← Harold's Old Time Radio
Harold's Old Time Radio
Dreadful John xx-xx-xx The Boarded Window
00:12:13
Dreadful John xx-xx-xx The Boarded Window
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
SA Good morning. This is dreadful, John. At midnight Let me tell you a few things about this morning's offer. A born adventurer, Ambrose Bierce joined the Indiana infantry in 1861 and fought courageously throughout the Civil War. Then he went to San Francisco, where he followed his chosen profession of journalist and became editor of the newsletter. His aggressiveness and sharp tongued wit stood him in good stead, and his stories and sketches won great popularity. His success dimmed somewhat as he grew older, but his adventurous spirit remained untamed. At the age of 75, he went off to Mexico to join peers and of revolutionists. He was never heard of again. This morning it is my pleasure to read for you. The Boarded Window by Ambrose beer. In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was partially settled by people of the frontier, restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which today we should call indigence, than, impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward to encounter new perils in privation, in the effort to regain the meager comforts which they had voluntarily denounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remotest settlement. But among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs, surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile, nor to speak a needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town. Not a thing did he grow upon the land, which, if needful, he might have cleaned by right of undisturbed possession. There were evidences of improvement. A few acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the axe. Apparently the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes the little log house with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles, and its chinking of clay had a single door and directly opposite a window. The ladder, however, was boarded up. No one could remember a time when it was not, and none knew why it was so closed. Certainly not because of the occupants dislike of light and air. For on those Rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot, the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep. If heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living today who ever knew the secret of that window. But I am one, as you shall see. The man's name was said to be Murloc. He was apparently 70 years old, actually about 50. Something besides years had had a hand in his aging. His hair and long full beard were white, his gray lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersect in figure. He was tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders, a burden bearer. I never saw him. These particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got a man's story when I was a lad. He had known him when living nearby. In that early day, one day Murloc was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers and I suppose it was a brief that he had died from natural causes. Or I should have been told and should remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness of things, the body was buried near the cabin alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter of this true story. Accepting indeed the circumstance that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a spoon against it and run away to avoid the ghost, which every well informed boy thereabout knew honored to start. But there is an earlier chapter that, supplied by my grandfather when Murloc built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his axe to hew out a farm, the rifle, meanwhile his means of support. He was young, strong and full of hope in that eastern country. When he came, he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman and always worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name, of her charms of mind and person. Tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubts. But God forbid that I should share it. Of their affection and happiness. There is abundant assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life. For what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that virtuous spirit to a lot like that? One day Murloc returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever and delirium. There was no physician within miles, no neighbor, nor was she in a condition to be left to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to health. But at the end of the third day, she fell into unconsciousness and so passed away, apparently with never a gleam of revolution returning reason from what we know of a nature like his, when they venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When convinced that she was dead, Murloch had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty, he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures to accomplish the some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar natural law. He was surprised, too, that he did not weep, surprised and a little ashamed. Surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead. Tomorrow, he said aloud, I shall have to make the coffin and dig the grave, and then I shall miss her when she is no longer in sight. But now she is dead, of course. But it is all right. It must be all right. So somehow things cannot be so bad as they seem. He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness ran an under sense of conviction that all was right, that he should have her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience in Greece. His capacity had not been enlarged by youth. His heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know he was so hard struck that knowledge would come later and never go. Greece is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low grave chords that throb recurrent, like the slow beating of a distant drum Some natures have startled from it stupefiles to one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener light, to another, as the blow of a bludgeon which in crushing benumbs we may conceive Murloch to have been that way affected, for and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture. No sooner had he finished his pious work than sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon the table's edge and dropped his face into them. Careless yet and unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window, A long wailing sound, like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the darkening wood. But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than before sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild beast, perhaps it was a dream, for Morlock was asleep. Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher awoke, and, lifting his head from his arms, intently listened. He knew not why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all without a shock, he strained his eyes to see. He knew not what. His senses were all alert. His breath was suspended. His blood had filled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who? What had awakened him and where was it? Suddenly the table shook beneath his arm, and at the same moment he heard, or fancied that he heard a light, soft step, another sounds of bare feet upon the floor. He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce, he waited, waited there in the darkness, through seeming centuries of such dread as one may know yet live to tell, he tried vainly to speak the dead woman's name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to learn she were there. His throat was powerless. His arms and hands were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against his breast so sharply as merely to overthrow him. And it the same instant, he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A scuffling ensued and a confusion of sounds impossible to escape. Murloch had risen to his feet here, had by excess forfeited control of his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there. There is a point at which terror may turn to madness, and madness in fight to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the wayward impulse of a madman, Murloc sprang to the wall with a little groping, seized his loaded rifle, and, without aim, discarded by the flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination. He saw an enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth fixed in her throat. Then there were darkness, blacker than before, and silence. And. And when he returned to consciousness, the sun was high and the wood vocal with songs of birds. The body lay near the window where the beast had left it when frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The clothing was deranged, the long hair in disorder. The limbs lay anyhow. From the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrist was broken. The hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal's ear. I've had the pleasure of reading for you the boarded window by Ambrose Death. I now have the pleasure of playing with you all. From ghoulies and ghosties and long legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. Dear Lord, deliver us. At least until this same time next week. Dreadful John at Midnight is produced and directed by Clive Thomas Cuthbertson. This is King's Crown Radio.