Abruptly, as the quick flame ate downward to his finger-tips, he made a short, backward step—stumbled—and the box fell from his nerveless hand, the match winked out, and at one stride the dominion of the dark enveloped him.
He bent swiftly, with frantic fingers searching in the mold, scratching, clawing in a fever of anxiety.
He found—nothing. Then, as if impelled from behind by an inexorable Force, he began to ran, stumbling, falling, bruising himself against the sharp, unseen angles of the passageway along which he fled....
Time had merged into an eternity of physical pain and mental torture, of corroding fear which left him in a sweat of agony as he fared onward in his blundering flight. The sense of direction which in the pitch blackness renders the familiar outlines of one’s very bed-chamber strangely distorted—this had become confused in his first headlong rush away from the scene of that which was branded upon his heart in letters of fire.
Now, in his warped and twisted brain the germ of a thought grew, expanded, flowered abruptly in an insane cacophony of sound.
A laugh, reedy, discordant, cackling echoed in his ears, beginning in a low chuckle, then rising all about him in a furious stridor of sound. It was as if the demons of the place were welcoming him to their midst as one worthy of their company.
Again he fell prone, groveling in the mold in an ecstasy of terror at the unrecognizable mouthings which issued from his throat. But even as his insanity peopled the void about him with shapes of terror, in especial the hideous Shape which he knew even now followed him, he got somehow to his feet, arose, and lurched headlong into a recess in the rocky corridor, which would have been familiar could he have but beheld it even in the brief flaring of a match.
It was then that he heard the ceaseless, slow dripping that smote him afresh with an indescribable, crawling fear, beside which his previous insane panic had been as nothing. For a moment he heard also a gibbering—a squeaking, a rustle which with his coming ceased abruptly in a faint shadow of sound. For the moment, he could have sworn that a slinking, furtive, Something, unbelievably swift, had brushed past his leg, touched him lightly as with the faint, fugitive contact of a dead, wind-blown leaf.
That slow, continuous dripping—too well he knew its meaning, or thought that he did. And in the same breath he became aware of the place in which he stood—recognized it for what it was even in the enveloping blackness.
At any other time he would have known that measured dripping for what it was: the curiously suggestive rhythm of the stalactite’s slow drip-drip, like the sluggish dripping of blood.