Everywhere there was a cold and mistlike darkness. Shapes emerged.
Billows of whiter mist loomed nearer through the darkness, came from
every corner of utmost space. The dark heaven departed as a scroll
when it is rolled together; the white billows poured in on every side,
engulphed me, choked me with icy fumes. Was I dead, and awake in cold
Eternity?
The mists turned into molten suns who scorched my body till only the
soul was left, naked against the burning heat.
I died again, to wake once more in a new causeless Eternity of terror.
Always there was a menace, everywhere a fear. I knew I was dreaming,
in a dream within a dream; this gave me no ease, as I knew that dreams
were true. Rather were the pain, the terror, the pursuit, more real,
more awful, than waking ills. My agony of soul was unsearchable; there
was no God even to cry to, for soon I was God, in His loneliness
without help or escape, without beginning and without end.
Human shapes, with a horror and a power to do me evil far beyond their
real stature in my past, pursued, reached, assailed, slew me. Always I
died, and always I woke to a new universe of more sickening fear. Aunt
Jael, Benamuckee--every evil face and evil fact from the old days of
the life I had once dreamt on the earth, invested now with infinite
power and unimaginable horror--menaced me, dogged my piteous flight
along the unending pathway of Eternity. Uncle Simeon was there. The
most horrible fear of my childhood, he was the most horrible now: an
Evil more ghastly than human memory or imagination. "Twelve years ago,
twelve years ago!" I whispered. He saw, rushed to the door, while I
rushed madlier across the roof-room to my attic. This time he would
outrun me. No, I was in time. I tore through the aperture and just had
time, shivering in fright, to huddle down upon the floor before the key
turned and he was in upon me, over me, peering at me with unpitying
cruelty and hate, I lay numbly staring at the yellow-pale face, the
savage blue eyes, the wet thin lips, the honey-coloured beard--now
tinged with grey--just as it would be now in "real" life, I had enough
reason in my dream to be able (in a frightening lapse from feeling to
thought) to reflect. The face came nearer, gleamed physically its hate,
seemed to breathe at me.
"Oh, God!" I prayed wildly, "Where am I? Tell me, oh tell me! If a
dream, of thy pity awaken me: if life after death, slay me for ever!"
Now he was Simeon Greeber the poisoner; he was pouring something into a
phial, he took a tiny white tablet--fear made my dream-eyes keen--and
dissolved it in the liquid. Some one was propping me up, his eyes were
gleaming with hope, he lifted the glass to my lips--
"Poisoner!" I shrieked and dashed the glass away. I put my hands
swiftly to my eyes, and they were _open_. My bed, the Château Villebecq
bedroom, half-drawn blinds, a hundred impressions instantaneously
reached me. I was awake again, and in this world; my chin and neck were
wet with the spilled liquid, and he was there, the this-world Uncle
Simeon, hastily picking up bits of glass. He was real, and I knew it;
he looked up and knew that I knew.
Could I sham him into doubting it? My senses had not properly returned,
and flog my brain as I would, in a frantic second of endeavour, she
could not tell me how or why I was here in bed, how or why Uncle Simeon
was here beside me.
I smiled, assumed my frankest stare, and shammed that I was dreaming
again. (Unless it was, after all, a dream unnameably real, a dream
within a dream.) Staring at him fixedly as though I did not see
him--and for a half-moment I saw doubt in his eyes--"_Madam_," I cried,
"some one has tried to poison me. Find him, find him!"
Deceived or no, he was not losing his chance. "One will find him soon,
one will find him," he whispered soothingly, the while preparing
another potion below the level of the bed: "Meanwhile, dearie, drink
something to make you better." Swiftly he seized me, grasped my neck as
in a vice, and forced the glass against my lips.
Somehow I got my mouth away, somehow I managed to shriek, to shriek
till I seemed to be losing my senses again. In dream-fashion shapes
crowded round me once more: Elise and Suzanne--and the Stranger.
Whether real shapes or not, they were Friends. I was saved. All would
be well. And I fell into a dreamless sleep.
To this day I do not know with absolute sureness whether these moments
were dream or waking life. Little is the difference, for is not the one
as real, or as unreal, as the other?