here would
nevertheless be a something about or around him, that would immediately
warn as keen a student of the occult as myself of his close association
with the lowest order of phantasms. I was not, however, permitted an
interview, and so had to base my deductions upon the descriptions of him
given me, first hand, by two experts in psychology, and upon
photographs. In the latter I recognised--though not with the readiness
I should have done in the photo's living prototype--the presence of the
unknown brain, the grey, silent, stealthy, ever-watchful, ever-lurking
occult brain. As I gazed at his picture, as in a crystal, it faded away,
and I saw the material man sitting alone in his study before a glowing
fire. From out of him there crept a shadow, the shadow of something big,
bloated, and crawling. I could distinguish nothing further. On reaching
the door it paused, and I felt it was eyeing him--or rather his material
body--anxiously. Perhaps it feared lest some other shadow, equally
baleful, equally sly and subtle, would usurp its home. Its hesitation
was, however, but momentary, and, passing through the door, it glided
across the dimly lighted hall and out into the freedom of the open air.
Picture succeeding picture with great rapidity, I followed it as it
curled and fawned over the tombstones in more than one churchyard; moved
with a peculiar waddling motion through foul alleys, halting wherever
the garbage lay thickest, rubbed itself caressingly on the gory floors
of slaughter-houses, and finally entered a dark, empty house in a road
that, if not the Euston Road, was a road in every way resembling it.

The atmosphere of the place was so suggestive of murder that my soul
sickened within me; and so much so, in fact, that when I saw several
grisly forms gliding down the gloomy staircases and along the sombre,
narrow passages, where X----'s immaterial personality was halting,
apparently to greet it, I could look no longer, but shut my eyes. For
some seconds I kept them closed, and, on re-opening them, found the
tableau had changed--the material body before the fire was re-animated,
and in the depths of the bleared, protruding eyes I saw the creeping,
crawling, waddling, enigmatical shadow vibrating with murder. Again the
scene changed, and I saw the physical man standing in the middle of a
bedroom, listening--listening with blanched face and slightly open
mouth, a steely glimmer of the superphysical, of the malignant,