Good! I knew you would be. Let's get to work at once!
He lifted the most ponderous volume in the laboratory from the floor to
the top of an old walnut refectory table. The book was bound in musty
yellow vellum, clasped with iron, and the foxed leaves were fashioned
from parchment made from the skin of virgin camels. As he opened it,
I saw that the pages were inscribed with cabalistic characters and
symbols, illuminated in colours, none of which I could decipher. Lou
Matagot jumped on to the table and sat on the leaves at the top of the
book, forming a paper weight. He sat with his back to Peter and his
long, black tail played nervously up and down the centre of the volume.
Peter now drew a circle with a radius of twelve or thirteen feet
around us, inscribing within its circumference certain characters
and pentacles. Then he plunged a dagger through what I recognized to
be a sacred wafer, which he told me had been stolen from a church
at midnight, at the same time, muttering what, from the tone of his
voice, I took to be blasphemous imprecations, although the language
he used was unfamiliar to me. Next he arranged a copper chafing-dish
over a blue flame and began to stir the ingredients, esoteric powders
and crystals of bright colours. Now he lovingly lifted a crystal
viol, filled with a purple liquid, and poured the contents into a
porcelain bowl. Instantly, there was a faint detonation and a thick
cloud of violet vapour mounted spirally to the ceiling. All the time,
occasionally referring to the grimoire on the table, and employing
certain unmentionable symbolic objects in the manner prescribed, he
muttered incantations in the unknown tongue. The room swam with odours
and mists, violet clouds and opopanax fogs. So far, the invocation was
pretty and amusing but it resembled the arcane rites of Paul Iribe more
than those of Hermes Trismegistus.
Now Peter pulled three black hairs from the cat's tail, which Lou
Matagot delivered with a yowl of rage, springing at the same time from
the table to the top of the cabinet, whence he regarded us through the
mists and vapours, with his evil yellow eyes. The hairs went into the
chafing-dish and a new aroma filled the room. The claws of an owl,
the flower of the moly, and the powder of vipers followed and then
Peter opened a long flat box which nearly covered one end of the huge
table, and a nest of serpents, with bellies of rich turquoise blue and
backs of tawny yellow, marked with black zigzags, reared their wicked
heads. He called them by name and they responded by waving their heads
rhythmically. I began to grow alarmed and dizzy. Vade retro, Satanas!
was on tip of my tongue. For a few seconds, I think, I must have
fainted. When I revived, I still heard the chanting of the incantation
and the sound of tinkling bells. The serpents' heads still waved in
rhythm and their bodies, yellow and turquoise blue, were elongated in
the air until they appeared to be balancing on the tips of their tails.
The eyes of Lou Matagot glared maliciously through the thick vapours
and the cat howled with rage or terror.
Now! cried Peter, for the first time in English. Now!
My nails dug holes in the palms of my perspiring hands. Peter renewed
his nocuous muttering and casting the wafer, transfixed by the dagger,
into the porcelain bowl containing the violet fluid, he poured the
whole mixture into the copper chafing-dish.
There was a terrific explosion.