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“Any impression who it could have been?” asked the doctor, now listening with close attention to every word, very much on the alert.

Pender hesitated and tried to smile. He brushed his hair from his forehead with a nervous gesture.

“You must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are quite as important as your certainties.”

“I had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great strength and great ability–of great force–quite an unusual personality–and, I was certain, too–a woman.”

“A good woman?” asked John Silence quietly.

Pender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it seemed to surprise him. But he shook his head quickly with an indefinable look of horror.

“Evil,” he answered briefly, “appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness–the perversity of the unbalanced mind.”

He hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. A shade of suspicion showed itself in his eyes.

“No,” laughed the doctor, “you need not fear that I’m merely humouring you, or think you mad. Far from it. Your story interests me exceedingly and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell it. You see, I possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic byways.”

“I was shaking with such violent laughter,” continued the narrator, reassured in a moment, “though with no clear idea what was amusing me, that I had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and was afraid I should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions. When the gas was lit I found the room empty, of course, and the door locked as usual. Then I half dressed and went out on to the landing, my hilarity better under control, and proceeded to go downstairs. I wished to record my sensations. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so as not to scream aloud and communicate my hysterics to the entire household.”

“And the presence of this–this–?”

“It was hanging about me all the time,” said Pender, “but for the moment it seemed to have withdrawn. Probably, too, my laughter killed all other emotions.”

“And how long did you take getting downstairs?”

“I was just coming to that. I see you know all my ‘symptoms’ in advance, as it were; for, of course, I thought I should never get to the bottom. Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the narrow hall at the foot of the stairs–well, I could have sworn it was half an hour’s journey had not my watch certified that it was a few seconds. Yet I walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I walked apparently without advancing, and at that rate it would have taken me a week to get down Putney Hill.”

“An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space sometimes–“

“But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter–“

“Yes; what?” asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his eyes.

“–I was overwhelmed with terror,” said Pender, lowering his reedy voice at the mere recollection of it.

He paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in his eyes now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners of his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of that merriment still amused him. The combination of fear and laughter in his face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story; it also lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures.

“Terror, was it?” repeated the doctor soothingly.

“Yes, terror; for, though the Thing that woke me seemed to have gone, the memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair. Then I locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug made my movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach the door, and another five to get back to the chair again. The laughter, too, kept bubbling up inside me–great wholesome laughter that shook me like gusts of wind–so that even my terror almost made me laugh. Oh, but I may tell you, Dr. Silence, it was altogether vile, that mixture of fear and laughter, altogether vile!