They returned to the hall and stood in a half circle about the empty chair, where a little while ago Silas Blackburn had cowered, mouthing snatches of his fear—"I'm not dead! I tell you I'm not dead! They can't make me go back—"
The echoes of that fear still shocked their ears.
There was a hypnotic power about the vacancy as there had been about the emptiness in the burial ground. Paredes spoke gropingly.
"What would we find," he whispered, "if we went to the cemetery and looked again in the coffin?"
"Why should he have come back at all?" Groom mused.
Robinson opened the front door.
"You know he might have gone this way."
But already the snow had obliterated the signs of their own passage in and out. It showed no fresh marks.
"Silas Blackburn has not gone that way in the body," Doctor Groom rumbled.
The storm was more violent. It discouraged the idea of examining the graveyard again before morning.