Bobby's inability to cry out alone prevented his alarming the others and announcing to Paredes and Doctor
Groom his unlawful presence in the room. During the moment that the shock held him, silent, motionless,
bent in the darkness above the bed, he understood there could have been no ambiguity about his ghastly and
loathsome experience. The dead detective had altered his position as Silas Blackburn had done, and this time
someone had been in the room and suffered the appalling change. Bobby's fingers still responded to the
charnel feeling of cold, inactive flesh suddenly become alive and potent beneath his touch. And a reason for
the apparent miracle offered itself. Between the extinction of his candle and the commencement of that
movement!--only a second or so--the evidence had disappeared from the detective's pocket.
Bobby relaxed. He stumbled across the room and into the corridor. He went with hands outstretched through
the blackness, for no candle burned in the upper hall, but he knew that Katherine was on guard there. When he
left the passage he saw her, an unnatural figure herself, in the yellowish, unhealthy twilight which sifted
through the stair well from the lamp in the hall below.
She must have sensed something out of the way immediately, for she hurried to meet him and her whisper
held no assurance.
"You got the cast and the handkerchief, Bobby?"
And when he didn't answer at once she asked with a sharp rush of fear:
"What's the matter? What's happened?"
He shuddered. At last he managed to speak.
"Katherine! I have felt death cease to be death."
Later he was to recall that phrase with a sicker horror than he experienced now.
"You saw something!" she said. "But your candle is out. There is no light in the room."
He took her hand. He pressed it.
"You're real!" he said with a nervous laugh. "Something I can understand. Everything is unreal. This light--"
He strode to the table, found a match, and lighted his candle. Katherine, as she saw his face, drew back.
"Bobby!"
"My candle went out," he said dully, "and he moved through the darkness. I tell you he moved beneath my
hand."
She drew farther away, staring at him.
"You were frightened--"
"No. If we go there with a light now," he said with the same dull conviction, "we will find him as we found
my grandfather this afternoon."