The Lady in Gray

"The Lady in Gray" is a horror short story by Donald Wandrei, originally published in the December 1933 issue of Weird Tales. It contains references to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert W. Chambers.
== Synopsis==
For all his life, a man has been assailed by nightmares filled with esoteric imagery, cosmic abysses, and terrifying scenes of death or torture. Psychologists and psychiatrists have tried and failed to shed a light on his nocturnal terrors, as apart from them, his life has been entirely free from traumatic events or even financial struggles.
However, real tragedy strikes when the narrator's fiancée, a pale-skinned, grey-eyed young woman named Miriam, dies in a plane crash the day before their wedding. On the night of her funeral, the narrator dreams that Miriam appears to him as a floating, luminous figure: the titular lady in grey. She takes him into a strange sea made of a black viscous slime-like liquid, and guides him back to bed before he drowns in it. When he wakes up, he finds that his body is indeed covered in black slime.
Several weeks pass by, during which only his "regular" nightmares plague him, until one night the lady in grey returns. This time she takes him by hand to a field covered in grey dust, where a large grey slug stands on a pillar. The narrator is disgusted by it, even though the slug's visage suggests a sapient creature. Still, he follows Miriam's instructions when she asks him to take the slug and carry it back to his room, where the mollusk kisses Miriam before she leaves.
When the narrator wakes up, he finds the slug in the room with him. Repulsed, he kills it with a fire poker and burns its body in the fireplace. He is even more disturbed to find the grey dust on his shoes, recognizing it as the ash-like soil that covered the area of the cemetery in which Miriam was buried, where no vegetation grows.
Once again, several weeks of comparatively "normal" nightmares pass by, before the narrator experiences his third dream of Miriam. This time she leads him through a forest into the entrance of a cave, which descends almost vertically to an underground world, although they simply walk on the vertical walls as if they were horizontal. The tunnel leads them to a crypt lit by candles, where Miriam's body lies in her grave, unconscious but alive, with a bowl filled with the slime of the black sea at her head, the grey slug at her feet, and a glowing gardenia in her hand.
The narrator rushes to get to Miriam, spilling the bowl and trampling the slug in the process, carrying her out of the crypt while the gardenia glows brighter, leading the way. Outside the crypt, the vertical tunnel is gone, and he finds himself standing on the field of grey dust under a sky with no stars. He carries Miriam back to his room, and when he wakes up, she is still there, seated besides him on his bed. Awakened, however, he can see that she isn't truly alive, but a reanimated corpse of rotten flesh.
The narrative doesn't disclose what happened next, but the narrator states that he now intends to kill himself as soon as he finishes writing.
==Behind the Mythos==
Among the many things the narrator has witnessed in his nightmares, he mentions "the whisperer in darkness", "the call of Cthulhu", "the seven deaths of Commoriom", "the twenty-three sleepers where Hali raises its black spires in Carcosa", "the dead titans waken", "the color out of space", and "the ichor of stone gods".
== Publication History ==
* Weird Tales (1933)
* The Eye and the Finger (1944)
* L'œil et le doigt (1977, 1983, French-language translation)
* Uncanny Banquet (1992, 1993)
* To Sleep, Perchance to Dream ... Nightmare (1993)
* Don't Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy of Donald Wandrei (1997)
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Donald Wandrei works