Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/417

 of a factory. Then I thought of Ezekiel's vision of the Living Wheels.⁠ ⁠…

'And it must have been at this instant, I think, that the muttering and deep note that issued from it formed itself into words within me. At any rate, I heard a voice that spoke with unmistakable intelligence:

' ‘Come!' it said. ‘Come out⁠—at once!' And the sense of power that accompanied the Voice was so splendid that my fear vanished and I obeyed instantly without thinking more. I followed; it led. It altered in shape. The door was open. It ran silently in a form that was more like a stream of deep black water than anything else I can think of⁠—out of the room, down the stairs, across the hall, and up to the deep shadows that lay against the door leading into the road. There I lost sight of it.'

Meiklejohn's only desire, he says, then was to rush after it⁠—to escape. This he did. He understood that somehow it had passed through the door into the open air. Ten seconds later, perhaps even less, he, too, was in the open air. He acted almost automatically; reason, reflection, logic all swept away. Nowhere, however, in the soft moonlight about him was any sign of the extraordinary apparition that had succeeded in drawing him out of the inn, out of his bedroom, out of his⁠—bed. He stared in a dazed way at everything⁠—just beginning to get control of his faculties a bit⁠—wondering what in the world it all meant. That huge spinning form, he felt convinced, lay hidden somewhere close beside him, waiting for the end. The danger it had enabled him to avoid was close at hand. ⁠… He knew that, he says.⁠…

There lay the meadows, touched here and there