Sylen was well supplied with money. Even when prolonged security had diminished his fear of arrest, he did not dare to linger in any place. A queer, morbid restlessness impelled him to go on. And always, it seemed to him, there was a willow-bordered river to remind him of the scene of his act; and always there were women who resembled Elise. The mere sight of a stream, or a girl with the fancied likeness, even in one feature or detail of costume, would send him toward the nearest railroad station. He tried not to think of Elise, and sometimes succeeded; but any chance resemblance was too much for his nerves. The damnable frequency of such resemblances became one of his chief worries. He could not account for them as part of the natural order of things.
Often, with apparitional suddenness and irrelevance, he would remember Elise as he had seen her in that last moment, when her face had emerged from the twilight with such preternatural pallor and vividness. Even when he managed to forget her, there was a sense of some troublous haunting in the background of his mind. He developed also a physical feeling that he was not alone—that an unseen presence accompanied him wherever he went. But at first he did not connect this feeling with Elise, nor did he associate with her the earliest beginnings of the actual visual hallucination from which he eventually came to suffer.
Sylen was well aware of his growing nervousness, and made desultory efforts to overcome it. He knew, or had been told, that such a condition might lead to insanity. He tried by means of auto-suggestion to dismiss the irrational fears and impressions that dogged him in his wanderings. He felt that he was succeeding to some extent, that his haunting obsessions were growing fainter. Then, simultaneously with this, he began to think that there was something wrong with his eye-sight. He was troubled by a small, blurred image, somewhat to one side in his field of vision—an image that he could not seize or define, and which followed him everywhere, maintaining always the same position. He could even see it when he lay awake in the darkness—as if it were possessed of a pale luminosity. It occurred to him that the glasses he wore were injuring his eyes; and forthwith discarded them; but the unaccountable blurring still persisted. For some reason, other than his natural fear of optical disease, it made him horribly uneasy. But, for the time being, he did not think so often of Elise. Also, he was not quite so afraid of rivers and women as he had formerly been.
One evening, in a strange city far from the state he had left, Sylen deliberately went for a walk by the shore of a tree-fringed river. He wanted to reassure himself, wanted to feel that he was mastering his old terrors.
It was still twilight when he neared the water—that deceptive half light which alters the position and proportion of objects in a manner so illusory. All at once, Sylen became aware than the strange blur in his field of vision was now directly before him instead of at one side. Also, the blur had defined itself to a human face, seen as in some diminished perspective, at an interval of vague distance. But the face was unnaturally clear in every feature, and was outlined in luminous pallor against the dark flowing of the stream. It was the face of Elise, even as Edgar Sylen had last seen her…
Sylen was unable afterward to recollect the circumstances of his flight from the apparition. Any real consciousness of his actions was drowned for awhile by a primordial tide of unreasoning terror. When he came to himself, trembling like an ague patient, he was sitting in the lighted smoker of a moving train. He could not even remember where he was going, till he looked at the ticket which he held in his hand. He no longer saw the face of Elise; but, even as before, there was a blurred image in his field of vision—perhaps not so far to one side as it had been as first.
For several days, it was only at twilight that the image became definite. But all the time it was moving nearer to the center of his vision. Then he saw the face at various hours during the day, and also at night. It was always pale and luminous, it was detached and disembodied, like a face that has been superimposed on a photographic plate. But the clearness of detail was abnormal; even at the remote perspective which it maintained for many days, he could see the horror-widened eyes, the parted lips, and the livid marks of his fingers on the white throat. It appeared to him on the streets, in trains, in restaurants and hotel-lobbies; it came between him and the visages of people when he passed; he saw it in the foliage of trees, and among the faces of actors in the plays or films to which he had gone in the hope of temporary distraction. But at first the haunting was not continual; the face came and went at varying intervals, and left him always with the same paralyzing horror, which would wear off in some slight degree before the next appearance.
Sylen had never been a believer in the supernatural. But he knew a little about brain diseases and morbid hallucinations. His fear of the dead woman was more than doubled by a fear of madness. He felt that he was unquestionably headed for some sort of lunacy. At first he tried to reason with himself in the interludes of his panic. Among other things, he went to a public library with the idea of consulting various medical volumes on brain-pathology. He did not repeat his visit: for while he was reading one of the pages in a work of this type, the letters suddenly began to blur and fade; and it seemed to him that he was looking through and beyond them into a shadowy gulf, in which swam the face of Elise.
From that time onward, the appearances of the face were more frequent day by day; till the hour came when he saw it continually. For awhile, he drank soddenly; he sought the anodyne of drugs; but without losing the specter even in the ultimate delirium of his intoxication. Then his mind succumbed to a fear that was utterly beyond reason; and he dwelt henceward in a hell of fantasmal and superstitious terrors. The thing was no longer a mere hallucination, it had come back from the cryptic realms of the dead, from a gulf beyond mortal perception, to freeze his blood and his brain with ghastly intimations of all that is hidden in the depths of death. Perhaps his mind had already given way; for he soon lost the fear of madness in a greater and more abysmal fear of the woman herself, and the unknown world into which he had precipitated her by his crime. In his heedlessness of anything but the apparition, he would stumble against people on the street; and he was often in danger from passing vehicles. But in some miraculous manner, like a somnambulist, he would avoid them without ever knowing his peril or his escape.
The face was nearer now. It sat opposite him at every table, it moved before him along the pavements, it stood at the feet of his bed through the night-time. It was always the same, with widely staring eyes, and lips that were parted in an eternal gasp. Sylen was no longer conscious of what he did or where he went. It was some automatic portion of his brain which enabled him to continue the daily movements and actions of life. He was wholly obsessed by the image of Elise, he lived in a kind of mental catalepsy. Held by a dreadful hypnosis, he watched all day in open sun or rain or shadowy rooms, the thing that was stamped upon his vision; and he watched it during the night, by lamplight or in utter darkness. He slept very little, and when he did sleep, Elise hovered before him in the vistas of his dreams. It was mostly at night, lying awake, that he became aware of the abyss that lay behind and beneath her face—an abyss in which he could see the slow sinking of dim, macabre forms, of corpse-like or skeleton-like things that appeared always to fall and decompose in unfathomable gloom. But the face itself never sank into the abyss.