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The soldier sat down and gasped openly in his face, breathing hard; but it was a very subdued voice that framed the question.

“And how do you propose to make it visible? How capture and confine it? What d’ye mean, Dr. John Silence?”

“By furnishing it with the materials for a form. By the process of materialisation simply. Once limited by dimensions, it will become slow, heavy, visible. We can then dissipate it. Invisible fire, you see, is dangerous and incalculable; locked up in a form we can perhaps manage it. We must betray it–to its death.”

“And this material?” we asked in the same breath, although I think I had already guessed.

“Not pleasant, but effective,” came the quiet reply; “the exhalations of freshly spilled blood.”

“Not human blood!” cried Colonel Wragge, starting up from his chair with a voice like an explosion. I thought his eyes would start from their sockets.

The face of Dr. Silence relaxed in spite of himself, and his spontaneous little laugh brought a welcome though momentary relief.

“The days of human sacrifice, I hope, will never come again,” he explained. “Animal blood will answer the purpose, and we can make the experiment as pleasant as possible. Only, the blood must be freshly spilled and strong with the vital emanations that attract this peculiar class of elemental creature. Perhaps–perhaps if some pig on the estate is ready for the market–“

He turned to hide a smile; but the passing touch of comedy found no echo in the mind of our host, who did not understand how to change quickly from one emotion to another. Clearly he was debating many things laboriously in his honest brain. But, in the end, the earnestness and scientific disinterestedness of the doctor, whose influence over him was already very great, won the day, and he presently looked up more calmly, and observed shortly that he thought perhaps the matter could be arranged.

“There are other and pleasanter methods,” Dr. Silence went on to explain, “but they require time and preparation, and things have gone much too far, in my opinion, to admit of delay. And the process need cause you no distress: we sit round the bowl and await results. Nothing more. The emanations of blood–which, as Levi says, is the first incarnation of the universal fluid–furnish the materials out of which the creatures of discarnate life, spirits if you prefer, can fashion themselves a temporary appearance. The process is old, and lies at the root of all blood sacrifice. It was known to the priests of Baal, and it is known to the modern ecstasy dancers who cut themselves to produce objective phantoms who dance with them. And the least gifted clairvoyant could tell you that the forms to be seen in the vicinity of slaughter-houses, or hovering above the deserted battlefields, are–well, simply beyond all description. I do not mean,” he added, noticing the uneasy fidgeting of his host, “that anything in our laundry-experiment need appear to terrify us, for this case seems a comparatively simple one, and it is only the vindictive character of the intelligence directing this fire-elemental that causes anxiety and makes for personal danger.”

“It is curious,” said the Colonel, with a sudden rush of words, drawing a deep breath, and as though speaking of things distasteful to him, “that during my years among the Hill Tribes of Northern India I came across–personally came across–instances of the sacrifices of blood to certain deities being stopped suddenly, and all manner of disasters happening until they were resumed. Fires broke out in the huts, and even on the clothes, of the natives–and–and I admit I have read, in the course of my studies,”–he made a gesture toward his books and heavily laden table,–“of the Yezidis of Syria evoking phantoms by means of cutting their bodies with knives during their whirling dances–enormous globes of fire which turned into monstrous and terrible forms–and I remember an account somewhere, too, how the emaciated forms and pallid countenances of the spectres, that appeared to the Emperor Julian, claimed to be the true Immortals, and told him to renew the sacrifices of blood ‘for the fumes of which, since the establishment of Christianity, they had been pining’–that these were in reality the phantoms evoked by the rites of blood.”