That first hour of watching, waiting, and listening in the lonely quietude passed drearily; and with the passage of every quarter—signalized by London’s muffled clocks—my mood became increasingly morbid. I peopled the silent rooms opening out of that wherein I sat, with stealthy, murderous figures; my imagination painted hideous yellow faces upon the draperies, twitching yellow hands protruding from this crevice and that. A score of times I started nervously, thinking I heard the pad of bare feet upon the floor behind me, the suppressed breathing of some deathly approach.
Since nothing occurred to justify these tremors, this apprehensive mood passed; I realized that I was growing cramped and stiff, that unconsciously I had been sitting with my muscles nervously tensed. The window was open a foot or so at the top and the blind was drawn; but so accustomed were my eyes now to peering through the darkness, that I could plainly discern the yellow oblong of the window, and though very vaguely, some of the appointments of the room—the Chesterfield against one wall, the lampshade above my head, the table with the Tûlun-Nûr box upon it.
There was fog in the room, and it was growing damply chill, for we had extinguished the electric heater some hours before. Very few sounds penetrated from outside. Twice or perhaps thrice people passed along the corridor, going to their rooms; but, as I knew, the greater number of the rooms along that corridor were unoccupied.
From the Embankment far below me, and from the river, faint noises came at long intervals it is true; the muffled hooting of motors, and yet fainter ringing of bells. Fog signals boomed distantly, and train whistles shrieked, remote and unreal. I determined to enter my bedroom, and, risking any sound which I might make, to lie down upon the bed.
I rose carefully and carried this plan into execution. I would have given much for a smoke, although my throat was parched; and almost any drink would have been nectar. But although my hopes (or my fears) of an intruder had left me, I determined to stick to the rules of the game as laid down. Therefore I neither smoked nor drank, but carefully extended my weary limbs upon the coverlet, and telling myself that I could guard our strange treasure as well from there as from elsewhere ... slipped off into a profound sleep.
Nothing approaching in acute and sustained horror to the moment when next I opened my eyes exists in all my memories of those days.
In the first place I was aroused by the shaking of the bed. It was quivering beneath me as though an earthquake disturbed the very foundations of the building. I sprang upright and into full consciousness of my lapse.... My hands clutching the coverlet on either side of me, I sat staring, staring, staring ... at that which peered at me over the foot of the bed.
I knew that I had slept at my post; I was convinced that I was now widely awake; yet I dared not admit to myself that what I saw was other than a product of my imagination. I dared not admit the physical quivering of the bed, for I could not, with sanity, believe its cause to be anything human. But what I saw, yet could not credit seeing, was this:
A ghostly white face, which seemed to glisten in some faint reflected light from the sitting-room beyond, peered over the bedrail; gibbered at me demoniacally. With quivering hands this nightmare horror, which had intruded where I believed human intrusion to be all but impossible, clutched the bedposts so that the frame of the structure shook and faintly rattled....
My heart leapt wildly in my breast, then seemed to suspend its pulsations and to grow icily cold. My whole body became chilled horrifically. My scalp tingled: I felt that I must either cry out or become stark raving mad!
For this clammily white face, those staring eyes, that wordless gibbering, and the shaking, shaking, shaking of the bed in the clutch of the nameless visitant—prevailed, refused to disperse like the evil dream I had hoped it all to be; manifested itself, indubitably, as something tangible—objective....
Outraged reason deprived me of coherent speech. Past the clammy white face I could see the sitting-room illuminated by a faint light; I could even see the Tûlun-Nûr box upon the table immediately opposite the door.
The thing which shook the bed was actual, existent—to be counted with!
Further and further I drew myself away from it, until I crouched close up against the head of the bed. Then, as the thing reeled aside, and—merciful Heaven!—made as if to come around and approach me yet closer, I uttered a hoarse cry and hurled myself out upon the floor and on the side remote from that pallid horror which I thought was pursuing me.
I heard a dull thud ... and the thing disappeared from my view, yet—and remembering the supreme terror of that visitation I am not ashamed to confess it—I dared not move from the spot upon which I stood, I dared not make to pass that which lay between me and the door.
“Smith!” I cried, but my voice was little more than a hoarse whisper—“Smith! Weymouth!”
The words became clearer and louder as I proceeded, so that the last—“Weymouth!”—was uttered in a sort of falsetto scream.
A door burst open upon the other side of the corridor. A key was inserted in the lock of the door. Into the dimly lighted arch which divided the bedroom from the sitting-room, sprang the figure of Nayland Smith!
“Petrie! Petrie!” he called—and I saw him standing there looking from left to right.
Then, ere I could reply, he turned, and his gaze fell upon whatever lay upon the floor at the foot of the bed.
“My God!” he whispered—and sprang into the room.
“Smith! Smith!” I cried, “what is it? what is it?”
He turned in a flash, as Weymouth entered at his heels, saw me, and fell back a step; then looked again down at the floor.
“God’s mercy!” he whispered, “I thought it was you—I thought it was you!”
Trembling violently, my mind a feverish chaos, I moved to the foot of the bed and looked down at what lay there.
“Turn up the light!” snapped Smith.
Weymouth reached for the switch, and the room became illuminated suddenly.
Prone upon the carpet, hands outstretched and nails dug deeply into the pile of the fabric, lay a dark-haired man having his head twisted sideways so that the face showed a ghastly pallid profile against the rich colorings upon which it rested. He wore no coat, but a sort of dark gray shirt and black trousers. To add to the incongruity of his attire, his feet were clad in drab-colored shoes, rubber-soled.
I stood, one hand raised to my head, looking down upon him, and gradually regaining control of myself. Weymouth, perceiving something of my condition, silently passed his flask to me; and I gladly availed myself of this.
“How in Heaven’s name did he get in?” I whispered.
“How, indeed!” said Weymouth, staring about him with wondering eyes.
Both he and Smith had discarded their disguises; and, a bewildered trio, we stood looking down upon the man at our feet. Suddenly Smith dropped to his knees and turned him flat upon his back. Composure was nearly restored to me, and I knelt upon the other side of the white-faced creature whose presence there seemed so utterly outside the realm of possibility, and examined him with a consuming and fearful interest; for it was palpable that, if not already dead, he was dying rapidly.
He was a slightly built man, and the first discovery that I made was a curious one. What I had mistaken for dark hair was a wig! The short black mustache which he wore was also factitious.
“Look at this!” I cried.
“I am looking,” snapped Smith.
He suddenly stood up, and entering the room beyond, turned on the light there. I saw him staring at the Tûlun-Nûr box, and I knew what had been in his mind. But the box, undisturbed, stood upon the table as we had left it. I saw Smith tugging irritably at the lobe of his ear, and staring from the box towards the man beside whom I knelt.
“For God’s sake, what does it mean?” said Inspector Weymouth in a voice hushed with wonder. “How did he get in? What did he come for?—and what has happened to him?”
“As to what has happened to him,” I replied, “unfortunately I cannot tell you. I only know that unless something can be done his end is not far off.”
“Shall we lay him on the bed?”
I nodded, and together we raised the slight figure and placed it upon the bed where so recently I had lain.
As we did so, the man suddenly opened his eyes, which were glazed with delirium. He tore himself from our grip, sat bolt upright, and holding his hands, fingers outstretched, before his face, stared at them frenziedly.
“The golden pomegranates!” he shrieked, and a slight froth appeared on his blanched lips. “The golden pomegranates!”
He laughed madly, and fell back inert.
“He’s dead!” whispered Weymouth; “he’s dead!”
Hard upon his words came a cry from Smith:
“Quick! Petrie!—Weymouth!”