Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/23

"I wish you'd raise the blind, so the moonlight can come in," I said; "it won't keep me awake. It seems to be a lovely night."

"It's beautiful outside, now. But Jennings will have some snow cleaning to do in the morning. Please try to get right to sleep, Mr. Herndon. Miss Manning says that you are inclined to lie awake after getting your hypodermic, and then sleep during the day. Nothing like the good before-midnight sleep, you know. If you need me, give one short ring. Good night."

Just as I told her Miss Richards always did, she left my door open as she went out, but a little more than half way. The lights in the ward were all out; and, now that the unfortunate little Martha was no more, there was hardly a sound to be heard in the building. Even outside, there was no wind; my own breathing and the beating of my heart alone were audible.

Then I gave myself up wholly to the wooing of my false goddess, Morphia. How much of the drug I swallowed during the next two hours I have not the faintest idea; but many times I took one of the tiny white tablets from my little bottle.

My nerves were throbbing; my muscles seemed continually to relax and contract; it appeared that the spinal cord was being slowly petrified. My neck, at the base of the brain, felt as if a steel band, which was being slowly tightened, encircled it. Through it all, a thousand strange, unnatural visions swept through my brain; the moonlight in the room seemed to become a variegated color display, reminding me of the Northern Lights that I had often seen in northern Ontario, while on hunting trips, before the war. At some distance from the hospital, a dog howled mournfully. It was the first sound to break the perfect stillness of the winter night; and instantly the thought of Dracula's wehr-wolves, with their frothing, blood-dripping fangs and fiery eyes, returned to me.

My mind centered on that silent, mysterious castle in the Carpathian mountains, the subterranean vaults, the open coffin with the chalk-faced count lying in it, his wide-open, glassy eyes gazing at nothing, the half-parted, blood-red lips exposing the needle-pointed teeth, bound in the trance of death but yet undead, waiting only for the setting of the sun to free him from death’s grasp, before setting forth on his horrible, nightly mission.

The moonlight, falling across a large, potted rubber-plant standing just beside the window, threw ghostly black shadows on the wall opposite.

Then, of a sudden, there was a terrific, whirring sound within my head, accompanied by a sound like the far-away tinkling of bells, and everything went dark.

How long this sleep or unconscious state lasted, I have no idea; but when next I opened my eyes it seemed to me that I had been awakened by hearing a noise, as of someone fumbling with a lock or bolt, at some considerable distance, and, apparently, outside the hospital. Then—and this occasioned me no small amount of wonder—I raised myself, without any effort, to a sitting position. Up to now, I had been unable to raise myself except very slowly, on account of the pain in the region of the operation wound.

I looked out of the window. All outdoors was still bathed in a flood of moonlight, though now the moon was sinking lower. A white mantle of glittering snow spread over fields, hospital grounds and distant hills. There was not even a path to the icehouse.

Suddenly, one of the children in the ward commenced muttering in