Under Lock and Key: A Story. Volume 3 (of 3)

by T. W. Speight

Again he was woke up in the middle of the night by feeling a wet hand laid across his mouth. This persistent disturbance of his sleep, together with the very want of sleep itself, was beginning to tell upon his nerves. When was the terrible persecution to end?

The sensation was so horrible as utterly to banish sleep for the time being, and again he lay tossing to and fro, waiting with impatient eyes for the dawn. About eight he rose and made a show of eating some breakfast. After breakfast he sat in his easy-chair before the fire, and while thus sitting he felt a sweet drowsiness steal through all his limbs. It was broad daylight now, and with the darkness some portion of the fear inspired by the Hand had vanished. He could almost afford to smile at his fright of the last three nights. In any case, he let the drowsiness have its way, and so in three minutes more he was fast asleep before the fire.

But he had not been more than ten minutes asleep when he was disturbed in precisely the same way that he had been disturbed before. And, if his senses did not deceive him, he heard the echo of a low malignant laugh close at the back of his chair. He stared round half expecting to see he knew not what. But every nook and corner of the room was plainly visible. There was no one there but himself. He shuddered from head to foot, and sank back in his chair, and burst into tears.

To-day the weather was even stormier than yesterday: a higher wind, more rain. He was not hurried for time, and to cross either to Southampton or Weymouth in the condition in which he then was, would be sheer madness. He would have medical advice while thus laid up in ordinary at the "Pomme d'Or," and would get cured of his cold, and have an opium mixture to make him sleep, and would wait for fairer weather and a gentler sea before attempting to continue his voyage. If he could only recover the lost tone of his nerves, he felt thoroughly convinced that he should never more be haunted by that nightmare Hand.

Captain Ducie had always held the whole tribe of doctors in abhorrence. He had not been under the hands of one of the brotherhood for more than twenty years, and nothing could have been more strongly indicative of the state to which he was now reduced, than the fact of his determining of his own free will to call in medical advice. He was, in very truth, wretchedly ill, thoroughly woe-begone.

The doctor came, saw him, listened to what he had to say, and prescribed. Ducie entered into no details as to the mode in which his sleep was broken. He merely said that he was unable to get his proper rest in consequence of being so frequently troubled with nightmare, and he begged of the doctor to provide him with a powerful opiate. Medicine came: two bottles: one for the improvement of his cold, the second to be taken just before getting into bed.

Ducie spent a doleful day enough. He had no heart left to read either a newspaper or a magazine, and the very thought of a cigar turned him sick. This latter he regarded as a very bad sign. "When a fellow gets past his smoke, he's not of much account in this world," he said to himself with a sigh. Still, he did not fail to derive some grains of comfort from the hope that with the assistance of his friend the doctor he should succeed in cheating that terrible nightmare which seemed bent on slowly pressing his life out an inch at a time.

He waited with desperate patience without any further attempt at sleep till he heard the people below stairs shutting up the hotel for the night. Then he got into bed, and marking off, with his forefinger on the bottle, a dose and a half of the draught, he swallowed it more gratefully than he had ever swallowed the choicest wine, and then lay down.

Hardly, as it seemed to him, had his head touched the pillow before a delicious languor stole through all his limbs, and with a half turn over to the other side, he was gone.

He was gone, and in a deeper sleep, probably, than he had ever been in before. But it was a sleep that did not last above an hour. At the end of that time it was broken precisely as it had been broken before. Only, this time, as if on account of his being so soundly asleep and therefore more difficult to arouse, he seemed closer to the point of actual suffocation than he had been before. He gasped for breath, and gurgled in his throat, and the veins of his forehead stood out thick and blue as though the circulation were on the point of being violently stopped for ever. Again his returning senses seemed to catch the sound of a low mocking laugh, and again there was the taste of saltwater on his lips.