"It could be a telegram with bad news," thought Mrs. Tibbets, worrying herself toward the door. "Or the police are here to arrest one of the tenants. Or some desperate criminal has come here to murder us all. Or—"
At this juncture, she opened the door.
She found herself looking up into the sad-eyed, pale face of a man who stood at least six-feet-six inches tall, couldn't have weighed less than two hundred pounds, and was rather startlingly garbed in an ankle-length opera cloak with a flame-colored silk lining.
"I've come about a room," he said, in an enthralling baritone voice, with just the smallest hint of a foreign accent bending the syllables. "My name," he added, with a toothy smile, "is Thobal. Vandor Thobal."
Mrs. Tibbets found herself smiling back, despite the queer goosefleshy feeling she got all over when she saw the length and sharpness of his canines. There was a numbing sort of heat in his deep-set, burning eyes that made her feel rather weak and helpless.
"I'm afraid—" she said, and almost left those two words as her complete statement, "—I'm afraid that I've rented all the rooms. I just had the ad taken out of the paper today."
"Surely you have something ..." he insisted, coming inside her hall and closing the door behind him. He made no move to remove his cloak. "All I require is a place to sleep...."
"I'm so terribly sorry, but I—" Mrs. Tibbets began to worry about Mister Thobal, all at once. What if she turned him away, and he were found in the morning, huddled frozen in an alley somewhere. The fact that it was mid-July didn't stop her mental image of frosty death. Then she brightened. "Perhaps ... I wouldn't show this to anybody, ordinarily, because it's really a terrible sort of place, but I do have a very small room. However, I should warn you: It's down in the cellar."
"Ah!" said Vandor Thobal, his eyes flashing scarlet. "Does it have mice? Cobwebs? Mold?"