But now he had a vaguely uncomfortable feeling. It was as though a million eyes were watching him, observing every move. It was as though a million tiny fingers were tearing away the shreds of his mind with secret, silent amusement. Jim did not look about him as he walked on, for he knew no one was there. It had something to do with this light, that much he knew.
Now he could see the end of the corridor through the pulsing greenish haze. Something seemed to be there, something towering and opalescent—and waiting.
He came very near before he saw what it was, a huge circular glass-enclosed well that towered up to the ceiling fifty feet above. It was from this well that the light came. Jim could see the gentle pulsing of it, with streamers of a darker color flashing through it vertically.
Those millions of eyes now were very near. Those millions of fingers probed into his brain unbearably. Jim pressed his hands to his throbbing temples, but the pain continued to expand within his skull. He could not turn and flee, for something held him there. He tried to cry out against it, but his throat seemed to contract and no sound would emerge.
He had no knowledge whether it was minutes or hours that he stood there; but when at last he felt his legs giving way beneath him, and glimpsed the blur of the floor rushing up, it was with a profound sense of gratitude for the oblivion that would be his.
But this was not to be. No sooner did he feel the floor beneath him, than the force which had beaten him down partially withdrew. Jim staggered to his feet, weak and a little dazed. Now something else was happening behind that glassite-encased well. The green pillar of light was lowering, coalescing upon itself with a slowly swirling motion.
And then, as the tower of light lessened, Jim saw what rode atop it. He saw a shape, huge, iridescent and apparently weightless. It seemed at first simply a larger area of greenish light, but for a single second he glimpsed more. He saw the massive core of it. He felt his stomach turning over in a prodigious yawn, and his brain churned in chaotic horror.
The thing he saw was a roughly globular, quasi-amorphous shape that was in a state of constant fluxion. It was partly tentacular, it writhed and pulsed, it seemed to project itself at will. Darkish tendrils came uncurling from it as if it were reaching for something not quite attainable. Simultaneously it spun slowly atop its pillar of light which seemed also a part of itself, somehow. It was alive, a thinking, intelligent entity. That much Jim knew. It would even have been an entity of beauty, with its whirling greenish effulgence, were it not for one thing.
It was evil. Terribly, undeniably so. Jim could feel the impact of it almost physically. Almost he felt that here was the essence of all the evil of another universe, compressed into that one horribly writhing mass that was now trying to expend itself but could not. And he had the feeling that although it could be moved to terrible, devastating anger, it was now for some reason gleeful.