s moonlight. I was absorbed by these past scenes and past
amusements, when, in an instant, the thread on which my memories hung
snapped asunder; my attention immediately came back to present things
more vividly than ever, and I found myself, I neither knew why nor
wherefore, looking hard at the picture again.

Looking for what?

Good God! the man had pulled his hat down on his brows! No! the hat
itself was gone! Where was the conical crown? Where the feathers--three
white, two green? Not there! In place of the hat and feathers, what
dusky object was it that now hid his forehead, his eyes, his shading
hand?

Was the bed moving?

I turned on my back and looked up. Was I mad? drunk? dreaming? giddy
again? or was the top of the bed really moving down--sinking slowly,
regularly, silently, horribly, right down throughout the whole of its
length and breadth--right down upon me, as I lay underneath?

My blood seemed to stand still. A deadly, paralyzing coldness stole all
over me as I turned my head round on the pillow and determined to test
whether the bed-top was really moving or not, by keeping my eye on the
man in the picture.

The next look in that direction was enough. The dull, black, frowzy
outline of the valance above me was within an inch of being parallel
with his waist. I still looked breathlessly. And steadily and
slowly--very slowly--I saw the figure, and the line of frame below the
figure, vanish, as the valance moved down before it.

I am, constitutionally, anything but timid. I have been on more than one
occasion in peril of my life, and have not lost my self-possession for
an instant; but when the conviction first settled on my mind that the
bed-top was really moving, was steadily and continuously sinking down
upon me, I looked up shuddering, helpless, panic-stricken, beneath the
hideous machinery for murder, which was advancing closer and closer to
suffocate me where I lay.

I looked up, motionless, speechless, breathless. The candle, fully
spent, went out; but the moonlight still brightened the room. Down and
down, without pausing and without sounding, came the bed-top, and still
my panic terror seemed to bind me faster and faster to the mattress on
which I lay--down and down it sank, till the dusty odour from the lining
of the canopy came stealing into my nostrils.

At that final moment the instinct of self-preservation startled me out
of my trance, and I moved at last. There was just room for me