“That’s right enough,” Mr. Jansen interrupted; “and Bertha’s never behaved like that since we moved her into another room.”
“Well, we experienced nothing more disturbing than bad dreams for the first fortnight or so, and nothing happened until we were both aroused one night by hearing Bertha scream. We lit a candle and got out of bed. ‘What is the matter,’ I asked; ‘are you in pain?’ ‘No, Poppa,’ she said. ‘Not in pain, but so frightened. I kept hearing the bed creak, and I thought one of you was coming out of it to kill me.’
“‘Why, what nonsense,’ I said. ‘You’ve been dreaming again, child.’ Then, turning to my wife, I remarked, ‘If she has many more of these nightmares we had better send for the doctor. Don’t you think so?’ My wife made no answer, but suddenly gave a cry and pointed at the bed. ‘Otto!’ she cried. ‘Look at the clothes! We never left them like that. What’s happened to them?’ I looked. The clothes were all heaped together down the centre of the bed exactly in the shape of a human body, with the face turned towards us.
“We all three stared at it in open-mouthed silence, and the longer we gazed, the more pronounced grew the features, until they at last became so lifelike, so evil, that my wife and I instinctively shrank back against the child’s cot, and tried to hide the thing from her. My wife declares she saw it move.”
“It did,” Mrs. Jansen said. “I saw it distinctly shift nearer to us. So did Bertha.”
“I know you were both agreed on that point,” Mr. Jansen went on. “All I can say is I didn’t see it do that, but I started praying, and whether it was the effect of my prayers or not, the clothes gradually became clothes again, and, after soothing Bertha, we scrambled back into bed, feeling rather ashamed we had been so frightened.
“The following evening after Bertha had been put to bed, we heard her scream again, and we ran up and found her quivering under the bedclothes. She said our bed had begun rattling, just as if we were moving in it. On turning to examine it, we found the clothes just as we had seen them in the night, with one of the pillows pressed and moulded into the speaking likeness of a face.
“As I looked at it, the features became convulsed with such an indescribable expression of hellishness that I backed against the table and upset the light.
“On re-lighting it, the thing on the bed had disappeared, and the clothes were once again normal. That same night, some time after we were in bed, I awoke to find myself being roughly shaken by the shoulders. It was my wife, but, perhaps I had better let her go on with the story.”
“I shook him,” Mrs. Jansen explained, “because a feeling had suddenly come over me that I must kill Bertha. The very first night we slept in the room I became obsessed with a passionate desire to see someone die, a desire that I can assure you was absolutely novel to me, because I flatter myself I am naturally kind-hearted and extremely sensitive to seeing other people suffer.”