Page 123 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Elective English—III

Notes watch the bed-top. I was literally spellbound by it. If I had heard footsteps behind me, I could
not have turned round; if a means of escape had been miraculously provided for me, I could not
have moved to take advantage of it. The whole life in me was, at that moment, concentrated in
my eyes.
It descended—the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came down—down—close down; so
close that there was not room now to squeeze my finger between the bed-top and the bed. I felt
at the sides, and discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary light
canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress, the substance of which was
concealed by the valance and its fringe. I looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare.
In the middle of the bed-top was a huge wooden screw that had evidently worked it down
through a hole in the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down on the substance selected
for compression. The frightful apparatus moved without making the faintest noise. There had
been no creaking as it came down; there was now not the faintest sound from the room above.
Amid a dead and awful silence, I beheld before me—in the nineteenth century, and in the
civilized capital of France—such a machine for secret murder by suffocation as might have
existed in the worst days of the Inquisition, in the lonely inns among the Hartz Mountains, in the
mysterious tribunals of Westphalia! Still, as I looked on it, I could not move, I could hardly
breathe, but I began to recover the power of thinking, and in a moment, I discovered the
murderous conspiracy framed against me in all its horror.

My cup of coffee had been drugged and drugged too strongly. I had been saved from being
smothered by having taken an overdose of some narcotic. How I had chafed and fretted at the
fever fit, which had preserved my life by keeping me awake! How recklessly I had confided
myself to the two wretches who had led me into this room, determined, for the sake of my
winnings, to kill me in my sleep by the surest and most horrible contrivance for secretly
accomplishing my destruction! How many men, winners like me, had slept, as I had proposed to
sleep, in that bed, and had never been seen or heard of more! I shuddered at the bare idea of it.
However, ere long, all thought was again suspended by the sight of the murderous canopy
moving once more. After it had remained on the bed—as nearly as I could guess—about ten
minutes, it began to move up again. The villains who worked it from above evidently believed
that their purpose was now accomplished. Slowly and silently, as it had descended, that horrible
bed-top rose towards its former place. When it reached the upper extremities of the four posts,
it reached the ceiling, too. Neither hole nor screw could be seen; the bed became in appearance
an ordinary bed again—the canopy an ordinary canopy—even to the most suspicious eyes.
Now, for the first time, I was able to move—to rise from my knees—to dress myself in my upper
clothing—and to consider of how I should escape. If I betrayed by the smallest noise that the
attempt to suffocate me had failed, I was certain to be murdered. Had I made any noise already?
I listened intently, looking towards the door.
No! No footsteps in the passage outside—no sound of a tread, light or heavy, in the room
above—absolute silence everywhere. Besides locking and bolting my door, I had moved an old
wooden chest against it, which I had found under the bed. To remove this chest (my blood ran
cold as I thought of what its contents might be!) without making some disturbance was impossible;
and to think of escaping through the house, now barred up for the night, was sheer insanity.
Only one chance was left me—the window. I stole to it on tiptoe.
My bedroom was on the first floor, above an entresol, and looked into a back street, which you
have sketched in your view. I raised my hand to open the window, knowing that on that action
hung, by the merest hairbreadth, my chance of safety. They keep vigilant watch in a House of
Murder. If any part of the frame cracked, if the hinge creaked, I was a lost man! It must have
occupied me at least five minutes, reckoning by time—five hours, reckoning by suspense—to
open that window. I succeeded in doing it silently—in doing it with all the dexterity of a
housebreaker—and then looked down into the street. To leap the distance beneath me would be

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