The Night Of The Terror
:
The Doomsman
The reader, desiring to inform himself in extenso regarding the
physical and social changes that followed the catastrophe by which the
ancient civilization was so suddenly subverted, would do well to consult
the final authority upon the subject, the learned Vigilas, author of
The Later Cosmos (elephant folio edition). But for our present purpose
a brief epitome should suffice. To borrow then, with all due
acknowledgmen
s, from our admirable historian:
* * * * *
"It was in the later years of the twentieth century that the Great
Change came; at least, so the traditions agree, and how is a man to know
certainly of such things except as he learns them from his father's
lips? True, the accounts differ, and widely so at times, but that much
is to be expected--where were there ever two men who heard or saw the
same things in the same way? It is human nature that we should color
even transparent fact with the reflected glow of our passions and
fancies, and so the distortion becomes inevitable; we should be
satisfied if, to-day, we succeed in making out even the broad outlines
of the picture.
"It appears tolerably certain that the wreck of the ancient civilization
took place about three generations ago, the catastrophe being both
sudden and overwhelming; moreover, all the authorities agree that only
an infinitesimal portion of the race escaped, with whole skins, from
what were, in very sooth, cities of destruction. These fortunate ones
were naturally the politically powerful and the immensely rich, and they
owed their safety to the fact that they were able to seize upon the
shipping in the harbors for their exclusive use. The fugitives sailed
away, presumably to the southward, and so disappeared from the pages of
authentic history. We know nothing for certain; only that they departed,
and that we saw their faces no more.
"Let us reconstruct, as best we may, the panorama of those few but awful
days. The first rush was naturally to the country, but the crowds,
choking the ferry and railway stations, were quickly confronted with the
terror-stricken thousands of the suburbs, who were flocking to the city
for refuge. And all through the dragging hours the same despairing
reports flowed in from the remoter rural districts; everywhere the
Terror walked, and men were dying like flies. From ocean to ocean, from
the lakes to the gulf, the shadow rushed, and now the whole land lay in
darkness.
"Such was the situation in what was then the United States of America,
and similar conditions prevailed throughout the habitable world. London
and Hong-Kong, Vienna and Pekin, Buenos Ayres and Archangel--from every
direction came the same inquiry, to every questioner was returned the
same answer. It was the end of all things.
"Coincidently with this great recession of the human tide, occurred the
eclipse of industry, science, and, indeed, every form of thought and
progress. The plough rusted in the furrow, the half-formed web dropped
to pieces in the loom, the very crops stood unharvested in the fields,
to be finally devoured by the birds and by a horde of rats and mice. Up
to the last moment there had been confusion and dismay certainly, but
the wheels of trade and of the civil administration had continued to
turn; men had stood at their posts in answer to the call of duty or
impressed by the blind instinct of habit. And then, suddenly, the sun
went down, only to rise again upon a silent land.
"The relapse into barbarism was swift. The few who had escaped were
segregated from one another in small family groups, each man content
with the bare necessities of animal existence and fearing the face of
the stranger. Under such circumstances, there could be but little
neighborly intercourse, and the ancient highways speedily became
overgrown with grass and weeds, or else they were undermined and washed
out by the winter storms. It was not until the second generation after
the Terror that men once more began to draw together, in obedience to
inherited instincts, and even then the new movement must have been
largely brought about through the increasing aggressions of the
Doomsmen. But of this in another place.
"It has been asserted that fire played a principal part in the
destruction of the ancient cities, and it was at one time supposed that
these extensive conflagrations were partly accidental and partly
attributable to the wide-spread lawlessness that marked the closing
hours of the greatest drama in all history. But later researches have
evolved a new theory, and it now seems probable that the torch was
employed by the authorities themselves as a final and truly a desperate
measure. An heroic cautery, but, alas, a useless one.
"The comparative exemption of New York from the universal fate goes to
support rather than to discredit this hypothesis. It escaped the
dynamite cartridge and the torch simply because in that city no
recognized authority remained in power; there was no one to carry out
the imperative orders of the federal government. There were, of course,
many isolated cases of incendiarism, but the city did not suffer from
any general and organized conflagration, as was the fate of Philadelphia
and St. Louis and New Orleans. The destiny of the metropolis was decided
in a different way; already it had passed into the keeping of the
Doomsmen.
"In effect, then, the highly civilized North American continent had
relapsed, within the brief period of ninety years, into its primeval
estate. In every direction stretched an inhospitable wilderness of
morass and forest, with a few feeble settlements of the Stockade people
fringing the principal waterways, and here and there the smoke of an
encampment of the Painted Men rising in a thin spiral from out of the
vast ocean of green leaves. To-day the wild boar ranges where once the
tide of human passion most turbulently flowed, and the poor herdsman,
eating his noonday curds from a wooden bowl, crushes with indifferent
heel the priceless bit of faience lying half hidden in the rotting
leaves. Everywhere, the old order changing and disappearing, only to
recreate itself in form ever more fantastic and enfeebled, a dead being,
and yet inextricably bound up with the life of the new age. And over
all, the shadow of Doom, gigantic, threatening, omnipotent."