midnight
Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent : in his dream . Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook , one-half of which was leaved for memoranda , he discovered that he was without a pencil . He broke a twig from a bush , dipped it into a pool of blood and wrote rapidly . He had hardly touched the paper with the point of his twig when a low , wild peal of laughter broke out at a measureless distance away , and growing ever louder , seemed approaching ever nearer ; a soulless , heartless , and unjoyous laugh , like that of the loon , solitary by the lakeside at midnight ; a laugh which culminated in an unearthly shout close at hand , then died away by slow gradations , as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the world whence it had come . But the man felt that this was not so -- that it was near by and had not moved . A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and his mind . He could not have said which , if any , of his senses was affected ; he felt it rather as a consciousness -- a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence -- some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about him , and superior to them in power .