When he reaches the bottom of the stairs, he stands still and again listens for a long while. There it is once more, but now he can distinguish some subtleties in the sound. It is indeed as if someone is walking and he or she is doing so carefully, so it is difficult to tell if the intruder is large or small, but there is another element to the sound, a steady little noise like what you might hear if someone were rolling something behind as he or she walked.

It cannot be Morley, says Edgar, inside his head, for he is dead. But if Morley is Satan, he reminds himself, then how can Satan be dead? He thinks again of The Fall of the House of Usher and the dead woman who came up from the basement. A terrible thought occurs to him. Is that apparition moving about in this building? He hears a caw, a deep guttural one, not from a crow, but a raven…then he remembers that big black bird they saw in the window as they approached this House of Usher. “Once upon a midnight dreary,” he hears a voice inside his head say, “while I pondered, weak and weary”…the first lines of Poe’s great poem, The Raven. “I am living in reality,” he says to himself in as steady a voice as he can muster, “and my friends are near, not my enemies. I am not in a poem or a story and I am not hearing Poe’s ‘ominous bird of yore’ speak to me from a windowsill.” Then the black bird offers another utterance, three quick caws like the syllables of a word…Nevermore!

“This is madness,” Edgar whispers. “Shake your head and send all the fiction out!” The Raven spoke of death, its finality, its terror. The Raven spoke of fear! He hears Dr. Berenice telling him not to avoid the devil but accept him. He hears her telling him to be suspicious of his friends. “Did she really say that?” he asks himself. He can smell her perfume.

The footsteps begin again, and the rolling sound. They are getting closer!

Edgar moves behind the staircase, crouches down and waits.

A spectral figure emerges out of the darkness with a long weapon in hand and trailing a larger one behind.

It is Tiger Tilley.

She does not see him and walks past. Edgar rises. He can see the smooth white stretch of her slim but muscular neck, so vulnerable there with her face turned away. He will take off her head indeed! He will bury her on the grounds here, her skull resting between her feet. He raises the sword to strike.