vulsed and choking
and warding off horror, Michael would wake in a frenzy of fear to his
own real house of ghastly stillness, where no longer did even a belated
luggage-train or jingling hansom assure him of life's continuity.

He did not always wake up suddenly: sometimes he would be aware that he
was slowly waking and would struggle to keep asleep, lying for a long
time without moving a muscle, in order to cheat himself into the belief
that he was not awake. But gradually the strain would be too much and he
would have to become conscious of the room. First of all he would turn
on to his left side and view apprehensively the door ajar. This would
seem to tremble, as he looked, to some invisible hand trying it. Then
along the wall the wardrobe would creak, and every knot of its varnished
surface would take on a fantastic countenance. He would wonder what was
inside, and try to gain comfort and the sense of commonplace daytime
existence by counting the cats swinging on a roundabout in one of Louis
Wain's Christmas pictures. In the corner beyond the wardrobe was a large
clothes-basket that crackled and snapped and must surely hold somebody
inside, hidden as the Forty Thieves were hidden in the oil-jars. The
fire-place, opposite the foot of the bed, seemed a centre for the noise
of mice. How he hoped they would be content to play upon the hearth and
not venture to leap over the fender and scuttle about the room. Then the
door would begin to frighten him again, and Michael would turn very
quietly on to his back, staring at the luminous ceiling where the
gas-jet made a huge moon whose edges wavered perpetually. But the
gas-jet itself became terrifying, when looked at too long, with its
queer blue base and slim solemn shape, so melancholy, so desolate, so
changeless. The ceiling would very soon become unendurable because
various black marks would seem with intensest contemplation more and
more like spiders and beetles. Michael would have to give up lying on
his back and turn upon his right side. He would count each slat of the
Venetian blinds and long passionately and sadly for the grey streaks to
appear at the sides in proclamation of the approach of day. Without
these grey streaks the windows were unbearable, so menacing were they
with the unknown infinite night behind them. The curtains, too, would
quiver, and even Michael's clothes, heaped upon a chair, would assume a
worm-like vitality. The washstand made him feel oppress