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."



More

;