to roll
myself sidewise off the bed. As I dropped noiselessly to the floor, the
edge of the murderous canopy touched me on the shoulder.

Without stopping to draw my breath, without wiping the cold sweat from
my face, I rose instantly on my knees to watch the bed-top. I was
literally spellbound by it. If I had heard footsteps behind me, I could
not have turned round; if a means of escape had been miraculously
provided for me, I could not have moved to take advantage of it. The
whole life in me was, at that moment, concentrated in my eyes.

It descended--the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came
down--down--close down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze
my finger between the bed-top and the bed. I felt at the side, and
discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary
light canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress,
the substance of which was concealed by the valance and its fringe. I
looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare. In the middle of
the bed-top was a huge wooden screw that had evidently worked it down
through a hole in the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down
on the substance selected for compression. The frightful apparatus moved
without making the faintest noise. There had been no creaking as it came
down; there was now not the faintest sound from the room above. Amidst a
dead and awful silence I beheld before me--in the nineteenth century,
and in the civilized capital of France--such a machine for secret murder
by suffocation as might have existed in the worst days of the
Inquisition, in the lonely inns among the Hartz Mountains, in the
mysterious tribunals of Westphalia! Still, as I looked on it, I could
not move, I could hardly breathe, but I began to recover the power of
thinking, and in a moment I discovered the murderous conspiracy framed
against me in all its horror.

My cup of coffee had been drugged, and drugged too strongly. I had been
saved from being smothered by having taken an overdose of some narcotic.
How I had chafed and fretted at the fever fit which had preserved my
life by keeping me awake! How recklessly I had confided myself to the
two wretches who had led me into this room, determined, for the sake of
my winnings, to kill me in my sleep by the surest and most horrible
contrivance for secretly accomplishing my destruction! How many men,
winners like me, had slept, as I had proposed to sleep, in