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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Three John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Three John Silence Stories
+
+Author: Algernon Blackwood
+
+Release Date: January 7, 2004 [eBook #10624]
+[Most recently updated: June 21, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE JOHN SILENCE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Three John Silence Stories
+
+by Algernon Blackwood
+
+
+Contents
+
+ Case I: A Psychical Invasion
+ Case II: Ancient Sorceries
+ Case III: The Nemesis of Fire
+
+
+
+
+To
+M.L.W.
+The Original of John Silence
+and
+My Companion in Many Adventures
+
+
+
+
+CASE I: A PSYCHICAL INVASION
+
+I
+
+“And what is it makes you think I could be of use in this particular
+case?” asked Dr. John Silence, looking across somewhat sceptically at
+the Swedish lady in the chair facing him.
+
+“Your sympathetic heart and your knowledge of occultism—”
+
+“Oh, please—that dreadful word!” he interrupted, holding up a finger
+with a gesture of impatience.
+
+“Well, then,” she laughed, “your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your
+trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may
+be disintegrated and destroyed—these strange studies you’ve been
+experimenting with all these years—”
+
+“If it’s only a case of multiple personality I must really cry off,”
+interrupted the doctor again hastily, a bored expression in his eyes.
+
+“It’s not that; now, please, be serious, for I want your help,” she
+said; “and if I choose my words poorly you must be patient with my
+ignorance. The case I know will interest you, and no one else could
+deal with it so well. In fact, no ordinary professional man could deal
+with it at all, for I know of no treatment nor medicine that can
+restore a lost sense of humour!”
+
+“You begin to interest me with your ‘case,’” he replied, and made
+himself comfortable to listen.
+
+Mrs. Sivendson drew a sigh of contentment as she watched him go to the
+tube and heard him tell the servant he was not to be disturbed.
+
+“I believe you have read my thoughts already,” she said; “your
+intuitive knowledge of what goes on in other people’s minds is
+positively uncanny.”
+
+Her friend shook his head and smiled as he drew his chair up to a
+convenient position and prepared to listen attentively to what she had
+to say. He closed his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb
+the real meaning of a recital that might be inadequately expressed, for
+by this method he found it easier to set himself in tune with the
+living thoughts that lay behind the broken words.
+
+By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he
+was rich by accident, and by choice—a doctor. That a man of independent
+means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who
+could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility
+of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help
+themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them, and, greatly
+to his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices.
+
+Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither
+consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner. He took no fees,
+being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no
+harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted
+unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very
+special reason. He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor
+could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large
+class of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the
+arts, could not afford the price of a week’s comforts merely to be told
+to travel. And it was these he desired to help: cases often requiring
+special and patient study—things no doctor can give for a guinea, and
+that no one would dream of expecting him to give.
+
+But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one
+with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that
+especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that
+intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical
+afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to
+approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or
+less generally as the “Psychic Doctor.”
+
+In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted
+himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and
+spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone,
+no one seemed to know,—for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he
+betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,—but the fact
+that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five
+years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no
+one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of
+quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for
+the genuineness of his attainments.
+
+For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the
+“man who knows.” There was a trace of pity in his voice—contempt he
+never showed—when he spoke of their methods.
+
+“This classification of results is uninspired work at best,” he said
+once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years.
+“It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is
+playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it
+would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily
+slip into place and explain themselves. For the sources are accessible,
+and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes
+practical investigation safe and possible.”
+
+And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was
+significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power
+was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than
+a keen power of visualising.
+
+“It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more,” he would
+say. “The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds
+a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you
+will find this always to be the real test.”
+
+Thus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was
+able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference
+between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction
+that claimed his special powers. It was never necessary for him to
+resort to the cheap mysteries of divination; for, as I have heard him
+observe, after the solution of some peculiarly intricate problem—
+
+“Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves,
+are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that
+the inner vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no
+system is necessary at all.”
+
+And the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man,
+the keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in
+the knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and,
+secondly, that thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.
+
+“Learn how to _think_,” he would have expressed it, “and you have
+learned to tap power at its source.”
+
+To look at—he was now past forty—he was sparely built, with speaking
+brown eyes in which shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence,
+while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness
+seen most often in the eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the
+mouth without disguising the grim determination of lips and jaw, and
+the face somehow conveyed an impression of transparency, almost of
+light, so delicately were the features refined away. On the fine
+forehead was that indefinable touch of peace that comes from
+identifying the mind with what is permanent in the soul, and letting
+the impermanent slip by without power to wound or distress; while, from
+his manner,—so gentle, quiet, sympathetic,—few could have guessed the
+strength of purpose that burned within like a great flame.
+
+“I think I should describe it as a psychical case,” continued the
+Swedish lady, obviously trying to explain herself very intelligently,
+“and just the kind you like. I mean a case where the cause is hidden
+deep down in some spiritual distress, and—”
+
+“But the symptoms first, please, my dear Svenska,” he interrupted, with
+a strangely compelling seriousness of manner, “and your deductions
+afterwards.”
+
+She turned round sharply on the edge of her chair and looked him in the
+face, lowering her voice to prevent her emotion betraying itself too
+obviously.
+
+“In my opinion there’s only one symptom,” she half whispered, as though
+telling something disagreeable—“fear—simply fear.”
+
+“Physical fear?”
+
+“I think not; though how can I say? I think it’s a horror in the
+psychical region. It’s no ordinary delusion; the man is quite sane; but
+he lives in mortal terror of something—”
+
+“I don’t know what you mean by his ‘psychical region,’” said the
+doctor, with a smile; “though I suppose you wish me to understand that
+his spiritual, and not his mental, processes are affected. Anyhow, try
+and tell me briefly and pointedly what you know about the man, his
+symptoms, his need for help, my peculiar help, that is, and all that
+seems vital in the case. I promise to listen devotedly.”
+
+“I am trying,” she continued earnestly, “but must do so in my own words
+and trust to your intelligence to disentangle as I go along. He is a
+young author, and lives in a tiny house off Putney Heath somewhere. He
+writes humorous stories—quite a genre of his own: Pender—you must have
+heard the name—Felix Pender? Oh, the man had a great gift, and married
+on the strength of it; his future seemed assured. I say ‘had,’ for
+quite suddenly his talent utterly failed him. Worse, it became
+transformed into its opposite. He can no longer write a line in the old
+way that was bringing him success—”
+
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes for a second and looked at her.
+
+“He still writes, then? The force has not gone?” he asked briefly, and
+then closed his eyes again to listen.
+
+“He works like a fury,” she went on, “but produces nothing”—she
+hesitated a moment—“nothing that he can use or sell. His earnings have
+practically ceased, and he makes a precarious living by book-reviewing
+and odd jobs—very odd, some of them. Yet, I am certain his talent has
+not really deserted him finally, but is merely—”
+
+Again Mrs. Sivendson hesitated for the appropriate word.
+
+“In abeyance,” he suggested, without opening his eyes.
+
+“Obliterated,” she went on, after a moment to weigh the word, “merely
+obliterated by something else—”
+
+“By some one else?”
+
+“I wish I knew. All I can say is that he is haunted, and temporarily
+his sense of humour is shrouded—gone—replaced by something dreadful
+that writes other things. Unless something competent is done, he will
+simply starve to death. Yet he is afraid to go to a doctor for fear of
+being pronounced insane; and, anyhow, a man can hardly ask a doctor to
+take a guinea to restore a vanished sense of humour, can he?”
+
+“Has he tried any one at all—?”
+
+“Not doctors yet. He tried some clergymen and religious people; but
+they know so little and have so little intelligent sympathy. And most
+of them are so busy balancing on their own little pedestals—”
+
+John Silence stopped her tirade with a gesture.
+
+“And how is it that you know so much about him?” he asked gently.
+
+“I know Mrs. Pender well—I knew her before she married him—”
+
+“And is she a cause, perhaps?”
+
+“Not in the least. She is devoted; a woman very well educated, though
+without being really intelligent, and with so little sense of humour
+herself that she always laughs at the wrong places. But she has nothing
+to do with the cause of his distress; and, indeed, has chiefly guessed
+it from observing him, rather than from what little he has told her.
+And he, you know, is a really lovable fellow, hard-working,
+patient—altogether worth saving.”
+
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes and went over to ring for tea. He did not
+know very much more about the case of the humorist than when he first
+sat down to listen; but he realised that no amount of words from his
+Swedish friend would help to reveal the real facts. A personal
+interview with the author himself could alone do that.
+
+“All humorists are worth saving,” he said with a smile, as she poured
+out tea. “We can’t afford to lose a single one in these strenuous days.
+I will go and see your friend at the first opportunity.”
+
+She thanked him elaborately, effusively, with many words, and he, with
+much difficulty, kept the conversation thenceforward strictly to the
+teapot.
+
+And, as a result of this conversation, and a little more he had
+gathered by means best known to himself and his secretary, he was
+whizzing in his motor-car one afternoon a few days later up the Putney
+Hill to have his first interview with Felix Pender, the humorous writer
+who was the victim of some mysterious malady in his “psychical region”
+that had obliterated his sense of the comic and threatened to wreck his
+life and destroy his talent. And his desire to help was probably of
+equal strength with his desire to know and to investigate.
+
+The motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black
+panther lay concealed within its hood, and the doctor—the “psychic
+doctor,” as he was sometimes called—stepped out through the gathering
+fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree
+and a stunted laurel shrubbery. The house was very small, and it was
+some time before any one answered the bell. Then, suddenly, a light
+appeared in the hall, and he saw a pretty little woman standing on the
+top step begging him to come in. She was dressed in grey, and the
+gaslight fell on a mass of deliberately brushed light hair. Stuffed,
+dusty birds, and a shabby array of African spears, hung on the wall
+behind her. A hat-rack, with a bronze plate full of very large cards,
+led his eye swiftly to a dark staircase beyond. Mrs. Pender had round
+eyes like a child’s, and she greeted him with an effusiveness that
+barely concealed her emotion, yet strove to appear naturally cordial.
+Evidently she had been looking out for his arrival, and had outrun the
+servant girl. She was a little breathless.
+
+“I hope you’ve not been kept waiting—I think it’s _most_ good of you to
+come—” she began, and then stopped sharp when she saw his face in the
+gaslight. There was something in Dr. Silence’s look that did not
+encourage mere talk. He was in earnest now, if ever man was.
+
+“Good evening, Mrs. Pender,” he said, with a quiet smile that won
+confidence, yet deprecated unnecessary words, “the fog delayed me a
+little. I am glad to see you.”
+
+They went into a dingy sitting-room at the back of the house, neatly
+furnished but depressing. Books stood in a row upon the mantelpiece.
+The fire had evidently just been lit. It smoked in great puffs into the
+room.
+
+“Mrs. Sivendson said she thought you might be able to come,” ventured
+the little woman again, looking up engagingly into his face and
+betraying anxiety and eagerness in every gesture. “But I hardly dared
+to believe it. I think it is really too good of you. My husband’s case
+is so peculiar that—well, you know, I am quite sure any _ordinary_
+doctor would say at once the asylum—”
+
+“Isn’t he in, then?” asked Dr. Silence gently.
+
+“In the asylum?” she gasped. “Oh dear, no—not yet!”
+
+“In the house, I meant,” he laughed.
+
+She gave a great sigh.
+
+“He’ll be back any minute now,” she replied, obviously relieved to see
+him laugh; “but the fact is, we didn’t expect you so early—I mean, my
+husband hardly thought you would come at all.”
+
+“I am always delighted to come—when I am really wanted, and can be of
+help,” he said quickly; “and, perhaps, it’s all for the best that your
+husband is out, for now that we are alone you can tell me something
+about his difficulties. So far, you know, I have heard very little.”
+
+Her voice trembled as she thanked him, and when he came and took a
+chair close beside her she actually had difficulty in finding words
+with which to begin.
+
+“In the first place,” she began timidly, and then continuing with a
+nervous incoherent rush of words, “he will be simply delighted that
+you’ve really come, because he said you were the only person he would
+consent to see at all—the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he
+doesn’t know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He
+pretends with me that it’s just a nervous breakdown, and I’m sure he
+doesn’t realise all the odd things I’ve noticed him doing. But the main
+thing, I suppose—”
+
+“Yes, the main thing, Mrs. Pender,” he said, encouragingly, noticing
+her hesitation.
+
+“—is that he thinks we are not alone in the house. That’s the chief
+thing.”
+
+“Tell me more facts—just facts.”
+
+“It began last summer when I came back from Ireland; he had been here
+alone for six weeks, and I thought him looking tired and queer—ragged
+and scattered about the face, if you know what I mean, and his manner
+worn out. He said he had been writing hard, but his inspiration had
+somehow failed him, and he was dissatisfied with his work. His sense of
+humour was leaving him, or changing into something else, he said. There
+was something in the house, he declared, that”—she emphasised the
+words—“prevented his feeling funny.”
+
+“Something in the house that prevented his feeling funny,” repeated the
+doctor. “Ah, now we’re getting to the heart of it!”
+
+“Yes,” she resumed vaguely, “that’s what he kept saying.”
+
+“And what was it he _did_ that you thought strange?” he asked
+sympathetically. “Be brief, or he may be here before you finish.”
+
+“Very small things, but significant it seemed to me. He changed his
+workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said
+all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they
+altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies—vile, debased
+tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. But now he says the same of
+the sitting-room, and he’s gone back to the library.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“You see, there’s so little I can tell you,” she went on, with
+increasing speed and countless gestures. “I mean it’s only very small
+things he does and says that are queer. What frightens me is that he
+assumes there is some one else in the house all the time—some one I
+never see. He does not actually say so, but on the stairs I’ve seen him
+standing aside to let some one pass; I’ve seen him open a door to let
+some one in or out; and often in our bedrooms he puts chairs about as
+though for some one else to sit in. Oh—oh yes, and once or twice,” she
+cried—“once or twice—”
+
+She paused, and looked about her with a startled air.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Once or twice,” she resumed hurriedly, as though she heard a sound
+that alarmed her, “I’ve heard him running—coming in and out of the
+rooms breathless as if something were after him—”
+
+The door opened while she was still speaking, cutting her words off in
+the middle, and a man came into the room. He was dark and clean-shaven,
+sallow rather, with the eyes of imagination, and dark hair growing
+scantily about the temples. He was dressed in a shabby tweed suit, and
+wore an untidy flannel collar at the neck. The dominant expression of
+his face was startled—hunted; an expression that might any moment leap
+into the dreadful stare of terror and announce a total loss of
+self-control.
+
+The moment he saw his visitor a smile spread over his worn features,
+and he advanced to shake hands.
+
+“I hoped you would come; Mrs. Sivendson said you might be able to find
+time,” he said simply. His voice was thin and needy. “I am very glad to
+see you, Dr. Silence. It is ‘Doctor,’ is it not?”
+
+“Well, I am entitled to the description,” laughed the other, “but I
+rarely get it. You know, I do not practise as a regular thing; that is,
+I only take cases that specially interest me, or—”
+
+He did not finish the sentence, for the men exchanged a glance of
+sympathy that rendered it unnecessary.
+
+“I have heard of your great kindness.”
+
+“It’s my hobby,” said the other quickly, “and my privilege.”
+
+“I trust you will still think so when you have heard what I have to
+tell you,” continued the author, a little wearily. He led the way
+across the hall into the little smoking-room where they could talk
+freely and undisturbed.
+
+In the smoking-room, the door shut and privacy about them, Fender’s
+attitude changed somewhat, and his manner became very grave. The doctor
+sat opposite, where he could watch his face. Already, he saw, it looked
+more haggard. Evidently it cost him much to refer to his trouble at
+all.
+
+“What I have is, in my belief, a profound spiritual affliction,” he
+began quite bluntly, looking straight into the other’s eyes.
+
+“I saw that at once,” Dr. Silence said.
+
+“Yes, you saw that, of course; my atmosphere must convey that much to
+any one with psychic perceptions. Besides which, I feel sure from all
+I’ve heard, that you are really a soul-doctor, are you not, more than a
+healer merely of the body?”
+
+“You think of me too highly,” returned the other; “though I prefer
+cases, as you know, in which the spirit is disturbed first, the body
+afterwards.”
+
+“I understand, yes. Well, I have experienced a curious disturbance
+in—not in my physical region primarily. I mean my nerves are all right,
+and my body is all right. I have no delusions exactly, but my spirit is
+tortured by a calamitous fear which first came upon me in a strange
+manner.”
+
+John Silence leaned forward a moment and took the speaker’s hand and
+held it in his own for a few brief seconds, closing his eyes as he did
+so. He was not feeling his pulse, or doing any of the things that
+doctors ordinarily do; he was merely absorbing into himself the main
+note of the man’s mental condition, so as to get completely his own
+point of view, and thus be able to treat his case with true sympathy. A
+very close observer might perhaps have noticed that a slight tremor ran
+through his frame after he had held the hand for a few seconds.
+
+“Tell me quite frankly, Mr. Pender,” he said soothingly, releasing the
+hand, and with deep attention in his manner, “tell me all the steps
+that led to the beginning of this invasion. I mean tell me what the
+particular drug was, and why you took it, and how it affected you—”
+
+“Then you know it began with a drug!” cried the author, with
+undisguised astonishment.
+
+“I only know from what I observe in you, and in its effect upon myself.
+You are in a surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your
+atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others. This is the
+effect of a drug, but of no ordinary drug. Allow me to finish, please.
+If the higher rate of vibration spreads all over, you will become, of
+course, permanently cognisant of a much larger world than the one you
+know normally. If, on the other hand, the rapid portion sinks back to
+the usual rate, you will lose these occasional increased perceptions
+you now have.”
+
+“You amaze me!” exclaimed the author; “for your words exactly describe
+what I have been feeling—”
+
+“I mention this only in passing, and to give you confidence before you
+approach the account of your real affliction,” continued the doctor.
+“All perception, as you know, is the result of vibrations; and
+clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of
+vibrations. The awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about
+means no more than that. Your partial clairvoyance is easily explained.
+The only thing that puzzles me is how you managed to procure the drug,
+for it is not easy to get in pure form, and no adulterated tincture
+could have given you the terrific impetus I see you have acquired. But,
+please proceed now and tell me your story in your own way.”
+
+“This _Cannabis indica_,” the author went on, “came into my possession
+last autumn while my wife was away. I need not explain how I got it,
+for that has no importance; but it was the genuine fluid extract, and I
+could not resist the temptation to make an experiment. One of its
+effects, as you know, is to induce torrential laughter—”
+
+“Yes: sometimes.”
+
+“—I am a writer of humorous tales, and I wished to increase my own
+sense of laughter—to see the ludicrous from an abnormal point of view.
+I wished to study it a bit, if possible, and—”
+
+“Tell me!”
+
+“I took an experimental dose. I starved for six hours to hasten the
+effect, locked myself into this room, and gave orders not to be
+disturbed. Then I swallowed the stuff and waited.”
+
+“And the effect?”
+
+“I waited one hour, two, three, four, five hours. Nothing happened. No
+laughter came, but only a great weariness instead. Nothing in the room
+or in my thoughts came within a hundred miles of a humorous aspect.”
+
+“Always a most uncertain drug,” interrupted the doctor. “We make very
+small use of it on that account.”
+
+“At two o’clock in the morning I felt so hungry and tired that I
+decided to give up the experiment and wait no longer. I drank some milk
+and went upstairs to bed. I felt flat and disappointed. I fell asleep
+at once and must have slept for about an hour, when I awoke suddenly
+with a great noise in my ears. It was the noise of my own laughter! I
+was simply shaking with merriment. At first I was bewildered and
+thought I had been laughing in dreams, but a moment later I remembered
+the drug, and was delighted to think that after all I had got an
+effect. It had been working all along, only I had miscalculated the
+time. The only unpleasant thing _then_ was an odd feeling that I had
+not waked naturally, but had been wakened by some one
+else—deliberately. This came to me as a certainty in the middle of my
+noisy laughter and distressed me.”
+
+“Any impression who it could have been?” asked the doctor, now
+listening with close attention to every word, very much on the alert.
+
+Pender hesitated and tried to smile. He brushed his hair from his
+forehead with a nervous gesture.
+
+“You must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are
+quite as important as your certainties.”
+
+“I had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten
+dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great
+strength and great ability—of great force—quite an unusual
+personality—and, I was certain, too—a woman.”
+
+“A good woman?” asked John Silence quietly.
+
+Pender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it
+seemed to surprise him. But he shook his head quickly with an
+indefinable look of horror.
+
+“Evil,” he answered briefly, “appallingly evil, and yet mingled with
+the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness—the
+perversity of the unbalanced mind.”
+
+He hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. A
+shade of suspicion showed itself in his eyes.
+
+“No,” laughed the doctor, “you need not fear that I’m merely humouring
+you, or think you mad. Far from it. Your story interests me exceedingly
+and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell it.
+You see, I possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic
+byways.”
+
+“I was shaking with such violent laughter,” continued the narrator,
+reassured in a moment, “though with no clear idea what was amusing me,
+that I had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and
+was afraid I should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions.
+When the gas was lit I found the room empty, of course, and the door
+locked as usual. Then I half dressed and went out on to the landing, my
+hilarity better under control, and proceeded to go downstairs. I wished
+to record my sensations. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so as
+not to scream aloud and communicate my hysterics to the entire
+household.”
+
+“And the presence of this—this—?”
+
+“It was hanging about me all the time,” said Pender, “but for the
+moment it seemed to have withdrawn. Probably, too, my laughter killed
+all other emotions.”
+
+“And how long did you take getting downstairs?”
+
+“I was just coming to that. I see you know all my ‘symptoms’ in
+advance, as it were; for, of course, I thought I should never get to
+the bottom. Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the
+narrow hall at the foot of the stairs—well, I could have sworn it was
+half an hour’s journey had not my watch certified that it was a few
+seconds. Yet I walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I
+walked apparently without advancing, and at that rate it would have
+taken me a week to get down Putney Hill.”
+
+“An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space
+sometimes—”
+
+“But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came
+horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of
+icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter—”
+
+“Yes; what?” asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his
+eyes.
+
+“—I was overwhelmed with terror,” said Pender, lowering his reedy voice
+at the mere recollection of it.
+
+He paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in
+his eyes now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners
+of his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of
+that merriment still amused him. The combination of fear and laughter
+in his face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story;
+it also lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures.
+
+“Terror, was it?” repeated the doctor soothingly.
+
+“Yes, terror; for, though the Thing that woke me seemed to have gone,
+the memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair.
+Then I locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug
+made my movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach
+the door, and another five to get back to the chair again. The
+laughter, too, kept bubbling up inside me—great wholesome laughter that
+shook me like gusts of wind—so that even my terror almost made me
+laugh. Oh, but I may tell you, Dr. Silence, it was altogether vile,
+that mixture of fear and laughter, altogether vile!
+
+“Then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny
+side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The
+bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the
+clock looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the
+arrangement of papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared
+and shook and held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And
+that footstool! Oh, that absurd footstool!”
+
+He lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands
+at the thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed, too.
+
+“Go on, please,” he said, “I quite understand. I know something myself
+of the hashish laughter.”
+
+The author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing
+quickly grave again.
+
+“So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless
+merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror.
+The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror
+I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was
+terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two
+opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then,
+the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion—so
+you called it just now—of the ‘person’ who had wakened me: she was
+utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished
+for good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything
+in the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my
+heart. And this creature was putting—putting her—”
+
+He hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely.
+
+“Putting what?”
+
+“—putting ideas into my mind,” he went on glancing nervously about the
+room. “Actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off the usual
+current and inject her own. How mad that sounds! I know it, but it’s
+true. It’s the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the operation
+terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh
+with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant,
+bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas,
+and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior
+and diabolical method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and
+ideas of evil and tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. Oh,
+doctor, I tell you again, it was unnerving!”
+
+John Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of
+the story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky
+sentences and lowered voice.
+
+“You saw nothing—no one—all this time?” he asked.
+
+“Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind
+there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman—large, dark-skinned,
+with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye—the left—so
+drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face—!”
+
+“A face you would recognise again?”
+
+Pender laughed dreadfully.
+
+“I wish I could forget it,” he whispered, “I only wish I could forget
+it!” Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the
+doctor’s hand with an emotional gesture.
+
+“I _must_ tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy,”
+he cried, with a tremor in his voice, “and—that you do not think me
+mad. I have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere
+freedom of speech—the relief of sharing my affliction with another—has
+helped me already more than I can possibly say.”
+
+Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened
+eyes. His voice was very gentle when he replied.
+
+“Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to
+me,” he said, “for it threatens, not your physical existence but the
+temple of your psychical existence—the inner life. Your mind would not
+be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the
+existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your
+spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be
+_spiritually insane_—a far more radical condition than merely being
+insane here.”
+
+There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men
+sitting there facing one another.
+
+“Do you really mean—Good Lord!” stammered the author as soon as he
+could find his tongue.
+
+“What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only
+say now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite
+positive of being able to help you. Oh, there’s no doubt as to that,
+believe me. In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of
+this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of
+opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I
+have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well
+as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and
+painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic
+treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened
+another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration,
+and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to
+this house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to
+their precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should
+myself be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling
+nothing as yet. But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the
+rest of your wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk
+about the means of cure.”
+
+Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and
+then went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.
+
+“After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again
+to bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up—at
+the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window,
+the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that
+outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to
+alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless
+sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache
+and a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation.”
+
+“Fear gone, too?” asked the doctor.
+
+“I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere
+nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that
+day I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed
+wonderfully quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the
+heart of true humour. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my
+experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I
+came to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden
+glances of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I was
+dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I had
+uttered it.”
+
+“And why?”
+
+“It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could
+remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense
+was so altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to
+tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted.
+Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. There was
+laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my
+attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it read
+then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had
+come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as
+merriment. The framework of humour was there, if you understand me, but
+the characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil.”
+
+“Can you show me this writing?”
+
+The author shook his head.
+
+“I destroyed it,” he whispered. “But, in the end, though of course much
+perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some
+after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my
+mind and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations
+that did not properly hold them.”
+
+“And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?”
+
+“No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I
+forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular,
+there she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly—”
+
+“In what way, precisely?” interrupted the doctor.
+
+“Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures
+of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been
+foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature—”
+
+“The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality,” murmured the
+doctor, making a quick note.
+
+“Eh? I didn’t quite catch—”
+
+“Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you shall know their purport
+fully later.”
+
+“Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the
+house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate
+fashion; and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and
+respectful towards it—to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself
+carefully deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at
+last, and, if I failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that
+it pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my
+very soul in its inmost abode. It certainly came before my wife so far
+as my attentions were concerned.
+
+“But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took
+it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience,
+delayed like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when
+it did come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. This time,
+however, there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time;
+it shortened instead of lengthened, so that I dressed and got
+downstairs in about twenty seconds, and the couple of hours I stayed
+and worked in the study passed literally like a period of ten minutes.”
+
+“That is often true of an overdose,” interjected the doctor, “and you
+may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour.
+It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it,
+and is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of
+thought.”
+
+“This time,” Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his
+excitement, “another extraordinary effect came to me, and I experienced
+a curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived external things
+through one large main sense-channel instead of through the five
+divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth. You will, I know,
+understand me when I tell you that I _heard_ sights and _saw_ sounds.
+No language can make this comprehensible, of course, and I can only
+say, for instance, that the striking of the clock I saw as a visible
+picture in the air before me. I saw the sounds of the tinkling bell.
+And in precisely the same way I heard the colours in the room,
+especially the colours of those books in the shelf behind you. Those
+red bindings I heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the
+French bindings next to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike
+the chattering of starlings. That brown bookcase muttered, and those
+green curtains opposite kept up a constant sort of rippling sound like
+the lower notes of a wood-horn. But I only was conscious of these
+sounds when I looked steadily at the different objects, and thought
+about them. The room, you understand, was not full of a chorus of
+notes; but when I concentrated my mind upon a colour, I heard, as well
+as saw, it.”
+
+“That is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of _Cannabis indica_,”
+observed the doctor. “And it provoked laughter again, did it?”
+
+“Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so
+like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of
+a performing bear—which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know.
+But this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On
+the contrary, I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an
+intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and
+keen-minded.
+
+“Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to
+sketch—a talent not normally mine—I found that I could draw nothing but
+heads, nothing, in fact, but one head—always the same—the head of a
+dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very drooping
+left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may
+imagine—”
+
+“And the expression of the face—?”
+
+Pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in
+the air and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.
+
+“What I can only describe as—_blackness_,” he replied in a low tone;
+“the face of a dark and evil soul.”
+
+“You destroyed that, too?” queried the doctor sharply.
+
+“No; I have kept the drawings,” he said, with a laugh, and rose to get
+them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.
+
+“Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see,” he added, pushing
+a number of loose sheets under the doctor’s eyes; “nothing but a few
+scrawly lines. That’s all I found the next morning. I had really drawn
+no heads at all—nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. The
+pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which
+constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered
+scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed,
+of course, with the passing of the drug’s effects. But the other thing
+did not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me.
+It is here still. It is real. I don’t know how I can escape from it.”
+
+“It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the
+house.”
+
+“Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole
+means of support, and—well, you see, since this change I cannot even
+write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their
+mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible? I shall go
+mad if this continues.”
+
+He screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected
+to see some haunting shape.
+
+“This influence in this house induced by my experiment, has killed in a
+flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humour, and though I still
+go on writing funny tales—I have a certain name you know—my inspiration
+has dried up, and much of what I write I have to burn—yes, doctor, to
+burn, before any one sees it.”
+
+“As utterly alien to your own mind and personality?”
+
+“Utterly! As though some one else had written it—”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“And shocking!” He passed his hand over his eyes a moment and let the
+breath escape softly through his teeth. “Yet most damnably clever in
+the consummate way the vile suggestions are insinuated under cover of a
+kind of high drollery. My stenographer left me of course—and I’ve been
+afraid to take another—”
+
+John Silence got up and began to walk about the room leisurely without
+speaking; he appeared to be examining the pictures on the wall and
+reading the names of the books lying about. Presently he paused on the
+hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and turned to look his patient
+quietly in the eyes. Pender’s face was grey and drawn; the hunted
+expression dominated it; the long recital had told upon him.
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Pender,” he said, a curious glow showing about his
+fine, quiet face; “thank you for the sincerity and frankness of your
+account. But I think now there is nothing further I need ask you.” He
+indulged in a long scrutiny of the author’s haggard features drawing
+purposely the man’s eyes to his own and then meeting them with a look
+of power and confidence calculated to inspire even the feeblest soul
+with courage. “And, to begin with,” he added, smiling pleasantly, “let
+me assure you without delay that you need have no alarm, for you are no
+more insane or deluded than I myself am—”
+
+Pender heaved a deep sigh and tried to return the smile.
+
+“—and this is simply a case, so far as I can judge at present, of a
+very singular psychical invasion, and a very sinister one, too, if you
+perhaps understand what I mean—”
+
+“It’s an odd expression; you used it before, you know,” said the author
+wearily, yet eagerly listening to every word of the diagnosis, and
+deeply touched by the intelligent sympathy which did not at once
+indicate the lunatic asylum.
+
+“Possibly,” returned the other, “and an odd affliction, too, you’ll
+allow, yet one not unknown to the nations of antiquity, nor to those
+moderns, perhaps, who recognise the freedom of action under certain
+pathogenic conditions between this world and another.”
+
+“And you think,” asked Pender hastily, “that it is all primarily due to
+the _Cannabis_? There is nothing radically amiss with myself—nothing
+incurable, or—?”
+
+“Due entirely to the overdose,” Dr. Silence replied emphatically, “to
+the drug’s direct action upon your psychical being. It rendered you
+ultra-sensitive and made you respond to an increased rate of vibration.
+And, let me tell you, Mr. Pender, that your experiment might have had
+results far more dire. It has brought you into touch with a somewhat
+singular class of Invisible, but of one, I think, chiefly human in
+character. You might, however, just as easily have been drawn out of
+human range altogether, and the results of such a contingency would
+have been exceedingly terrible. Indeed, you would not now be here to
+tell the tale. I need not alarm you on that score, but mention it as a
+warning you will not misunderstand or underrate after what you have
+been through.
+
+“You look puzzled. You do not quite gather what I am driving at; and it
+is not to be expected that you should, for you, I suppose, are the
+nominal Christian with the nominal Christian’s lofty standard of
+ethics, and his utter ignorance of spiritual possibilities. Beyond a
+somewhat childish understanding of ‘spiritual wickedness in high
+places,’ you probably have no conception of what is possible once you
+break-down the slender gulf that is mercifully fixed between you and
+that Outer World. But my studies and training have taken me far outside
+these orthodox trips, and I have made experiments that I could scarcely
+speak to you about in language that would be intelligible to you.”
+
+He paused a moment to note the breathless interest of Pender’s face and
+manner. Every word he uttered was calculated; he knew exactly the value
+and effect of the emotions he desired to waken in the heart of the
+afflicted being before him.
+
+“And from certain knowledge I have gained through various experiences,”
+he continued calmly, “I can diagnose your case as I said before to be
+one of psychical invasion.”
+
+“And the nature of this—er—invasion?” stammered the bewildered writer
+of humorous tales.
+
+“There is no reason why I should not say at once that I do not yet
+quite know,” replied Dr. Silence. “I may first have to make one or two
+experiments—”
+
+“On me?” gasped Pender, catching his breath.
+
+“Not exactly,” the doctor said, with a grave smile, “but with your
+assistance, perhaps. I shall want to test the conditions of the
+house—to ascertain, impossible, the character of the forces, of this
+strange personality that has been haunting you—”
+
+“At present you have no idea exactly who—what—why—” asked the other in
+a wild flurry of interest, dread and amazement.
+
+“I have a very good idea, but no proof rather,” returned the doctor.
+“The effects of the drug in altering the scale of time and space, and
+merging the senses have nothing primarily to do with the invasion. They
+come to any one who is fool enough to take an experimental dose. It is
+the other features of your case that are unusual. You see, you are now
+in touch with certain violent emotions, desires, purposes, still active
+in this house, that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil
+personality that lived here. How long ago, or why they still persist so
+forcibly, I cannot positively say. But I should judge that they are
+merely forces acting automatically with the momentum of their terrific
+original impetus.”
+
+“Not directed by a living being, a conscious will, you mean?”
+
+“Possibly not—but none the less dangerous on that account, and more
+difficult to deal with. I cannot explain to you in a few minutes the
+nature of such things, for you have not made the studies that would
+enable you to follow me; but I have reason to believe that on the
+dissolution at death of a human being, its forces may still persist and
+continue to act in a blind, unconscious fashion. As a rule they
+speedily dissipate themselves, but in the case of a very powerful
+personality they may last a long time. And, in some cases—of which I
+incline to think this is one—these forces may coalesce with certain
+non-human entities who thus continue their life indefinitely and
+increase their strength to an unbelievable degree. If the original
+personality was evil, the beings attracted to the left-over forces will
+also be evil. In this case, I think there has been an unusual and
+dreadful aggrandisement of the thoughts and purposes left behind long
+ago by a woman of consummate wickedness and great personal power of
+character and intellect. Now, do you begin to see what I am driving at
+a little?”
+
+Pender stared fixedly at his companion, plain horror showing in his
+eyes. But he found nothing to say, and the doctor continued—
+
+“In your case, predisposed by the action of the drug, you have
+experienced the rush of these forces in undiluted strength. They wholly
+obliterate in you the sense of humour, fancy, imagination,—all that
+makes for cheerfulness and hope. They seek, though perhaps
+automatically only, to oust your own thoughts and establish themselves
+in their place. You are the victim of a psychical invasion. At the same
+time, you have become clairvoyant in the true sense. You are also a
+clairvoyant victim.”
+
+Pender mopped his face and sighed. He left his chair and went over to
+the fireplace to warm himself.
+
+“You must think me a quack to talk like this, or a madman,” laughed Dr.
+Silence. “But never mind that. I have come to help you, and I can help
+you if you will do what I tell you. It is very simple: you must leave
+this house at once. Oh, never mind the difficulties; we will deal with
+those together. I can place another house at your disposal, or I would
+take the lease here off your hands, and later have it pulled down. Your
+case interests me greatly, and I mean to see you through, so that you
+have no anxiety, and can drop back into your old groove of work
+tomorrow! The drug has provided you, and therefore me, with a shortcut
+to a very interesting experience. I am grateful to you.”
+
+The author poked the fire vigorously, emotion rising in him like a
+tide. He glanced towards the door nervously.
+
+“There is no need to alarm your wife or to tell her the details of our
+conversation,” pursued the other quietly. “Let her know that you will
+soon be in possession again of your sense of humour and your health,
+and explain that I am lending you another house for six months.
+Meanwhile I may have the right to use this house for a night or two for
+my experiment. Is that understood between us?”
+
+“I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart,” stammered Pender,
+unable to find words to express his gratitude.
+
+Then he hesitated for a moment, searching the doctor’s face anxiously.
+
+“And your experiment with the house?” he said at length.
+
+“Of the simplest character, my dear Mr. Pender. Although I am myself an
+artificially trained psychic, and consequently aware of the presence of
+discarnate entities as a rule, I have so far felt nothing here at all.
+This makes me sure that the forces acting here are of an unusual
+description. What I propose to do is to make an experiment with a view
+of drawing out this evil, coaxing it from its lair, so to speak, in
+order that it may _exhaust itself through me_ and become dissipated for
+ever. I have already been inoculated,” he added; “I consider myself to
+be immune.”
+
+“Heavens above!” gasped the author, collapsing on to a chair.
+
+“Hell beneath! might be a more appropriate exclamation,” the doctor
+laughed. “But, seriously, Mr. Pender, this is what I propose to do—with
+your permission.”
+
+“Of course, of course,” cried the other, “you have my permission and my
+best wishes for success. I can see no possible objection, but—”
+
+“But what?”
+
+“I pray to Heaven you will not undertake this experiment alone, will
+you?”
+
+“Oh, dear, no; not alone.”
+
+“You will take a companion with good nerves, and reliable in case of
+disaster, won’t you?”
+
+“I shall bring two companions,” the doctor said.
+
+“Ah, that’s better. I feel easier. I am sure you must have among your
+acquaintances men who—”
+
+“I shall not think of bringing men, Mr. Pender.”
+
+The other looked up sharply.
+
+“No, or women either; or children.”
+
+“I don’t understand. Who will you bring, then?”
+
+“Animals,” explained the doctor, unable to prevent a smile at his
+companion’s expression of surprise—“two animals, a cat and a dog.”
+
+Pender stared as if his eyes would drop out upon the floor, and then
+led the way without another word into the adjoining room where his wife
+was awaiting them for tea.
+
+II
+
+A few days later the humorist and his wife, with minds greatly
+relieved, moved into a small furnished house placed at their free
+disposal in another part of London; and John Silence, intent upon his
+approaching experiment, made ready to spend a night in the empty house
+on the top of Putney Hill. Only two rooms were prepared for occupation:
+the study on the ground floor and the bedroom immediately above it; all
+other doors were to be locked, and no servant was to be left in the
+house. The motor had orders to call for him at nine o’clock the
+following morning.
+
+And, meanwhile, his secretary had instructions to look up the past
+history and associations of the place, and learn everything he could
+concerning the character of former occupants, recent or remote.
+
+The animals, by whose sensitiveness he intended to test any unusual
+conditions in the atmosphere of the building, Dr. Silence selected with
+care and judgment. He believed (and had already made curious
+experiments to prove it) that animals were more often, and more truly,
+clairvoyant than human beings. Many of them, he felt convinced,
+possessed powers of perception far superior to that mere keenness of
+the senses common to all dwellers in the wilds where the senses grow
+specially alert; they had what he termed “animal clairvoyance,” and
+from his experiments with horses, dogs, cats, and even birds, he had
+drawn certain deductions, which, however, need not be referred to in
+detail here.
+
+Cats, in particular, he believed, were almost continuously conscious of
+a larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera,
+and quite beyond the reach of normal human organs. He had, further,
+observed that while dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such
+phenomena, cats on the other hand were soothed and satisfied. They
+welcomed manifestations as something belonging peculiarly to their own
+region.
+
+He selected his animals, therefore, with wisdom so that they might
+afford a differing test, each in its own way, and that one should not
+merely communicate its own excitement to the other. He took a dog and a
+cat.
+
+The cat he chose, now full grown, had lived with him since kittenhood,
+a kittenhood of perplexing sweetness and audacious mischief. Wayward it
+was and fanciful, ever playing its own mysterious games in the corners
+of the room, jumping at invisible nothings, leaping sideways into the
+air and falling with tiny moccasined feet on to another part of the
+carpet, yet with an air of dignified earnestness which showed that the
+performance was necessary to its own well-being, and not done merely to
+impress a stupid human audience. In the middle of elaborate washing it
+would look up, startled, as though to stare at the approach of some
+Invisible, cocking its little head sideways and putting out a velvet
+pad to inspect cautiously. Then it would get absent-minded, and stare
+with equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the
+onlookers), and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in
+quite a new place. Except for a white patch on its breast it was coal
+black. And its name was—Smoke.
+
+“Smoke” described its temperament as well as its appearance. Its
+movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of
+concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to
+justify its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp
+of floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points
+only—the glowing eyes.
+
+All its forces ran to intelligence—secret intelligence, the wordless
+incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, _the_ cat for the
+business in hand.
+
+The selection of the dog was not so simple, for the doctor owned many;
+but after much deliberation he chose a collie, called Flame from his
+yellow coat. True, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and
+even beginning to grow deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very
+particular friend of Smoke’s, and had fathered it from kittenhood
+upwards so that a subtle understanding existed between them. It was
+this that turned the balance in its favour, this and its courage.
+Moreover, though good-tempered, it was a terrible fighter, and its
+anger when provoked by a righteous cause was a fury of fire, and
+irresistible.
+
+It had come to him quite young, straight from the shepherd, with the
+air of the hills yet in its nostrils, and was then little more than
+skin and bones and teeth. For a collie it was sturdily built, its nose
+blunter than most, its yellow hair stiff rather than silky, and it had
+full eyes, unlike the slit eyes of its breed. Only its master could
+touch it, for it ignored strangers, and despised their pattings—when
+any dared to pat it. There was something patriarchal about the old
+beast. He was in earnest, and went through life with tremendous energy
+and big things in view, as though he had the reputation of his whole
+race to uphold. And to watch him fighting against odds was to
+understand why he was terrible.
+
+In his relations with Smoke he was always absurdly gentle; also he was
+fatherly; and at the same time betrayed a certain diffidence or
+shyness. He recognised that Smoke called for strong yet respectful
+management. The cat’s circuitous methods puzzled him, and his elaborate
+pretences perhaps shocked the dog’s liking for direct, undisguised
+action. Yet, while he failed to comprehend these tortuous feline
+mysteries, he was never contemptuous or condescending; and he presided
+over the safety of his furry black friend somewhat as a father, loving,
+but intuitive, might superintend the vagaries of a wayward and talented
+child. And, in return, Smoke rewarded him with exhibitions of
+fascinating and audacious mischief.
+
+And these brief descriptions of their characters are necessary for the
+proper understanding of what subsequently took place.
+
+With Smoke sleeping in the folds of his fur coat, and the collie lying
+watchful on the seat opposite, John Silence went down in his motor
+after dinner on the night of November 15th.
+
+And the fog was so dense that they were obliged to travel at quarter
+speed the entire way.
+
+
+It was after ten o’clock when he dismissed the motor and entered the
+dingy little house with the latchkey provided by Pender. He found the
+hall gas turned low, and a fire in the study. Books and food had also
+been placed ready by the servant according to instructions. Coils of
+fog rushed in after him through the open door and filled the hall and
+passage with its cold discomfort.
+
+The first thing Dr. Silence did was to lock up Smoke in the study with
+a saucer of milk before the fire, and then make a search of the house
+with Flame. The dog ran cheerfully behind him all the way while he
+tried the doors of the other rooms to make sure they were locked. He
+nosed about into corners and made little excursions on his own account.
+His manner was expectant. He knew there must be something unusual about
+the proceeding, because it was contrary to the habits of his whole life
+not to be asleep at this hour on the mat in front of the fire. He kept
+looking up into his master’s face, as door after door was tried, with
+an expression of intelligent sympathy, but at the same time a certain
+air of disapproval. Yet everything his master did was good in his eyes,
+and he betrayed as little impatience as possible with all this
+unnecessary journeying to and fro. If the doctor was pleased to play
+this sort of game at such an hour of the night, it was surely not for
+him to object. So he played it, too; and was very busy and earnest
+about it into the bargain.
+
+After an uneventful search they came down again to the study, and here
+Dr. Silence discovered Smoke washing his face calmly in front of the
+fire. The saucer of milk was licked dry and clean; the preliminary
+examination that cats always make in new surroundings had evidently
+been satisfactorily concluded. He drew an arm-chair up to the fire,
+stirred the coals into a blaze, arranged the table and lamp to his
+satisfaction for reading, and then prepared surreptitiously to watch
+the animals. He wished to observe them carefully without their being
+aware of it.
+
+Now, in spite of their respective ages, it was the regular custom of
+these two to play together every night before sleep. Smoke always made
+the advances, beginning with grave impudence to pat the dog’s tail, and
+Flame played cumbrously, with condescension. It was his duty, rather
+than pleasure; he was glad when it was over, and sometimes he was very
+determined and refused to play at all.
+
+And this night was one of the occasions on which he was firm.
+
+The doctor, looking cautiously over the top of his book, watched the
+cat begin the performance. It started by gazing with an innocent
+expression at the dog where he lay with nose on paws and eyes wide open
+in the middle of the floor. Then it got up and made as though it meant
+to walk to the door, going deliberately and very softly. Flame’s eyes
+followed it until it was beyond the range of sight, and then the cat
+turned sharply and began patting his tail tentatively with one paw. The
+tail moved slightly in reply, and Smoke changed paws and tapped it
+again. The dog, however, did not rise to play as was his wont, and the
+cat fell to parting it briskly with both paws. Flame still lay
+motionless.
+
+This puzzled and bored the cat, and it went round and stared hard into
+its friend’s face to see what was the matter. Perhaps some inarticulate
+message flashed from the dog’s eyes into its own little brain, making
+it understand that the programme for the night had better not begin
+with play. Perhaps it only realised that its friend was immovable. But,
+whatever the reason, its usual persistence thenceforward deserted it,
+and it made no further attempts at persuasion. Smoke yielded at once to
+the dog’s mood; it sat down where it was and began to wash.
+
+But the washing, the doctor noted, was by no means its real purpose; it
+only used it to mask something else; it stopped at the most busy and
+furious moments and began to stare about the room. Its thoughts
+wandered absurdly. It peered intently at the curtains; at the shadowy
+corners; at empty space above; leaving its body in curiously awkward
+positions for whole minutes together. Then it turned sharply and stared
+with a sudden signal of intelligence at the dog, and Flame at once rose
+somewhat stiffly to his feet and began to wander aimlessly and
+restlessly to and fro about the floor. Smoke followed him, padding
+quietly at his heels. Between them they made what seemed to be a
+deliberate search of the room.
+
+And, here, as he watched them, noting carefully every detail of the
+performance over the top of his book, yet making no effort to
+interfere, it seemed to the doctor that the first beginnings of a faint
+distress betrayed themselves in the collie, and in the cat the
+stirrings of a vague excitement.
+
+He observed them closely. The fog was thick in the air, and the tobacco
+smoke from his pipe added to its density; the furniture at the far end
+stood mistily, and where the shadows congregated in hanging clouds
+under the ceiling, it was difficult to see clearly at all; the
+lamplight only reached to a level of five feet from the floor, above
+which came layers of comparative darkness, so that the room appeared
+twice as lofty as it actually was. By means of the lamp and the fire,
+however, the carpet was everywhere clearly visible.
+
+The animals made their silent tour of the floor, sometimes the dog
+leading, sometimes the cat; occasionally they looked at one another as
+though exchanging signals; and once or twice, in spite of the limited
+space, he lost sight of one or other among the fog and the shadows.
+Their curiosity, it appeared to him, was something more than the
+excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a strange room; yet, so
+far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely kept his mind
+quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part
+should communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the value of
+their independent behaviour.
+
+They made a very thorough journey, leaving no piece of furniture
+unexamined, or unsmelt. Flame led the way, walking slowly with lowered
+head, and Smoke followed demurely at his heels, making a transparent
+pretence of not being interested, yet missing nothing. And, at length,
+they returned, the old collie first, and came to rest on the mat before
+the fire. Flame rested his muzzle on his master’s knee, smiling
+beatifically while he patted the yellow head and spoke his name; and
+Smoke, coming a little later, pretending he came by chance, looked from
+the empty saucer to his face, lapped up the milk when it was given him
+to the last drop, and then sprang upon his knees and curled round for
+the sleep it had fully earned and intended to enjoy.
+
+Silence descended upon the room. Only the breathing of the dog upon the
+mat came through the deep stillness, like the pulse of time marking the
+minutes; and the steady drip, drip of the fog outside upon the
+window-ledges dismally testified to the inclemency of the night beyond.
+And the soft crashings of the coals as the fire settled down into the
+grate became less and less audible as the fire sank and the flames
+resigned their fierceness.
+
+It was now well after eleven o’clock, and Dr. Silence devoted himself
+again to his book. He read the words on the printed page and took in
+their meaning superficially, yet without starting into life the
+correlations of thought and suggestions that should accompany
+interesting reading. Underneath, all the while, his mental energies
+were absorbed in watching, listening, waiting for what might come. He
+was not over-sanguine himself, yet he did not wish to be taken by
+surprise. Moreover, the animals, his sensitive barometers, had
+incontinently gone to sleep.
+
+After reading a dozen pages, however, he realised that his mind was
+really occupied in reviewing the features of Pender’s extraordinary
+story, and that it was no longer necessary to steady his imagination by
+studying the dull paragraphs detailed in the pages before him. He laid
+down his book accordingly, and allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the
+features of the Case. Speculations as to the meaning, however, he
+rigorously suppressed, knowing that such thoughts would act upon his
+imagination like wind upon the glowing embers of a fire.
+
+As the night wore on the silence grew deeper and deeper, and only at
+rare intervals he heard the sound of wheels on the main road a hundred
+yards away, where the horses went at a walking pace owing to the
+density of the fog. The echo of pedestrian footsteps no longer reached
+him, the clamour of occasional voices no longer came down the side
+street. The night, muffled by fog, shrouded by veils of ultimate
+mystery, hung about the haunted villa like a doom. Nothing in the house
+stirred. Stillness, in a thick blanket, lay over the upper storeys.
+Only the mist in the room grew more dense, he thought, and the damp
+cold more penetrating. Certainly, from time to time, he shivered.
+
+The collie, now deep in slumber, moved occasionally,—grunted, sighed,
+or twitched his legs in dreams. Smoke lay on his knees, a pool of warm,
+black fur, only the closest observation detecting the movement of his
+sleek sides. It was difficult to distinguish exactly where his head and
+body joined in that circle of glistening hair; only a black satin nose
+and a tiny tip of pink tongue betrayed the secret.
+
+Dr. Silence watched him, and felt comfortable. The collie’s breathing
+was soothing. The fire was well built, and would burn for another two
+hours without attention. He was not conscious of the least nervousness.
+He particularly wished to remain in his ordinary and normal state of
+mind, and to force nothing. If sleep came naturally, he would let it
+come—and even welcome it. The coldness of the room, when the fire died
+down later, would be sure to wake him again; and it would then be time
+enough to carry these sleeping barometers up to bed. From various
+psychic premonitions he knew quite well that the night would not pass
+without adventure; but he did not wish to force its arrival; and he
+wished to remain normal, and let the animals remain normal, so that,
+when it came, it would be unattended by excitement or by any straining
+of the attention. Many experiments had made him wise. And, for the
+rest, he had no fear.
+
+Accordingly, after a time, he did fall asleep as he had expected, and
+the last thing he remembered, before oblivion slipped up over his eyes
+like soft wool, was the picture of Flame stretching all four legs at
+once, and sighing noisily as he sought a more comfortable position for
+his paws and muzzle upon the mat.
+
+
+It was a good deal later when he became aware that a weight lay upon
+his chest, and that something was pencilling over his face and mouth. A
+soft touch on the cheek woke him. Something was patting him.
+
+He sat up with a jerk, and found himself staring straight into a pair
+of brilliant eyes, half green, half black. Smoke’s face lay level with
+his own; and the cat had climbed up with its front paws upon his chest.
+
+The lamp had burned low and the fire was nearly out, yet Dr. Silence
+saw in a moment that the cat was in an excited state. It kneaded with
+its front paws into his chest, shifting from one to the other. He felt
+them prodding against him. It lifted a leg very carefully and patted
+his cheek gingerly. Its fur, he saw, was standing ridgewise upon its
+back; the ears were flattened back somewhat; the tail was switching
+sharply. The cat, of course, had wakened him with a purpose, and the
+instant he realised this, he set it upon the arm of the chair and
+sprang up with a quick turn to face the empty room behind him. By some
+curious instinct, his arms of their own accord assumed an attitude of
+defence in front of him, as though to ward off something that
+threatened his safety. Yet nothing was visible. Only shapes of fog hung
+about rather heavily in the air, moving slightly to and fro.
+
+His mind was now fully alert, and the last vestiges of sleep gone. He
+turned the lamp higher and peered about him. Two things he became aware
+of at once: one, that Smoke, while excited, was _pleasurably_ excited;
+the other, that the collie was no longer visible upon the mat at his
+feet. He had crept away to the corner of the wall farthest from the
+window, and lay watching the room with wide-open eyes, in which lurked
+plainly something of alarm.
+
+Something in the dog’s behaviour instantly struck Dr. Silence as
+unusual, and, calling him by name, he moved across to pat him. Flame
+got up, wagged his tail, and came over slowly to the rug, uttering a
+low sound that was half growl, half whine. He was evidently perturbed
+about something, and his master was proceeding to administer comfort
+when his attention was suddenly drawn to the antics of his other
+four-footed companion, the cat.
+
+And what he saw filled him with something like amazement.
+
+Smoke had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied
+the middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as
+ramrods, it was steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow
+space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of
+pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make
+expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back
+made it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of
+beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an ecstasy.
+
+At the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again
+along the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little
+muffled drums. It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against
+the ankles of some one who remained invisible. A thrill ran down the
+doctor’s spine as he stood and stared. His experiment was growing
+interesting at last.
+
+He called the collie’s attention to his friend’s performance to see
+whether he too was aware of anything standing there upon the carpet,
+and the dog’s behaviour was significant and corroborative. He came as
+far as his master’s knees and then stopped dead, refusing to
+investigate closely. In vain Dr. Silence urged him; he wagged his tail,
+whined a little, and stood in a half-crouching attitude, staring
+alternately at the cat and at his master’s face. He was, apparently,
+both puzzled and alarmed, and the whine went deeper and deeper down
+into his throat till it changed into an ugly snarl of awakening anger.
+
+Then the doctor called to him in a tone of command he had never known
+to be disregarded; but still the dog, though springing up in response,
+declined to move nearer. He made tentative motions, pranced a little
+like a dog about to take to water, pretended to bark, and ran to and
+fro on the carpet. So far there was no actual fear in his manner, but
+he was uneasy and anxious, and nothing would induce him to go within
+touching distance of the walking cat. Once he made a complete circuit,
+but always carefully out of reach; and in the end he returned to his
+master’s legs and rubbed vigorously against him. Flame did not like the
+performance at all: that much was quite clear.
+
+For several minutes John Silence watched the performance of the cat
+with profound attention and without interfering. Then he called to the
+animal by name.
+
+“Smoke, you mysterious beastie, what in the world are you about?” he
+said, in a coaxing tone.
+
+The cat looked up at him for a moment, smiling in its ecstasy, blinking
+its eyes, but too happy to pause. He spoke to it again. He called to it
+several times, and each time it turned upon him its blazing eyes, drunk
+with inner delight, opening and shutting its lips, its body large and
+rigid with excitement. Yet it never for one instant paused in its short
+journeys to and fro.
+
+He noted exactly what it did: it walked, he saw, the same number of
+paces each time, some six or seven steps, and then it turned sharply
+and retraced them. By the pattern of the great roses in the carpet he
+measured it. It kept to the same direction and the same line. It
+behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against something solid.
+Undoubtedly, there was something standing there on that strip of
+carpet, something invisible to the doctor, something that alarmed the
+dog, yet caused the cat unspeakable pleasure.
+
+“Smokie!” he called again, “Smokie, you black mystery, what is it
+excites you so?”
+
+Again the cat looked up at him for a brief second, and then continued
+its sentry-walk, blissfully happy, intensely preoccupied. And, for an
+instant, as he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness
+stirred in the depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment
+upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him.
+
+There rose in him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with
+the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it,
+the domestic cat—their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their
+incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human
+beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. As he
+watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along
+the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of
+darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred in his
+heart a feeling strangely akin to awe. Its indifference to human kind,
+its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh
+meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its
+real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals. Its
+absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater’s words
+that “no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself
+with the mysterious”; and he became suddenly aware that the presence of
+the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of Putney Hill was
+uncommonly welcome to him. He was glad to feel that Flame’s dependable
+personality was with him. The savage growling at his heels was a
+pleasant sound. He was glad to hear it. That marching cat made him
+uneasy.
+
+Finding that Smoke paid no further attention to his words, the doctor
+decided upon action. Would it rub against his leg, too? He would take
+it by surprise and see.
+
+He stepped quickly forward and placed himself upon the exact strip of
+carpet where it walked.
+
+But no cat is ever taken by surprise! The moment he occupied the space
+of the Intruder, setting his feet on the woven roses midway in the line
+of travel, Smoke suddenly stopped purring and sat down. If lifted up
+its face with the most innocent stare imaginable of its green eyes. He
+could have sworn it laughed. It was a perfect child again. In a single
+second it had resumed its simple, domestic manner; and it gazed at him
+in such a way that he almost felt Smoke was the normal being, and _his_
+was the eccentric behaviour that was being watched. It was consummate,
+the manner in which it brought about this change so easily and so
+quickly.
+
+“Superb little actor!” he laughed in spite of himself, and stooped to
+stroke the shining black back. But, in a flash, as he touched its fur,
+the cat turned and spat at him viciously, striking at his hand with one
+paw. Then, with a hurried scutter of feet, it shot like a shadow across
+the floor and a moment later was calmly sitting over by the
+window-curtains washing its face as though nothing interested it in the
+whole world but the cleanness of its cheeks and whiskers.
+
+John Silence straightened himself up and drew a long breath. He
+realised that the performance was temporarily at an end. The collie,
+meanwhile, who had watched the whole proceeding with marked
+disapproval, had now lain down again upon the mat by the fire, no
+longer growling. It seemed to the doctor just as though something that
+had entered the room while he slept, alarming the dog, yet bringing
+happiness to the cat, had now gone out again, leaving all as it was
+before. Whatever it was that excited its blissful attentions had
+retreated for the moment.
+
+He realised this intuitively. Smoke evidently realised it, too, for
+presently he deigned to march back to the fireplace and jump upon his
+master’s knees. Dr. Silence, patient and determined, settled down once
+more to his book. The animals soon slept; the fire blazed cheerfully;
+and the cold fog from outside poured into the room through every
+available chink and crannie.
+
+For a long time silence and peace reigned in the room and Dr. Silence
+availed himself of the quietness to make careful notes of what had
+happened. He entered for future use in other cases an exhaustive
+analysis of what he had observed, especially with regard to the effect
+upon the two animals. It is impossible here, nor would it be
+intelligible to the reader unversed in the knowledge of the region
+known to a scientifically trained psychic like Dr. Silence, to detail
+these observations. But to him it was clear, up to a certain point—for
+the rest he must still wait and watch. So far, at least, he realised
+that while he slept in the chair—that is, while his will was
+dormant—the room had suffered intrusion from what he recognised as an
+intensely active Force, and might later be forced to acknowledge as
+something more than merely a blind force, namely, a distinct
+personality.
+
+So far it had affected himself scarcely at all, but had acted directly
+upon the simpler organisms of the animals. It stimulated keenly the
+centres of the cat’s psychic being, inducing a state of instant
+happiness (intensifying its consciousness probably in the same way a
+drug or stimulant intensifies that of a human being); whereas it
+alarmed the less sensitive dog, causing it to feel a vague apprehension
+and distress.
+
+His own sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse
+it temporarily, yet he felt convinced—the indications were not lacking
+even while he sat there making notes—that it still remained near to
+him, conditionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering
+force for a second attack.
+
+And, further, he intuitively understood that the relations between the
+two animals had undergone a subtle change: that the cat had become
+immeasurably superior, confident, sure of itself in its own peculiar
+region, whereas Flame had been weakened by an attack he could not
+comprehend and knew not how to reply to. Though not yet afraid, he was
+defiant—ready to act against a fear that he felt to be approaching. He
+was no longer fatherly and protective towards the cat. Smoke held the
+key to the situation; and both he and the cat knew it.
+
+Thus, as the minutes passed, John Silence sat and waited, keenly on the
+alert, wondering how soon the attack would be renewed, and at what
+point it would be diverted from the animals and directed upon himself.
+
+The book lay on the floor beside him, his notes were complete. With one
+hand on the cat’s fur, and the dog’s front paws resting against his
+feet, the three of them dozed comfortably before the hot fire while the
+night wore on and the silence deepened towards midnight.
+
+It was well after one o’clock in the morning when Dr. Silence turned
+the lamp out and lighted the candle preparatory to going up to bed.
+Then Smoke suddenly woke with a loud sharp purr and sat up. It neither
+stretched, washed nor turned: it listened. And the doctor, watching it,
+realised that a certain indefinable change had come about that very
+moment in the room. A swift readjustment of the forces within the four
+walls had taken place—a new disposition of their personal equations.
+The balance was destroyed, the former harmony gone. Smoke, most
+sensitive of barometers, had been the first to feel it, but the dog was
+not slow to follow suit, for on looking down he noted that Flame was no
+longer asleep. He was lying with eyes wide open, and that same instant
+he sat up on his great haunches and began to growl.
+
+Dr. Silence was in the act of taking the matches to re-light the lamp
+when an audible movement in the room behind him made him pause. Smoke
+leaped down from his knee and moved forward a few paces across the
+carpet. Then it stopped and stared fixedly; and the doctor stood up on
+the rug to watch.
+
+As he rose the sound was repeated, and he discovered that it was not in
+the room as he first thought, but outside, and that it came from more
+directions than one. There was a rushing, sweeping noise against the
+window-panes, and simultaneously a sound of something brushing against
+the door—out in the hall. Smoke advanced sedately across the carpet,
+twitching his tail, and sat down within a foot of the door. The
+influence that had destroyed the harmonious conditions of the room had
+apparently moved in advance of its cause. Clearly, something was about
+to happen.
+
+For the first time that night John Silence hesitated; the thought of
+that dark narrow hall-way, choked with fog, and destitute of human
+comfort, was unpleasant. He became aware of a faint creeping of his
+flesh. He knew, of course, that the actual opening of the door was not
+necessary to the invasion of the room that was about to take place,
+since neither doors nor windows, nor any other solid barriers could
+interpose an obstacle to what was seeking entrance. Yet the opening of
+the door would be significant and symbolic, and he distinctly shrank
+from it.
+
+But for a moment only. Smoke, turning with a show of impatience,
+recalled him to his purpose, and he moved past the sitting, watching
+creature, and deliberately opened the door to its full width.
+
+What subsequently happened, happened in the feeble and flickering light
+of the solitary candle on the mantlepiece.
+
+Through the opened door he saw the hall, dimly lit and thick with fog.
+Nothing, of course, was visible—nothing but the hat-stand, the African
+spears in dark lines upon the wall and the high-backed wooden chair
+standing grotesquely underneath on the oilcloth floor. For one instant
+the fog seemed to move and thicken oddly; but he set that down to the
+score of the imagination. The door had opened upon nothing.
+
+Yet Smoke apparently thought otherwise, and the deep growling of the
+collie from the mat at the back of the room seemed to confirm his
+judgment.
+
+For, proud and self-possessed, the cat had again risen to his feet, and
+having advanced to the door, was now ushering some one slowly into the
+room. Nothing could have been more evident. He paced from side to side,
+bowing his little head with great _empressement_ and holding his
+stiffened tail aloft like a flag-staff. He turned this way and that,
+mincing to and fro, and showing signs of supreme satisfaction. He was
+in his element. He welcomed the intrusion, and apparently reckoned that
+his companions, the doctor and the dog, would welcome it likewise.
+
+The Intruder had returned for a second attack.
+
+Dr. Silence moved slowly backwards and took up his position on the
+hearthrug, keying himself up to a condition of concentrated attention.
+
+He noted that Flame stood beside him, facing the room, with body
+motionless, and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious
+swaying movement. His eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and
+jaws thrust forward, his legs tense and ready to leap. Savage, ready
+for attack or defence, yet dreadfully puzzled and perhaps already a
+little cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on his spine and sides
+positively bristling outwards as though a wind played through it. In
+the dim firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf, silent,
+eyes shooting dark fire, exceedingly formidable. It was Flame, the
+terrible.
+
+Smoke, meanwhile, advanced from the door towards the middle of the
+room, adopting the very slow pace of an invisible companion. A few feet
+away it stopped and began to smile and blink its eyes. There was
+something deliberately coaxing in its attitude as it stood there
+undecided on the carpet, clearly wishing to effect some sort of
+introduction between the Intruder and its canine friend and ally. It
+assumed its most winning manners, purring, smiling, looking
+persuasively from one to the other, and making quick tentative steps
+first in one direction and then in the other. There had always existed
+such perfect understanding between them in everything. Surely Flame
+would appreciate Smoke’s intention now, and acquiesce.
+
+But the old collie made no advances. He bared his teeth, lifting his
+lips till the gums showed, and stood stockstill with fixed eyes and
+heaving sides. The doctor moved a little farther back, watching
+intently the smallest movement, and it was just then he divined
+suddenly from the cat’s behaviour and attitude that it was not only a
+single companion it had ushered into the room, but _several_. It kept
+crossing over from one to the other, looking up at each in turn. It
+sought to win over the dog to friendliness with them all. The original
+Intruder had come back with reinforcements. And at the same time he
+further realised that the Intruder was something more than a blindly
+acting force, impersonal though destructive. It was a Personality, and
+moreover a great personality. And it was accompanied for the purposes
+of assistance by a host of other personalities, minor in degree, but
+similar in kind.
+
+He braced himself in the corner against the mantelpiece and waited, his
+whole being roused to defence, for he was now fully aware that the
+attack had spread to include himself as well as the animals, and he
+must be on the alert. He strained his eyes through the foggy
+atmosphere, trying in vain to see what the cat and dog saw; but the
+candlelight threw an uncertain and flickering light across the room and
+his eyes discerned nothing. On the floor Smoke moved softly in front of
+him like a black shadow, his eyes gleaming as he turned his head, still
+trying with many insinuating gestures and much purring to bring about
+the introductions he desired.
+
+But it was all in vain. Flame stood riveted to one spot, motionless as
+a figure carved in stone.
+
+Some minutes passed, during which only the cat moved, and then there
+came a sharp change. Flame began to back towards the wall. He moved his
+head from side to side as he went, sometimes turning to snap at
+something almost behind him. They were advancing upon him, trying to
+surround him. His distress became very marked from now onwards, and it
+seemed to the doctor that his anger merged into genuine terror and
+became overwhelmed by it. The savage growl sounded perilously like a
+whine, and more than once he tried to dive past his master’s legs, as
+though hunting for a way of escape. He was trying to avoid something
+that everywhere blocked the way.
+
+This terror of the indomitable fighter impressed the doctor enormously;
+yet also painfully; stirring his impatience; for he had never before
+seen the dog show signs of giving in, and it distressed him to witness
+it. He knew, however, that he was not giving in easily, and understood
+that it was really impossible for him to gauge the animal’s sensations
+properly at all. What Flame felt, and saw, must be terrible indeed to
+turn him all at once into a coward. He faced something that made him
+afraid of more than his life merely. The doctor spoke a few quick words
+of encouragement to him, and stroked the bristling hair. But without
+much success. The collie seemed already beyond the reach of comfort
+such as that, and the collapse of the old dog followed indeed very
+speedily after this.
+
+And Smoke, meanwhile, remained behind, watching the advance, but not
+joining in it; sitting, pleased and expectant, considering that all was
+going well and as it wished. It was kneading on the carpet with its
+front paws—slowly, laboriously, as though its feet were dipped in
+treacle. The sound its claws made as they caught in the threads was
+distinctly audible. It was still smiling, blinking, purring.
+
+Suddenly the collie uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to
+one side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom.
+The next instant he dashed past his master’s legs, almost upsetting his
+balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly
+against walls and furniture. But that bark was significant; the doctor
+had heard it before and knew what it meant: for it was the cry of the
+fighter against odds and it meant that the old beast had found his
+courage again. Possibly it was only the courage of despair, but at any
+rate the fighting would be terrific. And Dr. Silence understood, too,
+that he dared not interfere. Flame must fight his own enemies in his
+own way.
+
+But the cat, too, had heard that dreadful bark; and it, too, had
+understood. This was more than it had bargained for. Across the dim
+shadows of that haunted room there must have passed some secret signal
+of distress between the animals. Smoke stood up and looked swiftly
+about him. He uttered a piteous meow and trotted smartly away into the
+greater darkness by the windows. What his object was only those endowed
+with the spirit-like intelligence of cats might know. But, at any rate,
+he had at last ranged himself on the side of his friend. And the little
+beast meant business.
+
+At the same moment the collie managed to gain the door. The doctor saw
+him rush through into the hall like a flash of yellow light. He shot
+across the oilcloth, and tore up the stairs, but in another second he
+appeared again, flying down the steps and landing at the bottom in a
+tumbling heap, whining, cringing, terrified. The doctor saw him slink
+back into the room again and crawl round by the wall towards the cat.
+Was, then, even the staircase occupied? Did _They_ stand also in the
+hall? Was the whole house crowded from floor to ceiling?
+
+The thought came to add to the keen distress he felt at the sight of
+the collie’s discomfiture. And, indeed, his own personal distress had
+increased in a marked degree during the past minutes, and continued to
+increase steadily to the climax. He recognised that the drain on his
+own vitality grew steadily, and that the attack was now directed
+against himself even more than against the defeated dog, and the too
+much deceived cat.
+
+It all seemed so rapid and uncalculated after that—the events that took
+place in this little modern room at the top of Putney Hill between
+midnight and sunrise—that Dr. Silence was hardly able to follow and
+remember it all. It came about with such uncanny swiftness and terror;
+the light was so uncertain; the movements of the black cat so difficult
+to follow on the dark carpet, and the doctor himself so weary and taken
+by surprise—that he found it almost impossible to observe accurately,
+or to recall afterwards precisely what it was he had seen or in what
+order the incidents had taken place. He never could understand what
+defect of vision on his part made it seem as though the cat had
+duplicated itself at first, and then increased indefinitely, so that
+there were at least a dozen of them darting silently about the floor,
+leaping softly on to chairs and tables, passing like shadows from the
+open door to the end of the room, all black as sin, with brilliant
+green eyes flashing fire in all directions. It was like the reflections
+from a score of mirrors placed round the walls at different angles. Nor
+could he make out at the time why the size of the room seemed to have
+altered, grown much larger, and why it extended away behind him where
+ordinarily the wall should have been. The snarling of the enraged and
+terrified collie sounded sometimes so far away; the ceiling seemed to
+have raised itself so much higher than before, and much of the
+furniture had changed in appearance and shifted marvellously.
+
+It was all so confused and confusing, as though the little room he knew
+had become merged and transformed into the dimensions of quite another
+chamber, that came to him, with its host of cats and its strange
+distances, in a sort of vision.
+
+But these changes came about a little later, and at a time when his
+attention was so concentrated upon the proceedings of Smoke and the
+collie, that he only observed them, as it were, subconsciously. And the
+excitement, the flickering candlelight, the distress he felt for the
+collie, and the distorting atmosphere of fog were the poorest possible
+allies to careful observation.
+
+At first he was only aware that the dog was repeating his short
+dangerous bark from time to time, snapping viciously at the empty air,
+a foot or so from the ground. Once, indeed, he sprang upwards and
+forwards, working furiously with teeth and paws, and with a noise like
+wolves fighting, but only to dash back the next minute against the wall
+behind him. Then, after lying still for a bit, he rose to a crouching
+position as though to spring again, snarling horribly and making short
+half-circles with lowered head. And Smoke all the while meowed
+piteously by the window as though trying to draw the attack upon
+himself.
+
+Then it was that the rush of the whole dreadful business seemed to turn
+aside from the dog and direct itself upon his own person. The collie
+had made another spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner,
+where he made noise enough in his savage rage to waken the dead before
+he fell to whining and then finally lay still. And directly afterwards
+the doctor’s own distress became intolerably acute. He had made a half
+movement forward to come to the rescue when a veil that was denser than
+mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene, draping room, walls,
+animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also about his own
+mind. Other forms moved silently across the field of vision, forms that
+he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not. Unholy
+thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil
+presented themselves seductively. Ice seemed to settle about his heart,
+and his mind trembled. He began to lose memory—memory of his identity,
+of where he was, of what he ought to do. The very foundations of his
+strength were shaken. His will seemed paralysed.
+
+And it was then that the room filled with this horde of cats, all dark
+as the night, all silent, all with lamping eyes of green fire. The
+dimensions of the place altered and shifted. He was in a much larger
+space. The whining of the dog sounded far away, and all about him the
+cats flew busily to and fro, silently playing their tearing, rushing
+game of evil, weaving the pattern of their dark purpose upon the floor.
+He strove hard to collect himself and remember the words of power he
+had made use of before in similar dread positions where his dangerous
+practice had sometimes led; but he could recall nothing consecutively;
+a mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and his forces
+scattered. The deeps within were too troubled for healing power to come
+out of them.
+
+It was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour
+thrown upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the
+veil; but at the time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as
+with all true glamour, was unable to grasp where the true ended and the
+false began. He was caught momentarily in the same vortex that had
+sought to lure the cat to destruction through its delight, and
+threatened utterly to overwhelm the dog through its terror.
+
+There came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and
+tearing its way down. The windows rattled. The candle flickered and
+went out. The glacial atmosphere closed round him with the cold of
+death, and a great rushing sound swept by overhead as though the
+ceiling had lifted to a great height. He heard the door shut. Far away
+it sounded. He felt lost, shelterless in the depths of his soul. Yet
+still he held out and resisted while the climax of the fight came
+nearer and nearer.... He had stepped into the stream of forces awakened
+by Pender and he knew that he must withstand them to the end or come to
+a conclusion that it was not good for a man to come to. Something from
+the region of utter cold was upon him.
+
+And then quite suddenly, through the confused mists about him, there
+slowly rose up the Personality that had been all the time directing the
+battle. Some force entered his being that shook him as the tempest
+shakes a leaf, and close against his eyes—clean level with his face—he
+found himself staring into the wreck of a vast dark Countenance, a
+countenance that was terrible even in its ruin.
+
+For ruined it was, and terrible it was, and the mark of spiritual evil
+was branded everywhere upon its broken features. Eyes, face and hair
+rose level with his own, and for a space of time he never could
+properly measure, or determine, these two, a man and a woman, looked
+straight into each other’s visages and down into each other’s hearts.
+
+And John Silence, the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his
+own against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and
+whose soul was on the side of the Dark Powers.
+
+It was the climax that touched the depth of power within him and began
+to restore him slowly to his own. He was conscious, of course, of
+effort, and yet it seemed no superhuman one, for he had recognised the
+character of his opponent’s power, and he called upon the good within
+him to meet and overcome it. The inner forces stirred and trembled in
+response to his call. They did not at first come readily as was their
+habit, for under the spell of glamour they had already been
+diabolically lulled into inactivity, but come they eventually did,
+rising out of the inner spiritual nature he had learned with so much
+time and pain to awaken to life. And power and confidence came with
+them. He began to breathe deeply and regularly, and at the same time to
+absorb into himself the forces opposed to him, and to _turn them to his
+own account_. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to
+pour into him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his
+adversary and thus enormously increased his own.
+
+For this spiritual alchemy he had learned. He understood that force
+ultimately is everywhere one and the same; it is the motive behind that
+makes it good or evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. He
+knew—provided he was not first robbed of self-control—how vicariously
+to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically
+into his own good purposes. And, since his motive was pure and his soul
+fearless, they could not work him harm.
+
+Thus he stood in the main stream of evil unwittingly attracted by
+Pender, deflecting its course upon himself; and after passing through
+the purifying filter of his own unselfishness these energies could only
+add to his store of experience, of knowledge, and therefore of power.
+And, as his self-control returned to him, he gradually accomplished
+this purpose, even though trembling while he did so.
+
+Yet the struggle was severe, and in spite of the freezing chill of the
+air, the perspiration poured down his face. Then, by slow degrees, the
+dark and dreadful countenance faded, the glamour passed from his soul,
+the normal proportions returned to walls and ceiling, the forms melted
+back into the fog, and the whirl of rushing shadow-cats disappeared
+whence they came.
+
+And with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John
+Silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power. In a
+deep, modulated voice he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that
+slowly rolled through the air like a rising sea, filling the room with
+powerful vibratory activities that whelmed all irregularities of lesser
+vibrations in its own swelling tone. He made certain sigils, gestures
+and movements at the same time. For several minutes he continued to
+utter these words, until at length the growing volume dominated the
+whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it. For
+just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil
+forces by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study
+the occult use of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region
+wherein the powers of spiritual evil work their fell purposes. Harmony
+was restored first of all to his own soul, and thence to the room and
+all its occupants.
+
+And, after himself, the first to recognise it was the old dog lying in
+his corner. Flame began suddenly uttering sounds of pleasure, that
+“something” between a growl and a grunt that dogs make upon being
+restored to their master’s confidence. Dr. Silence heard the thumping
+of the collie’s tail against the floor. And the grunt and the thumping
+touched the depth of affection in the man’s heart, and gave him some
+inkling of what agonies the dumb creature had suffered.
+
+Next, from the shadows by the window, a somewhat shrill purring
+announced the restoration of the cat to its normal state. Smoke was
+advancing across the carpet. He seemed very pleased with himself, and
+smiled with an expression of supreme innocence. He was no shadow-cat,
+but real and full of his usual and perfect self-possession. He marched
+along, picking his way delicately, but with a stately dignity that
+suggested his ancestry with the majesty of Egypt. His eyes no longer
+glared; they shone steadily before him, they radiated, not excitement,
+but knowledge. Clearly he was anxious to make amends for the mischief
+to which he had unwittingly lent himself owing to his subtle and
+electric constitution.
+
+Still uttering his sharp high purrings he marched up to his master and
+rubbed vigorously against his legs. Then he stood on his hind feet and
+pawed his knees and stared beseechingly up into his face. He turned his
+head towards the corner where the collie still lay, thumping his tail
+feebly and pathetically.
+
+John Silence understood. He bent down and stroked the creature’s living
+fur, noting the line of bright blue sparks that followed the motion of
+his hand down its back. And then they advanced together towards the
+corner where the dog was.
+
+Smoke went first and put his nose gently against his friend’s muzzle,
+purring while he rubbed, and uttering little soft sounds of affection
+in his throat. The doctor lit the candle and brought it over. He saw
+the collie lying on its side against the wall; it was utterly
+exhausted, and foam still hung about its jaws. Its tail and eyes
+responded to the sound of its name, but it was evidently very weak and
+overcome. Smoke continued to rub against its cheek and nose and eyes,
+sometimes even standing on its body and kneading into the thick yellow
+hair. Flame replied from time to time by little licks of the tongue,
+most of them curiously misdirected.
+
+But Dr. Silence felt intuitively that something disastrous had
+happened, and his heart was wrung. He stroked the dear body, feeling it
+over for bruises or broken bones, but finding none. He fed it with what
+remained of the sandwiches and milk, but the creature clumsily upset
+the saucer and lost the sandwiches between its paws, so that the doctor
+had to feed it with his own hand. And all the while Smoke meowed
+piteously.
+
+Then John Silence began to understand. He went across to the farther
+side of the room and called aloud to it.
+
+“Flame, old man! come!”
+
+At any other time the dog would have been upon him in an instant,
+barking and leaping to the shoulder. And even now he got up, though
+heavily and awkwardly, to his feet. He started to run, wagging his tail
+more briskly. He collided first with a chair, and then ran straight
+into a table. Smoke trotted close at his side, trying his very best to
+guide him. But it was useless. Dr. Silence had to lift him up into his
+own arms and carry him like a baby. For he was blind.
+
+III
+
+It was a week later when John Silence called to see the author in his
+new house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy
+again with his writing. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he
+seemed cheerful and confident.
+
+“Humour restored?” laughed the doctor, as soon as they were comfortably
+settled in the room overlooking the Park.
+
+“I’ve had no trouble since I left that dreadful place,” returned Pender
+gratefully; “and thanks to you—”
+
+The doctor stopped him with a gesture.
+
+“Never mind that,” he said, “we’ll discuss your new plans afterwards,
+and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you settle
+elsewhere. Of course it must be pulled down, for it’s not fit for any
+sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted in
+the same way you were. Although, personally, I think the evil has
+exhausted itself by now.”
+
+He told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with
+the animals.
+
+“I don’t pretend to understand,” Pender said, when the account was
+finished, “but I and my wife are intensely relieved to be free of it
+all. Only I must say I should like to know something of the former
+history of the house. When we took it six months ago I heard no word
+against it.”
+
+Dr. Silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket.
+
+“I can satisfy your curiosity to some extent,” he said, running his eye
+over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; “for by my
+secretary’s investigations I have been able to check certain
+information obtained in the hypnotic trance by a ‘sensitive’ who helps
+me in such cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have
+been a woman of singularly atrocious life and character who finally
+suffered death by hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the
+whole of England and only came to light by the merest chance. She came
+to her end in the year 1798, for it was not this particular house she
+lived in, but a much larger one that then stood upon the site it now
+occupies, and was then, of course, not in London, but in the country.
+She was a person of intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will,
+and of consummate audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the
+resources of the lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to
+explain the virulence of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still
+able to carry on after death the evil practices that formed her main
+purpose during life.”
+
+“You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct—”
+gasped the author.
+
+“I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful
+personality may still persist after death in the line of their original
+momentum,” replied the doctor; “and that strong thoughts and purposes
+can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their
+originators have passed away.
+
+“If you knew anything of magic,” he pursued, “you would know that
+thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and
+pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far
+removed from the region of our human life is another region where float
+the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of
+the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and
+abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active
+life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the
+practices of lower magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce,
+I am persuaded, and the forces she set going during her life have
+simply been accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so
+had they not been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged
+and satisfied through me.
+
+“Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there
+are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain
+spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner
+being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your
+case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.
+
+“But now, tell me,” he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed
+author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had
+appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill—“tell me if you
+recognise this face?”
+
+Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered
+a little as he looked.
+
+“Undoubtedly,” he said, “it is the face I kept trying to draw—dark,
+with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman.”
+
+Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut
+of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records
+of the Newgate Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two
+different aspects of the same dreadful visage. The men compared them
+for some moments in silence.
+
+“It makes me thank God for the limitations of our senses,” said Pender
+quietly, with a sigh; “continuous clairvoyance must be a sore
+affliction.”
+
+“It is indeed,” returned John Silence significantly, “and if all the
+people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the
+statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they
+are. It is little wonder,” he added, “that your sense of humour was
+clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your
+brain for their dissemination. You have had an interesting adventure,
+Mr. Felix Pender, and, let me add, a fortunate escape.”
+
+The author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of
+scratching at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly.
+
+“It’s time for me to go. I left my dog on the step, but I suppose—”
+
+Before he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure
+behind it and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie. The
+dog, wagging his tail and contorting his whole body with delight, tore
+across the floor and tried to leap up upon his owner’s breast. And
+there was laughter and happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear
+again as the day.
+
+
+
+
+CASE II: ANCIENT SORCERIES
+
+I
+
+There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with
+none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or
+twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so
+strange that the world catches its breath—and looks the other way! And
+it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into
+the wide-spread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing
+to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of
+spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the
+strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.
+
+Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he
+loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very
+soul of things—and to release a suffering human soul in the process—was
+with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed,
+after passing strange.
+
+The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can
+attach credence—something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The
+adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them
+an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters
+obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the
+adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But
+dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and
+the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with
+them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely
+disturbed.
+
+“Such a thing happened to _that_ man!” it cries—“a commonplace person
+like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!”
+
+Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to
+little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to
+Dr. Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in
+spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed
+wisely that “such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that
+crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never
+have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to
+live and die according to scale.”
+
+But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not “live
+according to scale” so far as this particular event in his otherwise
+uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch
+his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and
+more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his
+halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing
+over again each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled
+in the recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became
+a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to
+excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so
+fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive
+soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and
+almost constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that
+should rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly
+remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an
+umbrella on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he
+was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he
+cared to admit.
+
+John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once,
+said that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet
+they were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably
+cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined or
+invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the effect
+was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the
+charming personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and
+revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but in the
+telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost
+vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure.
+
+He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from
+some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every
+summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the
+train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being
+unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his
+fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive,
+obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter
+tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt
+into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English
+clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he
+ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not
+claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn’t want and
+that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down,
+and so forth.
+
+So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were
+over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in
+Surbiton.
+
+And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little
+station in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the
+platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles
+debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to
+continue the journey. Even _his_ flabby soul revolted, and the idea of
+staying a night in the little town and going on next day by a slower,
+emptier train, flashed into his mind. The guard was already shouting
+“_en voiture_” and the corridor of his compartment was already packed
+when the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and
+rushed to snatch his bag.
+
+Finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window (for
+he had a corner seat) and begged the Frenchman who sat opposite to hand
+his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched French that he
+intended to break the journey there. And this elderly Frenchman, he
+declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of reproach, that to
+his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag through the window
+of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long
+sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend
+only the last few words: “_à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats_.”
+
+In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once
+seized upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin
+admitted that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginning,
+though without being able to explain why. They had sat facing one
+another during the four hours of the journey, and though no
+conversation had passed between them—Vezin was timid about his
+stuttering French—he confessed that his eyes were being continually
+drawn to his face, almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a
+dozen nameless little politenesses and attentions, had evinced the
+desire to be kind. The men liked each other and their personalities did
+not clash, or would not have clashed had they chanced to come to terms
+of acquaintance. The Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a
+silent protective influence over the insignificant little Englishman,
+and without words or gestures betrayed that he wished him well and
+would gladly have been of service to him.
+
+“And this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?” asked John
+Silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted
+the prejudices of his patient, “were you unable to follow it exactly?”
+
+“It was so quick and low and vehement,” explained Vezin, in his small
+voice, “that I missed practically the whole of it. I only caught the
+few words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his
+face was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine.”
+
+“‘_À cause du sommeil et à cause des chats’?_” repeated Dr. Silence, as
+though half speaking to himself.
+
+“That’s it exactly,” said Vezin; “which, I take it, means something
+like ‘because of sleep and because of the cats,’ doesn’t it?”
+
+“Certainly, that’s how I should translate it,” the doctor observed
+shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary.
+
+“And the rest of the sentence—all the first part I couldn’t understand,
+I mean—was a warning not to do something—not to stop in the town, or at
+some particular place in the town, perhaps. That was the impression it
+made on me.”
+
+Then, of course, the train rushed off, and left Vezin standing on the
+platform alone and rather forlorn.
+
+The little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising
+out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the
+twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the
+station itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was
+that the mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And
+once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean
+out of modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle of the
+crowded train seemed days away. The spirit of this silent hill-town,
+remote from tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life under
+the autumn sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. Long before he
+recognised this spell he acted under it. He walked softly, almost on
+tiptoe, down the winding narrow streets where the gables all but met
+over his head, and he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a
+deprecating and modest demeanour that was in itself an apology for
+intruding upon the place and disturbing its dream.
+
+At first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The
+attempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the
+delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy
+rattle of the train. He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.
+
+“Like a cat, you said?” interrupted John Silence, quickly catching him
+up.
+
+“Yes. At the very start I felt that.” He laughed apologetically. “I
+felt as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me
+purr. It seemed to be the general mood of the whole place—then.”
+
+The inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching
+days still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felt
+he was only tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, and
+the delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel
+really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold,
+original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He felt
+something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling
+and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it
+seemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep—a little dim
+cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked upon
+the courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him think
+of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors
+seemed padded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of the
+streets could not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute
+rest that surrounded him.
+
+On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who
+seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with
+Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards
+him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little
+promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress
+herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed
+to swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak.
+But she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of
+her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous
+and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low
+chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him
+see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and
+yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser
+on the watch occurred to him.
+
+She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite
+without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple
+in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and
+the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.
+
+“But when she looked at me, you know,” said Vezin, with that little
+apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating
+gesture of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, “the odd
+notion came to me that really she had intended to make quite a
+different movement, and that with a single bound she could have leaped
+at me across the width of that stone yard and pounced upon me like some
+huge cat upon a mouse.”
+
+He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his book
+without interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though he
+feared he had already told too much and more than we could believe.
+
+“Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and I
+felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind
+her back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She
+asked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then
+added that dinner was at seven o’clock, and that they were very early
+people in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey
+that late hours were not encouraged.”
+
+Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression
+that here he would be “managed,” that everything would be arranged and
+planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove
+and obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked
+for from him. It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly
+out into the street feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he
+was in a _milieu_ that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was
+so much easier to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that
+all the town purred with him.
+
+About the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling
+deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. With
+no special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. The September
+sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down winding alleyways,
+fringed with tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike
+glimpses of the great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses
+lying like a dream-map in the haze. The spell of the past held very
+potently here, he felt.
+
+The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy
+enough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him
+or turned to stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even
+able to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in
+a charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling
+delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious. It was
+like becoming part of a softly coloured dream which he did not even
+realise to be a dream.
+
+On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain
+below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which
+the little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble
+fields like deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of
+ancient fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were only
+vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls and
+wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for a
+moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the
+esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam
+crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he
+looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the
+cool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slow
+footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the
+gaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caught
+glimpses of their quiet movements far below.
+
+He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs
+and half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of
+the plane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it
+grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying
+there half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.
+
+And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of
+horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town
+band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the
+accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very
+sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured,
+unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with
+low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when
+no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an
+invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly
+charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as
+though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely
+marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after
+the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place
+and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were
+part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned
+plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all
+half smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his
+soul with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be
+quite pleasant.
+
+There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music
+seemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by
+the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or
+in the rigging of invisible ships; or—and the simile leaped up in his
+thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion—a chorus of animals, of
+wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and
+singing as animals will, to the moon. He could fancy he heard the
+wailing, half-human cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising and
+falling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled by
+distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of these
+creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music
+to one another and the moon in chorus.
+
+It was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it
+expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The
+instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos
+and diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at
+night, rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again,
+and all in such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the
+same time a plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords
+of these half-broken instruments were so singular that they did not
+distress his musical soul like fiddles out of tune.
+
+He listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character
+was, and then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly.
+
+“There was nothing to alarm?” put in Dr. Silence briefly.
+
+“Absolutely nothing,” said Vezin; “but you know it was all so
+fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed.
+Perhaps, too,” he continued, gently explanatory, “it was this stirring
+of my imagination that caused other impressions; for, as I walked back,
+the spell of the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though
+all intelligible ways. But there were other things I could not account
+for in the least, even then.”
+
+“Incidents, you mean?”
+
+“Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of vivid sensations crowded
+themselves upon my mind and I could trace them to no causes. It was
+just after sunset and the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines
+against an opalescent sky of gold and red. The dusk was running down
+the twisted streets. All round the hill the plain pressed in like a dim
+sea, its level rising with the darkness. The spell of this kind of
+scene, you know, can be very moving, and it was so that night. Yet I
+felt that what came to me had nothing directly to do with the mystery
+and wonder of the scene.”
+
+“Not merely the subtle transformations of the spirit that come with
+beauty,” put in the doctor, noticing his hesitation.
+
+“Exactly,” Vezin went on, duly encouraged and no longer so fearful of
+our smiles at his expense. “The impressions came from somewhere else.
+For instance, down the busy main street where men and women were
+bustling home from work, shopping at stalls and barrows, idly gossiping
+in groups, and all the rest of it, I saw that I aroused no interest and
+that no one turned to stare at me as a foreigner and stranger. I was
+utterly ignored, and my presence among them excited no special interest
+or attention.
+
+“And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me with conviction that all
+the time this indifference and inattention were merely feigned.
+Everybody as a matter of fact was watching me closely. Every movement I
+made was known and observed. Ignoring me was all a pretence—an
+elaborate pretence.”
+
+He paused a moment and looked at us to see if we were smiling, and then
+continued, reassured—
+
+“It is useless to ask me how I noticed this, because I simply cannot
+explain it. But the discovery gave me something of a shock. Before I
+got back to the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in
+my mind and forced my recognition of it as true. And this, too, I may
+as well say at once, was equally inexplicable to me. I mean I can only
+give you the fact, as fact it was to me.”
+
+The little man left his chair and stood on the mat before the fire. His
+diffidence lessened from now onwards, as he lost himself again in the
+magic of the old adventure. His eyes shone a little already as he
+talked.
+
+“Well,” he went on, his soft voice rising somewhat with his excitement,
+“I was in a shop when it came to me first—though the idea must have
+been at work for a long time subconsciously to appear in so complete a
+form all at once. I was buying socks, I think,” he laughed, “and
+struggling with my dreadful French, when it struck me that the woman in
+the shop did not care two pins whether I bought anything or not. She
+was indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. She was
+only pretending to sell.
+
+“This sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what
+follows. But really it was not small. I mean it was the spark that lit
+the line of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind.
+
+“For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so
+far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were
+elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere
+out of sight behind the scenes. Their busy-ness was but the outward
+semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and
+ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main
+stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in
+secret places. In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether
+I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to
+my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from
+hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. It was all
+a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or
+possibly for purposes of their own. But the main current of their
+energies ran elsewhere. I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance
+might be expected to feel when it has found its way into the human
+system and the whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it.
+The town was doing this very thing to me.
+
+“This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked
+home to the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of
+this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities
+of its hidden life.
+
+“And, now that my eyes were partly opened, I noticed other things too
+that puzzled me, first of which, I think, was the extraordinary silence
+of the whole place. Positively, the town was muffled. Although the
+streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently,
+softly, with padded feet, like cats. Nothing made noise. All was
+hushed, subdued, muted. The very voices were quiet, low-pitched like
+purring. Nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed able to live in
+the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little
+hill-town into its sleep. It was like the woman at the inn—an outward
+repose screening intense inner activity and purpose.
+
+“Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it.
+The people were active and alert. Only a magical and uncanny softness
+lay over them all like a spell.”
+
+Vezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory
+had become very vivid. His voice had run off into a whisper so that we
+heard the last part with difficulty. He was telling a true thing
+obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling.
+
+“I went back to the inn,” he continued presently in a louder voice,
+“and dined. I felt a new strange world about me. My old world of
+reality receded. Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and
+incomprehensible. I regretted having left the train so impulsively. An
+adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my
+nature. Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure
+somewhere deep within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and
+a feeling of alarm mingled itself with my wonder—alarm for the
+stability of what I had for forty years recognised as my ‘personality.’
+
+“I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were
+unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I
+kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those
+wholesome, blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them
+again. But my dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and
+soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled world
+beyond the senses.”
+
+II
+
+Vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had
+intended. He felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. He did
+nothing in particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not
+decide to leave. Decisions were always very difficult for him and he
+sometimes wondered how he had ever brought himself to the point of
+leaving the train. It seemed as though some one else must have arranged
+it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran to the swarthy Frenchman
+who had sat opposite. If only he could have understood that long
+sentence ending so strangely with “_à cause du sommeil et à cause des
+chats_.” He wondered what it all meant.
+
+Meanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he
+sought in his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay,
+and what it was all about. But his limited French and his
+constitutional hatred of active investigation made it hard for him to
+buttonhole anybody and ask questions. He was content to observe, and
+watch, and remain negative.
+
+The weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. He
+wandered about the town till he knew every street and alley. The people
+suffered him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became
+clearer to him every day that he was never free himself from
+observation. The town watched him as a cat watches a mouse. And he got
+no nearer to finding out what they were all so busy with or where the
+main stream of their activities lay. This remained hidden. The people
+were as soft and mysterious as cats.
+
+But that he was continually under observation became more evident from
+day to day.
+
+For instance, when he strolled to the end of the town and entered a
+little green public garden beneath the ramparts and seated himself upon
+one of the empty benches in the sun, he was quite alone—at first. Not
+another seat was occupied; the little park was empty, the paths
+deserted. Yet, within ten minutes of his coming, there must have been
+fully twenty persons scattered about him, some strolling aimlessly
+along the gravel walks, staring at the flowers, and others seated on
+the wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself. None of them appeared
+to take any notice of him; yet he understood quite well they had all
+come there to watch. They kept him under close observation. In the
+street they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon various errands; yet
+these were suddenly all forgotten and they had nothing to do but loll
+and laze in the sun, their duties unremembered. Five minutes after he
+left, the garden was again deserted, the seats vacant. But in the
+crowded street it was the same thing again; he was never alone. He was
+ever in their thoughts.
+
+By degrees, too, he began to see how it was he was so cleverly watched,
+yet without the appearance of it. The people did nothing _directly_.
+They behaved _obliquely_. He laughed in his mind as the thought thus
+clothed itself in words, but the phrase exactly described it. They
+looked at him from angles which naturally should have led their sight
+in another direction altogether. Their movements were oblique, too, so
+far as these concerned himself. The straight, direct thing was not
+their way evidently. They did nothing obviously. If he entered a shop
+to buy, the woman walked instantly away and busied herself with
+something at the farther end of the counter, though answering at once
+when he spoke, showing that she knew he was there and that this was
+only her way of attending to him. It was the fashion of the cat she
+followed. Even in the dining-room of the inn, the be-whiskered and
+courteous waiter, lithe and silent in all his movements, never seemed
+able to come straight to his table for an order or a dish. He came by
+zigzags, indirectly, vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to
+another table altogether, and only turned suddenly at the last moment,
+and was there beside him.
+
+Vezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to
+realize these things. Other tourists there were none in the hostel, but
+he recalled the figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took
+their _déjeuner_ and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically
+they entered the room in similar fashion. First, they paused in the
+doorway, peering about the room, and then, after a temporary
+inspection, they came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close to the
+walls so that he wondered which table they were making for, and at the
+last minute making almost a little quick run to their particular seats.
+And again he thought of the ways and methods of cats.
+
+Other small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer,
+soft town with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the
+people appeared and disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled
+him exceedingly. It may have been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet
+he could not make it out how the alleys swallowed them up and shot them
+forth in a second of time when there were no visible doorways or
+openings near enough to explain the phenomenon. Once he followed two
+elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly examining him from
+across the street—quite near the inn this was—and saw them turn the
+corner a few feet only in front of him. Yet when he sharply followed on
+their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted alley stretching in
+front of him with no sign of a living thing. And the only opening
+through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards
+away, which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time.
+
+And in just such sudden fashion people appeared, when he never expected
+them. Once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a
+low wall, and hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see
+but a group of girls and women engaged in vociferous conversation which
+instantly hushed itself to the normal whispering note of the town when
+his head appeared over the wall. And even then none of them turned to
+look at him directly, but slunk off with the most unaccountable
+rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. And their voices, he
+thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling of
+fighting animals, almost of cats.
+
+The whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as
+something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the
+same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of
+its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more—it began
+rather to frighten him.
+
+Out of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface
+thoughts, there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting
+for him to declare himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do
+that; and that when he had done so they in their turn would at length
+make some direct response, accepting or rejecting him. Yet the vital
+matter concerning which his decision was awaited came no nearer to him.
+
+Once or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the
+citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were
+bent; but they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each
+individual going his or her own way. It was always the same: he never
+could learn what their main interest was. The cathedral was ever empty,
+the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted.
+They shopped because they had to, and not because they wished to. The
+booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the little _cafés_
+desolate. Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk ever on the
+bustle.
+
+“Can it be,” he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh that
+he should have dared to think anything so odd, “can it be that these
+people are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their
+real life, and come out honestly only with the dusk? That during the
+day they make a sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down
+their true life begins? Have they the souls of night-things, and is the
+whole blessed town in the hands of the cats?”
+
+The fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and
+dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning
+to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a
+thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. Something
+utterly remote from his ordinary life, something that had not waked for
+years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending feelers abroad into
+his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and penetrating even into
+certain of his minor actions. Something exceedingly vital to himself,
+to his soul, hung in the balance.
+
+And, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he
+saw the figures of the townsfolk stealing through the dusk from their
+shop doors, moving sentry-wise to and fro at the corners of the
+streets, yet always vanishing silently like shadows at his near
+approach. And as the inn invariably closed its doors at ten o’clock he
+had never yet found the opportunity he rather half-heartedly sought to
+see for himself what account the town could give of itself at night.
+
+“—_à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats_”—the words now rang in his
+ears more and more often, though still as yet without any definite
+meaning.
+
+Moreover, something made him sleep like the dead.
+
+III
+
+It was, I think, on the fifth day—though in this detail his story
+sometimes varied—that he made a definite discovery which increased his
+alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax. Before that he had
+already noticed that a change was going forward and certain subtle
+transformations being brought about in his character which modified
+several of his minor habits. And he had affected to ignore them. Here,
+however, was something he could no longer ignore; and it startled him.
+
+At the best of times he was never very positive, always negative
+rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose he was
+capable of reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish
+decision. The discovery he now made that brought him up with such a
+sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to nothing. He
+found it impossible to make up his mind. For, on this fifth day, he
+realised that he had stayed long enough in the town and that for
+reasons he could only vaguely define to himself it was wiser _and
+safer_ that he should leave.
+
+And he found that he could not leave!
+
+This is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture and
+the expression of his face that he conveyed to Dr. Silence the state of
+impotence he had reached. All this spying and watching, he said, had as
+it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless
+to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the intricacies
+of a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not get away. It
+was a distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over his will till it
+had become almost incapable of decision. The mere thought of vigorous
+action—action towards escape—began to terrify him. All the currents of
+his life had turned inwards upon himself, striving to bring to the
+surface something that lay buried almost beyond reach, determined to
+force his recognition of something he had long forgotten—forgotten
+years upon years, centuries almost ago. It seemed as though a window
+deep within his being would presently open and reveal an entirely new
+world, yet somehow a world that was not unfamiliar. Beyond that, again,
+he fancied a great curtain hung; and when that too rolled up he would
+see still farther into this region and at last understand something of
+the secret life of these extraordinary people.
+
+“Is this why they wait and watch?” he asked himself with rather a
+shaking heart, “for the time when I shall join them—or refuse to join
+them? Does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?”
+
+And it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure
+first really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. The
+stability of his rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt,
+and something in his heart turned coward.
+
+Why otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily,
+silently, making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind
+him? Why else should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages
+of the practically deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found
+himself deliberately taking advantage of what cover presented itself?
+And why, if he was not afraid, should the wisdom of staying indoors
+after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as eminently desirable?
+Why, indeed?
+
+And, when John Silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these
+things, he admitted apologetically that he had none to give.
+
+“It was simply that I feared something might happen to me unless I kept
+a sharp look-out. I felt afraid. It was instinctive,” was all he could
+say. “I got the impression that the whole town was after me—wanted me
+for something; and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least
+the Self I knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am
+not a psychologist, you know,” he added meekly, “and I cannot define it
+better than that.”
+
+It was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening
+meal that Vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to
+his quiet room at the end of the winding passage to think it over
+alone. In the yard it was empty enough, true, but there was always the
+possibility that the big woman whom he dreaded would come out of some
+door, with her pretence of knitting, to sit and watch him. This had
+happened several times, and he could not endure the sight of her. He
+still remembered his original fancy, bizarre though it was, that she
+would spring upon him the moment his back was turned and land with one
+single crushing leap upon his neck. Of course it was nonsense, but then
+it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be
+nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.
+
+He went upstairs accordingly. It was dusk, and the oil lamps had not
+yet been lit in the passages. He stumbled over the uneven surface of
+the ancient flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the
+corridor—doors that he had never once seen opened—rooms that seemed
+never occupied. He moved, as his habit now was, stealthily and on
+tiptoe.
+
+Half-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp
+turn, and it was just here, while groping round the walls with
+outstretched hands, that his fingers touched something that was not
+wall—something that moved. It was soft and warm in texture,
+indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his shoulder; and he
+immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The next minute
+he knew it was something quite different.
+
+Instead of investigating, however,—his nerves must have been too
+overwrought for that, he said,—he shrank back as closely as possible
+against the wall on the other side. The thing, whatever it was, slipped
+past him with a sound of rustling and, retreating with light footsteps
+down the passage behind him, was gone. A breath of warm, scented air
+was wafted to his nostrils.
+
+Vezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half
+leaning against the wall—and then almost ran down the remaining
+distance and entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly
+behind him. Yet it was not fear that made him run: it was excitement,
+pleasurable excitement. His nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow
+made itself felt all over his body. In a flash it came to him that this
+was just what he had felt twenty-five years ago as a boy when he was in
+love for the first time. Warm currents of life ran all over him and
+mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. His mood was suddenly
+become tender, melting, loving.
+
+The room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window,
+wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. But the only
+thing he understood clearly in that instant was that something in him
+had swiftly, magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to
+argue with himself about leaving. The encounter in the passage-way had
+changed all that. The strange perfume of it still hung about him,
+bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew that it was a girl who had
+passed him, a girl’s face that his fingers had brushed in the darkness,
+and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had been actually
+kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.
+
+Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect
+his thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing
+of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate so
+electric a thrill to his whole being that he still shook with the
+sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he found it as useless to deny
+as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire had entered his veins, and
+now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was forty-five instead
+of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all the inner turmoil
+and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere atmosphere,
+the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the darkness,
+had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart,
+and rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of
+tearing and tumultuous excitement.
+
+After a time, however, the number of Vezin’s years began to assert
+their cumulative power; he grew calmer, and when a knock came at length
+upon his door and he heard the waiter’s voice suggesting that dinner
+was nearly over, he pulled himself together and slowly made his way
+downstairs into the dining-room.
+
+Every one looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took
+his customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. The trepidation
+was still in his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the
+courtyard and hall without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm
+him a little. He ate so fast that he had almost caught up with the
+current stage of the table d’hôte, when a slight commotion in the room
+drew his attention.
+
+His chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the
+long _salle à manger_ were behind him, yet it was not necessary to turn
+round to know that the same person he had passed in the dark passage
+had now come into the room. He felt the presence long before he heard
+or saw any one. Then he became aware that the old men, the only other
+guests, were rising one by one in their places, and exchanging
+greetings with some one who passed among them from table to table. And
+when at length he turned with his heart beating furiously to ascertain
+for himself, he saw the form of a young girl, lithe and slim, moving
+down the centre of the room and making straight for his own table in
+the corner. She moved wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young
+panther, and her approach filled him with such delicious bewilderment
+that he was utterly unable to tell at first what her face was like, or
+discover what it was about the whole presentment of the creature that
+filled him anew with trepidation and delight.
+
+“Ah, Ma’mselle est de retour!” he heard the old waiter murmur at his
+side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the
+proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. She was
+addressing him. Something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth,
+and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest
+was a dream in which his own emotion rose like a thick cloud before his
+eyes and prevented his seeing accurately, or knowing exactly what he
+did. He was aware that she greeted him with a charming little bow; that
+her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly into his own; that the
+perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again assailed his nostrils,
+and that she was bending a little towards him and leaning with one hand
+on the table at this side. She was quite close to him—that was the
+chief thing he knew—explaining that she had been asking after the
+comfort of her mother’s guests, and now was introducing herself to the
+latest arrival—himself.
+
+“M’sieur has already been here a few days,” he heard the waiter say;
+and then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied—
+
+“Ah, but M’sieur is not going to leave us just yet, I hope. My mother
+is too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now I
+am here I will remedy all that.” She laughed deliciously. “M’sieur
+shall be well looked after.”
+
+Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose
+to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply,
+but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting
+upon the table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of
+electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and
+shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a
+look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he
+had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already
+half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with
+a dessert-spoon and a knife.
+
+Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the
+remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be
+alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he
+suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding corridor was dim with
+shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards,
+seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the
+pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt
+that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the
+heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange
+fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely
+locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window
+thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind.
+
+IV
+
+This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special coaxing,
+it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could not in the
+least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him so
+profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. For her mere
+proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on fire. He
+knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a stranger to
+anything approaching tender relations with any member of the opposite
+sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his overwhelming
+defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature came to him
+deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on
+every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet
+frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the first glance of her
+shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in the dark merely by
+the magic of her invisible presence.
+
+“You felt she was altogether wholesome and good!” queried the doctor.
+“You had no reaction of any sort—for instance, of alarm?”
+
+Vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic
+smiles. It was some time before he replied. The mere memory of the
+adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes
+sought the floor again before he answered.
+
+“I don’t think I can quite say that,” he explained presently. “I
+acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. A
+conviction grew upon me that there was something about her—how shall I
+express it?—well, something unholy. It is not impurity in any sense,
+physical or mental, that I mean, but something quite indefinable that
+gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. She drew me, and at the same
+time repelled me, more than—than—”
+
+He hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.
+
+“Nothing like it has ever come to me before or since,” he concluded,
+with lame confusion. “I suppose it was, as you suggested just now,
+something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was strong enough to make
+me feel that I would stay in that awful little haunted town for years
+if only I could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful
+movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand.”
+
+“Can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?” John
+Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator.
+
+“I am surprised that you should ask me such a question,” answered
+Vezin, with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. “I think
+no man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of
+the woman who ensnares him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this
+slip of a girl bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living
+and sleeping in the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of
+delight.
+
+“But there’s one thing I can tell you,” he went on earnestly, his eyes
+aglow, “namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself all
+the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the town and
+its inhabitants. She had the silken movements of the panther, going
+smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods
+as the townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of her
+own—purposes that I was sure had _me_ for their objective. She kept me,
+to my terror and delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet so
+carelessly, so consummately, that another man less sensitive, if I may
+say so”—he made a deprecating gesture—“or less prepared by what had
+gone before, would never have noticed it at all. She was always still,
+always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I
+never could escape from her. I was continually meeting the stare and
+laughter of her great eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the
+passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest
+parts of the public streets.”
+
+Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter
+which had so violently disturbed the little man’s equilibrium. He was
+naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that
+anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they
+therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget
+his primness after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and as
+her mother’s representative she naturally had to do with the guests in
+the hotel. It was not out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie
+should spring up. Besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty,
+she was French, and—she obviously liked him.
+
+At the same time, there was something indescribable—a certain
+indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times—that made him try
+hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath
+with a sudden start. It was all rather like a delirious dream, half
+delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more
+than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though
+he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own.
+
+And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to
+his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on
+from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of
+this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his recognisable
+personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll up with an
+awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the secret
+purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by that time,
+he would have become transformed into an entirely different being.
+
+And, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention to
+make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more
+comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special little extra
+dishes on his private table in the dining-room. Conversations, too,
+with “Mademoiselle Ilsé” became more and more frequent and pleasant,
+and although they seldom travelled beyond the weather, or the details
+of the town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a hurry to bring them
+to an end, and often contrived to interject little odd sentences that
+he never properly understood, yet felt to be significant.
+
+And it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that
+pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy.
+They all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in
+the town indefinitely.
+
+“And has M’sieur not even yet come to a decision?” she said softly in
+his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before _déjeuner_, the
+acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. “Because, if
+it’s so difficult, we must all try together to help him!”
+
+The question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was
+spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as
+she turned and peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite
+understand the French of it, for her near presence always confused his
+small knowledge of the language distressingly. Yet the words, and her
+manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind,
+frightened him. It gave such point to his feeling that the town was
+waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter.
+
+At the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close
+beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.
+
+“It is true I find it difficult to leave,” he stammered, losing his way
+deliciously in the depths of her eyes, “and especially now that
+Mademoiselle Ilsé has come.”
+
+He was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted
+with the little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have
+bitten his tongue off for having said it.
+
+“Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased
+to stay on,” she said, ignoring the compliment.
+
+“I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you,” he cried, feeling
+that his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain.
+And he was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the
+wildest description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair
+beside him, and made to go.
+
+“It is _soupe à l’onion_ to-day!” she cried, laughing back at him
+through the sunlight, “and I must go and see about it. Otherwise, you
+know, M’sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will
+leave us!”
+
+He watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and
+lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her,
+he thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. She turned
+once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then
+stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in
+her corner seat just inside the hall-way.
+
+But how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly
+woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were?
+Whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped
+them both as by magic? What was it about that massive woman that made
+her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some dark and
+dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over the red glare of some
+tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender stripling of a girl,
+graceful as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air
+of sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and
+the darkness of night beneath her feet?
+
+Vezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. Then, almost
+simultaneously with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again,
+and the sunlight of day caught them both, and he heard her laughing to
+her mother about the _soupe à l’onion_, and saw her glancing back at
+him over her dear little shoulder with a smile that made him think of a
+dew-kissed rose bending lightly before summer airs.
+
+And, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day,
+because he saw another cover laid at his small table, and, with
+fluttering heart, heard the waiter murmur by way of explanation that
+“Ma’mselle Ilsé would honour M’sieur to-day at _déjeuner_, as her
+custom sometimes is with her mother’s guests.”
+
+So actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking
+quietly to him in easy French, seeing that he was well looked after,
+mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand. And,
+later in the afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard, longing
+for a sight of her as soon as her duties were done, she came again to
+his side, and when he rose to meet her, she stood facing him a moment,
+full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she spoke—
+
+“My mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little
+town, and _I_ think so too! Would M’sieur like me to be his guide,
+perhaps? I can show him everything, for our family has lived here for
+many generations.”
+
+She had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word to
+express his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the
+street, yet in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural she should
+do so, and without the faintest suggestion of boldness or immodesty.
+Her face glowed with the pleasure and interest of it, and with her
+short dress and tumbled hair she looked every bit the charming child of
+seventeen that she was, innocent and playful, proud of her native town,
+and alive beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty.
+
+So they went over the town together, and she showed him what she
+considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her
+forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her
+mother’s family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where
+several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score.
+She kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he
+understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing
+his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood
+revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton seemed
+very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world’s history. Her
+voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept
+deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep,
+allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its
+elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being
+became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir
+in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it
+might lift altogether....
+
+He began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town
+was reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external
+self became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and
+vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of
+it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with
+new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through
+the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly
+coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful
+and seductive.
+
+And only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in
+itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the
+child’s face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed
+to a column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves and
+made a picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the wall and
+called her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and there
+through the heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as though taken
+by surprise, her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned and
+run like the wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran, of
+which he had not understood a single word, except that the fire
+apparently frightened her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it,
+and to get him away too.
+
+Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though
+nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and
+they had both forgotten the incident.
+
+They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the
+weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his
+arrival. It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and
+somehow he managed to find his tongue and his best French. The girl
+leaned across the stones close beside him. No one was about. Driven by
+some remorseless engine within he began to stammer something—he hardly
+knew what—of his strange admiration for her. Almost at the first word
+she sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him,
+just touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as usual, and
+the sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.
+
+“Oh, I’m so glad!” she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his
+face, “so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must
+also like what I do, and what I belong to.”
+
+Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something
+in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of
+embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.
+
+“You will take part in our real life, I mean,” she added softly, with
+an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his
+shrinking. “You will come back to us.”
+
+Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power
+coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole
+over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its
+simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. He saw
+her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous
+scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. Dimly this
+shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.
+
+“You will, I know,” she repeated, holding him with her eyes.
+
+They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that
+she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The
+mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of
+him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the
+same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth.
+An irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what
+still remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to
+retain the right to his normal self.
+
+The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall
+close beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on
+the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He took his courage
+in both hands.
+
+“Tell me, Ilsé,” he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring
+softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, “what is
+the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And
+why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what
+it all means? And, tell me,” he added more quickly with passion in his
+voice, “what you really are—yourself?”
+
+She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her
+growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran
+like a shadow across her face.
+
+“It seems to me,”—he faltered oddly under her gaze—“that I have some
+right to know—”
+
+Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. “You love me, then?” she
+asked softly.
+
+“I swear,” he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising
+tide, “I never felt before—I have never known any other girl who—”
+
+“Then you _have_ the right to know,” she calmly interrupted his
+confused confession, “for love shares all secrets.”
+
+She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words
+lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed
+almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death.
+He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was
+speaking again.
+
+“The real life I speak of,” she whispered, “is the old, old life
+within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once
+belonged, and to which you still belong.”
+
+A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice
+sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true,
+even though he could not as yet understand its full purport. His
+present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his
+personality in one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of
+his present self that brought to him the thought of death.
+
+“You came here,” she went on, “with the purpose of seeking it, and the
+people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide,
+whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether—”
+
+Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change,
+growing larger and darker with an expression of age.
+
+“It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you
+feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The
+purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you.
+You were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want
+you back again among them.”
+
+Vezin’s timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl’s eyes
+held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She
+fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.
+
+“Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you,” she
+resumed. “The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded through
+all these years. But I”—she paused a moment and looked at him with
+complete confidence in her splendid eyes—“I possess the spell to
+conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back
+again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the
+ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And I
+do choose to use it. I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim
+past”—she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his
+eyes, and her voice positively sang—“I mean to have you, for you love
+me and are utterly at my mercy.”
+
+Vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand.
+He had passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his
+feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above
+it through the sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy
+with the wonder of her words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the
+terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind
+her sentences. For flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and
+licked at his soul.
+
+And they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process
+of swift telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he
+said to her. Yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was
+like the recital of verses long since known. And the mingled pain and
+sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul
+could hold.
+
+“Yet I came here wholly by chance—” he heard himself saying.
+
+“No,” she cried with passion, “you came here because I called to you. I
+have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the
+past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you.”
+
+She rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain
+insolence in the face—the insolence of power.
+
+The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness
+rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had
+ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of
+the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There was no
+sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft rustle of
+the girl’s dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He
+scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some terrible
+magic of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs of his own
+being, telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words shadowed
+forth the truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking beside
+him with so strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite
+another being. As he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew
+and lived, dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of
+reality he was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her
+tall and stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and
+mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of
+shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying
+loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of
+clothing. Others were about her, too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast
+delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only,
+one whom she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some
+tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led
+circled about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the
+scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and
+forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by
+the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne
+he knew to be her mother.
+
+The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of
+buried time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory
+reawakened.... And then the scene faded away and he saw the clear
+circle of the girl’s eyes gazing steadfastly into his own, and she
+became once more the pretty little daughter of the innkeeper, and he
+found his voice again.
+
+“And you,” he whispered tremblingly—“you child of visions and
+enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even
+before I saw?”
+
+She drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity.
+
+“The call of the Past,” she said; “and besides,” she added proudly, “in
+the real life I am a princess—”
+
+“A princess!” he cried.
+
+“—and my mother is a queen!”
+
+At this, little Vezin utterly lost his head. Delight tore at his heart
+and swept him into sheer ecstasy. To hear that sweet singing voice, and
+to see those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance
+beyond all hope of control. He took her in his arms and covered her
+unresisting face with kisses.
+
+But even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he felt
+that she was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses stained
+his very soul.... And when, presently, she had freed herself and
+vanished into the darkness, he stood there, leaning against the wall in
+a state of collapse, creeping with horror from the touch of her
+yielding body, and inwardly raging at the weakness that he already
+dimly realised must prove his undoing.
+
+And from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared
+there rose in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry,
+which at first he took for laughter, but which later he was sure he
+recognised as the almost human wailing of a cat.
+
+V
+
+For a long time Vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his
+surging thoughts and emotions. He understood at length that he had done
+the one thing necessary to call down upon him the whole force of this
+ancient Past. For in those passionate kisses he had acknowledged the
+tie of olden days, and had revived it. And the memory of that soft
+impalpable caress in the darkness of the inn corridor came back to him
+with a shudder. The girl had first mastered him, and then led him to
+the one act that was necessary for her purpose. He had been waylaid,
+after the lapse of centuries—caught, and conquered.
+
+Dimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. But,
+for the moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or
+will, for the sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted
+to his brain like a spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was
+utterly enchanted and moving in a world so much larger and wilder than
+the one he had ever been accustomed to.
+
+The moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain,
+when at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into
+new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew,
+seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables
+and quaint old towers lay far away in its purple reaches.
+
+The cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. He moved softly,
+keeping to the shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very
+silent; the doors were closed, the shutters fastened. Not a soul was
+astir. The hush of night lay over everything; it was like a town of the
+dead, a churchyard with gigantic and grotesque tombstones.
+
+Wondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared
+to, he made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of the
+stables, thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. He reached the
+courtyard safely and crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of the
+wall. He sidled down it, mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old men
+did when they entered the _salle à manger_. He was horrified to find
+himself doing this instinctively. A strange impulse came to him,
+catching him somehow in the centre of his body—an impulse to drop upon
+all fours and run swiftly and silently. He glanced upwards and the idea
+came to him to leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going
+round by the stairs. This occurred to him as the easiest, and most
+natural way. It was like the beginning of some horrible transformation
+of himself into something else. He was fearfully strung up.
+
+The moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of
+the street where he moved. He kept among the deepest of them, and
+reached the porch with the glass doors.
+
+But here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about.
+Hoping to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he
+opened the door carefully and stole in. Then he saw that the hall was
+not empty. A large dark thing lay against the wall on his left. At
+first he thought it must be household articles. Then it moved, and he
+thought it was an immense cat, distorted in some way by the play of
+light and shadow. Then it rose straight up before him and he saw that
+it was the proprietress.
+
+What she had been doing in this position he could only venture a
+dreadful guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware
+of some terrible dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the
+girl’s strange saying that she was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood
+there under the little oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe
+stirred in his heart, and the roots of some ancient fear. He felt that
+he must bow to her and make some kind of obeisance. The impulse was
+fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. He glanced quickly about
+him. There was no one there. Then he deliberately inclined his head
+toward her. He bowed.
+
+“Enfin! M’sieur s’est donc décidé. C’est bien alors. J’en suis
+contente.”
+
+Her words came to him sonorously as through a great open space.
+
+Then the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and
+seized his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and
+caught him.
+
+“On pourrait faire un p’tit tour ensemble, n’est-ce pas? Nous y allons
+cette nuit et il faut s’exercer un peu d’avance pour cela. Ilsé, Ilsé,
+viens donc ici. Viens vite!”
+
+And she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that
+seemed oddly and horribly familiar. They made no sound on the stones,
+this strangely assorted couple. It was all soft and stealthy. And
+presently, when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare
+as of flame shot through it, he was aware that some one else had joined
+them and that his hand the mother had released was now tightly held by
+the daughter. Ilsé had come in answer to the call, and he saw her with
+leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered vestiges
+of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly,
+odiously, loathsomely seductive.
+
+“To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!” they cried. “On to the Witches’
+Sabbath!”
+
+Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of
+him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly,
+dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went
+out, and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his
+heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid.
+
+Suddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother
+cry that it was time, and they must go. Which way they went he did not
+pause to see. He only realised that he was free, and he blundered
+through the darkness till he found the stairs and then tore up them to
+his room as though all hell was at his heels.
+
+He flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned.
+Swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally
+impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do for the moment
+was to sit quiet and wait. He must see what was going to happen. At
+least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly safe. The
+door was locked. He crossed over and softly opened the window which
+gave upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the hall
+through the glass doors.
+
+As he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears
+from the streets beyond—the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by
+distance. He leaned out cautiously and listened. The moonlight was
+clear and strong now, but his own window was in shadow, the silver disc
+being still behind the house. It came to him irresistibly that the
+inhabitants of the town, who a little while before had all been
+invisible behind closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy upon some
+secret and unholy errand. He listened intently.
+
+At first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of
+movements going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came to
+him across that still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings sent
+the hum of their activity into the night. Things were on the move
+everywhere. A biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he
+knew not whence. Presently his eyes became glued to the windows of the
+opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. The roof
+overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass,
+and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over
+the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and silently,
+shaped like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured
+glass, and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost
+sight of them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps.
+Sometimes their shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he
+could not make out whether they were the shadows of human beings or of
+cats. They seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. The
+transformation looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings,
+yet changed swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like
+animals.
+
+The yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements
+of dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass
+doors. They kept so closely to the wall that he could not determine
+their actual shape, but when he saw that they passed on to the great
+congregation that was gathering in the hall, he understood that these
+were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had first seen reflected in
+the windowpanes opposite. They were coming from all parts of the town,
+reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and tiles, and
+springing from level to level till they came to the yard.
+
+Then a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about
+him were being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. A
+moment later figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. And
+these figures, as they lowered themselves down from the windows, were
+human, he saw; but once safely in the yard they fell upon all fours and
+changed in the swiftest possible second into—cats—huge, silent cats.
+They ran in streams to join the main body in the hall beyond.
+
+So, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and
+unoccupied.
+
+Moreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. For he
+remembered it all. It was familiar. It had all happened before just so,
+hundreds of times, and he himself had taken part in it and known the
+wild madness of it all. The outline of the old building changed, the
+yard grew larger, and he seemed to be staring down upon it from a much
+greater height through smoky vapours. And, as he looked, half
+remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet, furiously
+assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the Call of
+the Dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of Ilsé
+whirling by his side.
+
+Suddenly he started back. A great lithe cat had leaped softly up from
+the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring
+fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. “Come,” it seemed to say,
+“come with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself
+swiftly and come!” Only too well he understood the creature’s soundless
+call.
+
+It was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet
+on the stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of
+the house, past his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting
+away rapidly, softly, towards the gathering point. And again he felt
+the dreadful desire to do likewise; to murmur the old incantation, and
+then drop upon hands and knees and run swiftly for the great flying
+leap into the air. Oh, how the passion of it rose within him like a
+flood, twisting his very entrails, sending his heart’s desire flaming
+forth into the night for the old, old Dance of the Sorcerers at the
+Witches’ Sabbath! The whirl of the stars was about him; once more he
+met the magic of the moon. The power of the wind, rushing from
+precipice and forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the valleys,
+tore him away.... He heard the cries of the dancers and their wild
+laughter, and with this savage girl in his embrace he danced furiously
+about the dim Throne where sat the Figure with the sceptre of
+majesty....
+
+Then, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a
+little in his heart. The calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and
+deserted. They had started. The procession was off into the sky. And he
+was left behind—alone.
+
+Vezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. The murmur
+from the streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. He
+made his way with the utmost caution down the corridor. At the head of
+the stairs he paused and listened. Below him, the hall where they had
+gathered was dark and still, but through opened doors and windows on
+the far side of the building came the sound of a great throng moving
+farther and farther into the distance.
+
+He made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing
+to meet some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one;
+across the dark hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things,
+and out through the opened front doors into the street. He could not
+believe that he was really left behind, really forgotten, that he had
+been purposely permitted to escape. It perplexed him.
+
+Nervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing
+nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement.
+
+The whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as though
+a great wind had blown everything alive out of it. The doors and
+windows of the houses stood open to the night; nothing stirred;
+moonlight and silence lay over all. The night lay about him like a
+cloak. The air, soft and cool, caressed his cheek like the touch of a
+great furry paw. He gained confidence and began to walk quickly, though
+still keeping to the shadowed side. Nowhere could he discover the
+faintest sign of the great unholy exodus he knew had just taken place.
+The moon sailed high over all in a sky cloudless and serene.
+
+Hardly realising where he was going, he crossed the open market-place
+and so came to the ramparts, whence he knew a pathway descended to the
+high road and along which he could make good his escape to one of the
+other little towns that lay to the northward, and so to the railway.
+
+But first he paused and gazed out over the scene at his feet where the
+great plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. The still
+beauty of it entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment
+and unreality. No air stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood
+motionless, the near details were defined with the sharpness of day
+against dark shadows, and in the distance the fields and woods melted
+away into haze and shimmering mistiness.
+
+But the breath caught in his throat and he stood stockstill as though
+transfixed when his gaze passed from the horizon and fell upon the near
+prospect in the depth of the valley at his feet. The whole lower slopes
+of the hill, that lay hid from the brightness of the moon, were aglow,
+and through the glare he saw countless moving forms, shifting thick and
+fast between the openings of the trees; while overhead, like leaves
+driven by the wind, he discerned flying shapes that hovered darkly one
+moment against the sky and then settled down with cries and weird
+singing through the branches into the region that was aflame.
+
+Spellbound, he stood and stared for a time that he could not measure.
+And then, moved by one of the terrible impulses that seemed to control
+the whole adventure, he climbed swiftly upon the top of the broad
+coping, and balanced a moment where the valley gaped at his feet. But
+in that very instant, as he stood hovering, a sudden movement among the
+shadows of the houses caught his eye, and he turned to see the outline
+of a large animal dart swiftly across the open space behind him, and
+land with a flying leap upon the top of the wall a little lower down.
+It ran like the wind to his feet and then rose up beside him upon the
+ramparts. A shiver seemed to run through the moonlight, and his sight
+trembled for a second. His heart pulsed fearfully. Ilsé stood beside
+him, peering into his face.
+
+Some dark substance, he saw, stained the girl’s face and skin, shining
+in the moonlight as she stretched her hands towards him; she was
+dressed in wretched tattered garments that yet became her mightily; rue
+and vervain twined about her temples; her eyes glittered with unholy
+light. He only just controlled the wild impulse to take her in his arms
+and leap with her from their giddy perch into the valley below.
