hideous heads writhing in the beating air. Then green and gray horrors,
bloated and shapeless, stained with earth or dripping with spattering
water; and here and there white, beautiful things, like chiselled ivory,
the dead of yesterday, locked it may be, in the mummy arms of rattling
skeletons.

Round and round the cursed room, a swaying, swirling maelstrom of death,
while the air grew thick with miasma, the floor foul with shreds of
shrouds, and yellow parchment, clattering bones, and wisps of tangled
hair.

And in the very midst of this ring of death, a sight not for words nor
for thought, a sight to blast forever the mind of the man who looked
upon it: a leaping, writhing dance of Count Albert's victims, the score
of beautiful women and reckless men who danced to their awful death
while the castle burned around them, charred and shapeless now, a living
charnel-house of nameless horror.

Count Albert, who had stood silent and gloomy, watching the dance of the
damned, turned to Rupert, and for the first time spoke.

"We are ready for you now; dance!"

A prancing horror, dead some dozen years, perhaps, flaunted from the
rushing river of the dead, and leered at Rupert with eyeless skull.

"Dance!"

Rupert stood frozen, motionless.

"Dance!"

His hard lips moved. "Not if the devil came from hell to make me."

Count Albert swept his vast two-handed sword into the f[oe]tid air while
the tide of corruption paused in its swirling, and swept down on Rupert
with gibbering grins.

The room, and the howling dead, and the black portent before him circled
dizzily around, as with a last effort of departing consciousness he
drew his pistol and fired full in the face of Count Albert.

* * * * *

Perfect silence, perfect darkness; not a breath, not a sound: the dead
stillness of a long-sealed tomb. Rupert lay on his back, stunned,
helpless, his pistol clenched in his frozen hand, a smell of powder in
the black air. Where was he? Dead? In hell? He reached his hand out
cautiously; it fell on dusty boards. Outside, far away, a clock struck
three. Had he dreamed? Of course; but how ghastly a dream! With
chattering teeth he called softly,--

"Otto!"

There was no reply, and none when he called again and again. He
staggered weakly to his feet, groping for matches and candles. A panic
of abject terror came on him; the matches were gone! He turned towards
the fireplace: a single coal glowed