“As I told you,” he continued, “where there had been that unseasonable
dahlia, there now burned a dim firelight, and my eyes were drawn there. Shapes were gathered round it; what they were I could not at first see. Then perhaps my eyes got more accustomed to the dusk, or the fire burned
better, for I perceived that they were of human form, but very small,
for when one rose, with a horrible chattering, to his feet, his head was
still some inches off the low roof. He was dressed in a sort of shirt
that came to his knees, but his arms were bare and covered with hair. Then the gesticulation and chattering increased, and I knew that they
were talking about me, for they kept pointing in my direction. At that
my horror suddenly deepened, for I became aware that I was powerless and
could not move hand or foot; a helpless, nightmare impotence had
possession of me. I could not lift a finger or turn my head. And in the
paralysis of that fear I tried to scream, but not a sound could I utter. “All this I suppose took place with the instantaneousness of a dream,
for at once, and without transition, the whole thing had vanished, and I
was back on the lawn again, while the stroke for which my wife was
aiming was still unplayed. But my face was dripping with perspiration,
and I was trembling all over. “Now you may all say that I had fallen asleep, and had a sudden
nightmare. That may be so; but I was conscious of no sense of sleepiness
before, and I was conscious of none afterwards. It was as if someone had
held a book before me, whisked the pages open for a second and closed
them again.”

Somebody, I don’t know who, got up from his chair with a sudden movement
that made me start, and turned on the electric light. I do not mind
confessing that I was rather glad of this. Everard laughed. “Really I feel like Hamlet in the play-scene,” he said, “and as if there
was a guilty uncle present. Shall I go on?”

I don’t think anyone replied, and he went on:

“Well, let us say for the moment that it was not a dream exactly, but a
hallucination. Whichever it was, in any case it haunted me; for months,
I think, it was never quite out of my mind, but lingered somewhere in
the dusk of consciousness, sometimes sleeping quietly, so to speak, but
sometimes stirring in its sleep. It was no good my telling myself that I
was disquieting myself in vain, for it was as if something had actually
entered into my very soul, as if some seed of horror had been planted
there. And as the weeks went on the seed began to sprout, so that I
could no longer even tell myself that that vision had been a moment’s
disorderment only. I can’t say that it actually affected my health. I
did not, as far as I know, sleep or eat insufficiently, but morning
after morning I used to wake, not gradually and through pleasant dozings
into full consciousness, but with absolute suddenness, and find myself
plunged in an abyss of despair. Often too, eating or drinking, I used to
pause and wonder if it was worth while. “Eventually I told two people about my trouble, hoping that perhaps the
mere communication would help matters, hoping also, but very distantly,
that though I could not believe at present that digestion or the
obscurities of the nervous system were at fault, a doctor by some simple
dose might convince me of it. In other words I told my wife, who laughed
at me, and my doctor who laughed also, and assured me that my health
was quite unnecessarily robust. At the same time he suggested that
change of air and scene does wonders for the delusions that exist merely
in the imagination. He also told me, in answer to a direct question,
that he would stake his reputation on the certainty that I was not going
mad. “Well, we went up to London as usual for the season, and though nothing
whatever occurred to remind me in any way of that single moment on
Christmas Eve, the reminding was seen to all right, the moment itself
took care of that, for instead of fading as is the way of sleeping or
waking dreams, it grew every day more vivid, and ate, so to speak, like
some corrosive acid into my mind, etching itself there. And to London
succeeded Scotland. “I took last year for the first time a small forest up in Sutherland,
called Glen Callan, very remote and wild, but affording excellent
stalking. It was not far from the sea, and the gillies used always to
warn me to carry a compass on the hill, because sea-mists were liable to
come up with frightful rapidity, and there was always a danger of being
caught by one, and of having perhaps to wait hours till it cleared
again. This at first I always used to do, but, as every one knows, any
precaution that one takes which continues to be unjustified gets
gradually relaxed, and at the end of a few weeks, since the weather had
been uniformly clear, it was natural that, as often as not, my compass
remained at home. “One day the stalk took me on to a part of my ground that I had seldom
been on before, a very high table-land on the limit of my forest, which
went down very steeply on one side to a loch that lay below it, and on
the other, by gentler gradations, to the river that came from the loch,
six miles below which stood the lodge. The wind had necessitated our
climbing up--or so my stalker had insisted--not by the easier way, but
up the crags from the loch. I had argued the point with him, for it
seemed to me that it was impossible that the deer could get our scent if
we went by the more natural path, but he still held to his opinion, and
therefore, since after all this was his part of the job, I yielded. A
dreadful climb we had of it, over big boulders with deep holes in
between, masked by clumps of heather, so that a wary eye and a prodding
stick were necessary for each step if one wished to avoid broken bones. Adders also literally swarmed in the heather; we must have seen a dozen
at least on our way up, and adders are a beast for which I have no
manner of use. But a couple of hours saw us to the top, only to find
that the stalker had been utterly at fault, and that the deer must quite
infallibly have got wind of us, if they had remained in the place where
we last saw them. That, when we could spy the ground again, we saw had
happened; in any case they had gone. The man insisted the wind had
changed, a palpably stupid excuse, and I wondered at that moment what
other reason he had--for reason I felt sure there must be--for not
wishing to take what would clearly now have been a better route. But
this piece of bad management did not spoil our luck, for within an hour
we had spied more deer, and about two o’clock I got a shot, killing a
heavy stag. Then sitting on the heather I ate lunch, and enjoyed a
well-earned bask and smoke in the sun. The pony meantime had been
saddled with the stag, and was plodding homewards.