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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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