Horacio Quiroga: La cámara oscura

Horacio Quiroga, Casa Museo del autor

Una noche de lluvia nos llegó al bar de las ruinas la noticia de que nuestro juez de paz, de viaje en Buenos Aires, había sido víctima del cuento del tío y regresaba muy enfermo.

Ambas noticias nos sorprendieron, porque jamás pisó Misiones mozo más desconfiado que nuestro juez, y nunca habíamos tomado en serio su enfermedad: asma, y para su frecuente dolor de muelas, cognac en buches, que no devolvía. ¿Cuentos del tío a él.? Había que verlo.

Ya conté en la historia del medio litro de alcohol carburado que bebieron don Juan Brown y su socio Rivet, el incidente de naipes en que actuó el juez de paz.

Llamábase este funcionario Malaquías Sotelo. Era un indio de baja estatura y cuello muy corto, que parecía sentir resistencia en la nuca para enderezar la cabeza. Tenía fuerte mandíbula y la frente tan baja que el pelo corto y rígido como alambre le arrancaba en línea azul a dos dedos de las cejas espesas. Bajo ésta, dos ojillos hundidos que miraban con eterna desconfianza, sobre todo cuando el asma los anegaba de angustia. Sus ojos se volvían entonces a uno y otro lado con jadeante recelo de animal acorralado, y uno evitaba con gusto mirarlo en tales casos.

Fuera de esta manifestación de su alma indígena, era un muchacho incapaz de malgastar un centavo en lo que fuere, y lleno de voluntad.

Había sido desde muchacho soldado de policía en la campaña de Corrientes. La ola de desasosiego que como un viento norte sopla sobre el destino de los individuos en los países extremos, lo empujó a abandonar de golpe su oficio por el de portero del juzgado letrado de Posadas. Allí, sentado en el zaguán, aprendió solo a leer en La Nación y La Prensa. No faltó quien adivinara las aspiraciones de aquel indiecito silencioso, y dos lustros más tarde lo hallamos al frente del juzgado de paz de Iviraromí.

Tenía una cierta cultura adquirida a hurtadillas, bastante superior a la que demostraba, y en los últimos tiempos había comprado la Historia Universal de César Cantú. Pero esto lo supimos después, en razón del sigilo con que ocultaba de las burlas ineludibles sus aspiraciones a doctor.

A caballo (jamás se lo vio caminar dos cuadras), era el tipo mejor vestido del lugar. Pero en su rancho andaba siempre descalzo, y al atardecer leía a la vera del camino real en un sillón de hamaca calzado sin medias con mocasines de cuero que él mismo se fabricaba. Tenía algunas herramientas de talabartería, y soñaba con adquirir una máquina de coser calzado.

Clive Barker: The life of deth

THE NEWSPAPER WAS the first edition of the day, and Elaine devoured it from cover to cover as she sat in the hospital waiting room. An animal thought to be a panther - which had terrorised the neighbourhood of Epping Forest for two months - had been shot and found to be a wild dog. Archaeologists in the Sudan had discovered bone fragments which they opined might lead to a complete reappraisal of Man's origins. A young woman who had once danced with minor royalty had been found murdered near Clapham; a solo round-the-world yachtsman was missing; recently excited hopes of a cure for the common cold had been dashed. She read the global bulletins and the trivia with equal fervour - anything to keep her mind off the examination ahead - but today's news seemed very like yesterday's; only the names had been changed.

Doctor Sennett informed her that she was healing well, both inside and out, and was quite fit to return to her full responsibilities whenever she felt psychologically resilient enough. She should make another appointment for the first week of the new year, he told her, and come back for a final examination then. She left him washing his hands of her.

The thought of getting straight onto the bus and heading back to her rooms was repugnant after so much time sitting and waiting. She would walk a stop or two along the route, she decided. The exercise would be good for her, and the December day, though far from warm, was bright.

Her plans proved over-ambitious however. After only a few minutes of walking her lower abdomen began to ache, and she started to feel nauseous, so she turned off the main road to seek out a place where she could rest and drink some tea. She should eat too, she knew, though she had never had much appetite, and had less still since the operation. Her wanderings were rewarded. She found a small restaurant which, though it was twelve fifty-five, was not enjoying a roaring lunch-time trade. A small woman with unashamedly artificial red hair served her tea and a mushroom omelette. She did her best to eat, but didn't get very far. The waitress was plainly concerned.

