“I should think that I knelt for a moment in a sort of stunned fright.  Then, with a mad, awkward movement, I snatched at the ring, intending to hurl it out of the Pentacle.  Yet it eluded me, as though some invisible, living thing jerked it hither and thither.  At last, I gripped it; yet, in the same instant, it was torn from my grasp with incredible and brutal force.  A great, black shadow covered it, and rose into the air, and came at me.  I saw that it was the Hand, vast and nearly perfect in form.  I gave one crazy yell, and jumped over the Pentacle and the ring of burning candles, and ran despairingly for the door.  I fumbled idiotically and ineffectually with the key, and all the time I stared, with a fear that was like insanity, toward the Barriers.  The hand was plunging toward me; yet, even as it had been unable to pass into the Pentacle when the ring was without, so, now that the ring was within, it had no power to pass out.  The monster was chained, as surely as any beast would be, were chains riveted upon it.

“Even then, I got a flash of this knowledge; but I was too utterly shaken with fright, to reason; and the instant I managed to get the key turned, I sprang into the passage, and slammed the door with a crash.  I locked it, and got to my room somehow; for I was trembling so that I could hardly stand, as you can imagine.  I locked myself in, and managed to get the candle lit; then I lay down on my bed, and kept quiet for an hour or two, and so I got steadied.

“I got a little sleep, later; but woke when Peter brought my coffee.  When I had drunk it I felt altogether better, and took the old man along with me whilst I had a look into the Grey Room.  I opened the door, and peeped in.  The candles were still burning, wan against the daylight; and behind them was the pale, glowing star of the Electric Pentacle.  And there, in the middle, was the ring ... the gateway of the monster, lying demure and ordinary.

“Nothing in the room was touched, and I knew that the brute had never managed to cross the Pentacles.  Then I went out, and locked the door.

“After a sleep of some hours, I left the house.  I returned in the afternoon in a cab.  I had with me an oxy-hydrogen jet, and two cylinders, containing the gases.  I carried the things into the Grey Room, and there, in the center of the Electric Pentacle, I erected the little furnace.  Five minutes later the Luck Ring, once the ‘luck,’ but now the ‘bane,’ of the Anderson family, was no more than a little solid splash of hot metal.”

Carnacki felt in his pocket, and pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper.  He passed it to me.  I opened it, and found a small circle of greyish metal, something like lead, only harder and rather brighter.

“Well?” I asked, at length, after examining it and handing it ’round to the others.  “Did that stop the haunting?”

Carnacki nodded.  “Yes,” he said.  “I slept three nights in the Grey Room, before I left.  Old Peter nearly fainted when he knew that I meant to; but by the third night he seemed to realize that the house was just safe and ordinary.  And, you know, I believe, in his heart, he hardly approved.”