Chapter 8
That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is
shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have
drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping
dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with
fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock
it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately
fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly
unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly,
horribly well.
My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I
was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a
human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered
motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged a
