rnaturalism, and it
was not a pretty sort of superstition either.

"There is another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan, in his
low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper. God knows how
they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor lowered
through any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hate
have been part of some damned machinery for walling him up. He is there.
I have looked through the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him
long, because his face is turned away from me and he does not move."

Al Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their outlet in
rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown room.

It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that it was
doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted a large black
A like the B and C outside their own doors. The letter in this case was
not painted outside, because this prison had no outside.

On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares had
maddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which was
startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous head
was ringed with hair of a frosty grey. The figure was draped, both
insecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like the remains of a
brown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of cocoa stood on the floor
beside it, and the creature had his big grey head cocked at a particular
angle of inquiry or attention which amid all that gathering gloom and
mystery struck one as comic if not cocksure.

After six still seconds Turnbull could stand it no longer, but called
out to the dwarfish thing--in what words heaven knows. The thing got
up with the promptitude of an animal, and turning round offered the
spectacle of two owlish eyes and a huge grey-and-white beard not unlike
the plumage of an owl. This extraordinary beard covered him literally to
his feet (not that that was very far), and perhaps it was as well
that it did, for portions of his remaining clothing seemed to fall off
whenever he moved. One talks trivially of a face like parchment, but
this old man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loaded
with hieroglyphics. The lines of his face were so deep and complex that
one could see five or ten different faces besides the real one, as one
can see them in an elaborate wall-paper. And yet while his face seemed
like a scripture older than the gods, his