Opening my eyes, I perceived the apartment flooded with a bright unnatural light that apparently emanated from, or at all events accompanied, the figure of a little old woman with yellow hair and a heliotrope skirt. I noticed these idiosyncrasies of person and dress directly, the nature of the light accentuating them, and my senses being, as they always are in the presence of superphysical phenomena, wonderfully and painfully acute.
Standing in front of the dressing-table, the eccentric individual was examining herself with the greatest curiosity in the crazy looking-glass to which allusion has already been made.
Her profile was angular, her lack of colour ghastly, whilst from her ears hung that style of drop-earring worn by ladies in the days of the crinoline; otherwise her costume might have belonged to the latter seventies or early eighties. There was nothing actually HORRIBLE about her, save her reflection, and as my eyes turned with irresistible fascination towards the looking-glass, my blood turned to ice. The surface of the mirror, made preternaturally bright, flashed back the most hideous, the most incomparably HIDEOUS image of Fear.
Never! never in all my life had I seen depicted in aught but Wiertz’s pictures such inconceivably awful terror as that which confronted me there—and now as I gazed at it, a sickly curiosity seized me as to what could be the origin of such Hellish Fear. Was it Fear of Death; of the Unknown metetherical Abysses; of Eternal Damnation; of what?
Then—as I followed the direction of the dilating pupils—I saw—God help me—the Cause! Descending from a few inches above her head were the snake-like coils of a rope. Had I been able to turn my head, maybe I should have seen whence they came; but I could not move a muscle, and could only feel the keynote to some great and hitherto unsolvable mystery was at hand but purposely hidden from me.
There was scant time for speculation. The enactment of this drama was brief as it was lurid; uttering an appalling scream that was quickly converted into a gurgle of the most blood-curdling significance, the old lady clawed the air with her spidery fingers.
The murderer was pitiless, the noose coming to with an irresistible snap, jerked the wretched victim off her feet.
For one instant—the most harrowing of all—I watched her falling backwards; watched the changing of her deadly pallor into a deep and vivid purple, watched the rolling of her starting eyeballs, the foam-flakes on her lips, and the frenzied movements of her stiffening arms and then—THEN—as she struck the ground with a reverberating crash—all was darkness. The ghostly tragedy for this night at least was over.
This I realised, but my nerves being too completely unstrung by what I had witnessed to allow me to sleep, I crept under the counterpane and lay there shivering till the welcome rays of early dawn converted the room into another place. My first movement was to examine the scene of the ghostly murder, and upon turning up the carpet, I discovered not a bloodstain, but a comparatively new piece of boarding!
With that, drawing my own conclusions, I had to rest content—there was nothing else in the room that could in any way have been transmuted into evidence.