The Ultimate Weird Tales Collection - 133 stories - Clark Ashton Smith (Trilogus Classics) Read Free Page B

me.
     
    All was dim within, and the light of many tapers scarcely served to illumine the vast nave and altar. Masses were being said by priests in black whose faces I could not see distinctly; and to me, their chanting was like words in a dream; and I could hear nothing, and nothing was plainly visible in all the place, except a bier of opulent fabrics on which there lay a motionless form in white. Flowers of many hues had been strewn upon the bier, and their fragrance filled the air with a drowsy languor, with an anodyne that seemed to drug my heart and brain. Such flowers had been cast on the bier of Mariel; and even thus, at her funeral, I had been overcome by a momentary dulling of the senses because of their perfume.
     
    Dimly I became aware that someone was at my elbow. With eyes still intent on the bier, I asked:
     
    'Who is it that lies yonder, for whom these masses are being said and these bells are rung?' And a slow, sepulchral voice replied:
     
    'It is the lady Mariel, who died yesterday and who will be interred tomorrow in the vaults of her ancestors. If you wish, you may go forward and gaze upon her.'
     
    So I went down the cathedral aisle, even to the side of the bier, whose opulent fabrics trailed on the cold flags. And the face of her who lay thereon, with a tranquil smile upon the lips, and tender shadows upon the shut eyelids, was the face of the Mariel I had loved and of none other. The tides of time were frozen in their flowing; and all that was or had been or could be, all of the world that existed aside from her, became as fading shadows; and even as once before (was it eons or instants ago?) my soul was locked in the marble hell of its supreme grief and regret. I could not move, I could not cry out nor even weep, for my very tears were turned to ice. And now I knew with a terrible certitude that this one event, the death of the lady Mariel, had drawn apart from all other happenings, had broken away from the sequence of time and had found for itself a setting of appropriate gloom and solemnity; or perhaps had even built around itself the whole enormous maze of that spectral city, in which to abide my destined return among the mists of a deceptive oblivion.
     
    At length, with an awful effort of will, I turned my eyes away; and leaving the cathedral with steps that were both hurried and leaden, I sought to find an egress from the dismal labyrinth of Malnéant to the gate by which I had entered. But this was by no means easy, and I must have roamed for hours in alleys blind and stifling as tombs, and along the tortuous, self-reverting thoroughfares, ere I came to a familiar street and was able henceforward to direct my paces with something of surety. And a dull and sunless daylight was dawning behind the mists when I crossed the bridge and came again to the road that would lead me away from that fatal city.
     
    Since then, I have wandered long and in many places. But never again have I cared to revisit those old-world realms of fog and mist, for fear that I should come once more to Malnéant, and find that its people are still busied with their preparations for the obsequies of the lady Mariel.
     

A PLATONIC ENTANGLEMENT
     
    They were sitting a fairly proper distance apart, on their favorite moss-grown boulder, at the end of the leaf-strewn autumn trail they had taken so often.
     
    "Do you know that people are talking about us?" Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, failing on a mournful cadence almost unaudible, and he moved nearer, to catch the faint silver of its tones . As always, he found something vaguely pleasurable in the nearness of the plump olive neck under its coil of unbobbed hair, and the tender oval cheek that was exquisitely innocent of rouge.
     
    "We have been seen together too often," she continued, with trouble and sadness in the droop of her eyelids, in the fall of her voice. "This town is full of cats, like all villages, and they are all the more willing to tear me in