HorrorMasters -- A Novel by Keith Fleming: "Can Such Things Be?"

 "Can Such Things Be?"
      Or        
 The Weird of the Beresfords 
  A Study In Occult Will Power  
By Keith Fleming

 ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
   The soul that rises with us (our Life’s star)
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
   And cometh from afar.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth
‘Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

 PREFACE. 

I cannot pretend to account for, or in any way attempt to explain, the extraordinary mystery of the following tale. I only try to tell the mere facts of a marvellous unearthly experience in all the same as here related, save that she who went through this great horror lived—though but for a brief week or two—and told the story of that terrible night.
   Many will, doubtless, assert that it must have been a dream, an hallucination, or the phantasma­goria of a diseased fancy; that either insanity, or the strange optical delusions and imaginations engendered by opiates when they fail as sleep inducers, must be the true solution of this weird problem. And possibly they may be right; but one or two unalterable, inexplicable facts remain.
   The mysterious music was heard by others besides her to whom the ghastly manifestation was made; and, above all, the singular disappear­ance of the violin, its reappearance a year later, and its still more marvellous and weirdly-mystic vanishing at the moment of death, are inexplicable phenomena.
   I think it necessary to say this little word of deprecation, as apology for offering to the world a tale almost too wild for belief

ARNOLD DYSART, M.A., F.R.S.,
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
and Professor of Modern Philosophy.

Cambridge,
            June 17^th, 1883.

Part I: HIS VIOLIN

 Part II: THE VARLEY MURDER CASE

Part III: THE PROPHECY FULFILLED

   
And don't forget to check out our
 Horror Story of the Day