top bedrooms--more particularly in a tiny garret overlooking the
back-yard--the Presence seemed inclined to hover. For some seconds I
waited there, in order to see if there would be any further
development; there being none--I obeyed the mandates of a sudden
impulse and made my way once more to the basement. On arriving at the
top of the kitchen stairs, Scott showed a decided disinclination to
descend farther. Crouching down, he whined piteously, and when I
attempted to grasp him by the collar, snarled in a most savage manner.
Consequently, thinking it better to have no companion at all than one
so unwilling, I descended without him.

The stairs terminated in a very dark and narrow passage, into which
the doors of the kitchen, larder, store room, etc., opened
respectively, and at the farther extremity of which was a doorway
leading to the back-yard. The superphysical Presence seeming to be
more pronounced in this passage than anywhere else, I decided to spend
the night in it, and, selecting a spot opposite the entrance to the
scullery, I constructed a seat out of two of the drawers of the
kitchen dresser, by placing them, one on the other, bottom uppermost
on the floor.

It was now half-past nine; the traffic in the street overhead was
beginning to diminish--the rumbling of drays or heavy four-wheelers
had almost ceased, whilst the jingling of hansoms and even the
piercing hoot-hoot and loud birr-birr of motors was fast becoming less
and less frequent. I put out my candle and waited; and, as I waited,
the hush and gloom of the house deepened and intensified, until, by
midnight, all round me was black and silent--black with a blackness
that defies penetration, and silent with a silence that challenges
only the rivalry of the grave. Occasionally I heard sounds--such, for
example, as the creaking of a board, the flopping of a cockroach, and
the growling of Scott--sounds which in the daytime would have been too
trivial to attract attention, but which now assumed the most startling
and exaggerated proportions. From time to time I felt my pulse and
took my temperature to make sure that I was perfectly normal, whilst
at one o'clock, the hour when human vitality begins to be on the wane,
I ate some chicken and ham sandwiches, which I helped down with a
single glass of oatmeal stout. So far, beyond my feeling that there
was a superphysical something in the house, nothing had occurred.
There had not been the slightest attempt a