A nausea of brain and soul swept him. Then again the half-sane interval darkened luridly into hallucination, but now it was a new hallucination.
The figure of the woman on the couch seemed to move. Instead of the filmy draperies torn by his own hand, she wore the habiliments of poverty and looked at him out of a face of plebeian prettiness; a face of dimly confused features. The apparition rose and stood waveringly upright. "You murdered me, too!" it said in a voice of vague simplicity. Eben Tollman tried to scream and could not.
He covered his eyes with his palms, but failed to shut out the image because it lay deeper than the retina's curtain.
"I'm one of the others you murdered," went on the voice. "I'm Minnie Ray."
Tollman straightened suddenly up. The vagary had passed—but on the couch the two immovable figures remained.
Tollman had never been a handsome man, but his face and carriage had held a certain stiff semblance of dignity. Now his cheeks flamed with the temperature which must, without the immediate administration of a powerful sedative, burn out his life with its crisping and charring virulence. His eyes were no longer human, but transformed into that kinship with those of wild beasts or red embers that comes with acute mania.
As the shadows wavered in the room which he had made a place of murder, there rose out of them taunting, accusing figures. He seemed to see Hagan, the detective, grotesquely converted into an executioner clad in red and Sam Haymond launching against him the anathema of the Church. There were shapes of strange things neither human, animal nor reptile—but wholly monstrous—emerging greedily from filthy lairs and creeping toward him with sinuous movements through a sea of slime.
For the furies that haunted Orestes, because of his classic crime, had come back to pursue Eben Tollman.
He laughed as maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through the house and came back in echo, as the retort of the furies.
One human sense was left: the sense of flight: the impulse to leave the place where Death held dominion and Death's avengers came in unclean and rapacious hordes.