The Mist in the Mirror Read Online Free PDF

I fell again, this time against a piece of furniture set back to the wall, and jarred myself badly and, through the noise and my own cursings, heard a peremptory voice and saw a light, as a door at the end of the passage was opened.
    The landlord showed me the way back to my room, from which I had been only a few paces, with an ill grace, and I could not have blamed him for that, but in fact I was very little aware of his sullen complaints and remonstrations, I was so caught up within my own disorientation and fear.
    I did not come to or calm myself until I had been alone for some time, sitting in the silence on my bed. I had been badly frightened, not by the dark nor by losing my way of course, those were trivial matters, but by what I had seen, the old crone draped in her gypsy-like scarves and shawls, sitting at a table in a dark room before a veiled lamp. Yet rack my brains as I might I could think of nothing in the reality of that to terrify a grown man who had travelled alone to some of the remotest parts of the world and seen almost daily sights a thousand times more horrifying and strange. My heart had pounded and was still beating too fast, my mouth was dry, my brain seemed to burn and crackle with the over-alertness of a state of nervous dread. Yet why? I had to conclude that I was not frightened by what I had actually seen so much as by some memory it had stirred, or something that had terrified me long ago. I could recall nothing, though I beat at my brains for most of that night, for I did not sleep again until dawn. I only knew that, whenever I saw the old woman with my inner eye, I started back, wanting desperately to get away, avoid the sight of her face and figure, her look, and, above all, toavoid entering the darkened room that lay beyond the beaded curtain.

CHAPTER THREE
    I spent the following week walking about London, and with every day that passed the dreadful nightmare glimpse of the old woman receded from my mind and my nerves became quite steady again, for nothing else at all disturbing or untoward came about, and it was a week of remarkably fine weather, with clear cold air and brightness in the sky both early and late.
    In that week I came to know the great city as well as any man who does not live in it for years; I gave myself over to it. I walked the length of the River Thames, and up to the Hampstead heights, I walked south and east far along the wide roads leading out to the country, I paced around square after square of graceful, fashionable houses, and lost myself repeatedly in the maze of huddled, smoky terraces that cluster behind the railway stations of Euston and St Pancras, Marylebone and Victoria. I went among the lawyers in their shady courts and ancient inns, I stood deafened by the thundering of all the presses of Fleet Street and strolled with the throngs up Ludgate Hill and through the Park and down Piccadilly. I looked at towers and palaces and statues and monuments, I came to recognise the cries of costers and flower girls, paper-sellers and draymen.I walked in the half-empty streets among the milk carts and hurrying clerks at early morning, and again and again took to them at night, in every well-lit thoroughfare and dim side-alley. I drank my fill of London and was intoxicated by it.
    Some weeks before embarking on my voyage to England I had written two letters, the first to an antiquarian bookseller and private publisher of a few monographs of biography and travel who, I had reason to know, had some interest in the voyages of Conrad Vane, and the second to the High Master of the public school Vane had attended, some twenty miles up the river from London.
    On the Friday of that week I went to the shipping company offices to make arrangements for the continued storage of my bags, for I had not yet decided in which part of London I wished eventually to take rooms, and there found replies from both men suggesting that I make contact with them when I arrived in England.
    I now did