I had no clue in the vision as to how the murder had been committed. My victim was a man, and a sensation, vague and cloudy, suggested that a quick poison was the mode of destruction I used, but I never gathered why I murdered him, or what relation, if any, he was to me.
The vision was confined to my miserable sensations of fear of detection, and the trouble was that I seemed utterly powerless to keep away from the scene of my crime, a large mansion in the West End of London.
Not only did I haunt the outside of the house, but I had several times contrived to penetrate into the interior without being discovered, the house having stood empty since the crime.
It was a dark, foggy night when I determined again to effect an entrance, and I listened intently in the street before darting up to the front door and fitting my key in the lock. There was not a sound, and I found myself in the interior with the door softly closed behind me.
I carried a candle, which I was about to light, when I saw that the large hall was not in its usual darkness. A dim light burned in a pendant globe, and looking round I perceived abundant evidences that the house was again occupied. Several pairs of men's gloves were neatly folded on the hall table, and a man's silk hat was neatly covered with a cloth. There was not the faintest sound to be heard in the house, and the hour was between eleven and midnight.
Very softly I crept up the wide staircase. My heart was beating tumultuously, and I was in an agony of apprehension. On the first corridor I entered the room where I had concealed the body of the man I had murdered. I had dragged it there and hidden it in a great dress wardrobe. I opened the wardrobe door and found the interior had been filled with women's clothes, they were swathed in linen sheets. Amongst them I began to search with both hands, but, of course, found no signs of the body, which had long since been removed. However, in some unaccountable way the action of searching seemed to comfort me, and soon I turned to retrace my steps and gain the street once more.
At that second I heard some one approaching, and quick as thought I slipped into the wardrobe and pulled the door close. Some one entered the room and then left it again. In a few more moments the house was again silent as the grave, and I began to creep downstairs very softly.
When halfway down, at a bend which brought me in full view of the hall and the front door in the background, I stopped short at a sound.
Some one was about to enter, some one was fumbling with a latch key at the other side of that door. Another moment and that some one would enter and I would be discovered. There was but one chance. Whoever it was might not come upstairs. He or she might strike off to the left of the hall, where a corridor ran to that end of the house.
I cannot attempt to describe my agonizing terror of suspense, yet I did not lose my presence of mind. Instantaneously I decided what to do, should the one about to enter elect to come straight upstairs.