I wondered what he would be doing; perhaps stuffing more squirrels. Or possibly playing with his phenakistoscope, watching the flickering images speeding past so that they merged into a facsimile of motion.
The dark of the night pressed around me. Once again, the infernal scratching began, coming from nowhere yet somehow from everywhere at the same time. My visit to the trophy room and its parade of dead animals seemed to have renewed my dread of it. Thought of the monks incarcerated alive in their tomb seemed horribly appropriate to how I now felt. Laying in my dark garret, I could have clawed at the darkness that seemed suddenly so suffocating.
Two monks had been incarcerated. But one had already died, and only one remained, carrying out his futile attempt to claw his way past whatever
