and upon the invokers?

Moreover--chief anxiety of all--what was this name to be experimented
with? What was the nature of this force that Skale hoped to invoke--so
mighty that it should make them "as gods," so terrible that a chord alone
could compass even the first of its stupendous syllables?

And, further, he was still haunted with the feeling that other "beings"
occupied certain portions of the rambling mansion, and more than once
recently he had wakened in the night with an idea, carried over from
dreams possibly, that the corridor outside his bedroom was moving and
alive with footsteps. "From dreams possibly," for when he went and peered
shivering through the narrow crack of the half-opened door, he saw
nothing unusual. And another time--he was awake beyond question at the
moment, for he had been reading till two o'clock and had but just
extinguished the candle--he had heard a sound that he found impossible to
describe, but that sent all the blood with a swift rush from the region
of his heart. It was not wind; it was not the wood cracking with the
frost; it was not snow sliding from the slates outside. It was something
that simultaneously filled the entire building, yet sounded particularly
loud just outside his door; and it came with the abrupt suddenness of a
report. It made him think of all the air in the rooms and halls and
passages being withdrawn by immense suction, as though a gigantic dome
had been dropped over the building in order to produce a vacuum. And just
after it he heard, unmistakably, the long soft stride of Skale going past
his door and down the whole length of the corridor--stealthily, very
quickly, with the hurry of anxiety or alarm in his silence and his speed.

This, moreover, had now happened twice, so that imagination seemed a
far-fetched explanation. And on both occasions the clergyman had remained
invisible on the day following until the evening, and had then
reappeared, quiet and as usual, but with an atmosphere of immense
vibratory force somehow about his person, and a glow in his face and eyes
that at moments seemed positively colored.

No word of explanation, however, had as yet been forthcoming of these
omens, and Spinrobin waited with what patience he could, meanwhile, for
the final test which he knew to be close upon him. And in his diary, the
pages usually left blank now because words failed him, he wrote a
portion of Anone's cry that had caught his memory and expressed a lit