A pressure against the pit of his stomach—a firm shove of hand upon his shoulder—and Defoe found himself stepping backward until it seemed he must have walked the length of the ship. But of course he hadn’t—he hadn’t even left the stateroom—and suddenly he was tumbled on to the edge of the berth, the pressure against his abdomen increasing.
A vague nausea gripped him. He clutched at his abdomen and his fingers wrapped themselves around the barrel of an automatic pistol. The pressure against his body became unbearable, piercing.... Defoe crumpled back into the berth and the convulsive effort restored his speech.
“What the hell are you doing?” he exploded. “Get out of here! What are you trying to do—stab me with a pistol?”
The incongruity of his question aroused a titter of amusement from the invisible presence.
“No, I only wished to make sure you weren’t trying to get away.”
That Voice again!—here! Defoe cringed in a sort of abject fear.
“What are you—who are you?” Defoe struggled to keep his voice steady, struggled, indeed, to keep his reason from flying out of balance and shattering into a thousand pieces of driveling idiocy.
“Call me anything you care to,” replied the Voice in the dark.
“I don’t believe you are—anything at all! I think you are all a dream, a nightmare, a damnable hallucination that I can’t get rid of! To hell with you! I’m going to go down to the smoking-room and—smoke you out of my mind! I’m going to stay in the light from now on, day and night, until I get over this morbid dreaming!”
Defoe really thought he meant it all, until the pressure against his stomach made him doubt his courage and defiance.