Before the ancient tumbledown altar, her white body glistening in the dark, stood Adrienne Bixby. Parted in a smile such as Circe, the enchantress, might have worn when she lured men to their ruin, the red lips of the entranced girl were drawn back from her gleaming teeth, while she crooned a slow sensuous melody. About her slender body, ascending in a spiral from hips to shoulders, was the spotted body of a gigantic snake. The monster's horrid, wedge-shaped head swung and swayed a scant half-inch before her face, and its darting, lambent tongue licked lightly at her parted lips. But it was no ordinary serpent which held her a laughing prisoner in its coils. . . .
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would be killed by its furious tenant, and he would have to remain in this shadowland for evermore. So that those long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried to and fro in his ineffectual excitement, innumerable spirits of that world about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went upon his glorious career.
For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting a way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not the only human soul in that place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies even it may be as he had lost his and wandered, despairingly, in that lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak because that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their dim human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.
But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where the bodies they had lost might be, whether they still roved about the earth, or whether they were closed forever in death against return. That they were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But Dr. Wilson Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are lost in madness on the earth.
At last Mr. Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such disembodied silent creatures was gathered, and thrusting through, them he saw below a brightly-lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen and a woman, a stoutish woman
