Following among those whose urgence was less than his, my eyes, which deviated from straight ahead, caught sight of a spine-stirring thing. It was motion, but of what? A darker mass on the dark sward. Size, shape, untellable—but moving, moving to the right, now seeming to crawl, now leaping—only an amorphous blob of black—moving, and swiftly, toward the north, moving stilly, with only a small rustling sound at whiles.
“Look there!” I exclaimed to someone who was near me, catching his arm. (It was Oxford.)
“Hey! What!”
“That—going off there—a black thing.”
“I don’t see it.” Nor did he want to, I judged.
I guided his arm, extending it in the proper line. “Sight by that.”
But I could not make him see it. He and I then diverged from the others, not much to his liking, and while we hastened after the nameless thing, I bethought me that I had changed my electric torch to these clothes. I hauled it from a side pocket, darted a cone of yellow ahead of us, cast an elliptic figure of yellow on the grass, but found no trace of the thing.
Oxford, however, saw an object ahead which made him give a yell. He stopped petrified, and I followed his look far before us. What we both then saw was too distant to be the thing I had observed nearby, unless it were indeed a fiend possessed of superhuman powers. He was crossing a patch of ground a hundred yards away where the moon streamed down unscathed by clouds; save for the quick, brief clearing, indeed, we should not have caught sight of him. Like the hopping, gliding thing on the lawn, he was black, or robed in black. Contrary to report, however, if this were Parson Lolly, his figure appeared not to be tall but distinctly short and squatty. Just then the fringe of a cloud partly obfuscated the moon, but still that space was clearer than all around it. While the figure glided toward the trees, it seemed to heave its shoulders and grow a foot, two feet, taller! Again it writhed itself into greater height, its long cloak billowing, and again! Just before gaining the covert of branches, it turned toward us a moment, twice the height of a man. And its head, if head it had, was only a pointed thing with unguessable features in the cavern of its hood. The moon was absolutely overcast when the figure, again wheeling about, went beneath the trees.
“Do we go after it?” I asked sardonically.
“We—we do not.”