my panic terror seemed to bind me faster and faster to the mattress on
which I lay--down and down it sank, till the dusty odour from the lining
of the canopy came stealing into my nostrils.

At that final moment the instinct of self-preservation startled me out
of my trance, and I moved at last. There was just room for me to roll
myself sideways off the bed. As I dropped noiselessly to the floor, the
edge of the murderous canopy touched me on the shoulder.

Without stopping to draw my breath, without wiping the cold sweat
from my face, I rose instantly on my knees to watch the bedtop. I was
literally spellbound by it. If I had heard footsteps behind me, I
could not have turned round; if a means of escape had been miraculously
provided for me, I could not have moved to take advantage of it. The
whole life in me was, at that moment, concentrated in my eyes.

It descended--the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came
down--down--close down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze
my finger between the bedtop and the bed. I felt at the sides, and
discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary
light canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress,
the substance of which was concealed by the valance and its fringe. I
looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare. In the middle
of the bedtop 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