He was not to sleep restfully that night.  He waked again, but very slowly, and without any movement of his body.  He lay with his face towards the door, dreamily considering that the landlord, for all his pride in his new paint, had employed a bad workman who had left a black strip of the door unpainted,—­a fairly wide strip, too, which his host should never have overlooked.

Wogan was lazily determining to speak to the landlord about it when his half-awakened mind was diverted by a curious phenomenon, a delusion of the eyes such as he had known to have befallen him before when he had stared for a long while on any particular object:  the strip of black widened and widened.  Wogan waited for it to contract, as it would be sure to do.  But it did not contract, and—­so Wogan waked up completely.

He waked up with a shock of the heart, with all his senses startled and strained.  But he had been gradually waking before, and so by neither movement nor cry did he betray that he was awake.  He had not locked the door of his room; that widening strip of black ran vertically down from the lintel to the ground and between the white door and the white door frame.  The door was being cautiously pushed open; the strip of black was the darkness of the passage coming through.

Wogan slid his hand beneath his pillow, and drew the knife from its sheath as silently as the door opened.  The strip of black ceased to widen, there was a slight scuffling sound upon the floor which Wogan was at no loss to understand.  It was the sound of a man crawling into the room upon his hands and knees.

Wogan lay on his side and felt grateful to his host,—­an admirable man,—­for he had painted his door white, and now he crawled through it on his hands and knees.  No doubt he would crawl to the side of the bed; he did.  To feel, no doubt, for Mr. Wogan’s coat and breeches and any little letter which might be hiding in the pockets.  But here Wogan was wrong.  For he saw a dark thing suddenly on the counterpane at the edge of the bed.  The dark thing travelled upwards very softly; it had four fingers and a thumb.  It was, no doubt, travelling towards the pillow, and as soon as it got there—­but Wogan watching that hand beneath his dosed eyelids had again to admit that he was wrong.  It did not travel towards the pillow; to his astonishment it stole across towards him, it touched his chest very gently, and then he understood.  The hand was creeping upwards towards his throat.

Meanwhile Wogan had seen no face, though the face must be just below the level of the bed.  He only saw the hand and the arm behind it.  He moved as if in his sleep, and the hand disappeared.  As if in his sleep, he flung out his left arm and felt for the sign-board standing beside his bed.  The bed was soft.  Wogan wanted something hard, and it had occurred to him that the sign-board would very well serve his turn.  An idea, too, which seemed to him diverting, had presented itself to his mind.