Wondering who my visitor could be—our only servant, a woman from the nearest village, having left an hour ago—I smoothed my gown and walking hastily to the door threw it open.
As I did so a current of cold air, tainted with the most disgusting and detestable stench conceivable, sent me half staggering, half choking backwards, and I perceived standing on the threshold, not ten paces from me two figures of hellish horror. Featureless, fleshless, foul, clad in the tattered, rotted garments of a monk and nun, they confronted me motionless, silent, and then the voice of my Eunice attracting their attention, they slowly wheeled round and glided ghoulishly along the passage.
I gave one shriek of warning to Eunice as she hove in sight, carrying in her arms a tray of odds and ends for me to sort.
For a second or so she stood too petrified to move—and—then—as the THINGS appeared on the verge of touching her with their long, outstretched arms, she dropped the tray and, uttering a kind of terrified gasp, fled precipitately.
They did not pursue her, but gliding onward with the same mechanical movements, suddenly vanished on reaching the wall at the end of the corridor; nor did we, I am thankful to say see them again.
The SMELL had explained itself.
Anxious to get to Eunice and fearsome lest she should have fainted, I was about to quit the study, when my eyes were attracted to an object on the floor. It was the mysterious volume which, loosened from the shelf in some miraculous fashion, had fallen to the ground, and now lay open, its ponderous, gilded clasps undone and limp.
The fading sunlight concentrating its rays on the pages of the book in a final and prodigiously bloody effort, enabled me to read the following extract: “and for this great and unpardonable sin of the Abbess Hilda and the Monk Nicholas, we—the Saintly and Beloved Abbot Matthew, the learned Franciscan brother Raymond, the laymen and labourers, Barber and Brooks together with I, Sir John Hickson Leigh, Knight did entomb them alive, clasped in each other’s arms, cursing man and blaspheming heaven, on the eve of the 11th day of August, 1521. And of the exact spot in the Abbey of Wolsey wherein they be buried, no man—save we who placed them there—knoweth, nor shall any discover the same until the day cometh when the secrets of all flesh shall be revealed.”
This much I read and no more for the light proving too strong for me, I was compelled to remove my gaze and when I opened my eyes and saw again the volume it had gone, and lo! to my intense and unfeigned amazement it was back again in its customary place on the shelf, nor could the united efforts of myself and daughters remove it from that spot.