"But you did say something."

"Nothing, nonsense. I say: to-morrow, at one o'clock in the afternoon!"

There was a sudden, acute pain in his heart--and he understood that he
would have neither sleep, nor peace, nor joy until that accursed black
hour standing out of the dial should have passed. Only the shadow of the
knowledge of something which no living being could know stood there in
the corner, and that was enough to darken the world and envelop him
with the impenetrable gloom of horror. The once disturbed fear of death
diffused through his body, penetrated into his bones.

He no longer feared the murderers of the next day--they had vanished,
they had been forgotten, they had mingled with the crowd of hostile
faces and incidents which surrounded his life. He now feared something
sudden and inevitable--an apoplectic stroke, heart failure, some foolish
thin little vessel which might suddenly fail to withstand the pressure
of the blood and might burst like a tight glove upon swollen fingers.

His short, thick neck seemed terrible to him. It became unbearable for
him to look upon his short, swollen fingers--to feel how short they were
and how they were filled with the moisture of death. And if before, when
it was dark, he had had to stir in order not to resemble a corpse, now
in the bright, cold, inimical, dreadful light he was so filled with
horror that he could not move in order to get a cigarette or to ring for
some one. His nerves were giving way. Each one of them seemed as if it
were a bent wire, at the top of which there was a small head with mad,
wide-open frightened eyes and a convulsively gaping, speechless mouth.
He could not draw his breath.

Suddenly in the darkness, amidst the dust and cobwebs somewhere upon
the ceiling, an electric bell came to life. The small, metallic tongue,
agitatedly, in terror, kept striking the edge of the ringing cap,
became silent--and again quivered in an unceasing, frightened din. His
Excellency was ringing his bell in his own room.

People began to run. Here and there, in the shadows upon the walls,
lamps flared up--there were not enough of them to give light, but there
were enough to cast shadows. The shadows appeared everywhere; they rose
in the corners, they stretched across the ceiling; tremulously clinging
to each and every elevation, they covered the walls. And it was hard
to understand where all these innumerable, deformed silent
shadows--voiceless souls of voiceles