sea and the grotesque and abnormal conditions that prevailed therein.
I then grew alert to a sound apart from the distant lugubrious murmur of the sea. Garth's study opened onto the front veranda, and the disturbance seemed to come from that direction. To my ears, it resembled someone walking in a rather clumsy and laborious fashion across the veranda.
Garth, too, heard the noise, for he turned with a start toward the front door.
"Are you expecting anyone?" I asked. For some reason, my thoughts went to the solitary traveler whom I had passed while driving up to the doctor's home earlier.
"Who the devil is that out there?" Garth demanded in in irritation, appearing not to have heard my question.
I saw that the door knob had begun to revolve -- slowly, hesitantly, as if being gripped by the unsteady hand of a child. I also perceived a small puddle of water on the floor at the entrance. The water, trickling in beneath the door, expanded into a larger pool before our transfixed eyes.
Garth strode to the door and flung it open. He recoiled as if shot. Getting one glimpse of what stood in the entrance, I thought I would faint.
I was dimly aware that Garth raced across the room to a desk. Producing a revolver from a drawer, he levelled the weapon at the thing which had begun to shuffle toward us. There followed a succession of deafening blasts as I turned and ran from the room, to flee from that accursed house through a rear door. Driving madly down fog-swathed Kelvin's Bluff, with the roar of the sea in my ears, a frightful vision was dominant in my mind -- destined to haunt me to my dying day.
Never would I forget the sight of that dripping, half-decomposed human body that had shambled into David Garth's study. It had leered at us through vacant eye sockets, and where the upper part of its head should have been, there was only a large, gaping hole that looked into the black pit of any empty skull. ********
