"I'll get flashlights," he said huskily.
They went up the road through the snow in silence--three men, a boy and a
dog. A pale quarter of moon had risen, and the world was all white
silver, and even the trees seemed ghostlike and unreal. The artist
dropped out at his house to write his letters, and the others went on to
Farley's. The place, Joe thought, did not look so forbidding under the
softening touch of the moon. Frost had come with darkness, and the porch
floor creaked under their feet. Mr. Sweetman thrust a key into a lock,
the front door opened on complaining hinges, and they stepped into the
damp, black, moldiness of a deserted, closed-up dwelling.
"The light!" the farmer cried. "Where is the light?"
Joe jumped, and switched on a flash. He had a momentary glimpse of his
uncle, standing in the eternal darkness of the blind, serene and
untroubled, and the sight gave him courage. The beam picked out faded
walls, a chair, broken and discarded, the dusty floor, a doorway, a
yawning staircase. Outside the yellow shaft of light there was naught but
a blank, impenetrable, stealthy darkness. Darkness, and the hushed,
unbroken silence.
"Well?" Dr. Stone asked.
There was a sound. At first it might have been the whimper of a wind
around the eaves of the house. It rose, and fell away, and rose again. It
fell away to a plaintive, worried whimper. And then, without warning, it
became a human cry that filled the house with ghastly echoes. A
voice--unmistakably a voice--sobbed wildly in writhing anguish. As
abruptly as it had risen the cry was gone, and there was only a low,
plaintive, heartbroken lamentation.
Mr. Sweetman's teeth chattered. "You hear it, Doctor? From all over the
house--upstairs, downstairs, everywhere."
"Quiet," said Dr. Stone.
There was a new sound. It seemed to come from nowhere and from
everywhere. It was gone--it came again. A measured beat, a steady rhythm
that hammered and throbbed like an unchanging pulse. Hammer and throb,
hammer and throb! It beat upon the ears. Hammer and throb! All at once
the sound stopped in the middle of a stroke and did not come again. The
dark house lay in frozen silence.
"Doctor!" The farmer's voice shook. "You know what that was?"
"Do you, Sweetman?"
The man's answer came in a hoarse whisper. "I think it was a heart
beating."
Joe's throat was a cramped vice. The flashlight shook in his hand and
made fantastic splotches of light upon the floor.
"Upstairs," Mr. Sweetman croaked.
They heard the sound of footsteps on the floor above. A child's
footsteps. Footsteps that ran and skipped lightly and gayly. Suddenly the
sound was gone from above and in the same room in which they stood the
same footsteps gamboled. Joe made a frantic circle of the room with the
flash.
"See!" the farmer choked. "Nothing!"
A new sound joined the footfalls. Joe recognized it, and his scalp
prickled. The beat of a heart! It throbbed momentarily and was gone. The
unseen child continued to romp.