For a moment he thought he must have picked up the gut, the cord seemed
so stiff and unresponsive. Incredible what nervousness can do to you,
he told himself. His mouth was dry. He swallowed with difficulty. Finally, by keeping his eyes on the illustration and imitating it step
for step, he managed to tie a carrick bend. All the while he felt as
if there were more between his fingers than a cord, as if he were
manipulating against a great inertia. Just as he finished, he felt a
slight prickly chill, like the onset of fever, and the light overhead
seemed to dim a trifle. Eye-strain. The phonograph needle was rolling in the opposite direction, spinning
faster and faster. He slapped his hand down on it, missed it, caught it
at the edge of the table. Just like a Ouija board, he told himself. You try to keep your fingers,
poised on the planchette, perfectly motionless. As a result muscular
tensions accumulate. They reach the breaking point. Seemingly without
any volition on your part, the planchette begins to roll and skid
about on its three little legs, traveling from letter to letter. Same
thing here. Nervous and muscular tensions made it difficult for him to
tie knots. Obeying a universal tendency, he projected the difficulty
into the cord. And, by hand and knee pressure, he had been doing some
unconscious table tipping. Between his fingers, the phonograph needle seemed to vibrate, as if it
were being pounded by infinitesimal hammers. There was a very faint
sensation of electric shock. Unbidden, the torturesome, clangorous
chords of the "Ninth Sonata" began to sound in his mind. Rot! One
well-known symptom of extreme nervousness is a tingling in the
fingers--often painfully intense. But his throat was dry and his snort
of bitter contempt sounded choked. He pinned the needle in the flannel for greater safety. Eleven forty-seven. Reaching for the gut, his fingers felt as shaky
and weak as if he just climbed a hundred-foot rope hand over hand. The stuff looked normal, but it was slimy to the touch. And for
some moments he had been conscious of an acrid, almost metallic
odor replacing the salt smell of the Bay. Tactual and olfactory
hallucinations joining in with the visual and auditory, he told
himself. He could still hear the "Ninth Sonata." He knew a bowline backwards, and it should have been easier because the
gut was not as stiff as it ought to be, but he felt there were other
forces manipulating it or other mentalities trying to give orders to
his fingers, so that the gut was trying to tie itself into a slip-knot,
a reef, a half hitch--anything but a bowline. His fingers ached, his
eyes were heavy with an abnormal fatigue. He was working against
a mounting inertia--a dangerous, crushing inertia. He remembered
Tansy telling him that first day--"There's a law of reaction in all
conjuring--like the kick of a gun--" Eleven fifty-two. With a great effort, he canalized his mental energy, focused his
attention only on the knot. His numb fingers began to move in an odd
rhythm, a rhythm of the "Ninth Sonata," _piu vivo_. The bowline
was tied. *       *       *       *       *

The overhead light dimmed markedly, throwing the whole room into a
sooty gloom. Hysterical blindness, he told himself in a despairing
effort to maintain the appearances of sanity and scientific law. It
was very cold now, so cold that he fancied he could see his breath. And silent, terribly silent. Against that silence he could feel and
hear the rapid drumming of his heart, accelerating unendurably to the
thundering, swirling rhythm of the music. Then, in one instant of diabolic paralyzing insight, he knew that
_this_ was sorcery. No mere puttering about with ridiculous
medieval implements, no effortless sleight of hand, but a straining,
back-breaking struggle to keep control of _forces summoned_,
of which the objects he manipulated were only the symbols. Outside
the walls of the room, outside the walls of his skull, outside the
impalpable energy-walls of his mind, he felt those forces gathering,
swelling up, dreadfully expectant, waiting for him to make a false move
so that they could crush him. He could not believe it. He had to believe it. The only question was--would he be able to stay in control? Eleven fifty-seven. He gathered the objects together on the flannel. The needle jumped to the lodestone and clung. It shouldn't; it wasn't
that magnetic. He took a pinch of graveyard dirt. Between finger and
thumb, each separate particle seemed to crawl, like a tiny maggot. He sensed that something was missing. He could not remember what it
was. He fumbled for the formula. A current of air was blowing the
scraps of paper off the table. He sensed an eager, inward surge of the
forces outside, as if they knew he was failing. He clutched at the
papers, managed to pin them down. Bending close, he made out the words
"platinum or iridium." He jabbed his pen against the table, broke off
the whole nib, and added it to the other objects. He stood at the side of the table away from the knife that marked
the east, trying to steady his shaking hands against the edge. His
teeth were chattering. The room was utterly dark now except for the
impossible bluish light that beat through the window shade. Abruptly the strip of flannel started to curl like a strip of heated
gelatine, to roll itself up from east to west, _with_ the sun. He jerked forward, got his hand inside the flannel before it closed,
drew it apart--in his numb hands it seemed like metal--and rolled it
against the sun, widdershins. The silence was intensified. Even the sound of his beating heart was
cut off. He knew that something was listening with a terrible intensity
for his command, and that something was hoping with an even more
terrible avidity that he would not be able to utter that command. Yet somewhere a clock was booming--or was it not a clock, but the
secret sound of time? Nine--ten--eleven--twelve. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He kept on choking
soundlessly. He could feel the walls giving way. Then, in a dry, croaking voice, he managed: "Stop Tansy. Bring her
here." *       *       *       *       *

The walls were shaken as if they were at the center of a whirlpool. Darkness became absolute. There was an eruption of force from the
table. He felt himself flung across the room. Then the forces were gone. In all things, tension gave way to limpness. Sound and light returned. He was sprawled across the bed. On the table
was a little flannel packet, no longer of any consequence. He felt as if he had been doped, or were waking after a debauch. There
was no inclination to do anything. Emotion was absent. Outwardly everything was the same. Even his mind, with automatic
rationality, could still wearily take up the thankless task of
explaining his experiences on a scientific basis--weaving an elaborate
web in which psychosis, hallucination, and improbable coincidences were
the strands.