Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/28

 stretch of winding marble stairs. I did not know where my window was, I might even now have passed it. I heard nothing, but I knew I was being followed, and that whatever it was that followed me was gaining on me rapidly. I could hardly breathe: an agony of fear shook me. Then I heard close to my ear the bark of a dog. It was the window. I dropped on my knees and squeezed my head and shoulders through; I was almost free when I felt myself grasped from behind and with a scream I woke shaking, panting, bathed in sweat.

There came a time when these nightmares occurred so frequently that I got to be able to waken myself out of them. While I was actually dreaming—when I would have run a few steps down the stair, for example—a sudden foresight of what was coming would dawn upon me, and by a violent struggle I would break through the net of sleep and sit up in bed. Many of these dreams were connected with. a dark, mahogany wardrobe which stood in my father's bedroom. When I had begun to dream and found myself in that room I knew something evil was going to happen, and I would watch the wardrobe door and struggle violently to wake myself before it should open. Even when I was wide awake, and in broad daylight, this so ordinary piece of furniture came to have, for me, a sinister aspect. It was odd that I should have suffered so from these grisly nocturnal terrors, for in ordinary life I was not in any way a coward. A feeling of shame made me keep them a profound secret, and as I grew older they diminished, till by the time I was fifteen they had practically ceased.

Perhaps I should here attempt some slight description of my father, whom I have already mentioned, and of my home. My father was the National schoolmaster at Newcastle, County Down, and our house was next door to the