ty hinge in motion; then a new silence,
pregnant with a thousand possibilities more eerie than any clamor.

My mind was rapidly at work. Lighting the topmost landing of the house
was a sort of glazed trap, evidently set in the floor of a loft-like
place extending over the entire building. Somewhere in the red-tiled
roof above, there presumably existed a corresponding skylight or
lantern.

So I argued; and, ere I had come to any proper decision, another sound,
more intimate, came to interrupt me.

This time I could be in no doubt; some one was lifting the trap above
the stairhead--slowly, cautiously, and all but silently. Yet to my ears,
attuned to trifling disturbances, the trap creaked and groaned noisily.

Nayland Smith waved to me to take a stand on the other side of the
opened door--behind it, in fact, where I should be concealed from the
view of any one descending the stair.

I stood up and crossed the floor to my new post.

A dull thud told of the trap fully raised and resting upon some
supporting joist. A faint rustling (of discarded garments, I told
myself) spoke to my newly awakened, acute perceptions, of the visitor
preparing to lower himself to the landing. Followed a groan of woodwork
submitted to sudden strain--and the unmistakable pad of bare feet upon
the linoleum of the top corridor.

I knew now that one of Dr. Fu-Manchu's uncanny servants had gained the
roof of the house by some means, had broken through the skylight and had
descended by means of the trap beneath on to the landing.

In such a tensed-up state as I cannot describe, nor, at this hour
mentally reconstruct, I waited for the creaking of the stairs which
should tell of the creature's descent.

I was disappointed. Removed scarce a yard from me as he was, I could
hear Nayland Smith's soft, staccato breathing; but my eyes were all for
the darkened hallway, for the smudgy outline of the stair-rail with the
faint patterning in the background which, alone, indicated the wall.

It was amid an utter silence, unheralded by even so slight a sound
as those which I had acquired the power of detecting--that I saw the
continuity of the smudgy line of stair-rail to be interrupted.

A dark patch showed upon it, just within my line of sight, invisible to
Smith on the other side of the doorway, and some ten or twelve stairs
up.

No sound reached me, but the dark patch vanished and reappeared three
feet lower down.

Still I knew that this phantom