I undressed quickly, and
got into bed, but though I had felt so sleepy before, I now felt
extremely wide-awake. But I was quite content to be awake: I did not
toss or turn, I felt perfectly happy listening to the song and seeing
the light. Then, it is possible, I may have gone to sleep, and what
follows may have been a dream. I thought anyhow that after a time the
nightingales ceased singing and the moon sank. I thought also that if,
for some unexplained reason, I was going to lie awake all night, I might
as well read, and I remembered that I had left a book in which I was
interested in the dining-room on the first floor. So I got out of bed,
lit a candle, and went downstairs. I went into the room, saw on a
side-table the book I had come to look for, and then, simultaneously,
saw that the door into the unoccupied bedroom was open. A curious grey
light, not of dawn nor of moonshine, came out of it, and I looked in. The bed stood just opposite the door, a big four-poster, hung with
tapestry at the head. Then I saw that the greyish light of the bedroom
came from the bed, or rather from what was on the bed. For it was
covered with great caterpillars, a foot or more in length, which crawled
over it. They were faintly luminous, and it was the light from them that
showed me the room. Instead of the sucker-feet of ordinary caterpillars
they had rows of pincers like crabs, and they moved by grasping what
they lay on with their pincers, and then sliding their bodies forward. In colour these dreadful insects were yellowish-grey, and they were
covered with irregular lumps and swellings. There must have been
hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of writhing, crawling pyramid
on the bed. Occasionally one fell off on to the floor, with a soft
fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard concrete, it yielded to
the pincer-feet as if it had been putty, and, crawling back, the
caterpillar would mount on to the bed again, to rejoin its fearful
companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but at one end
of them there was a mouth that opened sideways in respiration. Then, as I looked, it seemed to me as if they all suddenly became
conscious of my presence. All the mouths at any rate were turned in my
direction, and next moment they began dropping off the bed with those
soft fleshy thuds on to the floor, and wriggling towards me. For one
second a paralysis as of a dream was on me, but the next I was running
upstairs again to my room, and I remember feeling the cold of the marble
steps on my bare feet. I rushed into my bedroom, and slammed the door
behind me, and then--I was certainly wide awake now--I found myself
standing by my bed with the sweat of terror pouring from me. The noise
of the banged door still rang in my ears. But, as would have been more
usual, if this had been mere nightmare, the terror that had been mine
when I saw those foul beasts crawling about the bed or dropping softly
on to the floor did not cease then. Awake now, if dreaming before, I did
not at all recover from the horror of dream: it did not seem to me that
I had dreamed. And until dawn, I sat or stood, not daring to lie down,
thinking that every rustle or movement that I heard was the approach of
the caterpillars. To them and the claws that bit into the cement the
wood of the door was child’s play: steel would not keep them out. But with the sweet and noble return of day the horror vanished: the
whisper of wind became benignant again: the nameless fear, whatever it
was, was smoothed out and terrified me no longer. Dawn broke, hueless at
first; then it grew dove-coloured, then the flaming pageant of light
spread over the sky. *       *       *       *       *

The admirable rule of the house was that everybody had breakfast where
and when he pleased, and in consequence it was not till lunch-time that
I met any of the other members of our party, since I had breakfast on my
balcony, and wrote letters and other things till lunch. In fact, I got
down to that meal rather late, after the other three had begun. Between
my knife and fork there was a small pill-box of cardboard, and as I sat
down Inglis spoke. “Do look at that,” he said, “since you are interested in natural
history. I found it crawling on my counterpane last night, and I don’t
know what it is.”

I think that before I opened the pill-box I expected something of the
sort which I found in it. Inside it, anyhow, was a small caterpillar,
greyish-yellow in colour, with curious bumps and excrescences on its
rings. It was extremely active, and hurried round the box, this way and
that. Its feet were unlike the feet of any caterpillar I ever saw: they
were like the pincers of a crab. I looked, and shut the lid down again. “No, I don’t know it,” I said, “but it looks rather unwholesome. What
are you going to do with it?”

“Oh, I shall keep it,” said Inglis. “It has begun to spin: I want to see
what sort of a moth it turns into.”

I opened the box again, and saw that these hurrying movements were
indeed the beginning of the spinning of the web of its cocoon. Then
Inglis spoke again. “It has got funny feet, too,” he said. “They are like crabs’ pincers. What’s the Latin for crab? Oh, yes, Cancer. So in case it is unique,
let’s christen it: ‘Cancer Inglisensis.’”

Then something happened in my brain, some momentary piecing together of
all that I had seen or dreamed. Something in his words seemed to me to
throw light on it all, and my own intense horror at the experience of
the night before linked itself on to what he had just said. In effect, I
took the box and threw it, caterpillar and all, out of the window. There
was a gravel path just outside, and beyond it, a fountain playing into a
basin. The box fell on to the middle of this. Inglis laughed. “So the students of the occult don’t like solid facts,” he said. “My
poor caterpillar!”

The talk went off again at once on to other subjects, and I have only
given in detail, as they happened, these trivialities in order to be
sure myself that I have recorded everything that could have borne on
occult subjects or on the subject of caterpillars. But at the moment
when I threw the pill-box into the fountain, I lost my head: my only
excuse is that, as is probably plain, the tenant of it was, in
miniature, exactly what I had seen crowded on to the bed in the
unoccupied room. And though this translation of those phantoms into
flesh and blood--or whatever it is that caterpillars are made of--ought
perhaps to have relieved the horror of the night, as a matter of fact it
did nothing of the kind. It only made the crawling pyramid that covered
the bed in the unoccupied room more hideously real. *       *       *       *       *

After lunch we spent a lazy hour or two strolling about the garden or
sitting in the loggia, and it must have been about four o’clock when
Stanley and I started off to bathe, down the path that led by the
fountain into which I had thrown the pill-box.