A man with the head of a stag that filled the arched door, who stood silhouetted, giant, unforgettable image, against the dimly lit whitewashed wall of the corridor behind. The antlers were enormous, as black as almond branches, many-tined. And the man was in black from head to foot, with only the eyes and the nostril ends marked in white. He imposed his presence on me, then came slowly down the room to the table; stood centrally and regally behind it for another long moment, then moved to the extreme left end. By that time I had noted the black gloves, the black shoes beneath the narrow soutane-like smock he wore; that he had to move slowly because the mask was slightly precarious, being so large.

The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.

Another figure appeared, and paused, as they were all to do, in the archway.

This time it was a woman. She was dressed in traditional English witch costume; a brimmed black-peaked hat, long white hair, red apron, black cloak, and a malevolent mask; a beaked nose. She hobbled, bentbacked, to the right end of the table and set the cat she was carrying on it. It was dead, stuffed in a sitting position. The cat’s glass eyes were on me. Her black and white eyes. And the stagman’s.

Another startling figure: a man in a crocodile head—a bizarre maned mask that projected forwards, more Negroid than anything else, with ferocious white teeth and bulging eyes. He hardly paused, but came swiftly to his place beside the stag, as if the wearer was uncomfortable in costume; unused to such scenes.

A shorter male figure came next: an abnormally large head in which white cube teeth reached in a savage grin from ear to ear. His eyes seemed buried in deep black sockets. Round the top of his head there rose a great iguana frill. This man was dressed in a black poncho, and looked Mexican; Aztec. He moved to his place beside the witch.

Another woman figure appeared. I felt sure ft was Lily. She was the winged vampire, an eared bat head in black fur, two long white fangs; below her waist she wore a black skirt, black stockings, black shoes. Slim legs. She went quickly to her place beside the crocodile, the clawed wings held rigidly out, bellying a little in the air, uncanny in the torchlight; a great flickering shadow that darkened the cross and the rose.

The next figure was African, a folk horror, a corn-doll bundle of black strips of rag that hung down to the ground in a series of skirted flounces. Even the head mask was made of these rags; with a topknot of three white feathers and two huge saucer eyes. It appeared armless and legless, and indeed sexless, some ultimate childish nightmare. It shuffled forward to its place beside the vampire; added to the chorus of outrageous stares.

Then came a squat succubus with a Bosch-like snout.

The following man was by contrast mainly white, a macabre Pierrot-skeleton; echo of the figure on the wall of my cell. His mask was a skull. The outline of the pelvis had been cleverly exaggerated; and the wearer had a stiff, bony walk.

Then an even more bizarre personage. It was a woman, and I began to doubt whether, after all, the vampire was Lily. The front of her stiffened skirt had the form of a stylized fishtail, which swelled up into a heavy pregnant belly; and then that in turn, above the breasts, became an up-pointed bird’s head. This figure walked forward slowly, left hand supporting the swollen eight-months’ belly, right hand between the breasts. The beaked white head with its almond-shaped eyes seemed to stare up towards the ceiling. It was beautiful, this fish-woman-bird, strangely tender after the morbidity and threat of the other figures. In its upstretched throat I could see two small holes, apertures for the eyes of the real person beneath.

Four more places remained.

The next figure was almost an old friend. Anubis the jackal head, alert and vicious. He strode lithely to his place, a Negro walk.

A man in a black cloak on which were various astrological and alchemical symbols in white. On his head he wore a hat with a peak a yard high and a wide nefarious brim; a kind of black neck-covering hung from behind it. Black gloves, and a long white staff surmounted by a circle, a snake with its tail in its mouth. Over the face there was no more than a deep mask in black. I knew who it was. I could see the gleaming eyes and the implacable mouth.

Two more places at the center. There was a pause. The rank of figures behind the table stared up at me, unmoving, in total silence. I looked round at my guards, who stared ahead, like soldiers; and I shrugged. I wished I could have yawned, to put them all in their place; and to help me in mine.

Four men appeared in the white corridor. They were carrying a black sedan chair, so narrow that it looked almost like an upright coffin. I could see closed curtains at its sides, and in front. On the front panel was painted in white the same emblem as the one above my throne—an eight-spoked wheel. On the roof of the sedan was a kind of black tiara, each of whose teeth ended in a white meniscus, a ring of new moons.

The four porters were black-smocked. On their heads they had grotesque masks—witch-doctor faces in white and black and then rising from the crown of each head enormous vertical crosses a yard or more high. Instead of breaking off cleanly the ends of the arms and the upright of these crosses burst out in black mops of rag or raffia, so that they seemed to be burning with black flame.

They did not come directly to the center of the table, but as if it was some host, some purifying relic, carried their coffin-sedan round the room, up the left side, round in front of my throne, between me and the table, so that I could see the white crescent moons, the symbols of Artemis-Diana, on the side-panels, then on down the right side to the door again and then finally back to the table. The poles were slipped out of the brackets, and the box was lifted forward to the central empty place. Throughout, the other figures remained staring at me. The black porters went and stood by the brands, three of which were almost extinguished. The light was getting dim.

Then the thirteenth figure appeared.

In contrast to the others he was in a long white smock or alb that reached to the ground; whose only decoration consisted of two black bands round the end of the loose sleeves. He carried a black staff in red-gloved hands. The head was that of a pure black goat; a real goat’s head, worn as a kind of cap, so that it stood high off the shoulders of the person beneath, whose real face must have lain behind the shaggy black beard. Huge backswept horns, left their natural colors; amber glass eyes; the only ornament, a fat blood-red candle that had been fixed between the horns and lit. I wished I could speak, for I badly needed to shout something debunking, something adolescent and healthy and English; a “Doctor Crowley, I presume.” But all I could do was to cross my knees and look what I was not—unimpressed.

The goat figure, his satanic majesty, came forward with an archidiabolical dignity and I braced myself for the next development: a black mass seemed likely. Perhaps the table was to be the altar. I realized that he was lampooning the traditional Christ figure; the staff was the pastoral crook, the black beard Christ’s brown one, the blood-red candle some sort of blasphemous parody of the halo. He came to his place, the long line of black-carnival puppets stared at me from the floor. I stared down the line: the stag-devil, the crocodile-devil, the vampire, the succubus, the birdwoman, the magician, the coffin-sedan, the goat-devil, the jackal-devil, the Pierrot-skeleton, the corn doll, the Aztec, the witch. I found myself swallowing, looking round again at my inscrutable guards. The gag was beginning to hurt. In the end I found it more comfortable to stare down at the foot of the dais.