Lazarus himself could scarcely have been a more appalling object, when
the voice of him who spoke as never man spake, said, "Lazarus come
forth."
I made an unavailing attempt to cross the threshold, but could not. I
was spellbound, or there was an invisible barrier erected against me,
which I could not overleap. The buzzing in my ears, the pain and
throbbing in my head, and racking aches, once more bent me to the earth,
ill and reduced as I was, a relapse, thought I; and I felt my judgment
once more giving way before the sweltering fiend, who had retreated but
for a moment to renew his attacks with still greater fierceness. The
moment he once more entered into me--the instant that I was possessed--I
cannot call it by any other name--an unnatural strength pervaded my
shrunken muscles and emaciated frame, and I stepped boldly into the hall.
While I had stood at the door, listless and feeble as a child, hanging on
the arms of the two topmen, after they had raised me from the hammock,
the whole party had sat silently gazing at me, with their faculties
paralysed with terror. But now, when I stumped into the room like the
marble statue in Don Juan, and glared on them, my eyes sparkling with
unearthly brilliancy under the fierce distemper which had anew thrust its
red hot fingers into my maw, and was at the moment seething my brain in
its hellish caldron, the negroes in the piazza, one and all, men, women,
and children, evanished into the night, and the whole party in the
foreground started to their legs, as if they had been suddenly
galvanized; the table and chairs were overset, and whites and blacks
trundled, and scrambled, and bundled over and over each other, neck and
crop, as if the very devil had come to invite them to dinner in propria
personal horns, tail, and all.
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