midnight
Each separate story is perfectly clear and easy to follow , in spite of the elaborate interlacing . The romance opens with the death of a miser in a desolate Irish farmstead , with harpies clustering at his bedside . His nephew and heir , John Melmoth , is adjured to destroy a certain manuscript and a portrait of an ancestor with eyes `` such as one feels they wish they had never seen and feels they can never forget . '' Alone at midnight , John Melmoth reads the manuscript , which is reputed to have been written by Stanton , an English traveller in Spain , about 1676 . The document relates a startling story of a mysterious Englishman who appears at a Spanish wedding with disastrous consequences , and reappears before Stanton in a madhouse offering release on dreadful conditions . After reading it , John Melmoth decides to burn the family portrait . He is visited by a sinister form , who proves that he is no figment of the imagination by leaving black and blue marks on his relative 's wrist .