“I’m afraid I’ve been very selfish,” he said. “Of course she must have
sleep. I’ll give you a powder, unless you have something you prefer to
use.”
I remembered then that he was a chemist, and said I would gladly use
whatever he gave me.
“There is another thing I wanted to speak about, Mr. Reed,” I said. “The
children are mourning their dog. Don’t you think he may have been
accidentally shut up somewhere in the house in one of the upper floors?”
“Why do you say that?” he demanded sharply.
“They say they have heard him howling.”
He hesitated for barely a moment. Then:
“Possibly,” he said. “But they will not hear him again. The little chap
has been sick, and he—died to-day. Of course the boys are not to know.”
No one watched the staircase that night. I gave Mrs. Reed the opiate and
saw her comfortably into bed. When I went back fifteen minutes later she
was resting, but not asleep. Opiates sometimes make people garrulous for
a little while—sheer comfort, perhaps, and relaxed tension. I’ve had
stockbrokers and bankers in the hospital give me tips, after a
hypodermic of morphia, that would have made me wealthy had I not been
limited to my training allowance of twelve dollars a month.
“I was just wondering,” she said as I tucked her up, “where a woman owes
the most allegiance—to her husband or to her children?”
“Why not split it up,” I said cheerfully, “and try doing what seems best
for both?”
“But that’s only a compromise!” she complained, and was asleep almost
immediately. I lowered the light and closed the door, and shortly after
I heard Mr. Reed locking it from the outside.
With the bolt off my door and Mrs. Reed asleep my plan for the night was
easily carried out. I went to bed for a couple of hours and slept
calmly. I awakened once with the feeling that some one was looking at me
from the passage into the night nursery, but there was no one there.
However, so strong had been the feeling that I got up and went into the
back room. The children were asleep, and all doors opening into the hall
were locked. But the window on to the porte-cochère roof was open and
the curtain blowing. There was no one on the roof.
It was not twelve o’clock and I still had an hour. I went back to bed.
At one I prepared to make a thorough search of the house. Looking from
one of my windows I thought I saw the shadowy figure of a man across the
street, and I was comforted. Help was always close, I felt. And yet, as
I stood inside my door in my rubber-soled shoes, with my ulster over my
uniform and a revolver and my skeleton keys in my pockets, my heart was
going very fast. The stupid story of the ghost came back and made me
shudder, and the next instant I was remembering Mrs. Reed the night
before, staring down into the lower hall with fixed glassy eyes.
My plan was to begin at the top of the house and work down. The thing
was the more hazardous, of course, because Mr. Reed was most certainly
somewhere about. I had no excuse for being on the third floor. Down
below I could say I wanted tea, or hot water—anything. But I did not
expect to find Mr. Reed up above. The terror, whatever it was, seemed to
lie below.
Access to the third floor was not easy. The main staircase did not go
up. To get there I was obliged to unlock the door at the rear of the
hall with my own keys. I was working in bright light, trying my keys one
after another, and watching over my shoulder as I did so. When the door
finally gave it was a relief to slip into the darkness beyond, ghosts or
no ghosts.
I am always a silent worker. Caution about closing doors and squeaking
hinges is second nature to me. One learns to be cautious when one’s only
chance of sleep is not to rouse a peevish patient and have to give a
body-massage, as like as not, or listen to domestic troubles—“I said”
and “he said”—until one is almost crazy.
So I made no noise. I closed the door behind me and stood blinking in
the darkness. I listened. There was no sound above or below. Now houses
at night have no terror for me. Every nurse is obliged to do more or
less going about in the dark. But I was not easy. Suppose Mr. Reed
should call me? True, I had locked my door and had the key in my pocket.
But a dozen emergencies flew through my mind as I felt for the stair
rail.
There was a curious odor through all the back staircase, a pungent,
aromatic scent that, with all my familiarity with drugs, was strange to
me. As I slowly climbed the stairs it grew more powerful. The air was
heavy with it, as though no windows had been opened in that part of the
house. There was no door at the top of this staircase, as there was on
the second floor. It opened into an upper hall, and across from the head
of the stairs was a door leading into a room. This door was closed. On
this staircase, as on all the others, the carpet had been newly lifted.
My electric flash showed the white boards and painted borders, the
carpet tacks, many of them still in place. One, lying loose, penetrated
my rubber sole and went into my foot.
I sat down in the dark and took off the shoe. As I did so my flash, on
the step beside me, rolled over and down with a crash. I caught it on
the next step, but the noise had been like a pistol shot.
Almost immediately a voice spoke above me sharply. At first I thought it
was out in the upper hall. Then I realized that the closed door was
between it and me.
“Ees that you, Meester Reed?”
Mademoiselle!
“Meester Reed!” plaintively. “Eet comes up again, Meester Reed! I die!
To-morrow I die!”
She listened. On no reply coming she began to groan rhythmically, to a
curious accompaniment of creaking. When I had gathered up my nerves
again I realized that she must be sitting in a rocking chair. The groans
were really little plaintive grunts.
By the time I had got my shoe on she was up again, and I could hear her
pacing the room, the heavy step of a woman well fleshed and not young.
Now and then she stopped inside the door and listened; once she shook
the knob and mumbled querulously to herself.
I recovered the flash, and with infinite caution worked my way to the
top of the stairs. Mademoiselle was locked in, doubly bolted in. Two
strong bolts, above and below, supplemented the door lock.
Her ears must have been very quick, or else she felt my softly padding
feet on the boards outside, for suddenly she flung herself against the
door and begged for a priest, begged piteously, in jumbled French and
English. She wanted food; she was dying of hunger. She wanted a priest.
And all the while I stood outside the door and wondered what I should
do. Should I release the woman? Should I go down to the lower floor and
get the detective across the street to come in and force the door? Was
this the terror that held the house in thrall—this babbling old
Frenchwoman calling for food and a priest in one breath?
Surely not. This was a part of the mystery, not all. The real terror lay
below. It was not Mademoiselle, locked in her room on the upper floor,
that the Reeds waited for at the top of the stairs. But why was
Mademoiselle locked in her room? Why were the children locked in? What
was this thing that had turned a home into a jail, a barracks, that had
sent away the servants, imprisoned and probably killed the dog, sapped
the joy of life from two young people? What was it that Mademoiselle
cried “comes up again”?