At length we arrived at the bottom of the steps. The first part of Wolverton’s story was clearly true. There had been no one down these steps for a very long time, for, glancing back, I could clearly see my footprints and the wheelchair’s odd, snaking lines in the dust.
I took the lamp from Sir Harold and held it at the cellar door. It was bolted and nailed shut with large boards crossed over it, the way they bar access to condemned buildings. The wood of the door had split where the nails had entered, so it was no difficult matter to pull the boards off and pull open the bolt.
Once inside the cellar room, I wheeled Sir Harold to the far end of the table. It was, indeed, a large heavy table; it and the room were laden with dust. Clearly no one had been in that room for a long time. Other than the accumulated dust, the room had a perfectly normal appearance, though two chairs were lying on their sides by the windows. Without speaking, Sir Harold placed the lamp on the table and leaned back, signaling for me to begin. I made myself as comfortable as possible, after using my handkerchief to wipe away the dust on the seat and arms of my chair. I sat back and asked once more whether he was sure that we should go ahead.
“Positive,” he said.
I blew out the light. In the resulting darkness I saw nothing, though after a few minutes I could barely make out the bent figure across the table. Sir Harold let his head fall back, his neck resting against the wicker back of the wheelchair. His mouth slowly sagged open, exposing a set of teeth complete but misshapen and tobacco-stained; his eyes remained open, but with a chillingly sightless aspect. I sat facing him for what must have been close to forty-five minutes until I noticed that his breathing had apparently stopped. I immediately feared for the old man’s life; the terrible memories—real to him—might have given him a heart seizure. Then, in the dim cellar light, he began to exude an odd pale yellow glow. I looked behind me to see opaque windows; the glow was not coming from them. I began to feel an overwhelming fear. I had sat through numberless seances given by the most reputable mediums in the world, yet I never got so much as a tingle of fear. Now I was streaming with perspiration, my eyes nailed to the strange, bent form in front of me.
As I looked at him, I perceived a milky-white, viscous substance formlessly building up like mucous in his nostrils and mouth. Fascinated, I watched as it began to flow noiselessly out of his nose and mouth and down his lips and chin. It gave off its own glow, a rhythmically pulsating light, the quality of which was similar to lights seen from a great distance underwater. As the ectoplasmic substance glowed, I noticed that rather than lighting the room, it seemed to have darkened it. Whereas certain objects, especially the broken chairs under the window, had been quite clear, even bright, they now darkened to the point where the only visible things in the room were Sir Harold’s face and shoulders, neck and shirt front, and a few inches of the table.
By now I fully regretted the entire affair. Whereas in the light, with sherry in hand, stories of great green monsters are absolutely ridiculous, they begin to get less and less amusing as the light wanes. I have seen many a seance break down with the turning out of the light; but I am a professional and, presumably, used to such things.
Yet I had never felt a room to be so laden with evil, and with the tension of something terrible imminent. It must be very similar to the feeling experienced by a soldier awaiting a bombardment he knows is to come momentarily.
The darkness now lay on me palpably, a damp blanket that caused the windows, chilled with the cold night air, to run with moisture. Sir Harold remained the only visible thing in the room. His eyes were still open, sightless it would seem. Though he appeared unconscious, I could see his hands wringing furiously in his lap. He was undoubtedly awake, and terrified at reliving that experience that had resulted in several deaths and his retirement from public life.
The viscous substance exuding from his nostrils and mouth was now joining and producing a mass of sizeable bulk that lay directly between the two of us; and as I watched it, very unpleasantly thrilled, it began to form a roughly spheroid shape, a shape that I was fervently hoping would not become a head. As, however, it began to do so, I began to marshal my efforts to shake off the fascination that bound me to my seat. I realized now that Sir Harold’s story was true, and that I had best do all in my power to prevent a full repetition of the affair.
Perhaps you have had dreams in which you were in danger, a danger usually not specified, but somehow assumed by you to be mortal; yet you find movement is impossible. Often this same physical paralysis attends psychic phenomena—and so it did with me, and, I assume, Sir Harold. We were bound by some agent either within or outside us, to sit and watch as that creature slowly flowed out of Sir Harold’s body, or perhaps his mind, and begin to take form.
In any case, the head was now forming; it was large, about twice the size of a human head, I should say, while very melon-shaped. It was supported by a column of pulsating ectoplasm, under which was beginning to appear the rudiments of a body—a long tubular shape with what seemed to be long, thin arms and legs. In all, the form was humanoid, but quite definitely not human, not in shape, and not in intent.
The face was now forming. It was perfectly smooth, unstamped by any of the expression lines that mark creatures of thought or feeling. It was clearly not a ghost in the conventional sense; it was indeed a spirit—that is a creature that exists on a plane other than our own—but in this case a spirit that never was human; it was an elemental, a spirit that perhaps populated Earth before humanity, and that resents us as usurpers.
With a tremendous effort I succeeded in pushing my chair back slightly from the table. It squeaked over the dirty floor, and the sound enabled me to shake off some of the stupor that unnerved me.
“Sir Harold,” I managed to whisper, “Sir Harold, you must move.”
He made a visible effort to move—I could see his hands rise to the table and feebly push against it, without effect. He then made a sort of shrugging movement with his shoulders and shook his hands in a gesture of futility.
Dripping with sweat, I began to lean across the table in an effort to get at the lamp and light it. It was too far away, and, as leaning forward brought me closer to the thing hovering now almost fully formed above the table, I shrank back in my seat. It would only be a matter of moments before it would break away from Sir Harold with a malevolent life of its own. I knew that we needed light. I reached into my vest pocket and withdrew my matchbox. Fumbling, I dropped one or two matches before I succeeded in lighting one. I held it up as it flared, bringing the room briefly into view. The creature seemed to dissipate, and the features that had been strongly apparent began to melt back into the mass of ectoplasm. As the match began to flicker the creature once more began to fill out. I realized then that the matches did not throw enough light to destroy it, merely to stave off its complete formation. And I could not have had more than five or so matches left. As the match went out, I immediately lit another, with the same effect. I was only putting off the inevitable. In a desperate gamble, I decided to light all at once inside the box; during the longer brighter flame, I would try to get to the door.
Lighting the match in my hand, I put it inside the box, letting it rest against its corner. As the box itself began to burn, I pushed it carefully under the writhing mid-air figure, which knew now, if it commanded any intelligence at all, that there were agents working for its destruction.