"George Allen England - Darkness and Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (England George Allen)

Furniture, there now was none. Over the still-intact glass of the windows cobwebs were draped so
thickly as almost to exclude the light of day—a strange, fly-infested curtain where once neat green
shade-rollers had hung.

Even as the bewildered girl sat there, lips parted, eyes wide with amaze, a spider seized his buzzing prey
and scampered back into a hole in the wall.

A huge, leathery bat, suspended upside down in the far corner, cheeped with dry, crepitant sounds of
irritation.

Beatrice rubbed her eyes.

“What?” she said, quite slowly. “Dreaming? How singular! I only wish I could remember this when I
wake up. Of all the dreams I've ever had, this one's certainly the strangest. So real, so vivid! Why, I
could swear I was awake—and yet—”

All at once a sudden doubt flashed into her mind. An uneasy expression dawned across her face. Her
eyes grew wild with a great fear; the fear of utter and absolute incomprehension.

Something about this room, this weird awakening, bore upon her consciousness the dread tidings this
was not a dream.

Something drove home to her the fact that it was real, objective, positive! And with a gasp of fright she
struggled up amid the litter and the rubbish of that uncanny room.

“Oh!” she cried in terror, as a huge scorpion, malevolent, and with its tail raised to strike, scuttled away
and vanished through a gaping void where once the corridor-door had swung. “Oh, oh! WhereamI?
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




What—what has—happened?“

Horrified beyond all words, pale and staring, both hands clutched to her breast, whereon her very
clothing now had torn and crumbled, she faced about.

To her it seemed as though some monstrous, evil thing were lurking in the dim corner at her back. She
tried to scream, but could utter no sound, save a choked gasp.

Then she started toward the doorway. Even as she took the first few steps her gown—a mere tattered
mockery of garment—fell away from her.

And, confronted by a new problem, she stopped short. About her she peered in vain for something to
protect her disarray. There was nothing.

“Why—where's—where's my chair? My desk?” she exclaimed thickly, starting toward the place by the
window where they should have been, and were not. Her shapely feet fell soundlessly in that strange and
impalpable dust which thickly coated everything.