Higher than a tall
man's head, it was painted on bricks of a lighter hue than the
surrounding ones, and when the light touched it it seemed to leap
out of the dark like a thing alive, a thing that watched with an
unwinking and terrifying intensity.
I remembered Shooba's savage chant of the One Eye that his Snake had
shown him; and the doggerel verse on the frayed paper in Freeman's
diary.
"The Watcher in the Dark!" I stammered; "the Watcher in the Dark!
Why--why, that paper was the Key itself!"
"Exactly. And a very simple key, though it took me a heartbreaking
length of time to turn it. The cipher was easy enough. It falls
apart into the figures three, five, seven, and nine; it was also
the simplest train of reasoning to apply these figures to the column
of dots. Only, I hadn't the remotest idea what the dots themselves
represented. Nor did it occur to me that the tortuous turnings of
any of the passageways of Hynds House might follow the pattern of
the Greek key, until The Author called your attention to the design
over the outside windows. Clever man, The Author!
"I lost the paper in the attic the night you heard me stumble on the
stairs.
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