De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and
opened the clock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating
out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a bearded
mask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal. *       *       *       *       *

A year passed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His
estate is still unsettled. The Boston address from which one "Swami
Chandraputra" sent inquiries to various mystics in 1930-31-32 was
indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left shortly before the
date of the New Orleans conference and has never been seen since. He
was said to be dark, expressionless, and bearded, and his landlord
thinks the swarthy mask--which was duly exhibited--looks very much
like him. He was never, however, suspected of any connection with the
nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs. The hills behind
Arkham were searched for the "metal envelope," but nothing of the sort
was ever found. However, a clerk in Arkham's First National Bank does
recall a queer turbaned man who cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in
October, 1930. De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. After all, what was proved? There was a story. There was a key which
might have been forged from one of the pictures Carter had freely
distributed in 1928. There were papers--all indecisive. There was a
masked stranger, but who now living saw behind the mask? Amidst the
strain and the olibanum fumes that act of vanishing in the clock might
easily have been a dual hallucination. Hindoos know much of hypnotism. Reason proclaims the "Swami" a criminal with designs on Randolph
Carter's estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock. Was it rage _alone_ which caused it? And some things in that story.... In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with
olibanum fumes, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny often sits listening
with vague sensations to the abnormal rhythm of that hieroglyphed,