A Tale of Stark Terror Is
The HOUSE of FEAR
A HOUSE of silence, broken at times by a weird wailing as from the Pit; a house of dreams, gray in the moonlight, under the leprous-silvered finger of the moon, brooding now, a grim, gray fortress of the accursed; the stronghold of the Beast.
Dense pines grew about it, and when the wind wailed among them, it met and mingled with an eery ululation rising as if muffled by many thicknesses of walls, to end with a quick shriek and a sudden hush, broken after a moment by the faint echo of a taunting laugh.
That laugh would have struck terror to the swart soul of a lucivee, if lucivees have souls, for it was like an eldritch howling, faint and thin; like the thin, tinkling laughter of a fiend, without pity and without ruth.
Here, in the sanitarium of Dr. Helmholtz, there were secrets within secrets, walls within walls, downward as in Dante's Seventh Hades, and from this monastery of the hopeless, there penetrated, on occasion, outward from its battlemented walls, wild, frantic laughter; but there was nothing demoniac about it, because it was the laughter of the insane.
But that other laughter, like a sound heard in dreams,—passers-by, if there were any such, hearing it, would shudder, and pass on. For the secret of that house of doom was terrible and grim; a secret, for him who might have guessed at it, to be whispered behind locked doors and with bated breath. And there had been those who had whispered of the lost souls within those walls; and the whisper ran that they were, indeed, madmen who had not been always mad, but had become maniacs after their commitment to the bleak house within the wood.
In a bare cell, six feet by six—a cubicle in which there was barely sufficient head room for a tall man to stand upright—a figure stood with its hand clenched upon the bars, staring outward at the grim wood visible to the south.
Carrold Baron, banker, had abode here in this living tomb three weeks; say rather, three centuries, in which, as in a nightmare of cold horror, he had been aware merely of a face, three-pointed, bearded, the eyes active with a malign intelligence, the lips smiling always with the cold smile of death.
Twice a day the small panel in his cell door had slid backward without sound, to frame, in the opening, the face of Dr. Helmholtz, like a face without a body—and without a soul.
Carrold Baron, banker, knew that it was not a dream that would pass, because, on the second day, the head had spoken. Baron was scarcely a coward; he had fought like a baited grizzly when surprized in his house by the men who had brought him, under cover of the night, to this prison house. Now, at the voice, like the slow drip of an acid, Baron stared straight before him, with the gaze of a man who has abandoned hope.
