Another sound--this time not a crash, nothing
half so loud or definite--drew her eyes in the direction of the steps. An object was now standing at the top of them, and something lurid,
like the faint, phosphorescent glow of decay, emanated from all over
it; but _what_ it was, she could not for the life of her tell. It
might have been the figure of a man, or a woman, or a beast, or of
anything that was inexpressibly antagonistic and nasty. She would have
given her soul to have looked elsewhere, but her eyes were fixed--she
could neither turn nor shut them. For some seconds the shape remained
motionless, and then with a sly, subtle motion it lowered its head,
and came stealing stealthily down the stairs towards her. She followed
its approach like one in a hideous dream--her heart ready to burst,
her brain on the verge of madness. Another step, another, yet
another; till there were only three left between her and it; and she
was at length enabled to form some idea of what the thing was like. It was short and squat, and appeared to be partly clad in a loose,
flowing garment, that was not long enough to conceal the glistening
extremities of its limbs. From its general contour and the tangled
mass of hair that fell about its neck and shoulders, Lady Adela
concluded it was the phantasm of a woman. Its head being kept bent,
she was unable to see the face in full, but every instant she expected
the revelation would take place, and with each separate movement of
the phantasm her suspense became more and more intolerable. At last it
stood on the floor of the cellar, a broad, ungainly, horribly ungainly
figure, that glided up to and past her into the far cellar. There it
halted, as nearly as she could judge on the new tiles, and remained
standing. As she gazed at it, too fascinated to remove her eyes, there
was a loud, reverberating crash, a hideous sound of wrenching and
tearing, and the whole of the ceiling of the inner chamber came down
with an appalling roar. Lady Adela thinks that she must then have
fainted, for she distinctly remembers falling--falling into what
seemed to her a black, interminable abyss. When she recovered
consciousness, she was lying on the tiles, and all around was still
and normal. She got up, found and lighted her candle, and spent the
rest of the evening, without further adventure, in the drawing-room. All the week Lady Adela struggled hard to master a disinclination to
spend another evening alone in the house, and when Friday came she
succumbed to her fears. The servants were poor, foolish things, but it
was nice to feel that there was something in the house besides ghosts. She sat reading in the drawing-room till late that night, and when she
lolled out of the window to take a farewell look at the sky and stars
before retiring to rest, the sounds of traffic had completely ceased
and the whole city lay bathed in a refreshing silence. It was very
heavenly to stand there and feel the cool, soft air--unaccompanied,
for the first time during the day, by the rattling rumbling sounds of
locomotion and the jarring discordant murmurs of unmusical
voices--fanning her neck and face. Lady Adela, used as she was to the privacy of her yacht, and the
freedom of her big country mansion, where all sounds were regulated at
her will, chafed at the near proximity of her present habitation to
the noisy thoroughfare, and vaguely looked forward to the hours when
shops and theatres were closed, and all screeching, harsh-voiced
products of the gutter were in bed. To her the nights in Waterloo
Place were all too short; the days too long, too long for anything. The heavy, lumbering steps of a policeman at last broke her reverie. She had no desire to arouse his curiosity; besides, her costume had
become somewhat disordered, and she had the strictest sense of
propriety, at least in the presence of the lower orders. Retiring,
therefore, with a sigh of vexation, she sought her bedroom, and, after
the most scrupulous attention to her toilet, put out the lights and
got into bed. It was just one when she fell asleep, and three when she
awoke with a violent start. Why she started puzzled her. She did not
recollect experiencing any very dreadful dream, in fact no dream at
all, and there seemed nothing in the hush--the apparently unbroken
hush--that could in any way account for her action. Why, then, had she
started? She lay still and wondered. Surely everything was just as it
was when she went to sleep! And yet! When she ventured on a diagnosis,
there was something different, something new; she did not think it was
actually in the atmosphere, nor in the silence; she did not know where
it was until she opened her eyes--and then she _knew_. Bending over
her, within a few inches of her face, was another face, the ghastly
caricature of a human face. It was on a larger scale than that of any
mortal Lady Adela had ever seen; it was long in proportion to its
width--indeed, she could not make out where the cranium terminated at
the back, as the hinder portion of it was lost in a mist. The
forehead, which was very receding, was partly covered with a mass of
lank, black hair, that fell straight down into space; there were no
neck nor shoulders, at least none had materialised; the skin was
leaden-hued, and the emaciation so extreme that the raw cheek-bones
had burst through in places; the size of the eye sockets which
appeared monstrous, was emphasised by the fact that the eyes were
considerably sunken; the lips were curled downwards and tightly shut,
and the whole expression of the withered mouth, as indeed that of the
entire face, was one of bestial, diabolical malignity. Lady Adela's
heart momentarily stopped, her blood ran cold, she was petrified; and
as she stared helplessly at the dark eyes pressed close to hers, she
saw them suddenly suffuse with fiendish glee. The most frightful
change then took place: the upper lip writhed away from a few greenish
yellow stumps; the lower jaw fell with a metallic click, leaving the
mouth widely open, and disclosing to Lady Adela's shocked vision a
black and bloated tongue; the eyeballs rolled up and entirely
disappeared, whilst their places were immediately filled with the
foulest and most loathsome indications of advanced decay. A strong,
vibratory movement suddenly made all the bones in the head rattle and
the tongue wag, whilst from the jaws, as if belched up from some
deep-down well, came a gust of wind, putrescent with the ravages of
the tomb, and yet, at the same time, tainted with the same sweet,
sickly odour with which Lady Adela had latterly become so familiar. This was the culminating act; the head then receded, and, growing
fainter and fainter, gradually disappeared altogether. Lady Adela was
now more than satisfied,--there was not a house more horribly haunted
in Scotland,--and nothing on earth would induce her to remain in it
another night.