I looked up and saw the four posts
rising hideously bare. In the middle of the bed-top was a huge
wooden screw that had evidently worked it down through a hole in
the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down on the
substance selected for compression. The frightful apparatus moved
without making the faintest noise. There had been no creaking as
it came down; there was now not the faintest sound from the room
above. Amid a dead and awful silence I beheld before me--in the
nineteenth century, and in the civilized capital of France--such
a machine for secret murder by suffocation as might have existed
in the worst days of the Inquisition, in the lonely inns among
the Hartz Mountains, in the mysterious tribunals of Westphalia!
Still, as I looked on it, I could not move, I could hardly
breathe, but I began to recover the power of thinking, and in a
moment I discovered the murderous conspiracy framed against me in
all its horror.
My cup of coffee had been drugged, and drugged too strongly. I
had been saved from being smothered by having taken an overdose
of some narcotic. How I had chafed and fretted at the fever fit
which had preserved my life by keeping me awake! How recklessly I
had confided myself to the two wretches who had led me into this
room, determined, for the sake of my winnings, to kill me in my
sleep by the surest and most horrible contrivance for secretly
accomplishing my destruction! How many men, winners like me, had
slept, as
I had proposed to sleep, in that bed, and had never been seen or
heard of more! I shuddered at the bare idea of it.
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