Miss Hunter replied laughingly: "I can't tell you anything about them, for the very good reason that they don't exist. I am the first tenant of this house. It was only built two years ago, and remained vacant for the first twelve months."
Then I told her very cautiously of my feeling about my room, and that I had supposed it might have to do with someone who had slept there before she took the house.
Two or three of the young girls were in the room at the time, and it struck me that one of them—the one who was there for her second winter—looked a little surprised and interested; but the matron passed off the subject with a few bantering words, and again I had no suspicion of the truth.
Six weeks passed, and my last night in the house had arrived. My nurse friend was in the habit of giving me massage twice a day, before getting up in the morning and the last thing at night. She left me on this occasion about ten-thirty p.m., expressing a hope that I should soon sleep, and have a good night before my long journey next day.
"Not much doubt of that," I murmured. "Why, I'm half asleep already!" And I turned round, tired and yet soothed by the massage, and soon fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Several hours must have passed, when I woke up, trembling and terror-struck, after passing through an experience which seems as vivid to me to-day as on that February night or early morning. My heart was beating, my limbs trembling, beads of perspiration covered my face, as I discovered later.
No wonder! I had been through an experience from which few, I imagine, return to tell the tale. For I had passed through every detail of dying, and dying a very hard and difficult death.
Body and soul were being literally torn apart, in spite of the desperate effort to cling together, and my spirit seemed to be launched into unknown depths of darkness and possible horror. It was the feeling that I did not know where I was going nor what awaited me that seemed so terrible—this and the horrible fight for mastery between my poor body and soul and some unknown force that was inexorably set upon dividing them.
This, so far as I can express it, exactly describes the experience I had just gone through, and from which I had awakened in such abject terror.
As the beating of my heart subsided, and I could think more calmly, I remembered with startling distinctness that in the very worst of the struggle I had been vainly endeavouring to say that text in the twenty-third Psalm which begins: