“A skull!” mumbled the Phantom. Under ordinary circumstances he could have looked upon it calmly, but the stillness and darkness, broken only by the pallid glow in the distance, gave the object a mystical touch that cast a spell over his senses.
His nerves had withstood physical fear in its most severe forms, but they quavered a little before this subtle and bewildering manifestation. His weakness nettled him and he closed his eyes and sought to banish the thing from his mind, but the vision as it lingered in his imagination was even more disturbing than the reality. Again he opened his eyes and looked fixedly to one side, determined not to let an inanimate thing of bone upset his nerves. A slight shiver ran through him as, among the shadows at the wall, he discerned a dim shape. He could barely distinguish its outlines, but again he received an impression of something that had once pulsed with life and was now hollow and dead. He peered sharply at the blurred shape standing grimly erect a few feet from his chair, and presently he saw what it was.
Then he laughed, but the laugh sounded a trifle forced. He had seen a similar object before, in one of the glass cages in Doctor Bimble’s laboratory, but he had regarded it with no stronger feeling than mild curiosity. Now, in the stillness and gloom, the sight made him feel as if a dead hand had touched him. He turned his head toward the opposite wall, and there, etched dimly in the shadows, was another figure. A few feet away he glimpsed a third, and in the distance were a fourth and a fifth.
In the air there was a creeping chill, like a breath from a tomb. He felt no fear, but he experienced the acute depression that seizes even the strongest when standing in the presence of death, and his physical and mental distress was aggravated by his inability to move even an arm. The stifling air made him feel as though he were in a black and silent mausoleum, with dead things on all sides.
An unaccountable fascination caused him to look once more at the luminous circle. The greenish light seemed to have grown a trifle dimmer, but the waning of the glow only lent an added touch of hideousness to the object in the center of the nimbus. It fired his imagination, and he fancied that something loathsome was staring out at him through the black hollows where the eyes had been.
As the circular light faded, he thought it was drawing closer to where he sat. As if gently propelled by an invisible hand, the paling circle of light was creeping slowly nearer, moving steadily toward his chair.
He pulled at the ropes. Now the fringe of light was so faint that the skull was only a shapeless blur, but its dimness rendered its creeping approach all the more uncanny. In a little while, if it continued in its present course, it would touch his face. He wondered why his senses shrank from the encounter, for he knew that the contact could not harm him.
Finally the light died, leaving an intense, oppressive darkness. Though he could neither hear nor see, he was aware that the object was still creeping toward him and that in a few moments he would feel its chilling touch. There was something subtly enervating about its silent and stealthy advance, something that inspired him with a feeling he had never experienced when standing face to face with a foe of flesh and blood.
Then, without apparent cause, he sensed a change in the atmosphere. The oppression suddenly left him, and he knew instinctively that something had halted the advance of the dreaded thing. He drew a long, deep breath as he tried to account for the relief that had come so suddenly to him.
His thoughts were interrupted by the opening of a door at his back and the entrance of two men. He could not see them, but their footfalls told him that they were groping toward the point where he sat. Silently they fell to work and released him from the chair, but his arms and legs were still tied and he was as helpless as before. He wondered, as he was being carried from the room, what fresh ordeal awaited him.