The shapes they took as they plaited and wove themselves into one another were all involuted, everything turning itself inside out, and the end of every separate movement was blood-red.
King groaned aloud and rolled over on his side, just as the stuff became so dim and dreadful that you could hardly see your hand before your face, and a noise like the rushing of the wind between the worlds made every inch of your skin prickly with goose-flesh.

Low though the colors were, when you shut your eyes you could still see them, but I could not see the Gray Mahatma, and I was sure he could not see me.

He would not know which of us was down and out.
So I seized King and dragged him across the floor to the point where the irregular stone steps provided the only way of escape.

There I hove him like a sack on to my shoulders.

In that drunken, throbbing twilight it would have been easy for some of the gray-beard's crew to lean from the ledge and send me reeling back again; the best chance was to climb quickly before they were aware of me.
When I reached the ledge it was deserted.