I lay quite still. My muscles seemed frozen. I wanted to run, but it was like it is in a nightmare when you try to run but can’t. I was rigid with terror. The breathing came nearer, bending over me. Hands touched my bare stomach, sliding across the cringing flesh till they touched the stump of my left leg. They felt where it fitted into the cup of my artificial leg. Then they began to move up my body, feeling their way in the darkness as though they knew the shape of every muscle, every bone.
I stiffened in sudden, mortal terror. I knew those fingers. Lying there I knew who it was bending over me in the dark. I knew the touch of his hand and the way he breathed as certainly as if I could see him, and I screamed. It was a scream torn from the memory of the pain those hands had caused me. And as my scream went shrieking round the room, I lashed out with the frenzied violence of a man fighting for his life. But all I hit was air.
I thought I heard the sound of soft shoes on tiles and then a click of the windows closing. The air in the room no longer stirred. I sat up, gulping for breath in great sobs. My chest was heaving so that I thought my lungs would burst. I couldn’t still my panic.
Therewith a shock the windows flew open. Somebody floundered against the table. I screamed at him to go away. I could hear him moving blindly across the room. Panic gripped me so that I could scarcely breathe. And all the time I was screaming at him the only sound that came out of my mouth was an inarticulate retching for breath.
The central light clicked on and I was blinking at a figure in scarlet pyjamas. It was the man from the next room. 標hat’s the trouble?’ he asked. ‘What’s going on?’
I tried to explain, but I couldn’t get any words out. My heart was pounding and I seemed to have no control over my tongue. My breath just came in great sobs. Then I was sick, a dry retching. ‘Are you ill? Would you like a doctor?’
‘No,’ I gasped. I could feel my eyes dilating in horror at the suggestion. ‘No. I’m all right.’
‘Well, you don’t look it.’ He came over and stood staring down at me. ‘You must have had one hell of a nightmare.’
I realised I was half-naked and fumbled with the buttons of my pyjama jacket. ‘It wasn’t a nightmare,’ I managed to get out. ‘There was someone here, in the room. His hands were—’ It sounded so absurd when I tried to put it into words. ‘He was going to do something to me. I think he was going to kill me.’
‘Here, let me pull the bedclothes round you. Now then, you just lie still and relax.’