His eyes! His eyes were full of fear. And, though I had seen him in London only six months before, he seemed since then to have aged as many decades. A man like myself in his early thirties, he peered at me through the half open door of Ravenswood Grange with all the tremulous hostility, the white-eyed apprehension, of some ancient anchorite disturbed at his grimmest meditations.

I had already dismissed my trap. I could hear the horse’s hoofbeats fading behind me on the Grange’s long drive. The autumn darkling was closing around me, the windswept clouds of a lowering sky pressed down on me from above. The house itself, the whole great stone edifice, loomed menacingly before me as with an adsum to my conjuro te. All this—and the horrid ravens peering blackly at me from the gutters and gables of the place—served to magnify the thrill of dread I felt as I stood on the threshold and stared into the ravaged features of my old schoolmate.

“My God, Quentin!” I managed to expostulate at last. “My God, man, where are the servants?” For he had come to the door himself and, save for the taper guttering in his trembling hand, the hall behind him, the house around him, were all in darkness.

At the sound of my voice, Quentin glanced about, distracted, as if he only now realized he had been forsaken. Slowly, his frightened gaze returned to me—and yet, I felt, it passed right through me. I might have been a spectre, invisible, and he seeing only the empty drive where it stretched into the twilight overhung by gloomy rows of copper beech.

“Gone,” he said then, in a high, cracked whisper, an old man’s whisper. “All gone. They would not stay. Not one of them would stay with me. No, not one.”

The wind rose. The dead leaves swirled and chattered at my feet. From a gable peak came the hoarse cry of a raven, weirdly triumphant, horrible. I shivered. Then, bestirring myself at last from the first shock of seeing my friend in his shattered state, I stepped forward, extending my hand. Quentin merely licked his lips furtively, and faded away from me into the tenebrous front hall.

I followed him, entered. The heavy wooden door swung shut behind me with a melancholy reverberation. I forced myself to ignore it as I ignored the ominous penumbra that quickly gathered round the edges of his solitary flame. Again, and with a soothing word, I came towards him. This time, I was allowed to approach. Taking the poor man by the elbow, I led him gently inside.