Leopoldo María Panero: Godeo Clutex

Desde muy niño, soñaba con destruir a Dios; cuando los años ya me hubieron deteriorado, rezaba por las noches para que Dios no existiera, y me masturbaba pensando en la muerte de Dios: al eyacular gritaba «¡Godeo Clutex!» que es palabra má­gica que significaba, en aquella lengua informal a la que Fulcanelli llamara la «lengua de los pájaros», «Cierra a Dios».

Claro está que no me refería al Dios trascendente de los cris­tianos, cuya destrucción o muerte no significaría sino tan sólo un vacío o una pérdida absurda; no, yo me refería al Dios inma­nente de Spinoza y de los cabalistas, y en lo que soñaba, pues, era en la destrucción de todo, incluido, claro está, yo mismo: me odiaba tanto o más que a Dios. Y de aquí derivó un pensamien­to que fue la clave de todo: se me ocurrió que, puesto que Dios es todo pero es, además de un sistema, una unidad necesaria, la destrucción de una de sus partes implicaría indefectiblemente la destrucción del todo. Pero no sería, claro, la destrucción mera­mente física de aquella parte escogida la que atentaría contra el todo, sino su destrucción metafísica: la metódica corrupción de su esencia, de aquello que ni siquiera el tiempo corrompe...

Así pues, ya que yo formaba parte del todo, si yo me destruía metafísicamente, podía acabar con la coherencia del todo, y aquel, perdida. Su consistencia, se desvanecería en el vacío. Debía, además, modificar o pervertir los signos que me relacionaban con eso todo, además de borrar toda mi naturaleza simbólica.

Así pues, una mañana de sol esplendente, cuando la vida era más fértil y mi odio a ella más fuerte, me decidí a comenzar la empresa. Empecé por cambiar la orientación de mi espejo en re­lación al sol. Luego, tras de practicarme una pequeña herida en la mano, puse una ínfima y casi invisible mancha en el ángulo izquierdo de dicho espejo. Al hacerlo tuve en cuenta que las es­trellas fijas, que están más cerca del Malkhuth o de la corona de Dios, se mueven hacia la derecha, y por eso ubiqué la mancha de sangre en el lado opuesto, a la izquierda. Se había iniciado la corrosión del Infinito, una mañana de sol esplendente: yo había empezado a reparar el inmenso pecado de la creación.

Evelyn Waugh: The Man Who Liked Dickens

Evelyn Waugh by Henry Lamb

Although Mr. McMaster had lived in Amazonas for nearly sixty years, no one except a few families of Shiriana Indians was aware of his existence. His house stood in a small savannah, one of those little patches of sand and grass that crop up occasionally in that neighbourhood, three miles or so across, bounded on all sides by forest.

The stream which watered it was not marked on any map; it ran through rapids, always dangerous and at most seasons of the year impassable, to join the upper waters of the River Uraricoera, whose course, though boldly delineated in every school atlas, is still largely conjectural. None of the inhabitants of the district, except Mr. McMaster, had ever heard of the republic of Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil or Bolivia, each of whom had at one time or another claimed its possession.

Mr. McMaster’s house was larger than those of his neighbours, but similar in character—a palm thatch roof, breast high walls of mud and wattle, and a mud floor. He owned the dozen or so head of puny cattle which grazed in the savannah, a plantation of cassava, some banana and mango trees, a dog, and, unique in the neighbourhood, a single-barrelled, breech-loading shotgun. The few commodities which he employed from the outside world came to him through a long succession of traders, passed from hand to hand, bartered for in a dozen languages at the extreme end of one of the longest threads in the web of commerce that spreads from Manáos into the remote fastness of the forest.

One day while Mr. McMaster was engaged in filling some cartridges, a Shiriana came to him with the news that a white man was approaching through the forest, alone and very sick. He closed the cartridge and loaded his gun with it, put those that were finished into his pocket and set out in the direction indicated.

Ignacio Aldecoa: La muerte de un curandero meteorólogo

La tierra se resquebrajaba en los bajos de las vaguadas por donde antes corrían los arroyos. Se habían hecho romerías a las ermitas pidiendo agua. Los pájaros se caían de calor; las culebras se achicharraban por las piedras calientes, y en el río, casi muertos, los peces naufragaban flotando. Una nube tenía esperas de novia, y el vientecillo del norte, bendiciones de fortuna.

