Nightmare-Touch 241 



Needless to comment upon the policy of lock- 

 ing me up alone with these fears in a black room. 

 Unutterably was I tormented in that room 

 for years! Therefore I felt relatively happy 

 when sent away at last to a children's boarding- 

 school, where the haunters very seldom ventured 

 to show themselves. 



They were not like any people that I had ever 

 known. They were shadowy dark-robed figures, 

 capable of atrocious self-distortion, capable, for 

 instance, of growing up to the ceiling, and then 

 across it, and then lengthening themselves, head- 

 downwards, along the opposite wall. Only their 

 faces were distinct ; and I tried not to look at their 

 faces. I tried also in my dreams or thought 

 that I tried to awaken myself from the sight of 

 them by pulling at my eyelids with my fingers ; but 

 the eyelids would remain closed, as if sealed. . . . 

 Many years afterwards, the frightful plates in 

 Orfila's Traite des Exbumes, beheld for the first 

 time, recalled to me with a sickening start the 

 dream-terrors of childhood. But to understand the 

 Child's experience, you must imagine Orfila's draw- 

 ings intensely alive, and continually elongating or 

 distorting, as in some monstrous anamorphosis. 



16 



