He could not see the light; but a current of warm air stealing steadily into the underground indicated the orifice.  It was a welcome draft, for it differed in many features from the noisome, dank and earthy exhalations to which he had luckily become accustomed in his indefinite sojourn.

His surmise was correct.  Through a grating of iron bars, straight at the side and semi-circular at the top, set in massive masonry of some building, in the foundation of which he crouched, he saw, in the vagueness of clouded starlight, the domain of the dead.

On being assured of this, the panic, mastering him before, resumed its sway; it gave him a giant’s strength to escape the fancied, grisly pursuers, and he moved the whole series of bars far enough away to enable him to crawl through the gap.

He stood, exhausted, panting, glad of the relief from the waking nightmare which the darkness encouraged.  His weakness could be accounted for, as his wandering had lasted long; the syncope could not be brief since nearly thirty hours must have transpired from his rush out of the variety music-hall.

Before him, for at his back stood the chapel for services, stretched out the vast cemetery.  Some of the cracked, dilapidated tombs dated back to 1600; others marked the addition in 1788 to the original God’s-acre.  All was hushed; it was difficult to imagine a phantom where neglect seemed to rule.  It was not in this olden part that descendants of the departed flocked on All Saints’ Day to decorate the mausoleums with evergreens, plaster images and artificial immortelle garlands.  Except for a screeching-sparrow, which his first steps dislodged, not a sign of life appeared in this town around which the living city slept as quietly.

His eyes clearing, he believed he descried the gateway and, sure that so large a campo santo would have a warder in hourly attendance, he made his way, deviating as the tombs compelled, toward the entrance.  To his surprise, all was still there, and though a lamp burned in the little stone lodge, it was certainly untenanted.  The gate was ajar; there was no fear of the tenants flitting out bodily for a night’s excursion.

Claudius was dying for refreshment and he was not fastidious about intruding.  A man who has traversed the underlying catacombs need not be delicate about taking a nip of spirits or a hunch of bread.  Both were in a cupboard in the little domicile, supplied with a porter’s chair so ample as to be the watcher’s bed, and a stove where a fire merrily burned, crackling with billets of pine wood.

The disappearance was the more strange, as on a framed placard, at the base of which was a row of brazen knobs, there was a formal injunction for the gatewarder never to go away without his place being taken by another “from sunset to sunrise and an hour after!”

Claudius knew what those knobs and the instructions portended in this adjunct to the charnel house.  The public mortuary was at the other end of the wires from those bells; the custom was to attach them to the dead so that, if their slumbers were not that knowing no waking and they stirred even so little as a finger, the electric transmitter which they agitated would sound the appeal.