An entity found in alleys and dark corners, a living embodident of shadow and veil. This knowledge of this entity is gleaned from passerbys, who mentioned entire groups of people disappearing in the twilight. The police, always on the watch for night-kin, have never been able to place all the vanishing persons, though they have reason to think that the latter are mainly foreigners. The natives call them ghouls, but many physicians and psychologists dissent from this term, since they cannot agree with the results obtained on living ghouls. They think of the foetor, the loathsome stench, the abnormal perspiration, the doubled heart-beats, the doubled respiration, the doubled senses, the doubled memories, and the doubled insanity of the majority of the specimens. But in the end all physicians agree that the best diagnosis is simply apoplexy. Ghouls have not been able to find the tower, but have managed to subdue the local natives by frightful means. When the garrison at the outer wall was forced to retreat, the ghouls took with them most of the captured soldiers, and have there remained the bodies of those who had not gone into the tower.