I am willing to go through with it, I said at last.
Good! I knew you would be. Let's get to work at once!
He lifted the most ponderous volume in the laboratory from the floor to the top of an old walnut refectory table. The book was bound in musty yellow vellum, clasped with iron, and the foxed leaves were fashioned from parchment made from the skin of virgin camels. As he opened it, I saw that the pages were inscribed with cabalistic characters and symbols, illuminated in colours, none of which I could decipher. Lou Matagot jumped on to the table and sat on the leaves at the top of the book, forming a paper weight. He sat with his back to Peter and his long, black tail played nervously up and down the centre of the volume.
Peter now drew a circle with a radius of twelve or thirteen feet around us, inscribing within its circumference certain characters and pentacles. Then he plunged a dagger through what I recognized to be a sacred wafer, which he told me had been stolen from a church at midnight, at the same time, muttering what, from the tone of his voice, I took to be blasphemous imprecations, although the language he used was unfamiliar to me. Next he arranged a copper chafing-dish over a blue flame and began to stir the ingredients, esoteric powders and crystals of bright colours. Now he lovingly lifted a crystal viol, filled with a purple liquid, and poured the contents into a porcelain bowl. Instantly, there was a faint detonation and a thick cloud of violet vapour mounted spirally to the ceiling. All the time, occasionally referring to the grimoire on the table, and employing certain unmentionable symbolic objects in the manner prescribed, he muttered incantations in the unknown tongue. The room swam with odours and mists, violet clouds and opopanax fogs. So far, the invocation was pretty and amusing but it resembled the arcane rites of Paul Iribe more than those of Hermes Trismegistus.
Now Peter pulled three black hairs from the cat's tail, which Lou Matagot delivered with a yowl of rage, springing at the same time from the table to the top of the cabinet, whence he regarded us through the mists and vapours, with his evil yellow eyes. The hairs went into the chafing-dish and a new aroma filled the room. The claws of an owl, the flower of the moly, and the powder of vipers followed and then Peter opened a long flat box which nearly covered one end of the huge table, and a nest of serpents, with bellies of rich turquoise blue and backs of tawny yellow, marked with black zigzags, reared their wicked heads. He called them by name and they responded by waving their heads rhythmically. I began to grow alarmed and dizzy. Vade retro, Satanas! was on tip of my tongue. For a few seconds, I think, I must have fainted. When I revived, I still heard the chanting of the incantation and the sound of tinkling bells. The serpents' heads still waved in rhythm and their bodies, yellow and turquoise blue, were elongated in the air until they appeared to be balancing on the tips of their tails. The eyes of Lou Matagot glared maliciously through the thick vapours and the cat howled with rage or terror.
Now! cried Peter, for the first time in English. Now!
My nails dug holes in the palms of my perspiring hands. Peter renewed his nocuous muttering and casting the wafer, transfixed by the dagger, into the porcelain bowl containing the violet fluid, he poured the whole mixture into the copper chafing-dish.
There was a terrific explosion.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] A feeling in which he encourages belief in his preface to a new edition of "The Great God Pan"; 1916.