The pale atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air of some near conflagration.  The larvae grew lurid as things that live in fire.  Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the dark Shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into that darkness all returned.

As the gloom receded, the Shadow was wholly gone.  Slowly as it had been withdrawn, the flame grew again into the candles on the table, again into the fuel in the grate.  The whole room came once more calmly, healthfully into sight.

The two doors were still closed, the door communicating with the servants’ room still locked.  In the corner of the wall, into which he had so convulsively niched himself, lay the dog.  I called to him—­no movement; I approached—­the animal was dead; his eyes protruded; his tongue out of his mouth; the froth gathered round his jaws.  I took him in my arms; I brought him to the fire; I felt acute grief for the loss of my poor favourite—­acute self-reproach; I accused myself of his death; I imagined he had died of fright.  But what was my surprise on finding that his neck was actually broken—­actually twisted out of the vertebrae.  Had this been done in the dark?—­must it not have been by a hand human as mine?—­must there not have been a human agency all the while in that room?  Good cause to suspect it.  I cannot tell.  I cannot do more than state the fact fairly; the reader may draw his own inference.

Another surprising circumstance—­my watch was restored to the table from which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn; but it had stopped at the very moment it was so withdrawn; nor, despite all the skill of the watchmaker, has it ever gone since—­that is, it will go in a strange erratic way for a few hours, and then comes to a dead stop—­it is worthless.

Nothing more chanced for the rest of the night.  Nor, indeed, had I long to wait before the dawn broke.  Not till it was broad daylight did I quit the haunted house.  Before I did so, I revisited the little blind room in which my servant and myself had been for a time imprisoned.  I had a strong impression—­for which I could not account—­that from that room had originated the mechanism of the phenomena—­if I may use the term—­which had been experienced in my chamber.  And though I entered it now in the clear day, with the sun peering through the filmy window, I still felt, as I stood on its floor, the creep of the horror which I had first there experienced the night before, and which had been so aggravated by what had passed in my own chamber.  I could not, indeed, bear to stay more than half a minute within those walls.  I descended the stairs, and again I heard the footfall before me; and when I opened the street door, I thought I could distinguish a very low laugh.  I gained my own home, expecting to find my runaway servant there.  But he had not presented himself; nor did I hear more of him for three days, when I received a letter from him, dated from Liverpool, to this effect:—­