My room was filled with menacing
voices, and just then a mighty wind rushed past my window, and out of the
wind came cries, and lamentations, and curses, which took shapes unearthly,
and ranged about the bed on which I lay shuddering. Die! die! die! they
shrieked. I was commanded to hold my breath, and they threatened horrors
unimaginable if I did not obey.
I now believed that my time had come to render up the life which had been
so much abused. I asked what would become of my soul when my body gave it
up, and they told me it would descend to the tortures of an everlasting
hell, and that once there, my present sufferings would be as bliss compared
with what was in store for me for an endless age. As my eyes wandered about
the room--I was afraid to close them--I saw that innumerable devils were
crowding into it. They were henceforth to be my companions, and if the
Prince of all of them ever allowed me to leave for a brief time the regions
of infernal woe, it would be in their company and on missions such as they
were now fulfilling. I called aloud for my mother, and a voice more
diabolical than any I had yet heard, hissed into my ears that she was
chained in hell, but immediately a million devils screamed, "Liar! she is
in heaven!" I refused then to hold my breath, and told them to kill me and
do their worst.
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