“It is there that you are, James Rolls,” said Roupert in a loud voice of exultation. “In the name of God, come out!”
The convulsions redoubled themselves; the body writhed and bent like that of a poisoned man. Then round the face, brightest about the mouth, there formed a pale greenish light, corrupt and awful. It began to wreathe itself into lines and curves, weaving and intertwining; it grew in height, like a luminous column built without hands, in the darkness; it defined itself into human form, until in the air just above the recumbent body it stood complete. With its emergence the convulsions and the groanings subsided, and at the end, when this wraith in semblance of a swathed man, with face of such murderous cruelty that I shuddered as I looked at it, stood fully fashioned and finished, the body of Frank Hampden lay quite still, in that sleep which was nearest of all to death.
Then Roupert’s voice spoke again, clear and peremptory and triumphant.
“Begone, James Rolls!” he cried.
Very slowly the materialized spirit began to move, floating like a balloon in an almost windless air. Slowly it drifted towards us, with its eyes fixed on the unconscious medium and alight with awful purpose, its mouth curled into some sort of hellish smile. It came quite close to him, as if sucked there, and the edge of its outline began to extend towards him a feeler, as of a little whirlpool of water drawn down into a sink, till the end of it just touched him....
“In the name of the Holiest, and by the power of the Highest,” shouted Roupert, “I bid you go to the place that He has appointed for you.”
Then ... I can only describe what happened by saying that some shock, blinding, deafening, overwhelming every sense, shook the room. It leaped into a blaze of light, a thunder of sound rent the air, and yet I knew that all this came from within, was the echo of the spiritual crisis that raged round us made manifest to the bodily sense. And silence as of the frozen Polar night succeeded....
Then once again a light began to be built up over Hampden’s body that lay utterly still beside the curtains. It fashioned itself, but only very faintly, into the outline of a man, and this seemed to be drawn inwards and absorbed by that motionless figure. We waited till it had disappeared altogether.
The medium stirred and struggled.
“It is over,” he said, and laid his head on his arms.