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Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe · Audiobooks & Scary Stories

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  Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy this reading, which comes from a
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  Speaker 1: work in the public domain. Berenice Edgar Allan Poe dispent Miti,
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  Speaker 1: Sodlesse s I Sepolchrium Amesi Visitor M. Kurasmi's Aliquir to
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  Speaker 1: loom four levades dot e b n zayd. Misery is manifold.
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  Speaker 1: The wretchedness of earth is multiform, overreaching the wide horizon
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  Speaker 1: as the rainbow. Its hues are as various as the
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  Speaker 1: hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately blended,
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  Speaker 1: overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow. How is it
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  Speaker 1: that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness,
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  Speaker 1: from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow. But
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  Speaker 1: as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, So
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  Speaker 1: in fact, out of joy is sorrow born, either the
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  Speaker 1: memory of past bliss is the anguish of to day
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  Speaker 1: or the agonies which are have their origin in the
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  Speaker 1: ecstasies which might have been My baptismal name is Egeus.
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  Speaker 1: Out of my family, I will not mention. Yet there
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  Speaker 1: are no towers in the land more time honored than
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  Speaker 1: my gloomy, gray hereditary halls. Our line has been called
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  Speaker 1: a race of visionaries, and in many striking particulars, in
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  Speaker 1: the character of the family mansion, in the frescoes of
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  Speaker 1: the chief saloon, in the tapestries of the dormitories, in
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  Speaker 1: the chiseling of some buttresses in the armory, but more
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  Speaker 1: especially in the gallery of antique paintings, in the fashion
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  Speaker 1: of the library chamber, and lastly, in the very peculiar
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  Speaker 1: nature of the library's contents. There is more than sufficient
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  Speaker 1: evidence to warrant the belief the recollections of my earliest
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  Speaker 1: years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes,
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  Speaker 1: of which latter I will say no more. Here died
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  Speaker 1: my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere
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  Speaker 1: idleness to say that I had not lived before that
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  Speaker 1: the soul has no previous existence. You deny it. Let
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  Speaker 1: us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not
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  Speaker 1: to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms,
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  Speaker 1: of spiritual and meaning, eyes, of sounds musical yet sad,
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  Speaker 1: A remembrance which will not be excluded, A memory like
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  Speaker 1: a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady, and like a shadow
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  Speaker 1: too in the impossibility of my getting rid of it,
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  Speaker 1: while the sunlight of my reason shall exist in that chamber.
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  Speaker 1: Was I born thus, awaking from the long night of
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  Speaker 1: what seemed but was not nonentity, at once into the
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  Speaker 1: very regions of fairy land, into a palace of imagination,
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  Speaker 1: into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition. It
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  Speaker 1: is not singular that I gazed around me with a
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  Speaker 1: startled and ardent eye, that I loitered away my boyhood
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  Speaker 1: in books and dissipated my youth in reverie. But it
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  Speaker 1: is singular that, as years rolled away and the noon
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  Speaker 1: of man had found me still in the mansion of
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  Speaker 1: my father's it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon
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  Speaker 1: the springs of my life. Wonderful how total an inversion
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  Speaker 1: took place in the character of my commonest thought. The
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  Speaker 1: realities of the world affected me as visions, and as
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  Speaker 1: visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of
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  Speaker 1: dreams became in turn not the material of my everyday existence,
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  Speaker 1: but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
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  Speaker 1: Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together
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  Speaker 1: in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew I ill
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  Speaker 1: of health and buried in gloom. She agile, graceful, and
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  Speaker 1: overflowing with energy, hers the ramble on the hillside, mine
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  Speaker 1: the studies of the cloister, living within my own heart,
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  Speaker 1: and addicted body and soul to the most intense and
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  Speaker 1: painful meditation. She roaming carelessly through life, with no thought
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  Speaker 1: of the shadows in her path or the silent flight
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  Speaker 1: of the raven winged owers. Berenice. I call upon her name, Berenice,
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  Speaker 1: and from the gray ruins of memory, a thousand tumultuous
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  Speaker 1: recollections are startled at the sound. Ah. Vividly is her
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  Speaker 1: image before me, now as in the early days of
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  Speaker 1: her lightheartedness and joy, Oh gorgeous yet fantastic beauty, Oh
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  Speaker 1: sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim, oh nead among its fountains.
