achman is suffering in the same way as I am.
When I went back home yesterday, I noticed his singular paleness, and I
asked him: "What is the matter with you, Jean?" "The matter is that I
never get any rest, and my nights devour my days. Since your departure,
monsieur, there has been a spell over me."

However, the other servants are all well, but I am very frightened of
having another attack, myself.

_July 4th._ I am decidedly taken again; for my old nightmares have
returned. Last night I felt somebody leaning on me who was sucking my
life from between my lips with his mouth. Yes, he was sucking it out of
my neck, like a leech would have done. Then he got up, satiated, and I
woke up, so beaten, crushed and annihilated that I could not move. If
this continues for a few days, I shall certainly go away again.

_July 5th._ Have I lost my reason? What has happened, what I saw last
night, is so strange, that my head wanders when I think of it!

As I do now every evening, I had locked my door, and then, being
thirsty, I drank half a glass of water, and I accidentally noticed that
the water bottle was full up to the cut-glass stopper.

Then I went to bed and fell into one of my terrible sleeps, from which
I was aroused in about two hours by a still more terrible shock.

Picture to yourself a sleeping man who is being murdered and who wakes
up with a knife in his chest, and who is rattling in his throat,
covered with blood, and who can no longer breathe, and is going to die,
and does not understand anything at all about it--there it is.

Having recovered my senses, I was thirsty again, so I lit a candle and
went to the table on which my water bottle was. I lifted it up and
tilted it over my glass, but nothing came out. It was empty! It was
completely empty! At first I could not understand it at all, and then
suddenly I was seized by such a terrible feeling that I had to sit
down, or rather I fell into a chair! Then I sprang up with a bound to
look about me, and then I sat down again, overcome by astonishment and
fear, in front of the transparent crystal bottle! I looked at it with
fixed eyes, trying to conjecture, and my hands trembled! Somebody had
drunk the water, but who? I? I without any doubt. It could surely only
be I? In that case I was a somnambulist. I lived, without knowing it,
that double mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not
two beings in us, or whether a strange, unknowable and invisible