Mother Borton put her hand to her throat as though she choked, and was silent for a moment. Then she continued:
“I'll be to blame if I don't tell you—I must tell you. Are you listening?”
Her voice came thick and strange, and her eyes wandered anxiously about, searching the heavy shadows with a look of growing fear.
The candle burned down till it guttered and flickered in its pool of melted tallow, and the shadows it threw upon wall and ceiling seemed instinct with an impish life of their own, as though they were dark spirits from the pit come to mock the final hours of the life that was ebbing away before me.
“I am listening,” I replied.
“You must know—you must—know,—I must tell you. The boy—the woman is—”
On a sudden Mother Borton sat bolt upright in bed, and a shriek, so long, so shrill, so freighted with terror, came from her lips that I shrank from her and trembled, faint with the horror of the place.
“They come—there, they come!” she cried, and throwing up her arms she fell back on the bed.
The candle shot up into flame, sputtered an instant, and was gone. And I was alone with the darkness and the dead.