"A Terribly Strange Bed" is a short story by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1852 in Household Words, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens.
[1][2] In the story, an English visitor to a gambling-house in Paris stays overnight in the building, and is nearly killed by a specially constructed bed.
At the beginning and end of the book are "Leaves from Leah's Diary": William Kerby, a travelling portrait-painter, is in danger of losing his sight, and is required by his doctor to cease painting for a while.
As a change from respectable establishments, he visits a low gambling house, where a variety of unsavoury characters are playing Rouge et Noir.
The moonlight in the room brings to his mind a moonlit evening after a picnic years ago, which he thought he had forgotten.
He goes to a prefecture of police, where a sub-prefect, who happens to be discussing a recent murder with colleagues, becomes quickly interested in the narrator's story.
He returns with the sub-prefect and several assistants, who arrest the residents of the gambling house and investigate the machinery which moved the bed canopy.
The sub-prefect speculates that many individuals found drowned in the Seine were victims of the gambling house, with fake suicide notes.