III

Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While nothing appeared to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree; and Dr. Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change. The day was Good Friday, a circumstance of which the servants made much, but which others quite naturally dismiss as an irrelevant coincidence. Late in the afternoon young Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire house. The formula was so plainly audible in the hall outside the locked door that Mrs. Ward could not help memorizing it as she waited and listened anxiously, and later on she was able to write it down at Dr. Willett’s request. It ran as follows, and experts have told Dr. Willett that its very close analogue can be found in the mystic writings of “Eliphas Levi,” that cryptic soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed the frightful vistas of the void beyond:

Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton Ou Agla Methon, verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae, conventus sylvorum, antra, gnomorum, daemonia Coeli God, Almonsin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.

This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over all the neighborhood a pandemoniac howling of dogs set in. The extent of this howling can be judged from the space it received in the papers the next day, but to those in the Ward household it was overshadowed by the odor which instantly followed it; a hideous, all-pervasive odour which none of them had ever smelt before or have ever