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, 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 bedtop 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.  And 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, breathless.  The candle, fully spent, went out; but the moonlight still brightened the room.  Down and down, without pausing and without sounding, came the bedtop, 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 sideways 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 watch the bedtop.  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.