The hotel grew quiet; a watchman went down the hall turning out each alternate gas jet.
Just outside of the door was a burner in a red globe, fixed at a stair landing to show the exit in case of fire.

This burned all night and it streamed through the transom of Vandover's room, splotching the ceiling with a great square of red light.

Vandover was in a torment, overcome now by that same fear with which he had at last become so familiar, the unreasoning terror of something unknown.

He uttered an exclamation, a suppressed cry of despair, of misery, and then suddenly checked himself, astonished, seized with the fancy that his cry was not human, was not of himself, but of something four-footed, the snarl of some exasperated brute.

He paused abruptly in his walk, listening, for what he did not know.