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In a start of profoundest alarm, I fought my vertigo, fought the sense that another will than mine was drawing me, that the unclean gargoyle was luring me by some unspeakable mesmeric spell, as a serpent is said to lure its prey. I seemed to read a nameless purpose in its yellow-slitted eyes, in the soundless moving of its oozy, chancrous lips; and my very soul recoiled with nausea and revulsion as I breathed its pestilential fetor.

Apparently, the mere effort of mental resistance was enough. The vista and the face receded, they went out in a swirl of daylight; I saw the design of tea-roses on the wallpaper beyond; and the bed beneath me was sanely horizontal once more. I lay sweating with my terror, all adrift on a sea of nightmare surmise, of unearthly threat and whirlpool madness; till the ringing of the telephone bell recalled me automatically to the known world.

I sprang to answer the call. It was Cyprian, though I should hardly have recognized the dead, hopeless tones of his voice, from which the mad pride and self-assurance of the previous day had wholly vanished.

“I must see you at once,” he said. “Can you come to the studio?”

I was about to refuse, to tell him that I had been called home suddenly, that there was no time, that I must catch the noon train—anything to avert the ordeal of another visit to that place of mephitic evil—when I heard his voice again.

“You simply must come, Philip. I can’t tell you about it over the phone, but a dreadful thing has happened: Marta has disappeared.”

I consented, telling him that I would start for the studio as soon as I had dressed. The whole environing nightmare had closed in, had deepened immeasurably with his last words; but remembering the haunted face of the girl, her hysteric fears, her frantic plea and my vague promise, I could not very well decline to go. I dressed and went out with my mind in a turmoil of abominable conjecture, of ghastly doubt, and apprehension all the more hideous because I was unsure of its object. I tried to imagine what had happened, tried to piece together the frightful, evasive, half-admitted hints of unknown terror into a tangible coherent fabric; but found myself involved in a chaos of shadowy menace.

I could not have eaten any breakfast, even if I had taken the necessary time. I went at once to the studio, and found Cyprian standing aimlessly amid his baleful statuary. His look was that of a man who has been stunned by the blow of some crushing weapon, or has gazed on the very face of Medusa. He greeted me in a vacant manner, with dull, toneless words. Then, like a charged machine, as if his body rather than his mind were speaking, he began at once to pour forth the atrocious narrative.

“They took her,” he said, simply. “Maybe you didn’t know it, or weren’t sure of it; but I’ve been doing all my new sculptures from life—even that last group. Marta was posing for me this forenoon—only an hour ago—or less. I had hoped to finish her part of the modelling today; and she wouldn’t have had to come again for this particular piece. I hadn’t called the Things this time, since I knew she was beginning to fear them more and more. I think she feared them on my account more than her own… and they were making me a little uneasy too, by the boldness with which they sometimes lingered when I had ordered them to leave—and the way they would sometimes appear when I didn’t want them.

“I was busy with some of the final touches on the girl-figure, and wasn’t even looking at Marta, when suddenly I knew that the Things were there. The smell told me, if nothing else—I guess you know what the smell is like. I looked up, and found that the studio was full of them—they had never before appeared in such numbers. They were surrounding Marta, were crowding and jostling each other, were all reaching toward her with their filthy talons; but even then, I didn’t think that they could harm her. They aren’t material beings, in the sense that we are; and they really have no physical power outside of their own plane. All that they do have is a sort of snaky mesmerism, and they’ll always try to drag you down to their own dimension by means of it. God help anyone who yields to them; but you don’t have to go, unless you are weak, or willing. I’ve never had any doubt of my power to resist them; and I didn’t really dream they could do anything to Marta.

“It startled me, though, when I saw the whole crowding hell-pack, and I ordered them to go pretty sharply. I was angry—and somewhat alarmed, too. But they merely grimaced and slavered, with that slow, twisting movement of their lips that is like a voiceless gibbering; and then they closed in on Marta, just as I represented them doing in that accursed group of sculpture. Only there were scores of them now, instead of merely seven.

“I can’t describe how it happened, but all at once their foul talons had reached the girl, they were pawing her, were pulling at her hands, her arms, her body. She screamed—and I hope I’ll never hear another scream so full of black agony and soul-unhinging fright. Then I knew that she had yielded to them—either from choice, or from excess of terror—and knew that they were taking her away.

“For a moment, the studio wasn’t there at all—only a long, grey, oozing plain, beneath skies where the fumes of hell were writhing like a million ghostly and distorted dragons. Marta was sinking into that ooze—and the Things were all about her, were gathering in fresh hundreds from every side, were fighting each other for place, were sinking with her like bloated, misshapen fen-creatures into their native slime. Then everything vanished—and I was standing here in the studio—all alone with these damned sculptures.”

He paused for a little, and stared with dreary, desolate eyes at the floor. Then:

“It was awful, Philip, and I’ll never forgive myself for having anything to do with those monsters. I must have been a little mad; but I’ve always had a strong ambition to create some real stuff in the field of the grotesque and visionary and macabre. I don’t suppose you ever suspected, back in my stodgy phase, that I had a veritable appetence for such things. I wanted to do in sculpture what Poe and Lovecraft and Baudelaire have done in literature, what Rops and Goya did in pictorial art.

“That was what led me into the occult, when I realized my limitations. I knew that I had to see the dwellers of the invisible worlds before I could depict them. I wanted to do it, I longed for this power of vision and representation more than anything else… And then, all at once, I found that I had the power of summoning the unseen.

“There was no magic involved, in the usual sense of the word—no spells and circles, no pentacles and burning gums from old sorcery-books. At bottom, it was just will-power, I guess—a will to divine the Satanic, to summon the innumerable malignities and grotesqueries that people other planes than ours, or mingle unperceived with humanity.

“You’ve no idea what I have beheld, Philip. These statues of mine—these devils, vampires, lamias, satyrs—were all done from life, or, at least from recent memory. The originals are what the occultists would call elementals, I suppose. There are endless worlds, contiguous to our own, or co-existing with it, that such beings inhabit. All the creations of myth and fantasy, all the familiar spirits that sorcerers have evoked, are resident in these worlds.

“I made myself their master, I levied upon them at will… Then, from a dimension that must be a little lower than all others, a little nearer the ultimate nadir of hell, I called the innominate beings who posed for this new figure-piece.