"The silence irritated me. I grew angry; I coughed, laughed, whistled; and from afar off, from the distant lees, and streams, and spinneys, came a repetition of the noises.
"Then the blackest of clouds creeping slowly over the moor crushed the sheen out of the valley and smothered everything in sable darkness. The silence of death supervened, and my anger turned to fear. Around me there was now--NOTHING--only a void. Black ether and space! Space! a sanctuary from fear, and yet composed of fear itself. It was the space, the nameless, bottomless SOMETHING spreading limitless all around me, that, filling me with vague apprehensions, confused me with its terrors. What was it? Whence came it? I threw out my arms and Something, Something which I intuitively knew to be there, but which I cannot explain, receded. I drew them in again, and the same SOMETHING instantly oppressed me with its close--its very close proximity.
"I gasped for breath and tried to move my arms again--I could not. A sudden rigor held me spellbound, and fixed my eyes on the darkness directly ahead of me. Then, from somewhere in my rear, came a laugh--hoarse, malignant, and bestial, and I was conscious that the SOMETHING had materialised and was creeping stealthily towards me. Nearer, nearer and nearer it came, and all the time I wondered what, WHAT in the name of God it was like! My anticipations became unbearable, the pulsations of my heart and the feverish throbbing of my temples warning me that, if the climax were postponed much longer, I should either die where I sat, or go mad. That I did neither, was due to a divine inspiration which made me suddenly think of a device that I had once seen on a Druidical stone in Brittany--the sun, a hand with the index and little fingers pointing downwards, and a sprig of mistletoe. The instant I saw them in my mind's eye, the cords that held me paralytic slackened.
"I sprang up, and there, within a yard of where I had sat, was a figure--the luminous nude figure of a creature, half man and half ape. Standing some six feet high, it had a clumsy, thick-set body, covered in places with coarse, bristly hair, arms of abnormal length and girth, legs swelling with huge muscles and much bowed, and a very large and long dark head. The face was DREADFUL!--it was the face of something long since dead; and out of the mass of peeling, yellow skin and mouldering tissues gleamed two lurid and wholly malevolent eyes. Our glances met, and, as they did so, a smile of hellish glee suffused its countenance. Then, crouching down in cat-like fashion on its disgusting hands, it made ready to spring. Again the device of the sun and mistletoe arose before me. My fingers instinctively closed on my pocket flashlight. I pressed the button and, as the brilliant, white ray shot forth, the satanical object before me VANISHED. Then I turned tail, and never ceased running till I had arrived at the spot on the high-road where Krantz's motor awaited me.