The Plattner Story, and OthersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
The Plattner Story, and Others
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories, English
Some way down the Broad Walk I perceived that I was tired, and that my
feet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and sat
down on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I had
dozed into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision
of the resurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thought
myself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) pecked
out by birds. "Awake!" cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of the
path and the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before
thought of Regent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees,
stretching as far as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing
graves and heeling tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble: the
rising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward, they bled in
their struggles, the red flesh was tattered away from the white bones.
"Awake!" cried a voice; but I determined I would not rise to such
horrors. "Awake!" They would not let me alone. "Wike up!" said an angry
voice. A cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me,
demanding my penny.
I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and,
feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham
Place. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts
about death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end
of Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab,
and went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. It
struck me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death
on the morrow had led to my death that day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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