hated all things except books.

"Would you care to read some of them?" I said hospitably.

All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his head
to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.

"It's hell, ain't it?--you with a strong body and servants to carry for
you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that puts the
pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?"

How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he uttered
these words? I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down the hall past
my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of safety. Being alone in
the room with this man seemed much the same as if I were locked in a cage
with a tiger-cat. The devilishness, the wickedness, and, above all, the
pitch of glaring hatred with which the man eyed me and addressed me, were
most unpleasant. I swear I knew fear--not calculated caution, not timid
apprehension, but blind, panic, unreasoned terror. The malignancy of the
creature was blood curdling; nor did it require words to convey it: it
poured from him, out of his red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his
withered, twisted, tortured face, out of his broken-nailed, crooked
talons of hands. And yet, in that very moment of instinctive startle and
repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one hand I could take the
throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and throttle the
malformed life out of it.

But there was little encouragement in such thought--no more than a man
might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush
them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their poison
into him. And so with this Mulligan Jacobs. My fear of him was the fear
of being infected with his venom. I could not help it; for I caught a
quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had seen in his mouth
sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with their acid,
destroying me.

One thing was very clear. In the creature was no fear. Absolutely, he
did not know fear. He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one treads
underfoot in nightmares. Lord, Lord! that is what the thing was, a
nightmare.

"You suffer pain often?" I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by the
calculated use of sympathy.

"The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an' burn,"
was his reply. "But by what damnable right do you have all these books,
and time to read 'em, an' a