, a woman's cry, sounded through the night, and
two garret windows were opened! I had forgotten the servants! I saw the
terrorstruck faces, and their frantically waving arms!...

Then, overwhelmed with horror, I set off to run to the village,
shouting: "Help! help! fire! fire!" I met some people who were already
coming onto the scene, and I went back with them to see!

By this time the house was nothing but a horrible and magnificent
funeral pile, a monstrous funeral pile which lit up the whole country,
a funeral pile where men were burning, and where he was burning also,
He, He, my prisoner, that new Being, the new master, the Horla!

Suddenly the whole roof fell in between the walls, and a volcano of
flames darted up to the sky. Through all the windows which opened onto
that furnace I saw the flames darting, and I thought that he was there,
in that kiln, dead.

Dead? perhaps?... His body? Was not his body, which was transparent,
indestructible by such means as would kill ours?

If he was not dead?... Perhaps time alone has power over that
Invisible and Redoubtable Being. Why this transparent, unrecognizable
body, this body belonging to a spirit, if it also had to fear ills,
infirmities and premature destruction?

Premature destruction? All human terror springs from that! After man
the Horla. After him who can die every day, at any hour, at any moment,
by any accident, he came who was only to die at his own proper hour and
minute, because he had touched the limits of his existence!

No ... no ... without any doubt ... he is not dead. Then ... then ... I
suppose I must kill myself!

FOOTNOTE.--This story is a tragic experience and prophecy. It was
insanity that robbed the world of its most finished short story
writer, the author of this tale; and even before his madness became
overpowering, de Maupassant complained that he was haunted by his
double--by a vision of another Self confronting and threatening
him. He had run life at its top speed; this hallucination was the
result.

Medical science defines in such cases "an image of memory which
differs in intensity from the normal"--that is to say, a fixed idea
so persistent and growing that to the thinker it seems utterly
real.

--EDITOR.

PIERRE MILLE

_The Miracle of Zobeide_

Always wise and prudent, Zobeide cautiously put aside the myrtle
branches and peeped through to see who were the persons tal