"the whole place is ablaze!"

The key turned in the lock at last. For half a second Saunders stopped
to look back. Afterwards he could never be quite sure as to what he had
seen, but at the time he thought that something black and charred was
creeping slowly, very slowly, from the mass of flames toward Eustace
Borlsover. For a moment he thought of returning to his friend, but the
noise and the smell of the burning sent him running down the passage
crying, "Fire! Fire!" He rushed to the telephone to summon help, and
then back to the bathroom--he should have thought of that before--for
water. As he burst open the bedroom door there came a scream of terror
which ended suddenly, and then the sound of a heavy fall.

* * * * *

This is the story which I heard on successive Saturday evenings from the
senior mathematical master at a second-rate suburban school. For
Saunders has had to earn a living in a way which other men might reckon
less congenial than his old manner of life. I had mentioned by chance
the name of Adrian Borlsover, and wondered at the time why he changed
the conversation with such unusual abruptness. A week later, Saunders
began to tell me something of his own history--sordid enough, though
shielded with a reserve I could well understand, for it had to cover
not only his failings but those of a dead friend. Of the final tragedy
he was at first especially loath to speak, and it was only gradually
that I was able to piece together the narrative of the preceding pages.
Saunders was reluctant to draw any conclusions. At one time he thought
that the fingered beast had been animated by the spirit of Sigismund
Borlsover, a sinister eighteenth-century ancestor, who, according to
legend, built and worshipped in the ugly pagan temple that overlooked
the lake. At another time Saunders believed the spirit to belong to a
man whom Eustace had once employed as a laboratory assistant, "a
black-haired spiteful little brute," he said, "who died cursing his
doctor because the fellow couldn't help him to live to settle some
paltry score with Borlsover."

From the point of view of direct contemporary evidence, Saunders's story
is practically uncorroborated. All the letters mentioned in the
narrative were destroyed, with the exception of the last note which
Eustace received, or rather which he would have received had not
Saunders intercepted it. That I have seen myself. The handwriting was
thin