10 MAY

LOOKING THROUGH MY JOURNAL ENTRY FROM YESTERDAY, I realize that I have been long-winded. Therefore I’m determined to be more concise from now on.¹⁶⁴

I went to bed early last night, extinguishing the lights not long after midnight. It felt as though I had just drifted off to sleep when it started growing light out and I was suddenly awoken by a sound from outside. It was like the sound of a dying person; a loud cry at first, but then it gradually got weaker. Fully awake now, I sat up in bed and a cold sweat broke out all over my body. I could still hear the scream echo in my head. In one sweep, I threw on my clothes and rushed to the window. I had forgotten to let the shutters down the night before, and when I opened the window the cool air flowed in.¹⁶⁵

I could vaguely make out the first trace of early sunrise in the east, but fog lay over the ground, so nothing could be seen. I peered out the window as far as I could and listened. The air was cold and damp, and through the thick brume I could just make out the outlines of the castle walls a little farther away. After standing at the window for nearly half an hour, I heard a shuffling noise out in the darkness. It sounded as though something was creeping along the outside of the castle wall—perhaps on a ledge,¹⁶⁶ which had either been built for decoration or simply marked the transition between the lower and upper levels of the castle. As it moved closer, I saw that it was a human form, wrapped in a long grey coat, with a sort of hood over his head. He crawled on hands and feet, like a cat, along the narrow ledge, but after some time he disappeared, as if he had slipped through a crack in the wall or climbed into a window.¹⁶⁷

In a desperate hurry I closed the window and let down the shutters.

After lighting the candles in my room, I was able to steel my nerves and calm down a bit. I shivered from the cold, so I went straight for my hip flask and took a mouthful of cognac. It wouldn’t be funny if I became ill here. Then I checked whether the door was locked and made sure that the revolver was loaded. I laid it on the bedside table and got back under the blankets.

If I’d seen something like this in London—a strangely dressed man creeping cautiously along a gutter—my only thought would be to fetch the nearest police officer and, with his help, find out whether this was some unfortunate sleepwalker or an unconventional burglar, and then make sure he be taken into custody. But as a stranger here, I have no idea what to do. I don’t know my way around the castle—in fact, I don’t even know where the Count sleeps! I also suspect that, save for the two of us, not a single living soul would be found in this part of the house. I considered the risk of making a commotion to wake the Count, so that I could tell him what I’d witnessed, but I wasn’t certain he’d take kindly to such a disturbance. I decided it was wisest to try to keep myself safe with the means I had at hand and to pretend that everything was fine—keeping hold of my emotions.