Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the
narrow hall at the foot of the stairs—well, I could have sworn it was
half an hour’s journey had not my watch certified that it was a few
seconds. Yet I walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I
walked apparently without advancing, and at that rate it would have
taken me a week to get down Putney Hill.”

“An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space
sometimes—”

“But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came
horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of
icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter—”

“Yes; what?” asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his
eyes. “—I was overwhelmed with terror,” said Pender, lowering his reedy voice
at the mere recollection of it. He paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in
his eyes now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners
of his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of
that merriment still amused him. The combination of fear and laughter
in his face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story;
it also lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures. “Terror, was it?” repeated the doctor soothingly. “Yes, terror; for, though the Thing that woke me seemed to have gone,
the memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair. Then I locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug
made my movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach
the door, and another five to get back to the chair again. The
laughter, too, kept bubbling up inside me—great wholesome laughter that
shook me like gusts of wind—so that even my terror almost made me
laugh. Oh, but I may tell you, Dr. Silence, it was altogether vile,
that mixture of fear and laughter, altogether vile! “Then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny
side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The
bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the
clock looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the
arrangement of papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared
and shook and held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And
that footstool! Oh, that absurd footstool!”

He lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands
at the thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed, too. “Go on, please,” he said, “I quite understand. I know something myself
of the hashish laughter.”

The author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing
quickly grave again. “So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless
merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror
I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was
terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two
opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then,
the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion—so
you called it just now—of the ‘person’ who had wakened me: she was
utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished
for good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything
in the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my
heart. And this creature was putting—putting her—”

He hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely. “Putting what?”

“—putting ideas into my mind,” he went on glancing nervously about the
room. “Actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off the usual
current and inject her own. How mad that sounds! I know it, but it’s
true. It’s the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the operation
terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh
with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant,
bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas,
and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior
and diabolical method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and
ideas of evil and tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. Oh,
doctor, I tell you again, it was unnerving!”

John Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of
the story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky
sentences and lowered voice. “You saw nothing—no one—all this time?” he asked. “Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind
there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman—large, dark-skinned,
with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye—the left—so
drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face—!”

“A face you would recognise again?”

Pender laughed dreadfully. “I wish I could forget it,” he whispered, “I only wish I could forget
it!” Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the
doctor’s hand with an emotional gesture. “I _must_ tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy,”
he cried, with a tremor in his voice, “and—that you do not think me
mad. I have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere
freedom of speech—the relief of sharing my affliction with another—has
helped me already more than I can possibly say.”

Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened
eyes. His voice was very gentle when he replied. “Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to
me,” he said, “for it threatens, not your physical existence but the
temple of your psychical existence—the inner life. Your mind would not
be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the
existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your
spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be
_spiritually insane_—a far more radical condition than merely being
insane here.”

There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men
sitting there facing one another. “Do you really mean—Good Lord!” stammered the author as soon as he
could find his tongue. “What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only
say now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite
positive of being able to help you. Oh, there’s no doubt as to that,
believe me. In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of
this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of
opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I
have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well
as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and
painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic
treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened
another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration,
and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive.