ns and expectations which had lately filled
our minds to the exclusion of all else.

Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and
in time I yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle
seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed his period of watching even though
the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours.

Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the
most disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmal
loneness; with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison where I
lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing
yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle's face
came to me with less pleasant association than in waking hours, and I
recall many futile struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a
pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek
which clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and
startled awakeness in which every actual object before my eyes stood out
with more than natural clearness and reality.

5

I had been lying with my face away from my uncle's chair, so that in
this sudden flash of awakening I saw only the door to the street, the
window, and the wall and floor and ceiling toward the north of the room,
all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain in a light brighter
than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was
not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong
enough to read an average book by. But it cast a shadow of myself and
the cot on the floor, and had a yellowish, penetrating force that hinted
at things more potent than luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy
sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently
assailed. For on my ears rang the reverberations of that shocking
scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place.
My mind, as alert as my senses, recognized the gravely unusual; and
almost automatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the
destructive instruments which we had left trained on the moldy spot
before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for the
scream had been in my uncle's voice, and I knew not against what menace
I should have to defend him and myself.

Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors
beyond horrors, and this was one of