“Good God, Katherine!  It’s too big.  Whatever it is, we can’t fight it.”

She looked for some time down the corridor at the black entrance of the sinister room.  At last she turned and walked to the banister.  She called: 

“Hartley!  Will you come up?”

Bobby wondered at the steadiness of her voice.  The murmuring below ceased.  Graham ran up the stairs.  Her summons had been warning enough.  Their attitudes, as Graham reached the upper hall, were eloquent of Bobby’s failure.

“You didn’t get the cast and the handkerchief?” he said.

Bobby told briefly what had happened.

“What is one to do?” he ended.  “Even the dead are against me.”

“It’s beyond belief,” Graham said roughly.

He snatched up the candle and entered the corridor.  Uncertainly Katherine and Bobby followed him.  He went straight to the bed and thrust the candle beneath the canopy.  The others could see from the door the change that had taken place.  The body of Howells was turned awkwardly on its side.  The coat pocket was, as Bobby had described it, flat and empty.

Katherine turned and went back to the hall.  Graham’s hand shook as Bobby’s had shaken.

“No tricks, Bobby?”

Bobby couldn’t resent the suspicion which appeared to offer the only explanation of what had happened.  The candle flickered in the draft.

“Look out!” Bobby warned.

The misshapen shadows danced with a multiple vivacity across the walls.  Graham shaded the candle flame, and the shadows became like morbid decorations, gargantuan and motionless.

“It’s madness,” Graham said.  “There’s no explanation of this that we can understand.”

Howells’s straight smile mocked them.  As if in answer to Graham a voice sighed through the room.  Its quality was one with the shadows, unsubstantial and shapeless.  Bobby grasped one of the bed posts and braced himself, listening.  The candle in Graham’s hand commenced to flicker again, and Bobby knew that it hadn’t been his fancy, for Graham listened, too.

It shook again through the heavy, oppressive night, merely accentuated by the candle—­a faint ululation barely detaching itself from silence, straying after a time into the silence again.  At first it was like the grief of a woman heard at a great distance.  But the sound, while it gained no strength, forced on them more and more an abhorrent sense of intimacy.  This crying from an infinite distance filled the room, seemed finally to have its source in the room itself.  After it had sobbed thinly into nothing, its pulsations continued to sigh in Bobby’s ears.  They seemed timed to the renewed and eccentric dancing of the amorphous shadows.

Graham straightened and placed the candle on the bureau.  He seemed more startled than he had been at the unbelievable secretiveness of a dead man.

“You heard it?” Bobby breathed.

Graham nodded.