"Wishing you a pleasant night after your tiring journey,

"I remain,

"Very faithfully,

"Jeremy Buggam."

I leave my reader to imagine my state of mind when I completed the
perusal of the letter.

I have as little belief in the supernatural as anyone, yet I must
confess that there was something in the surroundings in which I now
found myself which rendered me at least uncomfortable. My reader may
smile if he will, but I assure him that it was with a very distinct
feeling of uneasiness that I at length managed to rise to my feet, and,
grasping my candle in my hand, to move backward into the bedroom. As I
backed into it something so like a moan seemed to proceed from the
closed cupboard that I accelerated my backward movement to a
considerable degree. I hastily blew out the candle, threw myself upon
the bed and drew the bedclothes over my head, keeping, however, one eye
and one ear still out and available.

How long I lay thus listening to every sound, I cannot tell. The
stillness had become absolute. From time to time I could dimly hear the
distant cry of an owl, and once far away in the building below a sound
as of some one dragging a chain along a floor. More than once I was
certain that I heard the sound of moaning behind the wainscot. Meantime
I realized that the hour must now be drawing close upon the fatal moment
of midnight. My watch I could not see in the darkness, but by reckoning
the time that must have elapsed I knew that midnight could not be far
away. Then presently my ear, alert to every sound, could just
distinguish far away across the fens the striking of a church bell, in
the clock tower of Buggam village church, no doubt, tolling the hour of
twelve.

On the last stroke of twelve, the cupboard door in the next room opened.
There is no need to ask me how I knew it. I couldn't, of course, see it,
but I could hear, or sense in some way, the sound of it. I could feel
my hair, all of it, rising upon my head. I was aware that there was a
_presence_ in the adjoining room, I will not say a person, a living
soul, but a _presence_. Anyone who has been in the next room to a
presence will know just how I felt. I could hear a sound as of some one
groping on the floor and the faint rattle as of coins.

My hair was now perpendicular. My reader can blame it or not, but it
was.

Then at this very moment from somewhere below in the building there came
the sound of a prolonged and pie