! Rah, rah, rah!"

They passed by along the adjacent street, their sounds growing faint.
Vandover took up his restless pacing again. Little by little the
hallucination gained upon him; little by little his mind slipped from
his grasp. The wolf--the beast--whatever the creature was, seemed in his
diseased fancy to grow stronger in him from moment to moment. But with
all his strength he fought against it, fought against this strange
mania, that overcame him at these periodical intervals--fought with his
hands so tightly clenched that the knuckles grew white, that the nails
bit into the palm. It seemed to him that in some way his personality
divided itself into three. There was himself, the real Vandover of every
day, the same familiar Vandover that looked back at him from his mirror;
then there was the wolf, the beast, whatever the creature was that lived
in his flesh, and that struggled with him now, striving to gain the
ascendency, to absorb the real Vandover into its own hideous identity;
and last of all, there was a third self, formless, very vague, elusive,
that stood aside and watched the strife of the other two. But as he
fought against his madness, concentrating all his attention with a
tremendous effort of the will, the queer numbness that came upon his
mind whenever he exerted it enwrapped his brain like a fog, and this
third self grew vaguer than ever, dwindled and disappeared. Somehow it
seemed to be associated with consciousness, for after this the sense of
the reality of things grew dim and blurred to him. He ceased to know
exactly what he was doing. His intellectual parts dropped away one by
one, leaving only the instincts, the blind, unreasoning impulses of the
animal.

Still he continued his restless, lurching walk back and forth in his
room, his head hanging low and swinging from side to side with the
movement of his gait. He had become so nervous that the restraint
imposed upon his freedom of movement by his bathrobe and his loose
night-clothes chafed and irritated him. At length he had stripped off
everything.

Suddenly and without the slightest warning Vandover's hands came slowly
above his head and he dropped forward, landing upon his palms. All in an
instant he had given way, yielding in a second to the strange
hallucination of that four-footed thing that sulked and snarled. Now
without a moment's stop he ran back and forth along the wall of the
room, upon the palms of his hands and his toes, a l