time.

At last I dashed the cursed thing from me, and ran for my life. I got to
some depot, I don't know what one, and took the cars. I didn't know or care
where I went; at about ten miles above Cincinnati I left the cars. At
times, for a little while, I could reason and understand my condition. I
found, on looking around, that I was in a little town, where a young man
lived who had been a college mate of mine. I went and told him my
condition, and he did for me everything that one friend can do for another.
But as night came on my tormentors returned in ten thousand hideous forms,
and drove me raving mad. I went to a hotel, and there they persuaded me to
lie down. Just as soon as I got to bed I reached my hand over, and it
touched a cold, dead corpse. The room lighted up with a hundred bright
lights, and that corpse, that now appeared to me like nothing that had ever
been visible in human shape, opened its large, glassy, dead eyes, and
stared me in the face. Then its whole face and form turned to a demon, and
its red eyes glared at me, and its whole face was full of passion,
fierceness and frenzy. I shrank back from the loathsome monster. On looking
around, I beheld everything in my vision turn to a living devil. Chairs,
stand, bed, and my very clothes, took shape and form, and lived; and every
one of them cursed me. Then in one corner of my room, a form, larger and
more hideous than all the others, appeared. Its look was that of a witch,
or hag, or rather like descriptions that I had read of them. It marched
right up to me, with a face and look that will haunt me to my grave. It
began to talk to me, saying that it would thrust its fingers through
my ribs, and drink my blood; then it would stick out its long, bony,
skeleton-like fingers, that looked like sharp knives, and ha! ha! Then it
said it would sit upon me and press me to hell; that it would roast me with
brimstone, and dash my burnt entrails into my eyes. Saying this, it sprang
at me, and, for what seemed to me an age, I fought the unearthly thing. At
last it said, "Let me go!" and when it did, it glided to the door, and as
it went out, gave me a fiendish look, and said, "I will soon be back, with
all the legions of hell; I will be the death of you; you shall not be alive
one hour." I left my room, and just as soon as I touched the street I
stepped on a dead body. The whole pavement and street were filled; men, and
women, and little children, lying with their pa