midnight
Finally , with Carrington Harris 's permission , I fitted a key to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street , preferring to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs , ground-floor hall , and front door could give . There , where morbidity lurked most thickly , I searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows , and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside . Nothing new rewarded my efforts -- only the same depressing mustiness and faint suggestions of noxious odors and nitrous outlines on the floor -- and I fancy that many pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes . At length , upon a suggestion of my uncle 's , I decided to try the spot nocturnally ; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the moldy floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted , half-phosphorescent fungi . The place had dispirited me curiously that evening , and I was almost prepared when I saw -- or thought I saw -- amidst the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the `` huddled form '' I had suspected from boyhood . Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented -- and as I watched I seemed to see again the thin , yellowish , shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy afternoon so many years before . Above the anthropomorphic patch of mold by the fireplace it rose ; a subtle , sickish , almost luminous vapor which as it hung trembling in the dampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form , gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with a fetor in its wake .