remote luminous spot. I stood in a grim silence for maybe ten long minutes, and looked down at the thing. It was increasing in size all the time, and had become much plainer to see; yet it was still lost in the far, tremendous Deep.

  ‘Then, as I stood and looked, the low whining sound crept up to me again, and

  Bains, who had lain like a log in my arms all the time, answered it with a long animallike whine, that was somehow newly abominable.

  ‘A very curious thing happened then; for all around the edge of the pit, that looked so peculiarly like black glass, there came a sudden, luminous glowing. It came and went oddly, smouldering queerly round and round the edge in an opposite direction to the circling of the wall of black, tufted cloud on the outside of the barrier.

  ‘This peculiar glowing finally disappeared, and, abruptly, out of the tremendous

  Deep, I was conscious of a dreadful quality or “atmosphere” of monstrousness that was coming up out of the pit. If I said there had been a sudden waft of it, this would very well describe the actuality of it; but the spiritual sickness of distress that it caused me to feel, I am simply stumped to explain to you. It was something that made me feel I should be soiled to the very core of me, if I did not beat it off from me with my will.

  ‘I leant sharply away from the pit towards the outer of the burning circles. I meant to see that no part of my body should overhang the pit whilst that disgusting power was beating up out of the unknown depths.

  ‘And thus it was, facing so rigidly away from the centre of the “defense”, I saw presently a fresh thing; for there was something, many things, I began to think, on the other side of the gloomy wall that moved everlastingly around the outside of the barrier.

  ‘The first thing I noticed was a queer disturbance of the ever circling cloud-wall.

  This disturbance was within eighteen inches of the floor, and directly before me. There was a curious, “puddling” action in the misty wall; as if something were meddling with it.

  The area of this peculiar little disturbance could not have been more than a foot across, and it did not remain opposite to me; but was taken round by the circling of the wall.

  ‘When it came past me again, I noticed that it was bulging slightly inwards

  towards me: and as it moved away from me once more, I saw another similar disturbance, and then a third and a fourth, all in different parts of the slowly whirling black wall; and all of them were no more than about eighteen inches from the floor.

  ‘When the first one came opposite me again, I saw that the slight bulge had grown

  into a very distinct protuberance towards me.

  ‘All around the moving wall, there had now come these curious swellings. They

  continued to reach inwards, and to elongate; and all the time they kept in a constant movement.

  ‘Suddenly, one of them broke, or opened, at the apex, and there protruded

  through, for an instant, the tip of a pallid, but unmistakable snout. It was gone at once, but I had seen the thing distinctly; and within a minute, I saw another one poke suddenly through the wall, to my right, and withdraw as quickly. I could not look at the base of the strange, black, moving circle about the barrier without seeing a swinish snout peep through momentarily, in this place or that.

  ‘I stared at these things in a very peculiar state of mind. There was so great a

  weight of the abnormal about me, before and behind and every way, that to a certain extent it bred in me a sort of antidote to fear. Can you understand? It produced in me a temporary dazedness in which things and the horror of things became less real. I stared at them, as a child stares out from a fast train at a quickly passing night-landscape, oddly hit by the furnaces of unknown industries. I want you to try to understand.

  ‘In my arms Bains lay quiet and rigid; and my arms and back ached until I was

  one dull ache in all my body; but I was only partly conscious of this when I roused momentarily from my psychic to my physical awaredness, to shift him to another

  position, less intolerable temporarily to my tired arms and back.

  ‘There was suddenly a fresh thing - a low but enormous, solitary grunt came

  rolling, vast and brutal into the room. It made the still body of Bains quiver against me, and he grunted thrice in return, with the voice of a young pig.

  ‘High up in the moving wall of the barrier, I saw a fluffing out of the black tufted clouds; and a pig’s hoof and leg, as far as the knuckle, came through and pawed a

  moment. This was about nine or ten feet above the floor. As it gradually disappeared I heard a low grunting from the other side of the veil of clouds which broke out suddenly into a diafaeon of brute-sound, grunting, squealing and swine-howling; all formed into a sound that was the essential melody of the brute - a grunting, squealing howling roar that rose, roar by roar, howl by howl and squeal by squeal to a crescendo of horrors - the bestial growths, longings, zests and acts of some grotto of hell…. It is no use, I can’t give it to you. I get dumb with the failure of my command over speech to tell you what that grunting, howling, roaring melody conveyed to me. It had in it something so inexplicably below the horizons of the soul in its monstrousness and fearfulness that the ordinary simple fear of death itself, with all its attendant agonies and terrors and sorrows, seemed like a thought of something peaceful and infinitely holy compared with the fear of those unknown elements in that dreadful roaring melody. And the sound was with me inside the room - there right in the room with me. Yet I seemed not to be aware of confining walls, but of echoing spaces of gargantuan corridors. Curious! I had in my mind those two words - gargantuan corridors.

