I had opportunity, in those hours, to think more or less deeply on my friend’s situation. My own beliefs notwithstanding, I am, I hope, no enemy to honest faith. Yet I could not help but wonder if it was perhaps Quentin’s spiritual studies that had so unnerved him. The civilized religion which we practice in this modern day has still its links to antique creeds and half-forgotten superstitions. Was it these, I asked myself, that haunted the abbey ruins, moulded by my friend’s fevered brain into the likeness of Black Annie?

As I meditated thus, the lamp went out. The embers in the grate continued to settle and hiss and a deeper blackness yet enclosed us. I studied my friend surreptitiously, growing even more concerned as the enervated condition in which he had begun our watch slowly gave way to a nervous attitude of growing tension and suspense. Somewhere beyond the room, a clock chimed. It was midnight.

Suddenly, Quentin was on his feet. “This is the hour!” he exclaimed. “She is here! ”

Before I could respond, he had rushed across the room to the window, had pressed himself close to the glass. I was fairly at his heels, was peering over his shoulder an instant later.

His breath misted the pane as he cried hoarsely, “Out there!”

“I can’t see a thing!” I answered. Beyond a yard away, I could make out nothing but thick, sable night.

And then the wind rose. I heard it in the chimney. I saw it a moment later in the movement of an elm as its naked branches bent and shivered. For as the wind rose, the clouds raced—and the moon appeared behind their wisps and traces. Its eldritch silver glow drew the landscape out of the darkness. Out there, beyond the sinuous silhouette of the elm, stood the abbey ruin, sullen, black and grim. The faltering illumination, laced as it was with the running cloud shadows, gave to the entire scene a floating quality, weird and dreamlike. We seemed to stare through the glass as through a torn curtain at another world revealed.

And as we stared, I saw her. A cloaked and hooded figure—raven-black, so black she seemed less a being than an absence of existence—was moving with slow and awful majesty among the churchyard headstones.

I cannot describe the suffocating horror that swept over me at that uncanny sight. I was unmanned, paralysed, my marrow ice, my sinew water. For long seconds, as the thing glided steadily towards the fragment of the chapel wall, I could not move or speak—I could not breathe—but only gaped unblinking as if I had been petrified on the spot. Death itself would not have seemed as forbidding to me as that ebon wraith who appeared the herald of a realm beyond death, a realm beyond reason, a realm, most terrible of all, beyond the reach of mercy or forgetfulness.