It was nine o’clock on the evening of 20 July and very warm. I had left my window open wide and light from a lamp on my table fell on a volume of Musset2 open at Nuit de Mai.3 I myself was stretched out on a sofa and had nodded off. After about forty minutes or so, awakened by a strange sort of feeling, I opened my eyes again but kept perfectly still. At first nothing happened. Then, as I watched, one of the pages of the book turned over, seemingly by itself. Not a breath of air had wafted through the window. Puzzled, I waited and in another four minutes or so I saw, I saw with my own eyes, gentlemen, another page rise and place itself over the first, exactly as if turned by invisible fingers. The armchair next to it seemed unoccupied but I knew perfectly well it was there. I leapt across the room to grab it, touch it, to seize hold of it somehow or other. But before I reached it, the chair, seemingly of its own accord, turned over backwards as if fleeing from me. The lamp also fell and went out, its glass smashed. The window was suddenly flung back against its hinges as if by some intruder making his escape … oh, my God! I rang the bell furiously and when my manservant came, said, “I’ve knocked all this stuff over and smashed it. Go and fetch another lamp will you?”

I slept no more that night. Yet I could still have made some sort of mistake. When you wake from a snooze you’re always a little bit befuddled. Could it have been I who turned the armchair over and upset the lamp, rushing about like a mad thing? No! Of course it was not! I had not the slightest doubt about that. Yet that was what I wanted to believe.

Now. What should I call this … Being? The Invisible One? No, that would not do. I decided to call it the Horla. Don’t ask me why. So I was going to be stuck with this Horla indefinitely. Night and day I could feel it there. I knew it was close to me the whole time, yet totally elusive. I also knew for certain that with each passing hour, each passing minute, even, it was drawing the life out of me. I was driven to distraction by the fact that I could never see it. I lit every lamp in the house. Maybe given proper illumination it could be exposed.

Then, finally, I saw it. Believe it or not, I saw it.