At that instant two rifle shots rang out almost as one. The woman fell face downward on the floor. The babies shrieked in a shrill chorus. Then she leapt up from all fours with an explosive suddenness, staggered in a hurled, lurching rush toward the hole in the wall, and, with a frightful yell, threw up her arms and whirled backward to the ground, doubled and contorted like a dying fish, stiffened, shuddered and was still. Waldo, his horrified eyes fixed on her face, even in his amazement noted that her lips did not open. The children, squealing faint cries of dismay, scrambled through the hole in the inner wall, vanishing into the inky void beyond. The last had hardly gone when the consul appeared in the doorway, his smoking gun in his hand. “Not a second too soon, my boy,” he ejaculated. “She was just going to spring.” He cocked his gun and prodded the body with the muzzle. “Good and dead,” he commented. “What luck! Generally it takes three or four bullets to finish one. I’ve known one with two bullets through her lungs to kill a man.” “Did you murder this woman?” Waldo demanded fiercely. “Murder?” the consul snorted. “Murder! Look at that.” He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced; and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative. Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified sympathy for their humanness. “Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?” Waldo insisted, revolted at the horrid death he had watched. “You are hard to convince,” said the consul sternly. “Do you call that a woman?” He stripped the clothing from the carcass. Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but more like the underside of an old fox-terrier with puppies, or of a white sow, with her second litter; from collar-bone to groin ten lolloping udders, two rows, mauled, stringy and flaccid. “What kind of a creature is it?” he asked faintly. “A Ghoul, my boy,” the consul answered solemnly, almost in a whisper. “I thought they did not exist,” Waldo babbled. “I thought they were mythical; I thought there were none.” “I can very well believe that there are none in Rhode Island,” the consul said gravely. “This is in Persia, and Persia is in Asia.” 1906 THE PIG-SKIN BELT THE PIG-SKIN BELT I BE it noted that I, John Radford, always of sound mind and matter-of-fact disposition, being entirely in my senses, here set down what I saw, heard and knew. As to my inferences from what occurred I say nothing, my theory might be regarded as more improbable than the facts themselves. From the facts anyone can draw conclusions as well as I. The first letter read: