r reading
had given me; that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which
tells of the creature _Jacques Roulet, of Caude_, who in 1598 was
condemned to death as a demoniac but afterward saved from the stake by
the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered
with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and
rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away
unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to
name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have
generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would
have brought some drastic and frightened action--indeed, might not its
limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the
Roulets from the town?

* * * * *

I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the
unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the
building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor.
Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the
disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street,
preferring to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the
dark stairs, ground-floor hall, and front door could give. There, where
morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long
afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed
above-ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked
door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside.
Nothing new rewarded my efforts--only the same depressing mustiness and
faint suggestions of noxious odors and nitrous outlines on the
floor--and I fancy that many pedestrians must have watched me curiously
through the broken panes.

At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try the spot
nocturnally; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch
over the moldy floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted,
half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me curiously that
evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw--or thought I saw--amidst
the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the "huddled
form" I had suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and
unprecedented--and as I watched I seemed to see again the thin,
yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy
aft