I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. What is it? I must be careful how I record my awakening today, for I am unstrung, and much hallucination is necessarily mixed with fact. It is all in that ancestral diary I found. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it, but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. The thing must have happened at about three-thirty in the afternoon.
As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams. The more I studied them, the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them. There is a hideous look of family resemblance in them all β and that which is human is more horrible than that which is non-human. In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding.
At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton. The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come out of the West. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind. Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the unutterable horror of his position.
A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his arm. I felt somehow in deadly peril, and drew out the peculiar ray-projector as a weapon of defense.
