After much toil, the words had finally seeped into my blood so that they would come automatically to my lips when I opened them to pronounce the conjuration.
The five of us sat in silence in the great hall as the bell in the spire of the parish church tolled the third quarter before two – excitement had so sharpened my ear that the noise was almost painful to it. Then we climbed up the tower. The five-pointed table that almost filled the chamber shone bright in the light of the candles as Kelley, tottering as if he were drunk, lit them one after the other. Then we sat in order in the high-backed chairs. Two of the points of the pentagram were directed towards the west, where the clear moonlight and the ice-cold night air poured in through the open window. Jane and Kelley sat at these two points; I myself was sitting with my back to the east and my eye was drawn out into the wooded landscape, deep in shadow, through which the frosty paths and roads flowed like rivulets of spilt milk. On either side of me sat Price and Talbot in mute expectation. The candle flames flickered in the air, as if they too were restless. The moon, high in the sky, was hidden from view, but its bright light fell in dazzling cataracts on the white stones of the window-sill. The five-sided hole in the table gaped before me like a dark well-shaft. – –
We sat as still as the dead, though each one could surely hear his own heart thumping in his breast.
All at once Kelley seemed to fall into a deep sleep, for suddenly we could hear a snoring sound as he breathed. His face began to twitch, but that may only have been the light of the candles flickering over his features. I did not know whether to begin the conjuration or not, for I had expected to hear an order from Kelley. I tried to pronounce the formulae, but each time it was as if an invisible finger were laid upon my lips ... Is it all Kelley’s imagination? I asked myself and was beginning to fall prey to doubt once more, when my mouth began to speak as if of its own accord and in a voice so deep and resonant that it seemed foreign to me, uttered the words of the evocation. – – –
An icy numbness filled the room. The candles were suddenly as still as death, their flames rigid and giving off no light: you could break them off from the candles, I thought, break them off like withered ears of corn ... The pictures of my ancestors on the walls had become black chasms, like the openings into dark dungeons, and the disappearance of the portraits made me feel as if I was cut off from those who were there to protect me.
In the deathly silence a child’s voice rang out:
“My name is Madini; I am a little girl from a poor family. I am the second youngest of the children; at home my mother has a babe at her breast.”
At the same time I saw hovering in the open air outside the window the figure of a pretty little girl of seven to nine years old; her long hair hung in ringlets over her forehead; her dress shimmered red and green and looked as if it were made from flakes of the jewel alexandrite, which appears green by day and at night blood red. Charming as the child looked at first sight, its appearance made a terrifying impression: it hovered outside the window, fluttering like taut, smooth silk, a shape without any physical depth, its features as if painted – a phantom in two dimensions. Is that the promised angel? I wondered, and a bitter disappointment fell upon me which the miracle of this inexplicable apparition could do nothing to lessen. Then Talbot leant over to me and whispered in a choking voice:
“It is my child; I am sure I recognise it. She died not long after birth. Do the dead continue to grow?”
There was so little pain and sorrow in my friend’s voice that I felt sure he was as terrified as I was. Could it be an image, deep within him, that had been projected out into the air, that had somehow been released from his soul and taken visible form? – But I immediately abandoned the thought as the phantom was obscured by a pale green pillar of light which suddenly shot up like a geyser through the hole in the table and then moulded itself into a human shape which yet had nothing human about it. It congealed into an emerald form, as translucent as beryl, and as hard – a hardness which seemed to gather and concentrate at its centre more perceptibly than in any earthly material. Arms detached themselves from the stone, a head, a neck. – – And hands! Those hands! There was something about them that I could not quite pin down. For a long time I could not take my eyes off them until I saw it: the thumb on the right hand pointed outwards, it was the left-hand thumb. I will not say that this terrified me – why should it? But this apparently trivial detail emphasised the otherness, the ahuman nature of the gigantic being rising up
