Use, Use, viens dans ici. Viens vite!”

And she whirled him round in the opening steps of some

dance that seemed oddly and horribly familiar. They made no sound on

the stones, this strangely assorted couple. It was all soft and

stealthy. And presently, when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and

a red glare as of flame shot through it, he was aware that some one

else had joined them and that his hand the mother had released was now

tightly held by the daughter. Use had come in answer to the call, and

he saw her with leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in

tattered vestiges of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and

horribly, odiously, loathsomely seductive.

“To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!” they cried. “On to

the Witches’ Sabbath!”

Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women

on each side of him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet

which he dimly, dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall

flickered and went out, and they were left in total darkness. And the

devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him

afraid.

Suddenly they released his hands and he heard the

voice of the mother cry that it was time, and they must go. Which way

they went he did not pause to see. He only realised that he was free,

and he blundered through the darkness till he found the stairs and then

tore up them to his room as though all hell was at his heels.

He flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his

hands, and groaned. Swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape,

all equally impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do

for the moment was to sit quiet and wait. He must see what was going to

happen. At least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly

safe. The door was locked. He crossed over and softly opened the window

which gave upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the

hall through the glass doors.

As he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity

reached his ears from the streets beyond—the sound of footsteps and

voices muffled by distance. He leaned out cautiously and listened. The

moonlight was clear and strong now, but his own window was in shadow,

the silver disc being still behind the house. It came to him

irresistibly that the inhabitants of the town, who a little while

before had all been invisible behind closed doors, were now issuing

forth, busy upon some secret and unholy errand. He listened intently.

At first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware

of movements going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came

to him across that still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings

sent the hum of their activity into the night. Things were on the move

everywhere. A biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he

knew not whence. Presently his eyes became glued to the windows of the

opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. The roof

overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass,

and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over

the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and silently,

shaped like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured

glass, and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost

sight of them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps.

Sometimes their shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he

could not make out whether they were the shadows of human beings or of

cats. They seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. The

transformation looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings,

yet changed swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like

animals.

The yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the

creeping movements of dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the

porch with the glass doors.