It was as that of a human head covered with a dark veil through which glared, with livid and demoniac fire, eyes that froze the marrow of his bones.

Nothing else of the face was distinguishable,--nothing but those intolerable eyes; but his terror, that even at the first seemed beyond nature to endure, was increased a thousand-fold, when, after a pause, the phantom glided slowly into the chamber.
The cloud retreated from it as it advanced; the bright lamps grew wan, and flickered restlessly as at the breath of its presence.

Its form was veiled as the face, but the outline was that of a female; yet it moved not as move even the ghosts that simulate the living.

It seemed rather to crawl as some vast misshapen reptile; and pausing, at length it cowered beside the table which held the mystic volume, and again fixed its eyes through the filmy veil on the rash invoker.

All fancies, the most grotesque, of monk or painter in the early North, would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering nature in those eyes alone.