The Red Light Above the Door
“_You have the radium!_”
He nodded. My mouth open I waited for him to tell me more. In the
little silence I heard a sort of rustle and I looked about me in some
alarm. O’Leary heard the rustle, too, but his face wore the most
peculiar expression of mingled satisfaction and anxiety. He made the
barest perceptible gesture against comment, and just at the moment
Morgue dropped casually down from an opening above what was formerly a
hay loft. I jumped a little at his—I mean, _her_ unexpected advent and
O’Leary spoke unconcernedly.
“Yes, I have the radium. Or rather it is in Room 18 which is, I
believe, the safest place in the world for it, inasmuch as there is
not a soul in St. Ann’s who would willingly enter that room—save
perhaps your intrepid self.”
“How did you find it?”
“Corole brought it to Room 18 last night.” O’Leary’s voice had lifted
to a normal pitch and I recall thinking that he should speak lower.
“Corole brought it in her jewel case. The jewel case is there, too;
she must have doubted your—er—hospitality.”
“Do you mean to say that she had that box of radium in her jewel
case!” I cried. “And that she left the whole thing there, in
Eighteen?”
“Possibly she agreed with me that it was the safest place in which to
leave it. No one would suspect its being back in Room 18. No one would
voluntarily enter that room. Oh, she took the precaution to cross to
that closet and place the jewel case away back on the shelf. She did
that while you were clearing the way for her passage through the halls
to your room. She came very near sitting down on the bed to wait,”
went on O’Leary drily. “And I was endeavouring to give an imitation of
a mattress when you opportunely returned.”
“Oh,” I said brilliantly. “Oh.”
“It was the same closet that hid Dr. Letheny’s body,” added O’Leary
meditatively. “I will leave the radium in Room 18 until to-night; it
will be under close guard all day, Miss Keate, but I think it safer to
wait till to-night, during second watch, when the guards are gone and
the wing is quiet, to remove it. I’m not going to run the risk of
Gainsay’s knocking me senseless again. Of course, we shall have to
locate Corole and keep her out when she returns, as she will, for the
radium. Then I’ll get the stuff away while the hospital is asleep.”
“Do you think that is wise?” I asked hesitantly. “Do you think that
will be——”
“Ready to go back to the hospital?” interrupted O’Leary, and as we
walked along the clean white gravel path he conversed so fluently and
determinedly about the effect of the continued moisture upon the crops
that I could not get a word in edgewise. At the grade door we paused
and O’Leary said a peculiar thing.
“See you later in the day, Miss Keate. Twelve of the twenty-four hours
I gave myself are gone, you know. And by the way, you couldn’t have
done better if you had rehearsed.” And with that he was gone, leaving
me entirely in the dark as to his meaning and feeling rather
irritated. Morgue, who had followed us along the path, brushed against
my skirts. She had already lost her air of pride and was taking on a
certain harassed appearance besides being very thin. But her yellow
eyes raised to mine were still complacent and knowing and so like
Corole’s that I thrust her impatiently aside with my foot and closed
the door sharply.
The rain continued, steadily increasing in fervour as the dreary day
passed. All morning I remained in my room, the door locked securely, a
chair in front of the window lest Corole should take a notion to
return the way she had gone, and myself trying to sleep and succeeding
for the most part in staring at the ceiling or at the rain-smeared
window.
At noon I rose, dashed ice water on my tired eyes, dressed and started
downstairs. The dark day made the vast old place gloomier than ever
and lights had had to be turned on all over the building which,
however, failed to dispel the lurking shadows. Apparently the nurses
were doing their duty as well as might be expected, though I noted
that they gathered in groups and that there was a noticeable lack of
smothered talk and laughter.
In the north wing of the second floor I caught a glimpse, as I rounded
the stairs, of Dr. Hajek, clad in fresh, white duck trousers and coat
and certainly not much resembling a thief and a murderer, making his
morning rounds, and at the door of the maternity ward I met Dr.
Balman, an attendant nurse at his elbow.
It was strange to see the everyday routine going on almost as usual,
almost as if we were not held in the cold grip of horror. No, not
quite as usual, for there was somehow about the place, emanating from
the very, white and expectant walls, an air of suspense, of breathless
waiting.
Dr. Balman had noted it, too.
“Even the patients are upset and restless to-day,” he said wearily, as
I stopped to ask him about Sonny, whose cast did not satisfy me. He
rubbed his hand over his high, benevolent forehead, drew it gently
over the bruise that still looked red and angry, and sighed.
“It is the weather,” I suggested, though it was nothing of the kind.
“Yes. Yes, it must be the weather. A constant succession of cloudy,
rainy days such as we have been having is bad for the nerves. I hope
this rain sees the end of it.” His anxious eyes went past me toward
the window at the end of the corridor.
