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Unit 9: The Traveller's Story of a Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins




          While I still lingered over this very improving and intellectual employment, my thoughts  Notes
          insensibly began to wander. The moonlight shining into the room reminded me of a certain
          moonlight night in England—the night after a picnic party in a Welsh valley. Every incident of
          the drive homeward, through lovely scenery, which the moonlight made lovelier than ever,
          came back to my remembrance, though I had never given the picnic a thought for years; though,
          if I had tried to recollect it, I could certainly have recalled little or nothing of that scene long past.
          Of all the wonderful faculties that help to tell us, we are immortal, which speaks the sublime
          truth more eloquently than memory? Here was I, in a strange house of the most suspicious
          character, in a situation of uncertainty, and even of peril, which might seem to make the cool
          exercise of my recollection almost out of the question; nevertheless, remembering, quite
          involuntarily, place, people, conversations, minute circumstances of every kind, which I had
          thought forgotten forever; which I could not possibly have recalled at will, even under the most
          favourable auspices. In addition, what cause had produced in a moment the whole of this
          strange, complicated, mysterious effect? Nothing but some rays of moonlight shining in at my
          bedroom window.
          I was still thinking of the picnic—of our merriment on the drive home—of the sentimental
          young woman who would quote “Childe Harold” because it was moonlight. I was absorbed by
          these past scenes and past amusements, when, in an instant, the thread on which my memories
          hung snapped asunder; my attention immediately came back to present things more vividly
          than ever, and I found myself, I neither knew why nor wherefore, looking hard at the picture
          again. Looking for what?

          Good God! The man had pulled his hat down on his brows! No! The hat itself was gone! Where
          was the conical crown? Where the feathers—three white, two green? Not there! In place of the
          hat and feathers, what dusky object was it that now hid his forehead, his eyes, and his shading
          hand? Was the bed moving?
          I turned on my back and looked up. Was I mad? Drunk? Dreaming? Giddy again? or was the top
          of the bed really moving down—sinking slowly, regularly, silently, horribly, right down
          throughout the whole of its length and breadth—right down upon me, as I lay underneath?
          My blood seemed to stand still. A deadly paralysing coldness stole all over me as I turned my
          head round on the pillow and determined to test whether the bed-top was really moving or not,
          by keeping my eye on the man in the picture.
          The next look in that direction was enough. The dull, black, frowzy outline of the valance above
          me was within an inch of being parallel with his waist. I still looked breathlessly. Moreover,
          steadily and slowly—very slowly—I saw the figure, and the line of frame below the figure,
          vanish, as the valance moved down before it.
          I am, constitutionally, anything but timid. I have been on more than one occasion in peril of my
          life, and have not lost my self-possession for an instant; but when the conviction first settled on
          my mind that the bed-top was really moving, was steadily and continuously sinking down
          upon me, I looked up shuddering, helpless, panic-stricken, beneath the hideous machinery for
          murder, which was advancing closer and closer to suffocate me where I lay.
          I looked up, motionless, speechless, and breathless. The candle, fully spent, went out; but the
          moonlight still brightened the room. Down and down, without pausing and without sounding,
          came the bed-top, and still my panic-terror seemed to bind me faster and faster to the mattress
          on which I lay—down and down it sank, till the dusty odour from the lining of the canopy came
          stealing into my nostrils.
          At that final moment, the instinct of self-preservation startled me out of my trance, and I moved
          at last. There was just room for me to roll myself sidewise off the bed. As I dropped noiselessly
          to the floor, the edge of the murderous canopy touched me on the shoulder. Without stopping to
          draw my breath, without wiping the cold sweat from my face, I rose instantly on my knees to



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