The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer
at a time. She wanted to be a man--to be fully human--that was why she
got hold of him. She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and
weak will in him. Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with
his body--disappear to become a great magician like her father and
leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn't even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffic with
things from the sea--it was horrible.... And old Ephraim--he had known
the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep alive--he
wanted to live for ever--Asenath would succeed--one successful
demonstration had taken place already. As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying
the impression of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape than usual--harder, more
normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness caused
by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active
and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and
I judged that Asenath's force must have pushed him into unwonted
channels of motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a
pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife,
about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which
would convince even me. He repeated names which I recognized from
bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder
with a certain thread of mythological consistency--of convincing
coherence--which ran through his maundering. Again and again he would
pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure. "Dan, Dan, don't you remember him--the wild eyes and the unkempt beard
that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot
it. Now _she_ glares that way. _And I know why!_ He found it in the
_Necronomicon_--the formula. I don't dare tell you the page yet, but
when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has
engulfed me. On, on, on, on--body to body to body--he means never to
die. The life-glow--he knows how to break the link ... it can flicker
on a while even when the body is dead. I'll give you hints and maybe
you'll guess. Listen, Dan--do you know why my wife always takes
such pains with that silly back-hand writing? Have you ever seen a
manuscript of old Ephraim's? Do you want to know why I shivered when I
saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down? "Asenath--_is there such a person?_ Why did they half think there was
poison in old Ephraim's stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the
way he shrieked--like a frightened child--when he went mad and Asenath
locked him up in the padded attic room where--the other--had been? _Was it old Ephraim's soul that was locked in?_ _Who locked in whom?_
Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a
weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn't a son? Tell me,
Daniel Upton--_what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of
horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed,
half-human child at his mercy?_ Didn't he make it permanent--as she'll
do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath
writes differently off guard, _so that you can't tell its script
from_----"

       *       *       *       *       *

Then the thing happened. Derby's voice was rising to a thin treble
scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost
mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when
his confidences had abruptly ceased--when I had half fancied that some
obscure telepathic wave of Asenath's mental force was intervening to
keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different--and,
I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost
unrecognizably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed
a shivering motion--as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and
glands were re-adjusting themselves to a radically different posture,
set of stresses, and general personality. Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell;
yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and
repulsion--such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and
abnormality--that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The
figure beside me seemed less like a life-long friend than like some
monstrous intrusion from outer space--some damnable, utterly accursed
focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces. I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my
companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind; so
I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was
phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energized
state--so unlike his usual self--which so many people had noticed. It
seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby--he who could
never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive--should be
ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car; yet that was
precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my
inexplicable horror I was glad he did not. In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and
shivered at the blaze of his eyes. The people were right--he did look
damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did
not wonder that the moods were disliked--there was certainly something
unnatural in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because
of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my life-long
knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger--an intrusion of some
sort from the black abyss. He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he
did his voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and
more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its accent and
pronunciation were altogether changed--though vaguely, remotely, and
rather disturbingly recalling something I could not quite place. There
was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine irony in the
timbre--not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow
"sophisticate", which Derby had habitually affected, but something
grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marveled at the
self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering. "I hope you'll forget my attack back there, Upton," he was saying. "You
know what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I'm
enormously grateful, of course, for this lift home. "And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying
about my wife--and about things in general. That's what comes from
overstudy in a field like mine.