I shouted, and my voice went empty-sounding 'round the great
apartment; and then, in a flash, _I knew that Tassoc had never called_. I
whirled 'round, sick with fear, toward the window, and as I did so, a
frightful, exultant whistling scream burst through the Room. On my left,
the end wall had bellied-in toward me, in a pair of gargantuan lips,
black and utterly monstrous, to within a yard of my face. I fumbled for a
mad instant at my revolver; not for _it_, but myself; for the danger was
a thousand times worse than death. And then, suddenly, the Unknown Last
Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual was whispered quite audibly in the room. Instantly, the thing happened that I have known once before. There came a
sense as of dust falling continually and monotonously, and I knew that my
life hung uncertain and suspended for a flash, in a brief, reeling
vertigo of unseeable things. Then _that_ ended, and I knew that I might
live. My soul and body blended again, and life and power came to me. I
dashed furiously at the window, and hurled myself out head-foremost; for
I can tell you that I had stopped being afraid of death. I crashed down
on to the ladder, and slithered, grabbing and grabbing; and so came some
way or other alive to the bottom. And there I sat in the soft, wet grass,
with the moonlight all about me; and far above, through the broken window
of the Room, there was a low whistling. "That is the chief of it. I was not hurt, and I went 'round to the front,
and knocked Tassoc up. When they let me in, we had a long yarn, over some
good whisky--for I was shaken to pieces--and I explained things as much
as I could, I told Tassoc that the room would have to come down, and
every fragment of it burned in a blast-furnace, erected within a
pentacle. He nodded. There was nothing to say. Then I went to bed. "We turned a small army on to the work, and within ten days, that lovely
thing had gone up in smoke, and what was left was calcined, and clean. "It was when the workmen were stripping the paneling, that I got hold of
a sound notion of the beginnings of that beastly development. Over the
great fireplace, after the great oak panels had been torn down, I found
that there was let into the masonry a scrollwork of stone, with on it an
old inscription, in ancient Celtic, that here in this room was burned
Dian Tiansay, Jester of King Alzof, who made the Song of Foolishness upon
King Ernore of the Seventh Castle. "When I got the translation clear, I gave it to Tassoc. He was
tremendously excited; for he knew the old tale, and took me down to the
library to look at an old parchment that gave the story in detail. Afterward, I found that the incident was well-known about the
countryside; but always regarded more as a legend than as history. And no
one seemed ever to have dreamt that the old East Wing of Iastrae Castle
was the remains of the ancient Seventh Castle. "From the old parchment, I gathered that there had been a pretty dirty
job done, away back in the years. It seems that King Alzof and King
Ernore had been enemies by birthright, as you might say truly; but that
nothing more than a little raiding had occurred on either side for years,
until Dian Tiansay made the Song of Foolishness upon King Ernore, and
sang it before King Alzof; and so greatly was it appreciated that King
Alzof gave the jester one of his ladies, to wife. "Presently, all the people of the land had come to know the song, and so
it came at last to King Ernore, who was so angered that he made war upon
his old enemy, and took and burned him and his castle; but Dian Tiansay,
the jester, he brought with him to his own place, and having torn his
tongue out because of the song which he had made and sung, he imprisoned
him in the Room in the East Wing (which was evidently used for unpleasant
purposes), and the jester's wife, he kept for himself, having a fancy for
her prettiness. "But one night, Dian Tiansay's wife was not to be found, and in the
morning they discovered her lying dead in her husband's arms, and he
sitting, whistling the Song of Foolishness, for he had no longer the
power to sing it. "Then they roasted Dian Tiansay, in the great fireplace--probably from
that selfsame 'galley-iron' which I have already mentioned. And until he
died, Dian Tiansay ceased not to whistle the Song of Foolishness, which
he could no longer sing. But afterward, 'in that room' there was often
heard at night the sound of something whistling; and there 'grew a power
in that room,' so that none dared to sleep in it. And presently, it would
seem, the King went to another castle; for the whistling troubled him. "There you have it all. Of course, that is only a rough rendering of the
translation of the parchment. But it sounds extraordinarily quaint. Don't
you think so?" "Yes," I said, answering for the lot. "But how did the thing grow to such
a tremendous manifestation?" "One of those cases of continuity of thought producing a positive action
upon the immediate surrounding material," replied Carnacki. "The
development must have been going forward through centuries, to have
produced such a monstrosity. It was a true instance of Saiitii
manifestation, which I can best explain by likening it to a living
spiritual fungus, which involves the very structure of the aether-fiber
itself, and, of course, in so doing, acquires an essential control over
the 'material substance' involved in it. It is impossible to make it
plainer in a few words." "What broke the seventh hair?" asked Taylor. But Carnacki did not know. He thought it was probably nothing but being
too severely tensioned. He also explained that they found out that the
men who had run away, had not been up to mischief; but had come over
secretly, merely to hear the whistling, which, indeed, had suddenly
become the talk of the whole countryside. "One other thing," said Arkright, "have you any idea what governs the
use of the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual? I know, of course,
that it was used by the Ab-human Priests in the Incantation of Raaaee;
but what used it on your behalf, and what made it?" "You had better read Harzan's Monograph, and my Addenda to it, on Astral
and Astral Co-ordination and Interference," said Carnacki. "It is an
extraordinary subject, and I can only say here that the human vibration
may not be insulated from the astral (as is always believed to be the
case, in interferences by the Ab-human), without immediate action being
taken by those Forces which govern the spinning of the outer circle. In
other words, it is being proved, time after time, that there is some
inscrutable Protective Force constantly intervening between the human
soul (not the body, mind you,) and the Outer Monstrosities. Am I clear?" "Yes, I think so," I replied. "And you believe that the Room had become
the material expression of the ancient Jester--that his soul, rotten with
hatred, had bred into a monster--eh?" I asked. "Yes," said Carnacki, nodding, "I think you've put my thought rather
neatly.