Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
strange sounds which, alternately rising and falling, still floated
around him. The fitful light of his lantern suddenly fell upon a
shape that seemed to creep through one of the stone galleries. In the
unsteady gleam it appeared from the distance like a gnome wandering
through the bowels of the earth, or a forsaken spirit from purgatory.
Had it been but a trick of his imagination, or had his mortal eyes
seen a denizen of the beyond? At last he aroused himself, trimmed with
careful hand his guiding wick and set forth to penetrate the great rift.
He moved on in an oblique direction for several feet, now creeping
over the tops of the foundation arches, now skirting the extremities
of the protrusions in the ruined brickwork, now descending into dark,
slimy, rubbish-choked chasms, until the rift suddenly diminished in all
directions.
For a moment Tristan paused and considered. He was almost tempted to
retrace his steps, abandoning the purpose upon which he had come.
Before him stretched interminable gloom, brooding, he knew not over
what caverns and caves, inhabited by denizens of night.
He moved onward, with less caution than he had formerly employed,
when suddenly and without warning a considerable portion of brickwork
fell with lightning suddenness from above. It missed him, else he
should never had known what happened. But some stray bricks hurled him
prostrate on the foundation arch, dislocating his right shoulder, and
shattering his lantern into atoms. A groan of anguish rose to his lips.
He was left in impenetrable darkness.
For a short time Tristan lay as one stunned in his dark solitude.
Then, trying to raise himself, he began to experience in all their
severity the fierce spasms, the dull gnawings that were the miserable
consequences of the injury he had sustained. His arm lay numbed by his
side, and for the space of some moments he had neither the strength nor
the will to even move the sound limbs of his body.
But gradually the anguish of his body awakened a wilder and strange
distemper in his mind, and then the two agonies, physical and mental,
rioted over him in fierce rivalry, divesting him of all thoughts, save
such as were aroused by their own agency. At length, however, the pangs
seemed to grow less frequent. He hardly knew now from what part of his
body they proceeded. Insensibly his faculties of thinking and feeling
grew blank; he remained for a time in a mysterious, unrefreshing repose
of body and mind, and at last his disordered senses, left unguided and
unrestrained, became the victims of a sudden and terrible illusion.
The black darkness about him appeared, after an interval, to be dawning
into a dull, misty light, like the reflection on clouds which threaten
a thunderstorm at the close of day. Soon this atmosphere seemed to be
crossed and streaked with a fantastic trellis work of white, seething
vapor. Then the mass of brickwork which had fallen in, grew visible,
enlarged to an enormous bulk and endowed with the power of locomotion,
by which it mysteriously swelled and shrank, raised and depressed
itself, without quitting for a moment its position near him. And then,
from its dark and toiling surface, there rose a long array of dusky
shapes, which twined themselves about the misty trellis work above and
took the palpable forms of human countenances.
There were infantile faces wreathed with grave worms that hung round
them like locks of slimy hair; aged faces dabbled with gore and slashed
with wounds; youthful faces, seamed with livid channels along which
ran unceasing tears; lovely faces distorted into the fixed coma of
despairing gloom. Not one of these countenances exactly resembled the
other. Each was stigmatized by a revolting character of its own. Yet,
however deformed their other features, the eyes of all were preserved
unimpaired. Speechless and bodiless they floated in unceasing myriads
up to the fantastic trellis work, which seemed to swell its wild
proportions to receive them. There they clustered in their goblin
amphitheatre, and fixedly and silently they glared down, without
exception, on the intruder's face.
Meanwhile the walls at the side began to gleam out with a light of
their own, making jaded boundaries to the midway scenes of phantom
faces. Then the rifts in their surface widened, and disgorged
misshapen figures of priests and idols of the olden time, which came
forth in every hideous deformity of aspect, mocking at the faces of
the trellis work, while behind and over the whole soared shapes of
gigantic darkness. From this ghastly assemblage there came not the
slightest sound. The stillness of a dead and ruined world was about
him, possessed of appalling mysteries, veiled in quivering vapors and
glooming shadows.
Days, years, centuries seemed to pass, as Tristan lay gazing up in a
trance of horror into this realm of peopled and ghostly darkness.
At last he staggered to his feet. He must find an egress or go mad.
Slowly raising himself upon his uninjured arm, he looked vainly about
for the faintest glimmer of light. Not a single object was discernible
about him. Darkness hemmed him in, in rayless and triumphant obscurity.
The first agony of the pain having resolved itself into a dull
changeless sensation, the vision that had possessed his senses was now,
in a vast and shadowy form, present only to his memory, filling the
darkness with fearful recollections and urging him on, in a restless,
headlong yearning, to effect his escape from this lonely and unhallowed
sepulchre.
"I must pass into light. I must breathe the air of the sky, or I shall
perish in this vault," he muttered in a hoarse voice, which the fitful
echoes mocked by throwing his words as it were, to each other, even to
the faintest whisper of its last recipient.
Gradually and painfully he commenced his meditated retreat.
