. Instantly realizing her situation, she uttered a shriek such as
only an unnamable terror can inspire. But hardly had her cry started
the echoes in the empty corridor when it was suddenly stifled. Two
prodigious arms had closed upon her and crushed the life out of her.

The cry performed the office of directing the detective and his
assistants, and it also aroused the old surgeon, who occupied rooms
between the officers and the object of their search. The cry of agony
pierced him to the marrow, and a realization of the cause of it burst
upon him with frightful force.

"It has come at last!" he gasped, springing from his bed.

Snatching from a table a dimly-burning lamp and a long knife which he
had kept at hand for three years, he dashed into the corridor. The four
officers had already started forward, but when they saw him emerge they
halted in silence. In that moment of stillness the surgeon paused to
listen. He heard the hissing sound and the clumsy floundering of a
bulky, living object in the direction of his wife's apartments. It
evidently was advancing towards him. A turn in the corridor shut out
the view. He turned up the light, which revealed a ghastly pallor in
his face.

"Wife!" he called.

There was no response. He hurriedly advanced, the four men following
quietly. He turned the angle of the corridor, and ran so rapidly that
by the time the officers had come in sight of him again he was twenty
steps away. He ran past a huge, shapeless object, sprawling, crawling,
and floundering along, and arrived at the body of his wife.

He gave one horrified glance at her face, and staggered away. Then a
fury seized him. Clutching the knife firmly, and holding the lamp
aloft, he sprang toward the ungainly object in the corridor. It was
then that the officers, still advancing cautiously, saw a little more
clearly, though still indistinctly, the object of the surgeon's fury,
and the cause of the look of unutterable anguish in his face. The
hideous sight caused them to pause. They saw what appeared to be a man,
yet evidently was not a man; huge, awkward, shapeless; a squirming,
lurching, stumbling mass, completely naked. It raised its broad
shoulders. _It had no head_, but instead of it a small metallic ball
surmounting its massive neck.

"Devil!" exclaimed the surgeon, raising the knife.

"Hold, there!" commanded a stern voice.

The surgeon quickly raised his eyes and saw the four officers, and for
a moment fear