+
+“See!” she cried, pointing with an arm on which the rags fluttered in
+the rising wind towards the forest aglow in the distance. “See where
+they await us! The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there,
+and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and
+come!”
+
+Though a moment before the sky was clear and cloudless, yet even while
+she spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in
+the crests of the plane trees at his feet. Stray gusts brought the
+sounds of hoarse singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill,
+and the pungent odour he had already noticed about the courtyard of the
+inn rose about him in the air.
+
+“Transform, transform!” she cried again, her voice rising like a song.
+“Rub well your skin before you fly. Come! Come with me to the Sabbath,
+to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its
+evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible
+Sacraments prepared. The Throne is occupied. Anoint and come! Anoint
+and come!”
+
+She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with
+flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change
+swiftly. Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him
+with the burning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the
+power before which fades all that is good.
+
+A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the
+girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her
+wicked joy.
+
+“Satan is there!” she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw
+him with her to the edge of the wall. “Satan has come. The Sacraments
+call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and
+dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!”
+
+Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to
+release himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and
+all but mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and
+then he shrieked again. It was the old impulses, the old awful habits
+instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely
+shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and
+were intelligible. It was the ancient call. And it was heard below. It
+was answered.
+
+The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him
+darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The
+crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of
+wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling
+top of the stone wall; and Ilsé clung to him with her long shining
+arms, smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. But not Ilsé
+alone, for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The
+pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the
+old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers
+doing honour to the personified Evil of the world.
+
+“Anoint and away! Anoint and away!” they cried in wild chorus about
+him. “To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and fearful fantasy of
+evil!”
+
+Another moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned
+soft and the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him,
+when—so can a small thing alter the whole course of an adventure—he
+caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then
+fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. But he fell towards
+the houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones, and fortunately
+not into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther side.
+
+And they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him, like flies upon a
+piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a moment from the
+power of their touch, and in that brief instant of freedom there
+flashed into his mind the sudden intuition that saved him. Before he
+could regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly back upon the
+wall, as though bat-like they could only fly by dropping from a height,
+and had no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them perched there
+in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly shapeless,
+their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of Ilsé’s
+terror at the sight of fire.
+
+Quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the dead leaves that lay
+under the wall.
+
+Dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the wind carried the
+flame in a long line down the length of the wall, licking upwards as it
+ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded row of forms upon the
+top melted away into the air on the other side, and were gone with a
+great rush and whirring of their bodies down into the heart of the
+haunted valley, leaving Vezin breathless and shaken in the middle of
+the deserted ground.
+
+“Ilsé!” he called feebly; “Ilsé!” for his heart ached to think that she
+was really gone to the great Dance without him, and that he had lost
+the opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same time his relief was
+so great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind with the whole
+thing, that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only cried aloud in
+the fierce storm of his emotion....
+
+The fire under the wall ran its course, and the moonlight came out
+again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse. With one last
+shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder
+for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still crowded and flew,
+he turned his face towards the town and slowly made his way in the
+direction of the hotel.
+
+And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling,
+followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and
+fainter with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between the houses.
+
+VI
+
+“It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending,” said
+Arthur Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence
+sitting there with his notebook, “but the fact is—er—from that moment
+my memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection
+of how I got home or what precisely I did.
+
+“It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect
+racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and
+villages, still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the
+towers of a biggish town and so came to a station.
+
+“But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and
+looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the
+moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay
+there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main
+streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its
+torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in my mind with the
+utmost vividness to this day.
+
+“Another thing remains in my mind from that escape—namely, the sudden
+sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made,
+standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left
+behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.
+
+“For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a
+café on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found
+my way to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same
+evening I reached London.”
+
+“And how long altogether,” asked John Silence quietly, “do you think
+you stayed in the town of the adventure?”
+
+Vezin looked up sheepishly.
+
+“I was coming to that,” he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his
+body. “In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of
+time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been
+September 15th,—instead of which it was only September 10th!”
+
+“So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?”
+queried the doctor.
+
+Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.
+
+“I must have gained time somewhere,” he said at length—“somewhere or
+somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can’t explain it. I can
+only give you the fact.”
+
+“And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been
+back to the place?”
+
+“Last autumn, yes,” murmured Vezin; “and I have never dared to go back.
+I think I never want to.”
+
+“And, tell me,” asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the
+little man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing
+more to say, “had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft
+practices during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the
+subject?”
+
+“Never!” declared Vezin emphatically. “I had never given a thought to
+such matters so far as I know—”
+
+“Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?”
+
+“Never—before my adventure; but I have since,” he replied
+significantly.
+
+There was, however, something still on the man’s mind that he wished to
+relieve himself of by confession, yet could only with difficulty bring
+himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness
+of the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed
+himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him
+the marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched
+him with her anointed hands.
+
+He took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered
+his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of
+the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a
+little way down the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated
+exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing.
+And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar
+mark, though not quite so clearly defined.
+
+“That was where she held me that night on the ramparts,” he whispered,
+a strange light coming and going in his eyes.
+
+
+It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John
+Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my
+notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin’s story. Since hearing it, the
+doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his
+secretaries had discovered that Vezin’s ancestors had actually lived
+for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two
+of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had
+been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to
+prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon
+the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place.
+The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches
+of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there
+literally by scores.
+
+“It seems strange,” continued the doctor, “that Vezin should have
+remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the
+kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to
+keep alive, or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to
+think he still knows nothing about it.
+
+“The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the
+memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact
+with the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place,
+and, by a most singular chance, too, with the very souls who had taken
+part with him in the events of that particular life. For the mother and
+daughter who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors,
+with himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that
+period dominated the imaginations of the whole country.
+
+“One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these
+witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various
+animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey
+themselves swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies.
+Lycanthropy, or the power to change themselves into wolves, was
+everywhere believed in, and the ability to transform themselves into
+cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or ointment provided
+by Satan himself, found equal credence. The witchcraft trials abound in
+evidences of such universal beliefs.”
+
+Dr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject,
+and showed how every detail of Vezin’s adventure had a basis in the
+practices of those dark days.
+
+“But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man’s own
+consciousness, I have no doubt,” he went on, in reply to my questions;
+“for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered
+his signature in the visitors’ book, and proved by it that he had
+arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. He
+left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty
+brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement
+of his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was
+absent from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he
+described her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange,
+absent-minded kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had
+feared for a long time that he had met with a violent end in the
+neighbouring forest where he used to roam about alone.
+
+“I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter
+so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took
+place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of
+burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former
+painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more
+than once that he saw her through smoke and flame.”
+
+“And that mark on his skin, for instance?” I inquired.
+
+“Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding,” he replied, “like
+the stigmata of the _religieuses_, and the bruises which appear on the
+bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them. This
+is very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these
+marks should have remained so long in Vezin’s case. Usually they
+disappear quickly.”
+
+“Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it
+all over again,” I ventured.
+
+“Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not
+yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to
+alleviate.”
+
+Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.
+
+“And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?” I asked
+further—“the man who warned him against the place, _à cause du sommeil
+et à cause des chats?_ Surely a very singular incident?”
+
+“A very singular incident indeed,” he made answer slowly, “and one I
+can only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence—”
+
+“Namely?”
+
+“That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone
+there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him.
+But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go
+upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some
+force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him
+thus to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might
+happen to him, and thus to warn him as he did.
+
+“Yes,” he presently continued, half talking to himself, “I suspect in
+this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of
+the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a
+scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For
+strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves,
+they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not
+vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man
+found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and
+the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it was
+true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in
+memory, to a former and lower state of development.
+
+“Ah yes!” he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening
+sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, “subliminal
+up-rushes of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes
+exceedingly dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon
+escape from this obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I
+doubt it, I doubt it.”
+
+His voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back
+into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon
+his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes
+greater than his power.
+
+
+
+
+CASE III: THE NEMESIS OF FIRE
+
+I
+
+By some means which I never could fathom, John Silence always contrived
+to keep the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of
+two hours before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the
+preliminary facts of the case. He had telephoned to me that very
+morning, and even through the disguise of the miles of wire the thrill
+of incalculable adventure had sounded in his voice.
+
+“As if it were an ordinary country visit,” he called, in reply to my
+question; “and don’t forget to bring your gun.”
+
+“With blank cartridges, I suppose?” for I knew his rigid principles
+with regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were
+merely for some obvious purpose of disguise.
+
+Then he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the
+receiver, and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation,
+to do my packing. For the honour of accompanying Dr. John Silence on
+one of his big cases was what many would have considered an empty
+honour—and risky. Certainly the adventure held all manner of
+possibilities, and I arrived at Waterloo with the feelings of a man who
+is about to embark on some dangerous and peculiar mission in which the
+dangers he expects to run will not be the ordinary dangers to life and
+limb, but of some secret character difficult to name and still more
+difficult to cope with.
+
+“The Manor House has a high sound,” he told me, as we sat with our feet
+up and talked, “but I believe it is little more than an overgrown
+farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond D——, and its owner,
+Colonel Wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there
+practically alone, I understand, with an elderly invalid sister. So you
+need not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some
+excitement of its own.”
+
+“Which is likely?”
+
+By way of reply he handed me a letter marked “Private.” It was dated a
+week ago, and signed “Yours faithfully, Horace Wragge.”
+
+“He heard of me, you see, through Captain Anderson,” the doctor
+explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost world-wide; “you
+remember that Indian obsession case—”
+
+I read the letter. Why it should have been marked private was difficult
+to understand. It was very brief, direct, and to the point. It referred
+by way of introduction to Captain Anderson, and then stated quite
+simply that the writer needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a
+personal interview—a morning interview, since it was impossible for him
+to be absent from the house at night. The letter was dignified even to
+the point of abruptness, and it is difficult to explain how it managed
+to convey to me the impression of a strong man, shaken and perplexed.
+Perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the mystery of the affair had
+something to do with it; and the reference to the Anderson case, the
+horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have touched the
+sense of something rather ominous and alarming. But, whatever the
+cause, there was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose
+somehow out of that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and
+the spirit of a deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the
+mind without any visible form of expression.
+
+“And when you saw him—?” I asked, returning the letter as the train
+rushed clattering noisily through Clapham Junction.
+
+“I have not seen him,” was the reply. “The man’s mind was charged to
+the brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures. Notice the
+restraint of it. For the main character of his case psychometry could
+be depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is
+sufficient to give to another mind—a sensitive and sympathetic
+mind—clear mental pictures of what is going on. I think I have a very
+sound general idea of his problem.”
+
+“So there may be excitement, after all?”
+
+John Silence waited a moment before he replied.
+
+“Something very serious is amiss there,” he said gravely, at length.
+“Some one—not himself, I gather,—has been meddling with a rather
+dangerous kind of gunpowder. So—yes, there may be excitement, as you
+put it.”
+
+“And my duties?” I asked, with a decidedly growing interest. “Remember,
+I am your ‘assistant.’”
+
+“Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything,
+without seeming to. Say nothing—nothing that means anything. Be present
+at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions
+are correct this is—”
+
+He broke off suddenly.
+
+“But I won’t tell you my impressions yet,” he resumed after a moment’s
+thought. “Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form your own
+impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary
+visitors, of course,” he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his
+eye; “hence, the guns.”
+
+Though disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his
+words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful
+suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise
+reflected that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to
+a man than double the quantity of mere “brains,” as such.
+
+Before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me
+to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any
+pictures that came spontaneously into my mind.
+
+“Don’t deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the inside
+of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark
+screen.”
+
+I followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as
+possible. But no visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light
+that pass to and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the
+blackness. A momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously.
+
+“You see—what?” he asked presently.
+
+“Nothing,” I was obliged to admit disappointedly; “nothing but the
+usual flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more
+vivid than usual.”
+
+He said nothing by way of comment or reply.
+
+“And they group themselves now and then,” I continued, with painful
+candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, “group
+themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that
+flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses—almost like
+geometrical figures. Nothing more.”
+
+I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.
+
+“It makes my head hot,” I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing
+anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at
+once.
+
+“That sensation of heat is important,” he said significantly.
+
+“It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable,” I replied, hoping he
+would expand and explain. “There was a distinct feeling of
+warmth—internal warmth somewhere—oppressive in a sense.”
+
+“That is interesting,” he remarked, putting the letter back in his
+pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books.
+He vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to
+make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines
+into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the
+flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the
+usual phantasmagoria of the day’s events—faces, scenes, memories,—and
+in due course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.
+
+When we left the train, after six hours’ travelling, at a little
+wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather,
+the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the
+landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland
+hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling
+across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen
+air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about
+us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the
+coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told
+us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the
+road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to
+shift past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only
+signs of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a
+bracing five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and
+we plunged into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor
+House up to the moment of actual arrival.
+
+Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army
+officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the
+process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean
+as a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning
+grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements
+showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the
+years. The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man
+to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore
+a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The
+whole appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity
+and importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm,
+I felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.
+
+His speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple
+and sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet.
+Thus, he showed plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come
+alone.
+
+“My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard,” the doctor said, introducing
+me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then received
+were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the impression
+that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose
+perplexity must spring from some very real and tangible cause. And,
+quite obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was
+unmistakably genuine.
+
+He led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room, that
+opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the
+impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient,
+comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. And so it was. Only the heat of
+the place struck me as unnatural. This room with the blazing fire may
+have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night
+air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere
+of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled
+grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the
+greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head
+and mind. It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught
+myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the
+letter in the train.
+
+I heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no
+preamble, and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest
+description. Evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved
+action rather than talk. His manner was straightforward and direct. I
+saw him in a flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by
+something he could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would
+have preferred to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness
+and making no attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his
+incompetence.
+
+“So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own
+company, and the queer business that has been going on here, and is
+still going on,” he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards
+me by way of including me in his confidence.
+
+“I think, Colonel Wragge,” replied John Silence impressively, “that we
+shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. I gather we shall have our
+hands full.”
+
+The two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and
+there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first
+time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a
+little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big
+case of this incalculable doctor. But no answer suggested itself, and
+to withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The gates had closed behind
+me now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind
+with its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.
+
+Explaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything
+serious, as no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the
+way upstairs and showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as
+I was finishing dressing that a knock came at my door and Dr. Silence
+entered.
+
+He was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of
+comedy you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life,
+but as he came across the room to me I caught the expression of his
+face and understood in a flash that he was now in his most grave and
+earnest mood. He looked almost troubled. I stopped fumbling with my
+black tie and stared.
+
+“It is serious,” he said, speaking in a low voice, “more so even than I
+imagined. Colonel Wragge’s control over his thoughts concealed a great
+deal in my psychometrising of the letter. I looked in to warn you to
+keep yourself well in hand—generally speaking.”
+
+“Haunted house?” I asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my back.
+
+But he smiled gravely at the question.
+
+“Haunted House of Life more likely,” he replied, and a look came into
+his eyes which I had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils
+and he was thick in the fight of rescue. He was stirred in the deeps.
+
+“Colonel Wragge—or the sister?” I asked hurriedly, for the gong was
+sounding.
+
+“Neither directly,” he said from the door. “Something far older,
+something very, very remote indeed. This thing has to do with the ages,
+unless I am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory
+have long lain undisturbed.”
+
+He came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips,
+looking at me with a peculiar searchingness of gaze.
+
+“Are you aware yet of anything—odd here?” he asked in a whisper.
+“Anything you cannot quite define, for instance. Tell me, Hubbard, for
+I want to know all your impressions. They may help me.”
+
+I shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes
+that scared me a little. But he was so in earnest that I set my mind
+keenly searching.
+
+“Nothing yet,” I replied truthfully, wishing I could confess to a real
+emotion; “nothing but the strange heat of the place.”
+
+He gave a little jump forward in my direction.
+
+“The heat again, that’s it!” he exclaimed, as though glad of my
+corroboration. “And how would you describe it, perhaps?” he asked
+quickly, with a hand on the door knob.
+
+“It doesn’t seem like ordinary physical heat,” I said, casting about in
+my thoughts for a definition.
+
+“More a mental heat,” he interrupted, “a glowing of thought and desire,
+a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. Isn’t that it?”
+
+I admitted that he had exactly described my sensations.
+
+“Good!” he said, as he opened the door, and with an indescribable
+gesture that combined a warning to be ready with a sign of praise for
+my correct intuition, he was gone.
+
+I hurried after him, and found the two men waiting for me in front of
+the fire.
+
+“I ought to warn you,” our host was saying as I came in, “that my
+sister, whom you will meet at dinner, is not aware of the real object
+of your visit. She is under the impression that we are interested in
+the same line of study—folklore—and that your researches have led to my
+seeking acquaintance. She comes to dinner in her chair, you know. It
+will be a great pleasure to her to meet you both. We have few
+visitors.”
+
+So that on entering the dining-room we were prepared to find Miss
+Wragge already at her place, seated in a sort of bath-chair. She was a
+vivacious and charming old lady, with smiling expression and bright
+eyes, and she chatted all through dinner with unfailing spontaneity.
+She had that face, unlined and fresh, that some people carry through
+life from the cradle to the grave; her smooth plump cheeks were all
+pink and white, and her hair, still dark, was divided into two glossy
+and sleek halves on either side of a careful parting. She wore
+gold-rimmed glasses, and at her throat was a large scarab of green
+jasper that made a very handsome brooch.
+
+Her brother and Dr. Silence talked little, so that most of the
+conversation was carried on between herself and me, and she told me a
+great deal about the history of the old house, most of which I fear I
+listened to with but half an ear.
+
+“And when Cromwell stayed here,” she babbled on, “he occupied the very
+rooms upstairs that used to be mine. But my brother thinks it safer for
+me to sleep on the ground floor now in case of fire.”
+
+And this sentence has stayed in my memory only because of the sudden
+way her brother interrupted her and instantly led the conversation on
+to another topic. The passing reference to fire seemed to have
+disturbed him, and thenceforward he directed the talk himself.
+
+It was difficult to believe that this lively and animated old lady,
+sitting beside me and taking so eager an interest in the affairs of
+life, was practically, we understood, without the use of her lower
+limbs, and that her whole existence for years had been passed between
+the sofa, the bed, and the bath-chair in which she chatted so naturally
+at the dinner table. She made no allusion to her affliction until the
+dessert was reached, and then, touching a bell, she made us a witty
+little speech about leaving us “like time, on noiseless feet,” and was
+wheeled out of the room by the butler and carried off to her apartments
+at the other end of the house.
+
+And the rest of us were not long in following suit, for Dr. Silence and
+myself were quite as eager to learn the nature of our errand as our
+host was to impart it to us. He led us down a long flagged passage to a
+room at the very end of the house, a room provided with double doors,
+and windows, I saw, heavily shuttered. Books lined the walls on every
+side, and a large desk in the bow window was piled up with volumes,
+some open, some shut, some showing scraps of paper stuck between the
+leaves, and all smothered in a general cataract of untidy foolscap and
+loose-half sheets.
+
+“My study and workroom,” explained Colonel Wragge, with a delightful
+touch of innocent pride, as though he were a very serious scholar. He
+placed arm-chairs for us round the fire. “Here,” he added
+significantly, “we shall be safe from interruption and can talk
+securely.”
+
+During dinner the manner of the doctor had been all that was natural
+and spontaneous, though it was impossible for me, knowing him as I did,
+not to be aware that he was subconsciously very keenly alert and
+already receiving upon the ultra-sensitive surface of his mind various
+and vivid impressions; and there was now something in the gravity of
+his face, as well as in the significant tone of Colonel Wragge’s
+speech, and something, too, in the fact that we three were shut away in
+this private chamber about to listen to things probably strange, and
+certainly mysterious—something in all this that touched my imagination
+sharply and sent an undeniable thrill along my nerves. Taking the chair
+indicated by my host, I lit my cigar and waited for the opening of the
+attack, fully conscious that we were now too far gone in the adventure
+to admit of withdrawal, and wondering a little anxiously where it was
+going to lead.
+
+What I expected precisely, it is hard to say. Nothing definite,
+perhaps. Only the sudden change was dramatic. A few hours before the
+prosaic atmosphere of Piccadilly was about me, and now I was sitting in
+a secret chamber of this remote old building waiting to hear an account
+of things that held possibly the genuine heart of terror. I thought of
+the dreary moors and hills outside, and the dark pine copses soughing
+in the wind of night; I remembered my companion’s singular words up in
+my bedroom before dinner; and then I turned and noted carefully the
+stern countenance of the Colonel as he faced us and lit his big black
+cigar before speaking.
+
+The threshold of an adventure, I reflected as I waited for the first
+words, is always the most thrilling moment—until the climax comes.
+
+But Colonel Wragge hesitated—mentally—a long time before he began. He
+talked briefly of our journey, the weather, the country, and other
+comparatively trivial topics, while he sought about in his mind for an
+appropriate entry into the subject that was uppermost in the thoughts
+of all of us. The fact was he found it a difficult matter to speak of
+at all, and it was Dr. Silence who finally showed him the way over the
+hedge.
+
+“Mr. Hubbard will take a few notes when you are ready—you won’t
+object,” he suggested; “I can give my undivided attention in this way.”
+
+“By all means,” turning to reach some of the loose sheets on the
+writing table, and glancing at me. He still hesitated a little, I
+thought. “The fact is,” he said apologetically, “I wondered if it was
+quite fair to trouble you so soon. The daylight might suit you better
+to hear what I have to tell. Your sleep, I mean, might be less
+disturbed, perhaps.”
+
+“I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” John Silence replied with his
+gentle smile, taking command as it were from that moment, “but really
+we are both quite immune. There is nothing, I think, that could prevent
+either of us sleeping, except—an outbreak of fire, or some such very
+physical disturbance.”
+
+Colonel Wragge raised his eyes and looked fixedly at him. This
+reference to an outbreak of fire I felt sure was made with a purpose.
+It certainly had the desired effect of removing from our host’s manner
+the last signs of hesitancy.
+
+“Forgive me,” he said. “Of course, I know nothing of your methods in
+matters of this kind—so, perhaps, you would like me to begin at once
+and give you an outline of the situation?”
+
+Dr. Silence bowed his agreement. “I can then take my precautions
+accordingly,” he added calmly.
+
+The soldier looked up for a moment as though he did not quite gather
+the meaning of these words; but he made no further comment and turned
+at once to tackle a subject on which he evidently talked with
+diffidence and unwillingness.
+
+“It’s all so utterly out of my line of things,” he began, puffing out
+clouds of cigar smoke between his words, “and there’s so little to tell
+with any real evidence behind it, that it’s almost impossible to make a
+consecutive story for you. It’s the total cumulative effect that is
+so—so disquieting.” He chose his words with care, as though determined
+not to travel one hair’s breadth beyond the truth.
+
+“I came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother died,”
+he continued, “but could not afford to live here then. My sister, whom
+you met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all
+these years, while I was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the
+place—for we never got a satisfactory tenant—and saw that it was not
+allowed to go to ruin. I myself took possession, however, only a year
+ago.
+
+“My brother,” he went on, after a perceptible pause, “spent much of his
+time away, too. He was a great traveller, and filled the house with
+stuff he brought home from all over the world. The laundry—a small
+detached building beyond the servants’ quarters—he turned into a
+regular little museum. The curios and things I have cleared away—they
+collected dust and were always getting broken—but the laundry-house you
+shall see tomorrow.”
+
+Colonel Wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses
+that this beginning took him a long time. But at this point he came to
+a full stop altogether. Evidently there was something he wished to say
+that cost him considerable effort. At length he looked up steadily into
+my companion’s face.
+
+“May I ask you—that is, if you won’t think it strange,” he said, and a
+sort of hush came over his voice and manner, “whether you have noticed
+anything at all unusual—anything queer, since you came into the house?”
+
+Dr. Silence answered without a moment’s hesitation.
+
+“I have,” he said. “There is a curious sensation of heat in the place.”
+
+“Ah!” exclaimed the other, with a slight start. “You _have_ noticed it.
+This unaccountable heat—”
+
+“But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself—but outside,” I
+was astonished to hear the doctor add.
+
+Colonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map
+that hung upon the wall. I got the impression that the movement was
+made with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face.
+
+“Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate,” he said after a
+moment, turning round with the map in his hands. “Though, of course, I
+can have no idea how you should guess—”
+
+John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. “Merely my
+impression,” he said. “If you pay attention to impressions, and do not
+allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will
+often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.”
+
+Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His
+face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.
+
+“On coming into possession,” he said, looking us alternately in the
+face, “I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and
+impossible kind I had ever heard—stories which at first I treated with
+amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only
+to keep my servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my
+brother’s death—and, in a way, I think so still.”
+
+He leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence.
+
+“It’s an old plan of the estate,” he explained, “but accurate enough
+for our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the
+plantations marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one,”
+indicating the spot with his finger, “is called the Twelve Acre
+Plantation. It was just there, on the side nearest the house, that my
+brother and the head keeper met their deaths.”
+
+He spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would
+have preferred to leave untouched—things he personally would rather
+have treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly
+dignified and impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness
+as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed
+as though I were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any
+moment I might be summoned to play a part.
+
+“It was twenty years ago,” continued the Colonel, “but there was much
+talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have
+heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered
+man but I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them
+seem to have been frequent.”
+
+“I do not recall the affair,” said the doctor. “May I ask what was the
+cause of death?” Something in his voice made me prick up my ears for
+the reply.
+
+“The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the
+doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time
+when found.”
+
+“And your brother?” asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and
+listening intently.
+
+“Equally mysterious,” said our host, speaking in a low voice with
+effort. “But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to
+mention. For those who saw the face—I did not see it myself—and though
+Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged—” He stammered and
+hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved between his
+words. He stuck.
+
+“Yes,” said the chief listener sympathetically.
+
+“My brother’s face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched.
+It had been swept, as it were, by something that burned—blasted. It
+was, I am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found lying side by
+side, faces downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they
+had been in the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from
+its edge.”
+
+Dr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map
+attentively.
+
+“I did not see the face myself,” repeated the other, his manner somehow
+expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, “but
+my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be
+entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be
+brought to refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that
+the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But
+she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame—blasted.”
+
+John Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the
+air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel
+Wragge went on with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad
+shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece.
+
+“They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That
+was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as Irish
+peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the
+foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every
+week. You may imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you
+that the servants dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants,
+but the men who worked on the estate outside. The keepers gave notice
+one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the
+foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it.
+Word flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a
+place to be avoided, day or night.
+
+“There came a point,” the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, “when
+I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could not
+kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the stories
+at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map,
+comes rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches
+the end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense
+growth of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the
+east winds that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my
+brother interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one
+of the best pheasant coverts on the whole estate.”
+
+“And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?” asked Dr.
+Silence.
+
+“In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know—except that I
+understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head
+keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up
+travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this
+wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall
+around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins
+tomorrow in the daylight.”
+
+“And the result of your investigations—these stories, I mean?” the
+doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.
+
+“Yes, I’m coming to that,” he said slowly, “but the wood first, for
+this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way
+peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer
+part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large
+boulders—old Druid stones, I’m told. At another place there’s a small
+pond. There’s nothing distinctive about it that I could mention—just an
+ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood—only the trees are a bit
+twisted in the trunks, some of ’em, and very dense. Nothing more.
+
+“And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor
+brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all
+odd—such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make
+out how these people got such notions into their heads.”
+
+He paused a moment to relight his cigar.
+
+“There’s no regular path through it,” he resumed, puffing vigorously,
+“but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners
+whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in
+it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of
+the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound—most
+of ’em said that, in fact—and another man saw shapes flitting in and
+out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all
+faintly luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms—always
+queer, huge things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the
+whole wood was lit up, and one fellow—he’s still here and you shall see
+him—has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying
+on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals—”
+
+“What kind of stars?” put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way that
+made me start.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very
+large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was
+too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them
+since.”
+
+He stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze—welcome for its
+blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already
+a strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its
+effect and far from comforting.
+
+“Of course,” he went on, straightening up again on the mat, “this was
+all commonplace enough—this seeing lights and figures at night. Most of
+these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may
+account for almost anything. But others saw things in broad daylight.
+One of the woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to
+his midday meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood
+by something that never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree,
+always keeping out of sight, yet solid enough to make the branches sway
+and the twigs snap on the ground. And it made a noise, he declared—but
+really”—the speaker stopped and gave a short laugh—“it’s too absurd—”
+
+“_Please!_” insisted the doctor; “for it is these small details that
+give me the best clues always.”
+
+“—it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. Those were his
+very words: like the crackling of a bonfire,” finished the soldier,
+with a repetition of his short laugh.
+
+“Most interesting,” Dr. Silence observed gravely. “Please omit
+nothing.”
+
+“Yes,” he went on, “and it was soon after that the fires began—the
+fires in the wood. They started mysteriously burning in the patches of
+coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation. No
+one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number,
+have seen them burning and smouldering. They are always small and
+circular in shape, and for all the world like a picnic fire. The head
+keeper has a dozen explanations, from sparks flying out of the house
+chimneys to the sunlight focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them,
+I must admit, convince me as being in the least likely or probable.
+They are most singular, I consider, most singular, these mysterious
+fires, and I am glad to say that they come only at rather long
+intervals and never seem to spread.
+
+“But the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that
+are verifiable. He declared that no life ever willingly entered the
+plantation; more, that no life existed in it at all. No birds nested in
+the trees, or flew into their shade. He set countless traps, but never
+caught so much as a rabbit or a weasel. Animals avoided it, and more
+than once he had picked up dead creatures round the edges that bore no
+obvious signs of how they had met their death.
+
+“Moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever
+chasing some invisible creature across the field one day when he was
+out with his gun. The dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at
+his feet, and then gave chase, yelping like a mad thing. It followed
+its imaginary quarry to the borders of the wood, and then went in—a
+thing he had never known it to do before. The moment it crossed the
+edge—it is darkish in there even in daylight—it began fighting in the
+most frenzied and terrific fashion. It made him afraid to interfere, he
+said. And at last, when the dog came out, hanging its tail down and
+panting, he found something like white hair stuck to its jaws, and
+brought it to show me. I tell you these details because—”
+
+“They are important, believe me,” the doctor stopped him. “And you have
+it still, this hair?” he asked.
+
+“It disappeared in the oddest way,” the Colonel explained. “It was
+curious looking stuff, something like asbestos, and I sent it to be
+analysed by the local chemist. But either the man got wind of its
+origin, or else he didn’t like the look of it for some reason, because
+he returned it to me and said it was neither animal, vegetable, nor
+mineral, so far as he could make out, and he didn’t wish to have
+anything to do with it. I put it away in paper, but a week later, on
+opening the package—it was gone! Oh, the stories are simply endless. I
+could tell you hundreds all on the same lines.”
+
+“And personal experiences of your own, Colonel Wragge?” asked John
+Silence earnestly, his manner showing the greatest possible interest
+and sympathy.
+
+The soldier gave an almost imperceptible start. He looked distinctly
+uncomfortable.
+
+“Nothing, I think,” he said slowly, “nothing—er—I should like to rely
+on. I mean nothing I have the right to speak of, perhaps—yet.”
+
+His mouth closed with a snap. Dr. Silence, after waiting a little to
+see if he would add to his reply, did not seek to press him on the
+point.
+
+“Well,” he resumed presently, and as though he would speak
+contemptuously, yet dared not, “this sort of thing has gone on at
+intervals ever since. It spreads like wildfire, of course, mysterious
+chatter of this kind, and people began trespassing all over the estate,
+coming to see the wood, and making themselves a general nuisance.
+Notices of man-traps and spring-guns only seemed to increase their
+persistence; and—think of it,” he snorted, “some local Research Society
+actually wrote and asked permission for one of their members to spend a
+night in the wood! Bolder fools, who didn’t write for leave, came and
+took away bits of bark from the trees and gave them to clairvoyants,
+who invented in their turn a further batch of tales. There was simply
+no end to it all.”
+
+“Most distressing and annoying, I can well believe,” interposed the
+doctor.
+
+“Then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun,
+and the interest flagged. The tales stopped. People got interested in
+something else. It all seemed to die out. This was last July. I can
+tell you exactly, for I’ve kept a diary more or less of what happened.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“But now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all
+revived again with a rush—with a kind of furious attack, so to speak.
+It has really become unbearable. You may imagine what it means, and the
+general state of affairs, when I say that the possibility of leaving
+has occurred to me.”
+
+“Incendiarism?” suggested Dr. Silence, half under his breath, but not
+so low that Colonel Wragge did not hear him.
+
+“By Jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!” exclaimed the
+astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the
+doctor, and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation
+of my friend’s divining powers were to be found that way.
+
+“It’s only that you are thinking very vividly,” the doctor said
+quietly, “and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you utter
+them. It’s merely a little elementary thought-reading.”
+
+His intention, I saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress
+him with his powers so as to ensure obedience later.
+
+“Good Lord! I had no idea—” He did not finish the sentence, and dived
+again abruptly into his narrative.
+
+“I did not see anything myself, I must admit, but the stories of
+independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like
+streams of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to
+shoot out precisely as flames might shoot out—in the direction of this
+house. There,” he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump,
+pointing with a thick finger to the map, “where the westerly fringe of
+the plantation comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the
+house—where it links on to those dark patches, which are laurel
+shrubberies, running right up to the back premises—that’s where these
+lights were seen. They passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in
+this way reached the house itself. Like silent rockets, one man
+described them, rapid as lightning and exceedingly bright.”
+
+“And this evidence you spoke of?”
+
+“They actually reached the sides of the house. They’ve left a mark of
+scorching on the walls—the walls of the laundry building at the other
+end. You shall see ’em tomorrow.” He pointed to the map to indicate the
+spot, and then straightened himself and glared about the room as though
+he had said something no one could believe and expected contradiction.
+
+“Scorched—just as the faces were,” the doctor murmured, looking
+significantly at me.
+
+“Scorched—yes,” repeated the Colonel, failing to catch the rest of the
+sentence in his excitement.
+
+There was a prolonged silence in the room, in which I heard the
+gurgling of the oil in the lamp and the click of the coals and the
+heavy breathing of our host. The most unwelcome sensations were
+creeping about my spine, and I wondered whether my companion would
+scorn me utterly if I asked to sleep on the sofa in his room. It was
+eleven o’clock, I saw by the clock on the mantelpiece. We had crossed
+the dividing line and were now well in the movement of the adventure.
+The fight between my interest and my dread became acute. But, even if
+turning back had been possible, I think the interest would have easily
+gained the day.
+
+“I have enemies, of course,” I heard the Colonel’s rough voice break
+into the pause presently, “and have discharged a number of servants—”
+
+“It’s not that,” put in John Silence briefly.
+
+“You think not? In a sense I am glad, and yet—there are some things
+that can be met and dealt with—”
+
+He left the sentence unfinished, and looked down at the floor with an
+expression of grim severity that betrayed a momentary glimpse of
+character. This fighting man loathed and abhorred the thought of an
+enemy he could not see and come to grips with. Presently he moved over
+and sat down in the chair between us. Something like a sigh escaped
+him. Dr. Silence said nothing.
+
+“My sister, of course, is kept in ignorance, as far as possible, of all
+this,” he said disconnectedly, and as if talking to himself. “But even
+if she knew she would find matter-of-fact explanations. I only wish I
+could. I’m sure they exist.”
+
+There came then an interval in the conversation that was very
+significant. It did not seem a real pause, or the silence real silence,
+for both men continued to think so rapidly and strongly that one almost
+imagined their thoughts clothed themselves in words in the air of the
+room. I was more than a little keyed up with the strange excitement of
+all I had heard, but what stimulated my nerves more than anything else
+was the obvious fact that the doctor was clearly upon the trail of
+discovery. In his mind at that moment, I believe, he had already solved
+the nature of this perplexing psychical problem. His face was like a
+mask, and he employed the absolute minimum of gesture and words. All
+his energies were directed inwards, and by those incalculable methods
+and processes he had mastered with such infinite patience and study, I
+felt sure he was already in touch with the forces behind these singular
+phenomena and laying his deep plans for bringing them into the open,
+and then effectively dealing with them.
+
+Colonel Wragge meanwhile grew more and more fidgety. From time to time
+he turned towards my companion, as though about to speak, yet always
+changing his mind at the last moment. Once he went over and opened the
+door suddenly, apparently to see if any one were listening at the
+keyhole, for he disappeared a moment between the two doors, and I then
+heard him open the outer one. He stood there for some seconds and made
+a noise as though he were sniffing the air like a dog. Then he closed
+both doors cautiously and came back to the fireplace. A strange
+excitement seemed growing upon him. Evidently he was trying to make up
+his mind to say something that he found it difficult to say. And John
+Silence, as I rightly judged, was waiting patiently for him to choose
+his own opportunity and his own way of saying it. At last he turned and
+faced us, squaring his great shoulders, and stiffening perceptibly.
+
+Dr. Silence looked up sympathetically.
+
+“Your own experiences help me most,” he observed quietly.
+
+“The fact is,” the Colonel said, speaking very low, “this past week
+there have been outbreaks of fire in the house itself. Three separate
+outbreaks—and all—in my sister’s room.”
+
+“Yes,” the doctor said, as if this was just what he had expected to
+hear.
+
+“Utterly unaccountable—all of them,” added the other, and then sat
+down. I began to understand something of the reason of his excitement.
+He was realising at last that the “natural” explanation he had held to
+all along was becoming impossible, and he hated it. It made him angry.
+
+“Fortunately,” he went on, “she was out each time and does not know.
+But I have made her sleep now in a room on the ground floor.”
+
+“A wise precaution,” the doctor said simply. He asked one or two
+questions. The fires had started in the curtains—once by the window and
+once by the bed. The third time smoke had been discovered by the maid
+coming from the cupboard, and it was found that Miss Wragge’s clothes
+hanging on the hooks were smouldering. The doctor listened attentively,
+but made no comment.
+
+“And now can you tell me,” he said presently, “what your own feeling
+about it is—your general impression?”
+
+“It sounds foolish to say so,” replied the soldier, after a moment’s
+hesitation, “but I feel exactly as I have often felt on active service
+in my Indian campaigns: just as if the house and all in it were in a
+state of siege; as though a concealed enemy were encamped about us—in
+ambush somewhere.” He uttered a soft nervous laugh. “As if the next
+sign of smoke would precipitate a panic—a dreadful panic.”
+
+The picture came before me of the night shadowing the house, and the
+twisted pine trees he had described crowding about it, concealing some
+powerful enemy; and, glancing at the resolute face and figure of the
+old soldier, forced at length to his confession, I understood something
+of all he had been through before he sought the assistance of John
+Silence.
+
+“And tomorrow, unless I am mistaken, is full moon,” said the doctor
+suddenly, watching the other’s face for the effect of his apparently
+careless words.
+
+Colonel Wragge gave an uncontrollable start, and his face for the first
+time showed unmistakable pallor.
+
+“What in the world—?” he began, his lip quivering.
+
+“Only that I am beginning to see light in this extraordinary affair,”
+returned the other calmly, “and, if my theory is correct, each month
+when the moon is at the full should witness an increase in the activity
+of the phenomena.”
+
+“I don’t see the connection,” Colonel Wragge answered almost savagely,
+“but I am bound to say my diary bears you out.” He wore the most
+puzzled expression I have ever seen upon an honest face, but he
+abhorred this additional corroboration of an explanation that perplexed
+him.
+
+“I confess,” he repeated, “I cannot see the connection.”
+
+“Why should you?” said the doctor, with his first laugh that evening.
+He got up and hung the map upon the wall again. “But I do—because these
+things are my special study—and let me add that I have yet to come
+across a problem that is not natural, and has not a natural
+explanation. It’s merely a question of how much one knows—and admits.”
+
+Colonel Wragge eyed him with a new and curious respect in his face. But
+his feelings were soothed. Moreover, the doctor’s laugh and change of
+manner came as a relief to all, and broke the spell of grave suspense
+that had held us so long. We all rose and stretched our limbs, and took
+little walks about the room.
+
+“I am glad, Dr. Silence, if you will allow me to say so, that you are
+here,” he said simply, “very glad indeed. And now I fear I have kept
+you both up very late,” with a glance to include me, “for you must be
+tired, and ready for your beds. I have told you all there is to tell,”
+he added, “and tomorrow you must feel perfectly free to take any steps
+you think necessary.”
+
+The end was abrupt, yet natural, for there was nothing more to say, and
+neither of these men talked for mere talking’s sake.
+
+Out in the cold and chilly hall he lit our candles and took us
+upstairs. The house was at rest and still, every one asleep. We moved
+softly. Through the windows on the stairs we saw the moonlight falling
+across the lawn, throwing deep shadows. The nearer pine trees were just
+visible in the distance, a wall of impenetrable blackness.
+
+Our host came for a moment to our rooms to see that we had everything.
+He pointed to a coil of strong rope lying beside the window, fastened
+to the wall by means of an iron ring. Evidently it had been recently
+put in.
+
+“I don’t think we shall need it,” Dr. Silence said, with a smile.
+
+“I trust not,” replied our host gravely. “I sleep quite close to you
+across the landing,” he whispered, pointing to his door, “and if you—if
+you want anything in the night you will know where to find me.”
+
+He wished us pleasant dreams and disappeared down the passage into his
+room, shading the candle with his big muscular hand from the draughts.
+
+John Silence stopped me a moment before I went.
+
+“You know what it is?” I asked, with an excitement that even overcame
+my weariness.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “I’m almost sure. And you?”
+
+“Not the smallest notion.”
+
+He looked disappointed, but not half as disappointed as I felt.
+
+“Egypt,” he whispered, “Egypt!”
+
+II
+
+Nothing happened to disturb me in the night—nothing, that is, except a
+nightmare in which Colonel Wragge chased me amid thin streaks of fire,
+and his sister always prevented my escape by suddenly rising up out of
+the ground in her chair—dead. The deep baying of dogs woke me once,
+just before the dawn, it must have been, for I saw the window frame
+against the sky; there was a flash of lightning, too, I thought, as I
+turned over in bed. And it was warm, for October oppressively warm.
+
+It was after eleven o’clock when our host suggested going out with the
+guns, these, we understood, being a somewhat thin disguise for our true
+purpose. Personally, I was glad to be in the open air, for the
+atmosphere of the house was heavy with presentiment. The sense of
+impending disaster hung over all. Fear stalked the passages, and lurked
+in the corners of every room. It was a house haunted, but really
+haunted; not by some vague shadow of the dead, but by a definite though
+incalculable influence that was actively alive, and dangerous. At the
+least smell of smoke the entire household quivered. An odour of
+burning, I was convinced, would paralyse all the inmates. For the
+servants, though professedly ignorant by the master’s unspoken orders,
+yet shared the common dread; and the hideous uncertainty, joined with
+this display of so spiteful and calculated a spirit of malignity,
+provided a kind of black doom that draped not only the walls, but also
+the minds of the people living within them.
+
+Only the bright and cheerful vision of old Miss Wragge being pushed
+about the house in her noiseless chair, chatting and nodding briskly to
+every one she met, prevented us from giving way entirely to the
+depression which governed the majority. The sight of her was like a
+gleam of sunshine through the depths of some ill-omened wood, and just
+as we went out I saw her being wheeled along by her attendant into the
+sunshine of the back lawn, and caught her cheery smile as she turned
+her head and wished us good sport.
+
+The morning was October at its best. Sunshine glistened on the
+dew-drenched grass and on leaves turned golden-red. The dainty
+messengers of coming hoar-frost were already in the air, a search for
+permanent winter quarters. From the wide moors that everywhere swept up
+against the sky, like a purple sea splashed by the occasional grey of
+rocky clefts, there stole down the cool and perfumed wind of the west.
+And the keen taste of the sea ran through all like a master-flavour,
+borne over the spaces perhaps by the seagulls that cried and circled
+high in the air.
+
+But our host took little interest in this sparkling beauty, and had no
+thought of showing off the scenery of his property. His mind was
+otherwise intent, and, for that matter, so were our own.
+
+“Those bleak moors and hills stretch unbroken for hours,” he said, with
+a sweep of the hand; “and over there, some four miles,” pointing in
+another direction, “lies S—— Bay, a long, swampy inlet of the sea,
+haunted by myriads of seabirds. On the other side of the house are the
+plantations and pine-woods. I thought we would get the dogs and go
+first to the Twelve Acre Wood I told you about last night. It’s quite
+near.”
+
+We found the dogs in the stable, and I recalled the deep baying of the
+night when a fine bloodhound and two great Danes leaped out to greet
+us. Singular companions for guns, I thought to myself, as we struck out
+across the fields and the great creatures bounded and ran beside us,
+nose to ground.
+
+The conversation was scanty. John Silence’s grave face did not
+encourage talk. He wore the expression I knew well—that look of earnest
+solicitude which meant that his whole being was deeply absorbed and
+preoccupied. Frightened, I had never seen him, but anxious often—it
+always moved me to witness it—and he was anxious now.
+
+“On the way back you shall see the laundry building,” Colonel Wragge
+observed shortly, for he, too, found little to say. “We shall attract
+less attention then.”
+
+Yet not all the crisp beauty of the morning seemed able to dispel the
+feelings of uneasy dread that gathered increasingly about our minds as
+we went.
+
+In a very few minutes a clump of pine trees concealed the house from
+view, and we found ourselves on the outskirts of a densely grown
+plantation of conifers. Colonel Wragge stopped abruptly, and, producing
+a map from his pocket, explained once more very briefly its position
+with regard to the house. He showed how it ran up almost to the walls
+of the laundry building—though at the moment beyond our actual view—and
+pointed to the windows of his sister’s bedroom where the fires had
+been. The room, now empty, looked straight on to the wood. Then,
+glancing nervously about him, and calling the dogs to heel, he proposed
+that we should enter the plantation and make as thorough examination of
+it as we thought worth while. The dogs, he added, might perhaps be
+persuaded to accompany us a little way—and he pointed to where they
+cowered at his feet—but he doubted it. “Neither voice nor whip will get
+them very far, I’m afraid,” he said. “I know by experience.”
+
+“If you have no objection,” replied Dr. Silence, with decision, and
+speaking almost for the first time, “we will make our examination
+alone—Mr. Hubbard and myself. It will be best so.”
+
+His tone was absolutely final, and the Colonel acquiesced so politely
+that even a less intuitive man than myself must have seen that he was
+genuinely relieved.
+
+“You doubtless have good reasons,” he said.
+
+“Merely that I wish to obtain my impressions uncoloured. This delicate
+clue I am working on might be so easily blurred by the thought-currents
+of another mind with strongly preconceived ideas.”
+
+“Perfectly. I understand,” rejoined the soldier, though with an
+expression of countenance that plainly contradicted his words. “Then I
+will wait here with the dogs; and we’ll have a look at the laundry on
+our way home.”
+
+I turned once to look back as we clambered over the low stone wall
+built by the late owner, and saw his straight, soldierly figure
+standing in the sunlit field watching us with a curiously intent look
+on his face. There was something to me incongruous, yet distinctly
+pathetic, in the man’s efforts to meet all far-fetched explanations of
+the mystery with contempt, and at the same time in his stolid,
+unswerving investigation of it all. He nodded at me and made a gesture
+of farewell with his hand. That picture of him, standing in the
+sunshine with his big dogs, steadily watching us, remains with me to
+this day.
+
+Dr. Silence led the way in among the twisted trunks, planted closely
+together in serried ranks, and I followed sharp at his heels. The
+moment we were out of sight he turned and put down his gun against the
+roots of a big tree, and I did likewise.
+
+“We shall hardly want these cumbersome weapons of murder,” he observed,
+with a passing smile.
+
+“You are sure of your clue, then?” I asked at once, bursting with
+curiosity, yet fearing to betray it lest he should think me unworthy.
+His own methods were so absolutely simple and untheatrical.
+
+“I am sure of my clue,” he answered gravely. “And I think we have come
+just in time. You shall know in due course. For the present—be content
+to follow and observe. And think, steadily. The support of your mind
+will help me.”
+
+His voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death
+with a sort of happiness and pride. I would have followed him anywhere
+at that moment. At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread
+seriousness. I caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this
+broad light of day, I felt the measure of alarm that lay behind.
+
+“You still have no strong impressions?” he asked. “Nothing happened in
+the night, for instance? No vivid dreamings?”
+
+He looked closely for my answer, I was aware.
+
+“I slept almost an unbroken sleep. I was tremendously tired, you know,
+and, but for the oppressive heat—”
+
+“Good! You still notice the heat, then,” he said to himself, rather
+than expecting an answer. “And the lightning?” he added, “that
+lightning out of a clear sky—that flashing—did you notice _that_?”
+
+I answered truly that I thought I had seen a flash during a moment of
+wakefulness, and he then drew my attention to certain facts before
+moving on.
+
+“You remember the sensation of warmth when you put the letter to your
+forehead in the train; the heat generally in the house last evening,
+and, as you now mention, in the night. You heard, too, the Colonel’s
+stories about the appearances of fire in this wood and in the house
+itself, and the way his brother and the gamekeeper came to their deaths
+twenty years ago.”
+
+I nodded, wondering what in the world it all meant.
+
+“And you get no clue from these facts?” he asked, a trifle surprised.
+
+I searched every corner of my mind and imagination for some inkling of
+his meaning, but was obliged to admit that I understood nothing so far.
+
+“Never mind, you will later. And now,” he added, “we will go over the
+wood and see what we can find.”
+
+His words explained to me something of his method. We were to keep our
+minds alert and report to each other the least fancy that crossed the
+picture-gallery of our thoughts. Then, just as we started, he turned
+again to me with a final warning.
+
+“And, for your safety,” he said earnestly, “imagine _now_—and for that
+matter, imagine always until we leave this place—imagine with the
+utmost keenness, that you are surrounded by a shell that protects you.
+Picture yourself inside a protective envelope, and build it up with the
+most intense imagination you can evoke. Pour the whole force of your
+thought and will into it. Believe vividly all through this adventure
+that such a shell, constructed of your thought, will and imagination,
+surrounds you completely, and that nothing can pierce it to attack.”
+
+He spoke with dramatic conviction, gazing hard at me as though to
+enforce his meaning, and then moved forward and began to pick his way
+over the rough, tussocky ground into the wood. And meanwhile, knowing
+the efficacy of his prescription, I adopted it to the best of my
+ability.
+
+The trees at once closed about us like the night. Their branches met
+overhead in a continuous tangle, their stems crept closer and closer,
+the brambly undergrowth thickened and multiplied. We tore our trousers,
+scratched our hands, and our eyes filled with fine dust that made it
+most difficult to avoid the clinging, prickly network of branches and
+creepers. Coarse white grass that caught our feet like string grew here
+and there in patches. It crowned the lumps of peaty growth that stuck
+up like human heads, fantastically dressed, thrusting up at us out of
+the ground with crests of dead hair. We stumbled and floundered among
+them. It was hard going, and I could well conceive it impossible to
+find a way at all in the night-time. We jumped, when possible, from
+tussock to tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among
+heads on a battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes
+that turned to stare as we passed.
+
+Here and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light,
+dazzling the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by
+contrast. And on two occasions we passed dark circular places in the
+grass where fires had eaten their mark and left a ring of ashes. Dr.
+Silence pointed to them, but without comment and without pausing, and
+the sight of them woke in me a singular realisation of the dread that
+lay so far only just out of sight in this adventure.
+
+It was exhausting work, and heavy going. We kept close together. The
+warmth, too, was extraordinary. Yet it did not seem the warmth of the
+body due to violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that
+laid glowing hands of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind
+of steady blaze. When my companion found himself too far in advance, he
+waited for me to come up. The place had evidently been untouched by
+hand of man, keeper, forester or sportsman, for many a year; and my
+thoughts, as we advanced painfully, were not unlike the state of the
+wood itself—dark, confused, full of a haunting wonder and the shadow of
+fear.
+
+By this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. No single
+gleam penetrated. We might have been groping in the heart of some
+primeval forest. Then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and
+stringlike grass came to an end; the trees opened out; and the ground
+began to slope upwards towards a large central mound. We had reached
+the middle of the plantation, and before us stood the broken Druid
+stones our host had mentioned. We walked easily up the little hill,
+between the sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered
+boulders, looked round upon a comparatively open space, as large,
+perhaps, as a small London Square.
+
+Thinking of the ceremonies and sacrifices this rough circle of
+prehistoric monoliths might have witnessed, I looked up into my
+companion’s face with an unspoken question. But he read my thought and
+shook his head.
+
+“Our mystery has nothing to do with these dead symbols,” he said, “but
+with something perhaps even more ancient, and of another country
+altogether.”
+
+“Egypt?” I said half under my breath, hopelessly puzzled, but recalling
+his words in my bedroom.
+
+He nodded. Mentally I still floundered, but he seemed intensely
+preoccupied and it was no time for asking questions; so while his words
+circled unintelligibly in my mind I looked round at the scene before
+me, glad of the opportunity to recover breath and some measure of
+composure. But hardly had I time to notice the twisted and contorted
+shapes of many of the pine trees close at hand when Dr. Silence leaned
+over and touched me on the shoulder. He pointed down the slope. And the
+look I saw in his eyes keyed up every nerve in my body to its utmost
+pitch.
+
+A thin, almost imperceptible column of blue smoke was rising among the
+trees some twenty yards away at the foot of the mound. It curled up and
+up, and disappeared from sight among the tangled branches overhead. It
+was scarcely thicker than the smoke from a small brand of burning wood.
+
+“Protect yourself! Imagine your shell strongly,” whispered the doctor
+sharply, “and follow me closely.”
+
+He rose at once and moved swiftly down the slope towards the smoke, and
+I followed, afraid to remain alone. I heard the soft crunching of our
+steps on the pine needles. Over his shoulder I watched the thin blue
+spiral, without once taking my eyes off it. I hardly know how to
+describe the peculiar sense of vague horror inspired in me by the sight
+of that streak of smoke pencilling its way upwards among the dark
+trees. And the sensation of increasing heat as we approached was
+phenomenal. It was like walking towards a glowing yet invisible fire.
+
+As we drew nearer his pace slackened. Then he stopped and pointed, and
+I saw a small circle of burnt grass upon the ground. The tussocks were
+blackened and smouldering, and from the centre rose this line of smoke,
+pale, blue, steady. Then I noticed a movement of the atmosphere beside
+us, as if the warm air were rising and the cooler air rushing in to
+take its place: a little centre of wind in the stillness. Overhead the
+boughs stirred and trembled where the smoke disappeared. Otherwise, not
+a tree sighed, not a sound made itself heard. The wood was still as a
+graveyard. A horrible idea came to me that the course of nature was
+about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that the
+sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken
+bubble. Something, certainly, reached up to the citadel of my reason,
+causing its throne to shake.
+
+John Silence moved forward again. I could not see his face, but his
+attitude was plainly one of resolution, of muscles and mind ready for
+vigorous action. We were within ten feet of the blackened circle when
+the smoke of a sudden ceased to rise, and vanished. The tail of the
+column disappeared in the air above, and at the same instant it seemed
+to me that the sensation of heat passed from my face, and the motion of
+the wind was gone. The calm spirit of the fresh October day resumed
+command.
+
+Side by side we advanced and examined the place. The grass was
+smouldering, the ground still hot. The circle of burned earth was a
+foot to a foot and a half in diameter. It looked like an ordinary
+picnic fireplace. I bent down cautiously to look, but in a second I
+sprang back with an involuntary cry of alarm, for, as the doctor
+stamped on the ashes to prevent them spreading, a sound of hissing rose
+from the spot as though he had kicked a living creature. This hissing
+was faintly audible in the air. It moved past us, away towards the
+thicker portion of the wood in the direction of our field, and in a
+second Dr. Silence had left the fire and started in pursuit.
+
+And then began the most extraordinary hunt of invisibility I can ever
+conceive.
+
+He went fast even at the beginning, and, of course, it was perfectly
+obvious that he was following something. To judge by the poise of his
+head he kept his eyes steadily at a certain level—just above the height
+of a man—and the consequence was he stumbled a good deal over the
+roughness of the ground. The hissing sound had stopped. There was no
+sound of any kind, and what he saw to follow was utterly beyond me. I
+only know, that in mortal dread of being left behind, and with a biting
+curiosity to see whatever there was to be seen, I followed as quickly
+as I could, and even then barely succeeded in keeping up with him.
+
+And, as we went, the whole mad jumble of the Colonel’s stories ran
+through my brain, touching a sense of frightened laughter that was only
+held in check by the sight of this earnest, hurrying figure before me.
+For John Silence at work inspired me with a kind of awe. He looked so
+diminutive among these giant twisted trees, while yet I knew that his
+purpose and his knowledge were so great, and even in hurry he was
+dignified. The fancy that we were playing some queer, exaggerated game
+together met the fact that we were two men dancing upon the brink of
+some possible tragedy, and the mingling of the two emotions in my mind
+was both grotesque and terrifying.
+
+He never turned in his mad chase, but pushed rapidly on, while I panted
+after him like a figure in some unreasoning nightmare. And, as I ran,
+it came upon me that he had been aware all the time, in his quiet,
+internal way, of many things that he had kept for his own secret
+consideration; he had been watching, waiting, planning from the very
+moment we entered the shade of the wood. By some inner, concentrated
+process of mind, dynamic if not actually magical, he had been in direct
+contact with the source of the whole adventure, the very essence of the
+real mystery. And now the forces were moving to a climax. Something was
+about to happen, something important, something possibly dreadful.
+Every nerve, every sense, every significant gesture of the plunging
+figure before me proclaimed the fact just as surely as the skies, the
+winds, and the face of the earth tell the birds the time to migrate and
+warn the animals that danger lurks and they must move.
+
+In a few moments we reached the foot of the mound and entered the
+tangled undergrowth that lay between us and the sunlight of the field.
+Here the difficulties of fast travelling increased a hundredfold. There
+were brambles to dodge, low boughs to dive under, and countless tree
+trunks closing up to make a direct path impossible. Yet Dr. Silence
+never seemed to falter or hesitate. He went, diving, jumping, dodging,
+ducking, but ever in the same main direction, following a clean trail.
+Twice I tripped and fell, and both times, when I picked myself up
+again, I saw him ahead of me, still forcing a way like a dog after its
+quarry. And sometimes, like a dog, he stopped and pointed—human
+pointing it was, psychic pointing, and each time he stopped to point I
+heard that faint high hissing in the air beyond us. The instinct of an
+infallible dowser possessed him, and he made no mistakes.
+
+At length, abruptly, I caught up with him, and found that we stood at
+the edge of the shallow pond Colonel Wragge had mentioned in his
+account the night before. It was long and narrow, filled with dark
+brown water, in which the trees were dimly reflected. Not a ripple
+stirred its surface.
+
+“Watch!” he cried out, as I came up. “It’s going to cross. It’s bound
+to betray itself. The water is its natural enemy, and we shall see the
+direction.”
+
+And, even as he spoke, a thin line like the track of a water-spider,
+shot swiftly across the shiny surface; there was a ghost of steam in
+the air above; and immediately I became aware of an odour of burning.
+
+Dr. Silence turned and shot a glance at me that made me think of
+lightning. I began to shake all over.
+
+“Quick!” he cried with excitement, “to the trail again! We must run
+around. It’s going to the house!”
+
+The alarm in his voice quite terrified me. Without a false step I
+dashed round the slippery banks and dived again at his heels into the
+sea of bushes and tree trunks. We were now in the thick of the very
+dense belt that ran around the outer edge of the plantation, and the
+field was near; yet so dark was the tangle that it was some time before
+the first shafts of white sunlight became visible. The doctor now ran
+in zigzags. He was following something that dodged and doubled quite
+wonderfully, yet had begun, I fancied, to move more slowly than before.
+
+“Quick!” he cried. “In the light we shall lose it!”
+
+I still saw nothing, heard nothing, caught no suggestion of a trail;
+yet this man, guided by some interior divining that seemed infallible,
+made no false turns, though how he failed to crash headlong into the
+trees has remained a mystery to me ever since. And then, with a sudden
+rush, we found ourselves on the skirts of the wood with the open field
+lying in bright sunshine before our eyes.
+
+“Too late!” I heard him cry, a note of anguish in his voice. “It’s
+out—and, by God, it’s making for the house!”
+
+I saw the Colonel standing in the field with his dogs where we had left
+him. He was bending double, peering into the wood where he heard us
+running, and he straightened up like a bent whip released. John Silence
+dashed passed, calling him to follow.
+
+“We shall lose the trail in the light,” I heard him cry as he ran. “But
+quick! We may yet get there in time!”
+
+That wild rush across the open field, with the dogs at our heels,
+leaping and barking, and the elderly Colonel behind us running as
+though for his life, shall I ever forget it? Though I had only vague
+ideas of the meaning of it all, I put my best foot forward, and, being
+the youngest of the three, I reached the house an easy first. I drew
+up, panting, and turned to wait for the others. But, as I turned,
+something moving a little distance away caught my eye, and in that
+moment I swear I experienced the most overwhelming and singular shock
+of surprise and terror I have ever known, or can conceive as possible.
+
+For the front door was open, and the waist of the house being narrow, I
+could see through the hall into the dining-room beyond, and so out on
+to the back lawn, and there I saw no less a sight than the figure of
+Miss Wragge—running. Even at that distance it was plain that she had
+seen me, and was coming fast towards me, running with the frantic gait
+of a terror-stricken woman. She had recovered the use of her legs.
+
+Her face was a livid grey, as of death itself, but the general
+expression was one of laughter, for her mouth was gaping, and her eyes,
+always bright, shone with the light of a wild merriment that seemed the
+merriment of a child, yet was singularly ghastly. And that very second,
+as she fled past me into her brother’s arms behind, I smelt again most
+unmistakably the odour of burning, and to this day the smell of smoke
+and fire can come very near to turning me sick with the memory of what
+I had seen.
+
+Fast on her heels, too, came the terrified attendant, more mistress of
+herself, and able to speak—which the old lady could not do—but with a
+face almost, if not quite, as fearful.
+
+“We were down by the bushes in the sun,”—she gasped and screamed in
+reply to Colonel Wragge’s distracted questionings,—“I was wheeling the
+chair as usual when she shrieked and leaped—I don’t know exactly—I was
+too frightened to see—Oh, my God! she jumped clean out of the
+chair—_and ran_! There was a blast of hot air from the wood, and she
+hid her face and jumped. She didn’t make a sound—she didn’t cry out, or
+make a sound. She just ran.”
+
+But the nightmare horror of it all reached the breaking point a few
+minutes later, and while I was still standing in the hall temporarily
+bereft of speech and movement; for while the doctor, the Colonel and
+the attendant were half-way up the staircase, helping the fainting
+woman to the privacy of her room, and all in a confused group of dark
+figures, there sounded a voice behind me, and I turned to see the
+butler, his face dripping with perspiration, his eyes starting out of
+his head.
+
+“The laundry’s on fire!” he cried; “the laundry building’s a-caught!”
+
+I remember his odd expression “a-caught,” and wanting to laugh, but
+finding my face rigid and inflexible.
+
+“The devil’s about again, s’help me Gawd!” he cried, in a voice thin
+with terror, running about in circles.
+
+And then the group on the stairs scattered as at the sound of a shot,
+and the Colonel and Dr. Silence came down three steps at a time,
+leaving the afflicted Miss Wragge to the care of her single attendant.
+
+We were out across the front lawn in a moment and round the corner of
+the house, the Colonel leading, Silence and I at his heels, and the
+portly butler puffing some distance in the rear, getting more and more
+mixed in his addresses to God and the devil; and the moment we passed
+the stables and came into view of the laundry building, we saw a
+wicked-looking volume of smoke pouring out of the narrow windows, and
+the frightened women-servants and grooms running hither and thither,
+calling aloud as they ran.
+
+The arrival of the master restored order instantly, and this retired
+soldier, poor thinker perhaps, but capable man of action, had the
+matter in hand from the start. He issued orders like a martinet, and,
+almost before I could realise it, there were streaming buckets on the
+scene and a line of men and women formed between the building and the
+stable pump.
+
+“Inside,” I heard John Silence cry, and the Colonel followed him
+through the door, while I was just quick enough at their heels to hear
+him add, “the smoke’s the worst part of it. There’s no fire yet, I
+think.”
+
+And, true enough, there was no fire. The interior was thick with smoke,
+but it speedily cleared and not a single bucket was used upon the floor
+or walls. The air was stifling, the heat fearful.
+
+“There’s precious little to burn in here; it’s all stone,” the Colonel
+exclaimed, coughing. But the doctor was pointing to the wooden covers
+of the great cauldron in which the clothes were washed, and we saw that
+these were smouldering and charred. And when we sprinkled half a bucket
+of water on them the surrounding bricks hissed and fizzed and sent up
+clouds of steam. Through the open door and windows this passed out with
+the rest of the smoke, and we three stood there on the brick floor
+staring at the spot and wondering, each in our own fashion, how in the
+name of natural law the place could have caught fire or smoked at all.
+And each was silent—myself from sheer incapacity and befuddlement, the
+Colonel from the quiet pluck that faces all things yet speaks little,
+and John Silence from the intense mental grappling with this latest
+manifestation of a profound problem that called for concentration of
+thought rather than for any words.
+
+There was really nothing to say. The facts were indisputable.
+
+Colonel Wragge was the first to utter.
+
+“My sister,” he said briefly, and moved off. In the yard I heard him
+sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently
+matter-of-fact voice, scolding some one roundly for making such a big
+fire and letting the flues get over-heated, and paying no heed to the
+stammering reply that no fire had been lit there for several days. Then
+he dispatched a groom on horseback for the local doctor.
+
+Then Dr. Silence turned and looked at me. The absolute control he
+possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture,
+change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well
+knew, over its very birth in his heart, the masklike face of the dead
+he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any
+given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. But now, when
+he turned and looked at me, there was no sphinx-expression there, but
+rather the keen triumphant face of a man who had solved a dangerous and
+complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory.
+
+“_Now_ do you guess?” he asked quietly, as though it were the simplest
+matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible.
+
+I could only stare stupidly and remain silent. He glanced down at the
+charred cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger.
+But I was too excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps,
+to see what it was he outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. I
+could only go on staring and shaking my puzzled head.
+
+“A fire-elemental,” he cried, “a fire-elemental of the most powerful
+and malignant kind—”
+
+“A what?” thundered the voice of Colonel Wragge behind us, having
+returned suddenly and overheard.
+
+“It’s a fire-elemental,” repeated Dr. Silence more calmly, but with a
+note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, “and a
+fire-elemental enraged.”
+
+The light began to dawn in my mind at last. But the Colonel—who had
+never heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably
+worked up for a plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to
+grapple with—the Colonel stood, with the most dumfoundered look ever
+seen on a human countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and
+stare.
+
+“And why,” he began, savage with the desire to find something visible
+he could fight—“why, in the name of all the blazes—?” and then stopped
+as John Silence moved up and took his arm.
+
+“There, my dear Colonel Wragge,” he said gently, “you touch the heart
+of the whole thing. You ask ‘Why.’ That is precisely our problem.” He
+held the soldier’s eyes firmly with his own. “And that, too, I think,
+we shall soon know. Come and let us talk over a plan of action—that
+room with the double doors, perhaps.”
+
+The word “action” calmed him a little, and he led the way, without
+further speech, back into the house, and down the long stone passage to
+the room where we had heard his stories on the night of our arrival. I
+understood from the doctor’s glance that my presence would not make the
+interview easier for our host, and I went upstairs to my own
+room—shaking.
+
+But in the solitude of my room the vivid memories of the last hour
+revived so mercilessly that I began to feel I should never in my whole
+life lose the dreadful picture of Miss Wragge running—that dreadful
+human climax after all the non-human mystery in the wood—and I was not
+sorry when a servant knocked at my door and said that Colonel Wragge
+would be glad if I would join them in the little smoking-room.
+
+“I think it is better you should be present,” was all Colonel Wragge
+said as I entered the room. I took the chair with my back to the
+window. There was still an hour before lunch, though I imagine that the
+usual divisions of the day hardly found a place in the thoughts of any
+one of us.
+
+The atmosphere of the room was what I might call electric. The Colonel
+was positively bristling; he stood with his back to the fire, fingering
+an unlit black cigar, his face flushed, his being obviously roused and
+ready for action. He hated this mystery. It was poisonous to his
+nature, and he longed to meet something face to face—something he could
+gauge and fight. Dr. Silence, I noticed at once, was sitting before the
+map of the estate which was spread upon a table. I knew by his
+expression the state of his mind. He was in the thick of it all, knew
+it, delighted in it, and was working at high pressure. He recognised my
+presence with a lifted eyelid, and the flash of the eye, contrasted
+with his stillness and composure, told me volumes.
+
+“I was about to explain to our host briefly what seems to me afoot in
+all this business,” he said without looking up, “when he asked that you
+should join us so that we can all work together.” And, while signifying
+my assent, I caught myself wondering what quality it was in the calm
+speech of this undemonstrative man that was so full of power, so
+charged with the strange, virile personality behind it and that seemed
+to inspire us with his own confidence as by a process of radiation.
+
+“Mr. Hubbard,” he went on gravely, turning to the soldier, “knows
+something of my methods, and in more than one—er—interesting situation
+has proved of assistance. What we want now”—and here he suddenly got up
+and took his place on the mat beside the Colonel, and looked hard at
+him—“is men who have self-control, who are sure of themselves, whose
+minds at the critical moment will emit positive forces, instead of the
+wavering and uncertain currents due to negative feelings—due, for
+instance, to fear.”
+
+He looked at us each in turn. Colonel Wragge moved his feet farther
+apart, and squared his shoulders; and I felt guilty but said nothing,
+conscious that my latent store of courage was being deliberately hauled
+to the front. He was winding me up like a clock.
+
+“So that, in what is yet to come,” continued our leader, “each of us
+will contribute his share of power, and ensure success for my plan.”
+
+“I’m not afraid of anything I can _see_,” said the Colonel bluntly.
+
+“I’m ready,” I heard myself say, as it were automatically, “for
+anything,” and then added, feeling the declaration was lamely
+insufficient, “and everything.”
+
+Dr. Silence left the mat and began walking to and fro about the room,
+both hands plunged deep into the pockets of his shooting-jacket.
+Tremendous vitality streamed from him. I never took my eyes off the
+small, moving figure; small yes,—and yet somehow making me think of a
+giant plotting the destruction of worlds. And his manner was gentle, as
+always, soothing almost, and his words uttered quietly without emphasis
+or emotion. Most of what he said was addressed, though not too
+obviously, to the Colonel.
+
+“The violence of this sudden attack,” he said softly, pacing to and fro
+beneath the bookcase at the end of the room, “is due, of course, partly
+to the fact that tonight the moon is at the full”—here he glanced at me
+for a moment—“and partly to the fact that we have all been so
+deliberately concentrating upon the matter. Our thinking, our
+investigation, has stirred it into unusual activity. I mean that the
+intelligent force behind these manifestations has realised that some
+one is busied about its destruction. And it is now on the defensive:
+more, it is aggressive.”
+
+“But ‘it’—what is ‘it’?” began the soldier, fuming. “What, in the name
+of all that’s dreadful, _is_ a fire-elemental?”
+
+“I cannot give you at this moment,” replied Dr. Silence, turning to
+him, but undisturbed by the interruption, “a lecture on the nature and
+history of magic, but can only say that an Elemental is the active
+force behind the elements,—whether earth, air, water, _or fire_,—it is
+impersonal in its essential nature, but can be focused, personified,
+ensouled, so to say, by those who know how—by magicians, if you
+will—for certain purposes of their own, much in the same way that steam
+and electricity can be harnessed by the practical man of this century.
+
+“Alone, these blind elemental energies can accomplish little, but
+governed and directed by the trained will of a powerful manipulator
+they may become potent activities for good or evil. They are the basis
+of all magic, and it is the motive behind them that constitutes the
+magic ‘black’ or ‘white’; they can be the vehicles of curses or of
+blessings, for a curse is nothing more than the thought of a violent
+will perpetuated. And in such cases—cases like this—the conscious,
+directing will of the mind that is using the elemental stands always
+behind the phenomena—”
+
+“You think that my brother—!” broke in the Colonel, aghast.
+
+“Has nothing whatever to do with it—directly. The fire-elemental that
+has here been tormenting you and your household was sent upon its
+mission long before you, or your family, or your ancestors, or even the
+nation you belong to—unless I am much mistaken—was even in existence.
+We will come to that a little later; after the experiment I propose to
+make we shall be more positive. At present I can only say we have to
+deal now, not only with the phenomenon of Attacking Fire merely, but
+with the vindictive and enraged intelligence that is directing it from
+behind the scenes—vindictive and enraged,”—he repeated the words.
+
+“That explains—” began Colonel Wragge, seeking furiously for words he
+could not find quickly enough.
+
+“Much,” said John Silence, with a gesture to restrain him.
+
+He stopped a moment in the middle of his walk, and a deep silence came
+down over the little room. Through the windows the sunlight seemed less
+bright, the long line of dark hills less friendly, making me think of a
+vast wave towering to heaven and about to break and overwhelm us.
+Something formidable had crept into the world about us. For,
+undoubtedly, there was a disquieting thought, holding terror as well as
+awe, in the picture his words conjured up: the conception of a human
+will reaching its deathless hand, spiteful and destructive, down
+through the ages, to strike the living and afflict the innocent.
+
+“But what is its object?” burst out the soldier, unable to restrain
+himself longer in the silence. “Why does it come from that plantation?
+And why should it attack us, or any one in particular?” Questions began
+to pour from him in a stream.
+
+“All in good time,” the doctor answered quietly, having let him run on
+for several minutes. “But I must first discover positively what, or
+who, it is that directs this particular fire-elemental. And, to do
+that, we must first”—he spoke with slow deliberation—“seek to
+capture—to confine by visibility—to limit its sphere in a concrete
+form.”
+
+“Good heavens almighty!” exclaimed the soldier, mixing his words in his
+unfeigned surprise.
+
+“Quite so,” pursued the other calmly; “for in so doing I think we can
+release it from the purpose that binds it, restore it to its normal
+condition of latent fire, and also”—he lowered his voice perceptibly
+—“also discover the face and form of the Being that ensouls it.”
+
+“The man behind the gun!” cried the Colonel, beginning to understand
+something, and leaning forward so as not to miss a single syllable.
+
+“I mean that in the last resort, before it returns to the womb of
+potential fire, it will probably assume the face and figure of its
+Director, of the man of magical knowledge who originally bound it with
+his incantations and sent it forth upon its mission of centuries.”
+
+The soldier sat down and gasped openly in his face, breathing hard; but
+it was a very subdued voice that framed the question.
+
+“And how do you propose to make it visible? How capture and confine it?
+What d’ye mean, Dr. John Silence?”
+
+“By furnishing it with the materials for a form. By the process of
+materialisation simply. Once limited by dimensions, it will become
+slow, heavy, visible. We can then dissipate it. Invisible fire, you
+see, is dangerous and incalculable; locked up in a form we can perhaps
+manage it. We must betray it—to its death.”
+
+“And this material?” we asked in the same breath, although I think I
+had already guessed.
+
+“Not pleasant, but effective,” came the quiet reply; “the exhalations
+of freshly spilled blood.”
+
+“Not human blood!” cried Colonel Wragge, starting up from his chair
+with a voice like an explosion. I thought his eyes would start from
+their sockets.
+
+The face of Dr. Silence relaxed in spite of himself, and his
+spontaneous little laugh brought a welcome though momentary relief.
+
+“The days of human sacrifice, I hope, will never come again,” he
+explained. “Animal blood will answer the purpose, and we can make the
+experiment as pleasant as possible. Only, the blood must be freshly
+spilled and strong with the vital emanations that attract this peculiar
+class of elemental creature. Perhaps—perhaps if some pig on the estate
+is ready for the market—”
+
+He turned to hide a smile; but the passing touch of comedy found no
+echo in the mind of our host, who did not understand how to change
+quickly from one emotion to another. Clearly he was debating many
+things laboriously in his honest brain. But, in the end, the
+earnestness and scientific disinterestedness of the doctor, whose
+influence over him was already very great, won the day, and he
+presently looked up more calmly, and observed shortly that he thought
+perhaps the matter could be arranged.
+
+“There are other and pleasanter methods,” Dr. Silence went on to
+explain, “but they require time and preparation, and things have gone
+much too far, in my opinion, to admit of delay. And the process need
+cause you no distress: we sit round the bowl and await results. Nothing
+more. The emanations of blood—which, as Levi says, is the first
+incarnation of the universal fluid—furnish the materials out of which
+the creatures of discarnate life, spirits if you prefer, can fashion
+themselves a temporary appearance. The process is old, and lies at the
+root of all blood sacrifice. It was known to the priests of Baal, and
+it is known to the modern ecstasy dancers who cut themselves to produce
+objective phantoms who dance with them. And the least gifted
+clairvoyant could tell you that the forms to be seen in the vicinity of
+slaughter-houses, or hovering above the deserted battlefields,
+are—well, simply beyond all description. I do not mean,” he added,
+noticing the uneasy fidgeting of his host, “that anything in our
+laundry-experiment need appear to terrify us, for this case seems a
+comparatively simple one, and it is only the vindictive character of
+the intelligence directing this fire-elemental that causes anxiety and
+makes for personal danger.”
+
+“It is curious,” said the Colonel, with a sudden rush of words, drawing
+a deep breath, and as though speaking of things distasteful to him,
+“that during my years among the Hill Tribes of Northern India I came
+across—personally came across—instances of the sacrifices of blood to
+certain deities being stopped suddenly, and all manner of disasters
+happening until they were resumed. Fires broke out in the huts, and
+even on the clothes, of the natives—and—and I admit I have read, in the
+course of my studies,”—he made a gesture toward his books and heavily
+laden table,—“of the Yezidis of Syria evoking phantoms by means of
+cutting their bodies with knives during their whirling dances—enormous
+globes of fire which turned into monstrous and terrible forms—and I
+remember an account somewhere, too, how the emaciated forms and pallid
+countenances of the spectres, that appeared to the Emperor Julian,
+claimed to be the true Immortals, and told him to renew the sacrifices
+of blood ‘for the fumes of which, since the establishment of
+Christianity, they had been pining’—that these were in reality the
+phantoms evoked by the rites of blood.”
+
+Both Dr. Silence and myself listened in amazement, for this sudden
+speech was so unexpected, and betrayed so much more knowledge than we
+had either of us suspected in the old soldier.
+
+“Then perhaps you have read, too,” said the doctor, “how the Cosmic
+Deities of savage races, elemental in their nature, have been kept
+alive through many ages by these blood rites?”
+
+“No,” he answered; “that is new to me.”
+
+“In any case,” Dr. Silence added, “I am glad you are not wholly
+unfamiliar with the subject, for you will now bring more sympathy, and
+therefore more help, to our experiment. For, of course, in this case,
+we only want the blood to tempt the creature from its lair and enclose
+it in a form—”
+
+“I quite understand. And I only hesitated just now,” he went on, his
+words coming much more slowly, as though he felt he had already said
+too much, “because I wished to be quite sure it was no mere curiosity,
+but an actual sense of necessity that dictated this horrible
+experiment.”
+
+“It is your safety, and that of your household, and of your sister,
+that is at stake,” replied the doctor. “Once I have _seen_, I hope to
+discover whence this elemental comes, and what its real purpose is.”
+
+Colonel Wragge signified his assent with a bow.
+
+“And the moon will help us,” the other said, “for it will be full in
+the early hours of the morning, and this kind of elemental-being is
+always most active at the period of full moon. Hence, you see, the clue
+furnished by your diary.”
+
+So it was finally settled. Colonel Wragge would provide the materials
+for the experiment, and we were to meet at midnight. How he would
+contrive at that hour—but that was his business. I only know we both
+realised that he would keep his word, and whether a pig died at
+midnight, or at noon, was after all perhaps only a question of the
+sleep and personal comfort of the executioner.
+
+“Tonight, then, in the laundry,” said Dr. Silence finally, to clinch
+the plan; “we three alone—and at midnight, when the household is asleep
+and we shall be free from disturbance.”
+
+He exchanged significant glances with our host, who, at that moment,
+was called away by the announcement that the family doctor had arrived,
+and was ready to see him in his sister’s room.
+
+For the remainder of the afternoon John Silence disappeared. I had my
+suspicions that he made a secret visit to the plantation and also to
+the laundry building; but, in any case, we saw nothing of him, and he
+kept strictly to himself. He was preparing for the night, I felt sure,
+but the nature of his preparations I could only guess. There was
+movement in his room, I heard, and an odour like incense hung about the
+door, and knowing that he regarded rites as the vehicles of energies,
+my guesses were probably not far wrong.
+
+Colonel Wragge, too, remained absent the greater part of the afternoon,
+and, deeply afflicted, had scarcely left his sister’s bedside, but in
+response to my inquiry when we met for a moment at tea-time, he told me
+that although she had moments of attempted speech, her talk was quite
+incoherent and hysterical, and she was still quite unable to explain
+the nature of what she had seen. The doctor, he said, feared she had
+recovered the use of her limbs, only to lose that of her memory, and
+perhaps even of her mind.
+
+“Then the recovery of her legs, I trust, may be permanent, at any
+rate,” I ventured, finding it difficult to know what sympathy to offer.
+And he replied with a curious short laugh, “Oh yes; about that there
+can be no doubt whatever.”
+
+And it was due merely to the chance of my overhearing a fragment of
+conversation—unwillingly, of course—that a little further light was
+thrown upon the state in which the old lady actually lay. For, as I
+came out of my room, it happened that Colonel Wragge and the doctor
+were going downstairs together, and their words floated up to my ears
+before I could make my presence known by so much as a cough.
+
+“Then you must find a way,” the doctor was saying with decision; “for I
+cannot insist too strongly upon that—and at all costs she must be kept
+quiet. These attempts to go out must be prevented—if necessary, by
+force. This desire to visit some wood or other she keeps talking about
+is, of course, hysterical in nature. It cannot be permitted for a
+moment.”
+
+“It shall not be permitted,” I heard the soldier reply, as they reached
+the hall below.
+
+“It has impressed her mind for some reason—” the doctor went on, by way
+evidently of soothing explanation, and then the distance made it
+impossible for me to hear more.
+
+At dinner Dr. Silence was still absent, on the public plea of a
+headache, and though food was sent to his room, I am inclined to
+believe he did not touch it, but spent the entire time fasting.
+
+We retired early, desiring that the household should do likewise, and I
+must confess that at ten o’clock when I bid my host a temporary
+good-night, and sought my room to make what mental preparation I could,
+I realised in no very pleasant fashion that it was a singular and
+formidable assignation, this midnight meeting in the laundry building,
+and that there were moments in every adventure of life when a wise man,
+and one who knew his own limitations, owed it to his dignity to
+withdraw discreetly. And, but for the character of our leader, I
+probably should have then and there offered the best excuse I could
+think of, and have allowed myself quietly to fall asleep and wait for
+an exciting story in the morning of what had happened. But with a man
+like John Silence, such a lapse was out of the question, and I sat
+before my fire counting the minutes and doing everything I could think
+of to fortify my resolution and fasten my will at the point where I
+could be reasonably sure that my self-control would hold against all
+attacks of men, devils, or elementals.
+
+III
+
+At a quarter before midnight, clad in a heavy ulster, and with
+slippered feet, I crept cautiously from my room and stole down the
+passage to the top of the stairs. Outside the doctor’s door I waited a
+moment to listen. All was still; the house in utter darkness; no gleam
+of light beneath any door; only, down the length of the corridor, from
+the direction of the sick-room, came faint sounds of laughter and
+incoherent talk that were not things to reassure a mind already half
+a-tremble, and I made haste to reach the hall and let myself out
+through the front door into the night.
+
+The air was keen and frosty, perfumed with night smells, and
+exquisitely fresh; all the million candles of the sky were alight, and
+a faint breeze rose and fell with far-away sighings in the tops of the
+pine trees. My blood leaped for a moment in the spaciousness of the
+night, for the splendid stars brought courage; but the next instant, as
+I turned the corner of the house, moving stealthily down the gravel
+drive, my spirits sank again ominously. For, yonder, over the funereal
+plumes of the Twelve Acre Plantation, I saw the broken, yellow disc of
+the half-moon just rising in the east, staring down like some vast
+Being come to watch upon the progress of our doom. Seen through the
+distorting vapours of the earth’s atmosphere, her face looked weirdly
+unfamiliar, her usual expression of benignant vacancy somehow a-twist.
+I slipped along by the shadows of the wall, keeping my eyes upon the
+ground.
+
+The laundry-house, as already described, stood detached from the other
+offices, with laurel shrubberies crowding thickly behind it, and the
+kitchen-garden so close on the other side that the strong smells of
+soil and growing things came across almost heavily. The shadows of the
+haunted plantation, hugely lengthened by the rising moon behind them,
+reached to the very walls and covered the stone tiles of the roof with
+a dark pall. So keenly were my senses alert at this moment that I
+believe I could fill a chapter with the endless small details of the
+impression I received—shadows, odour, shapes, sounds—in the space of
+the few seconds I stood and waited before the closed wooden door.
+
+Then I became aware of some one moving towards me through the
+moonlight, and the figure of John Silence, without overcoat and
+bareheaded, came quickly and without noise to join me. His eyes, I saw
+at once, were wonderfully bright, and so marked was the shining pallor
+of his face that I could hardly tell when he passed from the moonlight
+into the shade.
+
+He passed without a word, beckoning me to follow, and then pushed the
+door open, and went in.
+
+The chill air of the place met us like that of an underground vault;
+and the brick floor and whitewashed walls, streaked with damp and
+smoke, threw back the cold in our faces. Directly opposite gaped the
+black throat of the huge open fireplace, the ashes of wood fires still
+piled and scattered about the hearth, and on either side of the
+projecting chimney-column were the deep recesses holding the big twin
+cauldrons for boiling clothes. Upon the lids of these cauldrons stood
+the two little oil lamps, shaded red, which gave all the light there
+was, and immediately in front of the fireplace there was a small
+circular table with three chairs set about it. Overhead, the narrow
+slit windows, high up the walls, pointed to a dim network of wooden
+rafters half lost among the shadows, and then came the dark vault of
+the roof. Cheerless and unalluring, for all the red light, it certainly
+was, reminding me of some unused conventicle, bare of pews or pulpit,
+ugly and severe, and I was forcibly struck by the contrast between the
+normal uses to which the place was ordinarily put, and the strange and
+medieval purpose which had brought us under its roof tonight.
+
+Possibly an involuntary shudder ran over me, for my companion turned
+with a confident look to reassure me, and he was so completely master
+of himself that I at once absorbed from his abundance, and felt the
+chinks of my failing courage beginning to close up. To meet his eye in
+the presence of danger was like finding a mental railing that guided
+and supported thought along the giddy edges of alarm.
+
+“I am quite ready,” I whispered, turning to listen for approaching
+footsteps.
+
+He nodded, still keeping his eyes on mine. Our whispers sounded hollow
+as they echoed overhead among the rafters.
+
+“I’m glad you are here,” he said. “Not all would have the courage. Keep
+your thoughts controlled, and imagine the protective shell round
+you—round your inner being.”
+
+“I’m all right,” I repeated, cursing my chattering teeth.
+
+He took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into me
+something of his supreme confidence. The eyes and hands of a strong man
+can touch the soul. I think he guessed my thought, for a passing smile
+flashed about the corners of his mouth.
+
+“You will feel more comfortable,” he said, in a low tone, “when the
+chain is complete. The Colonel we can count on, of course. Remember,
+though,” he added warningly, “he may perhaps become
+controlled—possessed—when the thing comes, because he won’t know how to
+resist. And to explain the business to such a man—!” He shrugged his
+shoulders expressively. “But it will only be temporary, and I will see
+that no harm comes to him.”
+
+He glanced round at the arrangements with approval.
+
+“Red light,” he said, indicating the shaded lamps, “has the lowest rate
+of vibration. Materialisations are dissipated by strong light—won’t
+form, or hold together—in rapid vibrations.”
+
+I was not sure that I approved altogether of this dim light, for in
+complete darkness there is something protective—the knowledge that one
+cannot be seen, probably—which a half-light destroys, but I remembered
+the warning to keep my thoughts steady, and forbore to give them
+expression.
+
+There was a step outside, and the figure of Colonel Wragge stood in the
+doorway. Though entering on tiptoe, he made considerable noise and
+clatter, for his free movements were impeded by the burden he carried,
+and we saw a large yellowish bowl held out at arms’ length from his
+body, the mouth covered with a white cloth. His face, I noted, was
+rigidly composed. He, too, was master of himself. And, as I thought of
+this old soldier moving through the long series of alarms, worn with
+watching and wearied with assault, unenlightened yet undismayed, even
+down to the dreadful shock of his sister’s terror, and still showing
+the dogged pluck that persists in the face of defeat, I understood what
+Dr. Silence meant when he described him as a man “to be counted on.”
+
+I think there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features,
+and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the
+emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these
+two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door
+was shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage
+I possessed was well to the fore, and I felt as sure of myself as I
+knew I ever could feel.
+
+Colonel Wragge set the bowl carefully in the centre of the table.
+
+“Midnight,” he said shortly, glancing at his watch, and we all three
+moved to our chairs.
+
+There, in the middle of that cold and silent place, we sat, with the
+vile bowl before us, and a thin, hardly perceptible steam rising
+through the damp air from the surface of the white cloth and
+disappearing upwards the moment it passed beyond the zone of red light
+and entered the deep shadows thrown forward by the projecting wall of
+chimney.
+
+The doctor had indicated our respective places, and I found myself
+seated with my back to the door and opposite the black hearth. The
+Colonel was on my left, and Dr. Silence on my right, both half facing
+me, the latter more in shadow than the former. We thus divided the
+little table into even sections, and sitting back in our chairs we
+awaited events in silence.
+
+For something like an hour I do not think there was even the faintest
+sound within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted
+roof. Our slippers made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our
+breathing was suppressed almost to nothing; even the rustle of our
+clothes as we shifted from time to time upon our seats was inaudible.
+Silence smothered us absolutely—the silence of night, of listening, the
+silence of a haunted expectancy. The very gurgling of the lamps was too
+soft to be heard, and if light itself had sound, I do not think we
+should have noticed the silvery tread of the moonlight as it entered
+the high narrow windows and threw upon the floor the slender traces of
+its pallid footsteps.
+
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor, and myself too for that matter, sat thus
+like figures of stone, without speech and without gesture. My eyes
+passed in ceaseless journeys from the bowl to their faces, and from
+their faces to the bowl. They might have been masks, however, for all
+the signs of life they gave; and the light steaming from the horrid
+contents beneath the white cloth had long ceased to be visible.
+
+Then presently, as the moon rose higher, the wind rose with it. It
+sighed, like the lightest of passing wings, over the roof; it crept
+most softly round the walls; it made the brick floor like ice beneath
+our feet. With it I saw mentally the desolate moorland flowing like a
+sea about the old house, the treeless expanse of lonely hills, the
+nearer copses, sombre and mysterious in the night. The plantation, too,
+in particular I saw, and imagined I heard the mournful whisperings that
+must now be a-stirring among its tree-tops as the breeze played down
+between the twisted stems. In the depth of the room behind us the
+shafts of moonlight met and crossed in a growing network.
+
+It was after an hour of this wearing and unbroken attention, and I
+should judge about one o’clock in the morning, when the baying of the
+dogs in the stableyard first began, and I saw John Silence move
+suddenly in his chair and sit up in an attitude of attention. Every
+force in my being instantly leaped into the keenest vigilance. Colonel
+Wragge moved too, though slowly, and without raising his eyes from the
+table before him.
+
+The doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the
+bowl.
+
+It was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lamps
+grew fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. I had been
+expecting something for so long that the movement of my companions, and
+the lifting of the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusion
+that something hovered in the air before my face, touching the skin of
+my cheeks with a silken run. But it was certainly not a delusion that
+the Colonel looked up at the same moment and glanced over his shoulder,
+as though his eyes followed the movements of something to and fro about
+the room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat more tightly about him
+and his eyes sought my own face first, and then the doctor’s. And it
+was no delusion that his face seemed somehow to have turned dark,
+become spread as it were with a shadowy blackness. I saw his lips
+tighten and his expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then
+with a rush that, of course, this man had told us but a part of the
+experiences he had been through in the house, and that there was much
+more he had never been able to bring himself to reveal at all. I felt
+sure of it. The way he turned and stared about him betrayed a
+familiarity with other things than those he had described to us. It was
+not merely a sight of fire he looked for; it was a sight of something
+alive, intelligent, something able to evade his searching; it was _a
+person_. It was the watch for the ancient Being who sought to obsess
+him.
+
+And the way in which Dr. Silence answered his look—though it was only
+by a glance of subtlest sympathy—confirmed my impression.
+
+“We may be ready now,” I heard him say in a whisper, and I understood
+that his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced myself
+mentally to the utmost of my power.
+
+Yet long before Colonel Wragge had turned to stare about the room, and
+long before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were at
+last beginning to stir, I had become aware in most singular fashion
+that the place held more than our three selves. With the rising of the
+wind this increase to our numbers had first taken place. The baying of
+the hounds almost seemed to have signalled it. I cannot say how it may
+be possible to realise that an empty place has suddenly become—not
+empty, when the new arrival is nothing that appeals to any one of the
+senses; for this recognition of an “invisible,” as of the change in the
+balance of personal forces in a human group, is indefinable and beyond
+proof. Yet it is unmistakable. And I knew perfectly well at what given
+moment the atmosphere within these four walls became charged with the
+presence of other living beings besides ourselves. And, on reflection,
+I am convinced that both my companions knew it too.
+
+“Watch the light,” said the doctor under his breath, and then I knew
+too that it was no fancy of my own that had turned the air darker, and
+the way he turned to examine the face of our host sent an electric
+thrill of wonder and expectancy shivering along every nerve in my body.
+
+Yet it was no kind of terror that I experienced, but rather a sort of
+mental dizziness, and a sensation as of being suspended in some remote
+and dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to
+happen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. Horror
+may have formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in no
+sense ghostly horror.
+
+Uncommon thoughts kept beating on my brain like tiny hammers, soft yet
+persistent, seeking admission; their unbidden tide began to wash along
+the far fringes of my mind, the currents of unwonted sensations to rise
+over the remote frontiers of my consciousness. I was aware of thoughts,
+and the fantasies of thoughts, that I never knew before existed.
+Portions of my being stirred that had never stirred before, and things
+ancient and inexplicable rose to the surface and beckoned me to follow.
+I felt as though I were about to fly off, at some immense tangent, into
+an outer space hitherto unknown even in dreams. And so singular was the
+result produced upon me that I was uncommonly glad to anchor my mind,
+as well as my eyes, upon the masterful personality of the doctor at my
+side, for there, I realised, I could draw always upon the forces of
+sanity and safety.
+
+With a vigorous effort of will I returned to the scene before me, and
+tried to focus my attention, with steadier thoughts, upon the table,
+and upon the silent figures seated round it. And then I saw that
+certain changes had come about in the place where we sat.
+
+The patches of moonlight on the floor, I noted, had become curiously
+shaded; the faces of my companions opposite were not so clearly visible
+as before; and the forehead and cheeks of Colonel Wragge were
+glistening with perspiration. I realised further, that an extraordinary
+change had come about in the temperature of the atmosphere. The
+increased warmth had a painful effect, not alone on Colonel Wragge, but
+upon all of us. It was oppressive and unnatural. We gasped figuratively
+as well as actually.
+
+“You are the first to feel it,” said Dr. Silence in low tones, looking
+across at him. “You are in more intimate touch, of course—”
+
+The Colonel was trembling, and appeared to be in considerable distress.
+His knees shook, so that the shuffling of his slippered feet became
+audible. He inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no
+other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself
+in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had
+warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, though
+vainly, resisting.
+
+But, meanwhile, a curious and whirling sense of exhilaration began to
+come over me. The increasing heat was delightful, bringing a sensation
+of intense activity, of thoughts pouring through the mind at high
+speed, of vivid pictures in the brain, of fierce desires and lightning
+energies alive in every part of the body. I was conscious of no
+physical distress, such as the Colonel felt, but only of a vague
+feeling that it might all grow suddenly too intense—that I might be
+consumed—that my personality as well as my body, might become resolved
+into the flame of pure spirit. I began to live at a speed too intense
+to last. It was as if a thousand ecstasies besieged me—
+
+“Steady!” whispered the voice of John Silence in my ear, and I looked
+up with a start to see that the Colonel had risen from his chair. The
+doctor rose too. I followed suit, and for the first time saw down into
+the bowl. To my amazement and horror I saw that the contents were
+troubled. The blood was astir with movement.
+
+The rest of the experiment was witnessed by us standing. It came, too,
+with a curious suddenness. There was no more dreaming, for me at any
+rate.
+
+I shall never forget the figure of Colonel Wragge standing there beside
+me, upright and unshaken, squarely planted on his feet, looking about
+him, puzzled beyond belief, yet full of a fighting anger. Framed by the
+white walls, the red glow of the lamps upon his streaming cheeks, his
+eyes glowing against the deathly pallor of his skin, breathing hard and
+making convulsive efforts of hands and body to keep himself under
+control, his whole being roused to the point of savage fighting, yet
+with nothing visible to get at anywhere—he stood there, immovable
+against odds. And the strange contrast of the pale skin and the burning
+face I had never seen before, or wish to see again.
+
+But what has left an even sharper impression on my memory was the
+blackness that then began crawling over his face, obliterating the
+features, concealing their human outline, and hiding him inch by inch
+from view. This was my first realisation that the process of
+materialisation was at work. His visage became shrouded. I moved from
+one side to the other to keep him in view, and it was only then I
+understood that, properly speaking, the blackness was not upon the
+countenance of Colonel Wragge, but that something had inserted itself
+between me and him, thus screening his face with the effect of a dark
+veil. Something that apparently rose through the floor was passing
+slowly into the air above the table and above the bowl. The blood in
+the bowl, moreover, was considerably less than before.
+
+And, with this change in the air before us, there came at the same time
+a further change, I thought, in the face of the soldier. One-half was
+turned towards the red lamps, while the other caught the pale
+illumination of the moonlight falling aslant from the high windows, so
+that it was difficult to estimate this change with accuracy of detail.
+But it seemed to me that, while the features—eyes, nose, mouth—remained
+the same, the life informing them had undergone some profound
+transformation. The signature of a new power had crept into the face
+and left its traces there—an expression dark, and in some unexplained
+way, terrible.
+
+Then suddenly he opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of this
+changed voice, deep and musical though it was, made me cold and set my
+heart beating with uncomfortable rapidity. The Being, as he had
+dreaded, was already in control of his brain, using his mouth.
+
+“I see a blackness like the blackness of Egypt before my face,” said
+the tones of this unknown voice that seemed half his own and half
+another’s. “And out of this darkness they come, they come.”
+
+I gave a dreadful start. The doctor turned to look at me for an
+instant, and then turned to centre his attention upon the figure of our
+host, and I understood in some intuitive fashion that he was there to
+watch over the strangest contest man ever saw—to watch over and, if
+necessary, to protect.
+
+“He is being controlled—possessed,” he whispered to me through the
+shadows. His face wore a wonderful expression, half triumph, half
+admiration.
+
+Even as Colonel Wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible
+darkness began to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the
+hearth, rising up in sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. It
+stole up from below—an awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the
+radiations of light in the building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a
+radiance in their place. Then, out of this rising sea of shadows,
+issued a pale and spectral light that gradually spread itself about us,
+and from the heart of this light I saw the shapes of fire crowd and
+gather. And these were not human shapes, or the shapes of anything I
+recognised as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced
+globes, triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various
+geometrical figures. They grew bright, faded, and then grew bright
+again with an effect almost of pulsation. They passed swiftly to and
+fro through the air, rising and falling, and particularly in the
+immediate neighbourhood of the Colonel, often gathering about his head
+and shoulders, and even appearing to settle upon him like giant insects
+of flame. They were accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound of
+hissing—the same sound we had heard that afternoon in the plantation.
+
+“The fire-elementals that precede their master,” the doctor said in an
+undertone. “Be ready.”
+
+And while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed
+and faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters
+overhead, we heard the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of
+the afflicted soldier. It was a voice of power, splendid in some way I
+cannot describe, and with a certain sense of majesty in its cadences,
+and, as I listened to it with quickly beating heart, I could fancy it
+was some ancient voice of Time itself, echoing down immense corridors
+of stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of
+mountain tombs.
+
+“I have seen my divine Father, Osiris,” thundered the great tones. “I
+have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth,
+and am one with the starry Deities!”
+
+Something grand came into the soldier’s face. He was staring fixedly
+before him, as though seeing nothing.
+
+“Watch,” whispered Dr. Silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to
+come from very far away.
+
+Again the mouth opened and the awesome voice issued forth.
+
+“Thoth,” it boomed, “has loosened the bandages of Set which fettered my
+mouth. I have taken my place in the great winds of heaven.”
+
+I heard the little wind of night, with its mournful voice of ages,
+sighing round the walls and over the roof.
+
+“Listen!” came from the doctor at my side, and the thunder of the voice
+continued—
+
+“I have hidden myself with you, O ye stars that never diminish. I
+remember my name—in—the—House—of—Fire!”
+
+The voice ceased and the sound died away. Something about the face and
+figure of Colonel Wragge relaxed, I thought. The terrible look passed
+from his face. The Being that obsessed him was gone.
+
+“The great Ritual,” said Dr. Silence aside to me, very low, “the Book
+of the Dead. Now it’s leaving him. Soon the blood will fashion it a
+body.”
+
+Colonel Wragge, who had stood absolutely motionless all this time,
+suddenly swayed, so that I thought he was going to fall,—and, but for
+the quick support of the doctor’s arm, he probably would have fallen,
+for he staggered as in the beginning of collapse.
+
+“I am drunk with the wine of Osiris,” he cried,—and it was half with
+his own voice this time—“but Horus, the Eternal Watcher, is about my
+path—for—safety.” The voice dwindled and failed, dying away into
+something almost like a cry of distress.
+
+“Now, watch closely,” said Dr. Silence, speaking loud, “for after the
+cry will come the Fire!”
+
+I began to tremble involuntarily; an awful change had come without
+warning into the air; my legs grew weak as paper beneath my weight and
+I had to support myself by leaning on the table. Colonel Wragge, I saw,
+was also leaning forward with a kind of droop. The shapes of fire had
+vanished all, but his face was lit by the red lamps and the pale,
+shifting moonlight rose behind him like mist.
+
+We were both gazing at the bowl, now almost empty; the Colonel stooped
+so low I feared every minute he would lose his balance and drop into
+it; and the shadow, that had so long been in process of forming, now at
+length began to assume material outline in the air before us.
+
+Then John Silence moved forward quickly. He took his place between us
+and the shadow. Erect, formidable, absolute master of the situation, I
+saw him stand there, his face calm and almost smiling, and fire in his
+eyes. His protective influence was astounding and incalculable. Even
+the abhorrent dread I felt at the sight of the creature growing into
+life and substance before us, lessened in some way so that I was able
+to keep my eyes fixed on the air above the bowl without too vivid a
+terror.
+
+But as it took shape, rising out of nothing as it were, and growing
+momentarily more defined in outline, a period of utter and wonderful
+silence settled down upon the building and all it contained. A hush of
+ages, like the sudden centre of peace at the heart of the travelling
+cyclone, descended through the night, and out of this hush, as out of
+the emanations of the steaming blood, issued the form of the ancient
+being who had first sent the elemental of fire upon its mission. It
+grew and darkened and solidified before our eyes. It rose from just
+beyond the table so that the lower portions remained invisible, but I
+saw the outline limn itself upon the air, as though slowly revealed by
+the rising of a curtain. It apparently had not then quite concentrated
+to the normal proportions, but was spread out on all sides into space,
+huge, though rapidly condensing, for I saw the colossal shoulders, the
+neck, the lower portion of the dark jaws, the terrible mouth, and then
+the teeth and lips—and, as the veil seemed to lift further upon the
+tremendous face—I saw the nose and cheek bones. In another moment I
+should have looked straight into the eyes—
+
+But what Dr. Silence did at that moment was so unexpected, and took me
+so by surprise, that I have never yet properly understood its nature,
+and he has never yet seen fit to explain in detail to me. He uttered
+some sound that had a note of command in it—and, in so doing, stepped
+forward and intervened between me and the face. The figure, just
+nearing completeness, he therefore hid from my sight—and I have always
+thought purposely hid from my sight.
+
+“The fire!” he cried out. “The fire! Beware!”
+
+There was a sudden roar as of flame from the very mouth of the pit, and
+for the space of a single second all grew light as day. A blinding
+flash passed across my face, and there was heat for an instant that
+seemed to shrivel skin, and flesh, and bone. Then came steps, and I
+heard Colonel Wragge utter a great cry, wilder than any human cry I
+have ever known. The heat sucked all the breath out of my lungs with a
+rush, and the blaze of light, as it vanished, swept my vision with it
+into enveloping darkness.
+
+When I recovered the use of my senses a few moments later I saw that
+Colonel Wragge with a face of death, its whiteness strangely stained,
+had moved closer to me. Dr. Silence stood beside him, an expression of
+triumph and success in his eyes. The next minute the soldier tried to
+clutch me with his hand. Then he reeled, staggered, and, unable to save
+himself, fell with a great crash upon the brick floor.
+
+After the sheet of flame, a wind raged round the building as though it
+would lift the roof off, but then passed as suddenly as it came. And in
+the intense calm that followed I saw that the form had vanished, and
+the doctor was stooping over Colonel Wragge upon the floor, trying to
+lift him to a sitting position.
+
+“Light,” he said quietly, “more light. Take the shades off.”
+
+Colonel Wragge sat up and the glare of the unshaded lamps fell upon his
+face. It was grey and drawn, still running heat, and there was a look
+in the eyes and about the corners of the mouth that seemed in this
+short space of time to have added years to its age. At the same time,
+the expression of effort and anxiety had left it. It showed relief.
+
+“Gone!” he said, looking up at the doctor in a dazed fashion, and
+struggling to his feet. “Thank God! it’s gone at last.” He stared round
+the laundry as though to find out where he was. “Did it control me—take
+possession of me? Did I talk nonsense?” he asked bluntly. “After the
+heat came, I remember nothing—”
+
+“You’ll feel yourself again in a few minutes,” the doctor said. To my
+infinite horror I saw that he was surreptitiously wiping sundry dark
+stains from the face. “Our experiment has been a success and—”
+
+He gave me a swift glance to hide the bowl, standing between me and our
+host while I hurriedly stuffed it down under the lid of the nearest
+cauldron.
+
+“—and none of us the worse for it,” he finished.
+
+“And fires?” he asked, still dazed, “there’ll be no more fires?”
+
+“It is dissipated—partly, at any rate,” replied Dr. Silence cautiously.
+
+“And the man behind the gun,” he went on, only half realising what he
+was saying, I think; “have you discovered _that?_”
+
+“A form materialised,” said the doctor briefly. “I know for certain now
+what the directing intelligence was behind it all.”
+
+Colonel Wragge pulled himself together and got upon his feet. The words
+conveyed no clear meaning to him yet. But his memory was returning
+gradually, and he was trying to piece together the fragments into a
+connected whole. He shivered a little, for the place had grown suddenly
+chilly. The air was empty again, lifeless.
+
+“You feel all right again now,” Dr. Silence said, in the tone of a man
+stating a fact rather than asking a question.
+
+“Thanks to you—both, yes.” He drew a deep breath, and mopped his face,
+and even attempted a smile. He made me think of a man coming from the
+battlefield with the stains of fighting still upon him, but scornful of
+his wounds. Then he turned gravely towards the doctor with a question
+in his eyes. Memory had returned and he was himself again.
+
+“Precisely what I expected,” the doctor said calmly; “a fire-elemental
+sent upon its mission in the days of Thebes, centuries before Christ,
+and tonight, for the first time all these thousands of years, released
+from the spell that originally bound it.”
+
+We stared at him in amazement, Colonel Wragge opening his lips for
+words that refused to shape themselves.
+
+“And, if we dig,” he continued significantly, pointing to the floor
+where the blackness had poured up, “we shall find some underground
+connection—a tunnel most likely—leading to the Twelve Acre Wood. It was
+made by—your predecessor.”
+
+“A tunnel made by my brother!” gasped the soldier. “Then my sister
+should know—she lived here with him—” He stopped suddenly.
+
+John Silence inclined his head slowly. “I think so,” he said quietly.
+“Your brother, no doubt, was as much tormented as you have been,” he
+continued after a pause in which Colonel Wragge seemed deeply
+preoccupied with his thoughts, “and tried to find peace by burying it
+in the wood, and surrounding the wood then, like a large magic circle,
+with the enchantments of the old formulae. So the stars the man saw
+blazing—”
+
+“But burying what?” asked the soldier faintly, stepping backwards
+towards the support of the wall.
+
+Dr. Silence regarded us both intently for a moment before he replied. I
+think he weighed in his mind whether to tell us now, or when the
+investigation was absolutely complete.
+
+“The mummy,” he said softly, after a moment; “the mummy that your
+brother took from its resting place of centuries, and brought
+home—here.”
+
+Colonel Wragge dropped down upon the nearest chair, hanging
+breathlessly on every word. He was far too amazed for speech.
+
+“The mummy of some important person—a priest most likely—protected from
+disturbance and desecration by the ceremonial magic of the time. For
+they understood how to attach to the mummy, to lock up with it in the
+tomb, an elemental force that would direct itself even after ages upon
+any one who dared to molest it. In this case it was an elemental of
+fire.”
+
+Dr. Silence crossed the floor and turned out the lamps one by one. He
+had nothing more to say for the moment. Following his example, I folded
+the table together and took up the chairs, and our host, still dazed
+and silent, mechanically obeyed him and moved to the door.
+
+We removed all traces of the experiment, taking the empty bowl back to
+the house concealed beneath an ulster.
+
+The air was cool and fragrant as we walked to the house, the stars
+beginning to fade overhead and a fresh wind of early morning blowing up
+out of the east where the sky was already hinting of the coming day. It
+was after five o’clock.
+
+Stealthily we entered the front hall and locked the door, and as we
+went on tiptoe upstairs to our rooms, the Colonel, peering at us over
+his candle as he nodded good-night, whispered that if we were ready the
+digging should be begun that very day.
+
+Then I saw him steal along to his sister’s room and disappear.
+
+IV
+
+But not even the mysterious references to the mummy, or the prospect of
+a revelation by digging, were able to hinder the reaction that followed
+the intense excitement of the past twelve hours, and I slept the sleep
+of the dead, dreamless and undisturbed. A touch on the shoulder woke
+me, and I saw Dr. Silence standing beside the bed, dressed to go out.
+
+“Come,” he said, “it’s tea-time. You’ve slept the best part of a dozen
+hours.”
+
+I sprang up and made a hurried toilet, while my companion sat and
+talked. He looked fresh and rested, and his manner was even quieter
+than usual.
+
+“Colonel Wragge has provided spades and pickaxes. We’re going out to
+unearth this mummy at once,” he said; “and there’s no reason we should
+not get away by the morning train.”
+
+“I’m ready to go tonight, if you are,” I said honestly.
+
+But Dr. Silence shook his head.
+
+“I must see this through to the end,” he said gravely, and in a tone
+that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. He
+went on talking while I dressed.
+
+“This case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and none
+of them are cases to trifle with,” he explained, “for the mummies of
+important people—kings, priests, magicians—were laid away with
+profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected,
+as you have seen, against desecration, and especially against
+destruction.
+
+“The general belief,” he went on, anticipating my questions, “held, of
+course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its Ka,—the
+owner’s spirit,—but it is not improbable that the magical embalming was
+also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of the body
+preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline of
+earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful
+guardian-forces to keep off trespassers. And any one who dared to
+remove the mummy, or especially to unwind it—well,” he added, with
+meaning, “you have seen—and you will see.”
+
+I caught his face in the mirror while I struggled with my collar. It
+was deeply serious. There could be no question that he spoke of what he
+believed and knew.
+
+“The traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted too,”
+he continued, “for he tried to banish it by burial in the wood, making
+a magic circle to enclose it. Something of genuine ceremonial he must
+have known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the
+still flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. Only he
+did not know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy’s guardian
+was a fire-force. Fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw,
+it can be released by it.”
+
+“Then that awful figure in the laundry?” I asked, thrilled to find him
+so communicative.
+
+“Undoubtedly the actual Ka of the mummy operating always behind its
+agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old.”
+
+“And Miss Wragge—?” I ventured once more.
+
+“Ah, Miss Wragge,” he repeated with increased gravity, “Miss Wragge—”
+
+A knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready, and
+the Colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. The thread was
+broken. Dr. Silence moved to the door and signed to me to follow. But
+his manner told me that in any case no real answer would have been
+forthcoming to my question.
+
+“And the place to dig in,” I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity,
+“will you find it by some process of divination or—?”
+
+He paused at the door and looked back at me, and with that he left me
+to finish my dressing.
+
+It was growing dark when the three of us silently made our way to the
+Twelve Acre Plantation; the sky was overcast, and a black wind came out
+of the east. Gloom hung about the old house and the air seemed full of
+sighings. We found the tools ready laid at the edge of the wood, and
+each shouldering his piece, we followed our leader at once in among the
+trees. He went straight forward for some twenty yards and then stopped.
+At his feet lay the blackened circle of one of the burned places. It
+was just discernible against the surrounding white grass.
+
+“There are three of these,” he said, “and they all lie in a line with
+one another. Any one of them will tap the tunnel that connects the
+laundry—the former Museum—with the chamber where the mummy now lies
+buried.”
+
+He at once cleared away the burnt grass and began to dig; we all began
+to dig. While I used the pick, the others shovelled vigorously. No one
+spoke. Colonel Wragge worked the hardest of the three. The soil was
+light and sandy, and there were only a few snake-like roots and
+occasional loose stones to delay us. The pick made short work of these.
+And meanwhile the darkness settled about us and the biting wind swept
+roaring through the trees overhead.
+
+Then, quite suddenly, without a cry, Colonel Wragge disappeared up to
+his neck.
+
+“The tunnel!” cried the doctor, helping to drag him out, red,
+breathless, and covered with sand and perspiration. “Now, let me lead
+the way.” And he slipped down nimbly into the hole, so that a moment
+later we heard his voice, muffled by sand and distance, rising up to
+us.
+
+“Hubbard, you come next, and then Colonel Wragge—if he wishes,” we
+heard.
+
+“I’ll follow you, of course,” he said, looking at me as I scrambled in.
+
+The hole was bigger now, and I got down on all-fours in a channel not
+much bigger than a large sewer-pipe and found myself in total darkness.
+A minute later a heavy thud, followed by a cataract of loose sand,
+announced the arrival of the Colonel.
+
+“Catch hold of my heel,” called Dr. Silence, “and Colonel Wragge can
+take yours.”
+
+In this slow, laborious fashion we wormed our way along a tunnel that
+had been roughly dug out of the shifting sand, and was shored up
+clumsily by means of wooden pillars and posts. Any moment, it seemed to
+me, we might be buried alive. We could not see an inch before our eyes,
+but had to grope our way feeling the pillars and the walls. It was
+difficult to breathe, and the Colonel behind me made but slow progress,
+for the cramped position of our bodies was very severe.
+
+We had travelled in this way for ten minutes, and gone perhaps as much
+as ten yards, when I lost my grasp of the doctor’s heel.
+
+“Ah!” I heard his voice, sounding above me somewhere. He was standing
+up in a clear space, and the next moment I was standing beside him.
+Colonel Wragge came heavily after, and he too rose up and stood. Then
+Dr. Silence produced his candles and we heard preparations for striking
+matches.
+
+Yet even before there was light, an indefinable sensation of awe came
+over us all. In this hole in the sand, some three feet under ground, we
+stood side by side, cramped and huddled, struck suddenly with an over
+whelming apprehension of something ancient, something formidable,
+something incalculably wonderful, that touched in each one of us a
+sense of the sublime and the terrible even before we could see an inch
+before our faces. I know not how to express in language this singular
+emotion that caught us here in utter darkness, touching no sense
+directly, it seemed, yet with the recognition that before us in the
+blackness of this underground night there lay something that was mighty
+with the mightiness of long past ages.
+
+I felt Colonel Wragge press in closely to my side, and I understood the
+pressure and welcomed it. No human touch, to me at least, has ever been
+more eloquent.
+
+Then the match flared, a thousand shadows fled on black wings, and I
+saw John Silence fumbling with the candle, his face lit up grotesquely
+by the flickering light below it.
+
+I had dreaded this light, yet when it came there was apparently nothing
+to explain the profound sensations of dread that preceded it. We stood
+in a small vaulted chamber in the sand, the sides and roof shored with
+bars of wood, and the ground laid roughly with what seemed to be tiles.
+It was six feet high, so that we could all stand comfortably, and may
+have been ten feet long by eight feet wide. Upon the wooden pillars at
+the side I saw that Egyptian hieroglyphics had been rudely traced by
+burning.
+
+Dr. Silence lit three candles and handed one to each of us. He placed a
+fourth in the sand against the wall on his right, and another to mark
+the entrance to the tunnel. We stood and stared about us, instinctively
+holding our breath.
+
+“Empty, by God!” exclaimed Colonel Wragge. His voice trembled with
+excitement. And then, as his eyes rested on the ground, he added, “And
+footsteps—look—footsteps in the sand!”
+
+Dr. Silence said nothing. He stooped down and began to make a search of
+the chamber, and as he moved, my eyes followed his crouching figure and
+noted the queer distorted shadows that poured over the walls and
+ceiling after him. Here and there thin trickles of loose sand ran
+fizzing down the sides. The atmosphere, heavily charged with faint yet
+pungent odours, lay utterly still, and the flames of the candles might
+have been painted on the air for all the movement they betrayed.
+
+And, as I watched, it was almost necessary to persuade myself forcibly
+that I was only standing upright with difficulty in this little
+sand-hole of a modern garden in the south of England, for it seemed to
+me that I stood, as in vision, at the entrance of some vast rock-hewn
+Temple far, far down the river of Time. The illusion was powerful, and
+persisted. Granite columns, that rose to heaven, piled themselves about
+me, majestically uprearing, and a roof like the sky itself spread above
+a line of colossal figures that moved in shadowy procession along
+endless and stupendous aisles. This huge and splendid fantasy, borne I
+knew not whence, possessed me so vividly that I was actually obliged to
+concentrate my attention upon the small stooping figure of the doctor,
+as he groped about the walls, in order to keep the eye of imagination
+on the scene before me.
+
+But the limited space rendered a long search out of the question, and
+his footsteps, instead of shuffling through loose sand, presently
+struck something of a different quality that gave forth a hollow and
+resounding echo. He stooped to examine more closely.
+
+He was standing exactly in the centre of the little chamber when this
+happened, and he at once began scraping away the sand with his feet. In
+less than a minute a smooth surface became visible—the surface of a
+wooden covering. The next thing I saw was that he had raised it and was
+peering down into a space below. Instantly, a strong odour of nitre and
+bitumen, mingled with the strange perfume of unknown and powdered
+aromatics, rose up from the uncovered space and filled the vault,
+stinging the throat and making the eyes water and smart.
+
+“The mummy!” whispered Dr. Silence, looking up into our faces over his
+candle; and as he said the word I felt the soldier lurch against me,
+and heard his breathing in my very ear.
+
+“The mummy!” he repeated under his breath, as we pressed forward to
+look.
+
+It is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in me
+so prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for I have had not a
+little to do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even
+experimented magically with not a few. But there was something in the
+sight of that grey and silent figure, lying in its modern box of lead
+and wood at the bottom of this sandy grave, swathed in the bandages of
+centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen that the priests of Egypt
+had prayed over with their mighty enchantments thousands of years
+before—something in the sight of it lying there and breathing its own
+spice-laden atmosphere even in the darkness of its exile in this remote
+land, something that pierced to the very core of my being and touched
+that root of awe which slumbers in every man near the birth of tears
+and the passion of true worship.
+
+I remember turning quickly from the Colonel, lest he should see my
+emotion, yet fail to understand its cause, turn and clutch John Silence
+by the arm, and then fall trembling to see that he, too, had lowered
+his head and was hiding his face in his hands.
+
+A kind of whirling storm came over me, rising out of I know not what
+utter deeps of memory, and in a whiteness of vision I heard the magical
+old chauntings from the Book of the Dead, and saw the Gods pass by in
+dim procession, the mighty, immemorial Beings who were yet themselves
+only the personified attributes of the true Gods, the God with the Eyes
+of Fire, the God with the Face of Smoke. I saw again Anubis, the
+dog-faced deity, and the children of Horus, eternal watcher of the
+ages, as they swathed Osiris, the first mummy of the world, in the
+scented and mystic bands, and I tasted again something of the ecstasy
+of the justified soul as it embarked in the golden Boat of Ra, and
+journeyed onwards to rest in the fields of the blessed.
+
+And then, as Dr. Silence, with infinite reverence, stooped and touched
+the still face, so dreadfully staring with its painted eyes, there rose
+again to our nostrils wave upon wave of this perfume of thousands of
+years, and time fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in
+haunted panorama the most wonderful dream of the whole world.
+
+A gentle hissing became audible in the air, and the doctor moved
+quickly backwards. It came close to our faces and then seemed to play
+about the walls and ceiling.
+
+“The last of the Fire—still waiting for its full accomplishment,” he
+muttered; but I heard both words and hissing as things far away, for I
+was still busy with the journey of the soul through the Seven Halls of
+Death, listening for echoes of the grandest ritual ever known to men.
+
+The earthen plates covered with hieroglyphics still lay beside the
+mummy, and round it, carefully arranged at the points of the compass,
+stood the four jars with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the
+cynocephalus, and man, the jars in which were placed the hair, the nail
+parings, the heart, and other special portions of the body. Even the
+amulets, the mirror, the blue clay statues of the Ka, and the lamp with
+seven wicks were there. Only the sacred scarabaeus was missing.
+
+“Not only has it been torn from its ancient resting-place,” I heard Dr.
+Silence saying in a solemn voice as he looked at Colonel Wragge with
+fixed gaze, “but it has been partially unwound,”—he pointed to the
+wrappings of the breast,—“and—the scarabaeus has been removed from the
+throat.”
+
+The hissing, that was like the hissing of an invisible flame, had
+ceased; only from time to time we heard it as though it passed
+backwards and forwards in the tunnel; and we stood looking into each
+other’s faces without speaking.
+
+Presently Colonel Wragge made a great effort and braced himself. I
+heard the sound catch in his throat before the words actually became
+audible.
+
+“My sister,” he said, very low. And then there followed a long pause,
+broken at length by John Silence.
+
+“It must be replaced,” he said significantly.
+
+“I knew nothing,” the soldier said, forcing himself to speak the words
+he hated saying. “Absolutely nothing.”
+
+“It must be returned,” repeated the other, “if it is not now too late.
+For I fear—I fear—”
+
+Colonel Wragge made a movement of assent with his head.
+
+“It shall be,” he said.
+
+The place was still as the grave.
+
+I do not know what it was then that made us all three turn round with
+so sudden a start, for there was no sound audible to my ears, at least.
+
+The doctor was on the point of replacing the lid over the mummy, when
+he straightened up as if he had been shot.
+
+“There’s something coming,” said Colonel Wragge under his breath, and
+the doctor’s eyes, peering down the small opening of the tunnel, showed
+me the true direction.
+
+A distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point
+about half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated.
+
+“It’s the sand falling in,” I said, though I knew it was foolish.
+
+“No,” said the Colonel calmly, in a voice that seemed to have the ring
+of iron, “I’ve heard it for some time past. It is something alive—and
+it is coming nearer.”
+
+He stared about him with a look of resolution that made his face almost
+noble. The horror in his heart was overmastering, yet he stood there
+prepared for anything that might come.
+
+“There’s no other way out,” John Silence said.
+
+He leaned the lid against the sand, and waited. I knew by the masklike
+expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes,
+that he anticipated something that might be very terrible—appalling.
+
+The Colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. I still
+held my candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the grease
+all over me; but the soldier had set his into the sand just behind his
+feet.
+
+Thoughts of being buried alive, of being smothered like rats in a trap,
+of being caught and done to death by some invisible and merciless force
+we could not grapple with, rushed into my mind. Then I thought of
+fire—of suffocation—of being roasted alive. The perspiration began to
+pour from my face.
+
+“Steady!” came the voice of Dr. Silence to me through the vault.
+
+For five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from
+each other’s faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and
+all the time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually
+nearer. The tension, for me at least, was very near the breaking point
+when at last the cause of the disturbance reached the edge. It was
+hidden for a moment just behind the broken rim of soil. A jet of sand,
+shaken by the close vibration, trickled down on to the ground; I have
+never in my life seen anything fall with such laborious leisure. The
+next second, uttering a cry of curious quality, it came into view.
+
+And it was far more distressingly horrible than anything I had
+anticipated.
+
+For the sight of some Egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or even
+of some demon of fire, I think I was already half prepared; but when,
+instead, I saw the white visage of Miss Wragge framed in that round
+opening of sand, followed by her body crawling on all fours, her eyes
+bulging and reflecting the yellow glare of the candles, my first
+instinct was to turn and run like a frantic animal seeking a way of
+escape.
+
+But Dr. Silence, who seemed no whit surprised, caught my arm and
+steadied me, and we both saw the Colonel then drop upon his knees and
+come thus to a level with his sister. For more than a whole minute, as
+though struck in stone, the two faces gazed silently at each other:
+hers, for all the dreadful emotion in it, more like a gargoyle than
+anything human; and his, white and blank with an expression that was
+beyond either astonishment or alarm. She looked up; he looked down. It
+was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand close
+to the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights.
+
+Then John Silence moved forward and spoke in a voice that was very low,
+yet perfectly calm and natural.
+
+“I am glad you have come,” he said. “You are the one person whose
+presence at this moment is most required. And I hope that you may yet
+be in time to appease the anger of the Fire, and to bring peace again
+to your household, and,” he added lower still so that no one heard it
+but myself, “_safety to yourself_.”
+
+And while her brother stumbled backwards, crushing a candle into the
+sand in his awkwardness, the old lady crawled farther into the vaulted
+chamber and slowly rose upon her feet.
+
+At the sight of the wrapped figure of the mummy I was fully prepared to
+see her scream and faint, but on the contrary, to my complete
+amazement, she merely bowed her head and dropped quietly upon her
+knees. Then, after a pause of more than a minute, she raised her eyes
+to the roof and her lips began to mutter as in prayer. Her right hand,
+meanwhile, which had been fumbling for some time at her throat suddenly
+came away, and before the gaze of all of us she held it out, palm
+upwards, over the grey and ancient figure outstretched below. And in it
+we beheld glistening the green jasper of the stolen scarabaeus.
+
+Her brother, leaning heavily against the wall behind, uttered a sound
+that was half cry, half exclamation, but John Silence, standing
+directly in front of her, merely fixed his eyes on her and pointed
+downwards to the staring face below.
+
+“Replace it,” he said sternly, “where it belongs.”
+
+Miss Wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened.
+We three men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. Only the reader
+who by some remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly
+laid from their tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat
+of the Egyptian sun warms their ancient bodies into the semblance of
+life, can form any conception of the ultimate horror we experienced
+when the silent figure before us moved in its grave of lead and sand.
+Slowly, before our eyes, it writhed, and, with a faint rustling of the
+immemorial cerements, rose up, and, through sightless and bandaged
+eyes, stared across the yellow candlelight at the woman who had
+violated it.
+
+I tried to move—her brother tried to move—but the sand seemed to hold
+our feet. I tried to cry—her brother tried to cry—but the sand seemed
+to fill our lungs and throat. We could only stare—and, even so, the
+sand seemed to rise like a desert storm and cloud our vision ...
+
+And when I managed at length to open my eyes again, the mummy was lying
+once more upon its back, motionless, the shrunken and painted face
+upturned towards the ceiling, and the old lady had tumbled forward and
+was lying in the semblance of death with her head and arms upon its
+crumbling body.
+
+But upon the wrappings of the throat I saw the green jasper of the
+sacred scarabaeus shining again like a living eye.
+
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before I did,
+and I found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise
+the frail body of the old lady, while John Silence carefully replaced
+the covering over the grave and scraped back the sand with his foot,
+while he issued brief directions.
+
+I heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that
+cramped tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated
+with heat, was in no sense a dream. It took us the best part of half an
+hour to reach the open air. And, even then, we had to wait a
+considerable time for the appearance of Dr. Silence. We carried her
+undiscovered into the house and up to her own room.
+
+“The mummy will cause no further disturbance,” I heard Dr. Silence say
+to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night
+train, “provided always,” he added significantly, “that you, and yours,
+cause it no disturbance.”
+
+It was in a dream, too, that we left.
+
+“You did not see her face, I know,” he said to me as we wrapped our
+rugs about us in the empty compartment. And when I shook my head, quite
+unable to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he
+turned toward me, his face pale, and genuinely sad.
