ress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were
evidently unsubstantial, impalpable--simulacra--phantasms); and there
was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast
between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that
old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the
corpse-like stillness of the flitting wearer. Just as the male shape
approached the female, the dark Shadow started from the wall, all three
for a moment wrapped in darkness. When the pale light returned, the two
phantoms were as if in the grasp of the Shadow that towered between
them; and there was a blood-stain on the breast of the female; and the
phantom male was leaning on its phantom sword, and blood seemed
trickling fast from the ruffles, from the lace; and the darkness of the
intermediate Shadow swallowed them up--they were gone. And again the
bubbles of light shot, and sailed, and undulated, growing thicker and
thicker and more wildly confused in their movements.

The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the
aperture there came forth the form of an aged woman. In her hand she
held letters--the very letters over which I had seen the Hand close; and
behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen, and
then she opened the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I
saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned--bloated,
bleached--seaweed tangled in his dripping hair; and at her feet lay a
form as of a corpse, and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a
miserable squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes.
And as I looked in the old woman's face, the wrinkles and lines
vanished, and it became a face of youth--hard-eyed, stony, but still
youth; and the Shadow darted forth, and darkened over those phantoms as
it had darkened over the last.

Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently
fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow--malignant, serpent eyes.
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered,
irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from
these globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things
burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so
hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader
of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes
in a drop of wat