“I positively could not find a word to say in reply.  The channels of speech dried up within me.  I simply stared and wondered what he would say next.  I watched him in a sort of dream, and as far as I can remember, he asked me to promise to call him sooner another time, and then began to walk round the room, uttering strange sounds, and making signs with his arms and hands until he reached the door.  Then he was gone in a second, and I had closed and locked the door behind him.

“After this, the Smith adventure drew rapidly to a climax.  It was a week or two later, and I was coming home between two and three in the morning from a maternity case, certain features of which for the time being had very much taken possession of my mind, so much so, indeed, that I passed Smith’s door without giving him a single thought.

“The gas jet on the landing was still burning, but so low that it made little impression on the waves of deep shadow that lay across the stairs.  Overhead, the faintest possible gleam of grey showed that the morning was not far away.  A few stars shone down through the sky-light.  The house was still as the grave, and the only sound to break the silence was the rushing of the wind round the walls and over the roof.  But this was a fitful sound, suddenly rising and as suddenly falling away again, and it only served to intensify the silence.

“I had already reached my own landing when I gave a violent start.  It was automatic, almost a reflex action in fact, for it was only when I caught myself fumbling at the door handle and thinking where I could conceal myself quickest that I realised a voice had sounded close beside me in the air.  It was the same voice I had heard before, and it seemed to me to be calling for help.  And yet the very same minute I pushed on into the room, determined to disregard it, and seeking to persuade myself it was the creaking of the boards under my weight or the rushing noise of the wind that had deceived me.

“But hardly had I reached the table where the candles stood when the sound was unmistakably repeated:  ‘Help! help!’ And this time it was accompanied by what I can only describe as a vivid tactile hallucination.  I was touched:  the skin of my arm was clutched by fingers.

“Some compelling force sent me headlong downstairs as if the haunting forces of the whole world were at my heels.  At Smith’s door I paused.  The force of his previous warning injunction to seek his aid without delay acted suddenly and I leant my whole weight against the panels, little dreaming that I should be called upon to give help rather than to receive it.

“The door yielded at once, and I burst into a room that was so full of a choking vapour, moving in slow clouds, that at first I could distinguish nothing at all but a set of what seemed to be huge shadows passing in and out of the mist.  Then, gradually, I perceived that a red lamp on the mantelpiece gave all the light there was, and that the room which I now entered for the first time was almost empty of furniture.