oluntary command against all evil
beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible
hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at
my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I
should be in bodily peril; and I concentred all my faculties in the
single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from
the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,--eyes that had
now become distinctly visible. For there, though in nought else around
me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of intense,
creative, working evil, which might crush down my own.

The pale atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air
of some near conflagration. The larvae grew lurid as things that live
in fire. Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured
knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the
dark Shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into that
darkness all returned.

As the gloom receded, the Shadow was wholly gone. Slowly, as it had
been withdrawn, the flame grew again into the candles on the table,
again into the fuel in the grate. The whole room came once more
calmly, healthfully into sight.

The two doors were still closed, the door communicating with the
servant's room still locked. In the corner of the wall, into which he
had so convulsively niched himself, lay the dog. I called to him,--no
movement; I approached,--the animal was dead: his eyes protruded; his
tongue out of his mouth; the froth gathered round his jaws. I took him
in my arms; I brought him to the fire. I felt acute grief for the loss
of my poor favorite,--acute self-reproach; I accused myself of his
death; I imagined he had died of fright. But what was my surprise on
finding that his neck was actually broken. Had this been done in the
dark? Must it not have been by a hand human as mine; must there not
have been a human agency all the while in that room? Good cause to
suspect it. I cannot tell. I cannot do more than state the fact
fairly; the reader may draw his own inference.

Another surprising circumstance,--my watch was restored to the table
from which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn; but it had stopped
at the very moment it was so withdrawn, nor, despite all the skill of
the watchmaker, has it ever gone since,--that is, it will go in a
strange, erratic way for a few hours, and then come to a dead stop; it
is wort