+
+“Scorched and blasted,” he whispered.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE JOHN SILENCE STORIES ***
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Three John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
+
+body { margin-left: 20%;
+       margin-right: 20%;
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+
+.no-break {page-break-before: avoid;} /* for epubs */
+
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always; margin-top: 4em;}
+
+hr {width: 80%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em;}
+
+p {text-indent: 1em;
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+           text-indent: 0em;
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+a:visited {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
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+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Three John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Three John Silence Stories</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Algernon Blackwood</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: January 7, 2004 [eBook #10624]<br />
+[Most recently updated: June 21, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE JOHN SILENCE STORIES ***</div>
+
+<h1>Three John Silence Stories</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Algernon Blackwood</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">Case I: A Psychical Invasion</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">Case II: Ancient Sorceries</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">Case III: The Nemesis of Fire</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p class="center">
+To<br/>
+M.L.W.<br/>
+The Original of John Silence<br/>
+and<br/>
+My Companion in Many Adventures
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>CASE I: A PSYCHICAL INVASION</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what is it makes you think I could be of use in this particular
+case?&rdquo; asked Dr. John Silence, looking across somewhat sceptically at the
+Swedish lady in the chair facing him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your sympathetic heart and your knowledge of occultism&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, please&mdash;that dreadful word!&rdquo; he interrupted, holding up a
+finger with a gesture of impatience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; she laughed, &ldquo;your wonderful clairvoyant gift
+and your trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may
+be disintegrated and destroyed&mdash;these strange studies you&rsquo;ve been
+experimenting with all these years&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it&rsquo;s only a case of multiple personality I must really cry
+off,&rdquo; interrupted the doctor again hastily, a bored expression in his
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not that; now, please, be serious, for I want your
+help,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;and if I choose my words poorly you must be
+patient with my ignorance. The case I know will interest you, and no one else
+could deal with it so well. In fact, no ordinary professional man could deal
+with it at all, for I know of no treatment nor medicine that can restore a lost
+sense of humour!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You begin to interest me with your &lsquo;case,&rsquo;&rdquo; he
+replied, and made himself comfortable to listen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Sivendson drew a sigh of contentment as she watched him go to the tube and
+heard him tell the servant he was not to be disturbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I believe you have read my thoughts already,&rdquo; she said;
+&ldquo;your intuitive knowledge of what goes on in other people&rsquo;s minds
+is positively uncanny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her friend shook his head and smiled as he drew his chair up to a convenient
+position and prepared to listen attentively to what she had to say. He closed
+his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb the real meaning of a
+recital that might be inadequately expressed, for by this method he found it
+easier to set himself in tune with the living thoughts that lay behind the
+broken words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich
+by accident, and by choice&mdash;a doctor. That a man of independent means
+should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay,
+passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first
+desire was to help those who could not help themselves, puzzled them. After
+that, it irritated them, and, greatly to his own satisfaction, they left him to
+his own devices.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither
+consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner. He took no fees, being at
+heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no harm to his
+fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted unremunerative cases, and cases
+that interested him for some very special reason. He argued that the rich could
+pay, and the very poor could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a
+very large class of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the
+arts, could not afford the price of a week&rsquo;s comforts merely to be told
+to travel. And it was these he desired to help: cases often requiring special
+and patient study&mdash;things no doctor can give for a guinea, and that no one
+would dream of expecting him to give.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with which
+we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to
+him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and
+difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would
+have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond
+question that he was known more or less generally as the &ldquo;Psychic
+Doctor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself
+to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual. What
+precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to
+know,&mdash;for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other
+characteristic of the charlatan,&mdash;but the fact that it had involved a
+total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned
+and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so
+easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange
+quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the
+&ldquo;man who knows.&rdquo; There was a trace of pity in his
+voice&mdash;contempt he never showed&mdash;when he spoke of their methods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This classification of results is uninspired work at best,&rdquo; he
+said once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years.
+&ldquo;It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is
+playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it would be,
+to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily slip into place and
+explain themselves. For the sources are accessible, and open to all who have
+the courage to lead the life that alone makes practical investigation safe and
+possible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was significantly
+sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power was, and that what is
+commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than a keen power of visualising.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more,&rdquo; he
+would say. &ldquo;The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it
+adds a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you will
+find this always to be the real test.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was able to
+select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference between mere
+hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction that claimed his
+special powers. It was never necessary for him to resort to the cheap mysteries
+of divination; for, as I have heard him observe, after the solution of some
+peculiarly intricate problem&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are
+merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the inner
+vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no system is necessary at
+all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man, the
+keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in the knowledge,
+first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly, that thought is
+dynamic and can accomplish material results.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Learn how to <i>think</i>,&rdquo; he would have expressed it, &ldquo;and
+you have learned to tap power at its source.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To look at&mdash;he was now past forty&mdash;he was sparely built, with
+speaking brown eyes in which shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence,
+while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness seen
+most often in the eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the mouth without
+disguising the grim determination of lips and jaw, and the face somehow
+conveyed an impression of transparency, almost of light, so delicately were the
+features refined away. On the fine forehead was that indefinable touch of peace
+that comes from identifying the mind with what is permanent in the soul, and
+letting the impermanent slip by without power to wound or distress; while, from
+his manner,&mdash;so gentle, quiet, sympathetic,&mdash;few could have guessed
+the strength of purpose that burned within like a great flame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think I should describe it as a psychical case,&rdquo; continued the
+Swedish lady, obviously trying to explain herself very intelligently,
+&ldquo;and just the kind you like. I mean a case where the cause is hidden deep
+down in some spiritual distress, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the symptoms first, please, my dear Svenska,&rdquo; he interrupted,
+with a strangely compelling seriousness of manner, &ldquo;and your deductions
+afterwards.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned round sharply on the edge of her chair and looked him in the face,
+lowering her voice to prevent her emotion betraying itself too obviously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In my opinion there&rsquo;s only one symptom,&rdquo; she half whispered,
+as though telling something disagreeable&mdash;&ldquo;fear&mdash;simply
+fear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Physical fear?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think not; though how can I say? I think it&rsquo;s a horror in the
+psychical region. It&rsquo;s no ordinary delusion; the man is quite sane; but
+he lives in mortal terror of something&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you mean by his &lsquo;psychical
+region,&rsquo;&rdquo; said the doctor, with a smile; &ldquo;though I suppose
+you wish me to understand that his spiritual, and not his mental, processes are
+affected. Anyhow, try and tell me briefly and pointedly what you know about the
+man, his symptoms, his need for help, my peculiar help, that is, and all that
+seems vital in the case. I promise to listen devotedly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am trying,&rdquo; she continued earnestly, &ldquo;but must do so in my
+own words and trust to your intelligence to disentangle as I go along. He is a
+young author, and lives in a tiny house off Putney Heath somewhere. He writes
+humorous stories&mdash;quite a genre of his own: Pender&mdash;you must have
+heard the name&mdash;Felix Pender? Oh, the man had a great gift, and married on
+the strength of it; his future seemed assured. I say &lsquo;had,&rsquo; for
+quite suddenly his talent utterly failed him. Worse, it became transformed into
+its opposite. He can no longer write a line in the old way that was bringing
+him success&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes for a second and looked at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He still writes, then? The force has not gone?&rdquo; he asked briefly,
+and then closed his eyes again to listen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He works like a fury,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;but produces
+nothing&rdquo;&mdash;she hesitated a moment&mdash;&ldquo;nothing that he can
+use or sell. His earnings have practically ceased, and he makes a precarious
+living by book-reviewing and odd jobs&mdash;very odd, some of them. Yet, I am
+certain his talent has not really deserted him finally, but is
+merely&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again Mrs. Sivendson hesitated for the appropriate word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In abeyance,&rdquo; he suggested, without opening his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Obliterated,&rdquo; she went on, after a moment to weigh the word,
+&ldquo;merely obliterated by something else&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By some one else?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish I knew. All I can say is that he is haunted, and temporarily his
+sense of humour is shrouded&mdash;gone&mdash;replaced by something dreadful
+that writes other things. Unless something competent is done, he will simply
+starve to death. Yet he is afraid to go to a doctor for fear of being
+pronounced insane; and, anyhow, a man can hardly ask a doctor to take a guinea
+to restore a vanished sense of humour, can he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has he tried any one at all&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not doctors yet. He tried some clergymen and religious people; but they
+know so little and have so little intelligent sympathy. And most of them are so
+busy balancing on their own little pedestals&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence stopped her tirade with a gesture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how is it that you know so much about him?&rdquo; he asked gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know Mrs. Pender well&mdash;I knew her before she married
+him&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And is she a cause, perhaps?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not in the least. She is devoted; a woman very well educated, though
+without being really intelligent, and with so little sense of humour herself
+that she always laughs at the wrong places. But she has nothing to do with the
+cause of his distress; and, indeed, has chiefly guessed it from observing him,
+rather than from what little he has told her. And he, you know, is a really
+lovable fellow, hard-working, patient&mdash;altogether worth saving.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes and went over to ring for tea. He did not know very
+much more about the case of the humorist than when he first sat down to listen;
+but he realised that no amount of words from his Swedish friend would help to
+reveal the real facts. A personal interview with the author himself could alone
+do that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All humorists are worth saving,&rdquo; he said with a smile, as she
+poured out tea. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t afford to lose a single one in these
+strenuous days. I will go and see your friend at the first opportunity.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She thanked him elaborately, effusively, with many words, and he, with much
+difficulty, kept the conversation thenceforward strictly to the teapot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, as a result of this conversation, and a little more he had gathered by
+means best known to himself and his secretary, he was whizzing in his motor-car
+one afternoon a few days later up the Putney Hill to have his first interview
+with Felix Pender, the humorous writer who was the victim of some mysterious
+malady in his &ldquo;psychical region&rdquo; that had obliterated his sense of
+the comic and threatened to wreck his life and destroy his talent. And his
+desire to help was probably of equal strength with his desire to know and to
+investigate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black panther
+lay concealed within its hood, and the doctor&mdash;the &ldquo;psychic
+doctor,&rdquo; as he was sometimes called&mdash;stepped out through the
+gathering fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree
+and a stunted laurel shrubbery. The house was very small, and it was some time
+before any one answered the bell. Then, suddenly, a light appeared in the hall,
+and he saw a pretty little woman standing on the top step begging him to come
+in. She was dressed in grey, and the gaslight fell on a mass of deliberately
+brushed light hair. Stuffed, dusty birds, and a shabby array of African spears,
+hung on the wall behind her. A hat-rack, with a bronze plate full of very large
+cards, led his eye swiftly to a dark staircase beyond. Mrs. Pender had round
+eyes like a child&rsquo;s, and she greeted him with an effusiveness that barely
+concealed her emotion, yet strove to appear naturally cordial. Evidently she
+had been looking out for his arrival, and had outrun the servant girl. She was
+a little breathless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ve not been kept waiting&mdash;I think it&rsquo;s
+<i>most</i> good of you to come&mdash;&rdquo; she began, and then stopped sharp
+when she saw his face in the gaslight. There was something in Dr.
+Silence&rsquo;s look that did not encourage mere talk. He was in earnest now,
+if ever man was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good evening, Mrs. Pender,&rdquo; he said, with a quiet smile that won
+confidence, yet deprecated unnecessary words, &ldquo;the fog delayed me a
+little. I am glad to see you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went into a dingy sitting-room at the back of the house, neatly furnished
+but depressing. Books stood in a row upon the mantelpiece. The fire had
+evidently just been lit. It smoked in great puffs into the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Sivendson said she thought you might be able to come,&rdquo;
+ventured the little woman again, looking up engagingly into his face and
+betraying anxiety and eagerness in every gesture. &ldquo;But I hardly dared to
+believe it. I think it is really too good of you. My husband&rsquo;s case is so
+peculiar that&mdash;well, you know, I am quite sure any <i>ordinary</i> doctor
+would say at once the asylum&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t he in, then?&rdquo; asked Dr. Silence gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the asylum?&rdquo; she gasped. &ldquo;Oh dear, no&mdash;not
+yet!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the house, I meant,&rdquo; he laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave a great sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll be back any minute now,&rdquo; she replied, obviously
+relieved to see him laugh; &ldquo;but the fact is, we didn&rsquo;t expect you
+so early&mdash;I mean, my husband hardly thought you would come at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am always delighted to come&mdash;when I am really wanted, and can be
+of help,&rdquo; he said quickly; &ldquo;and, perhaps, it&rsquo;s all for the
+best that your husband is out, for now that we are alone you can tell me
+something about his difficulties. So far, you know, I have heard very
+little.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her voice trembled as she thanked him, and when he came and took a chair close
+beside her she actually had difficulty in finding words with which to begin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the first place,&rdquo; she began timidly, and then continuing with a
+nervous incoherent rush of words, &ldquo;he will be simply delighted that
+you&rsquo;ve really come, because he said you were the only person he would
+consent to see at all&mdash;the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he
+doesn&rsquo;t know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He pretends
+with me that it&rsquo;s just a nervous breakdown, and I&rsquo;m sure he
+doesn&rsquo;t realise all the odd things I&rsquo;ve noticed him doing. But the
+main thing, I suppose&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, the main thing, Mrs. Pender,&rdquo; he said, encouragingly,
+noticing her hesitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;is that he thinks we are not alone in the house. That&rsquo;s the
+chief thing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me more facts&mdash;just facts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It began last summer when I came back from Ireland; he had been here
+alone for six weeks, and I thought him looking tired and queer&mdash;ragged and
+scattered about the face, if you know what I mean, and his manner worn out. He
+said he had been writing hard, but his inspiration had somehow failed him, and
+he was dissatisfied with his work. His sense of humour was leaving him, or
+changing into something else, he said. There was something in the house, he
+declared, that&rdquo;&mdash;she emphasised the words&mdash;&ldquo;prevented his
+feeling funny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something in the house that prevented his feeling funny,&rdquo; repeated
+the doctor. &ldquo;Ah, now we&rsquo;re getting to the heart of it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she resumed vaguely, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s what he kept
+saying.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what was it he <i>did</i> that you thought strange?&rdquo; he asked
+sympathetically. &ldquo;Be brief, or he may be here before you finish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very small things, but significant it seemed to me. He changed his
+workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said all his
+characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they altered, so that he
+felt like writing tragedies&mdash;vile, debased tragedies, the tragedies of
+broken souls. But now he says the same of the sitting-room, and he&rsquo;s gone
+back to the library.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, there&rsquo;s so little I can tell you,&rdquo; she went on,
+with increasing speed and countless gestures. &ldquo;I mean it&rsquo;s only
+very small things he does and says that are queer. What frightens me is that he
+assumes there is some one else in the house all the time&mdash;some one I never
+see. He does not actually say so, but on the stairs I&rsquo;ve seen him
+standing aside to let some one pass; I&rsquo;ve seen him open a door to let
+some one in or out; and often in our bedrooms he puts chairs about as though
+for some one else to sit in. Oh&mdash;oh yes, and once or twice,&rdquo; she
+cried&mdash;&ldquo;once or twice&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused, and looked about her with a startled air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Once or twice,&rdquo; she resumed hurriedly, as though she heard a sound
+that alarmed her, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve heard him running&mdash;coming in and out
+of the rooms breathless as if something were after him&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door opened while she was still speaking, cutting her words off in the
+middle, and a man came into the room. He was dark and clean-shaven, sallow
+rather, with the eyes of imagination, and dark hair growing scantily about the
+temples. He was dressed in a shabby tweed suit, and wore an untidy flannel
+collar at the neck. The dominant expression of his face was
+startled&mdash;hunted; an expression that might any moment leap into the
+dreadful stare of terror and announce a total loss of self-control.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moment he saw his visitor a smile spread over his worn features, and he
+advanced to shake hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hoped you would come; Mrs. Sivendson said you might be able to find
+time,&rdquo; he said simply. His voice was thin and needy. &ldquo;I am very
+glad to see you, Dr. Silence. It is &lsquo;Doctor,&rsquo; is it not?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I am entitled to the description,&rdquo; laughed the other,
+&ldquo;but I rarely get it. You know, I do not practise as a regular thing;
+that is, I only take cases that specially interest me, or&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not finish the sentence, for the men exchanged a glance of sympathy that
+rendered it unnecessary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have heard of your great kindness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s my hobby,&rdquo; said the other quickly, &ldquo;and my
+privilege.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I trust you will still think so when you have heard what I have to tell
+you,&rdquo; continued the author, a little wearily. He led the way across the
+hall into the little smoking-room where they could talk freely and undisturbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the smoking-room, the door shut and privacy about them, Fender&rsquo;s
+attitude changed somewhat, and his manner became very grave. The doctor sat
+opposite, where he could watch his face. Already, he saw, it looked more
+haggard. Evidently it cost him much to refer to his trouble at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I have is, in my belief, a profound spiritual affliction,&rdquo; he
+began quite bluntly, looking straight into the other&rsquo;s eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw that at once,&rdquo; Dr. Silence said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, you saw that, of course; my atmosphere must convey that much to any
+one with psychic perceptions. Besides which, I feel sure from all I&rsquo;ve
+heard, that you are really a soul-doctor, are you not, more than a healer
+merely of the body?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think of me too highly,&rdquo; returned the other; &ldquo;though I
+prefer cases, as you know, in which the spirit is disturbed first, the body
+afterwards.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I understand, yes. Well, I have experienced a curious disturbance
+in&mdash;not in my physical region primarily. I mean my nerves are all right,
+and my body is all right. I have no delusions exactly, but my spirit is
+tortured by a calamitous fear which first came upon me in a strange
+manner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence leaned forward a moment and took the speaker&rsquo;s hand and held
+it in his own for a few brief seconds, closing his eyes as he did so. He was
+not feeling his pulse, or doing any of the things that doctors ordinarily do;
+he was merely absorbing into himself the main note of the man&rsquo;s mental
+condition, so as to get completely his own point of view, and thus be able to
+treat his case with true sympathy. A very close observer might perhaps have
+noticed that a slight tremor ran through his frame after he had held the hand
+for a few seconds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me quite frankly, Mr. Pender,&rdquo; he said soothingly, releasing
+the hand, and with deep attention in his manner, &ldquo;tell me all the steps
+that led to the beginning of this invasion. I mean tell me what the particular
+drug was, and why you took it, and how it affected you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you know it began with a drug!&rdquo; cried the author, with
+undisguised astonishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I only know from what I observe in you, and in its effect upon myself.
+You are in a surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your
+atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others. This is the effect
+of a drug, but of no ordinary drug. Allow me to finish, please. If the higher
+rate of vibration spreads all over, you will become, of course, permanently
+cognisant of a much larger world than the one you know normally. If, on the
+other hand, the rapid portion sinks back to the usual rate, you will lose these
+occasional increased perceptions you now have.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You amaze me!&rdquo; exclaimed the author; &ldquo;for your words exactly
+describe what I have been feeling&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mention this only in passing, and to give you confidence before you
+approach the account of your real affliction,&rdquo; continued the doctor.
+&ldquo;All perception, as you know, is the result of vibrations; and
+clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of
+vibrations. The awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about means no
+more than that. Your partial clairvoyance is easily explained. The only thing
+that puzzles me is how you managed to procure the drug, for it is not easy to
+get in pure form, and no adulterated tincture could have given you the terrific
+impetus I see you have acquired. But, please proceed now and tell me your story
+in your own way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This <i>Cannabis indica</i>,&rdquo; the author went on, &ldquo;came into
+my possession last autumn while my wife was away. I need not explain how I got
+it, for that has no importance; but it was the genuine fluid extract, and I
+could not resist the temptation to make an experiment. One of its effects, as
+you know, is to induce torrential laughter&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes: sometimes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;I am a writer of humorous tales, and I wished to increase my own
+sense of laughter&mdash;to see the ludicrous from an abnormal point of view. I
+wished to study it a bit, if possible, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I took an experimental dose. I starved for six hours to hasten the
+effect, locked myself into this room, and gave orders not to be disturbed. Then
+I swallowed the stuff and waited.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the effect?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I waited one hour, two, three, four, five hours. Nothing happened. No
+laughter came, but only a great weariness instead. Nothing in the room or in my
+thoughts came within a hundred miles of a humorous aspect.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Always a most uncertain drug,&rdquo; interrupted the doctor. &ldquo;We
+make very small use of it on that account.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At two o&rsquo;clock in the morning I felt so hungry and tired that I
+decided to give up the experiment and wait no longer. I drank some milk and
+went upstairs to bed. I felt flat and disappointed. I fell asleep at once and
+must have slept for about an hour, when I awoke suddenly with a great noise in
+my ears. It was the noise of my own laughter! I was simply shaking with
+merriment. At first I was bewildered and thought I had been laughing in dreams,
+but a moment later I remembered the drug, and was delighted to think that after
+all I had got an effect. It had been working all along, only I had
+miscalculated the time. The only unpleasant thing <i>then</i> was an odd
+feeling that I had not waked naturally, but had been wakened by some one
+else&mdash;deliberately. This came to me as a certainty in the middle of my
+noisy laughter and distressed me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any impression who it could have been?&rdquo; asked the doctor, now
+listening with close attention to every word, very much on the alert.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender hesitated and tried to smile. He brushed his hair from his forehead with
+a nervous gesture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are quite
+as important as your certainties.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten
+dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great strength and
+great ability&mdash;of great force&mdash;quite an unusual
+personality&mdash;and, I was certain, too&mdash;a woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A good woman?&rdquo; asked John Silence quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it seemed
+to surprise him. But he shook his head quickly with an indefinable look of
+horror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Evil,&rdquo; he answered briefly, &ldquo;appallingly evil, and yet
+mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain
+perverseness&mdash;the perversity of the unbalanced mind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. A shade of
+suspicion showed itself in his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; laughed the doctor, &ldquo;you need not fear that I&rsquo;m
+merely humouring you, or think you mad. Far from it. Your story interests me
+exceedingly and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell
+it. You see, I possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic
+byways.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was shaking with such violent laughter,&rdquo; continued the narrator,
+reassured in a moment, &ldquo;though with no clear idea what was amusing me,
+that I had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and was
+afraid I should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions. When the gas
+was lit I found the room empty, of course, and the door locked as usual. Then I
+half dressed and went out on to the landing, my hilarity better under control,
+and proceeded to go downstairs. I wished to record my sensations. I stuffed a
+handkerchief into my mouth so as not to scream aloud and communicate my
+hysterics to the entire household.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the presence of this&mdash;this&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was hanging about me all the time,&rdquo; said Pender, &ldquo;but for
+the moment it seemed to have withdrawn. Probably, too, my laughter killed all
+other emotions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how long did you take getting downstairs?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was just coming to that. I see you know all my &lsquo;symptoms&rsquo;
+in advance, as it were; for, of course, I thought I should never get to the
+bottom. Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the narrow hall at
+the foot of the stairs&mdash;well, I could have sworn it was half an
+hour&rsquo;s journey had not my watch certified that it was a few seconds. Yet
+I walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I walked apparently without
+advancing, and at that rate it would have taken me a week to get down Putney
+Hill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space
+sometimes&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came
+horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of icy
+water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; what?&rdquo; asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;I was overwhelmed with terror,&rdquo; said Pender, lowering his
+reedy voice at the mere recollection of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in his eyes
+now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners of his mouth
+hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of that merriment still
+amused him. The combination of fear and laughter in his face was very curious,
+and lent great conviction to his story; it also lent a bizarre expression of
+horror to his gestures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Terror, was it?&rdquo; repeated the doctor soothingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, terror; for, though the Thing that woke me seemed to have gone, the
+memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair. Then I locked
+the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug made my movements so
+prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach the door, and another five to
+get back to the chair again. The laughter, too, kept bubbling up inside
+me&mdash;great wholesome laughter that shook me like gusts of wind&mdash;so
+that even my terror almost made me laugh. Oh, but I may tell you, Dr. Silence,
+it was altogether vile, that mixture of fear and laughter, altogether vile!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny
+side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The bookcase was
+ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock looked at me on the
+mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of papers and inkstand on the
+desk tickled me till I roared and shook and held my sides and the tears
+streamed down my cheeks. And that footstool! Oh, that absurd footstool!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands at the
+thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed, too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on, please,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I quite understand. I know
+something myself of the hashish laughter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing quickly grave
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless
+merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. The drug
+produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not
+imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror masked by cap
+and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and
+fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this
+fear was caused by the invasion&mdash;so you called it just now&mdash;of the
+&lsquo;person&rsquo; who had wakened me: she was utterly evil; inimical to my
+soul, or at least to all in me that wished for good. There I stood, sweating
+and trembling, laughing at everything in the room, yet all the while with this
+white terror mastering my heart. And this creature was putting&mdash;putting
+her&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Putting what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;putting ideas into my mind,&rdquo; he went on glancing nervously
+about the room. &ldquo;Actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off
+the usual current and inject her own. How mad that sounds! I know it, but
+it&rsquo;s true. It&rsquo;s the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the
+operation terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me
+afresh with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant,
+bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas, and so
+on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior and diabolical
+method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and ideas of evil and
+tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. Oh, doctor, I tell you again,
+it was unnerving!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of the story
+which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky sentences and lowered
+voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You saw nothing&mdash;no one&mdash;all this time?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind
+there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman&mdash;large, dark-skinned,
+with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye&mdash;the left&mdash;so
+drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face&mdash;!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A face you would recognise again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender laughed dreadfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish I could forget it,&rdquo; he whispered, &ldquo;I only wish I
+could forget it!&rdquo; Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped
+the doctor&rsquo;s hand with an emotional gesture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I <i>must</i> tell you how grateful I am for your patience and
+sympathy,&rdquo; he cried, with a tremor in his voice, &ldquo;and&mdash;that
+you do not think me mad. I have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the
+mere freedom of speech&mdash;the relief of sharing my affliction with
+another&mdash;has helped me already more than I can possibly say.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened eyes. His
+voice was very gentle when he replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to
+me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;for it threatens, not your physical existence but
+the temple of your psychical existence&mdash;the inner life. Your mind would
+not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the existence
+after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your spirit so twisted,
+so distorted, so befouled, that you would be <i>spiritually insane</i>&mdash;a
+far more radical condition than merely being insane here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men sitting there
+facing one another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you really mean&mdash;Good Lord!&rdquo; stammered the author as soon
+as he could find his tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only say
+now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite positive of
+being able to help you. Oh, there&rsquo;s no doubt as to that, believe me. In
+the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of this extraordinary
+drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of opening you up to the forces
+of another region; and, in the second, I have a firm belief in the reality of
+supersensuous occurrences as well as considerable knowledge of psychic
+processes acquired by long and painful experiment. The rest is, or should be,
+merely sympathetic treatment and practical application. The hashish has
+partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical
+vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached
+to this house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to their
+precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself be
+psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling nothing as yet. But
+now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the rest of your wonderful story;
+and when you have finished, I will talk about the means of cure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then went
+on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again
+to bed. It was four o&rsquo;clock in the morning. I laughed all the way
+up&mdash;at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase
+window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that
+outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or
+disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the
+worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and a coldness of the
+extremities due to lowered circulation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fear gone, too?&rdquo; asked the doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere
+nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that day I
+wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed wonderfully quickened
+and my characters acted without effort out of the heart of true humour. I was
+exceedingly pleased with this result of my experiment. But when the
+stenographer had taken her departure and I came to read over the pages she had
+typed out, I recalled her sudden glances of surprise and the odd way she had
+looked up at me while I was dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could
+hardly believe I had uttered it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could
+remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense was so
+altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to tickle the
+ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted. Dreadful innuendoes
+had managed to creep into the phrases. There was laughter of a kind, but it was
+bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my attempt at analysis only increased my
+dismay. The story, as it read then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these
+slight changes it had come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror
+disguised as merriment. The framework of humour was there, if you understand
+me, but the characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can you show me this writing?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I destroyed it,&rdquo; he whispered. &ldquo;But, in the end, though of
+course much perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some
+after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my mind and
+made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations that did not
+properly hold them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I
+forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular, there she
+was beside me, influencing my mind horribly&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In what way, precisely?&rdquo; interrupted the doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures
+of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been foreign,
+indeed impossible, to my normal nature&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality,&rdquo; murmured
+the doctor, making a quick note.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eh? I didn&rsquo;t quite catch&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you shall know their purport
+fully later.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the
+house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate fashion;
+and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and respectful
+towards it&mdash;to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself carefully
+deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at last, and, if I
+failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that it pursued me about the
+house, from one room to another, haunting my very soul in its inmost abode. It
+certainly came before my wife so far as my attentions were concerned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took
+it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience, delayed like
+the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when it did come with a
+rush of this false demon-laughter. This time, however, there was a reversal of
+the changed scale of space and time; it shortened instead of lengthened, so
+that I dressed and got downstairs in about twenty seconds, and the couple of
+hours I stayed and worked in the study passed literally like a period of ten
+minutes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is often true of an overdose,&rdquo; interjected the doctor,
+&ldquo;and you may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of
+an hour. It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it,
+and is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of thought.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This time,&rdquo; Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his
+excitement, &ldquo;another extraordinary effect came to me, and I experienced a
+curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived external things through one
+large main sense-channel instead of through the five divisions known as sight,
+smell, touch, and so forth. You will, I know, understand me when I tell you
+that I <i>heard</i> sights and <i>saw</i> sounds. No language can make this
+comprehensible, of course, and I can only say, for instance, that the striking
+of the clock I saw as a visible picture in the air before me. I saw the sounds
+of the tinkling bell. And in precisely the same way I heard the colours in the
+room, especially the colours of those books in the shelf behind you. Those red
+bindings I heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the French bindings
+next to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike the chattering of
+starlings. That brown bookcase muttered, and those green curtains opposite kept
+up a constant sort of rippling sound like the lower notes of a wood-horn. But I
+only was conscious of these sounds when I looked steadily at the different
+objects, and thought about them. The room, you understand, was not full of a
+chorus of notes; but when I concentrated my mind upon a colour, I heard, as
+well as saw, it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of <i>Cannabis
+indica</i>,&rdquo; observed the doctor. &ldquo;And it provoked laughter again,
+did it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so
+like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of a
+performing bear&mdash;which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know. But
+this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On the contrary,
+I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an intensification of
+consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and keen-minded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to
+sketch&mdash;a talent not normally mine&mdash;I found that I could draw nothing
+but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head&mdash;always the same&mdash;the head
+of a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very drooping
+left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may
+imagine&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the expression of the face&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the air
+and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I can only describe as&mdash;<i>blackness</i>,&rdquo; he replied in
+a low tone; &ldquo;the face of a dark and evil soul.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You destroyed that, too?&rdquo; queried the doctor sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; I have kept the drawings,&rdquo; he said, with a laugh, and rose to
+get them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see,&rdquo; he added,
+pushing a number of loose sheets under the doctor&rsquo;s eyes; &ldquo;nothing
+but a few scrawly lines. That&rsquo;s all I found the next morning. I had
+really drawn no heads at all&mdash;nothing but those lines and blots and
+wriggles. The pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind
+which constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered
+scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed, of
+course, with the passing of the drug&rsquo;s effects. But the other thing did
+not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me. It is here
+still. It is real. I don&rsquo;t know how I can escape from it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the
+house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole
+means of support, and&mdash;well, you see, since this change I cannot even
+write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their mockery
+of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible? I shall go mad if this
+continues.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected to see
+some haunting shape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This influence in this house induced by my experiment, has killed in a
+flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humour, and though I still go on
+writing funny tales&mdash;I have a certain name you know&mdash;my inspiration
+has dried up, and much of what I write I have to burn&mdash;yes, doctor, to
+burn, before any one sees it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As utterly alien to your own mind and personality?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Utterly! As though some one else had written it&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And shocking!&rdquo; He passed his hand over his eyes a moment and let
+the breath escape softly through his teeth. &ldquo;Yet most damnably clever in
+the consummate way the vile suggestions are insinuated under cover of a kind of
+high drollery. My stenographer left me of course&mdash;and I&rsquo;ve been
+afraid to take another&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence got up and began to walk about the room leisurely without
+speaking; he appeared to be examining the pictures on the wall and reading the
+names of the books lying about. Presently he paused on the hearthrug, with his
+back to the fire, and turned to look his patient quietly in the eyes.
+Pender&rsquo;s face was grey and drawn; the hunted expression dominated it; the
+long recital had told upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Pender,&rdquo; he said, a curious glow showing about his
+fine, quiet face; &ldquo;thank you for the sincerity and frankness of your
+account. But I think now there is nothing further I need ask you.&rdquo; He
+indulged in a long scrutiny of the author&rsquo;s haggard features drawing
+purposely the man&rsquo;s eyes to his own and then meeting them with a look of
+power and confidence calculated to inspire even the feeblest soul with courage.
+&ldquo;And, to begin with,&rdquo; he added, smiling pleasantly, &ldquo;let me
+assure you without delay that you need have no alarm, for you are no more
+insane or deluded than I myself am&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender heaved a deep sigh and tried to return the smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;and this is simply a case, so far as I can judge at present, of a
+very singular psychical invasion, and a very sinister one, too, if you perhaps
+understand what I mean&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s an odd expression; you used it before, you know,&rdquo; said
+the author wearily, yet eagerly listening to every word of the diagnosis, and
+deeply touched by the intelligent sympathy which did not at once indicate the
+lunatic asylum.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Possibly,&rdquo; returned the other, &ldquo;and an odd affliction, too,
+you&rsquo;ll allow, yet one not unknown to the nations of antiquity, nor to
+those moderns, perhaps, who recognise the freedom of action under certain
+pathogenic conditions between this world and another.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you think,&rdquo; asked Pender hastily, &ldquo;that it is all
+primarily due to the <i>Cannabis</i>? There is nothing radically amiss with
+myself&mdash;nothing incurable, or&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Due entirely to the overdose,&rdquo; Dr. Silence replied emphatically,
+&ldquo;to the drug&rsquo;s direct action upon your psychical being. It rendered
+you ultra-sensitive and made you respond to an increased rate of vibration.
+And, let me tell you, Mr. Pender, that your experiment might have had results
+far more dire. It has brought you into touch with a somewhat singular class of
+Invisible, but of one, I think, chiefly human in character. You might, however,
+just as easily have been drawn out of human range altogether, and the results
+of such a contingency would have been exceedingly terrible. Indeed, you would
+not now be here to tell the tale. I need not alarm you on that score, but
+mention it as a warning you will not misunderstand or underrate after what you
+have been through.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You look puzzled. You do not quite gather what I am driving at; and it
+is not to be expected that you should, for you, I suppose, are the nominal
+Christian with the nominal Christian&rsquo;s lofty standard of ethics, and his
+utter ignorance of spiritual possibilities. Beyond a somewhat childish
+understanding of &lsquo;spiritual wickedness in high places,&rsquo; you
+probably have no conception of what is possible once you break-down the slender
+gulf that is mercifully fixed between you and that Outer World. But my studies
+and training have taken me far outside these orthodox trips, and I have made
+experiments that I could scarcely speak to you about in language that would be
+intelligible to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused a moment to note the breathless interest of Pender&rsquo;s face and
+manner. Every word he uttered was calculated; he knew exactly the value and
+effect of the emotions he desired to waken in the heart of the afflicted being
+before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And from certain knowledge I have gained through various
+experiences,&rdquo; he continued calmly, &ldquo;I can diagnose your case as I
+said before to be one of psychical invasion.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the nature of this&mdash;er&mdash;invasion?&rdquo; stammered the
+bewildered writer of humorous tales.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no reason why I should not say at once that I do not yet quite
+know,&rdquo; replied Dr. Silence. &ldquo;I may first have to make one or two
+experiments&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On me?&rdquo; gasped Pender, catching his breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not exactly,&rdquo; the doctor said, with a grave smile, &ldquo;but with
+your assistance, perhaps. I shall want to test the conditions of the
+house&mdash;to ascertain, impossible, the character of the forces, of this
+strange personality that has been haunting you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At present you have no idea exactly
+who&mdash;what&mdash;why&mdash;&rdquo; asked the other in a wild flurry of
+interest, dread and amazement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have a very good idea, but no proof rather,&rdquo; returned the
+doctor. &ldquo;The effects of the drug in altering the scale of time and space,
+and merging the senses have nothing primarily to do with the invasion. They
+come to any one who is fool enough to take an experimental dose. It is the
+other features of your case that are unusual. You see, you are now in touch
+with certain violent emotions, desires, purposes, still active in this house,
+that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil personality that lived
+here. How long ago, or why they still persist so forcibly, I cannot positively
+say. But I should judge that they are merely forces acting automatically with
+the momentum of their terrific original impetus.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not directed by a living being, a conscious will, you mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Possibly not&mdash;but none the less dangerous on that account, and more
+difficult to deal with. I cannot explain to you in a few minutes the nature of
+such things, for you have not made the studies that would enable you to follow
+me; but I have reason to believe that on the dissolution at death of a human
+being, its forces may still persist and continue to act in a blind, unconscious
+fashion. As a rule they speedily dissipate themselves, but in the case of a
+very powerful personality they may last a long time. And, in some
+cases&mdash;of which I incline to think this is one&mdash;these forces may
+coalesce with certain non-human entities who thus continue their life
+indefinitely and increase their strength to an unbelievable degree. If the
+original personality was evil, the beings attracted to the left-over forces
+will also be evil. In this case, I think there has been an unusual and dreadful
+aggrandisement of the thoughts and purposes left behind long ago by a woman of
+consummate wickedness and great personal power of character and intellect. Now,
+do you begin to see what I am driving at a little?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender stared fixedly at his companion, plain horror showing in his eyes. But
+he found nothing to say, and the doctor continued&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In your case, predisposed by the action of the drug, you have
+experienced the rush of these forces in undiluted strength. They wholly
+obliterate in you the sense of humour, fancy, imagination,&mdash;all that makes
+for cheerfulness and hope. They seek, though perhaps automatically only, to
+oust your own thoughts and establish themselves in their place. You are the
+victim of a psychical invasion. At the same time, you have become clairvoyant
+in the true sense. You are also a clairvoyant victim.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender mopped his face and sighed. He left his chair and went over to the
+fireplace to warm himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must think me a quack to talk like this, or a madman,&rdquo; laughed
+Dr. Silence. &ldquo;But never mind that. I have come to help you, and I can
+help you if you will do what I tell you. It is very simple: you must leave this
+house at once. Oh, never mind the difficulties; we will deal with those
+together. I can place another house at your disposal, or I would take the lease
+here off your hands, and later have it pulled down. Your case interests me
+greatly, and I mean to see you through, so that you have no anxiety, and can
+drop back into your old groove of work tomorrow! The drug has provided you, and
+therefore me, with a shortcut to a very interesting experience. I am grateful
+to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author poked the fire vigorously, emotion rising in him like a tide. He
+glanced towards the door nervously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no need to alarm your wife or to tell her the details of our
+conversation,&rdquo; pursued the other quietly. &ldquo;Let her know that you
+will soon be in possession again of your sense of humour and your health, and
+explain that I am lending you another house for six months. Meanwhile I may
+have the right to use this house for a night or two for my experiment. Is that
+understood between us?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart,&rdquo; stammered
+Pender, unable to find words to express his gratitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he hesitated for a moment, searching the doctor&rsquo;s face anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And your experiment with the house?&rdquo; he said at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of the simplest character, my dear Mr. Pender. Although I am myself an
+artificially trained psychic, and consequently aware of the presence of
+discarnate entities as a rule, I have so far felt nothing here at all. This
+makes me sure that the forces acting here are of an unusual description. What I
+propose to do is to make an experiment with a view of drawing out this evil,
+coaxing it from its lair, so to speak, in order that it may <i>exhaust itself
+through me</i> and become dissipated for ever. I have already been
+inoculated,&rdquo; he added; &ldquo;I consider myself to be immune.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Heavens above!&rdquo; gasped the author, collapsing on to a chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hell beneath! might be a more appropriate exclamation,&rdquo; the doctor
+laughed. &ldquo;But, seriously, Mr. Pender, this is what I propose to
+do&mdash;with your permission.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, of course,&rdquo; cried the other, &ldquo;you have my
+permission and my best wishes for success. I can see no possible objection,
+but&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I pray to Heaven you will not undertake this experiment alone, will
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, dear, no; not alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will take a companion with good nerves, and reliable in case of
+disaster, won&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall bring two companions,&rdquo; the doctor said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, that&rsquo;s better. I feel easier. I am sure you must have among
+your acquaintances men who&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall not think of bringing men, Mr. Pender.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other looked up sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, or women either; or children.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand. Who will you bring, then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Animals,&rdquo; explained the doctor, unable to prevent a smile at his
+companion&rsquo;s expression of surprise&mdash;&ldquo;two animals, a cat and a
+dog.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender stared as if his eyes would drop out upon the floor, and then led the
+way without another word into the adjoining room where his wife was awaiting
+them for tea.
+</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>
+A few days later the humorist and his wife, with minds greatly relieved, moved
+into a small furnished house placed at their free disposal in another part of
+London; and John Silence, intent upon his approaching experiment, made ready to
+spend a night in the empty house on the top of Putney Hill. Only two rooms were
+prepared for occupation: the study on the ground floor and the bedroom
+immediately above it; all other doors were to be locked, and no servant was to
+be left in the house. The motor had orders to call for him at nine
+o&rsquo;clock the following morning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, meanwhile, his secretary had instructions to look up the past history and
+associations of the place, and learn everything he could concerning the
+character of former occupants, recent or remote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The animals, by whose sensitiveness he intended to test any unusual conditions
+in the atmosphere of the building, Dr. Silence selected with care and judgment.
+He believed (and had already made curious experiments to prove it) that animals
+were more often, and more truly, clairvoyant than human beings. Many of them,
+he felt convinced, possessed powers of perception far superior to that mere
+keenness of the senses common to all dwellers in the wilds where the senses
+grow specially alert; they had what he termed &ldquo;animal
+clairvoyance,&rdquo; and from his experiments with horses, dogs, cats, and even
+birds, he had drawn certain deductions, which, however, need not be referred to
+in detail here.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cats, in particular, he believed, were almost continuously conscious of a
+larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera, and quite
+beyond the reach of normal human organs. He had, further, observed that while
+dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such phenomena, cats on the
+other hand were soothed and satisfied. They welcomed manifestations as
+something belonging peculiarly to their own region.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He selected his animals, therefore, with wisdom so that they might afford a
+differing test, each in its own way, and that one should not merely communicate
+its own excitement to the other. He took a dog and a cat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cat he chose, now full grown, had lived with him since kittenhood, a
+kittenhood of perplexing sweetness and audacious mischief. Wayward it was and
+fanciful, ever playing its own mysterious games in the corners of the room,
+jumping at invisible nothings, leaping sideways into the air and falling with
+tiny moccasined feet on to another part of the carpet, yet with an air of
+dignified earnestness which showed that the performance was necessary to its
+own well-being, and not done merely to impress a stupid human audience. In the
+middle of elaborate washing it would look up, startled, as though to stare at
+the approach of some Invisible, cocking its little head sideways and putting
+out a velvet pad to inspect cautiously. Then it would get absent-minded, and
+stare with equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the
+onlookers), and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in quite a
+new place. Except for a white patch on its breast it was coal black. And its
+name was&mdash;Smoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Smoke&rdquo; described its temperament as well as its appearance. Its
+movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of concealed
+mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify its name; and a
+subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of floating smoke, the fire
+below betraying itself at two points only&mdash;the glowing eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All its forces ran to intelligence&mdash;secret intelligence, the wordless
+incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, <i>the</i> cat for the
+business in hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The selection of the dog was not so simple, for the doctor owned many; but
+after much deliberation he chose a collie, called Flame from his yellow coat.
+True, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and even beginning to grow
+deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very particular friend of Smoke&rsquo;s,
+and had fathered it from kittenhood upwards so that a subtle understanding
+existed between them. It was this that turned the balance in its favour, this
+and its courage. Moreover, though good-tempered, it was a terrible fighter, and
+its anger when provoked by a righteous cause was a fury of fire, and
+irresistible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It had come to him quite young, straight from the shepherd, with the air of the
+hills yet in its nostrils, and was then little more than skin and bones and
+teeth. For a collie it was sturdily built, its nose blunter than most, its
+yellow hair stiff rather than silky, and it had full eyes, unlike the slit eyes
+of its breed. Only its master could touch it, for it ignored strangers, and
+despised their pattings&mdash;when any dared to pat it. There was something
+patriarchal about the old beast. He was in earnest, and went through life with
+tremendous energy and big things in view, as though he had the reputation of
+his whole race to uphold. And to watch him fighting against odds was to
+understand why he was terrible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his relations with Smoke he was always absurdly gentle; also he was
+fatherly; and at the same time betrayed a certain diffidence or shyness. He
+recognised that Smoke called for strong yet respectful management. The
+cat&rsquo;s circuitous methods puzzled him, and his elaborate pretences perhaps
+shocked the dog&rsquo;s liking for direct, undisguised action. Yet, while he
+failed to comprehend these tortuous feline mysteries, he was never contemptuous
+or condescending; and he presided over the safety of his furry black friend
+somewhat as a father, loving, but intuitive, might superintend the vagaries of
+a wayward and talented child. And, in return, Smoke rewarded him with
+exhibitions of fascinating and audacious mischief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And these brief descriptions of their characters are necessary for the proper
+understanding of what subsequently took place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With Smoke sleeping in the folds of his fur coat, and the collie lying watchful
+on the seat opposite, John Silence went down in his motor after dinner on the
+night of November 15th.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the fog was so dense that they were obliged to travel at quarter speed the
+entire way.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+It was after ten o&rsquo;clock when he dismissed the motor and entered the
+dingy little house with the latchkey provided by Pender. He found the hall gas
+turned low, and a fire in the study. Books and food had also been placed ready
+by the servant according to instructions. Coils of fog rushed in after him
+through the open door and filled the hall and passage with its cold discomfort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first thing Dr. Silence did was to lock up Smoke in the study with a saucer
+of milk before the fire, and then make a search of the house with Flame. The
+dog ran cheerfully behind him all the way while he tried the doors of the other
+rooms to make sure they were locked. He nosed about into corners and made
+little excursions on his own account. His manner was expectant. He knew there
+must be something unusual about the proceeding, because it was contrary to the
+habits of his whole life not to be asleep at this hour on the mat in front of
+the fire. He kept looking up into his master&rsquo;s face, as door after door
+was tried, with an expression of intelligent sympathy, but at the same time a
+certain air of disapproval. Yet everything his master did was good in his eyes,
+and he betrayed as little impatience as possible with all this unnecessary
+journeying to and fro. If the doctor was pleased to play this sort of game at
+such an hour of the night, it was surely not for him to object. So he played
+it, too; and was very busy and earnest about it into the bargain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After an uneventful search they came down again to the study, and here Dr.
+Silence discovered Smoke washing his face calmly in front of the fire. The
+saucer of milk was licked dry and clean; the preliminary examination that cats
+always make in new surroundings had evidently been satisfactorily concluded. He
+drew an arm-chair up to the fire, stirred the coals into a blaze, arranged the
+table and lamp to his satisfaction for reading, and then prepared
+surreptitiously to watch the animals. He wished to observe them carefully
+without their being aware of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, in spite of their respective ages, it was the regular custom of these two
+to play together every night before sleep. Smoke always made the advances,
+beginning with grave impudence to pat the dog&rsquo;s tail, and Flame played
+cumbrously, with condescension. It was his duty, rather than pleasure; he was
+glad when it was over, and sometimes he was very determined and refused to play
+at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this night was one of the occasions on which he was firm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor, looking cautiously over the top of his book, watched the cat begin
+the performance. It started by gazing with an innocent expression at the dog
+where he lay with nose on paws and eyes wide open in the middle of the floor.
+Then it got up and made as though it meant to walk to the door, going
+deliberately and very softly. Flame&rsquo;s eyes followed it until it was
+beyond the range of sight, and then the cat turned sharply and began patting
+his tail tentatively with one paw. The tail moved slightly in reply, and Smoke
+changed paws and tapped it again. The dog, however, did not rise to play as was
+his wont, and the cat fell to parting it briskly with both paws. Flame still
+lay motionless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This puzzled and bored the cat, and it went round and stared hard into its
+friend&rsquo;s face to see what was the matter. Perhaps some inarticulate
+message flashed from the dog&rsquo;s eyes into its own little brain, making it
+understand that the programme for the night had better not begin with play.
+Perhaps it only realised that its friend was immovable. But, whatever the
+reason, its usual persistence thenceforward deserted it, and it made no further
+attempts at persuasion. Smoke yielded at once to the dog&rsquo;s mood; it sat
+down where it was and began to wash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the washing, the doctor noted, was by no means its real purpose; it only
+used it to mask something else; it stopped at the most busy and furious moments
+and began to stare about the room. Its thoughts wandered absurdly. It peered
+intently at the curtains; at the shadowy corners; at empty space above; leaving
+its body in curiously awkward positions for whole minutes together. Then it
+turned sharply and stared with a sudden signal of intelligence at the dog, and
+Flame at once rose somewhat stiffly to his feet and began to wander aimlessly
+and restlessly to and fro about the floor. Smoke followed him, padding quietly
+at his heels. Between them they made what seemed to be a deliberate search of
+the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, here, as he watched them, noting carefully every detail of the performance
+over the top of his book, yet making no effort to interfere, it seemed to the
+doctor that the first beginnings of a faint distress betrayed themselves in the
+collie, and in the cat the stirrings of a vague excitement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He observed them closely. The fog was thick in the air, and the tobacco smoke
+from his pipe added to its density; the furniture at the far end stood mistily,
+and where the shadows congregated in hanging clouds under the ceiling, it was
+difficult to see clearly at all; the lamplight only reached to a level of five
+feet from the floor, above which came layers of comparative darkness, so that
+the room appeared twice as lofty as it actually was. By means of the lamp and
+the fire, however, the carpet was everywhere clearly visible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The animals made their silent tour of the floor, sometimes the dog leading,
+sometimes the cat; occasionally they looked at one another as though exchanging
+signals; and once or twice, in spite of the limited space, he lost sight of one
+or other among the fog and the shadows. Their curiosity, it appeared to him,
+was something more than the excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a
+strange room; yet, so far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely
+kept his mind quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part
+should communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the value of their
+independent behaviour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They made a very thorough journey, leaving no piece of furniture unexamined, or
+unsmelt. Flame led the way, walking slowly with lowered head, and Smoke
+followed demurely at his heels, making a transparent pretence of not being
+interested, yet missing nothing. And, at length, they returned, the old collie
+first, and came to rest on the mat before the fire. Flame rested his muzzle on
+his master&rsquo;s knee, smiling beatifically while he patted the yellow head
+and spoke his name; and Smoke, coming a little later, pretending he came by
+chance, looked from the empty saucer to his face, lapped up the milk when it
+was given him to the last drop, and then sprang upon his knees and curled round
+for the sleep it had fully earned and intended to enjoy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Silence descended upon the room. Only the breathing of the dog upon the mat
+came through the deep stillness, like the pulse of time marking the minutes;
+and the steady drip, drip of the fog outside upon the window-ledges dismally
+testified to the inclemency of the night beyond. And the soft crashings of the
+coals as the fire settled down into the grate became less and less audible as
+the fire sank and the flames resigned their fierceness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was now well after eleven o&rsquo;clock, and Dr. Silence devoted himself
+again to his book. He read the words on the printed page and took in their
+meaning superficially, yet without starting into life the correlations of
+thought and suggestions that should accompany interesting reading. Underneath,
+all the while, his mental energies were absorbed in watching, listening,
+waiting for what might come. He was not over-sanguine himself, yet he did not
+wish to be taken by surprise. Moreover, the animals, his sensitive barometers,
+had incontinently gone to sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After reading a dozen pages, however, he realised that his mind was really
+occupied in reviewing the features of Pender&rsquo;s extraordinary story, and
+that it was no longer necessary to steady his imagination by studying the dull
+paragraphs detailed in the pages before him. He laid down his book accordingly,
+and allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the features of the Case. Speculations
+as to the meaning, however, he rigorously suppressed, knowing that such
+thoughts would act upon his imagination like wind upon the glowing embers of a
+fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the night wore on the silence grew deeper and deeper, and only at rare
+intervals he heard the sound of wheels on the main road a hundred yards away,
+where the horses went at a walking pace owing to the density of the fog. The
+echo of pedestrian footsteps no longer reached him, the clamour of occasional
+voices no longer came down the side street. The night, muffled by fog, shrouded
+by veils of ultimate mystery, hung about the haunted villa like a doom. Nothing
+in the house stirred. Stillness, in a thick blanket, lay over the upper
+storeys. Only the mist in the room grew more dense, he thought, and the damp
+cold more penetrating. Certainly, from time to time, he shivered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The collie, now deep in slumber, moved occasionally,&mdash;grunted, sighed, or
+twitched his legs in dreams. Smoke lay on his knees, a pool of warm, black fur,
+only the closest observation detecting the movement of his sleek sides. It was
+difficult to distinguish exactly where his head and body joined in that circle
+of glistening hair; only a black satin nose and a tiny tip of pink tongue
+betrayed the secret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence watched him, and felt comfortable. The collie&rsquo;s breathing was
+soothing. The fire was well built, and would burn for another two hours without
+attention. He was not conscious of the least nervousness. He particularly
+wished to remain in his ordinary and normal state of mind, and to force
+nothing. If sleep came naturally, he would let it come&mdash;and even welcome
+it. The coldness of the room, when the fire died down later, would be sure to
+wake him again; and it would then be time enough to carry these sleeping
+barometers up to bed. From various psychic premonitions he knew quite well that
+the night would not pass without adventure; but he did not wish to force its
+arrival; and he wished to remain normal, and let the animals remain normal, so
+that, when it came, it would be unattended by excitement or by any straining of
+the attention. Many experiments had made him wise. And, for the rest, he had no
+fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Accordingly, after a time, he did fall asleep as he had expected, and the last
+thing he remembered, before oblivion slipped up over his eyes like soft wool,
+was the picture of Flame stretching all four legs at once, and sighing noisily
+as he sought a more comfortable position for his paws and muzzle upon the mat.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+It was a good deal later when he became aware that a weight lay upon his chest,
+and that something was pencilling over his face and mouth. A soft touch on the
+cheek woke him. Something was patting him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat up with a jerk, and found himself staring straight into a pair of
+brilliant eyes, half green, half black. Smoke&rsquo;s face lay level with his
+own; and the cat had climbed up with its front paws upon his chest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lamp had burned low and the fire was nearly out, yet Dr. Silence saw in a
+moment that the cat was in an excited state. It kneaded with its front paws
+into his chest, shifting from one to the other. He felt them prodding against
+him. It lifted a leg very carefully and patted his cheek gingerly. Its fur, he
+saw, was standing ridgewise upon its back; the ears were flattened back
+somewhat; the tail was switching sharply. The cat, of course, had wakened him
+with a purpose, and the instant he realised this, he set it upon the arm of the
+chair and sprang up with a quick turn to face the empty room behind him. By
+some curious instinct, his arms of their own accord assumed an attitude of
+defence in front of him, as though to ward off something that threatened his
+safety. Yet nothing was visible. Only shapes of fog hung about rather heavily
+in the air, moving slightly to and fro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mind was now fully alert, and the last vestiges of sleep gone. He turned
+the lamp higher and peered about him. Two things he became aware of at once:
+one, that Smoke, while excited, was <i>pleasurably</i> excited; the other, that
+the collie was no longer visible upon the mat at his feet. He had crept away to
+the corner of the wall farthest from the window, and lay watching the room with
+wide-open eyes, in which lurked plainly something of alarm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something in the dog&rsquo;s behaviour instantly struck Dr. Silence as unusual,
+and, calling him by name, he moved across to pat him. Flame got up, wagged his
+tail, and came over slowly to the rug, uttering a low sound that was half
+growl, half whine. He was evidently perturbed about something, and his master
+was proceeding to administer comfort when his attention was suddenly drawn to
+the antics of his other four-footed companion, the cat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And what he saw filled him with something like amazement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smoke had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied the
+middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as ramrods, it was
+steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow space, uttering, as it did
+so, those curious little guttural sounds of pleasure that only an animal of the
+feline species knows how to make expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened
+legs and arched back made it appear larger than usual, and the black visage
+wore a smile of beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an
+ecstasy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again along
+the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little muffled drums.
+It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against the ankles of some one
+who remained invisible. A thrill ran down the doctor&rsquo;s spine as he stood
+and stared. His experiment was growing interesting at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He called the collie&rsquo;s attention to his friend&rsquo;s performance to see
+whether he too was aware of anything standing there upon the carpet, and the
+dog&rsquo;s behaviour was significant and corroborative. He came as far as his
+master&rsquo;s knees and then stopped dead, refusing to investigate closely. In
+vain Dr. Silence urged him; he wagged his tail, whined a little, and stood in a
+half-crouching attitude, staring alternately at the cat and at his
+master&rsquo;s face. He was, apparently, both puzzled and alarmed, and the
+whine went deeper and deeper down into his throat till it changed into an ugly
+snarl of awakening anger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the doctor called to him in a tone of command he had never known to be
+disregarded; but still the dog, though springing up in response, declined to
+move nearer. He made tentative motions, pranced a little like a dog about to
+take to water, pretended to bark, and ran to and fro on the carpet. So far
+there was no actual fear in his manner, but he was uneasy and anxious, and
+nothing would induce him to go within touching distance of the walking cat.
+Once he made a complete circuit, but always carefully out of reach; and in the
+end he returned to his master&rsquo;s legs and rubbed vigorously against him.
+Flame did not like the performance at all: that much was quite clear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For several minutes John Silence watched the performance of the cat with
+profound attention and without interfering. Then he called to the animal by
+name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Smoke, you mysterious beastie, what in the world are you about?&rdquo;
+he said, in a coaxing tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cat looked up at him for a moment, smiling in its ecstasy, blinking its
+eyes, but too happy to pause. He spoke to it again. He called to it several
+times, and each time it turned upon him its blazing eyes, drunk with inner
+delight, opening and shutting its lips, its body large and rigid with
+excitement. Yet it never for one instant paused in its short journeys to and
+fro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He noted exactly what it did: it walked, he saw, the same number of paces each
+time, some six or seven steps, and then it turned sharply and retraced them. By
+the pattern of the great roses in the carpet he measured it. It kept to the
+same direction and the same line. It behaved precisely as though it were
+rubbing against something solid. Undoubtedly, there was something standing
+there on that strip of carpet, something invisible to the doctor, something
+that alarmed the dog, yet caused the cat unspeakable pleasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Smokie!&rdquo; he called again, &ldquo;Smokie, you black mystery, what
+is it excites you so?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again the cat looked up at him for a brief second, and then continued its
+sentry-walk, blissfully happy, intensely preoccupied. And, for an instant, as
+he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness stirred in the
+depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment upon this curious
+behaviour of the uncanny creature before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There rose in him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with the
+whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it, the domestic
+cat&mdash;their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their incalculable
+subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human beings understood lay the
+sources of their elusive activities. As he watched the indescribable bearing of
+the little creature mincing along the strip of carpet under his eyes,
+coquetting with the powers of darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome
+visitor, there stirred in his heart a feeling strangely akin to awe. Its
+indifference to human kind, its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him
+forcibly with fresh meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret
+purposes of its real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals.
+Its absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater&rsquo;s
+words that &ldquo;no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally
+itself with the mysterious&rdquo;; and he became suddenly aware that the
+presence of the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of Putney Hill was
+uncommonly welcome to him. He was glad to feel that Flame&rsquo;s dependable
+personality was with him. The savage growling at his heels was a pleasant
+sound. He was glad to hear it. That marching cat made him uneasy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finding that Smoke paid no further attention to his words, the doctor decided
+upon action. Would it rub against his leg, too? He would take it by surprise
+and see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stepped quickly forward and placed himself upon the exact strip of carpet
+where it walked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no cat is ever taken by surprise! The moment he occupied the space of the
+Intruder, setting his feet on the woven roses midway in the line of travel,
+Smoke suddenly stopped purring and sat down. If lifted up its face with the
+most innocent stare imaginable of its green eyes. He could have sworn it
+laughed. It was a perfect child again. In a single second it had resumed its
+simple, domestic manner; and it gazed at him in such a way that he almost felt
+Smoke was the normal being, and <i>his</i> was the eccentric behaviour that was
+being watched. It was consummate, the manner in which it brought about this
+change so easily and so quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Superb little actor!&rdquo; he laughed in spite of himself, and stooped
+to stroke the shining black back. But, in a flash, as he touched its fur, the
+cat turned and spat at him viciously, striking at his hand with one paw. Then,
+with a hurried scutter of feet, it shot like a shadow across the floor and a
+moment later was calmly sitting over by the window-curtains washing its face as
+though nothing interested it in the whole world but the cleanness of its cheeks
+and whiskers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence straightened himself up and drew a long breath. He realised that
+the performance was temporarily at an end. The collie, meanwhile, who had
+watched the whole proceeding with marked disapproval, had now lain down again
+upon the mat by the fire, no longer growling. It seemed to the doctor just as
+though something that had entered the room while he slept, alarming the dog,
+yet bringing happiness to the cat, had now gone out again, leaving all as it
+was before. Whatever it was that excited its blissful attentions had retreated
+for the moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He realised this intuitively. Smoke evidently realised it, too, for presently
+he deigned to march back to the fireplace and jump upon his master&rsquo;s
+knees. Dr. Silence, patient and determined, settled down once more to his book.
+The animals soon slept; the fire blazed cheerfully; and the cold fog from
+outside poured into the room through every available chink and crannie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a long time silence and peace reigned in the room and Dr. Silence availed
+himself of the quietness to make careful notes of what had happened. He entered
+for future use in other cases an exhaustive analysis of what he had observed,
+especially with regard to the effect upon the two animals. It is impossible
+here, nor would it be intelligible to the reader unversed in the knowledge of
+the region known to a scientifically trained psychic like Dr. Silence, to
+detail these observations. But to him it was clear, up to a certain
+point&mdash;for the rest he must still wait and watch. So far, at least, he
+realised that while he slept in the chair&mdash;that is, while his will was
+dormant&mdash;the room had suffered intrusion from what he recognised as an
+intensely active Force, and might later be forced to acknowledge as something
+more than merely a blind force, namely, a distinct personality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So far it had affected himself scarcely at all, but had acted directly upon the
+simpler organisms of the animals. It stimulated keenly the centres of the
+cat&rsquo;s psychic being, inducing a state of instant happiness (intensifying
+its consciousness probably in the same way a drug or stimulant intensifies that
+of a human being); whereas it alarmed the less sensitive dog, causing it to
+feel a vague apprehension and distress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His own sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse it
+temporarily, yet he felt convinced&mdash;the indications were not lacking even
+while he sat there making notes&mdash;that it still remained near to him,
+conditionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering force for a
+second attack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, further, he intuitively understood that the relations between the two
+animals had undergone a subtle change: that the cat had become immeasurably
+superior, confident, sure of itself in its own peculiar region, whereas Flame
+had been weakened by an attack he could not comprehend and knew not how to
+reply to. Though not yet afraid, he was defiant&mdash;ready to act against a
+fear that he felt to be approaching. He was no longer fatherly and protective
+towards the cat. Smoke held the key to the situation; and both he and the cat
+knew it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, as the minutes passed, John Silence sat and waited, keenly on the alert,
+wondering how soon the attack would be renewed, and at what point it would be
+diverted from the animals and directed upon himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The book lay on the floor beside him, his notes were complete. With one hand on
+the cat&rsquo;s fur, and the dog&rsquo;s front paws resting against his feet,
+the three of them dozed comfortably before the hot fire while the night wore on
+and the silence deepened towards midnight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was well after one o&rsquo;clock in the morning when Dr. Silence turned the
+lamp out and lighted the candle preparatory to going up to bed. Then Smoke
+suddenly woke with a loud sharp purr and sat up. It neither stretched, washed
+nor turned: it listened. And the doctor, watching it, realised that a certain
+indefinable change had come about that very moment in the room. A swift
+readjustment of the forces within the four walls had taken place&mdash;a new
+disposition of their personal equations. The balance was destroyed, the former
+harmony gone. Smoke, most sensitive of barometers, had been the first to feel
+it, but the dog was not slow to follow suit, for on looking down he noted that
+Flame was no longer asleep. He was lying with eyes wide open, and that same
+instant he sat up on his great haunches and began to growl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence was in the act of taking the matches to re-light the lamp when an
+audible movement in the room behind him made him pause. Smoke leaped down from
+his knee and moved forward a few paces across the carpet. Then it stopped and
+stared fixedly; and the doctor stood up on the rug to watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he rose the sound was repeated, and he discovered that it was not in the
+room as he first thought, but outside, and that it came from more directions
+than one. There was a rushing, sweeping noise against the window-panes, and
+simultaneously a sound of something brushing against the door&mdash;out in the
+hall. Smoke advanced sedately across the carpet, twitching his tail, and sat
+down within a foot of the door. The influence that had destroyed the harmonious
+conditions of the room had apparently moved in advance of its cause. Clearly,
+something was about to happen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the first time that night John Silence hesitated; the thought of that dark
+narrow hall-way, choked with fog, and destitute of human comfort, was
+unpleasant. He became aware of a faint creeping of his flesh. He knew, of
+course, that the actual opening of the door was not necessary to the invasion
+of the room that was about to take place, since neither doors nor windows, nor
+any other solid barriers could interpose an obstacle to what was seeking
+entrance. Yet the opening of the door would be significant and symbolic, and he
+distinctly shrank from it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But for a moment only. Smoke, turning with a show of impatience, recalled him
+to his purpose, and he moved past the sitting, watching creature, and
+deliberately opened the door to its full width.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What subsequently happened, happened in the feeble and flickering light of the
+solitary candle on the mantlepiece.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the opened door he saw the hall, dimly lit and thick with fog. Nothing,
+of course, was visible&mdash;nothing but the hat-stand, the African spears in
+dark lines upon the wall and the high-backed wooden chair standing grotesquely
+underneath on the oilcloth floor. For one instant the fog seemed to move and
+thicken oddly; but he set that down to the score of the imagination. The door
+had opened upon nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet Smoke apparently thought otherwise, and the deep growling of the collie
+from the mat at the back of the room seemed to confirm his judgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, proud and self-possessed, the cat had again risen to his feet, and having
+advanced to the door, was now ushering some one slowly into the room. Nothing
+could have been more evident. He paced from side to side, bowing his little
+head with great <i>empressement</i> and holding his stiffened tail aloft like a
+flag-staff. He turned this way and that, mincing to and fro, and showing signs
+of supreme satisfaction. He was in his element. He welcomed the intrusion, and
+apparently reckoned that his companions, the doctor and the dog, would welcome
+it likewise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Intruder had returned for a second attack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence moved slowly backwards and took up his position on the hearthrug,
+keying himself up to a condition of concentrated attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He noted that Flame stood beside him, facing the room, with body motionless,
+and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious swaying movement. His
+eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and jaws thrust forward, his legs
+tense and ready to leap. Savage, ready for attack or defence, yet dreadfully
+puzzled and perhaps already a little cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on
+his spine and sides positively bristling outwards as though a wind played
+through it. In the dim firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf,
+silent, eyes shooting dark fire, exceedingly formidable. It was Flame, the
+terrible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smoke, meanwhile, advanced from the door towards the middle of the room,
+adopting the very slow pace of an invisible companion. A few feet away it
+stopped and began to smile and blink its eyes. There was something deliberately
+coaxing in its attitude as it stood there undecided on the carpet, clearly
+wishing to effect some sort of introduction between the Intruder and its canine
+friend and ally. It assumed its most winning manners, purring, smiling, looking
+persuasively from one to the other, and making quick tentative steps first in
+one direction and then in the other. There had always existed such perfect
+understanding between them in everything. Surely Flame would appreciate
+Smoke&rsquo;s intention now, and acquiesce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the old collie made no advances. He bared his teeth, lifting his lips till
+the gums showed, and stood stockstill with fixed eyes and heaving sides. The
+doctor moved a little farther back, watching intently the smallest movement,
+and it was just then he divined suddenly from the cat&rsquo;s behaviour and
+attitude that it was not only a single companion it had ushered into the room,
+but <i>several</i>. It kept crossing over from one to the other, looking up at
+each in turn. It sought to win over the dog to friendliness with them all. The
+original Intruder had come back with reinforcements. And at the same time he
+further realised that the Intruder was something more than a blindly acting
+force, impersonal though destructive. It was a Personality, and moreover a
+great personality. And it was accompanied for the purposes of assistance by a
+host of other personalities, minor in degree, but similar in kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He braced himself in the corner against the mantelpiece and waited, his whole
+being roused to defence, for he was now fully aware that the attack had spread
+to include himself as well as the animals, and he must be on the alert. He
+strained his eyes through the foggy atmosphere, trying in vain to see what the
+cat and dog saw; but the candlelight threw an uncertain and flickering light
+across the room and his eyes discerned nothing. On the floor Smoke moved softly
+in front of him like a black shadow, his eyes gleaming as he turned his head,
+still trying with many insinuating gestures and much purring to bring about the
+introductions he desired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was all in vain. Flame stood riveted to one spot, motionless as a figure
+carved in stone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some minutes passed, during which only the cat moved, and then there came a
+sharp change. Flame began to back towards the wall. He moved his head from side
+to side as he went, sometimes turning to snap at something almost behind him.
+They were advancing upon him, trying to surround him. His distress became very
+marked from now onwards, and it seemed to the doctor that his anger merged into
+genuine terror and became overwhelmed by it. The savage growl sounded
+perilously like a whine, and more than once he tried to dive past his
+master&rsquo;s legs, as though hunting for a way of escape. He was trying to
+avoid something that everywhere blocked the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This terror of the indomitable fighter impressed the doctor enormously; yet
+also painfully; stirring his impatience; for he had never before seen the dog
+show signs of giving in, and it distressed him to witness it. He knew, however,
+that he was not giving in easily, and understood that it was really impossible
+for him to gauge the animal&rsquo;s sensations properly at all. What Flame
+felt, and saw, must be terrible indeed to turn him all at once into a coward.
+He faced something that made him afraid of more than his life merely. The
+doctor spoke a few quick words of encouragement to him, and stroked the
+bristling hair. But without much success. The collie seemed already beyond the
+reach of comfort such as that, and the collapse of the old dog followed indeed
+very speedily after this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Smoke, meanwhile, remained behind, watching the advance, but not joining in
+it; sitting, pleased and expectant, considering that all was going well and as
+it wished. It was kneading on the carpet with its front paws&mdash;slowly,
+laboriously, as though its feet were dipped in treacle. The sound its claws
+made as they caught in the threads was distinctly audible. It was still
+smiling, blinking, purring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly the collie uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to one
+side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom. The next
+instant he dashed past his master&rsquo;s legs, almost upsetting his balance,
+and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly against walls and
+furniture. But that bark was significant; the doctor had heard it before and
+knew what it meant: for it was the cry of the fighter against odds and it meant
+that the old beast had found his courage again. Possibly it was only the
+courage of despair, but at any rate the fighting would be terrific. And Dr.
+Silence understood, too, that he dared not interfere. Flame must fight his own
+enemies in his own way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the cat, too, had heard that dreadful bark; and it, too, had understood.
+This was more than it had bargained for. Across the dim shadows of that haunted
+room there must have passed some secret signal of distress between the animals.
+Smoke stood up and looked swiftly about him. He uttered a piteous meow and
+trotted smartly away into the greater darkness by the windows. What his object
+was only those endowed with the spirit-like intelligence of cats might know.
+But, at any rate, he had at last ranged himself on the side of his friend. And
+the little beast meant business.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same moment the collie managed to gain the door. The doctor saw him rush
+through into the hall like a flash of yellow light. He shot across the
+oilcloth, and tore up the stairs, but in another second he appeared again,
+flying down the steps and landing at the bottom in a tumbling heap, whining,
+cringing, terrified. The doctor saw him slink back into the room again and
+crawl round by the wall towards the cat. Was, then, even the staircase
+occupied? Did <i>They</i> stand also in the hall? Was the whole house crowded
+from floor to ceiling?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thought came to add to the keen distress he felt at the sight of the
+collie&rsquo;s discomfiture. And, indeed, his own personal distress had
+increased in a marked degree during the past minutes, and continued to increase
+steadily to the climax. He recognised that the drain on his own vitality grew
+steadily, and that the attack was now directed against himself even more than
+against the defeated dog, and the too much deceived cat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It all seemed so rapid and uncalculated after that&mdash;the events that took
+place in this little modern room at the top of Putney Hill between midnight and
+sunrise&mdash;that Dr. Silence was hardly able to follow and remember it all.
+It came about with such uncanny swiftness and terror; the light was so
+uncertain; the movements of the black cat so difficult to follow on the dark
+carpet, and the doctor himself so weary and taken by surprise&mdash;that he
+found it almost impossible to observe accurately, or to recall afterwards
+precisely what it was he had seen or in what order the incidents had taken
+place. He never could understand what defect of vision on his part made it seem
+as though the cat had duplicated itself at first, and then increased
+indefinitely, so that there were at least a dozen of them darting silently
+about the floor, leaping softly on to chairs and tables, passing like shadows
+from the open door to the end of the room, all black as sin, with brilliant
+green eyes flashing fire in all directions. It was like the reflections from a
+score of mirrors placed round the walls at different angles. Nor could he make
+out at the time why the size of the room seemed to have altered, grown much
+larger, and why it extended away behind him where ordinarily the wall should
+have been. The snarling of the enraged and terrified collie sounded sometimes
+so far away; the ceiling seemed to have raised itself so much higher than
+before, and much of the furniture had changed in appearance and shifted
+marvellously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was all so confused and confusing, as though the little room he knew had
+become merged and transformed into the dimensions of quite another chamber,
+that came to him, with its host of cats and its strange distances, in a sort of
+vision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these changes came about a little later, and at a time when his attention
+was so concentrated upon the proceedings of Smoke and the collie, that he only
+observed them, as it were, subconsciously. And the excitement, the flickering
+candlelight, the distress he felt for the collie, and the distorting atmosphere
+of fog were the poorest possible allies to careful observation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first he was only aware that the dog was repeating his short dangerous bark
+from time to time, snapping viciously at the empty air, a foot or so from the
+ground. Once, indeed, he sprang upwards and forwards, working furiously with
+teeth and paws, and with a noise like wolves fighting, but only to dash back
+the next minute against the wall behind him. Then, after lying still for a bit,
+he rose to a crouching position as though to spring again, snarling horribly
+and making short half-circles with lowered head. And Smoke all the while meowed
+piteously by the window as though trying to draw the attack upon himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that the rush of the whole dreadful business seemed to turn aside
+from the dog and direct itself upon his own person. The collie had made another
+spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner, where he made noise enough
+in his savage rage to waken the dead before he fell to whining and then finally
+lay still. And directly afterwards the doctor&rsquo;s own distress became
+intolerably acute. He had made a half movement forward to come to the rescue
+when a veil that was denser than mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene,
+draping room, walls, animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also
+about his own mind. Other forms moved silently across the field of vision,
+forms that he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not. Unholy
+thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil presented
+themselves seductively. Ice seemed to settle about his heart, and his mind
+trembled. He began to lose memory&mdash;memory of his identity, of where he
+was, of what he ought to do. The very foundations of his strength were shaken.
+His will seemed paralysed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was then that the room filled with this horde of cats, all dark as the
+night, all silent, all with lamping eyes of green fire. The dimensions of the
+place altered and shifted. He was in a much larger space. The whining of the
+dog sounded far away, and all about him the cats flew busily to and fro,
+silently playing their tearing, rushing game of evil, weaving the pattern of
+their dark purpose upon the floor. He strove hard to collect himself and
+remember the words of power he had made use of before in similar dread
+positions where his dangerous practice had sometimes led; but he could recall
+nothing consecutively; a mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and
+his forces scattered. The deeps within were too troubled for healing power to
+come out of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour thrown
+upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the veil; but at the
+time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as with all true glamour, was
+unable to grasp where the true ended and the false began. He was caught
+momentarily in the same vortex that had sought to lure the cat to destruction
+through its delight, and threatened utterly to overwhelm the dog through its
+terror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and tearing its
+way down. The windows rattled. The candle flickered and went out. The glacial
+atmosphere closed round him with the cold of death, and a great rushing sound
+swept by overhead as though the ceiling had lifted to a great height. He heard
+the door shut. Far away it sounded. He felt lost, shelterless in the depths of
+his soul. Yet still he held out and resisted while the climax of the fight came
+nearer and nearer.... He had stepped into the stream of forces awakened by
+Pender and he knew that he must withstand them to the end or come to a
+conclusion that it was not good for a man to come to. Something from the region
+of utter cold was upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then quite suddenly, through the confused mists about him, there slowly
+rose up the Personality that had been all the time directing the battle. Some
+force entered his being that shook him as the tempest shakes a leaf, and close
+against his eyes&mdash;clean level with his face&mdash;he found himself staring
+into the wreck of a vast dark Countenance, a countenance that was terrible even
+in its ruin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For ruined it was, and terrible it was, and the mark of spiritual evil was
+branded everywhere upon its broken features. Eyes, face and hair rose level
+with his own, and for a space of time he never could properly measure, or
+determine, these two, a man and a woman, looked straight into each
+other&rsquo;s visages and down into each other&rsquo;s hearts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And John Silence, the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his own
+against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose soul
+was on the side of the Dark Powers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the climax that touched the depth of power within him and began to
+restore him slowly to his own. He was conscious, of course, of effort, and yet
+it seemed no superhuman one, for he had recognised the character of his
+opponent&rsquo;s power, and he called upon the good within him to meet and
+overcome it. The inner forces stirred and trembled in response to his call.
+They did not at first come readily as was their habit, for under the spell of
+glamour they had already been diabolically lulled into inactivity, but come
+they eventually did, rising out of the inner spiritual nature he had learned
+with so much time and pain to awaken to life. And power and confidence came
+with them. He began to breathe deeply and regularly, and at the same time to
+absorb into himself the forces opposed to him, and to <i>turn them to his own
+account</i>. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour into
+him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus
+enormously increased his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this spiritual alchemy he had learned. He understood that force ultimately
+is everywhere one and the same; it is the motive behind that makes it good or
+evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. He knew&mdash;provided he was not
+first robbed of self-control&mdash;how vicariously to absorb these evil
+radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes.
+And, since his motive was pure and his soul fearless, they could not work him
+harm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus he stood in the main stream of evil unwittingly attracted by Pender,
+deflecting its course upon himself; and after passing through the purifying
+filter of his own unselfishness these energies could only add to his store of
+experience, of knowledge, and therefore of power. And, as his self-control
+returned to him, he gradually accomplished this purpose, even though trembling
+while he did so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the struggle was severe, and in spite of the freezing chill of the air, the
+perspiration poured down his face. Then, by slow degrees, the dark and dreadful
+countenance faded, the glamour passed from his soul, the normal proportions
+returned to walls and ceiling, the forms melted back into the fog, and the
+whirl of rushing shadow-cats disappeared whence they came.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John Silence was
+restored to the full control of his own will-power. In a deep, modulated voice
+he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that slowly rolled through the air
+like a rising sea, filling the room with powerful vibratory activities that
+whelmed all irregularities of lesser vibrations in its own swelling tone. He
+made certain sigils, gestures and movements at the same time. For several
+minutes he continued to utter these words, until at length the growing volume
+dominated the whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it.
+For just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil forces
+by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study the occult use
+of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region wherein the powers of
+spiritual evil work their fell purposes. Harmony was restored first of all to
+his own soul, and thence to the room and all its occupants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, after himself, the first to recognise it was the old dog lying in his
+corner. Flame began suddenly uttering sounds of pleasure, that
+&ldquo;something&rdquo; between a growl and a grunt that dogs make upon being
+restored to their master&rsquo;s confidence. Dr. Silence heard the thumping of
+the collie&rsquo;s tail against the floor. And the grunt and the thumping
+touched the depth of affection in the man&rsquo;s heart, and gave him some
+inkling of what agonies the dumb creature had suffered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next, from the shadows by the window, a somewhat shrill purring announced the
+restoration of the cat to its normal state. Smoke was advancing across the
+carpet. He seemed very pleased with himself, and smiled with an expression of
+supreme innocence. He was no shadow-cat, but real and full of his usual and
+perfect self-possession. He marched along, picking his way delicately, but with
+a stately dignity that suggested his ancestry with the majesty of Egypt. His
+eyes no longer glared; they shone steadily before him, they radiated, not
+excitement, but knowledge. Clearly he was anxious to make amends for the
+mischief to which he had unwittingly lent himself owing to his subtle and
+electric constitution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still uttering his sharp high purrings he marched up to his master and rubbed
+vigorously against his legs. Then he stood on his hind feet and pawed his knees
+and stared beseechingly up into his face. He turned his head towards the corner
+where the collie still lay, thumping his tail feebly and pathetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence understood. He bent down and stroked the creature&rsquo;s living
+fur, noting the line of bright blue sparks that followed the motion of his hand
+down its back. And then they advanced together towards the corner where the dog
+was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smoke went first and put his nose gently against his friend&rsquo;s muzzle,
+purring while he rubbed, and uttering little soft sounds of affection in his
+throat. The doctor lit the candle and brought it over. He saw the collie lying
+on its side against the wall; it was utterly exhausted, and foam still hung
+about its jaws. Its tail and eyes responded to the sound of its name, but it
+was evidently very weak and overcome. Smoke continued to rub against its cheek
+and nose and eyes, sometimes even standing on its body and kneading into the
+thick yellow hair. Flame replied from time to time by little licks of the
+tongue, most of them curiously misdirected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Dr. Silence felt intuitively that something disastrous had happened, and
+his heart was wrung. He stroked the dear body, feeling it over for bruises or
+broken bones, but finding none. He fed it with what remained of the sandwiches
+and milk, but the creature clumsily upset the saucer and lost the sandwiches
+between its paws, so that the doctor had to feed it with his own hand. And all
+the while Smoke meowed piteously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then John Silence began to understand. He went across to the farther side of
+the room and called aloud to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Flame, old man! come!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At any other time the dog would have been upon him in an instant, barking and
+leaping to the shoulder. And even now he got up, though heavily and awkwardly,
+to his feet. He started to run, wagging his tail more briskly. He collided
+first with a chair, and then ran straight into a table. Smoke trotted close at
+his side, trying his very best to guide him. But it was useless. Dr. Silence
+had to lift him up into his own arms and carry him like a baby. For he was
+blind.
+</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was a week later when John Silence called to see the author in his new
+house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy again with
+his writing. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he seemed cheerful and
+confident.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humour restored?&rdquo; laughed the doctor, as soon as they were
+comfortably settled in the room overlooking the Park.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had no trouble since I left that dreadful place,&rdquo;
+returned Pender gratefully; &ldquo;and thanks to you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor stopped him with a gesture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we&rsquo;ll discuss your new
+plans afterwards, and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you
+settle elsewhere. Of course it must be pulled down, for it&rsquo;s not fit for
+any sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted in the
+same way you were. Although, personally, I think the evil has exhausted itself
+by now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with the
+animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t pretend to understand,&rdquo; Pender said, when the
+account was finished, &ldquo;but I and my wife are intensely relieved to be
+free of it all. Only I must say I should like to know something of the former
+history of the house. When we took it six months ago I heard no word against
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can satisfy your curiosity to some extent,&rdquo; he said, running his
+eye over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; &ldquo;for by my
+secretary&rsquo;s investigations I have been able to check certain information
+obtained in the hypnotic trance by a &lsquo;sensitive&rsquo; who helps me in
+such cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have been a woman of
+singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by hanging,
+after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England and only came to
+light by the merest chance. She came to her end in the year 1798, for it was
+not this particular house she lived in, but a much larger one that then stood
+upon the site it now occupies, and was then, of course, not in London, but in
+the country. She was a person of intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained
+will, and of consummate audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the
+resources of the lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to explain the
+virulence of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on
+after death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think that after death a soul can still consciously
+direct&mdash;&rdquo; gasped the author.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful personality
+may still persist after death in the line of their original momentum,&rdquo;
+replied the doctor; &ldquo;and that strong thoughts and purposes can still
+react upon suitably prepared brains long after their originators have passed
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you knew anything of magic,&rdquo; he pursued, &ldquo;you would know
+that thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and pictures
+that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed from the region
+of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the
+centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region
+crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes
+galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind
+versed in the practices of lower magic. That this woman understood its vile
+commerce, I am persuaded, and the forces she set going during her life have
+simply been accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they
+not been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and satisfied
+through me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there
+are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain spiritual
+fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner being to a
+cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your case it happened to
+be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But now, tell me,&rdquo; he added, after a pause, handing to the
+perplexed author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had
+appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill&mdash;&ldquo;tell me if you
+recognise this face?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered a little
+as he looked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Undoubtedly,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is the face I kept trying to
+draw&mdash;dark, with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is
+the woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut of the
+same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records of the Newgate
+Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two different aspects of the
+same dreadful visage. The men compared them for some moments in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It makes me thank God for the limitations of our senses,&rdquo; said
+Pender quietly, with a sigh; &ldquo;continuous clairvoyance must be a sore
+affliction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is indeed,&rdquo; returned John Silence significantly, &ldquo;and if
+all the people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the
+statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they are. It
+is little wonder,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;that your sense of humour was
+clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your brain for
+their dissemination. You have had an interesting adventure, Mr. Felix Pender,
+and, let me add, a fortunate escape.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of scratching
+at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s time for me to go. I left my dog on the step, but I
+suppose&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure behind it
+and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie. The dog, wagging his
+tail and contorting his whole body with delight, tore across the floor and
+tried to leap up upon his owner&rsquo;s breast. And there was laughter and
+happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear again as the day.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>CASE II: ANCIENT SORCERIES</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>
+There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with none of
+the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice in the course
+of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange that the world catches
+its breath&mdash;and looks the other way! And it was cases of this kind,
+perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the wide-spread net of John
+Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to his deep humanity, to his
+patience, and to his great qualities of spiritual sympathy, led often to the
+revelation of problems of the strangest complexity, and of the profoundest
+possible human interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved to
+trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul of
+things&mdash;and to release a suffering human soul in the process&mdash;was
+with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed, after
+passing strange.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can attach
+credence&mdash;something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The adventurous
+type it can understand: such people carry about with them an adequate
+explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters obviously drive them
+into the circumstances which produce the adventures. It expects nothing else
+from them, and is satisfied. But dull, ordinary folk have no right to
+out-of-the-way experiences, and the world having been led to expect otherwise,
+is disappointed with them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been
+rudely disturbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Such a thing happened to <i>that</i> man!&rdquo; it cries&mdash;&ldquo;a
+commonplace person like that! It is too absurd! There must be something
+wrong!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to little
+Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr. Silence.
+Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of
+his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely that &ldquo;such a
+thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained Iszard, or to that
+odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to commonplace little Vezin,
+who was fore-ordained to live and die according to scale.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not &ldquo;live
+according to scale&rdquo; so far as this particular event in his otherwise
+uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his pale
+delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more hushed as he
+proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting words perhaps failed
+sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again each time he told it. His
+whole personality became muffled in the recital. It subdued him more than ever,
+so that the tale became a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated.
+He appeared to excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part
+in so fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive
+soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost
+constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that should rightly
+have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote from anything
+more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella on an omnibus. And
+when this curious event came upon him he was already more years beyond forty
+than his friends suspected or he cared to admit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said that
+he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet they were all
+obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably cinematographed on to his
+mind. None of the details were imagined or invented. And when he told the story
+with them all complete, the effect was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes
+shone, and much of the charming personality, usually so carefully repressed,
+came forward and revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but
+in the telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost
+vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some
+mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He
+had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to
+suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He
+disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they
+were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing
+all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him
+to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English
+clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to
+be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently
+enough all kinds of things that he didn&rsquo;t want and that were really
+valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were over
+and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in Surbiton.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station in
+northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform, and saw to
+his dismay a further batch of the British Isles debouching from another train,
+it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the journey. Even <i>his</i>
+flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little town and
+going on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his mind. The guard
+was already shouting &ldquo;<i>en voiture</i>&rdquo; and the corridor of his
+compartment was already packed when the thought came to him. And, for once, he
+acted with decision and rushed to snatch his bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window (for he had
+a corner seat) and begged the Frenchman who sat opposite to hand his luggage
+out to him, explaining in his wretched French that he intended to break the
+journey there. And this elderly Frenchman, he declared, gave him a look, half
+of warning, half of reproach, that to his dying day he could never forget;
+handed the bag through the window of the moving train; and at the same time
+poured into his ears a long sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was
+able to comprehend only the last few words: &ldquo;<i>à cause du sommeil et à
+cause des chats</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized upon
+this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin admitted that the man
+had impressed him favourably from the beginning, though without being able to
+explain why. They had sat facing one another during the four hours of the
+journey, and though no conversation had passed between them&mdash;Vezin was
+timid about his stuttering French&mdash;he confessed that his eyes were being
+continually drawn to his face, almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by
+a dozen nameless little politenesses and attentions, had evinced the desire to
+be kind. The men liked each other and their personalities did not clash, or
+would not have clashed had they chanced to come to terms of acquaintance. The
+Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a silent protective influence over
+the insignificant little Englishman, and without words or gestures betrayed
+that he wished him well and would gladly have been of service to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?&rdquo; asked John
+Silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted the
+prejudices of his patient, &ldquo;were you unable to follow it exactly?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was so quick and low and vehement,&rdquo; explained Vezin, in his
+small voice, &ldquo;that I missed practically the whole of it. I only caught
+the few words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his face
+was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;<i>À cause du sommeil et à cause des chats&rsquo;?</i>&rdquo;
+repeated Dr. Silence, as though half speaking to himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it exactly,&rdquo; said Vezin; &ldquo;which, I take it,
+means something like &lsquo;because of sleep and because of the cats,&rsquo;
+doesn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly, that&rsquo;s how I should translate it,&rdquo; the doctor
+observed shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the rest of the sentence&mdash;all the first part I couldn&rsquo;t
+understand, I mean&mdash;was a warning not to do something&mdash;not to stop in
+the town, or at some particular place in the town, perhaps. That was the
+impression it made on me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, of course, the train rushed off, and left Vezin standing on the platform
+alone and rather forlorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the
+plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the
+ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station itself it looked
+uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the mediaeval position lay out
+of sight just beyond the crest. And once he reached the top and entered the old
+streets, he stepped clean out of modern life into a bygone century. The noise
+and bustle of the crowded train seemed days away. The spirit of this silent
+hill-town, remote from tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life
+under the autumn sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. Long before he
+recognised this spell he acted under it. He walked softly, almost on tiptoe,
+down the winding narrow streets where the gables all but met over his head, and
+he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a deprecating and modest
+demeanour that was in itself an apology for intruding upon the place and
+disturbing its dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The attempt
+at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the delightful
+contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train.
+He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Like a cat, you said?&rdquo; interrupted John Silence, quickly catching
+him up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. At the very start I felt that.&rdquo; He laughed apologetically.
+&ldquo;I felt as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me
+purr. It seemed to be the general mood of the whole place&mdash;then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching days
+still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felt he was only
+tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, and the delicious cup of
+afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel really very pleased with himself
+for leaving the train in this bold, original way. For to him it had seemed bold
+and original. He felt something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its
+dark panelling and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led
+to it seemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep&mdash;a little dim
+cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked upon the
+courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him think of himself
+as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed padded, the walls
+provided with cushions. The sounds of the streets could not penetrate there. It
+was an atmosphere of absolute rest that surrounded him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who seemed to
+be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with Dundreary whiskers and a
+drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards him across the stone yard; but
+on coming downstairs again for a little promenade in the town before dinner he
+encountered the proprietress herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet,
+and features seemed to swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged,
+so to speak. But she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk
+of her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and
+alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair
+against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a
+great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time
+prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch occurred to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite without
+being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple in spite of its
+proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and the head it carried
+bowed so very flexibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But when she looked at me, you know,&rdquo; said Vezin, with that little
+apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gesture of the
+shoulders that was characteristic of him, &ldquo;the odd notion came to me that
+really she had intended to make quite a different movement, and that with a
+single bound she could have leaped at me across the width of that stone yard
+and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his book without
+interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though he feared he had
+already told too much and more than we could believe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and I
+felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind her back.
+She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She asked if I had my
+luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then added that dinner was at
+seven o&rsquo;clock, and that they were very early people in this little
+country town. Clearly, she intended to convey that late hours were not
+encouraged.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression that
+here he would be &ldquo;managed,&rdquo; that everything would be arranged and
+planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove and
+obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked for from him.
+It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly out into the street
+feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he was in a <i>milieu</i> that
+suited him and stroked him the right way. It was so much easier to be obedient.
+He began to purr again, and to feel that all the town purred with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling deeper and
+deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. With no special aim he
+wandered up and down, and to and fro. The September sunshine fell slantingly
+over the roofs. Down winding alleyways, fringed with tumbling gables and open
+casements, he caught fairylike glimpses of the great plain below, and of the
+meadows and yellow copses lying like a dream-map in the haze. The spell of the
+past held very potently here, he felt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy enough,
+going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him or turned to
+stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even able to forget that with
+his tourist appearance he was a false note in a charming picture, and he melted
+more and more into the scene, feeling delightfully insignificant and
+unimportant and unselfconscious. It was like becoming part of a softly coloured
+dream which he did not even realise to be a dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain below ran
+off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which the little patches
+of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fields like deep water. Here he
+strolled along the old ramparts of ancient fortifications that once had been
+formidable, but now were only vision-like with their charming mingling of
+broken grey walls and wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he
+sat for a moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw
+the esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam crept
+in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he looked down
+and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the cool of the evening.
+He could just hear the sound of their slow footfalls, and the murmur of their
+voices floated up to him through the gaps between the trees. The figures looked
+like shadows as he caught glimpses of their quiet movements far below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs and
+half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of the plane
+trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew as naturally as
+an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying there half asleep on the
+plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of horns and
+strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play
+at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very
+soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it
+intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the
+composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to
+himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up
+through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the
+townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it
+sounded as though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No
+definitely marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly
+after the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place and
+scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were part of the
+scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned plaintive horns, pierced
+here and there by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous
+booming of the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell that
+was almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music seemed to
+him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by the wind, of night
+breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in the rigging of invisible
+ships; or&mdash;and the simile leaped up in his thoughts with a sudden
+sharpness of suggestion&mdash;a chorus of animals, of wild creatures, somewhere
+in desolate places of the world, crying and singing as animals will, to the
+moon. He could fancy he heard the wailing, half-human cries of cats upon the
+tiles at night, rising and falling with weird intervals of sound, and this
+music, muffled by distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of
+these creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music
+to one another and the moon in chorus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it expressed
+his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The instruments played
+such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and diminuendos were so very
+suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping without
+warning to deep notes again, and all in such strange confusion of discords and
+accords. But, at the same time a plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and
+the discords of these half-broken instruments were so singular that they did
+not distress his musical soul like fiddles out of tune.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character was, and
+then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There was nothing to alarm?&rdquo; put in Dr. Silence briefly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Absolutely nothing,&rdquo; said Vezin; &ldquo;but you know it was all so
+fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed. Perhaps,
+too,&rdquo; he continued, gently explanatory, &ldquo;it was this stirring of my
+imagination that caused other impressions; for, as I walked back, the spell of
+the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though all intelligible ways.
+But there were other things I could not account for in the least, even
+then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Incidents, you mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of vivid sensations crowded themselves
+upon my mind and I could trace them to no causes. It was just after sunset and
+the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines against an opalescent sky of
+gold and red. The dusk was running down the twisted streets. All round the hill
+the plain pressed in like a dim sea, its level rising with the darkness. The
+spell of this kind of scene, you know, can be very moving, and it was so that
+night. Yet I felt that what came to me had nothing directly to do with the
+mystery and wonder of the scene.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not merely the subtle transformations of the spirit that come with
+beauty,&rdquo; put in the doctor, noticing his hesitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; Vezin went on, duly encouraged and no longer so fearful
+of our smiles at his expense. &ldquo;The impressions came from somewhere else.
+For instance, down the busy main street where men and women were bustling home
+from work, shopping at stalls and barrows, idly gossiping in groups, and all
+the rest of it, I saw that I aroused no interest and that no one turned to
+stare at me as a foreigner and stranger. I was utterly ignored, and my presence
+among them excited no special interest or attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me with conviction that all the
+time this indifference and inattention were merely feigned. Everybody as a
+matter of fact was watching me closely. Every movement I made was known and
+observed. Ignoring me was all a pretence&mdash;an elaborate pretence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused a moment and looked at us to see if we were smiling, and then
+continued, reassured&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is useless to ask me how I noticed this, because I simply cannot
+explain it. But the discovery gave me something of a shock. Before I got back
+to the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in my mind and
+forced my recognition of it as true. And this, too, I may as well say at once,
+was equally inexplicable to me. I mean I can only give you the fact, as fact it
+was to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little man left his chair and stood on the mat before the fire. His
+diffidence lessened from now onwards, as he lost himself again in the magic of
+the old adventure. His eyes shone a little already as he talked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he went on, his soft voice rising somewhat with his
+excitement, &ldquo;I was in a shop when it came to me first&mdash;though the
+idea must have been at work for a long time subconsciously to appear in so
+complete a form all at once. I was buying socks, I think,&rdquo; he laughed,
+&ldquo;and struggling with my dreadful French, when it struck me that the woman
+in the shop did not care two pins whether I bought anything or not. She was
+indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. She was only
+pretending to sell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what
+follows. But really it was not small. I mean it was the spark that lit the line
+of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so
+far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and
+otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the
+scenes. Their busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual
+purposes. They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the
+streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere
+beyond my ken, underground, in secret places. In the shops and at the stalls
+they did not care whether I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they
+were indifferent to my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own,
+springing from hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. It
+was all a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or
+possibly for purposes of their own. But the main current of their energies ran
+elsewhere. I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to
+feel when it has found its way into the human system and the whole body
+organises itself to eject it or to absorb it. The town was doing this very
+thing to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked
+home to the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of this
+town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of its hidden
+life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And, now that my eyes were partly opened, I noticed other things too
+that puzzled me, first of which, I think, was the extraordinary silence of the
+whole place. Positively, the town was muffled. Although the streets were paved
+with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly, with padded feet, like
+cats. Nothing made noise. All was hushed, subdued, muted. The very voices were
+quiet, low-pitched like purring. Nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed
+able to live in the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little
+hill-town into its sleep. It was like the woman at the inn&mdash;an outward
+repose screening intense inner activity and purpose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it. The
+people were active and alert. Only a magical and uncanny softness lay over them
+all like a spell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory had
+become very vivid. His voice had run off into a whisper so that we heard the
+last part with difficulty. He was telling a true thing obviously, yet something
+that he both liked and hated telling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I went back to the inn,&rdquo; he continued presently in a louder voice,
+&ldquo;and dined. I felt a new strange world about me. My old world of reality
+receded. Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and
+incomprehensible. I regretted having left the train so impulsively. An
+adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my nature.
+Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere deep
+within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and a feeling of alarm
+mingled itself with my wonder&mdash;alarm for the stability of what I had for
+forty years recognised as my &lsquo;personality.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual
+to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept thinking
+of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering
+passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my dreams took me
+elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of
+life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>
+Vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had
+intended. He felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. He did nothing in
+particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not decide to leave.
+Decisions were always very difficult for him and he sometimes wondered how he
+had ever brought himself to the point of leaving the train. It seemed as though
+some one else must have arranged it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran
+to the swarthy Frenchman who had sat opposite. If only he could have understood
+that long sentence ending so strangely with &ldquo;<i>à cause du sommeil et à
+cause des chats</i>.&rdquo; He wondered what it all meant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he sought in
+his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay, and what it was all
+about. But his limited French and his constitutional hatred of active
+investigation made it hard for him to buttonhole anybody and ask questions. He
+was content to observe, and watch, and remain negative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. He wandered about
+the town till he knew every street and alley. The people suffered him to come
+and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to him every day that
+he was never free himself from observation. The town watched him as a cat
+watches a mouse. And he got no nearer to finding out what they were all so busy
+with or where the main stream of their activities lay. This remained hidden.
+The people were as soft and mysterious as cats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that he was continually under observation became more evident from day to
+day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For instance, when he strolled to the end of the town and entered a little
+green public garden beneath the ramparts and seated himself upon one of the
+empty benches in the sun, he was quite alone&mdash;at first. Not another seat
+was occupied; the little park was empty, the paths deserted. Yet, within ten
+minutes of his coming, there must have been fully twenty persons scattered
+about him, some strolling aimlessly along the gravel walks, staring at the
+flowers, and others seated on the wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself.
+None of them appeared to take any notice of him; yet he understood quite well
+they had all come there to watch. They kept him under close observation. In the
+street they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon various errands; yet these
+were suddenly all forgotten and they had nothing to do but loll and laze in the
+sun, their duties unremembered. Five minutes after he left, the garden was
+again deserted, the seats vacant. But in the crowded street it was the same
+thing again; he was never alone. He was ever in their thoughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By degrees, too, he began to see how it was he was so cleverly watched, yet
+without the appearance of it. The people did nothing <i>directly</i>. They
+behaved <i>obliquely</i>. He laughed in his mind as the thought thus clothed
+itself in words, but the phrase exactly described it. They looked at him from
+angles which naturally should have led their sight in another direction
+altogether. Their movements were oblique, too, so far as these concerned
+himself. The straight, direct thing was not their way evidently. They did
+nothing obviously. If he entered a shop to buy, the woman walked instantly away
+and busied herself with something at the farther end of the counter, though
+answering at once when he spoke, showing that she knew he was there and that
+this was only her way of attending to him. It was the fashion of the cat she
+followed. Even in the dining-room of the inn, the be-whiskered and courteous
+waiter, lithe and silent in all his movements, never seemed able to come
+straight to his table for an order or a dish. He came by zigzags, indirectly,
+vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to another table altogether, and only
+turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to realize these
+things. Other tourists there were none in the hostel, but he recalled the
+figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took their <i>déjeuner</i> and
+dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they entered the room in similar
+fashion. First, they paused in the doorway, peering about the room, and then,
+after a temporary inspection, they came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close
+to the walls so that he wondered which table they were making for, and at the
+last minute making almost a little quick run to their particular seats. And
+again he thought of the ways and methods of cats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer, soft town
+with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the people appeared and
+disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled him exceedingly. It may have
+been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet he could not make it out how the
+alleys swallowed them up and shot them forth in a second of time when there
+were no visible doorways or openings near enough to explain the phenomenon.
+Once he followed two elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly
+examining him from across the street&mdash;quite near the inn this
+was&mdash;and saw them turn the corner a few feet only in front of him. Yet
+when he sharply followed on their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted
+alley stretching in front of him with no sign of a living thing. And the only
+opening through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards
+away, which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in just such sudden fashion people appeared, when he never expected them.
+Once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a low wall, and
+hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see but a group of girls
+and women engaged in vociferous conversation which instantly hushed itself to
+the normal whispering note of the town when his head appeared over the wall.
+And even then none of them turned to look at him directly, but slunk off with
+the most unaccountable rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. And their
+voices, he thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling
+of fighting animals, almost of cats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as something
+elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the same time
+intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of its life, this
+concealment puzzled and irritated him; more&mdash;it began rather to frighten
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface thoughts,
+there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting for him to declare
+himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do that; and that when he had
+done so they in their turn would at length make some direct response, accepting
+or rejecting him. Yet the vital matter concerning which his decision was
+awaited came no nearer to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the
+citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were bent; but
+they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each individual going his
+or her own way. It was always the same: he never could learn what their main
+interest was. The cathedral was ever empty, the old church of St. Martin, at
+the other end of the town, deserted. They shopped because they had to, and not
+because they wished to. The booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the
+little <i>cafés</i> desolate. Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk
+ever on the bustle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can it be,&rdquo; he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh
+that he should have dared to think anything so odd, &ldquo;can it be that these
+people are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their real
+life, and come out honestly only with the dusk? That during the day they make a
+sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down their true life begins?
+Have they the souls of night-things, and is the whole blessed town in the hands
+of the cats?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and dismay.
+Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning to feel more
+than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a thousand invisible
+cords at the very centre of his being. Something utterly remote from his
+ordinary life, something that had not waked for years, began faintly to stir in
+his soul, sending feelers abroad into his brain and heart, shaping queer
+thoughts and penetrating even into certain of his minor actions. Something
+exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he saw the
+figures of the townsfolk stealing through the dusk from their shop doors,
+moving sentry-wise to and fro at the corners of the streets, yet always
+vanishing silently like shadows at his near approach. And as the inn invariably
+closed its doors at ten o&rsquo;clock he had never yet found the opportunity he
+rather half-heartedly sought to see for himself what account the town could
+give of itself at night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;<i>à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats</i>&rdquo;&mdash;the
+words now rang in his ears more and more often, though still as yet without any
+definite meaning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, something made him sleep like the dead.
+</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was, I think, on the fifth day&mdash;though in this detail his story
+sometimes varied&mdash;that he made a definite discovery which increased his
+alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax. Before that he had already
+noticed that a change was going forward and certain subtle transformations
+being brought about in his character which modified several of his minor
+habits. And he had affected to ignore them. Here, however, was something he
+could no longer ignore; and it startled him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather,
+compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose he was capable of
+reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision. The discovery
+he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was that this power had
+positively dwindled to nothing. He found it impossible to make up his mind.
+For, on this fifth day, he realised that he had stayed long enough in the town
+and that for reasons he could only vaguely define to himself it was wiser
+<i>and safer</i> that he should leave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he found that he could not leave!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture and the
+expression of his face that he conveyed to Dr. Silence the state of impotence
+he had reached. All this spying and watching, he said, had as it were spun a
+net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless to escape; he felt like
+a fly that had blundered into the intricacies of a great web; he was caught,
+imprisoned, and could not get away. It was a distressing sensation. A numbness
+had crept over his will till it had become almost incapable of decision. The
+mere thought of vigorous action&mdash;action towards escape&mdash;began to
+terrify him. All the currents of his life had turned inwards upon himself,
+striving to bring to the surface something that lay buried almost beyond reach,
+determined to force his recognition of something he had long
+forgotten&mdash;forgotten years upon years, centuries almost ago. It seemed as
+though a window deep within his being would presently open and reveal an
+entirely new world, yet somehow a world that was not unfamiliar. Beyond that,
+again, he fancied a great curtain hung; and when that too rolled up he would
+see still farther into this region and at last understand something of the
+secret life of these extraordinary people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is this why they wait and watch?&rdquo; he asked himself with rather a
+shaking heart, &ldquo;for the time when I shall join them&mdash;or refuse to
+join them? Does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure first
+really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. The stability of his
+rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt, and something in his
+heart turned coward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily, silently,
+making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind him? Why else
+should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages of the practically
+deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found himself deliberately taking
+advantage of what cover presented itself? And why, if he was not afraid, should
+the wisdom of staying indoors after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as
+eminently desirable? Why, indeed?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, when John Silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these things,
+he admitted apologetically that he had none to give.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was simply that I feared something might happen to me unless I kept a
+sharp look-out. I felt afraid. It was instinctive,&rdquo; was all he could say.
+&ldquo;I got the impression that the whole town was after me&mdash;wanted me
+for something; and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least the Self
+I knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am not a psychologist,
+you know,&rdquo; he added meekly, &ldquo;and I cannot define it better than
+that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening meal
+that Vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to his quiet room
+at the end of the winding passage to think it over alone. In the yard it was
+empty enough, true, but there was always the possibility that the big woman
+whom he dreaded would come out of some door, with her pretence of knitting, to
+sit and watch him. This had happened several times, and he could not endure the
+sight of her. He still remembered his original fancy, bizarre though it was,
+that she would spring upon him the moment his back was turned and land with one
+single crushing leap upon his neck. Of course it was nonsense, but then it
+haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It
+has clothed itself in reality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went upstairs accordingly. It was dusk, and the oil lamps had not yet been
+lit in the passages. He stumbled over the uneven surface of the ancient
+flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the corridor&mdash;doors that
+he had never once seen opened&mdash;rooms that seemed never occupied. He moved,
+as his habit now was, stealthily and on tiptoe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp turn, and
+it was just here, while groping round the walls with outstretched hands, that
+his fingers touched something that was not wall&mdash;something that moved. It
+was soft and warm in texture, indescribably fragrant, and about the height of
+his shoulder; and he immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The
+next minute he knew it was something quite different.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead of investigating, however,&mdash;his nerves must have been too
+overwrought for that, he said,&mdash;he shrank back as closely as possible
+against the wall on the other side. The thing, whatever it was, slipped past
+him with a sound of rustling and, retreating with light footsteps down the
+passage behind him, was gone. A breath of warm, scented air was wafted to his
+nostrils.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half leaning
+against the wall&mdash;and then almost ran down the remaining distance and
+entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly behind him. Yet it was
+not fear that made him run: it was excitement, pleasurable excitement. His
+nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow made itself felt all over his body.
+In a flash it came to him that this was just what he had felt twenty-five years
+ago as a boy when he was in love for the first time. Warm currents of life ran
+all over him and mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. His mood was
+suddenly become tender, melting, loving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window,
+wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. But the only thing he
+understood clearly in that instant was that something in him had swiftly,
+magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to argue with himself about
+leaving. The encounter in the passage-way had changed all that. The strange
+perfume of it still hung about him, bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew
+that it was a girl who had passed him, a girl&rsquo;s face that his fingers had
+brushed in the darkness, and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had
+been actually kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect his
+thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing of a girl in
+the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate so electric a thrill to
+his whole being that he still shook with the sweetness of it. Yet, there it
+was! And he found it as useless to deny as to attempt analysis. Some ancient
+fire had entered his veins, and now ran coursing through his blood; and that he
+was forty-five instead of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all the
+inner turmoil and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere
+atmosphere, the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the
+darkness, had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart,
+and rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of tearing
+and tumultuous excitement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a time, however, the number of Vezin&rsquo;s years began to assert their
+cumulative power; he grew calmer, and when a knock came at length upon his door
+and he heard the waiter&rsquo;s voice suggesting that dinner was nearly over,
+he pulled himself together and slowly made his way downstairs into the
+dining-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every one looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took his
+customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. The trepidation was still in
+his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the courtyard and hall
+without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm him a little. He ate so
+fast that he had almost caught up with the current stage of the table
+d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te, when a slight commotion in the room drew his attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the long
+<i>salle à manger</i> were behind him, yet it was not necessary to turn round
+to know that the same person he had passed in the dark passage had now come
+into the room. He felt the presence long before he heard or saw any one. Then
+he became aware that the old men, the only other guests, were rising one by one
+in their places, and exchanging greetings with some one who passed among them
+from table to table. And when at length he turned with his heart beating
+furiously to ascertain for himself, he saw the form of a young girl, lithe and
+slim, moving down the centre of the room and making straight for his own table
+in the corner. She moved wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young panther,
+and her approach filled him with such delicious bewilderment that he was
+utterly unable to tell at first what her face was like, or discover what it was
+about the whole presentment of the creature that filled him anew with
+trepidation and delight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, Ma&rsquo;mselle est de retour!&rdquo; he heard the old waiter murmur
+at his side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the
+proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. She was addressing
+him. Something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth, and stray wisps of
+fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest was a dream in which his own
+emotion rose like a thick cloud before his eyes and prevented his seeing
+accurately, or knowing exactly what he did. He was aware that she greeted him
+with a charming little bow; that her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly
+into his own; that the perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again
+assailed his nostrils, and that she was bending a little towards him and
+leaning with one hand on the table at this side. She was quite close to
+him&mdash;that was the chief thing he knew&mdash;explaining that she had been
+asking after the comfort of her mother&rsquo;s guests, and now was introducing
+herself to the latest arrival&mdash;himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;M&rsquo;sieur has already been here a few days,&rdquo; he heard the
+waiter say; and then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, but M&rsquo;sieur is not going to leave us just yet, I hope. My
+mother is too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now I
+am here I will remedy all that.&rdquo; She laughed deliciously.
+&ldquo;M&rsquo;sieur shall be well looked after.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to
+acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as he did
+so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting upon the table, and a
+shock that was for all the world like a shock of electricity, passed from her
+skin into his body. His soul wavered and shook deep within him. He caught her
+eyes fixed upon his own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next
+moment he knew that he had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl
+was already half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad
+with a dessert-spoon and a knife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of
+his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts.
+This time the passages were lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretemps;
+yet the winding corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from the
+bend of the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran
+downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it
+he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the
+heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange fancies filled
+his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked, he did not
+light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long, long thoughts that
+came unbidden in troops to his mind.
+</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>
+This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special coaxing, it is
+true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could not in the least
+understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him so profoundly, and
+even before he had set eyes upon her. For her mere proximity in the darkness
+had been sufficient to set him on fire. He knew nothing of enchantments, and
+for years had been a stranger to anything approaching tender relations with any
+member of the opposite sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his
+overwhelming defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature came to
+him deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on every
+possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet frankly inviting;
+and she won him utterly with the first glance of her shining eyes, even if she
+had not already done so in the dark merely by the magic of her invisible
+presence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You felt she was altogether wholesome and good!&rdquo; queried the
+doctor. &ldquo;You had no reaction of any sort&mdash;for instance, of
+alarm?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic smiles. It
+was some time before he replied. The mere memory of the adventure had suffused
+his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes sought the floor again before he
+answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I can quite say that,&rdquo; he explained presently.
+&ldquo;I acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. A
+conviction grew upon me that there was something about her&mdash;how shall I
+express it?&mdash;well, something unholy. It is not impurity in any sense,
+physical or mental, that I mean, but something quite indefinable that gave me a
+vague sensation of the creeps. She drew me, and at the same time repelled me,
+more than&mdash;than&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing like it has ever come to me before or since,&rdquo; he
+concluded, with lame confusion. &ldquo;I suppose it was, as you suggested just
+now, something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was strong enough to make me
+feel that I would stay in that awful little haunted town for years if only I
+could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful movements, and
+sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?&rdquo;
+John Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am surprised that you should ask me such a question,&rdquo; answered
+Vezin, with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. &ldquo;I think no
+man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman
+who ensnares him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this slip of a girl
+bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in the
+same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of delight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there&rsquo;s one thing I can tell you,&rdquo; he went on earnestly,
+his eyes aglow, &ldquo;namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in
+herself all the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the town
+and its inhabitants. She had the silken movements of the panther, going
+smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods as the
+townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of her own&mdash;purposes that
+I was sure had <i>me</i> for their objective. She kept me, to my terror and
+delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet so carelessly, so consummately,
+that another man less sensitive, if I may say so&rdquo;&mdash;he made a
+deprecating gesture&mdash;&ldquo;or less prepared by what had gone before,
+would never have noticed it at all. She was always still, always reposeful, yet
+she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I never could escape from her. I
+was continually meeting the stare and laughter of her great eyes, in the
+corners of the rooms, in the passages, calmly looking at me through the
+windows, or in the busiest parts of the public streets.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter which
+had so violently disturbed the little man&rsquo;s equilibrium. He was naturally
+very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that anything
+violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they therefore
+instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget his primness
+after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and as her mother&rsquo;s
+representative she naturally had to do with the guests in the hotel. It was not
+out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie should spring up. Besides, she was
+young, she was charmingly pretty, she was French, and&mdash;she obviously liked
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same time, there was something indescribable&mdash;a certain indefinable
+atmosphere of other places, other times&mdash;that made him try hard to remain
+on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath with a sudden start. It
+was all rather like a delirious dream, half delight, half dread, he confided in
+a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more than once he hardly knew quite what he was
+doing or saying, as though he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely
+recognised as his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to his mind,
+it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on from day to day,
+becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of this dreamy mediaeval town,
+losing more and more of his recognisable personality. Soon, he felt, the
+Curtain within would roll up with an awful rush, and he would find himself
+suddenly admitted into the secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind
+it all. Only, by that time, he would have become transformed into an entirely
+different being.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention to make his
+stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more comfortable arm-chair in
+the corner, and even special little extra dishes on his private table in the
+dining-room. Conversations, too, with &ldquo;Mademoiselle Ilsé&rdquo; became
+more and more frequent and pleasant, and although they seldom travelled beyond
+the weather, or the details of the town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a
+hurry to bring them to an end, and often contrived to interject little odd
+sentences that he never properly understood, yet felt to be significant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that pointed
+to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy. They all had to do,
+he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in the town indefinitely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And has M&rsquo;sieur not even yet come to a decision?&rdquo; she said
+softly in his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before <i>déjeuner</i>,
+the acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. &ldquo;Because,
+if it&rsquo;s so difficult, we must all try together to help him!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was spoken with
+a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as she turned and
+peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite understand the French
+of it, for her near presence always confused his small knowledge of the
+language distressingly. Yet the words, and her manner, and something else that
+lay behind it all in her mind, frightened him. It gave such point to his
+feeling that the town was waiting for him to make his mind up on some important
+matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close beside
+him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is true I find it difficult to leave,&rdquo; he stammered, losing his
+way deliciously in the depths of her eyes, &ldquo;and especially now that
+Mademoiselle Ilsé has come.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted with the
+little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have bitten his tongue
+off for having said it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased to
+stay on,&rdquo; she said, ignoring the compliment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you,&rdquo; he cried, feeling
+that his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain. And he
+was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the wildest
+description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair beside him, and
+made to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is <i>soupe à l&rsquo;onion</i> to-day!&rdquo; she cried, laughing
+back at him through the sunlight, &ldquo;and I must go and see about it.
+Otherwise, you know, M&rsquo;sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then,
+perhaps, he will leave us!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and lightness of
+the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her, he thought, exactly
+like the fur of the same supple species. She turned once to laugh at him from
+the porch with the glass door, and then stopped a moment to speak to her
+mother, who sat knitting as usual in her corner seat just inside the hall-way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly woman,
+the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were? Whence came that
+transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped them both as by magic?
+What was it about that massive woman that made her appear instantly regal, and
+set her on a throne in some dark and dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over
+the red glare of some tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender stripling of a
+girl, graceful as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air of
+sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and the
+darkness of night beneath her feet?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. Then, almost simultaneously
+with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again, and the sunlight of day
+caught them both, and he heard her laughing to her mother about the <i>soupe à
+l&rsquo;onion</i>, and saw her glancing back at him over her dear little
+shoulder with a smile that made him think of a dew-kissed rose bending lightly
+before summer airs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day, because he saw
+another cover laid at his small table, and, with fluttering heart, heard the
+waiter murmur by way of explanation that &ldquo;Ma&rsquo;mselle Ilsé would
+honour M&rsquo;sieur to-day at <i>déjeuner</i>, as her custom sometimes is with
+her mother&rsquo;s guests.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking quietly to
+him in easy French, seeing that he was well looked after, mixing the
+salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand. And, later in the
+afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard, longing for a sight of her as
+soon as her duties were done, she came again to his side, and when he rose to
+meet her, she stood facing him a moment, full of a perplexing sweet shyness
+before she spoke&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little
+town, and <i>I</i> think so too! Would M&rsquo;sieur like me to be his guide,
+perhaps? I can show him everything, for our family has lived here for many
+generations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word to express
+his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the street, yet in such a
+way that it seemed perfectly natural she should do so, and without the faintest
+suggestion of boldness or immodesty. Her face glowed with the pleasure and
+interest of it, and with her short dress and tumbled hair she looked every bit
+the charming child of seventeen that she was, innocent and playful, proud of
+her native town, and alive beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So they went over the town together, and she showed him what she considered its
+chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her forebears had lived; the
+sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her mother&rsquo;s family dwelt for
+centuries, and the ancient market-place where several hundred years before the
+witches had been burnt by the score. She kept up a lively running stream of
+talk about it all, of which he understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged
+along by her side, cursing his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings
+of his early manhood revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and
+Surbiton seemed very far away indeed, almost in another age of the
+world&rsquo;s history. Her voice touched something immeasurably old in him,
+something that slept deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to
+sleep, allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its
+elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being became
+dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir in its sleep.
+That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it might lift
+altogether....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town was
+reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external self became
+muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and vital, asserted
+itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of it all, the chief
+instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with new interpretations,
+flooded his mind as she walked beside him through the winding streets, while
+the picturesque old gabled town, softly coloured in the sunset, had never
+appeared to him so wholly wonderful and seductive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in itself,
+but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the child&rsquo;s face and
+a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed to a column of blue smoke
+that rose from the burning autumn leaves and made a picture against the red
+roofs, and had then run to the wall and called her to his side to watch the
+flames shooting here and there through the heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight
+of it, as though taken by surprise, her face had altered dreadfully, and she
+had turned and run like the wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran,
+of which he had not understood a single word, except that the fire apparently
+frightened her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it, and to get him away
+too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though nothing had
+happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and they had both
+forgotten the incident.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the weird
+music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival. It moved him
+again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he managed to find his
+tongue and his best French. The girl leaned across the stones close beside him.
+No one was about. Driven by some remorseless engine within he began to stammer
+something&mdash;he hardly knew what&mdash;of his strange admiration for her.
+Almost at the first word she sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in
+front of him, just touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as
+usual, and the sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m so glad!&rdquo; she cried, clapping her little hands
+softly in his face, &ldquo;so very glad, because that means that if you like me
+you must also like what I do, and what I belong to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something in the
+phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of embarking upon an
+unknown and dangerous sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will take part in our real life, I mean,&rdquo; she added softly,
+with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking.
+&ldquo;You will come back to us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power coming
+over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole over his senses
+and made him aware that her personality, for all its simple grace, held forces
+that were stately, imposing, august. He saw her again moving through smoke and
+flame amid broken and tempestuous scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible
+mother by her side. Dimly this shone through her smile and appearance of
+charming innocence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will, I know,&rdquo; she repeated, holding him with her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that she was
+overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The mingled abandon
+and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of him that was man rose up
+and resisted the creeping influence, at the same time acclaiming it with the
+full delight of his forgotten youth. An irresistible desire came to him to
+question her, to summon what still remained to him of his own little
+personality in an effort to retain the right to his normal self.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall close
+beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on the coping,
+motionless as a figure carved in stone. He took his courage in both hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me, Ilsé,&rdquo; he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring
+softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, &ldquo;what is the
+meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And why is it
+that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what it all means? And,
+tell me,&rdquo; he added more quickly with passion in his voice, &ldquo;what
+you really are&mdash;yourself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her growing
+inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran like a shadow
+across her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems to me,&rdquo;&mdash;he faltered oddly under her
+gaze&mdash;&ldquo;that I have some right to know&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. &ldquo;You love me, then?&rdquo; she
+asked softly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I swear,&rdquo; he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising
+tide, &ldquo;I never felt before&mdash;I have never known any other girl
+who&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you <i>have</i> the right to know,&rdquo; she calmly interrupted
+his confused confession, &ldquo;for love shares all secrets.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words lifted
+him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed almost the same
+instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He became aware that she
+had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The real life I speak of,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;is the old, old
+life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged,
+and to which you still belong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice sank
+into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true, even though he
+could not as yet understand its full purport. His present life seemed slipping
+from him as he listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and
+greater. It was this loss of his present self that brought to him the thought
+of death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You came here,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;with the purpose of seeking
+it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide,
+whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change, growing
+larger and darker with an expression of age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you
+feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The purposes of
+their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. You were all part of
+the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back again among
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin&rsquo;s timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl&rsquo;s
+eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She
+fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you,&rdquo;
+she resumed. &ldquo;The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded
+through all these years. But I&rdquo;&mdash;she paused a moment and looked at
+him with complete confidence in her splendid eyes&mdash;&ldquo;I possess the
+spell to conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back
+again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the ancient tie
+between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And I do choose to use it.
+I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim past&rdquo;&mdash;she pressed
+closer to him so that her breath passed across his eyes, and her voice
+positively sang&mdash;&ldquo;I mean to have you, for you love me and are
+utterly at my mercy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand. He had
+passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his feet, made of
+music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above it through the
+sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy with the wonder of her
+words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the terror of it all, the dreadful
+thought of death, pressed ever behind her sentences. For flames shot through
+her voice out of black smoke and licked at his soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process of swift
+telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he said to her. Yet
+she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was like the recital of
+verses long since known. And the mingled pain and sweetness of it as he
+listened were almost more than his little soul could hold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet I came here wholly by chance&mdash;&rdquo; he heard himself saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she cried with passion, &ldquo;you came here because I called
+to you. I have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of
+the past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain insolence in the
+face&mdash;the insolence of power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness rose up
+from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had ceased. The leaves
+of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of the autumn evening rose
+about them and made Vezin shiver. There was no sound but the sound of their
+voices and the occasional soft rustle of the girl&rsquo;s dress. He could hear
+the blood rushing in his ears. He scarcely realised where he was or what he was
+doing. Some terrible magic of the imagination drew him deeply down into the
+tombs of his own being, telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words
+shadowed forth the truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking beside
+him with so strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite another being.
+As he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew and lived, dressing
+itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of reality he was compelled to
+acknowledge. As once before, he saw her tall and stately, moving through wild
+and broken scenery of forests and mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind
+her head and clouds of shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her
+hair, flying loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags
+of clothing. Others were about her, too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast
+delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only, one whom
+she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some tempestuous orgy to
+the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled about a great and
+awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the scene through lurid vapours, while
+innumerable other wild faces and forms crowded furiously about her in the
+dance. But the one she held by the hand he knew to be himself, and the
+monstrous shape upon the throne he knew to be her mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of buried time,
+crying aloud to him with the voice of memory reawakened.... And then the scene
+faded away and he saw the clear circle of the girl&rsquo;s eyes gazing
+steadfastly into his own, and she became once more the pretty little daughter
+of the innkeeper, and he found his voice again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you,&rdquo; he whispered tremblingly&mdash;&ldquo;you child of
+visions and enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even
+before I saw?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The call of the Past,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;and besides,&rdquo; she
+added proudly, &ldquo;in the real life I am a princess&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A princess!&rdquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;and my mother is a queen!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this, little Vezin utterly lost his head. Delight tore at his heart and
+swept him into sheer ecstasy. To hear that sweet singing voice, and to see
+those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance beyond all hope
+of control. He took her in his arms and covered her unresisting face with
+kisses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he felt that she
+was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses stained his very soul....
+And when, presently, she had freed herself and vanished into the darkness, he
+stood there, leaning against the wall in a state of collapse, creeping with
+horror from the touch of her yielding body, and inwardly raging at the weakness
+that he already dimly realised must prove his undoing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared there rose
+in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry, which at first he
+took for laughter, but which later he was sure he recognised as the almost
+human wailing of a cat.
+</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>
+For a long time Vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his surging
+thoughts and emotions. He understood at length that he had done the one thing
+necessary to call down upon him the whole force of this ancient Past. For in
+those passionate kisses he had acknowledged the tie of olden days, and had
+revived it. And the memory of that soft impalpable caress in the darkness of
+the inn corridor came back to him with a shudder. The girl had first mastered
+him, and then led him to the one act that was necessary for her purpose. He had
+been waylaid, after the lapse of centuries&mdash;caught, and conquered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. But, for the
+moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or will, for the
+sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted to his brain like a
+spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was utterly enchanted and moving
+in a world so much larger and wilder than the one he had ever been accustomed
+to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain, when at
+last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into new perspective,
+so that their roofs, already glistening with dew, seemed to stretch much higher
+into the sky than usual, and their gables and quaint old towers lay far away in
+its purple reaches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. He moved softly, keeping to the
+shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very silent; the doors were
+closed, the shutters fastened. Not a soul was astir. The hush of night lay over
+everything; it was like a town of the dead, a churchyard with gigantic and
+grotesque tombstones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared to, he
+made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of the stables,
+thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. He reached the courtyard safely and
+crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of the wall. He sidled down it,
+mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old men did when they entered the <i>salle
+à manger</i>. He was horrified to find himself doing this instinctively. A
+strange impulse came to him, catching him somehow in the centre of his
+body&mdash;an impulse to drop upon all fours and run swiftly and silently. He
+glanced upwards and the idea came to him to leap up upon his window-sill
+overhead instead of going round by the stairs. This occurred to him as the
+easiest, and most natural way. It was like the beginning of some horrible
+transformation of himself into something else. He was fearfully strung up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of the street
+where he moved. He kept among the deepest of them, and reached the porch with
+the glass doors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about. Hoping
+to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he opened the door
+carefully and stole in. Then he saw that the hall was not empty. A large dark
+thing lay against the wall on his left. At first he thought it must be
+household articles. Then it moved, and he thought it was an immense cat,
+distorted in some way by the play of light and shadow. Then it rose straight up
+before him and he saw that it was the proprietress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What she had been doing in this position he could only venture a dreadful
+guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware of some terrible
+dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the girl&rsquo;s strange
+saying that she was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood there under the little
+oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe stirred in his heart, and the
+roots of some ancient fear. He felt that he must bow to her and make some kind
+of obeisance. The impulse was fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. He
+glanced quickly about him. There was no one there. Then he deliberately
+inclined his head toward her. He bowed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Enfin! M&rsquo;sieur s&rsquo;est donc décidé. C&rsquo;est bien alors.
+J&rsquo;en suis contente.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her words came to him sonorously as through a great open space.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and seized
+his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and caught him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On pourrait faire un p&rsquo;tit tour ensemble, n&rsquo;est-ce pas? Nous
+y allons cette nuit et il faut s&rsquo;exercer un peu d&rsquo;avance pour cela.
