Ancient forces attached to
this house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to
their precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should
myself be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling
nothing as yet. But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the
rest of your wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk
about the means of cure.”

Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and
then went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative. “After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again
to bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up—at
the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window,
the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that
outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to
alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless
sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache
and a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation.”

“Fear gone, too?” asked the doctor. “I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere
nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that
day I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed
wonderfully quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the
heart of true humour. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my
experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I
came to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden
glances of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I was
dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I had
uttered it.”

“And why?”

“It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could
remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense
was so altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to
tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted. Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. There was
laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my
attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it read
then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had
come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as
merriment. The framework of humour was there, if you understand me, but
the characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil.”

“Can you show me this writing?”

The author shook his head. “I destroyed it,” he whispered. “But, in the end, though of course much
perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some
after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my
mind and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations
that did not properly hold them.”

“And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?”

“No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I
forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular,
there she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly—”

“In what way, precisely?” interrupted the doctor. “Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures
of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been
foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature—”

“The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality,” murmured the
doctor, making a quick note. “Eh? I didn’t quite catch—”

“Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you shall know their purport
fully later.”

“Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the
house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate
fashion; and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and
respectful towards it—to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself
carefully deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at
last, and, if I failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that
it pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my
very soul in its inmost abode. It certainly came before my wife so far
as my attentions were concerned. “But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took
it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience,
delayed like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when
it did come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. This time,
however, there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time;
it shortened instead of lengthened, so that I dressed and got
downstairs in about twenty seconds, and the couple of hours I stayed
and worked in the study passed literally like a period of ten minutes.”

“That is often true of an overdose,” interjected the doctor, “and you
may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour. It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it,
and is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of
thought.”

“This time,” Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his
excitement, “another extraordinary effect came to me, and I experienced
a curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived external things
through one large main sense-channel instead of through the five
divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth. You will, I know,
understand me when I tell you that I _heard_ sights and _saw_ sounds. No language can make this comprehensible, of course, and I can only
say, for instance, that the striking of the clock I saw as a visible
picture in the air before me. I saw the sounds of the tinkling bell. And in precisely the same way I heard the colours in the room,
especially the colours of those books in the shelf behind you. Those
red bindings I heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the
French bindings next to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike
the chattering of starlings. That brown bookcase muttered, and those
green curtains opposite kept up a constant sort of rippling sound like
the lower notes of a wood-horn. But I only was conscious of these
sounds when I looked steadily at the different objects, and thought
about them. The room, you understand, was not full of a chorus of
notes; but when I concentrated my mind upon a colour, I heard, as well
as saw, it.”

“That is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of _Cannabis indica_,”
observed the doctor. “And it provoked laughter again, did it?”

“Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so
like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of
a performing bear—which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know. But this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On
the contrary, I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an
intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and
keen-minded.