THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS Read Free Page B

and more continuous, he looked up, and there before him stood the phantom exactly as had been described. The ghastly figure seemed to beckon with its finger, but the philosopher signed with his hand that he was busy, and again bent to his writing. The chains were shaken angrily and with persistence, upon which Athenodorus quietly arose from his seat, and, taking the lamp, motioned the spectre to lead before. With low groans the figure passed heavily through the spacious corridors and empty rooms until they came out into the garden, when it led the philosopher to a distant shrubbery and, with a deep sigh, mingled with the night. Athenodorus, having marked the spot with stones and a broken bough, returned to the house, where he slept soundly until morning. He then repaired to the nearest magistrates, related what he had seen, and advised that the spot where the ghost disappeared should be investigated. This was done, and in digging they found a few feet below the surface a human skeleton, carious, enchained and fettered in gyves of a pattern many centuries old — now rusty and eroded, so that they fell asunder in flakes of desquamating verdigris. The mouldering bones were collected with reverend care and given a decent and seemly burial. The house was purged and cleansed with ritual lustrations, and never afterwards was it troubled by spectre or ill luck." 
    Pliny vouches for the truth of his narrative. Ludwig Lavater, at any rate, than whom there is no more serious-minded author, reproduced it entire in his De Spectris, lemuribus, et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus (Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght) , and the little duodecimo edition of Lavater, published at Gorkum in 1687, give us an illustration of the haggard spectre confronting the philosopher.
    In Latin literature the supernatural informs at least one masterpiece of the world's romance, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, a book to which that sadly overworked word "decadent" may be most fittingly and justly applied. From the first sentences to the last these pages are heavy with the mystic and the macabre, as some ornate cortège is palled with velvet trappings and the pomp of solemn habiliments of sacred dignity and reverend awe. Lucius is travelling in Thessaly, earth's very caldron, where voodoo and unclean sciences seethe and stew amain. At the outset he falls in with Aristomenes, who tells how, as it seemed to him, his fellow-companion had been slain by foul hags in the midnight inn, and yet he counted it but some evil dream, and travelled through those early morning hours with a dead man at his side. But when they came to running water the spell was broken, the corpse fell rigid and stiffening fast upon the river's bank with staring eyes long glazed and slackened, gaping jaw. It may be that this suggested Richard Middleton's On the Brighton Road , where the tramp plods along and two miles beyond Reigate meets the boy who asks to walk with him a bit, who died in the Crawley hospital twelve hours before.
    It has not been possible to give any selection from Apuleius. It were difficult and it were profane to attempt any excerpt from his chapters, which must be read in the fullness of their beauty — a beauty which is that of some still night when the cypress point to heaven like burned-out torches against the dusky sky and the yews darkly splotch the landscape, when the sickle of the harvest moon rides high in heaven, and nightingales are singing amorously, and the owl hoots dully ever and anon to remind us that there is death as well as love.
    "Aut indicauit, aut finxit," wrote the supreme wisdom of S. Augustine as he pondered the tale that Apuleius told.
    Throughout the Middle Ages the supernatural played as large a part in literature as in life. Those were the days of the sabbat and the witch. The old chronicles narrate deeds more horrible and facts more grim than any writer of fiction could weave. In the sixteenth century, too, the ghost story had no place