We entered a low, narrow doorway and found ourselves inside a small, sparsely furnished parlor whose general condition was every bit as deplorable as that of the bedchamber. Without pausing, Crockett stepped to the opposite side of the room and, standing beside a tattered and exceptionally rickety-looking sofa, raised the lamp so as to illuminate the wall directly above this woebegone piece of furniture.

So stained and moldy was the wallpaper that, for a moment, I could not discern precisely what the frontiersman intended me to see. It was not until I stepped to his side and peered closely at the spot he was indicating that my eyes widened in startled recognition.

Inscribed upon the wall were nine bloody letters, unmistakably produced by the same hand that had left the inscrutable message over the bed of the butchered landlady. Only this time—because its author had evidently exerted greater care in his handiwork—every individual character was meticulously shaped.

What the message referred to I could not immediately say. But as to its denotation there was no ambiguity. The letters did not constitute the name “Neuendorf” Nor—I now saw clearly—did they form the words “New Export.”

What they spelled was “NEVERMORE.”

CHAPTER 15

One conundrum, at least, had thus been resolved: the signification of the sanguinary message left at the scene of the landlady’s murder. This revelation, however, brought us no closer to an ultimate solution of the case, whose mysteries had only been deepened by the newest developments. What did the inscription “NEVERMORE” mean? Who was its author? And what had become of the aged, nearly sightless, and severely incapacitated being in whose parlor this singular—this sinister—communication had now been discovered?

That Alexander Montague had become the latest victim of the same unknown maniac who had perpetrated such unspeakable atrocities upon Elmira Macready seemed beyond dispute. No reasonable observer could fail to conclude that the enigmatic word defacing the parlor wall had been printed with the old man’s life’s blood. And yet, in contrast to the landlady, whose fearfully butchered body had been displayed with such stark—such obscene—visibility, there was no discernible sign, in the present case, of a corpus delicti. The old man’s body had evidently been removed from the premises by the killer—for what grotesque, what ghastly reason, it was impossible to conceive.

For approximately the next half-hour, our little party—Captain Russell, Officer Carlton, Colonel Crockett, and I—remained inside the parlor, conducting an exhaustive search of the cramped and wretchedly appointed room. In spite of its thoroughness, however, this investigation failed to turn up the slightest clue as to either the fate or the whereabouts of the missing man. We then crossed back to the opposite side of the hallway and embarked on a similarly meticulous examination of the bedchamber. Our efforts here proved equally fruitless.