I turned around: they had not heard my words. They had forgotten me. They had forgotten their own impulse, their own words which sent me on this errand. Even Mildred. She thrummed her guitar and her emerald body swayed, and her face, its opalescent smile, beamed upon Philip, whose eyes she held in hers. My mother was conversing low with Doctor Stein and my father had taken a chair beside Mr. Fayn: they were intent together over the cards. “Something is down there ... bright ... and it moves up.” My words, first naked, now seemed disembodied. --They cannot hear my words! Once more I faced the window and the night. The little light, as it grew larger, changed from a bright glow to a vague gray. It became less like flame, more like some substance through whose translucent stuff a flame ran fragilely. And as it moved up the dense mountain slope, it seemed to limn with its march the vastness of this world upon whose summit stood the house: and at whose depth lay the sky. The words behind me in the room, the tap of a foot on the floor, and Mildred’s hands merging with the silver strings of her guitar, lay in my ears now evanescent. The thing that was a light, yet grayly swelling, moved up the slope of the mountain. The room with its words and its music and its laughter became a tinkle of gilt beside this gorgeous silence. And in the silence moved the light thing up. I see it clear. “Something was down there ... and is moving up ... something convolved and gray. Some Thing....” Now they heard me. And in the stillness of their mouths I heard their bodies rise, and move across the floor, take place beside me. I saw on either side of me their eyes, peering with mine into the silent night. The gray light Thing was flowing up the mountain. It had a simple motion up the slope, simple and straight. Within itself it had another motion, intricate and convolved. In its gray translucence, forms swarmed and writhed upon themselves: contorted, funneling, in permutation. But they were held to a unity of interaction, making them simply one in their approach, like the bewildered parts of some body disarrayed by magic, that writhed and twisted to fall back into measure. The Thing was a penetrant glow within the night, tracing the night of the slope, tracing the night of the sky. The writhing parts of the Thing writhed closer, moved more sluggish, densened, grew white: a white form merged from the chaotic whirl. The Thing was almost abreast us. It was solid. It was the form, translucent and still with a vaporous glow about it, of a youth. He moves up toward us. The amorphous maze from which he has condensed is now an aura. He moves up from the right, he crosses the front vision of our eyes. He is very near, bearing leftward toward the house, yet slantwise so that he will not touch our room.