Out Of The Silence by Erle Cox — Read

FOR a long time Alan lay face downwards, with his head resting on his arms to recover his scattered senses. That he had been the victim of a fiendish device he now realised, and the realisation that his panic was due to nothing but a trick did not serve to heighten his self-esteem. He told himself that he might have expected some such assault on his imagination. That it had been deliberately planned to break the nerve of the discoverer he felt sure, and, lying there, a nebulous idea came to his mind as to how it had worked. He felt very little consolation in the reflection that not one man in a thousand would have kept his head and his courage. "That's twice I've been scared stiff by nothing in this dashed museum. What a beastly nightmare it was while it lasted. I suppose if I had not been in such an infernal hurry to get in I would have found a warning in that book in the library." He sat up with a sigh, and looked round him. "Well, I'll be hanged if there seems to be much to make such a fuss about. Good Lord! Are they real?"

Alan pulled himself to his feet slowly and stood staring down the gallery. The great room, large as it was, was slightly shorter than the others--probably by as much as the width of the ante-chamber. Its contents were few in number, but as Alan looked them over he found they lacked nothing in interest. The whole of the far end nearest the main doorway from the vestibule was occupied by what appeared to be a small temple built within the gallery. It was about thirty feet wide and sixty feet long. The architecture was somewhat Grecian in design. Two steps the whole width of the front led up to a portico supported by two pillars at either end, and the middle of the front was filled by a closed doorway. Fairly in the centre of the gallery, and about twenty feet from the steps of the portico, was set a heavily built chair with a low back, and it was so placed that anyone occupying it would be seated squarely facing the temple. It was neither the temple nor the chair that had drawn the startled question from Alan's lips, and brought him to his feet.