"Not unless they threw themselves from the side of the tower."
"Well, it's quite impossible to believe that three hundred people have committed suicide during the night without a sound being heard. Quick! let's get to the bottom of this."
Pu-Yi led. He didn't seem really to run, only to glide along the ghostly streets and passages. But I had hard work to keep up with him, all the same. My mouth felt as if it had been sucking a brass tap. The most deadly fear clutched at my heart—that noiseless, pattering run through the deserted town in the air, accompanied always by the mouthing, gibbering ghosts of the mist, was appalling.
We dashed down the last corridor and were brought up by a stout door. Pu-Yi bent down to the handle, turned it gently, and—it opened.
We tiptoed into that room. Directly I was over the threshold, the spiritual odor of death, of violent death, came to me.
A fire of logs was still burning redly upon the hearth. For the rest the room was lit only by its skylight, through which filtered a dirty and opaque illumination which was only sufficient to give every object a shape of the sinister or bizarre. The red glow from the fire glistened upon the polished screen of steel which divided the room into two portions. And it also fell, redly, upon something else.
This was the corpse of Mulligan.
It was seated in a chair which had been pulled up to the screen with its back towards it, as if in mockery and derision of its power to keep it.
He had been strangled by a yard of catgut, twisted, tourniquet-fashion, by a piece of stick at the back of the neck. The catgut had sunk far into the flesh, reducing the neck to less than half its ordinary size, and the great staring head hung down upon one shoulder.
One of the logs in the grate fell with a crackle of sparks. For the rest, dead silence.