ed by some hyper-rational power--his lips
and tongue moved. The words he spoke were clear. "I am in a ... a ...
tunnel," he said. "It is lighted, dimly, but there is nothing for me to
see." Blue veins showed through the flesh of his cheeks like watermarks
on translucent paper.

He paused and I urged, "Go on."

"I am alone," he said. "The realities I knew no longer exist, and I am
damp and cold. All about me is a sense of gloom and dejection. It is an
apprehension--an emanation--so deep and real as to be almost a tangible
thing. The walls to either side of me seem to be formed, not of
substance, but rather of the soundless cries of melancholy of spirits I
cannot see.

"I am waiting, waiting in the gloom for something which will come to me.
That need to wait is an innate part of my being and I have no thought of
questioning it." His voice died again.

"What are you waiting for?" I asked.

"I do not know," he said, his voice dreary with the despair of centuries
of hopelessness. "I only know that I must wait--that compulsion is
greater than my strength to combat."

The tone of his voice changed slightly. "The tunnel about me is widening
and now the walls have receded into invisibility. The tunnel has become
a plain, but the plain is as desolate, as forlorn and dreary as was the
tunnel, and still I stand and wait. How long must this go on?"

He fell silent again, and I was about to prompt him with another
question--I could not afford to let the time run out in long
silences--but abruptly the muscles about his eyes tightened and subtly a
new aspect replaced their hopeless dejection. Now they expressed a
black, bottomless terror. For a moment I marveled that so small a
portion of a facial anatomy could express such horror.

"There is something coming toward me," he said. "A--beast--of brutish
foulness! Beast is too inadequate a term to describe it, but I know no
words to tell its form. It is an intangible and evasive--thing--but very
real. And it is coming closer! It has no organs of sight as I know them,
but I feel that it can see me. Or rather that it is aware of me with a
sense sharper than vision itself. It is very near now. Oh God, the
malevolence, the hate--the potentiality of awful, fearsome
destructiveness that is its very essence! And still I cannot move!"

The expression of terrified anticipation, centered in his eyes, lessened
slightly, and was replaced, instantly, by its former deep, deep despair.
"I am