The thunder of my old-fashioned door-knocker, reverberating eerily through the house, roused me from a restless and nightmare-haunted sleep. I looked out the window. In the last light of the sinking moon, the white face of my friend John Conrad looked up at me. May I come up, Kirowan?" His voice was shaky and strained. "Certainly!" I sprang out of bed and pulled on a bath-robe as I heard him enter the front door and ascend the stairs. A moment later he stood before me, and in the light which I had turned on I saw his hands tremble and noticed the unnatural pallor of his face. "Old John Grimlan died an hour ago," he said abruptly. "Indeed? I had not known that he was ill." "It was a sudden, virulent attack of peculiar nature, a sort of seizure somewhat akin to epilepsy. He has been subject to such spells of late years, you know." I nodded. I knew something of the old hermit-like man who had lived in his great dark house on the hill; indeed, I had once witnessed one of his strange seizures, and I had been appalled at the writhings, howlings and yammerings of the wretch, who had groveled on the earth like a wounded snake, gibbering terrible curses and black blasphemies until his voice broke in a wordless screaming which spattered his lips with foam. Seeing this, I understood why people in old times looked on such victims as men possessed by demons.