“It used to spring on a table, on the back of a chair, on the chimney-piece, and slowly to swing itself from side to side, looking at me all the time.  There is in its motion an indefinable power to dissipate thought, and to contract one’s attention to that monotony, till the ideas shrink, as it were, to a point, and at last to nothing—­and unless I had started up, and shook off the catalepsy I have felt as if my mind were on the point of losing itself.  There are other ways,” he sighed heavily; “thus, for instance, while I pray with my eyes closed, it comes closer and closer, and I see it.  I know it is not to be accounted for physically, but I do actually see it, though my lids are dosed, and so it rocks my mind, as it were, and overpowers me, and I am obliged to rise from my knees.  If you had ever yourself known this, you would be acquainted with desperation.”

CHAPTER IX

The Third Stage

“I see, Dr. Hesselius, that you don’t lose one word of my statement.  I need not ask you to listen specially to what I am now going to tell you.  They talk of the optic nerves, and of spectral illusions, as if the organ of sight was the only point assailable by the influences that have fastened upon me—­I know better.  For two years in my direful case that limitation prevailed.  But as food is taken in softly at the lips, and then brought under the teeth, as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has been once caught firmly by the end of the finest fibre of his nerve, is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am.  Yes, Doctor, as I am, for a while I talk to you, and implore relief, I feel that my prayer is for the impossible, and my pleading with the inexorable.”

I endeavoured to calm his visibly increasing agitation, and told him that he must not despair.

While we talked the night had overtaken us.  The filmy moonlight was wide over the scene which the window commanded, and I said: 

“Perhaps you would prefer having candles.  This light, you know, is odd.  I should wish you, as much as possible, under your usual conditions while I make my diagnosis, shall I call it—­otherwise I don’t care.”

“All lights are the same to me,” he said; “except when I read or write, I care not if night were perpetual.  I am going to tell you what happened about a year ago.  The thing began to speak to me.”

“Speak!  How do you mean—­speak as a man does, do you mean?”

“Yes; speak in words and consecutive sentences, with perfect coherence and articulation; but there is a peculiarity.  It is not like the tone of a human voice.  It is not by my ears it reaches me—­it comes like a singing through my head.

“This faculty, the power of speaking to me, will be my undoing.  It won’t let me pray, it interrupts me with dreadful blasphemies.  I dare not go on, I could not.  Oh!  Doctor, can the skill, and thought, and prayers of man avail me nothing!”