Then, later, dawned the day when from this comfortable high estate a common adder, preserved in spirits of wine, was the cause of his downfall and Bully Harberth the means of his reinstatement….
One afternoon Mr. Steynker, the Science Master, for some reason and without preliminary mention of his intent, produced a bottled specimen of a snake. He entered the room with the thing under his arm and partly concealed by the sleeve of his gown. Watching him as he approached the master’s desk and spoke with Mr. Colfe, the form-master, Dam noted that he had what appeared to be a long oblong glass box of which the side turned towards him was white and opaque.
When Mr. Steynker stepped on to the dais, as Mr. Colfe took up his books and departed, he placed the thing on the desk with the other side to the class….
And there before Dam’s starting, staring eyes, fastened to the white back of the tall glass box, and immersed in colourless liquid was the Terror.
He rose, gibbering, to his feet, pale as the dead, and pointed, mopping and mowing like an idiot.
How should a glass box restrain the Fiend that had made his life a Hell upon earth? What did Steynker and Colfe and these others—all gaping at him open-mouthed—know of the Devil with whom he had wrestled deep beneath the Pit itself for ten thousand centuries of horror—centuries whose every moment was an aeon?
What could these innocent men and boys know of the living Damnation that made him pray to die—provided only that he could be really dead and finished, beyond all consciousness and fear. The fools!… to think that it was a harmless, concrete thing. It would emerge in a moment like the Fisherman’s Geni from the Brass Bottle and grow as big as the world. He felt he was going mad again.
“Help!” he suddenly shrieked. “It is under my foot. It is moving … moving … moving out.” He sprang to his astounded friend, Delorme, and screamed to him for help—and then realizing that there was no help, that neither man nor God could save him, he fled from the room screaming like a wounded horse.
Rushing madly down the corridor, falling head-long down the stone stairs, bolting blindly across the entrance-hall, he fled until (unaware of his portly presence up to the moment when he rebounded from him as a cricket-ball from a net) he violently encountered the Head.
Scrambling beneath his gown the demented boy flung his arms around the massy pillar of the Doctor’s leg, and prayed aloud to him for help, between heart-rending screams.