Sheila Wayne: All I know is that death in its most hideous form waits for me at the top of those stairs.

[closing narration]
Sheila Wayne: We left the old house: silent and foreboding, a place of horror and death. It was truly haunted. No one would ever live there again. It was a house of madness.

[first lines]
Sheila Wayne: Did I go up the stairs this time, doctor?

[last lines]
Philip Tierney: Come on, honey.

[opening narration]
Sheila Wayne: And then through the branches of the old trees I see the house again. It sits there waiting for me. Silent, malignant. A place of unspeakable horror. There is no one there now. On a mailbox beside the driveway, I can make out the name of the people who lived there once: Tierney. But the Tierneys must have all gone away a long time ago. And the house stands like a moldering tombstone to a world that died. There is an old-fashioned knocker on the door. An unseen hand always opens the door for me. I always go up the shadowy stairway as if I know exactly where to find the answer to what has drawn me here. It's behind a little unmarked door. And some unearthly power swings it open to receive me. I look up that narrow, dusty stairway, and for a moment that is so brief, so filled with terror that my mind cannot hold onto it, I know why I had to come to this place.