He stared at me with tortured, smoldering eyes that had looked into hell
itself, and he pointed to what lay beside me, and in a flash of
nightmare realization I knew the secret of the curse of Kralitz. There
came to me the knowledge that made my brain a frightful thing in which
shapes of darkness would ever swirl and scream; the dreadful
comprehension of _when_ each Baron Kralitz was initiated into the
brotherhood of blood. I knew--_I knew_--that no coffin had ever been
placed unoccupied in the tombs, and I read upon the stone sarcophagus at
my feet the inscription that made my doom known to me--_my own name,
"Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz."_