rought fear to my soul. One of them was a
heavy flash-lamp--a watchman's lamp--where it had evidently been
dropped. Been dropped in flight! But what awful terror must have gripped
the fellow to make him forsake his only means of escape through those
black passages? And the second thing--a worn copy of a leather-bound
book, flung open on the boards below the stool!

The flash-lamp, thank God! had not been shattered. I switched it on,
directing its white circle of light over the room. This time, in the
vivid glare, the room became even more unreal. Black walls, clumsy,
distorted shadows on the wall, thrown by those huge piles of wooden
boxes. Shadows that were like crouching men, groping toward me. And
beyond, where the single door opened into a passage of Stygian darkness,
that yawning entrance was thrown into hideous detail. Had any upright
figure been standing there, the light would have made an unholy
phosphorescent specter out of it.

I summoned enough courage to cross the room and pull the door shut.
There was no way of locking it. Had I been able to fasten it, I should
surely have done so; but the room was evidently an unused chamber,
filled with empty refuse. This was the reason, probably, why the
watchman had made use of it as a retreat during the intervals between
his rounds.

But I had no desire to ponder over the sordidness of my surroundings. I
returned to my stool in silence, and stooping, picked up the fallen book
from the floor. Carefully I placed the lamp on the table, where its
light would shine on the open page. Then, turning the cover, I began to
glance through the thing which the man before me had evidently been
studying.

And before I had read two lines, the explanation of the whole horrible
thing struck me. I stared dumbly down at the little book and laughed.
Laughed harshly, so that the sound of my mad cackle echoed in a thousand
ghastly reverberations through the dead corridors of the building.

* * * * *

It was a book of horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying,
supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and
white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably
struck terror to that unlucky devil's soul, explained M. S.'s "decayed
human form, standing in the doorway with arms extended and a frightful
face of passion!" The description--the same description--lay before me,
almost in my friend's words. Little