"I came in, as I said," explained West, "about eleven o'clock and having made some notes relating to an interview arranged for this morning, I locked the plans in the safe and turned in." "There was no one hidden anywhere in your chambers?" snapped Smith. "There was not," replied West. "I looked. I invariably do. Almost immediately, I went to sleep." "How many chloral tabloids did you take?" I interrupted. Norris West turned to me with a slow smile. "You're cute, Doctor," he said. "I took two. It's a bad habit, but I can't sleep without. They are specially made up for me by a firm in Philadelphia." "How long sleep lasted, when it became filled with uncanny dreams, and when those dreams merged into reality, I do not know--shall never know, I suppose. But out of the dreamless void a face came to me--closer--closer--and peered into mine. "I was in that curious condition wherein one knows that one is dreaming and seeks to awaken--to escape. But a nightmare-like oppression held me. So I must lie and gaze into the seared yellow face that hung over me, for it would drop so close that I could trace the cicatrized scar running from the left ear to the corner of the mouth, and drawing up the lip like the lip of a snarling cur. I could look into the malignant, jaundiced eyes; I could hear the dim whispering of the distorted mouth--whispering that seemed to counsel something--something evil. That whispering intimacy was indescribably repulsive. Then the wicked yellow face would be withdrawn, and would recede until it became as a pin's head in the darkness far above me--almost like a glutinous, liquid thing. "Somehow I got upon my feet, or dreamed I did--God knows where dreaming ended and reality began. Gentlemen maybe you'll conclude I went mad last night, but as I stood holding on to the bedrail I heard the blood throbbing through my arteries with a noise like a screw-propeller. I started laughing. The laughter issued from my lips with a shrill whistling sound that pierced me with physical pain and seemed to wake the echoes of the whole block. I thought myself I was going mad, and I tried to command my will--to break the power of the chloral--for I concluded that I had accidentally taken an overdose. "Then the walls of my bedroom started to recede, till at last I stood holding on to a bed which had shrunk to the size of a doll's cot, in the middle of a room like Trafalgar Square! That window yonder was such a long way off I could scarcely see it, but I could just detect a Chinaman--the owner of the evil yellow face--creeping through it. He was followed by another, who was enormously tall--so tall that, as they came towards me (and it seemed to take them something like half-an-hour to cross this incredible apartment in my dream), the second Chinaman seemed to tower over me like a cypress-tree.