El curandero, metido en oficios de meteorólogo, había regado su campo y el de sus vecinos con agua del cirio pascual, que mata el sapo y hace crecer el pan. El curandero había prometido cambios frotándose las manos con tierra. También le había encendido a San Patricio dos velas de buena cera, para que la lluvia llegase. Tenía algo de brujo, sabía la virtud de las hierbas y llevaba un secreto piscator en la cabeza. Su nariz le daba los cambios, y en el frotarse las yemas de los dedos con la corteza de los árboles notaba cómo iba a asomar la oreja el tiempo. Esta vez se equivocaba.

La gente bebía el agua de los pozos, que daban lugar en su derredor a la única vegetación verde posible, y que parecía que servían de guarida a todos los culebrones del campo. Daba miedo asomarse ellos, de profundos y misteriosos. Los niños les tenían un santo horror, porque podían ser las mismas bocas de los infiernos por donde los diablos salen a hacer el mal y los hombres entran al caliente lodo eterno. Cuando los franceses, sirvieron, según contaban, de fosas comunes, sin posible averiguación de lo que albergaban. En un cubo una vez salió una herrumbrosa hebilla de cinturón militar.

Los pozos desencadenaron una epidemia de tifus, que las visitas y la terapéutica del médico del pueblo vecino no lograron cortar. Epidemia que el curandero no acertaba a resolver tampoco con untos, elixires y dietas. El curandero se desprestigiaba a ojos vistas delante de sus paisanos.

De los Monegros siempre han llegado los cuervos al Condado. Vienen en grandes bandadas, hambrientos y crascitantes. Desconciertan el campo y aran los sembrados. Los cuervos aragoneses son tardos de vuelo y les cuesta marcharse de donde se afincan. El curandero los solía cazar, porque del corazón, con ajos, se hacía una buena mixtura para el reúma y para las caídas. Las bandadas acababan con las cosechas del año, ya casi perdidas, y hacían que corriera el único viento posible en aquel horno: el viento de las alas de la miseria. Algunos mozos se fueron a las poblaciones de la costa cantábrica, buscando trabajo y alivio a los miedos de la mala suerte. Y así se iban quemando los días y los campos de Treviño, la tierra santona y trabajadora, que se cerca de montes para librarse de la mala influencia del mundo que la abraza y la exprime como una uva diminuta, sangrante y viva.

Dennis Etchison: It Only Comes Out at Night

If you leave L.A. by way of San Bernardino, headed for Route 66 and points east, you must cross the Mojave Desert.

Even after Needles and the border, however, there is no relief; the dry air only thins further as the long, relentless climb continues in earnest. Flagstaff is still almost two hundred miles, and Winslow, Gallup and Albuquerque are too many hours away to think of making without food, rest and, mercifully, sleep.

It is like this: the car runs hot, hotter than it ever has before, the plies of the tires expand and contract until the sidewalls begin to shimmy slightly as they spin on over the miserable Arizona roads, giving up a faint odor like burning hair from between the treads, as the windshield colors over with essence of honeybee, wasp, dragonfly, mayfly, June bug, ladybug and the like, and the radiator, clotted with the bodies of countless kamikaze insects, hisses like a moribund lizard in the sun...

All of which means, of course, that if you are traveling that way between May and September, you move by night.

Only by night.

For there are, after all, dawn check-in motels, Do Not Disturb signs for bungalow doorknobs; there are diners for mid-afternoon breakfasts, coffee by the carton; there are 24-hour filling stations bright as dreams—Whiting Brothers, Conoco, Terrible Herbst—their flags as unfamiliar as their names, with ice machines, soda machines, candy machines; and there are the sudden, unexpected Rest Areas, just off the highway, with brick bathrooms and showers and electrical outlets, constructed especially for those who are weary, out of money, behind schedule...

So McClay had had to learn, the hard way.

He slid his hands to the bottom of the steering wheel and peered ahead into the darkness, trying to relax. But the wheel stuck to his fingers like warm candy. Off somewhere to his left, the horizon flickered with pearly luminescence, then faded again to black. This time he did not bother to look. Sometimes, though, he wondered just how far away the lightning was striking; not once during the night had the sound of its thunder reached him here in the car.

