“Good. Open it and go.”
He sat and sipped and pondered the situation.
There was no fire in the grate before him, but a bundle of the towy stuff known as “crinoline”; and this, as the wind moaned down the chimney, heaved and pulsed like a thing that breathed very silently. After a time this stealthy, life-like action wrought a certain uneasiness in him. He filled another glass, drained it, and glanced with a growing sickness of alarm at the palpitating mass. Good God! it was swelling, writhing in monstrous and unnatural motion! He tried to shriek out. His voice had left him. He could hear it very faint and agonized fifty miles away. He struggled to rise to his feet. The thing was out of the fire-place now—climbing his knees—lapping him in, overwhelming him from foot to throat.
With a liquid grunt, that rang in his own congested brain like his dying yell, he sank down in a heap and into immediate unconsciousness.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A dream, a memory of a wire factory he had once been shown over—this to re-connect him with a world he had sunk fathom-deep from; a buzzing and whistling in his brain, from which the brassy filament was being whirled to spin round a great reel at which some shadowy horror toiled; a snapping of the attenuated strand—and Mr. Tuke came to consciousness with a shock.
Even then, at first, he could not disassociate himself from the business of his quickening stupor; but saw the criss-cross of wires on all his drowsy eyes looked at. Somewhere in his forehead was the hole the screaming thread had issued from. He put up his hand vaguely to feel the acrid wound he knew must be there; for his whole skull yet throbbed and ached from the jarring process. He groped for the fancied mark, curiously, and then with a sense of grievance. If it had closed already, the torture would go on in his brain and find no outlet.
Suddenly the instinct of motion came to him, and he staggered to his feet. Yet his eyes were half-blind to the reality of his surroundings.
Bit by bit, however, these shook out into distinctness, vibrating like a spun coin before they settled down and became the commonplace objects of the room he had fallen asleep in. And then he saw that broad daylight was beating through a little high window, half-choked with creepers, that pierced the wall at the far end.
A few moments later the furious jangling of a bell seized every echo in the “Dog and Duck.” He who had awakened them, finding no response follow, flung out into the passage storming like a maniac.