“My wife, trembling in all her limbs — though my friend’s adventure was unknown to her — put the baby’s cradle at the foot of her bed upstairs, taking every precaution for the watching of the cradle and of her bolted door. She knew that she could expect no concession from me to the ‘supernatural,’ and that the trickster or tricksters, if caught, would be brutally done to death. It was, in fact, war.
“I had begun to forget completely why I was reading a law book, sitting in an easy chair instead of lying in bed, when, about 1 a. m., my candle began to wane. The wick fell in a little pool of wax and went out.
“I need hardly say that I had closed the shutters, pushed the bolt well in, and let my guillotine of a window slide exactly down into its grooves.
“As I put out my arm to seize the matches I saw — this happened automatically as soon as the light went out — I saw the shutters opening slowly, and the moon introducing into the opening the white cold blade of its sword of light.
“With one bound I was at the guillotine and raised it. I hooked it up and stretched my arms forward without bending my head, warned by the first inexplicable accident.
“I pushed the shutters with all my force. But they resisted.
“Those shutters seemed to be held by a crowd of people. They were both resistant and elastic to the touch, as if held by muscles working against my own.
“I was silent, fearing to disturb her who slept up there, but I felt bathed in perspiration. I underwent the baptism of fear, a first impression of fear which is a sort of nameless anger, an impotent rage which can only utter itself in blasphemies.
“Like my friend, I let go everything and bounded to the door of the passage leading into the garden. I opened it suddenly. The whole movement took me only five seconds.
“I found there was no human being behind the wooden shutters, no branch of a tree to stop them. No string attached — nothing but the pure night air.
“I ran around the house and came back to the door. It had closed itself.
“I was the plaything of an unknown force! I stood for an instant, dum-founded, grinding my teeth and swearing. Yet I had to get out of this terrible force, a force well planned. But by whom?
“Then I called to my wife in a voice as calm as I could make it. At once she came to the upper window, fully dressed, thus showing that she had not intended to sleep.
“ ‘Please open,’ I said to her. ‘Like a fool I have got out, but the door got accidentally closed, and, of course, the front door is locked. It is silly, but after this little night round I believe we can go to sleep on both ears.’
“Although it was summer, my teeth chattered as I spoke. She came downstairs quickly and opened the door, not as yet suspecting my anxiety. I went to get my revolver, which I had left at my bedside.”
Another candle was lit and everything became peaceful once more. But as soon as the candle went out several heavy blows were heard on the ground floor door leading to the garden.
Christo crept down the passageway and stood just inside the door. The blows started again. He jerked the door open suddenly and thrust his head out.
There was no one there — nothing to be seen.
In a little room next to his bedroom, which had no exit, noises began and became louder and louder. As soon as a light was lit they ceased, but the moment the light was put out they began again.
Christo, anxious to catch the trickster, stood on the stair landing, revolver in hand. Hardly had the match he held in his fingers gone out when he heard, close to his face, a loud burst of laughter which echoed all over the house.
He saw a white cloud before him, and two wisps of whitish light came from the nostrils of the figure.
This was too much. He felt his courage giving away. His searching fingers could find no more matches, and he called to his wife to bring some down to him. She came quickly, but, in his excitement, he dropped the candle he held, and it rolled away in the darkness somewhere.
“I clasped my wife against my side with my left hand and said to her:
“ ‘I have no more candle. I shall go up with you to find one. If I shoot at random don’t be frightened. There is really nobody. Only, you know if somebody were there, it would be a good warning.’
“ ‘No,’ she replied, very much frightened, even more by my tone than by my words. ‘I do not understand. Are you frightened, too?’
“ ‘There is no cause, I assure you,’ I said, trying to laugh. ‘I am going with you. You will give me another candle because the moon lights things up so badly—’ I went rambling on.
“As we were going up the stairs, pressed against each other, I suddenly felt her getting heavy and pulling me back with the weight of two bodies. She started struggling and crying:
“ ‘Francis, help! Somebody has got hold of my feet.’
“We had arrived on the small landing lighted by a window opening on the garden at the back of the house.
“Without turning around, so convinced was I that I should not see anybody, I passed my right hand over my left shoulder and fired in that direction. The shot rang out fearfully in that sonorous house, and my wife, leaning across my arm, seemed to be dead.
“But I had not killed the evil thing which pursued me. For I received a violent blow on the cheek as if with five small sticks.
“Strangely enough, the blow on the cheek gave me back all my energy. Being struck means that one strikes out and reacts immediately.
“I tore my wife from the terrible thing which sought to take her away from me, and by the vague light of the window I saw once more that there was nobody behind her. We reached our room and I banged the door feverishly, as if I were crushing something in the doorway.
“My wife, feeling herself saved, and thinking of a malefactor because I defended myself with a revolver, rushed to the cradle of the child.
“The cradle was empty.
“Then she fainted away.
“Savagely watching the circle of feeble light, which the lamp shed around me and the woman on the floor, for a sign of the something which would no doubt appear there, I waited. It was useless to think of defense. Knife, revolver — all this became helpless against an enemy who could not be seized.
“From afar the servants, having heard the firing, howled like dogs at the moon. I know of nothing more demoralizing than the cries of women in the night.
“But the soft wailing of a baby which seemed to come from under the floor awoke me from my moral feebleness. It had to be found, the little mite, for I knew from my wife’s fainting fit that it was not she who put it away.
“So I had the courage — it required some courage to go up and downstairs in that house — to search the whole ground floor, holding the lamp on high.
“I found the infant quite naked, all its swaddling clothes taken off, placed on its back in the middle of a marble tablelike object of no value abandoned by a redoubtable robber in his haste to escape in the night.
“All night long I had to soothe the hysterics of my wife and the terror of my infant child. It was only at sunrise that everything returned to its natural order, and the mother went to sleep with the baby’s lips on her breast.
“I must say that this horrible adventure put me into such a state of breakdown that I could no longer face my invisible enemy or enemies. This last conjuring trick, this baby being taken away without our being able to guess how it passed the staircase — or the walls — it could not be explained, could not be tolerated.