And then he is gone, the blue beams snuffed out, while the glow invading my room has taken on the tones of a Maxfield Parrish sunset, if the painter had had only one hue left on his palette and no choice but to finish his work. I am paralyzed, as a cold, sweaty dread saps my will to move, even to breath.
A cold blare of tinny trumpets heralds the arrival of a being new to my midnight chambers, and a vast, luminous orange head, with drooping lips and sagging jowls, its eyes squinted quite shut against its own glare, erupts into existence in a fountain of ectoplasm which splashes over every available surface, even my own prostrate body.
I am certain that Mrs. Malloy will have something unkind to say about the spectral deposit left by this visitor.
The being speaks, gibbering madly in a tongue that I take to be English but which is completely indecipherable. There are promises made, a contract offered, but I cannot comprehend so much as a single clause. Montgomery would naturally counsel me not to accept until some legitimate legal power has had the opportunity to peruse the articles thus offered, and I would agree with him. But I am so paralyzed that I can neither consent to nor deny said articles. The muscles of my throat spasm uncontrollably, and I fear that I will choke, either upon the ectoplasm which has spattered grotesquely onto my face or upon the bilious mass rising from my gorge.
The head, visibly vaster than the space it occupies, seems to take my lack of response as consent of a kind, sufficient unto its cause. It radiates an Infernal smugness and laughs, ectoplasmic spittle spraying across my chambers. It then rushes at me, as if from a great distance in spite of the evident smallness of the space, and seems to pass into – and I dare hope through – me in another splashing wave of faintly luminous ectoplasm.
I am now doubly drenched, and weakened beyond endurance. And whether I truly expire – and the world with me – with the passing of that orange glow, or simply lose consciousness, to awaken in the morning to a world changed and yet not changed and unrecognizable in either case, I think I will never know.
