Of the taste of this unpleasantness I could not wholly rid myself, nor of another thing, which strengthened in the diminishing of light. This was the witching time of day—and I could not get away from Parson Lolly.
Well I understood Morgan the stableman when he said that there were whiles when the “otherness” took hold of one. Having crossed the clearing, I stood near the cottage of the French sisters, who, though nothing concerning their characters had been told me, I conceived must be eccentrics, women so distant from their nativity, if not in mere statute miles, certainly in their lives and surroundings. While I looked at the cottage, a rugged thing of stone, scarcely two stories high, with roof of hewn stone tiles, as is common hereabout, I thought it had a deserted and disappointed appearance. It was far too early, indeed, for even tired farm-women to be abed; yet no light glimmered through window or cranny. I approached; I even knocked. No response.
Puzzled, disturbed, I retraced my path.
So feeling, I came in view of Highglen House, all dark and still on the edge of sunset. I passed beneath the clustered cypress trees; I traversed the northern span of the lawn and passed the conservatory with its mended panes. I stepped on the driveway where it passed the Hall of the Moth, intending to advance to the front entrance and ring the bell there, having enough hold on reality, in spite of my fuming blood, to recall that my own shaving things had been in my bag recently fetched by Toby, and that with hot water I could quickly remove the stubble of the day, before the first reading of “Noah’s Flood” in the Hall of the Moth. At the moment of my setting foot on the drive, I remember, the faintest sound of speech wandered to me from somewhere beyond the gate-house. I could not distinguish any voices, but there seemed to be both men and women in the party, doubtless returning from beside Aidenn Water.
Then I chanced to look inside the Hall of the Moth.
Now, now, now is the time when I need to hold each sense and faculty to accurate account. For what I saw then, what then I took to be hallucination, now I know too well was something real, something serious, and something totally inexplicable to all who have heard of it.
Through the cleft between the eminences of Esgair Nantau and Vron Hill a single dart from the sun still leaped, lustering the twilight about the house. A fragment of that glimmer, about the size of a top-hat but rudely circular in shape, played and smouldered mild, high on the bare stone of the inner wall of the room. Except for this wavering spot, dusk had taken possession of the empty Hall, wherein even the masses of the furniture were invisible to me.
The chanciest glance took in the gloom of the chamber, but before I had looked elsewhere, my eyes perceived yet one other thing distinguishable in the obscurity, and all the blood in me leaped. To indicate definitely the position of the object, I should say that to the best of my affrighted recollection it was just beyond the couch which Lib Dale had mounted earlier in the afternoon during her talk with me, although the couch itself, like the rest of the furniture, was now absorbed in the pool of darkness.
In the air perhaps a foot above the imagined position of the back of the couch, with no visible means of suspension or support, was what I can describe only as a clean white bone.