Hernan Casciari: Finlandia

El 14 de noviembre de 1995 maté sin querer a la hija mayor de mi hermana, haciendo marchatrás con el auto. Entre el impacto seco, los gritos de pánico de mi familia y el descubrimiento de que en realidad había chocado contra un tronco, ocurrieron los diez segundos más intensos de mi vida. Diez segundos durante los que me aferré al tiempo y supe que todo futuro posible sería un infierno interminable.

Yo vivía en Buenos Aires y había viajado a Mercedes para festejar el cumpleaños número ochenta de mi abuela paterna (por eso recuerdo la fecha exacta: porque en unos días mi abuela cumplirá noventa, porque en unos días se cumplirán diez años de esto que ahora narro y que me marcó como ninguna otra cosa, ni buena ni mala, en la vida).

Festejábamos el aniversario de mi abuela con un asado en la quinta; ya estábamos en la sobremesa familiar. A las tres de la tarde le pido prestado el auto a Roberto para ir hasta el diario a entregar un reportaje. Me subo al coche, vigilo por el espejo retrovisor que no haya chicos rondando y hago marchatrás para encarar la tranquera y salir a la calle. Entonces siento el golpe, seco contra la parte de atrás del auto, y se detiene el mundo para siempre.

A cuarenta metros, en la mesa donde todos conversan, mi hermana se levanta aterrada y grita el nombre de su hija. Mi madre, o mi abuela, alguien, también grita:

—¡La agarró!

Entonces me doy cuenta de que mi vida, tal y como estaba transcurriendo, había llegado al final. Mi vida ya no era. Lo supe inmediatamente. Supe que mi sobrina, de tres años, estaba detrás del auto; supe que, a causa de su altura, yo no habría podido verla por el espejo antes de hacer marchatrás; supe, por fin, que efectivamente acababa de matarla.

Diez segundos es lo que tardan todos en correr desde la mesa hasta el auto. Los veo levantarse, con el gesto desencajado, veo un vaso de vino interminable cayendo al suelo. Los veo a ellos, de frente, venir hasta mí. Yo no hago nada; ni me bajo del coche, ni miro a nadie: no tengo ojos que dedicarle al mundo real, porque ya ha empezado mi viaje fatal en el tiempo, mi larguísimo viaje que en la superficie duraría diez segundos pero que, dentro mío, se convertirá en una eternidad pegajosa.

Clark Ashton Smith: The Seed from the Sepulchre

"Yes, I found the place," said Falmer. "It's a queer sort of place, pretty much as the legends describe it." He spat quickly into the fire, as if the act of speech had been physically distasteful to him, and, half averting his face from the scrutiny of Thone, stared with morose and somber eyes into the jungle-matted Venezuelan darkness.

Thone, still weak and dizzy from the fever that had incapacitated him for continuing their journey to its end, was curiously puzzled. Falmer, he thought, had under-gone an inexplicable change during the three days of his absence; a change that was too elusive in some of its phases to be fully defined or delimited.

Other phases, however, were all too obvious. Falmer, even during extreme hardship or illness, had heretofore been unquenchably loquacious and cheerful. Now he seemed sullen, uncommunicative, as if preoccupied with far-off things of disagreeable import. His bluff face had grown hollow – even pointed – and his eyes had narrowed to secretive slits. Thone was troubled by these changes, though he tried to dismiss his impressions as mere distempered fancies due to the influence of the ebbing fever.

"But can't you tell me what the place was like?", he persisted.

"There isn't much to tell," said Falmer, in a queer grumbling tone. "Just a few crumbling walls and falling pillars."

"But didn't you find the burial-pit of the Indian legend, where the gold was supposed to be?"

"I found it – but there was no treasure." Falmer's voice had taken on a forbidding surliness; and Thone decided to refrain from further questioning.

"I guess," he commented lightly, "that we had better stick to orchid hunting. Treasure trove doesn't seem to be in our line. By the way, did you see any unusual flowers or plants during the trip?"

"Hell, no," Falmer snapped. His face had gone suddenly ashen in the firelight, and his eyes had assumed a set glare that might have meant either fear or anger. "Shut up, can't you? I don't want to talk. I've had a headache all day; some damned Venezuelan fever coming on, I suppose. We'd better head for the Orinoco tomorrow. I've had all I want of this trip."'

