so desirable. Half a hundred times, nearly, I
would doze for an instant, only to awake with a start, and find my pipe
gone out. Nor did the exertion of relighting it pull me together. I
struck my match mechanically, and with the first puff dropped off again.
It was most vexing. I got up and walked around the room. It was most
annoying. My cramped position had almost put both my legs to sleep. I
could hardly stand. I felt numb, as though with cold. There was no
longer any sound from the other rooms, nor from without. I sank down in
my window seat. How dark it was growing! I turned up the lantern. That
pipe again, how obstinately it kept going out! and my last match was
gone. The lantern, too, was _that_ going out? I lifted my hand to turn
it up again. It felt like lead, and fell beside me.

_Then_ I awoke,--absolutely. I remembered the story of "The Haunters and
the Haunted." _This_ was the Horror. I tried to rise, to cry out. My
body was like lead, my tongue was paralyzed. I could hardly move my
eyes. And the light was going out. There was no question about that.
Darker and darker yet; little by little the pattern of the paper was
swallowed up in the advancing night. A prickling numbness gathered in
every nerve, my right arm slipped without feeling from my lap to my
side, and I could not raise it,--it swung helpless. A thin, keen humming
began in my head, like the cicadas on a hillside in September. The
darkness was coming fast.

Yes, this was it. Something was subjecting me, body and mind, to slow
paralysis. Physically I was already dead. If I could only hold my mind,
my consciousness, I might still be safe, but could I? Could I resist
the mad horror of this silence, the deepening dark, the creeping
numbness? I knew that, like the man in the ghost story, my only safety
lay here.

It had come at last. My body was dead, I could no longer move my eyes.
They were fixed in that last look on the place where the door had been,
now only a deepening of the dark.

Utter night: the last flicker of the lantern was gone. I sat and waited;
my mind was still keen, but how long would it last? There was a limit
even to the endurance of the utter panic of fear.

Then the end began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky,
opalescent, small, far away,--awful eyes, like a dead dream. More
beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the
perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like a never end