She searched the room once more, however-every corner, under the bed, the chest of drawers and the dressing-table, before she got into bed again, her feet icily cold. And yet again before settling down she looked round, perplexed and inquiring. Placing the matches beside the candlestick, she blew out the light. Then, half-turning on her side with her face to the wall, she composed herself to sleep.
Resolutely putting from her mind any sense of the supernatural, she shut her eyes with confidence of coming sleep. While she was, however, still within the borders of wakefulness, and wholly conscious, she felt the Thing jump from the floor upon her legs, and crouch there with that deadening pressure which was not weight. Now with a start of anger she raised herself, and shot out a determined hand to seize the Thing, whatever it was. Her hand grasped nothing, and again she distinctly heard a soft thud as of something jumping on the floor. Exasperated, she drew herself out of bed, lit the candle again, and began another search. Nothing was to be seen; but she had now the curious sense of an unseen presence. She went to the door, opened it, and looked out into the narrow hall. Nothing was to be seen there. Then she closed the door again, and stood looking at it meditatively for a moment. It had a lock and key; yet it had never been locked in the years they had lived on the Sagalac. She did not know whether the key would turn in the lock. After a moment’s hesitation, she shrugged her shoulders and turned the key. It rasped, proved stubborn, but at last came home with a click. Then she turned to the window. It was open about three inches at the bottom. She closed it tight, and fastened it, then stood for a moment in the middle of the room looking at both door and window.
She was conscious of a sense of suffocation. Never in her life had she slept with door or window or tentflap entirely closed. Never before had she been shut in all night behind closed doors and sealed windows. Now, as the sense of imprisonment was felt, her body protested; her spirit resented the funereal embrace of security. It panted for the freedom which gives the challenge to danger and the courage to face it.
She went to the window and opened it slightly at the top, and then sought her bed again; but even as she lay down, something whispered to her mind that it was folly to lock the door and yet leave the window open, if it was but an inch. With an exclamation of self-reproach, and a vague indignation at something, she got up and closed the window once more.
Again she composed herself to sleep, lying now with her face turned to the window and the door. She was still sure that she had been the victim of a hallucination which, emerging from her sleep, had invaded the borders of wakefulness, and then had reproduced itself in a waking illusion—an imitation of its original existence.
Resolved to conquer any superstitious feeling, she invoked sleep, and was on its borders once more when she was startled more violently than before.
The Thing had sprung again upon her feet and was crouched there. Wide awake, she waited for a moment to make sure that she was not mad, or that she was not asleep or in a half-dream. In the pause, she felt the Thing draw up towards her knees, dragging its body along with tiger-like closeness, and with that strange pressure which was not weight but power.
With a cry which was no longer doubt, but agonized apprehension, she threw the Thing from her with a motion of both hands and feet; and, as she did so, she felt a horrible cold air breathing from a bloodless body, chill her hand.
In another instant she was on her feet again. With shaking fingers she lighted the candle yet once more, after which she lighted a lamp standing upon the chest of drawers. The room was almost brilliantly bright now. With a gesture of incredulity she looked round. The doors and windows were sealed tight, and there was nothing to be seen; yet she was more than ever conscious of a presence grown more manifest. For a moment she stood staring straight before her at the place where it seemed to be. She realized its malice and its hatred, and an intense anger and hatred took possession of her. She had always laughed at such things even when thrilled by wonder and manufactured terrors. But now there was a sense of conflict, of evil, of the indefinable things in which so many believed.
Suddenly she remembered an ancient Sage of her tribe, who, proficient in mysteries and secret rites gathered from nations as old as Phoenicia and Egypt and as modern as Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in awe, for his fame had travelled where he could not follow. To Fleda in her earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood facing the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had recited to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of the Between World. This exorcism was, as he had told her, more powerful than that which the Christian exorcists used, and the symbol of exorcism was not unlike the sign of the Cross, to which was added genuflection of Assyrian origin.