I got into bed, feeling so cowed, that I could not even resent, with a proper show of dignity, her monstrous accusation. That anyone could have been wicked enough to accuse me of such a thing! I was trembling all over. I believed that the thing had shrieked, and was haunted by a horrible doubt that it was alive. Never before was I in such a state of mind and body. My brain was all in a whirl. I could do nothing but lie there shivering; my joints and muscles seemed to be possessed by an attack of twitching spasms, as if I had been suddenly smitten with some hideous disease.
I heard Miss Ashton return to her own bed. Then a voice whispered in my ear, so gently that it could have been audible to no one but me—
“Never mind, dear. She’s a beast!”
It was Lucy. I put out my hand. She was leaning over me.
“Kiss me,” I muttered.
She kissed me. It did me good. I held her, for a moment, to me. It comforted me to feel her face against mine.
“Now go to sleep! and don’t you dream!”
It was easy enough to talk; it was harder to do. I did not often dream. Not nearly so much as some of the other girls, who were always telling us of the things they dreamed about. Rubbish it mostly was. I always said they made up three parts of it, not believing that such stuff could get into the heads of sensible people, even when they were asleep. That night I dreamt while I was wide awake. I was overcome by a sort of nightmare horror, which held me, with staring eyes and racking head, motionless between the sheets, as if I had been glued to them. It was as if the thing which Miss Ashton had thrown on the floor was in an agony of pain, and as if it had communicated its sufferings to me.
At last I suppose I must have gone to sleep. And then it was worse than ever. What I endured in my sleep that night no one could conceive. It was as if I were continually passing through endless chambers of nameless horrors. With it all were mixed up the events of the evening. I saw Isaac Rudd, and the creature in the canvas cloth, and the two short men, and the person in the long black coat. They kept popping in and out, always in full enjoyment of my tortures. There were Emily and I, standing at the top of an enormous flight of steps, in pitch-black darkness, in frightful weather, outside the door of some dreadful place, and there were those dreadful creatures jeering at us because no one would let us in. And Tom—I knew that somewhere near Tom was crying. And the thing which was in the scrap of paper was with me all the night. It was always on me somewhere; now on my throat, biting through the skin; now on my breast, drawing the life right out of me; now on my toes, hampering my feet, so that I could scarcely lift them up and down; now inside my mouth, filling me with a horrible choking sense of nausea.
But perhaps the strangest part of it all was that, when I awoke, there actually was something on my forehead. I felt it against my chin. Giving my head a sudden shake it slipped off on to the pillow at my side. I sat up. It was broad day. I saw it as plain as could be. A little painted thing, tricked out in ridiculously contrasting shades of green, and pink, and yellow. As Miss Ashton had said, it might have been a toy. I had seen things not unlike it in the shop, among the Japanese and Chinese curiosities. Or it might have been a tiny representation of some preposterous heathen god, with beads for eyes.