“Will of Josiah Bateman. Dated June 10, 1855.”
The papers had that musty smell peculiar to old documents, and to which I was entirely accustomed, but that night the odor had a sickening effect upon me. It seemed to dry up the very air and make it suffocating with the horrible stench of decay. I stood up and stretched my neck to get an upper stratum of air, but the whole room seemed tainted with the foul cloying breath.
I sat down at the desk again and turned my back upon the lamp so that the light would fall over my shoulder. With a shudder I picked up the envelope, which seemed to reek with the unendurable odor, and as I did so, noticed the window close beside me. Why had I not thought of that before? I dropped the paper and rose to open the sash.
The darkness outside and the light within had turned the window pane into a mirror reflecting the room behind me with perfect clearness. The whole effect was fearfully weird, and for an instant it held me spellbound. In the foreground was my own ghastly white face—the eyes apparently gazing not into mine, but at something behind me. In the background the lamp, the desk, the papers, and the brass-nailed green baize door, jet black in the night light, stood out clearly.
As I stared into this reflected room, I noted a peculiar dark spot on the oval glass panel of the door. Was it at this my mirrored eyes seemed to look?
I knew I was in no fit condition to withstand the tricks of imagination, so I turned, not without an effort, to ascertain what really caused this strange reflection. But my imagination would have served my over-wrought nerves better than the fact, for the dark spot was unquestionably something pressed against the glass from outside the room. Steadily I gazed at this object, and endeavored with all the power I possessed to reason myself out of the nameless dread that had settled down upon me.
It could not be what it seemed.—Hair against the panel of that coffin-like door was too full of horrible suggestions! It must be a mop which had fallen against the glass.—Of course it must be that. A mop, too, would account for those damp breath stains on the glass.
Thus I reasoned, never taking my eyes off that oval pane in the door. But as I gazed my theory fell to pieces and my reasoning stopped. The moist spots on the glass began to expand and contract, vanish and reappear slowly and regularly as to some heavy breathing. Every exhalation seemed to blow that fearful odor of death toward my nostrils!
After a few moments however I could no longer deceive myself, for my eyes, accustomed to the light, made out too plainly for doubt a face pressed close against the glass watching my every movement.
With that discovery my reason and coolness seemed to return instantly. Without taking my eyes off the face framed in the door panel, I slid open the drawer immediately beneath my hand, groped for, and at last grasped, the revolver I always kept there.