mong themselves that he shunned darkness because he feared that
out of that darkness might return the vision of his deed, bloodied and
shocking and hideous. And they were right. He did so fear, and he
feared mightily, constantly and unendingly.

That fear, along with the behavior which became from that night
thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set
over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime
was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the
twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or
take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the
midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of
stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's
sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which
would keep the darkness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering
gloom into which from window or door he would not look and dared not
look.

There were trees about his house, cottonwoods and sycamores and one
noble elm branching like a lyre. He chopped them all down and had the
roots grubbed out. The vines which covered his porch were shorn away. To
these things many were witnesses. What transformations he worked within
the walls were largely known by hearsay through the medium of Aunt
Kassie, the old negress who served him as cook and chambermaid and was
his only house servant. To half-fearsome, half-fascinated audiences of
her own color, whose members in time communicated what she told to
their white employers, she related how with his own hands, bringing a
crude carpentry into play, her master ripped out certain dark closets
and abolished a secluded and gloomy recess beneath a hall staircase, and
how privily he called in men who strung his ceilings with electric
lights, although already the building was piped for gas; and how, for
final touches, he placed in various parts of his bedroom tallow dips and
oil lamps to be lit before twilight and to burn all night, so that
though the gas sometime should fail and the electric bulbs blink out,
there still would be abundant lighting about him. His became the house
which harbored no single shadow save only the shadow of morbid dread
which lived within its owner's bosom. An orthodox haunted house should
by rights be deserted and dark. This house, haunted if ever one was,
differed from the orthodox conception. It w