nfluence of a kind of
morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat. I could not
whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-o'-the-wisp;
and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and mire, until it
fell into a state of collapse, and was useful for nothing else.

I went to bed and to sleep without difficulty, but I was conscious of
myself all the time, and of a shadowless horror that seemed to come
stealthily out of corners and to bend over and look at me, and to be
nothing but a curtain or a hanging coat when I started and stared.

Over and over again this happened, and my temperature rose by leaps, and
suddenly I saw that if I failed to assert myself, and promptly, fever
would lap me in a consuming fire. Then in a moment I broke into a profuse
perspiration, and sank exhausted into delicious unconsciousness.

Morning found me restored to vigour, but still with the maggot of
curiosity boring in my brain. It worked there all day, and for many
subsequent days, and at last it seemed as if my every faculty were
honeycombed with its ramifications. Then "this will not do", I thought,
but still the tunnelling process went on.

At first I would not acknowledge to myself what all this mental to-do was
about. I was ashamed of my new development, in fact, and nervous, too,
in a degree of what it might reveal in the matter of moral degeneration;
but gradually, as the curious devil mastered me, I grew into such harmony
with it that I could shut my eyes no longer to the true purpose of its
insistence. It was the _closed cell_ about which my thoughts hovered like
crows circling round carrion.

* * * * *

"In the dead waste and middle" of a certain night I awoke with a strange,
quick recovery of consciousness. There was the passing of a single
expiration, and I had been asleep and was awake. I had gone to bed with
no sense of premonition or of resolve in a particular direction; I sat up
a monomaniac. It was as if, swelling in the silent hours, the tumour of
curiosity had come to a head, and in a moment it was necessary to operate
upon it.

I make no excuse for my then condition. I am convinced I was the victim
of some undistinguishable force, that I was an agent under the control of
the supernatural, if you like. Some thought had been in my mind of late
that in my position it was my duty to unriddle the mystery of the closed
cell. This was a sop timidly held out to