You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and
split me if I’d have risked tampering that much with--the powers--had
ye not been so hot after bygone things.”

I shuddered as the man grew colloquial--and with the familiar speech
of another day. He went on. “But you must know, Sir, that what--the squire--got from those mongrel
salvages was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had
not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account with an
ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made
sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past
the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn
in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make
about us; and what we don’t want, we may sweep away. I won’t say that
all this is wholly true in body, but ’tis sufficient true to furnish a
very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled
by a better sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you;
so be pleased to hold back any fright at what I design to show. Come
to the window and be quiet.”

                *       *       *       *       *

My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the
long side of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his
ungloved fingers I turned cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of
the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his pulling. But
again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly
prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window,
the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into
the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of
tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an
insidious motion of my host’s hand, a flash of heat-lightning played
over the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant
foliage--foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to be expected
by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and in
the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh
constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile
illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer. “That was before my time--before the new squire’s time. Pray let us
try again.”

I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed
city had made me. “Good God!” I whispered; “can you do that for _any time_?” And as he
nodded, and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs,
I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he
steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his
insidious gesture. Again the lightning flashed--but this time upon a scene not wholly
strange. It was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here
and there a roof or row of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely
green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The marsh still
glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of
what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul’s and the Brick
Church dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke
hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, but not so much from the
sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly
conjured up. “Can you--dare you--go _far_?” I spoke with awe, and I think he shared
it for a second, but the evil grin returned. “_Far?_ What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back, back--forward, _forward_--look, ye puling lack-wit!”

And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew;
bringing to the sky a flash more blinding than either which had come
before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight,
and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment
me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things,
and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with
impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning
from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries
I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in
orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered
kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning
of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like
the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen. I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind’s ear the
blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the
shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever
stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I
screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls
quivered about me. Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a
look of shocking fear half-blotting from his face the serpent
distortion of rage which my screams had excited. He tottered, clutched
at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head wildly,
like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my
screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly suggestive
that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the
steady, stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as
with the ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the
cautious, purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the
feeble candlelight. The old man clawed and spat at me through the
moldy air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the
yellow curtain he clutched. “The full moon--damn ye--ye . . . ye yelping dog--ye called ’em, and
they’ve come for me! Moccasined feet--dead men--Gad sink ye, ye red
devils, but I poisoned no rum o’ yours--han’t I kept your pox-rotted
magic safe?--ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and ye must needs
blame the squire--let go, you! Unhand that latch--I’ve naught for ye
here----”

At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of
the door, and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic
magician. His fright, turning to steely despair, left room for a
resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step toward the
table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The curtains, still
clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut and
finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the
room a flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky
had presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new
semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy
paneling, sagging floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and
ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too, whether from the
same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw him
shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with
vulturine talons.