Towards midnight, he had finished encasing
the body in a close-clinging shell of plaster, which, when broken off, and
fitted together, would be the matrix to the form of the dead Wolkenlicht.
Before leaving it to harden till the morning, he was just proceeding to
strengthen it with an additional layer all over, when a flash of
lightning, reflected in all its dazzle from the snow without, almost
blinded him. A peal of long-drawn thunder followed; the wind rose; and
just such a storm came on as had risen some time before at the death of
Kuntz, whose spectre was still tormenting the city. The gnomes of terror,
deep hidden in the caverns of Teufelsbuerst's nature, broke out jubilant.
With trembling hands he tried to cast the pall over the awful white
chrysalis,--failed, and fled to his chamber. And there lay the studio
naked to the eyes of the lightning, with its tortured forms throbbing out
of the dark, and quivering, as with life, in the almost continuous
palpitations of the light; while on the couch lay the motionless mass of
whiteness, gleaming blue in the lightning, almost more terrible in its
crude indications of the human form, than that which it enclosed.
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