He cried the words like a parrot, not knowing what he said.
And Berselius?
Berselius, also dripping with sweat, his eyes also dilated to a rim, tottering like a drunken man, gazed, drinking, drinking the sight in.
Down, away down in the heart of man there is a trapdoor. Beyond the instincts of murder and assassination, beyond the instincts that make a Count Cajus or a Marquis de Sade, it lies, and it leads directly into the last and nethermost depths of hell, where sits in eternal damnation Eccelin de Romano.
Cruelty for cruelty’s sake: the mad pleasure of watching suffering in its most odious form: that is the passion which hides demon-like beneath this door, and that was the passion that held Berselius now in its grip.
He had drunk of all things, this man, but never of such a potent draught as this demon held now to his lips—and not for the first time. The draught would have been nothing but for the bitterness of it, the horror of it, the mad delight of knowing the fiendishness of it, and drinking, drinking, drinking, till reason, self-respect, and soul, were overthrown.
The thing that had been a black woman and, now, seemed like nothing earthly except a bundle of red rags, gave up the miserable soul it contained and, stiffening in the clutches of tetanus, became a hoop.
What happened then to the remaining villagers could be heard echoing for miles through the forest in the shrieks and wails of the tortured ones.