He whimpered. He dared not go without that case. He dared not reach in his hand to seize it. He sobbed a little with pure terror. Then, glassy-eyed with horror, he swung his foot in a sudden, nervous kick. If he could kick the case from its insecure position, he could retrieve it from the floor....
He was quivering. The kick failed. The thing remained motionless, but it seemed to him that it was tensing itself for a sudden effort.... The murderer wrung his hands. He kicked again, and sheer icy fear flowed through his veins as he felt the soft resistance of the cloth against his foot. But he missed.
He heard a curious little chuckling sound that could not possibly have come from anything but a human throat. It was a human voice. It was syllables, divided to form words, but words in a strangled, distant, ghastly tone....
Drenched in the sweat of undiluted horror, the murderer swung his foot a third time, desperately, with his eyes glassy and the breath whistling in his throat.
Then he screamed....
The flashlight dropped to the floor. There was utter darkness. There was no noise for seconds save those chuckling sounds. They were louder, now. The murderer stood rigid, balanced upon one foot, his eyes terrible. He screamed again. Something had hold of his foot. Something grasped at his trouser-leg and tugged at it gently. Not strongly. Gently. But it was tugging....
The murderer screamed and screamed, with his eyes the eyes of a man in the depths of hell. Not because his foot was caught, but because something was pulling him, weakly but inexorably, in furtive little tugs, toward the man in the chair—who was dead.
Then sharp nails sank in his flesh and the murderer broke away. He fell, and in falling his slipping foot crashed against the leg of the chair, and that turned over upon him....
The telephone operator had been listening since the receiver was flung off its hook by the fall of the telephone. She had spoken several times, asking what was wanted, and the sound had issued from the receiver on the floor like—well—like the chuckle of a man amused in a horrible fashion. When she heard screaming, she sent men to investigate. And they found a dead man tumbled out of the chair in which he had died, and another man crawling about the room. The living man was crawling about on his hands and knees, his eyes wide and staring and terrified, while a huge pet cat made playful pounces at his trouser-leg, tugging at it, worrying it, pulling backward upon it. And whenever the cat pulled at the bit of cloth, the living man screamed in a sickly, terrified fashion.