quickly to his feet. A look such as I had seen when he strangled the dog and the woman distorted his features.
He sprang toward me, then stopped short and looked at his useless arms. He gnashed his teeth in rage, but quickly whispered something to the two hands that were hanging to his shoulders. They seemed to understand, for immediately they crept rapidly from their perch, down his body, and to the floor. For an instant only they paused. Then, like monstrous spiders they crawled slowly in my direction.
I realized that the crucial moment had come, that now or never I must assert my will power, my courage, or I would never leave the room alive. Stifling the shriek that rose to my lips I summoned all my remaining courage. I reiterated aloud my oft-repeated theory that the spirits of the dead could have no power over the living in the face of undaunted courage. Was mine undaunted? Yes! Yes! I shrieked it aloud. No power, however devilish, would overcome it.
And slowly the creeping, crawling hands, like huge, hairy spiders, approached me. They reached my feet. My heels kicked the wall. They had now clasped my ankles. Their clutch burned like fire. The figure of the old man was dancing in fiendish glee. The picture on the wall seemed to gloat. And now I felt them crawling up my legs, the long nails of each finger digging sharply into my flesh.
My own hands seemed powerless. As they hitched themselves heavily, cumbrously over my stomach and heart I turned deathly sick. I felt I must soon give way. I don't know that I screamed, probably I did, for the inside of my throat ached intolerably.
If I could only get power into my own hands! I was no weakling. I could cope successfully with strong men. To use my hands before those others reached my throat! The vulnerable point. I thought of Brooks, of Jim-the coward! I gasped for breath. Oh, God, help! With one supreme effort, I unloosed the power that held me.
My own hands shot with desperate, superhuman strength to those monstrous things that were already clutching my throat. With one last effort of will I tore first one, then the other, from my throat and with a shriek of horror and loathing I dashed them from me. I heard a crash of glass. The picture before me was dissolved from view. I reeled and fell just as a loud honk! honk! sounded on the air.
I was dimly conscious of a crash of doors, of a blinding light, of Jim's voice -then utter, complete oblivion.
LITTLE more remains to be told. Three months later I was removed. from the hospital, a broken man. The serious attack of brain fever, following my terrible experience, was all but fatal.
During the whole period Jim never left my side. His remorse was pitiable. He has never ceased to execrate his cowardice in forsaking me.
But I do not now hold him a coward. On the contrary, I consider his act in coming back for me, after what he had seen, one of sublime courage.
I have no explanations to make, no theories to advance. I must add, however, that the portrait was found to have been torn from top to bottom, and the heavy glass protecting it, shattered into a thousand pieces. Back of the canvas was a cavity, in which rested the skeletons of two immense hands, and a manuscript which, so far, has defied all attempts to decipher. It may contain an explanation of the facts which I have related.
I no longer take any interest in the occult. My one thought and hope now is to live down, if I may, the recollection of that night of horror.
One word more. The last Ormond was found dead in bed, in a little hotel in Italy, on the same night I spent in the room with the red-paneled door.
A Heroine of the Black Hole
On the hottest day in June a nineteen-year-old girl was locked in the terrible dark cell of a British convict ship lying in the harbor. at New Bedford, Massachusetts. She was kept there for twenty-six hours, chained to a bolt in such a position that she could neither sit, lie down, nor stand up, and in that time she was given one meal of bread and water.
She had not committed crime or misdemeanor, and she was not a convict. Neither was she acting for the movies. She was Miss Carolyn Pittsley, aspiring to the title of New Bedford's Bravest Girl. She won it, too, though she came out of the cell known as the Black Hole unable to stand or see after her 26-hour torment. A hundred dollars in gold was the more substantial reward for her courage and endurance.
This old convict ship, the Success, which has not been used as a prison since 1865, has been fitted out as a replica of the three floating prisons (the Success being one of them) once in use in England and Australia. It has been exhibited in many American seaports and in each the captain urges the bravest girl in the city to come forward and earn a hundred dollars as well as considerable reputation for pluck.
On the deck of the Success one sees the balls and chains of various weights which the convicts were forced to wear during their imprisonment; the rings to which they were fastened when flogged, a common punishment then; the curious iron tank kept filled with salt water into which the punished men were thrown to revive if they fainted under the lash.
Two lower enclosed decks are lined with windowless cells, in each a waxwork figure clad in the prison garb, stamped with the government broad arrow, looking startlingly lifelike in the dim light. The figures are effigies of real prisoners who occupied these or other cells at one time, and each now has his name on the cell door. Besides these wax figures, there are on exhibition several waxwork groups, one showing the murder in a quarry of a particularly cruel keeper once in command of a convict ship. This murder, though the convict murderers were executed, led to the investigation and reform of the convict ship system.