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  Speaker 1: And then then all is mystery and terror, and a
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  Speaker 1: tale which should not be told. Disease, a fatal disease,
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  Speaker 1: fell like the simon upon her frame. And even while
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  Speaker 1: I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her,
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  Speaker 1: pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and in
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  Speaker 1: a manner the most subtle and terrible disturbing even the
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  Speaker 1: identity of her person alas the destroyer came and went,
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  Speaker 1: and the victim where is she? I knew her not,
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  Speaker 1: or knew her no longer as Berenice. Among the numerous
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  Speaker 1: train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one
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  Speaker 1: which affected a revolution of so horrible a kind in
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  Speaker 1: the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be
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  Speaker 1: mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature,
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  Speaker 1: a species of epilepsy, not unfrequently terminating in trance itself,
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  Speaker 1: trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her
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  Speaker 1: manner of recovery was in most instances startlingly abrupt. In
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  Speaker 1: the meantime, my own disease, for I have been told
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  Speaker 1: that I should call it by no other appellation. My
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  Speaker 1: own disease then grew rapidly upon me and assumed finally
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  Speaker 1: a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form, hourly
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  Speaker 1: and momently gaining vigor, and at length obtaining over me
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  Speaker 1: the most incomprehensible ascendency. This monomania, if I must so
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  Speaker 1: term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties
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  Speaker 1: of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It
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  Speaker 1: is more than probable that I am not understood, but
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  Speaker 1: I fear indeed that it is in no manner possible
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  Speaker 1: to convey to the mind of the merely general reader
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  Speaker 1: an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which,
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  Speaker 1: in my case, the powers of meditation, not to speak,
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  Speaker 1: technically busied and buried themselves in the contemplation of even
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  Speaker 1: the most ordinary objects of the universe. To muse for long,
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  Speaker 1: unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device
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  Speaker 1: on the margin, or in the typography of a book,
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  Speaker 1: To become absorbed for the better part of a summer's
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  Speaker 1: day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry
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  Speaker 1: or upon the floor, To lose myself for an entire
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  Speaker 1: night in watching the steady flame of a lamp or
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  Speaker 1: the embers of a fire. To dream away whole days
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  Speaker 1: over the perfume of a flower. To repeat monotonously some
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  Speaker 1: common word until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition,
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  Speaker 1: ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind, To
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  Speaker 1: lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means
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  Speaker 1: of absolute bodily quiescence, long and obstinately persevered. In Such
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  Speaker 1: were a few of the most common and least pernicious
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  Speaker 1: vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not
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  Speaker 1: indeed altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like
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  Speaker 1: analysis or explanation. Yet, let me not be misapprehended. The undue,
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  Speaker 1: earnest and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their
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  Speaker 1: own nature frivolous must not be confounded in character with
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  Speaker 1: that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially
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  Speaker 1: indulged in by persons of ardent imagination. It was not,
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  Speaker 1: even as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition
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  Speaker 1: or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct
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  Speaker 1: and different. In the one instance, the dreamer or enthusiast,
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  Speaker 1: being interested by an object, usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses
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  Speaker 1: sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions,
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  Speaker 1: issuing therefrom until at the conclusion of a day dream
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  Speaker 1: often replete with luxury, he finds the incitimentum, or first
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  Speaker 1: cause of his musings, entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case,
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  Speaker 1: the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming through the
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  Speaker 1: medium of my distempered vision or refracted and un real importance,
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  Speaker 1: few deductions, if any, were made, and those few pernaciously
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  Speaker 1: returning in upon the original object as a center. The
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  Speaker 1: meditations were never pleasurable, and at the termination of the reverie,
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  Speaker 1: the first cause, so far from being out of sight,
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  Speaker 1: had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing
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  Speaker 1: feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind,
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  Speaker 1: more particularly exercised, were with me, as I have said before,
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  Speaker 1: the attentive, and are with the day dreamer, the speculative.
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  Speaker 1: My books at this epoch, if they did not actually
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  Speaker 1: serve to irritate the disorder pertook it, will be perceived
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  Speaker 1: largely in their imaginative and inconsequential nature of the characteristic
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  Speaker 1: qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others,
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  Speaker 1: the treatise of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio, the
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  Speaker 1: amplitudine bed Regni day Saint Austin's great work The City
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  Speaker 1: of God and Tertullians that Carne Christie, in which the
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  Speaker 1: paradoxical sentence morteous s Dae Philus credible est cha and
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  Speaker 1: neptamast a sepultus resurrects it serdem est Chia impossible. Est
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  Speaker 1: occupied my undivided time for many weeks of laborious and
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  Speaker 1: fruitless investigation. Thus it will appear that, shaken from its
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  Speaker 1: balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to
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  Speaker 1: that ocean crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hefestian, which, steadily
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  Speaker 1: resisting the attacks of human violence and the fiercer fury
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  Speaker 1: of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the
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  Speaker 1: touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although to a
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  Speaker 1: careless thinker it might appear a matter beyond doubt that
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  Speaker 1: the alteration produced by her unhappy malady in the moral
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  Speaker 1: condition of Berenice would afford me many objects for the
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  Speaker 1: exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation, whose nature I
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  Speaker 1: have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was
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  Speaker 1: not in any degree the case. In the lucid intervals
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  Speaker 1: of my infirmity. Her calamity indeed gave me pain, and
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  Speaker 1: taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair
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  Speaker 1: and gentle life, I did not fail to ponder frequently
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  Speaker 1: and bitterly upon the wonder working means by which so
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  Speaker 1: strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass.
