ole dreadful business seemed to turn
aside from the dog and direct itself upon his own person. The collie had
made another spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner, where
he made noise enough in his savage rage to waken the dead before he fell
to whining and then finally lay still. And directly afterwards the
doctor's own distress became intolerably acute. He had made a half
movement forward to come to the rescue when a veil that was denser than
mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene, draping room, walls,
animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also about his own
mind. Other forms moved silently across the field of vision, forms that
he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not. Unholy
thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil
presented themselves seductively. Ice seemed to settle about his heart,
and his mind trembled. He began to lose memory--memory of his identity,
of where he was, of what he ought to do. The very foundations of his
strength were shaken. His will seemed paralysed.

And it was then that the room filled with this horde of cats, all dark
as the night, all silent, all with lamping eyes of green fire. The
dimensions of the place altered and shifted. He was in a much larger
space. The whining of the dog sounded far away, and all about him the
cats flew busily to and fro, silently playing their tearing, rushing
game of evil, weaving the pattern of their dark purpose upon the floor.
He strove hard to collect himself and remember the words of power he had
made use of before in similar dread positions where his dangerous
practice had sometimes led; but he could recall nothing consecutively; a
mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and his forces
scattered. The deeps within were too troubled for healing power to come
out of them.

It was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour
thrown upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the
veil; but at the time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as with
all true glamour, was unable to grasp where the true ended and the false
began. He was caught momentarily in the same vortex that had sought to
lure the cat to destruction through its delight, and threatened utterly
to overwhelm the dog through its terror.

There came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and
tearing its way down. The windows rattled. The candle flickered and went
out.