Only Alan saw —ghostly, at the very edge of vision— the tall figure that came out, a figure dressed not in a sport-coat or a smoking jacket but in a black broadcloth coat. A travelling coat.
In one hand Mr. Gaunt held an old-fashioned valise, the sort in which a drummer or a travelling salesman might have carried his goods and samples in days of old. It was made of hyena hide, and it was not still. It puffed and bulged, puffed and bulged below the long white fingers which gripped its handle. And from inside, like the sound of a distant wind or the ghostly cry one hears in high tension wires, the faint sound of screams. Alan did not hear this horrid and unsettling sound with his ears; he seemed to hear it with his heart and in his mind.