María Teresa Andruetto: Huellas en la arena

En los confines del desierto un hombre y una mujer se encuentran para hacer un viaje. El hombre se llama Ramadán, la mujer Suraqadima, y el viaje que emprenden más parece una huida.

Antes que el viento lo disuelva, se puede ver el dibujo de los pies sobre la arena: las huellas cruzan el desierto hasta el oasis donde abrevan los hombres y las bestias.

Junto al frescor del agua se sientan. Ella afloja el lazo que le ciñe la cintura, desata las sandalias, bebe. Él moja sus sienes, la barba, el pecho, y luego la nuca de ella, el pelo.

Han dejado atrás su casa, los hijos, el marido de ella, la mujer de él, y pasan la tarde haciendo planes. En un día de marcha llegarán al otro lado de las dunas, a una ciudad donde Ramadán tiene amigos y dinero.

Atrás quedarán las sombras.

Suraqadima levanta la cabeza y ve una calavera y una inscripción que narra un crimen. Imagina que quien ha muerto aquella vez ha de haber sido una mujer y piensa también que acaso esa mujer haya abandonado al marido y a los hijos para encontrarse con un hombre que tiene amigos y dinero en una ciudad que está al otro lado de las dunas. Y que si no hubiera soplado el viento se podrían ver todavía sobre la arena sus huellas, el viaje a través del desierto, los pies del hombre tras los de ella hasta la mancha verde, hasta la vera del agua, donde él, piensa ella, la ha de haber matado.

Ramadán le pregunta en qué está pensando. Ella señala la calavera y cuenta:

Alice Askew - Claude Askew: Aylmer Vance and the Vampire

Aylmer Vance had rooms in Dover Street, Piccadilly, and now that I had decided to follow in his footsteps and to accept him as my instructor in matters psychic, I found it convenient to lodge in the same house. Aylmer and I quickly became close friends, and he showed me how to develop that faculty of clairvoyance which I had possessed without being aware of it. And I may say at once that this particular faculty of mine proved of service on several important occasions.

At the same time I made myself useful to Vance in other ways, not the least of which was that of acting as recorder of his many strange adventures. For himself, he never cared much about publicity, and it was some time before I could persuade him, in the interests of science, to allow me to give any detailed account of his experiences to the world.

The incidents which I will now narrate occurred very soon after we had taken up our residence together, and while I was still, so to speak, a novice.

It was about ten o'clock in the morning that a visitor was announced. He sent up a card which bore upon it the name of Paul Davenant.

The name was familiar to me, and I wondered if this could be the same Mr Davenant who was so well known for his polo playing and for his success as an amateur rider, especially over the hurdles? He was a young man of wealth and position, and I recollected that he had married, about a year ago, a girl who was reckoned the greatest beauty of the season. All the illustrated papers had given their portraits at the time, and I remember thinking what a remarkably handsome couple they made.

Mr Davenant was ushered in, and at first I was uncertain as to whether this could be the individual whom I had in mind, so wan and pale and ill did he appear. A finely-built, upstanding man at the time of his marriage, he had now acquired a languid droop of the shoulders and a shuffling gait, while his face, especially about the lips, was bloodless to an alarming degree.

And yet it was the same man, for behind all this I could recognize the shadow of the good looks that had once distinguished Paul Davenant.

Horacio Quiroga: Los bebedores de sangre

Chiquitos:

¿Han puesto ustedes el oído contra el lomo de un gato cuando runrunea? Háganlo con Tutankamón, el gato del almacenero. Y después de haberlo hecho, tendrán una idea clara del ronquido de un tigre cuando anda al trote por el monte en son de caza.

Este ronquido que no tiene nada de agradable cuando uno está solo en el bosque, me perseguía desde hacía una semana. Comenzaba al caer la noche, y hasta la madrugada el monte entero vibraba de rugidos.

¿De dónde podía haber salido tanto tigre? La selva parecía haber perdido todos sus bichos, como si todos hubieran ido a ahogarse en el río. No había más que tigres: no se oía otra cosa que el ronquido profundo e incansable del tigre hambriento, cuando trota con el hocico a ras de tierra para percibir el tufo de los animales.

