The victim first lost control, limb by limb, of his entire organism. Then his voice failed. When he would have called to his Lady-bird, speech was silenced—paralyzed. Nothing of sound but a gurgling, hissing whisper issued from that tiny hole—no longer a human mouth. Only the eyes lived. In that small, corrugated sphere, once a perfect head, was left nothing now that was human, nothing of human intelligence save the eyes—two gleaming sparks of light—and even these, receding and diminishing, gave evidence of the vanishing soul. So long, however, as these two glittering points shone through the vapor mask that had been a face, they sought and chilled the marrow of the disillusioned Imogene.
So long as these two points of intelligence burned in that misshapen ball they rested only upon her, and then—finally as the sodden curtains of phlogisticated matter fell before those windows of the soul and conscious love was swallowed up in vapor, she for whom this tragedy was enacted fell shrieking across the cask of copper wire.
Conversation ceased in the death chamber. The cylinder continued to whirl—dizzily, madly, satanically. Sheets of crackling sparks, blue and wicked, streamed out from that insatiable monster. The full current was on. Every horse-power was let loose. The silent but resistless force of electricity was unchained. And the victim of this awful experiment was no longer a man. It was now but a shape, a cloud, a vapor, a shadow.
There was now but a spinning mass of vapor, a shape no larger than an infant that shot in and out of the laboratory, obedient to the avenger’s hand. The rapid revolutions in that fearful orbit traced out a misty band of cloud. That central cylinder became the hub of a huge spokeless wheel.
With every pulse of time the whirr-r-r-r and the whizz-z-z-z-z of that soulless, bloodless executioner seemed to increase. The invisible avenger flew on its tireless wings with vindictive glee. The air of the room was white-hot. There was an ominous snapping and crackling in and above and around.
There was now but a tiny, shapeless mass of cosmic matter flying in and out through floor and ceiling. There was but the faint, shadowy rim of a phantom wheel.
The heat increased.
The light was blinding. The crackling of the atmosphere was maddening.
Only a faint, misty line now marked the path of the departing soul.