  As the rolling chaos of swine melody beat itself away on every side, there came

  booming through it a single grunt, the single recurring grunt of the HOG; for I knew now that I was actually and without any doubt hearing the beat of monstrosity, the HOG.

  ‘In the Sigsand the thing is described something like this: “Ye Hogge which ye Almighty alone hath power upon. If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle. For ye Hogge doth be of ye outer Monstrous Ones, nor shall any human come nigh him nor continue meddling when ye hear his voice, for in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end. And in that ye Hogge had once a power upon ye earth, so doth he crave sore to come again. And dreadful shall be ye harm to ye soul if ye continue to meddle, and to let ye beast come nigh. And I say unto all, if ye have brought this dire danger upon ye, have memory of ye cross, for of all sign hath ye Hogge a horror.”

  ‘There’s a lot more, but I can’t remember it all and that is about the substance of it.

  ‘There was I holding Bains who was all the time howling that dreadful grunt out

  with the voice of a swine. I wonder I didn’t go mad. It was, I believe, the antidote of dazedness produced by the strain which helped me through each moment.

  ‘A minute later, or perhaps five minutes, I had a sudden new sensation, like a

  warning cutting through my dulled feelings. I turned my head; but there was nothing behind me, and bending over to my left I seemed to be looking down into that black depth which fell away sheer under my left elbow. At that moment the roaring bellow of swine-noise ceased and I seemed to be staring down into miles of black aether at

  something that hung there - a pallid face floating far down and remote - a great swine face.

  ‘And as I gazed I saw it grow bigger. A seemingly motionless, pallid swine-face

  rising upward out of the depth. And suddenly I realised that I was actually looking at the Hog.’

  Chapter 5

  ‘FOR perhaps a full minute I stared down through the darkness at that thing

  swimming like some far-off, dead white planet in the stupendous void. And then I simply woke up bang, as you might say, to the possession of my faculties. For just a certain over-degree of strain had brought about the dumbly helpful anaesthesia of dazedness, so this sudden overwhelming supreme fact of horror produced, in turn, its reaction from inertness to action. I passed in one moment from listlessness to a fierce efficiency.

  ‘I knew that I had, through some accident, penetrated beyond all previous

  “bounds”, and that I stood where no human soul had any right to be, and that in but a few of the puny minutes of earth’s time I might be dead.

  ‘Whether Bains had passed beyond the “lines of retraction” or not, I could not tell.

  I put him down carefully but quickly on his side, between the inner circles - that is, the violet circle and the indigo circle - where he lay grunting slowly. Feeling that the dreadful moment had come I drew out my automatic. It seemed best to make sure of our end before that thing in the depth came any nearer: for once Bains in his present

  condition came within what I might term the “inductive forces” of the monster, he would cease to be human. There would happen, as in that case of Aster who stayed

  outside the pentacles in the Black Veil Case, what can only be described as a

  pathological, spiritual change - literally in other words, soul destruction.

  ‘And then something seemed to be telling me not to shoot. This sounds perhaps a

  bit superstitious; but I meant to kill Bains in that moment, and what stopped me was a distinct message from the outside.

  ‘I tell you, it sent a great thrill of hope through me, for I knew that the forces which govern the spinning of the outer circle were intervening. But the very fact of the intervention proved to me afresh the enormous spiritual peril into which we had

  stumbled; for that inscrutable Protective Force only intervenes between the human soul and the Outer Monstrosities.

  ‘The moment I received that message I stood up like a flash and turned towards

  the pit, stepping over the violet circle slap into the mouth of darkness. I had to take the risk in order to get at the switch board which lay on the glass shelf under the table top in the centre. I could not shake free from the horror of the idea that I might fall down through that awful blackness. The floor felt solid enough under me; but I seemed to be walking on nothing above a black void, like an inverted starless night, with the face of the approaching Hog rising up from far down under my feet - a silent, incredible thing out of the abyss - a pallid, floating swine-face, framed in enormous blackness.

  ‘Two quick, nervous strides took me to the table standing there in the centre with its glass legs apparently resting on nothing. I grabbed out the switch board, sliding out the vulcanite plate which carried the switch-control of the blue circle. The battery which fed this circle was the right-hand one of the row of seven, and each battery was marked with the letter of its circle painted on it, so that in an emergency I could select any particular battery in a moment.

  ‘As I snatched up the B switch I had a grim enough warning of the unknown

  dangers that I was risking in that short journey of two steps; for that dreadful sense of vertigo returned suddenly and for one horrible moment I saw everything through a

  blurred medium as if I were trying to look through water.

  ‘Below me, far away down between my feet I could see the Hog which, in some

  peculiar way, looked different dearer and much nearer, and enormous. I felt it had got nearer to me all in a moment. And suddenly I had the impression I was descending

  bodily.

  ‘I had a sense of a tremendous force being used to push me over the side of that

  pit, but with every shred of will power I had in me I hurled myself into the smoky appearance that hid everything and reached the violet circle where Bains lay in front of me.

