Some half-hour later he had returned to his room, and was busily engaged making preparations for test three.  Letting a drop of Curtis’s blood fall on the skull, he put the latter under his pillow, and retired to rest.  He had slept for little over an hour, when he awoke with a start.  The muffled sound of hammering—­as of nails in a coffin—­was going on all around him, and occasionally it seemed to him that something big and heavy stalked across the floor; but in spite of the fact that the room was illuminated with a red glow—­the same lurid red as had appeared in tests one and two—­nothing was to be seen.  The phenomena lasted five or six minutes and then everything was again normal.  Hamar was so terrified that he lay with his head under the bedclothes till morning, and vowed nothing on earth would persuade him to sleep in that room again.  But sunlight soon restored his courage, and by the evening he was quite eager to go on with the next test.  He had some difficulty in persuading any one to allow him the use of an oven for so pernicious a mixture as nightshade and hemlock; but at last he over-ruled the objections of some good-natured woman—­the mother of one of the office boys at his former employer’s—­and test four proved as successful as the previous three.  The preliminary part of test five was also successfully accomplished; but in carrying out the second part of it, Hamar all but met with disaster.  He was walking along Kearney Street with the specially prepared hazel twig carefully concealed beneath his coat, when just opposite Saddler’s jewelry store, he came across a child standing by itself.  The nearest person being some fifty yards away, and no policeman within sight, Hamar concluded this was too good an opportunity to be lost.  He whipped out the twig, and held it, in the manner prescribed, in front of the child.  The effect was instantaneous.  The child turned white as death, its eyes bulged with terror, and opening its mouth to its full extent it commenced to shriek and yell.  Then it fell on the pavement; and clutching and clawing the air, and foaming at the mouth rolled over and over.  People from every quarter flocked to the spot, and judging Hamar, from his proximity to the child, to be responsible for its condition, shouted for the police.  The latter, however, arrived too late.  Hamar, whose presence of mind had only left him for the moment seeing a bicycle leaning against a store door, jumped on it and soon put a respectable distance between himself and the crowd.

That night the trio met once more in Hamar’s room for test six.  There was a wood fire in the grate, and on it a tin vessel containing the prescribed ingredients.  Somewhat unpleasantly conspicuous amongst these ingredients were the death’s-head moth, and the soil from Satan’s grave.  As soon as the mixture had been heated three hours, the vessel was removed, the fire extinguished, and the room made absolutely dark.  Then the three sat close together and waited.