“One wonders where it is all coming from,” I commented. “I think, too,
that the patients feel the—er—atmosphere of the hospital. The nurses
are uneasy and nervous, jump at every sound, and there is a distinct
feeling of suspense and—breathlessness in the air.”
Dr. Balman nodded; his eyes looked tired and sad under his thin
eyebrows.
“I understand what you mean. There is a psychic undercurrent of unrest
and alarm that is bound to communicate itself to the sick.”
“You aren’t looking well, Dr. Balman,” I said. “You should have that
bruise attended to.” And I thought, though I did not say it, that he
would profit by some liver pills.
“I haven’t had time——” he began; a nurse rattling up to us in her
crisp skirts interrupted him with a question and I went on downstairs.
A letter was waiting for me on the rack in the hall. I did not
recognize the handwriting, which was square and distinct and very
painstaking; the signature, however, caught my attention and I ran
through the note hastily, read it again more carefully, and with an
involuntary glance about me I withdrew into a secluded corner of the
hall and read it once more. It was short and to the point.
Dear Miss:
I think it is my dooty to tell you somthing I heerd. It is about Mr.
Gansie I liked him but he is croked. He thinks Miss C whuz name I
will not menshun has the radeyum, she said you know more than you
will tell about those murders too and he said well what if I do what
I want is the radeyum. Then she said youd better get out of here
before you land in jail and he said speak for yourself. Then the
kitchen door blew shut. You can tell that little man with the gray
eyes if you want to.
That Gansie is a bad man he has a revolver in his pocket.
I have left Miss C for good.
Yours respectfully,
Huldah Hansinge.
Aside from reading “croked” to be “croaked” and thinking for a wild
second that she was announcing Gainsay’s death, I had no difficulty in
understanding Huldah’s amazing epistle. It sounded exactly like her,
and Huldah is honest, so I did not even have the dubious satisfaction
of doubting her word. It was my duty, too, to turn the thing over to
O’Leary, and I should have done so at once had I been able to find
him. But he was not to be found and I finally went down to lunch with
a heavier heart.
The afternoon passed as slowly as the morning. O’Leary stayed out of
sight, I heard no news about Corole or the radium, and the note from
Huldah was simply burning a hole in my pocket. I tried telephoning to
O’Leary but could not even get an answer from his servant. It was
while I was in the general office that someone telephoned for Dr.
Hajek. Miss Jones was at the telephone and asked me to call him,
saying he was in the south wing.
“It’s a woman,” she said, winking at me. “She wouldn’t give her name
or number.”
I found Dr. Hajek in Room 17 changing a dressing. He dropped his
forceps and pulled off his rubber gloves so hastily that they split
across one palm.
“Pick up those forceps and sterilize them,” he directed the attendant
nurse. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I suppose he noted the disapproval in my face, for as we left he
murmured something about having expected an important call and
Seventeen being all right until he returned. In the corridor, tipped
back against the door of Eighteen, lounged a policeman. Dr. Hajek
regarded him speculatively but said nothing concerning his presence,
which was, to my mind, an extraordinarily stupid arrangement. It
seemed far better, to me, to remove the radium under guard to a place
of safe-keeping, but O’Leary’s business was O’Leary’s.
It seemed a singular thing that this man Hajek was at liberty to go
about the hospital, his opinions deferred to by the nurses, his duty
to administer to the sick, and at the same time he was most certainly
involved somehow in the ugly, sordid tragedy that had befallen us. I
followed his white coat through the intervening corridors and,
recalling a record I had meant to look into, also into the general
office. But as I bent over the filing cabinet, though every word of
his brief conversation was audible to me, I could make nothing of it.
It consisted of three “Yes’s,” one “No,” and finished with “All
right.” Upon which he hung up the receiver and departed briskly toward
the south wing and Seventeen. Miss Jones was no wiser than I, for his
eyes had been on her as he talked and she had not dared listen in.
“There’s one thing I know, Miss Keate,” she said as I was about to
leave. “That voice at the other end sounded for all the world like
Miss Letheny’s.”
And some twenty minutes later I was quite sure that I saw Dr. Hajek
going unostentatiously out the grade door toward the garage, though
when the bell rang for dinner he was sitting in the general office
smoking a forbidden cigar and reading the evening papers with the
utmost composure.
I spent most of the intervening time wandering about the halls; I was
very restless and could not settle down to anything, and altogether
the afternoon was a total loss so far as anything interesting was
concerned, so I was not in the best of humours at dinner.
Once I caught a fragment of conversation from a little group of nurses
down at the end of the table.
“. . . and I said, ‘What on earth is that man doing out in the
elderberry bushes in all this rain?’ and she said, ‘He is watching
Room 18.’”
