The Beetle | Page 6

why permit,
unchecked, my burglarious entry. Since I had been allowed to enter, the
probability was that I should be at liberty to retreat,--and I was sensible
of a much keener desire to retreat than I had ever had to enter.
I had to put the greatest amount of pressure upon myself before I could
summon up sufficient courage to enable me to even turn my head upon
my shoulders,--and the moment I did so I turned it back again. What
constrained me, to save my soul I could not have said,--but I was
constrained. My heart was palpitating in my bosom; I could hear it beat.
I was trembling so that I could scarcely stand. I was overwhelmed by a
fresh flood of terror. I stared in front of me with eyes in which, had it
been light, would have been seen the frenzy of unreasoning fear. My
ears were strained so that I listened with an acuteness of tension which
was painful.
Something moved. Slightly, with so slight a sound, that it would
scarcely have been audible to other ears save mine. But I heard. I was
looking in the direction from which the movement came, and, as I
looked, I saw in front of me two specks of light. They had not been
there a moment before, that I would swear. They were there now. They
were eyes,--I told myself they were eyes. I had heard how cats' eyes
gleam in the dark, though I had never seen them, and I said to myself

that these were cats' eyes; that the thing in front of me was nothing but
a cat. But I knew I lied. I knew that these were eyes, and I knew they
were not cats' eyes, but what eyes they were I did not know,--nor dared
to think.
They moved,--towards me. The creature to which the eyes belonged
was coming closer. So intense was my desire to fly that I would much
rather have died than stood there still; yet I could not control a limb;
my limbs were as if they were not mine. The eyes came
on,--noiselessly. At first they were between two and three feet from the
ground; but, on a sudden, there was a squelching sound, as if some
yielding body had been squashed upon the floor. The eyes vanished,--to
reappear, a moment afterwards, at what I judged to be a distance of
some six inches from the floor. And they again came on.
So it seemed that the creature, whatever it was to which the eyes
belonged, was, after all, but small. Why I did not obey the frantic
longing which I had to flee from it, I cannot tell; I only know, I could
not. I take it that the stress and privations which I had lately undergone,
and which I was, even then, still undergoing, had much to do with my
conduct at that moment, and with the part I played in all that followed.
Ordinarily I believe that I have as high a spirit as the average man, and
as solid a resolution; but when one has been dragged through the
Valley of Humiliation, and plunged, again and again, into the Waters of
Bitterness and Privation, a man can be constrained to a course of action
of which, in his happier moments, he would have deemed himself
incapable. I know this of my own knowledge.
Slowly the eyes came on, with a strange slowness, and as they came
they moved from side to side as if their owner walked unevenly.
Nothing could have exceeded the horror with which I awaited their
approach,--except my incapacity to escape them. Not for an instant did
my glance pass from them,--I could not have shut my eyes for all the
gold the world contains!--so that as they came closer I had to look right
down to what seemed to be almost the level of my feet. And, at last,
they reached my feet. They never paused. On a sudden I felt something
on my boot, and, with a sense of shrinking, horror, nausea, rendering

me momentarily more helpless, I realised that the creature was
beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my body. Even then what it was
I could not tell,--it mounted me, apparently, with as much ease as if I
had been horizontal instead of perpendicular. It was as though it were
some gigantic spider,--a spider of the nightmares; a monstrous
conception of some dreadful vision. It pressed lightly against my
clothing with what might, for all the world, have been spider's legs.
There was an amazing host of them,--I felt the pressure of each separate
one. They embraced me softly, stickily, as if the creature glued and
unglued them, each time it moved.
Higher and higher! It had