“That is all, Monsieur,” said he; “Farewell!”
XXX
He had disappeared.
But a moment later I was conscious of his presence close behind me. I knew that he was standing there, his eyes fixed upon me; for between my neck and shoulders I could feel a weight, an impact, like the one I had experienced when the Vicomte Antoine found me lying on the heath, and the one with which the Count François welcomed me on my entrance into the House of the Secret....
Like these, I say ... but no! The present pressure was something incomparably heavier and more forceful—a veritable succession of hammer blows descending upon me with a violence that left me bruised and dazed.
Then suddenly ... everything began to go round and round—an overpowering dizziness assailed me. The lens of the golden sparkles, the armchair opposite me, the clock in the corner, the antique chest against the wall, all seemed to be caught up in a cyclonic whirl of which I was the tottering, collapsing center. In spite of the downy prop behind my head and the cushions that contained me all around, I seemed to be falling, falling, or soaring, soaring; and my frenzied fingers clutched the arms of my chair, which, to my sense, now plunged into bottomless depths, now darted upwards to impossible heights, rocking frightfully meanwhile and even turning completely over and around. A measureless void was all about me, and my single intelligent thought was one of surprise that I was not hurtling into this gulf of nothingness.
An atrocious torture, but a short one! A deadening stupor came over me progressively, first relieving and finally overcoming my dizziness. My sensation now was one of extreme fatigue, more exhausting than any I had ever before experienced. My head especially seemed emptied of all its cerebral substance as a result of the first shocks I had received; and it lay helpless, lifeless, in its hollow formed in the upholstery. A whimsical interest in what time it might possibly be came to obsess me. I remember that I could hardly move my eyes when I tried to turn them toward the clock; and if I did succeed eventually in focussing them on that point, I could not read the clock’s hands, so dark and murky had my eyeballs become, so insensitive my retina.
A curious tingling began at the ends of my fingers and toes, and spread upwards into my hands and arms, and into my feet and legs. It was like the beginning of a cramp.