I took it. The Scin-Laeca glided along the wall towards the threshold,
and motioned me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow flitted on
through the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small
stair into Forman's study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be
narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign. I
obeyed the guidance, not only unresistingly, but without a desire to
resist. I was unconscious either of curiosity or of awe,--only of a calm
and passive indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful. In this
obedience, from which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands the
staff which I had examined the day before, and which lay on the table,
just where Margrave had cast it on re-entering the house. I unclosed the
shutter to the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the light in my left
hand, the staff in my right, stepped forth into the garden. The night was
still; the flame of the candle scarcely trembled in the air; the Shadow
moved on before me towards the old pavilion described in an earlier part
of this narrative, and of which the mouldering doors stood wide open. I
followed the Shadow into the pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room
above, with its four great blank unglazed windows, or rather arcades,
north, south, east, and west. I halted on the middle of the floor: right
before my eyes, through the vista made by breathless boughs, stood out
from the moonlit air the dreary mausoleum. Then, at the command conveyed
to me, I placed the candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the
handle of the staff; a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a
lump of some dark bituminous substance, next a smaller slender wand of
polished steel, of which the point was tipped with a translucent material,
which appeared to me like crystal. Bending down, still obedient to the
direction conveyed to me, I described on the floor with the lump of
bitumen (if I may so call it) the figure of the pentacle with the
interlaced triangles, in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I had
drawn it for Margrave the evening before. The material used made the