+Ilsé, Ilsé, viens donc ici. Viens vite!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that seemed oddly
+and horribly familiar. They made no sound on the stones, this strangely
+assorted couple. It was all soft and stealthy. And presently, when the air
+seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare as of flame shot through it, he
+was aware that some one else had joined them and that his hand the mother had
+released was now tightly held by the daughter. Ilsé had come in answer to the
+call, and he saw her with leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in
+tattered vestiges of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and
+horribly, odiously, loathsomely seductive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!&rdquo; they cried. &ldquo;On to the
+Witches&rsquo; Sabbath!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him, to the
+wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly, dreadfully
+remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out, and they were
+left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile
+suggestions and made him afraid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother cry that
+it was time, and they must go. Which way they went he did not pause to see. He
+only realised that he was free, and he blundered through the darkness till he
+found the stairs and then tore up them to his room as though all hell was at
+his heels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned. Swiftly
+reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally impossible, he finally
+decided that the only thing to do for the moment was to sit quiet and wait. He
+must see what was going to happen. At least in the privacy of his own bedroom
+he would be fairly safe. The door was locked. He crossed over and softly opened
+the window which gave upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of
+the hall through the glass doors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears from the
+streets beyond&mdash;the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by distance. He
+leaned out cautiously and listened. The moonlight was clear and strong now, but
+his own window was in shadow, the silver disc being still behind the house. It
+came to him irresistibly that the inhabitants of the town, who a little while
+before had all been invisible behind closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy
+upon some secret and unholy errand. He listened intently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of movements
+going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came to him across that
+still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings sent the hum of their
+activity into the night. Things were on the move everywhere. A biting, pungent
+odour rose through the air, coming he knew not whence. Presently his eyes
+became glued to the windows of the opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a
+soft blaze. The roof overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the
+panes of glass, and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long
+footsteps over the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and
+silently, shaped like immense cats, in an endless procession across the
+pictured glass, and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost
+sight of them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps. Sometimes their
+shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he could not make out
+whether they were the shadows of human beings or of cats. They seemed to change
+swiftly from one to the other. The transformation looked horribly real, for
+they leaped like human beings, yet changed swiftly in the air immediately
+afterwards, and dropped like animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements of dark
+forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass doors. They kept
+so closely to the wall that he could not determine their actual shape, but when
+he saw that they passed on to the great congregation that was gathering in the
+hall, he understood that these were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had
+first seen reflected in the windowpanes opposite. They were coming from all
+parts of the town, reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and
+tiles, and springing from level to level till they came to the yard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about him were
+being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. A moment later
+figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. And these figures, as they
+lowered themselves down from the windows, were human, he saw; but once safely
+in the yard they fell upon all fours and changed in the swiftest possible
+second into&mdash;cats&mdash;huge, silent cats. They ran in streams to join the
+main body in the hall beyond.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and unoccupied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. For he remembered it
+all. It was familiar. It had all happened before just so, hundreds of times,
+and he himself had taken part in it and known the wild madness of it all. The
+outline of the old building changed, the yard grew larger, and he seemed to be
+staring down upon it from a much greater height through smoky vapours. And, as
+he looked, half remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet,
+furiously assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the Call of
+the Dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of Ilsé whirling by
+his side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly he started back. A great lithe cat had leaped softly up from the
+shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring fixedly at him
+with the eyes of a human. &ldquo;Come,&rdquo; it seemed to say, &ldquo;come
+with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself swiftly and
+come!&rdquo; Only too well he understood the creature&rsquo;s soundless call.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet on the
+stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of the house, past
+his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting away rapidly, softly,
+towards the gathering point. And again he felt the dreadful desire to do
+likewise; to murmur the old incantation, and then drop upon hands and knees and
+run swiftly for the great flying leap into the air. Oh, how the passion of it
+rose within him like a flood, twisting his very entrails, sending his
+heart&rsquo;s desire flaming forth into the night for the old, old Dance of the
+Sorcerers at the Witches&rsquo; Sabbath! The whirl of the stars was about him;
+once more he met the magic of the moon. The power of the wind, rushing from
+precipice and forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the valleys, tore him
+away.... He heard the cries of the dancers and their wild laughter, and with
+this savage girl in his embrace he danced furiously about the dim Throne where
+sat the Figure with the sceptre of majesty....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a little
+in his heart. The calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and deserted. They
+had started. The procession was off into the sky. And he was left
+behind&mdash;alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. The murmur from the
+streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. He made his way with
+the utmost caution down the corridor. At the head of the stairs he paused and
+listened. Below him, the hall where they had gathered was dark and still, but
+through opened doors and windows on the far side of the building came the sound
+of a great throng moving farther and farther into the distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing to meet
+some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one; across the dark
+hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things, and out through the opened
+front doors into the street. He could not believe that he was really left
+behind, really forgotten, that he had been purposely permitted to escape. It
+perplexed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing
+nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as though a great
+wind had blown everything alive out of it. The doors and windows of the houses
+stood open to the night; nothing stirred; moonlight and silence lay over all.
+The night lay about him like a cloak. The air, soft and cool, caressed his
+cheek like the touch of a great furry paw. He gained confidence and began to
+walk quickly, though still keeping to the shadowed side. Nowhere could he
+discover the faintest sign of the great unholy exodus he knew had just taken
+place. The moon sailed high over all in a sky cloudless and serene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hardly realising where he was going, he crossed the open market-place and so
+came to the ramparts, whence he knew a pathway descended to the high road and
+along which he could make good his escape to one of the other little towns that
+lay to the northward, and so to the railway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But first he paused and gazed out over the scene at his feet where the great
+plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. The still beauty of it
+entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment and unreality. No air
+stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood motionless, the near details were
+defined with the sharpness of day against dark shadows, and in the distance the
+fields and woods melted away into haze and shimmering mistiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the breath caught in his throat and he stood stockstill as though
+transfixed when his gaze passed from the horizon and fell upon the near
+prospect in the depth of the valley at his feet. The whole lower slopes of the
+hill, that lay hid from the brightness of the moon, were aglow, and through the
+glare he saw countless moving forms, shifting thick and fast between the
+openings of the trees; while overhead, like leaves driven by the wind, he
+discerned flying shapes that hovered darkly one moment against the sky and then
+settled down with cries and weird singing through the branches into the region
+that was aflame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Spellbound, he stood and stared for a time that he could not measure. And then,
+moved by one of the terrible impulses that seemed to control the whole
+adventure, he climbed swiftly upon the top of the broad coping, and balanced a
+moment where the valley gaped at his feet. But in that very instant, as he
+stood hovering, a sudden movement among the shadows of the houses caught his
+eye, and he turned to see the outline of a large animal dart swiftly across the
+open space behind him, and land with a flying leap upon the top of the wall a
+little lower down. It ran like the wind to his feet and then rose up beside him
+upon the ramparts. A shiver seemed to run through the moonlight, and his sight
+trembled for a second. His heart pulsed fearfully. Ilsé stood beside him,
+peering into his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some dark substance, he saw, stained the girl&rsquo;s face and skin, shining in
+the moonlight as she stretched her hands towards him; she was dressed in
+wretched tattered garments that yet became her mightily; rue and vervain twined
+about her temples; her eyes glittered with unholy light. He only just
+controlled the wild impulse to take her in his arms and leap with her from
+their giddy perch into the valley below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;See!&rdquo; she cried, pointing with an arm on which the rags fluttered
+in the rising wind towards the forest aglow in the distance. &ldquo;See where
+they await us! The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there, and the
+dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and come!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though a moment before the sky was clear and cloudless, yet even while she
+spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in the crests
+of the plane trees at his feet. Stray gusts brought the sounds of hoarse
+singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill, and the pungent odour he
+had already noticed about the courtyard of the inn rose about him in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Transform, transform!&rdquo; she cried again, her voice rising like a
+song. &ldquo;Rub well your skin before you fly. Come! Come with me to the
+Sabbath, to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its
+evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments
+prepared. The Throne is occupied. Anoint and come! Anoint and come!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with flaming
+eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change swiftly. Her hands
+touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him with the burning salve
+that sent the old magic into his blood with the power before which fades all
+that is good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the girl, when
+she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her wicked joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Satan is there!&rdquo; she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to
+draw him with her to the edge of the wall. &ldquo;Satan has come. The
+Sacraments call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and
+dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to release
+himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but
+mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he shrieked
+again. It was the old impulses, the old awful habits instinctively finding
+voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely shrieked nonsense, the words
+he uttered really had meaning in them, and were intelligible. It was the
+ancient call. And it was heard below. It was answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him darkened with
+many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The crying of hoarse
+voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of wind buffeted him,
+tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top of the stone wall; and
+Ilsé clung to him with her long shining arms, smooth and bare, holding him fast
+about the neck. But not Ilsé alone, for a dozen of them surrounded him,
+dropping out of the air. The pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him,
+exciting him to the old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and
+sorcerers doing honour to the personified Evil of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anoint and away! Anoint and away!&rdquo; they cried in wild chorus about
+him. &ldquo;To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and fearful fantasy of
+evil!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned soft and
+the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him, when&mdash;so can a
+small thing alter the whole course of an adventure&mdash;he caught his foot
+upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then fell with a sudden crash
+on to the ground below. But he fell towards the houses, in the open space of
+dust and cobblestones, and fortunately not into the gaping depth of the valley
+on the farther side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him, like flies upon a piece of
+food, but as they fell he was released for a moment from the power of their
+touch, and in that brief instant of freedom there flashed into his mind the
+sudden intuition that saved him. Before he could regain his feet he saw them
+scrabbling awkwardly back upon the wall, as though bat-like they could only fly
+by dropping from a height, and had no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing
+them perched there in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly
+shapeless, their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of
+Ilsé&rsquo;s terror at the sight of fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the dead leaves that lay under
+the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the wind carried the flame in a
+long line down the length of the wall, licking upwards as it ran; and with
+shrieks and wailings, the crowded row of forms upon the top melted away into
+the air on the other side, and were gone with a great rush and whirring of
+their bodies down into the heart of the haunted valley, leaving Vezin
+breathless and shaken in the middle of the deserted ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ilsé!&rdquo; he called feebly; &ldquo;Ilsé!&rdquo; for his heart ached
+to think that she was really gone to the great Dance without him, and that he
+had lost the opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same time his relief
+was so great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind with the whole thing,
+that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only cried aloud in the fierce
+storm of his emotion....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fire under the wall ran its course, and the moonlight came out again, soft
+and clear, from its temporary eclipse. With one last shuddering look at the
+ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder for the haunted valley beyond,
+where the shapes still crowded and flew, he turned his face towards the town
+and slowly made his way in the direction of the hotel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling, followed him
+from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and fainter with the bursts of
+wind as he disappeared between the houses.
+</p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending,&rdquo; said
+Arthur Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence sitting
+there with his notebook, &ldquo;but the fact is&mdash;er&mdash;from that moment
+my memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection of how I
+got home or what precisely I did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect
+racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and villages, still
+and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the towers of a biggish town
+and so came to a station.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and
+looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the moonlight,
+and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay there upon the
+plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main streets, and the twin and
+broken towers of the cathedral marking its torn ears against the sky. That
+picture stays in my mind with the utmost vividness to this day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Another thing remains in my mind from that escape&mdash;namely, the
+sudden sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made,
+standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left behind
+would more than settle for my indebtedness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a café
+on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found my way to the
+station and caught a train later in the day. That same evening I reached
+London.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how long altogether,&rdquo; asked John Silence quietly, &ldquo;do
+you think you stayed in the town of the adventure?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin looked up sheepishly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was coming to that,&rdquo; he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of
+his body. &ldquo;In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning
+of time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been
+September 15th,&mdash;instead of which it was only September 10th!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the
+inn?&rdquo; queried the doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must have gained time somewhere,&rdquo; he said at
+length&mdash;&ldquo;somewhere or somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit.
+I can&rsquo;t explain it. I can only give you the fact.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been back
+to the place?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Last autumn, yes,&rdquo; murmured Vezin; &ldquo;and I have never dared
+to go back. I think I never want to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And, tell me,&rdquo; asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the
+little man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing more to
+say, &ldquo;had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft practices
+during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the subject?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never!&rdquo; declared Vezin emphatically. &ldquo;I had never given a
+thought to such matters so far as I know&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never&mdash;before my adventure; but I have since,&rdquo; he replied
+significantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was, however, something still on the man&rsquo;s mind that he wished to
+relieve himself of by confession, yet could only with difficulty bring himself
+to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness of the doctor had
+provided numerous openings that he at length availed himself of one of them,
+and stammered that he would like to show him the marks he still had on his neck
+where, he said, the girl had touched him with her anointed hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered his
+shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of the skin,
+lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a little way down
+the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated exactly the position an arm
+might have taken in the act of embracing. And on the other side of the neck,
+slightly higher up, was a similar mark, though not quite so clearly defined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was where she held me that night on the ramparts,&rdquo; he
+whispered, a strange light coming and going in his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John Silence
+concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my notice, and we
+fell to discussing Vezin&rsquo;s story. Since hearing it, the doctor had made
+investigations on his own account, and one of his secretaries had discovered
+that Vezin&rsquo;s ancestors had actually lived for generations in the very
+town where the adventure came to him. Two of them, both women, had been tried
+and convicted as witches, and had been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it
+had not been difficult to prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built
+about 1700 upon the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took
+place. The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of
+the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by
+scores.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems strange,&rdquo; continued the doctor, &ldquo;that Vezin should
+have remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the kind
+of history that successive generations would have been anxious to keep alive,
+or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to think he still knows
+nothing about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the
+memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with the
+living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by a most
+singular chance, too, with the very souls who had taken part with him in the
+events of that particular life. For the mother and daughter who impressed him
+so strangely must have been leading actors, with himself, in the scenes and
+practices of witchcraft which at that period dominated the imaginations of the
+whole country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these
+witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various animals, both
+for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves swiftly to the
+scenes of their imaginary orgies. Lycanthropy, or the power to change
+themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and the ability to
+transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or
+ointment provided by Satan himself, found equal credence. The witchcraft trials
+abound in evidences of such universal beliefs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject, and
+showed how every detail of Vezin&rsquo;s adventure had a basis in the practices
+of those dark days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man&rsquo;s
+own consciousness, I have no doubt,&rdquo; he went on, in reply to my
+questions; &ldquo;for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate,
+discovered his signature in the visitors&rsquo; book, and proved by it that he
+had arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. He
+left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty brown bag
+and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement of his debt, and
+have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was absent from home, but the
+proprietress, a large woman very much as he described her, told my secretary
+that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded kind of gentleman, and after
+his disappearance she had feared for a long time that he had met with a violent
+end in the neighbouring forest where he used to roam about alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter so
+as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took place with
+her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of burning must, of
+course, have been the intuitive memory of her former painful death at the
+stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more than once that he saw her
+through smoke and flame.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that mark on his skin, for instance?&rdquo; I inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding,&rdquo; he replied,
+&ldquo;like the stigmata of the <i>religieuses</i>, and the bruises which
+appear on the bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them.
+This is very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these
+marks should have remained so long in Vezin&rsquo;s case. Usually they
+disappear quickly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it all
+over again,&rdquo; I ventured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not yet.
+We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to
+alleviate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?&rdquo; I asked
+further&mdash;&ldquo;the man who warned him against the place, <i>à cause du
+sommeil et à cause des chats?</i> Surely a very singular incident?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very singular incident indeed,&rdquo; he made answer slowly,
+&ldquo;and one I can only explain on the basis of a highly improbable
+coincidence&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Namely?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone
+there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him. But the
+crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go upon, and I can
+only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some force still active in
+his being out of the same past life, drew him thus to the personality of Vezin,
+and enabled him to fear what might happen to him, and thus to warn him as he
+did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he presently continued, half talking to himself, &ldquo;I
+suspect in this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out
+of the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a scene
+in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For strong
+actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves, they may be said
+in a sense never to die. In this case they were not vital enough to render the
+illusion complete, so that the little man found himself caught in a very
+distressing confusion of the present and the past; yet he was sufficiently
+sensitive to recognise that it was true, and to fight against the degradation
+of returning, even in memory, to a former and lower state of development.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah yes!&rdquo; he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening
+sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, &ldquo;subliminal up-rushes
+of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly
+dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this
+obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I doubt it, I doubt
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back into the
+room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon his face, the
+yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes greater than his power.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>CASE III: THE NEMESIS OF FIRE</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>
+By some means which I never could fathom, John Silence always contrived to keep
+the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of two hours
+before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the preliminary facts of
+the case. He had telephoned to me that very morning, and even through the
+disguise of the miles of wire the thrill of incalculable adventure had sounded
+in his voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As if it were an ordinary country visit,&rdquo; he called, in reply to
+my question; &ldquo;and don&rsquo;t forget to bring your gun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With blank cartridges, I suppose?&rdquo; for I knew his rigid principles
+with regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were merely for
+some obvious purpose of disguise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the receiver,
+and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation, to do my packing.
+For the honour of accompanying Dr. John Silence on one of his big cases was
+what many would have considered an empty honour&mdash;and risky. Certainly the
+adventure held all manner of possibilities, and I arrived at Waterloo with the
+feelings of a man who is about to embark on some dangerous and peculiar mission
+in which the dangers he expects to run will not be the ordinary dangers to life
+and limb, but of some secret character difficult to name and still more
+difficult to cope with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Manor House has a high sound,&rdquo; he told me, as we sat with our
+feet up and talked, &ldquo;but I believe it is little more than an overgrown
+farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond D&mdash;&mdash;, and its
+owner, Colonel Wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there
+practically alone, I understand, with an elderly invalid sister. So you need
+not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some excitement of
+its own.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is likely?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By way of reply he handed me a letter marked &ldquo;Private.&rdquo; It was
+dated a week ago, and signed &ldquo;Yours faithfully, Horace Wragge.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He heard of me, you see, through Captain Anderson,&rdquo; the doctor
+explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost world-wide; &ldquo;you
+remember that Indian obsession case&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I read the letter. Why it should have been marked private was difficult to
+understand. It was very brief, direct, and to the point. It referred by way of
+introduction to Captain Anderson, and then stated quite simply that the writer
+needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a personal interview&mdash;a
+morning interview, since it was impossible for him to be absent from the house
+at night. The letter was dignified even to the point of abruptness, and it is
+difficult to explain how it managed to convey to me the impression of a strong
+man, shaken and perplexed. Perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the
+mystery of the affair had something to do with it; and the reference to the
+Anderson case, the horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have
+touched the sense of something rather ominous and alarming. But, whatever the
+cause, there was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose somehow out
+of that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and the spirit of a
+deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the mind without any visible
+form of expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And when you saw him&mdash;?&rdquo; I asked, returning the letter as the
+train rushed clattering noisily through Clapham Junction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have not seen him,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;The man&rsquo;s mind
+was charged to the brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures.
+Notice the restraint of it. For the main character of his case psychometry
+could be depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is
+sufficient to give to another mind&mdash;a sensitive and sympathetic
+mind&mdash;clear mental pictures of what is going on. I think I have a very
+sound general idea of his problem.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So there may be excitement, after all?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence waited a moment before he replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something very serious is amiss there,&rdquo; he said gravely, at
+length. &ldquo;Some one&mdash;not himself, I gather,&mdash;has been meddling
+with a rather dangerous kind of gunpowder. So&mdash;yes, there may be
+excitement, as you put it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And my duties?&rdquo; I asked, with a decidedly growing interest.
+&ldquo;Remember, I am your &lsquo;assistant.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything,
+without seeming to. Say nothing&mdash;nothing that means anything. Be present
+at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions are
+correct this is&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke off suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I won&rsquo;t tell you my impressions yet,&rdquo; he resumed after a
+moment&rsquo;s thought. &ldquo;Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form
+your own impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary
+visitors, of course,&rdquo; he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his
+eye; &ldquo;hence, the guns.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his words and
+knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful suggestion of
+having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise reflected that intuition
+joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than double the quantity
+of mere &ldquo;brains,&rdquo; as such.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me to place
+it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any pictures that
+came spontaneously into my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the
+inside of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark
+screen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible. But no
+visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to and fro like
+the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. A momentary sensation of
+warmth came and went curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see&mdash;what?&rdquo; he asked presently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; I was obliged to admit disappointedly; &ldquo;nothing
+but the usual flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more
+vivid than usual.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said nothing by way of comment or reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And they group themselves now and then,&rdquo; I continued, with painful
+candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, &ldquo;group
+themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about
+sometimes look like triangles and crosses&mdash;almost like geometrical
+figures. Nothing more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It makes my head hot,&rdquo; I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not
+seeing anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at
+once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That sensation of heat is important,&rdquo; he said significantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable,&rdquo; I replied,
+hoping he would expand and explain. &ldquo;There was a distinct feeling of
+warmth&mdash;internal warmth somewhere&mdash;oppressive in a sense.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is interesting,&rdquo; he remarked, putting the letter back in his
+pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He
+vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk.
+Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into my corner. But
+when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation
+of heat, I found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria of the day&rsquo;s
+events&mdash;faces, scenes, memories,&mdash;and in due course I fell asleep and
+then saw nothing at all of any kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When we left the train, after six hours&rsquo; travelling, at a little wayside
+station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather, the late October
+shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the landscape, and the sun
+dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland hills. In a high dogcart, behind
+a fast horse, we were soon rattling across the undulating stretches of an open
+and bleak country, the keen air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and
+bracken strong about us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon,
+and the coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told
+us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road among
+straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift past us with a
+movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs of humanity and
+civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing five miles the lights
+of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged into a thick grove of pine
+trees that concealed the Manor House up to the moment of actual arrival.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army officer who
+had seen service, real service, and found himself in the process. He was tall
+and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as a greyhound, with grave
+eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning grey. I judged him to be about
+sixty years of age, but his movements showed a suppleness of strength and
+agility that contradicted the years. The face was full of character and
+resolution, the face of a man to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes,
+it seemed to me, wore a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to
+disguise. The whole appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with
+gravity and importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm,
+I felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple and
+sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet. Thus, he showed
+plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard,&rdquo; the doctor said,
+introducing me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then
+received were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the
+impression that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose
+perplexity must spring from some very real and tangible cause. And, quite
+obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was unmistakably
+genuine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room, that opened out
+of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the impression of a rambling
+and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient, comfortable, and wholly unpretentious.
+And so it was. Only the heat of the place struck me as unnatural. This room
+with the blazing fire may have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive
+through the night air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole
+atmosphere of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled
+grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the
+greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head and mind.
+It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught myself thinking of
+the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the letter in the train.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no preamble, and
+the exchange of civilities was of the briefest description. Evidently here was
+a man who, like my companion, loved action rather than talk. His manner was
+straightforward and direct. I saw him in a flash: puzzled, worried, harassed
+into a state of alarm by something he could not comprehend; forced to deal with
+things he would have preferred to despise, yet facing it all with dogged
+seriousness and making no attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of
+his incompetence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own company,
+and the queer business that has been going on here, and is still going
+on,&rdquo; he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards me by way of
+including me in his confidence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think, Colonel Wragge,&rdquo; replied John Silence impressively,
+&ldquo;that we shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. I gather we shall
+have our hands full.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and there was
+an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first time made me admit
+a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a little at my rashness in coming
+with so little reflection into a big case of this incalculable doctor. But no
+answer suggested itself, and to withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The
+gates had closed behind me now, and the spirit of the adventure was already
+besieging my mind with its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Explaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything serious, as
+no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the way upstairs and
+showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as I was finishing dressing
+that a knock came at my door and Dr. Silence entered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of comedy
+you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life, but as he came
+across the room to me I caught the expression of his face and understood in a
+flash that he was now in his most grave and earnest mood. He looked almost
+troubled. I stopped fumbling with my black tie and stared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is serious,&rdquo; he said, speaking in a low voice, &ldquo;more so
+even than I imagined. Colonel Wragge&rsquo;s control over his thoughts
+concealed a great deal in my psychometrising of the letter. I looked in to warn
+you to keep yourself well in hand&mdash;generally speaking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haunted house?&rdquo; I asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my
+back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he smiled gravely at the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haunted House of Life more likely,&rdquo; he replied, and a look came
+into his eyes which I had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils
+and he was thick in the fight of rescue. He was stirred in the deeps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Colonel Wragge&mdash;or the sister?&rdquo; I asked hurriedly, for the
+gong was sounding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Neither directly,&rdquo; he said from the door. &ldquo;Something far
+older, something very, very remote indeed. This thing has to do with the ages,
+unless I am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory have long
+lain undisturbed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips, looking at me
+with a peculiar searchingness of gaze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you aware yet of anything&mdash;odd here?&rdquo; he asked in a
+whisper. &ldquo;Anything you cannot quite define, for instance. Tell me,
+Hubbard, for I want to know all your impressions. They may help me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes that
+scared me a little. But he was so in earnest that I set my mind keenly
+searching.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing yet,&rdquo; I replied truthfully, wishing I could confess to a
+real emotion; &ldquo;nothing but the strange heat of the place.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave a little jump forward in my direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The heat again, that&rsquo;s it!&rdquo; he exclaimed, as though glad of
+my corroboration. &ldquo;And how would you describe it, perhaps?&rdquo; he
+asked quickly, with a hand on the door knob.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t seem like ordinary physical heat,&rdquo; I said,
+casting about in my thoughts for a definition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More a mental heat,&rdquo; he interrupted, &ldquo;a glowing of thought
+and desire, a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. Isn&rsquo;t that
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I admitted that he had exactly described my sensations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he said, as he opened the door, and with an indescribable
+gesture that combined a warning to be ready with a sign of praise for my
+correct intuition, he was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I hurried after him, and found the two men waiting for me in front of the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ought to warn you,&rdquo; our host was saying as I came in,
+&ldquo;that my sister, whom you will meet at dinner, is not aware of the real
+object of your visit. She is under the impression that we are interested in the
+same line of study&mdash;folklore&mdash;and that your researches have led to my
+seeking acquaintance. She comes to dinner in her chair, you know. It will be a
+great pleasure to her to meet you both. We have few visitors.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So that on entering the dining-room we were prepared to find Miss Wragge
+already at her place, seated in a sort of bath-chair. She was a vivacious and
+charming old lady, with smiling expression and bright eyes, and she chatted all
+through dinner with unfailing spontaneity. She had that face, unlined and
+fresh, that some people carry through life from the cradle to the grave; her
+smooth plump cheeks were all pink and white, and her hair, still dark, was
+divided into two glossy and sleek halves on either side of a careful parting.
+She wore gold-rimmed glasses, and at her throat was a large scarab of green
+jasper that made a very handsome brooch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her brother and Dr. Silence talked little, so that most of the conversation was
+carried on between herself and me, and she told me a great deal about the
+history of the old house, most of which I fear I listened to with but half an
+ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And when Cromwell stayed here,&rdquo; she babbled on, &ldquo;he occupied
+the very rooms upstairs that used to be mine. But my brother thinks it safer
+for me to sleep on the ground floor now in case of fire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this sentence has stayed in my memory only because of the sudden way her
+brother interrupted her and instantly led the conversation on to another topic.
+The passing reference to fire seemed to have disturbed him, and thenceforward
+he directed the talk himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was difficult to believe that this lively and animated old lady, sitting
+beside me and taking so eager an interest in the affairs of life, was
+practically, we understood, without the use of her lower limbs, and that her
+whole existence for years had been passed between the sofa, the bed, and the
+bath-chair in which she chatted so naturally at the dinner table. She made no
+allusion to her affliction until the dessert was reached, and then, touching a
+bell, she made us a witty little speech about leaving us &ldquo;like time, on
+noiseless feet,&rdquo; and was wheeled out of the room by the butler and
+carried off to her apartments at the other end of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the rest of us were not long in following suit, for Dr. Silence and myself
+were quite as eager to learn the nature of our errand as our host was to impart
+it to us. He led us down a long flagged passage to a room at the very end of
+the house, a room provided with double doors, and windows, I saw, heavily
+shuttered. Books lined the walls on every side, and a large desk in the bow
+window was piled up with volumes, some open, some shut, some showing scraps of
+paper stuck between the leaves, and all smothered in a general cataract of
+untidy foolscap and loose-half sheets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My study and workroom,&rdquo; explained Colonel Wragge, with a
+delightful touch of innocent pride, as though he were a very serious scholar.
+He placed arm-chairs for us round the fire. &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he added
+significantly, &ldquo;we shall be safe from interruption and can talk
+securely.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During dinner the manner of the doctor had been all that was natural and
+spontaneous, though it was impossible for me, knowing him as I did, not to be
+aware that he was subconsciously very keenly alert and already receiving upon
+the ultra-sensitive surface of his mind various and vivid impressions; and
+there was now something in the gravity of his face, as well as in the
+significant tone of Colonel Wragge&rsquo;s speech, and something, too, in the
+fact that we three were shut away in this private chamber about to listen to
+things probably strange, and certainly mysterious&mdash;something in all this
+that touched my imagination sharply and sent an undeniable thrill along my
+nerves. Taking the chair indicated by my host, I lit my cigar and waited for
+the opening of the attack, fully conscious that we were now too far gone in the
+adventure to admit of withdrawal, and wondering a little anxiously where it was
+going to lead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What I expected precisely, it is hard to say. Nothing definite, perhaps. Only
+the sudden change was dramatic. A few hours before the prosaic atmosphere of
+Piccadilly was about me, and now I was sitting in a secret chamber of this
+remote old building waiting to hear an account of things that held possibly the
+genuine heart of terror. I thought of the dreary moors and hills outside, and
+the dark pine copses soughing in the wind of night; I remembered my
+companion&rsquo;s singular words up in my bedroom before dinner; and then I
+turned and noted carefully the stern countenance of the Colonel as he faced us
+and lit his big black cigar before speaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The threshold of an adventure, I reflected as I waited for the first words, is
+always the most thrilling moment&mdash;until the climax comes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Colonel Wragge hesitated&mdash;mentally&mdash;a long time before he began.
+He talked briefly of our journey, the weather, the country, and other
+comparatively trivial topics, while he sought about in his mind for an
+appropriate entry into the subject that was uppermost in the thoughts of all of
+us. The fact was he found it a difficult matter to speak of at all, and it was
+Dr. Silence who finally showed him the way over the hedge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Hubbard will take a few notes when you are ready&mdash;you
+won&rsquo;t object,&rdquo; he suggested; &ldquo;I can give my undivided
+attention in this way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By all means,&rdquo; turning to reach some of the loose sheets on the
+writing table, and glancing at me. He still hesitated a little, I thought.
+&ldquo;The fact is,&rdquo; he said apologetically, &ldquo;I wondered if it was
+quite fair to trouble you so soon. The daylight might suit you better to hear
+what I have to tell. Your sleep, I mean, might be less disturbed,
+perhaps.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I appreciate your thoughtfulness,&rdquo; John Silence replied with his
+gentle smile, taking command as it were from that moment, &ldquo;but really we
+are both quite immune. There is nothing, I think, that could prevent either of
+us sleeping, except&mdash;an outbreak of fire, or some such very physical
+disturbance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge raised his eyes and looked fixedly at him. This reference to an
+outbreak of fire I felt sure was made with a purpose. It certainly had the
+desired effect of removing from our host&rsquo;s manner the last signs of
+hesitancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Forgive me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Of course, I know nothing of your
+methods in matters of this kind&mdash;so, perhaps, you would like me to begin
+at once and give you an outline of the situation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence bowed his agreement. &ldquo;I can then take my precautions
+accordingly,&rdquo; he added calmly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The soldier looked up for a moment as though he did not quite gather the
+meaning of these words; but he made no further comment and turned at once to
+tackle a subject on which he evidently talked with diffidence and
+unwillingness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all so utterly out of my line of things,&rdquo; he began,
+puffing out clouds of cigar smoke between his words, &ldquo;and there&rsquo;s
+so little to tell with any real evidence behind it, that it&rsquo;s almost
+impossible to make a consecutive story for you. It&rsquo;s the total cumulative
+effect that is so&mdash;so disquieting.&rdquo; He chose his words with care, as
+though determined not to travel one hair&rsquo;s breadth beyond the truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother
+died,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;but could not afford to live here then. My
+sister, whom you met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all
+these years, while I was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the
+place&mdash;for we never got a satisfactory tenant&mdash;and saw that it was
+not allowed to go to ruin. I myself took possession, however, only a year ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My brother,&rdquo; he went on, after a perceptible pause, &ldquo;spent
+much of his time away, too. He was a great traveller, and filled the house with
+stuff he brought home from all over the world. The laundry&mdash;a small
+detached building beyond the servants&rsquo; quarters&mdash;he turned into a
+regular little museum. The curios and things I have cleared away&mdash;they
+collected dust and were always getting broken&mdash;but the laundry-house you
+shall see tomorrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses that this
+beginning took him a long time. But at this point he came to a full stop
+altogether. Evidently there was something he wished to say that cost him
+considerable effort. At length he looked up steadily into my companion&rsquo;s
+face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;May I ask you&mdash;that is, if you won&rsquo;t think it strange,&rdquo;
+he said, and a sort of hush came over his voice and manner, &ldquo;whether you
+have noticed anything at all unusual&mdash;anything queer, since you came into
+the house?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence answered without a moment&rsquo;s hesitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There is a curious sensation of heat in
+the place.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; exclaimed the other, with a slight start. &ldquo;You
+<i>have</i> noticed it. This unaccountable heat&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself&mdash;but
+outside,&rdquo; I was astonished to hear the doctor add.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map that hung
+upon the wall. I got the impression that the movement was made with the
+deliberate purpose of concealing his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate,&rdquo; he said after a
+moment, turning round with the map in his hands. &ldquo;Though, of course, I
+can have no idea how you should guess&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. &ldquo;Merely my
+impression,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you pay attention to impressions, and do
+not allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often
+find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His face was
+very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On coming into possession,&rdquo; he said, looking us alternately in the
+face, &ldquo;I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and impossible
+kind I had ever heard&mdash;stories which at first I treated with amused
+indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only to keep my
+servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my brother&rsquo;s
+death&mdash;and, in a way, I think so still.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s an old plan of the estate,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;but
+accurate enough for our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the
+plantations marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one,&rdquo;
+indicating the spot with his finger, &ldquo;is called the Twelve Acre
+Plantation. It was just there, on the side nearest the house, that my brother
+and the head keeper met their deaths.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would have
+preferred to leave untouched&mdash;things he personally would rather have
+treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly dignified and
+impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness as to the sort of help
+the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed as though I were a spectator
+of some drama of mystery in which any moment I might be summoned to play a
+part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was twenty years ago,&rdquo; continued the Colonel, &ldquo;but there
+was much talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have
+heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered man but
+I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them seem to have been
+frequent.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do not recall the affair,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;May I ask
+what was the cause of death?&rdquo; Something in his voice made me prick up my
+ears for the reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the
+doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time when
+found.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And your brother?&rdquo; asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and
+listening intently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Equally mysterious,&rdquo; said our host, speaking in a low voice with
+effort. &ldquo;But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to
+mention. For those who saw the face&mdash;I did not see it myself&mdash;and
+though Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged&mdash;&rdquo; He
+stammered and hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved
+between his words. He stuck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the chief listener sympathetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My brother&rsquo;s face, they said, looked as though it had been
+scorched. It had been swept, as it were, by something that
+burned&mdash;blasted. It was, I am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found
+lying side by side, faces downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as
+though they had been in the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards
+from its edge.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map attentively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did not see the face myself,&rdquo; repeated the other, his manner
+somehow expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice,
+&ldquo;but my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be
+entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be brought to
+refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that the memory has
+mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But she spoke of it at the
+time as a face swept by flame&mdash;blasted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the air of
+one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel Wragge went on
+with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad shoulders hiding most of the
+mantelpiece.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That
+was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as Irish
+peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the foolish
+talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every week. You may
+imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you that the servants
+dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants, but the men who worked on
+the estate outside. The keepers gave notice one after another, none of them
+with any reason I could accept; the foresters refused to enter the wood, and
+the beaters to beat in it. Word flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre
+Plantation was a place to be avoided, day or night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There came a point,&rdquo; the Colonel went on, now well in his swing,
+&ldquo;when I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could
+not kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the stories at
+first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map, comes rather
+near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches the end of the back
+lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense growth of pines forms the
+chief protection the house enjoys from the east winds that blow up from the
+sea. And in olden days, before my brother interfered with it and frightened all
+the game away, it was one of the best pheasant coverts on the whole
+estate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?&rdquo; asked
+Dr. Silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know&mdash;except that I
+understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head keeper;
+but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up travelling and
+settled down here, he took a special interest in this wood, and for some
+unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall around it. This wall was
+never finished, but you shall see the ruins tomorrow in the daylight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the result of your investigations&mdash;these stories, I
+mean?&rdquo; the doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;m coming to that,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;but the
+wood first, for this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in
+any way peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer
+part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large
+boulders&mdash;old Druid stones, I&rsquo;m told. At another place there&rsquo;s
+a small pond. There&rsquo;s nothing distinctive about it that I could
+mention&mdash;just an ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood&mdash;only
+the trees are a bit twisted in the trunks, some of &rsquo;em, and very dense.
+Nothing more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor
+brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all
+odd&mdash;such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make out
+how these people got such notions into their heads.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused a moment to relight his cigar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no regular path through it,&rdquo; he resumed, puffing
+vigorously, &ldquo;but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the
+gardeners whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights
+in it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of the
+trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound&mdash;most of
+&rsquo;em said that, in fact&mdash;and another man saw shapes flitting in and
+out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all faintly
+luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms&mdash;always queer, huge
+things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the whole wood was lit up,
+and one fellow&mdash;he&rsquo;s still here and you shall see him&mdash;has a
+most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying on the ground
+round the edge of the wood at regular intervals&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What kind of stars?&rdquo; put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way
+that made me start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very
+large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was too
+terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them since.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze&mdash;welcome for its
+blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already a
+strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its effect and far
+from comforting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he went on, straightening up again on the mat,
+&ldquo;this was all commonplace enough&mdash;this seeing lights and figures at
+night. Most of these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may
+account for almost anything. But others saw things in broad daylight. One of
+the woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to his midday
+meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood by something that
+never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree, always keeping out of sight,
+yet solid enough to make the branches sway and the twigs snap on the ground.
+And it made a noise, he declared&mdash;but really&rdquo;&mdash;the speaker
+stopped and gave a short laugh&mdash;&ldquo;it&rsquo;s too absurd&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Please!</i>&rdquo; insisted the doctor; &ldquo;for it is these small
+details that give me the best clues always.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. Those were
+his very words: like the crackling of a bonfire,&rdquo; finished the soldier,
+with a repetition of his short laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most interesting,&rdquo; Dr. Silence observed gravely. &ldquo;Please
+omit nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;and it was soon after that the fires
+began&mdash;the fires in the wood. They started mysteriously burning in the
+patches of coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation.
+No one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number, have
+seen them burning and smouldering. They are always small and circular in shape,
+and for all the world like a picnic fire. The head keeper has a dozen
+explanations, from sparks flying out of the house chimneys to the sunlight
+focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them, I must admit, convince me as
+being in the least likely or probable. They are most singular, I consider, most
+singular, these mysterious fires, and I am glad to say that they come only at
+rather long intervals and never seem to spread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that
+are verifiable. He declared that no life ever willingly entered the plantation;
+more, that no life existed in it at all. No birds nested in the trees, or flew
+into their shade. He set countless traps, but never caught so much as a rabbit
+or a weasel. Animals avoided it, and more than once he had picked up dead
+creatures round the edges that bore no obvious signs of how they had met their
+death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever chasing
+some invisible creature across the field one day when he was out with his gun.
+The dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at his feet, and then gave
+chase, yelping like a mad thing. It followed its imaginary quarry to the
+borders of the wood, and then went in&mdash;a thing he had never known it to do
+before. The moment it crossed the edge&mdash;it is darkish in there even in
+daylight&mdash;it began fighting in the most frenzied and terrific fashion. It
+made him afraid to interfere, he said. And at last, when the dog came out,
+hanging its tail down and panting, he found something like white hair stuck to
+its jaws, and brought it to show me. I tell you these details
+because&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are important, believe me,&rdquo; the doctor stopped him.
+&ldquo;And you have it still, this hair?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It disappeared in the oddest way,&rdquo; the Colonel explained.
+&ldquo;It was curious looking stuff, something like asbestos, and I sent it to
+be analysed by the local chemist. But either the man got wind of its origin, or
+else he didn&rsquo;t like the look of it for some reason, because he returned
+it to me and said it was neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, so far as he
+could make out, and he didn&rsquo;t wish to have anything to do with it. I put
+it away in paper, but a week later, on opening the package&mdash;it was gone!
+Oh, the stories are simply endless. I could tell you hundreds all on the same
+lines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And personal experiences of your own, Colonel Wragge?&rdquo; asked John
+Silence earnestly, his manner showing the greatest possible interest and
+sympathy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The soldier gave an almost imperceptible start. He looked distinctly
+uncomfortable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing, I think,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;nothing&mdash;er&mdash;I
+should like to rely on. I mean nothing I have the right to speak of,
+perhaps&mdash;yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mouth closed with a snap. Dr. Silence, after waiting a little to see if he
+would add to his reply, did not seek to press him on the point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he resumed presently, and as though he would speak
+contemptuously, yet dared not, &ldquo;this sort of thing has gone on at
+intervals ever since. It spreads like wildfire, of course, mysterious chatter
+of this kind, and people began trespassing all over the estate, coming to see
+the wood, and making themselves a general nuisance. Notices of man-traps and
+spring-guns only seemed to increase their persistence; and&mdash;think of
+it,&rdquo; he snorted, &ldquo;some local Research Society actually wrote and
+asked permission for one of their members to spend a night in the wood! Bolder
+fools, who didn&rsquo;t write for leave, came and took away bits of bark from
+the trees and gave them to clairvoyants, who invented in their turn a further
+batch of tales. There was simply no end to it all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most distressing and annoying, I can well believe,&rdquo; interposed the
+doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun,
+and the interest flagged. The tales stopped. People got interested in something
+else. It all seemed to die out. This was last July. I can tell you exactly, for
+I&rsquo;ve kept a diary more or less of what happened.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all revived
+again with a rush&mdash;with a kind of furious attack, so to speak. It has
+really become unbearable. You may imagine what it means, and the general state
+of affairs, when I say that the possibility of leaving has occurred to
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Incendiarism?&rdquo; suggested Dr. Silence, half under his breath, but
+not so low that Colonel Wragge did not hear him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By Jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!&rdquo; exclaimed
+the astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the doctor,
+and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation of my
+friend&rsquo;s divining powers were to be found that way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s only that you are thinking very vividly,&rdquo; the doctor
+said quietly, &ldquo;and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you
+utter them. It&rsquo;s merely a little elementary thought-reading.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His intention, I saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress him with
+his powers so as to ensure obedience later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good Lord! I had no idea&mdash;&rdquo; He did not finish the sentence,
+and dived again abruptly into his narrative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did not see anything myself, I must admit, but the stories of
+independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like streams
+of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to shoot out
+precisely as flames might shoot out&mdash;in the direction of this house.
+There,&rdquo; he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump, pointing with
+a thick finger to the map, &ldquo;where the westerly fringe of the plantation
+comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the house&mdash;where it
+links on to those dark patches, which are laurel shrubberies, running right up
+to the back premises&mdash;that&rsquo;s where these lights were seen. They
+passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in this way reached the house
+itself. Like silent rockets, one man described them, rapid as lightning and
+exceedingly bright.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And this evidence you spoke of?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They actually reached the sides of the house. They&rsquo;ve left a mark
+of scorching on the walls&mdash;the walls of the laundry building at the other
+end. You shall see &rsquo;em tomorrow.&rdquo; He pointed to the map to indicate
+the spot, and then straightened himself and glared about the room as though he
+had said something no one could believe and expected contradiction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Scorched&mdash;just as the faces were,&rdquo; the doctor murmured,
+looking significantly at me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Scorched&mdash;yes,&rdquo; repeated the Colonel, failing to catch the
+rest of the sentence in his excitement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a prolonged silence in the room, in which I heard the gurgling of the
+oil in the lamp and the click of the coals and the heavy breathing of our host.
+The most unwelcome sensations were creeping about my spine, and I wondered
+whether my companion would scorn me utterly if I asked to sleep on the sofa in
+his room. It was eleven o&rsquo;clock, I saw by the clock on the mantelpiece.
+We had crossed the dividing line and were now well in the movement of the
+adventure. The fight between my interest and my dread became acute. But, even
+if turning back had been possible, I think the interest would have easily
+gained the day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have enemies, of course,&rdquo; I heard the Colonel&rsquo;s rough
+voice break into the pause presently, &ldquo;and have discharged a number of
+servants&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not that,&rdquo; put in John Silence briefly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think not? In a sense I am glad, and yet&mdash;there are some things
+that can be met and dealt with&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He left the sentence unfinished, and looked down at the floor with an
+expression of grim severity that betrayed a momentary glimpse of character.
+This fighting man loathed and abhorred the thought of an enemy he could not see
+and come to grips with. Presently he moved over and sat down in the chair
+between us. Something like a sigh escaped him. Dr. Silence said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My sister, of course, is kept in ignorance, as far as possible, of all
+this,&rdquo; he said disconnectedly, and as if talking to himself. &ldquo;But
+even if she knew she would find matter-of-fact explanations. I only wish I
+could. I&rsquo;m sure they exist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came then an interval in the conversation that was very significant. It
+did not seem a real pause, or the silence real silence, for both men continued
+to think so rapidly and strongly that one almost imagined their thoughts
+clothed themselves in words in the air of the room. I was more than a little
+keyed up with the strange excitement of all I had heard, but what stimulated my
+nerves more than anything else was the obvious fact that the doctor was clearly
+upon the trail of discovery. In his mind at that moment, I believe, he had
+already solved the nature of this perplexing psychical problem. His face was
+like a mask, and he employed the absolute minimum of gesture and words. All his
+energies were directed inwards, and by those incalculable methods and processes
+he had mastered with such infinite patience and study, I felt sure he was
+already in touch with the forces behind these singular phenomena and laying his
+deep plans for bringing them into the open, and then effectively dealing with
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge meanwhile grew more and more fidgety. From time to time he
+turned towards my companion, as though about to speak, yet always changing his
+mind at the last moment. Once he went over and opened the door suddenly,
+apparently to see if any one were listening at the keyhole, for he disappeared
+a moment between the two doors, and I then heard him open the outer one. He
+stood there for some seconds and made a noise as though he were sniffing the
+air like a dog. Then he closed both doors cautiously and came back to the
+fireplace. A strange excitement seemed growing upon him. Evidently he was
+trying to make up his mind to say something that he found it difficult to say.
+And John Silence, as I rightly judged, was waiting patiently for him to choose
+his own opportunity and his own way of saying it. At last he turned and faced
+us, squaring his great shoulders, and stiffening perceptibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence looked up sympathetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your own experiences help me most,&rdquo; he observed quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The fact is,&rdquo; the Colonel said, speaking very low, &ldquo;this
+past week there have been outbreaks of fire in the house itself. Three separate
+outbreaks&mdash;and all&mdash;in my sister&rsquo;s room.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; the doctor said, as if this was just what he had expected to
+hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Utterly unaccountable&mdash;all of them,&rdquo; added the other, and
+then sat down. I began to understand something of the reason of his excitement.
+He was realising at last that the &ldquo;natural&rdquo; explanation he had held
+to all along was becoming impossible, and he hated it. It made him angry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fortunately,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;she was out each time and does
+not know. But I have made her sleep now in a room on the ground floor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A wise precaution,&rdquo; the doctor said simply. He asked one or two
+questions. The fires had started in the curtains&mdash;once by the window and
+once by the bed. The third time smoke had been discovered by the maid coming
+from the cupboard, and it was found that Miss Wragge&rsquo;s clothes hanging on
+the hooks were smouldering. The doctor listened attentively, but made no
+comment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now can you tell me,&rdquo; he said presently, &ldquo;what your own
+feeling about it is&mdash;your general impression?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It sounds foolish to say so,&rdquo; replied the soldier, after a
+moment&rsquo;s hesitation, &ldquo;but I feel exactly as I have often felt on
+active service in my Indian campaigns: just as if the house and all in it were
+in a state of siege; as though a concealed enemy were encamped about
+us&mdash;in ambush somewhere.&rdquo; He uttered a soft nervous laugh. &ldquo;As
+if the next sign of smoke would precipitate a panic&mdash;a dreadful
+panic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The picture came before me of the night shadowing the house, and the twisted
+pine trees he had described crowding about it, concealing some powerful enemy;
+and, glancing at the resolute face and figure of the old soldier, forced at
+length to his confession, I understood something of all he had been through
+before he sought the assistance of John Silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And tomorrow, unless I am mistaken, is full moon,&rdquo; said the doctor
+suddenly, watching the other&rsquo;s face for the effect of his apparently
+careless words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge gave an uncontrollable start, and his face for the first time
+showed unmistakable pallor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What in the world&mdash;?&rdquo; he began, his lip quivering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only that I am beginning to see light in this extraordinary
+affair,&rdquo; returned the other calmly, &ldquo;and, if my theory is correct,
+each month when the moon is at the full should witness an increase in the
+activity of the phenomena.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see the connection,&rdquo; Colonel Wragge answered almost
+savagely, &ldquo;but I am bound to say my diary bears you out.&rdquo; He wore
+the most puzzled expression I have ever seen upon an honest face, but he
+abhorred this additional corroboration of an explanation that perplexed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confess,&rdquo; he repeated, &ldquo;I cannot see the
+connection.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why should you?&rdquo; said the doctor, with his first laugh that
+evening. He got up and hung the map upon the wall again. &ldquo;But I
+do&mdash;because these things are my special study&mdash;and let me add that I
+have yet to come across a problem that is not natural, and has not a natural
+explanation. It&rsquo;s merely a question of how much one knows&mdash;and
+admits.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge eyed him with a new and curious respect in his face. But his
+feelings were soothed. Moreover, the doctor&rsquo;s laugh and change of manner
+came as a relief to all, and broke the spell of grave suspense that had held us
+so long. We all rose and stretched our limbs, and took little walks about the
+room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad, Dr. Silence, if you will allow me to say so, that you are
+here,&rdquo; he said simply, &ldquo;very glad indeed. And now I fear I have
+kept you both up very late,&rdquo; with a glance to include me, &ldquo;for you
+must be tired, and ready for your beds. I have told you all there is to
+tell,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;and tomorrow you must feel perfectly free to take
+any steps you think necessary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The end was abrupt, yet natural, for there was nothing more to say, and neither
+of these men talked for mere talking&rsquo;s sake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out in the cold and chilly hall he lit our candles and took us upstairs. The
+house was at rest and still, every one asleep. We moved softly. Through the
+windows on the stairs we saw the moonlight falling across the lawn, throwing
+deep shadows. The nearer pine trees were just visible in the distance, a wall
+of impenetrable blackness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our host came for a moment to our rooms to see that we had everything. He
+pointed to a coil of strong rope lying beside the window, fastened to the wall
+by means of an iron ring. Evidently it had been recently put in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think we shall need it,&rdquo; Dr. Silence said, with a
+smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I trust not,&rdquo; replied our host gravely. &ldquo;I sleep quite close
+to you across the landing,&rdquo; he whispered, pointing to his door,
+&ldquo;and if you&mdash;if you want anything in the night you will know where
+to find me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wished us pleasant dreams and disappeared down the passage into his room,
+shading the candle with his big muscular hand from the draughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence stopped me a moment before I went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know what it is?&rdquo; I asked, with an excitement that even
+overcame my weariness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m almost sure. And you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not the smallest notion.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked disappointed, but not half as disappointed as I felt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Egypt,&rdquo; he whispered, &ldquo;Egypt!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>
+Nothing happened to disturb me in the night&mdash;nothing, that is, except a
+nightmare in which Colonel Wragge chased me amid thin streaks of fire, and his
+sister always prevented my escape by suddenly rising up out of the ground in
+her chair&mdash;dead. The deep baying of dogs woke me once, just before the
+dawn, it must have been, for I saw the window frame against the sky; there was
+a flash of lightning, too, I thought, as I turned over in bed. And it was warm,
+for October oppressively warm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was after eleven o&rsquo;clock when our host suggested going out with the
+guns, these, we understood, being a somewhat thin disguise for our true
+purpose. Personally, I was glad to be in the open air, for the atmosphere of
+the house was heavy with presentiment. The sense of impending disaster hung
+over all. Fear stalked the passages, and lurked in the corners of every room.
+It was a house haunted, but really haunted; not by some vague shadow of the
+dead, but by a definite though incalculable influence that was actively alive,
+and dangerous. At the least smell of smoke the entire household quivered. An
+odour of burning, I was convinced, would paralyse all the inmates. For the
+servants, though professedly ignorant by the master&rsquo;s unspoken orders,
+yet shared the common dread; and the hideous uncertainty, joined with this
+display of so spiteful and calculated a spirit of malignity, provided a kind of
+black doom that draped not only the walls, but also the minds of the people
+living within them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the bright and cheerful vision of old Miss Wragge being pushed about the
+house in her noiseless chair, chatting and nodding briskly to every one she
+met, prevented us from giving way entirely to the depression which governed the
+majority. The sight of her was like a gleam of sunshine through the depths of
+some ill-omened wood, and just as we went out I saw her being wheeled along by
+her attendant into the sunshine of the back lawn, and caught her cheery smile
+as she turned her head and wished us good sport.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The morning was October at its best. Sunshine glistened on the dew-drenched
+grass and on leaves turned golden-red. The dainty messengers of coming
+hoar-frost were already in the air, a search for permanent winter quarters.
+From the wide moors that everywhere swept up against the sky, like a purple sea
+splashed by the occasional grey of rocky clefts, there stole down the cool and
+perfumed wind of the west. And the keen taste of the sea ran through all like a
+master-flavour, borne over the spaces perhaps by the seagulls that cried and
+circled high in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But our host took little interest in this sparkling beauty, and had no thought
+of showing off the scenery of his property. His mind was otherwise intent, and,
+for that matter, so were our own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Those bleak moors and hills stretch unbroken for hours,&rdquo; he said,
+with a sweep of the hand; &ldquo;and over there, some four miles,&rdquo;
+pointing in another direction, &ldquo;lies S&mdash;&mdash; Bay, a long, swampy
+inlet of the sea, haunted by myriads of seabirds. On the other side of the
+house are the plantations and pine-woods. I thought we would get the dogs and
+go first to the Twelve Acre Wood I told you about last night. It&rsquo;s quite
+near.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We found the dogs in the stable, and I recalled the deep baying of the night
+when a fine bloodhound and two great Danes leaped out to greet us. Singular
+companions for guns, I thought to myself, as we struck out across the fields
+and the great creatures bounded and ran beside us, nose to ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The conversation was scanty. John Silence&rsquo;s grave face did not encourage
+talk. He wore the expression I knew well&mdash;that look of earnest solicitude
+which meant that his whole being was deeply absorbed and preoccupied.
+Frightened, I had never seen him, but anxious often&mdash;it always moved me to
+witness it&mdash;and he was anxious now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the way back you shall see the laundry building,&rdquo; Colonel
+Wragge observed shortly, for he, too, found little to say. &ldquo;We shall
+attract less attention then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet not all the crisp beauty of the morning seemed able to dispel the feelings
+of uneasy dread that gathered increasingly about our minds as we went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a very few minutes a clump of pine trees concealed the house from view, and
+we found ourselves on the outskirts of a densely grown plantation of conifers.
+Colonel Wragge stopped abruptly, and, producing a map from his pocket,
+explained once more very briefly its position with regard to the house. He
+showed how it ran up almost to the walls of the laundry building&mdash;though
+at the moment beyond our actual view&mdash;and pointed to the windows of his
+sister&rsquo;s bedroom where the fires had been. The room, now empty, looked
+straight on to the wood. Then, glancing nervously about him, and calling the
+dogs to heel, he proposed that we should enter the plantation and make as
+thorough examination of it as we thought worth while. The dogs, he added, might
+perhaps be persuaded to accompany us a little way&mdash;and he pointed to where
+they cowered at his feet&mdash;but he doubted it. &ldquo;Neither voice nor whip
+will get them very far, I&rsquo;m afraid,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I know by
+experience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you have no objection,&rdquo; replied Dr. Silence, with decision, and
+speaking almost for the first time, &ldquo;we will make our examination
+alone&mdash;Mr. Hubbard and myself. It will be best so.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His tone was absolutely final, and the Colonel acquiesced so politely that even
+a less intuitive man than myself must have seen that he was genuinely relieved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You doubtless have good reasons,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Merely that I wish to obtain my impressions uncoloured. This delicate
+clue I am working on might be so easily blurred by the thought-currents of
+another mind with strongly preconceived ideas.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perfectly. I understand,&rdquo; rejoined the soldier, though with an
+expression of countenance that plainly contradicted his words. &ldquo;Then I
+will wait here with the dogs; and we&rsquo;ll have a look at the laundry on our
+way home.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I turned once to look back as we clambered over the low stone wall built by the
+late owner, and saw his straight, soldierly figure standing in the sunlit field
+watching us with a curiously intent look on his face. There was something to me
+incongruous, yet distinctly pathetic, in the man&rsquo;s efforts to meet all
+far-fetched explanations of the mystery with contempt, and at the same time in
+his stolid, unswerving investigation of it all. He nodded at me and made a
+gesture of farewell with his hand. That picture of him, standing in the
+sunshine with his big dogs, steadily watching us, remains with me to this day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence led the way in among the twisted trunks, planted closely together
+in serried ranks, and I followed sharp at his heels. The moment we were out of
+sight he turned and put down his gun against the roots of a big tree, and I did
+likewise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall hardly want these cumbersome weapons of murder,&rdquo; he
+observed, with a passing smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are sure of your clue, then?&rdquo; I asked at once, bursting with
+curiosity, yet fearing to betray it lest he should think me unworthy. His own
+methods were so absolutely simple and untheatrical.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am sure of my clue,&rdquo; he answered gravely. &ldquo;And I think we
+have come just in time. You shall know in due course. For the present&mdash;be
+content to follow and observe. And think, steadily. The support of your mind
+will help me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death with a
+sort of happiness and pride. I would have followed him anywhere at that moment.
+At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread seriousness. I caught the
+thrill of his confidence; but also, in this broad light of day, I felt the
+measure of alarm that lay behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You still have no strong impressions?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Nothing
+happened in the night, for instance? No vivid dreamings?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked closely for my answer, I was aware.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I slept almost an unbroken sleep. I was tremendously tired, you know,
+and, but for the oppressive heat&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good! You still notice the heat, then,&rdquo; he said to himself, rather
+than expecting an answer. &ldquo;And the lightning?&rdquo; he added,
+&ldquo;that lightning out of a clear sky&mdash;that flashing&mdash;did you
+notice <i>that</i>?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I answered truly that I thought I had seen a flash during a moment of
+wakefulness, and he then drew my attention to certain facts before moving on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You remember the sensation of warmth when you put the letter to your
+forehead in the train; the heat generally in the house last evening, and, as
+you now mention, in the night. You heard, too, the Colonel&rsquo;s stories
+about the appearances of fire in this wood and in the house itself, and the way
+his brother and the gamekeeper came to their deaths twenty years ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded, wondering what in the world it all meant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you get no clue from these facts?&rdquo; he asked, a trifle
+surprised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I searched every corner of my mind and imagination for some inkling of his
+meaning, but was obliged to admit that I understood nothing so far.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind, you will later. And now,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;we will go
+over the wood and see what we can find.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His words explained to me something of his method. We were to keep our minds
+alert and report to each other the least fancy that crossed the picture-gallery
+of our thoughts. Then, just as we started, he turned again to me with a final
+warning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And, for your safety,&rdquo; he said earnestly, &ldquo;imagine
+<i>now</i>&mdash;and for that matter, imagine always until we leave this
+place&mdash;imagine with the utmost keenness, that you are surrounded by a
+shell that protects you. Picture yourself inside a protective envelope, and
+build it up with the most intense imagination you can evoke. Pour the whole
+force of your thought and will into it. Believe vividly all through this
+adventure that such a shell, constructed of your thought, will and imagination,
+surrounds you completely, and that nothing can pierce it to attack.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke with dramatic conviction, gazing hard at me as though to enforce his
+meaning, and then moved forward and began to pick his way over the rough,
+tussocky ground into the wood. And meanwhile, knowing the efficacy of his
+prescription, I adopted it to the best of my ability.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trees at once closed about us like the night. Their branches met overhead
+in a continuous tangle, their stems crept closer and closer, the brambly
+undergrowth thickened and multiplied. We tore our trousers, scratched our
+hands, and our eyes filled with fine dust that made it most difficult to avoid
+the clinging, prickly network of branches and creepers. Coarse white grass that
+caught our feet like string grew here and there in patches. It crowned the
+lumps of peaty growth that stuck up like human heads, fantastically dressed,
+thrusting up at us out of the ground with crests of dead hair. We stumbled and
+floundered among them. It was hard going, and I could well conceive it
+impossible to find a way at all in the night-time. We jumped, when possible,
+from tussock to tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among heads
+on a battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes that turned to
+stare as we passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light, dazzling
+the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by contrast. And on two
+occasions we passed dark circular places in the grass where fires had eaten
+their mark and left a ring of ashes. Dr. Silence pointed to them, but without
+comment and without pausing, and the sight of them woke in me a singular
+realisation of the dread that lay so far only just out of sight in this
+adventure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was exhausting work, and heavy going. We kept close together. The warmth,
+too, was extraordinary. Yet it did not seem the warmth of the body due to
+violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that laid glowing hands
+of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind of steady blaze. When my
+companion found himself too far in advance, he waited for me to come up. The
+place had evidently been untouched by hand of man, keeper, forester or
+sportsman, for many a year; and my thoughts, as we advanced painfully, were not
+unlike the state of the wood itself&mdash;dark, confused, full of a haunting
+wonder and the shadow of fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. No single gleam
+penetrated. We might have been groping in the heart of some primeval forest.
+Then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and stringlike grass came to an end;
+the trees opened out; and the ground began to slope upwards towards a large
+central mound. We had reached the middle of the plantation, and before us stood
+the broken Druid stones our host had mentioned. We walked easily up the little
+hill, between the sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered
+boulders, looked round upon a comparatively open space, as large, perhaps, as a
+small London Square.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thinking of the ceremonies and sacrifices this rough circle of prehistoric
+monoliths might have witnessed, I looked up into my companion&rsquo;s face with
+an unspoken question. But he read my thought and shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our mystery has nothing to do with these dead symbols,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;but with something perhaps even more ancient, and of another country
+altogether.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Egypt?&rdquo; I said half under my breath, hopelessly puzzled, but
+recalling his words in my bedroom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded. Mentally I still floundered, but he seemed intensely preoccupied and
+it was no time for asking questions; so while his words circled unintelligibly
+in my mind I looked round at the scene before me, glad of the opportunity to
+recover breath and some measure of composure. But hardly had I time to notice
+the twisted and contorted shapes of many of the pine trees close at hand when
+Dr. Silence leaned over and touched me on the shoulder. He pointed down the
+slope. And the look I saw in his eyes keyed up every nerve in my body to its
+utmost pitch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A thin, almost imperceptible column of blue smoke was rising among the trees
+some twenty yards away at the foot of the mound. It curled up and up, and
+disappeared from sight among the tangled branches overhead. It was scarcely
+thicker than the smoke from a small brand of burning wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Protect yourself! Imagine your shell strongly,&rdquo; whispered the
+doctor sharply, &ldquo;and follow me closely.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose at once and moved swiftly down the slope towards the smoke, and I
+followed, afraid to remain alone. I heard the soft crunching of our steps on
+the pine needles. Over his shoulder I watched the thin blue spiral, without
+once taking my eyes off it. I hardly know how to describe the peculiar sense of
+vague horror inspired in me by the sight of that streak of smoke pencilling its
+way upwards among the dark trees. And the sensation of increasing heat as we
+approached was phenomenal. It was like walking towards a glowing yet invisible
+fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we drew nearer his pace slackened. Then he stopped and pointed, and I saw a
+small circle of burnt grass upon the ground. The tussocks were blackened and
+smouldering, and from the centre rose this line of smoke, pale, blue, steady.
+Then I noticed a movement of the atmosphere beside us, as if the warm air were
+rising and the cooler air rushing in to take its place: a little centre of wind
+in the stillness. Overhead the boughs stirred and trembled where the smoke
+disappeared. Otherwise, not a tree sighed, not a sound made itself heard. The
+wood was still as a graveyard. A horrible idea came to me that the course of
+nature was about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that
+the sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken
+bubble. Something, certainly, reached up to the citadel of my reason, causing
+its throne to shake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence moved forward again. I could not see his face, but his attitude
+was plainly one of resolution, of muscles and mind ready for vigorous action.
+We were within ten feet of the blackened circle when the smoke of a sudden
+ceased to rise, and vanished. The tail of the column disappeared in the air
+above, and at the same instant it seemed to me that the sensation of heat
+passed from my face, and the motion of the wind was gone. The calm spirit of
+the fresh October day resumed command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Side by side we advanced and examined the place. The grass was smouldering, the
+ground still hot. The circle of burned earth was a foot to a foot and a half in
+diameter. It looked like an ordinary picnic fireplace. I bent down cautiously
+to look, but in a second I sprang back with an involuntary cry of alarm, for,
+as the doctor stamped on the ashes to prevent them spreading, a sound of
+hissing rose from the spot as though he had kicked a living creature. This
+hissing was faintly audible in the air. It moved past us, away towards the
+thicker portion of the wood in the direction of our field, and in a second Dr.
+Silence had left the fire and started in pursuit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then began the most extraordinary hunt of invisibility I can ever conceive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went fast even at the beginning, and, of course, it was perfectly obvious
+that he was following something. To judge by the poise of his head he kept his
+eyes steadily at a certain level&mdash;just above the height of a man&mdash;and
+the consequence was he stumbled a good deal over the roughness of the ground.
+The hissing sound had stopped. There was no sound of any kind, and what he saw
+to follow was utterly beyond me. I only know, that in mortal dread of being
+left behind, and with a biting curiosity to see whatever there was to be seen,
+I followed as quickly as I could, and even then barely succeeded in keeping up
+with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, as we went, the whole mad jumble of the Colonel&rsquo;s stories ran
+through my brain, touching a sense of frightened laughter that was only held in
+check by the sight of this earnest, hurrying figure before me. For John Silence
+at work inspired me with a kind of awe. He looked so diminutive among these
+giant twisted trees, while yet I knew that his purpose and his knowledge were
+so great, and even in hurry he was dignified. The fancy that we were playing
+some queer, exaggerated game together met the fact that we were two men dancing
+upon the brink of some possible tragedy, and the mingling of the two emotions
+in my mind was both grotesque and terrifying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He never turned in his mad chase, but pushed rapidly on, while I panted after
+him like a figure in some unreasoning nightmare. And, as I ran, it came upon me
+that he had been aware all the time, in his quiet, internal way, of many things
+that he had kept for his own secret consideration; he had been watching,
+waiting, planning from the very moment we entered the shade of the wood. By
+some inner, concentrated process of mind, dynamic if not actually magical, he
+had been in direct contact with the source of the whole adventure, the very
+essence of the real mystery. And now the forces were moving to a climax.
+Something was about to happen, something important, something possibly
+dreadful. Every nerve, every sense, every significant gesture of the plunging
+figure before me proclaimed the fact just as surely as the skies, the winds,
+and the face of the earth tell the birds the time to migrate and warn the
+animals that danger lurks and they must move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a few moments we reached the foot of the mound and entered the tangled
+undergrowth that lay between us and the sunlight of the field. Here the
+difficulties of fast travelling increased a hundredfold. There were brambles to
+dodge, low boughs to dive under, and countless tree trunks closing up to make a
+direct path impossible. Yet Dr. Silence never seemed to falter or hesitate. He
+went, diving, jumping, dodging, ducking, but ever in the same main direction,
+following a clean trail. Twice I tripped and fell, and both times, when I
+picked myself up again, I saw him ahead of me, still forcing a way like a dog
+after its quarry. And sometimes, like a dog, he stopped and pointed&mdash;human
+pointing it was, psychic pointing, and each time he stopped to point I heard
+that faint high hissing in the air beyond us. The instinct of an infallible
+dowser possessed him, and he made no mistakes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length, abruptly, I caught up with him, and found that we stood at the edge
+of the shallow pond Colonel Wragge had mentioned in his account the night
+before. It was long and narrow, filled with dark brown water, in which the
+trees were dimly reflected. Not a ripple stirred its surface.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch!&rdquo; he cried out, as I came up. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s going to
+cross. It&rsquo;s bound to betray itself. The water is its natural enemy, and
+we shall see the direction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, even as he spoke, a thin line like the track of a water-spider, shot
+swiftly across the shiny surface; there was a ghost of steam in the air above;
+and immediately I became aware of an odour of burning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence turned and shot a glance at me that made me think of lightning. I
+began to shake all over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quick!&rdquo; he cried with excitement, &ldquo;to the trail again! We
+must run around. It&rsquo;s going to the house!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The alarm in his voice quite terrified me. Without a false step I dashed round
+the slippery banks and dived again at his heels into the sea of bushes and tree
+trunks. We were now in the thick of the very dense belt that ran around the
+outer edge of the plantation, and the field was near; yet so dark was the
+tangle that it was some time before the first shafts of white sunlight became
+visible. The doctor now ran in zigzags. He was following something that dodged
+and doubled quite wonderfully, yet had begun, I fancied, to move more slowly
+than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quick!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;In the light we shall lose it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I still saw nothing, heard nothing, caught no suggestion of a trail; yet this
+man, guided by some interior divining that seemed infallible, made no false
+turns, though how he failed to crash headlong into the trees has remained a
+mystery to me ever since. And then, with a sudden rush, we found ourselves on
+the skirts of the wood with the open field lying in bright sunshine before our
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too late!&rdquo; I heard him cry, a note of anguish in his voice.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s out&mdash;and, by God, it&rsquo;s making for the
+house!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw the Colonel standing in the field with his dogs where we had left him. He
+was bending double, peering into the wood where he heard us running, and he
+straightened up like a bent whip released. John Silence dashed passed, calling
+him to follow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall lose the trail in the light,&rdquo; I heard him cry as he ran.
+&ldquo;But quick! We may yet get there in time!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That wild rush across the open field, with the dogs at our heels, leaping and
+barking, and the elderly Colonel behind us running as though for his life,
+shall I ever forget it? Though I had only vague ideas of the meaning of it all,
+I put my best foot forward, and, being the youngest of the three, I reached the
+house an easy first. I drew up, panting, and turned to wait for the others.
+But, as I turned, something moving a little distance away caught my eye, and in
+that moment I swear I experienced the most overwhelming and singular shock of
+surprise and terror I have ever known, or can conceive as possible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the front door was open, and the waist of the house being narrow, I could
+see through the hall into the dining-room beyond, and so out on to the back
+lawn, and there I saw no less a sight than the figure of Miss
+Wragge&mdash;running. Even at that distance it was plain that she had seen me,
+and was coming fast towards me, running with the frantic gait of a
+terror-stricken woman. She had recovered the use of her legs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her face was a livid grey, as of death itself, but the general expression was
+one of laughter, for her mouth was gaping, and her eyes, always bright, shone
+with the light of a wild merriment that seemed the merriment of a child, yet
+was singularly ghastly. And that very second, as she fled past me into her
+brother&rsquo;s arms behind, I smelt again most unmistakably the odour of
+burning, and to this day the smell of smoke and fire can come very near to
+turning me sick with the memory of what I had seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fast on her heels, too, came the terrified attendant, more mistress of herself,
+and able to speak&mdash;which the old lady could not do&mdash;but with a face
+almost, if not quite, as fearful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We were down by the bushes in the sun,&rdquo;&mdash;she gasped and
+screamed in reply to Colonel Wragge&rsquo;s distracted
+questionings,&mdash;&ldquo;I was wheeling the chair as usual when she shrieked
+and leaped&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know exactly&mdash;I was too frightened to
+see&mdash;Oh, my God! she jumped clean out of the chair&mdash;<i>and ran</i>!
+There was a blast of hot air from the wood, and she hid her face and jumped.
+She didn&rsquo;t make a sound&mdash;she didn&rsquo;t cry out, or make a sound.
+She just ran.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the nightmare horror of it all reached the breaking point a few minutes
+later, and while I was still standing in the hall temporarily bereft of speech
+and movement; for while the doctor, the Colonel and the attendant were half-way
+up the staircase, helping the fainting woman to the privacy of her room, and
+all in a confused group of dark figures, there sounded a voice behind me, and I
+turned to see the butler, his face dripping with perspiration, his eyes
+starting out of his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The laundry&rsquo;s on fire!&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;the laundry
+building&rsquo;s a-caught!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember his odd expression &ldquo;a-caught,&rdquo; and wanting to laugh, but
+finding my face rigid and inflexible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The devil&rsquo;s about again, s&rsquo;help me Gawd!&rdquo; he cried, in
+a voice thin with terror, running about in circles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the group on the stairs scattered as at the sound of a shot, and the
+Colonel and Dr. Silence came down three steps at a time, leaving the afflicted
+Miss Wragge to the care of her single attendant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were out across the front lawn in a moment and round the corner of the
+house, the Colonel leading, Silence and I at his heels, and the portly butler
+puffing some distance in the rear, getting more and more mixed in his addresses
+to God and the devil; and the moment we passed the stables and came into view
+of the laundry building, we saw a wicked-looking volume of smoke pouring out of
+the narrow windows, and the frightened women-servants and grooms running hither
+and thither, calling aloud as they ran.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The arrival of the master restored order instantly, and this retired soldier,
+poor thinker perhaps, but capable man of action, had the matter in hand from
+the start. He issued orders like a martinet, and, almost before I could realise
+it, there were streaming buckets on the scene and a line of men and women
+formed between the building and the stable pump.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Inside,&rdquo; I heard John Silence cry, and the Colonel followed him
+through the door, while I was just quick enough at their heels to hear him add,
+&ldquo;the smoke&rsquo;s the worst part of it. There&rsquo;s no fire yet, I
+think.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, true enough, there was no fire. The interior was thick with smoke, but it
+speedily cleared and not a single bucket was used upon the floor or walls. The
+air was stifling, the heat fearful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s precious little to burn in here; it&rsquo;s all
+stone,&rdquo; the Colonel exclaimed, coughing. But the doctor was pointing to
+the wooden covers of the great cauldron in which the clothes were washed, and
+we saw that these were smouldering and charred. And when we sprinkled half a
+bucket of water on them the surrounding bricks hissed and fizzed and sent up
+clouds of steam. Through the open door and windows this passed out with the
+rest of the smoke, and we three stood there on the brick floor staring at the
+spot and wondering, each in our own fashion, how in the name of natural law the
+place could have caught fire or smoked at all. And each was silent&mdash;myself
+from sheer incapacity and befuddlement, the Colonel from the quiet pluck that
+faces all things yet speaks little, and John Silence from the intense mental
+grappling with this latest manifestation of a profound problem that called for
+concentration of thought rather than for any words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was really nothing to say. The facts were indisputable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge was the first to utter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My sister,&rdquo; he said briefly, and moved off. In the yard I heard
+him sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently
+matter-of-fact voice, scolding some one roundly for making such a big fire and
+letting the flues get over-heated, and paying no heed to the stammering reply
+that no fire had been lit there for several days. Then he dispatched a groom on
+horseback for the local doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Dr. Silence turned and looked at me. The absolute control he possessed,
+not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture, change of colour,
+light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well knew, over its very birth
+in his heart, the masklike face of the dead he could assume at will, made it
+extremely difficult to know at any given moment what was at work in his inner
+consciousness. But now, when he turned and looked at me, there was no
+sphinx-expression there, but rather the keen triumphant face of a man who had
+solved a dangerous and complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Now</i> do you guess?&rdquo; he asked quietly, as though it were the
+simplest matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could only stare stupidly and remain silent. He glanced down at the charred
+cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger. But I was too
+excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps, to see what it was he
+outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. I could only go on staring and
+shaking my puzzled head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A fire-elemental,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;a fire-elemental of the most
+powerful and malignant kind&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A what?&rdquo; thundered the voice of Colonel Wragge behind us, having
+returned suddenly and overheard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a fire-elemental,&rdquo; repeated Dr. Silence more calmly,
+but with a note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, &ldquo;and a
+fire-elemental enraged.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The light began to dawn in my mind at last. But the Colonel&mdash;who had never
+heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably worked up for a
+plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to grapple with&mdash;the
+Colonel stood, with the most dumfoundered look ever seen on a human
+countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and stare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And why,&rdquo; he began, savage with the desire to find something
+visible he could fight&mdash;&ldquo;why, in the name of all the
+blazes&mdash;?&rdquo; and then stopped as John Silence moved up and took his
+arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There, my dear Colonel Wragge,&rdquo; he said gently, &ldquo;you touch
+the heart of the whole thing. You ask &lsquo;Why.&rsquo; That is precisely our
+problem.&rdquo; He held the soldier&rsquo;s eyes firmly with his own.
+&ldquo;And that, too, I think, we shall soon know. Come and let us talk over a
+plan of action&mdash;that room with the double doors, perhaps.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The word &ldquo;action&rdquo; calmed him a little, and he led the way, without
+further speech, back into the house, and down the long stone passage to the
+room where we had heard his stories on the night of our arrival. I understood
+from the doctor&rsquo;s glance that my presence would not make the interview
+easier for our host, and I went upstairs to my own room&mdash;shaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the solitude of my room the vivid memories of the last hour revived so
+mercilessly that I began to feel I should never in my whole life lose the
+dreadful picture of Miss Wragge running&mdash;that dreadful human climax after
+all the non-human mystery in the wood&mdash;and I was not sorry when a servant
+knocked at my door and said that Colonel Wragge would be glad if I would join
+them in the little smoking-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think it is better you should be present,&rdquo; was all Colonel
+Wragge said as I entered the room. I took the chair with my back to the window.
+There was still an hour before lunch, though I imagine that the usual divisions
+of the day hardly found a place in the thoughts of any one of us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The atmosphere of the room was what I might call electric. The Colonel was
+positively bristling; he stood with his back to the fire, fingering an unlit
+black cigar, his face flushed, his being obviously roused and ready for action.
+He hated this mystery. It was poisonous to his nature, and he longed to meet
+something face to face&mdash;something he could gauge and fight. Dr. Silence, I
+noticed at once, was sitting before the map of the estate which was spread upon
+a table. I knew by his expression the state of his mind. He was in the thick of
+it all, knew it, delighted in it, and was working at high pressure. He
+recognised my presence with a lifted eyelid, and the flash of the eye,
+contrasted with his stillness and composure, told me volumes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was about to explain to our host briefly what seems to me afoot in all
+this business,&rdquo; he said without looking up, &ldquo;when he asked that you
+should join us so that we can all work together.&rdquo; And, while signifying
+my assent, I caught myself wondering what quality it was in the calm speech of
+this undemonstrative man that was so full of power, so charged with the
+strange, virile personality behind it and that seemed to inspire us with his
+own confidence as by a process of radiation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Hubbard,&rdquo; he went on gravely, turning to the soldier,
+&ldquo;knows something of my methods, and in more than
+one&mdash;er&mdash;interesting situation has proved of assistance. What we want
+now&rdquo;&mdash;and here he suddenly got up and took his place on the mat
+beside the Colonel, and looked hard at him&mdash;&ldquo;is men who have
+self-control, who are sure of themselves, whose minds at the critical moment
+will emit positive forces, instead of the wavering and uncertain currents due
+to negative feelings&mdash;due, for instance, to fear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at us each in turn. Colonel Wragge moved his feet farther apart, and
+squared his shoulders; and I felt guilty but said nothing, conscious that my
+latent store of courage was being deliberately hauled to the front. He was
+winding me up like a clock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So that, in what is yet to come,&rdquo; continued our leader,
+&ldquo;each of us will contribute his share of power, and ensure success for my
+plan.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not afraid of anything I can <i>see</i>,&rdquo; said the
+Colonel bluntly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m ready,&rdquo; I heard myself say, as it were automatically,
+&ldquo;for anything,&rdquo; and then added, feeling the declaration was lamely
+insufficient, &ldquo;and everything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence left the mat and began walking to and fro about the room, both
+hands plunged deep into the pockets of his shooting-jacket. Tremendous vitality
+streamed from him. I never took my eyes off the small, moving figure; small
+yes,&mdash;and yet somehow making me think of a giant plotting the destruction
+of worlds. And his manner was gentle, as always, soothing almost, and his words
+uttered quietly without emphasis or emotion. Most of what he said was
+addressed, though not too obviously, to the Colonel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The violence of this sudden attack,&rdquo; he said softly, pacing to and
+fro beneath the bookcase at the end of the room, &ldquo;is due, of course,
+partly to the fact that tonight the moon is at the full&rdquo;&mdash;here he
+glanced at me for a moment&mdash;&ldquo;and partly to the fact that we have all
+been so deliberately concentrating upon the matter. Our thinking, our
+investigation, has stirred it into unusual activity. I mean that the
+intelligent force behind these manifestations has realised that some one is
+busied about its destruction. And it is now on the defensive: more, it is
+aggressive.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But &lsquo;it&rsquo;&mdash;what is &lsquo;it&rsquo;?&rdquo; began the
+soldier, fuming. &ldquo;What, in the name of all that&rsquo;s dreadful,
+<i>is</i> a fire-elemental?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I cannot give you at this moment,&rdquo; replied Dr. Silence, turning to
+him, but undisturbed by the interruption, &ldquo;a lecture on the nature and
+history of magic, but can only say that an Elemental is the active force behind
+the elements,&mdash;whether earth, air, water, <i>or fire</i>,&mdash;it is
+impersonal in its essential nature, but can be focused, personified, ensouled,
+so to say, by those who know how&mdash;by magicians, if you will&mdash;for
+certain purposes of their own, much in the same way that steam and electricity
+can be harnessed by the practical man of this century.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Alone, these blind elemental energies can accomplish little, but
+governed and directed by the trained will of a powerful manipulator they may
+become potent activities for good or evil. They are the basis of all magic, and
+it is the motive behind them that constitutes the magic &lsquo;black&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;white&rsquo;; they can be the vehicles of curses or of blessings, for a
+curse is nothing more than the thought of a violent will perpetuated. And in
+such cases&mdash;cases like this&mdash;the conscious, directing will of the
+mind that is using the elemental stands always behind the
+phenomena&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think that my brother&mdash;!&rdquo; broke in the Colonel, aghast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has nothing whatever to do with it&mdash;directly. The fire-elemental
+that has here been tormenting you and your household was sent upon its mission
+long before you, or your family, or your ancestors, or even the nation you
+belong to&mdash;unless I am much mistaken&mdash;was even in existence. We will
+come to that a little later; after the experiment I propose to make we shall be
+more positive. At present I can only say we have to deal now, not only with the
+phenomenon of Attacking Fire merely, but with the vindictive and enraged
+intelligence that is directing it from behind the scenes&mdash;vindictive and
+enraged,&rdquo;&mdash;he repeated the words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That explains&mdash;&rdquo; began Colonel Wragge, seeking furiously for
+words he could not find quickly enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Much,&rdquo; said John Silence, with a gesture to restrain him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped a moment in the middle of his walk, and a deep silence came down
+over the little room. Through the windows the sunlight seemed less bright, the
+long line of dark hills less friendly, making me think of a vast wave towering
+to heaven and about to break and overwhelm us. Something formidable had crept
+into the world about us. For, undoubtedly, there was a disquieting thought,
+holding terror as well as awe, in the picture his words conjured up: the
+conception of a human will reaching its deathless hand, spiteful and
+destructive, down through the ages, to strike the living and afflict the
+innocent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what is its object?&rdquo; burst out the soldier, unable to restrain
+himself longer in the silence. &ldquo;Why does it come from that plantation?
+And why should it attack us, or any one in particular?&rdquo; Questions began
+to pour from him in a stream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All in good time,&rdquo; the doctor answered quietly, having let him run
+on for several minutes. &ldquo;But I must first discover positively what, or
+who, it is that directs this particular fire-elemental. And, to do that, we
+must first&rdquo;&mdash;he spoke with slow deliberation&mdash;&ldquo;seek to
+capture&mdash;to confine by visibility&mdash;to limit its sphere in a concrete
+form.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good heavens almighty!&rdquo; exclaimed the soldier, mixing his words in
+his unfeigned surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; pursued the other calmly; &ldquo;for in so doing I
+think we can release it from the purpose that binds it, restore it to its
+normal condition of latent fire, and also&rdquo;&mdash;he lowered his voice
+perceptibly &mdash;&ldquo;also discover the face and form of the Being that
+ensouls it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The man behind the gun!&rdquo; cried the Colonel, beginning to
+understand something, and leaning forward so as not to miss a single syllable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean that in the last resort, before it returns to the womb of
+potential fire, it will probably assume the face and figure of its Director, of
+the man of magical knowledge who originally bound it with his incantations and
+sent it forth upon its mission of centuries.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The soldier sat down and gasped openly in his face, breathing hard; but it was
+a very subdued voice that framed the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how do you propose to make it visible? How capture and confine it?
+What d&rsquo;ye mean, Dr. John Silence?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By furnishing it with the materials for a form. By the process of
+materialisation simply. Once limited by dimensions, it will become slow, heavy,
+visible. We can then dissipate it. Invisible fire, you see, is dangerous and
+incalculable; locked up in a form we can perhaps manage it. We must betray
+it&mdash;to its death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And this material?&rdquo; we asked in the same breath, although I think
+I had already guessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not pleasant, but effective,&rdquo; came the quiet reply; &ldquo;the
+exhalations of freshly spilled blood.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not human blood!&rdquo; cried Colonel Wragge, starting up from his chair
+with a voice like an explosion. I thought his eyes would start from their
+sockets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The face of Dr. Silence relaxed in spite of himself, and his spontaneous little
+laugh brought a welcome though momentary relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The days of human sacrifice, I hope, will never come again,&rdquo; he
+explained. &ldquo;Animal blood will answer the purpose, and we can make the
+experiment as pleasant as possible. Only, the blood must be freshly spilled and
+strong with the vital emanations that attract this peculiar class of elemental
+creature. Perhaps&mdash;perhaps if some pig on the estate is ready for the
+market&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned to hide a smile; but the passing touch of comedy found no echo in the
+mind of our host, who did not understand how to change quickly from one emotion
+to another. Clearly he was debating many things laboriously in his honest
+brain. But, in the end, the earnestness and scientific disinterestedness of the
+doctor, whose influence over him was already very great, won the day, and he
+presently looked up more calmly, and observed shortly that he thought perhaps
+the matter could be arranged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are other and pleasanter methods,&rdquo; Dr. Silence went on to
+explain, &ldquo;but they require time and preparation, and things have gone
+much too far, in my opinion, to admit of delay. And the process need cause you
+no distress: we sit round the bowl and await results. Nothing more. The
+emanations of blood&mdash;which, as Levi says, is the first incarnation of the
+universal fluid&mdash;furnish the materials out of which the creatures of
+discarnate life, spirits if you prefer, can fashion themselves a temporary
+appearance. The process is old, and lies at the root of all blood sacrifice. It
+was known to the priests of Baal, and it is known to the modern ecstasy dancers
+who cut themselves to produce objective phantoms who dance with them. And the
+least gifted clairvoyant could tell you that the forms to be seen in the
+vicinity of slaughter-houses, or hovering above the deserted battlefields,
+are&mdash;well, simply beyond all description. I do not mean,&rdquo; he added,
+noticing the uneasy fidgeting of his host, &ldquo;that anything in our
+laundry-experiment need appear to terrify us, for this case seems a
+comparatively simple one, and it is only the vindictive character of the
+intelligence directing this fire-elemental that causes anxiety and makes for
+personal danger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is curious,&rdquo; said the Colonel, with a sudden rush of words,
+drawing a deep breath, and as though speaking of things distasteful to him,
+&ldquo;that during my years among the Hill Tribes of Northern India I came
+across&mdash;personally came across&mdash;instances of the sacrifices of blood
+to certain deities being stopped suddenly, and all manner of disasters
+happening until they were resumed. Fires broke out in the huts, and even on the
+clothes, of the natives&mdash;and&mdash;and I admit I have read, in the course
+of my studies,&rdquo;&mdash;he made a gesture toward his books and heavily
+laden table,&mdash;&ldquo;of the Yezidis of Syria evoking phantoms by means of
+cutting their bodies with knives during their whirling dances&mdash;enormous
+globes of fire which turned into monstrous and terrible forms&mdash;and I
+remember an account somewhere, too, how the emaciated forms and pallid
+countenances of the spectres, that appeared to the Emperor Julian, claimed to
+be the true Immortals, and told him to renew the sacrifices of blood &lsquo;for
+the fumes of which, since the establishment of Christianity, they had been
+pining&rsquo;&mdash;that these were in reality the phantoms evoked by the rites
+of blood.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both Dr. Silence and myself listened in amazement, for this sudden speech was
+so unexpected, and betrayed so much more knowledge than we had either of us
+suspected in the old soldier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then perhaps you have read, too,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;how the
+Cosmic Deities of savage races, elemental in their nature, have been kept alive
+through many ages by these blood rites?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; he answered; &ldquo;that is new to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In any case,&rdquo; Dr. Silence added, &ldquo;I am glad you are not
+wholly unfamiliar with the subject, for you will now bring more sympathy, and
+therefore more help, to our experiment. For, of course, in this case, we only
+want the blood to tempt the creature from its lair and enclose it in a
+form&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I quite understand. And I only hesitated just now,&rdquo; he went on,
+his words coming much more slowly, as though he felt he had already said too
+much, &ldquo;because I wished to be quite sure it was no mere curiosity, but an
+actual sense of necessity that dictated this horrible experiment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is your safety, and that of your household, and of your sister, that
+is at stake,&rdquo; replied the doctor. &ldquo;Once I have <i>seen</i>, I hope
+to discover whence this elemental comes, and what its real purpose is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge signified his assent with a bow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the moon will help us,&rdquo; the other said, &ldquo;for it will be
+full in the early hours of the morning, and this kind of elemental-being is
+always most active at the period of full moon. Hence, you see, the clue
+furnished by your diary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was finally settled. Colonel Wragge would provide the materials for the
+experiment, and we were to meet at midnight. How he would contrive at that
+hour&mdash;but that was his business. I only know we both realised that he
+would keep his word, and whether a pig died at midnight, or at noon, was after
+all perhaps only a question of the sleep and personal comfort of the
+executioner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tonight, then, in the laundry,&rdquo; said Dr. Silence finally, to
+clinch the plan; &ldquo;we three alone&mdash;and at midnight, when the
+household is asleep and we shall be free from disturbance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He exchanged significant glances with our host, who, at that moment, was called
+away by the announcement that the family doctor had arrived, and was ready to
+see him in his sister&rsquo;s room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the remainder of the afternoon John Silence disappeared. I had my
+suspicions that he made a secret visit to the plantation and also to the
+laundry building; but, in any case, we saw nothing of him, and he kept strictly
+to himself. He was preparing for the night, I felt sure, but the nature of his
+preparations I could only guess. There was movement in his room, I heard, and
+an odour like incense hung about the door, and knowing that he regarded rites
+as the vehicles of energies, my guesses were probably not far wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge, too, remained absent the greater part of the afternoon, and,
+deeply afflicted, had scarcely left his sister&rsquo;s bedside, but in response
+to my inquiry when we met for a moment at tea-time, he told me that although
+she had moments of attempted speech, her talk was quite incoherent and
+hysterical, and she was still quite unable to explain the nature of what she
+had seen. The doctor, he said, feared she had recovered the use of her limbs,
+only to lose that of her memory, and perhaps even of her mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then the recovery of her legs, I trust, may be permanent, at any
+rate,&rdquo; I ventured, finding it difficult to know what sympathy to offer.
+And he replied with a curious short laugh, &ldquo;Oh yes; about that there can
+be no doubt whatever.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was due merely to the chance of my overhearing a fragment of
+conversation&mdash;unwillingly, of course&mdash;that a little further light was
+thrown upon the state in which the old lady actually lay. For, as I came out of
+my room, it happened that Colonel Wragge and the doctor were going downstairs
+together, and their words floated up to my ears before I could make my presence
+known by so much as a cough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you must find a way,&rdquo; the doctor was saying with decision;
+&ldquo;for I cannot insist too strongly upon that&mdash;and at all costs she
+must be kept quiet. These attempts to go out must be prevented&mdash;if
+necessary, by force. This desire to visit some wood or other she keeps talking
+about is, of course, hysterical in nature. It cannot be permitted for a
+moment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It shall not be permitted,&rdquo; I heard the soldier reply, as they
+reached the hall below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It has impressed her mind for some reason&mdash;&rdquo; the doctor went
+on, by way evidently of soothing explanation, and then the distance made it
+impossible for me to hear more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At dinner Dr. Silence was still absent, on the public plea of a headache, and
+though food was sent to his room, I am inclined to believe he did not touch it,
+but spent the entire time fasting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We retired early, desiring that the household should do likewise, and I must
+confess that at ten o&rsquo;clock when I bid my host a temporary good-night,
+and sought my room to make what mental preparation I could, I realised in no
+very pleasant fashion that it was a singular and formidable assignation, this
+midnight meeting in the laundry building, and that there were moments in every
+adventure of life when a wise man, and one who knew his own limitations, owed
+it to his dignity to withdraw discreetly. And, but for the character of our
+leader, I probably should have then and there offered the best excuse I could
+think of, and have allowed myself quietly to fall asleep and wait for an
+exciting story in the morning of what had happened. But with a man like John
+Silence, such a lapse was out of the question, and I sat before my fire
+counting the minutes and doing everything I could think of to fortify my
+resolution and fasten my will at the point where I could be reasonably sure
+that my self-control would hold against all attacks of men, devils, or
+elementals.
+</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>
+At a quarter before midnight, clad in a heavy ulster, and with slippered feet,
+I crept cautiously from my room and stole down the passage to the top of the
+stairs. Outside the doctor&rsquo;s door I waited a moment to listen. All was
+still; the house in utter darkness; no gleam of light beneath any door; only,
+down the length of the corridor, from the direction of the sick-room, came
+faint sounds of laughter and incoherent talk that were not things to reassure a
+mind already half a-tremble, and I made haste to reach the hall and let myself
+out through the front door into the night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The air was keen and frosty, perfumed with night smells, and exquisitely fresh;
+all the million candles of the sky were alight, and a faint breeze rose and
+fell with far-away sighings in the tops of the pine trees. My blood leaped for
+a moment in the spaciousness of the night, for the splendid stars brought
+courage; but the next instant, as I turned the corner of the house, moving
+stealthily down the gravel drive, my spirits sank again ominously. For, yonder,
+over the funereal plumes of the Twelve Acre Plantation, I saw the broken,
+yellow disc of the half-moon just rising in the east, staring down like some
+vast Being come to watch upon the progress of our doom. Seen through the
+distorting vapours of the earth&rsquo;s atmosphere, her face looked weirdly
+unfamiliar, her usual expression of benignant vacancy somehow a-twist. I
+slipped along by the shadows of the wall, keeping my eyes upon the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The laundry-house, as already described, stood detached from the other offices,
+with laurel shrubberies crowding thickly behind it, and the kitchen-garden so
+close on the other side that the strong smells of soil and growing things came
+across almost heavily. The shadows of the haunted plantation, hugely lengthened
+by the rising moon behind them, reached to the very walls and covered the stone
+tiles of the roof with a dark pall. So keenly were my senses alert at this
+moment that I believe I could fill a chapter with the endless small details of
+the impression I received&mdash;shadows, odour, shapes, sounds&mdash;in the
+space of the few seconds I stood and waited before the closed wooden door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I became aware of some one moving towards me through the moonlight, and
+the figure of John Silence, without overcoat and bareheaded, came quickly and
+without noise to join me. His eyes, I saw at once, were wonderfully bright, and
+so marked was the shining pallor of his face that I could hardly tell when he
+passed from the moonlight into the shade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He passed without a word, beckoning me to follow, and then pushed the door
+open, and went in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The chill air of the place met us like that of an underground vault; and the
+brick floor and whitewashed walls, streaked with damp and smoke, threw back the
+cold in our faces. Directly opposite gaped the black throat of the huge open
+fireplace, the ashes of wood fires still piled and scattered about the hearth,
+and on either side of the projecting chimney-column were the deep recesses
+holding the big twin cauldrons for boiling clothes. Upon the lids of these
+cauldrons stood the two little oil lamps, shaded red, which gave all the light
+there was, and immediately in front of the fireplace there was a small circular
+table with three chairs set about it. Overhead, the narrow slit windows, high
+up the walls, pointed to a dim network of wooden rafters half lost among the
+shadows, and then came the dark vault of the roof. Cheerless and unalluring,
+for all the red light, it certainly was, reminding me of some unused
+conventicle, bare of pews or pulpit, ugly and severe, and I was forcibly struck
+by the contrast between the normal uses to which the place was ordinarily put,
+and the strange and medieval purpose which had brought us under its roof
+tonight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Possibly an involuntary shudder ran over me, for my companion turned with a
+confident look to reassure me, and he was so completely master of himself that
+I at once absorbed from his abundance, and felt the chinks of my failing
+courage beginning to close up. To meet his eye in the presence of danger was
+like finding a mental railing that guided and supported thought along the giddy
+edges of alarm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am quite ready,&rdquo; I whispered, turning to listen for approaching
+footsteps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded, still keeping his eyes on mine. Our whispers sounded hollow as they
+echoed overhead among the rafters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad you are here,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Not all would have
+the courage. Keep your thoughts controlled, and imagine the protective shell
+round you&mdash;round your inner being.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m all right,&rdquo; I repeated, cursing my chattering teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into me something
+of his supreme confidence. The eyes and hands of a strong man can touch the
+soul. I think he guessed my thought, for a passing smile flashed about the
+corners of his mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will feel more comfortable,&rdquo; he said, in a low tone,
+&ldquo;when the chain is complete. The Colonel we can count on, of course.
+Remember, though,&rdquo; he added warningly, &ldquo;he may perhaps become
+controlled&mdash;possessed&mdash;when the thing comes, because he won&rsquo;t
+know how to resist. And to explain the business to such a man&mdash;!&rdquo; He
+shrugged his shoulders expressively. &ldquo;But it will only be temporary, and
+I will see that no harm comes to him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced round at the arrangements with approval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Red light,&rdquo; he said, indicating the shaded lamps, &ldquo;has the
+lowest rate of vibration. Materialisations are dissipated by strong
+light&mdash;won&rsquo;t form, or hold together&mdash;in rapid
+vibrations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was not sure that I approved altogether of this dim light, for in complete
+darkness there is something protective&mdash;the knowledge that one cannot be
+seen, probably&mdash;which a half-light destroys, but I remembered the warning
+to keep my thoughts steady, and forbore to give them expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a step outside, and the figure of Colonel Wragge stood in the
+doorway. Though entering on tiptoe, he made considerable noise and clatter, for
+his free movements were impeded by the burden he carried, and we saw a large
+yellowish bowl held out at arms&rsquo; length from his body, the mouth covered
+with a white cloth. His face, I noted, was rigidly composed. He, too, was
+master of himself. And, as I thought of this old soldier moving through the
+long series of alarms, worn with watching and wearied with assault,
+unenlightened yet undismayed, even down to the dreadful shock of his
+sister&rsquo;s terror, and still showing the dogged pluck that persists in the
+face of defeat, I understood what Dr. Silence meant when he described him as a
+man &ldquo;to be counted on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I think there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features, and a
+certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the emotions that
+were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these two men, each in his
+own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door was shut and we had
+exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage I possessed was well to the
+fore, and I felt as sure of myself as I knew I ever could feel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge set the bowl carefully in the centre of the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Midnight,&rdquo; he said shortly, glancing at his watch, and we all
+three moved to our chairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There, in the middle of that cold and silent place, we sat, with the vile bowl
+before us, and a thin, hardly perceptible steam rising through the damp air
+from the surface of the white cloth and disappearing upwards the moment it
+passed beyond the zone of red light and entered the deep shadows thrown forward
+by the projecting wall of chimney.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor had indicated our respective places, and I found myself seated with
+my back to the door and opposite the black hearth. The Colonel was on my left,
+and Dr. Silence on my right, both half facing me, the latter more in shadow
+than the former. We thus divided the little table into even sections, and
+sitting back in our chairs we awaited events in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For something like an hour I do not think there was even the faintest sound
+within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted roof. Our slippers
+made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our breathing was suppressed almost
+to nothing; even the rustle of our clothes as we shifted from time to time upon
+our seats was inaudible. Silence smothered us absolutely&mdash;the silence of
+night, of listening, the silence of a haunted expectancy. The very gurgling of
+the lamps was too soft to be heard, and if light itself had sound, I do not
+think we should have noticed the silvery tread of the moonlight as it entered
+the high narrow windows and threw upon the floor the slender traces of its
+pallid footsteps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor, and myself too for that matter, sat thus like
+figures of stone, without speech and without gesture. My eyes passed in
+ceaseless journeys from the bowl to their faces, and from their faces to the
+bowl. They might have been masks, however, for all the signs of life they gave;
+and the light steaming from the horrid contents beneath the white cloth had
+long ceased to be visible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then presently, as the moon rose higher, the wind rose with it. It sighed, like
+the lightest of passing wings, over the roof; it crept most softly round the
+walls; it made the brick floor like ice beneath our feet. With it I saw
+mentally the desolate moorland flowing like a sea about the old house, the
+treeless expanse of lonely hills, the nearer copses, sombre and mysterious in
+the night. The plantation, too, in particular I saw, and imagined I heard the
+mournful whisperings that must now be a-stirring among its tree-tops as the
+breeze played down between the twisted stems. In the depth of the room behind
+us the shafts of moonlight met and crossed in a growing network.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was after an hour of this wearing and unbroken attention, and I should judge
+about one o&rsquo;clock in the morning, when the baying of the dogs in the
+stableyard first began, and I saw John Silence move suddenly in his chair and
+sit up in an attitude of attention. Every force in my being instantly leaped
+into the keenest vigilance. Colonel Wragge moved too, though slowly, and
+without raising his eyes from the table before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the bowl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lamps grew
+fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. I had been expecting
+something for so long that the movement of my companions, and the lifting of
+the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusion that something hovered
+in the air before my face, touching the skin of my cheeks with a silken run.
+But it was certainly not a delusion that the Colonel looked up at the same
+moment and glanced over his shoulder, as though his eyes followed the movements
+of something to and fro about the room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat
+more tightly about him and his eyes sought my own face first, and then the
+doctor&rsquo;s. And it was no delusion that his face seemed somehow to have
+turned dark, become spread as it were with a shadowy blackness. I saw his lips
+tighten and his expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then with a
+rush that, of course, this man had told us but a part of the experiences he had
+been through in the house, and that there was much more he had never been able
+to bring himself to reveal at all. I felt sure of it. The way he turned and
+stared about him betrayed a familiarity with other things than those he had
+described to us. It was not merely a sight of fire he looked for; it was a
+sight of something alive, intelligent, something able to evade his searching;
+it was <i>a person</i>. It was the watch for the ancient Being who sought to
+obsess him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the way in which Dr. Silence answered his look&mdash;though it was only by
+a glance of subtlest sympathy&mdash;confirmed my impression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We may be ready now,&rdquo; I heard him say in a whisper, and I
+understood that his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced
+myself mentally to the utmost of my power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet long before Colonel Wragge had turned to stare about the room, and long
+before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were at last
+beginning to stir, I had become aware in most singular fashion that the place
+held more than our three selves. With the rising of the wind this increase to
+our numbers had first taken place. The baying of the hounds almost seemed to
+have signalled it. I cannot say how it may be possible to realise that an empty
+place has suddenly become&mdash;not empty, when the new arrival is nothing that
+appeals to any one of the senses; for this recognition of an
+&ldquo;invisible,&rdquo; as of the change in the balance of personal forces in
+a human group, is indefinable and beyond proof. Yet it is unmistakable. And I
+knew perfectly well at what given moment the atmosphere within these four walls
+became charged with the presence of other living beings besides ourselves. And,
+on reflection, I am convinced that both my companions knew it too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch the light,&rdquo; said the doctor under his breath, and then I
+knew too that it was no fancy of my own that had turned the air darker, and the
+way he turned to examine the face of our host sent an electric thrill of wonder
+and expectancy shivering along every nerve in my body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet it was no kind of terror that I experienced, but rather a sort of mental
+dizziness, and a sensation as of being suspended in some remote and dreadful
+altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to happen, that had never
+before happened within the ken of man. Horror may have formed an ingredient,
+but it was not chiefly horror, and in no sense ghostly horror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Uncommon thoughts kept beating on my brain like tiny hammers, soft yet
+persistent, seeking admission; their unbidden tide began to wash along the far
+fringes of my mind, the currents of unwonted sensations to rise over the remote
+frontiers of my consciousness. I was aware of thoughts, and the fantasies of
+thoughts, that I never knew before existed. Portions of my being stirred that
+had never stirred before, and things ancient and inexplicable rose to the
+surface and beckoned me to follow. I felt as though I were about to fly off, at
+some immense tangent, into an outer space hitherto unknown even in dreams. And
+so singular was the result produced upon me that I was uncommonly glad to
+anchor my mind, as well as my eyes, upon the masterful personality of the
+doctor at my side, for there, I realised, I could draw always upon the forces
+of sanity and safety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a vigorous effort of will I returned to the scene before me, and tried to
+focus my attention, with steadier thoughts, upon the table, and upon the silent
+figures seated round it. And then I saw that certain changes had come about in
+the place where we sat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The patches of moonlight on the floor, I noted, had become curiously shaded;
+the faces of my companions opposite were not so clearly visible as before; and
+the forehead and cheeks of Colonel Wragge were glistening with perspiration. I
+realised further, that an extraordinary change had come about in the
+temperature of the atmosphere. The increased warmth had a painful effect, not
+alone on Colonel Wragge, but upon all of us. It was oppressive and unnatural.
+We gasped figuratively as well as actually.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are the first to feel it,&rdquo; said Dr. Silence in low tones,
+looking across at him. &ldquo;You are in more intimate touch, of
+course&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Colonel was trembling, and appeared to be in considerable distress. His
+knees shook, so that the shuffling of his slippered feet became audible. He
+inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no other reply. I think,
+even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself in hand. I knew what he was
+struggling against. As Dr. Silence had warned me, he was about to be obsessed,
+and was savagely, though vainly, resisting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, meanwhile, a curious and whirling sense of exhilaration began to come over
+me. The increasing heat was delightful, bringing a sensation of intense
+activity, of thoughts pouring through the mind at high speed, of vivid pictures
+in the brain, of fierce desires and lightning energies alive in every part of
+the body. I was conscious of no physical distress, such as the Colonel felt,
+but only of a vague feeling that it might all grow suddenly too
+intense&mdash;that I might be consumed&mdash;that my personality as well as my
+body, might become resolved into the flame of pure spirit. I began to live at a
+speed too intense to last. It was as if a thousand ecstasies besieged me&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Steady!&rdquo; whispered the voice of John Silence in my ear, and I
+looked up with a start to see that the Colonel had risen from his chair. The
+doctor rose too. I followed suit, and for the first time saw down into the
+bowl. To my amazement and horror I saw that the contents were troubled. The
+blood was astir with movement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rest of the experiment was witnessed by us standing. It came, too, with a
+curious suddenness. There was no more dreaming, for me at any rate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall never forget the figure of Colonel Wragge standing there beside me,
+upright and unshaken, squarely planted on his feet, looking about him, puzzled
+beyond belief, yet full of a fighting anger. Framed by the white walls, the red
+glow of the lamps upon his streaming cheeks, his eyes glowing against the
+deathly pallor of his skin, breathing hard and making convulsive efforts of
+hands and body to keep himself under control, his whole being roused to the
+point of savage fighting, yet with nothing visible to get at anywhere&mdash;he
+stood there, immovable against odds. And the strange contrast of the pale skin
+and the burning face I had never seen before, or wish to see again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what has left an even sharper impression on my memory was the blackness
+that then began crawling over his face, obliterating the features, concealing
+their human outline, and hiding him inch by inch from view. This was my first
+realisation that the process of materialisation was at work. His visage became
+shrouded. I moved from one side to the other to keep him in view, and it was
+only then I understood that, properly speaking, the blackness was not upon the
+countenance of Colonel Wragge, but that something had inserted itself between
+me and him, thus screening his face with the effect of a dark veil. Something
+that apparently rose through the floor was passing slowly into the air above
+the table and above the bowl. The blood in the bowl, moreover, was considerably
+less than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, with this change in the air before us, there came at the same time a
+further change, I thought, in the face of the soldier. One-half was turned
+towards the red lamps, while the other caught the pale illumination of the
+moonlight falling aslant from the high windows, so that it was difficult to
+estimate this change with accuracy of detail. But it seemed to me that, while
+the features&mdash;eyes, nose, mouth&mdash;remained the same, the life
+informing them had undergone some profound transformation. The signature of a
+new power had crept into the face and left its traces there&mdash;an expression
+dark, and in some unexplained way, terrible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then suddenly he opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of this changed
+voice, deep and musical though it was, made me cold and set my heart beating
+with uncomfortable rapidity. The Being, as he had dreaded, was already in
+control of his brain, using his mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see a blackness like the blackness of Egypt before my face,&rdquo;
+said the tones of this unknown voice that seemed half his own and half
+another&rsquo;s. &ldquo;And out of this darkness they come, they come.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I gave a dreadful start. The doctor turned to look at me for an instant, and
+then turned to centre his attention upon the figure of our host, and I
+understood in some intuitive fashion that he was there to watch over the
+strangest contest man ever saw&mdash;to watch over and, if necessary, to
+protect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is being controlled&mdash;possessed,&rdquo; he whispered to me
+through the shadows. His face wore a wonderful expression, half triumph, half
+admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as Colonel Wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible darkness began
+to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the hearth, rising up in
+sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. It stole up from below&mdash;an
+awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the radiations of light in the
+building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a radiance in their place. Then, out
+of this rising sea of shadows, issued a pale and spectral light that gradually
+spread itself about us, and from the heart of this light I saw the shapes of
+fire crowd and gather. And these were not human shapes, or the shapes of
+anything I recognised as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced
+globes, triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various geometrical
+figures. They grew bright, faded, and then grew bright again with an effect
+almost of pulsation. They passed swiftly to and fro through the air, rising and
+falling, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood of the Colonel, often
+gathering about his head and shoulders, and even appearing to settle upon him
+like giant insects of flame. They were accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound
+of hissing&mdash;the same sound we had heard that afternoon in the plantation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The fire-elementals that precede their master,&rdquo; the doctor said in
+an undertone. &ldquo;Be ready.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed and
+faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters overhead, we heard
+the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of the afflicted soldier. It
+was a voice of power, splendid in some way I cannot describe, and with a
+certain sense of majesty in its cadences, and, as I listened to it with quickly
+beating heart, I could fancy it was some ancient voice of Time itself, echoing
+down immense corridors of stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very
+heart of mountain tombs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have seen my divine Father, Osiris,&rdquo; thundered the great tones.
+&ldquo;I have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth,
+and am one with the starry Deities!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something grand came into the soldier&rsquo;s face. He was staring fixedly
+before him, as though seeing nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch,&rdquo; whispered Dr. Silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to
+come from very far away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again the mouth opened and the awesome voice issued forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thoth,&rdquo; it boomed, &ldquo;has loosened the bandages of Set which
+fettered my mouth. I have taken my place in the great winds of heaven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I heard the little wind of night, with its mournful voice of ages, sighing
+round the walls and over the roof.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Listen!&rdquo; came from the doctor at my side, and the thunder of the
+voice continued&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have hidden myself with you, O ye stars that never diminish. I
+remember my name&mdash;in&mdash;the&mdash;House&mdash;of&mdash;Fire!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voice ceased and the sound died away. Something about the face and figure
+of Colonel Wragge relaxed, I thought. The terrible look passed from his face.
+The Being that obsessed him was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The great Ritual,&rdquo; said Dr. Silence aside to me, very low,
+&ldquo;the Book of the Dead. Now it&rsquo;s leaving him. Soon the blood will
+fashion it a body.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge, who had stood absolutely motionless all this time, suddenly
+swayed, so that I thought he was going to fall,&mdash;and, but for the quick
+support of the doctor&rsquo;s arm, he probably would have fallen, for he
+staggered as in the beginning of collapse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am drunk with the wine of Osiris,&rdquo; he cried,&mdash;and it was
+half with his own voice this time&mdash;&ldquo;but Horus, the Eternal Watcher,
+is about my path&mdash;for&mdash;safety.&rdquo; The voice dwindled and failed,
+dying away into something almost like a cry of distress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, watch closely,&rdquo; said Dr. Silence, speaking loud, &ldquo;for
+after the cry will come the Fire!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I began to tremble involuntarily; an awful change had come without warning into
+the air; my legs grew weak as paper beneath my weight and I had to support
+myself by leaning on the table. Colonel Wragge, I saw, was also leaning forward
+with a kind of droop. The shapes of fire had vanished all, but his face was lit
+by the red lamps and the pale, shifting moonlight rose behind him like mist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were both gazing at the bowl, now almost empty; the Colonel stooped so low I
+feared every minute he would lose his balance and drop into it; and the shadow,
+that had so long been in process of forming, now at length began to assume
+material outline in the air before us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then John Silence moved forward quickly. He took his place between us and the
+shadow. Erect, formidable, absolute master of the situation, I saw him stand
+there, his face calm and almost smiling, and fire in his eyes. His protective
+influence was astounding and incalculable. Even the abhorrent dread I felt at
+the sight of the creature growing into life and substance before us, lessened
+in some way so that I was able to keep my eyes fixed on the air above the bowl
+without too vivid a terror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as it took shape, rising out of nothing as it were, and growing momentarily
+more defined in outline, a period of utter and wonderful silence settled down
+upon the building and all it contained. A hush of ages, like the sudden centre
+of peace at the heart of the travelling cyclone, descended through the night,
+and out of this hush, as out of the emanations of the steaming blood, issued
+the form of the ancient being who had first sent the elemental of fire upon its
+mission. It grew and darkened and solidified before our eyes. It rose from just
+beyond the table so that the lower portions remained invisible, but I saw the
+outline limn itself upon the air, as though slowly revealed by the rising of a
+curtain. It apparently had not then quite concentrated to the normal
+proportions, but was spread out on all sides into space, huge, though rapidly
+condensing, for I saw the colossal shoulders, the neck, the lower portion of
+the dark jaws, the terrible mouth, and then the teeth and lips&mdash;and, as
+the veil seemed to lift further upon the tremendous face&mdash;I saw the nose
+and cheek bones. In another moment I should have looked straight into the
+eyes&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what Dr. Silence did at that moment was so unexpected, and took me so by
+surprise, that I have never yet properly understood its nature, and he has
+never yet seen fit to explain in detail to me. He uttered some sound that had a
+note of command in it&mdash;and, in so doing, stepped forward and intervened
+between me and the face. The figure, just nearing completeness, he therefore
+hid from my sight&mdash;and I have always thought purposely hid from my sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The fire!&rdquo; he cried out. &ldquo;The fire! Beware!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a sudden roar as of flame from the very mouth of the pit, and for the
+space of a single second all grew light as day. A blinding flash passed across
+my face, and there was heat for an instant that seemed to shrivel skin, and
+flesh, and bone. Then came steps, and I heard Colonel Wragge utter a great cry,
+wilder than any human cry I have ever known. The heat sucked all the breath out
+of my lungs with a rush, and the blaze of light, as it vanished, swept my
+vision with it into enveloping darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I recovered the use of my senses a few moments later I saw that Colonel
+Wragge with a face of death, its whiteness strangely stained, had moved closer
+to me. Dr. Silence stood beside him, an expression of triumph and success in
+his eyes. The next minute the soldier tried to clutch me with his hand. Then he
+reeled, staggered, and, unable to save himself, fell with a great crash upon
+the brick floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the sheet of flame, a wind raged round the building as though it would
+lift the roof off, but then passed as suddenly as it came. And in the intense
+calm that followed I saw that the form had vanished, and the doctor was
+stooping over Colonel Wragge upon the floor, trying to lift him to a sitting
+position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Light,&rdquo; he said quietly, &ldquo;more light. Take the shades
+off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge sat up and the glare of the unshaded lamps fell upon his face.
+It was grey and drawn, still running heat, and there was a look in the eyes and
+about the corners of the mouth that seemed in this short space of time to have
+added years to its age. At the same time, the expression of effort and anxiety
+had left it. It showed relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gone!&rdquo; he said, looking up at the doctor in a dazed fashion, and
+struggling to his feet. &ldquo;Thank God! it&rsquo;s gone at last.&rdquo; He
+stared round the laundry as though to find out where he was. &ldquo;Did it
+control me&mdash;take possession of me? Did I talk nonsense?&rdquo; he asked
+bluntly. &ldquo;After the heat came, I remember nothing&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll feel yourself again in a few minutes,&rdquo; the doctor
+said. To my infinite horror I saw that he was surreptitiously wiping sundry
+dark stains from the face. &ldquo;Our experiment has been a success
+and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave me a swift glance to hide the bowl, standing between me and our host
+while I hurriedly stuffed it down under the lid of the nearest cauldron.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;and none of us the worse for it,&rdquo; he finished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And fires?&rdquo; he asked, still dazed, &ldquo;there&rsquo;ll be no
+more fires?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is dissipated&mdash;partly, at any rate,&rdquo; replied Dr. Silence
+cautiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the man behind the gun,&rdquo; he went on, only half realising what
+he was saying, I think; &ldquo;have you discovered <i>that?</i>&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A form materialised,&rdquo; said the doctor briefly. &ldquo;I know for
+certain now what the directing intelligence was behind it all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge pulled himself together and got upon his feet. The words
+conveyed no clear meaning to him yet. But his memory was returning gradually,
+and he was trying to piece together the fragments into a connected whole. He
+shivered a little, for the place had grown suddenly chilly. The air was empty
+again, lifeless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You feel all right again now,&rdquo; Dr. Silence said, in the tone of a
+man stating a fact rather than asking a question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thanks to you&mdash;both, yes.&rdquo; He drew a deep breath, and mopped
+his face, and even attempted a smile. He made me think of a man coming from the
+battlefield with the stains of fighting still upon him, but scornful of his
+wounds. Then he turned gravely towards the doctor with a question in his eyes.
+Memory had returned and he was himself again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Precisely what I expected,&rdquo; the doctor said calmly; &ldquo;a
+fire-elemental sent upon its mission in the days of Thebes, centuries before
+Christ, and tonight, for the first time all these thousands of years, released
+from the spell that originally bound it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We stared at him in amazement, Colonel Wragge opening his lips for words that
+refused to shape themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And, if we dig,&rdquo; he continued significantly, pointing to the floor
+where the blackness had poured up, &ldquo;we shall find some underground
+connection&mdash;a tunnel most likely&mdash;leading to the Twelve Acre Wood. It
+was made by&mdash;your predecessor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A tunnel made by my brother!&rdquo; gasped the soldier. &ldquo;Then my
+sister should know&mdash;she lived here with him&mdash;&rdquo; He stopped
+suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John Silence inclined his head slowly. &ldquo;I think so,&rdquo; he said
+quietly. &ldquo;Your brother, no doubt, was as much tormented as you have
+been,&rdquo; he continued after a pause in which Colonel Wragge seemed deeply
+preoccupied with his thoughts, &ldquo;and tried to find peace by burying it in
+the wood, and surrounding the wood then, like a large magic circle, with the
+enchantments of the old formulae. So the stars the man saw
+blazing&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But burying what?&rdquo; asked the soldier faintly, stepping backwards
+towards the support of the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence regarded us both intently for a moment before he replied. I think
+he weighed in his mind whether to tell us now, or when the investigation was
+absolutely complete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The mummy,&rdquo; he said softly, after a moment; &ldquo;the mummy that
+your brother took from its resting place of centuries, and brought
+home&mdash;here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge dropped down upon the nearest chair, hanging breathlessly on
+every word. He was far too amazed for speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The mummy of some important person&mdash;a priest most
+likely&mdash;protected from disturbance and desecration by the ceremonial magic
+of the time. For they understood how to attach to the mummy, to lock up with it
+in the tomb, an elemental force that would direct itself even after ages upon
+any one who dared to molest it. In this case it was an elemental of
+fire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence crossed the floor and turned out the lamps one by one. He had
+nothing more to say for the moment. Following his example, I folded the table
+together and took up the chairs, and our host, still dazed and silent,
+mechanically obeyed him and moved to the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We removed all traces of the experiment, taking the empty bowl back to the
+house concealed beneath an ulster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The air was cool and fragrant as we walked to the house, the stars beginning to
+fade overhead and a fresh wind of early morning blowing up out of the east
+where the sky was already hinting of the coming day. It was after five
+o&rsquo;clock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stealthily we entered the front hall and locked the door, and as we went on
+tiptoe upstairs to our rooms, the Colonel, peering at us over his candle as he
+nodded good-night, whispered that if we were ready the digging should be begun
+that very day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I saw him steal along to his sister&rsquo;s room and disappear.
+</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>
+But not even the mysterious references to the mummy, or the prospect of a
+revelation by digging, were able to hinder the reaction that followed the
+intense excitement of the past twelve hours, and I slept the sleep of the dead,
+dreamless and undisturbed. A touch on the shoulder woke me, and I saw Dr.
+Silence standing beside the bed, dressed to go out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s tea-time. You&rsquo;ve slept the
+best part of a dozen hours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I sprang up and made a hurried toilet, while my companion sat and talked. He
+looked fresh and rested, and his manner was even quieter than usual.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Colonel Wragge has provided spades and pickaxes. We&rsquo;re going out
+to unearth this mummy at once,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;and there&rsquo;s no
+reason we should not get away by the morning train.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m ready to go tonight, if you are,&rdquo; I said honestly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Dr. Silence shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must see this through to the end,&rdquo; he said gravely, and in a
+tone that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. He went
+on talking while I dressed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and none
+of them are cases to trifle with,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;for the mummies
+of important people&mdash;kings, priests, magicians&mdash;were laid away with
+profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected, as you
+have seen, against desecration, and especially against destruction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The general belief,&rdquo; he went on, anticipating my questions,
+&ldquo;held, of course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its
+Ka,&mdash;the owner&rsquo;s spirit,&mdash;but it is not improbable that the
+magical embalming was also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of
+the body preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline of
+earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful guardian-forces
+to keep off trespassers. And any one who dared to remove the mummy, or
+especially to unwind it&mdash;well,&rdquo; he added, with meaning, &ldquo;you
+have seen&mdash;and you will see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I caught his face in the mirror while I struggled with my collar. It was deeply
+serious. There could be no question that he spoke of what he believed and knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted
+too,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;for he tried to banish it by burial in the
+wood, making a magic circle to enclose it. Something of genuine ceremonial he
+must have known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the
+still flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. Only he did not
+know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy&rsquo;s guardian was a
+fire-force. Fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw, it can be
+released by it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then that awful figure in the laundry?&rdquo; I asked, thrilled to find
+him so communicative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Undoubtedly the actual Ka of the mummy operating always behind its
+agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And Miss Wragge&mdash;?&rdquo; I ventured once more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, Miss Wragge,&rdquo; he repeated with increased gravity, &ldquo;Miss
+Wragge&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready, and the
+Colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. The thread was broken. Dr.
+Silence moved to the door and signed to me to follow. But his manner told me
+that in any case no real answer would have been forthcoming to my question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the place to dig in,&rdquo; I asked, unable to restrain my
+curiosity, &ldquo;will you find it by some process of divination
+or&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused at the door and looked back at me, and with that he left me to finish
+my dressing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was growing dark when the three of us silently made our way to the Twelve
+Acre Plantation; the sky was overcast, and a black wind came out of the east.
+Gloom hung about the old house and the air seemed full of sighings. We found
+the tools ready laid at the edge of the wood, and each shouldering his piece,
+we followed our leader at once in among the trees. He went straight forward for
+some twenty yards and then stopped. At his feet lay the blackened circle of one
+of the burned places. It was just discernible against the surrounding white
+grass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are three of these,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and they all lie in a
+line with one another. Any one of them will tap the tunnel that connects the
+laundry&mdash;the former Museum&mdash;with the chamber where the mummy now lies
+buried.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He at once cleared away the burnt grass and began to dig; we all began to dig.
+While I used the pick, the others shovelled vigorously. No one spoke. Colonel
+Wragge worked the hardest of the three. The soil was light and sandy, and there
+were only a few snake-like roots and occasional loose stones to delay us. The
+pick made short work of these. And meanwhile the darkness settled about us and
+the biting wind swept roaring through the trees overhead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, quite suddenly, without a cry, Colonel Wragge disappeared up to his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The tunnel!&rdquo; cried the doctor, helping to drag him out, red,
+breathless, and covered with sand and perspiration. &ldquo;Now, let me lead the
+way.&rdquo; And he slipped down nimbly into the hole, so that a moment later we
+heard his voice, muffled by sand and distance, rising up to us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hubbard, you come next, and then Colonel Wragge&mdash;if he
+wishes,&rdquo; we heard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll follow you, of course,&rdquo; he said, looking at me as I
+scrambled in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hole was bigger now, and I got down on all-fours in a channel not much
+bigger than a large sewer-pipe and found myself in total darkness. A minute
+later a heavy thud, followed by a cataract of loose sand, announced the arrival
+of the Colonel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Catch hold of my heel,&rdquo; called Dr. Silence, &ldquo;and Colonel
+Wragge can take yours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this slow, laborious fashion we wormed our way along a tunnel that had been
+roughly dug out of the shifting sand, and was shored up clumsily by means of
+wooden pillars and posts. Any moment, it seemed to me, we might be buried
+alive. We could not see an inch before our eyes, but had to grope our way
+feeling the pillars and the walls. It was difficult to breathe, and the Colonel
+behind me made but slow progress, for the cramped position of our bodies was
+very severe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had travelled in this way for ten minutes, and gone perhaps as much as ten
+yards, when I lost my grasp of the doctor&rsquo;s heel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; I heard his voice, sounding above me somewhere. He was
+standing up in a clear space, and the next moment I was standing beside him.
+Colonel Wragge came heavily after, and he too rose up and stood. Then Dr.
+Silence produced his candles and we heard preparations for striking matches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet even before there was light, an indefinable sensation of awe came over us
+all. In this hole in the sand, some three feet under ground, we stood side by
+side, cramped and huddled, struck suddenly with an over whelming apprehension
+of something ancient, something formidable, something incalculably wonderful,
+that touched in each one of us a sense of the sublime and the terrible even
+before we could see an inch before our faces. I know not how to express in
+language this singular emotion that caught us here in utter darkness, touching
+no sense directly, it seemed, yet with the recognition that before us in the
+blackness of this underground night there lay something that was mighty with
+the mightiness of long past ages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I felt Colonel Wragge press in closely to my side, and I understood the
+pressure and welcomed it. No human touch, to me at least, has ever been more
+eloquent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the match flared, a thousand shadows fled on black wings, and I saw John
+Silence fumbling with the candle, his face lit up grotesquely by the flickering
+light below it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had dreaded this light, yet when it came there was apparently nothing to
+explain the profound sensations of dread that preceded it. We stood in a small
+vaulted chamber in the sand, the sides and roof shored with bars of wood, and
+the ground laid roughly with what seemed to be tiles. It was six feet high, so
+that we could all stand comfortably, and may have been ten feet long by eight
+feet wide. Upon the wooden pillars at the side I saw that Egyptian
+hieroglyphics had been rudely traced by burning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence lit three candles and handed one to each of us. He placed a fourth
+in the sand against the wall on his right, and another to mark the entrance to
+the tunnel. We stood and stared about us, instinctively holding our breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Empty, by God!&rdquo; exclaimed Colonel Wragge. His voice trembled with
+excitement. And then, as his eyes rested on the ground, he added, &ldquo;And
+footsteps&mdash;look&mdash;footsteps in the sand!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Silence said nothing. He stooped down and began to make a search of the
+chamber, and as he moved, my eyes followed his crouching figure and noted the
+queer distorted shadows that poured over the walls and ceiling after him. Here
+and there thin trickles of loose sand ran fizzing down the sides. The
+atmosphere, heavily charged with faint yet pungent odours, lay utterly still,
+and the flames of the candles might have been painted on the air for all the
+movement they betrayed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, as I watched, it was almost necessary to persuade myself forcibly that I
+was only standing upright with difficulty in this little sand-hole of a modern
+garden in the south of England, for it seemed to me that I stood, as in vision,
+at the entrance of some vast rock-hewn Temple far, far down the river of Time.
+The illusion was powerful, and persisted. Granite columns, that rose to heaven,
+piled themselves about me, majestically uprearing, and a roof like the sky
+itself spread above a line of colossal figures that moved in shadowy procession
+along endless and stupendous aisles. This huge and splendid fantasy, borne I
+knew not whence, possessed me so vividly that I was actually obliged to
+concentrate my attention upon the small stooping figure of the doctor, as he
+groped about the walls, in order to keep the eye of imagination on the scene
+before me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the limited space rendered a long search out of the question, and his
+footsteps, instead of shuffling through loose sand, presently struck something
+of a different quality that gave forth a hollow and resounding echo. He stooped
+to examine more closely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was standing exactly in the centre of the little chamber when this happened,
+and he at once began scraping away the sand with his feet. In less than a
+minute a smooth surface became visible&mdash;the surface of a wooden covering.
