A Midnight Visitor - Page 2

Night," the more I became convinced
that in that achievement I had reached the zenith of my powers. The thing
for me to do now was to hook myself securely on to the zenith and stay
there. But how to do it? That was the question which drove sleep from my
eyes, and deprived me for a period of six weeks of my reason, my hair
departing immediately upon the restoration thereof--a not uncommon
after-symptom of typhoid.

It was a typical March night, this one upon which the extraordinary
incident about to be related took place. It was the kind of night that
novelists use when they are handling a mystery that in the abstract would
amount to nothing, but which in the concrete of a bit of wild, weird, and
windy nocturnalism sends the reader into hysterics. It may be--I shall not
attempt to deny it--that had it happened upon another kind of an
evening--a soft, mild, balmy June evening, for instance--my own experience
would have seemed less worthy of preservation in the amber of publicity,
but of that the reader must judge for himself. The fact alone remains that
upon the night when my uncanny visitor appeared, the weather department
was apparently engaged in getting rid of its remnants. There was a large
percentage of withering blast in the general make-up of the evening; there
were rain and snow, which alternated in pattering upon my window-pane and
whitening the apology for a wold that stands three blocks from my flat on
Madison Square; the wind whistled as it always does upon occasions of this
sort, and from all corners of my apartment, after the usual fashion, there
seemed to come sounds of a supernatural order, the effect of which was to
send cold chills off on their regular trips up and down the spine of their
victim--in this instance myself. I wish that at the time the hackneyed
quality of these sensations had appealed to me. That it did not do so was
shown by the highly nervous state in which I found myself as my clock
struck eleven. If I could only have realized at that hour that these
symptoms were the same old threadbare premonitions of the appearance of a
supernatural being, I should have left the house and gone to the club, and
so have avoided the visitation then imminent. Had I done this, I should
doubtless also have escaped the typhoid, since the doctors attributed that
misfortune to the shock of my experience, which, in my then wearied state,
I was unable to sustain--and what the escape of typhoid would have meant
to me only those who have seen the bills of my physician and druggist for
services rendered and prescriptions compounded are aware. That my mind
unconsciously took thought of spirits was shown by the fact that when the
first chill came upon me I arose and poured out for myself a stiff bumper