The Word Volume 6
About this book
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. ...as it had begun the wind stopped and a dead calm prevailed. Then the overwhelming sensation of horror and fear that possessed me when in the house, returned with tenfold force. Dark as the night was, except where the light of Calvert's lantern fell, I fancied that I could see ghastly, horrible, monstrous and threatening forms, vaguely defined, all-about me. That such presences surrounded us I do not doubt, but am inclined to believe that actually seeing them was an hallucination produced by a habit of the mind seeking translation of the subjective into the objective. It was only with the eyes of my mind that I saw those bodiless things of evil, invisible, intangible, yet real, like the deadly choke-damp in a mine. But there can be no question of my having seen with physi cal sight the awful thing that almost immediately evolved itself out of the darkness. First there was a faintly luminous haze, like a ball thrice the bigness of a man's-head. Quickly this condensed itself into a face, nothing but a face, with enough inherent light to be visible--the face of an old man, deeply lined and wrinkled, distorted hideously by rage and unspeakable mental agony. It remained but an instant, yet that was enough to brand it in the memory forever as a thing of superlative horror. And I knew it was the face of Ralph Weston. Then a low tremulous wail, full of unutterable despairing grief, arose, swelled and died away. It was a female voice and seemed to come, not from any one direction more than another, but to pervade the atmosphere. After that, there came a calm, long enough at least for us to flee from the place. Our driver, when we asked him if he felt the great wind, replied that he had not; the air about him had been perfectly still....