+The next thing I saw was that he had raised it and was peering down into a
+space below. Instantly, a strong odour of nitre and bitumen, mingled with the
+strange perfume of unknown and powdered aromatics, rose up from the uncovered
+space and filled the vault, stinging the throat and making the eyes water and
+smart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The mummy!&rdquo; whispered Dr. Silence, looking up into our faces over
+his candle; and as he said the word I felt the soldier lurch against me, and
+heard his breathing in my very ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The mummy!&rdquo; he repeated under his breath, as we pressed forward to
+look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in me so
+prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for I have had not a little to
+do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even experimented magically
+with not a few. But there was something in the sight of that grey and silent
+figure, lying in its modern box of lead and wood at the bottom of this sandy
+grave, swathed in the bandages of centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen
+that the priests of Egypt had prayed over with their mighty enchantments
+thousands of years before&mdash;something in the sight of it lying there and
+breathing its own spice-laden atmosphere even in the darkness of its exile in
+this remote land, something that pierced to the very core of my being and
+touched that root of awe which slumbers in every man near the birth of tears
+and the passion of true worship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember turning quickly from the Colonel, lest he should see my emotion, yet
+fail to understand its cause, turn and clutch John Silence by the arm, and then
+fall trembling to see that he, too, had lowered his head and was hiding his
+face in his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A kind of whirling storm came over me, rising out of I know not what utter
+deeps of memory, and in a whiteness of vision I heard the magical old
+chauntings from the Book of the Dead, and saw the Gods pass by in dim
+procession, the mighty, immemorial Beings who were yet themselves only the
+personified attributes of the true Gods, the God with the Eyes of Fire, the God
+with the Face of Smoke. I saw again Anubis, the dog-faced deity, and the
+children of Horus, eternal watcher of the ages, as they swathed Osiris, the
+first mummy of the world, in the scented and mystic bands, and I tasted again
+something of the ecstasy of the justified soul as it embarked in the golden
+Boat of Ra, and journeyed onwards to rest in the fields of the blessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, as Dr. Silence, with infinite reverence, stooped and touched the
+still face, so dreadfully staring with its painted eyes, there rose again to
+our nostrils wave upon wave of this perfume of thousands of years, and time
+fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in haunted panorama the most
+wonderful dream of the whole world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A gentle hissing became audible in the air, and the doctor moved quickly
+backwards. It came close to our faces and then seemed to play about the walls
+and ceiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The last of the Fire&mdash;still waiting for its full
+accomplishment,&rdquo; he muttered; but I heard both words and hissing as
+things far away, for I was still busy with the journey of the soul through the
+Seven Halls of Death, listening for echoes of the grandest ritual ever known to
+men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The earthen plates covered with hieroglyphics still lay beside the mummy, and
+round it, carefully arranged at the points of the compass, stood the four jars
+with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the cynocephalus, and man, the jars in
+which were placed the hair, the nail parings, the heart, and other special
+portions of the body. Even the amulets, the mirror, the blue clay statues of
+the Ka, and the lamp with seven wicks were there. Only the sacred scarabaeus
+was missing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not only has it been torn from its ancient resting-place,&rdquo; I heard
+Dr. Silence saying in a solemn voice as he looked at Colonel Wragge with fixed
+gaze, &ldquo;but it has been partially unwound,&rdquo;&mdash;he pointed to the
+wrappings of the breast,&mdash;&ldquo;and&mdash;the scarabaeus has been removed
+from the throat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hissing, that was like the hissing of an invisible flame, had ceased; only
+from time to time we heard it as though it passed backwards and forwards in the
+tunnel; and we stood looking into each other&rsquo;s faces without speaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently Colonel Wragge made a great effort and braced himself. I heard the
+sound catch in his throat before the words actually became audible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My sister,&rdquo; he said, very low. And then there followed a long
+pause, broken at length by John Silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must be replaced,&rdquo; he said significantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I knew nothing,&rdquo; the soldier said, forcing himself to speak the
+words he hated saying. &ldquo;Absolutely nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must be returned,&rdquo; repeated the other, &ldquo;if it is not now
+too late. For I fear&mdash;I fear&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge made a movement of assent with his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It shall be,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The place was still as the grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not know what it was then that made us all three turn round with so sudden
+a start, for there was no sound audible to my ears, at least.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor was on the point of replacing the lid over the mummy, when he
+straightened up as if he had been shot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s something coming,&rdquo; said Colonel Wragge under his
+breath, and the doctor&rsquo;s eyes, peering down the small opening of the
+tunnel, showed me the true direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point about
+half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the sand falling in,&rdquo; I said, though I knew it was
+foolish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the Colonel calmly, in a voice that seemed to have the
+ring of iron, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve heard it for some time past. It is something
+alive&mdash;and it is coming nearer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stared about him with a look of resolution that made his face almost noble.
+The horror in his heart was overmastering, yet he stood there prepared for
+anything that might come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no other way out,&rdquo; John Silence said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leaned the lid against the sand, and waited. I knew by the masklike
+expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes, that he
+anticipated something that might be very terrible&mdash;appalling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. I still held my
+candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the grease all over me;
+but the soldier had set his into the sand just behind his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thoughts of being buried alive, of being smothered like rats in a trap, of
+being caught and done to death by some invisible and merciless force we could
+not grapple with, rushed into my mind. Then I thought of fire&mdash;of
+suffocation&mdash;of being roasted alive. The perspiration began to pour from
+my face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Steady!&rdquo; came the voice of Dr. Silence to me through the vault.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from each
+other&rsquo;s faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and all the
+time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually nearer. The
+tension, for me at least, was very near the breaking point when at last the
+cause of the disturbance reached the edge. It was hidden for a moment just
+behind the broken rim of soil. A jet of sand, shaken by the close vibration,
+trickled down on to the ground; I have never in my life seen anything fall with
+such laborious leisure. The next second, uttering a cry of curious quality, it
+came into view.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was far more distressingly horrible than anything I had anticipated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the sight of some Egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or even of some
+demon of fire, I think I was already half prepared; but when, instead, I saw
+the white visage of Miss Wragge framed in that round opening of sand, followed
+by her body crawling on all fours, her eyes bulging and reflecting the yellow
+glare of the candles, my first instinct was to turn and run like a frantic
+animal seeking a way of escape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Dr. Silence, who seemed no whit surprised, caught my arm and steadied me,
+and we both saw the Colonel then drop upon his knees and come thus to a level
+with his sister. For more than a whole minute, as though struck in stone, the
+two faces gazed silently at each other: hers, for all the dreadful emotion in
+it, more like a gargoyle than anything human; and his, white and blank with an
+expression that was beyond either astonishment or alarm. She looked up; he
+looked down. It was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand
+close to the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then John Silence moved forward and spoke in a voice that was very low, yet
+perfectly calm and natural.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad you have come,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You are the one person
+whose presence at this moment is most required. And I hope that you may yet be
+in time to appease the anger of the Fire, and to bring peace again to your
+household, and,&rdquo; he added lower still so that no one heard it but myself,
+&ldquo;<i>safety to yourself</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while her brother stumbled backwards, crushing a candle into the sand in
+his awkwardness, the old lady crawled farther into the vaulted chamber and
+slowly rose upon her feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the sight of the wrapped figure of the mummy I was fully prepared to see her
+scream and faint, but on the contrary, to my complete amazement, she merely
+bowed her head and dropped quietly upon her knees. Then, after a pause of more
+than a minute, she raised her eyes to the roof and her lips began to mutter as
+in prayer. Her right hand, meanwhile, which had been fumbling for some time at
+her throat suddenly came away, and before the gaze of all of us she held it
+out, palm upwards, over the grey and ancient figure outstretched below. And in
+it we beheld glistening the green jasper of the stolen scarabaeus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her brother, leaning heavily against the wall behind, uttered a sound that was
+half cry, half exclamation, but John Silence, standing directly in front of
+her, merely fixed his eyes on her and pointed downwards to the staring face
+below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Replace it,&rdquo; he said sternly, &ldquo;where it belongs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened. We three
+men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. Only the reader who by some
+remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly laid from their
+tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat of the Egyptian sun warms
+their ancient bodies into the semblance of life, can form any conception of the
+ultimate horror we experienced when the silent figure before us moved in its
+grave of lead and sand. Slowly, before our eyes, it writhed, and, with a faint
+rustling of the immemorial cerements, rose up, and, through sightless and
+bandaged eyes, stared across the yellow candlelight at the woman who had
+violated it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I tried to move&mdash;her brother tried to move&mdash;but the sand seemed to
+hold our feet. I tried to cry&mdash;her brother tried to cry&mdash;but the sand
+seemed to fill our lungs and throat. We could only stare&mdash;and, even so,
+the sand seemed to rise like a desert storm and cloud our vision ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when I managed at length to open my eyes again, the mummy was lying once
+more upon its back, motionless, the shrunken and painted face upturned towards
+the ceiling, and the old lady had tumbled forward and was lying in the
+semblance of death with her head and arms upon its crumbling body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But upon the wrappings of the throat I saw the green jasper of the sacred
+scarabaeus shining again like a living eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before I did, and I
+found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise the frail body
+of the old lady, while John Silence carefully replaced the covering over the
+grave and scraped back the sand with his foot, while he issued brief
+directions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that cramped
+tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated with heat, was
+in no sense a dream. It took us the best part of half an hour to reach the open
+air. And, even then, we had to wait a considerable time for the appearance of
+Dr. Silence. We carried her undiscovered into the house and up to her own room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The mummy will cause no further disturbance,&rdquo; I heard Dr. Silence
+say to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night train,
+&ldquo;provided always,&rdquo; he added significantly, &ldquo;that you, and
+yours, cause it no disturbance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in a dream, too, that we left.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You did not see her face, I know,&rdquo; he said to me as we wrapped our
+rugs about us in the empty compartment. And when I shook my head, quite unable
+to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he turned toward me,
+his face pale, and genuinely sad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Scorched and blasted,&rdquo; he whispered.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE JOHN SILENCE STORIES ***</div>
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+Project Gutenberg's Three John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Three John Silence Stories
+
+Author: Algernon Blackwood
+
+Release Date: January 7, 2004 [EBook #10624]
+[This file last updated on August 3, 2010]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE JOHN SILENCE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+Three John Silence Stories
+
+ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
+
+
+
+
+To M.L.W. The Original of John Silence
+
+and
+
+My Companion in Many Adventures
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+Case I: A Psychical Invasion
+
+Case II: Ancient Sorceries
+
+Case III: The Nemesis of Fire
+
+
+
+
+CASE I: A PSYCHICAL INVASION
+
+
+I
+
+"And what is it makes you think I could be of use in this particular
+case?" asked Dr. John Silence, looking across somewhat sceptically at
+the Swedish lady in the chair facing him.
+
+"Your sympathetic heart and your knowledge of occultism--"
+
+"Oh, please--that dreadful word!" he interrupted, holding up a finger
+with a gesture of impatience.
+
+"Well, then," she laughed, "your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your
+trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may be
+disintegrated and destroyed--these strange studies you've been
+experimenting with all these years--"
+
+"If it's only a case of multiple personality I must really cry off,"
+interrupted the doctor again hastily, a bored expression in his eyes.
+
+"It's not that; now, please, be serious, for I want your help," she
+said; "and if I choose my words poorly you must be patient with my
+ignorance. The case I know will interest you, and no one else could deal
+with it so well. In fact, no ordinary professional man could deal with
+it at all, for I know of no treatment nor medicine that can restore a
+lost sense of humour!"
+
+"You begin to interest me with your 'case,'" he replied, and made
+himself comfortable to listen.
+
+Mrs. Sivendson drew a sigh of contentment as she watched him go to the
+tube and heard him tell the servant he was not to be disturbed.
+
+"I believe you have read my thoughts already," she said; "your intuitive
+knowledge of what goes on in other people's minds is positively
+uncanny."
+
+Her friend shook his head and smiled as he drew his chair up to a
+convenient position and prepared to listen attentively to what she had
+to say. He closed his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb
+the real meaning of a recital that might be inadequately expressed, for
+by this method he found it easier to set himself in tune with the living
+thoughts that lay behind the broken words.
+
+By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was
+rich by accident, and by choice--a doctor. That a man of independent
+means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who
+could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility
+of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help
+themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them, and, greatly to
+his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices.
+
+Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither
+consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner. He took no fees,
+being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no
+harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted
+unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very
+special reason. He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor
+could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large class
+of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the arts, could
+not afford the price of a week's comforts merely to be told to travel.
+And it was these he desired to help: cases often requiring special and
+patient study--things no doctor can give for a guinea, and that no one
+would dream of expecting him to give.
+
+But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with
+which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially
+appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible,
+elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions;
+and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the
+title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally
+as the "Psychic Doctor."
+
+In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted
+himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and
+spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no
+one seemed to know,--for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed
+no single other characteristic of the charlatan,--but the fact that it
+had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and
+that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever
+dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack,
+spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the
+genuineness of his attainments.
+
+For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the
+"man who knows." There was a trace of pity in his voice--contempt he
+never showed--when he spoke of their methods.
+
+"This classification of results is uninspired work at best," he said
+once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years.
+"It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is
+playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it
+would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily
+slip into place and explain themselves. For the sources are accessible,
+and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes
+practical investigation safe and possible."
+
+And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was
+significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power
+was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than
+a keen power of visualising.
+
+"It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more," he would
+say. "The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds
+a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you
+will find this always to be the real test."
+
+Thus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was
+able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference
+between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction
+that claimed his special powers. It was never necessary for him to
+resort to the cheap mysteries of divination; for, as I have heard him
+observe, after the solution of some peculiarly intricate problem--
+
+"Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are
+merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the
+inner vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no system is
+necessary at all."
+
+And the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man,
+the keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in the
+knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly,
+that thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.
+
+"Learn how to _think_," he would have expressed it, "and you have
+learned to tap power at its source."
+
+To look at--he was now past forty--he was sparely built, with speaking
+brown eyes in which shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence,
+while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness
+seen most often in the eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the
+mouth without disguising the grim determination of lips and jaw, and the
+face somehow conveyed an impression of transparency, almost of light, so
+delicately were the features refined away. On the fine forehead was that
+indefinable touch of peace that comes from identifying the mind with
+what is permanent in the soul, and letting the impermanent slip by
+without power to wound or distress; while, from his manner,--so gentle,
+quiet, sympathetic,--few could have guessed the strength of purpose that
+burned within like a great flame.
+
+"I think I should describe it as a psychical case," continued the
+Swedish lady, obviously trying to explain herself very intelligently,
+"and just the kind you like. I mean a case where the cause is hidden
+deep down in some spiritual distress, and--"
+
+"But the symptoms first, please, my dear Svenska," he interrupted, with
+a strangely compelling seriousness of manner, "and your deductions
+afterwards."
+
+She turned round sharply on the edge of her chair and looked him in the
+face, lowering her voice to prevent her emotion betraying itself too
+obviously.
+
+"In my opinion there's only one symptom," she half whispered, as though
+telling something disagreeable--"fear--simply fear."
+
+"Physical fear?"
+
+"I think not; though how can I say? I think it's a horror in the
+psychical region. It's no ordinary delusion; the man is quite sane; but
+he lives in mortal terror of something--"
+
+"I don't know what you mean by his 'psychical region,'" said the doctor,
+with a smile; "though I suppose you wish me to understand that his
+spiritual, and not his mental, processes are affected. Anyhow, try and
+tell me briefly and pointedly what you know about the man, his symptoms,
+his need for help, my peculiar help, that is, and all that seems vital
+in the case. I promise to listen devotedly."
+
+"I am trying," she continued earnestly, "but must do so in my own words
+and trust to your intelligence to disentangle as I go along. He is a
+young author, and lives in a tiny house off Putney Heath somewhere. He
+writes humorous stories--quite a genre of his own: Pender--you must have
+heard the name--Felix Pender? Oh, the man had a great gift, and married
+on the strength of it; his future seemed assured. I say 'had,' for quite
+suddenly his talent utterly failed him. Worse, it became transformed
+into its opposite. He can no longer write a line in the old way that was
+bringing him success--"
+
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes for a second and looked at her.
+
+"He still writes, then? The force has not gone?" he asked briefly, and
+then closed his eyes again to listen.
+
+"He works like a fury," she went on, "but produces nothing"--she
+hesitated a moment--"nothing that he can use or sell. His earnings have
+practically ceased, and he makes a precarious living by book-reviewing
+and odd jobs--very odd, some of them. Yet, I am certain his talent has
+not really deserted him finally, but is merely--"
+
+Again Mrs. Sivendson hesitated for the appropriate word.
+
+"In abeyance," he suggested, without opening his eyes.
+
+"Obliterated," she went on, after a moment to weigh the word, "merely
+obliterated by something else--"
+
+"By some one else?"
+
+"I wish I knew. All I can say is that he is haunted, and temporarily his
+sense of humour is shrouded--gone--replaced by something dreadful that
+writes other things. Unless something competent is done, he will simply
+starve to death. Yet he is afraid to go to a doctor for fear of being
+pronounced insane; and, anyhow, a man can hardly ask a doctor to take a
+guinea to restore a vanished sense of humour, can he?"
+
+"Has he tried any one at all--?"
+
+"Not doctors yet. He tried some clergymen and religious people; but they
+know so little and have so little intelligent sympathy. And most of them
+are so busy balancing on their own little pedestals--"
+
+John Silence stopped her tirade with a gesture.
+
+"And how is it that you know so much about him?" he asked gently.
+
+"I know Mrs. Pender well--I knew her before she married him--"
+
+"And is she a cause, perhaps?"
+
+"Not in the least. She is devoted; a woman very well educated, though
+without being really intelligent, and with so little sense of humour
+herself that she always laughs at the wrong places. But she has nothing
+to do with the cause of his distress; and, indeed, has chiefly guessed
+it from observing him, rather than from what little he has told her. And
+he, you know, is a really lovable fellow, hard-working,
+patient--altogether worth saving."
+
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes and went over to ring for tea. He did not
+know very much more about the case of the humorist than when he first
+sat down to listen; but he realised that no amount of words from his
+Swedish friend would help to reveal the real facts. A personal interview
+with the author himself could alone do that.
+
+"All humorists are worth saving," he said with a smile, as she poured
+out tea. "We can't afford to lose a single one in these strenuous days.
+I will go and see your friend at the first opportunity."
+
+She thanked him elaborately, effusively, with many words, and he, with
+much difficulty, kept the conversation thenceforward strictly to the
+teapot.
+
+And, as a result of this conversation, and a little more he had gathered
+by means best known to himself and his secretary, he was whizzing in his
+motor-car one afternoon a few days later up the Putney Hill to have his
+first interview with Felix Pender, the humorous writer who was the
+victim of some mysterious malady in his "psychical region" that had
+obliterated his sense of the comic and threatened to wreck his life and
+destroy his talent. And his desire to help was probably of equal
+strength with his desire to know and to investigate.
+
+The motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black
+panther lay concealed within its hood, and the doctor--the "psychic
+doctor," as he was sometimes called--stepped out through the gathering
+fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree
+and a stunted laurel shrubbery. The house was very small, and it was
+some time before any one answered the bell. Then, suddenly, a light
+appeared in the hall, and he saw a pretty little woman standing on the
+top step begging him to come in. She was dressed in grey, and the
+gaslight fell on a mass of deliberately brushed light hair. Stuffed,
+dusty birds, and a shabby array of African spears, hung on the wall
+behind her. A hat-rack, with a bronze plate full of very large cards,
+led his eye swiftly to a dark staircase beyond. Mrs. Pender had round
+eyes like a child's, and she greeted him with an effusiveness that
+barely concealed her emotion, yet strove to appear naturally cordial.
+Evidently she had been looking out for his arrival, and had outrun the
+servant girl. She was a little breathless.
+
+"I hope you've not been kept waiting--I think it's _most_ good of you to
+come--" she began, and then stopped sharp when she saw his face in the
+gaslight. There was something in Dr. Silence's look that did not
+encourage mere talk. He was in earnest now, if ever man was.
+
+"Good evening, Mrs. Pender," he said, with a quiet smile that won
+confidence, yet deprecated unnecessary words, "the fog delayed me a
+little. I am glad to see you."
+
+They went into a dingy sitting-room at the back of the house, neatly
+furnished but depressing. Books stood in a row upon the mantelpiece. The
+fire had evidently just been lit. It smoked in great puffs into the
+room.
+
+"Mrs. Sivendson said she thought you might be able to come," ventured
+the little woman again, looking up engagingly into his face and
+betraying anxiety and eagerness in every gesture. "But I hardly dared to
+believe it. I think it is really too good of you. My husband's case is
+so peculiar that--well, you know, I am quite sure any _ordinary_ doctor
+would say at once the asylum--"
+
+"Isn't he in, then?" asked Dr. Silence gently.
+
+"In the asylum?" she gasped. "Oh dear, no--not yet!"
+
+"In the house, I meant," he laughed.
+
+She gave a great sigh.
+
+"He'll be back any minute now," she replied, obviously relieved to see
+him laugh; "but the fact is, we didn't expect you so early--I mean, my
+husband hardly thought you would come at all."
+
+"I am always delighted to come--when I am really wanted, and can be of
+help," he said quickly; "and, perhaps, it's all for the best that your
+husband is out, for now that we are alone you can tell me something
+about his difficulties. So far, you know, I have heard very little."
+
+Her voice trembled as she thanked him, and when he came and took a chair
+close beside her she actually had difficulty in finding words with which
+to begin.
+
+"In the first place," she began timidly, and then continuing with a
+nervous incoherent rush of words, "he will be simply delighted that
+you've really come, because he said you were the only person he would
+consent to see at all--the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he
+doesn't know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He
+pretends with me that it's just a nervous breakdown, and I'm sure he
+doesn't realise all the odd things I've noticed him doing. But the main
+thing, I suppose--"
+
+"Yes, the main thing, Mrs. Pender," he said, encouragingly, noticing her
+hesitation.
+
+"--is that he thinks we are not alone in the house. That's the chief
+thing."
+
+"Tell me more facts--just facts."
+
+"It began last summer when I came back from Ireland; he had been here
+alone for six weeks, and I thought him looking tired and queer--ragged
+and scattered about the face, if you know what I mean, and his manner
+worn out. He said he had been writing hard, but his inspiration had
+somehow failed him, and he was dissatisfied with his work. His sense of
+humour was leaving him, or changing into something else, he said. There
+was something in the house, he declared, that"--she emphasised the
+words--"prevented his feeling funny."
+
+"Something in the house that prevented his feeling funny," repeated the
+doctor. "Ah, now we're getting to the heart of it!"
+
+"Yes," she resumed vaguely, "that's what he kept saying."
+
+"And what was it he _did_ that you thought strange?" he asked
+sympathetically. "Be brief, or he may be here before you finish."
+
+"Very small things, but significant it seemed to me. He changed his
+workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said
+all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they
+altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies--vile, debased
+tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. But now he says the same of
+the sitting-room, and he's gone back to the library."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"You see, there's so little I can tell you," she went on, with
+increasing speed and countless gestures. "I mean it's only very small
+things he does and says that are queer. What frightens me is that he
+assumes there is some one else in the house all the time--some one I
+never see. He does not actually say so, but on the stairs I've seen him
+standing aside to let some one pass; I've seen him open a door to let
+some one in or out; and often in our bedrooms he puts chairs about as
+though for some one else to sit in. Oh--oh yes, and once or twice," she
+cried--"once or twice--"
+
+She paused, and looked about her with a startled air.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Once or twice," she resumed hurriedly, as though she heard a sound that
+alarmed her, "I've heard him running--coming in and out of the rooms
+breathless as if something were after him--"
+
+The door opened while she was still speaking, cutting her words off in
+the middle, and a man came into the room. He was dark and clean-shaven,
+sallow rather, with the eyes of imagination, and dark hair growing
+scantily about the temples. He was dressed in a shabby tweed suit, and
+wore an untidy flannel collar at the neck. The dominant expression of
+his face was startled--hunted; an expression that might any moment leap
+into the dreadful stare of terror and announce a total loss of
+self-control.
+
+The moment he saw his visitor a smile spread over his worn features, and
+he advanced to shake hands.
+
+"I hoped you would come; Mrs. Sivendson said you might be able to find
+time," he said simply. His voice was thin and needy. "I am very glad to
+see you, Dr. Silence. It is 'Doctor,' is it not?"
+
+"Well, I am entitled to the description," laughed the other, "but I
+rarely get it. You know, I do not practise as a regular thing; that is,
+I only take cases that specially interest me, or--"
+
+He did not finish the sentence, for the men exchanged a glance of
+sympathy that rendered it unnecessary.
+
+"I have heard of your great kindness."
+
+"It's my hobby," said the other quickly, "and my privilege."
+
+"I trust you will still think so when you have heard what I have to tell
+you," continued the author, a little wearily. He led the way across the
+hall into the little smoking-room where they could talk freely and
+undisturbed.
+
+In the smoking-room, the door shut and privacy about them, Fender's
+attitude changed somewhat, and his manner became very grave. The doctor
+sat opposite, where he could watch his face. Already, he saw, it looked
+more haggard. Evidently it cost him much to refer to his trouble at all.
+
+"What I have is, in my belief, a profound spiritual affliction," he
+began quite bluntly, looking straight into the other's eyes.
+
+"I saw that at once," Dr. Silence said.
+
+"Yes, you saw that, of course; my atmosphere must convey that much to
+any one with psychic perceptions. Besides which, I feel sure from all
+I've heard, that you are really a soul-doctor, are you not, more than a
+healer merely of the body?"
+
+"You think of me too highly," returned the other; "though I prefer
+cases, as you know, in which the spirit is disturbed first, the body
+afterwards."
+
+"I understand, yes. Well, I have experienced a curious disturbance
+in--not in my physical region primarily. I mean my nerves are all right,
+and my body is all right. I have no delusions exactly, but my spirit is
+tortured by a calamitous fear which first came upon me in a strange
+manner."
+
+John Silence leaned forward a moment and took the speaker's hand and
+held it in his own for a few brief seconds, closing his eyes as he did
+so. He was not feeling his pulse, or doing any of the things that
+doctors ordinarily do; he was merely absorbing into himself the main
+note of the man's mental condition, so as to get completely his own
+point of view, and thus be able to treat his case with true sympathy. A
+very close observer might perhaps have noticed that a slight tremor ran
+through his frame after he had held the hand for a few seconds.
+
+"Tell me quite frankly, Mr. Pender," he said soothingly, releasing the
+hand, and with deep attention in his manner, "tell me all the steps that
+led to the beginning of this invasion. I mean tell me what the
+particular drug was, and why you took it, and how it affected you--"
+
+"Then you know it began with a drug!" cried the author, with undisguised
+astonishment.
+
+"I only know from what I observe in you, and in its effect upon myself.
+You are in a surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your
+atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others. This is the
+effect of a drug, but of no ordinary drug. Allow me to finish, please.
+If the higher rate of vibration spreads all over, you will become, of
+course, permanently cognisant of a much larger world than the one you
+know normally. If, on the other hand, the rapid portion sinks back to
+the usual rate, you will lose these occasional increased perceptions you
+now have."
+
+"You amaze me!" exclaimed the author; "for your words exactly describe
+what I have been feeling--"
+
+"I mention this only in passing, and to give you confidence before you
+approach the account of your real affliction," continued the doctor.
+"All perception, as you know, is the result of vibrations; and
+clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of
+vibrations. The awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about
+means no more than that. Your partial clairvoyance is easily explained.
+The only thing that puzzles me is how you managed to procure the drug,
+for it is not easy to get in pure form, and no adulterated tincture
+could have given you the terrific impetus I see you have acquired. But,
+please proceed now and tell me your story in your own way."
+
+"This _Cannabis indica_," the author went on, "came into my possession
+last autumn while my wife was away. I need not explain how I got it, for
+that has no importance; but it was the genuine fluid extract, and I could
+not resist the temptation to make an experiment. One of its effects, as
+you know, is to induce torrential laughter--"
+
+"Yes: sometimes."
+
+"--I am a writer of humorous tales, and I wished to increase my own
+sense of laughter--to see the ludicrous from an abnormal point of view.
+I wished to study it a bit, if possible, and--"
+
+"Tell me!"
+
+"I took an experimental dose. I starved for six hours to hasten the
+effect, locked myself into this room, and gave orders not to be
+disturbed. Then I swallowed the stuff and waited."
+
+"And the effect?"
+
+"I waited one hour, two, three, four, five hours. Nothing happened. No
+laughter came, but only a great weariness instead. Nothing in the room
+or in my thoughts came within a hundred miles of a humorous aspect."
+
+"Always a most uncertain drug," interrupted the doctor. "We make very
+small use of it on that account."
+
+"At two o'clock in the morning I felt so hungry and tired that I decided
+to give up the experiment and wait no longer. I drank some milk and went
+upstairs to bed. I felt flat and disappointed. I fell asleep at once and
+must have slept for about an hour, when I awoke suddenly with a great
+noise in my ears. It was the noise of my own laughter! I was simply
+shaking with merriment. At first I was bewildered and thought I had been
+laughing in dreams, but a moment later I remembered the drug, and was
+delighted to think that after all I had got an effect. It had been
+working all along, only I had miscalculated the time. The only
+unpleasant thing _then_ was an odd feeling that I had not waked
+naturally, but had been wakened by some one else--deliberately. This
+came to me as a certainty in the middle of my noisy laughter and
+distressed me."
+
+"Any impression who it could have been?" asked the doctor, now listening
+with close attention to every word, very much on the alert.
+
+Pender hesitated and tried to smile. He brushed his hair from his
+forehead with a nervous gesture.
+
+"You must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are
+quite as important as your certainties."
+
+"I had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten
+dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great
+strength and great ability--of great force--quite an unusual
+personality--and, I was certain, too--a woman."
+
+"A good woman?" asked John Silence quietly.
+
+Pender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it
+seemed to surprise him. But he shook his head quickly with an
+indefinable look of horror.
+
+"Evil," he answered briefly, "appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the
+sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness--the perversity
+of the unbalanced mind."
+
+He hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. A shade
+of suspicion showed itself in his eyes.
+
+"No," laughed the doctor, "you need not fear that I'm merely humouring
+you, or think you mad. Far from it. Your story interests me exceedingly
+and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell it.
+You see, I possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic byways."
+
+"I was shaking with such violent laughter," continued the narrator,
+reassured in a moment, "though with no clear idea what was amusing me,
+that I had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and
+was afraid I should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions.
+When the gas was lit I found the room empty, of course, and the door
+locked as usual. Then I half dressed and went out on to the landing, my
+hilarity better under control, and proceeded to go downstairs. I wished
+to record my sensations. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so as
+not to scream aloud and communicate my hysterics to the entire
+household."
+
+"And the presence of this--this--?"
+
+"It was hanging about me all the time," said Pender, "but for the moment
+it seemed to have withdrawn. Probably, too, my laughter killed all other
+emotions."
+
+"And how long did you take getting downstairs?"
+
+"I was just coming to that. I see you know all my 'symptoms' in advance,
+as it were; for, of course, I thought I should never get to the bottom.
+Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the narrow hall at
+the foot of the stairs--well, I could have sworn it was half an hour's
+journey had not my watch certified that it was a few seconds. Yet I
+walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I walked apparently
+without advancing, and at that rate it would have taken me a week to get
+down Putney Hill."
+
+"An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space
+sometimes--"
+
+"But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came
+horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of
+icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter--"
+
+"Yes; what?" asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his
+eyes.
+
+"--I was overwhelmed with terror," said Pender, lowering his reedy
+voice at the mere recollection of it.
+
+He paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in
+his eyes now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners of
+his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of that
+merriment still amused him. The combination of fear and laughter in his
+face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story; it also
+lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures.
+
+"Terror, was it?" repeated the doctor soothingly.
+
+"Yes, terror; for, though the Thing that woke me seemed to have gone,
+the memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair. Then
+I locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug made my
+movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach the door,
+and another five to get back to the chair again. The laughter, too, kept
+bubbling up inside me--great wholesome laughter that shook me like gusts
+of wind--so that even my terror almost made me laugh. Oh, but I may tell
+you, Dr. Silence, it was altogether vile, that mixture of fear and
+laughter, altogether vile!
+
+"Then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny
+side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The
+bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock
+looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of
+papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared and shook and
+held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And that footstool!
+Oh, that absurd footstool!"
+
+He lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands
+at the thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed, too.
+
+"Go on, please," he said, "I quite understand. I know something myself
+of the hashish laughter."
+
+The author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing quickly
+grave again.
+
+"So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless
+merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror.
+The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I
+could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror
+masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing
+emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the
+impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion--so you
+called it just now--of the 'person' who had wakened me: she was utterly
+evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for
+good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything in
+the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my heart.
+And this creature was putting--putting her--"
+
+He hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely.
+
+"Putting what?"
+
+"--putting ideas into my mind," he went on glancing nervously about the
+room. "Actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off the usual
+current and inject her own. How mad that sounds! I know it, but it's
+true. It's the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the operation
+terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh
+with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant,
+bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas,
+and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior
+and diabolical method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and
+ideas of evil and tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. Oh,
+doctor, I tell you again, it was unnerving!"
+
+John Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of the
+story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky sentences
+and lowered voice.
+
+"You saw nothing--no one--all this time?" he asked.
+
+"Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind
+there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman--large, dark-skinned,
+with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye--the left--so
+drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face--!"
+
+"A face you would recognise again?"
+
+Pender laughed dreadfully.
+
+"I wish I could forget it," he whispered, "I only wish I could forget
+it!" Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the doctor's
+hand with an emotional gesture.
+
+"I _must_ tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy," he
+cried, with a tremor in his voice, "and--that you do not think me mad. I
+have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere freedom of
+speech--the relief of sharing my affliction with another--has helped me
+already more than I can possibly say."
+
+Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened
+eyes. His voice was very gentle when he replied.
+
+"Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to
+me," he said, "for it threatens, not your physical existence but the
+temple of your psychical existence--the inner life. Your mind would
+not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the
+existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your
+spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be
+_spiritually insane_--a far more radical condition than merely being
+insane here."
+
+There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men sitting
+there facing one another.
+
+"Do you really mean--Good Lord!" stammered the author as soon as he
+could find his tongue.
+
+"What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only
+say now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite
+positive of being able to help you. Oh, there's no doubt as to that,
+believe me. In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of
+this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of
+opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I
+have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well
+as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and
+painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic
+treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened
+another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and
+thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to this
+house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to their
+precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself
+be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling nothing as
+yet. But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the rest of your
+wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk about the means
+of cure."
+
+Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then
+went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.
+
+"After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again
+to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up--at
+the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window,
+the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that
+outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to
+alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless
+sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and
+a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation."
+
+"Fear gone, too?" asked the doctor.
+
+"I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere
+nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that day
+I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed wonderfully
+quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the heart of
+true humour. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my
+experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I came
+to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden glances
+of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I was
+dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I had
+uttered it."
+
+"And why?"
+
+"It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could
+remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense
+was so altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to
+tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted.
+Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. There was
+laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my
+attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it read
+then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had come
+somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as merriment.
+The framework of humour was there, if you understand me, but the
+characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil."
+
+"Can you show me this writing?"
+
+The author shook his head.
+
+"I destroyed it," he whispered. "But, in the end, though of course much
+perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some
+after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my
+mind and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations
+that did not properly hold them."
+
+"And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?"
+
+"No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I
+forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular,
+there she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly--"
+
+"In what way, precisely?" interrupted the doctor.
+
+"Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures
+of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been
+foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature--"
+
+"The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality," murmured the
+doctor, making a quick note.
+
+"Eh? I didn't quite catch--"
+
+"Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you shall know their purport
+fully later."
+
+"Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the
+house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate
+fashion; and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and
+respectful towards it--to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself
+carefully deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at
+last, and, if I failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that
+it pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my
+very soul in its inmost abode. It certainly came before my wife so far
+as my attentions were concerned.
+
+"But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took
+it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience,
+delayed like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when
+it did come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. This time,
+however, there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time; it
+shortened instead of lengthened, so that I dressed and got downstairs in
+about twenty seconds, and the couple of hours I stayed and worked in the
+study passed literally like a period of ten minutes."
+
+"That is often true of an overdose," interjected the doctor, "and you
+may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour.
+It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it, and
+is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of thought."
+
+"This time," Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his
+excitement, "another extraordinary effect came to me, and I experienced
+a curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived external things
+through one large main sense-channel instead of through the five
+divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth. You will, I know,
+understand me when I tell you that I _heard_ sights and _saw_ sounds. No
+language can make this comprehensible, of course, and I can only say,
+for instance, that the striking of the clock I saw as a visible picture
+in the air before me. I saw the sounds of the tinkling bell. And in
+precisely the same way I heard the colours in the room, especially the
+colours of those books in the shelf behind you. Those red bindings I
+heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the French bindings next
+to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike the chattering of
+starlings. That brown bookcase muttered, and those green curtains
+opposite kept up a constant sort of rippling sound like the lower notes
+of a wood-horn. But I only was conscious of these sounds when I looked
+steadily at the different objects, and thought about them. The room, you
+understand, was not full of a chorus of notes; but when I concentrated
+my mind upon a colour, I heard, as well as saw, it."
+
+"That is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of _Cannabis indica_,"
+observed the doctor. "And it provoked laughter again, did it?"
+
+"Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so
+like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of a
+performing bear--which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know.
+But this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On
+the contrary, I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an
+intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and
+keen-minded.
+
+"Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to
+sketch--a talent not normally mine--I found that I could draw nothing
+but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head--always the same--the head of
+a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very
+drooping left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may
+imagine--"
+
+"And the expression of the face--?"
+
+Pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the
+air and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.
+
+"What I can only describe as--_blackness_," he replied in a low tone;
+"the face of a dark and evil soul."
+
+"You destroyed that, too?" queried the doctor sharply.
+
+"No; I have kept the drawings," he said, with a laugh, and rose to get
+them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.
+
+"Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see," he added, pushing a
+number of loose sheets under the doctor's eyes; "nothing but a few
+scrawly lines. That's all I found the next morning. I had really drawn
+no heads at all--nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. The
+pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which
+constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered
+scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed, of
+course, with the passing of the drug's effects. But the other thing did
+not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me. It is
+here still. It is real. I don't know how I can escape from it."
+
+"It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the
+house."
+
+"Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole
+means of support, and--well, you see, since this change I cannot even
+write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their
+mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible? I shall go
+mad if this continues."
+
+He screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected
+to see some haunting shape.
+
+"This influence in this house induced by my experiment, has killed in a
+flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humour, and though I still
+go on writing funny tales--I have a certain name you know--my
+inspiration has dried up, and much of what I write I have to burn--yes,
+doctor, to burn, before any one sees it."
+
+"As utterly alien to your own mind and personality?"
+
+"Utterly! As though some one else had written it--"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And shocking!" He passed his hand over his eyes a moment and let the
+breath escape softly through his teeth. "Yet most damnably clever in the
+consummate way the vile suggestions are insinuated under cover of a kind
+of high drollery. My stenographer left me of course--and I've been
+afraid to take another--"
+
+John Silence got up and began to walk about the room leisurely without
+speaking; he appeared to be examining the pictures on the wall and
+reading the names of the books lying about. Presently he paused on the
+hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and turned to look his patient
+quietly in the eyes. Pender's face was grey and drawn; the hunted
+expression dominated it; the long recital had told upon him.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Pender," he said, a curious glow showing about his fine,
+quiet face; "thank you for the sincerity and frankness of your account.
+But I think now there is nothing further I need ask you." He indulged in
+a long scrutiny of the author's haggard features drawing purposely the
+man's eyes to his own and then meeting them with a look of power and
+confidence calculated to inspire even the feeblest soul with courage.
+"And, to begin with," he added, smiling pleasantly, "let me assure you
+without delay that you need have no alarm, for you are no more insane or
+deluded than I myself am--"
+
+Pender heaved a deep sigh and tried to return the smile.
+
+"--and this is simply a case, so far as I can judge at present, of a
+very singular psychical invasion, and a very sinister one, too, if you
+perhaps understand what I mean--"
+
+"It's an odd expression; you used it before, you know," said the author
+wearily, yet eagerly listening to every word of the diagnosis, and
+deeply touched by the intelligent sympathy which did not at once
+indicate the lunatic asylum.
+
+"Possibly," returned the other, "and an odd affliction, too, you'll
+allow, yet one not unknown to the nations of antiquity, nor to those
+moderns, perhaps, who recognise the freedom of action under certain
+pathogenic conditions between this world and another."
+
+"And you think," asked Pender hastily, "that it is all primarily due to
+the _Cannabis_? There is nothing radically amiss with myself--nothing
+incurable, or--?"
+
+"Due entirely to the overdose," Dr. Silence replied emphatically, "to
+the drug's direct action upon your psychical being. It rendered you
+ultra-sensitive and made you respond to an increased rate of vibration.
+And, let me tell you, Mr. Pender, that your experiment might have had
+results far more dire. It has brought you into touch with a somewhat
+singular class of Invisible, but of one, I think, chiefly human in
+character. You might, however, just as easily have been drawn out of
+human range altogether, and the results of such a contingency would have
+been exceedingly terrible. Indeed, you would not now be here to tell the
+tale. I need not alarm you on that score, but mention it as a warning
+you will not misunderstand or underrate after what you have been
+through.
+
+"You look puzzled. You do not quite gather what I am driving at; and it
+is not to be expected that you should, for you, I suppose, are the
+nominal Christian with the nominal Christian's lofty standard of ethics,
+and his utter ignorance of spiritual possibilities. Beyond a somewhat
+childish understanding of 'spiritual wickedness in high places,' you
+probably have no conception of what is possible once you break-down the
+slender gulf that is mercifully fixed between you and that Outer World.
+But my studies and training have taken me far outside these orthodox
+trips, and I have made experiments that I could scarcely speak to you
+about in language that would be intelligible to you."
+
+He paused a moment to note the breathless interest of Pender's face and
+manner. Every word he uttered was calculated; he knew exactly the value
+and effect of the emotions he desired to waken in the heart of the
+afflicted being before him.
+
+"And from certain knowledge I have gained through various experiences,"
+he continued calmly, "I can diagnose your case as I said before to be
+one of psychical invasion."
+
+"And the nature of this--er--invasion?" stammered the bewildered writer
+of humorous tales.
+
+"There is no reason why I should not say at once that I do not yet quite
+know," replied Dr. Silence. "I may first have to make one or two
+experiments--"
+
+"On me?" gasped Pender, catching his breath.
+
+"Not exactly," the doctor said, with a grave smile, "but with your
+assistance, perhaps. I shall want to test the conditions of the
+house--to ascertain, impossible, the character of the forces, of this
+strange personality that has been haunting you--"
+
+"At present you have no idea exactly who--what--why--" asked the
+other in a wild flurry of interest, dread and amazement.
+
+"I have a very good idea, but no proof rather," returned the doctor.
+"The effects of the drug in altering the scale of time and space, and
+merging the senses have nothing primarily to do with the invasion. They
+come to any one who is fool enough to take an experimental dose. It is
+the other features of your case that are unusual. You see, you are now
+in touch with certain violent emotions, desires, purposes, still active
+in this house, that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil
+personality that lived here. How long ago, or why they still persist so
+forcibly, I cannot positively say. But I should judge that they are
+merely forces acting automatically with the momentum of their terrific
+original impetus."
+
+"Not directed by a living being, a conscious will, you mean?"
+
+"Possibly not--but none the less dangerous on that account, and more
+difficult to deal with. I cannot explain to you in a few minutes the
+nature of such things, for you have not made the studies that would
+enable you to follow me; but I have reason to believe that on the
+dissolution at death of a human being, its forces may still persist and
+continue to act in a blind, unconscious fashion. As a rule they speedily
+dissipate themselves, but in the case of a very powerful personality
+they may last a long time. And, in some cases--of which I incline to
+think this is one--these forces may coalesce with certain non-human
+entities who thus continue their life indefinitely and increase their
+strength to an unbelievable degree. If the original personality was
+evil, the beings attracted to the left-over forces will also be evil. In
+this case, I think there has been an unusual and dreadful aggrandisement
+of the thoughts and purposes left behind long ago by a woman of
+consummate wickedness and great personal power of character and
+intellect. Now, do you begin to see what I am driving at a little?"
+
+Pender stared fixedly at his companion, plain horror showing in his
+eyes. But he found nothing to say, and the doctor continued--
+
+"In your case, predisposed by the action of the drug, you have
+experienced the rush of these forces in undiluted strength. They wholly
+obliterate in you the sense of humour, fancy, imagination,--all that
+makes for cheerfulness and hope. They seek, though perhaps automatically
+only, to oust your own thoughts and establish themselves in their place.
+You are the victim of a psychical invasion. At the same time, you have
+become clairvoyant in the true sense. You are also a clairvoyant
+victim."
+
+Pender mopped his face and sighed. He left his chair and went over to
+the fireplace to warm himself.
+
+"You must think me a quack to talk like this, or a madman," laughed Dr.
+Silence. "But never mind that. I have come to help you, and I can help
+you if you will do what I tell you. It is very simple: you must leave
+this house at once. Oh, never mind the difficulties; we will deal with
+those together. I can place another house at your disposal, or I would
+take the lease here off your hands, and later have it pulled down. Your
+case interests me greatly, and I mean to see you through, so that you
+have no anxiety, and can drop back into your old groove of work
+tomorrow! The drug has provided you, and therefore me, with a shortcut
+to a very interesting experience. I am grateful to you."
+
+The author poked the fire vigorously, emotion rising in him like a
+tide. He glanced towards the door nervously.
+
+"There is no need to alarm your wife or to tell her the details of our
+conversation," pursued the other quietly. "Let her know that you will
+soon be in possession again of your sense of humour and your health, and
+explain that I am lending you another house for six months. Meanwhile I
+may have the right to use this house for a night or two for my
+experiment. Is that understood between us?"
+
+"I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart," stammered Pender,
+unable to find words to express his gratitude.
+
+Then he hesitated for a moment, searching the doctor's face anxiously.
+
+"And your experiment with the house?" he said at length.
+
+"Of the simplest character, my dear Mr. Pender. Although I am myself an
+artificially trained psychic, and consequently aware of the presence of
+discarnate entities as a rule, I have so far felt nothing here at all.
+This makes me sure that the forces acting here are of an unusual
+description. What I propose to do is to make an experiment with a view
+of drawing out this evil, coaxing it from its lair, so to speak, in
+order that it may _exhaust itself through me_ and become dissipated for
+ever. I have already been inoculated," he added; "I consider myself to
+be immune."
+
+"Heavens above!" gasped the author, collapsing on to a chair.
+
+"Hell beneath! might be a more appropriate exclamation," the doctor
+laughed. "But, seriously, Mr. Pender, this is what I propose to do--with
+your permission."
+
+"Of course, of course," cried the other, "you have my permission and my
+best wishes for success. I can see no possible objection, but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"I pray to Heaven you will not undertake this experiment alone, will
+you?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no; not alone."
+
+"You will take a companion with good nerves, and reliable in case of
+disaster, won't you?"
+
+"I shall bring two companions," the doctor said.
+
+"Ah, that's better. I feel easier. I am sure you must have among your
+acquaintances men who--"
+
+"I shall not think of bringing men, Mr. Pender."
+
+The other looked up sharply.
+
+"No, or women either; or children."
+
+"I don't understand. Who will you bring, then?"
+
+"Animals," explained the doctor, unable to prevent a smile at his
+companion's expression of surprise--"two animals, a cat and a dog."
+
+Pender stared as if his eyes would drop out upon the floor, and then
+led the way without another word into the adjoining room where his wife
+was awaiting them for tea.
+
+
+II
+
+A few days later the humorist and his wife, with minds greatly relieved,
+moved into a small furnished house placed at their free disposal in
+another part of London; and John Silence, intent upon his approaching
+experiment, made ready to spend a night in the empty house on the top of
+Putney Hill. Only two rooms were prepared for occupation: the study on
+the ground floor and the bedroom immediately above it; all other doors
+were to be locked, and no servant was to be left in the house. The motor
+had orders to call for him at nine o'clock the following morning.
+
+And, meanwhile, his secretary had instructions to look up the past
+history and associations of the place, and learn everything he could
+concerning the character of former occupants, recent or remote.
+
+The animals, by whose sensitiveness he intended to test any unusual
+conditions in the atmosphere of the building, Dr. Silence selected with
+care and judgment. He believed (and had already made curious experiments
+to prove it) that animals were more often, and more truly, clairvoyant
+than human beings. Many of them, he felt convinced, possessed powers of
+perception far superior to that mere keenness of the senses common to
+all dwellers in the wilds where the senses grow specially alert; they
+had what he termed "animal clairvoyance," and from his experiments with
+horses, dogs, cats, and even birds, he had drawn certain deductions,
+which, however, need not be referred to in detail here.
+
+Cats, in particular, he believed, were almost continuously conscious of
+a larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera,
+and quite beyond the reach of normal human organs. He had, further,
+observed that while dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such
+phenomena, cats on the other hand were soothed and satisfied. They
+welcomed manifestations as something belonging peculiarly to their own
+region.
+
+He selected his animals, therefore, with wisdom so that they might
+afford a differing test, each in its own way, and that one should not
+merely communicate its own excitement to the other. He took a dog and a
+cat.
+
+The cat he chose, now full grown, had lived with him since kittenhood, a
+kittenhood of perplexing sweetness and audacious mischief. Wayward it
+was and fanciful, ever playing its own mysterious games in the corners
+of the room, jumping at invisible nothings, leaping sideways into the
+air and falling with tiny moccasined feet on to another part of the
+carpet, yet with an air of dignified earnestness which showed that the
+performance was necessary to its own well-being, and not done merely to
+impress a stupid human audience. In the middle of elaborate washing it
+would look up, startled, as though to stare at the approach of some
+Invisible, cocking its little head sideways and putting out a velvet pad
+to inspect cautiously. Then it would get absent-minded, and stare with
+equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the onlookers),
+and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in quite a new
+place. Except for a white patch on its breast it was coal black. And its
+name was--Smoke.
+
+"Smoke" described its temperament as well as its appearance. Its
+movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of
+concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify
+its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of
+floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points only--the
+glowing eyes.
+
+All its forces ran to intelligence--secret intelligence, the wordless
+incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, _the_ cat for the
+business in hand.
+
+The selection of the dog was not so simple, for the doctor owned many;
+but after much deliberation he chose a collie, called Flame from his
+yellow coat. True, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and
+even beginning to grow deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very
+particular friend of Smoke's, and had fathered it from kittenhood
+upwards so that a subtle understanding existed between them. It was this
+that turned the balance in its favour, this and its courage. Moreover,
+though good-tempered, it was a terrible fighter, and its anger when
+provoked by a righteous cause was a fury of fire, and irresistible.
+
+It had come to him quite young, straight from the shepherd, with the air
+of the hills yet in its nostrils, and was then little more than skin and
+bones and teeth. For a collie it was sturdily built, its nose blunter
+than most, its yellow hair stiff rather than silky, and it had full
+eyes, unlike the slit eyes of its breed. Only its master could touch it,
+for it ignored strangers, and despised their pattings--when any dared to
+pat it. There was something patriarchal about the old beast. He was in
+earnest, and went through life with tremendous energy and big things in
+view, as though he had the reputation of his whole race to uphold. And
+to watch him fighting against odds was to understand why he was
+terrible.
+
+In his relations with Smoke he was always absurdly gentle; also he was
+fatherly; and at the same time betrayed a certain diffidence or shyness.
+He recognised that Smoke called for strong yet respectful management.
+The cat's circuitous methods puzzled him, and his elaborate pretences
+perhaps shocked the dog's liking for direct, undisguised action. Yet,
+while he failed to comprehend these tortuous feline mysteries, he was
+never contemptuous or condescending; and he presided over the safety of
+his furry black friend somewhat as a father, loving, but intuitive,
+might superintend the vagaries of a wayward and talented child. And, in
+return, Smoke rewarded him with exhibitions of fascinating and audacious
+mischief.
+
+And these brief descriptions of their characters are necessary for the
+proper understanding of what subsequently took place.
+
+With Smoke sleeping in the folds of his fur coat, and the collie lying
+watchful on the seat opposite, John Silence went down in his motor after
+dinner on the night of November 15th.
+
+And the fog was so dense that they were obliged to travel at quarter
+speed the entire way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was after ten o'clock when he dismissed the motor and entered the
+dingy little house with the latchkey provided by Pender. He found the
+hall gas turned low, and a fire in the study. Books and food had also
+been placed ready by the servant according to instructions. Coils of fog
+rushed in after him through the open door and filled the hall and
+passage with its cold discomfort.
+
+The first thing Dr. Silence did was to lock up Smoke in the study with a
+saucer of milk before the fire, and then make a search of the house with
+Flame. The dog ran cheerfully behind him all the way while he tried the
+doors of the other rooms to make sure they were locked. He nosed about
+into corners and made little excursions on his own account. His manner
+was expectant. He knew there must be something unusual about the
+proceeding, because it was contrary to the habits of his whole life not
+to be asleep at this hour on the mat in front of the fire. He kept
+looking up into his master's face, as door after door was tried, with an
+expression of intelligent sympathy, but at the same time a certain air
+of disapproval. Yet everything his master did was good in his eyes, and
+he betrayed as little impatience as possible with all this unnecessary
+journeying to and fro. If the doctor was pleased to play this sort of
+game at such an hour of the night, it was surely not for him to object.
+So he played it, too; and was very busy and earnest about it into the
+bargain.
+
+After an uneventful search they came down again to the study, and here
+Dr. Silence discovered Smoke washing his face calmly in front of the
+fire. The saucer of milk was licked dry and clean; the preliminary
+examination that cats always make in new surroundings had evidently
+been satisfactorily concluded. He drew an arm-chair up to the fire,
+stirred the coals into a blaze, arranged the table and lamp to his
+satisfaction for reading, and then prepared surreptitiously to watch the
+animals. He wished to observe them carefully without their being aware
+of it.
+
+Now, in spite of their respective ages, it was the regular custom of
+these two to play together every night before sleep. Smoke always made
+the advances, beginning with grave impudence to pat the dog's tail, and
+Flame played cumbrously, with condescension. It was his duty, rather
+than pleasure; he was glad when it was over, and sometimes he was very
+determined and refused to play at all.
+
+And this night was one of the occasions on which he was firm.
+
+The doctor, looking cautiously over the top of his book, watched the cat
+begin the performance. It started by gazing with an innocent expression
+at the dog where he lay with nose on paws and eyes wide open in the
+middle of the floor. Then it got up and made as though it meant to walk
+to the door, going deliberately and very softly. Flame's eyes followed
+it until it was beyond the range of sight, and then the cat turned
+sharply and began patting his tail tentatively with one paw. The tail
+moved slightly in reply, and Smoke changed paws and tapped it again. The
+dog, however, did not rise to play as was his wont, and the cat fell to
+parting it briskly with both paws. Flame still lay motionless.
+
+This puzzled and bored the cat, and it went round and stared hard into
+its friend's face to see what was the matter. Perhaps some inarticulate
+message flashed from the dog's eyes into its own little brain, making it
+understand that the programme for the night had better not begin with
+play. Perhaps it only realised that its friend was immovable. But,
+whatever the reason, its usual persistence thenceforward deserted it,
+and it made no further attempts at persuasion. Smoke yielded at once to
+the dog's mood; it sat down where it was and began to wash.
+
+But the washing, the doctor noted, was by no means its real purpose; it
+only used it to mask something else; it stopped at the most busy and
+furious moments and began to stare about the room. Its thoughts wandered
+absurdly. It peered intently at the curtains; at the shadowy corners; at
+empty space above; leaving its body in curiously awkward positions for
+whole minutes together. Then it turned sharply and stared with a sudden
+signal of intelligence at the dog, and Flame at once rose somewhat
+stiffly to his feet and began to wander aimlessly and restlessly to and
+fro about the floor. Smoke followed him, padding quietly at his heels.
+Between them they made what seemed to be a deliberate search of the
+room.
+
+And, here, as he watched them, noting carefully every detail of the
+performance over the top of his book, yet making no effort to
+interfere, it seemed to the doctor that the first beginnings of a faint
+distress betrayed themselves in the collie, and in the cat the stirrings
+of a vague excitement.
+
+He observed them closely. The fog was thick in the air, and the tobacco
+smoke from his pipe added to its density; the furniture at the far end
+stood mistily, and where the shadows congregated in hanging clouds under
+the ceiling, it was difficult to see clearly at all; the lamplight only
+reached to a level of five feet from the floor, above which came layers
+of comparative darkness, so that the room appeared twice as lofty as it
+actually was. By means of the lamp and the fire, however, the carpet was
+everywhere clearly visible.
+
+The animals made their silent tour of the floor, sometimes the dog
+leading, sometimes the cat; occasionally they looked at one another as
+though exchanging signals; and once or twice, in spite of the limited
+space, he lost sight of one or other among the fog and the shadows.
+Their curiosity, it appeared to him, was something more than the
+excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a strange room; yet, so
+far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely kept his mind
+quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part should
+communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the value of their
+independent behaviour.
+
+They made a very thorough journey, leaving no piece of furniture
+unexamined, or unsmelt. Flame led the way, walking slowly with lowered
+head, and Smoke followed demurely at his heels, making a transparent
+pretence of not being interested, yet missing nothing. And, at length,
+they returned, the old collie first, and came to rest on the mat before
+the fire. Flame rested his muzzle on his master's knee, smiling
+beatifically while he patted the yellow head and spoke his name; and
+Smoke, coming a little later, pretending he came by chance, looked from
+the empty saucer to his face, lapped up the milk when it was given him
+to the last drop, and then sprang upon his knees and curled round for
+the sleep it had fully earned and intended to enjoy.
+
+Silence descended upon the room. Only the breathing of the dog upon the
+mat came through the deep stillness, like the pulse of time marking the
+minutes; and the steady drip, drip of the fog outside upon the
+window-ledges dismally testified to the inclemency of the night beyond.
+And the soft crashings of the coals as the fire settled down into the
+grate became less and less audible as the fire sank and the flames
+resigned their fierceness.
+
+It was now well after eleven o'clock, and Dr. Silence devoted himself
+again to his book. He read the words on the printed page and took in
+their meaning superficially, yet without starting into life the
+correlations of thought and suggestions that should accompany
+interesting reading. Underneath, all the while, his mental energies were
+absorbed in watching, listening, waiting for what might come. He was not
+over-sanguine himself, yet he did not wish to be taken by surprise.
+Moreover, the animals, his sensitive barometers, had incontinently gone
+to sleep.
+
+After reading a dozen pages, however, he realised that his mind was
+really occupied in reviewing the features of Pender's extraordinary
+story, and that it was no longer necessary to steady his imagination by
+studying the dull paragraphs detailed in the pages before him. He laid
+down his book accordingly, and allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the
+features of the Case. Speculations as to the meaning, however, he
+rigorously suppressed, knowing that such thoughts would act upon his
+imagination like wind upon the glowing embers of a fire.
+
+As the night wore on the silence grew deeper and deeper, and only at
+rare intervals he heard the sound of wheels on the main road a hundred
+yards away, where the horses went at a walking pace owing to the density
+of the fog. The echo of pedestrian footsteps no longer reached him, the
+clamour of occasional voices no longer came down the side street. The
+night, muffled by fog, shrouded by veils of ultimate mystery, hung about
+the haunted villa like a doom. Nothing in the house stirred. Stillness,
+in a thick blanket, lay over the upper storeys. Only the mist in the
+room grew more dense, he thought, and the damp cold more penetrating.
+Certainly, from time to time, he shivered.
+
+The collie, now deep in slumber, moved occasionally,--grunted, sighed,
+or twitched his legs in dreams. Smoke lay on his knees, a pool of warm,
+black fur, only the closest observation detecting the movement of his
+sleek sides. It was difficult to distinguish exactly where his head and
+body joined in that circle of glistening hair; only a black satin nose
+and a tiny tip of pink tongue betrayed the secret.
+
+Dr. Silence watched him, and felt comfortable. The collie's breathing
+was soothing. The fire was well built, and would burn for another two
+hours without attention. He was not conscious of the least nervousness.
+He particularly wished to remain in his ordinary and normal state of
+mind, and to force nothing. If sleep came naturally, he would let it
+come--and even welcome it. The coldness of the room, when the fire died
+down later, would be sure to wake him again; and it would then be time
+enough to carry these sleeping barometers up to bed. From various
+psychic premonitions he knew quite well that the night would not pass
+without adventure; but he did not wish to force its arrival; and he
+wished to remain normal, and let the animals remain normal, so that,
+when it came, it would be unattended by excitement or by any straining
+of the attention. Many experiments had made him wise. And, for the rest,
+he had no fear.
+
+Accordingly, after a time, he did fall asleep as he had expected, and
+the last thing he remembered, before oblivion slipped up over his eyes
+like soft wool, was the picture of Flame stretching all four legs at
+once, and sighing noisily as he sought a more comfortable position for
+his paws and muzzle upon the mat.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a good deal later when he became aware that a weight lay upon his
+chest, and that something was pencilling over his face and mouth. A soft
+touch on the cheek woke him. Something was patting him.
+
+He sat up with a jerk, and found himself staring straight into a pair of
+brilliant eyes, half green, half black. Smoke's face lay level with his
+own; and the cat had climbed up with its front paws upon his chest.
+
+The lamp had burned low and the fire was nearly out, yet Dr. Silence saw
+in a moment that the cat was in an excited state. It kneaded with its
+front paws into his chest, shifting from one to the other. He felt them
+prodding against him. It lifted a leg very carefully and patted his
+cheek gingerly. Its fur, he saw, was standing ridgewise upon its back;
+the ears were flattened back somewhat; the tail was switching sharply.
+The cat, of course, had wakened him with a purpose, and the instant he
+realised this, he set it upon the arm of the chair and sprang up with a
+quick turn to face the empty room behind him. By some curious instinct,
+his arms of their own accord assumed an attitude of defence in front of
+him, as though to ward off something that threatened his safety. Yet
+nothing was visible. Only shapes of fog hung about rather heavily in the
+air, moving slightly to and fro.
+
+His mind was now fully alert, and the last vestiges of sleep gone. He
+turned the lamp higher and peered about him. Two things he became aware
+of at once: one, that Smoke, while excited, was _pleasurably_ excited;
+the other, that the collie was no longer visible upon the mat at his
+feet. He had crept away to the corner of the wall farthest from the
+window, and lay watching the room with wide-open eyes, in which lurked
+plainly something of alarm.
+
+Something in the dog's behaviour instantly struck Dr. Silence as
+unusual, and, calling him by name, he moved across to pat him. Flame got
+up, wagged his tail, and came over slowly to the rug, uttering a low
+sound that was half growl, half whine. He was evidently perturbed about
+something, and his master was proceeding to administer comfort when his
+attention was suddenly drawn to the antics of his other four-footed
+companion, the cat.
+
+And what he saw filled him with something like amazement.
+
+Smoke had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied
+the middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as
+ramrods, it was steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow
+space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of
+pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make
+expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back made
+it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of
+beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an ecstasy.
+
+At the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again
+along the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little
+muffled drums. It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against
+the ankles of some one who remained invisible. A thrill ran down the
+doctor's spine as he stood and stared. His experiment was growing
+interesting at last.
+
+He called the collie's attention to his friend's performance to see
+whether he too was aware of anything standing there upon the carpet, and
+the dog's behaviour was significant and corroborative. He came as far as
+his master's knees and then stopped dead, refusing to investigate
+closely. In vain Dr. Silence urged him; he wagged his tail, whined a
+little, and stood in a half-crouching attitude, staring alternately at
+the cat and at his master's face. He was, apparently, both puzzled and
+alarmed, and the whine went deeper and deeper down into his throat till
+it changed into an ugly snarl of awakening anger.
+
+Then the doctor called to him in a tone of command he had never known to
+be disregarded; but still the dog, though springing up in response,
+declined to move nearer. He made tentative motions, pranced a little
+like a dog about to take to water, pretended to bark, and ran to and fro
+on the carpet. So far there was no actual fear in his manner, but he was
+uneasy and anxious, and nothing would induce him to go within touching
+distance of the walking cat. Once he made a complete circuit, but always
+carefully out of reach; and in the end he returned to his master's legs
+and rubbed vigorously against him. Flame did not like the performance at
+all: that much was quite clear.
+
+For several minutes John Silence watched the performance of the cat with
+profound attention and without interfering. Then he called to the animal
+by name.
+
+"Smoke, you mysterious beastie, what in the world are you about?" he
+said, in a coaxing tone.
+
+The cat looked up at him for a moment, smiling in its ecstasy, blinking
+its eyes, but too happy to pause. He spoke to it again. He called to it
+several times, and each time it turned upon him its blazing eyes, drunk
+with inner delight, opening and shutting its lips, its body large and
+rigid with excitement. Yet it never for one instant paused in its short
+journeys to and fro.
+
+He noted exactly what it did: it walked, he saw, the same number of
+paces each time, some six or seven steps, and then it turned sharply and
+retraced them. By the pattern of the great roses in the carpet he
+measured it. It kept to the same direction and the same line. It behaved
+precisely as though it were rubbing against something solid.
+Undoubtedly, there was something standing there on that strip of carpet,
+something invisible to the doctor, something that alarmed the dog, yet
+caused the cat unspeakable pleasure.
+
+"Smokie!" he called again, "Smokie, you black mystery, what is it
+excites you so?"
+
+Again the cat looked up at him for a brief second, and then continued
+its sentry-walk, blissfully happy, intensely preoccupied. And, for an
+instant, as he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness
+stirred in the depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment
+upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him.
+
+There rose in him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with
+the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it,
+the domestic cat--their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their
+incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human
+beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. As he
+watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along
+the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of
+darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred in his
+heart a feeling strangely akin to awe. Its indifference to human kind,
+its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh
+meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its
+real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals. Its
+absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater's words
+that "no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself
+with the mysterious"; and he became suddenly aware that the presence of
+the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of Putney Hill was
+uncommonly welcome to him. He was glad to feel that Flame's dependable
+personality was with him. The savage growling at his heels was a
+pleasant sound. He was glad to hear it. That marching cat made him
+uneasy.
+
+Finding that Smoke paid no further attention to his words, the doctor
+decided upon action. Would it rub against his leg, too? He would take it
+by surprise and see.
+
+He stepped quickly forward and placed himself upon the exact strip of
+carpet where it walked.
+
+But no cat is ever taken by surprise! The moment he occupied the space
+of the Intruder, setting his feet on the woven roses midway in the line
+of travel, Smoke suddenly stopped purring and sat down. If lifted up its
+face with the most innocent stare imaginable of its green eyes. He could
+have sworn it laughed. It was a perfect child again. In a single second
+it had resumed its simple, domestic manner; and it gazed at him in such
+a way that he almost felt Smoke was the normal being, and _his_ was the
+eccentric behaviour that was being watched. It was consummate, the
+manner in which it brought about this change so easily and so quickly.
+
+"Superb little actor!" he laughed in spite of himself, and stooped to
+stroke the shining black back. But, in a flash, as he touched its fur,
+the cat turned and spat at him viciously, striking at his hand with one
+paw. Then, with a hurried scutter of feet, it shot like a shadow across
+the floor and a moment later was calmly sitting over by the
+window-curtains washing its face as though nothing interested it in the
+whole world but the cleanness of its cheeks and whiskers.
+
+John Silence straightened himself up and drew a long breath. He realised
+that the performance was temporarily at an end. The collie, meanwhile,
+who had watched the whole proceeding with marked disapproval, had now
+lain down again upon the mat by the fire, no longer growling. It seemed
+to the doctor just as though something that had entered the room while
+he slept, alarming the dog, yet bringing happiness to the cat, had now
+gone out again, leaving all as it was before. Whatever it was that
+excited its blissful attentions had retreated for the moment.
+
+He realised this intuitively. Smoke evidently realised it, too, for
+presently he deigned to march back to the fireplace and jump upon his
+master's knees. Dr. Silence, patient and determined, settled down once
+more to his book. The animals soon slept; the fire blazed cheerfully;
+and the cold fog from outside poured into the room through every
+available chink and crannie.
+
+For a long time silence and peace reigned in the room and Dr. Silence
+availed himself of the quietness to make careful notes of what had
+happened. He entered for future use in other cases an exhaustive
+analysis of what he had observed, especially with regard to the effect
+upon the two animals. It is impossible here, nor would it be
+intelligible to the reader unversed in the knowledge of the region known
+to a scientifically trained psychic like Dr. Silence, to detail these
+observations. But to him it was clear, up to a certain point--for the
+rest he must still wait and watch. So far, at least, he realised that
+while he slept in the chair--that is, while his will was dormant--the
+room had suffered intrusion from what he recognised as an intensely
+active Force, and might later be forced to acknowledge as something more
+than merely a blind force, namely, a distinct personality.
+
+So far it had affected himself scarcely at all, but had acted directly
+upon the simpler organisms of the animals. It stimulated keenly the
+centres of the cat's psychic being, inducing a state of instant
+happiness (intensifying its consciousness probably in the same way a
+drug or stimulant intensifies that of a human being); whereas it alarmed
+the less sensitive dog, causing it to feel a vague apprehension and
+distress.
+
+His own sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse it
+temporarily, yet he felt convinced--the indications were not lacking
+even while he sat there making notes--that it still remained near to
+him, conditionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering
+force for a second attack.
+
+And, further, he intuitively understood that the relations between the
+two animals had undergone a subtle change: that the cat had become
+immeasurably superior, confident, sure of itself in its own peculiar
+region, whereas Flame had been weakened by an attack he could not
+comprehend and knew not how to reply to. Though not yet afraid, he was
+defiant--ready to act against a fear that he felt to be approaching. He
+was no longer fatherly and protective towards the cat. Smoke held the
+key to the situation; and both he and the cat knew it.
+
+Thus, as the minutes passed, John Silence sat and waited, keenly on the
+alert, wondering how soon the attack would be renewed, and at what point
+it would be diverted from the animals and directed upon himself.
+
+The book lay on the floor beside him, his notes were complete. With one
+hand on the cat's fur, and the dog's front paws resting against his
+feet, the three of them dozed comfortably before the hot fire while the
+night wore on and the silence deepened towards midnight.
+
+It was well after one o'clock in the morning when Dr. Silence turned the
+lamp out and lighted the candle preparatory to going up to bed. Then
+Smoke suddenly woke with a loud sharp purr and sat up. It neither
+stretched, washed nor turned: it listened. And the doctor, watching it,
+realised that a certain indefinable change had come about that very
+moment in the room. A swift readjustment of the forces within the four
+walls had taken place--a new disposition of their personal equations.
+The balance was destroyed, the former harmony gone. Smoke, most
+sensitive of barometers, had been the first to feel it, but the dog was
+not slow to follow suit, for on looking down he noted that Flame was no
+longer asleep. He was lying with eyes wide open, and that same instant
+he sat up on his great haunches and began to growl.
+
+Dr. Silence was in the act of taking the matches to re-light the lamp
+when an audible movement in the room behind him made him pause. Smoke
+leaped down from his knee and moved forward a few paces across the
+carpet. Then it stopped and stared fixedly; and the doctor stood up on
+the rug to watch.
+
+As he rose the sound was repeated, and he discovered that it was not in
+the room as he first thought, but outside, and that it came from more
+directions than one. There was a rushing, sweeping noise against the
+window-panes, and simultaneously a sound of something brushing against
+the door--out in the hall. Smoke advanced sedately across the carpet,
+twitching his tail, and sat down within a foot of the door. The
+influence that had destroyed the harmonious conditions of the room had
+apparently moved in advance of its cause. Clearly, something was about
+to happen.
+
+For the first time that night John Silence hesitated; the thought of
+that dark narrow hall-way, choked with fog, and destitute of human
+comfort, was unpleasant. He became aware of a faint creeping of his
+flesh. He knew, of course, that the actual opening of the door was not
+necessary to the invasion of the room that was about to take place,
+since neither doors nor windows, nor any other solid barriers could
+interpose an obstacle to what was seeking entrance. Yet the opening of
+the door would be significant and symbolic, and he distinctly shrank
+from it.
+
+But for a moment only. Smoke, turning with a show of impatience,
+recalled him to his purpose, and he moved past the sitting, watching
+creature, and deliberately opened the door to its full width.
+
+What subsequently happened, happened in the feeble and flickering light
+of the solitary candle on the mantlepiece.
+
+Through the opened door he saw the hall, dimly lit and thick with fog.
+Nothing, of course, was visible--nothing but the hat-stand, the African
+spears in dark lines upon the wall and the high-backed wooden chair
+standing grotesquely underneath on the oilcloth floor. For one instant
+the fog seemed to move and thicken oddly; but he set that down to the
+score of the imagination. The door had opened upon nothing.
+
+Yet Smoke apparently thought otherwise, and the deep growling of the
+collie from the mat at the back of the room seemed to confirm his
+judgment.
+
+For, proud and self-possessed, the cat had again risen to his feet, and
+having advanced to the door, was now ushering some one slowly into the
+room. Nothing could have been more evident. He paced from side to side,
+bowing his little head with great _empressement_ and holding his
+stiffened tail aloft like a flag-staff. He turned this way and that,
+mincing to and fro, and showing signs of supreme satisfaction. He was in
+his element. He welcomed the intrusion, and apparently reckoned that his
+companions, the doctor and the dog, would welcome it likewise.
+
+The Intruder had returned for a second attack.
+
+Dr. Silence moved slowly backwards and took up his position on the
+hearthrug, keying himself up to a condition of concentrated attention.
+
+He noted that Flame stood beside him, facing the room, with body
+motionless, and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious
+swaying movement. His eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and
+jaws thrust forward, his legs tense and ready to leap. Savage, ready for
+attack or defence, yet dreadfully puzzled and perhaps already a little
+cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on his spine and sides positively
+bristling outwards as though a wind played through it. In the dim
+firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf, silent, eyes
+shooting dark fire, exceedingly formidable. It was Flame, the terrible.
+
+Smoke, meanwhile, advanced from the door towards the middle of the room,
+adopting the very slow pace of an invisible companion. A few feet away
+it stopped and began to smile and blink its eyes. There was something
+deliberately coaxing in its attitude as it stood there undecided on the
+carpet, clearly wishing to effect some sort of introduction between the
+Intruder and its canine friend and ally. It assumed its most winning
+manners, purring, smiling, looking persuasively from one to the other,
+and making quick tentative steps first in one direction and then in the
+other. There had always existed such perfect understanding between them
+in everything. Surely Flame would appreciate Smoke's intention now, and
+acquiesce.
+
+But the old collie made no advances. He bared his teeth, lifting his
+lips till the gums showed, and stood stockstill with fixed eyes and
+heaving sides. The doctor moved a little farther back, watching intently
+the smallest movement, and it was just then he divined suddenly from the
+cat's behaviour and attitude that it was not only a single companion it
+had ushered into the room, but _several_. It kept crossing over from one
+to the other, looking up at each in turn. It sought to win over the dog
+to friendliness with them all. The original Intruder had come back with
+reinforcements. And at the same time he further realised that the
+Intruder was something more than a blindly acting force, impersonal
+though destructive. It was a Personality, and moreover a great
+personality. And it was accompanied for the purposes of assistance by a
+host of other personalities, minor in degree, but similar in kind.
+
+He braced himself in the corner against the mantelpiece and waited, his
+whole being roused to defence, for he was now fully aware that the
+attack had spread to include himself as well as the animals, and he
+must be on the alert. He strained his eyes through the foggy atmosphere,
+trying in vain to see what the cat and dog saw; but the candlelight
+threw an uncertain and flickering light across the room and his eyes
+discerned nothing. On the floor Smoke moved softly in front of him like
+a black shadow, his eyes gleaming as he turned his head, still trying
+with many insinuating gestures and much purring to bring about the
+introductions he desired.
+
+But it was all in vain. Flame stood riveted to one spot, motionless as a
+figure carved in stone.
+
+Some minutes passed, during which only the cat moved, and then there
+came a sharp change. Flame began to back towards the wall. He moved his
+head from side to side as he went, sometimes turning to snap at
+something almost behind him. They were advancing upon him, trying to
+surround him. His distress became very marked from now onwards, and it
+seemed to the doctor that his anger merged into genuine terror and
+became overwhelmed by it. The savage growl sounded perilously like a
+whine, and more than once he tried to dive past his master's legs, as
+though hunting for a way of escape. He was trying to avoid something
+that everywhere blocked the way.
+
+This terror of the indomitable fighter impressed the doctor enormously;
+yet also painfully; stirring his impatience; for he had never before
+seen the dog show signs of giving in, and it distressed him to witness
+it. He knew, however, that he was not giving in easily, and understood
+that it was really impossible for him to gauge the animal's sensations
+properly at all. What Flame felt, and saw, must be terrible indeed to
+turn him all at once into a coward. He faced something that made him
+afraid of more than his life merely. The doctor spoke a few quick words
+of encouragement to him, and stroked the bristling hair. But without
+much success. The collie seemed already beyond the reach of comfort such
+as that, and the collapse of the old dog followed indeed very speedily
+after this.
+
+And Smoke, meanwhile, remained behind, watching the advance, but not
+joining in it; sitting, pleased and expectant, considering that all was
+going well and as it wished. It was kneading on the carpet with its
+front paws--slowly, laboriously, as though its feet were dipped in
+treacle. The sound its claws made as they caught in the threads was
+distinctly audible. It was still smiling, blinking, purring.
+
+Suddenly the collie uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to
+one side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom.
+The next instant he dashed past his master's legs, almost upsetting his
+balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly
+against walls and furniture. But that bark was significant; the doctor
+had heard it before and knew what it meant: for it was the cry of the
+fighter against odds and it meant that the old beast had found his
+courage again. Possibly it was only the courage of despair, but at any
+rate the fighting would be terrific. And Dr. Silence understood, too,
+that he dared not interfere. Flame must fight his own enemies in his own
+way.
+
+But the cat, too, had heard that dreadful bark; and it, too, had
+understood. This was more than it had bargained for. Across the dim
+shadows of that haunted room there must have passed some secret signal
+of distress between the animals. Smoke stood up and looked swiftly about
+him. He uttered a piteous meow and trotted smartly away into the greater
+darkness by the windows. What his object was only those endowed with the
+spirit-like intelligence of cats might know. But, at any rate, he had at
+last ranged himself on the side of his friend. And the little beast
+meant business.
+
+At the same moment the collie managed to gain the door. The doctor saw
+him rush through into the hall like a flash of yellow light. He shot
+across the oilcloth, and tore up the stairs, but in another second he
+appeared again, flying down the steps and landing at the bottom in a
+tumbling heap, whining, cringing, terrified. The doctor saw him slink
+back into the room again and crawl round by the wall towards the cat.
+Was, then, even the staircase occupied? Did _They_ stand also in the
+hall? Was the whole house crowded from floor to ceiling?
+
+The thought came to add to the keen distress he felt at the sight of the
+collie's discomfiture. And, indeed, his own personal distress had
+increased in a marked degree during the past minutes, and continued to
+increase steadily to the climax. He recognised that the drain on his own
+vitality grew steadily, and that the attack was now directed against
+himself even more than against the defeated dog, and the too much
+deceived cat.
+
+It all seemed so rapid and uncalculated after that--the events that took
+place in this little modern room at the top of Putney Hill between
+midnight and sunrise--that Dr. Silence was hardly able to follow and
+remember it all. It came about with such uncanny swiftness and terror;
+the light was so uncertain; the movements of the black cat so difficult
+to follow on the dark carpet, and the doctor himself so weary and taken
+by surprise--that he found it almost impossible to observe accurately,
+or to recall afterwards precisely what it was he had seen or in what
+order the incidents had taken place. He never could understand what
+defect of vision on his part made it seem as though the cat had
+duplicated itself at first, and then increased indefinitely, so that
+there were at least a dozen of them darting silently about the floor,
+leaping softly on to chairs and tables, passing like shadows from the
+open door to the end of the room, all black as sin, with brilliant green
+eyes flashing fire in all directions. It was like the reflections from a
+score of mirrors placed round the walls at different angles. Nor could
+he make out at the time why the size of the room seemed to have altered,
+grown much larger, and why it extended away behind him where ordinarily
+the wall should have been. The snarling of the enraged and terrified
+collie sounded sometimes so far away; the ceiling seemed to have raised
+itself so much higher than before, and much of the furniture had changed
+in appearance and shifted marvellously.
+
+It was all so confused and confusing, as though the little room he knew
+had become merged and transformed into the dimensions of quite another
+chamber, that came to him, with its host of cats and its strange
+distances, in a sort of vision.
+
+But these changes came about a little later, and at a time when his
+attention was so concentrated upon the proceedings of Smoke and the
+collie, that he only observed them, as it were, subconsciously. And the
+excitement, the flickering candlelight, the distress he felt for the
+collie, and the distorting atmosphere of fog were the poorest possible
+allies to careful observation.
+
+At first he was only aware that the dog was repeating his short
+dangerous bark from time to time, snapping viciously at the empty air, a
+foot or so from the ground. Once, indeed, he sprang upwards and
+forwards, working furiously with teeth and paws, and with a noise like
+wolves fighting, but only to dash back the next minute against the wall
+behind him. Then, after lying still for a bit, he rose to a crouching
+position as though to spring again, snarling horribly and making short
+half-circles with lowered head. And Smoke all the while meowed piteously
+by the window as though trying to draw the attack upon himself.
+
+Then it was that the rush of the whole dreadful business seemed to turn
+aside from the dog and direct itself upon his own person. The collie had
+made another spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner, where
+he made noise enough in his savage rage to waken the dead before he fell
+to whining and then finally lay still. And directly afterwards the
+doctor's own distress became intolerably acute. He had made a half
+movement forward to come to the rescue when a veil that was denser than
+mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene, draping room, walls,
+animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also about his own
+mind. Other forms moved silently across the field of vision, forms that
+he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not. Unholy
+thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil
+presented themselves seductively. Ice seemed to settle about his heart,
+and his mind trembled. He began to lose memory--memory of his identity,
+of where he was, of what he ought to do. The very foundations of his
+strength were shaken. His will seemed paralysed.
+
+And it was then that the room filled with this horde of cats, all dark
+as the night, all silent, all with lamping eyes of green fire. The
+dimensions of the place altered and shifted. He was in a much larger
+space. The whining of the dog sounded far away, and all about him the
+cats flew busily to and fro, silently playing their tearing, rushing
+game of evil, weaving the pattern of their dark purpose upon the floor.
+He strove hard to collect himself and remember the words of power he had
+made use of before in similar dread positions where his dangerous
+practice had sometimes led; but he could recall nothing consecutively; a
+mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and his forces
+scattered. The deeps within were too troubled for healing power to come
+out of them.
+
+It was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour
+thrown upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the
+veil; but at the time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as with
+all true glamour, was unable to grasp where the true ended and the false
+began. He was caught momentarily in the same vortex that had sought to
+lure the cat to destruction through its delight, and threatened utterly
+to overwhelm the dog through its terror.
+
+There came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and
+tearing its way down. The windows rattled. The candle flickered and went
+out. The glacial atmosphere closed round him with the cold of death, and
+a great rushing sound swept by overhead as though the ceiling had lifted
+to a great height. He heard the door shut. Far away it sounded. He felt
+lost, shelterless in the depths of his soul. Yet still he held out and
+resisted while the climax of the fight came nearer and nearer.... He had
+stepped into the stream of forces awakened by Pender and he knew that he
+must withstand them to the end or come to a conclusion that it was not
+good for a man to come to. Something from the region of utter cold was
+upon him.
+
+And then quite suddenly, through the confused mists about him, there
+slowly rose up the Personality that had been all the time directing the
+battle. Some force entered his being that shook him as the tempest
+shakes a leaf, and close against his eyes--clean level with his face--he
+found himself staring into the wreck of a vast dark Countenance, a
+countenance that was terrible even in its ruin.
+
+For ruined it was, and terrible it was, and the mark of spiritual evil
+was branded everywhere upon its broken features. Eyes, face and hair
+rose level with his own, and for a space of time he never could properly
+measure, or determine, these two, a man and a woman, looked straight
+into each other's visages and down into each other's hearts.
+
+And John Silence, the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his own
+against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose
+soul was on the side of the Dark Powers.
+
+It was the climax that touched the depth of power within him and began
+to restore him slowly to his own. He was conscious, of course, of
+effort, and yet it seemed no superhuman one, for he had recognised the
+character of his opponent's power, and he called upon the good within
+him to meet and overcome it. The inner forces stirred and trembled in
+response to his call. They did not at first come readily as was their
+habit, for under the spell of glamour they had already been diabolically
+lulled into inactivity, but come they eventually did, rising out of the
+inner spiritual nature he had learned with so much time and pain to
+awaken to life. And power and confidence came with them. He began to
+breathe deeply and regularly, and at the same time to absorb into
+himself the forces opposed to him, and to _turn them to his own
+account_. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour
+into him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and
+thus enormously increased his own.
+
+For this spiritual alchemy he had learned. He understood that force
+ultimately is everywhere one and the same; it is the motive behind that
+makes it good or evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. He
+knew--provided he was not first robbed of self-control--how vicariously
+to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically
+into his own good purposes. And, since his motive was pure and his soul
+fearless, they could not work him harm.
+
+Thus he stood in the main stream of evil unwittingly attracted by
+Pender, deflecting its course upon himself; and after passing through
+the purifying filter of his own unselfishness these energies could only
+add to his store of experience, of knowledge, and therefore of power.
+And, as his self-control returned to him, he gradually accomplished this
+purpose, even though trembling while he did so.
+
+Yet the struggle was severe, and in spite of the freezing chill of the
+air, the perspiration poured down his face. Then, by slow degrees, the
+dark and dreadful countenance faded, the glamour passed from his soul,
+the normal proportions returned to walls and ceiling, the forms melted
+back into the fog, and the whirl of rushing shadow-cats disappeared
+whence they came.
+
+And with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John
+Silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power. In a
+deep, modulated voice he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that
+slowly rolled through the air like a rising sea, filling the room with
+powerful vibratory activities that whelmed all irregularities of lesser
+vibrations in its own swelling tone. He made certain sigils, gestures
+and movements at the same time. For several minutes he continued to
+utter these words, until at length the growing volume dominated the
+whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it. For
+just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil
+forces by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study
+the occult use of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region
+wherein the powers of spiritual evil work their fell purposes. Harmony
+was restored first of all to his own soul, and thence to the room and
+all its occupants.
+
+And, after himself, the first to recognise it was the old dog lying in
+his corner. Flame began suddenly uttering sounds of pleasure, that
+"something" between a growl and a grunt that dogs make upon being
+restored to their master's confidence. Dr. Silence heard the thumping of
+the collie's tail against the floor. And the grunt and the thumping
+touched the depth of affection in the man's heart, and gave him some
+inkling of what agonies the dumb creature had suffered.
+
+Next, from the shadows by the window, a somewhat shrill purring
+announced the restoration of the cat to its normal state. Smoke was
+advancing across the carpet. He seemed very pleased with himself, and
+smiled with an expression of supreme innocence. He was no shadow-cat,
+but real and full of his usual and perfect self-possession. He marched
+along, picking his way delicately, but with a stately dignity that
+suggested his ancestry with the majesty of Egypt. His eyes no longer
+glared; they shone steadily before him, they radiated, not excitement,
+but knowledge. Clearly he was anxious to make amends for the mischief to
+which he had unwittingly lent himself owing to his subtle and electric
+constitution.
+
+Still uttering his sharp high purrings he marched up to his master and
+rubbed vigorously against his legs. Then he stood on his hind feet and
+pawed his knees and stared beseechingly up into his face. He turned his
+head towards the corner where the collie still lay, thumping his tail
+feebly and pathetically.
+
+John Silence understood. He bent down and stroked the creature's living
+fur, noting the line of bright blue sparks that followed the motion of
+his hand down its back. And then they advanced together towards the
+corner where the dog was.
+
+Smoke went first and put his nose gently against his friend's muzzle,
+purring while he rubbed, and uttering little soft sounds of affection in
+his throat. The doctor lit the candle and brought it over. He saw the
+collie lying on its side against the wall; it was utterly exhausted, and
+foam still hung about its jaws. Its tail and eyes responded to the sound
+of its name, but it was evidently very weak and overcome. Smoke
+continued to rub against its cheek and nose and eyes, sometimes even
+standing on its body and kneading into the thick yellow hair. Flame
+replied from time to time by little licks of the tongue, most of them
+curiously misdirected.
+
+But Dr. Silence felt intuitively that something disastrous had happened,
+and his heart was wrung. He stroked the dear body, feeling it over for
+bruises or broken bones, but finding none. He fed it with what remained
+of the sandwiches and milk, but the creature clumsily upset the saucer
+and lost the sandwiches between its paws, so that the doctor had to feed
+it with his own hand. And all the while Smoke meowed piteously.
+
+Then John Silence began to understand. He went across to the farther
+side of the room and called aloud to it.
+
+"Flame, old man! come!"
+
+At any other time the dog would have been upon him in an instant,
+barking and leaping to the shoulder. And even now he got up, though
+heavily and awkwardly, to his feet. He started to run, wagging his tail
+more briskly. He collided first with a chair, and then ran straight into
+a table. Smoke trotted close at his side, trying his very best to guide
+him. But it was useless. Dr. Silence had to lift him up into his own
+arms and carry him like a baby. For he was blind.
+
+
+III
+
+It was a week later when John Silence called to see the author in his
+new house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy
+again with his writing. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he
+seemed cheerful and confident.
+
+"Humour restored?" laughed the doctor, as soon as they were comfortably
+settled in the room overlooking the Park.
+
+"I've had no trouble since I left that dreadful place," returned Pender
+gratefully; "and thanks to you--"
+
+The doctor stopped him with a gesture.
+
+"Never mind that," he said, "we'll discuss your new plans afterwards,
+and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you settle
+elsewhere. Of course it must be pulled down, for it's not fit for any
+sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted in
+the same way you were. Although, personally, I think the evil has
+exhausted itself by now."
+
+He told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with
+the animals.
+
+"I don't pretend to understand," Pender said, when the account was
+finished, "but I and my wife are intensely relieved to be free of it
+all. Only I must say I should like to know something of the former
+history of the house. When we took it six months ago I heard no word
+against it."
+
+Dr. Silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket.
+
+"I can satisfy your curiosity to some extent," he said, running his eye
+over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; "for by my
+secretary's investigations I have been able to check certain information
+obtained in the hypnotic trance by a 'sensitive' who helps me in such
+cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have been a woman
+of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by
+hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England and
+only came to light by the merest chance. She came to her end in the year
+1798, for it was not this particular house she lived in, but a much
+larger one that then stood upon the site it now occupies, and was then,
+of course, not in London, but in the country. She was a person of
+intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will, and of consummate
+audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the resources of the
+lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to explain the virulence
+of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on after
+death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life."
+
+"You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct--"
+gasped the author.
+
+"I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful
+personality may still persist after death in the line of their original
+momentum," replied the doctor; "and that strong thoughts and purposes
+can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their
+originators have passed away.
+
+"If you knew anything of magic," he pursued, "you would know that
+thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and
+pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed
+from the region of our human life is another region where float the
+waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the
+dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of
+all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the
+will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower
+magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce, I am persuaded,
+and the forces she set going during her life have simply been
+accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they not
+been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and satisfied
+through me.
+
+"Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there
+are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain
+spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner
+being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your
+case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.
+
+"But now, tell me," he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed
+author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had
+appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill--"tell me if you
+recognise this face?"
+
+Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered a
+little as he looked.
+
+"Undoubtedly," he said, "it is the face I kept trying to draw--dark,
+with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman."
+
+Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut
+of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records of
+the Newgate Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two
+different aspects of the same dreadful visage. The men compared them for
+some moments in silence.
+
+"It makes me thank God for the limitations of our senses," said Pender
+quietly, with a sigh; "continuous clairvoyance must be a sore
+affliction."
+
+"It is indeed," returned John Silence significantly, "and if all the
+people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the
+statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they
+are. It is little wonder," he added, "that your sense of humour was
+clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your
+brain for their dissemination. You have had an interesting adventure,
+Mr. Felix Pender, and, let me add, a fortunate escape."
+
+The author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of
+scratching at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly.
+
+"It's time for me to go. I left my dog on the step, but I suppose--"
+
+Before he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure
+behind it and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie. The
+dog, wagging his tail and contorting his whole body with delight, tore
+across the floor and tried to leap up upon his owner's breast. And there
+was laughter and happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear again as
+the day.
+
+
+
+
+CASE II: ANCIENT SORCERIES
+
+
+I
+
+There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with
+none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice
+in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange
+that the world catches its breath--and looks the other way! And it was
+cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the
+wide-spread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to
+his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of
+spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the
+strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.
+
+Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved
+to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul
+of things--and to release a suffering human soul in the process--was
+with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed,
+after passing strange.
+
+The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can
+attach credence--something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The
+adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an
+adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters
+obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the
+adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But
+dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the
+world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them,
+not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.
+
+"Such a thing happened to _that_ man!" it cries--"a commonplace person
+like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!"
+
+Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to
+little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr.
+Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite
+of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely
+that "such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained
+Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to
+commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die
+according to scale."
+
+But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not "live
+according to scale" so far as this particular event in his otherwise
+uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his
+pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more
+hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting
+words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again
+each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled in the
+recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a
+lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to
+excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so
+fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive
+soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost
+constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that should
+rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote
+from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella
+on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he was already
+more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he cared to admit.
+
+John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said
+that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet they
+were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably
+cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined or
+invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the effect
+was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the charming
+personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and revealed
+itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but in the telling he
+forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost vividly as he
+lived again in the past of his adventure.
+
+He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from
+some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every
+summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the
+train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed
+holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his
+fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive,
+obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter
+tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt
+into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English
+clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he
+ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not
+claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn't want and
+that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down,
+and so forth.
+
+So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were
+over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in Surbiton.
+
+And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station
+in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform,
+and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles debouching
+from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the
+journey. Even _his_ flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a
+night in the little town and going on next day by a slower, emptier
+train, flashed into his mind. The guard was already shouting "_en
+voiture_" and the corridor of his compartment was already packed when
+the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and
+rushed to snatch his bag.
+
+Finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window (for
+he had a corner seat) and begged the Frenchman who sat opposite to hand
+his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched French that he
+intended to break the journey there. And this elderly Frenchman, he
+declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of reproach, that to
+his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag through the window
+of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long
+sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend
+only the last few words: "_� cause du sommeil et � cause des chats_."
+
+In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized
+upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin admitted
+that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginning, though
+without being able to explain why. They had sat facing one another
+during the four hours of the journey, and though no conversation had
+passed between them--Vezin was timid about his stuttering French--he
+confessed that his eyes were being continually drawn to his face,
+almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a dozen nameless little
+politenesses and attentions, had evinced the desire to be kind. The men
+liked each other and their personalities did not clash, or would not
+have clashed had they chanced to come to terms of acquaintance. The
+Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a silent protective
+influence over the insignificant little Englishman, and without words or
+gestures betrayed that he wished him well and would gladly have been of
+service to him.
+
+"And this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?" asked John
+Silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted
+the prejudices of his patient, "were you unable to follow it exactly?"
+
+"It was so quick and low and vehement," explained Vezin, in his small
+voice, "that I missed practically the whole of it. I only caught the few
+words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his face
+was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine."
+
+"'_� cause du sommeil et � cause des chats'?_" repeated Dr. Silence, as
+though half speaking to himself.
+
+"That's it exactly," said Vezin; "which, I take it, means something like
+'because of sleep and because of the cats,' doesn't it?"
+
+"Certainly, that's how I should translate it," the doctor observed
+shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary.
+
+"And the rest of the sentence--all the first part I couldn't understand,
+I mean--was a warning not to do something--not to stop in the town, or
+at some particular place in the town, perhaps. That was the impression
+it made on me."
+
+Then, of course, the train rushed off, and left Vezin standing on the
+platform alone and rather forlorn.
+
+The little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out
+of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin
+towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station
+itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the
+mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And once he
+reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of
+modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle of the crowded
+train seemed days away. The spirit of this silent hill-town, remote from
+tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life under the autumn
+sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. Long before he recognised this
+spell he acted under it. He walked softly, almost on tiptoe, down the
+winding narrow streets where the gables all but met over his head, and
+he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a deprecating and modest
+demeanour that was in itself an apology for intruding upon the place and
+disturbing its dream.
+
+At first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The
+attempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the
+delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy
+rattle of the train. He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.
+
+"Like a cat, you said?" interrupted John Silence, quickly catching him
+up.
+
+"Yes. At the very start I felt that." He laughed apologetically. "I felt
+as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me purr. It
+seemed to be the general mood of the whole place--then."
+
+The inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching
+days still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felt
+he was only tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, and
+the delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel
+really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold,
+original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He felt
+something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling
+and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it
+seemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep--a little dim
+cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked upon
+the courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him think
+of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed
+padded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of the streets
+could not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute rest that
+surrounded him.
+
+On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who
+seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with
+Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards
+him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little
+promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress
+herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed to
+swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak. But
+she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her
+body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and
+alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair
+against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her
+as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the
+same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch
+occurred to him.
+
+She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite
+without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple
+in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and
+the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.
+
+"But when she looked at me, you know," said Vezin, with that little
+apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gesture
+of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, "the odd notion came to
+me that really she had intended to make quite a different movement, and
+that with a single bound she could have leaped at me across the width of
+that stone yard and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse."
+
+He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his book
+without interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though he
+feared he had already told too much and more than we could believe.
+
+"Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and I
+felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind
+her back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She
+asked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then
+added that dinner was at seven o'clock, and that they were very early
+people in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey that
+late hours were not encouraged."
+
+Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression
+that here he would be "managed," that everything would be arranged and
+planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove
+and obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked for
+from him. It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly out
+into the street feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he was in
+a _milieu_ that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was so much
+easier to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that all the
+town purred with him.
+
+About the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling
+deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. With
+no special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. The September
+sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down winding alleyways, fringed
+with tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike glimpses of
+the great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses lying like a
+dream-map in the haze. The spell of the past held very potently here, he
+felt.
+
+The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy
+enough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him
+or turned to stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even able
+to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in a
+charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling
+delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious. It was
+like becoming part of a softly coloured dream which he did not even
+realise to be a dream.
+
+On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain below
+ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which the
+little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fields
+like deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of ancient
+fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were only
+vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls and
+wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for a
+moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the
+esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam
+crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he
+looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the
+cool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slow
+footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the
+gaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caught
+glimpses of their quiet movements far below.
+
+He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs and
+half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of the
+plane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew as
+naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying there
+half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.
+
+And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of
+horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town
+band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the
+accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very
+sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured,
+unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with
+low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when
+no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an
+invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly
+charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as
+though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely
+marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after
+the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place
+and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were
+part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned
+plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all half
+smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soul
+with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quite
+pleasant.
+
+There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music
+seemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by
+the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in
+the rigging of invisible ships; or--and the simile leaped up in his
+thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion--a chorus of animals, of
+wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and
+singing as animals will, to the moon. He could fancy he heard the
+wailing, half-human cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising and
+falling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled by
+distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of these
+creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music
+to one another and the moon in chorus.
+
+It was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it
+expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The
+instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and
+diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night,
+rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in
+such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time a
+plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords of these
+half-broken instruments were so singular that they did not distress his
+musical soul like fiddles out of tune.
+
+He listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character
+was, and then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly.
+
+"There was nothing to alarm?" put in Dr. Silence briefly.
+
+"Absolutely nothing," said Vezin; "but you know it was all so
+fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed.
+Perhaps, too," he continued, gently explanatory, "it was this stirring
+of my imagination that caused other impressions; for, as I walked back,
+the spell of the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though
+all intelligible ways. But there were other things I could not account
+for in the least, even then."
+
+"Incidents, you mean?"
+
+"Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of vivid sensations crowded themselves
+upon my mind and I could trace them to no causes. It was just after
+sunset and the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines against an
+opalescent sky of gold and red. The dusk was running down the twisted
+streets. All round the hill the plain pressed in like a dim sea, its
+level rising with the darkness. The spell of this kind of scene, you
+know, can be very moving, and it was so that night. Yet I felt that what
+came to me had nothing directly to do with the mystery and wonder of the
+scene."
+
+"Not merely the subtle transformations of the spirit that come with
+beauty," put in the doctor, noticing his hesitation.
+
+"Exactly," Vezin went on, duly encouraged and no longer so fearful of
+our smiles at his expense. "The impressions came from somewhere else.
+For instance, down the busy main street where men and women were
+bustling home from work, shopping at stalls and barrows, idly gossiping
+in groups, and all the rest of it, I saw that I aroused no interest and
+that no one turned to stare at me as a foreigner and stranger. I was
+utterly ignored, and my presence among them excited no special interest
+or attention.
+
+"And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me with conviction that all
+the time this indifference and inattention were merely feigned.
+Everybody as a matter of fact was watching me closely. Every movement I
+made was known and observed. Ignoring me was all a pretence--an
+elaborate pretence."
+
+He paused a moment and looked at us to see if we were smiling, and then
+continued, reassured--
+
+"It is useless to ask me how I noticed this, because I simply cannot
+explain it. But the discovery gave me something of a shock. Before I got
+back to the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in my
+mind and forced my recognition of it as true. And this, too, I may as
+well say at once, was equally inexplicable to me. I mean I can only give
+you the fact, as fact it was to me."
+
+The little man left his chair and stood on the mat before the fire. His
+diffidence lessened from now onwards, as he lost himself again in the
+magic of the old adventure. His eyes shone a little already as he
+talked.
+
+"Well," he went on, his soft voice rising somewhat with his excitement,
+"I was in a shop when it came to me first--though the idea must have
+been at work for a long time subconsciously to appear in so complete a
+form all at once. I was buying socks, I think," he laughed, "and
+struggling with my dreadful French, when it struck me that the woman in
+the shop did not care two pins whether I bought anything or not. She was
+indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. She was only
+pretending to sell.
+
+"This sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what
+follows. But really it was not small. I mean it was the spark that lit
+the line of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind.
+
+"For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so
+far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were
+elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere
+out of sight behind the scenes. Their busy-ness was but the outward
+semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and
+ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main
+stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in
+secret places. In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether
+I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to
+my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from
+hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. It was all a
+great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly
+for purposes of their own. But the main current of their energies ran
+elsewhere. I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be
+expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the
+whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it. The town was
+doing this very thing to me.
+
+"This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked
+home to the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of
+this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of
+its hidden life.
+
+"And, now that my eyes were partly opened, I noticed other things too
+that puzzled me, first of which, I think, was the extraordinary silence
+of the whole place. Positively, the town was muffled. Although the
+streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly,
+with padded feet, like cats. Nothing made noise. All was hushed,
+subdued, muted. The very voices were quiet, low-pitched like purring.
+Nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed able to live in the
+drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little hill-town
+into its sleep. It was like the woman at the inn--an outward repose
+screening intense inner activity and purpose.
+
+"Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it.
+The people were active and alert. Only a magical and uncanny softness
+lay over them all like a spell."
+
+Vezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory
+had become very vivid. His voice had run off into a whisper so that we
+heard the last part with difficulty. He was telling a true thing
+obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling.
+
+"I went back to the inn," he continued presently in a louder voice, "and
+dined. I felt a new strange world about me. My old world of reality
+receded. Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and
+incomprehensible. I regretted having left the train so impulsively. An
+adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my nature.
+Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere
+deep within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and a feeling
+of alarm mingled itself with my wonder--alarm for the stability of what
+I had for forty years recognised as my 'personality.'
+
+"I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual
+to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept
+thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome,
+blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my
+dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures,
+and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses."
+
+
+II
+
+Vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had
+intended. He felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. He did
+nothing in particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not
+decide to leave. Decisions were always very difficult for him and he
+sometimes wondered how he had ever brought himself to the point of
+leaving the train. It seemed as though some one else must have arranged
+it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran to the swarthy Frenchman
+who had sat opposite. If only he could have understood that long
+sentence ending so strangely with "_� cause du sommeil et � cause des
+chats_." He wondered what it all meant.
+
+Meanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he
+sought in his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay,
+and what it was all about. But his limited French and his constitutional
+hatred of active investigation made it hard for him to buttonhole
+anybody and ask questions. He was content to observe, and watch, and
+remain negative.
+
+The weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. He wandered
+about the town till he knew every street and alley. The people suffered
+him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to
+him every day that he was never free himself from observation. The town
+watched him as a cat watches a mouse. And he got no nearer to finding
+out what they were all so busy with or where the main stream of their
+activities lay. This remained hidden. The people were as soft and
+mysterious as cats.
+
+But that he was continually under observation became more evident from
+day to day.
+
+For instance, when he strolled to the end of the town and entered a
+little green public garden beneath the ramparts and seated himself upon
+one of the empty benches in the sun, he was quite alone--at first. Not
+another seat was occupied; the little park was empty, the paths
+deserted. Yet, within ten minutes of his coming, there must have been
+fully twenty persons scattered about him, some strolling aimlessly along
+the gravel walks, staring at the flowers, and others seated on the
+wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself. None of them appeared to
+take any notice of him; yet he understood quite well they had all come
+there to watch. They kept him under close observation. In the street
+they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon various errands; yet these
+were suddenly all forgotten and they had nothing to do but loll and laze
+in the sun, their duties unremembered. Five minutes after he left, the
+garden was again deserted, the seats vacant. But in the crowded street
+it was the same thing again; he was never alone. He was ever in their
+thoughts.
+
+By degrees, too, he began to see how it was he was so cleverly watched,
+yet without the appearance of it. The people did nothing _directly_.
+They behaved _obliquely_. He laughed in his mind as the thought thus
+clothed itself in words, but the phrase exactly described it. They
+looked at him from angles which naturally should have led their sight in
+another direction altogether. Their movements were oblique, too, so far
+as these concerned himself. The straight, direct thing was not their way
+evidently. They did nothing obviously. If he entered a shop to buy, the
+woman walked instantly away and busied herself with something at the
+farther end of the counter, though answering at once when he spoke,
+showing that she knew he was there and that this was only her way of
+attending to him. It was the fashion of the cat she followed. Even in
+the dining-room of the inn, the be-whiskered and courteous waiter, lithe
+and silent in all his movements, never seemed able to come straight to
+his table for an order or a dish. He came by zigzags, indirectly,
+vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to another table altogether,
+and only turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him.
+
+Vezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to
+realize these things. Other tourists there were none in the hostel, but
+he recalled the figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took
+their _d�jeuner_ and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they
+entered the room in similar fashion. First, they paused in the doorway,
+peering about the room, and then, after a temporary inspection, they
+came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close to the walls so that he
+wondered which table they were making for, and at the last minute making
+almost a little quick run to their particular seats. And again he
+thought of the ways and methods of cats.
+
+Other small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer,
+soft town with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the
+people appeared and disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled him
+exceedingly. It may have been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet he
+could not make it out how the alleys swallowed them up and shot them
+forth in a second of time when there were no visible doorways or
+openings near enough to explain the phenomenon. Once he followed two
+elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly examining him from
+across the street--quite near the inn this was--and saw them turn the
+corner a few feet only in front of him. Yet when he sharply followed on
+their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted alley stretching in
+front of him with no sign of a living thing. And the only opening
+through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards away,
+which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time.
+
+And in just such sudden fashion people appeared, when he never expected
+them. Once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a low
+wall, and hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see but a
+group of girls and women engaged in vociferous conversation which
+instantly hushed itself to the normal whispering note of the town when
+his head appeared over the wall. And even then none of them turned to
+look at him directly, but slunk off with the most unaccountable
+rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. And their voices, he
+thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling of
+fighting animals, almost of cats.
+
+The whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as
+something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the
+same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of
+its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more--it began
+rather to frighten him.
+
+Out of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface
+thoughts, there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting
+for him to declare himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do
+that; and that when he had done so they in their turn would at length
+make some direct response, accepting or rejecting him. Yet the vital
+matter concerning which his decision was awaited came no nearer to him.
+
+Once or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the
+citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were
+bent; but they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each
+individual going his or her own way. It was always the same: he never
+could learn what their main interest was. The cathedral was ever empty,
+the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted.
+They shopped because they had to, and not because they wished to. The
+booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the little _caf�s_
+desolate. Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk ever on the
+bustle.
+
+"Can it be," he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh that he
+should have dared to think anything so odd, "can it be that these people
+are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their real
+life, and come out honestly only with the dusk? That during the day they
+make a sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down their true
+life begins? Have they the souls of night-things, and is the whole
+blessed town in the hands of the cats?"
+
+The fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and
+dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning
+to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a
+thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. Something
+utterly remote from his ordinary life, something that had not waked for
+years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending feelers abroad into
+his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and penetrating even into
+certain of his minor actions. Something exceedingly vital to himself, to
+his soul, hung in the balance.
+
+And, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he saw
+the figures of the townsfolk stealing through the dusk from their shop
+doors, moving sentry-wise to and fro at the corners of the streets, yet
+always vanishing silently like shadows at his near approach. And as the
+inn invariably closed its doors at ten o'clock he had never yet found
+the opportunity he rather half-heartedly sought to see for himself what
+account the town could give of itself at night.
+
+"--_� cause du sommeil et � cause des chats_"--the words now rang in his
+ears more and more often, though still as yet without any definite
+meaning.
+
+Moreover, something made him sleep like the dead.
+
+
+III
+
+It was, I think, on the fifth day--though in this detail his story
+sometimes varied--that he made a definite discovery which increased his
+alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax. Before that he had
+already noticed that a change was going forward and certain subtle
+transformations being brought about in his character which modified
+several of his minor habits. And he had affected to ignore them. Here,
+however, was something he could no longer ignore; and it startled him.
+
+At the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather,
+compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose he was capable of
+reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision. The
+discovery he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was
+that this power had positively dwindled to nothing. He found it
+impossible to make up his mind. For, on this fifth day, he realised that
+he had stayed long enough in the town and that for reasons he could only
+vaguely define to himself it was wiser _and safer_ that he should leave.
+
+And he found that he could not leave!
+
+This is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture and
+the expression of his face that he conveyed to Dr. Silence the state of
+impotence he had reached. All this spying and watching, he said, had as
+it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless
+to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the intricacies of
+a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not get away. It was a
+distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over his will till it had
+become almost incapable of decision. The mere thought of vigorous
+action--action towards escape--began to terrify him. All the currents of
+his life had turned inwards upon himself, striving to bring to the
+surface something that lay buried almost beyond reach, determined to
+force his recognition of something he had long forgotten--forgotten
+years upon years, centuries almost ago. It seemed as though a window
+deep within his being would presently open and reveal an entirely new
+world, yet somehow a world that was not unfamiliar. Beyond that, again,
+he fancied a great curtain hung; and when that too rolled up he would
+see still farther into this region and at last understand something of
+the secret life of these extraordinary people.
+
+"Is this why they wait and watch?" he asked himself with rather a
+shaking heart, "for the time when I shall join them--or refuse to join
+them? Does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?"
+
+And it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure
+first really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. The
+stability of his rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt,
+and something in his heart turned coward.
+
+Why otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily,
+silently, making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind
+him? Why else should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages
+of the practically deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found
+himself deliberately taking advantage of what cover presented itself?
+And why, if he was not afraid, should the wisdom of staying indoors
+after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as eminently desirable? Why,
+indeed?
+
+And, when John Silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these
+things, he admitted apologetically that he had none to give.
+
+"It was simply that I feared something might happen to me unless I kept
+a sharp look-out. I felt afraid. It was instinctive," was all he could
+say. "I got the impression that the whole town was after me--wanted me
+for something; and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least
+the Self I knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am not
+a psychologist, you know," he added meekly, "and I cannot define it
+better than that."
+
+It was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening
+meal that Vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to his
+quiet room at the end of the winding passage to think it over alone. In
+the yard it was empty enough, true, but there was always the possibility
+that the big woman whom he dreaded would come out of some door, with her
+pretence of knitting, to sit and watch him. This had happened several
+times, and he could not endure the sight of her. He still remembered his
+original fancy, bizarre though it was, that she would spring upon him
+the moment his back was turned and land with one single crushing leap
+upon his neck. Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and
+once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed
+itself in reality.
+
+He went upstairs accordingly. It was dusk, and the oil lamps had not
+yet been lit in the passages. He stumbled over the uneven surface of
+the ancient flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the
+corridor--doors that he had never once seen opened--rooms that seemed
+never occupied. He moved, as his habit now was, stealthily and on
+tiptoe.
+
+Half-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp
+turn, and it was just here, while groping round the walls with
+outstretched hands, that his fingers touched something that was not
+wall--something that moved. It was soft and warm in texture,
+indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his shoulder; and he
+immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The next minute
+he knew it was something quite different.
+
+Instead of investigating, however,--his nerves must have been too
+overwrought for that, he said,--he shrank back as closely as possible
+against the wall on the other side. The thing, whatever it was, slipped
+past him with a sound of rustling and, retreating with light footsteps
+down the passage behind him, was gone. A breath of warm, scented air was
+wafted to his nostrils.
+
+Vezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half
+leaning against the wall--and then almost ran down the remaining
+distance and entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly
+behind him. Yet it was not fear that made him run: it was excitement,
+pleasurable excitement. His nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow
+made itself felt all over his body. In a flash it came to him that this
+was just what he had felt twenty-five years ago as a boy when he was in
+love for the first time. Warm currents of life ran all over him and
+mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. His mood was suddenly
+become tender, melting, loving.
+
+The room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window,
+wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. But the only
+thing he understood clearly in that instant was that something in him
+had swiftly, magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to
+argue with himself about leaving. The encounter in the passage-way had
+changed all that. The strange perfume of it still hung about him,
+bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew that it was a girl who had
+passed him, a girl's face that his fingers had brushed in the darkness,
+and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had been actually
+kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.
+
+Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect
+his thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing
+of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate so
+electric a thrill to his whole being that he still shook with the
+sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he found it as useless to deny
+as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire had entered his veins, and
+now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was forty-five instead
+of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all the inner turmoil
+and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere atmosphere, the
+merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the darkness, had
+been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart, and
+rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of
+tearing and tumultuous excitement.
+
+After a time, however, the number of Vezin's years began to assert their
+cumulative power; he grew calmer, and when a knock came at length upon
+his door and he heard the waiter's voice suggesting that dinner was
+nearly over, he pulled himself together and slowly made his way
+downstairs into the dining-room.
+
+Every one looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took his
+customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. The trepidation was
+still in his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the
+courtyard and hall without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm
+him a little. He ate so fast that he had almost caught up with the
+current stage of the table d'h�te, when a slight commotion in the room
+drew his attention.
+
+His chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the
+long _salle � manger_ were behind him, yet it was not necessary to turn
+round to know that the same person he had passed in the dark passage had
+now come into the room. He felt the presence long before he heard or saw
+any one. Then he became aware that the old men, the only other guests,
+were rising one by one in their places, and exchanging greetings with
+some one who passed among them from table to table. And when at length
+he turned with his heart beating furiously to ascertain for himself, he
+saw the form of a young girl, lithe and slim, moving down the centre of
+the room and making straight for his own table in the corner. She moved
+wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young panther, and her approach
+filled him with such delicious bewilderment that he was utterly unable
+to tell at first what her face was like, or discover what it was about
+the whole presentment of the creature that filled him anew with
+trepidation and delight.
+
+"Ah, Ma'mselle est de retour!" he heard the old waiter murmur at his
+side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the
+proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. She was
+addressing him. Something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth,
+and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest
+was a dream in which his own emotion rose like a thick cloud before his
+eyes and prevented his seeing accurately, or knowing exactly what he
+did. He was aware that she greeted him with a charming little bow; that
+her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly into his own; that the
+perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again assailed his nostrils,
+and that she was bending a little towards him and leaning with one hand
+on the table at this side. She was quite close to him--that was the
+chief thing he knew--explaining that she had been asking after the
+comfort of her mother's guests, and now was introducing herself to the
+latest arrival--himself.
+
+"M'sieur has already been here a few days," he heard the waiter say; and
+then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied--
+
+"Ah, but M'sieur is not going to leave us just yet, I hope. My mother is
+too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now I am
+here I will remedy all that." She laughed deliciously. "M'sieur shall be
+well looked after."
+
+Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to
+acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as
+he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting upon the
+table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of
+electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and
+shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a look
+of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he had sat
+down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already half-way
+across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with a
+dessert-spoon and a knife.
+
+Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the
+remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be
+alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he
+suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding corridor was dim with
+shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards,
+seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the
+pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt
+that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the
+heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange fancies
+filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked,
+he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long,
+long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind.
+
+
+IV
+
+This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special coaxing,
+it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could not in the
+least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him so
+profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. For her mere
+proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on fire. He
+knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a stranger to
+anything approaching tender relations with any member of the opposite
+sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his overwhelming
+defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature came to him
+deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on
+every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet
+frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the first glance of her
+shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in the dark merely by
+the magic of her invisible presence.
+
+"You felt she was altogether wholesome and good!" queried the doctor.
+"You had no reaction of any sort--for instance, of alarm?"
+
+Vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic
+smiles. It was some time before he replied. The mere memory of the
+adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes
+sought the floor again before he answered.
+
+"I don't think I can quite say that," he explained presently. "I
+acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. A
+conviction grew upon me that there was something about her--how shall I
+express it?--well, something unholy. It is not impurity in any sense,
+physical or mental, that I mean, but something quite indefinable that
+gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. She drew me, and at the same
+time repelled me, more than--than--"
+
+He hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.
+
+"Nothing like it has ever come to me before or since," he concluded,
+with lame confusion. "I suppose it was, as you suggested just now,
+something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was strong enough to make
+me feel that I would stay in that awful little haunted town for years if
+only I could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful
+movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand."
+
+"Can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?" John
+Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator.
+
+"I am surprised that you should ask me such a question," answered Vezin,
+with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. "I think no man
+can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman
+who ensnares him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this slip of a girl
+bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in
+the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of delight.
+
+"But there's one thing I can tell you," he went on earnestly, his eyes
+aglow, "namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself all
+the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the town and
+its inhabitants. She had the silken movements of the panther, going
+smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods as
+the townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of her
+own--purposes that I was sure had _me_ for their objective. She kept me,
+to my terror and delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet so
+carelessly, so consummately, that another man less sensitive, if I may
+say so"--he made a deprecating gesture--"or less prepared by what had
+gone before, would never have noticed it at all. She was always still,
+always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I
+never could escape from her. I was continually meeting the stare and
+laughter of her great eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the
+passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest
+parts of the public streets."
+
+Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter
+which had so violently disturbed the little man's equilibrium. He was
+naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that
+anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they
+therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget
+his primness after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and as
+her mother's representative she naturally had to do with the guests in
+the hotel. It was not out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie should
+spring up. Besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty, she was
+French, and--she obviously liked him.
+
+At the same time, there was something indescribable--a certain
+indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times--that made him try
+hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath
+with a sudden start. It was all rather like a delirious dream, half
+delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more
+than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though he
+were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own.
+
+And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to
+his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on
+from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of
+this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his recognisable
+personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll up with an
+awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the secret
+purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by that time,
+he would have become transformed into an entirely different being.
+
+And, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention to
+make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more
+comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special little extra
+dishes on his private table in the dining-room. Conversations, too, with
+"Mademoiselle Ils�" became more and more frequent and pleasant, and
+although they seldom travelled beyond the weather, or the details of the
+town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a hurry to bring them to an
+end, and often contrived to interject little odd sentences that he never
+properly understood, yet felt to be significant.
+
+And it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that
+pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy. They
+all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in the town
+indefinitely.
+
+"And has M'sieur not even yet come to a decision?" she said softly in
+his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before _d�jeuner_, the
+acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. "Because, if
+it's so difficult, we must all try together to help him!"
+
+The question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was
+spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as
+she turned and peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite
+understand the French of it, for her near presence always confused his
+small knowledge of the language distressingly. Yet the words, and her
+manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind,
+frightened him. It gave such point to his feeling that the town was
+waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter.
+
+At the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close
+beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.
+
+"It is true I find it difficult to leave," he stammered, losing his way
+deliciously in the depths of her eyes, "and especially now that
+Mademoiselle Ils� has come."
+
+He was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted
+with the little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have
+bitten his tongue off for having said it.
+
+"Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased to
+stay on," she said, ignoring the compliment.
+
+"I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you," he cried, feeling that
+his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain. And he
+was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the wildest
+description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair beside him,
+and made to go.
+
+"It is _soupe � l'onion_ to-day!" she cried, laughing back at him
+through the sunlight, "and I must go and see about it. Otherwise, you
+know, M'sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will
+leave us!"
+
+He watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and
+lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her, he
+thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. She turned
+once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then
+stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in
+her corner seat just inside the hall-way.
+
+But how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly
+woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were?
+Whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped
+them both as by magic? What was it about that massive woman that made
+her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some dark and
+dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over the red glare of some
+tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender stripling of a girl, graceful
+as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air of
+sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and the
+darkness of night beneath her feet?
+
+Vezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. Then, almost
+simultaneously with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again, and
+the sunlight of day caught them both, and he heard her laughing to her
+mother about the _soupe � l'onion_, and saw her glancing back at him
+over her dear little shoulder with a smile that made him think of a
+dew-kissed rose bending lightly before summer airs.
+
+And, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day, because
+he saw another cover laid at his small table, and, with fluttering
+heart, heard the waiter murmur by way of explanation that "Ma'mselle
+Ils� would honour M'sieur to-day at _d�jeuner_, as her custom sometimes
+is with her mother's guests."
+
+So actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking
+quietly to him in easy French, seeing that he was well looked after,
+mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand. And,
+later in the afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard, longing
+for a sight of her as soon as her duties were done, she came again to
+his side, and when he rose to meet her, she stood facing him a moment,
+full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she spoke--
+
+"My mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little
+town, and _I_ think so too! Would M'sieur like me to be his guide,
+perhaps? I can show him everything, for our family has lived here for
+many generations."
+
+She had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word to
+express his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the street,
+yet in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural she should do so, and
+without the faintest suggestion of boldness or immodesty. Her face
+glowed with the pleasure and interest of it, and with her short dress
+and tumbled hair she looked every bit the charming child of seventeen
+that she was, innocent and playful, proud of her native town, and alive
+beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty.
+
+So they went over the town together, and she showed him what she
+considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her
+forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her
+mother's family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where
+several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score.
+She kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he
+understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing
+his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood
+revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton seemed
+very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world's history. Her
+voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept
+deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep,
+allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its
+elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being
+became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir
+in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it
+might lift altogether....
+
+He began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town was
+reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external self
+became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and
+vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of
+it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with
+new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through
+the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly
+coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful
+and seductive.
+
+And only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in
+itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the child's
+face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed to a
+column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves and made a
+picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the wall and called
+her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and there through the
+heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as though taken by surprise,
+her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned and run like the
+wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran, of which he had not
+understood a single word, except that the fire apparently frightened
+her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it, and to get him away
+too.
+
+Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though
+nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and
+they had both forgotten the incident.
+
+They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the
+weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival.
+It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he
+managed to find his tongue and his best French. The girl leaned across
+the stones close beside him. No one was about. Driven by some
+remorseless engine within he began to stammer something--he hardly knew
+what--of his strange admiration for her. Almost at the first word she
+sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him, just
+touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as usual, and the
+sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.
+
+"Oh, I'm so glad!" she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his
+face, "so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must
+also like what I do, and what I belong to."
+
+Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something
+in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of
+embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.
+
+"You will take part in our real life, I mean," she added softly, with an
+indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking.
+"You will come back to us."
+
+Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power
+coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole
+over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its
+simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. He saw
+her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous
+scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. Dimly this
+shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.
+
+"You will, I know," she repeated, holding him with her eyes.
+
+They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that
+she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The
+mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of
+him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the
+same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth. An
+irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what still
+remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to retain the
+right to his normal self.
+
+The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall
+close beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on
+the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He took his courage
+in both hands.
+
+"Tell me, Ils�," he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring
+softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, "what is
+the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And
+why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what
+it all means? And, tell me," he added more quickly with passion in his
+voice, "what you really are--yourself?"
+
+She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her
+growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran
+like a shadow across her face.
+
+"It seems to me,"--he faltered oddly under her gaze--"that I have some
+right to know--"
+
+Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. "You love me, then?" she asked
+softly.
+
+"I swear," he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide,
+"I never felt before--I have never known any other girl who--"
+
+"Then you _have_ the right to know," she calmly interrupted his confused
+confession, "for love shares all secrets."
+
+She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words
+lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed
+almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He
+became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking
+again.
+
+"The real life I speak of," she whispered, "is the old, old life within,
+the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to
+which you still belong."
+
+A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice
+sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true,
+even though he could not as yet understand its full purport. His present
+life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his personality in
+one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of his present self
+that brought to him the thought of death.
+
+"You came here," she went on, "with the purpose of seeking it, and the
+people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide,
+whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether--"
+
+Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change,
+growing larger and darker with an expression of age.
+
+"It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you
+feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The purposes
+of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. You were
+all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back
+again among them."
+
+Vezin's timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl's eyes
+held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She
+fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.
+
+"Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you," she
+resumed. "The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded through
+all these years. But I"--she paused a moment and looked at him with
+complete confidence in her splendid eyes--"I possess the spell to
+conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back
+again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the
+ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And I do
+choose to use it. I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim
+past"--she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his
+eyes, and her voice positively sang--"I mean to have you, for you love
+me and are utterly at my mercy."
+
+Vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand.
+He had passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his
+feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above
+it through the sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy
+with the wonder of her words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the
+terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind her
+sentences. For flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and
+licked at his soul.
+
+And they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process
+of swift telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he
+said to her. Yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was
+like the recital of verses long since known. And the mingled pain and
+sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul
+could hold.
+
+"Yet I came here wholly by chance--" he heard himself saying.
+
+"No," she cried with passion, "you came here because I called to you. I
+have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the
+past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you."
+
+She rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain insolence
+in the face--the insolence of power.
+
+The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness
+rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had
+ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of
+the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There was no
+sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft rustle of
+the girl's dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He
+scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some terrible magic
+of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs of his own being,
+telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words shadowed forth the
+truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking beside him with so
+strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite another being. As
+he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew and lived,
+dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of reality he
+was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her tall and
+stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and mountain
+caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of shifting
+smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying loosely in
+the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of clothing.
+Others were about her, too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast delirious
+glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only, one whom
+she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some tempestuous
+orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled
+about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the scene
+through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and forms
+crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by the
+hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne he
+knew to be her mother.
+
+The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of buried
+time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory reawakened.... And
+then the scene faded away and he saw the clear circle of the girl's eyes
+gazing steadfastly into his own, and she became once more the pretty
+little daughter of the innkeeper, and he found his voice again.
+
+"And you," he whispered tremblingly--"you child of visions and
+enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even
+before I saw?"
+
+She drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity.
+
+"The call of the Past," she said; "and besides," she added proudly, "in
+the real life I am a princess--"
+
+"A princess!" he cried.
+
+"--and my mother is a queen!"
+
+At this, little Vezin utterly lost his head. Delight tore at his heart
+and swept him into sheer ecstasy. To hear that sweet singing voice, and
+to see those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance
+beyond all hope of control. He took her in his arms and covered her
+unresisting face with kisses.
+
+But even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he felt
+that she was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses stained
+his very soul.... And when, presently, she had freed herself and
+vanished into the darkness, he stood there, leaning against the wall in
+a state of collapse, creeping with horror from the touch of her yielding
+body, and inwardly raging at the weakness that he already dimly
+realised must prove his undoing.
+
+And from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared
+there rose in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry,
+which at first he took for laughter, but which later he was sure he
+recognised as the almost human wailing of a cat.
+
+
+V
+
+For a long time Vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his
+surging thoughts and emotions. He understood at length that he had done
+the one thing necessary to call down upon him the whole force of this
+ancient Past. For in those passionate kisses he had acknowledged the tie
+of olden days, and had revived it. And the memory of that soft
+impalpable caress in the darkness of the inn corridor came back to him
+with a shudder. The girl had first mastered him, and then led him to the
+one act that was necessary for her purpose. He had been waylaid, after
+the lapse of centuries--caught, and conquered.
+
+Dimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. But,
+for the moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or
+will, for the sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted to
+his brain like a spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was
+utterly enchanted and moving in a world so much larger and wilder than
+the one he had ever been accustomed to.
+
+The moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain,
+when at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into
+new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew,
+seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables
+and quaint old towers lay far away in its purple reaches.
+
+The cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. He moved softly, keeping
+to the shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very silent; the
+doors were closed, the shutters fastened. Not a soul was astir. The hush
+of night lay over everything; it was like a town of the dead, a
+churchyard with gigantic and grotesque tombstones.
+
+Wondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared
+to, he made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of the
+stables, thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. He reached the
+courtyard safely and crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of the
+wall. He sidled down it, mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old men
+did when they entered the _salle � manger_. He was horrified to find
+himself doing this instinctively. A strange impulse came to him,
+catching him somehow in the centre of his body--an impulse to drop upon
+all fours and run swiftly and silently. He glanced upwards and the idea
+came to him to leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going
+round by the stairs. This occurred to him as the easiest, and most
+natural way. It was like the beginning of some horrible transformation
+of himself into something else. He was fearfully strung up.
+
+The moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of the
+street where he moved. He kept among the deepest of them, and reached
+the porch with the glass doors.
+
+But here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about.
+Hoping to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he
+opened the door carefully and stole in. Then he saw that the hall was
+not empty. A large dark thing lay against the wall on his left. At first
+he thought it must be household articles. Then it moved, and he thought
+it was an immense cat, distorted in some way by the play of light and
+shadow. Then it rose straight up before him and he saw that it was the
+proprietress.
+
+What she had been doing in this position he could only venture a
+dreadful guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware
+of some terrible dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the
+girl's strange saying that she was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood
+there under the little oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe
+stirred in his heart, and the roots of some ancient fear. He felt that
+he must bow to her and make some kind of obeisance. The impulse was
+fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. He glanced quickly about him.
+There was no one there. Then he deliberately inclined his head toward
+her. He bowed.
+
+"Enfin! M'sieur s'est donc d�cid�. C'est bien alors. J'en suis
+contente."
+
+Her words came to him sonorously as through a great open space.
+
+Then the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and
+seized his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and
+caught him.
+
+"On pourrait faire un p'tit tour ensemble, n'est-ce pas? Nous y allons
+cette nuit et il faut s'exercer un peu d'avance pour cela. Ils�, Ils�,
+viens donc ici. Viens vite!"
+
+And she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that seemed
+oddly and horribly familiar. They made no sound on the stones, this
+strangely assorted couple. It was all soft and stealthy. And presently,
+when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare as of flame
+shot through it, he was aware that some one else had joined them and
+that his hand the mother had released was now tightly held by the
+daughter. Ils� had come in answer to the call, and he saw her with
+leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered vestiges
+of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly, odiously,
+loathsomely seductive.
