"About eighteen months ago," Lessing began, "my wife was in rather
bad health. It was some sort of nervous trouble, which I need not
enter into here, but the doctor said she needed complete change, and
that she must positively live in the country for some time, a year or
two at least. We came down here. I bought the piece of ground up
the hill there and built the little bungalow we are living in, with
the idea of using it later on, when her health is restored, simply as
a summer cottage. I have a fondness for dabbling in chemistry, as I
think I told you, and shortly after we moved down here I built that
sort of outdoor study you have seen, so that I could have a place,
perfectly quiet, that I could work in without being disturbed, and
without messing the house up with my things. I am not a good
sleeper. I sit up pretty late at night as a rule, and it worries me
to know I'm disturbing other people in the house or that the women
are liable to drop in in their dressing-gowns at half-past one or so,
to ask whether I'm going to bed or not.
"My laboratory has a top light for day use, and I have rigged up an
acetylene lamp just over my table, with a pretty strong light. One
night last fall I happened to be working rather late. As a rule I
have no difficulty whatever about keeping awake--it's the other way
about, in fact--but along about one o'clock I began to get rather
drowsy. It might have been the fumes of the chemicals I was using,
but I'm used to that, and anyway I don't think they could have
affected me. My interest in what I was doing was still awake, but
the other side of my mind seemed to get drowsy at the same time. I
fought against it a long while, and then gradually I seemed to get
the consciousness of something--some presence--in or near the room.
I don't know if you have ever attended a séance, Haverill?"
"Never--of any account."
My cigarette had burned down to my fingers, and I threw it away. I
was beginning to get keenly interested in his story.
"Well, if you had, you would know that one sometimes gets the sense
of a materialization some minutes before it actually takes place. I
suppose the subconscious part of one's mind acts more quickly than
the senses in receiving an impression. Anyway that was what seemed
to happen with me. I waited. I was awake; I want you to understand
that clearly. I was as awake as I am now. I saw everything about
me, but I seemed to see it in a quite impersonal sort of way.
"The top light is arranged to open in sections, the top as well as
the four sides. The side glasses were my idea for bad weather, so
that I could always have ventilation on one side or the other without
rain driving in, as it will with an ordinary skylight. I had the
middle section raised, and one side open as well. Presently I was
conscious that something was trying to enter at the glass. There
were no sound on the roof itself, which is galvanized, but I could
hear plainly a sort of scraping at the window. The inside light was
so strong that I could see nothing, but something was gradually
obscuring the opening. I had a conviction that the thing, whatever
it was, was attracted by my light, and I made an effort, with the
strange drowsiness gaining on me, to reach the lamp and turn it out.
"I was on my feet, reaching across the table, with the glare of the
lamp full in my eyes, when something--I don't know what--struck me
and threw me to the ground. My hand was already on the lamp, and I
must have managed to turn it out actually in the moment of falling.
I have a recollection of struggling for a moment there in the
darkness, of trying, with some sort of hazy instinct, to drag myself
under cover of the table, and then I suppose I became unconscious.
"When I came to it was broad daylight. I was lying on the floor,
near the table. There was broken glass near me, and I seemed to
remember the crash of it before I lost consciousness. My clothes
were torn, my arms and chest were badly scratched--I must have
somehow defended my face without knowing it--and I was stiff all over
when I moved. When I got into the open I was seized with an intense
nausea, which lasted for several minutes. My wife and sister are
used to my being up till all hours, so that my absence had caused no
uneasiness. I went into the house, washed myself as well as I could,
and went to sleep. It was then five o'clock, so that I must have
been nearly four hours unconscious."
"Did you notice any other symptoms besides the nausea?" I interrupted.
"Yes; an intense fatigue. It was not sleepiness. I was tired out,
as if I had been through some great exertion."
"Well?" I said, for I knew he had not finished.
"That was last October, the twenty-fourth, to be exact. Since then
the thing has happened twice again. On each occasion I have had the
same premonitory drowsiness. I have struggled against it, and it has
mastered me at just the critical moment. The second time when I came
to I was more badly hurt than before. My sister happened to be up
early that morning, and there was no disguising my condition from
her. She went off for Lennox. When he came he fixed me up and gave
me a sleeping draught--which I didn't need--and I slept nearly the
whole day. He held the opinion, which I wrested from him later, that
I had had some sort of seizure, the result of overwork, and that I
had inflicted the injuries on myself during unconsciousness. The
rest he put down to hallucination. He was a fool, and I told him so.
Whatever the thing was, it was no hallucination."
"How wide was the skylight open?"
"About eighteen inches."
"Did you find any traces in the morning?"
"Not a mark. The building is high, as you know, and the sides are of
perfectly plain boarding. There is nothing that could give foothold,
except to a monkey, and the nearest tree is eight feet off. Oh, I
went over the whole ground carefully! Whatever it was that came, it
did not reach me from the ground."