Then the thing happened. Derby's voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased--when I had half fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath's mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different--and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognizably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion--as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were re-adjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality. Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion--such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality--that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a life-long friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space--some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces. I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind; so I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energized state--so unlike his usual self--which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby--he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive--should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car; yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not. In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his eyes. The people were right--he did look damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked--there was certainly something unnatural in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my life-long knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger--an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.