It was ten o’clock. I was waiting impatiently for the last hour to pass. I had seated myself in a rocking-chair by the bed, my suitcase beside me, my back to the mirror. The rain no longer fell. I must have dozed off.
But all at once I was wide awake, my heart beating furiously. Something had touched me. I leapt to my feet, and, turning sharply, my eyes fell upon the mirror. In it I saw the door just as I had seen it the other night, and the figure fumbling with the bolt. I wheeled around, but there was nothing there.
I told myself that I was dreaming again, that Arthur was asleep in his bed. But I trembled as I opened the door of his room and peered in. The room was empty, the bed not even crumpled. Lighting a match, I groped my way through the bath-room into the library.
The moon had come from under a cloud and was pouring in a silvery flood through the windows, but Arthur was not there. I stumbled back into my room.
The moon was there, too.... And the door, the door in the corner was half open. The bolt had been drawn. In the darkness I could just make out a flight of steps that wound upward.
I could no longer hesitate. Striking another match, I climbed the black stairway.
When I reached the top I found myself in total darkness, for the blinds were tightly closed. Realizing that the room was probably a duplicate of the one below, I felt along the wall until I came to the gas jet. For a moment the flame flickered, then burned bright and clear.
O God! what was it I saw? A table, thick with dust, and something wrapped in a reddish-brown dressing-gown, that sat with its elbows propped upon it.
How long had it been sitting there that it had grown more dry than the dust upon the table! For how many thousands of days and nights had the flesh rotted from that grinning skull!
In its bony fingers it still clutched a pencil. In front of it lay a sheet of scratch paper, yellow with age. With trembling fingers I brushed away the dust. It was dated October 19, 1912. It read: