"You are like hell. Get in." He did. "Hang on." I nudged the old girl out of the village and when we were hidden by the first hill I trod on her pedals with all my weight and terror behind my feet. We crashed off into a beautiful eighty m.p.h., which I held or surpassed all the way home. Three or four times he tried to bellow something at me. I ignored him. When we had flown up the long winding drive I put her into the stables, part of which we had fitted up as a garage. Then I sat there in the gloom and shook with what felt like fever. "Here, what is it, laddie?" he barked. "What's wrong?" "Describe the barmaid," I said. "What?" "Describe the barmaid." "Fortyish, plain, thickset, red hands, red face, couple of warts. Pleasant expression. Right?" "Not exactly. You left out a few things." "What on earth?" "The green horns, six of 'em, growing out of her face in the middle where the nose should have been. The shifting outlines that looked now like a tree stump and now like an octopus. The pulsing heart of scarlet fire in the belly. The dusky-pink tentacles that pushed the mugs across the bar. The pure _hatred_ that throbbed visibly and seemed to feel cold when it got near you. The eyes like bursting orchids full of slimy white worms." He put his hand on my arm and tightened his grip until his knuckles grew pale. "Merciful God!" he said quietly. "Merciful God!" CHAPTER IV We went into the deserted hall of Exeter Castle. "Look, Colonel," I said, "will you tell them about this? They'll be upstairs. Tell 'em that it works, that I can see as Jerry Wolfe saw, and everything he told Alec was true. I'll be all right after a while, but now I want to be alone. I don't want to be hedged in by close walls, or have to talk. I'll just roam around down here for a bit. You tell 'em it's okay, that I'll speak to them later." "Absolutely." The Colonel was the best stuff there is. "Come up when you feel like it, son." He was gone. I strolled over to one of the great mullioned windows and touched its dusty glass lightly. That glass was older, probably, than all our little band put together. I thought: when it was placed here, were the usurping devils abroad in England? How long have they been filtering through into our world--a hundred years, a thousand? If you start with one and he lets in others, then figuring by the birth rate and the multiplying branches of his horrid clan, how long would it take to let in a million of them? How many figures of our glorious history were just that--figures, puppets, marionettes pulled by fourth-dimensional strings, flesh-and-bone shadows fronting for demons.... _We are no other than a moving row of magic shadow-shapes that come and go...._