d. Burke was making the most frightful
sounds and quite obviously was being asphyxiated before my eyes!

"Smith!" I cried, "Smith! Help! help! for God's sake!"

Despite the confusion of my mind I became aware of sounds outside and
below me. Twice the thing at the window coughed; there was an incessant,
lash-like cracking, then some shouted words which I was unable to make
out; and finally the staccato report of a pistol.

Snarling like that of a wild beast came from the creature with the hairy
arms, together with renewed coughing. But the steel grip relaxed not one
iota.

I realized two things: the first, that in my terror at the suddenness of
the attack I had omitted to act as pre-arranged: the second, that I had
discredited the strength of the visitant, whilst Smith had foreseen it.

Desisting in my vain endeavor to pit my strength against that of the
nameless thing, I sprang back across the room and took up the weapon
which had been left in my charge earlier in the night, but which I had
been unable to believe it would be necessary to employ. This was a sharp
and heavy axe, which Nayland Smith, when I had met him in Covent Garden,
had brought with him, to the great amazement of Weymouth and myself.

As I leaped back to the window and uplifted this primitive weapon, a
second shot sounded from below, and more fierce snarling, coughing, and
guttural mutterings assailed my ears from beyond the pane.

Lifting the heavy blade, I brought it down with all my strength upon the
nearer of those hairy arms where it crossed the window-ledge, severing
muscle, tendon and bone as easily as a knife might cut cheese....

A shriek--a shriek neither human nor animal, but gruesomely compounded
of both--followed... and merged into a choking cough. Like a flash the
other shaggy arm was withdrawn, and some vaguely-seen body went rolling
down the sloping red tiles and crashed on to the ground beneath.

With a second piercing shriek, louder than that recently uttered
by Burke, wailing through the night from somewhere below, I turned
desperately to the man on the bed, who now was become significantly
silent. A candle, with matches, stood upon a table hard by, and,
my fingers far from steady, I set about obtaining a light. This
accomplished, I stood the candle upon the little chest-of-drawers and
returned to Burke's side.

"Merciful God!" I cried.

Of all the pictures which remain in my memory, some of them dark enough,
I can find n