Tristan's brain still whirled with the emotion that had so entirely
overwhelmed his mind, as, staggering through the interminable gloom, he
set forth on his toilsome, perilous journey.
Suddenly however he paused, bewildered, in the darkness. He had no
doubt mistaken the direction, and a gleam of light, streaming through
the fissure of the rock, informed him that there were others in this
abode of darkness, beside himself.
Had he come upon the object of his quest?
For a moment Tristan's heart stood still, then, with all the caution
which the darkness, the danger of secret pitfalls and the risk of
discovery suggested, he crept toward the crevice until the glow
gradually increased. From the bowels of the earth, as it were, voices
were now audible; they seemed to issue from the depths of a cavern
directly below where Tristan stood. Groping his way carefully along
the wall of rock, he at last reached the spot whence the light issued
and presently started at finding himself before an aperture just wide
enough to admit the body of a single man. A sort of perpendicular
ladder was formed in the wall of narrow juttings of stone, and below
these was the rock chamber from which the voices proceeded.
It was some time ere the confusion of his ideas and the darkness
allowed Tristan to form any notion of the character of the locality,
when it suddenly dawned upon him that he had strayed into a place
regarding which he had heard and wondered much: the Catacombs of St.
Calixtus.
This revelation was by no means reassuring, although the presence of
others held out hope that he would discover an exit from this shadowy
labyrinth.
For a moment Tristan remained as one transfixed, as he gazed from his
lofty pinnacle into the shadowy vault below.
He saw a stone table, lighted with a single taper, in the centre of
which lay an unsheathed dagger, and an object the exact character of
which he could not determine in the half gloom, also a brazen bowl.
About a dozen men in cloaks with black vizors stood around, and one,
taller than the rest, the gleam of whose eyes shone through the slits
of his mask, appeared to be concluding an address to his companions.
The words were indistinguishable to Tristan but, when the speaker had
concluded, a dark murmur arose which subsided anon. Then those present
crowded around the stone table. The taper was momentarily obscured by
the intervening throng, and Tristan could not see the ceremony, though
he could hear the muttered formula of an oath they seemed to be taking.
What he did see caused the chill of death to run through his veins.
The group again receding, the man bared his left arm, raised the dagger
on high and let it descend. Tristan saw the blood weltering slowly
from the self-inflicted wound, trickling drop by drop into the brazen
bowl, which another muffled figure was holding. Then each one present
repeated the ceremony, he who was presenting the bowl being the last to
mingle his blood with that of the rest.
Then another stepped forth and, raising the bloody knife on high,
stabbed the object that lay upon the table. Some mysterious signs
passed between them, meaningless words that struck Tristan's ear with
the vague memory of a dimly remembered dream. Then he who seemed to
be the speaker raised the object on high and, walking to a niche,
concealed in the shadows, placed it in, what seemed to Tristan, a
fissure in the rock.
Like ghosts returning to the bowels of the earth, they glided away,
silently, soundlessly, and soon the silence of death hovered once again
in the rock caverns of the Catacombs of St. Calixtus.
In breathless suspense, utterly oblivious of the injury he had
sustained, Tristan gazed into the deserted rock chamber where the dim
light of the taper still flickered in a faint breath of air wafted from
without.
Hardly did the hearts of the Magi when the vision of the Star in the
East first dawned upon their eyes experience a transport more vivid
than that which animated Tristan when he found his terrible stress
relieved.
But almost immediately a reaction set in and a dire misgiving
extinguished the quick ray of hope that had lighted his heart, luring
him on to escape from these caverns of Death.
By a strange mischance they had neglected to extinguish the taper.
They might return at any moment and, his presence discovered, the doom
in store for the intruder on their secret rites was not a matter of
surmise. Composing himself to patience, Tristan waited, glaring as a
caged tiger at the gates whose opening or closing might spell freedom
or doom. At last, after a considerable lapse of time, moments that
seemed eternity, he resolved to hazard the descent.
Slowly and painfully moving, with the pace and perseverance of a
turtle, he writhed downward upon his unguided course until he reached
the bottom of the cavern. Breathless with exhaustion after his
breakneck descent, he waited in the shadow of a projecting rock. When
the deep sepulchral silence remained undisturbed, he advanced toward
the fissure in the rock where one of the muffled company had placed the
mysterious object.
Tristan's quest was not at once rewarded. The shelving in the rock
cavern, being irregular and almost indistinguishable, offered no clue
to the mystery. A great fear was upon him, but he was determined, to
discover the meaning of it all.
Suddenly he paused. A small cabinet of sandal wood, concealed behind
the jutting stone, had caught his eye. It was painted to resemble the
rock and the untrained eye would not linger upon it. A small keyhole
was revealed, but the key had been taken away.
Tristan stood irresolute, with straining eyes and listening ear. Not
a sound was audible. Even the piping of the night wind in the rock
fissures seemed to have died to silence. With quick resolution he
inserted one of the sharp-edged flints and gave a wrench.
When the top receded he could not repress an outcry. A chill coursed