What are commonly called the pleasures of life had never any
attractions for me, and I lived alone in London, avoiding my
fellow-students, and in my turn avoided by them as a man self-absorbed
and unsympathetic. So long as I could gratify my desire of knowledge of
a peculiar kind, knowledge of which the very existence is a profound
secret to most men, I was intensely happy, and I have often spent whole
nights sitting in the darkness of my room, and thinking of the strange
world on the brink of which I trod. My professional studies, however,
and the necessity of obtaining a degree, for some time forced my more
obscure employment into the background, and soon after I had qualified I
met Agnes, who became my wife. We took a new house in this remote
suburb, and I began the regular routine of a sober practice, and for
some months lived happily enough, sharing in the life about me, and only
thinking at odd intervals of that occult science which had once
fascinated my whole being. I had learnt enough of the paths I had begun
to tread to know that they were beyond all expression difficult and
dangerous, that to persevere meant in all probability the wreck of a
life, and that they led to regions so terrible, that the mind of man
shrinks appalled at the very thought. Moreover, the quiet and the peace
I had enjoyed since my marriage had wiled me away to a great extent from
places where I knew no peace could dwell. But suddenly--I think indeed
it was the work of a single night, as I lay awake on my bed gazing into
the darkness--suddenly, I say, the old desire, the former longing,
returned, and returned with a force that had been intensified ten times
by its absence; and when the day dawned and I looked out of the window,
and saw with haggard eyes the sunrise in the east, I knew that my doom
had been pronounced; that as I had gone far, so now I must go farther
with unfaltering steps. I turned to the bed where my wife was sleeping
peacefully, and lay down again, weeping bitter tears, for the sun had
set on our happy life and had risen with a dawn of terror to us both. I
will not set down here in minute detail what followed; outwardly I went
about the day's labour as before, saying nothing to my wife. But she
soon saw that I had changed; I spent my spare time in a room which I had
fitted up as a laboratory, and often I crept upstairs in the grey dawn
of the morning, when the light of many lamps still glowed over London;
and each night I had stolen a step nearer to that great abyss which I
was to bridge over, the gulf between the world of consciousness and the
world of matter. My experiments were many and complicated in their
nature, and it was some months before I realized whither they all
pointed, and when this was borne in upon me in a moment's time, I felt
my face whiten and my heart still within me. But the power to draw back,
the power to stand before the doors that now opened wide before me and
not to enter in, had long ago been absent; the way was closed, and I
could only pass onward. My position was as utterly hopeless as that of
the prisoner in an utter dungeon, whose only light is that of the
dungeon above him; the doors were shut and escape was impossible. Experiment after experiment gave the same result, and I knew, and shrank
even as the thought passed through my mind, that in the work I had to do
there must be elements which no laboratory could furnish, which no
scales could ever measure. In that work, from which even I doubted to
escape with life, life itself must enter; from some human being there
must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place
(for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber)--in its
place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind
cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death
itself. And when I knew this, I knew also on whom this fate would fall;
I looked into my wife's eyes. Even at that hour, if I had gone out and
taken a rope and hanged myself, I might have escaped, and she also, but
in no other way. At last I told her all. She shuddered, and wept, and
called on her dead mother for help, and asked me if I had no mercy, and
I could only sigh. I concealed nothing from her; I told her what she
would become, and what would enter in where her life had been; I told
her of all the shame and of all the horror. You who will read this when
I am dead--if indeed I allow this record to survive,--you who have
opened the box and have seen what lies there, if you could understand
what lies hidden in that opal! For one night my wife consented to what I
asked of her, consented with the tears running down her beautiful face,
and hot shame flushing red over her neck and breast, consented to
undergo this for me. I threw open the window, and we looked together at
the sky and the dark earth for the last time; it was a fine star-light
night, and there was a pleasant breeze blowing, and I kissed her on her
lips, and her tears ran down upon my face. That night she came down to
my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred down, with
curtains drawn thick and close, so that the very stars might be shut out
from the sight of that room, while the crucible hissed and boiled over
the lamp, I did what had to be done, and led out what was no longer a
woman. But on the table the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as
no eyes of man have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was
within it flashed and glittered, and shone even to my heart. My wife had
only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last what I had told
her, I would kill her. I have kept that promise.' *       *       *       *       *

There was nothing more. Dyson let the little pocket-book fall, and
turned and looked again at the opal with its flaming inmost light, and
then with unutterable irresistible horror surging up in his heart,
grasped the jewel, and flung it on the ground, and trampled it beneath
his heel. His face was white with terror as he turned away, and for a
moment stood sick and trembling, and then with a start he leapt across
the room and steadied himself against the door. There was an angry hiss,
as of steam escaping under great pressure, and as he gazed, motionless,
a volume of heavy yellow smoke was slowly issuing from the very centre
of the jewel, and wreathing itself in snake-like coils above it. And
then a thin white flame burst forth from the smoke, and shot up into the
air and vanished; and on the ground there lay a thing like a cinder,