"To their great disappointment, the clamorous breakfasters learned nothing--I kept the adventure rigidly to myself, and that night, Christmas night, found me, for the third time, listening for the sounds from the mysterious, the hideously, hellishly mysterious, high-backed, ebony chair. "There had been a severe storm during the day, and the wind had howled with cyclonic force around the house; but there was silence now, an almost preternatural silence; and the lawn, lavishly bestrewn with huge heaps of driven snow, and broken, twisted branches, presented the appearance of a titanic battlefield. In marked contrast to the disturbed condition of the ground, the sky was singularly serene, and broad beams of phosphorescent light poured in through the diamond window-panes on to the bed, in which I was sitting, bolt upright. "One o'clock struck, and ere the hollow-sounding vibrations had ceased, the vague form once again appeared behind the chair, and the malignant, evil eyes met mine in a diabolical stare; whilst, as before, on trying to speak or move, I found myself tongue-tied and paralysed. As the moments slowly glided away, the shape of the Thing became more and more distinct; a dark and sexless face appeared, surmounted with a straggling mass of black hair, the ends of which melted away into mist. I saw no trunk, but I descried two long and bony arms, ebony as the chair, with crooked, spidery, misty fingers. As I watched its development with increasing horror, hoping and praying for the arrival of the never-again-to-be-despised waits, I suddenly realised with a fresh grip of terror that the chair had moved out of the corner, and that the Thing behind it was slowly creeping towards me. "As it approached, the outlines of its face and limbs became clearer. I knew that it was something repulsively, diabolically grotesque, but whether the phantasm of man, or woman, or hellish elemental, I couldn't for the life of me say; and this uncertainty, making my fear all the more poignant, added to my already sublime sufferings, those of the damned. "It passed the chair on which my dress-shirt flashed whiter than the snow in the moonlight; it passed the tomb-like structure constituting the foot-board of the bed; and as in my frantic madness I strained and strained at the cruel cords that held me paralytic, it crept on to the counterpane and wriggled noiselessly towards me. "Even then, though its long, pale eyes were close to mine, and the ends of its tangled hair curled around me, and its icy corpse-tainted breath scoured my cheeks, even then--I could not see its body nor give it a name.