“I felt a cold stubborn rage. Something unspeakable had happened here. And the perpetrator was not on the premises, and hadn’t been for several months, but might at any moment return.

“I approached this tarlike substance. I knelt down beside it and I picked out the glinting fragment and discovered it with no surprise to be one of the earrings which Rebecca had worn when she came to me. Within seconds my trembling fingers had found the mate. And there, in the nauseating substance, was the cameo Rebecca had worn at her throat. I collected this too.

“I was paralyzed with excitement, but that didn’t keep me from seeing that a fifth chain, a chain quite separate from those which must have once bound wrists and ankles, also dangled from the wall, and at the end of it was a hook. This hook was caught in the dark filth, and the dark filth contained fragments of fabric and fragments of hair.

“It was this fifth chain that horrified me more than anything else.

“Chills ran over me. My head was swimming and I suffered a loss of balance, and a sense again of Rebecca speaking to me, Rebecca whispering to me, Rebecca crying; and then her voice rose, distinct in the buzzing silence of the house: You can’t do it, you can’t!

“ ‘Not Rebecca,’ I whispered. But I knew that she had died here, I knew that for a century her bones had moldered here, I knew that even now, before my eyes, the tiny creatures of the swamp were eating at what was left of her—I could see them at work in the ugly residue—and soon there would be nothing at all.

“She had sent me here. I had a right to touch the skull, and as I did so it disintegrated before my eyes. It was no more now than a heap of white powder along with all the other bones. I should never have touched it! But it was too late.

“Quite suddenly I flew into action. I stood up. I secured the earrings and the brooch in my pocket. I pulled out my hunting knife—the kitchen knife was in the pirogue—and I spun round to face the stairs. No one had come, that was obvious, but at any moment someone might.

“And who were they, or who was he, I should say, who could sit at a desk and read by the light of candles when such a horror existed on the floor above?

“This had been a house of torture, this place, and surely it had been my great-great-great-grandfather Manfred who brought his victims here, I reasoned, and here it was that Rebecca had met her end.