“Miss Mullany has kindly offered to show me the sights o’ yore fair city. I’m jest bustin’ to visit Mr. Peale’s museum and see them splendaciously presarved Egyptian mummies I’ve heard tell about!”

After exchanging a hearty handshake with the police officer and bidding the two of us a final farewell, the frontiersman and his escort strolled away. A moment later, Captain Russell—after conveying, once more, his deepest gratitude and appreciation—began to follow in the direction of the receding couple.

Before he had progressed more than a few paces, however, he paused and turned to face me. “One thing more, Mr. Poe,” he said. “If the bloody markings above Mrs. Macready’s bed did not form the name ‘Neuendorf,’ then what, pray tell, did they spell?”

“That, indeed, is a most pertinent question,” I replied. “Unfortunately, I cannot, as of the present moment, answer it with any degree of certitude.”

“I see,” muttered the captain in a vaguely smirking tone, as though to say, “I thought as much.” Then, with a polite tip of his hat, he swivelled on his heels and sauntered away.

I was now left alone on the pier. My feelings, as I stood there contemplating the events of the morning, can scarcely be described—so wildly confused, so intensely contradictory, were the emotions which possessed my soul. That I alone had perceived a deliberate pattern of denotation in the seemingly random markings left upon the wall of the murder scene was, on the one hand, a source of the keenest satisfaction. But my failure to persuade the police captain that the horribly butchered victim could not, under any circumstance, have been the author of this communication filled me with a sense of the bitterest frustration.

All at once, my heart was seized with a far different—and infinitely more unnerving—sensation. I was not, after all, alone on the dock! Someone—or something—was situated directly at my rear, scrutinizing me with an intensity so fierce, so palpable, that I could feel its gaze upon my back.

My heart quailed—an icy chill ran through my frame—a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me. Who—or what—was the unseen presence lurking at my back?

Slowly—torturously—I turned to face my unknown observer—then froze and gave a startled gasp at the sight of the great, dark-winged seagull eying me from atop the massive wooden pile!

An instant later—still fixing me with a look of almost preternatural intelligence—it opened wide its beak and emitted a shrill and ominous cry, as though endeavoring to communicate a deliberate meaning. What that meaning might be, I could not begin to conceive. But as I stood upon the windswept dock, staring at the grim, ungainly, ghastly fowl, every fibre of my being was suddenly suffused with a sense of the deepest and most dire foreboding!

CHAPTER 7