But occasionally it is
not so easy to find such an explanation, and for the following story I
can find no explanation at all. It came out of the dark, and into the
dark it has gone again. All my life I have been a habitual dreamer: the nights are few, that is
to say, when I do not find on awaking in the morning that some mental
experience has been mine, and sometimes, all night long, apparently, a
series of the most dazzling adventures befall me. Almost without
exception these adventures are pleasant, though often merely trivial. It
is of an exception that I am going to speak. It was when I was about sixteen that a certain dream first came to me,
and this is how it befell. It opened with my being set down at the door
of a big red-brick house, where, I understood, I was going to stay. The
servant who opened the door told me that tea was going on in the garden,
and led me through a low dark-panelled hall, with a large open
fireplace, on to a cheerful green lawn set round with flower beds. There
were grouped about the tea-table a small party of people, but they were
all strangers to me except one, who was a school-fellow called Jack
Stone, clearly the son of the house, and he introduced me to his mother
and father and a couple of sisters. I was, I remember, somewhat
astonished to find myself here, for the boy in question was scarcely
known to me, and I rather disliked what I knew of him: moreover, he had
left school nearly a year before. The afternoon was very hot, and an
intolerable oppression reigned. On the far side of the lawn ran a
red-brick wall, with an iron gate in its centre, outside which stood a
walnut tree. We sat in the shadow of the house opposite a row of long
windows, inside which I could see a table with cloth laid, glimmering
with glass and silver. This garden front of the house was very long, and
at one end of it stood a tower of three stories, which looked to me much
older than the rest of the building. Before long, Mrs Stone, who, like the rest of the party, had sat in
absolute silence, said to me, “Jack will show you your room: I have
given you the room in the tower.”

Quite inexplicably my heart sank at her words. I felt as if I had known
that I should have the room in the tower, and that it contained
something dreadful and significant. Jack instantly got up, and I
understood that I had to follow him. In silence we passed through the
hall, and mounted a great oak staircase with many corners, and arrived
at a small landing with two doors set in it. He pushed one of these open
for me to enter, and without coming in himself, closed it behind me. Then I knew that my conjecture had been right: there was something awful
in the room, and with the terror of nightmare growing swiftly and
enveloping me, I awoke in a spasm of terror. Now that dream or variations on it occurred to me intermittently for
fifteen years. Most often it came in exactly this form, the arrival, the
tea laid out on the lawn, the deadly silence succeeded by that one
deadly sentence, the mounting with Jack Stone up to the room in the
tower where horror dwelt, and it always came to a close in the nightmare
of terror at that which was in the room, though I never saw what it was. At other times I experienced variations on this same theme. Occasionally, for instance, we would be sitting at dinner in the
dining-room, into the windows of which I had looked on the first night
when the dream of this house visited me, but wherever we were, there was
the same silence, the same sense of dreadful oppression and foreboding. And the silence I knew would always be broken by Mrs Stone saying to me,
“Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.”
Upon which (this was invariable) I had to follow him up the oak
staircase with many corners, and enter the place that I dreaded more and
more each time that I visited it in sleep. Or, again, I would find
myself playing cards still in silence in a drawing-room lit with immense
chandeliers, that gave a blinding illumination. What the game was I have
no idea; what I remember, with a sense of miserable anticipation, was
that soon Mrs Stone would get up and say to me, “Jack will show you your
room: I have given you the room in the tower.” This drawing-room where
we played cards was next to the dining-room, and, as I have said, was
always brilliantly illuminated, whereas the rest of the house was full
of dusk and shadows. And yet, how often, in spite of those bouquets of
lights, have I not pored over the cards that were dealed me, scarcely
able for some reason to see them. Their designs, too, were strange:
there were no red suits, but all were black, and among them there were
certain cards which were black all over. I hated and dreaded those. As this dream continued to recur, I got to know the greater part of the
house. There was a smoking-room beyond the drawing-room, at the end of a
passage with a green baize door. It was always very dark there, and as
often as I went there I passed somebody whom I could not see in the
doorway coming out. Curious developments, too, took place in the
characters that peopled the dream as might happen to living persons. Mrs
Stone, for instance, who, when I first saw her, had been black haired,
became grey, and instead of rising briskly, as she had done at first
when she said, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room
in the tower,” got up very feebly, as if the strength was leaving her
limbs. Jack also grew up, and became a rather ill-looking young man,
with a brown moustache, while one of the sisters ceased to appear, and I
understood she was married. Then it so happened that I was not visited by this dream for six months
or more, and I began to hope, in such inexplicable dread did I hold it,
that it had passed away for good. But one night after this interval I
again found myself being shown out on to the lawn for tea, and Mrs Stone
was not there, while the others were all dressed in black. At once I
guessed the reason, and my heart leaped at the thought that perhaps this
time I should not have to sleep in the room in the tower, and though we
usually all sat in silence, on this occasion the sense of relief made me
talk and laugh as I had never yet done. But even then matters were not
altogether comfortable, for no one else spoke, but they all looked
secretly at each other. And soon the foolish stream of my talk ran dry,
and gradually an apprehension worse than anything I had previously known
gained on me as the light slowly faded. Suddenly a voice which I knew well broke the stillness, the voice of Mrs
Stone, saying, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room
in the tower.” It seemed to come from near the gate in the red-brick
wall that bounded the lawn, and looking up, I saw that the grass outside
was sown thick with gravestones.