I had just been pushed into a low alleyway with broken and uneven flagstones. All along the wall there ran a yellowish ooze exhaling a fetid stench. I walked among shadows with the two men behind me. Further on the chiaroscuro of an internal courtyard began to become visible.
As I approached it, I was possessed by an ever-increasing sense of terror. There was nothing natural about it, just a harrowing feeling of impending doom, nightmarish, unnatural. I instinctively drew back from it with each forward step that I took.
"Get along with you!" one of the policemen shouted, putting his hand on my shoulder. "Walk, damn you!"
Imagine my sense of dread when, at the end of this passage, I saw the courtyard I had drawn the night before with its walls furnished with hooks, its heaps of scrap metal, its hencoop and its rabbit hutch.... Not one skylight big or small, high or low, not one cracked pane of glass, not a single detail in my drawing had been left out!
I was transfixed by this bizarre turn of events.
Near the well were the two judges, Van Spreckdal and Richter. At their feet lay the old woman, supine...her long grey hair dishevelled... her face blue...her eyes open inordinately wide...and her tongue caught in her teeth.
"Well," Van Spreckdal said to me solemnly, "what have you got to say for yourself?"
"Do you admit to having thrown this woman, Theresa Becker, down this well after strangling her to steal her money?"
"No!" I shouted. "No! I don't know this woman! I've never seen her before! As God is my witness!"
And he strode off, without any further ado, in the company of his colleague.
The policemen then saw fit to put the handcuffs on me. I was taken back to the Raspelhaus in a catatonic state. I no longer knew what to think...even my conscience was plaguing me. I started to wonder myself if I really had murdered the old woman!
I will not tell you what my emotions were during that night in the Raspelhaus when, sitting on my bale of straw, with a skylight facing me and a gallows to look at, I heard the nightwatchman dissipate the silence with cries of: "Sleep, good people of Nuremberg, the Lord is watching over you! One o'clock!...Two o'clock!...Three o'clock and all's well!"