I advanced a step nearer to the door.
“Who’s there?” I cried loudly. “What do you want?”
The flap of the letter box began to move, and I formed a sudden determination. Making no sound in my heelless Turkish slippers I crept close up to the door and dropped upon my knees.
Thereupon the flap became fully lifted, but from where I crouched beneath it I was unable to see who or what was looking in; yet I hesitated no longer. I suddenly raised myself and thrust the revolver barrel through the opening!
“Who are you?” I cried. “Answer or I fire!”—and along the barrel I peered out on to the landing.
Still no one answered. But something impalpable—a powder—a vapour—to this hour I do not know what—enveloped me with its nauseating fumes; was puffed fully into my face! My eyes, my mouth, my nostrils became choked up, it seemed, with a deadly stifling perfume.
Wildly, feeling that everything about me was slipping away, that I was sinking into a void, for ought I knew that of dissolution, I pulled the trigger once, twice, thrice...
“My God!”—the words choked in my throat and I reeled back into the passage—“it’s not loaded!”
I threw up my arms to save myself, lurched, and fell forward into what seemed a bottomless pit.