The hideous words resounded: “Miscarried! Miscarried!”
Garmonov sat down. He smiled guiltily and cunningly. Sonpolyev looked at him with unseeing eyes.
The clock began to strike in the next room. And to each stroke the uniter of souls responded with the hoarse outcry: “Miscarried!”
And he laughed again his metallic laughter like a wound-up spring. He whirled round and grimaced; he seemed to lose himself in the lifeless yellow electric light.
At the twelfth stroke, the last voice of the passing year, the hideous voice grew silent.
“Miscarried!”
And the horrible laughter of the vanishing monster died away. Garmonov, truly rejoicing over his deliverance from an unhappy fate, rose, and said: “A happy New Year!”
INVOKER OF THE BEAST
I
It was quiet and tranquil, and neither joyous nor sad. There was an electric light in the room. The walls seemed impregnable. The window was overhung by heavy, dark-green draperies, even denser in tone than the green of the wall-paper. Both doors—the large one at the side, and the small one in the depth of the alcove that faced the window—were securely bolted. And there, behind them, reigned darkness and desolation in the broad corridor as well as in the spacious and cold reception-room, where melancholy plants yearned for their native soil.