raw; consumed with resentment, aflame with hate, thinking evil—complaining, fighting, snarling. . . . Then, at last, the breaking-point—the logical, ineluctable figuration of all this self-feeding, ingrowing hatred."
"All of that is easy to understand," agreed Markham. "But, after all, your conclusion is wholly theoretic, not to say literary.—By what tangible links do you connect last night's shooting with the admittedly abnormal situation at the Greene mansion?"
"There are no tangible links—that's the horror of it. But the joinders are there, however shadowy. I began to sense them the minute I entered the house; and all this afternoon I was reaching for them blindly. But they eluded me at every turn. It was like a house of mazes and false passages and trapdoors and reeking oubliettes: nothing normal, nothing sane—a house in a nightmare, peopled by strange, abnormal creatures, each reflecting the subtle, monstrous horror that broke forth last night and went prowling about the old hallways. Didn't you sense it? Didn't you see the vague shape of this abomination continually flash out and disappear as we talked to these people and watched them battling against their own hideous thoughts and suspicions?"
Markham moved uneasily and straightened a pile of papers before him. Vance's unwonted gravity had affected him.
"I understand perfectly what you mean," he said. "But I don't see that your impressions bring us any nearer to a new theory of the crime. The Greene mansion is unhealthy—that's granted—and so, no
