“Cousin, oh cousin, what is this?” she cries. “Who is it who can have come to live in this so desolate abode?”

And finally, her guardian directs his burning glance upon her upturned face, and shouts his answer at her above the ferment.

“It is the alchemist!” he shrieks with an intonation of insane joy. “It is the alchemist come at last!”

3

What a passion of horror thrilled Theresa’s maiden breast as the rotting gate of the tower closed behind her with a reverberant crash. Her cousin’s mysterious and yet strangely appalling words still echoed in her ears as an even more complete darkness than before now enshrouded them; and that sable cerement was made only the more suffocating to Theresa by the weird, flickering tongues of scarlet luminescence which, falling from some unknown chamber above, brought the shape of a stone spiral staircase faintly into view before her. Towards this, Conrad drew her now. And—hark!—as they began to mount the crumbling steps, a faint noise drifted down to them, becoming audible as the howling storm without was muted by the impenetrable thickness of the tower’s walls:

Tink-tink, tink-tink.

“Sweet merciful heavens,” gasped Theresa, clinging to her cousin in the blackness. “What is that, guardian?”

“It is only the alchemist at work, my child,” answered Conrad.

Slowly, he continued to mount the steps, pulling his reluctant ward in his train. The lambent glow above grew brighter; the enigmatic noise grew louder as they climbed.

Tink-tink, tink-tink.

“But what is it, what is it?” Theresa cried out. “What is it, cousin, that makes that sound, for at each repetition of it my heart misgives me?”

“He only hammers the iron rings into the wall,” Conrad muttered. “Be still, my child.”

Cobwebs brushed against Theresa’s soft cheeks, tangled in her silken hair as her cousin continued to drag her up and up and up the spiral staircase. And the flickering light grew brighter above, and the hammering louder.

Tink-tink, tink-tink.

“Oh, what now, what now, my cousin, my trusted guardian?” Theresa babbled in a paroxysm of fear.

“He makes the chains, he only makes the chains,” said Conrad, his eyes fixed on the turning path above him. “Have no fear, my child.”

On and on, he drew her, up and up. The glimmer of the flames—for such is what they were—now appeared to rise ubiquitous on the walls around her; the noises of the unseen workshop were magnified in Theresa’s frenzied imagination until she nearly swooned with affright at each reiteration.

Tink-tink, tink-tink.

“Oh, by the mercy of sweet heaven, what is it?” she whimpered, clutching her guardian’s arm with fresh force.

“The fetters now,” said he in an eldritch, distant tone. “He forges the fetters, I think. Be of good cheer, my child.”