He rose to his feet.

“Good night, all,” he said, and began to usher us out abruptly, but without offence, into the night.

A fortnight later, he dropped each of us a card, and you can imagine that I was not late this time.  When we arrived, Carnacki took us straight into dinner, and when we had finished, and all made ourselves comfortable, he began again, where he had left off:—­

“Now just listen quietly; for I have got something pretty queer to tell you.  I got back late at night, and I had to walk up to the castle, as I had not warned them that I was coming.  It was bright moonlight; so that the walk was rather a pleasure, than otherwise.  When I got there, the whole place was in darkness, and I thought I would take a walk ’round outside, to see whether Tassoc or his brother was keeping watch.  But I could not find them anywhere, and concluded that they had got tired of it, and gone off to bed.

“As I returned across the front of the East Wing, I caught the hooning whistling of the Room, coming down strangely through the stillness of the night.  It had a queer note in it, I remember—­low and constant, queerly meditative.  I looked up at the window, bright in the moonlight, and got a sudden thought to bring a ladder from the stable yard, and try to get a look into the Room, through the window.

“With this notion, I hunted ’round at the back of the castle, among the straggle of offices, and presently found a long, fairly light ladder; though it was heavy enough for one, goodness knows!  And I thought at first that I should never get it reared.  I managed at last, and let the ends rest very quietly against the wall, a little below the sill of the larger window.  Then, going silently, I went up the ladder.  Presently, I had my face above the sill and was looking in alone with the moonlight.

“Of course, the queer whistling sounded louder up there; but it still conveyed that peculiar sense of something whistling quietly to itself—­can you understand?  Though, for all the meditative lowness of the note, the horrible, gargantuan quality was distinct—­a mighty parody of the human, as if I stood there and listened to the whistling from the lips of a monster with a man’s soul.

“And then, you know, I saw something.  The floor in the middle of the huge, empty room, was puckered upward in the center into a strange soft-looking mound, parted at the top into an ever changing hole, that pulsated to that great, gentle hooning.  At times, as I watched, I saw the heaving of the indented mound, gap across with a queer, inward suction, as with the drawing of an enormous breath; then the thing would dilate and pout once more to the incredible melody.  And suddenly, as I stared, dumb, it came to me that the thing was living.  I was looking at two enormous, blackened lips, blistered and brutal, there in the pale moonlight....