
Ads: Link
house. These walls-are you going, gentlemen?-these walls are solidly put together”; and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brickwork behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the ArchFiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!-by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman-a howl-a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!
Pluto’s Heritage BY P. J. PARRISH
The homeless man cornered us outside the supermarket. “I found this in the Dumpster,” he said, pointing to his dirty plaid shirt.
Poking out of his pocket was a kitten’s head.
“I got no place for it,” he said. “Can you give it a home?” The tiny beast was wet with blood. It was dying.
My husband took it and handed the man a twenty. It was late on a Saturday night, but we drove to the emergency vet. An hour and two hundred dollars later, the vet sent us on our way with the kitten.
It was fine, he said, just starving and missing an eye.
Cleaned up, the kitten didn’t look that bad. It quickly grew fat and found its rank among our eight other cats.
“What should we name it?” my husband asked.
“Pluto,” I said.
Which is, of course, the name of the tortured feline in Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Not that I was any expert on Poe then.
Far from it. Like most people, my first guide to Poe was B-director Roger Corman (Ray Milland in
Premature Burial
drinking maggots from a wine goblet!). My next guide was Professor Schneider, whose Introduction to American Literature course had me shoehorning the Poe short stories in between Twain and Hawthorne.
I remember finding “The Black Cat” dense and difficult. I had to look up a lot of words. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And what was the deal with this guy gouging out his cat’s eye and planting an ax in his wife’s head after claiming he adored them both? Was he a liar, confused, drunk, or just plain nuts?
Like most critics of Poe’s day-Yeats called him “vulgar”-I was underwhelmed.
I didn’t cross paths with “The Black Cat” for decades, writing it-and its creator-off as archaic and lightweight. It was only after I started writing fiction that I gave Poe a second chance. Although I had published a handful of crime novels, I was struggling with my first short story. Pluto was sitting on my lap at the computer one day as I stared at the blank screen. He wasn’t the one who Googled “The Black Cat,” but damn, wouldn’t that have made a great Poe twist? I was floored by the story and went on to read others. Poe hadn’t gotten better; I had just gotten older. The Saturday-matinee Poe who scared the Jujubes out of me as a kid scared me in a completely different way as an adult. Now I could understand the thin line between promise and disappointment. Now I could imagine the terror of a mind unbalanced by demons or drink. Now I could see the rich mix of emotions, the
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the ArchFiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!-by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman-a howl-a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!
Pluto’s Heritage BY P. J. PARRISH
The homeless man cornered us outside the supermarket. “I found this in the Dumpster,” he said, pointing to his dirty plaid shirt.
Poking out of his pocket was a kitten’s head.
“I got no place for it,” he said. “Can you give it a home?” The tiny beast was wet with blood. It was dying.
My husband took it and handed the man a twenty. It was late on a Saturday night, but we drove to the emergency vet. An hour and two hundred dollars later, the vet sent us on our way with the kitten.
It was fine, he said, just starving and missing an eye.
Cleaned up, the kitten didn’t look that bad. It quickly grew fat and found its rank among our eight other cats.
“What should we name it?” my husband asked.
“Pluto,” I said.
Which is, of course, the name of the tortured feline in Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Not that I was any expert on Poe then.
Far from it. Like most people, my first guide to Poe was B-director Roger Corman (Ray Milland in
Premature Burial
drinking maggots from a wine goblet!). My next guide was Professor Schneider, whose Introduction to American Literature course had me shoehorning the Poe short stories in between Twain and Hawthorne.
I remember finding “The Black Cat” dense and difficult. I had to look up a lot of words. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And what was the deal with this guy gouging out his cat’s eye and planting an ax in his wife’s head after claiming he adored them both? Was he a liar, confused, drunk, or just plain nuts?
Like most critics of Poe’s day-Yeats called him “vulgar”-I was underwhelmed.
I didn’t cross paths with “The Black Cat” for decades, writing it-and its creator-off as archaic and lightweight. It was only after I started writing fiction that I gave Poe a second chance. Although I had published a handful of crime novels, I was struggling with my first short story. Pluto was sitting on my lap at the computer one day as I stared at the blank screen. He wasn’t the one who Googled “The Black Cat,” but damn, wouldn’t that have made a great Poe twist? I was floored by the story and went on to read others. Poe hadn’t gotten better; I had just gotten older. The Saturday-matinee Poe who scared the Jujubes out of me as a kid scared me in a completely different way as an adult. Now I could understand the thin line between promise and disappointment. Now I could imagine the terror of a mind unbalanced by demons or drink. Now I could see the rich mix of emotions, the
Similar Books
