A phantom toe. I am not a superstitious man, far from it.
But despite all my efforts to the contrary, I could not help thinking directly
I had taken a survey of my chamber that I should never quit it without
going through a strange adventure. There was something in its immense size, heaviness
and gloom that seemed to annihilate, at one blow all my resolute skepticism as
regards supernatural visitations. It appeared to me totally impossible to go into that room
and disbelieve in ghosts. The fact is I had incautiously partaken at supper of
that favorite Dutch dish, sauer Kraut, and I suppose it had disagreed with
me and put strange fancies into my head. Be this as it may,
I only know that after parting with my friend the night, I gradually worked
myself up into such a state of fidgettiness that at last I wasn't sure whether
I hadn't become a ghost myself. Supposing ruminated, I supposing the landlord himself
should be a practical robber and should have taken the lock and bolt from off
this door for the purpose of entering here in the dead of the night,
abstracting all my property and perhaps murdering me. I thought the dog had a
very cut throat air about him. Now, I had never had any such
idea until that moment, for my host was a fat all Dutchmen are fat,
stupid looking fellow who I don't believe had sense enough to understand what a
robbery or murder meant. But somehow or other, whenever we have anything really
to annoy us, and it certainly was not pleasant to go to bed in
a strange place without being able to fasten one's door, we are sure to
aggravate it by myriads of chimeras of our own brain. So on the present
occasion, in the midst of a thousand disagreeable reveries, some of the most
wild absurdity, it jumped very gloomily into bed, having first put out my
candle for total darkness was far preferable to its flickering ghostly light, which transformed
rather than revealed objects, and soon fell asleep, perfectly tired out with my
day's riding. How long I lay asleep, I don't know, but I
suddenly awoke from a disagreeable dream of cut throats, ghosts and long winding passages
in a haunted inn. An indescribable feeling such as I never before experienced,
hung upon me. It seemed as if every nerve in my body had a
hundred spirits tickling it. And this was accompanied by so great a heat that,
inwardly cursing mine host's sour kraut and wondering how the dutch Men could endure
such poison, I was forced to sit up in bed to cool myself.
The whole of the room was profoundly dark, excepting at one place, where
the moonlight, falling through a crevice in the shutters, through a straight line
of about an inch or so thick upon the floor, clear, sharp,
and intensely brilliant against the darkness. I leave you to conceive my horror when,
upon looking at this said line of light, I saw there a naked
human toe, nothing more. For the first instant I thought the vision must
be some effect of moonlight. Then that I was only half awake and could
not see distinctly. So I rubbed my eyes two or three times and looked
again. Still there was the accursed thing, plain, distinct, immovable,
marble like in its fixedness and rigidity, but in everything else horribly human.
I am not an easily frightened man, no one who has traveled so much
and seen so much, and been exposed to so many dangers as I can
be. But there was something so mysterious and unusual in the appearance of this
single toe that for a short time I could not think what to be at,
so I did nothing but stare at it in a state of utter bewilderment.
At length, however, as the toe did not vanish under my steady
gaze, I thought I might as well change my tactics, and, remembering
that all midnight invaders, be they thieves, ghosts, or devils, dislike
nothing so much as a good noise, I shouted out in a loud voice,
Who's there? The toe immediately disappeared in the darkness. Almost simultaneously with
my words, I leaped out of bed and rushed toward the place where I
had beheld the strange appearance. The next instant, I ran against something and
felt an iron grip round my body. After this, I have no distinct
recollection of what occurred, excepting that a fearful struggle ensued between me and my
unseen opponent. That every now and then we were violently hurled to the floor,
from which we always rose again in an instant, locked in a deadly
embrace, that we tugged and strained and pulled and pushed I in the convulsive
and frantic energy of a fight for life. He For by this time I
had discovered that the intruder was a human being, actuated by some passion of
which I was ignorant. That we whirled round and round, cheek to cheek,
and arm to arm in fierce contest, until the room appeared to whiz
round with us, and that at least a dozen people, my fellow traveler
among them, roused, I suppose by our repeated falls, came pouring into
the room with lights and showed me struggling with a man having nothing on but
a shirt, whose long tangled hair and wild, unsettled eyes told me he
was insane. And then, for the first time I became aware that I
had received in the conflict several gashes from a knife, which my opponent still
held in his hand. To conclude my story in a few words, for
I dare say, all of you, by this time are getting very tired.
It turned out that my midnight visitor was a madman who was being conveyed
to a lunatic asylum at the Hague, and that he and his caper had
been obliged to stop at Delphi on their way. The poor fellow had contrived
during the night to escape from his keeper, who had carelessly forgotten to lock
the door of his chamber, and with that irresistible desire to shed blood peculiar
to many insane people, had possessed himself of a pocket knife belonging to the
man who had charge of him. Entered my room, which was most likely
the only one in the house unfastened, and was probably meditating the fatal stroke
when I saw his toe in the moonlight, the rest of his body being
hidden in the shade. After this terrible freak of his he was watched with
much greater strictness, But I ought to observe as some excuse for the keeper's
negligence, that this was the first act of violence he had ever attempted,
and of a phantom toe