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  Speaker 1: But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease,
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  Speaker 1: and were such as would have occurred under similar circumstances
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  Speaker 1: to the ordinary mass of mankind, true to its own character.
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  Speaker 1: My disorder reveled in the less important, but more startling
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  Speaker 1: changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice, in the
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  Speaker 1: singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity during
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  Speaker 1: the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty. Most surely I
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  Speaker 1: had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence,
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  Speaker 1: Feelings with me had never been of the heart, and
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  Speaker 1: my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray
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  Speaker 1: of the early morning, among the trellised shadows of the
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  Speaker 1: forest at noonday, and in the silence of my library
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  Speaker 1: at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I
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  Speaker 1: had seen her not as the living and breathing Bereonice,
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  Speaker 1: but as the Breonice of a dream, Not as a
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  Speaker 1: being of the earth birthy, but as the abstraction of
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  Speaker 1: such a being, Not as a thing to admire but
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  Speaker 1: to analyze, not as an object of love, but as
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  Speaker 1: the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And
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  Speaker 1: now now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale
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  Speaker 1: at her approach, yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition,
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  Speaker 1: I called to mind that she had loved me long,
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  Speaker 1: and in an evil moment I spoke to her of marriage,
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  Speaker 1: and at length the period of our nuptials was approaching.
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  Speaker 1: When upon an afternoon in the winter of the year,
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  Speaker 1: one of those unseasonably warm, calm and misty days which
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  Speaker 1: are the nurse of the beautiful halcion asterisk one, I
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  Speaker 1: sat and sat as I thought, alone in the inner
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  Speaker 1: apartment of the library. But uplifting my eyes, I saw
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  Speaker 1: that Breonice stood before me. Was it my own excited imagination,
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  Speaker 1: or the misty influence of the atmosphere, or the uncertain
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  Speaker 1: twilight of the chamber, or the gray draperies which fell
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  Speaker 1: around her figure that caused in it so vacillating an
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  Speaker 1: indistinct an outline I could not tell. She spoke no word,
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  Speaker 1: and I not for worlds could I have uttered A syllable.
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  Speaker 1: An icy chill ran through my frame. A sense of
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  Speaker 1: insufferable anxiety oppressed me, A consuming curiosity pervaded my soul,
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  Speaker 1: and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some
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  Speaker 1: time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her
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  Speaker 1: person alas its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige
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  Speaker 1: of the former being lurked in any single line of
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  Speaker 1: the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face.
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  Speaker 1: The forehead was high and very pale, and singularly placid,
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  Speaker 1: and the once jetty hair fell partially over it and
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  Speaker 1: overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a
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  Speaker 1: vivid yellow and jarring discordantly in their fantastic character. With
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  Speaker 1: the reigning melancholy of the countenance, the eyes were lifeless
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  Speaker 1: and lustreless and seemingly pupiliss and I shrank involuntarily from
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  Speaker 1: their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and
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  Speaker 1: shrunken lips. They parted, and, in a smile of peculiar meaning,
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  Speaker 1: the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to
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  Speaker 1: my view, would to God that I had never beheld them,
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  Speaker 1: or that having done so, I had died. The shutting
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  Speaker 1: of a door disturbed me, and looking up. I found
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  Speaker 1: that my cousin had departed from the chamber, but from
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  Speaker 1: the disordered chamber of my brain had not alas departed,
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  Speaker 1: and would not be driven away the white and ghastly
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  Speaker 1: spectrum of the teeth, not a speck on their surface,
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  Speaker 1: not a shade on their enamel, not an indenture in
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  Speaker 1: their edges, But what that period of her smile had
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  Speaker 1: sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them now,
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  Speaker 1: even more unequivocally than I beheld them. Then, the teeth,
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  Speaker 1: the teeth, they were here and there and everywhere, and
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  Speaker 1: visibly and palpably before me, long narrow and excessively white,
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  Speaker 1: with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the
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  Speaker 1: very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the
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  Speaker 1: full fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain
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  Speaker 1: against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects
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  Speaker 1: of the external world, I had no thoughts but for
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  Speaker 1: the teeth. For these I longed with a frenzied desire.
