ping 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 recognized 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 realized 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 fo