rick
on her. On going to bed one night, she had turned back the smooth,
white counterpane of her bed to find, to her horror, a whole nest of
young garden-snakes curled up together between the sheets. The
exterior of the bed had given not the slightest inkling of the
loathsome contents, so carefully had her sister tidied the clothes.
Perverse that this particular incident should have come to her now out
of the past!

Esther was not psychic, she was not even given to premonitions. Yet
she knew that she was sensitive to the emotional states and conflicts
of those about her. She had always been able, on entering a room full
of people, to tell instinctively if anything was amiss, though whether
her faculty was purely intuitional or merely the delicate functioning
of a mental process she was unable to say, any more than a person
suffering from "cat-fear" can tell how he detects the presence of the
hidden cat, whether the warning comes out of the blue, or is the result
of finely developed olfactory nerves.

In the present instance, having no tangible grounds for her conviction,
she became exasperated and made repeated resolutions to put the entire
thing out of mind. It was no use; she was wide awake, over-excited,
the room felt hot, the cover got in her way. Why on earth were French
sheets so many yards long? This one kept coming up about her neck and
stifling her. Again and again she flung it back, until a final gesture
of fury brought her hand in contact with a hard object, which fell with
a clatter to the floor. It was her small alarm-clock. She picked it
up and set it on the table beside her, where it ticked busily away.

How long it was before the welcome tide of drowsiness engulfed her she
did not know. She hardly realised she had been asleep when gradually
she became aware of something heavy lying across her body, pressing
down upon her with an inert weight. The unpleasant consciousness grew,
she wanted to rid herself of the incubus, but she felt curiously
drugged, impotent. The weight increased; at the same time it seemed to
have life of a certain sort, slow-moving and lethargic; it crept upward
slowly, always pressing heavily upon her. She was cramped, her body
ached, her breath came with difficulty, she turned and twisted, tried
to free her arms, but they were pinioned close to her sides. What was
the Thing thus crushing her? She strained to see, but the darkness was
like black velvet; she could se