me. Even the trailing thing
on the floor behind them had not touched my feet, as I had dreaded it
would, and on such an occasion as this I was grateful even for the
smallest mercies.

The absence of the Indians from my immediate neighbourhood brought
little sense of relief. I stood shivering and shuddering in my corner,
and, beyond being able to breathe more freely, I felt no whit less
uncomfortable. Also, I was aware that a certain light, which, without
apparent source or rays, had enabled me to follow their every gesture
and movement, had gone out of the room with their departure. An
unnatural darkness now filled the room, and pervaded its every corner so
that I could barely make out the positions of the windows and the glass
doors.

As I said before, my condition was evidently an abnormal one. The
capacity for feeling surprise seemed, as in dreams, to be wholly absent.
My senses recorded with unusual accuracy every smallest occurrence, but
I was able to draw only the simplest deductions.

The Indians soon reached the top of the stairs, and there they halted
for a moment. I had not the faintest clue as to their next movement.
They appeared to hesitate. They were listening attentively. Then I heard
one of them, who by the weight of his soft tread must have been the
giant, cross the narrow corridor and enter the room directly
overhead--my own little bedroom. But for the insistence of that
unaccountable dread I had experienced there in the morning, I should at
that very moment have been lying in the bed with the big Indian in the
room standing beside me.

For the space of a hundred seconds there was silence, such as might
have existed before the birth of sound. It was followed by a long
quivering shriek of terror, which rang out into the night, and ended in
a short gulp before it had run its full course. At the same moment the
other Indian left his place at the head of the stairs, and joined his
companion in the bedroom. I heard the "thing" trailing behind him along
the floor. A thud followed, as of something heavy falling, and then all
became as still and silent as before.

It was at this point that the atmosphere, surcharged all day with the
electricity of a fierce storm, found relief in a dancing flash of
brilliant lightning simultaneously with a crash of loudest thunder. For
five seconds every article in the room was visible to me with amazing
distinctness, and through the windows I saw the tree trunks standing