(French of Lermina: E. C. Waggener: For Short Stories.)
More nervous than drunk, he closed and locked the door, and by the
light of a taper went to bed. Profound silence! Then, on his ear-drums
tinkled a sound, crystalline, swelling to a vibration, like the notes
of a hautboy interspersed with trumpet calls. The pillow, too, rose and
fell under his head, sucking the brain like an exhauster, to eject it
like a pump.
He opened his eyes. The light hushed the symphony; constrained the
pillow to immobility. The taper flickered and leaped. Then, in the
aureole of light, something black appeared, big, sprawling, with great
antennæ. Ugh! he hated beasts! A beast? No. His arm hung from the bed;
it was the shadow of his hand he saw, thrown by the taper. He turned
on his back, seeing and not seeing; a misty film stretching across the
sclerotic like the nyctoloptic membrane of birds. Fiery atoms danced in
the darkness; his palate like a stopper closed his throat and gummed
it with saliva. Then, in that obscurity, he was conscious of a slow
gliding. It was the door, which he had locked, opening with wing-like
sweeps, uncovering a hole long, narrow, always broader, never longer,
showing black and always blacker.
He stared, lips puffed, parched and parted. But from that hole, that
abyss of nothingness, nothing issued. He waited; a locked door would
never thus open without something coming! He waited; still nothing;
more and more feebly the taper danced; soon it would fall, splutter,
drown in oil. He quickly decided. That something that did not come
_should not come_! Doubling like a serpent he slipped to the floor,
threw himself forward, seized, slammed the door, braced it with one
hand, turned the key with the other. It was done! Breathless, panting,
he returned to bed; not to sleep. His hot skin pricked and stung him;
that devilish symphony, with the roar of a torrent, had recommenced.
And that door, which a second time he had closed, was a second time
reopening, swinging itself back like a vertical sepulchre. The
wing-like sweeps began anew; the black hole widened, blacker always
blacker, then--the taper fell, flashed, died to ember....
He was dead when they found him. The door? Both locked and bolted; but
neither lock nor bolt had caught the socket.