The hooded Familiars, as one man, turned, and the long knives flashed, luminous, under the lights, as Kane and Ellison, meeting them half way, raised their heavy guns.
Annister, covering the Doctor, froze suddenly in motion as that gobbling horror mounted, and then, filling that narrow way like figures in a dream, they came: the outcasts, the lost battalion, the Men Who Had no Right to Live.
In their van, but running rather as if pursued than as if in answer to that snarling call, there came three men, guards by their dress, their faces contorted, agonized, upon them the impress of a crawling fear. They streamed past that door, pursuers and pursued, as Black Steve Annister, finger upon the trigger of his pistol, saw that lean hand sweep upward; it flicked the thin lips; the dark face grayed, went blank; the Dark Doctor, his gaze in a queer, frozen look upon Eternity, pitched forward upon his face.
In some way, as Annister could understand, the madmen had won free, but—how?
Turning, he saw a white face at his elbow as there sounded from without the staccato explosions of a motor, and a swift, hammering thunder upon the great door.
“I am—Newbold Humiston,” said the face, “and I am not mad, or, rather, I am but mad north-north-west when the wind is southerly,” he quoted, with a ghastly smile. “This devil—” he pointed to the body of Elphinstone—“has gone to his own place, but the evil that he did lives after him—in us.”
His voice rose to a shriek as there came a rush of feet along the corridor: a compact body of men, at their head a tall man at sight of whom Stephen Annister flung up a hand.
“Well, Childers,” he said. “I’m glad!”
Childers spoke pantingly, in quick gasps: