I strained my eyes into the darkness, unable to comprehend what I thought I was witnessing. The wind rose, and the chant grew louder.
Henry was returning, I told myself, and I must hurry away before he reached the knoll with his infernal book and the ring that glowed in the dark.
Two things happened then almost simultaneously. As I started to let myself over the side to go down the ladder, I glanced once more toward the black mass of hemlocks. Only they weren’t hemlocks. They were immense, towering trees, tropical in outline, which resembled giant ferns against the sky.
And as I stared in amazement and disbelief, a figure faced me on the platform—a figure with distorted features and glittering eyes which looked like an evil caricature of Henry Crotell!
With a rush of horror, I realized that I could see through the figure to the night sky beyond.
After a frozen moment of immobility, I went over the side of the platform. I slid partway down the apology for a ladder and fell the rest of the way.
As soon as my feet touched earth, they were racing for the trees. And when I entered them, they were the dark sweet hemlocks which I knew.
I rushed through them, gouging and scratching myself on projecting branches. Henry’s chant, somewhat weak but still persistent, followed me.
I could hear it, far off in the night, when I stumbled onto my porch and opened the door.
I sat up for hours drinking coffee and at last fell asleep in my chair. I was slumped there, red-eyed and unshaven, when someone knocked.
I got up with a start, noticing that sunlight was pouring through a nearby window, and opened the door.
Dave Baines looked at me keenly, both abashed and a bit amused. “Sorry I woke you up. I’ll come back—”
I shook my head. “No, no! Sit down. You’re the very person I want to see!”
He heard me out in silence. After he had polished his glasses for five minutes, he spoke.
“I’m not sure, but I’d be willing to venture the opinion that the figure you saw on that platform was what some folks call an astral projection.’ Henry’s still at the Miller place; I called this morning to find out. One of the field hands came in after midnight and saw him fast asleep—he never would have had time to come down here, rant on that crazy tower of his and walk back again. Henry, consciously or unconsciously, projected part of himself back here to the knoll. A kind of intense wish fulfillment, I guess. Chances are he doesn’t even remember it this morning.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “But what did I hear?”
Dave replaced his spectacles. “You heard his chanting all right, but not with your ears. You heard it inside your head, with your mind only. No reason telepathy, or projection, can’t be audible as well as visual. It’s all the result of a mind’s—or a psyche’s—fierce desire to be in another place. The desire is so strong that part of that person—call it ‘ectoplasm’ or what you will—actually does return.”
“But what about the trees?” I interjected. “What made the wood and the hemlocks change? Why did I seem to be looking out over a great forest of tropical fern trees—or whatever they were?”
Dave got up, rather wearily. “That I can’t explain, at least not now.” He sighed. “I wish the whole business was over with. I just have a feelin’ Henry’s going to come a cropper.”
Henry did “come a cropper” the very next night. Just before dusk, as we learned later, when the haying crews at Miller’s were leaving the fields for supper, Henry, scorning both a meal and the pay due him, slipped over a fence and set out on the main road for Juniper Hill.
It was after eleven, and I was about to get ready for bed, when Henry’s familiar chant, clear and strong, came to me on the night breeze.
I told myself that he had “projected” himself again and that only an ectoplasmic caricature of him was chanting on the willow platform.
But I could not convince myself that such was the case. His voice was too high-pitched and powerful. There was none of the weak, tentative quality of the night before.
I set out for the knoll with many misgivings. I suppose I felt a kind of obligation to see the business through. Perhaps a sense of responsibility moved me. In addition, I will admit to a degree of curiosity.
As I started through the hemlock woods, however, I experienced a feeling of acute apprehension. Henry’s garbled chant, this night, was louder than I had ever heard it before. It flooded the wood. And I detected in his voice an edge of excitement bordering on hysteria.
I reached the knoll without incident and paused within the shadows cast by the surrounding hemlocks. Something seemed to warn me to keep well out of sight.
Henry, book in hand, stood on the willow platform, chanting rapidly in a shrill voice. His ring glowed more brightly than ever, bathing the book and his own face in an eerie blue light. There was a moderate wind; the tower swayed gently from side to side.
I studied the figure on the platform carefully; there was no doubt in my mind that it was Henry in the flesh. What I saw was not the projection, or apparition, of the previous night.
As he moved his head to read from the book, or to look out over the black expanse of the hemlock woods, I noticed that his expression mirrored intense agitation and expectancy.
His chant rose and fell in the night, and again I sensed a frightening transformation in the contour and general appearance of the surrounding forest. Massive trees which did not resemble hemlocks seemed to loom against the darkened sky.
Once again I felt that a vast unseen audience waited among these alien trees—and that Henry was aware of their presence.
His chant swiftly became an incoherent shriek. His eyes appeared to protrude from his head; his face became so contorted it was scarcely recognizable.
I quickly became convinced that while formerly he was chanting to invoke someone or something—he was suddenly chanting frantically in an attempt to forestall the advent of whatever he had been trying to conjure.
Too late. The thing came slowly prancing and gliding over the tops of the huge fern-like trees. It was black even against the darkness of the night sky, but it seemed to contain within itself a kind of lambent flame. An aura of cold blue fire flickered about it.
If it had a definite shape, that shape was not easily apparent, because it continually flowed in upon itself, contorting and writhing in a manner which I found intensely repellent.
In size, it was enormous. If you can imagine a team of six or eight black horses, somehow joined together and all attempting to gallop off in different directions at once, you might have some faint conception of the appalling thing’s appearance.
Henry saw it. His shrill chanting ceased and his mouth fell open. He was frozen into immobility. His face became wooden. Only his eyes remained alive—two bulging points of blue light which glazed with ultimate horror even before the monstrous entity came over the knoll.
I wanted desperately to intervene, but I was nearly as terrified as poor Henry. And I sensed that, in any case, I would be completely helpless if I did attempt to interfere.
Deliberately and inexorably, the prancing nightmare made for the knoll. Once overhead, it paused. The blue fires which animated it intensified.
It descended slowly, straight for Henry. It seemed to tread on air, very carefully, as it came down above him. I could detect neither eyes nor mouth in the fearful creature, but I knew that it must be equipped with a sensory apparatus—quite probably superior to my own.
Its convulsions almost ceased as it dropped toward the willow platform. When it was within a few feet of that upward-staring white face, its legs—or whatever kind of appendages they were—snaked down and wrapped themselves tightly around the doomed man.