“You are the first to feel it,” said Dr. Silence in low tones, looking
across at him. “You are in more intimate touch, of course—”

The Colonel was trembling, and appeared to be in considerable distress. His knees shook, so that the shuffling of his slippered feet became
audible. He inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no
other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself
in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had
warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, though
vainly, resisting. But, meanwhile, a curious and whirling sense of exhilaration began to
come over me. The increasing heat was delightful, bringing a sensation
of intense activity, of thoughts pouring through the mind at high
speed, of vivid pictures in the brain, of fierce desires and lightning
energies alive in every part of the body. I was conscious of no
physical distress, such as the Colonel felt, but only of a vague
feeling that it might all grow suddenly too intense—that I might be
consumed—that my personality as well as my body, might become resolved
into the flame of pure spirit. I began to live at a speed too intense
to last. It was as if a thousand ecstasies besieged me—

“Steady!” whispered the voice of John Silence in my ear, and I looked
up with a start to see that the Colonel had risen from his chair. The
doctor rose too. I followed suit, and for the first time saw down into
the bowl. To my amazement and horror I saw that the contents were
troubled. The blood was astir with movement. The rest of the experiment was witnessed by us standing. It came, too,
with a curious suddenness. There was no more dreaming, for me at any
rate. I shall never forget the figure of Colonel Wragge standing there beside
me, upright and unshaken, squarely planted on his feet, looking about
him, puzzled beyond belief, yet full of a fighting anger. Framed by the
white walls, the red glow of the lamps upon his streaming cheeks, his
eyes glowing against the deathly pallor of his skin, breathing hard and
making convulsive efforts of hands and body to keep himself under
control, his whole being roused to the point of savage fighting, yet
with nothing visible to get at anywhere—he stood there, immovable
against odds. And the strange contrast of the pale skin and the burning
face I had never seen before, or wish to see again. But what has left an even sharper impression on my memory was the
blackness that then began crawling over his face, obliterating the
features, concealing their human outline, and hiding him inch by inch
from view. This was my first realisation that the process of
materialisation was at work. His visage became shrouded. I moved from
one side to the other to keep him in view, and it was only then I
understood that, properly speaking, the blackness was not upon the
countenance of Colonel Wragge, but that something had inserted itself
between me and him, thus screening his face with the effect of a dark
veil. Something that apparently rose through the floor was passing
slowly into the air above the table and above the bowl. The blood in
the bowl, moreover, was considerably less than before. And, with this change in the air before us, there came at the same time
a further change, I thought, in the face of the soldier. One-half was
turned towards the red lamps, while the other caught the pale
illumination of the moonlight falling aslant from the high windows, so
that it was difficult to estimate this change with accuracy of detail. But it seemed to me that, while the features—eyes, nose, mouth—remained
the same, the life informing them had undergone some profound
transformation. The signature of a new power had crept into the face
and left its traces there—an expression dark, and in some unexplained
way, terrible. Then suddenly he opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of this
changed voice, deep and musical though it was, made me cold and set my
heart beating with uncomfortable rapidity. The Being, as he had
dreaded, was already in control of his brain, using his mouth. “I see a blackness like the blackness of Egypt before my face,” said
the tones of this unknown voice that seemed half his own and half
another’s. “And out of this darkness they come, they come.”

I gave a dreadful start. The doctor turned to look at me for an
instant, and then turned to centre his attention upon the figure of our
host, and I understood in some intuitive fashion that he was there to
watch over the strangest contest man ever saw—to watch over and, if
necessary, to protect. “He is being controlled—possessed,” he whispered to me through the
shadows. His face wore a wonderful expression, half triumph, half
admiration. Even as Colonel Wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible
darkness began to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the
hearth, rising up in sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. It
stole up from below—an awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the
radiations of light in the building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a
radiance in their place. Then, out of this rising sea of shadows,
issued a pale and spectral light that gradually spread itself about us,
and from the heart of this light I saw the shapes of fire crowd and
gather. And these were not human shapes, or the shapes of anything I
recognised as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced
globes, triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various
geometrical figures. They grew bright, faded, and then grew bright
again with an effect almost of pulsation. They passed swiftly to and
fro through the air, rising and falling, and particularly in the
immediate neighbourhood of the Colonel, often gathering about his head
and shoulders, and even appearing to settle upon him like giant insects
of flame. They were accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound of
hissing—the same sound we had heard that afternoon in the plantation. “The fire-elementals that precede their master,” the doctor said in an
undertone. “Be ready.”

And while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed
and faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters
overhead, we heard the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of
the afflicted soldier. It was a voice of power, splendid in some way I
cannot describe, and with a certain sense of majesty in its cadences,
and, as I listened to it with quickly beating heart, I could fancy it
was some ancient voice of Time itself, echoing down immense corridors
of stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of
mountain tombs. “I have seen my divine Father, Osiris,” thundered the great tones. “I
have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth,
and am one with the starry Deities!”

Something grand came into the soldier’s face. He was staring fixedly
before him, as though seeing nothing. “Watch,” whispered Dr. Silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to
come from very far away.