emotions were swallowed up in fear. He tried to turn and run from
before it, but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet
from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes
only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the
lusterless orbs of the apparition, which he knew was not a soul
without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting
that haunted wood--a body without a soul! In its blank stare was
neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence--nothing to which to address
an appeal for mercy. "An appeal will not lie," he thought, with an
absurd reversion to professional slang, making the situation more
horrible, as the fire of a cigar might light up a tomb.

For a time, which seemed so long that the world grew gray with age
and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this
monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of his
consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood
within a pace, regarding him with the mindless malevolence of a wild
brute; then thrust its hands forward and sprang upon him with
appalling ferocity! The act released his physical energies without
unfettering his will; his mind was still spellbound, but his powerful
body and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their
own, resisted stoutly and well. For an instant he seemed to see this
unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing
mechanism only as a spectator--such fancies are in dreams; then he
regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his body,
and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert and fierce
as that of its hideous antagonist.

But what mortal can cope with a creature of his dream? The
imagination creating the enemy is already vanquished; the combat's