  ‘Here I crouched down on my heels, and with my two arms out before me I

  slipped the nails of each forefinger under the vulcanite base of the blue circle, which I lifted very gently so that when the base was far enough from the floor I could push the tips of my fingers underneath. I took care to keep from reaching farther under than the inner edge of the glowing tube which rested on the two-inch-broad foundation of

  vulcanite.

  ‘Very slowly I stood upright, lifting the side of the blue circle with me. My feet were between the indigo and the violet circles, and only the blue circle between me and sudden death; for if it had snapped with the unusual strain I was putting upon it by lifting it like that, I knew that I should in all probability go west pretty quickly.

  ‘So you fellows can imagine what I felt like. I was conscious of a disagreeable

  faint prickling that was strongest in the tips of my fingers and wrists, and the blue circle seemed to vibrate strangely as if minute particles of something were impinging upon it in countless millions. Along the shining glass tubes for a couple of feet on each side of my hands a queer haze of tiny sparks boiled and whirled in the form of an extraordinary halo.

  ‘Stepping forward over the indigo circle I pushed the blue circle out against the

  slowly moving wall of black cloud causing a ripple of tiny pale flashes to curl in over the circle. These flashes ran along the vacuum tube until they came to the place where the blue circle crossed the indigo, and there they flicked off into space with sharp cracks of sound.

  ‘As I advanced slowly and carefully with the blue circle a most extraordinary

  thing happened, for the moving wall of cloud gave from it in a great belly of shadow, and appeared to thin away from before it. Lowering my edge of the circle to the floor I stepped over Bains and right into the mouth of the pit, lifting the other side of the circle over the table. It creaked as if it were about to break in half as I lifted it, but eventually it came over safely.

  ‘When I looked again into the depth of that shadow I saw below me the dreadful

  pallid head of the Hog floating in a circle of night. It struck me that it glowed very slightly - just a vague luminosity. And quite near - comparatively. No one could have judged distances in that black void.

  ‘Picking up the edge of the blue circle again as I had done before, I took it out

  further till it was half clear of the indigo circle. Then I picked up Bains and carried him to that portion of the floor guarded by the part of the blue circle which was clear of the

  “defense”. Then I lifted the circle and started to move it forward as quickly as I dared, shivering each time the joints squeaked as the whole fabric of it groaned with the strain I was putting upon it. And all the time the moving wall of tufted clouds gave from the edge of the blue circle, bellying away from it in a marvellous fashion as if blown by an unheard wind.

  ‘From time to time little flashes of light had begun to flick in over the blue circle, and I began to wonder whether it would be able to hold out the “tension” until I had dragged it clear of the defense.

  ‘Once it was clear I hoped the abnormal stress would cease from about us, and

  concentrate chiefly around the “defense” again, and the attractions of the negative

  “tension.”

  ‘Just then I heard a sharp tap behind me, and the blue circle jarred somewhat,

  having now ridden completely over the violet and indigo circles, and dropped clear on to the floor. The same instant there came a low rolling noise as of thunder, and a curious roaring. The black circling wall had thinned away from around us and the room showed clearly once more, yet nothing was to be seen except that now and then a peculiar bluish flicker of light would ripple across the floor.

  ‘Turning to look at the “defense” I noticed it was surrounded by the circling wall of black cloud, and looked strangely extraordinary seen from the outside. It resembled a slightly swaying squat funnel of whirling black mist reaching from the floor to the ceiling, and through it I could see glowing, sometimes vague and sometimes plain, the indigo and violet circles. And then as I watched, the whole room seemed suddenly filled with an awful presence which pressed upon me with a weight of horror that

  was the very essence of spiritual deathliness.

  ‘Kneeling there in the blue circle by Bains, my initiative faculties stupefied and temporarily paralysed, I could form no further plan of escape, and indeed I seemed to care for nothing at the moment. I felt I had already escaped from immediate destruction and I was strung up to an amazing pitch of indifference to any minor horrors.

  ‘Bains all this while had been quietly lying on his side. I rolled him over and

  looked closely at his eyes, taking care on account of his condition not to gaze into them; for if he had passed beyond the “line of retraction” he would be dangerous. I mean, if the

  “wandering” part of his essence had been assimilated by the Hog, then Bains would be spiritually accessible and might be even then no more than the outer form of the man, charged with radiation of the monstrous ego of the Hog, and therefore capable of

  what I might term for want of a more exact phrase, a psychically infective force; such force being more readily transmitted through the eyes than any other way, and capable of producing a brain storm of an extremely dangerous character.

  ‘I found Bains, however, with both eyes with an extraordinary distressed interned

  quality; not the eyeballs, remember, but a reflex action transmitted from the “mental eye”

  to the physical eye, and giving to the physical eye an expression of thought instead of sight. I wonder whether I make this clear to you?

  ‘Abruptly, from every part of the room there broke out the noise of those hoofs