“This is madness itself. To paint faces on the darkness, to hear voices in the air, is madness. The madman can do no more.”
“A lie!” said the voice again. He cast a look over his shoulder. It was the same as if some one had touched him and spoken.
He walked faster. The voice seemed to walk with him. “I will hold myself firm,” he thought; “I will not be afraid. Reason does not fail a man until he allows himself to believe that it is failing. 'I am going mad,' he thinks; and then he shrieks and is mad indeed. I will not depart from my course. If I do so now, I shall be lost. The horror will master me, and I shall be its slave for ever.”
He had turned out of Ballure into the Ramsey Road, and he could see the town lights in the distance. But the voice continued to haunt him persistently, besiegingly, despotically.
“Great God!” he thought, “what is the imaginary devil to the horror of this presence? Your own eye, your own voice, always with you, always following you! No darkness so dense that it can hide the sight, no noise so loud that it can deaden the sound!”
He walked faster. Still the voice seemed to stride by his side, an invisible thing, with deliberate and noiseless step, from which there was no escape.
He drew up suddenly and walked slower. His knees were tottering, he was treading as on waves; yet he went on. “I will not yield. I will master myself. I will do what I intended. I am not mad,” he thought.
He was at the gate of Elm Cottage by this time, and, with a strong glow of resolution, he walked boldly to the door and knocked.