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  Speaker 1: All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in
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  Speaker 1: their single contemplation. They, they alone, were present to the
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  Speaker 1: mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality became the
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  Speaker 1: essence of my mental life. I held them in every light,
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  Speaker 1: I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics.
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  Speaker 1: I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation.
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  Speaker 1: I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered
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  Speaker 1: as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and
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  Speaker 1: sentient power, and, even when unassisted by the lips, a
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  Speaker 1: capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle's salad has been well
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  Speaker 1: said K two s e s pa' eta and dessentiments,
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  Speaker 1: and of bereonice, I more seriously believed k Tout's se
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  Speaker 1: s densit and di ideas DEAs ideas ah. Here was
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  Speaker 1: the idiotic thought that destroyed me, DEAs ideas ah. Therefore
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  Speaker 1: it was that I coveted them so madly. I felt
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  Speaker 1: that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace,
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  Speaker 1: in giving me back to reason. And the evening closed
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  Speaker 1: in upon me. Thus, and then the darkness came and
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  Speaker 1: tarried and went, and the day again dawned, and the
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  Speaker 1: mists of a second night were now gathering around. And
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: still I sat motionless in that solitary room, And still
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  Speaker 1: I sat buried in meditation, and still the phantasma of
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  Speaker 1: the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as with the most vivid,
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  Speaker 1: hideous distinctness, It floated about amid the changing lights and
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  Speaker 1: shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon
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  Speaker 1: my dreams a cry as of horror and dismay, and
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  Speaker 1: thereunto after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices,
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  Speaker 1: intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow or of pain.
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  Speaker 1: I arose from my seat, and, throwing open one of
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  Speaker 1: the doors of the library, saw standing out in the
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  Speaker 1: ante chamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told
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  Speaker 1: me that Baronice was no more. She had been seized
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  Speaker 1: with epilepsy in the early morning, and now at the
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  Speaker 1: closing in of the night, the grave was ready for
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  Speaker 1: its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed.
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  Speaker 1: I found myself sitting in the library, and again, sitting
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  Speaker 1: there alone, it seemed that I had newly awakened from
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  Speaker 1: a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was
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  Speaker 1: now midnight, and I was well aware that since the
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  Speaker 1: setting of the sun, Breonice had been interred but of
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  Speaker 1: that dreary period which intervened, I had no positive, at
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with
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  Speaker 1: horror moo or more horrible from being vague, and terror
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  Speaker 1: more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in
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  Speaker 1: the record my existence, written all over with dim and
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: hideous and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decipher them, but
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  Speaker 1: in vain while ever and anon like the spirit of
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  Speaker 1: a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I
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  Speaker 1: had done a deed. What was it? I asked myself
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  Speaker 1: the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber
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  Speaker 1: answered me. What was it? On the table beside me
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  Speaker 1: burned the lamp, and near it lay a little box.
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  Speaker 1: It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen
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  Speaker 1: it frequently before, for it was the property of the
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  Speaker 1: family physician. But how came it there upon my table?
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  Speaker 1: And why did I shudder in regarding it? These things
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: were in no manner to be accounted for, And my
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a book,
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  Speaker 1: and to a sentence underscored therein the words were the
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  Speaker 1: singular but simple ones of the poet E. B. N
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: zaiat dice but me he sodalesss I suppolchrum AMESI visitor M.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: Kurazmi's aloquantum four levatas Why then, as I perused them,
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  Speaker 1: did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end,
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  Speaker 1: and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins?
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  Speaker 1: There came a light tap at the library door, and
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  Speaker 1: pale as the tenant of a tomb a menial entered
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  Speaker 1: upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he
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  Speaker 1: spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low.
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  Speaker 1: What said he? Some broken sentences I heard. He told
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  Speaker 1: of a wild cry, disturbing the silence of the night,
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  Speaker 1: of the gathering together of the household, of a search
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  Speaker 1: in the direction of the sound. And then his tones
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: grew thrillingly distinct, as he whispered me of a violated grave,
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  Speaker 1: of a disfigured body, enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating,
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  Speaker 1: still alive. He pointed to garments. They were muddy and
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me
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  Speaker 1: gently by the hand. It was indented with the impress
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  Speaker 1: of human nails. He directed my attention to some object
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  Speaker 1: against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: It was a spade with a shriek. I bounded to
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: the table and grasped the box that lay upon it,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: but I could not force it open, and in my tremor,
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: it slipped from my hands and fell heavily and burst
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: into pieces. And from it, with a rattling sound, there
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: two small, white and ivory looking substances that were scattered
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: to and fro about the floor.