I decided to try another plan; I called to him.  My voice had a thin weak sound, far away and quite unreal, and there was no answer to it.  Hark, though!  There was something that might have been a very faint voice near me!

I called again, this time with greater distinctness, “Shorthouse, where are you? can you hear me?”

There certainly was a sound, but it was not a voice.  Something was moving.  It was someone shuffling along, and it seemed to be outside the barn.  I was afraid to call again, and the sound continued.  It was an ordinary sound enough, no doubt, but it came to me just then as something unusual and unpleasant.  Ordinary sounds remain ordinary only so long as one is not listening to them; under the influence of intense listening they become unusual, portentous, and therefore extraordinary.  So, this common sound came to me as something uncommon, disagreeable.  It conveyed, too, an impression of stealth.  And with it there was another, a slighter sound.

Just at this minute the wind bore faintly over the field the sound of the stable clock, a mile away.  It was three o’clock; the hour when life’s pulses beat lowest; when poor souls lying between life and death find it hardest to resist.  Vividly I remember this thought crashing through my brain with a sound of thunder, and I realised that the strain on my nerves was nearing the limit, and that something would have to be done at once if I was to reclaim my self-control at all.

When thinking over afterwards the events of this dreadful night, it has always seemed strange to me that my second nightmare, so vivid in its terror and its nearness, should have furnished me with no inkling of what was really going on all this while; and that I should not have been able to put two and two together, or have discovered sooner than I did what this sound was and where it came from.  I can well believe that the vile scheming which lay behind the whole experience found it an easy trifle to direct my hearing amiss; though, of course, it may equally well have been due to the confused condition of my mind at the time and to the general nervous tension under which I was undoubtedly suffering.

But, whatever the cause for my stupidity at first in failing to trace the sound to its proper source, I can only say here that it was with a shock of unexampled horror that my eye suddenly glanced upwards and caught sight of the figure moving in the shadows above my head among the rafters.  Up to this moment I had thought that it was somebody outside the barn, crawling round the walls till it came to a door; and the rush of horror that froze my heart when I looked up and saw that it was Shorthouse creeping stealthily along a beam, is something altogether beyond the power of words to describe.

He was staring intently down upon me, and I knew at once that it was he who had been watching me.