"Stop, please," I said. "You're either off your head, or worse. Let's call it the first. Don't tell me any more, please."
"Frightened, what? Well, I don't blame you. But what would you do?"
"I should see a doctor; I'm only an engineer," I replied.
"Doctors?… Bah!" he said, and spat.
I hope you see how the matter stood with Rooum. What do you make of it? Could you have believed it—do you believe it?… He'd made a nearish guess when he'd said that much of our knowledge is giving names to things we know nothing about; only rule-of-thumb Physics thinks everything's explained in the Manual; and you've always got to remember one thing: You can call it Force or what you like, but it's a certainty that things, solid things of wood and iron and stone, would explode, just go off in a puff into space, if it wasn't for something just as inexplicable as that that Rooum said he felt in his own person. And if you can swallow that, it's a relatively small matter whether Rooum's light-footed Familiar slipped through him unperceived, or had to struggle through obstinately. You see now why I said that "a queer thing overtook Rooum."
More: I saw it. This thing, that outrages reason—I saw it happen. That is to say, I saw its effects, and it was in broad daylight, on an ordinary afternoon, in the middle of Oxford Street, of all places. There wasn't a shadow of doubt about it. People were pressing and jostling about him, and suddenly I saw him turn his head and listen, as I'd seen him before. I tell you, an icy creeping ran all over my skin. I fancied I felt it approaching too, nearer and nearer…. The next moment he had made a sort of gathering of himself, as if against a gust. He stumbled and thrust—thrust with his body. He swayed, physically, as a tree sways in a wind; he clutched my arm and gave a loud scream. Then, after seconds—minutes—I don't know how long—he was free again.
And for the colour of his face when by-and-by I glanced at it … well, I once saw a swarthy Italian fall under a sunstroke, and his face was much the same colour that Rooum's negro face had gone; a cloudy, whitish green.
"Well—you've seen it—what do you think of it?" he gasped presently, turning a ghastly grin on me.
But it was night before the full horror of it had soaked into me.
Soon after that he disappeared again. I wasn't sorry.