At last the candle inside the lantern’s glass began to flicker feebly, and then came the certainty that perseverance had been rewarded.  Light filled the narrow way, and she looked timidly down the rickety stone steps, dreading to venture into the blackness beyond.  Ahead lay the possibility of escape, behind lay failure and the certainty that no other opportunity would be afforded her.  So she bravely went down the steps, her knees weakly striking against each other, the lantern jangling noisily against the stone wall.

How she managed to reach the chamber under the tower she could not have told afterward; she did not know at the time.  At last, however, she stood, with blood chilled to the curdling point, in the center of the room that knew the way to the outside world.  Pounding on the rocky walls with a piece of stone against which her foot had struck, she at length found a block that gave forth the hollow sound she longed to hear.  Here, then, was the key to the passage, and it only remained for her to discover the means by which the osbtruction could be moved from the opening.

For half an hour, cold with fear and nervousness, she sought for the traditional spring, but her efforts were in vain.  There was absolutely no solution, and it dawned upon her that she was doomed to return to the upper world defeated.  Indeed, unless she could make those in the castle hear her cries, it was possible that she might actually die of starvation in the pitiless cavern.  The lantern dropped from her palsied fingers, and she half sank against the stubborn door in the wall.  To be back once more in the rooms above, with cheery human beings instead of with the spirits of she knew not how many murdered men and women, was now her only desire, her only petition.

The contact of her body with the slab in some way brought about the result for which she had striven.  The door moved slowly downward and a dash of freezing air came from the widening aperture at the top, blowing damp across her face.  Staggering away from the ghostlike hole that seemed to grin fiendishly until it spread itself into a long, black gulf with eyes, a voice, and clammy hands, she grabbed up the still lighted lantern and cried aloud in a frenzy of fear.  The door slowly sank out of sight and the way was open but her courage was gone.  What was beyond that black hole?  Could she live in the foul air that poured forth from that dismal mouth?  Trembling like a leaf, she lifted the lantern and peered into the aperture, standing quite close to the edge.

Her eyes fastened themselves in mute horror upon the object that first met their gaze; she could not breathe, her heart ceased beating, and every vestige of life seemed to pass beyond recall.  She was looking upon the skeleton of a human being, crouched, hunched against the wall of the narrow passage, a headless skeleton, for the skull rolled out against her feet as the sliding door sank below the level.  Slowly she backed away from the door, not knowing what she did, conscious only that her eyes could not be drawn from the horrifying spectacle.