In the light of the candle the face seemed alive and more menacing than it had ever done in life. About the straight smile was a wider, more triumphant quality. The candle flickered sharply. It expired. The conquering blackness took his breath. He told himself it was the draft from the window which was strong, but the companionship of the night was closer and more numerous. The darkness wreathed itself into mocking and tortuous bodies whose faces were hidden. In an agony of revolt against these incorporeal, these fanciful horrors, he reached in the pocket. He sprang back with a choked, inaudible cry, for the dead thing beneath his hand was stirring. The dead, cold thing with a languid and impossible rebuke, moved beneath his touch. And the pocket he had felt was empty. The coat, a moment ago bulging and awkward, was flat. There sprang to his mind the mad thought that the detective, malevolent in life, had long after death snatched from his hand the evidence, carefully gathered, on which everything for him depended. CHAPTER V THE CRYING THROUGH THE WOODS 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--"