--“Door locked, door not locked, Zombi comes and goes.... I do not like
this house.... Missié, leave that candle burning!”
He uttered the last phrase imperatively, without using the respectful
_souplé_--just as a guide speaks at an instant of common danger; and
his tone conveyed to me the contagion of his fear. Despite the candle,
I knew for one moment the sensation of nightmare outside of sleep! The
coincidences stunned reason; and the hideous primitive fancy fitted
itself, like a certitude, to the explanation of cause and effect.
The similarity of my vision and the vision of Louis, the creaking of
the floor heard by us both, the visit of the nightmare to every room
in succession,--these formed a more than unpleasant combination of
evidence. I tried the planking with my foot in the place where I
thought I had seen the figure: it uttered the very same loud creak that
I had heard before. “_Ça pa ka sam révé_,” said Louis. No!--that was not
like dreaming. I left the candle burning, and went back to bed--not to
sleep, but to think. Louis lay down again, with his hand on the hilt of
his cutlass.
* * * * *
I thought for a long time. All was now silent below. The heat was at
last lifting; and occasional whiffs of cooler air from the garden
announced the wakening of a land-breeze. Louis, in spite of his recent
terror, soon began to snore again. Then I was startled by hearing a
plank creak--quite loudly,--the same plank that I had tried with my
foot. This time Louis did not seem to hear it. There was nothing there.
It creaked twice more,--and I understood. The intense heat first, and
the change of temperature later, had been successively warping and
unwarping the wood so as to produce those sounds. In the state of
dreaming, which is the state of imperfect sleep, noises may be audible
enough to affect imagination strongly,--and may startle into motion a
long procession of distorted fancies. At the same time it occurred to me
that the almost concomitant experiences of nightmare in the different
rooms could be quite sufficiently explained by the sickening atmospheric
oppression of the hour.
There still remained the ugly similitude of the two dreams to be
accounted for; and a natural solution of this riddle also, I was able
to find after some little reflection. The coincidence had certainly
been startling; but the similitude was only partial. That which my
guide had seen in his nightmare was a familiar creation of West-Indian
superstition--probably of African origin. But the shape that I had
dreamed about used to vex my sleep in childhood,--a phantom created for
me by the impression of a certain horrible Celtic story which ought not
to have been told to any child blessed, or cursed, with an imagination.