"That is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of _Cannabis indica_,"
observed the doctor. "And it provoked laughter again, did it?"

"Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so
like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of a
performing bear--which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know.
But this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On
the contrary, I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an
intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and
keen-minded.

"Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to
sketch--a talent not normally mine--I found that I could draw nothing
but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head--always the same--the head of
a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very
drooping left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may
imagine--"

"And the expression of the face--?"

Pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the
air and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.

"What I can only describe as--_blackness_," he replied in a low tone;
"the face of a dark and evil soul."

"You destroyed that, too?" queried the doctor sharply.

"No; I have kept the drawings," he said, with a laugh, and rose to get
them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.

"Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see," he added, pushing a
number of loose sheets under the doctor's eyes; "nothing but a few
scrawly lines. That's all I found the next morning. I had really drawn
no heads at all--nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. The
pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which
constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered
scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed, of
course, with the passing of the drug's effects. But the other thing did
not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me. It is
here still. It is real. I don't know how I can escape from it."

"It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the
house."

"Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole
means of support, and--well, you see, since this change I cannot even
write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their
mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible? I shall go