And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a sleepwalker.

"Take up the light."

I took it. The Scin-Laeca glided along the wall towards the threshold,
and motioned me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow flitted on
through the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small
stair into Forman's study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be
narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign.
I obeyed the guidance, not only unresistingly, but without a desire to
resist. I was unconscious either of curiosity or of awe,--only of a
calm and passive indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful. In this
obedience, from which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands
the staff which I had examined the day before, and which lay on the
table, just where Margrave had cast it on re-entering the house. I
unclosed the shutter to the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the
light in my left hand, the staff in my right, stepped forth into the
garden. The night was still; the flame of the candle scarcely trembled
in the air; the Shadow moved on before me towards the old pavilion
described in an earlier part of this narrative, and of which the
mouldering doors stood wide open. I followed the Shadow into the
pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room above, with its four great
blank unglazed windows, or rather arcades, north, south, east, and west.
I halted on the middle of the floor: right before my eyes, through the
vista made by breathless boughs, stood out from the moonlit air the
dreary mausoleum. Then, at the command conveyed to me, I placed the
candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the handle of the staff;
a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a lump of some dark
bituminous substance, next a smaller slender wand of polished steel, of
which the point was tipped with a translucent material, which appeared
to me like crystal. Bending down, still obedient to the direction
conveyed to me, I described on the floor with the lump of bitumen (if
I may so call it) the figure of the pentacle with the interlaced
triangles, in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I had drawn it
for Margrave the evening before. The material used made the figure
perceptible, in a dark colour of mingled black and red. I applied the
flame of the candle to the circle, and immediately it became lambent
with a low steady splendour that rose about an inch from the floor; and
gradually front