+
+"To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!" they cried. "On to the Witches'
+Sabbath!"
+
+Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him,
+to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly,
+dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out,
+and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart
+with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid.
+
+Suddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother
+cry that it was time, and they must go. Which way they went he did not
+pause to see. He only realised that he was free, and he blundered
+through the darkness till he found the stairs and then tore up them to
+his room as though all hell was at his heels.
+
+He flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned.
+Swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally
+impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do for the moment
+was to sit quiet and wait. He must see what was going to happen. At
+least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly safe. The
+door was locked. He crossed over and softly opened the window which gave
+upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the hall through
+the glass doors.
+
+As he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears
+from the streets beyond--the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by
+distance. He leaned out cautiously and listened. The moonlight was clear
+and strong now, but his own window was in shadow, the silver disc being
+still behind the house. It came to him irresistibly that the inhabitants
+of the town, who a little while before had all been invisible behind
+closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy upon some secret and unholy
+errand. He listened intently.
+
+At first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of
+movements going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came to
+him across that still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings sent
+the hum of their activity into the night. Things were on the move
+everywhere. A biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he knew
+not whence. Presently his eyes became glued to the windows of the
+opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. The roof
+overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass,
+and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over
+the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and silently, shaped
+like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured glass,
+and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost sight of
+them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps. Sometimes their
+shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he could not make
+out whether they were the shadows of human beings or of cats. They
+seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. The transformation
+looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings, yet changed
+swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like animals.
+
+The yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements of
+dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass
+doors. They kept so closely to the wall that he could not determine
+their actual shape, but when he saw that they passed on to the great
+congregation that was gathering in the hall, he understood that these
+were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had first seen reflected in
+the windowpanes opposite. They were coming from all parts of the town,
+reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and tiles, and
+springing from level to level till they came to the yard.
+
+Then a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about
+him were being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. A
+moment later figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. And
+these figures, as they lowered themselves down from the windows, were
+human, he saw; but once safely in the yard they fell upon all fours and
+changed in the swiftest possible second into--cats--huge, silent cats.
+They ran in streams to join the main body in the hall beyond.
+
+So, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and unoccupied.
+
+Moreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. For he
+remembered it all. It was familiar. It had all happened before just so,
+hundreds of times, and he himself had taken part in it and known the
+wild madness of it all. The outline of the old building changed, the
+yard grew larger, and he seemed to be staring down upon it from a much
+greater height through smoky vapours. And, as he looked, half
+remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet, furiously
+assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the Call of the
+Dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of Ils� whirling
+by his side.
+
+Suddenly he started back. A great lithe cat had leaped softly up from
+the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring
+fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. "Come," it seemed to say, "come
+with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself swiftly and
+come!" Only too well he understood the creature's soundless call.
+
+It was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet
+on the stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of
+the house, past his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting
+away rapidly, softly, towards the gathering point. And again he felt the
+dreadful desire to do likewise; to murmur the old incantation, and then
+drop upon hands and knees and run swiftly for the great flying leap into
+the air. Oh, how the passion of it rose within him like a flood,
+twisting his very entrails, sending his heart's desire flaming forth
+into the night for the old, old Dance of the Sorcerers at the Witches'
+Sabbath! The whirl of the stars was about him; once more he met the
+magic of the moon. The power of the wind, rushing from precipice and
+forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the valleys, tore him
+away.... He heard the cries of the dancers and their wild laughter, and
+with this savage girl in his embrace he danced furiously about the dim
+Throne where sat the Figure with the sceptre of majesty....
+
+Then, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a
+little in his heart. The calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and
+deserted. They had started. The procession was off into the sky. And he
+was left behind--alone.
+
+Vezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. The murmur
+from the streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. He
+made his way with the utmost caution down the corridor. At the head of
+the stairs he paused and listened. Below him, the hall where they had
+gathered was dark and still, but through opened doors and windows on the
+far side of the building came the sound of a great throng moving farther
+and farther into the distance.
+
+He made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing to
+meet some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one; across
+the dark hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things, and out
+through the opened front doors into the street. He could not believe
+that he was really left behind, really forgotten, that he had been
+purposely permitted to escape. It perplexed him.
+
+Nervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing
+nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement.
+
+The whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as though
+a great wind had blown everything alive out of it. The doors and windows
+of the houses stood open to the night; nothing stirred; moonlight and
+silence lay over all. The night lay about him like a cloak. The air,
+soft and cool, caressed his cheek like the touch of a great furry paw.
+He gained confidence and began to walk quickly, though still keeping to
+the shadowed side. Nowhere could he discover the faintest sign of the
+great unholy exodus he knew had just taken place. The moon sailed high
+over all in a sky cloudless and serene.
+
+Hardly realising where he was going, he crossed the open market-place
+and so came to the ramparts, whence he knew a pathway descended to the
+high road and along which he could make good his escape to one of the
+other little towns that lay to the northward, and so to the railway.
+
+But first he paused and gazed out over the scene at his feet where the
+great plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. The still
+beauty of it entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment and
+unreality. No air stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood
+motionless, the near details were defined with the sharpness of day
+against dark shadows, and in the distance the fields and woods melted
+away into haze and shimmering mistiness.
+
+But the breath caught in his throat and he stood stockstill as though
+transfixed when his gaze passed from the horizon and fell upon the near
+prospect in the depth of the valley at his feet. The whole lower slopes
+of the hill, that lay hid from the brightness of the moon, were aglow,
+and through the glare he saw countless moving forms, shifting thick and
+fast between the openings of the trees; while overhead, like leaves
+driven by the wind, he discerned flying shapes that hovered darkly one
+moment against the sky and then settled down with cries and weird
+singing through the branches into the region that was aflame.
+
+Spellbound, he stood and stared for a time that he could not measure.
+And then, moved by one of the terrible impulses that seemed to control
+the whole adventure, he climbed swiftly upon the top of the broad
+coping, and balanced a moment where the valley gaped at his feet. But in
+that very instant, as he stood hovering, a sudden movement among the
+shadows of the houses caught his eye, and he turned to see the outline
+of a large animal dart swiftly across the open space behind him, and
+land with a flying leap upon the top of the wall a little lower down. It
+ran like the wind to his feet and then rose up beside him upon the
+ramparts. A shiver seemed to run through the moonlight, and his sight
+trembled for a second. His heart pulsed fearfully. Ils� stood beside
+him, peering into his face.
+
+Some dark substance, he saw, stained the girl's face and skin, shining
+in the moonlight as she stretched her hands towards him; she was dressed
+in wretched tattered garments that yet became her mightily; rue and
+vervain twined about her temples; her eyes glittered with unholy light.
+He only just controlled the wild impulse to take her in his arms and
+leap with her from their giddy perch into the valley below.
+
+"See!" she cried, pointing with an arm on which the rags fluttered in
+the rising wind towards the forest aglow in the distance. "See where
+they await us! The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there,
+and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and
+come!"
+
+Though a moment before the sky was clear and cloudless, yet even while
+she spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in
+the crests of the plane trees at his feet. Stray gusts brought the
+sounds of hoarse singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill,
+and the pungent odour he had already noticed about the courtyard of the
+inn rose about him in the air.
+
+"Transform, transform!" she cried again, her voice rising like a song.
+"Rub well your skin before you fly. Come! Come with me to the Sabbath,
+to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its
+evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments
+prepared. The Throne is occupied. Anoint and come! Anoint and come!"
+
+She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with
+flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change
+swiftly. Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him
+with the burning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the
+power before which fades all that is good.
+
+A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the
+girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her
+wicked joy.
+
+"Satan is there!" she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw
+him with her to the edge of the wall. "Satan has come. The Sacraments
+call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and
+dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!"
+
+Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to release
+himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but
+mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he
+shrieked again. It was the old impulses, the old awful habits
+instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely
+shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and
+were intelligible. It was the ancient call. And it was heard below. It
+was answered.
+
+The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him
+darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The
+crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of
+wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top
+of the stone wall; and Ils� clung to him with her long shining arms,
+smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. But not Ils� alone,
+for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The
+pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the
+old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers doing
+honour to the personified Evil of the world.
+
+"Anoint and away! Anoint and away!" they cried in wild chorus about him.
+"To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and fearful fantasy of
+evil!"
+
+Another moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned
+soft and the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him,
+when--so can a small thing after the whole course of an adventure--he
+caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then
+fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. But he fell towards the
+houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones, and fortunately not
+into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther side.
+
+And they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him, like flies upon a
+piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a moment from the
+power of their touch, and in that brief instant of freedom there flashed
+into his mind the sudden intuition that saved him. Before he could
+regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly back upon the wall, as
+though bat-like they could only fly by dropping from a height, and had
+no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them perched there in a row
+like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly shapeless, their eyes
+like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of Ils�'s terror at the
+sight of fire.
+
+Quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the dead leaves that lay
+under the wall.
+
+Dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the wind carried the
+flame in a long line down the length of the wall, licking upwards as it
+ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded row of forms upon the
+top melted away into the air on the other side, and were gone with a
+great rush and whirring of their bodies down into the heart of the
+haunted valley, leaving Vezin breathless and shaken in the middle of the
+deserted ground.
+
+"Ils�!" he called feebly; "Ils�!" for his heart ached to think that she
+was really gone to the great Dance without him, and that he had lost the
+opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same time his relief was so
+great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind with the whole thing,
+that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only cried aloud in the
+fierce storm of his emotion....
+
+The fire under the wall ran its course, and the moonlight came out
+again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse. With one last
+shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder
+for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still crowded and flew,
+he turned his face towards the town and slowly made his way in the
+direction of the hotel.
+
+And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling,
+followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and fainter
+with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between the houses.
+
+VI
+
+"It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending," said Arthur
+Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence sitting
+there with his notebook, "but the fact is--er--from that moment my
+memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection of
+how I got home or what precisely I did.
+
+"It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect
+racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and villages,
+still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the towers of a
+biggish town and so came to a station.
+
+"But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and
+looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the
+moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay
+there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main
+streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its
+torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in my mind with the utmost
+vividness to this day.
+
+"Another thing remains in my mind from that escape--namely, the sudden
+sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made,
+standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left
+behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.
+
+"For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a caf�
+on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found my way
+to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same evening I
+reached London."
+
+"And how long altogether," asked John Silence quietly, "do you think you
+stayed in the town of the adventure?"
+
+Vezin looked up sheepishly.
+
+"I was coming to that," he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his
+body. "In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of
+time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been
+September 15th,--instead of which it was only September 10th!"
+
+"So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?"
+queried the doctor.
+
+Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.
+
+"I must have gained time somewhere," he said at length--"somewhere or
+somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can't explain it. I can
+only give you the fact."
+
+"And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been back
+to the place?"
+
+"Last autumn, yes," murmured Vezin; "and I have never dared to go back.
+I think I never want to."
+
+"And, tell me," asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the little
+man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing more to
+say, "had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft practices
+during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the subject?"
+
+"Never!" declared Vezin emphatically. "I had never given a thought to
+such matters so far as I know--"
+
+"Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?"
+
+"Never--before my adventure; but I have since," he replied
+significantly.
+
+There was, however, something still on the man's mind that he wished to
+relieve himself of by confession, yet could only with difficulty bring
+himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness of
+the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed
+himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him the
+marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched him
+with her anointed hands.
+
+He took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered
+his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of
+the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a
+little way down the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated
+exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing.
+And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar
+mark, though not quite so clearly defined.
+
+"That was where she held me that night on the ramparts," he whispered, a
+strange light coming and going in his eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John
+Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my
+notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin's story. Since hearing it, the
+doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his
+secretaries had discovered that Vezin's ancestors had actually lived for
+generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two of
+them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had been
+burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to prove
+that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon the spot
+where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place. The town
+was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of the
+entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by
+scores.
+
+"It seems strange," continued the doctor, "that Vezin should have
+remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the
+kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to
+keep alive, or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to
+think he still knows nothing about it.
+
+"The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the
+memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with
+the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by
+a most singular chance, too, with the very souls who had taken part with
+him in the events of that particular life. For the mother and daughter
+who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors, with
+himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that period
+dominated the imaginations of the whole country.
+
+"One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these
+witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various
+animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves
+swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies. Lycanthropy, or the
+power to change themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and
+the ability to transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies
+with a special salve or ointment provided by Satan himself, found equal
+credence. The witchcraft trials abound in evidences of such universal
+beliefs."
+
+Dr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject,
+and showed how every detail of Vezin's adventure had a basis in the
+practices of those dark days.
+
+"But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man's own
+consciousness, I have no doubt," he went on, in reply to my questions;
+"for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered
+his signature in the visitors' book, and proved by it that he had
+arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. He
+left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty
+brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement of
+his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was absent
+from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he described
+her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded
+kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had feared for a long
+time that he had met with a violent end in the neighbouring forest where
+he used to roam about alone.
+
+"I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter
+so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took
+place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of
+burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former
+painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more
+than once that he saw her through smoke and flame."
+
+"And that mark on his skin, for instance?" I inquired.
+
+"Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding," he replied, "like
+the stigmata of the _religieuses_, and the bruises which appear on the
+bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them. This is
+very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these marks
+should have remained so long in Vezin's case. Usually they disappear
+quickly."
+
+"Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it
+all over again," I ventured.
+
+"Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not
+yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to
+alleviate."
+
+Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.
+
+"And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?" I asked
+further--"the man who warned him against the place, _� cause du sommeil
+et � cause des chats?_ Surely a very singular incident?"
+
+"A very singular incident indeed," he made answer slowly, "and one I can
+only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence--"
+
+"Namely?"
+
+"That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone
+there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him.
+But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go
+upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some
+force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him thus
+to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might happen
+to him, and thus to warn him as he did.
+
+"Yes," he presently continued, half talking to himself, "I suspect in
+this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of
+the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a
+scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For
+strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves,
+they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not
+vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man
+found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and
+the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it was
+true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in
+memory, to a former and lower state of development.
+
+"Ah yes!" he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening sky,
+and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, "subliminal up-rushes of
+memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly
+dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this
+obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I doubt it, I doubt
+it."
+
+His voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back
+into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon
+his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes
+greater than his power.
+
+
+
+
+CASE III: THE NEMESIS OF FIRE
+
+
+I
+
+By some means which I never could fathom, John Silence always contrived
+to keep the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of
+two hours before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the
+preliminary facts of the case. He had telephoned to me that very
+morning, and even through the disguise of the miles of wire the thrill
+of incalculable adventure had sounded in his voice.
+
+"As if it were an ordinary country visit," he called, in reply to my
+question; "and don't forgot to bring your gun."
+
+"With blank cartridges, I suppose?" for I knew his rigid principles with
+regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were merely for
+some obvious purpose of disguise.
+
+Then he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the
+receiver, and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation, to
+do my packing. For the honour of accompanying Dr. John Silence on one of
+his big cases was what many would have considered an empty honour--and
+risky. Certainly the adventure held all manner of possibilities, and I
+arrived at Waterloo with the feelings of a man who is about to embark on
+some dangerous and peculiar mission in which the dangers he expects to
+run will not be the ordinary dangers to life and limb, but of some
+secret character difficult to name and still more difficult to cope
+with.
+
+"The Manor House has a high sound," he told me, as we sat with our feet
+up and talked, "but I believe it is little more than an overgrown
+farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond D----, and its owner,
+Colonel Wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there
+practically alone, I understand, with an elderly invalid sister. So you
+need not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some
+excitement of its own."
+
+"Which is likely?"
+
+By way of reply he handed me a letter marked "Private." It was dated a
+week ago, and signed "Yours faithfully, Horace Wragge."
+
+"He heard of me, you see, through Captain Anderson," the doctor
+explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost world-wide; "you
+remember that Indian obsession case--"
+
+I read the letter. Why it should have been marked private was difficult
+to understand. It was very brief, direct, and to the point. It referred
+by way of introduction to Captain Anderson, and then stated quite simply
+that the writer needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a personal
+interview--a morning interview, since it was impossible for him to be
+absent from the house at night. The letter was dignified even to the
+point of abruptness, and it is difficult to explain how it managed to
+convey to me the impression of a strong man, shaken and perplexed.
+Perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the mystery of the affair had
+something to do with it; and the reference to the Anderson case, the
+horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have touched the sense
+of something rather ominous and alarming. But, whatever the cause, there
+was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose somehow out of
+that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and the spirit of a
+deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the mind without any
+visible form of expression.
+
+"And when you saw him--?" I asked, returning the letter as the train
+rushed clattering noisily through Clapham Junction.
+
+"I have not seen him," was the reply. "The man's mind was charged to the
+brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures. Notice the
+restraint of it. For the main character of his case psychometry could be
+depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is sufficient
+to give to another mind--a sensitive and sympathetic mind--clear mental
+pictures of what is going on. I think I have a very sound general idea
+of his problem."
+
+"So there may be excitement, after all?"
+
+John Silence waited a moment before he replied.
+
+"Something very serious is amiss there," he said gravely, at length.
+"Some one--not himself, I gather,--has been meddling with a rather
+dangerous kind of gunpowder. So--yes, there may be excitement, as you
+put it."
+
+"And my duties?" I asked, with a decidedly growing interest. "Remember,
+I am your 'assistant.'"
+
+"Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything,
+without seeming to. Say nothing--nothing that means anything. Be present
+at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions
+are correct this is--"
+
+He broke off suddenly.
+
+"But I won't tell you my impressions yet," he resumed after a moment's
+thought. "Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form your own
+impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary visitors,
+of course," he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his eye;
+"hence, the guns."
+
+Though disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his
+words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful
+suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise reflected
+that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than
+double the quantity of mere "brains," as such.
+
+Before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me
+to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any
+pictures that came spontaneously into my mind.
+
+"Don't deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the inside
+of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen."
+
+I followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible.
+But no visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to
+and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. A
+momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously.
+
+"You see--what?" he asked presently.
+
+"Nothing," I was obliged to admit disappointedly; "nothing but the usual
+flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more vivid
+than usual."
+
+He said nothing by way of comment or reply.
+
+"And they group themselves now and then," I continued, with painful
+candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, "group
+themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash
+about sometimes look like triangles and crosses--almost like geometrical
+figures. Nothing more."
+
+I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.
+
+"It makes my head hot," I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing
+anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at
+once.
+
+"That sensation of heat is important," he said significantly.
+
+"It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable," I replied, hoping he
+would expand and explain. "There was a distinct feeling of
+warmth--internal warmth somewhere--oppressive in a sense."
+
+"That is interesting," he remarked, putting the letter back in his
+pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He
+vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make
+him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into
+my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing
+lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual
+phantasmagoria of the day's events--faces, scenes, memories,--and in due
+course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.
+
+When we left the train, after six hours' travelling, at a little
+wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather,
+the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the
+landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland
+hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling
+across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen
+air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about
+us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the
+coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told
+us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road
+among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift
+past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs
+of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing
+five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged
+into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to
+the moment of actual arrival.
+
+Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army
+officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the
+process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as
+a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning
+grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements
+showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years.
+The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be
+depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil
+of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The whole
+appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity and
+importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm, I
+felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.
+
+His speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple
+and sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet.
+Thus, he showed plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come
+alone.
+
+"My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard," the doctor said, introducing
+me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then received
+were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the impression
+that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose perplexity
+must spring from some very real and tangible cause. And, quite
+obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was
+unmistakably genuine.
+
+He led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room, that
+opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the
+impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient,
+comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. And so it was. Only the heat of
+the place struck me as unnatural. This room with the blazing fire may
+have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night
+air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere
+of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled
+grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the
+greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head and
+mind. It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught
+myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the
+letter in the train.
+
+I heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no preamble,
+and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest description.
+Evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved action rather
+than talk. His manner was straightforward and direct. I saw him in a
+flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by something he
+could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would have preferred
+to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness and making no
+attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his incompetence.
+
+"So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own company,
+and the queer business that has been going on here, and is still going
+on," he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards me by way of
+including me in his confidence.
+
+"I think, Colonel Wragge," replied John Silence impressively, "that we
+shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. I gather we shall have our
+hands full."
+
+The two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and
+there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first
+time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a
+little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big
+case of this incalculable doctor. But no answer suggested itself, and to
+withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The gates had closed behind me
+now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind with
+its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.
+
+Explaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything
+serious, as no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the way
+upstairs and showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as I was
+finishing dressing that a knock came at my door and Dr. Silence entered.
+
+He was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of
+comedy you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life, but
+as he came across the room to me I caught the expression of his face
+and understood in a flash that he was now in his most grave and earnest
+mood. He looked almost troubled. I stopped fumbling with my black tie
+and stared.
+
+"It is serious," he said, speaking in a low voice, "more so even than I
+imagined. Colonel Wragge's control over his thoughts concealed a great
+deal in my psychometrising of the letter. I looked in to warn you to
+keep yourself well in hand--generally speaking."
+
+"Haunted house?" I asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my back.
+
+But he smiled gravely at the question.
+
+"Haunted House of Life more likely," he replied, and a look came into
+his eyes which I had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils
+and he was thick in the fight of rescue. He was stirred in the deeps.
+
+"Colonel Wragge--or the sister?" I asked hurriedly, for the gong was
+sounding.
+
+"Neither directly," he said from the door. "Something far older,
+something very, very remote indeed. This thing has to do with the ages,
+unless I am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory have
+long lain undisturbed."
+
+He came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips, looking
+at me with a peculiar searchingness of gaze.
+
+"Are you aware yet of anything--odd here?" he asked in a whisper.
+"Anything you cannot quite define, for instance. Tell me, Hubbard, for I
+want to know all your impressions. They may help me."
+
+I shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes
+that scared me a little. But he was so in earnest that I set my mind
+keenly searching.
+
+"Nothing yet," I replied truthfully, wishing I could confess to a real
+emotion; "nothing but the strange heat of the place."
+
+He gave a little jump forward in my direction.
+
+"The heat again, that's it!" he exclaimed, as though glad of my
+corroboration. "And how would you describe it, perhaps?" he asked
+quickly, with a hand on the door knob.
+
+"It doesn't seem like ordinary physical heat," I said, casting about in
+my thoughts for a definition.
+
+"More a mental heat," he interrupted, "a glowing of thought and desire,
+a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. Isn't that it?"
+
+I admitted that he had exactly described my sensations.
+
+"Good!" he said, as he opened the door, and with an indescribable
+gesture that combined a warning to be ready with a sign of praise for my
+correct intuition, he was gone.
+
+I hurried after him, and found the two men waiting for me in front of
+the fire.
+
+"I ought to warn you," our host was saying as I came in, "that my
+sister, whom you will meet at dinner, is not aware of the real object of
+your visit. She is under the impression that we are interested in the
+same line of study--folklore--and that your researches have led to my
+seeking acquaintance. She comes to dinner in her chair, you know. It
+will be a great pleasure to her to meet you both. We have few visitors."
+
+So that on entering the dining-room we were prepared to find Miss Wragge
+already at her place, seated in a sort of bath-chair. She was a
+vivacious and charming old lady, with smiling expression and bright
+eyes, and she chatted all through dinner with unfailing spontaneity. She
+had that face, unlined and fresh, that some people carry through life
+from the cradle to the grave; her smooth plump cheeks were all pink and
+white, and her hair, still dark, was divided into two glossy and sleek
+halves on either side of a careful parting. She wore gold-rimmed
+glasses, and at her throat was a large scarab of green jasper that made
+a very handsome brooch.
+
+Her brother and Dr. Silence talked little, so that most of the
+conversation was carried on between herself and me, and she told me a
+great deal about the history of the old house, most of which I fear I
+listened to with but half an ear.
+
+"And when Cromwell stayed here," she babbled on, "he occupied the very
+rooms upstairs that used to be mine. But my brother thinks it safer for
+me to sleep on the ground floor now in case of fire."
+
+And this sentence has stayed in my memory only because of the sudden way
+her brother interrupted her and instantly led the conversation on to
+another topic. The passing reference to fire seemed to have disturbed
+him, and thenceforward he directed the talk himself.
+
+It was difficult to believe that this lively and animated old lady,
+sitting beside me and taking so eager an interest in the affairs of
+life, was practically, we understood, without the use of her lower
+limbs, and that her whole existence for years had been passed between
+the sofa, the bed, and the bath-chair in which she chatted so naturally
+at the dinner table. She made no allusion to her affliction until the
+dessert was reached, and then, touching a bell, she made us a witty
+little speech about leaving us "like time, on noiseless feet," and was
+wheeled out of the room by the butler and carried off to her apartments
+at the other end of the house.
+
+And the rest of us were not long in following suit, for Dr. Silence and
+myself were quite as eager to learn the nature of our errand as our host
+was to impart it to us. He led us down a long flagged passage to a room
+at the very end of the house, a room provided with double doors, and
+windows, I saw, heavily shuttered. Books lined the walls on every side,
+and a large desk in the bow window was piled up with volumes, some open,
+some shut, some showing scraps of paper stuck between the leaves, and
+all smothered in a general cataract of untidy foolscap and loose-half
+sheets.
+
+"My study and workroom," explained Colonel Wragge, with a delightful
+touch of innocent pride, as though he were a very serious scholar. He
+placed arm-chairs for us round the fire. "Here," he added significantly,
+"we shall be safe from interruption and can talk securely."
+
+During dinner the manner of the doctor had been all that was natural and
+spontaneous, though it was impossible for me, knowing him as I did, not
+to be aware that he was subconsciously very keenly alert and already
+receiving upon the ultra-sensitive surface of his mind various and vivid
+impressions; and there was now something in the gravity of his face, as
+well as in the significant tone of Colonel Wragge's speech, and
+something, too, in the fact that we three were shut away in this private
+chamber about to listen to things probably strange, and certainly
+mysterious--something in all this that touched my imagination sharply
+and sent an undeniable thrill along my nerves. Taking the chair
+indicated by my host, I lit my cigar and waited for the opening of the
+attack, fully conscious that we were now too far gone in the adventure
+to admit of withdrawal, and wondering a little anxiously where it was
+going to lead.
+
+What I expected precisely, it is hard to say. Nothing definite, perhaps.
+Only the sudden change was dramatic. A few hours before the prosaic
+atmosphere of Piccadilly was about me, and now I was sitting in a secret
+chamber of this remote old building waiting to hear an account of things
+that held possibly the genuine heart of terror. I thought of the dreary
+moors and hills outside, and the dark pine copses soughing in the wind
+of night; I remembered my companion's singular words up in my bedroom
+before dinner; and then I turned and noted carefully the stern
+countenance of the Colonel as he faced us and lit his big black cigar
+before speaking.
+
+The threshold of an adventure, I reflected as I waited for the first
+words, is always the most thrilling moment--until the climax comes.
+
+But Colonel Wragge hesitated--mentally--a long time before he began. He
+talked briefly of our journey, the weather, the country, and other
+comparatively trivial topics, while he sought about in his mind for an
+appropriate entry into the subject that was uppermost in the thoughts of
+all of us. The fact was he found it a difficult matter to speak of at
+all, and it was Dr. Silence who finally showed him the way over the
+hedge.
+
+"Mr. Hubbard will take a few notes when you are ready--you won't
+object," he suggested; "I can give my undivided attention in this way."
+
+"By all means," turning to reach some of the loose sheets on the writing
+table, and glancing at me. He still hesitated a little, I thought. "The
+fact is," he said apologetically, "I wondered if it was quite fair to
+trouble you so soon. The daylight might suit you better to hear what I
+have to tell. Your sleep, I mean, might be less disturbed, perhaps."
+
+"I appreciate your thoughtfulness," John Silence replied with his gentle
+smile, taking command as it were from that moment, "but really we are
+both quite immune. There is nothing, I think, that could prevent either
+of us sleeping, except--an outbreak of fire, or some such very physical
+disturbance."
+
+Colonel Wragge raised his eyes and looked fixedly at him. This reference
+to an outbreak of fire I felt sure was made with a purpose. It certainly
+had the desired effect of removing from our host's manner the last signs
+of hesitancy.
+
+"Forgive me," he said. "Of course, I know nothing of your methods in
+matters of this kind--so, perhaps, you would like me to begin at once
+and give you an outline of the situation?"
+
+Dr. Silence bowed his agreement. "I can then take my precautions
+accordingly," he added calmly.
+
+The soldier looked up for a moment as though he did not quite gather the
+meaning of these words; but he made no further comment and turned at
+once to tackle a subject on which he evidently talked with diffidence
+and unwillingness.
+
+"It's all so utterly out of my line of things," he began, puffing out
+clouds of cigar smoke between his words, "and there's so little to tell
+with any real evidence behind it, that it's almost impossible to make a
+consecutive story for you. It's the total cumulative effect that is
+so--so disquieting." He chose his words with care, as though determined
+not to travel one hair's breadth beyond the truth.
+
+"I came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother died," he
+continued, "but could not afford to live here then. My sister, whom you
+met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all these
+years, while I was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the
+place--for we never got a satisfactory tenant--and saw that it was not
+allowed to go to ruin. I myself took possession, however, only a year
+ago.
+
+"My brother," he went on, after a perceptible pause, "spent much of his
+time away, too. He was a great traveller, and filled the house with
+stuff he brought home from all over the world. The laundry--a small
+detached building beyond the servants' quarters--he turned into a
+regular little museum. The curios and things I have cleared away--they
+collected dust and were always getting broken--but the laundry-house you
+shall see tomorrow."
+
+Colonel Wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses that
+this beginning took him a long time. But at this point he came to a full
+stop altogether. Evidently there was something he wished to say that
+cost him considerable effort. At length he looked up steadily into my
+companion's face.
+
+"May I ask you--that is, if you won't think it strange," he said, and a
+sort of hush came over his voice and manner, "whether you have noticed
+anything at all unusual--anything queer, since you came into the house?"
+
+Dr. Silence answered without a moment's hesitation.
+
+"I have," he said. "There is a curious sensation of heat in the place."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the other, with a slight start. "You _have_ noticed it.
+This unaccountable heat--"
+
+"But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself--but outside," I
+was astonished to hear the doctor add.
+
+Colonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map
+that hung upon the wall. I got the impression that the movement was made
+with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face.
+
+"Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate," he said after a
+moment, turning round with the map in his hands. "Though, of course, I
+can have no idea how you should guess--"
+
+John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. "Merely my
+impression," he said. "If you pay attention to impressions, and do not
+allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often
+find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate."
+
+Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His
+face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.
+
+"On coming into possession," he said, looking us alternately in the
+face, "I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and
+impossible kind I had ever heard--stories which at first I treated with
+amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only
+to keep my servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my
+brother's death--and, in a way, I think so still."
+
+He leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence.
+
+"It's an old plan of the estate," he explained, "but accurate enough for
+our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the plantations
+marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one," indicating
+the spot with his finger, "is called the Twelve Acre Plantation. It was
+just there, on the side nearest the house, that my brother and the head
+keeper met their deaths."
+
+He spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would
+have preferred to leave untouched--things he personally would rather
+have treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly
+dignified and impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness
+as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed
+as though I were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any
+moment I might be summoned to play a part.
+
+"It was twenty years ago," continued the Colonel, "but there was much
+talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have
+heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered
+man but I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them
+seem to have been frequent."
+
+"I do not recall the affair," said the doctor. "May I ask what was the
+cause of death?" Something in his voice made me prick up my ears for the
+reply.
+
+"The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the
+doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time when
+found."
+
+"And your brother?" asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and
+listening intently.
+
+"Equally mysterious," said our host, speaking in a low voice with
+effort. "But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to
+mention. For those who saw the face--I did not see it myself--and though
+Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged--" He stammered
+and hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved between
+his words. He stuck.
+
+"Yes," said the chief listener sympathetically.
+
+"My brother's face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched. It
+had been swept, as it were, by something that burned--blasted. It was, I
+am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found lying side by side, faces
+downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they had been in
+the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from its edge."
+
+Dr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map
+attentively.
+
+"I did not see the face myself," repeated the other, his manner somehow
+expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, "but
+my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be
+entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be
+brought to refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that
+the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But
+she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame--blasted."
+
+John Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the
+air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel
+Wragge went on with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad
+shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece.
+
+"They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That
+was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as Irish
+peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the
+foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every
+week. You may imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you
+that the servants dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants,
+but the men who worked on the estate outside. The keepers gave notice
+one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the
+foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. Word
+flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a place to
+be avoided, day or night.
+
+"There came a point," the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, "when
+I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could not
+kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the stories
+at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map, comes
+rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches the
+end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense growth
+of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the east winds
+that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my brother
+interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one of the
+best pheasant coverts on the whole estate."
+
+"And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?" asked Dr.
+Silence.
+
+"In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know--except that I
+understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head
+keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up
+travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this
+wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall
+around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins
+tomorrow in the daylight."
+
+"And the result of your investigations--these stories, I mean?" the
+doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.
+
+"Yes, I'm coming to that," he said slowly, "but the wood first, for this
+wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way
+peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part
+in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large
+boulders--old Druid stones, I'm told. At another place there's a small
+pond. There's nothing distinctive about it that I could mention--just an
+ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood--only the trees are a bit
+twisted in the trunks, some of 'em, and very dense. Nothing more.
+
+"And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor
+brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all
+odd--such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make
+out how these people got such notions into their heads."
+
+He paused a moment to relight his cigar.
+
+"There's no regular path through it," he resumed, puffing vigorously,
+"but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners
+whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in
+it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of
+the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound--most
+of 'em said that, in fact--and another man saw shapes flitting in and
+out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all
+faintly luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms--always
+queer, huge things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the whole
+wood was lit up, and one fellow--he's still here and you shall see
+him--has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying
+on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals--"
+
+"What kind of stars?" put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way that
+made me start.
+
+"Oh, I don't know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very
+large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was
+too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them
+since."
+
+He stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze--welcome for its
+blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already a
+strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its effect
+and far from comforting.
+
+"Of course," he went on, straightening up again on the mat, "this was
+all commonplace enough--this seeing lights and figures at night. Most of
+these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may account
+for almost anything. But others saw things in broad daylight. One of the
+woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to his midday
+meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood by
+something that never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree, always
+keeping out of sight, yet solid enough to make the branches sway and the
+twigs snap on the ground. And it made a noise, he declared--but
+really"--the speaker stopped and gave a short laugh--"it's too
+absurd--"
+
+"_Please!_" insisted the doctor; "for it is these small details that
+give me the best clues always."
+
+"--it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. Those were
+his very words: like the crackling of a bonfire," finished the soldier,
+with a repetition of his short laugh.
+
+"Most interesting," Dr. Silence observed gravely. "Please omit nothing."
+
+"Yes," he went on, "and it was soon after that the fires began--the
+fires in the wood. They started mysteriously burning in the patches of
+coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation. No
+one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number,
+have seen them burning and smouldering. They are always small and
+circular in shape, and for all the world like a picnic fire. The head
+keeper has a dozen explanations, from sparks flying out of the house
+chimneys to the sunlight focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them, I
+must admit, convince me as being in the least likely or probable. They
+are most singular, I consider, most singular, these mysterious fires,
+and I am glad to say that they come only at rather long intervals and
+never seem to spread.
+
+"But the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that
+are verifiable. He declared that no life ever willingly entered the
+plantation; more, that no life existed in it at all. No birds nested in
+the trees, or flew into their shade. He set countless traps, but never
+caught so much as a rabbit or a weasel. Animals avoided it, and more
+than once he had picked up dead creatures round the edges that bore no
+obvious signs of how they had met their death.
+
+"Moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever chasing
+some invisible creature across the field one day when he was out with
+his gun. The dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at his feet,
+and then gave chase, yelping like a mad thing. It followed its imaginary
+quarry to the borders of the wood, and then went in--a thing he had
+never known it to do before. The moment it crossed the edge--it is
+darkish in there even in daylight--it began fighting in the most
+frenzied and terrific fashion. It made him afraid to interfere, he said.
+And at last, when the dog came out, hanging its tail down and panting,
+he found something like white hair stuck to its jaws, and brought it to
+show me. I tell you these details because--"
+
+"They are important, believe me," the doctor stopped him. "And you have
+it still, this hair?" he asked.
+
+"It disappeared in the oddest way," the Colonel explained. "It was
+curious looking stuff, something like asbestos, and I sent it to be
+analysed by the local chemist. But either the man got wind of its
+origin, or else he didn't like the look of it for some reason, because
+he returned it to me and said it was neither animal, vegetable, nor
+mineral, so far as he could make out, and he didn't wish to have
+anything to do with it. I put it away in paper, but a week later, on
+opening the package--it was gone! Oh, the stories are simply endless. I
+could tell you hundreds all on the same lines."
+
+"And personal experiences of your own, Colonel Wragge?" asked John
+Silence earnestly, his manner showing the greatest possible interest and
+sympathy.
+
+The soldier gave an almost imperceptible start. He looked distinctly
+uncomfortable.
+
+"Nothing, I think," he said slowly, "nothing--er--I should like to rely
+on. I mean nothing I have the right to speak of, perhaps--yet."
+
+His mouth closed with a snap. Dr. Silence, after waiting a little to see
+if he would add to his reply, did not seek to press him on the point.
+
+"Well," he resumed presently, and as though he would speak
+contemptuously, yet dared not, "this sort of thing has gone on at
+intervals ever since. It spreads like wildfire, of course, mysterious
+chatter of this kind, and people began trespassing all over the estate,
+coming to see the wood, and making themselves a general nuisance.
+Notices of man-traps and spring-guns only seemed to increase their
+persistence; and--think of it," he snorted, "some local Research Society
+actually wrote and asked permission for one of their members to spend a
+night in the wood! Bolder fools, who didn't write for leave, came and
+took away bits of bark from the trees and gave them to clairvoyants, who
+invented in their turn a further batch of tales. There was simply no end
+to it all."
+
+"Most distressing and annoying, I can well believe," interposed the
+doctor.
+
+"Then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun,
+and the interest flagged. The tales stopped. People got interested in
+something else. It all seemed to die out. This was last July. I can tell
+you exactly, for I've kept a diary more or less of what happened."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"But now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all
+revived again with a rush--with a kind of furious attack, so to speak.
+It has really become unbearable. You may imagine what it means, and the
+general state of affairs, when I say that the possibility of leaving has
+occurred to me."
+
+"Incendiarism?" suggested Dr. Silence, half under his breath, but not so
+low that Colonel Wragge did not hear him.
+
+"By Jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!" exclaimed the
+astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the
+doctor, and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation
+of my friend's divining powers were to be found that way.
+
+"It's only that you are thinking very vividly," the doctor said quietly,
+"and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you utter them. It's
+merely a little elementary thought-reading."
+
+His intention, I saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress
+him with his powers so as to ensure obedience later.
+
+"Good Lord! I had no idea--" He did not finish the sentence, and
+dived again abruptly into his narrative.
+
+"I did not see anything myself, I must admit, but the stories of
+independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like
+streams of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to
+shoot out precisely as flames might shoot out--in the direction of this
+house. There," he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump,
+pointing with a thick finger to the map, "where the westerly fringe of
+the plantation comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the
+house--where it links on to those dark patches, which are laurel
+shrubberies, running right up to the back premises--that's where these
+lights were seen. They passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in
+this way reached the house itself. Like silent rockets, one man
+described them, rapid as lightning and exceedingly bright."
+
+"And this evidence you spoke of?"
+
+"They actually reached the sides of the house. They've left a mark of
+scorching on the walls--the walls of the laundry building at the other
+end. You shall see 'em tomorrow." He pointed to the map to indicate the
+spot, and then straightened himself and glared about the room as though
+he had said something no one could believe and expected contradiction.
+
+"Scorched--just as the faces were," the doctor murmured, looking
+significantly at me.
+
+"Scorched--yes," repeated the Colonel, failing to catch the rest of the
+sentence in his excitement.
+
+There was a prolonged silence in the room, in which I heard the gurgling
+of the oil in the lamp and the click of the coals and the heavy
+breathing of our host. The most unwelcome sensations were creeping about
+my spine, and I wondered whether my companion would scorn me utterly if
+I asked to sleep on the sofa in his room. It was eleven o'clock, I saw
+by the clock on the mantelpiece. We had crossed the dividing line and
+were now well in the movement of the adventure. The fight between my
+interest and my dread became acute. But, even if turning back had been
+possible, I think the interest would have easily gained the day.
+
+"I have enemies, of course," I heard the Colonel's rough voice break
+into the pause presently, "and have discharged a number of
+servants---"
+
+"It's not that," put in John Silence briefly.
+
+"You think not? In a sense I am glad, and yet--there are some things
+that can be met and dealt with--"
+
+He left the sentence unfinished, and looked down at the floor with an
+expression of grim severity that betrayed a momentary glimpse of
+character. This fighting man loathed and abhorred the thought of an
+enemy he could not see and come to grips with. Presently he moved over
+and sat down in the chair between us. Something like a sigh escaped him.
+Dr. Silence said nothing.
+
+"My sister, of course, is kept in ignorance, as far as possible, of all
+this," he said disconnectedly, and as if talking to himself. "But even
+if she knew she would find matter-of-fact explanations. I only wish I
+could. I'm sure they exist."
+
+There came then an interval in the conversation that was very
+significant. It did not seem a real pause, or the silence real silence,
+for both men continued to think so rapidly and strongly that one almost
+imagined their thoughts clothed themselves in words in the air of the
+room. I was more than a little keyed up with the strange excitement of
+all I had heard, but what stimulated my nerves more than anything else
+was the obvious fact that the doctor was clearly upon the trail of
+discovery. In his mind at that moment, I believe, he had already solved
+the nature of this perplexing psychical problem. His face was like a
+mask, and he employed the absolute minimum of gesture and words. All his
+energies were directed inwards, and by those incalculable methods and
+processes he had mastered with such infinite patience and study, I felt
+sure he was already in touch with the forces behind these singular
+phenomena and laying his deep plans for bringing them into the open, and
+then effectively dealing with them.
+
+Colonel Wragge meanwhile grew more and more fidgety. From time to time
+he turned towards my companion, as though about to speak, yet always
+changing his mind at the last moment. Once he went over and opened the
+door suddenly, apparently to see if any one were listening at the
+keyhole, for he disappeared a moment between the two doors, and I then
+heard him open the outer one. He stood there for some seconds and made a
+noise as though he were sniffing the air like a dog. Then he closed both
+doors cautiously and came back to the fireplace. A strange excitement
+seemed growing upon him. Evidently he was trying to make up his mind to
+say something that he found it difficult to say. And John Silence, as I
+rightly judged, was waiting patiently for him to choose his own
+opportunity and his own way of saying it. At last he turned and faced
+us, squaring his great shoulders, and stiffening perceptibly.
+
+Dr. Silence looked up sympathetically.
+
+"Your own experiences help me most," he observed quietly.
+
+"The fact is," the Colonel said, speaking very low, "this past week
+there have been outbreaks of fire in the house itself. Three separate
+outbreaks--and all--in my sister's room."
+
+"Yes," the doctor said, as if this was just what he had expected to
+hear.
+
+"Utterly unaccountable--all of them," added the other, and then sat
+down. I began to understand something of the reason of his excitement.
+He was realising at last that the "natural" explanation he had held to
+all along was becoming impossible, and he hated it. It made him angry.
+
+"Fortunately," he went on, "she was out each time and does not know. But
+I have made her sleep now in a room on the ground floor."
+
+"A wise precaution," the doctor said simply. He asked one or two
+questions. The fires had started in the curtains--once by the window and
+once by the bed. The third time smoke had been discovered by the maid
+coming from the cupboard, and it was found that Miss Wragge's clothes
+hanging on the hooks were smouldering. The doctor listened attentively,
+but made no comment.
+
+"And now can you tell me," he said presently, "what your own feeling
+about it is--your general impression?"
+
+"It sounds foolish to say so," replied the soldier, after a moment's
+hesitation, "but I feel exactly as I have often felt on active service
+in my Indian campaigns: just as if the house and all in it were in a
+state of siege; as though a concealed enemy were encamped about us--in
+ambush somewhere." He uttered a soft nervous laugh. "As if the next sign
+of smoke would precipitate a panic--a dreadful panic."
+
+The picture came before me of the night shadowing the house, and the
+twisted pine trees he had described crowding about it, concealing some
+powerful enemy; and, glancing at the resolute face and figure of the old
+soldier, forced at length to his confession, I understood something of
+all he had been through before he sought the assistance of John Silence.
+
+"And tomorrow, unless I am mistaken, is full moon," said the doctor
+suddenly, watching the other's face for the effect of his apparently
+careless words.
+
+Colonel Wragge gave an uncontrollable start, and his face for the first
+time showed unmistakable pallor.
+
+"What in the world---?" he began, his lip quivering.
+
+"Only that I am beginning to see light in this extraordinary affair,"
+returned the other calmly, "and, if my theory is correct, each month
+when the moon is at the full should witness an increase in the activity
+of the phenomena."
+
+"I don't see the connection," Colonel Wragge answered almost savagely,
+"but I am bound to say my diary bears you out." He wore the most puzzled
+expression I have ever seen upon an honest face, but he abhorred this
+additional corroboration of an explanation that perplexed him.
+
+"I confess," he repeated, "I cannot see the connection."
+
+"Why should you?" said the doctor, with his first laugh that evening. He
+got up and hung the map upon the wall again. "But I do--because these
+things are my special study--and let me add that I have yet to come
+across a problem that is not natural, and has not a natural explanation.
+It's merely a question of how much one knows--and admits."
+
+Colonel Wragge eyed him with a new and curious respect in his face. But
+his feelings were soothed. Moreover, the doctor's laugh and change of
+manner came as a relief to all, and broke the spell of grave suspense
+that had held us so long. We all rose and stretched our limbs, and took
+little walks about the room.
+
+"I am glad, Dr. Silence, if you will allow me to say so, that you are
+here," he said simply, "very glad indeed. And now I fear I have kept you
+both up very late," with a glance to include me, "for you must be tired,
+and ready for your beds. I have told you all there is to tell," he
+added, "and tomorrow you must feel perfectly free to take any steps you
+think necessary."
+
+The end was abrupt, yet natural, for there was nothing more to say, and
+neither of these men talked for mere talking's sake.
+
+Out in the cold and chilly hall he lit our candles and took us upstairs.
+The house was at rest and still, every one asleep. We moved softly.
+Through the windows on the stairs we saw the moonlight falling across
+the lawn, throwing deep shadows. The nearer pine trees were just visible
+in the distance, a wall of impenetrable blackness.
+
+Our host came for a moment to our rooms to see that we had everything.
+He pointed to a coil of strong rope lying beside the window, fastened to
+the wall by means of an iron ring. Evidently it had been recently put
+in.
+
+"I don't think we shall need it," Dr. Silence said, with a smile.
+
+"I trust not," replied our host gravely. "I sleep quite close to you
+across the landing," he whispered, pointing to his door, "and if you--if
+you want anything in the night you will know where to find me."
+
+He wished us pleasant dreams and disappeared down the passage into his
+room, shading the candle with his big muscular hand from the draughts.
+
+John Silence stopped me a moment before I went.
+
+"You know what it is?" I asked, with an excitement that even overcame my
+weariness.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I'm almost sure. And you?"
+
+"Not the smallest notion."
+
+He looked disappointed, but not half as disappointed as I felt.
+
+"Egypt," he whispered, "Egypt!"
+
+
+II
+
+Nothing happened to disturb me in the night--nothing, that is, except a
+nightmare in which Colonel Wragge chased me amid thin streaks of fire,
+and his sister always prevented my escape by suddenly rising up out of
+the ground in her chair--dead. The deep baying of dogs woke me once,
+just before the dawn, it must have been, for I saw the window frame
+against the sky; there was a flash of lightning, too, I thought, as I
+turned over in bed. And it was warm, for October oppressively warm.
+
+It was after eleven o'clock when our host suggested going out with the
+guns, these, we understood, being a somewhat thin disguise for our true
+purpose. Personally, I was glad to be in the open air, for the
+atmosphere of the house was heavy with presentiment. The sense of
+impending disaster hung over all. Fear stalked the passages, and lurked
+in the corners of every room. It was a house haunted, but really
+haunted; not by some vague shadow of the dead, but by a definite though
+incalculable influence that was actively alive, and dangerous. At the
+least smell of smoke the entire household quivered. An odour of burning,
+I was convinced, would paralyse all the inmates. For the servants,
+though professedly ignorant by the master's unspoken orders, yet shared
+the common dread; and the hideous uncertainty, joined with this display
+of so spiteful and calculated a spirit of malignity, provided a kind of
+black doom that draped not only the walls, but also the minds of the
+people living within them.
+
+Only the bright and cheerful vision of old Miss Wragge being pushed
+about the house in her noiseless chair, chatting and nodding briskly to
+every one she met, prevented us from giving way entirely to the
+depression which governed the majority. The sight of her was like a
+gleam of sunshine through the depths of some ill-omened wood, and just
+as we went out I saw her being wheeled along by her attendant into the
+sunshine of the back lawn, and caught her cheery smile as she turned her
+head and wished us good sport.
+
+The morning was October at its best. Sunshine glistened on the
+dew-drenched grass and on leaves turned golden-red. The dainty
+messengers of coming hoar-frost were already in the air, a search for
+permanent winter quarters. From the wide moors that everywhere swept up
+against the sky, like a purple sea splashed by the occasional grey of
+rocky clefts, there stole down the cool and perfumed wind of the west.
+And the keen taste of the sea ran through all like a master-flavour,
+borne over the spaces perhaps by the seagulls that cried and circled
+high in the air.
+
+But our host took little interest in this sparkling beauty, and had no
+thought of showing off the scenery of his property. His mind was
+otherwise intent, and, for that matter, so were our own.
+
+"Those bleak moors and hills stretch unbroken for hours," he said, with
+a sweep of the hand; "and over there, some four miles," pointing in
+another direction, "lies S---- Bay, a long, swampy inlet of the sea,
+haunted by myriads of seabirds. On the other side of the house are the
+plantations and pine-woods. I thought we would get the dogs and go first
+to the Twelve Acre Wood I told you about last night. It's quite near."
+
+We found the dogs in the stable, and I recalled the deep baying of the
+night when a fine bloodhound and two great Danes leaped out to greet us.
+Singular companions for guns, I thought to myself, as we struck out
+across the fields and the great creatures bounded and ran beside us,
+nose to ground.
+
+The conversation was scanty. John Silence's grave face did not encourage
+talk. He wore the expression I knew well--that look of earnest
+solicitude which meant that his whole being was deeply absorbed and
+preoccupied. Frightened, I had never seen him, but anxious often--it
+always moved me to witness it--and he was anxious now.
+
+"On the way back you shall see the laundry building," Colonel Wragge
+observed shortly, for he, too, found little to say. "We shall attract
+less attention then."
+
+Yet not all the crisp beauty of the morning seemed able to dispel the
+feelings of uneasy dread that gathered increasingly about our minds as
+we went.
+
+In a very few minutes a clump of pine trees concealed the house from
+view, and we found ourselves on the outskirts of a densely grown
+plantation of conifers. Colonel Wragge stopped abruptly, and, producing
+a map from his pocket, explained once more very briefly its position
+with regard to the house. He showed how it ran up almost to the walls
+of the laundry building--though at the moment beyond our actual
+view--and pointed to the windows of his sister's bedroom where the fires
+had been. The room, now empty, looked straight on to the wood. Then,
+glancing nervously about him, and calling the dogs to heel, he proposed
+that we should enter the plantation and make as thorough examination of
+it as we thought worth while. The dogs, he added, might perhaps be
+persuaded to accompany us a little way--and he pointed to where they
+cowered at his feet--but he doubted it. "Neither voice nor whip will get
+them very far, I'm afraid," he said. "I know by experience."
+
+"If you have no objection," replied Dr. Silence, with decision, and
+speaking almost for the first time, "we will make our examination
+alone--Mr. Hubbard and myself. It will be best so."
+
+His tone was absolutely final, and the Colonel acquiesced so politely
+that even a less intuitive man than myself must have seen that he was
+genuinely relieved.
+
+"You doubtless have good reasons," he said.
+
+"Merely that I wish to obtain my impressions uncoloured. This delicate
+clue I am working on might be so easily blurred by the thought-currents
+of another mind with strongly preconceived ideas."
+
+"Perfectly. I understand," rejoined the soldier, though with an
+expression of countenance that plainly contradicted his words. "Then I
+will wait here with the dogs; and we'll have a look at the laundry on
+our way home."
+
+I turned once to look back as we clambered over the low stone wall built
+by the late owner, and saw his straight, soldierly figure standing in
+the sunlit field watching us with a curiously intent look on his face.
+There was something to me incongruous, yet distinctly pathetic, in the
+man's efforts to meet all far-fetched explanations of the mystery with
+contempt, and at the same time in his stolid, unswerving investigation
+of it all. He nodded at me and made a gesture of farewell with his hand.
+That picture of him, standing in the sunshine with his big dogs,
+steadily watching us, remains with me to this day.
+
+Dr. Silence led the way in among the twisted trunks, planted closely
+together in serried ranks, and I followed sharp at his heels. The moment
+we were out of sight he turned and put down his gun against the roots of
+a big tree, and I did likewise.
+
+"We shall hardly want these cumbersome weapons of murder," he observed,
+with a passing smile.
+
+"You are sure of your clue, then?" I asked at once, bursting with
+curiosity, yet fearing to betray it lest he should think me unworthy.
+His own methods were so absolutely simple and untheatrical.
+
+"I am sure of my clue," he answered gravely. "And I think we have come
+just in time. You shall know in due course. For the present--be content
+to follow and observe. And think, steadily. The support of your mind
+will help me."
+
+His voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death
+with a sort of happiness and pride. I would have followed him anywhere
+at that moment. At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread
+seriousness. I caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this
+broad light of day, I felt the measure of alarm that lay behind.
+
+"You still have no strong impressions?" he asked. "Nothing happened in
+the night, for instance? No vivid dreamings?"
+
+He looked closely for my answer, I was aware.
+
+"I slept almost an unbroken sleep. I was tremendously tired, you know,
+and, but for the oppressive heat--"
+
+"Good! You still notice the heat, then," he said to himself, rather than
+expecting an answer. "And the lightning?" he added, "that lightning out
+of a clear sky--that flashing--did you notice _that_?"
+
+I answered truly that I thought I had seen a flash during a moment of
+wakefulness, and he then drew my attention to certain facts before
+moving on.
+
+"You remember the sensation of warmth when you put the letter to your
+forehead in the train; the heat generally in the house last evening,
+and, as you now mention, in the night. You heard, too, the Colonel's
+stories about the appearances of fire in this wood and in the house
+itself, and the way his brother and the gamekeeper came to their deaths
+twenty years ago."
+
+I nodded, wondering what in the world it all meant.
+
+"And you get no clue from these facts?" he asked, a trifle surprised.
+
+I searched every corner of my mind and imagination for some inkling of
+his meaning, but was obliged to admit that I understood nothing so far.
+
+"Never mind, you will later. And now," he added, "we will go over the
+wood and see what we can find."
+
+His words explained to me something of his method. We were to keep our
+minds alert and report to each other the least fancy that crossed the
+picture-gallery of our thoughts. Then, just as we started, he turned
+again to me with a final warning.
+
+"And, for your safety," he said earnestly, "imagine _now_--and for that
+matter, imagine always until we leave this place--imagine with the
+utmost keenness, that you are surrounded by a shell that protects you.
+Picture yourself inside a protective envelope, and build it up with the
+most intense imagination you can evoke. Pour the whole force of your
+thought and will into it. Believe vividly all through this adventure
+that such a shell, constructed of your thought, will and imagination,
+surrounds you completely, and that nothing can pierce it to attack."
+
+He spoke with dramatic conviction, gazing hard at me as though to
+enforce his meaning, and then moved forward and began to pick his way
+over the rough, tussocky ground into the wood. And meanwhile, knowing
+the efficacy of his prescription, I adopted it to the best of my
+ability.
+
+The trees at once closed about us like the night. Their branches met
+overhead in a continuous tangle, their stems crept closer and closer,
+the brambly undergrowth thickened and multiplied. We tore our trousers,
+scratched our hands, and our eyes filled with fine dust that made it
+most difficult to avoid the clinging, prickly network of branches and
+creepers. Coarse white grass that caught our feet like string grew here
+and there in patches. It crowned the lumps of peaty growth that stuck up
+like human heads, fantastically dressed, thrusting up at us out of the
+ground with crests of dead hair. We stumbled and floundered among them.
+It was hard going, and I could well conceive it impossible to find a way
+at all in the night-time. We jumped, when possible, from tussock to
+tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among heads on a
+battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes that turned
+to stare as we passed.
+
+Here and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light,
+dazzling the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by
+contrast. And on two occasions we passed dark circular places in the
+grass where fires had eaten their mark and left a ring of ashes. Dr.
+Silence pointed to them, but without comment and without pausing, and
+the sight of them woke in me a singular realisation of the dread that
+lay so far only just out of sight in this adventure.
+
+It was exhausting work, and heavy going. We kept close together. The
+warmth, too, was extraordinary. Yet it did not seem the warmth of the
+body due to violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that
+laid glowing hands of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind of
+steady blaze. When my companion found himself too far in advance, he
+waited for me to come up. The place had evidently been untouched by hand
+of man, keeper, forester or sportsman, for many a year; and my thoughts,
+as we advanced painfully, were not unlike the state of the wood
+itself--dark, confused, full of a haunting wonder and the shadow of
+fear.
+
+By this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. No single
+gleam penetrated. We might have been groping in the heart of some
+primeval forest. Then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and
+stringlike grass came to an end; the trees opened out; and the ground
+began to slope upwards towards a large central mound. We had reached the
+middle of the plantation, and before us stood the broken Druid stones
+our host had mentioned. We walked easily up the little hill, between the
+sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered boulders, looked
+round upon a comparatively open space, as large, perhaps, as a small
+London Square.
+
+Thinking of the ceremonies and sacrifices this rough circle of
+prehistoric monoliths might have witnessed, I looked up into my
+companion's face with an unspoken question. But he read my thought and
+shook his head.
+
+"Our mystery has nothing to do with these dead symbols," he said, "but
+with something perhaps even more ancient, and of another country
+altogether."
+
+"Egypt?" I said half under my breath, hopelessly puzzled, but recalling
+his words in my bedroom.
+
+He nodded. Mentally I still floundered, but he seemed intensely
+preoccupied and it was no time for asking questions; so while his words
+circled unintelligibly in my mind I looked round at the scene before me,
+glad of the opportunity to recover breath and some measure of composure.
+But hardly had I time to notice the twisted and contorted shapes of many
+of the pine trees close at hand when Dr. Silence leaned over and touched
+me on the shoulder. He pointed down the slope. And the look I saw in his
+eyes keyed up every nerve in my body to its utmost pitch.
+
+A thin, almost imperceptible column of blue smoke was rising among the
+trees some twenty yards away at the foot of the mound. It curled up and
+up, and disappeared from sight among the tangled branches overhead. It
+was scarcely thicker than the smoke from a small brand of burning wood.
+
+"Protect yourself! Imagine your shell strongly," whispered the doctor
+sharply, "and follow me closely."
+
+He rose at once and moved swiftly down the slope towards the smoke, and
+I followed, afraid to remain alone. I heard the soft crunching of our
+steps on the pine needles. Over his shoulder I watched the thin blue
+spiral, without once taking my eyes off it. I hardly know how to
+describe the peculiar sense of vague horror inspired in me by the sight
+of that streak of smoke pencilling its way upwards among the dark trees.
+And the sensation of increasing heat as we approached was phenomenal. It
+was like walking towards a glowing yet invisible fire.
+
+As we drew nearer his pace slackened. Then he stopped and pointed, and I
+saw a small circle of burnt grass upon the ground. The tussocks were
+blackened and smouldering, and from the centre rose this line of smoke,
+pale, blue, steady. Then I noticed a movement of the atmosphere beside
+us, as if the warm air were rising and the cooler air rushing in to take
+its place: a little centre of wind in the stillness. Overhead the boughs
+stirred and trembled where the smoke disappeared. Otherwise, not a tree
+sighed, not a sound made itself heard. The wood was still as a
+graveyard. A horrible idea came to me that the course of nature was
+about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that the
+sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken
+bubble. Something, certainly, reached up to the citadel of my reason,
+causing its throne to shake.
+
+John Silence moved forward again. I could not see his face, but his
+attitude was plainly one of resolution, of muscles and mind ready for
+vigorous action. We were within ten feet of the blackened circle when
+the smoke of a sudden ceased to rise, and vanished. The tail of the
+column disappeared in the air above, and at the same instant it seemed
+to me that the sensation of heat passed from my face, and the motion of
+the wind was gone. The calm spirit of the fresh October day resumed
+command.
+
+Side by side we advanced and examined the place. The grass was
+smouldering, the ground still hot. The circle of burned earth was a foot
+to a foot and a half in diameter. It looked like an ordinary picnic
+fireplace. I bent down cautiously to look, but in a second I sprang back
+with an involuntary cry of alarm, for, as the doctor stamped on the
+ashes to prevent them spreading, a sound of hissing rose from the spot
+as though he had kicked a living creature. This hissing was faintly
+audible in the air. It moved past us, away towards the thicker portion
+of the wood in the direction of our field, and in a second Dr. Silence
+had left the fire and started in pursuit.
+
+And then began the most extraordinary hunt of invisibility I can ever
+conceive.
+
+He went fast even at the beginning, and, of course, it was perfectly
+obvious that he was following something. To judge by the poise of his
+head he kept his eyes steadily at a certain level--just above the height
+of a man--and the consequence was he stumbled a good deal over the
+roughness of the ground. The hissing sound had stopped. There was no
+sound of any kind, and what he saw to follow was utterly beyond me. I
+only know, that in mortal dread of being left behind, and with a biting
+curiosity to see whatever there was to be seen, I followed as quickly as
+I could, and even then barely succeeded in keeping up with him.
+
+And, as we went, the whole mad jumble of the Colonel's stories ran
+through my brain, touching a sense of frightened laughter that was only
+held in check by the sight of this earnest, hurrying figure before me.
+For John Silence at work inspired me with a kind of awe. He looked so
+diminutive among these giant twisted trees, while yet I knew that his
+purpose and his knowledge were so great, and even in hurry he was
+dignified. The fancy that we were playing some queer, exaggerated game
+together met the fact that we were two men dancing upon the brink of
+some possible tragedy, and the mingling of the two emotions in my mind
+was both grotesque and terrifying.
+
+He never turned in his mad chase, but pushed rapidly on, while I panted
+after him like a figure in some unreasoning nightmare. And, as I ran, it
+came upon me that he had been aware all the time, in his quiet, internal
+way, of many things that he had kept for his own secret consideration;
+he had been watching, waiting, planning from the very moment we entered
+the shade of the wood. By some inner, concentrated process of mind,
+dynamic if not actually magical, he had been in direct contact with the
+source of the whole adventure, the very essence of the real mystery. And
+now the forces were moving to a climax. Something was about to happen,
+something important, something possibly dreadful. Every nerve, every
+sense, every significant gesture of the plunging figure before me
+proclaimed the fact just as surely as the skies, the winds, and the face
+of the earth tell the birds the time to migrate and warn the animals
+that danger lurks and they must move.
+
+In a few moments we reached the foot of the mound and entered the
+tangled undergrowth that lay between us and the sunlight of the field.
+Here the difficulties of fast travelling increased a hundredfold. There
+were brambles to dodge, low boughs to dive under, and countless tree
+trunks closing up to make a direct path impossible. Yet Dr. Silence
+never seemed to falter or hesitate. He went, diving, jumping, dodging,
+ducking, but ever in the same main direction, following a clean trail.
+Twice I tripped and fell, and both times, when I picked myself up again,
+I saw him ahead of me, still forcing a way like a dog after its quarry.
+And sometimes, like a dog, he stopped and pointed--human pointing it
+was, psychic pointing, and each time he stopped to point I heard that
+faint high hissing in the air beyond us. The instinct of an infallible
+dowser possessed him, and he made no mistakes.
+
+At length, abruptly, I caught up with him, and found that we stood at
+the edge of the shallow pond Colonel Wragge had mentioned in his account
+the night before. It was long and narrow, filled with dark brown water,
+in which the trees were dimly reflected. Not a ripple stirred its
+surface.
+
+"Watch!" he cried out, as I came up. "It's going to cross. It's bound
+to betray itself. The water is its natural enemy, and we shall see the
+direction."
+
+And, even as he spoke, a thin line like the track of a water-spider,
+shot swiftly across the shiny surface; there was a ghost of steam in the
+air above; and immediately I became aware of an odour of burning.
+
+Dr. Silence turned and shot a glance at me that made me think of
+lightning. I began to shake all over.
+
+"Quick!" he cried with excitement, "to the trail again! We must run
+around. It's going to the house!"
+
+The alarm in his voice quite terrified me. Without a false step I dashed
+round the slippery banks and dived again at his heels into the sea of
+bushes and tree trunks. We were now in the thick of the very dense belt
+that ran around the outer edge of the plantation, and the field was
+near; yet so dark was the tangle that it was some time before the first
+shafts of white sunlight became visible. The doctor now ran in zigzags.
+He was following something that dodged and doubled quite wonderfully,
+yet had begun, I fancied, to move more slowly than before.
+
+"Quick!" he cried. "In the light we shall lose it!"
+
+I still saw nothing, heard nothing, caught no suggestion of a trail; yet
+this man, guided by some interior divining that seemed infallible, made
+no false turns, though how he failed to crash headlong into the trees
+has remained a mystery to me ever since. And then, with a sudden rush,
+we found ourselves on the skirts of the wood with the open field lying
+in bright sunshine before our eyes.
+
+"Too late!" I heard him cry, a note of anguish in his voice. "It's
+out--and, by God, it's making for the house!"
+
+I saw the Colonel standing in the field with his dogs where we had left
+him. He was bending double, peering into the wood where he heard us
+running, and he straightened up like a bent whip released. John Silence
+dashed passed, calling him to follow.
+
+"We shall lose the trail in the light," I heard him cry as he ran. "But
+quick! We may yet get there in time!"
+
+That wild rush across the open field, with the dogs at our heels,
+leaping and barking, and the elderly Colonel behind us running as though
+for his life, shall I ever forget it? Though I had only vague ideas of
+the meaning of it all, I put my best foot forward, and, being the
+youngest of the three, I reached the house an easy first. I drew up,
+panting, and turned to wait for the others. But, as I turned, something
+moving a little distance away caught my eye, and in that moment I swear
+I experienced the most overwhelming and singular shock of surprise and
+terror I have ever known, or can conceive as possible.
+
+For the front door was open, and the waist of the house being narrow, I
+could see through the hall into the dining-room beyond, and so out on to
+the back lawn, and there I saw no less a sight than the figure of Miss
+Wragge--running. Even at that distance it was plain that she had seen
+me, and was coming fast towards me, running with the frantic gait of a
+terror-stricken woman. She had recovered the use of her legs.
+
+Her face was a livid grey, as of death itself, but the general
+expression was one of laughter, for her mouth was gaping, and her eyes,
+always bright, shone with the light of a wild merriment that seemed the
+merriment of a child, yet was singularly ghastly. And that very second,
+as she fled past me into her brother's arms behind, I smelt again most
+unmistakably the odour of burning, and to this day the smell of smoke
+and fire can come very near to turning me sick with the memory of what I
+had seen.
+
+Fast on her heels, too, came the terrified attendant, more mistress of
+herself, and able to speak--which the old lady could not do--but with a
+face almost, if not quite, as fearful.
+
+"We were down by the bushes in the sun,"--she gasped and screamed in
+reply to Colonel Wragge's distracted questionings,--"I was wheeling the
+chair as usual when she shrieked and leaped--I don't know exactly--I was
+too frightened to see--Oh, my God! she jumped clean out of the
+chair--_and ran_! There was a blast of hot air from the wood, and she
+hid her face and jumped. She didn't make a sound--she didn't cry out, or
+make a sound. She just ran."
+
+But the nightmare horror of it all reached the breaking point a few
+minutes later, and while I was still standing in the hall temporarily
+bereft of speech and movement; for while the doctor, the Colonel and the
+attendant were half-way up the staircase, helping the fainting woman to
+the privacy of her room, and all in a confused group of dark figures,
+there sounded a voice behind me, and I turned to see the butler, his
+face dripping with perspiration, his eyes starting out of his head.
+
+"The laundry's on fire!" he cried; "the laundry building's a-caught!"
+
+I remember his odd expression "a-caught," and wanting to laugh, but
+finding my face rigid and inflexible.
+
+"The devil's about again, s'help me Gawd!" he cried, in a voice thin
+with terror, running about in circles.
+
+And then the group on the stairs scattered as at the sound of a shot,
+and the Colonel and Dr. Silence came down three steps at a time, leaving
+the afflicted Miss Wragge to the care of her single attendant.
+
+We were out across the front lawn in a moment and round the corner of
+the house, the Colonel leading, Silence and I at his heels, and the
+portly butler puffing some distance in the rear, getting more and more
+mixed in his addresses to God and the devil; and the moment we passed
+the stables and came into view of the laundry building, we saw a
+wicked-looking volume of smoke pouring out of the narrow windows, and
+the frightened women-servants and grooms running hither and thither,
+calling aloud as they ran.
+
+The arrival of the master restored order instantly, and this retired
+soldier, poor thinker perhaps, but capable man of action, had the matter
+in hand from the start. He issued orders like a martinet, and, almost
+before I could realise it, there were streaming buckets on the scene and
+a line of men and women formed between the building and the stable pump.
+
+"Inside," I heard John Silence cry, and the Colonel followed him through
+the door, while I was just quick enough at their heels to hear him add,
+"the smoke's the worst part of it. There's no fire yet, I think."
+
+And, true enough, there was no fire. The interior was thick with smoke,
+but it speedily cleared and not a single bucket was used upon the floor
+or walls. The air was stifling, the heat fearful.
+
+"There's precious little to burn in here; it's all stone," the Colonel
+exclaimed, coughing. But the doctor was pointing to the wooden covers of
+the great cauldron in which the clothes were washed, and we saw that
+these were smouldering and charred. And when we sprinkled half a bucket
+of water on them the surrounding bricks hissed and fizzed and sent up
+clouds of steam. Through the open door and windows this passed out with
+the rest of the smoke, and we three stood there on the brick floor
+staring at the spot and wondering, each in our own fashion, how in the
+name of natural law the place could have caught fire or smoked at all.
+And each was silent--myself from sheer incapacity and befuddlement, the
+Colonel from the quiet pluck that faces all things yet speaks little,
+and John Silence from the intense mental grappling with this latest
+manifestation of a profound problem that called for concentration of
+thought rather than for any words.
+
+There was really nothing to say. The facts were indisputable.
+
+Colonel Wragge was the first to utter.
+
+"My sister," he said briefly, and moved off. In the yard I heard him
+sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently
+matter-of-fact voice, scolding some one roundly for making such a big
+fire and letting the flues get over-heated, and paying no heed to the
+stammering reply that no fire had been lit there for several days. Then
+he dispatched a groom on horseback for the local doctor.
+
+Then Dr. Silence turned and looked at me. The absolute control he
+possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture,
+change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well
+knew, over its very birth in his heart, the masklike face of the dead he
+could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any given
+moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. But now, when he
+turned and looked at me, there was no sphinx-expression there, but
+rather the keen triumphant face of a man who had solved a dangerous and
+complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory.
+
+"_Now_ do you guess?" he asked quietly, as though it were the simplest
+matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible.
+
+I could only stare stupidly and remain silent. He glanced down at the
+charred cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger.
+But I was too excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps, to
+see what it was he outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. I could
+only go on staring and shaking my puzzled head.
+
+"A fire-elemental," he cried, "a fire-elemental of the most powerful and
+malignant kind--"
+
+"A what?" thundered the voice of Colonel Wragge behind us, having
+returned suddenly and overheard.
+
+"It's a fire-elemental," repeated Dr. Silence more calmly, but with a
+note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, "and a
+fire-elemental enraged."
+
+The light began to dawn in my mind at last. But the Colonel--who had
+never heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably worked
+up for a plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to grapple
+with--the Colonel stood, with the most dumfoundered look ever seen on a
+human countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and stare.
+
+"And why," he began, savage with the desire to find something visible he
+could fight--"why, in the name of all the blazes--?" and then stopped as
+John Silence moved up and took his arm.
+
+"There, my dear Colonel Wragge," he said gently, "you touch the heart of
+the whole thing. You ask 'Why.' That is precisely our problem." He held
+the soldier's eyes firmly with his own. "And that, too, I think, we
+shall soon know. Come and let us talk over a plan of action--that room
+with the double doors, perhaps."
+
+The word "action" calmed him a little, and he led the way, without
+further speech, back into the house, and down the long stone passage to
+the room where we had heard his stories on the night of our arrival. I
+understood from the doctor's glance that my presence would not make the
+interview easier for our host, and I went upstairs to my own
+room--shaking.
+
+But in the solitude of my room the vivid memories of the last hour
+revived so mercilessly that I began to feel I should never in my whole
+life lose the dreadful picture of Miss Wragge running--that dreadful
+human climax after all the non-human mystery in the wood--and I was not
+sorry when a servant knocked at my door and said that Colonel Wragge
+would be glad if I would join them in the little smoking-room.
+
+"I think it is better you should be present," was all Colonel Wragge
+said as I entered the room. I took the chair with my back to the window.
+There was still an hour before lunch, though I imagine that the usual
+divisions of the day hardly found a place in the thoughts of any one of
+us.
+
+The atmosphere of the room was what I might call electric. The Colonel
+was positively bristling; he stood with his back to the fire, fingering
+an unlit black cigar, his face flushed, his being obviously roused and
+ready for action. He hated this mystery. It was poisonous to his nature,
+and he longed to meet something face to face--something he could gauge
+and fight. Dr. Silence, I noticed at once, was sitting before the map of
+the estate which was spread upon a table. I knew by his expression the
+state of his mind. He was in the thick of it all, knew it, delighted in
+it, and was working at high pressure. He recognised my presence with a
+lifted eyelid, and the flash of the eye, contrasted with his stillness
+and composure, told me volumes.
+
+"I was about to explain to our host briefly what seems to me afoot in
+all this business," he said without looking up, "when he asked that you
+should join us so that we can all work together." And, while signifying
+my assent, I caught myself wondering what quality it was in the calm
+speech of this undemonstrative man that was so full of power, so charged
+with the strange, virile personality behind it and that seemed to
+inspire us with his own confidence as by a process of radiation.
+
+"Mr. Hubbard," he went on gravely, turning to the soldier, "knows
+something of my methods, and in more than one--er--interesting situation
+has proved of assistance. What we want now"--and here he suddenly got up
+and took his place on the mat beside the Colonel, and looked hard at
+him--"is men who have self-control, who are sure of themselves, whose
+minds at the critical moment will emit positive forces, instead of the
+wavering and uncertain currents due to negative feelings--due, for
+instance, to fear."
+
+He looked at us each in turn. Colonel Wragge moved his feet farther
+apart, and squared his shoulders; and I felt guilty but said nothing,
+conscious that my latent store of courage was being deliberately hauled
+to the front. He was winding me up like a clock.
+
+"So that, in what is yet to come," continued our leader, "each of us
+will contribute his share of power, and ensure success for my plan."
+
+"I'm not afraid of anything I can _see_," said the Colonel bluntly.
+
+"I'm ready," I heard myself say, as it were automatically, "for
+anything," and then added, feeling the declaration was lamely
+insufficient, "and everything."
+
+Dr. Silence left the mat and began walking to and fro about the room,
+both hands plunged deep into the pockets of his shooting-jacket.
+Tremendous vitality streamed from him. I never took my eyes off the
+small, moving figure; small yes,--and yet somehow making me think of a
+giant plotting the destruction of worlds. And his manner was gentle, as
+always, soothing almost, and his words uttered quietly without emphasis
+or emotion. Most of what he said was addressed, though not too
+obviously, to the Colonel.
+
+"The violence of this sudden attack," he said softly, pacing to and fro
+beneath the bookcase at the end of the room, "is due, of course, partly
+to the fact that tonight the moon is at the full"--here he glanced at me
+for a moment--"and partly to the fact that we have all been so
+deliberately concentrating upon the matter. Our thinking, our
+investigation, has stirred it into unusual activity. I mean that the
+intelligent force behind these manifestations has realised that some one
+is busied about its destruction. And it is now on the defensive: more,
+it is aggressive."
+
+"But 'it'--what is 'it'?" began the soldier, fuming. "What, in the name
+of all that's dreadful, _is_ a fire-elemental?"
+
+"I cannot give you at this moment," replied Dr. Silence, turning to him,
+but undisturbed by the interruption, "a lecture on the nature and
+history of magic, but can only say that an Elemental is the active force
+behind the elements,--whether earth, air, water, _or fire_,--it is
+impersonal in its essential nature, but can be focused, personified,
+ensouled, so to say, by those who know how--by magicians, if you
+will--for certain purposes of their own, much in the same way that steam
+and electricity can be harnessed by the practical man of this century.
+
+"Alone, these blind elemental energies can accomplish little, but
+governed and directed by the trained will of a powerful manipulator they
+may become potent activities for good or evil. They are the basis of all
+magic, and it is the motive behind them that constitutes the magic
+'black' or 'white'; they can be the vehicles of curses or of blessings,
+for a curse is nothing more than the thought of a violent will
+perpetuated. And in such cases--cases like this--the conscious,
+directing will of the mind that is using the elemental stands always
+behind the phenomena--"
+
+"You think that my brother--!" broke in the Colonel, aghast.
+
+"Has nothing whatever to do with it--directly. The fire-elemental that
+has here been tormenting you and your household was sent upon its
+mission long before you, or your family, or your ancestors, or even the
+nation you belong to--unless I am much mistaken--was even in existence.
+We will come to that a little later; after the experiment I propose to
+make we shall be more positive. At present I can only say we have to
+deal now, not only with the phenomenon of Attacking Fire merely, but
+with the vindictive and enraged intelligence that is directing it from
+behind the scenes--vindictive and enraged,"--he repeated the words.
+
+"That explains--" began Colonel Wragge, seeking furiously for words he
+could not find quickly enough.
+
+"Much," said John Silence, with a gesture to restrain him.
+
+He stopped a moment in the middle of his walk, and a deep silence came
+down over the little room. Through the windows the sunlight seemed less
+bright, the long line of dark hills less friendly, making me think of a
+vast wave towering to heaven and about to break and overwhelm us.
+Something formidable had crept into the world about us. For,
+undoubtedly, there was a disquieting thought, holding terror as well as
+awe, in the picture his words conjured up: the conception of a human
+will reaching its deathless hand, spiteful and destructive, down through
+the ages, to strike the living and afflict the innocent.
+
+"But what is its object?" burst out the soldier, unable to restrain
+himself longer in the silence. "Why does it come from that plantation?
+And why should it attack us, or any one in particular?" Questions began
+to pour from him in a stream.
+
+"All in good time," the doctor answered quietly, having let him run on
+for several minutes. "But I must first discover positively what, or who,
+it is that directs this particular fire-elemental. And, to do that, we
+must first"--he spoke with slow deliberation--"seek to capture--to
+confine by visibility--to limit its sphere in a concrete form."
+
+"Good heavens almighty!" exclaimed the soldier, mixing his words in his
+unfeigned surprise.
+
+"Quite so," pursued the other calmly; "for in so doing I think we can
+release it from the purpose that binds it, restore it to its normal
+condition of latent fire, and also"--he lowered his voice perceptibly
+--"also discover the face and form of the Being that ensouls it."
+
+"The man behind the gun!" cried the Colonel, beginning to understand
+something, and leaning forward so as not to miss a single syllable.
+
+"I mean that in the last resort, before it returns to the womb of
+potential fire, it will probably assume the face and figure of its
+Director, of the man of magical knowledge who originally bound it with
+his incantations and sent it forth upon its mission of centuries."
+
+The soldier sat down and gasped openly in his face, breathing hard; but
+it was a very subdued voice that framed the question.
+
+"And how do you propose to make it visible? How capture and confine it?
+What d'ye mean, Dr. John Silence?"
+
+"By furnishing it with the materials for a form. By the process of
+materialisation simply. Once limited by dimensions, it will become slow,
+heavy, visible. We can then dissipate it. Invisible fire, you see, is
+dangerous and incalculable; locked up in a form we can perhaps manage
+it. We must betray it--to its death."
+
+"And this material?" we asked in the same breath, although I think I had
+already guessed.
+
+"Not pleasant, but effective," came the quiet reply; "the exhalations of
+freshly spilled blood."
+
+"Not human blood!" cried Colonel Wragge, starting up from his chair with
+a voice like an explosion. I thought his eyes would start from their
+sockets.
+
+The face of Dr. Silence relaxed in spite of himself, and his spontaneous
+little laugh brought a welcome though momentary relief.
+
+"The days of human sacrifice, I hope, will never come again," he
+explained. "Animal blood will answer the purpose, and we can make the
+experiment as pleasant as possible. Only, the blood must be freshly
+spilled and strong with the vital emanations that attract this peculiar
+class of elemental creature. Perhaps--perhaps if some pig on the estate
+is ready for the market--"
+
+He turned to hide a smile; but the passing touch of comedy found no echo
+in the mind of our host, who did not understand how to change quickly
+from one emotion to another. Clearly he was debating many things
+laboriously in his honest brain. But, in the end, the earnestness and
+scientific disinterestedness of the doctor, whose influence over him was
+already very great, won the day, and he presently looked up more calmly,
+and observed shortly that he thought perhaps the matter could be
+arranged.
+
+"There are other and pleasanter methods," Dr. Silence went on to
+explain, "but they require time and preparation, and things have gone
+much too far, in my opinion, to admit of delay. And the process need
+cause you no distress: we sit round the bowl and await results. Nothing
+more. The emanations of blood--which, as Levi says, is the first
+incarnation of the universal fluid--furnish the materials out of which
+the creatures of discarnate life, spirits if you prefer, can fashion
+themselves a temporary appearance. The process is old, and lies at the
+root of all blood sacrifice. It was known to the priests of Baal, and it
+is known to the modern ecstasy dancers who cut themselves to produce
+objective phantoms who dance with them. And the least gifted clairvoyant
+could tell you that the forms to be seen in the vicinity of
+slaughter-houses, or hovering above the deserted battlefields,
+are--well, simply beyond all description. I do not mean," he added,
+noticing the uneasy fidgeting of his host, "that anything in our
+laundry-experiment need appear to terrify us, for this case seems a
+comparatively simple one, and it is only the vindictive character of the
+intelligence directing this fire-elemental that causes anxiety and makes
+for personal danger."
+
+"It is curious," said the Colonel, with a sudden rush of words, drawing
+a deep breath, and as though speaking of things distasteful to him,
+"that during my years among the Hill Tribes of Northern India I came
+across--personally came across--instances of the sacrifices of blood to
+certain deities being stopped suddenly, and all manner of disasters
+happening until they were resumed. Fires broke out in the huts, and even
+on the clothes, of the natives--and--and I admit I have read, in the
+course of my studies,"--he made a gesture toward his books and heavily
+laden table,--"of the Yezidis of Syria evoking phantoms by means of
+cutting their bodies with knives during their whirling dances--enormous
+globes of fire which turned into monstrous and terrible forms--and I
+remember an account somewhere, too, how the emaciated forms and pallid
+countenances of the spectres, that appeared to the Emperor Julian,
+claimed to be the true Immortals, and told him to renew the sacrifices
+of blood 'for the fumes of which, since the establishment of
+Christianity, they had been pining'--that these were in reality the
+phantoms evoked by the rites of blood."
+
+Both Dr. Silence and myself listened in amazement, for this sudden
+speech was so unexpected, and betrayed so much more knowledge than we
+had either of us suspected in the old soldier.
+
+"Then perhaps you have read, too," said the doctor, "how the Cosmic
+Deities of savage races, elemental in their nature, have been kept alive
+through many ages by these blood rites?"
+
+"No," he answered; "that is new to me."
+
+"In any case," Dr. Silence added, "I am glad you are not wholly
+unfamiliar with the subject, for you will now bring more sympathy, and
+therefore more help, to our experiment. For, of course, in this case, we
+only want the blood to tempt the creature from its lair and enclose it
+in a form--"
+
+"I quite understand. And I only hesitated just now," he went on, his
+words coming much more slowly, as though he felt he had already said too
+much, "because I wished to be quite sure it was no mere curiosity, but
+an actual sense of necessity that dictated this horrible experiment."
+
+"It is your safety, and that of your household, and of your sister, that
+is at stake," replied the doctor. "Once I have _seen_, I hope to
+discover whence this elemental comes, and what its real purpose is."
+
+Colonel Wragge signified his assent with a bow.
+
+"And the moon will help us," the other said, "for it will be full in the
+early hours of the morning, and this kind of elemental-being is always
+most active at the period of full moon. Hence, you see, the clue
+furnished by your diary."
+
+So it was finally settled. Colonel Wragge would provide the materials
+for the experiment, and we were to meet at midnight. How he would
+contrive at that hour--but that was his business. I only know we both
+realised that he would keep his word, and whether a pig died at
+midnight, or at noon, was after all perhaps only a question of the sleep
+and personal comfort of the executioner.
+
+"Tonight, then, in the laundry," said Dr. Silence finally, to clinch the
+plan; "we three alone--and at midnight, when the household is asleep and
+we shall be free from disturbance."
+
+He exchanged significant glances with our host, who, at that moment, was
+called away by the announcement that the family doctor had arrived, and
+was ready to see him in his sister's room.
+
+For the remainder of the afternoon John Silence disappeared. I had my
+suspicions that he made a secret visit to the plantation and also to the
+laundry building; but, in any case, we saw nothing of him, and he kept
+strictly to himself. He was preparing for the night, I felt sure, but
+the nature of his preparations I could only guess. There was movement in
+his room, I heard, and an odour like incense hung about the door, and
+knowing that he regarded rites as the vehicles of energies, my guesses
+were probably not far wrong.
+
+Colonel Wragge, too, remained absent the greater part of the afternoon,
+and, deeply afflicted, had scarcely left his sister's bedside, but in
+response to my inquiry when we met for a moment at tea-time, he told me
+that although she had moments of attempted speech, her talk was quite
+incoherent and hysterical, and she was still quite unable to explain the
+nature of what she had seen. The doctor, he said, feared she had
+recovered the use of her limbs, only to lose that of her memory, and
+perhaps even of her mind.
+
+"Then the recovery of her legs, I trust, may be permanent, at any rate,"
+I ventured, finding it difficult to know what sympathy to offer. And he
+replied with a curious short laugh, "Oh yes; about that there can be no
+doubt whatever."
+
+And it was due merely to the chance of my overhearing a fragment of
+conversation--unwillingly, of course--that a little further light was
+thrown upon the state in which the old lady actually lay. For, as I came
+out of my room, it happened that Colonel Wragge and the doctor were
+going downstairs together, and their words floated up to my ears before
+I could make my presence known by so much as a cough.
+
+"Then you must find a way," the doctor was saying with decision; "for I
+cannot insist too strongly upon that--and at all costs she must be kept
+quiet. These attempts to go out must be prevented--if necessary, by
+force. This desire to visit some wood or other she keeps talking about
+is, of course, hysterical in nature. It cannot be permitted for a
+moment."
+
+"It shall not be permitted," I heard the soldier reply, as they reached
+the hall below.
+
+"It has impressed her mind for some reason--" the doctor went on, by way
+evidently of soothing explanation, and then the distance made it
+impossible for me to hear more.
+
+At dinner Dr. Silence was still absent, on the public plea of a
+headache, and though food was sent to his room, I am inclined to believe
+he did not touch it, but spent the entire time fasting.
+
+We retired early, desiring that the household should do likewise, and I
+must confess that at ten o'clock when I bid my host a temporary
+good-night, and sought my room to make what mental preparation I could,
+I realised in no very pleasant fashion that it was a singular and
+formidable assignation, this midnight meeting in the laundry building,
+and that there were moments in every adventure of life when a wise man,
+and one who knew his own limitations, owed it to his dignity to withdraw
+discreetly. And, but for the character of our leader, I probably should
+have then and there offered the best excuse I could think of, and have
+allowed myself quietly to fall asleep and wait for an exciting story in
+the morning of what had happened. But with a man like John Silence, such
+a lapse was out of the question, and I sat before my fire counting the
+minutes and doing everything I could think of to fortify my resolution
+and fasten my will at the point where I could be reasonably sure that my
+self-control would hold against all attacks of men, devils, or
+elementals.
+
+
+III
+
+At a quarter before midnight, clad in a heavy ulster, and with slippered
+feet, I crept cautiously from my room and stole down the passage to the
+top of the stairs. Outside the doctor's door I waited a moment to
+listen. All was still; the house in utter darkness; no gleam of light
+beneath any door; only, down the length of the corridor, from the
+direction of the sick-room, came faint sounds of laughter and incoherent
+talk that were not things to reassure a mind already half a-tremble, and
+I made haste to reach the hall and let myself out through the front
+door into the night.
+
+The air was keen and frosty, perfumed with night smells, and exquisitely
+fresh; all the million candles of the sky were alight, and a faint
+breeze rose and fell with far-away sighings in the tops of the pine
+trees. My blood leaped for a moment in the spaciousness of the night,
+for the splendid stars brought courage; but the next instant, as I
+turned the corner of the house, moving stealthily down the gravel drive,
+my spirits sank again ominously. For, yonder, over the funereal plumes
+of the Twelve Acre Plantation, I saw the broken, yellow disc of the
+half-moon just rising in the east, staring down like some vast Being
+come to watch upon the progress of our doom. Seen through the distorting
+vapours of the earth's atmosphere, her face looked weirdly unfamiliar,
+her usual expression of benignant vacancy somehow a-twist. I slipped
+along by the shadows of the wall, keeping my eyes upon the ground.
+
+The laundry-house, as already described, stood detached from the other
+offices, with laurel shrubberies crowding thickly behind it, and the
+kitchen-garden so close on the other side that the strong smells of soil
+and growing things came across almost heavily. The shadows of the
+haunted plantation, hugely lengthened by the rising moon behind them,
+reached to the very walls and covered the stone tiles of the roof with a
+dark pall. So keenly were my senses alert at this moment that I believe
+I could fill a chapter with the endless small details of the impression
+I received--shadows, odour, shapes, sounds--in the space of the few
+seconds I stood and waited before the closed wooden door.
+
+Then I became aware of some one moving towards me through the moonlight,
+and the figure of John Silence, without overcoat and bareheaded, came
+quickly and without noise to join me. His eyes, I saw at once, were
+wonderfully bright, and so marked was the shining pallor of his face
+that I could hardly tell when he passed from the moonlight into the
+shade.
+
+He passed without a word, beckoning me to follow, and then pushed the
+door open, and went in.
+
+The chill air of the place met us like that of an underground vault; and
+the brick floor and whitewashed walls, streaked with damp and smoke,
+threw back the cold in our faces. Directly opposite gaped the black
+throat of the huge open fireplace, the ashes of wood fires still piled
+and scattered about the hearth, and on either side of the projecting
+chimney-column were the deep recesses holding the big twin cauldrons for
+boiling clothes. Upon the lids of these cauldrons stood the two little
+oil lamps, shaded red, which gave all the light there was, and
+immediately in front of the fireplace there was a small circular table
+with three chairs set about it. Overhead, the narrow slit windows, high
+up the walls, pointed to a dim network of wooden rafters half lost among
+the shadows, and then came the dark vault of the roof. Cheerless and
+unalluring, for all the red light, it certainly was, reminding me of
+some unused conventicle, bare of pews or pulpit, ugly and severe, and I
+was forcibly struck by the contrast between the normal uses to which the
+place was ordinarily put, and the strange and medieval purpose which had
+brought us under its roof tonight.
+
+Possibly an involuntary shudder ran over me, for my companion turned
+with a confident look to reassure me, and he was so completely master of
+himself that I at once absorbed from his abundance, and felt the chinks
+of my failing courage beginning to close up. To meet his eye in the
+presence of danger was like finding a mental railing that guided and
+supported thought along the giddy edges of alarm.
+
+"I am quite ready," I whispered, turning to listen for approaching
+footsteps.
+
+He nodded, still keeping his eyes on mine. Our whispers sounded hollow
+as they echoed overhead among the rafters.
+
+"I'm glad you are here," he said. "Not all would have the courage. Keep
+your thoughts controlled, and imagine the protective shell round
+you--round your inner being."
+
+"I'm all right," I repeated, cursing my chattering teeth.
+
+He took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into me
+something of his supreme confidence. The eyes and hands of a strong man
+can touch the soul. I think he guessed my thought, for a passing smile
+flashed about the corners of his mouth.
+
+"You will feel more comfortable," he said, in a low tone, "when the
+chain is complete. The Colonel we can count on, of course.
+Remember, though," he added warningly, "he may perhaps become
+controlled--possessed--when the thing comes, because he won't know how
+to resist. And to explain the business to such a man--!" He shrugged
+his shoulders expressively. "But it will only be temporary, and I will
+see that no harm comes to him."
+
+He glanced round at the arrangements with approval.
+
+"Red light," he said, indicating the shaded lamps, "has the lowest rate
+of vibration. Materialisations are dissipated by strong light--won't
+form, or hold together--in rapid vibrations."
+
+I was not sure that I approved altogether of this dim light, for in
+complete darkness there is something protective--the knowledge that one
+cannot be seen, probably--which a half-light destroys, but I remembered
+the warning to keep my thoughts steady, and forbore to give them
+expression.
+
+There was a step outside, and the figure of Colonel Wragge stood in the
+doorway. Though entering on tiptoe, he made considerable noise and
+clatter, for his free movements were impeded by the burden he carried,
+and we saw a large yellowish bowl held out at arms' length from his
+body, the mouth covered with a white cloth. His face, I noted, was
+rigidly composed. He, too, was master of himself. And, as I thought of
+this old soldier moving through the long series of alarms, worn with
+watching and wearied with assault, unenlightened yet undismayed, even
+down to the dreadful shock of his sister's terror, and still showing the
+dogged pluck that persists in the face of defeat, I understood what Dr.
+Silence meant when he described him as a man "to be counted on."
+
+I think there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features,
+and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the
+emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these
+two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door
+was shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage I
+possessed was well to the fore, and I felt as sure of myself as I knew I
+ever could feel.
+
+Colonel Wragge set the bowl carefully in the centre of the table.
+
+"Midnight," he said shortly, glancing at his watch, and we all three
+moved to our chairs.
+
+There, in the middle of that cold and silent place, we sat, with the
+vile bowl before us, and a thin, hardly perceptible steam rising through
+the damp air from the surface of the white cloth and disappearing
+upwards the moment it passed beyond the zone of red light and entered
+the deep shadows thrown forward by the projecting wall of chimney.
+
+The doctor had indicated our respective places, and I found myself
+seated with my back to the door and opposite the black hearth. The
+Colonel was on my left, and Dr. Silence on my right, both half facing
+me, the latter more in shadow than the former. We thus divided the
+little table into even sections, and sitting back in our chairs we
+awaited events in silence.
+
+For something like an hour I do not think there was even the faintest
+sound within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted roof.
+Our slippers made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our breathing
+was suppressed almost to nothing; even the rustle of our clothes as we
+shifted from time to time upon our seats was inaudible. Silence
+smothered us absolutely--the silence of night, of listening, the silence
+of a haunted expectancy. The very gurgling of the lamps was too soft to
+be heard, and if light itself had sound, I do not think we should have
+noticed the silvery tread of the moonlight as it entered the high narrow
+windows and threw upon the floor the slender traces of its pallid
+footsteps.
+
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor, and myself too for that matter, sat thus
+like figures of stone, without speech and without gesture. My eyes
+passed in ceaseless journeys from the bowl to their faces, and from
+their faces to the bowl. They might have been masks, however, for all
+the signs of life they gave; and the light steaming from the horrid
+contents beneath the white cloth had long ceased to be visible.
+
+Then presently, as the moon rose higher, the wind rose with it. It
+sighed, like the lightest of passing wings, over the roof; it crept most
+softly round the walls; it made the brick floor like ice beneath our
+feet. With it I saw mentally the desolate moorland flowing like a sea
+about the old house, the treeless expanse of lonely hills, the nearer
+copses, sombre and mysterious in the night. The plantation, too, in
+particular I saw, and imagined I heard the mournful whisperings that
+must now be a-stirring among its tree-tops as the breeze played down
+between the twisted stems. In the depth of the room behind us the shafts
+of moonlight met and crossed in a growing network.
+
+It was after an hour of this wearing and unbroken attention, and I
+should judge about one o'clock in the morning, when the baying of the
+dogs in the stableyard first began, and I saw John Silence move suddenly
+in his chair and sit up in an attitude of attention. Every force in my
+being instantly leaped into the keenest vigilance. Colonel Wragge moved
+too, though slowly, and without raising his eyes from the table before
+him.
+
+The doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the bowl.
+
+It was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lamps
+grew fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. I had been
+expecting something for so long that the movement of my companions, and
+the lifting of the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusion
+that something hovered in the air before my face, touching the skin of
+my cheeks with a silken run. But it was certainly not a delusion that
+the Colonel looked up at the same moment and glanced over his shoulder,
+as though his eyes followed the movements of something to and fro about
+the room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat more tightly about him
+and his eyes sought my own face first, and then the doctor's. And it was
+no delusion that his face seemed somehow to have turned dark, become
+spread as it were with a shadowy blackness. I saw his lips tighten and
+his expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then with a rush
+that, of course, this man had told us but a part of the experiences he
+had been through in the house, and that there was much more he had never
+been able to bring himself to reveal at all. I felt sure of it. The way
+he turned and stared about him betrayed a familiarity with other things
+than those he had described to us. It was not merely a sight of fire he
+looked for; it was a sight of something alive, intelligent, something
+able to evade his searching; it was _a person_. It was the watch for the
+ancient Being who sought to obsess him.
+
+And the way in which Dr. Silence answered his look--though it was only
+by a glance of subtlest sympathy--confirmed my impression.
+
+"We may be ready now," I heard him say in a whisper, and I understood
+that his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced myself
+mentally to the utmost of my power.
+
+Yet long before Colonel Wragge had turned to stare about the room, and
+long before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were at
+last beginning to stir, I had become aware in most singular fashion that
+the place held more than our three selves. With the rising of the wind
+this increase to our numbers had first taken place. The baying of the
+hounds almost seemed to have signalled it. I cannot say how it may be
+possible to realise that an empty place has suddenly become--not empty,
+when the new arrival is nothing that appeals to any one of the senses;
+for this recognition of an "invisible," as of the change in the balance
+of personal forces in a human group, is indefinable and beyond proof.
+Yet it is unmistakable. And I knew perfectly well at what given moment
+the atmosphere within these four walls became charged with the presence
+of other living beings besides ourselves. And, on reflection, I am
+convinced that both my companions knew it too.
+
+"Watch the light," said the doctor under his breath, and then I knew too
+that it was no fancy of my own that had turned the air darker, and the
+way he turned to examine the face of our host sent an electric thrill of
+wonder and expectancy shivering along every nerve in my body.
+
+Yet it was no kind of terror that I experienced, but rather a sort of
+mental dizziness, and a sensation as of being suspended in some remote
+and dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to
+happen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. Horror may
+have formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in no
+sense ghostly horror.
+
+Uncommon thoughts kept beating on my brain like tiny hammers, soft yet
+persistent, seeking admission; their unbidden tide began to wash along
+the far fringes of my mind, the currents of unwonted sensations to rise
+over the remote frontiers of my consciousness. I was aware of thoughts,
+and the fantasies of thoughts, that I never knew before existed.
+Portions of my being stirred that had never stirred before, and things
+ancient and inexplicable rose to the surface and beckoned me to follow.
+I felt as though I were about to fly off, at some immense tangent, into
+an outer space hitherto unknown even in dreams. And so singular was the
+result produced upon me that I was uncommonly glad to anchor my mind, as
+well as my eyes, upon the masterful personality of the doctor at my
+side, for there, I realised, I could draw always upon the forces of
+sanity and safety.
+
+With a vigorous effort of will I returned to the scene before me, and
+tried to focus my attention, with steadier thoughts, upon the table, and
+upon the silent figures seated round it. And then I saw that certain
+changes had come about in the place where we sat.
+
+The patches of moonlight on the floor, I noted, had become curiously
+shaded; the faces of my companions opposite were not so clearly visible
+as before; and the forehead and cheeks of Colonel Wragge were glistening
+with perspiration. I realised further, that an extraordinary change had
+come about in the temperature of the atmosphere. The increased warmth
+had a painful effect, not alone on Colonel Wragge, but upon all of us.
+It was oppressive and unnatural. We gasped figuratively as well as
+actually.
+
+"You are the first to feel it," said Dr. Silence in low tones, looking
+across at him. "You are in more intimate touch, of course--"
+
+The Colonel was trembling, and appeared to be in considerable distress.
+His knees shook, so that the shuffling of his slippered feet became
+audible. He inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no
+other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself
+in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had
+warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, though vainly,
+resisting.
+
+But, meanwhile, a curious and whirling sense of exhilaration began to
+come over me. The increasing heat was delightful, bringing a sensation
+of intense activity, of thoughts pouring through the mind at high speed,
+of vivid pictures in the brain, of fierce desires and lightning energies
+alive in every part of the body. I was conscious of no physical
+distress, such as the Colonel felt, but only of a vague feeling that it
+might all grow suddenly too intense--that I might be consumed--that my
+personality as well as my body, might become resolved into the flame of
+pure spirit. I began to live at a speed too intense to last. It was as
+if a thousand ecstasies besieged me--
+
+"Steady!" whispered the voice of John Silence in my ear, and I looked up
+with a start to see that the Colonel had risen from his chair. The
+doctor rose too. I followed suit, and for the first time saw down into
+the bowl. To my amazement and horror I saw that the contents were
+troubled. The blood was astir with movement.
+
+The rest of the experiment was witnessed by us standing. It came, too,
+with a curious suddenness. There was no more dreaming, for me at any
+rate.
+
+I shall never forget the figure of Colonel Wragge standing there beside
+me, upright and unshaken, squarely planted on his feet, looking about
+him, puzzled beyond belief, yet full of a fighting anger. Framed by the
+white walls, the red glow of the lamps upon his streaming cheeks, his
+eyes glowing against the deathly pallor of his skin, breathing hard and
+making convulsive efforts of hands and body to keep himself under
+control, his whole being roused to the point of savage fighting, yet
+with nothing visible to get at anywhere--he stood there, immovable
+against odds. And the strange contrast of the pale skin and the burning
+face I had never seen before, or wish to see again.
+
+But what has left an even sharper impression on my memory was the
+blackness that then began crawling over his face, obliterating the
+features, concealing their human outline, and hiding him inch by inch
+from view. This was my first realisation that the process of
+materialisation was at work. His visage became shrouded. I moved from
+one side to the other to keep him in view, and it was only then I
+understood that, properly speaking, the blackness was not upon the
+countenance of Colonel Wragge, but that something had inserted itself
+between me and him, thus screening his face with the effect of a dark
+veil. Something that apparently rose through the floor was passing
+slowly into the air above the table and above the bowl. The blood in the
+bowl, moreover, was considerably less than before.
+
+And, with this change in the air before us, there came at the same time
+a further change, I thought, in the face of the soldier. One-half was
+turned towards the red lamps, while the other caught the pale
+illumination of the moonlight falling aslant from the high windows, so
+that it was difficult to estimate this change with accuracy of detail.
+But it seemed to me that, while the features--eyes, nose,
+mouth--remained the same, the life informing them had undergone some
+profound transformation. The signature of a new power had crept into the
+face and left its traces there--an expression dark, and in some
+unexplained way, terrible.
+
+Then suddenly he opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of this
+changed voice, deep and musical though it was, made me cold and set my
+heart beating with uncomfortable rapidity. The Being, as he had dreaded,
+was already in control of his brain, using his mouth.
+
+"I see a blackness like the blackness of Egypt before my face," said
+the tones of this unknown voice that seemed half his own and half
+another's. "And out of this darkness they come, they come."
+
+I gave a dreadful start. The doctor turned to look at me for an instant,
+and then turned to centre his attention upon the figure of our host, and
+I understood in some intuitive fashion that he was there to watch over
+the strangest contest man ever saw--to watch over and, if necessary, to
+protect.
+
+"He is being controlled--possessed," he whispered to me through the
+shadows. His face wore a wonderful expression, half triumph, half
+admiration.
+
+Even as Colonel Wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible darkness
+began to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the hearth,
+rising up in sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. It stole up
+from below--an awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the
+radiations of light in the building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a
+radiance in their place. Then, out of this rising sea of shadows, issued
+a pale and spectral light that gradually spread itself about us, and
+from the heart of this light I saw the shapes of fire crowd and gather.
+And these were not human shapes, or the shapes of anything I recognised
+as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced globes,
+triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various geometrical
+figures. They grew bright, faded, and then grew bright again with an
+effect almost of pulsation. They passed swiftly to and fro through the
+air, rising and falling, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood
+of the Colonel, often gathering about his head and shoulders, and even
+appearing to settle upon him like giant insects of flame. They were
+accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound of hissing--the same sound we
+had heard that afternoon in the plantation.
+
+"The fire-elementals that precede their master," the doctor said in an
+undertone. "Be ready."
+
+And while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed
+and faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters
+overhead, we heard the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of
+the afflicted soldier. It was a voice of power, splendid in some way I
+cannot describe, and with a certain sense of majesty in its cadences,
+and, as I listened to it with quickly beating heart, I could fancy it
+was some ancient voice of Time itself, echoing down immense corridors of
+stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of mountain
+tombs.
+
+"I have seen my divine Father, Osiris," thundered the great tones. "I
+have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth,
+and am one with the starry Deities!"
+
+Something grand came into the soldier's face. He was staring fixedly
+before him, as though seeing nothing.
+
+"Watch," whispered Dr. Silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to come
+from very far away.
+
+Again the mouth opened and the awesome voice issued forth.
+
+"Thoth," it boomed, "has loosened the bandages of Set which fettered my
+mouth. I have taken my place in the great winds of heaven."
+
+I heard the little wind of night, with its mournful voice of ages,
+sighing round the walls and over the roof.
+
+"Listen!" came from the doctor at my side, and the thunder of the voice
+continued--
+
+"I have hidden myself with you, O ye stars that never diminish. I
+remember my name--in--the--House--of--Fire!"
+
+The voice ceased and the sound died away. Something about the face and
+figure of Colonel Wragge relaxed, I thought. The terrible look passed
+from his face. The Being that obsessed him was gone.
+
+"The great Ritual," said Dr. Silence aside to me, very low, "the Book of
+the Dead. Now it's leaving him. Soon the blood will fashion it a body."
+
+Colonel Wragge, who had stood absolutely motionless all this time,
+suddenly swayed, so that I thought he was going to fall,--and, but for
+the quick support of the doctor's arm, he probably would have fallen,
+for he staggered as in the beginning of collapse.
+
+"I am drunk with the wine of Osiris," he cried,--and it was half with
+his own voice this time--"but Horus, the Eternal Watcher, is about my
+path--for--safety." The voice dwindled and failed, dying away into
+something almost like a cry of distress.
+
+"Now, watch closely," said Dr. Silence, speaking loud, "for after the
+cry will come the Fire!"
+
+I began to tremble involuntarily; an awful change had come without
+warning into the air; my legs grew weak as paper beneath my weight and I
+had to support myself by leaning on the table. Colonel Wragge, I saw,
+was also leaning forward with a kind of droop. The shapes of fire had
+vanished all, but his face was lit by the red lamps and the pale,
+shifting moonlight rose behind him like mist.
+
+We were both gazing at the bowl, now almost empty; the Colonel stooped
+so low I feared every minute he would lose his balance and drop into it;
+and the shadow, that had so long been in process of forming, now at
+length began to assume material outline in the air before us.
+
+Then John Silence moved forward quickly. He took his place between us
+and the shadow. Erect, formidable, absolute master of the situation, I
+saw him stand there, his face calm and almost smiling, and fire in his
+eyes. His protective influence was astounding and incalculable. Even the
+abhorrent dread I felt at the sight of the creature growing into life
+and substance before us, lessened in some way so that I was able to keep
+my eyes fixed on the air above the bowl without too vivid a terror.
+
+But as it took shape, rising out of nothing as it were, and growing
+momentarily more defined in outline, a period of utter and wonderful
+silence settled down upon the building and all it contained. A hush of
+ages, like the sudden centre of peace at the heart of the travelling
+cyclone, descended through the night, and out of this hush, as out of
+the emanations of the steaming blood, issued the form of the ancient
+being who had first sent the elemental of fire upon its mission. It grew
+and darkened and solidified before our eyes. It rose from just beyond
+the table so that the lower portions remained invisible, but I saw the
+outline limn itself upon the air, as though slowly revealed by the
+rising of a curtain. It apparently had not then quite concentrated to
+the normal proportions, but was spread out on all sides into space,
+huge, though rapidly condensing, for I saw the colossal shoulders, the
+neck, the lower portion of the dark jaws, the terrible mouth, and then
+the teeth and lips--and, as the veil seemed to lift further upon the
+tremendous face--I saw the nose and cheek bones. In another moment I
+should have looked straight into the eyes--
+
+But what Dr. Silence did at that moment was so unexpected, and took me
+so by surprise, that I have never yet properly understood its nature,
+and he has never yet seen fit to explain in detail to me. He uttered
+some sound that had a note of command in it--and, in so doing, stepped
+forward and intervened between me and the face. The figure, just nearing
+completeness, he therefore hid from my sight--and I have always thought
+purposely hid from my sight.
+
+"The fire!" he cried out. "The fire! Beware!"
+
+There was a sudden roar as of flame from the very mouth of the pit, and
+for the space of a single second all grew light as day. A blinding flash
+passed across my face, and there was heat for an instant that seemed to
+shrivel skin, and flesh, and bone. Then came steps, and I heard Colonel
+Wragge utter a great cry, wilder than any human cry I have ever known.
+The heat sucked all the breath out of my lungs with a rush, and the
+blaze of light, as it vanished, swept my vision with it into enveloping
+darkness.
+
+When I recovered the use of my senses a few moments later I saw that
+Colonel Wragge with a face of death, its whiteness strangely stained,
+had moved closer to me. Dr. Silence stood beside him, an expression of
+triumph and success in his eyes. The next minute the soldier tried to
+clutch me with his hand. Then he reeled, staggered, and, unable to save
+himself, fell with a great crash upon the brick floor.
+
+After the sheet of flame, a wind raged round the building as though it
+would lift the roof off, but then passed as suddenly as it came. And in
+the intense calm that followed I saw that the form had vanished, and the
+doctor was stooping over Colonel Wragge upon the floor, trying to lift
+him to a sitting position.
+
+"Light," he said quietly, "more light. Take the shades off."
+
+Colonel Wragge sat up and the glare of the unshaded lamps fell upon his
+face. It was grey and drawn, still running heat, and there was a look in
+the eyes and about the corners of the mouth that seemed in this short
+space of time to have added years to its age. At the same time, the
+expression of effort and anxiety had left it. It showed relief.
+
+"Gone!" he said, looking up at the doctor in a dazed fashion, and
+struggling to his feet. "Thank God! it's gone at last." He stared round
+the laundry as though to find out where he was. "Did it control me--take
+possession of me? Did I talk nonsense?" he asked bluntly. "After the
+heat came, I remember nothing--"
+
+"You'll feel yourself again in a few minutes," the doctor said. To my
+infinite horror I saw that he was surreptitiously wiping sundry dark
+stains from the face. "Our experiment has been a success and--"
+
+He gave me a swift glance to hide the bowl, standing between me and our
+host while I hurriedly stuffed it down under the lid of the nearest
+cauldron.
+
+"--and none of us the worse for it," he finished.
+
+"And fires?" he asked, still dazed, "there'll be no more fires?"
+
+"It is dissipated--partly, at any rate," replied Dr. Silence cautiously.
+
+"And the man behind the gun," he went on, only half realising what he
+was saying, I think; "have you discovered _that?_"
+
+"A form materialised," said the doctor briefly. "I know for certain now
+what the directing intelligence was behind it all."
+
+Colonel Wragge pulled himself together and got upon his feet. The words
+conveyed no clear meaning to him yet. But his memory was returning
+gradually, and he was trying to piece together the fragments into a
+connected whole. He shivered a little, for the place had grown suddenly
+chilly. The air was empty again, lifeless.
+
+"You feel all right again now," Dr. Silence said, in the tone of a man
+stating a fact rather than asking a question.
+
+"Thanks to you--both, yes." He drew a deep breath, and mopped his face,
+and even attempted a smile. He made me think of a man coming from the
+battlefield with the stains of fighting still upon him, but scornful of
+his wounds. Then he turned gravely towards the doctor with a question
+in his eyes. Memory had returned and he was himself again.
+
+"Precisely what I expected," the doctor said calmly; "a fire-elemental
+sent upon its mission in the days of Thebes, centuries before Christ,
+and tonight, for the first time all these thousands of years, released
+from the spell that originally bound it."
+
+We stared at him in amazement, Colonel Wragge opening his lips for words
+that refused to shape themselves.
+
+"And, if we dig," he continued significantly, pointing to the floor
+where the blackness had poured up, "we shall find some underground
+connection--a tunnel most likely--leading to the Twelve Acre Wood. It
+was made by--your predecessor."
+
+"A tunnel made by my brother!" gasped the soldier. "Then my sister
+should know--she lived here with him--" He stopped suddenly.
+
+John Silence inclined his head slowly. "I think so," he said quietly.
+"Your brother, no doubt, was as much tormented as you have been," he
+continued after a pause in which Colonel Wragge seemed deeply
+preoccupied with his thoughts, "and tried to find peace by burying it in
+the wood, and surrounding the wood then, like a large magic circle, with
+the enchantments of the old formulae. So the stars the man saw
+blazing--"
+
+"But burying what?" asked the soldier faintly, stepping backwards
+towards the support of the wall.
+
+Dr. Silence regarded us both intently for a moment before he replied. I
+think he weighed in his mind whether to tell us now, or when the
+investigation was absolutely complete.
+
+"The mummy," he said softly, after a moment; "the mummy that your
+brother took from its resting place of centuries, and brought
+home--here."
+
+Colonel Wragge dropped down upon the nearest chair, hanging breathlessly
+on every word. He was far too amazed for speech.
+
+"The mummy of some important person--a priest most likely--protected
+from disturbance and desecration by the ceremonial magic of the time.
+For they understood how to attach to the mummy, to lock up with it in
+the tomb, an elemental force that would direct itself even after ages
+upon any one who dared to molest it. In this case it was an elemental of
+fire."
+
+Dr. Silence crossed the floor and turned out the lamps one by one. He
+had nothing more to say for the moment. Following his example, I folded
+the table together and took up the chairs, and our host, still dazed and
+silent, mechanically obeyed him and moved to the door.
+
+We removed all traces of the experiment, taking the empty bowl back to
+the house concealed beneath an ulster.
+
+The air was cool and fragrant as we walked to the house, the stars
+beginning to fade overhead and a fresh wind of early morning blowing up
+out of the east where the sky was already hinting of the coming day. It
+was after five o'clock.
+
+Stealthily we entered the front hall and locked the door, and as we went
+on tiptoe upstairs to our rooms, the Colonel, peering at us over his
+candle as he nodded good-night, whispered that if we were ready the
+digging should be begun that very day.
+
+Then I saw him steal along to his sister's room and disappear.
+
+
+IV
+
+But not even the mysterious references to the mummy, or the prospect of
+a revelation by digging, were able to hinder the reaction that followed
+the intense excitement of the past twelve hours, and I slept the sleep
+of the dead, dreamless and undisturbed. A touch on the shoulder woke me,
+and I saw Dr. Silence standing beside the bed, dressed to go out.
+
+"Come," he said, "it's tea-time. You've slept the best part of a dozen
+hours."
+
+I sprang up and made a hurried toilet, while my companion sat and
+talked. He looked fresh and rested, and his manner was even quieter than
+usual.
+
+"Colonel Wragge has provided spades and pickaxes. We're going out to
+unearth this mummy at once," he said; "and there's no reason we should
+not get away by the morning train."
+
+"I'm ready to go tonight, if you are," I said honestly.
+
+But Dr. Silence shook his head.
+
+"I must see this through to the end," he said gravely, and in a tone
+that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. He went
+on talking while I dressed.
+
+"This case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and none
+of them are cases to trifle with," he explained, "for the mummies of
+important people--kings, priests, magicians--were laid away with
+profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected,
+as you have seen, against desecration, and especially against
+destruction.
+
+"The general belief," he went on, anticipating my questions, "held, of
+course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its Ka,--the
+owner's spirit,--but it is not improbable that the magical embalming
+was also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of the body
+preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline of
+earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful
+guardian-forces to keep off trespassers. And any one who dared to remove
+the mummy, or especially to unwind it--well," he added, with meaning,
+"you have seen--and you will see."
+
+I caught his face in the mirror while I struggled with my collar. It was
+deeply serious. There could be no question that he spoke of what he
+believed and knew.
+
+"The traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted too,"
+he continued, "for he tried to banish it by burial in the wood, making a
+magic circle to enclose it. Something of genuine ceremonial he must have
+known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the still
+flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. Only he did not
+know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy's guardian was a
+fire-force. Fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw, it can
+be released by it."
+
+"Then that awful figure in the laundry?" I asked, thrilled to find him
+so communicative.
+
+"Undoubtedly the actual Ka of the mummy operating always behind its
+agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old."
+
+"And Miss Wragge--?" I ventured once more.
+
+"Ah, Miss Wragge," he repeated with increased gravity, "Miss Wragge--"
+
+A knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready, and
+the Colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. The thread was
+broken. Dr. Silence moved to the door and signed to me to follow. But
+his manner told me that in any case no real answer would have been
+forthcoming to my question.
+
+"And the place to dig in," I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity,
+"will you find it by some process of divination or--?"
+
+He paused at the door and looked back at me, and with that he left me to
+finish my dressing.
+
+It was growing dark when the three of us silently made our way to the
+Twelve Acre Plantation; the sky was overcast, and a black wind came out
+of the east. Gloom hung about the old house and the air seemed full of
+sighings. We found the tools ready laid at the edge of the wood, and
+each shouldering his piece, we followed our leader at once in among the
+trees. He went straight forward for some twenty yards and then stopped.
+At his feet lay the blackened circle of one of the burned places. It was
+just discernible against the surrounding white grass.
+
+"There are three of these," he said, "and they all lie in a line with
+one another. Any one of them will tap the tunnel that connects the
+laundry--the former Museum--with the chamber where the mummy now lies
+buried."
+
+He at once cleared away the burnt grass and began to dig; we all began
+to dig. While I used the pick, the others shovelled vigorously. No one
+spoke. Colonel Wragge worked the hardest of the three. The soil was
+light and sandy, and there were only a few snake-like roots and
+occasional loose stones to delay us. The pick made short work of these.
+And meanwhile the darkness settled about us and the biting wind swept
+roaring through the trees overhead.
+
+Then, quite suddenly, without a cry, Colonel Wragge disappeared up to
+his neck.
+
+"The tunnel!" cried the doctor, helping to drag him out, red,
+breathless, and covered with sand and perspiration. "Now, let me lead
+the way." And he slipped down nimbly into the hole, so that a moment
+later we heard his voice, muffled by sand and distance, rising up to us.
+
+"Hubbard, you come next, and then Colonel Wragge--if he wishes," we
+heard.
+
+"I'll follow you, of course," he said, looking at me as I scrambled in.
+
+The hole was bigger now, and I got down on all-fours in a channel not
+much bigger than a large sewer-pipe and found myself in total darkness.
+A minute later a heavy thud, followed by a cataract of loose sand,
+announced the arrival of the Colonel.
+
+"Catch hold of my heel," called Dr. Silence, "and Colonel Wragge can
+take yours."
+
+In this slow, laborious fashion we wormed our way along a tunnel that
+had been roughly dug out of the shifting sand, and was shored up
+clumsily by means of wooden pillars and posts. Any moment, it seemed to
+me, we might be buried alive. We could not see an inch before our eyes,
+but had to grope our way feeling the pillars and the walls. It was
+difficult to breathe, and the Colonel behind me made but slow progress,
+for the cramped position of our bodies was very severe.
+
+We had travelled in this way for ten minutes, and gone perhaps as much
+as ten yards, when I lost my grasp of the doctor's heel.
+
+"Ah!" I heard his voice, sounding above me somewhere. He was standing up
+in a clear space, and the next moment I was standing beside him. Colonel
+Wragge came heavily after, and he too rose up and stood. Then Dr.
+Silence produced his candles and we heard preparations for striking
+matches.
+
+Yet even before there was light, an indefinable sensation of awe came
+over us all. In this hole in the sand, some three feet under ground, we
+stood side by side, cramped and huddled, struck suddenly with an over
+whelming apprehension of something ancient, something formidable,
+something incalculably wonderful, that touched in each one of us a sense
+of the sublime and the terrible even before we could see an inch before
+our faces. I know not how to express in language this singular emotion
+that caught us here in utter darkness, touching no sense directly, it
+seemed, yet with the recognition that before us in the blackness of this
+underground night there lay something that was mighty with the
+mightiness of long past ages.
+
+I felt Colonel Wragge press in closely to my side, and I understood the
+pressure and welcomed it. No human touch, to me at least, has ever been
+more eloquent.
+
+Then the match flared, a thousand shadows fled on black wings, and I saw
+John Silence fumbling with the candle, his face lit up grotesquely by
+the flickering light below it.
+
+I had dreaded this light, yet when it came there was apparently nothing
+to explain the profound sensations of dread that preceded it. We stood
+in a small vaulted chamber in the sand, the sides and roof shored with
+bars of wood, and the ground laid roughly with what seemed to be tiles.
+It was six feet high, so that we could all stand comfortably, and may
+have been ten feet long by eight feet wide. Upon the wooden pillars at
+the side I saw that Egyptian hieroglyphics had been rudely traced by
+burning.
+
+Dr. Silence lit three candles and handed one to each of us. He placed a
+fourth in the sand against the wall on his right, and another to mark
+the entrance to the tunnel. We stood and stared about us, instinctively
+holding our breath.
+
+"Empty, by God!" exclaimed Colonel Wragge. His voice trembled with
+excitement. And then, as his eyes rested on the ground, he added, "And
+footsteps--look--footsteps in the sand!"
+
+Dr. Silence said nothing. He stooped down and began to make a search of
+the chamber, and as he moved, my eyes followed his crouching figure and
+noted the queer distorted shadows that poured over the walls and ceiling
+after him. Here and there thin trickles of loose sand ran fizzing down
+the sides. The atmosphere, heavily charged with faint yet pungent
+odours, lay utterly still, and the flames of the candles might have been
+painted on the air for all the movement they betrayed.
+
+And, as I watched, it was almost necessary to persuade myself forcibly
+that I was only standing upright with difficulty in this little
+sand-hole of a modern garden in the south of England, for it seemed to
+me that I stood, as in vision, at the entrance of some vast rock-hewn
+Temple far, far down the river of Time. The illusion was powerful, and
+persisted. Granite columns, that rose to heaven, piled themselves about
+me, majestically uprearing, and a roof like the sky itself spread above
+a line of colossal figures that moved in shadowy procession along
+endless and stupendous aisles. This huge and splendid fantasy, borne I
+knew not whence, possessed me so vividly that I was actually obliged to
+concentrate my attention upon the small stooping figure of the doctor,
+as he groped about the walls, in order to keep the eye of imagination on
+the scene before me.
+
+But the limited space rendered a long search out of the question, and
+his footsteps, instead of shuffling through loose sand, presently struck
+something of a different quality that gave forth a hollow and resounding
+echo. He stooped to examine more closely.
+
+He was standing exactly in the centre of the little chamber when this
+happened, and he at once began scraping away the sand with his feet. In
+less than a minute a smooth surface became visible--the surface of a
+wooden covering. The next thing I saw was that he had raised it and was
+peering down into a space below. Instantly, a strong odour of nitre and
+bitumen, mingled with the strange perfume of unknown and powdered
+aromatics, rose up from the uncovered space and filled the vault,
+stinging the throat and making the eyes water and smart.
+
+"The mummy!" whispered Dr. Silence, looking up into our faces over his
+candle; and as he said the word I felt the soldier lurch against me, and
+heard his breathing in my very ear.
+
+"The mummy!" he repeated under his breath, as we pressed forward to
+look.
+
+It is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in me
+so prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for I have had not a
+little to do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even
+experimented magically with not a few. But there was something in the
+sight of that grey and silent figure, lying in its modern box of lead
+and wood at the bottom of this sandy grave, swathed in the bandages of
+centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen that the priests of Egypt
+had prayed over with their mighty enchantments thousands of years
+before--something in the sight of it lying there and breathing its own
+spice-laden atmosphere even in the darkness of its exile in this remote
+land, something that pierced to the very core of my being and touched
+that root of awe which slumbers in every man near the birth of tears and
+the passion of true worship.
+
+I remember turning quickly from the Colonel, lest he should see my
+emotion, yet fail to understand its cause, turn and clutch John Silence
+by the arm, and then fall trembling to see that he, too, had lowered his
+head and was hiding his face in his hands.
+
+A kind of whirling storm came over me, rising out of I know not what
+utter deeps of memory, and in a whiteness of vision I heard the magical
+old chauntings from the Book of the Dead, and saw the Gods pass by in
+dim procession, the mighty, immemorial Beings who were yet themselves
+only the personified attributes of the true Gods, the God with the Eyes
+of Fire, the God with the Face of Smoke. I saw again Anubis, the
+dog-faced deity, and the children of Horus, eternal watcher of the ages,
+as they swathed Osiris, the first mummy of the world, in the scented and
+mystic bands, and I tasted again something of the ecstasy of the
+justified soul as it embarked in the golden Boat of Ra, and journeyed
+onwards to rest in the fields of the blessed.
+
+And then, as Dr. Silence, with infinite reverence, stooped and touched
+the still face, so dreadfully staring with its painted eyes, there rose
+again to our nostrils wave upon wave of this perfume of thousands of
+years, and time fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in
+haunted panorama the most wonderful dream of the whole world.
+
+A gentle hissing became audible in the air, and the doctor moved quickly
+backwards. It came close to our faces and then seemed to play about the
+walls and ceiling.
+
+"The last of the Fire--still waiting for its full accomplishment," he
+muttered; but I heard both words and hissing as things far away, for I
+was still busy with the journey of the soul through the Seven Halls of
+Death, listening for echoes of the grandest ritual ever known to men.
+
+The earthen plates covered with hieroglyphics still lay beside the
+mummy, and round it, carefully arranged at the points of the compass,
+stood the four jars with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the
+cynocephalus, and man, the jars in which were placed the hair, the nail
+parings, the heart, and other special portions of the body. Even the
+amulets, the mirror, the blue clay statues of the Ka, and the lamp with
+seven wicks were there. Only the sacred scarabaeus was missing.
+
+"Not only has it been torn from its ancient resting-place," I heard Dr.
+Silence saying in a solemn voice as he looked at Colonel Wragge with
+fixed gaze, "but it has been partially unwound,"--he pointed to the
+wrappings of the breast,--"and--the scarabaeus has been removed from the
+throat."
+
+The hissing, that was like the hissing of an invisible flame, had
+ceased; only from time to time we heard it as though it passed backwards
+and forwards in the tunnel; and we stood looking into each other's faces
+without speaking.
+
+Presently Colonel Wragge made a great effort and braced himself. I heard
+the sound catch in his throat before the words actually became audible.
+
+"My sister," he said, very low. And then there followed a long pause,
+broken at length by John Silence.
+
+"It must be replaced," he said significantly.
+
+"I knew nothing," the soldier said, forcing himself to speak the words
+he hated saying. "Absolutely nothing."
+
+"It must be returned," repeated the other, "if it is not now too late.
+For I fear--I fear--"
+
+Colonel Wragge made a movement of assent with his head.
+
+"It shall be," he said.
+
+The place was still as the grave.
+
+I do not know what it was then that made us all three turn round with so
+sudden a start, for there was no sound audible to my ears, at least.
+
+The doctor was on the point of replacing the lid over the mummy, when he
+straightened up as if he had been shot.
+
+"There's something coming," said Colonel Wragge under his breath, and
+the doctor's eyes, peering down the small opening of the tunnel, showed
+me the true direction.
+
+A distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point
+about half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated.
+
+"It's the sand falling in," I said, though I knew it was foolish.
+
+"No," said the Colonel calmly, in a voice that seemed to have the ring
+of iron, "I've heard it for some time past. It is something alive--and
+it is coming nearer."
+
+He stared about him with a look of resolution that made his face almost
+noble. The horror in his heart was overmastering, yet he stood there
+prepared for anything that might come.
+
+"There's no other way out," John Silence said.
+
+He leaned the lid against the sand, and waited. I knew by the masklike
+expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes, that
+he anticipated something that might be very terrible--appalling.
+
+The Colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. I still held
+my candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the grease all
+over me; but the soldier had set his into the sand just behind his feet.
+
+Thoughts of being buried alive, of being smothered like rats in a trap,
+of being caught and done to death by some invisible and merciless force
+we could not grapple with, rushed into my mind. Then I thought of
+fire--of suffocation--of being roasted alive. The perspiration began to
+pour from my face.
+
+"Steady!" came the voice of Dr. Silence to me through the vault.
+
+For five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from
+each other's faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and all
+the time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually nearer.
+The tension, for me at least, was very near the breaking point when at
+last the cause of the disturbance reached the edge. It was hidden for a
+moment just behind the broken rim of soil. A jet of sand, shaken by the
+close vibration, trickled down on to the ground; I have never in my life
+seen anything fall with such laborious leisure. The next second,
+uttering a cry of curious quality, it came into view.
