,--the empty
fireplace, where a thin smoke rose in a spiral from a bit of charred
wood, the mass of the great bed, and, in the very middle, black against
the curious brightness, the armored man, or ghost, or devil, standing,
not suspended, beneath the rusty hook. And with the rending of the wall
the music grew more distinct, though sounding still very, very far away.

Count Albert raised his mailed hand and beckoned to him; then turned,
and stood in the riven wall.

Without a word, Rupert rose and followed him, his pistol in hand. Count
Albert passed through the mighty wall and disappeared in the unearthly
light. Rupert followed mechanically. He felt the crushing of the mortar
beneath his feet, the roughness of the jagged wall where he rested his
hand to steady himself.

The keep rose absolutely isolated among the ruins, yet on passing
through the wall Rupert found himself in a long, uneven corridor, the
floor of which was warped and sagging, while the walls were covered on
one side with big faded portraits of an inferior quality, like those in
the corridor that connects the Pitti and Uffizzi in Florence. Before him
moved the figure of Count Albert,--a black silhouette in the
ever-increasing light. And always the music grew stronger and stranger,
a mad, evil, seductive dance that bewitched even while it disgusted.

In a final blaze of vivid, intolerable light, in a burst of hellish
music that might have come from Bedlam, Rupert stepped from the corridor
into a vast and curious room where at first he saw nothing,
distinguished nothing but a mad, seething whirl of sweeping figures,
white, in a white room, under white light, Count Albert standing before
him, the only dark object to be seen. As his eyes grew accustomed to the
fearful brightness, he knew that he was looking on a dance such as the
damned might see in hell, but such as no living man had ever seen
before.

Around the long, narrow hall, under the fearful light that came from
nowhere, but was omnipresent, swept a rushing stream of unspeakable
horrors, dancing insanely, laughing, gibbering hideously; the dead of
forty years. White, polished skeletons, bare of flesh and vesture,
skeletons clothed in the dreadful rags of dried and rattling sinews, the
tags of tattering grave-clothes flaunting behind them. These were the
dead of many years ago. Then the dead of more recent times, with yellow
bones showing only here and there, the long and insecure hair of their