difficult not to follow them into that great gulf of
darkness where they all rushed and vanished. But that, I knew, meant
sleep again. Yet, it was strange I should feel sleepy when at the same
time all my nerves were fairly tingling. Every time I heard what seemed
like a step outside, or a movement in the hay opposite, the blood stood
still for a moment in my veins. Doubtless, the unremitting strain told
upon me more than I realised, and this was doubly great now that I knew
Shorthouse was a source of weakness instead of strength, as I had
counted. Certainly, a curious sense of languor grew upon me more and
more, and I was sure that the man beside me was engaged in the same
struggle. The feverishness of his talk proved this, if nothing else. It
was dreadfully hard to keep awake.

But this time, instead of dropping into the gulf, I saw something come
up out of it! It reached our world by a door in the side of the barn
furthest from me, and it came in cautiously and silently and moved into
the mass of hay opposite. There, for a moment, I lost it, but presently
I caught it again higher up. It was clinging, like a great bat, to the
side of the barn. Something trailed behind it, I could not make out
what. . . . It crawled up the wooden wall and began to move out along one
of the rafters. A numb terror settled down all over me as I watched it.
The thing trailing behind it was apparently a rope.

The whispering began again just then, but the only words I could catch
seemed without meaning; it was almost like another language. The voices
were above me, under the roof. Suddenly I saw signs of active movement
going on just beyond the place where the thing lay upon the rafter.
There was something else up there with it! Then followed panting, like
the quick breathing that accompanies effort, and the next minute a black
mass dropped through the air and dangled at the end of the rope.

Instantly, it all flashed upon me. I sprang to my feet and rushed
headlong across the floor of the barn. How I moved so quickly in the
darkness I do not know; but, even as I ran, it flashed into my mind that
I should never get at my knife in time to cut the thing down, or else
that I should find it had been taken from me. Somehow or other--the
Goddess of Dreams knows how--I climbed up by the hay bales and swung out
along the rafter. I was hanging, of course, by my arms, and the knife
was already between my teeth, though I had no recollection of how it