ntom sword, and blood
seemed trickling fast from the ruffles, from the lace; and the darkness
of the intermediate Shadow swallowed them up--they were gone. And again
the bubbles of light shot, and sailed, and undulated, growing thicker
and thicker and more wildly confused in their movements.

The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the
aperture there came the form of an aged woman. In her hand she held
letters,--the very letters over which I had seen _the_ Hand close; and
behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen, and
then she opened the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I
saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned--bloated, bleached,
seaweed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a
corpse, and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable squalid
child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked
in the old woman's face, the wrinkles and lines vanished and it became a
face of youth--hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow darted
forth, and darkened over these phantoms as it had darkened over the
last.

Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently
fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow--malignant, serpent eyes.
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disorder,
irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from
these globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things
burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so
hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader
of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes
in a drop of water--things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each
other, devouring each other--forms like nought ever beheld by the naked
eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were
without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came
round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my
head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary
command against all evil beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but
not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of
cold soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I
gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentrated all my
faculties in the single focus of resist