We had no time to say anything before it began to
speak.
Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying
man, and you will realize less than one-half of the horror of that
head's voice.
There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a
sort of "ring, ring, ring," in the note of the voice, like the
timbre of a bell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for
several minutes before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed
solution struck me. I looked at the body lying near the doorway,
and saw, just where the hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders,
a muscle that had nothing to do with any man's regular breathing,
twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction
of the Egyptian teraphin that one read about sometimes and the voice
was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could
wish to hear. All this time the head was "lip-lip-lapping" against
the side of the basin, and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face
again whining, of his son's illness and of the state of the illness
up to the evening of that very night.
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