+
+And it was far more distressingly horrible than anything I had
+anticipated.
+
+For the sight of some Egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or even
+of some demon of fire, I think I was already half prepared; but when,
+instead, I saw the white visage of Miss Wragge framed in that round
+opening of sand, followed by her body crawling on all fours, her eyes
+bulging and reflecting the yellow glare of the candles, my first
+instinct was to turn and run like a frantic animal seeking a way of
+escape.
+
+But Dr. Silence, who seemed no whit surprised, caught my arm and
+steadied me, and we both saw the Colonel then drop upon his knees and
+come thus to a level with his sister. For more than a whole minute, as
+though struck in stone, the two faces gazed silently at each other:
+hers, for all the dreadful emotion in it, more like a gargoyle than
+anything human; and his, white and blank with an expression that was
+beyond either astonishment or alarm. She looked up; he looked down. It
+was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand close to
+the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights.
+
+Then John Silence moved forward and spoke in a voice that was very low,
+yet perfectly calm and natural.
+
+"I am glad you have come," he said. "You are the one person whose
+presence at this moment is most required. And I hope that you may yet be
+in time to appease the anger of the Fire, and to bring peace again to
+your household, and," he added lower still so that no one heard it but
+myself, "_safety to yourself_."
+
+And while her brother stumbled backwards, crushing a candle into the
+sand in his awkwardness, the old lady crawled farther into the vaulted
+chamber and slowly rose upon her feet.
+
+At the sight of the wrapped figure of the mummy I was fully prepared to
+see her scream and faint, but on the contrary, to my complete amazement,
+she merely bowed her head and dropped quietly upon her knees. Then,
+after a pause of more than a minute, she raised her eyes to the roof and
+her lips began to mutter as in prayer. Her right hand, meanwhile, which
+had been fumbling for some time at her throat suddenly came away, and
+before the gaze of all of us she held it out, palm upwards, over the
+grey and ancient figure outstretched below. And in it we beheld
+glistening the green jasper of the stolen scarabaeus.
+
+Her brother, leaning heavily against the wall behind, uttered a sound
+that was half cry, half exclamation, but John Silence, standing directly
+in front of her, merely fixed his eyes on her and pointed downwards to
+the staring face below.
+
+"Replace it," he said sternly, "where it belongs."
+
+Miss Wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened. We
+three men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. Only the reader who
+by some remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly laid
+from their tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat of the
+Egyptian sun warms their ancient bodies into the semblance of life, can
+form any conception of the ultimate horror we experienced when the
+silent figure before us moved in its grave of lead and sand. Slowly,
+before our eyes, it writhed, and, with a faint rustling of the
+immemorial cerements, rose up, and, through sightless and bandaged eyes,
+stared across the yellow candlelight at the woman who had violated it.
+
+I tried to move--her brother tried to move--but the sand seemed to hold
+our feet. I tried to cry--her brother tried to cry--but the sand seemed
+to fill our lungs and throat. We could only stare--and, even so, the
+sand seemed to rise like a desert storm and cloud our vision ...
+
+And when I managed at length to open my eyes again, the mummy was lying
+once more upon its back, motionless, the shrunken and painted face
+upturned towards the ceiling, and the old lady had tumbled forward and
+was lying in the semblance of death with her head and arms upon its
+crumbling body.
+
+But upon the wrappings of the throat I saw the green jasper of the
+sacred scarabaeus shining again like a living eye.
+
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before I did,
+and I found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise
+the frail body of the old lady, while John Silence carefully replaced
+the covering over the grave and scraped back the sand with his foot,
+while he issued brief directions.
+
+I heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that cramped
+tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated with
+heat, was in no sense a dream. It took us the best part of half an hour
+to reach the open air. And, even then, we had to wait a considerable
+time for the appearance of Dr. Silence. We carried her undiscovered into
+the house and up to her own room.
+
+"The mummy will cause no further disturbance," I heard Dr. Silence say
+to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night
+train, "provided always," he added significantly, "that you, and yours,
+cause it no disturbance."
+
+It was in a dream, too, that we left.
+
+"You did not see her face, I know," he said to me as we wrapped our rugs
+about us in the empty compartment. And when I shook my head, quite
+unable to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he
+turned toward me, his face pale, and genuinely sad.
+
+"Scorched and blasted," he whispered.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Three John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Three John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Three John Silence Stories
+
+Author: Algernon Blackwood
+
+Release Date: January 7, 2004 [EBook #10624]
+[This file last updated on August 3, 2010]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE JOHN SILENCE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+Three John Silence Stories
+
+ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
+
+
+
+
+To M.L.W. The Original of John Silence
+
+and
+
+My Companion in Many Adventures
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+Case I: A Psychical Invasion
+
+Case II: Ancient Sorceries
+
+Case III: The Nemesis of Fire
+
+
+
+
+CASE I: A PSYCHICAL INVASION
+
+
+I
+
+"And what is it makes you think I could be of use in this particular
+case?" asked Dr. John Silence, looking across somewhat sceptically at
+the Swedish lady in the chair facing him.
+
+"Your sympathetic heart and your knowledge of occultism--"
+
+"Oh, please--that dreadful word!" he interrupted, holding up a finger
+with a gesture of impatience.
+
+"Well, then," she laughed, "your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your
+trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may be
+disintegrated and destroyed--these strange studies you've been
+experimenting with all these years--"
+
+"If it's only a case of multiple personality I must really cry off,"
+interrupted the doctor again hastily, a bored expression in his eyes.
+
+"It's not that; now, please, be serious, for I want your help," she
+said; "and if I choose my words poorly you must be patient with my
+ignorance. The case I know will interest you, and no one else could deal
+with it so well. In fact, no ordinary professional man could deal with
+it at all, for I know of no treatment nor medicine that can restore a
+lost sense of humour!"
+
+"You begin to interest me with your 'case,'" he replied, and made
+himself comfortable to listen.
+
+Mrs. Sivendson drew a sigh of contentment as she watched him go to the
+tube and heard him tell the servant he was not to be disturbed.
+
+"I believe you have read my thoughts already," she said; "your intuitive
+knowledge of what goes on in other people's minds is positively
+uncanny."
+
+Her friend shook his head and smiled as he drew his chair up to a
+convenient position and prepared to listen attentively to what she had
+to say. He closed his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb
+the real meaning of a recital that might be inadequately expressed, for
+by this method he found it easier to set himself in tune with the living
+thoughts that lay behind the broken words.
+
+By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was
+rich by accident, and by choice--a doctor. That a man of independent
+means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who
+could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility
+of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help
+themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them, and, greatly to
+his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices.
+
+Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither
+consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner. He took no fees,
+being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no
+harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted
+unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very
+special reason. He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor
+could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large class
+of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the arts, could
+not afford the price of a week's comforts merely to be told to travel.
+And it was these he desired to help: cases often requiring special and
+patient study--things no doctor can give for a guinea, and that no one
+would dream of expecting him to give.
+
+But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with
+which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially
+appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible,
+elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions;
+and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the
+title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally
+as the "Psychic Doctor."
+
+In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted
+himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and
+spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no
+one seemed to know,--for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed
+no single other characteristic of the charlatan,--but the fact that it
+had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and
+that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever
+dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack,
+spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the
+genuineness of his attainments.
+
+For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the
+"man who knows." There was a trace of pity in his voice--contempt he
+never showed--when he spoke of their methods.
+
+"This classification of results is uninspired work at best," he said
+once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years.
+"It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is
+playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it
+would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily
+slip into place and explain themselves. For the sources are accessible,
+and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes
+practical investigation safe and possible."
+
+And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was
+significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power
+was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than
+a keen power of visualising.
+
+"It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more," he would
+say. "The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds
+a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you
+will find this always to be the real test."
+
+Thus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was
+able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference
+between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction
+that claimed his special powers. It was never necessary for him to
+resort to the cheap mysteries of divination; for, as I have heard him
+observe, after the solution of some peculiarly intricate problem--
+
+"Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are
+merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the
+inner vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no system is
+necessary at all."
+
+And the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man,
+the keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in the
+knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly,
+that thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.
+
+"Learn how to _think_," he would have expressed it, "and you have
+learned to tap power at its source."
+
+To look at--he was now past forty--he was sparely built, with speaking
+brown eyes in which shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence,
+while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness
+seen most often in the eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the
+mouth without disguising the grim determination of lips and jaw, and the
+face somehow conveyed an impression of transparency, almost of light, so
+delicately were the features refined away. On the fine forehead was that
+indefinable touch of peace that comes from identifying the mind with
+what is permanent in the soul, and letting the impermanent slip by
+without power to wound or distress; while, from his manner,--so gentle,
+quiet, sympathetic,--few could have guessed the strength of purpose that
+burned within like a great flame.
+
+"I think I should describe it as a psychical case," continued the
+Swedish lady, obviously trying to explain herself very intelligently,
+"and just the kind you like. I mean a case where the cause is hidden
+deep down in some spiritual distress, and--"
+
+"But the symptoms first, please, my dear Svenska," he interrupted, with
+a strangely compelling seriousness of manner, "and your deductions
+afterwards."
+
+She turned round sharply on the edge of her chair and looked him in the
+face, lowering her voice to prevent her emotion betraying itself too
+obviously.
+
+"In my opinion there's only one symptom," she half whispered, as though
+telling something disagreeable--"fear--simply fear."
+
+"Physical fear?"
+
+"I think not; though how can I say? I think it's a horror in the
+psychical region. It's no ordinary delusion; the man is quite sane; but
+he lives in mortal terror of something--"
+
+"I don't know what you mean by his 'psychical region,'" said the doctor,
+with a smile; "though I suppose you wish me to understand that his
+spiritual, and not his mental, processes are affected. Anyhow, try and
+tell me briefly and pointedly what you know about the man, his symptoms,
+his need for help, my peculiar help, that is, and all that seems vital
+in the case. I promise to listen devotedly."
+
+"I am trying," she continued earnestly, "but must do so in my own words
+and trust to your intelligence to disentangle as I go along. He is a
+young author, and lives in a tiny house off Putney Heath somewhere. He
+writes humorous stories--quite a genre of his own: Pender--you must have
+heard the name--Felix Pender? Oh, the man had a great gift, and married
+on the strength of it; his future seemed assured. I say 'had,' for quite
+suddenly his talent utterly failed him. Worse, it became transformed
+into its opposite. He can no longer write a line in the old way that was
+bringing him success--"
+
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes for a second and looked at her.
+
+"He still writes, then? The force has not gone?" he asked briefly, and
+then closed his eyes again to listen.
+
+"He works like a fury," she went on, "but produces nothing"--she
+hesitated a moment--"nothing that he can use or sell. His earnings have
+practically ceased, and he makes a precarious living by book-reviewing
+and odd jobs--very odd, some of them. Yet, I am certain his talent has
+not really deserted him finally, but is merely--"
+
+Again Mrs. Sivendson hesitated for the appropriate word.
+
+"In abeyance," he suggested, without opening his eyes.
+
+"Obliterated," she went on, after a moment to weigh the word, "merely
+obliterated by something else--"
+
+"By some one else?"
+
+"I wish I knew. All I can say is that he is haunted, and temporarily his
+sense of humour is shrouded--gone--replaced by something dreadful that
+writes other things. Unless something competent is done, he will simply
+starve to death. Yet he is afraid to go to a doctor for fear of being
+pronounced insane; and, anyhow, a man can hardly ask a doctor to take a
+guinea to restore a vanished sense of humour, can he?"
+
+"Has he tried any one at all--?"
+
+"Not doctors yet. He tried some clergymen and religious people; but they
+know so little and have so little intelligent sympathy. And most of them
+are so busy balancing on their own little pedestals--"
+
+John Silence stopped her tirade with a gesture.
+
+"And how is it that you know so much about him?" he asked gently.
+
+"I know Mrs. Pender well--I knew her before she married him--"
+
+"And is she a cause, perhaps?"
+
+"Not in the least. She is devoted; a woman very well educated, though
+without being really intelligent, and with so little sense of humour
+herself that she always laughs at the wrong places. But she has nothing
+to do with the cause of his distress; and, indeed, has chiefly guessed
+it from observing him, rather than from what little he has told her. And
+he, you know, is a really lovable fellow, hard-working,
+patient--altogether worth saving."
+
+Dr. Silence opened his eyes and went over to ring for tea. He did not
+know very much more about the case of the humorist than when he first
+sat down to listen; but he realised that no amount of words from his
+Swedish friend would help to reveal the real facts. A personal interview
+with the author himself could alone do that.
+
+"All humorists are worth saving," he said with a smile, as she poured
+out tea. "We can't afford to lose a single one in these strenuous days.
+I will go and see your friend at the first opportunity."
+
+She thanked him elaborately, effusively, with many words, and he, with
+much difficulty, kept the conversation thenceforward strictly to the
+teapot.
+
+And, as a result of this conversation, and a little more he had gathered
+by means best known to himself and his secretary, he was whizzing in his
+motor-car one afternoon a few days later up the Putney Hill to have his
+first interview with Felix Pender, the humorous writer who was the
+victim of some mysterious malady in his "psychical region" that had
+obliterated his sense of the comic and threatened to wreck his life and
+destroy his talent. And his desire to help was probably of equal
+strength with his desire to know and to investigate.
+
+The motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black
+panther lay concealed within its hood, and the doctor--the "psychic
+doctor," as he was sometimes called--stepped out through the gathering
+fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree
+and a stunted laurel shrubbery. The house was very small, and it was
+some time before any one answered the bell. Then, suddenly, a light
+appeared in the hall, and he saw a pretty little woman standing on the
+top step begging him to come in. She was dressed in grey, and the
+gaslight fell on a mass of deliberately brushed light hair. Stuffed,
+dusty birds, and a shabby array of African spears, hung on the wall
+behind her. A hat-rack, with a bronze plate full of very large cards,
+led his eye swiftly to a dark staircase beyond. Mrs. Pender had round
+eyes like a child's, and she greeted him with an effusiveness that
+barely concealed her emotion, yet strove to appear naturally cordial.
+Evidently she had been looking out for his arrival, and had outrun the
+servant girl. She was a little breathless.
+
+"I hope you've not been kept waiting--I think it's _most_ good of you to
+come--" she began, and then stopped sharp when she saw his face in the
+gaslight. There was something in Dr. Silence's look that did not
+encourage mere talk. He was in earnest now, if ever man was.
+
+"Good evening, Mrs. Pender," he said, with a quiet smile that won
+confidence, yet deprecated unnecessary words, "the fog delayed me a
+little. I am glad to see you."
+
+They went into a dingy sitting-room at the back of the house, neatly
+furnished but depressing. Books stood in a row upon the mantelpiece. The
+fire had evidently just been lit. It smoked in great puffs into the
+room.
+
+"Mrs. Sivendson said she thought you might be able to come," ventured
+the little woman again, looking up engagingly into his face and
+betraying anxiety and eagerness in every gesture. "But I hardly dared to
+believe it. I think it is really too good of you. My husband's case is
+so peculiar that--well, you know, I am quite sure any _ordinary_ doctor
+would say at once the asylum--"
+
+"Isn't he in, then?" asked Dr. Silence gently.
+
+"In the asylum?" she gasped. "Oh dear, no--not yet!"
+
+"In the house, I meant," he laughed.
+
+She gave a great sigh.
+
+"He'll be back any minute now," she replied, obviously relieved to see
+him laugh; "but the fact is, we didn't expect you so early--I mean, my
+husband hardly thought you would come at all."
+
+"I am always delighted to come--when I am really wanted, and can be of
+help," he said quickly; "and, perhaps, it's all for the best that your
+husband is out, for now that we are alone you can tell me something
+about his difficulties. So far, you know, I have heard very little."
+
+Her voice trembled as she thanked him, and when he came and took a chair
+close beside her she actually had difficulty in finding words with which
+to begin.
+
+"In the first place," she began timidly, and then continuing with a
+nervous incoherent rush of words, "he will be simply delighted that
+you've really come, because he said you were the only person he would
+consent to see at all--the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he
+doesn't know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He
+pretends with me that it's just a nervous breakdown, and I'm sure he
+doesn't realise all the odd things I've noticed him doing. But the main
+thing, I suppose--"
+
+"Yes, the main thing, Mrs. Pender," he said, encouragingly, noticing her
+hesitation.
+
+"--is that he thinks we are not alone in the house. That's the chief
+thing."
+
+"Tell me more facts--just facts."
+
+"It began last summer when I came back from Ireland; he had been here
+alone for six weeks, and I thought him looking tired and queer--ragged
+and scattered about the face, if you know what I mean, and his manner
+worn out. He said he had been writing hard, but his inspiration had
+somehow failed him, and he was dissatisfied with his work. His sense of
+humour was leaving him, or changing into something else, he said. There
+was something in the house, he declared, that"--she emphasised the
+words--"prevented his feeling funny."
+
+"Something in the house that prevented his feeling funny," repeated the
+doctor. "Ah, now we're getting to the heart of it!"
+
+"Yes," she resumed vaguely, "that's what he kept saying."
+
+"And what was it he _did_ that you thought strange?" he asked
+sympathetically. "Be brief, or he may be here before you finish."
+
+"Very small things, but significant it seemed to me. He changed his
+workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said
+all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they
+altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies--vile, debased
+tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. But now he says the same of
+the sitting-room, and he's gone back to the library."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"You see, there's so little I can tell you," she went on, with
+increasing speed and countless gestures. "I mean it's only very small
+things he does and says that are queer. What frightens me is that he
+assumes there is some one else in the house all the time--some one I
+never see. He does not actually say so, but on the stairs I've seen him
+standing aside to let some one pass; I've seen him open a door to let
+some one in or out; and often in our bedrooms he puts chairs about as
+though for some one else to sit in. Oh--oh yes, and once or twice," she
+cried--"once or twice--"
+
+She paused, and looked about her with a startled air.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Once or twice," she resumed hurriedly, as though she heard a sound that
+alarmed her, "I've heard him running--coming in and out of the rooms
+breathless as if something were after him--"
+
+The door opened while she was still speaking, cutting her words off in
+the middle, and a man came into the room. He was dark and clean-shaven,
+sallow rather, with the eyes of imagination, and dark hair growing
+scantily about the temples. He was dressed in a shabby tweed suit, and
+wore an untidy flannel collar at the neck. The dominant expression of
+his face was startled--hunted; an expression that might any moment leap
+into the dreadful stare of terror and announce a total loss of
+self-control.
+
+The moment he saw his visitor a smile spread over his worn features, and
+he advanced to shake hands.
+
+"I hoped you would come; Mrs. Sivendson said you might be able to find
+time," he said simply. His voice was thin and needy. "I am very glad to
+see you, Dr. Silence. It is 'Doctor,' is it not?"
+
+"Well, I am entitled to the description," laughed the other, "but I
+rarely get it. You know, I do not practise as a regular thing; that is,
+I only take cases that specially interest me, or--"
+
+He did not finish the sentence, for the men exchanged a glance of
+sympathy that rendered it unnecessary.
+
+"I have heard of your great kindness."
+
+"It's my hobby," said the other quickly, "and my privilege."
+
+"I trust you will still think so when you have heard what I have to tell
+you," continued the author, a little wearily. He led the way across the
+hall into the little smoking-room where they could talk freely and
+undisturbed.
+
+In the smoking-room, the door shut and privacy about them, Fender's
+attitude changed somewhat, and his manner became very grave. The doctor
+sat opposite, where he could watch his face. Already, he saw, it looked
+more haggard. Evidently it cost him much to refer to his trouble at all.
+
+"What I have is, in my belief, a profound spiritual affliction," he
+began quite bluntly, looking straight into the other's eyes.
+
+"I saw that at once," Dr. Silence said.
+
+"Yes, you saw that, of course; my atmosphere must convey that much to
+any one with psychic perceptions. Besides which, I feel sure from all
+I've heard, that you are really a soul-doctor, are you not, more than a
+healer merely of the body?"
+
+"You think of me too highly," returned the other; "though I prefer
+cases, as you know, in which the spirit is disturbed first, the body
+afterwards."
+
+"I understand, yes. Well, I have experienced a curious disturbance
+in--not in my physical region primarily. I mean my nerves are all right,
+and my body is all right. I have no delusions exactly, but my spirit is
+tortured by a calamitous fear which first came upon me in a strange
+manner."
+
+John Silence leaned forward a moment and took the speaker's hand and
+held it in his own for a few brief seconds, closing his eyes as he did
+so. He was not feeling his pulse, or doing any of the things that
+doctors ordinarily do; he was merely absorbing into himself the main
+note of the man's mental condition, so as to get completely his own
+point of view, and thus be able to treat his case with true sympathy. A
+very close observer might perhaps have noticed that a slight tremor ran
+through his frame after he had held the hand for a few seconds.
+
+"Tell me quite frankly, Mr. Pender," he said soothingly, releasing the
+hand, and with deep attention in his manner, "tell me all the steps that
+led to the beginning of this invasion. I mean tell me what the
+particular drug was, and why you took it, and how it affected you--"
+
+"Then you know it began with a drug!" cried the author, with undisguised
+astonishment.
+
+"I only know from what I observe in you, and in its effect upon myself.
+You are in a surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your
+atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others. This is the
+effect of a drug, but of no ordinary drug. Allow me to finish, please.
+If the higher rate of vibration spreads all over, you will become, of
+course, permanently cognisant of a much larger world than the one you
+know normally. If, on the other hand, the rapid portion sinks back to
+the usual rate, you will lose these occasional increased perceptions you
+now have."
+
+"You amaze me!" exclaimed the author; "for your words exactly describe
+what I have been feeling--"
+
+"I mention this only in passing, and to give you confidence before you
+approach the account of your real affliction," continued the doctor.
+"All perception, as you know, is the result of vibrations; and
+clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of
+vibrations. The awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about
+means no more than that. Your partial clairvoyance is easily explained.
+The only thing that puzzles me is how you managed to procure the drug,
+for it is not easy to get in pure form, and no adulterated tincture
+could have given you the terrific impetus I see you have acquired. But,
+please proceed now and tell me your story in your own way."
+
+"This _Cannabis indica_," the author went on, "came into my possession
+last autumn while my wife was away. I need not explain how I got it, for
+that has no importance; but it was the genuine fluid extract, and I could
+not resist the temptation to make an experiment. One of its effects, as
+you know, is to induce torrential laughter--"
+
+"Yes: sometimes."
+
+"--I am a writer of humorous tales, and I wished to increase my own
+sense of laughter--to see the ludicrous from an abnormal point of view.
+I wished to study it a bit, if possible, and--"
+
+"Tell me!"
+
+"I took an experimental dose. I starved for six hours to hasten the
+effect, locked myself into this room, and gave orders not to be
+disturbed. Then I swallowed the stuff and waited."
+
+"And the effect?"
+
+"I waited one hour, two, three, four, five hours. Nothing happened. No
+laughter came, but only a great weariness instead. Nothing in the room
+or in my thoughts came within a hundred miles of a humorous aspect."
+
+"Always a most uncertain drug," interrupted the doctor. "We make very
+small use of it on that account."
+
+"At two o'clock in the morning I felt so hungry and tired that I decided
+to give up the experiment and wait no longer. I drank some milk and went
+upstairs to bed. I felt flat and disappointed. I fell asleep at once and
+must have slept for about an hour, when I awoke suddenly with a great
+noise in my ears. It was the noise of my own laughter! I was simply
+shaking with merriment. At first I was bewildered and thought I had been
+laughing in dreams, but a moment later I remembered the drug, and was
+delighted to think that after all I had got an effect. It had been
+working all along, only I had miscalculated the time. The only
+unpleasant thing _then_ was an odd feeling that I had not waked
+naturally, but had been wakened by some one else--deliberately. This
+came to me as a certainty in the middle of my noisy laughter and
+distressed me."
+
+"Any impression who it could have been?" asked the doctor, now listening
+with close attention to every word, very much on the alert.
+
+Pender hesitated and tried to smile. He brushed his hair from his
+forehead with a nervous gesture.
+
+"You must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are
+quite as important as your certainties."
+
+"I had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten
+dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great
+strength and great ability--of great force--quite an unusual
+personality--and, I was certain, too--a woman."
+
+"A good woman?" asked John Silence quietly.
+
+Pender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it
+seemed to surprise him. But he shook his head quickly with an
+indefinable look of horror.
+
+"Evil," he answered briefly, "appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the
+sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness--the perversity
+of the unbalanced mind."
+
+He hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. A shade
+of suspicion showed itself in his eyes.
+
+"No," laughed the doctor, "you need not fear that I'm merely humouring
+you, or think you mad. Far from it. Your story interests me exceedingly
+and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell it.
+You see, I possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic byways."
+
+"I was shaking with such violent laughter," continued the narrator,
+reassured in a moment, "though with no clear idea what was amusing me,
+that I had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and
+was afraid I should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions.
+When the gas was lit I found the room empty, of course, and the door
+locked as usual. Then I half dressed and went out on to the landing, my
+hilarity better under control, and proceeded to go downstairs. I wished
+to record my sensations. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so as
+not to scream aloud and communicate my hysterics to the entire
+household."
+
+"And the presence of this--this--?"
+
+"It was hanging about me all the time," said Pender, "but for the moment
+it seemed to have withdrawn. Probably, too, my laughter killed all other
+emotions."
+
+"And how long did you take getting downstairs?"
+
+"I was just coming to that. I see you know all my 'symptoms' in advance,
+as it were; for, of course, I thought I should never get to the bottom.
+Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the narrow hall at
+the foot of the stairs--well, I could have sworn it was half an hour's
+journey had not my watch certified that it was a few seconds. Yet I
+walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I walked apparently
+without advancing, and at that rate it would have taken me a week to get
+down Putney Hill."
+
+"An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space
+sometimes--"
+
+"But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came
+horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of
+icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter--"
+
+"Yes; what?" asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his
+eyes.
+
+"--I was overwhelmed with terror," said Pender, lowering his reedy
+voice at the mere recollection of it.
+
+He paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in
+his eyes now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners of
+his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of that
+merriment still amused him. The combination of fear and laughter in his
+face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story; it also
+lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures.
+
+"Terror, was it?" repeated the doctor soothingly.
+
+"Yes, terror; for, though the Thing that woke me seemed to have gone,
+the memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair. Then
+I locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug made my
+movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach the door,
+and another five to get back to the chair again. The laughter, too, kept
+bubbling up inside me--great wholesome laughter that shook me like gusts
+of wind--so that even my terror almost made me laugh. Oh, but I may tell
+you, Dr. Silence, it was altogether vile, that mixture of fear and
+laughter, altogether vile!
+
+"Then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny
+side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The
+bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock
+looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of
+papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared and shook and
+held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And that footstool!
+Oh, that absurd footstool!"
+
+He lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands
+at the thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed, too.
+
+"Go on, please," he said, "I quite understand. I know something myself
+of the hashish laughter."
+
+The author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing quickly
+grave again.
+
+"So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless
+merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror.
+The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I
+could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror
+masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing
+emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the
+impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion--so you
+called it just now--of the 'person' who had wakened me: she was utterly
+evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for
+good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything in
+the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my heart.
+And this creature was putting--putting her--"
+
+He hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely.
+
+"Putting what?"
+
+"--putting ideas into my mind," he went on glancing nervously about the
+room. "Actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off the usual
+current and inject her own. How mad that sounds! I know it, but it's
+true. It's the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the operation
+terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh
+with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant,
+bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas,
+and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior
+and diabolical method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and
+ideas of evil and tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. Oh,
+doctor, I tell you again, it was unnerving!"
+
+John Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of the
+story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky sentences
+and lowered voice.
+
+"You saw nothing--no one--all this time?" he asked.
+
+"Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind
+there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman--large, dark-skinned,
+with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye--the left--so
+drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face--!"
+
+"A face you would recognise again?"
+
+Pender laughed dreadfully.
+
+"I wish I could forget it," he whispered, "I only wish I could forget
+it!" Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the doctor's
+hand with an emotional gesture.
+
+"I _must_ tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy," he
+cried, with a tremor in his voice, "and--that you do not think me mad. I
+have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere freedom of
+speech--the relief of sharing my affliction with another--has helped me
+already more than I can possibly say."
+
+Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened
+eyes. His voice was very gentle when he replied.
+
+"Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to
+me," he said, "for it threatens, not your physical existence but the
+temple of your psychical existence--the inner life. Your mind would
+not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the
+existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your
+spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be
+_spiritually insane_--a far more radical condition than merely being
+insane here."
+
+There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men sitting
+there facing one another.
+
+"Do you really mean--Good Lord!" stammered the author as soon as he
+could find his tongue.
+
+"What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only
+say now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite
+positive of being able to help you. Oh, there's no doubt as to that,
+believe me. In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of
+this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of
+opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I
+have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well
+as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and
+painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic
+treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened
+another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and
+thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to this
+house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to their
+precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself
+be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling nothing as
+yet. But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the rest of your
+wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk about the means
+of cure."
+
+Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then
+went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.
+
+"After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again
+to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up--at
+the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window,
+the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that
+outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to
+alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless
+sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and
+a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation."
+
+"Fear gone, too?" asked the doctor.
+
+"I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere
+nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that day
+I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed wonderfully
+quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the heart of
+true humour. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my
+experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I came
+to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden glances
+of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I was
+dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I had
+uttered it."
+
+"And why?"
+
+"It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could
+remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense
+was so altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to
+tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted.
+Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. There was
+laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my
+attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it read
+then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had come
+somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as merriment.
+The framework of humour was there, if you understand me, but the
+characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil."
+
+"Can you show me this writing?"
+
+The author shook his head.
+
+"I destroyed it," he whispered. "But, in the end, though of course much
+perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some
+after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my
+mind and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations
+that did not properly hold them."
+
+"And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?"
+
+"No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I
+forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular,
+there she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly--"
+
+"In what way, precisely?" interrupted the doctor.
+
+"Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures
+of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been
+foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature--"
+
+"The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality," murmured the
+doctor, making a quick note.
+
+"Eh? I didn't quite catch--"
+
+"Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you shall know their purport
+fully later."
+
+"Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the
+house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate
+fashion; and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and
+respectful towards it--to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself
+carefully deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at
+last, and, if I failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that
+it pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my
+very soul in its inmost abode. It certainly came before my wife so far
+as my attentions were concerned.
+
+"But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took
+it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience,
+delayed like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when
+it did come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. This time,
+however, there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time; it
+shortened instead of lengthened, so that I dressed and got downstairs in
+about twenty seconds, and the couple of hours I stayed and worked in the
+study passed literally like a period of ten minutes."
+
+"That is often true of an overdose," interjected the doctor, "and you
+may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour.
+It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it, and
+is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of thought."
+
+"This time," Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his
+excitement, "another extraordinary effect came to me, and I experienced
+a curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived external things
+through one large main sense-channel instead of through the five
+divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth. You will, I know,
+understand me when I tell you that I _heard_ sights and _saw_ sounds. No
+language can make this comprehensible, of course, and I can only say,
+for instance, that the striking of the clock I saw as a visible picture
+in the air before me. I saw the sounds of the tinkling bell. And in
+precisely the same way I heard the colours in the room, especially the
+colours of those books in the shelf behind you. Those red bindings I
+heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the French bindings next
+to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike the chattering of
+starlings. That brown bookcase muttered, and those green curtains
+opposite kept up a constant sort of rippling sound like the lower notes
+of a wood-horn. But I only was conscious of these sounds when I looked
+steadily at the different objects, and thought about them. The room, you
+understand, was not full of a chorus of notes; but when I concentrated
+my mind upon a colour, I heard, as well as saw, it."
+
+"That is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of _Cannabis indica_,"
+observed the doctor. "And it provoked laughter again, did it?"
+
+"Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so
+like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of a
+performing bear--which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know.
+But this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On
+the contrary, I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an
+intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and
+keen-minded.
+
+"Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to
+sketch--a talent not normally mine--I found that I could draw nothing
+but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head--always the same--the head of
+a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very
+drooping left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may
+imagine--"
+
+"And the expression of the face--?"
+
+Pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the
+air and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.
+
+"What I can only describe as--_blackness_," he replied in a low tone;
+"the face of a dark and evil soul."
+
+"You destroyed that, too?" queried the doctor sharply.
+
+"No; I have kept the drawings," he said, with a laugh, and rose to get
+them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.
+
+"Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see," he added, pushing a
+number of loose sheets under the doctor's eyes; "nothing but a few
+scrawly lines. That's all I found the next morning. I had really drawn
+no heads at all--nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. The
+pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which
+constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered
+scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed, of
+course, with the passing of the drug's effects. But the other thing did
+not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me. It is
+here still. It is real. I don't know how I can escape from it."
+
+"It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the
+house."
+
+"Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole
+means of support, and--well, you see, since this change I cannot even
+write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their
+mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible? I shall go
+mad if this continues."
+
+He screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected
+to see some haunting shape.
+
+"This influence in this house induced by my experiment, has killed in a
+flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humour, and though I still
+go on writing funny tales--I have a certain name you know--my
+inspiration has dried up, and much of what I write I have to burn--yes,
+doctor, to burn, before any one sees it."
+
+"As utterly alien to your own mind and personality?"
+
+"Utterly! As though some one else had written it--"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And shocking!" He passed his hand over his eyes a moment and let the
+breath escape softly through his teeth. "Yet most damnably clever in the
+consummate way the vile suggestions are insinuated under cover of a kind
+of high drollery. My stenographer left me of course--and I've been
+afraid to take another--"
+
+John Silence got up and began to walk about the room leisurely without
+speaking; he appeared to be examining the pictures on the wall and
+reading the names of the books lying about. Presently he paused on the
+hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and turned to look his patient
+quietly in the eyes. Pender's face was grey and drawn; the hunted
+expression dominated it; the long recital had told upon him.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Pender," he said, a curious glow showing about his fine,
+quiet face; "thank you for the sincerity and frankness of your account.
+But I think now there is nothing further I need ask you." He indulged in
+a long scrutiny of the author's haggard features drawing purposely the
+man's eyes to his own and then meeting them with a look of power and
+confidence calculated to inspire even the feeblest soul with courage.
+"And, to begin with," he added, smiling pleasantly, "let me assure you
+without delay that you need have no alarm, for you are no more insane or
+deluded than I myself am--"
+
+Pender heaved a deep sigh and tried to return the smile.
+
+"--and this is simply a case, so far as I can judge at present, of a
+very singular psychical invasion, and a very sinister one, too, if you
+perhaps understand what I mean--"
+
+"It's an odd expression; you used it before, you know," said the author
+wearily, yet eagerly listening to every word of the diagnosis, and
+deeply touched by the intelligent sympathy which did not at once
+indicate the lunatic asylum.
+
+"Possibly," returned the other, "and an odd affliction, too, you'll
+allow, yet one not unknown to the nations of antiquity, nor to those
+moderns, perhaps, who recognise the freedom of action under certain
+pathogenic conditions between this world and another."
+
+"And you think," asked Pender hastily, "that it is all primarily due to
+the _Cannabis_? There is nothing radically amiss with myself--nothing
+incurable, or--?"
+
+"Due entirely to the overdose," Dr. Silence replied emphatically, "to
+the drug's direct action upon your psychical being. It rendered you
+ultra-sensitive and made you respond to an increased rate of vibration.
+And, let me tell you, Mr. Pender, that your experiment might have had
+results far more dire. It has brought you into touch with a somewhat
+singular class of Invisible, but of one, I think, chiefly human in
+character. You might, however, just as easily have been drawn out of
+human range altogether, and the results of such a contingency would have
+been exceedingly terrible. Indeed, you would not now be here to tell the
+tale. I need not alarm you on that score, but mention it as a warning
+you will not misunderstand or underrate after what you have been
+through.
+
+"You look puzzled. You do not quite gather what I am driving at; and it
+is not to be expected that you should, for you, I suppose, are the
+nominal Christian with the nominal Christian's lofty standard of ethics,
+and his utter ignorance of spiritual possibilities. Beyond a somewhat
+childish understanding of 'spiritual wickedness in high places,' you
+probably have no conception of what is possible once you break-down the
+slender gulf that is mercifully fixed between you and that Outer World.
+But my studies and training have taken me far outside these orthodox
+trips, and I have made experiments that I could scarcely speak to you
+about in language that would be intelligible to you."
+
+He paused a moment to note the breathless interest of Pender's face and
+manner. Every word he uttered was calculated; he knew exactly the value
+and effect of the emotions he desired to waken in the heart of the
+afflicted being before him.
+
+"And from certain knowledge I have gained through various experiences,"
+he continued calmly, "I can diagnose your case as I said before to be
+one of psychical invasion."
+
+"And the nature of this--er--invasion?" stammered the bewildered writer
+of humorous tales.
+
+"There is no reason why I should not say at once that I do not yet quite
+know," replied Dr. Silence. "I may first have to make one or two
+experiments--"
+
+"On me?" gasped Pender, catching his breath.
+
+"Not exactly," the doctor said, with a grave smile, "but with your
+assistance, perhaps. I shall want to test the conditions of the
+house--to ascertain, impossible, the character of the forces, of this
+strange personality that has been haunting you--"
+
+"At present you have no idea exactly who--what--why--" asked the
+other in a wild flurry of interest, dread and amazement.
+
+"I have a very good idea, but no proof rather," returned the doctor.
+"The effects of the drug in altering the scale of time and space, and
+merging the senses have nothing primarily to do with the invasion. They
+come to any one who is fool enough to take an experimental dose. It is
+the other features of your case that are unusual. You see, you are now
+in touch with certain violent emotions, desires, purposes, still active
+in this house, that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil
+personality that lived here. How long ago, or why they still persist so
+forcibly, I cannot positively say. But I should judge that they are
+merely forces acting automatically with the momentum of their terrific
+original impetus."
+
+"Not directed by a living being, a conscious will, you mean?"
+
+"Possibly not--but none the less dangerous on that account, and more
+difficult to deal with. I cannot explain to you in a few minutes the
+nature of such things, for you have not made the studies that would
+enable you to follow me; but I have reason to believe that on the
+dissolution at death of a human being, its forces may still persist and
+continue to act in a blind, unconscious fashion. As a rule they speedily
+dissipate themselves, but in the case of a very powerful personality
+they may last a long time. And, in some cases--of which I incline to
+think this is one--these forces may coalesce with certain non-human
+entities who thus continue their life indefinitely and increase their
+strength to an unbelievable degree. If the original personality was
+evil, the beings attracted to the left-over forces will also be evil. In
+this case, I think there has been an unusual and dreadful aggrandisement
+of the thoughts and purposes left behind long ago by a woman of
+consummate wickedness and great personal power of character and
+intellect. Now, do you begin to see what I am driving at a little?"
+
+Pender stared fixedly at his companion, plain horror showing in his
+eyes. But he found nothing to say, and the doctor continued--
+
+"In your case, predisposed by the action of the drug, you have
+experienced the rush of these forces in undiluted strength. They wholly
+obliterate in you the sense of humour, fancy, imagination,--all that
+makes for cheerfulness and hope. They seek, though perhaps automatically
+only, to oust your own thoughts and establish themselves in their place.
+You are the victim of a psychical invasion. At the same time, you have
+become clairvoyant in the true sense. You are also a clairvoyant
+victim."
+
+Pender mopped his face and sighed. He left his chair and went over to
+the fireplace to warm himself.
+
+"You must think me a quack to talk like this, or a madman," laughed Dr.
+Silence. "But never mind that. I have come to help you, and I can help
+you if you will do what I tell you. It is very simple: you must leave
+this house at once. Oh, never mind the difficulties; we will deal with
+those together. I can place another house at your disposal, or I would
+take the lease here off your hands, and later have it pulled down. Your
+case interests me greatly, and I mean to see you through, so that you
+have no anxiety, and can drop back into your old groove of work
+tomorrow! The drug has provided you, and therefore me, with a shortcut
+to a very interesting experience. I am grateful to you."
+
+The author poked the fire vigorously, emotion rising in him like a
+tide. He glanced towards the door nervously.
+
+"There is no need to alarm your wife or to tell her the details of our
+conversation," pursued the other quietly. "Let her know that you will
+soon be in possession again of your sense of humour and your health, and
+explain that I am lending you another house for six months. Meanwhile I
+may have the right to use this house for a night or two for my
+experiment. Is that understood between us?"
+
+"I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart," stammered Pender,
+unable to find words to express his gratitude.
+
+Then he hesitated for a moment, searching the doctor's face anxiously.
+
+"And your experiment with the house?" he said at length.
+
+"Of the simplest character, my dear Mr. Pender. Although I am myself an
+artificially trained psychic, and consequently aware of the presence of
+discarnate entities as a rule, I have so far felt nothing here at all.
+This makes me sure that the forces acting here are of an unusual
+description. What I propose to do is to make an experiment with a view
+of drawing out this evil, coaxing it from its lair, so to speak, in
+order that it may _exhaust itself through me_ and become dissipated for
+ever. I have already been inoculated," he added; "I consider myself to
+be immune."
+
+"Heavens above!" gasped the author, collapsing on to a chair.
+
+"Hell beneath! might be a more appropriate exclamation," the doctor
+laughed. "But, seriously, Mr. Pender, this is what I propose to do--with
+your permission."
+
+"Of course, of course," cried the other, "you have my permission and my
+best wishes for success. I can see no possible objection, but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"I pray to Heaven you will not undertake this experiment alone, will
+you?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no; not alone."
+
+"You will take a companion with good nerves, and reliable in case of
+disaster, won't you?"
+
+"I shall bring two companions," the doctor said.
+
+"Ah, that's better. I feel easier. I am sure you must have among your
+acquaintances men who--"
+
+"I shall not think of bringing men, Mr. Pender."
+
+The other looked up sharply.
+
+"No, or women either; or children."
+
+"I don't understand. Who will you bring, then?"
+
+"Animals," explained the doctor, unable to prevent a smile at his
+companion's expression of surprise--"two animals, a cat and a dog."
+
+Pender stared as if his eyes would drop out upon the floor, and then
+led the way without another word into the adjoining room where his wife
+was awaiting them for tea.
+
+
+II
+
+A few days later the humorist and his wife, with minds greatly relieved,
+moved into a small furnished house placed at their free disposal in
+another part of London; and John Silence, intent upon his approaching
+experiment, made ready to spend a night in the empty house on the top of
+Putney Hill. Only two rooms were prepared for occupation: the study on
+the ground floor and the bedroom immediately above it; all other doors
+were to be locked, and no servant was to be left in the house. The motor
+had orders to call for him at nine o'clock the following morning.
+
+And, meanwhile, his secretary had instructions to look up the past
+history and associations of the place, and learn everything he could
+concerning the character of former occupants, recent or remote.
+
+The animals, by whose sensitiveness he intended to test any unusual
+conditions in the atmosphere of the building, Dr. Silence selected with
+care and judgment. He believed (and had already made curious experiments
+to prove it) that animals were more often, and more truly, clairvoyant
+than human beings. Many of them, he felt convinced, possessed powers of
+perception far superior to that mere keenness of the senses common to
+all dwellers in the wilds where the senses grow specially alert; they
+had what he termed "animal clairvoyance," and from his experiments with
+horses, dogs, cats, and even birds, he had drawn certain deductions,
+which, however, need not be referred to in detail here.
+
+Cats, in particular, he believed, were almost continuously conscious of
+a larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera,
+and quite beyond the reach of normal human organs. He had, further,
+observed that while dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such
+phenomena, cats on the other hand were soothed and satisfied. They
+welcomed manifestations as something belonging peculiarly to their own
+region.
+
+He selected his animals, therefore, with wisdom so that they might
+afford a differing test, each in its own way, and that one should not
+merely communicate its own excitement to the other. He took a dog and a
+cat.
+
+The cat he chose, now full grown, had lived with him since kittenhood, a
+kittenhood of perplexing sweetness and audacious mischief. Wayward it
+was and fanciful, ever playing its own mysterious games in the corners
+of the room, jumping at invisible nothings, leaping sideways into the
+air and falling with tiny moccasined feet on to another part of the
+carpet, yet with an air of dignified earnestness which showed that the
+performance was necessary to its own well-being, and not done merely to
+impress a stupid human audience. In the middle of elaborate washing it
+would look up, startled, as though to stare at the approach of some
+Invisible, cocking its little head sideways and putting out a velvet pad
+to inspect cautiously. Then it would get absent-minded, and stare with
+equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the onlookers),
+and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in quite a new
+place. Except for a white patch on its breast it was coal black. And its
+name was--Smoke.
+
+"Smoke" described its temperament as well as its appearance. Its
+movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of
+concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify
+its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of
+floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points only--the
+glowing eyes.
+
+All its forces ran to intelligence--secret intelligence, the wordless
+incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, _the_ cat for the
+business in hand.
+
+The selection of the dog was not so simple, for the doctor owned many;
+but after much deliberation he chose a collie, called Flame from his
+yellow coat. True, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and
+even beginning to grow deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very
+particular friend of Smoke's, and had fathered it from kittenhood
+upwards so that a subtle understanding existed between them. It was this
+that turned the balance in its favour, this and its courage. Moreover,
+though good-tempered, it was a terrible fighter, and its anger when
+provoked by a righteous cause was a fury of fire, and irresistible.
+
+It had come to him quite young, straight from the shepherd, with the air
+of the hills yet in its nostrils, and was then little more than skin and
+bones and teeth. For a collie it was sturdily built, its nose blunter
+than most, its yellow hair stiff rather than silky, and it had full
+eyes, unlike the slit eyes of its breed. Only its master could touch it,
+for it ignored strangers, and despised their pattings--when any dared to
+pat it. There was something patriarchal about the old beast. He was in
+earnest, and went through life with tremendous energy and big things in
+view, as though he had the reputation of his whole race to uphold. And
+to watch him fighting against odds was to understand why he was
+terrible.
+
+In his relations with Smoke he was always absurdly gentle; also he was
+fatherly; and at the same time betrayed a certain diffidence or shyness.
+He recognised that Smoke called for strong yet respectful management.
+The cat's circuitous methods puzzled him, and his elaborate pretences
+perhaps shocked the dog's liking for direct, undisguised action. Yet,
+while he failed to comprehend these tortuous feline mysteries, he was
+never contemptuous or condescending; and he presided over the safety of
+his furry black friend somewhat as a father, loving, but intuitive,
+might superintend the vagaries of a wayward and talented child. And, in
+return, Smoke rewarded him with exhibitions of fascinating and audacious
+mischief.
+
+And these brief descriptions of their characters are necessary for the
+proper understanding of what subsequently took place.
+
+With Smoke sleeping in the folds of his fur coat, and the collie lying
+watchful on the seat opposite, John Silence went down in his motor after
+dinner on the night of November 15th.
+
+And the fog was so dense that they were obliged to travel at quarter
+speed the entire way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was after ten o'clock when he dismissed the motor and entered the
+dingy little house with the latchkey provided by Pender. He found the
+hall gas turned low, and a fire in the study. Books and food had also
+been placed ready by the servant according to instructions. Coils of fog
+rushed in after him through the open door and filled the hall and
+passage with its cold discomfort.
+
+The first thing Dr. Silence did was to lock up Smoke in the study with a
+saucer of milk before the fire, and then make a search of the house with
+Flame. The dog ran cheerfully behind him all the way while he tried the
+doors of the other rooms to make sure they were locked. He nosed about
+into corners and made little excursions on his own account. His manner
+was expectant. He knew there must be something unusual about the
+proceeding, because it was contrary to the habits of his whole life not
+to be asleep at this hour on the mat in front of the fire. He kept
+looking up into his master's face, as door after door was tried, with an
+expression of intelligent sympathy, but at the same time a certain air
+of disapproval. Yet everything his master did was good in his eyes, and
+he betrayed as little impatience as possible with all this unnecessary
+journeying to and fro. If the doctor was pleased to play this sort of
+game at such an hour of the night, it was surely not for him to object.
+So he played it, too; and was very busy and earnest about it into the
+bargain.
+
+After an uneventful search they came down again to the study, and here
+Dr. Silence discovered Smoke washing his face calmly in front of the
+fire. The saucer of milk was licked dry and clean; the preliminary
+examination that cats always make in new surroundings had evidently
+been satisfactorily concluded. He drew an arm-chair up to the fire,
+stirred the coals into a blaze, arranged the table and lamp to his
+satisfaction for reading, and then prepared surreptitiously to watch the
+animals. He wished to observe them carefully without their being aware
+of it.
+
+Now, in spite of their respective ages, it was the regular custom of
+these two to play together every night before sleep. Smoke always made
+the advances, beginning with grave impudence to pat the dog's tail, and
+Flame played cumbrously, with condescension. It was his duty, rather
+than pleasure; he was glad when it was over, and sometimes he was very
+determined and refused to play at all.
+
+And this night was one of the occasions on which he was firm.
+
+The doctor, looking cautiously over the top of his book, watched the cat
+begin the performance. It started by gazing with an innocent expression
+at the dog where he lay with nose on paws and eyes wide open in the
+middle of the floor. Then it got up and made as though it meant to walk
+to the door, going deliberately and very softly. Flame's eyes followed
+it until it was beyond the range of sight, and then the cat turned
+sharply and began patting his tail tentatively with one paw. The tail
+moved slightly in reply, and Smoke changed paws and tapped it again. The
+dog, however, did not rise to play as was his wont, and the cat fell to
+parting it briskly with both paws. Flame still lay motionless.
+
+This puzzled and bored the cat, and it went round and stared hard into
+its friend's face to see what was the matter. Perhaps some inarticulate
+message flashed from the dog's eyes into its own little brain, making it
+understand that the programme for the night had better not begin with
+play. Perhaps it only realised that its friend was immovable. But,
+whatever the reason, its usual persistence thenceforward deserted it,
+and it made no further attempts at persuasion. Smoke yielded at once to
+the dog's mood; it sat down where it was and began to wash.
+
+But the washing, the doctor noted, was by no means its real purpose; it
+only used it to mask something else; it stopped at the most busy and
+furious moments and began to stare about the room. Its thoughts wandered
+absurdly. It peered intently at the curtains; at the shadowy corners; at
+empty space above; leaving its body in curiously awkward positions for
+whole minutes together. Then it turned sharply and stared with a sudden
+signal of intelligence at the dog, and Flame at once rose somewhat
+stiffly to his feet and began to wander aimlessly and restlessly to and
+fro about the floor. Smoke followed him, padding quietly at his heels.
+Between them they made what seemed to be a deliberate search of the
+room.
+
+And, here, as he watched them, noting carefully every detail of the
+performance over the top of his book, yet making no effort to
+interfere, it seemed to the doctor that the first beginnings of a faint
+distress betrayed themselves in the collie, and in the cat the stirrings
+of a vague excitement.
+
+He observed them closely. The fog was thick in the air, and the tobacco
+smoke from his pipe added to its density; the furniture at the far end
+stood mistily, and where the shadows congregated in hanging clouds under
+the ceiling, it was difficult to see clearly at all; the lamplight only
+reached to a level of five feet from the floor, above which came layers
+of comparative darkness, so that the room appeared twice as lofty as it
+actually was. By means of the lamp and the fire, however, the carpet was
+everywhere clearly visible.
+
+The animals made their silent tour of the floor, sometimes the dog
+leading, sometimes the cat; occasionally they looked at one another as
+though exchanging signals; and once or twice, in spite of the limited
+space, he lost sight of one or other among the fog and the shadows.
+Their curiosity, it appeared to him, was something more than the
+excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a strange room; yet, so
+far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely kept his mind
+quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part should
+communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the value of their
+independent behaviour.
+
+They made a very thorough journey, leaving no piece of furniture
+unexamined, or unsmelt. Flame led the way, walking slowly with lowered
+head, and Smoke followed demurely at his heels, making a transparent
+pretence of not being interested, yet missing nothing. And, at length,
+they returned, the old collie first, and came to rest on the mat before
+the fire. Flame rested his muzzle on his master's knee, smiling
+beatifically while he patted the yellow head and spoke his name; and
+Smoke, coming a little later, pretending he came by chance, looked from
+the empty saucer to his face, lapped up the milk when it was given him
+to the last drop, and then sprang upon his knees and curled round for
+the sleep it had fully earned and intended to enjoy.
+
+Silence descended upon the room. Only the breathing of the dog upon the
+mat came through the deep stillness, like the pulse of time marking the
+minutes; and the steady drip, drip of the fog outside upon the
+window-ledges dismally testified to the inclemency of the night beyond.
+And the soft crashings of the coals as the fire settled down into the
+grate became less and less audible as the fire sank and the flames
+resigned their fierceness.
+
+It was now well after eleven o'clock, and Dr. Silence devoted himself
+again to his book. He read the words on the printed page and took in
+their meaning superficially, yet without starting into life the
+correlations of thought and suggestions that should accompany
+interesting reading. Underneath, all the while, his mental energies were
+absorbed in watching, listening, waiting for what might come. He was not
+over-sanguine himself, yet he did not wish to be taken by surprise.
+Moreover, the animals, his sensitive barometers, had incontinently gone
+to sleep.
+
+After reading a dozen pages, however, he realised that his mind was
+really occupied in reviewing the features of Pender's extraordinary
+story, and that it was no longer necessary to steady his imagination by
+studying the dull paragraphs detailed in the pages before him. He laid
+down his book accordingly, and allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the
+features of the Case. Speculations as to the meaning, however, he
+rigorously suppressed, knowing that such thoughts would act upon his
+imagination like wind upon the glowing embers of a fire.
+
+As the night wore on the silence grew deeper and deeper, and only at
+rare intervals he heard the sound of wheels on the main road a hundred
+yards away, where the horses went at a walking pace owing to the density
+of the fog. The echo of pedestrian footsteps no longer reached him, the
+clamour of occasional voices no longer came down the side street. The
+night, muffled by fog, shrouded by veils of ultimate mystery, hung about
+the haunted villa like a doom. Nothing in the house stirred. Stillness,
+in a thick blanket, lay over the upper storeys. Only the mist in the
+room grew more dense, he thought, and the damp cold more penetrating.
+Certainly, from time to time, he shivered.
+
+The collie, now deep in slumber, moved occasionally,--grunted, sighed,
+or twitched his legs in dreams. Smoke lay on his knees, a pool of warm,
+black fur, only the closest observation detecting the movement of his
+sleek sides. It was difficult to distinguish exactly where his head and
+body joined in that circle of glistening hair; only a black satin nose
+and a tiny tip of pink tongue betrayed the secret.
+
+Dr. Silence watched him, and felt comfortable. The collie's breathing
+was soothing. The fire was well built, and would burn for another two
+hours without attention. He was not conscious of the least nervousness.
+He particularly wished to remain in his ordinary and normal state of
+mind, and to force nothing. If sleep came naturally, he would let it
+come--and even welcome it. The coldness of the room, when the fire died
+down later, would be sure to wake him again; and it would then be time
+enough to carry these sleeping barometers up to bed. From various
+psychic premonitions he knew quite well that the night would not pass
+without adventure; but he did not wish to force its arrival; and he
+wished to remain normal, and let the animals remain normal, so that,
+when it came, it would be unattended by excitement or by any straining
+of the attention. Many experiments had made him wise. And, for the rest,
+he had no fear.
+
+Accordingly, after a time, he did fall asleep as he had expected, and
+the last thing he remembered, before oblivion slipped up over his eyes
+like soft wool, was the picture of Flame stretching all four legs at
+once, and sighing noisily as he sought a more comfortable position for
+his paws and muzzle upon the mat.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a good deal later when he became aware that a weight lay upon his
+chest, and that something was pencilling over his face and mouth. A soft
+touch on the cheek woke him. Something was patting him.
+
+He sat up with a jerk, and found himself staring straight into a pair of
+brilliant eyes, half green, half black. Smoke's face lay level with his
+own; and the cat had climbed up with its front paws upon his chest.
+
+The lamp had burned low and the fire was nearly out, yet Dr. Silence saw
+in a moment that the cat was in an excited state. It kneaded with its
+front paws into his chest, shifting from one to the other. He felt them
+prodding against him. It lifted a leg very carefully and patted his
+cheek gingerly. Its fur, he saw, was standing ridgewise upon its back;
+the ears were flattened back somewhat; the tail was switching sharply.
+The cat, of course, had wakened him with a purpose, and the instant he
+realised this, he set it upon the arm of the chair and sprang up with a
+quick turn to face the empty room behind him. By some curious instinct,
+his arms of their own accord assumed an attitude of defence in front of
+him, as though to ward off something that threatened his safety. Yet
+nothing was visible. Only shapes of fog hung about rather heavily in the
+air, moving slightly to and fro.
+
+His mind was now fully alert, and the last vestiges of sleep gone. He
+turned the lamp higher and peered about him. Two things he became aware
+of at once: one, that Smoke, while excited, was _pleasurably_ excited;
+the other, that the collie was no longer visible upon the mat at his
+feet. He had crept away to the corner of the wall farthest from the
+window, and lay watching the room with wide-open eyes, in which lurked
+plainly something of alarm.
+
+Something in the dog's behaviour instantly struck Dr. Silence as
+unusual, and, calling him by name, he moved across to pat him. Flame got
+up, wagged his tail, and came over slowly to the rug, uttering a low
+sound that was half growl, half whine. He was evidently perturbed about
+something, and his master was proceeding to administer comfort when his
+attention was suddenly drawn to the antics of his other four-footed
+companion, the cat.
+
+And what he saw filled him with something like amazement.
+
+Smoke had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied
+the middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as
+ramrods, it was steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow
+space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of
+pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make
+expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back made
+it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of
+beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an ecstasy.
+
+At the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again
+along the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little
+muffled drums. It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against
+the ankles of some one who remained invisible. A thrill ran down the
+doctor's spine as he stood and stared. His experiment was growing
+interesting at last.
+
+He called the collie's attention to his friend's performance to see
+whether he too was aware of anything standing there upon the carpet, and
+the dog's behaviour was significant and corroborative. He came as far as
+his master's knees and then stopped dead, refusing to investigate
+closely. In vain Dr. Silence urged him; he wagged his tail, whined a
+little, and stood in a half-crouching attitude, staring alternately at
+the cat and at his master's face. He was, apparently, both puzzled and
+alarmed, and the whine went deeper and deeper down into his throat till
+it changed into an ugly snarl of awakening anger.
+
+Then the doctor called to him in a tone of command he had never known to
+be disregarded; but still the dog, though springing up in response,
+declined to move nearer. He made tentative motions, pranced a little
+like a dog about to take to water, pretended to bark, and ran to and fro
+on the carpet. So far there was no actual fear in his manner, but he was
+uneasy and anxious, and nothing would induce him to go within touching
+distance of the walking cat. Once he made a complete circuit, but always
+carefully out of reach; and in the end he returned to his master's legs
+and rubbed vigorously against him. Flame did not like the performance at
+all: that much was quite clear.
+
+For several minutes John Silence watched the performance of the cat with
+profound attention and without interfering. Then he called to the animal
+by name.
+
+"Smoke, you mysterious beastie, what in the world are you about?" he
+said, in a coaxing tone.
+
+The cat looked up at him for a moment, smiling in its ecstasy, blinking
+its eyes, but too happy to pause. He spoke to it again. He called to it
+several times, and each time it turned upon him its blazing eyes, drunk
+with inner delight, opening and shutting its lips, its body large and
+rigid with excitement. Yet it never for one instant paused in its short
+journeys to and fro.
+
+He noted exactly what it did: it walked, he saw, the same number of
+paces each time, some six or seven steps, and then it turned sharply and
+retraced them. By the pattern of the great roses in the carpet he
+measured it. It kept to the same direction and the same line. It behaved
+precisely as though it were rubbing against something solid.
+Undoubtedly, there was something standing there on that strip of carpet,
+something invisible to the doctor, something that alarmed the dog, yet
+caused the cat unspeakable pleasure.
+
+"Smokie!" he called again, "Smokie, you black mystery, what is it
+excites you so?"
+
+Again the cat looked up at him for a brief second, and then continued
+its sentry-walk, blissfully happy, intensely preoccupied. And, for an
+instant, as he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness
+stirred in the depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment
+upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him.
+
+There rose in him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with
+the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it,
+the domestic cat--their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their
+incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human
+beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. As he
+watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along
+the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of
+darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred in his
+heart a feeling strangely akin to awe. Its indifference to human kind,
+its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh
+meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its
+real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals. Its
+absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater's words
+that "no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself
+with the mysterious"; and he became suddenly aware that the presence of
+the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of Putney Hill was
+uncommonly welcome to him. He was glad to feel that Flame's dependable
+personality was with him. The savage growling at his heels was a
+pleasant sound. He was glad to hear it. That marching cat made him
+uneasy.
+
+Finding that Smoke paid no further attention to his words, the doctor
+decided upon action. Would it rub against his leg, too? He would take it
+by surprise and see.
+
+He stepped quickly forward and placed himself upon the exact strip of
+carpet where it walked.
+
+But no cat is ever taken by surprise! The moment he occupied the space
+of the Intruder, setting his feet on the woven roses midway in the line
+of travel, Smoke suddenly stopped purring and sat down. If lifted up its
+face with the most innocent stare imaginable of its green eyes. He could
+have sworn it laughed. It was a perfect child again. In a single second
+it had resumed its simple, domestic manner; and it gazed at him in such
+a way that he almost felt Smoke was the normal being, and _his_ was the
+eccentric behaviour that was being watched. It was consummate, the
+manner in which it brought about this change so easily and so quickly.
+
+"Superb little actor!" he laughed in spite of himself, and stooped to
+stroke the shining black back. But, in a flash, as he touched its fur,
+the cat turned and spat at him viciously, striking at his hand with one
+paw. Then, with a hurried scutter of feet, it shot like a shadow across
+the floor and a moment later was calmly sitting over by the
+window-curtains washing its face as though nothing interested it in the
+whole world but the cleanness of its cheeks and whiskers.
+
+John Silence straightened himself up and drew a long breath. He realised
+that the performance was temporarily at an end. The collie, meanwhile,
+who had watched the whole proceeding with marked disapproval, had now
+lain down again upon the mat by the fire, no longer growling. It seemed
+to the doctor just as though something that had entered the room while
+he slept, alarming the dog, yet bringing happiness to the cat, had now
+gone out again, leaving all as it was before. Whatever it was that
+excited its blissful attentions had retreated for the moment.
+
+He realised this intuitively. Smoke evidently realised it, too, for
+presently he deigned to march back to the fireplace and jump upon his
+master's knees. Dr. Silence, patient and determined, settled down once
+more to his book. The animals soon slept; the fire blazed cheerfully;
+and the cold fog from outside poured into the room through every
+available chink and crannie.
+
+For a long time silence and peace reigned in the room and Dr. Silence
+availed himself of the quietness to make careful notes of what had
+happened. He entered for future use in other cases an exhaustive
+analysis of what he had observed, especially with regard to the effect
+upon the two animals. It is impossible here, nor would it be
+intelligible to the reader unversed in the knowledge of the region known
+to a scientifically trained psychic like Dr. Silence, to detail these
+observations. But to him it was clear, up to a certain point--for the
+rest he must still wait and watch. So far, at least, he realised that
+while he slept in the chair--that is, while his will was dormant--the
+room had suffered intrusion from what he recognised as an intensely
+active Force, and might later be forced to acknowledge as something more
+than merely a blind force, namely, a distinct personality.
+
+So far it had affected himself scarcely at all, but had acted directly
+upon the simpler organisms of the animals. It stimulated keenly the
+centres of the cat's psychic being, inducing a state of instant
+happiness (intensifying its consciousness probably in the same way a
+drug or stimulant intensifies that of a human being); whereas it alarmed
+the less sensitive dog, causing it to feel a vague apprehension and
+distress.
+
+His own sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse it
+temporarily, yet he felt convinced--the indications were not lacking
+even while he sat there making notes--that it still remained near to
+him, conditionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering
+force for a second attack.
+
+And, further, he intuitively understood that the relations between the
+two animals had undergone a subtle change: that the cat had become
+immeasurably superior, confident, sure of itself in its own peculiar
+region, whereas Flame had been weakened by an attack he could not
+comprehend and knew not how to reply to. Though not yet afraid, he was
+defiant--ready to act against a fear that he felt to be approaching. He
+was no longer fatherly and protective towards the cat. Smoke held the
+key to the situation; and both he and the cat knew it.
+
+Thus, as the minutes passed, John Silence sat and waited, keenly on the
+alert, wondering how soon the attack would be renewed, and at what point
+it would be diverted from the animals and directed upon himself.
+
+The book lay on the floor beside him, his notes were complete. With one
+hand on the cat's fur, and the dog's front paws resting against his
+feet, the three of them dozed comfortably before the hot fire while the
+night wore on and the silence deepened towards midnight.
+
+It was well after one o'clock in the morning when Dr. Silence turned the
+lamp out and lighted the candle preparatory to going up to bed. Then
+Smoke suddenly woke with a loud sharp purr and sat up. It neither
+stretched, washed nor turned: it listened. And the doctor, watching it,
+realised that a certain indefinable change had come about that very
+moment in the room. A swift readjustment of the forces within the four
+walls had taken place--a new disposition of their personal equations.
+The balance was destroyed, the former harmony gone. Smoke, most
+sensitive of barometers, had been the first to feel it, but the dog was
+not slow to follow suit, for on looking down he noted that Flame was no
+longer asleep. He was lying with eyes wide open, and that same instant
+he sat up on his great haunches and began to growl.
+
+Dr. Silence was in the act of taking the matches to re-light the lamp
+when an audible movement in the room behind him made him pause. Smoke
+leaped down from his knee and moved forward a few paces across the
+carpet. Then it stopped and stared fixedly; and the doctor stood up on
+the rug to watch.
+
+As he rose the sound was repeated, and he discovered that it was not in
+the room as he first thought, but outside, and that it came from more
+directions than one. There was a rushing, sweeping noise against the
+window-panes, and simultaneously a sound of something brushing against
+the door--out in the hall. Smoke advanced sedately across the carpet,
+twitching his tail, and sat down within a foot of the door. The
+influence that had destroyed the harmonious conditions of the room had
+apparently moved in advance of its cause. Clearly, something was about
+to happen.
+
+For the first time that night John Silence hesitated; the thought of
+that dark narrow hall-way, choked with fog, and destitute of human
+comfort, was unpleasant. He became aware of a faint creeping of his
+flesh. He knew, of course, that the actual opening of the door was not
+necessary to the invasion of the room that was about to take place,
+since neither doors nor windows, nor any other solid barriers could
+interpose an obstacle to what was seeking entrance. Yet the opening of
+the door would be significant and symbolic, and he distinctly shrank
+from it.
+
+But for a moment only. Smoke, turning with a show of impatience,
+recalled him to his purpose, and he moved past the sitting, watching
+creature, and deliberately opened the door to its full width.
+
+What subsequently happened, happened in the feeble and flickering light
+of the solitary candle on the mantlepiece.
+
+Through the opened door he saw the hall, dimly lit and thick with fog.
+Nothing, of course, was visible--nothing but the hat-stand, the African
+spears in dark lines upon the wall and the high-backed wooden chair
+standing grotesquely underneath on the oilcloth floor. For one instant
+the fog seemed to move and thicken oddly; but he set that down to the
+score of the imagination. The door had opened upon nothing.
+
+Yet Smoke apparently thought otherwise, and the deep growling of the
+collie from the mat at the back of the room seemed to confirm his
+judgment.
+
+For, proud and self-possessed, the cat had again risen to his feet, and
+having advanced to the door, was now ushering some one slowly into the
+room. Nothing could have been more evident. He paced from side to side,
+bowing his little head with great _empressement_ and holding his
+stiffened tail aloft like a flag-staff. He turned this way and that,
+mincing to and fro, and showing signs of supreme satisfaction. He was in
+his element. He welcomed the intrusion, and apparently reckoned that his
+companions, the doctor and the dog, would welcome it likewise.
+
+The Intruder had returned for a second attack.
+
+Dr. Silence moved slowly backwards and took up his position on the
+hearthrug, keying himself up to a condition of concentrated attention.
+
+He noted that Flame stood beside him, facing the room, with body
+motionless, and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious
+swaying movement. His eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and
+jaws thrust forward, his legs tense and ready to leap. Savage, ready for
+attack or defence, yet dreadfully puzzled and perhaps already a little
+cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on his spine and sides positively
+bristling outwards as though a wind played through it. In the dim
+firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf, silent, eyes
+shooting dark fire, exceedingly formidable. It was Flame, the terrible.
+
+Smoke, meanwhile, advanced from the door towards the middle of the room,
+adopting the very slow pace of an invisible companion. A few feet away
+it stopped and began to smile and blink its eyes. There was something
+deliberately coaxing in its attitude as it stood there undecided on the
+carpet, clearly wishing to effect some sort of introduction between the
+Intruder and its canine friend and ally. It assumed its most winning
+manners, purring, smiling, looking persuasively from one to the other,
+and making quick tentative steps first in one direction and then in the
+other. There had always existed such perfect understanding between them
+in everything. Surely Flame would appreciate Smoke's intention now, and
+acquiesce.
+
+But the old collie made no advances. He bared his teeth, lifting his
+lips till the gums showed, and stood stockstill with fixed eyes and
+heaving sides. The doctor moved a little farther back, watching intently
+the smallest movement, and it was just then he divined suddenly from the
+cat's behaviour and attitude that it was not only a single companion it
+had ushered into the room, but _several_. It kept crossing over from one
+to the other, looking up at each in turn. It sought to win over the dog
+to friendliness with them all. The original Intruder had come back with
+reinforcements. And at the same time he further realised that the
+Intruder was something more than a blindly acting force, impersonal
+though destructive. It was a Personality, and moreover a great
+personality. And it was accompanied for the purposes of assistance by a
+host of other personalities, minor in degree, but similar in kind.
+
+He braced himself in the corner against the mantelpiece and waited, his
+whole being roused to defence, for he was now fully aware that the
+attack had spread to include himself as well as the animals, and he
+must be on the alert. He strained his eyes through the foggy atmosphere,
+trying in vain to see what the cat and dog saw; but the candlelight
+threw an uncertain and flickering light across the room and his eyes
+discerned nothing. On the floor Smoke moved softly in front of him like
+a black shadow, his eyes gleaming as he turned his head, still trying
+with many insinuating gestures and much purring to bring about the
+introductions he desired.
+
+But it was all in vain. Flame stood riveted to one spot, motionless as a
+figure carved in stone.
+
+Some minutes passed, during which only the cat moved, and then there
+came a sharp change. Flame began to back towards the wall. He moved his
+head from side to side as he went, sometimes turning to snap at
+something almost behind him. They were advancing upon him, trying to
+surround him. His distress became very marked from now onwards, and it
+seemed to the doctor that his anger merged into genuine terror and
+became overwhelmed by it. The savage growl sounded perilously like a
+whine, and more than once he tried to dive past his master's legs, as
+though hunting for a way of escape. He was trying to avoid something
+that everywhere blocked the way.
+
+This terror of the indomitable fighter impressed the doctor enormously;
+yet also painfully; stirring his impatience; for he had never before
+seen the dog show signs of giving in, and it distressed him to witness
+it. He knew, however, that he was not giving in easily, and understood
+that it was really impossible for him to gauge the animal's sensations
+properly at all. What Flame felt, and saw, must be terrible indeed to
+turn him all at once into a coward. He faced something that made him
+afraid of more than his life merely. The doctor spoke a few quick words
+of encouragement to him, and stroked the bristling hair. But without
+much success. The collie seemed already beyond the reach of comfort such
+as that, and the collapse of the old dog followed indeed very speedily
+after this.
+
+And Smoke, meanwhile, remained behind, watching the advance, but not
+joining in it; sitting, pleased and expectant, considering that all was
+going well and as it wished. It was kneading on the carpet with its
+front paws--slowly, laboriously, as though its feet were dipped in
+treacle. The sound its claws made as they caught in the threads was
+distinctly audible. It was still smiling, blinking, purring.
+
+Suddenly the collie uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to
+one side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom.
+The next instant he dashed past his master's legs, almost upsetting his
+balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly
+against walls and furniture. But that bark was significant; the doctor
+had heard it before and knew what it meant: for it was the cry of the
+fighter against odds and it meant that the old beast had found his
+courage again. Possibly it was only the courage of despair, but at any
+rate the fighting would be terrific. And Dr. Silence understood, too,
+that he dared not interfere. Flame must fight his own enemies in his own
+way.
+
+But the cat, too, had heard that dreadful bark; and it, too, had
+understood. This was more than it had bargained for. Across the dim
+shadows of that haunted room there must have passed some secret signal
+of distress between the animals. Smoke stood up and looked swiftly about
+him. He uttered a piteous meow and trotted smartly away into the greater
+darkness by the windows. What his object was only those endowed with the
+spirit-like intelligence of cats might know. But, at any rate, he had at
+last ranged himself on the side of his friend. And the little beast
+meant business.
+
+At the same moment the collie managed to gain the door. The doctor saw
+him rush through into the hall like a flash of yellow light. He shot
+across the oilcloth, and tore up the stairs, but in another second he
+appeared again, flying down the steps and landing at the bottom in a
+tumbling heap, whining, cringing, terrified. The doctor saw him slink
+back into the room again and crawl round by the wall towards the cat.
+Was, then, even the staircase occupied? Did _They_ stand also in the
+hall? Was the whole house crowded from floor to ceiling?
+
+The thought came to add to the keen distress he felt at the sight of the
+collie's discomfiture. And, indeed, his own personal distress had
+increased in a marked degree during the past minutes, and continued to
+increase steadily to the climax. He recognised that the drain on his own
+vitality grew steadily, and that the attack was now directed against
+himself even more than against the defeated dog, and the too much
+deceived cat.
+
+It all seemed so rapid and uncalculated after that--the events that took
+place in this little modern room at the top of Putney Hill between
+midnight and sunrise--that Dr. Silence was hardly able to follow and
+remember it all. It came about with such uncanny swiftness and terror;
+the light was so uncertain; the movements of the black cat so difficult
+to follow on the dark carpet, and the doctor himself so weary and taken
+by surprise--that he found it almost impossible to observe accurately,
+or to recall afterwards precisely what it was he had seen or in what
+order the incidents had taken place. He never could understand what
+defect of vision on his part made it seem as though the cat had
+duplicated itself at first, and then increased indefinitely, so that
+there were at least a dozen of them darting silently about the floor,
+leaping softly on to chairs and tables, passing like shadows from the
+open door to the end of the room, all black as sin, with brilliant green
+eyes flashing fire in all directions. It was like the reflections from a
+score of mirrors placed round the walls at different angles. Nor could
+he make out at the time why the size of the room seemed to have altered,
+grown much larger, and why it extended away behind him where ordinarily
+the wall should have been. The snarling of the enraged and terrified
+collie sounded sometimes so far away; the ceiling seemed to have raised
+itself so much higher than before, and much of the furniture had changed
+in appearance and shifted marvellously.
+
+It was all so confused and confusing, as though the little room he knew
+had become merged and transformed into the dimensions of quite another
+chamber, that came to him, with its host of cats and its strange
+distances, in a sort of vision.
+
+But these changes came about a little later, and at a time when his
+attention was so concentrated upon the proceedings of Smoke and the
+collie, that he only observed them, as it were, subconsciously. And the
+excitement, the flickering candlelight, the distress he felt for the
+collie, and the distorting atmosphere of fog were the poorest possible
+allies to careful observation.
+
+At first he was only aware that the dog was repeating his short
+dangerous bark from time to time, snapping viciously at the empty air, a
+foot or so from the ground. Once, indeed, he sprang upwards and
+forwards, working furiously with teeth and paws, and with a noise like
+wolves fighting, but only to dash back the next minute against the wall
+behind him. Then, after lying still for a bit, he rose to a crouching
+position as though to spring again, snarling horribly and making short
+half-circles with lowered head. And Smoke all the while meowed piteously
+by the window as though trying to draw the attack upon himself.
+
+Then it was that the rush of the whole dreadful business seemed to turn
+aside from the dog and direct itself upon his own person. The collie had
+made another spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner, where
+he made noise enough in his savage rage to waken the dead before he fell
+to whining and then finally lay still. And directly afterwards the
+doctor's own distress became intolerably acute. He had made a half
+movement forward to come to the rescue when a veil that was denser than
+mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene, draping room, walls,
+animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also about his own
+mind. Other forms moved silently across the field of vision, forms that
+he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not. Unholy
+thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil
+presented themselves seductively. Ice seemed to settle about his heart,
+and his mind trembled. He began to lose memory--memory of his identity,
+of where he was, of what he ought to do. The very foundations of his
+strength were shaken. His will seemed paralysed.
+
+And it was then that the room filled with this horde of cats, all dark
+as the night, all silent, all with lamping eyes of green fire. The
+dimensions of the place altered and shifted. He was in a much larger
+space. The whining of the dog sounded far away, and all about him the
+cats flew busily to and fro, silently playing their tearing, rushing
+game of evil, weaving the pattern of their dark purpose upon the floor.
+He strove hard to collect himself and remember the words of power he had
+made use of before in similar dread positions where his dangerous
+practice had sometimes led; but he could recall nothing consecutively; a
+mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and his forces
+scattered. The deeps within were too troubled for healing power to come
+out of them.
+
+It was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour
+thrown upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the
+veil; but at the time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as with
+all true glamour, was unable to grasp where the true ended and the false
+began. He was caught momentarily in the same vortex that had sought to
+lure the cat to destruction through its delight, and threatened utterly
+to overwhelm the dog through its terror.
+
+There came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and
+tearing its way down. The windows rattled. The candle flickered and went
+out. The glacial atmosphere closed round him with the cold of death, and
+a great rushing sound swept by overhead as though the ceiling had lifted
+to a great height. He heard the door shut. Far away it sounded. He felt
+lost, shelterless in the depths of his soul. Yet still he held out and
+resisted while the climax of the fight came nearer and nearer.... He had
+stepped into the stream of forces awakened by Pender and he knew that he
+must withstand them to the end or come to a conclusion that it was not
+good for a man to come to. Something from the region of utter cold was
+upon him.
+
+And then quite suddenly, through the confused mists about him, there
+slowly rose up the Personality that had been all the time directing the
+battle. Some force entered his being that shook him as the tempest
+shakes a leaf, and close against his eyes--clean level with his face--he
+found himself staring into the wreck of a vast dark Countenance, a
+countenance that was terrible even in its ruin.
+
+For ruined it was, and terrible it was, and the mark of spiritual evil
+was branded everywhere upon its broken features. Eyes, face and hair
+rose level with his own, and for a space of time he never could properly
+measure, or determine, these two, a man and a woman, looked straight
+into each other's visages and down into each other's hearts.
+
+And John Silence, the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his own
+against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose
+soul was on the side of the Dark Powers.
+
+It was the climax that touched the depth of power within him and began
+to restore him slowly to his own. He was conscious, of course, of
+effort, and yet it seemed no superhuman one, for he had recognised the
+character of his opponent's power, and he called upon the good within
+him to meet and overcome it. The inner forces stirred and trembled in
+response to his call. They did not at first come readily as was their
+habit, for under the spell of glamour they had already been diabolically
+lulled into inactivity, but come they eventually did, rising out of the
+inner spiritual nature he had learned with so much time and pain to
+awaken to life. And power and confidence came with them. He began to
+breathe deeply and regularly, and at the same time to absorb into
+himself the forces opposed to him, and to _turn them to his own
+account_. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour
+into him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and
+thus enormously increased his own.
+
+For this spiritual alchemy he had learned. He understood that force
+ultimately is everywhere one and the same; it is the motive behind that
+makes it good or evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. He
+knew--provided he was not first robbed of self-control--how vicariously
+to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically
+into his own good purposes. And, since his motive was pure and his soul
+fearless, they could not work him harm.
+
+Thus he stood in the main stream of evil unwittingly attracted by
+Pender, deflecting its course upon himself; and after passing through
+the purifying filter of his own unselfishness these energies could only
+add to his store of experience, of knowledge, and therefore of power.
+And, as his self-control returned to him, he gradually accomplished this
+purpose, even though trembling while he did so.
+
+Yet the struggle was severe, and in spite of the freezing chill of the
+air, the perspiration poured down his face. Then, by slow degrees, the
+dark and dreadful countenance faded, the glamour passed from his soul,
+the normal proportions returned to walls and ceiling, the forms melted
+back into the fog, and the whirl of rushing shadow-cats disappeared
+whence they came.
+
+And with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John
+Silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power. In a
+deep, modulated voice he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that
+slowly rolled through the air like a rising sea, filling the room with
+powerful vibratory activities that whelmed all irregularities of lesser
+vibrations in its own swelling tone. He made certain sigils, gestures
+and movements at the same time. For several minutes he continued to
+utter these words, until at length the growing volume dominated the
+whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it. For
+just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil
+forces by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study
+the occult use of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region
+wherein the powers of spiritual evil work their fell purposes. Harmony
+was restored first of all to his own soul, and thence to the room and
+all its occupants.
+
+And, after himself, the first to recognise it was the old dog lying in
+his corner. Flame began suddenly uttering sounds of pleasure, that
+"something" between a growl and a grunt that dogs make upon being
+restored to their master's confidence. Dr. Silence heard the thumping of
+the collie's tail against the floor. And the grunt and the thumping
+touched the depth of affection in the man's heart, and gave him some
+inkling of what agonies the dumb creature had suffered.
+
+Next, from the shadows by the window, a somewhat shrill purring
+announced the restoration of the cat to its normal state. Smoke was
+advancing across the carpet. He seemed very pleased with himself, and
+smiled with an expression of supreme innocence. He was no shadow-cat,
+but real and full of his usual and perfect self-possession. He marched
+along, picking his way delicately, but with a stately dignity that
+suggested his ancestry with the majesty of Egypt. His eyes no longer
+glared; they shone steadily before him, they radiated, not excitement,
+but knowledge. Clearly he was anxious to make amends for the mischief to
+which he had unwittingly lent himself owing to his subtle and electric
+constitution.
+
+Still uttering his sharp high purrings he marched up to his master and
+rubbed vigorously against his legs. Then he stood on his hind feet and
+pawed his knees and stared beseechingly up into his face. He turned his
+head towards the corner where the collie still lay, thumping his tail
+feebly and pathetically.
+
+John Silence understood. He bent down and stroked the creature's living
+fur, noting the line of bright blue sparks that followed the motion of
+his hand down its back. And then they advanced together towards the
+corner where the dog was.
+
+Smoke went first and put his nose gently against his friend's muzzle,
+purring while he rubbed, and uttering little soft sounds of affection in
+his throat. The doctor lit the candle and brought it over. He saw the
+collie lying on its side against the wall; it was utterly exhausted, and
+foam still hung about its jaws. Its tail and eyes responded to the sound
+of its name, but it was evidently very weak and overcome. Smoke
+continued to rub against its cheek and nose and eyes, sometimes even
+standing on its body and kneading into the thick yellow hair. Flame
+replied from time to time by little licks of the tongue, most of them
+curiously misdirected.
+
+But Dr. Silence felt intuitively that something disastrous had happened,
+and his heart was wrung. He stroked the dear body, feeling it over for
+bruises or broken bones, but finding none. He fed it with what remained
+of the sandwiches and milk, but the creature clumsily upset the saucer
+and lost the sandwiches between its paws, so that the doctor had to feed
+it with his own hand. And all the while Smoke meowed piteously.
+
+Then John Silence began to understand. He went across to the farther
+side of the room and called aloud to it.
+
+"Flame, old man! come!"
+
+At any other time the dog would have been upon him in an instant,
+barking and leaping to the shoulder. And even now he got up, though
+heavily and awkwardly, to his feet. He started to run, wagging his tail
+more briskly. He collided first with a chair, and then ran straight into
+a table. Smoke trotted close at his side, trying his very best to guide
+him. But it was useless. Dr. Silence had to lift him up into his own
+arms and carry him like a baby. For he was blind.
+
+
+III
+
+It was a week later when John Silence called to see the author in his
+new house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy
+again with his writing. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he
+seemed cheerful and confident.
+
+"Humour restored?" laughed the doctor, as soon as they were comfortably
+settled in the room overlooking the Park.
+
+"I've had no trouble since I left that dreadful place," returned Pender
+gratefully; "and thanks to you--"
+
+The doctor stopped him with a gesture.
+
+"Never mind that," he said, "we'll discuss your new plans afterwards,
+and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you settle
+elsewhere. Of course it must be pulled down, for it's not fit for any
+sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted in
+the same way you were. Although, personally, I think the evil has
+exhausted itself by now."
+
+He told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with
+the animals.
+
+"I don't pretend to understand," Pender said, when the account was
+finished, "but I and my wife are intensely relieved to be free of it
+all. Only I must say I should like to know something of the former
+history of the house. When we took it six months ago I heard no word
+against it."
+
+Dr. Silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket.
+
+"I can satisfy your curiosity to some extent," he said, running his eye
+over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; "for by my
+secretary's investigations I have been able to check certain information
+obtained in the hypnotic trance by a 'sensitive' who helps me in such
+cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have been a woman
+of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by
+hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England and
+only came to light by the merest chance. She came to her end in the year
+1798, for it was not this particular house she lived in, but a much
+larger one that then stood upon the site it now occupies, and was then,
+of course, not in London, but in the country. She was a person of
+intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will, and of consummate
+audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the resources of the
+lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to explain the virulence
+of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on after
+death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life."
+
+"You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct--"
+gasped the author.
+
+"I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful
+personality may still persist after death in the line of their original
+momentum," replied the doctor; "and that strong thoughts and purposes
+can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their
+originators have passed away.
+
+"If you knew anything of magic," he pursued, "you would know that
+thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and
+pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed
+from the region of our human life is another region where float the
+waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the
+dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of
+all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the
+will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower
+magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce, I am persuaded,
+and the forces she set going during her life have simply been
+accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they not
+been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and satisfied
+through me.
+
+"Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there
+are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain
+spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner
+being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your
+case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.
+
+"But now, tell me," he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed
+author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had
+appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill--"tell me if you
+recognise this face?"
+
+Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered a
+little as he looked.
+
+"Undoubtedly," he said, "it is the face I kept trying to draw--dark,
+with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman."
+
+Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut
+of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records of
+the Newgate Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two
+different aspects of the same dreadful visage. The men compared them for
+some moments in silence.
+
+"It makes me thank God for the limitations of our senses," said Pender
+quietly, with a sigh; "continuous clairvoyance must be a sore
+affliction."
+
+"It is indeed," returned John Silence significantly, "and if all the
+people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the
+statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they
+are. It is little wonder," he added, "that your sense of humour was
+clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your
+brain for their dissemination. You have had an interesting adventure,
+Mr. Felix Pender, and, let me add, a fortunate escape."
+
+The author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of
+scratching at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly.
+
+"It's time for me to go. I left my dog on the step, but I suppose--"
+
+Before he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure
+behind it and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie. The
+dog, wagging his tail and contorting his whole body with delight, tore
+across the floor and tried to leap up upon his owner's breast. And there
+was laughter and happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear again as
+the day.
+
+
+
+
+CASE II: ANCIENT SORCERIES
+
+
+I
+
+There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with
+none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice
+in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange
+that the world catches its breath--and looks the other way! And it was
+cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the
+wide-spread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to
+his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of
+spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the
+strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.
+
+Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved
+to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul
+of things--and to release a suffering human soul in the process--was
+with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed,
+after passing strange.
+
+The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can
+attach credence--something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The
+adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an
+adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters
+obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the
+adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But
+dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the
+world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them,
+not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.
+
+"Such a thing happened to _that_ man!" it cries--"a commonplace person
+like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!"
+
+Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to
+little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr.
+Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite
+of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely
+that "such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained
+Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to
+commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die
+according to scale."
+
+But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not "live
+according to scale" so far as this particular event in his otherwise
+uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his
+pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more
+hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting
+words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again
+each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled in the
+recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a
+lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to
+excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so
+fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive
+soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost
+constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that should
+rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote
+from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella
+on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he was already
+more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he cared to admit.
+
+John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said
+that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet they
+were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably
+cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined or
+invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the effect
+was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the charming
+personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and revealed
+itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but in the telling he
+forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost vividly as he
+lived again in the past of his adventure.
+
+He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from
+some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every
+summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the
+train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed
+holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his
+fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive,
+obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter
+tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt
+into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English
+clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he
+ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not
+claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn't want and
+that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down,
+and so forth.
+
+So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were
+over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in Surbiton.
+
+And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station
+in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform,
+and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles debouching
+from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the
+journey. Even _his_ flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a
+night in the little town and going on next day by a slower, emptier
+train, flashed into his mind. The guard was already shouting "_en
+voiture_" and the corridor of his compartment was already packed when
+the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and
+rushed to snatch his bag.
+
+Finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window (for
+he had a corner seat) and begged the Frenchman who sat opposite to hand
+his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched French that he
+intended to break the journey there. And this elderly Frenchman, he
+declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of reproach, that to
+his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag through the window
+of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long
+sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend
+only the last few words: "_a cause du sommeil et a cause des chats_."
+
+In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized
+upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin admitted
+that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginning, though
+without being able to explain why. They had sat facing one another
+during the four hours of the journey, and though no conversation had
+passed between them--Vezin was timid about his stuttering French--he
+confessed that his eyes were being continually drawn to his face,
+almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a dozen nameless little
+politenesses and attentions, had evinced the desire to be kind. The men
+liked each other and their personalities did not clash, or would not
+have clashed had they chanced to come to terms of acquaintance. The
+Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a silent protective
+influence over the insignificant little Englishman, and without words or
+gestures betrayed that he wished him well and would gladly have been of
+service to him.
+
+"And this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?" asked John
+Silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted
+the prejudices of his patient, "were you unable to follow it exactly?"
+
+"It was so quick and low and vehement," explained Vezin, in his small
+voice, "that I missed practically the whole of it. I only caught the few
+words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his face
+was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine."
+
+"'_A cause du sommeil et a cause des chats'?_" repeated Dr. Silence, as
+though half speaking to himself.
+
+"That's it exactly," said Vezin; "which, I take it, means something like
+'because of sleep and because of the cats,' doesn't it?"
+
+"Certainly, that's how I should translate it," the doctor observed
+shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary.
+
+"And the rest of the sentence--all the first part I couldn't understand,
+I mean--was a warning not to do something--not to stop in the town, or
+at some particular place in the town, perhaps. That was the impression
+it made on me."
+
+Then, of course, the train rushed off, and left Vezin standing on the
+platform alone and rather forlorn.
+
+The little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out
+of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin
+towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station
+itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the
+mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And once he
+reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of
+modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle of the crowded
+train seemed days away. The spirit of this silent hill-town, remote from
+tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life under the autumn
+sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. Long before he recognised this
+spell he acted under it. He walked softly, almost on tiptoe, down the
+winding narrow streets where the gables all but met over his head, and
+he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a deprecating and modest
+demeanour that was in itself an apology for intruding upon the place and
+disturbing its dream.
+
+At first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The
+attempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the
+delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy
+rattle of the train. He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.
+
+"Like a cat, you said?" interrupted John Silence, quickly catching him
+up.
+
+"Yes. At the very start I felt that." He laughed apologetically. "I felt
+as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me purr. It
+seemed to be the general mood of the whole place--then."
+
+The inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching
+days still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felt
+he was only tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, and
+the delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel
+really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold,
+original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He felt
+something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling
+and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it
+seemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep--a little dim
+cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked upon
+the courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him think
+of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed
+padded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of the streets
+could not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute rest that
+surrounded him.
+
+On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who
+seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with
+Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards
+him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little
+promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress
+herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed to
+swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak. But
+she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her
+body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and
+alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair
+against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her
+as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the
+same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch
+occurred to him.
+
+She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite
+without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple
+in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and
+the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.
+
+"But when she looked at me, you know," said Vezin, with that little
+apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gesture
+of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, "the odd notion came to
+me that really she had intended to make quite a different movement, and
+that with a single bound she could have leaped at me across the width of
+that stone yard and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse."
+
+He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his book
+without interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though he
+feared he had already told too much and more than we could believe.
+
+"Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and I
+felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind
+her back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She
+asked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then
+added that dinner was at seven o'clock, and that they were very early
+people in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey that
+late hours were not encouraged."
+
+Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression
+that here he would be "managed," that everything would be arranged and
+planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove
+and obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked for
+from him. It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly out
+into the street feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he was in
+a _milieu_ that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was so much
+easier to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that all the
+town purred with him.
+
+About the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling
+deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. With
+no special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. The September
+sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down winding alleyways, fringed
+with tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike glimpses of
+the great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses lying like a
+dream-map in the haze. The spell of the past held very potently here, he
+felt.
+
+The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy
+enough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him
+or turned to stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even able
+to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in a
+charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling
+delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious. It was
+like becoming part of a softly coloured dream which he did not even
+realise to be a dream.
+
+On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain below
+ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which the
+little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fields
+like deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of ancient
+fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were only
+vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls and
+wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for a
+moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the
+esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam
+crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he
+looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the
+cool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slow
+footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the
+gaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caught
+glimpses of their quiet movements far below.
+
+He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs and
+half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of the
+plane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew as
+naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying there
+half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.
+
+And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of
+horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town
+band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the
+accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very
+sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured,
+unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with
+low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when
+no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an
+invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly
+charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as
+though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely
+marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after
+the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place
+and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were
+part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned
+plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all half
+smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soul
+with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quite
+pleasant.
+
+There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music
+seemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by
+the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in
+the rigging of invisible ships; or--and the simile leaped up in his
+thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion--a chorus of animals, of
+wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and
+singing as animals will, to the moon. He could fancy he heard the
+wailing, half-human cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising and
+falling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled by
+distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of these
+creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music
+to one another and the moon in chorus.
+
+It was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it
+expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The
+instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and
+diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night,
+rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in
+such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time a
+plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords of these
+half-broken instruments were so singular that they did not distress his
+musical soul like fiddles out of tune.
+
+He listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character
+was, and then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly.
+
+"There was nothing to alarm?" put in Dr. Silence briefly.
+
+"Absolutely nothing," said Vezin; "but you know it was all so
+fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed.
+Perhaps, too," he continued, gently explanatory, "it was this stirring
+of my imagination that caused other impressions; for, as I walked back,
+the spell of the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though
+all intelligible ways. But there were other things I could not account
+for in the least, even then."
+
+"Incidents, you mean?"
+
+"Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of vivid sensations crowded themselves
+upon my mind and I could trace them to no causes. It was just after
+sunset and the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines against an
+opalescent sky of gold and red. The dusk was running down the twisted
+streets. All round the hill the plain pressed in like a dim sea, its
+level rising with the darkness. The spell of this kind of scene, you
+know, can be very moving, and it was so that night. Yet I felt that what
+came to me had nothing directly to do with the mystery and wonder of the
+scene."
+
+"Not merely the subtle transformations of the spirit that come with
+beauty," put in the doctor, noticing his hesitation.
+
+"Exactly," Vezin went on, duly encouraged and no longer so fearful of
+our smiles at his expense. "The impressions came from somewhere else.
+For instance, down the busy main street where men and women were
+bustling home from work, shopping at stalls and barrows, idly gossiping
+in groups, and all the rest of it, I saw that I aroused no interest and
+that no one turned to stare at me as a foreigner and stranger. I was
+utterly ignored, and my presence among them excited no special interest
+or attention.
+
+"And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me with conviction that all
+the time this indifference and inattention were merely feigned.
+Everybody as a matter of fact was watching me closely. Every movement I
+made was known and observed. Ignoring me was all a pretence--an
+elaborate pretence."
+
+He paused a moment and looked at us to see if we were smiling, and then
+continued, reassured--
+
+"It is useless to ask me how I noticed this, because I simply cannot
+explain it. But the discovery gave me something of a shock. Before I got
+back to the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in my
+mind and forced my recognition of it as true. And this, too, I may as
+well say at once, was equally inexplicable to me. I mean I can only give
+you the fact, as fact it was to me."
+
+The little man left his chair and stood on the mat before the fire. His
+diffidence lessened from now onwards, as he lost himself again in the
+magic of the old adventure. His eyes shone a little already as he
+talked.
+
+"Well," he went on, his soft voice rising somewhat with his excitement,
+"I was in a shop when it came to me first--though the idea must have
+been at work for a long time subconsciously to appear in so complete a
+form all at once. I was buying socks, I think," he laughed, "and
+struggling with my dreadful French, when it struck me that the woman in
+the shop did not care two pins whether I bought anything or not. She was
+indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. She was only
+pretending to sell.
+
+"This sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what
+follows. But really it was not small. I mean it was the spark that lit
+the line of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind.
+
+"For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so
+far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were
+elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere
+out of sight behind the scenes. Their busy-ness was but the outward
+semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and
+ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main
+stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in
+secret places. In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether
+I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to
+my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from
+hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. It was all a
+great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly
+for purposes of their own. But the main current of their energies ran
+elsewhere. I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be
+expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the
+whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it. The town was
+doing this very thing to me.
+
+"This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked
+home to the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of
+this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of
+its hidden life.
+
+"And, now that my eyes were partly opened, I noticed other things too
+that puzzled me, first of which, I think, was the extraordinary silence
+of the whole place. Positively, the town was muffled. Although the
+streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly,
+with padded feet, like cats. Nothing made noise. All was hushed,
+subdued, muted. The very voices were quiet, low-pitched like purring.
+Nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed able to live in the
+drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little hill-town
+into its sleep. It was like the woman at the inn--an outward repose
+screening intense inner activity and purpose.
+
+"Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it.
+The people were active and alert. Only a magical and uncanny softness
+lay over them all like a spell."
+
+Vezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory
+had become very vivid. His voice had run off into a whisper so that we
+heard the last part with difficulty. He was telling a true thing
+obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling.
+
+"I went back to the inn," he continued presently in a louder voice, "and
+dined. I felt a new strange world about me. My old world of reality
+receded. Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and
+incomprehensible. I regretted having left the train so impulsively. An
+adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my nature.
+Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere
+deep within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and a feeling
+of alarm mingled itself with my wonder--alarm for the stability of what
+I had for forty years recognised as my 'personality.'
+
+"I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual
+to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept
+thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome,
+blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my
+dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures,
+and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses."
+
+
+II
+
+Vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had
+intended. He felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. He did
+nothing in particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not
+decide to leave. Decisions were always very difficult for him and he
+sometimes wondered how he had ever brought himself to the point of
+leaving the train. It seemed as though some one else must have arranged
+it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran to the swarthy Frenchman
+who had sat opposite. If only he could have understood that long
+sentence ending so strangely with "_a cause du sommeil et a cause des
+chats_." He wondered what it all meant.
+
+Meanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he
+sought in his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay,
+and what it was all about. But his limited French and his constitutional
+hatred of active investigation made it hard for him to buttonhole
+anybody and ask questions. He was content to observe, and watch, and
+remain negative.
+
+The weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. He wandered
+about the town till he knew every street and alley. The people suffered
+him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to
+him every day that he was never free himself from observation. The town
+watched him as a cat watches a mouse. And he got no nearer to finding
+out what they were all so busy with or where the main stream of their
+activities lay. This remained hidden. The people were as soft and
+mysterious as cats.
+
+But that he was continually under observation became more evident from
+day to day.
+
+For instance, when he strolled to the end of the town and entered a
+little green public garden beneath the ramparts and seated himself upon
+one of the empty benches in the sun, he was quite alone--at first. Not
+another seat was occupied; the little park was empty, the paths
+deserted. Yet, within ten minutes of his coming, there must have been
+fully twenty persons scattered about him, some strolling aimlessly along
+the gravel walks, staring at the flowers, and others seated on the
+wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself. None of them appeared to
+take any notice of him; yet he understood quite well they had all come
+there to watch. They kept him under close observation. In the street
+they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon various errands; yet these
+were suddenly all forgotten and they had nothing to do but loll and laze
+in the sun, their duties unremembered. Five minutes after he left, the
+garden was again deserted, the seats vacant. But in the crowded street
+it was the same thing again; he was never alone. He was ever in their
+thoughts.
+
+By degrees, too, he began to see how it was he was so cleverly watched,
+yet without the appearance of it. The people did nothing _directly_.
+They behaved _obliquely_. He laughed in his mind as the thought thus
+clothed itself in words, but the phrase exactly described it. They
+looked at him from angles which naturally should have led their sight in
+another direction altogether. Their movements were oblique, too, so far
+as these concerned himself. The straight, direct thing was not their way
+evidently. They did nothing obviously. If he entered a shop to buy, the
+woman walked instantly away and busied herself with something at the
+farther end of the counter, though answering at once when he spoke,
+showing that she knew he was there and that this was only her way of
+attending to him. It was the fashion of the cat she followed. Even in
+the dining-room of the inn, the be-whiskered and courteous waiter, lithe
+and silent in all his movements, never seemed able to come straight to
+his table for an order or a dish. He came by zigzags, indirectly,
+vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to another table altogether,
+and only turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him.
+
+Vezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to
+realize these things. Other tourists there were none in the hostel, but
+he recalled the figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took
+their _dejeuner_ and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they
+entered the room in similar fashion. First, they paused in the doorway,
+peering about the room, and then, after a temporary inspection, they
+came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close to the walls so that he
+wondered which table they were making for, and at the last minute making
+almost a little quick run to their particular seats. And again he
+thought of the ways and methods of cats.
+
+Other small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer,
+soft town with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the
+people appeared and disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled him
+exceedingly. It may have been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet he
+could not make it out how the alleys swallowed them up and shot them
+forth in a second of time when there were no visible doorways or
+openings near enough to explain the phenomenon. Once he followed two
+elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly examining him from
+across the street--quite near the inn this was--and saw them turn the
+corner a few feet only in front of him. Yet when he sharply followed on
+their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted alley stretching in
+front of him with no sign of a living thing. And the only opening
+through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards away,
+which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time.
+
+And in just such sudden fashion people appeared, when he never expected
+them. Once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a low
+wall, and hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see but a
+group of girls and women engaged in vociferous conversation which
+instantly hushed itself to the normal whispering note of the town when
+his head appeared over the wall. And even then none of them turned to
+look at him directly, but slunk off with the most unaccountable
+rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. And their voices, he
+thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling of
+fighting animals, almost of cats.
+
+The whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as
+something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the
+same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of
+its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more--it began
+rather to frighten him.
+
+Out of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface
+thoughts, there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting
+for him to declare himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do
+that; and that when he had done so they in their turn would at length
+make some direct response, accepting or rejecting him. Yet the vital
+matter concerning which his decision was awaited came no nearer to him.
+
+Once or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the
+citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were
+bent; but they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each
+individual going his or her own way. It was always the same: he never
+could learn what their main interest was. The cathedral was ever empty,
+the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted.
+They shopped because they had to, and not because they wished to. The
+booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the little _cafes_
+desolate. Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk ever on the
+bustle.
+
+"Can it be," he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh that he
+should have dared to think anything so odd, "can it be that these people
+are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their real
+life, and come out honestly only with the dusk? That during the day they
+make a sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down their true
+life begins? Have they the souls of night-things, and is the whole
+blessed town in the hands of the cats?"
+
+The fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and
+dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning
+to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a
+thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. Something
+utterly remote from his ordinary life, something that had not waked for
+years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending feelers abroad into
+his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and penetrating even into
+certain of his minor actions. Something exceedingly vital to himself, to
+his soul, hung in the balance.
+
+And, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he saw
+the figures of the townsfolk stealing through the dusk from their shop
+doors, moving sentry-wise to and fro at the corners of the streets, yet
+always vanishing silently like shadows at his near approach. And as the
+inn invariably closed its doors at ten o'clock he had never yet found
+the opportunity he rather half-heartedly sought to see for himself what
+account the town could give of itself at night.
+
+"--_a cause du sommeil et a cause des chats_"--the words now rang in his
+ears more and more often, though still as yet without any definite
+meaning.
+
+Moreover, something made him sleep like the dead.
+
+
+III
+
+It was, I think, on the fifth day--though in this detail his story
+sometimes varied--that he made a definite discovery which increased his
+alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax. Before that he had
+already noticed that a change was going forward and certain subtle
+transformations being brought about in his character which modified
+several of his minor habits. And he had affected to ignore them. Here,
+however, was something he could no longer ignore; and it startled him.
+
+At the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather,
+compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose he was capable of
+reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision. The
+discovery he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was
+that this power had positively dwindled to nothing. He found it
+impossible to make up his mind. For, on this fifth day, he realised that
+he had stayed long enough in the town and that for reasons he could only
+vaguely define to himself it was wiser _and safer_ that he should leave.
+
+And he found that he could not leave!
+
+This is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture and
+the expression of his face that he conveyed to Dr. Silence the state of
+impotence he had reached. All this spying and watching, he said, had as
+it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless
+to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the intricacies of
+a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not get away. It was a
+distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over his will till it had
+become almost incapable of decision. The mere thought of vigorous
+action--action towards escape--began to terrify him. All the currents of
+his life had turned inwards upon himself, striving to bring to the
+surface something that lay buried almost beyond reach, determined to
+force his recognition of something he had long forgotten--forgotten
+years upon years, centuries almost ago. It seemed as though a window
+deep within his being would presently open and reveal an entirely new
+world, yet somehow a world that was not unfamiliar. Beyond that, again,
+he fancied a great curtain hung; and when that too rolled up he would
+see still farther into this region and at last understand something of
+the secret life of these extraordinary people.
+
+"Is this why they wait and watch?" he asked himself with rather a
+shaking heart, "for the time when I shall join them--or refuse to join
+them? Does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?"
+
+And it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure
+first really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. The
+stability of his rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt,
+and something in his heart turned coward.
+
+Why otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily,
+silently, making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind
+him? Why else should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages
+of the practically deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found
+himself deliberately taking advantage of what cover presented itself?
+And why, if he was not afraid, should the wisdom of staying indoors
+after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as eminently desirable? Why,
+indeed?
+
+And, when John Silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these
+things, he admitted apologetically that he had none to give.
+
+"It was simply that I feared something might happen to me unless I kept
+a sharp look-out. I felt afraid. It was instinctive," was all he could
+say. "I got the impression that the whole town was after me--wanted me
+for something; and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least
+the Self I knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am not
+a psychologist, you know," he added meekly, "and I cannot define it
+better than that."
+
+It was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening
+meal that Vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to his
+quiet room at the end of the winding passage to think it over alone. In
+the yard it was empty enough, true, but there was always the possibility
+that the big woman whom he dreaded would come out of some door, with her
+pretence of knitting, to sit and watch him. This had happened several
+times, and he could not endure the sight of her. He still remembered his
+original fancy, bizarre though it was, that she would spring upon him
+the moment his back was turned and land with one single crushing leap
+upon his neck. Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and
+once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed
+itself in reality.
+
+He went upstairs accordingly. It was dusk, and the oil lamps had not
+yet been lit in the passages. He stumbled over the uneven surface of
+the ancient flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the
+corridor--doors that he had never once seen opened--rooms that seemed
+never occupied. He moved, as his habit now was, stealthily and on
+tiptoe.
+
+Half-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp
+turn, and it was just here, while groping round the walls with
+outstretched hands, that his fingers touched something that was not
+wall--something that moved. It was soft and warm in texture,
+indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his shoulder; and he
+immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The next minute
+he knew it was something quite different.
+
+Instead of investigating, however,--his nerves must have been too
+overwrought for that, he said,--he shrank back as closely as possible
+against the wall on the other side. The thing, whatever it was, slipped
+past him with a sound of rustling and, retreating with light footsteps
+down the passage behind him, was gone. A breath of warm, scented air was
+wafted to his nostrils.
+
+Vezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half
+leaning against the wall--and then almost ran down the remaining
+distance and entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly
+behind him. Yet it was not fear that made him run: it was excitement,
+pleasurable excitement. His nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow
+made itself felt all over his body. In a flash it came to him that this
+was just what he had felt twenty-five years ago as a boy when he was in
+love for the first time. Warm currents of life ran all over him and
+mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. His mood was suddenly
+become tender, melting, loving.
+
+The room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window,
+wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. But the only
+thing he understood clearly in that instant was that something in him
+had swiftly, magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to
+argue with himself about leaving. The encounter in the passage-way had
+changed all that. The strange perfume of it still hung about him,
+bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew that it was a girl who had
+passed him, a girl's face that his fingers had brushed in the darkness,
+and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had been actually
+kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.
+
+Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect
+his thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing
+of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate so
+electric a thrill to his whole being that he still shook with the
+sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he found it as useless to deny
+as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire had entered his veins, and
+now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was forty-five instead
+of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all the inner turmoil
+and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere atmosphere, the
+merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the darkness, had
+been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart, and
+rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of
+tearing and tumultuous excitement.
+
+After a time, however, the number of Vezin's years began to assert their
+cumulative power; he grew calmer, and when a knock came at length upon
+his door and he heard the waiter's voice suggesting that dinner was
+nearly over, he pulled himself together and slowly made his way
+downstairs into the dining-room.
+
+Every one looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took his
+customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. The trepidation was
+still in his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the
+courtyard and hall without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm
+him a little. He ate so fast that he had almost caught up with the
+current stage of the table d'hote, when a slight commotion in the room
+drew his attention.
+
+His chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the
+long _salle a manger_ were behind him, yet it was not necessary to turn
+round to know that the same person he had passed in the dark passage had
+now come into the room. He felt the presence long before he heard or saw
+any one. Then he became aware that the old men, the only other guests,
+were rising one by one in their places, and exchanging greetings with
+some one who passed among them from table to table. And when at length
+he turned with his heart beating furiously to ascertain for himself, he
+saw the form of a young girl, lithe and slim, moving down the centre of
+the room and making straight for his own table in the corner. She moved
+wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young panther, and her approach
+filled him with such delicious bewilderment that he was utterly unable
+to tell at first what her face was like, or discover what it was about
+the whole presentment of the creature that filled him anew with
+trepidation and delight.
+
+"Ah, Ma'mselle est de retour!" he heard the old waiter murmur at his
+side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the
+proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. She was
+addressing him. Something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth,
+and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest
+was a dream in which his own emotion rose like a thick cloud before his
+eyes and prevented his seeing accurately, or knowing exactly what he
+did. He was aware that she greeted him with a charming little bow; that
+her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly into his own; that the
+perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again assailed his nostrils,
+and that she was bending a little towards him and leaning with one hand
+on the table at this side. She was quite close to him--that was the
+chief thing he knew--explaining that she had been asking after the
+comfort of her mother's guests, and now was introducing herself to the
+latest arrival--himself.
+
+"M'sieur has already been here a few days," he heard the waiter say; and
+then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied--
+
+"Ah, but M'sieur is not going to leave us just yet, I hope. My mother is
+too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now I am
+here I will remedy all that." She laughed deliciously. "M'sieur shall be
+well looked after."
+
+Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to
+acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as
+he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting upon the
+table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of
+electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and
+shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a look
+of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he had sat
+down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already half-way
+across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with a
+dessert-spoon and a knife.
+
+Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the
+remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be
+alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he
+suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding corridor was dim with
+shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards,
+seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the
+pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt
+that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the
+heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange fancies
+filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked,
+he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long,
+long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind.
+
+
+IV
+
+This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special coaxing,
+it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could not in the
+least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him so
+profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. For her mere
+proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on fire. He
+knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a stranger to
+anything approaching tender relations with any member of the opposite
+sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his overwhelming
+defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature came to him
+deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on
+every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet
+frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the first glance of her
+shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in the dark merely by
+the magic of her invisible presence.
+
+"You felt she was altogether wholesome and good!" queried the doctor.
+"You had no reaction of any sort--for instance, of alarm?"
+
+Vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic
+smiles. It was some time before he replied. The mere memory of the
+adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes
+sought the floor again before he answered.
+
+"I don't think I can quite say that," he explained presently. "I
+acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. A
+conviction grew upon me that there was something about her--how shall I
+express it?--well, something unholy. It is not impurity in any sense,
+physical or mental, that I mean, but something quite indefinable that
+gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. She drew me, and at the same
+time repelled me, more than--than--"
+
+He hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.
+
+"Nothing like it has ever come to me before or since," he concluded,
+with lame confusion. "I suppose it was, as you suggested just now,
+something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was strong enough to make
+me feel that I would stay in that awful little haunted town for years if
+only I could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful
+movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand."
+
+"Can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?" John
+Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator.
+
+"I am surprised that you should ask me such a question," answered Vezin,
+with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. "I think no man
+can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman
+who ensnares him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this slip of a girl
+bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in
+the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of delight.
+
+"But there's one thing I can tell you," he went on earnestly, his eyes
+aglow, "namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself all
+the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the town and
+its inhabitants. She had the silken movements of the panther, going
+smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods as
+the townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of her
+own--purposes that I was sure had _me_ for their objective. She kept me,
+to my terror and delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet so
+carelessly, so consummately, that another man less sensitive, if I may
+say so"--he made a deprecating gesture--"or less prepared by what had
+gone before, would never have noticed it at all. She was always still,
+always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I
+never could escape from her. I was continually meeting the stare and
+laughter of her great eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the
+passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest
+parts of the public streets."
+
+Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter
+which had so violently disturbed the little man's equilibrium. He was
+naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that
+anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they
+therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget
+his primness after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and as
+her mother's representative she naturally had to do with the guests in
+the hotel. It was not out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie should
+spring up. Besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty, she was
+French, and--she obviously liked him.
+
+At the same time, there was something indescribable--a certain
+indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times--that made him try
+hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath
+with a sudden start. It was all rather like a delirious dream, half
+delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more
+than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though he
+were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own.
+
+And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to
+his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on
+from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of
+this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his recognisable
+personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll up with an
+awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the secret
+purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by that time,
+he would have become transformed into an entirely different being.
+
+And, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention to
+make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more
+comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special little extra
+dishes on his private table in the dining-room. Conversations, too, with
+"Mademoiselle Ilse" became more and more frequent and pleasant, and
+although they seldom travelled beyond the weather, or the details of the
+town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a hurry to bring them to an
+end, and often contrived to interject little odd sentences that he never
+properly understood, yet felt to be significant.
+
+And it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that
+pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy. They
+all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in the town
+indefinitely.
+
+"And has M'sieur not even yet come to a decision?" she said softly in
+his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before _dejeuner_, the
+acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. "Because, if
+it's so difficult, we must all try together to help him!"
+
+The question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was
+spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as
+she turned and peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite
+understand the French of it, for her near presence always confused his
+small knowledge of the language distressingly. Yet the words, and her
+manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind,
+frightened him. It gave such point to his feeling that the town was
+waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter.
+
+At the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close
+beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.
+
+"It is true I find it difficult to leave," he stammered, losing his way
+deliciously in the depths of her eyes, "and especially now that
+Mademoiselle Ilse has come."
+
+He was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted
+with the little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have
+bitten his tongue off for having said it.
+
+"Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased to
+stay on," she said, ignoring the compliment.
+
+"I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you," he cried, feeling that
+his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain. And he
+was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the wildest
+description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair beside him,
+and made to go.
+
+"It is _soupe a l'onion_ to-day!" she cried, laughing back at him
+through the sunlight, "and I must go and see about it. Otherwise, you
+know, M'sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will
+leave us!"
+
+He watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and
+lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her, he
+thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. She turned
+once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then
+stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in
+her corner seat just inside the hall-way.
+
+But how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly
+woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were?
+Whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped
+them both as by magic? What was it about that massive woman that made
+her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some dark and
+dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over the red glare of some
+tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender stripling of a girl, graceful
+as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air of
+sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and the
+darkness of night beneath her feet?
+
+Vezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. Then, almost
+simultaneously with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again, and
+the sunlight of day caught them both, and he heard her laughing to her
+mother about the _soupe a l'onion_, and saw her glancing back at him
+over her dear little shoulder with a smile that made him think of a
+dew-kissed rose bending lightly before summer airs.
+
+And, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day, because
+he saw another cover laid at his small table, and, with fluttering
+heart, heard the waiter murmur by way of explanation that "Ma'mselle
+Ilse would honour M'sieur to-day at _dejeuner_, as her custom sometimes
+is with her mother's guests."
+
+So actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking
+quietly to him in easy French, seeing that he was well looked after,
+mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand. And,
+later in the afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard, longing
+for a sight of her as soon as her duties were done, she came again to
+his side, and when he rose to meet her, she stood facing him a moment,
+full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she spoke--
+
+"My mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little
+town, and _I_ think so too! Would M'sieur like me to be his guide,
+perhaps? I can show him everything, for our family has lived here for
+many generations."
+
+She had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word to
+express his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the street,
+yet in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural she should do so, and
+without the faintest suggestion of boldness or immodesty. Her face
+glowed with the pleasure and interest of it, and with her short dress
+and tumbled hair she looked every bit the charming child of seventeen
+that she was, innocent and playful, proud of her native town, and alive
+beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty.
+
+So they went over the town together, and she showed him what she
+considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her
+forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her
+mother's family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where
+several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score.
+She kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he
+understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing
+his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood
+revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton seemed
+very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world's history. Her
+voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept
+deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep,
+allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its
+elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being
+became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir
+in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it
+might lift altogether....
+
+He began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town was
+reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external self
+became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and
+vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of
+it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with
+new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through
+the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly
+coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful
+and seductive.
+
+And only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in
+itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the child's
+face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed to a
+column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves and made a
+picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the wall and called
+her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and there through the
+heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as though taken by surprise,
+her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned and run like the
+wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran, of which he had not
+understood a single word, except that the fire apparently frightened
+her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it, and to get him away
+too.
+
+Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though
+nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and
+they had both forgotten the incident.
+
+They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the
+weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival.
+It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he
+managed to find his tongue and his best French. The girl leaned across
+the stones close beside him. No one was about. Driven by some
+remorseless engine within he began to stammer something--he hardly knew
+what--of his strange admiration for her. Almost at the first word she
+sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him, just
+touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as usual, and the
+sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.
+
+"Oh, I'm so glad!" she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his
+face, "so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must
+also like what I do, and what I belong to."
+
+Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something
+in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of
+embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.
+
+"You will take part in our real life, I mean," she added softly, with an
+indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking.
+"You will come back to us."
+
+Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power
+coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole
+over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its
+simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. He saw
+her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous
+scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. Dimly this
+shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.
+
+"You will, I know," she repeated, holding him with her eyes.
+
+They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that
+she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The
+mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of
+him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the
+same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth. An
+irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what still
+remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to retain the
+right to his normal self.
+
+The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall
+close beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on
+the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He took his courage
+in both hands.
+
+"Tell me, Ilse," he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring
+softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, "what is
+the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And
+why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what
+it all means? And, tell me," he added more quickly with passion in his
+voice, "what you really are--yourself?"
+
+She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her
+growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran
+like a shadow across her face.
+
+"It seems to me,"--he faltered oddly under her gaze--"that I have some
+right to know--"
+
+Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. "You love me, then?" she asked
+softly.
+
+"I swear," he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide,
+"I never felt before--I have never known any other girl who--"
+
+"Then you _have_ the right to know," she calmly interrupted his confused
+confession, "for love shares all secrets."
+
+She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words
+lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed
+almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He
+became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking
+again.
+
+"The real life I speak of," she whispered, "is the old, old life within,
+the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to
+which you still belong."
+
+A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice
+sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true,
+even though he could not as yet understand its full purport. His present
+life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his personality in
+one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of his present self
+that brought to him the thought of death.
+
+"You came here," she went on, "with the purpose of seeking it, and the
+people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide,
+whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether--"
+
+Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change,
+growing larger and darker with an expression of age.
+
+"It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you
+feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The purposes
+of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. You were
+all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back
+again among them."
+
+Vezin's timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl's eyes
+held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She
+fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.
+
+"Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you," she
+resumed. "The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded through
+all these years. But I"--she paused a moment and looked at him with
+complete confidence in her splendid eyes--"I possess the spell to
+conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back
+again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the
+ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And I do
+choose to use it. I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim
+past"--she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his
+eyes, and her voice positively sang--"I mean to have you, for you love
+me and are utterly at my mercy."
+
+Vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand.
+He had passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his
+feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above
+it through the sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy
+with the wonder of her words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the
+terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind her
+sentences. For flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and
+licked at his soul.
+
+And they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process
+of swift telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he
+said to her. Yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was
+like the recital of verses long since known. And the mingled pain and
+sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul
+could hold.
+
+"Yet I came here wholly by chance--" he heard himself saying.
+
+"No," she cried with passion, "you came here because I called to you. I
+have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the
+past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you."
+
+She rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain insolence
+in the face--the insolence of power.
+
+The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness
+rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had
+ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of
+the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There was no
+sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft rustle of
+the girl's dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He
+scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some terrible magic
+of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs of his own being,
+telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words shadowed forth the
+truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking beside him with so
+strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite another being. As
+he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew and lived,
+dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of reality he
+was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her tall and
+stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and mountain
+caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of shifting
+smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying loosely in
+the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of clothing.
+Others were about her, too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast delirious
+glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only, one whom
+she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some tempestuous
+orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled
+about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the scene
+through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and forms
+crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by the
+hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne he
+knew to be her mother.
+
+The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of buried
+time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory reawakened.... And
+then the scene faded away and he saw the clear circle of the girl's eyes
+gazing steadfastly into his own, and she became once more the pretty
+little daughter of the innkeeper, and he found his voice again.
+
+"And you," he whispered tremblingly--"you child of visions and
+enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even
+before I saw?"
+
+She drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity.
+
+"The call of the Past," she said; "and besides," she added proudly, "in
+the real life I am a princess--"
+
+"A princess!" he cried.
+
+"--and my mother is a queen!"
+
+At this, little Vezin utterly lost his head. Delight tore at his heart
+and swept him into sheer ecstasy. To hear that sweet singing voice, and
+to see those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance
+beyond all hope of control. He took her in his arms and covered her
+unresisting face with kisses.
+
+But even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he felt
+that she was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses stained
+his very soul.... And when, presently, she had freed herself and
+vanished into the darkness, he stood there, leaning against the wall in
+a state of collapse, creeping with horror from the touch of her yielding
+body, and inwardly raging at the weakness that he already dimly
+realised must prove his undoing.
+
+And from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared
+there rose in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry,
+which at first he took for laughter, but which later he was sure he
+recognised as the almost human wailing of a cat.
+
+
+V
+
+For a long time Vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his
+surging thoughts and emotions. He understood at length that he had done
+the one thing necessary to call down upon him the whole force of this
+ancient Past. For in those passionate kisses he had acknowledged the tie
+of olden days, and had revived it. And the memory of that soft
+impalpable caress in the darkness of the inn corridor came back to him
+with a shudder. The girl had first mastered him, and then led him to the
+one act that was necessary for her purpose. He had been waylaid, after
+the lapse of centuries--caught, and conquered.
+
+Dimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. But,
+for the moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or
+will, for the sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted to
+his brain like a spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was
+utterly enchanted and moving in a world so much larger and wilder than
+the one he had ever been accustomed to.
+
+The moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain,
+when at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into
+new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew,
+seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables
+and quaint old towers lay far away in its purple reaches.
+
+The cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. He moved softly, keeping
+to the shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very silent; the
+doors were closed, the shutters fastened. Not a soul was astir. The hush
+of night lay over everything; it was like a town of the dead, a
+churchyard with gigantic and grotesque tombstones.
+
+Wondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared
+to, he made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of the
+stables, thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. He reached the
+courtyard safely and crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of the
+wall. He sidled down it, mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old men
+did when they entered the _salle a manger_. He was horrified to find
+himself doing this instinctively. A strange impulse came to him,
+catching him somehow in the centre of his body--an impulse to drop upon
+all fours and run swiftly and silently. He glanced upwards and the idea
+came to him to leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going
+round by the stairs. This occurred to him as the easiest, and most
+natural way. It was like the beginning of some horrible transformation
+of himself into something else. He was fearfully strung up.
+
+The moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of the
+street where he moved. He kept among the deepest of them, and reached
+the porch with the glass doors.
+
+But here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about.
+Hoping to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he
+opened the door carefully and stole in. Then he saw that the hall was
+not empty. A large dark thing lay against the wall on his left. At first
+he thought it must be household articles. Then it moved, and he thought
+it was an immense cat, distorted in some way by the play of light and
+shadow. Then it rose straight up before him and he saw that it was the
+proprietress.
+
+What she had been doing in this position he could only venture a
+dreadful guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware
+of some terrible dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the
+girl's strange saying that she was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood
+there under the little oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe
+stirred in his heart, and the roots of some ancient fear. He felt that
+he must bow to her and make some kind of obeisance. The impulse was
+fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. He glanced quickly about him.
+There was no one there. Then he deliberately inclined his head toward
+her. He bowed.
+
+"Enfin! M'sieur s'est donc decide. C'est bien alors. J'en suis
+contente."
+
+Her words came to him sonorously as through a great open space.
+
+Then the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and
+seized his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and
+caught him.
+
+"On pourrait faire un p'tit tour ensemble, n'est-ce pas? Nous y allons
+cette nuit et il faut s'exercer un peu d'avance pour cela. Ilse, Ilse,
+viens donc ici. Viens vite!"
+
+And she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that seemed
+oddly and horribly familiar. They made no sound on the stones, this
+strangely assorted couple. It was all soft and stealthy. And presently,
+when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare as of flame
+shot through it, he was aware that some one else had joined them and
+that his hand the mother had released was now tightly held by the
+daughter. Ilse had come in answer to the call, and he saw her with
+leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered vestiges
+of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly, odiously,
+loathsomely seductive.
+
+"To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!" they cried. "On to the Witches'
+Sabbath!"
+
+Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him,
+to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly,
+dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out,
+and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart
+with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid.
+
+Suddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother
+cry that it was time, and they must go. Which way they went he did not
+pause to see. He only realised that he was free, and he blundered
+through the darkness till he found the stairs and then tore up them to
+his room as though all hell was at his heels.
+
+He flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned.
+Swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally
+impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do for the moment
+was to sit quiet and wait. He must see what was going to happen. At
+least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly safe. The
+door was locked. He crossed over and softly opened the window which gave
+upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the hall through
+the glass doors.
+
+As he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears
+from the streets beyond--the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by
+distance. He leaned out cautiously and listened. The moonlight was clear
+and strong now, but his own window was in shadow, the silver disc being
+still behind the house. It came to him irresistibly that the inhabitants
+of the town, who a little while before had all been invisible behind
+closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy upon some secret and unholy
+errand. He listened intently.
+
+At first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of
+movements going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came to
+him across that still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings sent
+the hum of their activity into the night. Things were on the move
+everywhere. A biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he knew
+not whence. Presently his eyes became glued to the windows of the
+opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. The roof
+overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass,
+and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over
+the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and silently, shaped
+like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured glass,
+and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost sight of
+them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps. Sometimes their
+shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he could not make
+out whether they were the shadows of human beings or of cats. They
+seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. The transformation
+looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings, yet changed
+swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like animals.
+
+The yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements of
+dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass
+doors. They kept so closely to the wall that he could not determine
+their actual shape, but when he saw that they passed on to the great
+congregation that was gathering in the hall, he understood that these
+were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had first seen reflected in
+the windowpanes opposite. They were coming from all parts of the town,
+reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and tiles, and
+springing from level to level till they came to the yard.
+
+Then a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about
+him were being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. A
+moment later figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. And
+these figures, as they lowered themselves down from the windows, were
+human, he saw; but once safely in the yard they fell upon all fours and
+changed in the swiftest possible second into--cats--huge, silent cats.
+They ran in streams to join the main body in the hall beyond.
+
+So, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and unoccupied.
+
+Moreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. For he
+remembered it all. It was familiar. It had all happened before just so,
+hundreds of times, and he himself had taken part in it and known the
+wild madness of it all. The outline of the old building changed, the
+yard grew larger, and he seemed to be staring down upon it from a much
+greater height through smoky vapours. And, as he looked, half
+remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet, furiously
+assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the Call of the
+Dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of Ilse whirling
+by his side.
+
+Suddenly he started back. A great lithe cat had leaped softly up from
+the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring
+fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. "Come," it seemed to say, "come
+with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself swiftly and
+come!" Only too well he understood the creature's soundless call.
+
+It was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet
+on the stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of
+the house, past his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting
+away rapidly, softly, towards the gathering point. And again he felt the
+dreadful desire to do likewise; to murmur the old incantation, and then
+drop upon hands and knees and run swiftly for the great flying leap into
+the air. Oh, how the passion of it rose within him like a flood,
+twisting his very entrails, sending his heart's desire flaming forth
+into the night for the old, old Dance of the Sorcerers at the Witches'
+Sabbath! The whirl of the stars was about him; once more he met the
+magic of the moon. The power of the wind, rushing from precipice and
+forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the valleys, tore him
+away.... He heard the cries of the dancers and their wild laughter, and
+with this savage girl in his embrace he danced furiously about the dim
+Throne where sat the Figure with the sceptre of majesty....
+
+Then, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a
+little in his heart. The calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and
+deserted. They had started. The procession was off into the sky. And he
+was left behind--alone.
+
+Vezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. The murmur
+from the streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. He
+made his way with the utmost caution down the corridor. At the head of
+the stairs he paused and listened. Below him, the hall where they had
+gathered was dark and still, but through opened doors and windows on the
+far side of the building came the sound of a great throng moving farther
+and farther into the distance.
+
+He made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing to
+meet some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one; across
+the dark hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things, and out
+through the opened front doors into the street. He could not believe
+that he was really left behind, really forgotten, that he had been
+purposely permitted to escape. It perplexed him.
+
+Nervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing
+nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement.
