where it was more easy to advance. It led him to the house.

Had he been a boy of any imagination, he would have shuddered at the
thought of attempting an entrance. All the windows had outside
shutters. Those of the ground floor were closed--except one that swung
to and fro, and must have swung in many a wind since the house was
abandoned. The moon shone with a dull whitish gleam on the dusty
windows of the first and second stories, and on the great dormers that
shot out from the slope of the roof, and cast strange shadows upon
it. The door to the garden had had a porch of trellis-work, over which
jasmine and other creeping plants were trained; but whether anything
of the porch was left, no one could have told in that thicket of
creepers, interlaced and matted by antagonist forces of wind and
growth so that not a hint of door was visible. Clearly there was
nobody within.

Tommy sought the window with the open shutter. Through the dirty
glass, and the reflection of the moon, he could see nothing. He tried
the sash, but could not stir it. He went round the corner to one end
of the house, and saw another door. But an enemy stepped between: the
moon shone suddenly up from the ground. In a hollow of the pavement
had gathered a pool from the drip of the neglected gutters, and out of
its hidden depth the staring round looked at him. It was the third
time Tommy's nerves had been shaken that night, and he could stand no
more. At the awful vision he turned and fled, fell, and rose and fled
again. It was not imagination in Tommy; it was an undefined,
inexplicable horror, that must have had a cause, but could have no
reason. Young as he was he had already more than once looked on the
face of death, and had felt no awe; he had listened to the gruesomest
of tales, told not altogether without art, and had never moved a hair