erwise. When I got there, the
whole place was in darkness, and I thought I would take a walk 'round
outside, to see whether Tassoc or his brother was keeping watch. But I
could not find them anywhere, and concluded that they had got tired of
it, and gone off to bed.

"As I returned across the front of the East Wing, I caught the hooning
whistling of the Room, coming down strangely through the stillness of the
night. It had a queer note in it, I remember--low and constant, queerly
meditative. I looked up at the window, bright in the moonlight, and got a
sudden thought to bring a ladder from the stable yard, and try to get a
look into the Room, through the window.

"With this notion, I hunted 'round at the back of the castle, among the
straggle of offices, and presently found a long, fairly light ladder;
though it was heavy enough for one, goodness knows! And I thought at
first that I should never get it reared. I managed at last, and let the
ends rest very quietly against the wall, a little below the sill of the
larger window. Then, going silently, I went up the ladder. Presently, I
had my face above the sill and was looking in alone with the moonlight.

"Of course, the queer whistling sounded louder up there; but it still
conveyed that peculiar sense of something whistling quietly to
itself--can you understand? Though, for all the meditative lowness of the
note, the horrible, gargantuan quality was distinct--a mighty parody of
the human, as if I stood there and listened to the whistling from the
lips of a monster with a man's soul.

"And then, you know, I saw something. The floor in the middle of the
huge, empty room, was puckered upward in the center into a strange
soft-looking mound, parted at the top into an ever changing hole, that
pulsated to that great, gentle hooning. At times, as I watched, I saw the
heaving of the indented mound, gap across with a queer, inward suction,
as with the drawing of an enormous breath; then the thing would dilate
and pout once more to the incredible melody. And suddenly, as I stared,
dumb, it came to me that the thing was living. I was looking at two
enormous, blackened lips, blistered and brutal, there in the pale
moonlight....

"Abruptly, they bulged out to a vast, pouting mound of force and sound,
stiffened and swollen, and hugely massive and clean-cut in the
moon-beams. And a great sweat lay heavy on the vast upper-lip. In the
same moment of time, the whistling had burst into