I gasped and backed up, half-tripping over the ottoman. Lady Ligeia! My wife! My beautiful, beloved wife come back!
Her eyes now had a milky, opalescent sheen to them, her skin more sickly pale than it had been. She looked up.
I rubbed my eyes. No! no! no! no! This can't-I am sure that what I saw then was the Lady Ligeia-be her! It can't! The emptiness-the shallow, unfathomable abyss behind those dark eyes was not my Ligeia. Not the one I loved. There was no wisdom, none of her idolatrous love left for me. Instead, I saw hatred. Pure, cold, utter hatred, burning within those black pupils. A hatred so hard and unconceivable that it stunned my puny human mind, and I wondered for a moment if I might, in fact be having a fit, an opium dream. But no. I know-My Lady Ligeia, full of such expressionless, fiery emotion, as if she had risen up from Hell itself! Oh, how desperate I was. How paralyzed with horror, with selfish fear I was. How vain I was to believe that my Lady Ligeia would not come back.
"My husband," said she coldly and slowly. "My husband. The impatient lover, yet ephemeral. The resolute mind is as fickle in him as glass, easily broken and warped. As is life. You mourned for me as a husband, but not as a lover. Greedy sin and curiosity can overcome the most malleable of minds, shaping them to believe in love and fidelity and yet, somehow, inevitably the bond is broken. Just as gardens wither away to weeds, so life must end. Your end is now."
And with a shriek-O! And what a shriek it was that it so shattered the mirrors and made the curtains with their Arabesque designs flutter madly as if in a cyclone!-Lady Ligeia (the only, my wife, for there is no other as deserving of her name) leaped forward, mouth wide open, screaming like the day when God will judge us, sinful humans, and place us in the endless torrential fire of Hades and the Seven Circles of Hell. The day that all men and women will protest, "Lo! Let me not be judged, for I have become a monstrosity!" and all men and women, equals in disgusting sin, will fall deep within the cracks of the Earth, falling into the abysmal drear of Death. The scream tore from her mouth, set in an O, and she leaped, clawing for my flesh with her fingernails. She tore at my hair and my chest, screaming all the while, as chunks of myself and blood and fear spat throughout the room, emanating from my heart, which lay, bleeding, on the ottoman. My heart, the only fragment left of my broken and tortured life lay there, deserved of the maggots and worms that feast upon it. And then, and only then - once my Lady Ligeia had desecrated my body thusly- only then, she disappeared, speaking a poem which I had only heard one time, just before her own unwilling death.
"...Out -out are the lights -out all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, 'Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm."