e a house of cards. The passing
of the lightning left the sky again dark, but a blue flame fell downward
from the tower, and, with inconceivable rapidity, running along the
ground in the direction of Diana's Grove, reached the dark silent house,
which in the instant burst into flame at a hundred different points.

At the same moment there rose from the house a rending, crashing sound of
woodwork, broken or thrown about, mixed with a quick scream so appalling
that Adam, stout of heart as he undoubtedly was, felt his blood turn into
ice. Instinctively, despite the danger and their consciousness of it,
husband and wife took hands and listened, trembling. Something was going
on close to them, mysterious, terrible, deadly! The shrieks continued,
though less sharp in sound, as though muffled. In the midst of them was
a terrific explosion, seemingly from deep in the earth.

The flames from Castra Regis and from Diana's Grove made all around
almost as light as day, and now that the lightning had ceased to flash,
their eyes, unblinded, were able to judge both perspective and detail.
The heat of the burning house caused the iron doors to warp and collapse.
Seemingly of their own accord, they fell open, and exposed the interior.
The Saltons could now look through to the room beyond, where the well-
hole yawned, a deep narrow circular chasm. From this the agonised
shrieks were rising, growing ever more terrible with each second that
passed.

But it was not only the heart-rending sound that almost paralysed poor
Mimi with terror. What she saw was sufficient to fill her with evil
dreams for the remainder of her life. The whole place looked as if a sea
of blood had been beating against it. Each of the explosions from below
had thrown out from the well-hole, as if it had been the mouth of a
cannon, a mass of fine sand mixed with blood, and a horrible repulsive
slime in which were great red masses of rent and torn flesh and fat. As
the explosions kept on, more and more of this repulsive mass was shot up,
the great bulk of it falling back again. Many of the awful fragments
were of something which had lately been alive. They quivered and
trembled and writhed as though they were still in torment, a supposition
to which the unending scream gave a horrible credence. At moments some
mountainous mass of flesh surged up through the narrow orifice, as though
forced by a measureless power through an opening infinitely smaller than