“Why are they watching Room 18?” asked Miss Ferguson, wide-eyed.
“Don’t ask me!” The first girl shrugged her shoulders. “But there have
been a couple of men, besides that policeman in the south wing,
hanging around all day; I don’t think they are police because they
don’t wear uniforms, but they didn’t have their eyes off the windows
of Room 18 all day long.”
“What do you suppose is the reason?” whispered someone in a tense,
shrill whisper that carried.
“I don’t know!”
“Mercy, I’m glad I’m not on duty in the south wing,” said someone
else, and all the eyes at the table immediately focussed on me.
“Well, whatever it is, I wish it would be settled,” announced Miss
Ferguson vigorously. “I’m getting so nervous I drop everything I
touch. And my neck is stiff from twisting it to look back over my
shoulder.”
Melvina Smith cleared her throat and I left the table at once. I have
nothing against Melvina, but if she had been in the south wing during
the past week she would have got her fill of horrors.
With the gathering darkness the feeling of impending catastrophe that
had hung over us all day intensified itself. By midnight I was as
jumpy as a race horse, my heart leaping to my throat at every sound
and my hands shaking so that I could scarcely turn off my alarm clock
and adjust my cap.
The storm had grown steadily worse and by twelve o’clock was blowing a
gale with thunder and lightning making the night hideous. The old
building seemed to tremble at each onslaught, and every window casing
rattled and every curtain flapped and the whole place seemed to quiver
and shudder as if it were alive.
On the way down to the south wing, I don’t mind saying that I suffered
from something very near to stage fright, at least there was a rock in
the pit of my stomach and the backs of my knees felt shaky and not to
be depended upon. I very nearly shrieked when I heard footsteps back
of me on the stairs, but it was only Maida, going down to duty, and
together we walked through those deserted, creaking halls.
I had not been on duty more than twenty minutes when I found a note
pinned to the order blank and addressed “Miss Keate”! It was sealed,
and across the paper was a single sentence splashed hurriedly:
When the red light shines above 18 answer it.
I wheeled to stare down the length of corridor toward that closed,
inscrutable door at its far end. The corridor lost itself in the
shadows and the door was itself indistinguishable, but it seemed to me
that the faraway panes of glass in the south door caught green glints
of light from the shade above my head.
“When the red light shines above 18 answer it.”
What was going on in the dark room? What did it mean?
It was fortunate that I had plenty of assistance, for I could not
possibly have gone about my duty with this amazing thing in my mind.
In fact, I paid very little attention to the demands of the wing and
alternated my gaze between my wrist watch and that shadowy end of the
south wing corridor.
When the red light shines above 18!
When would it shine—what would I see upon opening that heavy gumwood
door?
When the red light shines . . . After what seemed eons of time I
strolled casually and with attempted calm in that direction. My heart
began to pound violently as I approached that mysterious door. I
paused at the south end of the corridor, pretending to scrutinize a
thermometer that hung on the wall and listening with all my ears
toward that dully gleaming panel of gumwood. Not a sound came from it,
and though I lingered for some time in the vicinity, still I heard
nothing.
On the way back Olma Flynn stopped me.
“Eleven says he will not take his medicine, Miss Keate. What shall I
do?”
I must have answered her rather vaguely and, in fact, barely heard her
question. At any rate, she gave me a strange look, whirled to follow
my gaze down the corridor south and, seeing nothing, faced me again.
Her eyes were very wide and her mouth hung open.
“What—what did you say, Miss Keate?”
“I’ll see about it in the morning,” I replied, quite at random. She
retreated, eyeing me with trepidation, and later I saw her whispering
with the student nurse in the drug room and both of them regarding me
distrustfully.
Somehow the seconds dragged along. I took up my post at the chart
desk, turning the chair so that it faced the long length of empty,
dark corridor, and the dark space above Eighteen was visible to me.
Maida stopped at the desk now and then, and once paused to survey me
curiously.
“What on earth is the matter with you, Sarah?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, looking for the thousandth time at my watch. It
was then a quarter of two.
She studied me oddly for a moment.
“What a night! The wind and rain is getting awfully on my nerves.” She
unpinned her thermometer, took off the cap and held it closer to her
eyes. “I was taking a temperature a moment ago when that loud crack of
thunder came and it startled me so that I dropped the thermometer. I
don’t think”—she paused to squint interestedly along the small glass
tube—“I don’t think I broke it. For heaven’s sake, Sarah!” she broke
off in sudden irritation. “Stop staring down the corridor. You make me
edgy. What are you looking for? What do you——”
I did not hear the rest of the sentence. I sprang to my feet, peering
through the semi-darkness to be sure my eyes had not mistaken me.
They had not!
Gleaming above the door of Eighteen was a single, small red light!