Then the bold tapping of the detective's foot, who would do all his accusing without saying a word, and the startling coincidence of the owl hoot-hooting outside the window to the same measure, bring us close to the final breakdown.

These realistic material actors are as potent as the actual apparitions of the dead man that preceded them.

Those visions prepared the mind to invest trifles with significance.

The pencil and the pendulum conducting themselves in an apparently everyday fashion, satisfy in a far nobler way the thing in the cave-man attending the show that made him take note in other centuries of the rope that began to hang the butcher, the fire that began to burn the stick, and the stick that began to beat the dog.
Now the play takes a higher demoniacal plane reminiscent of Poe's Bells.
The boy opens the door.

He peers into the darkness.