Así estábamos hacía una semana, cuando de pronto los tigres desaparecieron. No se oyó un solo bramido más. En cambio, en el monte volvieron a resonar el balido del ciervo, el chillido del agutí, el silbido del tapir, todos los ruidos y aullidos de la selva. ¿Qué había pasado otra vez? Los tigres no desaparecen porque sí, no hay fiera capaz de hacerlos huir.

¡Ah, chiquitos! Esto creía yo. Pero cuando después de un día de marcha llegaba yo a las márgenes del río Iguazú (veinte leguas arriba de las cataratas), me encontré con dos cazadores que me sacaron de mi ignorancia. De cómo y por qué había habido en esos días tanto tigre, no me supieron decir una palabra. Pero en cambio me aseguraron que la causa de su brusca fuga se debía a la aparición de un puma. El tigre, a quien se cree rey incontestable de la selva, tiene terror pánico a un gato cobardón como el puma.

¿Han visto, chiquitos míos, cosa más rara? Cuando le llamo gato al puma, me refiero a su cara de gato, nada más. Pero es un gatazo de un metro de largo, sin contar la cola, y tan fuerte como el tigre mismo.

Pues bien. Esa misma mañana, los dos cazadores habían hallado cuatro cabras, de las doce que tenían, muertas a la entrada del monte. No estaban despedazadas en lo más mínimo. Pero a ninguna de ellas les quedaba una gota de sangre en las venas. En el cuello, por debajo de los pelos manchados, tenían todas cuatro agujeros, y no muy grandes tampoco. Por allí, con los colmillos prendidos a las venas, el puma había vaciado a sus víctimas, sorbiéndoles toda la sangre.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The tomb

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreation of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analyzing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discolored by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call 'divine wrath' in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I had felt for the forest-darkened sepulcher. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land, to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.

José Emilio Pacheco: Memorias de Juan Charrasqueado

-Yo no lo maté: él solito se le atravesó a la bala.

Algernon Blackwood: An Egyptian Hornet

The word has an angry, malignant sound that brings the idea of attack vividly into the mind. There is a vicious sting about it somewhere -- even a foreigner, ignorant of the meaning, must feel it. A hornet is wicked; it darts and stabs; it pierces, aiming without provocation for the face and eyes. The name suggests a metallic droning of evil wings, fierce flight, and poisonous assault. Though black and yellow, it sounds scarlet. There is blood in it. A striped tiger of the air in concentrated form! There is no escape -- if it attacks.

In Egypt an ordinary bee is the size of an English hornet, but the Egyptian hornet is enormous. It is truly monstrous -- an ominous, dying terror. It shares that universal quality of the land of the Sphinx and Pyramids -- great size. It is a formidable insect, worse than scorpion or tarantula. The Rev. James Milligan, meeting one for the first time, realized the meaning of another word as well, a word he used prolifically in his eloquent sermons -- devil.

One morning in April, when the heat began to bring the insects out, he rose as usual betimes and went across the wide stone corridor to his bath. The desert already glared in through the open windows. The heat would be afflicting later in the day, but at this early hour the cool north wind blew pleasantly down the hotel passages. It was Sunday, and at half-past eight o'clock he would appear to conduct the morning service for the English visitors. The floor of the passage-way was cold beneath his feet in their thin native slippers of bright yellow. He was neither young nor old; his salary was comfortable; he had a competency of his own, without wife or children to absorb it; the dry climate had been recommended to him; and -- the big hotel took him in for next to nothing. And he was thoroughly pleased with himself, for he was a sleek, vain, pompous, well-advertised personality, but mean as a rat. No worries of any kind were on his mind as, carrying sponge and towel, scented soap and a bottle of Scrubb's ammonia, he travelled amiably across the deserted, shining corridor to the bathroom. And nothing went wrong with the Rev. James Milligan until he opened the door, and his eye fell upon a dark, suspicious-looking object clinging to the window-pane in front of him.

And even then, at first, he felt no anxiety or alarm, but merely a natural curiosity to know exactly what it was -- this little clot of an odd-shaped, elongated thing that stuck there on the wooden framework six feet before his aquiline nose. He went straight up to it to see -- then stopped dead. His heart gave a distinct, unclerical leap. His lips formed themselves into unregenerate shape. He gasped: "Good God! What is it?" For something unholy, something wicked as a secret sin, stuck there before his eyes in the patch of blazing sunshine. He caught his breath.