+
+The whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as though
+a great wind had blown everything alive out of it. The doors and windows
+of the houses stood open to the night; nothing stirred; moonlight and
+silence lay over all. The night lay about him like a cloak. The air,
+soft and cool, caressed his cheek like the touch of a great furry paw.
+He gained confidence and began to walk quickly, though still keeping to
+the shadowed side. Nowhere could he discover the faintest sign of the
+great unholy exodus he knew had just taken place. The moon sailed high
+over all in a sky cloudless and serene.
+
+Hardly realising where he was going, he crossed the open market-place
+and so came to the ramparts, whence he knew a pathway descended to the
+high road and along which he could make good his escape to one of the
+other little towns that lay to the northward, and so to the railway.
+
+But first he paused and gazed out over the scene at his feet where the
+great plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. The still
+beauty of it entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment and
+unreality. No air stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood
+motionless, the near details were defined with the sharpness of day
+against dark shadows, and in the distance the fields and woods melted
+away into haze and shimmering mistiness.
+
+But the breath caught in his throat and he stood stockstill as though
+transfixed when his gaze passed from the horizon and fell upon the near
+prospect in the depth of the valley at his feet. The whole lower slopes
+of the hill, that lay hid from the brightness of the moon, were aglow,
+and through the glare he saw countless moving forms, shifting thick and
+fast between the openings of the trees; while overhead, like leaves
+driven by the wind, he discerned flying shapes that hovered darkly one
+moment against the sky and then settled down with cries and weird
+singing through the branches into the region that was aflame.
+
+Spellbound, he stood and stared for a time that he could not measure.
+And then, moved by one of the terrible impulses that seemed to control
+the whole adventure, he climbed swiftly upon the top of the broad
+coping, and balanced a moment where the valley gaped at his feet. But in
+that very instant, as he stood hovering, a sudden movement among the
+shadows of the houses caught his eye, and he turned to see the outline
+of a large animal dart swiftly across the open space behind him, and
+land with a flying leap upon the top of the wall a little lower down. It
+ran like the wind to his feet and then rose up beside him upon the
+ramparts. A shiver seemed to run through the moonlight, and his sight
+trembled for a second. His heart pulsed fearfully. Ilse stood beside
+him, peering into his face.
+
+Some dark substance, he saw, stained the girl's face and skin, shining
+in the moonlight as she stretched her hands towards him; she was dressed
+in wretched tattered garments that yet became her mightily; rue and
+vervain twined about her temples; her eyes glittered with unholy light.
+He only just controlled the wild impulse to take her in his arms and
+leap with her from their giddy perch into the valley below.
+
+"See!" she cried, pointing with an arm on which the rags fluttered in
+the rising wind towards the forest aglow in the distance. "See where
+they await us! The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there,
+and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and
+come!"
+
+Though a moment before the sky was clear and cloudless, yet even while
+she spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in
+the crests of the plane trees at his feet. Stray gusts brought the
+sounds of hoarse singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill,
+and the pungent odour he had already noticed about the courtyard of the
+inn rose about him in the air.
+
+"Transform, transform!" she cried again, her voice rising like a song.
+"Rub well your skin before you fly. Come! Come with me to the Sabbath,
+to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its
+evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments
+prepared. The Throne is occupied. Anoint and come! Anoint and come!"
+
+She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with
+flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change
+swiftly. Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him
+with the burning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the
+power before which fades all that is good.
+
+A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the
+girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her
+wicked joy.
+
+"Satan is there!" she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw
+him with her to the edge of the wall. "Satan has come. The Sacraments
+call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and
+dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!"
+
+Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to release
+himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but
+mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he
+shrieked again. It was the old impulses, the old awful habits
+instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely
+shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and
+were intelligible. It was the ancient call. And it was heard below. It
+was answered.
+
+The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him
+darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The
+crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of
+wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top
+of the stone wall; and Ilse clung to him with her long shining arms,
+smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. But not Ilse alone,
+for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The
+pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the
+old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers doing
+honour to the personified Evil of the world.
+
+"Anoint and away! Anoint and away!" they cried in wild chorus about him.
+"To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and fearful fantasy of
+evil!"
+
+Another moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned
+soft and the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him,
+when--so can a small thing after the whole course of an adventure--he
+caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then
+fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. But he fell towards the
+houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones, and fortunately not
+into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther side.
+
+And they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him, like flies upon a
+piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a moment from the
+power of their touch, and in that brief instant of freedom there flashed
+into his mind the sudden intuition that saved him. Before he could
+regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly back upon the wall, as
+though bat-like they could only fly by dropping from a height, and had
+no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them perched there in a row
+like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly shapeless, their eyes
+like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of Ilse's terror at the
+sight of fire.
+
+Quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the dead leaves that lay
+under the wall.
+
+Dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the wind carried the
+flame in a long line down the length of the wall, licking upwards as it
+ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded row of forms upon the
+top melted away into the air on the other side, and were gone with a
+great rush and whirring of their bodies down into the heart of the
+haunted valley, leaving Vezin breathless and shaken in the middle of the
+deserted ground.
+
+"Ilse!" he called feebly; "Ilse!" for his heart ached to think that she
+was really gone to the great Dance without him, and that he had lost the
+opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same time his relief was so
+great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind with the whole thing,
+that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only cried aloud in the
+fierce storm of his emotion....
+
+The fire under the wall ran its course, and the moonlight came out
+again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse. With one last
+shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder
+for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still crowded and flew,
+he turned his face towards the town and slowly made his way in the
+direction of the hotel.
+
+And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling,
+followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and fainter
+with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between the houses.
+
+VI
+
+"It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending," said Arthur
+Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence sitting
+there with his notebook, "but the fact is--er--from that moment my
+memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection of
+how I got home or what precisely I did.
+
+"It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect
+racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and villages,
+still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the towers of a
+biggish town and so came to a station.
+
+"But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and
+looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the
+moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay
+there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main
+streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its
+torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in my mind with the utmost
+vividness to this day.
+
+"Another thing remains in my mind from that escape--namely, the sudden
+sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made,
+standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left
+behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.
+
+"For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a cafe
+on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found my way
+to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same evening I
+reached London."
+
+"And how long altogether," asked John Silence quietly, "do you think you
+stayed in the town of the adventure?"
+
+Vezin looked up sheepishly.
+
+"I was coming to that," he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his
+body. "In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of
+time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been
+September 15th,--instead of which it was only September 10th!"
+
+"So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?"
+queried the doctor.
+
+Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.
+
+"I must have gained time somewhere," he said at length--"somewhere or
+somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can't explain it. I can
+only give you the fact."
+
+"And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been back
+to the place?"
+
+"Last autumn, yes," murmured Vezin; "and I have never dared to go back.
+I think I never want to."
+
+"And, tell me," asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the little
+man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing more to
+say, "had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft practices
+during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the subject?"
+
+"Never!" declared Vezin emphatically. "I had never given a thought to
+such matters so far as I know--"
+
+"Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?"
+
+"Never--before my adventure; but I have since," he replied
+significantly.
+
+There was, however, something still on the man's mind that he wished to
+relieve himself of by confession, yet could only with difficulty bring
+himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness of
+the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed
+himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him the
+marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched him
+with her anointed hands.
+
+He took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered
+his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of
+the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a
+little way down the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated
+exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing.
+And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar
+mark, though not quite so clearly defined.
+
+"That was where she held me that night on the ramparts," he whispered, a
+strange light coming and going in his eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John
+Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my
+notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin's story. Since hearing it, the
+doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his
+secretaries had discovered that Vezin's ancestors had actually lived for
+generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two of
+them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had been
+burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to prove
+that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon the spot
+where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place. The town
+was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of the
+entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by
+scores.
+
+"It seems strange," continued the doctor, "that Vezin should have
+remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the
+kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to
+keep alive, or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to
+think he still knows nothing about it.
+
+"The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the
+memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with
+the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by
+a most singular chance, too, with the very souls who had taken part with
+him in the events of that particular life. For the mother and daughter
+who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors, with
+himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that period
+dominated the imaginations of the whole country.
+
+"One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these
+witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various
+animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves
+swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies. Lycanthropy, or the
+power to change themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and
+the ability to transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies
+with a special salve or ointment provided by Satan himself, found equal
+credence. The witchcraft trials abound in evidences of such universal
+beliefs."
+
+Dr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject,
+and showed how every detail of Vezin's adventure had a basis in the
+practices of those dark days.
+
+"But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man's own
+consciousness, I have no doubt," he went on, in reply to my questions;
+"for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered
+his signature in the visitors' book, and proved by it that he had
+arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. He
+left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty
+brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement of
+his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was absent
+from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he described
+her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded
+kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had feared for a long
+time that he had met with a violent end in the neighbouring forest where
+he used to roam about alone.
+
+"I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter
+so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took
+place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of
+burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former
+painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more
+than once that he saw her through smoke and flame."
+
+"And that mark on his skin, for instance?" I inquired.
+
+"Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding," he replied, "like
+the stigmata of the _religieuses_, and the bruises which appear on the
+bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them. This is
+very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these marks
+should have remained so long in Vezin's case. Usually they disappear
+quickly."
+
+"Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it
+all over again," I ventured.
+
+"Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not
+yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to
+alleviate."
+
+Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.
+
+"And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?" I asked
+further--"the man who warned him against the place, _a cause du sommeil
+et a cause des chats?_ Surely a very singular incident?"
+
+"A very singular incident indeed," he made answer slowly, "and one I can
+only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence--"
+
+"Namely?"
+
+"That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone
+there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him.
+But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go
+upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some
+force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him thus
+to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might happen
+to him, and thus to warn him as he did.
+
+"Yes," he presently continued, half talking to himself, "I suspect in
+this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of
+the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a
+scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For
+strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves,
+they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not
+vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man
+found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and
+the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it was
+true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in
+memory, to a former and lower state of development.
+
+"Ah yes!" he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening sky,
+and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, "subliminal up-rushes of
+memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly
+dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this
+obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I doubt it, I doubt
+it."
+
+His voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back
+into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon
+his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes
+greater than his power.
+
+
+
+
+CASE III: THE NEMESIS OF FIRE
+
+
+I
+
+By some means which I never could fathom, John Silence always contrived
+to keep the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of
+two hours before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the
+preliminary facts of the case. He had telephoned to me that very
+morning, and even through the disguise of the miles of wire the thrill
+of incalculable adventure had sounded in his voice.
+
+"As if it were an ordinary country visit," he called, in reply to my
+question; "and don't forgot to bring your gun."
+
+"With blank cartridges, I suppose?" for I knew his rigid principles with
+regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were merely for
+some obvious purpose of disguise.
+
+Then he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the
+receiver, and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation, to
+do my packing. For the honour of accompanying Dr. John Silence on one of
+his big cases was what many would have considered an empty honour--and
+risky. Certainly the adventure held all manner of possibilities, and I
+arrived at Waterloo with the feelings of a man who is about to embark on
+some dangerous and peculiar mission in which the dangers he expects to
+run will not be the ordinary dangers to life and limb, but of some
+secret character difficult to name and still more difficult to cope
+with.
+
+"The Manor House has a high sound," he told me, as we sat with our feet
+up and talked, "but I believe it is little more than an overgrown
+farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond D----, and its owner,
+Colonel Wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there
+practically alone, I understand, with an elderly invalid sister. So you
+need not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some
+excitement of its own."
+
+"Which is likely?"
+
+By way of reply he handed me a letter marked "Private." It was dated a
+week ago, and signed "Yours faithfully, Horace Wragge."
+
+"He heard of me, you see, through Captain Anderson," the doctor
+explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost world-wide; "you
+remember that Indian obsession case--"
+
+I read the letter. Why it should have been marked private was difficult
+to understand. It was very brief, direct, and to the point. It referred
+by way of introduction to Captain Anderson, and then stated quite simply
+that the writer needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a personal
+interview--a morning interview, since it was impossible for him to be
+absent from the house at night. The letter was dignified even to the
+point of abruptness, and it is difficult to explain how it managed to
+convey to me the impression of a strong man, shaken and perplexed.
+Perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the mystery of the affair had
+something to do with it; and the reference to the Anderson case, the
+horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have touched the sense
+of something rather ominous and alarming. But, whatever the cause, there
+was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose somehow out of
+that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and the spirit of a
+deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the mind without any
+visible form of expression.
+
+"And when you saw him--?" I asked, returning the letter as the train
+rushed clattering noisily through Clapham Junction.
+
+"I have not seen him," was the reply. "The man's mind was charged to the
+brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures. Notice the
+restraint of it. For the main character of his case psychometry could be
+depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is sufficient
+to give to another mind--a sensitive and sympathetic mind--clear mental
+pictures of what is going on. I think I have a very sound general idea
+of his problem."
+
+"So there may be excitement, after all?"
+
+John Silence waited a moment before he replied.
+
+"Something very serious is amiss there," he said gravely, at length.
+"Some one--not himself, I gather,--has been meddling with a rather
+dangerous kind of gunpowder. So--yes, there may be excitement, as you
+put it."
+
+"And my duties?" I asked, with a decidedly growing interest. "Remember,
+I am your 'assistant.'"
+
+"Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything,
+without seeming to. Say nothing--nothing that means anything. Be present
+at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions
+are correct this is--"
+
+He broke off suddenly.
+
+"But I won't tell you my impressions yet," he resumed after a moment's
+thought. "Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form your own
+impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary visitors,
+of course," he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his eye;
+"hence, the guns."
+
+Though disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his
+words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful
+suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise reflected
+that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than
+double the quantity of mere "brains," as such.
+
+Before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me
+to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any
+pictures that came spontaneously into my mind.
+
+"Don't deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the inside
+of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen."
+
+I followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible.
+But no visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to
+and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. A
+momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously.
+
+"You see--what?" he asked presently.
+
+"Nothing," I was obliged to admit disappointedly; "nothing but the usual
+flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more vivid
+than usual."
+
+He said nothing by way of comment or reply.
+
+"And they group themselves now and then," I continued, with painful
+candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, "group
+themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash
+about sometimes look like triangles and crosses--almost like geometrical
+figures. Nothing more."
+
+I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.
+
+"It makes my head hot," I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing
+anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at
+once.
+
+"That sensation of heat is important," he said significantly.
+
+"It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable," I replied, hoping he
+would expand and explain. "There was a distinct feeling of
+warmth--internal warmth somewhere--oppressive in a sense."
+
+"That is interesting," he remarked, putting the letter back in his
+pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He
+vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make
+him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into
+my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing
+lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual
+phantasmagoria of the day's events--faces, scenes, memories,--and in due
+course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.
+
+When we left the train, after six hours' travelling, at a little
+wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather,
+the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the
+landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland
+hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling
+across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen
+air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about
+us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the
+coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told
+us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road
+among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift
+past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs
+of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing
+five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged
+into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to
+the moment of actual arrival.
+
+Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army
+officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the
+process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as
+a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning
+grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements
+showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years.
+The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be
+depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil
+of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The whole
+appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity and
+importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm, I
+felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.
+
+His speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple
+and sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet.
+Thus, he showed plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come
+alone.
+
+"My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard," the doctor said, introducing
+me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then received
+were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the impression
+that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose perplexity
+must spring from some very real and tangible cause. And, quite
+obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was
+unmistakably genuine.
+
+He led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room, that
+opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the
+impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient,
+comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. And so it was. Only the heat of
+the place struck me as unnatural. This room with the blazing fire may
+have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night
+air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere
+of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled
+grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the
+greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head and
+mind. It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught
+myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the
+letter in the train.
+
+I heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no preamble,
+and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest description.
+Evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved action rather
+than talk. His manner was straightforward and direct. I saw him in a
+flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by something he
+could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would have preferred
+to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness and making no
+attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his incompetence.
+
+"So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own company,
+and the queer business that has been going on here, and is still going
+on," he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards me by way of
+including me in his confidence.
+
+"I think, Colonel Wragge," replied John Silence impressively, "that we
+shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. I gather we shall have our
+hands full."
+
+The two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and
+there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first
+time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a
+little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big
+case of this incalculable doctor. But no answer suggested itself, and to
+withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The gates had closed behind me
+now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind with
+its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.
+
+Explaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything
+serious, as no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the way
+upstairs and showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as I was
+finishing dressing that a knock came at my door and Dr. Silence entered.
+
+He was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of
+comedy you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life, but
+as he came across the room to me I caught the expression of his face
+and understood in a flash that he was now in his most grave and earnest
+mood. He looked almost troubled. I stopped fumbling with my black tie
+and stared.
+
+"It is serious," he said, speaking in a low voice, "more so even than I
+imagined. Colonel Wragge's control over his thoughts concealed a great
+deal in my psychometrising of the letter. I looked in to warn you to
+keep yourself well in hand--generally speaking."
+
+"Haunted house?" I asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my back.
+
+But he smiled gravely at the question.
+
+"Haunted House of Life more likely," he replied, and a look came into
+his eyes which I had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils
+and he was thick in the fight of rescue. He was stirred in the deeps.
+
+"Colonel Wragge--or the sister?" I asked hurriedly, for the gong was
+sounding.
+
+"Neither directly," he said from the door. "Something far older,
+something very, very remote indeed. This thing has to do with the ages,
+unless I am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory have
+long lain undisturbed."
+
+He came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips, looking
+at me with a peculiar searchingness of gaze.
+
+"Are you aware yet of anything--odd here?" he asked in a whisper.
+"Anything you cannot quite define, for instance. Tell me, Hubbard, for I
+want to know all your impressions. They may help me."
+
+I shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes
+that scared me a little. But he was so in earnest that I set my mind
+keenly searching.
+
+"Nothing yet," I replied truthfully, wishing I could confess to a real
+emotion; "nothing but the strange heat of the place."
+
+He gave a little jump forward in my direction.
+
+"The heat again, that's it!" he exclaimed, as though glad of my
+corroboration. "And how would you describe it, perhaps?" he asked
+quickly, with a hand on the door knob.
+
+"It doesn't seem like ordinary physical heat," I said, casting about in
+my thoughts for a definition.
+
+"More a mental heat," he interrupted, "a glowing of thought and desire,
+a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. Isn't that it?"
+
+I admitted that he had exactly described my sensations.
+
+"Good!" he said, as he opened the door, and with an indescribable
+gesture that combined a warning to be ready with a sign of praise for my
+correct intuition, he was gone.
+
+I hurried after him, and found the two men waiting for me in front of
+the fire.
+
+"I ought to warn you," our host was saying as I came in, "that my
+sister, whom you will meet at dinner, is not aware of the real object of
+your visit. She is under the impression that we are interested in the
+same line of study--folklore--and that your researches have led to my
+seeking acquaintance. She comes to dinner in her chair, you know. It
+will be a great pleasure to her to meet you both. We have few visitors."
+
+So that on entering the dining-room we were prepared to find Miss Wragge
+already at her place, seated in a sort of bath-chair. She was a
+vivacious and charming old lady, with smiling expression and bright
+eyes, and she chatted all through dinner with unfailing spontaneity. She
+had that face, unlined and fresh, that some people carry through life
+from the cradle to the grave; her smooth plump cheeks were all pink and
+white, and her hair, still dark, was divided into two glossy and sleek
+halves on either side of a careful parting. She wore gold-rimmed
+glasses, and at her throat was a large scarab of green jasper that made
+a very handsome brooch.
+
+Her brother and Dr. Silence talked little, so that most of the
+conversation was carried on between herself and me, and she told me a
+great deal about the history of the old house, most of which I fear I
+listened to with but half an ear.
+
+"And when Cromwell stayed here," she babbled on, "he occupied the very
+rooms upstairs that used to be mine. But my brother thinks it safer for
+me to sleep on the ground floor now in case of fire."
+
+And this sentence has stayed in my memory only because of the sudden way
+her brother interrupted her and instantly led the conversation on to
+another topic. The passing reference to fire seemed to have disturbed
+him, and thenceforward he directed the talk himself.
+
+It was difficult to believe that this lively and animated old lady,
+sitting beside me and taking so eager an interest in the affairs of
+life, was practically, we understood, without the use of her lower
+limbs, and that her whole existence for years had been passed between
+the sofa, the bed, and the bath-chair in which she chatted so naturally
+at the dinner table. She made no allusion to her affliction until the
+dessert was reached, and then, touching a bell, she made us a witty
+little speech about leaving us "like time, on noiseless feet," and was
+wheeled out of the room by the butler and carried off to her apartments
+at the other end of the house.
+
+And the rest of us were not long in following suit, for Dr. Silence and
+myself were quite as eager to learn the nature of our errand as our host
+was to impart it to us. He led us down a long flagged passage to a room
+at the very end of the house, a room provided with double doors, and
+windows, I saw, heavily shuttered. Books lined the walls on every side,
+and a large desk in the bow window was piled up with volumes, some open,
+some shut, some showing scraps of paper stuck between the leaves, and
+all smothered in a general cataract of untidy foolscap and loose-half
+sheets.
+
+"My study and workroom," explained Colonel Wragge, with a delightful
+touch of innocent pride, as though he were a very serious scholar. He
+placed arm-chairs for us round the fire. "Here," he added significantly,
+"we shall be safe from interruption and can talk securely."
+
+During dinner the manner of the doctor had been all that was natural and
+spontaneous, though it was impossible for me, knowing him as I did, not
+to be aware that he was subconsciously very keenly alert and already
+receiving upon the ultra-sensitive surface of his mind various and vivid
+impressions; and there was now something in the gravity of his face, as
+well as in the significant tone of Colonel Wragge's speech, and
+something, too, in the fact that we three were shut away in this private
+chamber about to listen to things probably strange, and certainly
+mysterious--something in all this that touched my imagination sharply
+and sent an undeniable thrill along my nerves. Taking the chair
+indicated by my host, I lit my cigar and waited for the opening of the
+attack, fully conscious that we were now too far gone in the adventure
+to admit of withdrawal, and wondering a little anxiously where it was
+going to lead.
+
+What I expected precisely, it is hard to say. Nothing definite, perhaps.
+Only the sudden change was dramatic. A few hours before the prosaic
+atmosphere of Piccadilly was about me, and now I was sitting in a secret
+chamber of this remote old building waiting to hear an account of things
+that held possibly the genuine heart of terror. I thought of the dreary
+moors and hills outside, and the dark pine copses soughing in the wind
+of night; I remembered my companion's singular words up in my bedroom
+before dinner; and then I turned and noted carefully the stern
+countenance of the Colonel as he faced us and lit his big black cigar
+before speaking.
+
+The threshold of an adventure, I reflected as I waited for the first
+words, is always the most thrilling moment--until the climax comes.
+
+But Colonel Wragge hesitated--mentally--a long time before he began. He
+talked briefly of our journey, the weather, the country, and other
+comparatively trivial topics, while he sought about in his mind for an
+appropriate entry into the subject that was uppermost in the thoughts of
+all of us. The fact was he found it a difficult matter to speak of at
+all, and it was Dr. Silence who finally showed him the way over the
+hedge.
+
+"Mr. Hubbard will take a few notes when you are ready--you won't
+object," he suggested; "I can give my undivided attention in this way."
+
+"By all means," turning to reach some of the loose sheets on the writing
+table, and glancing at me. He still hesitated a little, I thought. "The
+fact is," he said apologetically, "I wondered if it was quite fair to
+trouble you so soon. The daylight might suit you better to hear what I
+have to tell. Your sleep, I mean, might be less disturbed, perhaps."
+
+"I appreciate your thoughtfulness," John Silence replied with his gentle
+smile, taking command as it were from that moment, "but really we are
+both quite immune. There is nothing, I think, that could prevent either
+of us sleeping, except--an outbreak of fire, or some such very physical
+disturbance."
+
+Colonel Wragge raised his eyes and looked fixedly at him. This reference
+to an outbreak of fire I felt sure was made with a purpose. It certainly
+had the desired effect of removing from our host's manner the last signs
+of hesitancy.
+
+"Forgive me," he said. "Of course, I know nothing of your methods in
+matters of this kind--so, perhaps, you would like me to begin at once
+and give you an outline of the situation?"
+
+Dr. Silence bowed his agreement. "I can then take my precautions
+accordingly," he added calmly.
+
+The soldier looked up for a moment as though he did not quite gather the
+meaning of these words; but he made no further comment and turned at
+once to tackle a subject on which he evidently talked with diffidence
+and unwillingness.
+
+"It's all so utterly out of my line of things," he began, puffing out
+clouds of cigar smoke between his words, "and there's so little to tell
+with any real evidence behind it, that it's almost impossible to make a
+consecutive story for you. It's the total cumulative effect that is
+so--so disquieting." He chose his words with care, as though determined
+not to travel one hair's breadth beyond the truth.
+
+"I came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother died," he
+continued, "but could not afford to live here then. My sister, whom you
+met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all these
+years, while I was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the
+place--for we never got a satisfactory tenant--and saw that it was not
+allowed to go to ruin. I myself took possession, however, only a year
+ago.
+
+"My brother," he went on, after a perceptible pause, "spent much of his
+time away, too. He was a great traveller, and filled the house with
+stuff he brought home from all over the world. The laundry--a small
+detached building beyond the servants' quarters--he turned into a
+regular little museum. The curios and things I have cleared away--they
+collected dust and were always getting broken--but the laundry-house you
+shall see tomorrow."
+
+Colonel Wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses that
+this beginning took him a long time. But at this point he came to a full
+stop altogether. Evidently there was something he wished to say that
+cost him considerable effort. At length he looked up steadily into my
+companion's face.
+
+"May I ask you--that is, if you won't think it strange," he said, and a
+sort of hush came over his voice and manner, "whether you have noticed
+anything at all unusual--anything queer, since you came into the house?"
+
+Dr. Silence answered without a moment's hesitation.
+
+"I have," he said. "There is a curious sensation of heat in the place."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the other, with a slight start. "You _have_ noticed it.
+This unaccountable heat--"
+
+"But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself--but outside," I
+was astonished to hear the doctor add.
+
+Colonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map
+that hung upon the wall. I got the impression that the movement was made
+with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face.
+
+"Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate," he said after a
+moment, turning round with the map in his hands. "Though, of course, I
+can have no idea how you should guess--"
+
+John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. "Merely my
+impression," he said. "If you pay attention to impressions, and do not
+allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often
+find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate."
+
+Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His
+face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.
+
+"On coming into possession," he said, looking us alternately in the
+face, "I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and
+impossible kind I had ever heard--stories which at first I treated with
+amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only
+to keep my servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my
+brother's death--and, in a way, I think so still."
+
+He leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence.
+
+"It's an old plan of the estate," he explained, "but accurate enough for
+our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the plantations
+marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one," indicating
+the spot with his finger, "is called the Twelve Acre Plantation. It was
+just there, on the side nearest the house, that my brother and the head
+keeper met their deaths."
+
+He spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would
+have preferred to leave untouched--things he personally would rather
+have treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly
+dignified and impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness
+as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed
+as though I were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any
+moment I might be summoned to play a part.
+
+"It was twenty years ago," continued the Colonel, "but there was much
+talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have
+heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered
+man but I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them
+seem to have been frequent."
+
+"I do not recall the affair," said the doctor. "May I ask what was the
+cause of death?" Something in his voice made me prick up my ears for the
+reply.
+
+"The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the
+doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time when
+found."
+
+"And your brother?" asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and
+listening intently.
+
+"Equally mysterious," said our host, speaking in a low voice with
+effort. "But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to
+mention. For those who saw the face--I did not see it myself--and though
+Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged--" He stammered
+and hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved between
+his words. He stuck.
+
+"Yes," said the chief listener sympathetically.
+
+"My brother's face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched. It
+had been swept, as it were, by something that burned--blasted. It was, I
+am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found lying side by side, faces
+downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they had been in
+the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from its edge."
+
+Dr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map
+attentively.
+
+"I did not see the face myself," repeated the other, his manner somehow
+expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, "but
+my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be
+entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be
+brought to refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that
+the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But
+she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame--blasted."
+
+John Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the
+air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel
+Wragge went on with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad
+shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece.
+
+"They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That
+was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as Irish
+peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the
+foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every
+week. You may imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you
+that the servants dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants,
+but the men who worked on the estate outside. The keepers gave notice
+one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the
+foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. Word
+flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a place to
+be avoided, day or night.
+
+"There came a point," the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, "when
+I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could not
+kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the stories
+at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map, comes
+rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches the
+end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense growth
+of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the east winds
+that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my brother
+interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one of the
+best pheasant coverts on the whole estate."
+
+"And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?" asked Dr.
+Silence.
+
+"In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know--except that I
+understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head
+keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up
+travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this
+wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall
+around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins
+tomorrow in the daylight."
+
+"And the result of your investigations--these stories, I mean?" the
+doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.
+
+"Yes, I'm coming to that," he said slowly, "but the wood first, for this
+wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way
+peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part
+in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large
+boulders--old Druid stones, I'm told. At another place there's a small
+pond. There's nothing distinctive about it that I could mention--just an
+ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood--only the trees are a bit
+twisted in the trunks, some of 'em, and very dense. Nothing more.
+
+"And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor
+brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all
+odd--such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make
+out how these people got such notions into their heads."
+
+He paused a moment to relight his cigar.
+
+"There's no regular path through it," he resumed, puffing vigorously,
+"but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners
+whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in
+it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of
+the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound--most
+of 'em said that, in fact--and another man saw shapes flitting in and
+out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all
+faintly luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms--always
+queer, huge things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the whole
+wood was lit up, and one fellow--he's still here and you shall see
+him--has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying
+on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals--"
+
+"What kind of stars?" put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way that
+made me start.
+
+"Oh, I don't know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very
+large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was
+too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them
+since."
+
+He stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze--welcome for its
+blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already a
+strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its effect
+and far from comforting.
+
+"Of course," he went on, straightening up again on the mat, "this was
+all commonplace enough--this seeing lights and figures at night. Most of
+these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may account
+for almost anything. But others saw things in broad daylight. One of the
+woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to his midday
+meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood by
+something that never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree, always
+keeping out of sight, yet solid enough to make the branches sway and the
+twigs snap on the ground. And it made a noise, he declared--but
+really"--the speaker stopped and gave a short laugh--"it's too
+absurd--"
+
+"_Please!_" insisted the doctor; "for it is these small details that
+give me the best clues always."
+
+"--it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. Those were
+his very words: like the crackling of a bonfire," finished the soldier,
+with a repetition of his short laugh.
+
+"Most interesting," Dr. Silence observed gravely. "Please omit nothing."
+
+"Yes," he went on, "and it was soon after that the fires began--the
+fires in the wood. They started mysteriously burning in the patches of
+coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation. No
+one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number,
+have seen them burning and smouldering. They are always small and
+circular in shape, and for all the world like a picnic fire. The head
+keeper has a dozen explanations, from sparks flying out of the house
+chimneys to the sunlight focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them, I
+must admit, convince me as being in the least likely or probable. They
+are most singular, I consider, most singular, these mysterious fires,
+and I am glad to say that they come only at rather long intervals and
+never seem to spread.
+
+"But the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that
+are verifiable. He declared that no life ever willingly entered the
+plantation; more, that no life existed in it at all. No birds nested in
+the trees, or flew into their shade. He set countless traps, but never
+caught so much as a rabbit or a weasel. Animals avoided it, and more
+than once he had picked up dead creatures round the edges that bore no
+obvious signs of how they had met their death.
+
+"Moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever chasing
+some invisible creature across the field one day when he was out with
+his gun. The dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at his feet,
+and then gave chase, yelping like a mad thing. It followed its imaginary
+quarry to the borders of the wood, and then went in--a thing he had
+never known it to do before. The moment it crossed the edge--it is
+darkish in there even in daylight--it began fighting in the most
+frenzied and terrific fashion. It made him afraid to interfere, he said.
+And at last, when the dog came out, hanging its tail down and panting,
+he found something like white hair stuck to its jaws, and brought it to
+show me. I tell you these details because--"
+
+"They are important, believe me," the doctor stopped him. "And you have
+it still, this hair?" he asked.
+
+"It disappeared in the oddest way," the Colonel explained. "It was
+curious looking stuff, something like asbestos, and I sent it to be
+analysed by the local chemist. But either the man got wind of its
+origin, or else he didn't like the look of it for some reason, because
+he returned it to me and said it was neither animal, vegetable, nor
+mineral, so far as he could make out, and he didn't wish to have
+anything to do with it. I put it away in paper, but a week later, on
+opening the package--it was gone! Oh, the stories are simply endless. I
+could tell you hundreds all on the same lines."
+
+"And personal experiences of your own, Colonel Wragge?" asked John
+Silence earnestly, his manner showing the greatest possible interest and
+sympathy.
+
+The soldier gave an almost imperceptible start. He looked distinctly
+uncomfortable.
+
+"Nothing, I think," he said slowly, "nothing--er--I should like to rely
+on. I mean nothing I have the right to speak of, perhaps--yet."
+
+His mouth closed with a snap. Dr. Silence, after waiting a little to see
+if he would add to his reply, did not seek to press him on the point.
+
+"Well," he resumed presently, and as though he would speak
+contemptuously, yet dared not, "this sort of thing has gone on at
+intervals ever since. It spreads like wildfire, of course, mysterious
+chatter of this kind, and people began trespassing all over the estate,
+coming to see the wood, and making themselves a general nuisance.
+Notices of man-traps and spring-guns only seemed to increase their
+persistence; and--think of it," he snorted, "some local Research Society
+actually wrote and asked permission for one of their members to spend a
+night in the wood! Bolder fools, who didn't write for leave, came and
+took away bits of bark from the trees and gave them to clairvoyants, who
+invented in their turn a further batch of tales. There was simply no end
+to it all."
+
+"Most distressing and annoying, I can well believe," interposed the
+doctor.
+
+"Then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun,
+and the interest flagged. The tales stopped. People got interested in
+something else. It all seemed to die out. This was last July. I can tell
+you exactly, for I've kept a diary more or less of what happened."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"But now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all
+revived again with a rush--with a kind of furious attack, so to speak.
+It has really become unbearable. You may imagine what it means, and the
+general state of affairs, when I say that the possibility of leaving has
+occurred to me."
+
+"Incendiarism?" suggested Dr. Silence, half under his breath, but not so
+low that Colonel Wragge did not hear him.
+
+"By Jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!" exclaimed the
+astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the
+doctor, and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation
+of my friend's divining powers were to be found that way.
+
+"It's only that you are thinking very vividly," the doctor said quietly,
+"and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you utter them. It's
+merely a little elementary thought-reading."
+
+His intention, I saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress
+him with his powers so as to ensure obedience later.
+
+"Good Lord! I had no idea--" He did not finish the sentence, and
+dived again abruptly into his narrative.
+
+"I did not see anything myself, I must admit, but the stories of
+independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like
+streams of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to
+shoot out precisely as flames might shoot out--in the direction of this
+house. There," he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump,
+pointing with a thick finger to the map, "where the westerly fringe of
+the plantation comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the
+house--where it links on to those dark patches, which are laurel
+shrubberies, running right up to the back premises--that's where these
+lights were seen. They passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in
+this way reached the house itself. Like silent rockets, one man
+described them, rapid as lightning and exceedingly bright."
+
+"And this evidence you spoke of?"
+
+"They actually reached the sides of the house. They've left a mark of
+scorching on the walls--the walls of the laundry building at the other
+end. You shall see 'em tomorrow." He pointed to the map to indicate the
+spot, and then straightened himself and glared about the room as though
+he had said something no one could believe and expected contradiction.
+
+"Scorched--just as the faces were," the doctor murmured, looking
+significantly at me.
+
+"Scorched--yes," repeated the Colonel, failing to catch the rest of the
+sentence in his excitement.
+
+There was a prolonged silence in the room, in which I heard the gurgling
+of the oil in the lamp and the click of the coals and the heavy
+breathing of our host. The most unwelcome sensations were creeping about
+my spine, and I wondered whether my companion would scorn me utterly if
+I asked to sleep on the sofa in his room. It was eleven o'clock, I saw
+by the clock on the mantelpiece. We had crossed the dividing line and
+were now well in the movement of the adventure. The fight between my
+interest and my dread became acute. But, even if turning back had been
+possible, I think the interest would have easily gained the day.
+
+"I have enemies, of course," I heard the Colonel's rough voice break
+into the pause presently, "and have discharged a number of
+servants---"
+
+"It's not that," put in John Silence briefly.
+
+"You think not? In a sense I am glad, and yet--there are some things
+that can be met and dealt with--"
+
+He left the sentence unfinished, and looked down at the floor with an
+expression of grim severity that betrayed a momentary glimpse of
+character. This fighting man loathed and abhorred the thought of an
+enemy he could not see and come to grips with. Presently he moved over
+and sat down in the chair between us. Something like a sigh escaped him.
+Dr. Silence said nothing.
+
+"My sister, of course, is kept in ignorance, as far as possible, of all
+this," he said disconnectedly, and as if talking to himself. "But even
+if she knew she would find matter-of-fact explanations. I only wish I
+could. I'm sure they exist."
+
+There came then an interval in the conversation that was very
+significant. It did not seem a real pause, or the silence real silence,
+for both men continued to think so rapidly and strongly that one almost
+imagined their thoughts clothed themselves in words in the air of the
+room. I was more than a little keyed up with the strange excitement of
+all I had heard, but what stimulated my nerves more than anything else
+was the obvious fact that the doctor was clearly upon the trail of
+discovery. In his mind at that moment, I believe, he had already solved
+the nature of this perplexing psychical problem. His face was like a
+mask, and he employed the absolute minimum of gesture and words. All his
+energies were directed inwards, and by those incalculable methods and
+processes he had mastered with such infinite patience and study, I felt
+sure he was already in touch with the forces behind these singular
+phenomena and laying his deep plans for bringing them into the open, and
+then effectively dealing with them.
+
+Colonel Wragge meanwhile grew more and more fidgety. From time to time
+he turned towards my companion, as though about to speak, yet always
+changing his mind at the last moment. Once he went over and opened the
+door suddenly, apparently to see if any one were listening at the
+keyhole, for he disappeared a moment between the two doors, and I then
+heard him open the outer one. He stood there for some seconds and made a
+noise as though he were sniffing the air like a dog. Then he closed both
+doors cautiously and came back to the fireplace. A strange excitement
+seemed growing upon him. Evidently he was trying to make up his mind to
+say something that he found it difficult to say. And John Silence, as I
+rightly judged, was waiting patiently for him to choose his own
+opportunity and his own way of saying it. At last he turned and faced
+us, squaring his great shoulders, and stiffening perceptibly.
+
+Dr. Silence looked up sympathetically.
+
+"Your own experiences help me most," he observed quietly.
+
+"The fact is," the Colonel said, speaking very low, "this past week
+there have been outbreaks of fire in the house itself. Three separate
+outbreaks--and all--in my sister's room."
+
+"Yes," the doctor said, as if this was just what he had expected to
+hear.
+
+"Utterly unaccountable--all of them," added the other, and then sat
+down. I began to understand something of the reason of his excitement.
+He was realising at last that the "natural" explanation he had held to
+all along was becoming impossible, and he hated it. It made him angry.
+
+"Fortunately," he went on, "she was out each time and does not know. But
+I have made her sleep now in a room on the ground floor."
+
+"A wise precaution," the doctor said simply. He asked one or two
+questions. The fires had started in the curtains--once by the window and
+once by the bed. The third time smoke had been discovered by the maid
+coming from the cupboard, and it was found that Miss Wragge's clothes
+hanging on the hooks were smouldering. The doctor listened attentively,
+but made no comment.
+
+"And now can you tell me," he said presently, "what your own feeling
+about it is--your general impression?"
+
+"It sounds foolish to say so," replied the soldier, after a moment's
+hesitation, "but I feel exactly as I have often felt on active service
+in my Indian campaigns: just as if the house and all in it were in a
+state of siege; as though a concealed enemy were encamped about us--in
+ambush somewhere." He uttered a soft nervous laugh. "As if the next sign
+of smoke would precipitate a panic--a dreadful panic."
+
+The picture came before me of the night shadowing the house, and the
+twisted pine trees he had described crowding about it, concealing some
+powerful enemy; and, glancing at the resolute face and figure of the old
+soldier, forced at length to his confession, I understood something of
+all he had been through before he sought the assistance of John Silence.
+
+"And tomorrow, unless I am mistaken, is full moon," said the doctor
+suddenly, watching the other's face for the effect of his apparently
+careless words.
+
+Colonel Wragge gave an uncontrollable start, and his face for the first
+time showed unmistakable pallor.
+
+"What in the world---?" he began, his lip quivering.
+
+"Only that I am beginning to see light in this extraordinary affair,"
+returned the other calmly, "and, if my theory is correct, each month
+when the moon is at the full should witness an increase in the activity
+of the phenomena."
+
+"I don't see the connection," Colonel Wragge answered almost savagely,
+"but I am bound to say my diary bears you out." He wore the most puzzled
+expression I have ever seen upon an honest face, but he abhorred this
+additional corroboration of an explanation that perplexed him.
+
+"I confess," he repeated, "I cannot see the connection."
+
+"Why should you?" said the doctor, with his first laugh that evening. He
+got up and hung the map upon the wall again. "But I do--because these
+things are my special study--and let me add that I have yet to come
+across a problem that is not natural, and has not a natural explanation.
+It's merely a question of how much one knows--and admits."
+
+Colonel Wragge eyed him with a new and curious respect in his face. But
+his feelings were soothed. Moreover, the doctor's laugh and change of
+manner came as a relief to all, and broke the spell of grave suspense
+that had held us so long. We all rose and stretched our limbs, and took
+little walks about the room.
+
+"I am glad, Dr. Silence, if you will allow me to say so, that you are
+here," he said simply, "very glad indeed. And now I fear I have kept you
+both up very late," with a glance to include me, "for you must be tired,
+and ready for your beds. I have told you all there is to tell," he
+added, "and tomorrow you must feel perfectly free to take any steps you
+think necessary."
+
+The end was abrupt, yet natural, for there was nothing more to say, and
+neither of these men talked for mere talking's sake.
+
+Out in the cold and chilly hall he lit our candles and took us upstairs.
+The house was at rest and still, every one asleep. We moved softly.
+Through the windows on the stairs we saw the moonlight falling across
+the lawn, throwing deep shadows. The nearer pine trees were just visible
+in the distance, a wall of impenetrable blackness.
+
+Our host came for a moment to our rooms to see that we had everything.
+He pointed to a coil of strong rope lying beside the window, fastened to
+the wall by means of an iron ring. Evidently it had been recently put
+in.
+
+"I don't think we shall need it," Dr. Silence said, with a smile.
+
+"I trust not," replied our host gravely. "I sleep quite close to you
+across the landing," he whispered, pointing to his door, "and if you--if
+you want anything in the night you will know where to find me."
+
+He wished us pleasant dreams and disappeared down the passage into his
+room, shading the candle with his big muscular hand from the draughts.
+
+John Silence stopped me a moment before I went.
+
+"You know what it is?" I asked, with an excitement that even overcame my
+weariness.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I'm almost sure. And you?"
+
+"Not the smallest notion."
+
+He looked disappointed, but not half as disappointed as I felt.
+
+"Egypt," he whispered, "Egypt!"
+
+
+II
+
+Nothing happened to disturb me in the night--nothing, that is, except a
+nightmare in which Colonel Wragge chased me amid thin streaks of fire,
+and his sister always prevented my escape by suddenly rising up out of
+the ground in her chair--dead. The deep baying of dogs woke me once,
+just before the dawn, it must have been, for I saw the window frame
+against the sky; there was a flash of lightning, too, I thought, as I
+turned over in bed. And it was warm, for October oppressively warm.
+
+It was after eleven o'clock when our host suggested going out with the
+guns, these, we understood, being a somewhat thin disguise for our true
+purpose. Personally, I was glad to be in the open air, for the
+atmosphere of the house was heavy with presentiment. The sense of
+impending disaster hung over all. Fear stalked the passages, and lurked
+in the corners of every room. It was a house haunted, but really
+haunted; not by some vague shadow of the dead, but by a definite though
+incalculable influence that was actively alive, and dangerous. At the
+least smell of smoke the entire household quivered. An odour of burning,
+I was convinced, would paralyse all the inmates. For the servants,
+though professedly ignorant by the master's unspoken orders, yet shared
+the common dread; and the hideous uncertainty, joined with this display
+of so spiteful and calculated a spirit of malignity, provided a kind of
+black doom that draped not only the walls, but also the minds of the
+people living within them.
+
+Only the bright and cheerful vision of old Miss Wragge being pushed
+about the house in her noiseless chair, chatting and nodding briskly to
+every one she met, prevented us from giving way entirely to the
+depression which governed the majority. The sight of her was like a
+gleam of sunshine through the depths of some ill-omened wood, and just
+as we went out I saw her being wheeled along by her attendant into the
+sunshine of the back lawn, and caught her cheery smile as she turned her
+head and wished us good sport.
+
+The morning was October at its best. Sunshine glistened on the
+dew-drenched grass and on leaves turned golden-red. The dainty
+messengers of coming hoar-frost were already in the air, a search for
+permanent winter quarters. From the wide moors that everywhere swept up
+against the sky, like a purple sea splashed by the occasional grey of
+rocky clefts, there stole down the cool and perfumed wind of the west.
+And the keen taste of the sea ran through all like a master-flavour,
+borne over the spaces perhaps by the seagulls that cried and circled
+high in the air.
+
+But our host took little interest in this sparkling beauty, and had no
+thought of showing off the scenery of his property. His mind was
+otherwise intent, and, for that matter, so were our own.
+
+"Those bleak moors and hills stretch unbroken for hours," he said, with
+a sweep of the hand; "and over there, some four miles," pointing in
+another direction, "lies S---- Bay, a long, swampy inlet of the sea,
+haunted by myriads of seabirds. On the other side of the house are the
+plantations and pine-woods. I thought we would get the dogs and go first
+to the Twelve Acre Wood I told you about last night. It's quite near."
+
+We found the dogs in the stable, and I recalled the deep baying of the
+night when a fine bloodhound and two great Danes leaped out to greet us.
+Singular companions for guns, I thought to myself, as we struck out
+across the fields and the great creatures bounded and ran beside us,
+nose to ground.
+
+The conversation was scanty. John Silence's grave face did not encourage
+talk. He wore the expression I knew well--that look of earnest
+solicitude which meant that his whole being was deeply absorbed and
+preoccupied. Frightened, I had never seen him, but anxious often--it
+always moved me to witness it--and he was anxious now.
+
+"On the way back you shall see the laundry building," Colonel Wragge
+observed shortly, for he, too, found little to say. "We shall attract
+less attention then."
+
+Yet not all the crisp beauty of the morning seemed able to dispel the
+feelings of uneasy dread that gathered increasingly about our minds as
+we went.
+
+In a very few minutes a clump of pine trees concealed the house from
+view, and we found ourselves on the outskirts of a densely grown
+plantation of conifers. Colonel Wragge stopped abruptly, and, producing
+a map from his pocket, explained once more very briefly its position
+with regard to the house. He showed how it ran up almost to the walls
+of the laundry building--though at the moment beyond our actual
+view--and pointed to the windows of his sister's bedroom where the fires
+had been. The room, now empty, looked straight on to the wood. Then,
+glancing nervously about him, and calling the dogs to heel, he proposed
+that we should enter the plantation and make as thorough examination of
+it as we thought worth while. The dogs, he added, might perhaps be
+persuaded to accompany us a little way--and he pointed to where they
+cowered at his feet--but he doubted it. "Neither voice nor whip will get
+them very far, I'm afraid," he said. "I know by experience."
+
+"If you have no objection," replied Dr. Silence, with decision, and
+speaking almost for the first time, "we will make our examination
+alone--Mr. Hubbard and myself. It will be best so."
+
+His tone was absolutely final, and the Colonel acquiesced so politely
+that even a less intuitive man than myself must have seen that he was
+genuinely relieved.
+
+"You doubtless have good reasons," he said.
+
+"Merely that I wish to obtain my impressions uncoloured. This delicate
+clue I am working on might be so easily blurred by the thought-currents
+of another mind with strongly preconceived ideas."
+
+"Perfectly. I understand," rejoined the soldier, though with an
+expression of countenance that plainly contradicted his words. "Then I
+will wait here with the dogs; and we'll have a look at the laundry on
+our way home."
+
+I turned once to look back as we clambered over the low stone wall built
+by the late owner, and saw his straight, soldierly figure standing in
+the sunlit field watching us with a curiously intent look on his face.
+There was something to me incongruous, yet distinctly pathetic, in the
+man's efforts to meet all far-fetched explanations of the mystery with
+contempt, and at the same time in his stolid, unswerving investigation
+of it all. He nodded at me and made a gesture of farewell with his hand.
+That picture of him, standing in the sunshine with his big dogs,
+steadily watching us, remains with me to this day.
+
+Dr. Silence led the way in among the twisted trunks, planted closely
+together in serried ranks, and I followed sharp at his heels. The moment
+we were out of sight he turned and put down his gun against the roots of
+a big tree, and I did likewise.
+
+"We shall hardly want these cumbersome weapons of murder," he observed,
+with a passing smile.
+
+"You are sure of your clue, then?" I asked at once, bursting with
+curiosity, yet fearing to betray it lest he should think me unworthy.
+His own methods were so absolutely simple and untheatrical.
+
+"I am sure of my clue," he answered gravely. "And I think we have come
+just in time. You shall know in due course. For the present--be content
+to follow and observe. And think, steadily. The support of your mind
+will help me."
+
+His voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death
+with a sort of happiness and pride. I would have followed him anywhere
+at that moment. At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread
+seriousness. I caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this
+broad light of day, I felt the measure of alarm that lay behind.
+
+"You still have no strong impressions?" he asked. "Nothing happened in
+the night, for instance? No vivid dreamings?"
+
+He looked closely for my answer, I was aware.
+
+"I slept almost an unbroken sleep. I was tremendously tired, you know,
+and, but for the oppressive heat--"
+
+"Good! You still notice the heat, then," he said to himself, rather than
+expecting an answer. "And the lightning?" he added, "that lightning out
+of a clear sky--that flashing--did you notice _that_?"
+
+I answered truly that I thought I had seen a flash during a moment of
+wakefulness, and he then drew my attention to certain facts before
+moving on.
+
+"You remember the sensation of warmth when you put the letter to your
+forehead in the train; the heat generally in the house last evening,
+and, as you now mention, in the night. You heard, too, the Colonel's
+stories about the appearances of fire in this wood and in the house
+itself, and the way his brother and the gamekeeper came to their deaths
+twenty years ago."
+
+I nodded, wondering what in the world it all meant.
+
+"And you get no clue from these facts?" he asked, a trifle surprised.
+
+I searched every corner of my mind and imagination for some inkling of
+his meaning, but was obliged to admit that I understood nothing so far.
+
+"Never mind, you will later. And now," he added, "we will go over the
+wood and see what we can find."
+
+His words explained to me something of his method. We were to keep our
+minds alert and report to each other the least fancy that crossed the
+picture-gallery of our thoughts. Then, just as we started, he turned
+again to me with a final warning.
+
+"And, for your safety," he said earnestly, "imagine _now_--and for that
+matter, imagine always until we leave this place--imagine with the
+utmost keenness, that you are surrounded by a shell that protects you.
+Picture yourself inside a protective envelope, and build it up with the
+most intense imagination you can evoke. Pour the whole force of your
+thought and will into it. Believe vividly all through this adventure
+that such a shell, constructed of your thought, will and imagination,
+surrounds you completely, and that nothing can pierce it to attack."
+
+He spoke with dramatic conviction, gazing hard at me as though to
+enforce his meaning, and then moved forward and began to pick his way
+over the rough, tussocky ground into the wood. And meanwhile, knowing
+the efficacy of his prescription, I adopted it to the best of my
+ability.
+
+The trees at once closed about us like the night. Their branches met
+overhead in a continuous tangle, their stems crept closer and closer,
+the brambly undergrowth thickened and multiplied. We tore our trousers,
+scratched our hands, and our eyes filled with fine dust that made it
+most difficult to avoid the clinging, prickly network of branches and
+creepers. Coarse white grass that caught our feet like string grew here
+and there in patches. It crowned the lumps of peaty growth that stuck up
+like human heads, fantastically dressed, thrusting up at us out of the
+ground with crests of dead hair. We stumbled and floundered among them.
+It was hard going, and I could well conceive it impossible to find a way
+at all in the night-time. We jumped, when possible, from tussock to
+tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among heads on a
+battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes that turned
+to stare as we passed.
+
+Here and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light,
+dazzling the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by
+contrast. And on two occasions we passed dark circular places in the
+grass where fires had eaten their mark and left a ring of ashes. Dr.
+Silence pointed to them, but without comment and without pausing, and
+the sight of them woke in me a singular realisation of the dread that
+lay so far only just out of sight in this adventure.
+
+It was exhausting work, and heavy going. We kept close together. The
+warmth, too, was extraordinary. Yet it did not seem the warmth of the
+body due to violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that
+laid glowing hands of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind of
+steady blaze. When my companion found himself too far in advance, he
+waited for me to come up. The place had evidently been untouched by hand
+of man, keeper, forester or sportsman, for many a year; and my thoughts,
+as we advanced painfully, were not unlike the state of the wood
+itself--dark, confused, full of a haunting wonder and the shadow of
+fear.
+
+By this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. No single
+gleam penetrated. We might have been groping in the heart of some
+primeval forest. Then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and
+stringlike grass came to an end; the trees opened out; and the ground
+began to slope upwards towards a large central mound. We had reached the
+middle of the plantation, and before us stood the broken Druid stones
+our host had mentioned. We walked easily up the little hill, between the
+sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered boulders, looked
+round upon a comparatively open space, as large, perhaps, as a small
+London Square.
+
+Thinking of the ceremonies and sacrifices this rough circle of
+prehistoric monoliths might have witnessed, I looked up into my
+companion's face with an unspoken question. But he read my thought and
+shook his head.
+
+"Our mystery has nothing to do with these dead symbols," he said, "but
+with something perhaps even more ancient, and of another country
+altogether."
+
+"Egypt?" I said half under my breath, hopelessly puzzled, but recalling
+his words in my bedroom.
+
+He nodded. Mentally I still floundered, but he seemed intensely
+preoccupied and it was no time for asking questions; so while his words
+circled unintelligibly in my mind I looked round at the scene before me,
+glad of the opportunity to recover breath and some measure of composure.
+But hardly had I time to notice the twisted and contorted shapes of many
+of the pine trees close at hand when Dr. Silence leaned over and touched
+me on the shoulder. He pointed down the slope. And the look I saw in his
+eyes keyed up every nerve in my body to its utmost pitch.
+
+A thin, almost imperceptible column of blue smoke was rising among the
+trees some twenty yards away at the foot of the mound. It curled up and
+up, and disappeared from sight among the tangled branches overhead. It
+was scarcely thicker than the smoke from a small brand of burning wood.
+
+"Protect yourself! Imagine your shell strongly," whispered the doctor
+sharply, "and follow me closely."
+
+He rose at once and moved swiftly down the slope towards the smoke, and
+I followed, afraid to remain alone. I heard the soft crunching of our
+steps on the pine needles. Over his shoulder I watched the thin blue
+spiral, without once taking my eyes off it. I hardly know how to
+describe the peculiar sense of vague horror inspired in me by the sight
+of that streak of smoke pencilling its way upwards among the dark trees.
+And the sensation of increasing heat as we approached was phenomenal. It
+was like walking towards a glowing yet invisible fire.
+
+As we drew nearer his pace slackened. Then he stopped and pointed, and I
+saw a small circle of burnt grass upon the ground. The tussocks were
+blackened and smouldering, and from the centre rose this line of smoke,
+pale, blue, steady. Then I noticed a movement of the atmosphere beside
+us, as if the warm air were rising and the cooler air rushing in to take
+its place: a little centre of wind in the stillness. Overhead the boughs
+stirred and trembled where the smoke disappeared. Otherwise, not a tree
+sighed, not a sound made itself heard. The wood was still as a
+graveyard. A horrible idea came to me that the course of nature was
+about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that the
+sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken
+bubble. Something, certainly, reached up to the citadel of my reason,
+causing its throne to shake.
+
+John Silence moved forward again. I could not see his face, but his
+attitude was plainly one of resolution, of muscles and mind ready for
+vigorous action. We were within ten feet of the blackened circle when
+the smoke of a sudden ceased to rise, and vanished. The tail of the
+column disappeared in the air above, and at the same instant it seemed
+to me that the sensation of heat passed from my face, and the motion of
+the wind was gone. The calm spirit of the fresh October day resumed
+command.
+
+Side by side we advanced and examined the place. The grass was
+smouldering, the ground still hot. The circle of burned earth was a foot
+to a foot and a half in diameter. It looked like an ordinary picnic
+fireplace. I bent down cautiously to look, but in a second I sprang back
+with an involuntary cry of alarm, for, as the doctor stamped on the
+ashes to prevent them spreading, a sound of hissing rose from the spot
+as though he had kicked a living creature. This hissing was faintly
+audible in the air. It moved past us, away towards the thicker portion
+of the wood in the direction of our field, and in a second Dr. Silence
+had left the fire and started in pursuit.
+
+And then began the most extraordinary hunt of invisibility I can ever
+conceive.
+
+He went fast even at the beginning, and, of course, it was perfectly
+obvious that he was following something. To judge by the poise of his
+head he kept his eyes steadily at a certain level--just above the height
+of a man--and the consequence was he stumbled a good deal over the
+roughness of the ground. The hissing sound had stopped. There was no
+sound of any kind, and what he saw to follow was utterly beyond me. I
+only know, that in mortal dread of being left behind, and with a biting
+curiosity to see whatever there was to be seen, I followed as quickly as
+I could, and even then barely succeeded in keeping up with him.
+
+And, as we went, the whole mad jumble of the Colonel's stories ran
+through my brain, touching a sense of frightened laughter that was only
+held in check by the sight of this earnest, hurrying figure before me.
+For John Silence at work inspired me with a kind of awe. He looked so
+diminutive among these giant twisted trees, while yet I knew that his
+purpose and his knowledge were so great, and even in hurry he was
+dignified. The fancy that we were playing some queer, exaggerated game
+together met the fact that we were two men dancing upon the brink of
+some possible tragedy, and the mingling of the two emotions in my mind
+was both grotesque and terrifying.
+
+He never turned in his mad chase, but pushed rapidly on, while I panted
+after him like a figure in some unreasoning nightmare. And, as I ran, it
+came upon me that he had been aware all the time, in his quiet, internal
+way, of many things that he had kept for his own secret consideration;
+he had been watching, waiting, planning from the very moment we entered
+the shade of the wood. By some inner, concentrated process of mind,
+dynamic if not actually magical, he had been in direct contact with the
+source of the whole adventure, the very essence of the real mystery. And
+now the forces were moving to a climax. Something was about to happen,
+something important, something possibly dreadful. Every nerve, every
+sense, every significant gesture of the plunging figure before me
+proclaimed the fact just as surely as the skies, the winds, and the face
+of the earth tell the birds the time to migrate and warn the animals
+that danger lurks and they must move.
+
+In a few moments we reached the foot of the mound and entered the
+tangled undergrowth that lay between us and the sunlight of the field.
+Here the difficulties of fast travelling increased a hundredfold. There
+were brambles to dodge, low boughs to dive under, and countless tree
+trunks closing up to make a direct path impossible. Yet Dr. Silence
+never seemed to falter or hesitate. He went, diving, jumping, dodging,
+ducking, but ever in the same main direction, following a clean trail.
+Twice I tripped and fell, and both times, when I picked myself up again,
+I saw him ahead of me, still forcing a way like a dog after its quarry.
+And sometimes, like a dog, he stopped and pointed--human pointing it
+was, psychic pointing, and each time he stopped to point I heard that
+faint high hissing in the air beyond us. The instinct of an infallible
+dowser possessed him, and he made no mistakes.
+
+At length, abruptly, I caught up with him, and found that we stood at
+the edge of the shallow pond Colonel Wragge had mentioned in his account
+the night before. It was long and narrow, filled with dark brown water,
+in which the trees were dimly reflected. Not a ripple stirred its
+surface.
+
+"Watch!" he cried out, as I came up. "It's going to cross. It's bound
+to betray itself. The water is its natural enemy, and we shall see the
+direction."
+
+And, even as he spoke, a thin line like the track of a water-spider,
+shot swiftly across the shiny surface; there was a ghost of steam in the
+air above; and immediately I became aware of an odour of burning.
+
+Dr. Silence turned and shot a glance at me that made me think of
+lightning. I began to shake all over.
+
+"Quick!" he cried with excitement, "to the trail again! We must run
+around. It's going to the house!"
+
+The alarm in his voice quite terrified me. Without a false step I dashed
+round the slippery banks and dived again at his heels into the sea of
+bushes and tree trunks. We were now in the thick of the very dense belt
+that ran around the outer edge of the plantation, and the field was
+near; yet so dark was the tangle that it was some time before the first
+shafts of white sunlight became visible. The doctor now ran in zigzags.
+He was following something that dodged and doubled quite wonderfully,
+yet had begun, I fancied, to move more slowly than before.
+
+"Quick!" he cried. "In the light we shall lose it!"
+
+I still saw nothing, heard nothing, caught no suggestion of a trail; yet
+this man, guided by some interior divining that seemed infallible, made
+no false turns, though how he failed to crash headlong into the trees
+has remained a mystery to me ever since. And then, with a sudden rush,
+we found ourselves on the skirts of the wood with the open field lying
+in bright sunshine before our eyes.
+
+"Too late!" I heard him cry, a note of anguish in his voice. "It's
+out--and, by God, it's making for the house!"
+
+I saw the Colonel standing in the field with his dogs where we had left
+him. He was bending double, peering into the wood where he heard us
+running, and he straightened up like a bent whip released. John Silence
+dashed passed, calling him to follow.
+
+"We shall lose the trail in the light," I heard him cry as he ran. "But
+quick! We may yet get there in time!"
+
+That wild rush across the open field, with the dogs at our heels,
+leaping and barking, and the elderly Colonel behind us running as though
+for his life, shall I ever forget it? Though I had only vague ideas of
+the meaning of it all, I put my best foot forward, and, being the
+youngest of the three, I reached the house an easy first. I drew up,
+panting, and turned to wait for the others. But, as I turned, something
+moving a little distance away caught my eye, and in that moment I swear
+I experienced the most overwhelming and singular shock of surprise and
+terror I have ever known, or can conceive as possible.
+
+For the front door was open, and the waist of the house being narrow, I
+could see through the hall into the dining-room beyond, and so out on to
+the back lawn, and there I saw no less a sight than the figure of Miss
+Wragge--running. Even at that distance it was plain that she had seen
+me, and was coming fast towards me, running with the frantic gait of a
+terror-stricken woman. She had recovered the use of her legs.
+
+Her face was a livid grey, as of death itself, but the general
+expression was one of laughter, for her mouth was gaping, and her eyes,
+always bright, shone with the light of a wild merriment that seemed the
+merriment of a child, yet was singularly ghastly. And that very second,
+as she fled past me into her brother's arms behind, I smelt again most
+unmistakably the odour of burning, and to this day the smell of smoke
+and fire can come very near to turning me sick with the memory of what I
+had seen.
+
+Fast on her heels, too, came the terrified attendant, more mistress of
+herself, and able to speak--which the old lady could not do--but with a
+face almost, if not quite, as fearful.
+
+"We were down by the bushes in the sun,"--she gasped and screamed in
+reply to Colonel Wragge's distracted questionings,--"I was wheeling the
+chair as usual when she shrieked and leaped--I don't know exactly--I was
+too frightened to see--Oh, my God! she jumped clean out of the
+chair--_and ran_! There was a blast of hot air from the wood, and she
+hid her face and jumped. She didn't make a sound--she didn't cry out, or
+make a sound. She just ran."
+
+But the nightmare horror of it all reached the breaking point a few
+minutes later, and while I was still standing in the hall temporarily
+bereft of speech and movement; for while the doctor, the Colonel and the
+attendant were half-way up the staircase, helping the fainting woman to
+the privacy of her room, and all in a confused group of dark figures,
+there sounded a voice behind me, and I turned to see the butler, his
+face dripping with perspiration, his eyes starting out of his head.
+
+"The laundry's on fire!" he cried; "the laundry building's a-caught!"
+
+I remember his odd expression "a-caught," and wanting to laugh, but
+finding my face rigid and inflexible.
+
+"The devil's about again, s'help me Gawd!" he cried, in a voice thin
+with terror, running about in circles.
+
+And then the group on the stairs scattered as at the sound of a shot,
+and the Colonel and Dr. Silence came down three steps at a time, leaving
+the afflicted Miss Wragge to the care of her single attendant.
+
+We were out across the front lawn in a moment and round the corner of
+the house, the Colonel leading, Silence and I at his heels, and the
+portly butler puffing some distance in the rear, getting more and more
+mixed in his addresses to God and the devil; and the moment we passed
+the stables and came into view of the laundry building, we saw a
+wicked-looking volume of smoke pouring out of the narrow windows, and
+the frightened women-servants and grooms running hither and thither,
+calling aloud as they ran.
+
+The arrival of the master restored order instantly, and this retired
+soldier, poor thinker perhaps, but capable man of action, had the matter
+in hand from the start. He issued orders like a martinet, and, almost
+before I could realise it, there were streaming buckets on the scene and
+a line of men and women formed between the building and the stable pump.
+
+"Inside," I heard John Silence cry, and the Colonel followed him through
+the door, while I was just quick enough at their heels to hear him add,
+"the smoke's the worst part of it. There's no fire yet, I think."
+
+And, true enough, there was no fire. The interior was thick with smoke,
+but it speedily cleared and not a single bucket was used upon the floor
+or walls. The air was stifling, the heat fearful.
+
+"There's precious little to burn in here; it's all stone," the Colonel
+exclaimed, coughing. But the doctor was pointing to the wooden covers of
+the great cauldron in which the clothes were washed, and we saw that
+these were smouldering and charred. And when we sprinkled half a bucket
+of water on them the surrounding bricks hissed and fizzed and sent up
+clouds of steam. Through the open door and windows this passed out with
+the rest of the smoke, and we three stood there on the brick floor
+staring at the spot and wondering, each in our own fashion, how in the
+name of natural law the place could have caught fire or smoked at all.
+And each was silent--myself from sheer incapacity and befuddlement, the
+Colonel from the quiet pluck that faces all things yet speaks little,
+and John Silence from the intense mental grappling with this latest
+manifestation of a profound problem that called for concentration of
+thought rather than for any words.
+
+There was really nothing to say. The facts were indisputable.
+
+Colonel Wragge was the first to utter.
+
+"My sister," he said briefly, and moved off. In the yard I heard him
+sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently
+matter-of-fact voice, scolding some one roundly for making such a big
+fire and letting the flues get over-heated, and paying no heed to the
+stammering reply that no fire had been lit there for several days. Then
+he dispatched a groom on horseback for the local doctor.
+
+Then Dr. Silence turned and looked at me. The absolute control he
+possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture,
+change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well
+knew, over its very birth in his heart, the masklike face of the dead he
+could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any given
+moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. But now, when he
+turned and looked at me, there was no sphinx-expression there, but
+rather the keen triumphant face of a man who had solved a dangerous and
+complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory.
+
+"_Now_ do you guess?" he asked quietly, as though it were the simplest
+matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible.
+
+I could only stare stupidly and remain silent. He glanced down at the
+charred cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger.
+But I was too excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps, to
+see what it was he outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. I could
+only go on staring and shaking my puzzled head.
+
+"A fire-elemental," he cried, "a fire-elemental of the most powerful and
+malignant kind--"
+
+"A what?" thundered the voice of Colonel Wragge behind us, having
+returned suddenly and overheard.
+
+"It's a fire-elemental," repeated Dr. Silence more calmly, but with a
+note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, "and a
+fire-elemental enraged."
+
+The light began to dawn in my mind at last. But the Colonel--who had
+never heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably worked
+up for a plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to grapple
+with--the Colonel stood, with the most dumfoundered look ever seen on a
+human countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and stare.
+
+"And why," he began, savage with the desire to find something visible he
+could fight--"why, in the name of all the blazes--?" and then stopped as
+John Silence moved up and took his arm.
+
+"There, my dear Colonel Wragge," he said gently, "you touch the heart of
+the whole thing. You ask 'Why.' That is precisely our problem." He held
+the soldier's eyes firmly with his own. "And that, too, I think, we
+shall soon know. Come and let us talk over a plan of action--that room
+with the double doors, perhaps."
+
+The word "action" calmed him a little, and he led the way, without
+further speech, back into the house, and down the long stone passage to
+the room where we had heard his stories on the night of our arrival. I
+understood from the doctor's glance that my presence would not make the
+interview easier for our host, and I went upstairs to my own
+room--shaking.
+
+But in the solitude of my room the vivid memories of the last hour
+revived so mercilessly that I began to feel I should never in my whole
+life lose the dreadful picture of Miss Wragge running--that dreadful
+human climax after all the non-human mystery in the wood--and I was not
+sorry when a servant knocked at my door and said that Colonel Wragge
+would be glad if I would join them in the little smoking-room.
+
+"I think it is better you should be present," was all Colonel Wragge
+said as I entered the room. I took the chair with my back to the window.
+There was still an hour before lunch, though I imagine that the usual
+divisions of the day hardly found a place in the thoughts of any one of
+us.
+
+The atmosphere of the room was what I might call electric. The Colonel
+was positively bristling; he stood with his back to the fire, fingering
+an unlit black cigar, his face flushed, his being obviously roused and
+ready for action. He hated this mystery. It was poisonous to his nature,
+and he longed to meet something face to face--something he could gauge
+and fight. Dr. Silence, I noticed at once, was sitting before the map of
+the estate which was spread upon a table. I knew by his expression the
+state of his mind. He was in the thick of it all, knew it, delighted in
+it, and was working at high pressure. He recognised my presence with a
+lifted eyelid, and the flash of the eye, contrasted with his stillness
+and composure, told me volumes.
+
+"I was about to explain to our host briefly what seems to me afoot in
+all this business," he said without looking up, "when he asked that you
+should join us so that we can all work together." And, while signifying
+my assent, I caught myself wondering what quality it was in the calm
+speech of this undemonstrative man that was so full of power, so charged
+with the strange, virile personality behind it and that seemed to
+inspire us with his own confidence as by a process of radiation.
+
+"Mr. Hubbard," he went on gravely, turning to the soldier, "knows
+something of my methods, and in more than one--er--interesting situation
+has proved of assistance. What we want now"--and here he suddenly got up
+and took his place on the mat beside the Colonel, and looked hard at
+him--"is men who have self-control, who are sure of themselves, whose
+minds at the critical moment will emit positive forces, instead of the
+wavering and uncertain currents due to negative feelings--due, for
+instance, to fear."
+
+He looked at us each in turn. Colonel Wragge moved his feet farther
+apart, and squared his shoulders; and I felt guilty but said nothing,
+conscious that my latent store of courage was being deliberately hauled
+to the front. He was winding me up like a clock.
+
+"So that, in what is yet to come," continued our leader, "each of us
+will contribute his share of power, and ensure success for my plan."
+
+"I'm not afraid of anything I can _see_," said the Colonel bluntly.
+
+"I'm ready," I heard myself say, as it were automatically, "for
+anything," and then added, feeling the declaration was lamely
+insufficient, "and everything."
+
+Dr. Silence left the mat and began walking to and fro about the room,
+both hands plunged deep into the pockets of his shooting-jacket.
+Tremendous vitality streamed from him. I never took my eyes off the
+small, moving figure; small yes,--and yet somehow making me think of a
+giant plotting the destruction of worlds. And his manner was gentle, as
+always, soothing almost, and his words uttered quietly without emphasis
+or emotion. Most of what he said was addressed, though not too
+obviously, to the Colonel.
+
+"The violence of this sudden attack," he said softly, pacing to and fro
+beneath the bookcase at the end of the room, "is due, of course, partly
+to the fact that tonight the moon is at the full"--here he glanced at me
+for a moment--"and partly to the fact that we have all been so
+deliberately concentrating upon the matter. Our thinking, our
+investigation, has stirred it into unusual activity. I mean that the
+intelligent force behind these manifestations has realised that some one
+is busied about its destruction. And it is now on the defensive: more,
+it is aggressive."
+
+"But 'it'--what is 'it'?" began the soldier, fuming. "What, in the name
+of all that's dreadful, _is_ a fire-elemental?"
+
+"I cannot give you at this moment," replied Dr. Silence, turning to him,
+but undisturbed by the interruption, "a lecture on the nature and
+history of magic, but can only say that an Elemental is the active force
+behind the elements,--whether earth, air, water, _or fire_,--it is
+impersonal in its essential nature, but can be focused, personified,
+ensouled, so to say, by those who know how--by magicians, if you
+will--for certain purposes of their own, much in the same way that steam
+and electricity can be harnessed by the practical man of this century.
+
+"Alone, these blind elemental energies can accomplish little, but
+governed and directed by the trained will of a powerful manipulator they
+may become potent activities for good or evil. They are the basis of all
+magic, and it is the motive behind them that constitutes the magic
+'black' or 'white'; they can be the vehicles of curses or of blessings,
+for a curse is nothing more than the thought of a violent will
+perpetuated. And in such cases--cases like this--the conscious,
+directing will of the mind that is using the elemental stands always
+behind the phenomena--"
+
+"You think that my brother--!" broke in the Colonel, aghast.
+
+"Has nothing whatever to do with it--directly. The fire-elemental that
+has here been tormenting you and your household was sent upon its
+mission long before you, or your family, or your ancestors, or even the
+nation you belong to--unless I am much mistaken--was even in existence.
+We will come to that a little later; after the experiment I propose to
+make we shall be more positive. At present I can only say we have to
+deal now, not only with the phenomenon of Attacking Fire merely, but
+with the vindictive and enraged intelligence that is directing it from
+behind the scenes--vindictive and enraged,"--he repeated the words.
+
+"That explains--" began Colonel Wragge, seeking furiously for words he
+could not find quickly enough.
+
+"Much," said John Silence, with a gesture to restrain him.
+
+He stopped a moment in the middle of his walk, and a deep silence came
+down over the little room. Through the windows the sunlight seemed less
+bright, the long line of dark hills less friendly, making me think of a
+vast wave towering to heaven and about to break and overwhelm us.
+Something formidable had crept into the world about us. For,
+undoubtedly, there was a disquieting thought, holding terror as well as
+awe, in the picture his words conjured up: the conception of a human
+will reaching its deathless hand, spiteful and destructive, down through
+the ages, to strike the living and afflict the innocent.
+
+"But what is its object?" burst out the soldier, unable to restrain
+himself longer in the silence. "Why does it come from that plantation?
+And why should it attack us, or any one in particular?" Questions began
+to pour from him in a stream.
+
+"All in good time," the doctor answered quietly, having let him run on
+for several minutes. "But I must first discover positively what, or who,
+it is that directs this particular fire-elemental. And, to do that, we
+must first"--he spoke with slow deliberation--"seek to capture--to
+confine by visibility--to limit its sphere in a concrete form."
+
+"Good heavens almighty!" exclaimed the soldier, mixing his words in his
+unfeigned surprise.
+
+"Quite so," pursued the other calmly; "for in so doing I think we can
+release it from the purpose that binds it, restore it to its normal
+condition of latent fire, and also"--he lowered his voice perceptibly
+--"also discover the face and form of the Being that ensouls it."
+
+"The man behind the gun!" cried the Colonel, beginning to understand
+something, and leaning forward so as not to miss a single syllable.
+
+"I mean that in the last resort, before it returns to the womb of
+potential fire, it will probably assume the face and figure of its
+Director, of the man of magical knowledge who originally bound it with
+his incantations and sent it forth upon its mission of centuries."
+
+The soldier sat down and gasped openly in his face, breathing hard; but
+it was a very subdued voice that framed the question.
+
+"And how do you propose to make it visible? How capture and confine it?
+What d'ye mean, Dr. John Silence?"
+
+"By furnishing it with the materials for a form. By the process of
+materialisation simply. Once limited by dimensions, it will become slow,
+heavy, visible. We can then dissipate it. Invisible fire, you see, is
+dangerous and incalculable; locked up in a form we can perhaps manage
+it. We must betray it--to its death."
+
+"And this material?" we asked in the same breath, although I think I had
+already guessed.
+
+"Not pleasant, but effective," came the quiet reply; "the exhalations of
+freshly spilled blood."
+
+"Not human blood!" cried Colonel Wragge, starting up from his chair with
+a voice like an explosion. I thought his eyes would start from their
+sockets.
+
+The face of Dr. Silence relaxed in spite of himself, and his spontaneous
+little laugh brought a welcome though momentary relief.
+
+"The days of human sacrifice, I hope, will never come again," he
+explained. "Animal blood will answer the purpose, and we can make the
+experiment as pleasant as possible. Only, the blood must be freshly
+spilled and strong with the vital emanations that attract this peculiar
+class of elemental creature. Perhaps--perhaps if some pig on the estate
+is ready for the market--"
+
+He turned to hide a smile; but the passing touch of comedy found no echo
+in the mind of our host, who did not understand how to change quickly
+from one emotion to another. Clearly he was debating many things
+laboriously in his honest brain. But, in the end, the earnestness and
+scientific disinterestedness of the doctor, whose influence over him was
+already very great, won the day, and he presently looked up more calmly,
+and observed shortly that he thought perhaps the matter could be
+arranged.
+
+"There are other and pleasanter methods," Dr. Silence went on to
+explain, "but they require time and preparation, and things have gone
+much too far, in my opinion, to admit of delay. And the process need
+cause you no distress: we sit round the bowl and await results. Nothing
+more. The emanations of blood--which, as Levi says, is the first
+incarnation of the universal fluid--furnish the materials out of which
+the creatures of discarnate life, spirits if you prefer, can fashion
+themselves a temporary appearance. The process is old, and lies at the
+root of all blood sacrifice. It was known to the priests of Baal, and it
+is known to the modern ecstasy dancers who cut themselves to produce
+objective phantoms who dance with them. And the least gifted clairvoyant
+could tell you that the forms to be seen in the vicinity of
+slaughter-houses, or hovering above the deserted battlefields,
+are--well, simply beyond all description. I do not mean," he added,
+noticing the uneasy fidgeting of his host, "that anything in our
+laundry-experiment need appear to terrify us, for this case seems a
+comparatively simple one, and it is only the vindictive character of the
+intelligence directing this fire-elemental that causes anxiety and makes
+for personal danger."
+
+"It is curious," said the Colonel, with a sudden rush of words, drawing
+a deep breath, and as though speaking of things distasteful to him,
+"that during my years among the Hill Tribes of Northern India I came
+across--personally came across--instances of the sacrifices of blood to
+certain deities being stopped suddenly, and all manner of disasters
+happening until they were resumed. Fires broke out in the huts, and even
+on the clothes, of the natives--and--and I admit I have read, in the
+course of my studies,"--he made a gesture toward his books and heavily
+laden table,--"of the Yezidis of Syria evoking phantoms by means of
+cutting their bodies with knives during their whirling dances--enormous
+globes of fire which turned into monstrous and terrible forms--and I
+remember an account somewhere, too, how the emaciated forms and pallid
+countenances of the spectres, that appeared to the Emperor Julian,
+claimed to be the true Immortals, and told him to renew the sacrifices
+of blood 'for the fumes of which, since the establishment of
+Christianity, they had been pining'--that these were in reality the
+phantoms evoked by the rites of blood."
+
+Both Dr. Silence and myself listened in amazement, for this sudden
+speech was so unexpected, and betrayed so much more knowledge than we
+had either of us suspected in the old soldier.
+
+"Then perhaps you have read, too," said the doctor, "how the Cosmic
+Deities of savage races, elemental in their nature, have been kept alive
+through many ages by these blood rites?"
+
+"No," he answered; "that is new to me."
+
+"In any case," Dr. Silence added, "I am glad you are not wholly
+unfamiliar with the subject, for you will now bring more sympathy, and
+therefore more help, to our experiment. For, of course, in this case, we
+only want the blood to tempt the creature from its lair and enclose it
+in a form--"
+
+"I quite understand. And I only hesitated just now," he went on, his
+words coming much more slowly, as though he felt he had already said too
+much, "because I wished to be quite sure it was no mere curiosity, but
+an actual sense of necessity that dictated this horrible experiment."
+
+"It is your safety, and that of your household, and of your sister, that
+is at stake," replied the doctor. "Once I have _seen_, I hope to
+discover whence this elemental comes, and what its real purpose is."
+
+Colonel Wragge signified his assent with a bow.
+
+"And the moon will help us," the other said, "for it will be full in the
+early hours of the morning, and this kind of elemental-being is always
+most active at the period of full moon. Hence, you see, the clue
+furnished by your diary."
+
+So it was finally settled. Colonel Wragge would provide the materials
+for the experiment, and we were to meet at midnight. How he would
+contrive at that hour--but that was his business. I only know we both
+realised that he would keep his word, and whether a pig died at
+midnight, or at noon, was after all perhaps only a question of the sleep
+and personal comfort of the executioner.
+
+"Tonight, then, in the laundry," said Dr. Silence finally, to clinch the
+plan; "we three alone--and at midnight, when the household is asleep and
+we shall be free from disturbance."
+
+He exchanged significant glances with our host, who, at that moment, was
+called away by the announcement that the family doctor had arrived, and
+was ready to see him in his sister's room.
+
+For the remainder of the afternoon John Silence disappeared. I had my
+suspicions that he made a secret visit to the plantation and also to the
+laundry building; but, in any case, we saw nothing of him, and he kept
+strictly to himself. He was preparing for the night, I felt sure, but
+the nature of his preparations I could only guess. There was movement in
+his room, I heard, and an odour like incense hung about the door, and
+knowing that he regarded rites as the vehicles of energies, my guesses
+were probably not far wrong.
+
+Colonel Wragge, too, remained absent the greater part of the afternoon,
+and, deeply afflicted, had scarcely left his sister's bedside, but in
+response to my inquiry when we met for a moment at tea-time, he told me
+that although she had moments of attempted speech, her talk was quite
+incoherent and hysterical, and she was still quite unable to explain the
+nature of what she had seen. The doctor, he said, feared she had
+recovered the use of her limbs, only to lose that of her memory, and
+perhaps even of her mind.
+
+"Then the recovery of her legs, I trust, may be permanent, at any rate,"
+I ventured, finding it difficult to know what sympathy to offer. And he
+replied with a curious short laugh, "Oh yes; about that there can be no
+doubt whatever."
+
+And it was due merely to the chance of my overhearing a fragment of
+conversation--unwillingly, of course--that a little further light was
+thrown upon the state in which the old lady actually lay. For, as I came
+out of my room, it happened that Colonel Wragge and the doctor were
+going downstairs together, and their words floated up to my ears before
+I could make my presence known by so much as a cough.
+
+"Then you must find a way," the doctor was saying with decision; "for I
+cannot insist too strongly upon that--and at all costs she must be kept
+quiet. These attempts to go out must be prevented--if necessary, by
+force. This desire to visit some wood or other she keeps talking about
+is, of course, hysterical in nature. It cannot be permitted for a
+moment."
+
+"It shall not be permitted," I heard the soldier reply, as they reached
+the hall below.
+
+"It has impressed her mind for some reason--" the doctor went on, by way
+evidently of soothing explanation, and then the distance made it
+impossible for me to hear more.
+
+At dinner Dr. Silence was still absent, on the public plea of a
+headache, and though food was sent to his room, I am inclined to believe
+he did not touch it, but spent the entire time fasting.
+
+We retired early, desiring that the household should do likewise, and I
+must confess that at ten o'clock when I bid my host a temporary
+good-night, and sought my room to make what mental preparation I could,
+I realised in no very pleasant fashion that it was a singular and
+formidable assignation, this midnight meeting in the laundry building,
+and that there were moments in every adventure of life when a wise man,
+and one who knew his own limitations, owed it to his dignity to withdraw
+discreetly. And, but for the character of our leader, I probably should
+have then and there offered the best excuse I could think of, and have
+allowed myself quietly to fall asleep and wait for an exciting story in
+the morning of what had happened. But with a man like John Silence, such
+a lapse was out of the question, and I sat before my fire counting the
+minutes and doing everything I could think of to fortify my resolution
+and fasten my will at the point where I could be reasonably sure that my
+self-control would hold against all attacks of men, devils, or
+elementals.
+
+
+III
+
+At a quarter before midnight, clad in a heavy ulster, and with slippered
+feet, I crept cautiously from my room and stole down the passage to the
+top of the stairs. Outside the doctor's door I waited a moment to
+listen. All was still; the house in utter darkness; no gleam of light
+beneath any door; only, down the length of the corridor, from the
+direction of the sick-room, came faint sounds of laughter and incoherent
+talk that were not things to reassure a mind already half a-tremble, and
+I made haste to reach the hall and let myself out through the front
+door into the night.
+
+The air was keen and frosty, perfumed with night smells, and exquisitely
+fresh; all the million candles of the sky were alight, and a faint
+breeze rose and fell with far-away sighings in the tops of the pine
+trees. My blood leaped for a moment in the spaciousness of the night,
+for the splendid stars brought courage; but the next instant, as I
+turned the corner of the house, moving stealthily down the gravel drive,
+my spirits sank again ominously. For, yonder, over the funereal plumes
+of the Twelve Acre Plantation, I saw the broken, yellow disc of the
+half-moon just rising in the east, staring down like some vast Being
+come to watch upon the progress of our doom. Seen through the distorting
+vapours of the earth's atmosphere, her face looked weirdly unfamiliar,
+her usual expression of benignant vacancy somehow a-twist. I slipped
+along by the shadows of the wall, keeping my eyes upon the ground.
+
+The laundry-house, as already described, stood detached from the other
+offices, with laurel shrubberies crowding thickly behind it, and the
+kitchen-garden so close on the other side that the strong smells of soil
+and growing things came across almost heavily. The shadows of the
+haunted plantation, hugely lengthened by the rising moon behind them,
+reached to the very walls and covered the stone tiles of the roof with a
+dark pall. So keenly were my senses alert at this moment that I believe
+I could fill a chapter with the endless small details of the impression
+I received--shadows, odour, shapes, sounds--in the space of the few
+seconds I stood and waited before the closed wooden door.
+
+Then I became aware of some one moving towards me through the moonlight,
+and the figure of John Silence, without overcoat and bareheaded, came
+quickly and without noise to join me. His eyes, I saw at once, were
+wonderfully bright, and so marked was the shining pallor of his face
+that I could hardly tell when he passed from the moonlight into the
+shade.
+
+He passed without a word, beckoning me to follow, and then pushed the
+door open, and went in.
+
+The chill air of the place met us like that of an underground vault; and
+the brick floor and whitewashed walls, streaked with damp and smoke,
+threw back the cold in our faces. Directly opposite gaped the black
+throat of the huge open fireplace, the ashes of wood fires still piled
+and scattered about the hearth, and on either side of the projecting
+chimney-column were the deep recesses holding the big twin cauldrons for
+boiling clothes. Upon the lids of these cauldrons stood the two little
+oil lamps, shaded red, which gave all the light there was, and
+immediately in front of the fireplace there was a small circular table
+with three chairs set about it. Overhead, the narrow slit windows, high
+up the walls, pointed to a dim network of wooden rafters half lost among
+the shadows, and then came the dark vault of the roof. Cheerless and
+unalluring, for all the red light, it certainly was, reminding me of
+some unused conventicle, bare of pews or pulpit, ugly and severe, and I
+was forcibly struck by the contrast between the normal uses to which the
+place was ordinarily put, and the strange and medieval purpose which had
+brought us under its roof tonight.
+
+Possibly an involuntary shudder ran over me, for my companion turned
+with a confident look to reassure me, and he was so completely master of
+himself that I at once absorbed from his abundance, and felt the chinks
+of my failing courage beginning to close up. To meet his eye in the
+presence of danger was like finding a mental railing that guided and
+supported thought along the giddy edges of alarm.
+
+"I am quite ready," I whispered, turning to listen for approaching
+footsteps.
+
+He nodded, still keeping his eyes on mine. Our whispers sounded hollow
+as they echoed overhead among the rafters.
+
+"I'm glad you are here," he said. "Not all would have the courage. Keep
+your thoughts controlled, and imagine the protective shell round
+you--round your inner being."
+
+"I'm all right," I repeated, cursing my chattering teeth.
+
+He took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into me
+something of his supreme confidence. The eyes and hands of a strong man
+can touch the soul. I think he guessed my thought, for a passing smile
+flashed about the corners of his mouth.
+
+"You will feel more comfortable," he said, in a low tone, "when the
+chain is complete. The Colonel we can count on, of course.
+Remember, though," he added warningly, "he may perhaps become
+controlled--possessed--when the thing comes, because he won't know how
+to resist. And to explain the business to such a man--!" He shrugged
+his shoulders expressively. "But it will only be temporary, and I will
+see that no harm comes to him."
+
+He glanced round at the arrangements with approval.
+
+"Red light," he said, indicating the shaded lamps, "has the lowest rate
+of vibration. Materialisations are dissipated by strong light--won't
+form, or hold together--in rapid vibrations."
+
+I was not sure that I approved altogether of this dim light, for in
+complete darkness there is something protective--the knowledge that one
+cannot be seen, probably--which a half-light destroys, but I remembered
+the warning to keep my thoughts steady, and forbore to give them
+expression.
+
+There was a step outside, and the figure of Colonel Wragge stood in the
+doorway. Though entering on tiptoe, he made considerable noise and
+clatter, for his free movements were impeded by the burden he carried,
+and we saw a large yellowish bowl held out at arms' length from his
+body, the mouth covered with a white cloth. His face, I noted, was
+rigidly composed. He, too, was master of himself. And, as I thought of
+this old soldier moving through the long series of alarms, worn with
+watching and wearied with assault, unenlightened yet undismayed, even
+down to the dreadful shock of his sister's terror, and still showing the
+dogged pluck that persists in the face of defeat, I understood what Dr.
+Silence meant when he described him as a man "to be counted on."
+
+I think there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features,
+and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the
+emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these
+two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door
+was shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage I
+possessed was well to the fore, and I felt as sure of myself as I knew I
+ever could feel.
+
+Colonel Wragge set the bowl carefully in the centre of the table.
+
+"Midnight," he said shortly, glancing at his watch, and we all three
+moved to our chairs.
+
+There, in the middle of that cold and silent place, we sat, with the
+vile bowl before us, and a thin, hardly perceptible steam rising through
+the damp air from the surface of the white cloth and disappearing
+upwards the moment it passed beyond the zone of red light and entered
+the deep shadows thrown forward by the projecting wall of chimney.
+
+The doctor had indicated our respective places, and I found myself
+seated with my back to the door and opposite the black hearth. The
+Colonel was on my left, and Dr. Silence on my right, both half facing
+me, the latter more in shadow than the former. We thus divided the
+little table into even sections, and sitting back in our chairs we
+awaited events in silence.
+
+For something like an hour I do not think there was even the faintest
+sound within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted roof.
+Our slippers made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our breathing
+was suppressed almost to nothing; even the rustle of our clothes as we
+shifted from time to time upon our seats was inaudible. Silence
+smothered us absolutely--the silence of night, of listening, the silence
+of a haunted expectancy. The very gurgling of the lamps was too soft to
+be heard, and if light itself had sound, I do not think we should have
+noticed the silvery tread of the moonlight as it entered the high narrow
+windows and threw upon the floor the slender traces of its pallid
+footsteps.
+
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor, and myself too for that matter, sat thus
+like figures of stone, without speech and without gesture. My eyes
+passed in ceaseless journeys from the bowl to their faces, and from
+their faces to the bowl. They might have been masks, however, for all
+the signs of life they gave; and the light steaming from the horrid
+contents beneath the white cloth had long ceased to be visible.
+
+Then presently, as the moon rose higher, the wind rose with it. It
+sighed, like the lightest of passing wings, over the roof; it crept most
+softly round the walls; it made the brick floor like ice beneath our
+feet. With it I saw mentally the desolate moorland flowing like a sea
+about the old house, the treeless expanse of lonely hills, the nearer
+copses, sombre and mysterious in the night. The plantation, too, in
+particular I saw, and imagined I heard the mournful whisperings that
+must now be a-stirring among its tree-tops as the breeze played down
+between the twisted stems. In the depth of the room behind us the shafts
+of moonlight met and crossed in a growing network.
+
+It was after an hour of this wearing and unbroken attention, and I
+should judge about one o'clock in the morning, when the baying of the
+dogs in the stableyard first began, and I saw John Silence move suddenly
+in his chair and sit up in an attitude of attention. Every force in my
+being instantly leaped into the keenest vigilance. Colonel Wragge moved
+too, though slowly, and without raising his eyes from the table before
+him.
+
+The doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the bowl.
+
+It was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lamps
+grew fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. I had been
+expecting something for so long that the movement of my companions, and
+the lifting of the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusion
+that something hovered in the air before my face, touching the skin of
+my cheeks with a silken run. But it was certainly not a delusion that
+the Colonel looked up at the same moment and glanced over his shoulder,
+as though his eyes followed the movements of something to and fro about
+the room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat more tightly about him
+and his eyes sought my own face first, and then the doctor's. And it was
+no delusion that his face seemed somehow to have turned dark, become
+spread as it were with a shadowy blackness. I saw his lips tighten and
+his expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then with a rush
+that, of course, this man had told us but a part of the experiences he
+had been through in the house, and that there was much more he had never
+been able to bring himself to reveal at all. I felt sure of it. The way
+he turned and stared about him betrayed a familiarity with other things
+than those he had described to us. It was not merely a sight of fire he
+looked for; it was a sight of something alive, intelligent, something
+able to evade his searching; it was _a person_. It was the watch for the
+ancient Being who sought to obsess him.
+
+And the way in which Dr. Silence answered his look--though it was only
+by a glance of subtlest sympathy--confirmed my impression.
+
+"We may be ready now," I heard him say in a whisper, and I understood
+that his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced myself
+mentally to the utmost of my power.
+
+Yet long before Colonel Wragge had turned to stare about the room, and
+long before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were at
+last beginning to stir, I had become aware in most singular fashion that
+the place held more than our three selves. With the rising of the wind
+this increase to our numbers had first taken place. The baying of the
+hounds almost seemed to have signalled it. I cannot say how it may be
+possible to realise that an empty place has suddenly become--not empty,
+when the new arrival is nothing that appeals to any one of the senses;
+for this recognition of an "invisible," as of the change in the balance
+of personal forces in a human group, is indefinable and beyond proof.
+Yet it is unmistakable. And I knew perfectly well at what given moment
+the atmosphere within these four walls became charged with the presence
+of other living beings besides ourselves. And, on reflection, I am
+convinced that both my companions knew it too.
+
+"Watch the light," said the doctor under his breath, and then I knew too
+that it was no fancy of my own that had turned the air darker, and the
+way he turned to examine the face of our host sent an electric thrill of
+wonder and expectancy shivering along every nerve in my body.
+
+Yet it was no kind of terror that I experienced, but rather a sort of
+mental dizziness, and a sensation as of being suspended in some remote
+and dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to
+happen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. Horror may
+have formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in no
+sense ghostly horror.
+
+Uncommon thoughts kept beating on my brain like tiny hammers, soft yet
+persistent, seeking admission; their unbidden tide began to wash along
+the far fringes of my mind, the currents of unwonted sensations to rise
+over the remote frontiers of my consciousness. I was aware of thoughts,
+and the fantasies of thoughts, that I never knew before existed.
+Portions of my being stirred that had never stirred before, and things
+ancient and inexplicable rose to the surface and beckoned me to follow.
+I felt as though I were about to fly off, at some immense tangent, into
+an outer space hitherto unknown even in dreams. And so singular was the
+result produced upon me that I was uncommonly glad to anchor my mind, as
+well as my eyes, upon the masterful personality of the doctor at my
+side, for there, I realised, I could draw always upon the forces of
+sanity and safety.
+
+With a vigorous effort of will I returned to the scene before me, and
+tried to focus my attention, with steadier thoughts, upon the table, and
+upon the silent figures seated round it. And then I saw that certain
+changes had come about in the place where we sat.
+
+The patches of moonlight on the floor, I noted, had become curiously
+shaded; the faces of my companions opposite were not so clearly visible
+as before; and the forehead and cheeks of Colonel Wragge were glistening
+with perspiration. I realised further, that an extraordinary change had
+come about in the temperature of the atmosphere. The increased warmth
+had a painful effect, not alone on Colonel Wragge, but upon all of us.
+It was oppressive and unnatural. We gasped figuratively as well as
+actually.
+
+"You are the first to feel it," said Dr. Silence in low tones, looking
+across at him. "You are in more intimate touch, of course--"
+
+The Colonel was trembling, and appeared to be in considerable distress.
+His knees shook, so that the shuffling of his slippered feet became
+audible. He inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no
+other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself
+in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had
+warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, though vainly,
+resisting.
+
+But, meanwhile, a curious and whirling sense of exhilaration began to
+come over me. The increasing heat was delightful, bringing a sensation
+of intense activity, of thoughts pouring through the mind at high speed,
+of vivid pictures in the brain, of fierce desires and lightning energies
+alive in every part of the body. I was conscious of no physical
+distress, such as the Colonel felt, but only of a vague feeling that it
+might all grow suddenly too intense--that I might be consumed--that my
+personality as well as my body, might become resolved into the flame of
+pure spirit. I began to live at a speed too intense to last. It was as
+if a thousand ecstasies besieged me--
+
+"Steady!" whispered the voice of John Silence in my ear, and I looked up
+with a start to see that the Colonel had risen from his chair. The
+doctor rose too. I followed suit, and for the first time saw down into
+the bowl. To my amazement and horror I saw that the contents were
+troubled. The blood was astir with movement.
+
+The rest of the experiment was witnessed by us standing. It came, too,
+with a curious suddenness. There was no more dreaming, for me at any
+rate.
+
+I shall never forget the figure of Colonel Wragge standing there beside
+me, upright and unshaken, squarely planted on his feet, looking about
+him, puzzled beyond belief, yet full of a fighting anger. Framed by the
+white walls, the red glow of the lamps upon his streaming cheeks, his
+eyes glowing against the deathly pallor of his skin, breathing hard and
+making convulsive efforts of hands and body to keep himself under
+control, his whole being roused to the point of savage fighting, yet
+with nothing visible to get at anywhere--he stood there, immovable
+against odds. And the strange contrast of the pale skin and the burning
+face I had never seen before, or wish to see again.
+
+But what has left an even sharper impression on my memory was the
+blackness that then began crawling over his face, obliterating the
+features, concealing their human outline, and hiding him inch by inch
+from view. This was my first realisation that the process of
+materialisation was at work. His visage became shrouded. I moved from
+one side to the other to keep him in view, and it was only then I
+understood that, properly speaking, the blackness was not upon the
+countenance of Colonel Wragge, but that something had inserted itself
+between me and him, thus screening his face with the effect of a dark
+veil. Something that apparently rose through the floor was passing
+slowly into the air above the table and above the bowl. The blood in the
+bowl, moreover, was considerably less than before.
+
+And, with this change in the air before us, there came at the same time
+a further change, I thought, in the face of the soldier. One-half was
+turned towards the red lamps, while the other caught the pale
+illumination of the moonlight falling aslant from the high windows, so
+that it was difficult to estimate this change with accuracy of detail.
+But it seemed to me that, while the features--eyes, nose,
+mouth--remained the same, the life informing them had undergone some
+profound transformation. The signature of a new power had crept into the
+face and left its traces there--an expression dark, and in some
+unexplained way, terrible.
+
+Then suddenly he opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of this
+changed voice, deep and musical though it was, made me cold and set my
+heart beating with uncomfortable rapidity. The Being, as he had dreaded,
+was already in control of his brain, using his mouth.
+
+"I see a blackness like the blackness of Egypt before my face," said
+the tones of this unknown voice that seemed half his own and half
+another's. "And out of this darkness they come, they come."
+
+I gave a dreadful start. The doctor turned to look at me for an instant,
+and then turned to centre his attention upon the figure of our host, and
+I understood in some intuitive fashion that he was there to watch over
+the strangest contest man ever saw--to watch over and, if necessary, to
+protect.
+
+"He is being controlled--possessed," he whispered to me through the
+shadows. His face wore a wonderful expression, half triumph, half
+admiration.
+
+Even as Colonel Wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible darkness
+began to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the hearth,
+rising up in sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. It stole up
+from below--an awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the
+radiations of light in the building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a
+radiance in their place. Then, out of this rising sea of shadows, issued
+a pale and spectral light that gradually spread itself about us, and
+from the heart of this light I saw the shapes of fire crowd and gather.
+And these were not human shapes, or the shapes of anything I recognised
+as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced globes,
+triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various geometrical
+figures. They grew bright, faded, and then grew bright again with an
+effect almost of pulsation. They passed swiftly to and fro through the
+air, rising and falling, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood
+of the Colonel, often gathering about his head and shoulders, and even
+appearing to settle upon him like giant insects of flame. They were
+accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound of hissing--the same sound we
+had heard that afternoon in the plantation.
+
+"The fire-elementals that precede their master," the doctor said in an
+undertone. "Be ready."
+
+And while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed
+and faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters
+overhead, we heard the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of
+the afflicted soldier. It was a voice of power, splendid in some way I
+cannot describe, and with a certain sense of majesty in its cadences,
+and, as I listened to it with quickly beating heart, I could fancy it
+was some ancient voice of Time itself, echoing down immense corridors of
+stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of mountain
+tombs.
+
+"I have seen my divine Father, Osiris," thundered the great tones. "I
+have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth,
+and am one with the starry Deities!"
+
+Something grand came into the soldier's face. He was staring fixedly
+before him, as though seeing nothing.
+
+"Watch," whispered Dr. Silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to come
+from very far away.
+
+Again the mouth opened and the awesome voice issued forth.
+
+"Thoth," it boomed, "has loosened the bandages of Set which fettered my
+mouth. I have taken my place in the great winds of heaven."
+
+I heard the little wind of night, with its mournful voice of ages,
+sighing round the walls and over the roof.
+
+"Listen!" came from the doctor at my side, and the thunder of the voice
+continued--
+
+"I have hidden myself with you, O ye stars that never diminish. I
+remember my name--in--the--House--of--Fire!"
+
+The voice ceased and the sound died away. Something about the face and
+figure of Colonel Wragge relaxed, I thought. The terrible look passed
+from his face. The Being that obsessed him was gone.
+
+"The great Ritual," said Dr. Silence aside to me, very low, "the Book of
+the Dead. Now it's leaving him. Soon the blood will fashion it a body."
+
+Colonel Wragge, who had stood absolutely motionless all this time,
+suddenly swayed, so that I thought he was going to fall,--and, but for
+the quick support of the doctor's arm, he probably would have fallen,
+for he staggered as in the beginning of collapse.
+
+"I am drunk with the wine of Osiris," he cried,--and it was half with
+his own voice this time--"but Horus, the Eternal Watcher, is about my
+path--for--safety." The voice dwindled and failed, dying away into
+something almost like a cry of distress.
+
+"Now, watch closely," said Dr. Silence, speaking loud, "for after the
+cry will come the Fire!"
+
+I began to tremble involuntarily; an awful change had come without
+warning into the air; my legs grew weak as paper beneath my weight and I
+had to support myself by leaning on the table. Colonel Wragge, I saw,
+was also leaning forward with a kind of droop. The shapes of fire had
+vanished all, but his face was lit by the red lamps and the pale,
+shifting moonlight rose behind him like mist.
+
+We were both gazing at the bowl, now almost empty; the Colonel stooped
+so low I feared every minute he would lose his balance and drop into it;
+and the shadow, that had so long been in process of forming, now at
+length began to assume material outline in the air before us.
+
+Then John Silence moved forward quickly. He took his place between us
+and the shadow. Erect, formidable, absolute master of the situation, I
+saw him stand there, his face calm and almost smiling, and fire in his
+eyes. His protective influence was astounding and incalculable. Even the
+abhorrent dread I felt at the sight of the creature growing into life
+and substance before us, lessened in some way so that I was able to keep
+my eyes fixed on the air above the bowl without too vivid a terror.
+
+But as it took shape, rising out of nothing as it were, and growing
+momentarily more defined in outline, a period of utter and wonderful
+silence settled down upon the building and all it contained. A hush of
+ages, like the sudden centre of peace at the heart of the travelling
+cyclone, descended through the night, and out of this hush, as out of
+the emanations of the steaming blood, issued the form of the ancient
+being who had first sent the elemental of fire upon its mission. It grew
+and darkened and solidified before our eyes. It rose from just beyond
+the table so that the lower portions remained invisible, but I saw the
+outline limn itself upon the air, as though slowly revealed by the
+rising of a curtain. It apparently had not then quite concentrated to
+the normal proportions, but was spread out on all sides into space,
+huge, though rapidly condensing, for I saw the colossal shoulders, the
+neck, the lower portion of the dark jaws, the terrible mouth, and then
+the teeth and lips--and, as the veil seemed to lift further upon the
+tremendous face--I saw the nose and cheek bones. In another moment I
+should have looked straight into the eyes--
+
+But what Dr. Silence did at that moment was so unexpected, and took me
+so by surprise, that I have never yet properly understood its nature,
+and he has never yet seen fit to explain in detail to me. He uttered
+some sound that had a note of command in it--and, in so doing, stepped
+forward and intervened between me and the face. The figure, just nearing
+completeness, he therefore hid from my sight--and I have always thought
+purposely hid from my sight.
+
+"The fire!" he cried out. "The fire! Beware!"
+
+There was a sudden roar as of flame from the very mouth of the pit, and
+for the space of a single second all grew light as day. A blinding flash
+passed across my face, and there was heat for an instant that seemed to
+shrivel skin, and flesh, and bone. Then came steps, and I heard Colonel
+Wragge utter a great cry, wilder than any human cry I have ever known.
+The heat sucked all the breath out of my lungs with a rush, and the
+blaze of light, as it vanished, swept my vision with it into enveloping
+darkness.
+
+When I recovered the use of my senses a few moments later I saw that
+Colonel Wragge with a face of death, its whiteness strangely stained,
+had moved closer to me. Dr. Silence stood beside him, an expression of
+triumph and success in his eyes. The next minute the soldier tried to
+clutch me with his hand. Then he reeled, staggered, and, unable to save
+himself, fell with a great crash upon the brick floor.
+
+After the sheet of flame, a wind raged round the building as though it
+would lift the roof off, but then passed as suddenly as it came. And in
+the intense calm that followed I saw that the form had vanished, and the
+doctor was stooping over Colonel Wragge upon the floor, trying to lift
+him to a sitting position.
+
+"Light," he said quietly, "more light. Take the shades off."
+
+Colonel Wragge sat up and the glare of the unshaded lamps fell upon his
+face. It was grey and drawn, still running heat, and there was a look in
+the eyes and about the corners of the mouth that seemed in this short
+space of time to have added years to its age. At the same time, the
+expression of effort and anxiety had left it. It showed relief.
+
+"Gone!" he said, looking up at the doctor in a dazed fashion, and
+struggling to his feet. "Thank God! it's gone at last." He stared round
+the laundry as though to find out where he was. "Did it control me--take
+possession of me? Did I talk nonsense?" he asked bluntly. "After the
+heat came, I remember nothing--"
+
+"You'll feel yourself again in a few minutes," the doctor said. To my
+infinite horror I saw that he was surreptitiously wiping sundry dark
+stains from the face. "Our experiment has been a success and--"
+
+He gave me a swift glance to hide the bowl, standing between me and our
+host while I hurriedly stuffed it down under the lid of the nearest
+cauldron.
+
+"--and none of us the worse for it," he finished.
+
+"And fires?" he asked, still dazed, "there'll be no more fires?"
+
+"It is dissipated--partly, at any rate," replied Dr. Silence cautiously.
+
+"And the man behind the gun," he went on, only half realising what he
+was saying, I think; "have you discovered _that?_"
+
+"A form materialised," said the doctor briefly. "I know for certain now
+what the directing intelligence was behind it all."
+
+Colonel Wragge pulled himself together and got upon his feet. The words
+conveyed no clear meaning to him yet. But his memory was returning
+gradually, and he was trying to piece together the fragments into a
+connected whole. He shivered a little, for the place had grown suddenly
+chilly. The air was empty again, lifeless.
+
+"You feel all right again now," Dr. Silence said, in the tone of a man
+stating a fact rather than asking a question.
+
+"Thanks to you--both, yes." He drew a deep breath, and mopped his face,
+and even attempted a smile. He made me think of a man coming from the
+battlefield with the stains of fighting still upon him, but scornful of
+his wounds. Then he turned gravely towards the doctor with a question
+in his eyes. Memory had returned and he was himself again.
+
+"Precisely what I expected," the doctor said calmly; "a fire-elemental
+sent upon its mission in the days of Thebes, centuries before Christ,
+and tonight, for the first time all these thousands of years, released
+from the spell that originally bound it."
+
+We stared at him in amazement, Colonel Wragge opening his lips for words
+that refused to shape themselves.
+
+"And, if we dig," he continued significantly, pointing to the floor
+where the blackness had poured up, "we shall find some underground
+connection--a tunnel most likely--leading to the Twelve Acre Wood. It
+was made by--your predecessor."
+
+"A tunnel made by my brother!" gasped the soldier. "Then my sister
+should know--she lived here with him--" He stopped suddenly.
+
+John Silence inclined his head slowly. "I think so," he said quietly.
+"Your brother, no doubt, was as much tormented as you have been," he
+continued after a pause in which Colonel Wragge seemed deeply
+preoccupied with his thoughts, "and tried to find peace by burying it in
+the wood, and surrounding the wood then, like a large magic circle, with
+the enchantments of the old formulae. So the stars the man saw
+blazing--"
+
+"But burying what?" asked the soldier faintly, stepping backwards
+towards the support of the wall.
+
+Dr. Silence regarded us both intently for a moment before he replied. I
+think he weighed in his mind whether to tell us now, or when the
+investigation was absolutely complete.
+
+"The mummy," he said softly, after a moment; "the mummy that your
+brother took from its resting place of centuries, and brought
+home--here."
+
+Colonel Wragge dropped down upon the nearest chair, hanging breathlessly
+on every word. He was far too amazed for speech.
+
+"The mummy of some important person--a priest most likely--protected
+from disturbance and desecration by the ceremonial magic of the time.
+For they understood how to attach to the mummy, to lock up with it in
+the tomb, an elemental force that would direct itself even after ages
+upon any one who dared to molest it. In this case it was an elemental of
+fire."
+
+Dr. Silence crossed the floor and turned out the lamps one by one. He
+had nothing more to say for the moment. Following his example, I folded
+the table together and took up the chairs, and our host, still dazed and
+silent, mechanically obeyed him and moved to the door.
+
+We removed all traces of the experiment, taking the empty bowl back to
+the house concealed beneath an ulster.
+
+The air was cool and fragrant as we walked to the house, the stars
+beginning to fade overhead and a fresh wind of early morning blowing up
+out of the east where the sky was already hinting of the coming day. It
+was after five o'clock.
+
+Stealthily we entered the front hall and locked the door, and as we went
+on tiptoe upstairs to our rooms, the Colonel, peering at us over his
+candle as he nodded good-night, whispered that if we were ready the
+digging should be begun that very day.
+
+Then I saw him steal along to his sister's room and disappear.
+
+
+IV
+
+But not even the mysterious references to the mummy, or the prospect of
+a revelation by digging, were able to hinder the reaction that followed
+the intense excitement of the past twelve hours, and I slept the sleep
+of the dead, dreamless and undisturbed. A touch on the shoulder woke me,
+and I saw Dr. Silence standing beside the bed, dressed to go out.
+
+"Come," he said, "it's tea-time. You've slept the best part of a dozen
+hours."
+
+I sprang up and made a hurried toilet, while my companion sat and
+talked. He looked fresh and rested, and his manner was even quieter than
+usual.
+
+"Colonel Wragge has provided spades and pickaxes. We're going out to
+unearth this mummy at once," he said; "and there's no reason we should
+not get away by the morning train."
+
+"I'm ready to go tonight, if you are," I said honestly.
+
+But Dr. Silence shook his head.
+
+"I must see this through to the end," he said gravely, and in a tone
+that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. He went
+on talking while I dressed.
+
+"This case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and none
+of them are cases to trifle with," he explained, "for the mummies of
+important people--kings, priests, magicians--were laid away with
+profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected,
+as you have seen, against desecration, and especially against
+destruction.
+
+"The general belief," he went on, anticipating my questions, "held, of
+course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its Ka,--the
+owner's spirit,--but it is not improbable that the magical embalming
+was also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of the body
+preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline of
+earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful
+guardian-forces to keep off trespassers. And any one who dared to remove
+the mummy, or especially to unwind it--well," he added, with meaning,
+"you have seen--and you will see."
+
+I caught his face in the mirror while I struggled with my collar. It was
+deeply serious. There could be no question that he spoke of what he
+believed and knew.
+
+"The traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted too,"
+he continued, "for he tried to banish it by burial in the wood, making a
+magic circle to enclose it. Something of genuine ceremonial he must have
+known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the still
+flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. Only he did not
+know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy's guardian was a
+fire-force. Fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw, it can
+be released by it."
+
+"Then that awful figure in the laundry?" I asked, thrilled to find him
+so communicative.
+
+"Undoubtedly the actual Ka of the mummy operating always behind its
+agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old."
+
+"And Miss Wragge--?" I ventured once more.
+
+"Ah, Miss Wragge," he repeated with increased gravity, "Miss Wragge--"
+
+A knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready, and
+the Colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. The thread was
+broken. Dr. Silence moved to the door and signed to me to follow. But
+his manner told me that in any case no real answer would have been
+forthcoming to my question.
+
+"And the place to dig in," I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity,
+"will you find it by some process of divination or--?"
+
+He paused at the door and looked back at me, and with that he left me to
+finish my dressing.
+
+It was growing dark when the three of us silently made our way to the
+Twelve Acre Plantation; the sky was overcast, and a black wind came out
+of the east. Gloom hung about the old house and the air seemed full of
+sighings. We found the tools ready laid at the edge of the wood, and
+each shouldering his piece, we followed our leader at once in among the
+trees. He went straight forward for some twenty yards and then stopped.
+At his feet lay the blackened circle of one of the burned places. It was
+just discernible against the surrounding white grass.
+
+"There are three of these," he said, "and they all lie in a line with
+one another. Any one of them will tap the tunnel that connects the
+laundry--the former Museum--with the chamber where the mummy now lies
+buried."
+
+He at once cleared away the burnt grass and began to dig; we all began
+to dig. While I used the pick, the others shovelled vigorously. No one
+spoke. Colonel Wragge worked the hardest of the three. The soil was
+light and sandy, and there were only a few snake-like roots and
+occasional loose stones to delay us. The pick made short work of these.
+And meanwhile the darkness settled about us and the biting wind swept
+roaring through the trees overhead.
+
+Then, quite suddenly, without a cry, Colonel Wragge disappeared up to
+his neck.
+
+"The tunnel!" cried the doctor, helping to drag him out, red,
+breathless, and covered with sand and perspiration. "Now, let me lead
+the way." And he slipped down nimbly into the hole, so that a moment
+later we heard his voice, muffled by sand and distance, rising up to us.
+
+"Hubbard, you come next, and then Colonel Wragge--if he wishes," we
+heard.
+
+"I'll follow you, of course," he said, looking at me as I scrambled in.
+
+The hole was bigger now, and I got down on all-fours in a channel not
+much bigger than a large sewer-pipe and found myself in total darkness.
+A minute later a heavy thud, followed by a cataract of loose sand,
+announced the arrival of the Colonel.
+
+"Catch hold of my heel," called Dr. Silence, "and Colonel Wragge can
+take yours."
+
+In this slow, laborious fashion we wormed our way along a tunnel that
+had been roughly dug out of the shifting sand, and was shored up
+clumsily by means of wooden pillars and posts. Any moment, it seemed to
+me, we might be buried alive. We could not see an inch before our eyes,
+but had to grope our way feeling the pillars and the walls. It was
+difficult to breathe, and the Colonel behind me made but slow progress,
+for the cramped position of our bodies was very severe.
+
+We had travelled in this way for ten minutes, and gone perhaps as much
+as ten yards, when I lost my grasp of the doctor's heel.
+
+"Ah!" I heard his voice, sounding above me somewhere. He was standing up
+in a clear space, and the next moment I was standing beside him. Colonel
+Wragge came heavily after, and he too rose up and stood. Then Dr.
+Silence produced his candles and we heard preparations for striking
+matches.
+
+Yet even before there was light, an indefinable sensation of awe came
+over us all. In this hole in the sand, some three feet under ground, we
+stood side by side, cramped and huddled, struck suddenly with an over
+whelming apprehension of something ancient, something formidable,
+something incalculably wonderful, that touched in each one of us a sense
+of the sublime and the terrible even before we could see an inch before
+our faces. I know not how to express in language this singular emotion
+that caught us here in utter darkness, touching no sense directly, it
+seemed, yet with the recognition that before us in the blackness of this
+underground night there lay something that was mighty with the
+mightiness of long past ages.
+
+I felt Colonel Wragge press in closely to my side, and I understood the
+pressure and welcomed it. No human touch, to me at least, has ever been
+more eloquent.
+
+Then the match flared, a thousand shadows fled on black wings, and I saw
+John Silence fumbling with the candle, his face lit up grotesquely by
+the flickering light below it.
+
+I had dreaded this light, yet when it came there was apparently nothing
+to explain the profound sensations of dread that preceded it. We stood
+in a small vaulted chamber in the sand, the sides and roof shored with
+bars of wood, and the ground laid roughly with what seemed to be tiles.
+It was six feet high, so that we could all stand comfortably, and may
+have been ten feet long by eight feet wide. Upon the wooden pillars at
+the side I saw that Egyptian hieroglyphics had been rudely traced by
+burning.
+
+Dr. Silence lit three candles and handed one to each of us. He placed a
+fourth in the sand against the wall on his right, and another to mark
+the entrance to the tunnel. We stood and stared about us, instinctively
+holding our breath.
+
+"Empty, by God!" exclaimed Colonel Wragge. His voice trembled with
+excitement. And then, as his eyes rested on the ground, he added, "And
+footsteps--look--footsteps in the sand!"
+
+Dr. Silence said nothing. He stooped down and began to make a search of
+the chamber, and as he moved, my eyes followed his crouching figure and
+noted the queer distorted shadows that poured over the walls and ceiling
+after him. Here and there thin trickles of loose sand ran fizzing down
+the sides. The atmosphere, heavily charged with faint yet pungent
+odours, lay utterly still, and the flames of the candles might have been
+painted on the air for all the movement they betrayed.
+
+And, as I watched, it was almost necessary to persuade myself forcibly
+that I was only standing upright with difficulty in this little
+sand-hole of a modern garden in the south of England, for it seemed to
+me that I stood, as in vision, at the entrance of some vast rock-hewn
+Temple far, far down the river of Time. The illusion was powerful, and
+persisted. Granite columns, that rose to heaven, piled themselves about
+me, majestically uprearing, and a roof like the sky itself spread above
+a line of colossal figures that moved in shadowy procession along
+endless and stupendous aisles. This huge and splendid fantasy, borne I
+knew not whence, possessed me so vividly that I was actually obliged to
+concentrate my attention upon the small stooping figure of the doctor,
+as he groped about the walls, in order to keep the eye of imagination on
+the scene before me.
+
+But the limited space rendered a long search out of the question, and
+his footsteps, instead of shuffling through loose sand, presently struck
+something of a different quality that gave forth a hollow and resounding
+echo. He stooped to examine more closely.
+
+He was standing exactly in the centre of the little chamber when this
+happened, and he at once began scraping away the sand with his feet. In
+less than a minute a smooth surface became visible--the surface of a
+wooden covering. The next thing I saw was that he had raised it and was
+peering down into a space below. Instantly, a strong odour of nitre and
+bitumen, mingled with the strange perfume of unknown and powdered
+aromatics, rose up from the uncovered space and filled the vault,
+stinging the throat and making the eyes water and smart.
+
+"The mummy!" whispered Dr. Silence, looking up into our faces over his
+candle; and as he said the word I felt the soldier lurch against me, and
+heard his breathing in my very ear.
+
+"The mummy!" he repeated under his breath, as we pressed forward to
+look.
+
+It is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in me
+so prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for I have had not a
+little to do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even
+experimented magically with not a few. But there was something in the
+sight of that grey and silent figure, lying in its modern box of lead
+and wood at the bottom of this sandy grave, swathed in the bandages of
+centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen that the priests of Egypt
+had prayed over with their mighty enchantments thousands of years
+before--something in the sight of it lying there and breathing its own
+spice-laden atmosphere even in the darkness of its exile in this remote
+land, something that pierced to the very core of my being and touched
+that root of awe which slumbers in every man near the birth of tears and
+the passion of true worship.
+
+I remember turning quickly from the Colonel, lest he should see my
+emotion, yet fail to understand its cause, turn and clutch John Silence
+by the arm, and then fall trembling to see that he, too, had lowered his
+head and was hiding his face in his hands.
+
+A kind of whirling storm came over me, rising out of I know not what
+utter deeps of memory, and in a whiteness of vision I heard the magical
+old chauntings from the Book of the Dead, and saw the Gods pass by in
+dim procession, the mighty, immemorial Beings who were yet themselves
+only the personified attributes of the true Gods, the God with the Eyes
+of Fire, the God with the Face of Smoke. I saw again Anubis, the
+dog-faced deity, and the children of Horus, eternal watcher of the ages,
+as they swathed Osiris, the first mummy of the world, in the scented and
+mystic bands, and I tasted again something of the ecstasy of the
+justified soul as it embarked in the golden Boat of Ra, and journeyed
+onwards to rest in the fields of the blessed.
+
+And then, as Dr. Silence, with infinite reverence, stooped and touched
+the still face, so dreadfully staring with its painted eyes, there rose
+again to our nostrils wave upon wave of this perfume of thousands of
+years, and time fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in
+haunted panorama the most wonderful dream of the whole world.
+
+A gentle hissing became audible in the air, and the doctor moved quickly
+backwards. It came close to our faces and then seemed to play about the
+walls and ceiling.
+
+"The last of the Fire--still waiting for its full accomplishment," he
+muttered; but I heard both words and hissing as things far away, for I
+was still busy with the journey of the soul through the Seven Halls of
+Death, listening for echoes of the grandest ritual ever known to men.
+
+The earthen plates covered with hieroglyphics still lay beside the
+mummy, and round it, carefully arranged at the points of the compass,
+stood the four jars with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the
+cynocephalus, and man, the jars in which were placed the hair, the nail
+parings, the heart, and other special portions of the body. Even the
+amulets, the mirror, the blue clay statues of the Ka, and the lamp with
+seven wicks were there. Only the sacred scarabaeus was missing.
+
+"Not only has it been torn from its ancient resting-place," I heard Dr.
+Silence saying in a solemn voice as he looked at Colonel Wragge with
+fixed gaze, "but it has been partially unwound,"--he pointed to the
+wrappings of the breast,--"and--the scarabaeus has been removed from the
+throat."
+
+The hissing, that was like the hissing of an invisible flame, had
+ceased; only from time to time we heard it as though it passed backwards
+and forwards in the tunnel; and we stood looking into each other's faces
+without speaking.
+
+Presently Colonel Wragge made a great effort and braced himself. I heard
+the sound catch in his throat before the words actually became audible.
+
+"My sister," he said, very low. And then there followed a long pause,
+broken at length by John Silence.
+
+"It must be replaced," he said significantly.
+
+"I knew nothing," the soldier said, forcing himself to speak the words
+he hated saying. "Absolutely nothing."
+
+"It must be returned," repeated the other, "if it is not now too late.
+For I fear--I fear--"
+
+Colonel Wragge made a movement of assent with his head.
+
+"It shall be," he said.
+
+The place was still as the grave.
+
+I do not know what it was then that made us all three turn round with so
+sudden a start, for there was no sound audible to my ears, at least.
+
+The doctor was on the point of replacing the lid over the mummy, when he
+straightened up as if he had been shot.
+
+"There's something coming," said Colonel Wragge under his breath, and
+the doctor's eyes, peering down the small opening of the tunnel, showed
+me the true direction.
+
+A distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point
+about half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated.
+
+"It's the sand falling in," I said, though I knew it was foolish.
+
+"No," said the Colonel calmly, in a voice that seemed to have the ring
+of iron, "I've heard it for some time past. It is something alive--and
+it is coming nearer."
+
+He stared about him with a look of resolution that made his face almost
+noble. The horror in his heart was overmastering, yet he stood there
+prepared for anything that might come.
+
+"There's no other way out," John Silence said.
+
+He leaned the lid against the sand, and waited. I knew by the masklike
+expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes, that
+he anticipated something that might be very terrible--appalling.
+
+The Colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. I still held
+my candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the grease all
+over me; but the soldier had set his into the sand just behind his feet.
+
+Thoughts of being buried alive, of being smothered like rats in a trap,
+of being caught and done to death by some invisible and merciless force
+we could not grapple with, rushed into my mind. Then I thought of
+fire--of suffocation--of being roasted alive. The perspiration began to
+pour from my face.
+
+"Steady!" came the voice of Dr. Silence to me through the vault.
+
+For five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from
+each other's faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and all
+the time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually nearer.
+The tension, for me at least, was very near the breaking point when at
+last the cause of the disturbance reached the edge. It was hidden for a
+moment just behind the broken rim of soil. A jet of sand, shaken by the
+close vibration, trickled down on to the ground; I have never in my life
+seen anything fall with such laborious leisure. The next second,
+uttering a cry of curious quality, it came into view.
+
+And it was far more distressingly horrible than anything I had
+anticipated.
+
+For the sight of some Egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or even
+of some demon of fire, I think I was already half prepared; but when,
+instead, I saw the white visage of Miss Wragge framed in that round
+opening of sand, followed by her body crawling on all fours, her eyes
+bulging and reflecting the yellow glare of the candles, my first
+instinct was to turn and run like a frantic animal seeking a way of
+escape.
+
+But Dr. Silence, who seemed no whit surprised, caught my arm and
+steadied me, and we both saw the Colonel then drop upon his knees and
+come thus to a level with his sister. For more than a whole minute, as
+though struck in stone, the two faces gazed silently at each other:
+hers, for all the dreadful emotion in it, more like a gargoyle than
+anything human; and his, white and blank with an expression that was
+beyond either astonishment or alarm. She looked up; he looked down. It
+was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand close to
+the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights.
+
+Then John Silence moved forward and spoke in a voice that was very low,
+yet perfectly calm and natural.
+
+"I am glad you have come," he said. "You are the one person whose
+presence at this moment is most required. And I hope that you may yet be
+in time to appease the anger of the Fire, and to bring peace again to
+your household, and," he added lower still so that no one heard it but
+myself, "_safety to yourself_."
+
+And while her brother stumbled backwards, crushing a candle into the
+sand in his awkwardness, the old lady crawled farther into the vaulted
+chamber and slowly rose upon her feet.
+
+At the sight of the wrapped figure of the mummy I was fully prepared to
+see her scream and faint, but on the contrary, to my complete amazement,
+she merely bowed her head and dropped quietly upon her knees. Then,
+after a pause of more than a minute, she raised her eyes to the roof and
+her lips began to mutter as in prayer. Her right hand, meanwhile, which
+had been fumbling for some time at her throat suddenly came away, and
+before the gaze of all of us she held it out, palm upwards, over the
+grey and ancient figure outstretched below. And in it we beheld
+glistening the green jasper of the stolen scarabaeus.
+
+Her brother, leaning heavily against the wall behind, uttered a sound
+that was half cry, half exclamation, but John Silence, standing directly
+in front of her, merely fixed his eyes on her and pointed downwards to
+the staring face below.
+
+"Replace it," he said sternly, "where it belongs."
+
+Miss Wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened. We
+three men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. Only the reader who
+by some remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly laid
+from their tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat of the
+Egyptian sun warms their ancient bodies into the semblance of life, can
+form any conception of the ultimate horror we experienced when the
+silent figure before us moved in its grave of lead and sand. Slowly,
+before our eyes, it writhed, and, with a faint rustling of the
+immemorial cerements, rose up, and, through sightless and bandaged eyes,
+stared across the yellow candlelight at the woman who had violated it.
+
+I tried to move--her brother tried to move--but the sand seemed to hold
+our feet. I tried to cry--her brother tried to cry--but the sand seemed
+to fill our lungs and throat. We could only stare--and, even so, the
+sand seemed to rise like a desert storm and cloud our vision ...
+
+And when I managed at length to open my eyes again, the mummy was lying
+once more upon its back, motionless, the shrunken and painted face
+upturned towards the ceiling, and the old lady had tumbled forward and
+was lying in the semblance of death with her head and arms upon its
+crumbling body.
+
+But upon the wrappings of the throat I saw the green jasper of the
+sacred scarabaeus shining again like a living eye.
+
+Colonel Wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before I did,
+and I found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise
+the frail body of the old lady, while John Silence carefully replaced
+the covering over the grave and scraped back the sand with his foot,
+while he issued brief directions.
+
+I heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that cramped
+tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated with
+heat, was in no sense a dream. It took us the best part of half an hour
+to reach the open air. And, even then, we had to wait a considerable
+time for the appearance of Dr. Silence. We carried her undiscovered into
+the house and up to her own room.
+
+"The mummy will cause no further disturbance," I heard Dr. Silence say
+to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night
+train, "provided always," he added significantly, "that you, and yours,
+cause it no disturbance."
+
+It was in a dream, too, that we left.
+
+"You did not see her face, I know," he said to me as we wrapped our rugs
+about us in the empty compartment. And when I shook my head, quite
+unable to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he
+turned toward me, his face pale, and genuinely sad.
+
+"Scorched and blasted," he whispered.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Three John Silence Stories, by Algernon Blackwood
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