Basil held out his hands, as if to ward off some unseen assailant.
"Whirl back into the night—" he shrieked, but the voice resumed, mocking and gibbering.
"Only a coward will shrink from the dreadful boundaries between things of this earth and things beyond this earth. I have sought you by night and by day—as fiercely as any of those athirst pant round hell's mock springs! In the great vaults of wrath, in the sleepless caverns, whose eternal darkness is only lighted by pools of molten stone that bathe the lost, where, in the lurid light, the shadows dance—I sit and watch the lakes of torment, taciturn and lone. I summon you to earthly power—to the fulfillment of all your heart desires!"—
The voice ceased. All the elements of hell seemed to roar and shriek around the battlemented walls.
There was a pause during which Basil regained his composure.
At last the dread shadow was looming across his path. An undefined awe crept over him, such as dark chasms instill; an awe at his own self. He would fain have been screened from his own substance. By degrees he welcomed the tidings with a dark rapture. In himself lay the substance of Evil. It was not the Angel of Light that ruled the reeling universe. It was the shadow of Eblis looming dark and terrible over the lives of men. Long before he had ever guessed what rills of flaming Phlegethon ran riot in his veins, had he not felt his pulses swell with joy at human pain, had he not played the fiend untaught? Could not the Fiend, as well as God, live incarnate in human clay? Was not the earth the meeting ground of Heaven and Hell? And why should not he, Basil, defying Heaven, be Hell's incarnation?—
Ay—but the day of death and the day of reckoning! Would his parentage entail eternal fire, or princely power and sway in the dark vaults of nameless terror? Should he quail or thrill with awful exaltation?
"And—in return for that which I offer up—King of the dark red glare—will you give to me what I crave—boundless power and the woman for which my soul is on fire?"
"Have you the courage to snatch them from the talons of Fate?" came back the gibbering reply.
A blinding flash of lightning was succeeded by an appalling crash of thunder.