Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 117: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

tree Se ee ey yim. et TAY =a Ge customed to it all. I was making, this evening, as careful a comparison as possible between my remembered work on paper and the detailed appearance -of the room. By now, the furniture stood out clearly, in a kind of light of its own which I can roughly compare only to “phosphorescence.” It was not, quite, that. But that will serve, lame as it is, and trite perhaps, to indicate what I mean. I suppose the appearance of the room was something lke what a cat “sees” when she arches her back,—as Algernon Blackwood has pointed out, in John Silence,—and rubs against the imaginary legs of some personage entirely invisible to the man in the armchair who idly wonders what has taken possession of his house-pet. I was, as I say, studying the detail. I could not find that I had left out any- - thing salient. The detail was, too, quite clear now. There were no blurred outlines as there had been on the first few nights. My own, material furniture had, so to speak, sunk back into invisibility, which was sensible enough, secing that I had put the room in as nearly perfect darkness as I could, and there was no moon to interfere, those nights. I had run my eyes all around it, up and down the twisted legs of the great bureau, along the carved ornamentation of the top of the wardrobe, along the lines of the chairs, and had come back to the bed. It was at this point of my checking-up that I got what I must describe as the first “shock” of the entire experience. Something moved, beside the bed. [ peered, carefully, straining my eyes to catch what it might be. It had been something bulky, a slow-moving object, on the far side of the bed, blurred, somewhat, just as the original outlines had been blurred in the be- ginning of my week’s experience. The now strong and clear outlines of the bed, and what I might describe as its ethereal substance, stood between me and it. Besides, the vision of the slow-moving mass was further obscured by a ghostly mosquito-net, which had been one of the last of the details to come into the scope of my strange night-vision. Those folds of the mosquito-netting moved,—waved, before my eyes. Someone, it might almost be imagined, was getting into that bed! I sat, petrified. This was a bit too much for me. I could feel the little chills run up and down my spine. My scalp prickled. I put my hands on my knees, and pressed hard. I drew several deep breaths, “All-overish” is an old New England expression, once much used by spinsters, I believe, resident in that intellectual section of the United States. Whatever the precise connotation of the term, that was the way I felt. I could feel the reactive sensation, | mean, of that-particular portion of the whole experience, in every part of my being,— body, mind, and soul! It was,—paralyzing. I reached up a hand that was trembling violently,—I could barely control it, and the fingers, when they touched the hard-rubber button, felt numb,—and switched on the bedroom light, and spent the next ten minutes recovering. That night, when I came to retire, [ dreaded —actually dreaded,—what might come to my vision when I snapped off the light. This, however, I man- aged to reason out with myself. I used several arguments—nothing had so tar occurred to annoy or injure me; if this were to be a cumulative experience, if 115 comiliclooks.com