Of a sudden she opened her eyes wide, straining her pupils against the darkness. She could not be quite sure, but she thought a shadow had emerged from one of the exits and was gliding silently toward the woman in the rear. She sat very still while little shivers ran up and down her back, and she was vaguely wondering at an odd change in Starr’s voice. It drooped, grew hoarse and uncertain, and there were pauses between the words. She felt he was trying to conquer a sense of unreasoning dread. A feeling of dizziness seized her, but her imagination formed a picture of a dark shape stealing softly, silently toward where the woman sat.
Acting on an irresistible impulse, she rose and hurried from the box, deaf to her father’s mild remonstrance. Without volition on her part, her feet seemed to carry her swiftly up the heavily carpeted aisle. She heard a jumble of noises in her head and felt a tightening at the throat. She rounded the last tier of seats and rushed forward, guided only by a feeble red gleam over one of the exits. A dim shape, a shade darker than the surrounding dusk, was moving a few feet ahead of her.
All at once, as if the hesitancy in Starr’s voice had cast a deadening spell over the actors and the audience, an uneasy silence fell upon the house. Helen sensed it as she sped along in the wake of the creeping shadow. A few steps more, and she could make out the woman’s figure, vaguely outlined against the gloom, and just behind it stood the shadowy shape whose furtive movements Helen had followed since she left the box.
The happenings of the next few moments were like a swift, horrible dream. Suddenly she felt limp and cold. Within reach of her arm a hand moved, and the motion seemed to strike a hideous note through the surrounding stillness. A cry rose and died in her throat. She staggered back against a post and stood there motionless while a dark shape brushed past her. She recoiled as a hand touched hers in passing, and she caught a fleeting but unforgettable glimpse of a face.
It was gone in a moment, but the swarthy features, framed by coarse black hair that reached to the shoulders, the flat, short nose, the thick and jutting lower lip, the great eyes with their lambent flames that seemed to send streaks of fire into the darkness, gave her a feeling that something evil and loathsome had passed.
[CHAPTER II—“MR. SHEI”]
For a moment longer she leaned against the pillar. Then she heard laughter—laughter that was low and sibilant and edged with the insinuating twang that sometimes characterizes the laughter of a madman. It was soft and gentle, yet she thought it was the most fearful sound she had ever heard. It gripped and shook her, and she knew instinctively that it came from the woman in the rear.
Something urged her forward, but her nerves and limbs rebelled. Others beside herself must have heard that soul-shaking laughter, for the hush that had fallen over the house ended abruptly in a jumble of loud sounds. The curtain descended with a rhythmic chugging, there were exclamations of surprise and horror, and the audience sprang from their seats as the lights went on. With startled faces they looked to left and right and rear, and several of them excitedly inquired what had happened. No one seemed to know, but as if moved by a single impulse, they scrambled in the direction whence the laughter came. Then they stopped, huddled in a half circle, and stared.
What they saw seemed all the stranger by contrast with the flowery scents in the air and the rich and brilliant hues of the surroundings. All eyes were fixed on the woman whose peculiar demeanor had aroused Helen’s interest. Her extravagant attire and her wild, gypsylike beauty seemed typical of the oddly assorted characters who made up Vincent Starr’s circle of intimates. A filmy drapery embroidered with gold-touched flowers hung like an iridescent fog over her gown of silver tissue. Her bare arm was flung out over the top of the next seat, and her head had fallen back against the elbow.
Murmurs of awe and consternation fell from the lips of the onlookers. Before their eyes the pallor of death was creeping into the woman’s face, and her cheeks and forehead were beaded with the perspiration of the death struggle. Now and then her figure writhed with a slow, snakelike motion. A film of gray was gradually dimming the luster of the eyes. Only the lips were still red.