edible profusion. His forehead, high
beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deep sunken and heavily lined
with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like and gnarled, were of such
a deathly, marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere seen in man.
His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton, was strangely bent
and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. But
strangest of all were his eyes; twin caves of abysmal blackness;
profound in expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of
wickedness. These were now fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their
hatred, and rooting me to the spot whereon I stood. At last the figure
spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull
hollowness and latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse
was clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more
learned men of the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged
researches into the works of the old alchemists and demonologists. The
apparition spoke of the curse which had hovered over my house, told me
of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong perpetrated by my ancestor against
old Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier.
He told me how the young Charles had escaped into the night, returning
in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as he
approached the age which had been his father's at his assassination; how
he had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown,
in the even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed
the hideous narrator; how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a
field, forced poison down his throat and left him to die at the age of
thirty-two, thus maintaining the foul provisions of his vengeful curse.
At this point I was left to imagine the solution of the greatest mystery
of all, how the curse had been fulfilled since that time when Charles Le
Sorcier must in the course of nature have died, for the man digressed
into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two wizards,
father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles
Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook
of it eternal life and youth.

His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible
eyes the hatred that had at first so haunted them, but suddenly the
fiendish glare returned, and with a shocking sound like the hissing of a
ser