The sight of the features, calm and still in death,
would banish, he thought, all such wild conjectures as were haunting
him in spite of himself. But the thought of those dead eyes staring in
the lamplight was intolerable; so at last he blew out the light and lay
down. This fear had been stealing upon him so insidiously and gradually
that he had not been aware of its growth. With the extinguishing of the light, however, and the blotting out
of the sight of the corpse, things assumed their true character and
proportions, and Falred fell asleep almost instantly, on his lips a
faint smile for his previous folly. *       *       *       *       *

He awakened suddenly. How long he had been asleep he did not know. He sat up, his pulse pounding frantically, the cold sweat beading
his forehead. He knew instantly where he was, remembered the other
occupant of the room. But what had awakened him? A dream--yes, now he
remembered--a hideous dream in which the dead man had risen from the
bed and stalked stiffly across the room with eyes of fire and a horrid
leer frozen on his gray lips. Falred had seemed to lie motionless,
helpless; then as the corpse reached a gnarled and horrible hand, he
had awakened. He strove to pierce the gloom, but the room was all blackness and all
without was so dark that no gleam of light came through the window. He reached a shaking hand toward the lamp, then recoiled as if from a
hidden serpent. Sitting here in the dark with a fiendish corpse was bad
enough, but he dared not light the lamp, for fear that his reason would
be snuffed out like a candle at what he might see. Horror, stark and
unreasoning, had full possession of his soul; he no longer questioned
the instinctive fears that rose in him. All those legends he had heard
came back to him and brought a belief in them. Death was a hideous
thing, a brain-shattering horror, imbuing lifeless men with a horrid
malevolence. Adam Farrel in his life had been simply a churlish but
harmless man; now he was a terror, a monster, a fiend lurking in the
shadows of fear, ready to leap on mankind with talons dipped deep in
death and insanity. Falred sat there, his blood freezing, and fought out his silent battle. Faint glimmerings of reason had begun to touch his fright when a soft,
stealthy sound again froze him. He did not recognize it as the whisper
of the night wind across the window-sill. His frenzied fancy knew it
only as the tread of death and horror. He sprang from the couch, then
stood undecided. Escape was in his mind but he was too dazed to even
try to formulate a plan of escape. Even his sense of direction was
gone. Fear had so stultified his mind that he was not able to think
consciously. The blackness spread in long waves about him and its
darkness and void entered into his brain. His motions, such as they
were, were instinctive. He seemed shackled with mighty chains and his
limbs responded sluggishly, like an imbecile's. A terrible horror grew up in him and reared its grisly shape, that the
dead man was behind him, was stealing upon him from the rear. He no
longer thought of lighting the lamp; he no longer thought of anything. Fear filled his whole being; there was room for nothing else. He backed slowly away in the darkness, hands behind him, instinctively
feeling the way. With a terrific effort he partly shook the clinging
mists of horror from him, and, the cold sweat clammy upon his body,
strove to orient himself. He could see nothing, but the bed was across
the room, in front of him. He was backing away from it. There was
where the dead man was lying, according to all rules of nature; if
the thing were, as he felt, behind him, then the old tales were true:
death did implant in lifeless bodies an unearthly animation, and dead
men did roam the shadows to work their ghastly and evil will upon the
sons of men. Then--great God!--what was man but a wailing infant, lost
in the night and beset by frightful things from the black abysses and
the terrible unknown voids of space and time? These conclusions he
did not reach by any reasoning process; they leaped full-grown into
his terror-dazed brain. He worked his way slowly backward, groping,
clinging to the thought that the dead man _must_ be in front of him. Then his back-flung hands encountered something--something slick,
cold and clammy--like the touch of death. A scream shook the echoes,
followed by the crash of a falling body. *       *       *       *       *

The next morning they who came to the house of death found two corpses
in the room. Adam Farrel's sheeted body lay motionless upon the bed,
and across the room lay the body of Falred, beneath the shelf where
Dr. Stein had absent-mindedly left his gloves--rubber gloves, slick
and clammy to the touch of a hand groping in the dark--a hand of one
fleeing his own fear--rubber gloves, slick and clammy and cold, like