assure you, made me thoroughly awake, and the first thing
I noticed on recovering my scattered senses--was the smell. I sat up,
and saw to my terror my bed was occupied, but occupied in the most
alarming manner. On the middle of the pillow was a face, the face
of--I looked closer; I would have given every penny I possessed not to
have done so, but I could not help myself--I looked closer, and it
was--the face of my brother; my brother Ralph--you may recollect my
mentioning him to you, for he was the only one of us who was at that
time making money--whom I believed to be in New York. He had always
been rather sallow, but apart from the fact that he now looked very
yellow, his appearance was quite natural. Indeed, as I gazed at him, I
grew so convinced it was he that I cried out, 'Ralph!' The moment I
did so, there was a ghastly change: his eyelids opened, and his
eyes--eyes I recognised at once--protruded to such a degree that they
almost rolled out; his mouth flew open, his tongue swelled, his whole
countenance became convulsed with the most unparalleled, and for that
reason indescribable, expression of agony, whilst the yellowness of
his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so
inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the
bed--appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice
that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph,
broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but
_something_, I cannot explain, has always prevented me. I have been
dead a month; not cancer, but Dolly. Poison. Good-bye, Hely. I shall
rest in peace now.' The voice stopped; there was a rush of cold air,
laden with the scent of the drug, and tainted, faintly tainted, with
the nauseating smell of the grave, and--the face on the pillow
vanished. How I got through the remainder of the night I cannot say--I
dare not think. I dare only remember that I did not sleep. I was
devoted to Ralph, and the thought that he had perished in the
miserable manner suggested by the apparition, completely prostrated
me. In the morning I received a black-edged letter from my mother,
stating that she had just heard from Dolly, my brother's wife, saying
Ralph had died from cancer in the throat. Dolly added in a postscript
that her dearly beloved Ralph had been very good to her, and left her
well provided for. Of course, we might have had the body exhumed, but
we were poor, and Ralph's widow