Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/27

 it different from its neighbours and aroused our curiosity. We noticed in the wall, almost on the street level, a small window. This window was open, and a fatal fascination drew us to it at once. I watched my friend crawl through, for we knew the house was empty; then I followed him, the opening being just wide enough to admit me. Inside, we found ourselves on a gigantic marble staircase, spiral in form, and winding up and down as far as we could follow it with our eyes. There were no windows except the one we had entered by, and it, somehow, was invisible from inside, yet the place was perfectly lighted. There were no landings, no doors, nothing but this staircase, absolutely uniform in its construction, with low, broad, marble steps which wound down and down, and up and up. The place resembled a vast, still well, and we could not hear the slightest sound as we stood listening. The steps were very shallow, and we ran lightly down. The other boy went more quickly than I did, and in a little while I lost sight of him, though I still heard his footsteps, growing ever fainter, till at least they died away, and the stillness closed in about me with a strange heaviness. I continued to follow him, but all at once I noticed that the stairs I trod were darker and stained with damp. A faint chill odour and feeling of damp and decay rose, too, into my face, and the light was growing dimmer. I knew I was going down into a great vault or tomb far below the ground, a charnel-house, an unknown place of death. I caught sight far below me of a light as of a lamp burning, and I had an intuition, a consciousness that came to me in a flash, that my companion had awakened something. This knowledge brought with it a memory of mysterious horror, a memory that I had been here before. Then, with an ever increasing terror, I began to run up the steps I had just run down, but my feet had grown heavy and my limbs weak. Up and up I hurried, seeing nothing before me but an endless