Edith Nesbit - The Book of Shadows Vol 3

I do not know what time I woke. It seemed to me that the air was blowing in upon my chest where the bedclothes should have covered me up. And – yes, certainly there was an odd depression in my pillow, close in front of my face, as if some heavy weight were pressing it down. I put up my hand to investigate. I touched something on the pillow. I caught hold of it, and turned cold with terror. For I held tightly in my hand, another hand, neither cold nor warm, but large and solid. My light was still burning, and there was no one to be seen. The hand was suddenly jerked away from me. I sprang out of bed, and rushed to the fireplace with a despairing feeling that someone followed close behind me. I seized the poker, turned round, and struck wildly at the air. Whether I hit anything or not I do not know. I remember only that as I was recovering myself from a frantic lunge at nothing, I received a sharp and stunning blow on the back of my head. When I came to myself it was six in the morning, and I was lying on the floor where I had fallen. The night-light was out, and the morning sunlight was streaming in at my window. There was a very large and painful bruise where I had been struck.

III

I felt that this was getting beyond a joke. It was all very well to frighten me, but when my ghostly enemy took to knocking me down like a ninepin, I was not going to keep it to myself any longer. I had no intention of surrendering, for the blood of the Maseys was up, and the fact that each of my ancestors since the house was built had sooner or later evacuated the premises made me all the more determined not to be driven away without making some further resistance. So I unbosomed to my sister Ellen the whole of my experience in the matter. She was decidedly sceptical about the ghost, if ghost it could be called, and suggested that I was not well. I vowed that I was as well as any man with a great hole in the back of his head could be, and she consented to the arrangement that I proposed – that she should sit up for a night or two in the drawing-room, while I was in my study, with the door open between us, and that if any remarkable incident occurred, I should call her in. In order not to be wholly without male assistance in case I should be attacked, I invited a college friend of mine named Prescott, a strong, sensible, and energetic young doctor who lived near us, to keep my sister company in the drawing-room. He, when he heard my story, was, as befitted a scientific young professional man, exceedingly facetious at my expense, but he willingly consented to share our watch, and to sleep in the house. That evening I sat up as usual in my study, while Prescott and Ellen beguiled the hours in the drawing-room with light literature, until about half-past two, when, nothing having occurred, we settled to go to bed, and separated; Prescott divided between high spirits at the temporary triumph of incredulity, and a tinge of disappointment at the non-occurrence of anything in the shape of a row, and Ellen rather indignant with me for having kept her up so long to no purpose. After the stormy experiences of the two preceding nights I thoroughly enjoyed an unbroken sleep.

I prevailed upon my sister and my friend to give the ghost one more chance, and the next evening saw us again comfortably established in the two rooms, separated only by the curtain which hung over the door of communication.

It may have been eleven o’clock when I heard a board creak just behind my chair. Uttering a shout, I sprang up, and dashed at the spot from which the noise had come. I came into heavy contact with what felt like a gigantic human figure. Prescott and Ellen hurried into the room and beheld me wildly grappling, apparently with nothing at all. “By Jove!” said Prescott, “he has got them.” “Them” I believe meant some kind of hallucinations upon which Prescott professed to be an authority, but I was struggling furiously with my unseen antagonist, and had no breath for explanations.

“Seize him! seize him!” I cried.

At that moment my prey burst from me, hurling me with prodigious violence across the room.

Prescott rushed forward, and as he did so was tripped up by what he afterwards described as a heavy kick from an unseen foot, and sent sprawling on the floor. Fortunately I was prostrate at the other end of the room, and could not be suspected of having had a hand, or a foot, in this outrage.

As we struggled to our feet, while Ellen stared wildly about, we all heard two or three hurried steps, as of a man running; there was a tremendous crash, and all was still. But the curtains had swung violently back into the window, and the window itself, plate-glass, frame, and all, was burst clean away outwards.

Prescott was as white as a sheet, and the sensible and strong-minded Ellen was actually crying, which impressed me more than anything else in the scene.

“Let us leave this horrible house,” she said; “something worse will happen if we stay.”

But I was filled with an unreasonable kind of courage at having, as it seemed, put our inexplicable visitor to flight; and I was besides conscious of a certain degree of pride in the assurance that Prescott had been converted, and would hardly talk again about my having “got them”.

“We can’t go tonight,” I said, “and as our gentleman seems to have taken himself off for the present, we had better consider what’s to be done next. I am sure Prescott wants to stay and investigate the phenomenon.”

We shut the shutters over the wreck of the window, and sat talking over the event until late at night. By degrees I contrived to infuse into my companions some of my courage, and at last, no further disturbance having taken place, we all went to bed in pretty good spirits. I placed a loaded double-barrelled pistol on the table by my bedside, thinking that if a ghost could be struggled with, he ought to be able to be shot, and Prescott placed within reach a large bowie-knife, which he had brought back from America, and had long been wishing for an opportunity to make use of.

When I woke I thought my last hour had come. My throat was tightly grasped by two extremely strong hands. A crushing weight was on my chest. I tried to shout, but could not. I was rapidly being strangled. And as I lay writhing, my eyes, forced half out of their sockets, glared through the light of the night-light at the opposite wall, which looked precisely as usual, except that, as the squeezing of my throat grew more and more intolerable, my view of the room slowly darkened. But of the horrible and only too palpable form that was killing me I could see no trace, hi unavailing despair I clutched at the iron wrists that held me down. In another moment I believe I should have become unconscious. Then, a last gleam of hope, the thought of my pistol, flashed through my mind. I stretched out my hand, and as I lay I could just reach the end of the barrel. I drew it towards me, and with an expiring effort pushed the muzzle of it close against what I took to be the invisible body of my tormentor, and fired. We never found the bullet, or any trace of it afterwards. Instantly the hands relaxed their grip on my throat a little, and with a violent effort I wrenched my neck away; then a heavy body fell sideways from my bed to the ground, and I fell too, grappling with it. At that moment Ellen and Prescott, who had been aroused by the sound of the shot, burst into the room. There they saw me struggling, partly on the floor, and partly kneeling apparently on space. They rushed to my assistance. Both of them felt the thing, both of them grappled with it. The struggles of our enemy became fainter.

Managing to get one hand free I repossessed myself of the pistol, which had fallen on the floor, and emptied the second barrel into what I judged to be the breast of the spectre. I fired straight downwards, apparently at the floor, but of that bullet we saw no more than of the other. Meanwhile Prescott stabbed furiously with the bowie-knife, and each time he dashed the blade down its progress was arrested before it reached the carpet. Then the struggles ceased, and nothing was heard except our rapid panting. We were all kneeling on and holding down what looked like space, and felt like the form of a tall and athletic man.