He felt that he was
hovering on the confines of a phantom or demon-world,--a world in which
the name they had spoken constituted the Master-name, the word of
ultimate power. What followed he heard and saw as in a nightmare. “In the half light that veils all truth, let us prepare to worship and
adore,” chanted Schliemann, who had preceded him to the end of the room. “In the mists that protect our faces before the Black Throne, let us
make ready the willing victim,” echoed Kalkmann in his great bass. They raised their faces, listening expectantly, as a roaring sound,
like the passing of mighty projectiles, filled the air, far, far away,
very wonderful, very forbidding. The walls of the room trembled. “He comes! He comes! He comes!” chanted the Brothers in chorus. The sound of roaring died away, and an atmosphere of still and utter
cold established itself over all. Then Kalkmann, dark and unutterably
stern, turned in the dim light and faced the rest. “Asmodelius, our _Hauptbruder_, is about us,” he cried in a voice that
even while it shook was yet a voice of iron; “Asmodelius is about us. Make ready.”

There followed a pause in which no one stirred or spoke. A tall Brother
approached the Englishman; but Kalkmann held up his hand. “Let the eyes remain uncovered,” he said, “in honour of so freely
giving himself.” And to his horror Harris then realised for the first
time that his hands were already fastened to his sides. The Brother retreated again silently, and in the pause that followed
all the figures about him dropped to their knees, leaving him standing
alone, and as they dropped, in voices hushed with mingled reverence and
awe, they cried softly, odiously, appallingly, the name of the Being
whom they momentarily expected to appear. Then, at the end of the room, where the windows seemed to have
disappeared so that he saw the stars, there rose into view far up
against the night sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A
kind of grey glory enveloped it so that it resembled a steel-cased
statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendour; while,
at the same time, the face was so spiritually mighty, yet so proudly,
so austerely sad, that Harris felt as he stared, that the sight was
more than his eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power
of vision would fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter
nothingness. So remote and inaccessible hung this figure that it was impossible to
gauge anything as to its size, yet at the same time so strangely close,
that when the grey radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and
mournful, beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the
powers of spiritual evil, he felt almost as though he were looking into
a face no farther removed from him in space than the face of any one of
the Brothers who stood by his side. And then the room filled and trembled with sounds that Harris
understood full well were the failing voices of others who had preceded
him in a long series down the years. There came first a plain, sharp
cry, as of a man in the last anguish, choking for his breath, and
yet, with the very final expiration of it, breathing the name of the
Worship--of the dark Being who rejoiced to hear it. The cries of the
strangled; the short, running gasp of the suffocated; and the smothered
gurgling of the tightened throat, all these, and more, echoed back
and forth between the walls, the very walls in which he now stood a
prisoner, a sacrificial victim. The cries, too, not alone of the broken
bodies, but--far worse--of beaten, broken souls. And as the ghastly
chorus rose and fell, there came also the faces of the lost and unhappy
creatures to whom they belonged, and, against that curtain of pale grey
light, he saw float past him in the air, an array of white and piteous
human countenances that seemed to beckon and gibber at him as though he
were already one of themselves. Slowly, too, as the voices rose, and the pallid crew sailed past, that
giant form of grey descended from the sky and approached the room that
contained the worshippers and their prisoner. Hands rose and sank about
him in the darkness, and he felt that he was being draped in other
garments than his own; a circlet of ice seemed to run about his head,
while round the waist, enclosing the fastened arms, he felt a girdle
tightly drawn. At last, about his very throat, there ran a soft and
silken touch which, better than if there had been full light, and a
mirror held to his face, he understood to be the cord of sacrifice--and
of death. At this moment the Brothers, still prostrate upon the floor, began
again their mournful, yet impassioned chanting, and as they did so a
strange thing happened. For, apparently without moving or altering its
position, the huge Figure seemed, at once and suddenly, to be inside
the room, almost beside him, and to fill the space around him to the
exclusion of all else. He was now beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling
as of death--the death of the soul--stirred in his heart. His thoughts
no longer even beat vainly for escape. The end was near, and he knew
it. The dreadfully chanting voices rose about him in a wave: “We worship! We adore! We offer!” The sounds filled his ears and hammered, almost
meaningless, upon his brain. Then the majestic grey face turned slowly downwards upon him, and his
very soul passed outwards and seemed to become absorbed in the sea
of those anguished eyes. At the same moment a dozen hands forced him
to his knees, and in the air before him he saw the arm of Kalkmann
upraised, and felt the pressure about his throat grow strong. It was in this awful moment, when he had given up all hope, and the
help of gods or men seemed beyond question, that a strange thing
happened. For before his fading and terrified vision, there slid, as
in a dream of light,--yet without apparent rhyme or reason--wholly
unbidden and unexplained,--the face of that other man at the supper
table of the railway inn. And the sight, even mentally, of that strong,
wholesome, vigorous English face, inspired him suddenly with a new
courage. It was but a flash of fading vision before he sank into a dark and
terrible death, yet, in some inexplicable way, the sight of that face
stirred in him unconquerable hope and the certainty of deliverance. It
was a face of power, a face, he now realised, of simple goodness such
as might have been seen by men of old on the shores of Galilee; a face,
by heaven, that could conquer even the devils of outer space. And, in his despair and abandonment, he called upon it, and called with
no uncertain accents. He found his voice in this overwhelming moment
to some purpose; though the words he actually used, and whether they
were in German or English, he could never remember. Their effect,
nevertheless, was instantaneous. The Brothers understood, and that grey
Figure of evil understood. For a second the confusion was terrific. There came a great shattering
sound.