Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/57

 swore that he sometimes 'felt the tempter pull my clothes' and sometimes the devil 'took the form of a bull, bush, or besom.'

All the demons in the Pilgrim's Progress came out of his memories of these experiences.

ALPHA.

William Blake, the poet and artist, had dreams and visions all his life. He left a record of not only how he saw the devil but also how he drew him. He wrote: 'I was going downstairs in the dark, when suddenly a light came streaming at my feet. I turned around, and there he was, looking fiercely at me through the iron grating of my staircase window. As he appeared, so I drew him.'

Blake's sketch showed a horrible phantom glaring through a grated window—with burning eyes, long teeth, and claws like talons.

William Blake went mad.

SO, my friend, remember while you are Pent up in your little cottage, to BEWARE of 'dreams and visions.

O, DECIDEDLY not a cheering communication. I cursed the man for his perverted sense of humor—if this was supposed to be humor—and his maddening obscurantism.

But it struck me as strange that the arrival of such an effort as this should coincide with a time at which I was seeing things.

I sat down and studied the typed sheet with a frown.

"ACLE, AGRAM, AGERON " What gibberish words were these? What connection was there between them?

If I guessed Spencer's twisted mind right, there was some link. Quite possibly he had put a clue in the wording. He was always searching for some such crazy but deliberate clues in the writings of Shakespeare to indicate that the plays were actually written by Francis Bacon.

I went slowly through the wordage again. Why, I pondered, a capital "P" for "Pent"?

Wait a moment—Pent-ACLE, Pent-AGRAM

I seized upon a volume of my encyclopedia, and sought what I soon found—this entry:

"PENTACLE, PENTANGLE, PENTAGRAM, PENTAGERON, or PENTALPHA.

"These various names all belong to the design of a 5-pointed star, composed of 5 straight lines, which may be formed complete without severance of the tracing medium from the recording medium, i.e., it may be drawn without the pen being lifted from the paper, for the tip of the pen returns to its starting point. Possibly for some such oddity as this the sign has long been used as a mystic symbol, first by the Pythagoreans and later by the astrologers and necromancers of the Middle Ages. It is found frequently in early ornamental art, and is still sometimes used, in superstitious regions of the world, on doorways to keep away witches and evil spirits."

There followed representations of the Pentacle, etc., and "The Hexagram—two interlaced equilateral triangles—with which it is often confused."

While I had the "P" volume in my hand, I thought I might as well look up Pythagoras, of whom I knew nothing except that he had been a Greek philosopher with a theorem.

His time, it appeared, was the sixth century B.C., and he travelled around quite a lot, passing through Egypt among other places, and went to Italy in 529 B.C. and founded there a religious brotherhood for the reformation of mankind, through practising certain rites. Reaction against him began in his life-time and reached a head in the middle of the fifth century B.C. His movement was violently trampled out, meeting houses of Pythagoreans were everywhere sacked and burned and Pythagoreans persecuted and slain.

Well, all that was fairly interesting, I supposed, but I still didn't see any point to the letter. Yet there was still the coincidence of its arrival and my fit of the willies.