“There is something in the house downstairs that you are afraid of?” I
persisted.
She took a step forward and caught my arm.
“I had no idea it would be like this, Miss Adams. I’m dying of fear!”
I had a quick vision of the swathed head on the back staircase, and some
of my night’s terror came back to me. I believe we stared at each other
with dilated pupils for a moment. Then I asked:
“Is it a real thing?—surely you can tell me this. Are you afraid of a
reality, or—is it something supernatural?” I was ashamed of the
question. It sounded so absurd in the broad light of that April morning.
“It is a real danger,” she replied. Then I think she decided that she
had gone as far as she dared, and I went through the ceremony of letting
her out and of locking the door behind her.
The day was warm. I threw up some of the windows and the boys and I
played ball, using a rolled handkerchief. My part, being to sit on the
floor with a newspaper folded into a bat and to bang at the handkerchief
as it flew past me, became automatic after a time.
As I look back I see a pair of disordered young rascals in Russian
blouses and bare round knees doing a great deal of yelling and some very
crooked throwing; a nurse sitting tailor fashion on the floor,
alternately ducking to save her cap and making vigorous but ineffectual
passes at the ball with her newspaper bat. And I see sunshine in the
room and the dwarf parrot eating sugar out of his claw. And below, the
fish in the aquarium floating belly-up with dull eyes.
Mr. Reed brought up our luncheon tray. He looked tired and depressed and
avoided my eyes. I watched him while I spread the bread and butter for
the children. He nailed shut the windows that opened on to the
porte-cochère roof and when he thought I was not looking he examined the
registers in the wall to see if the gratings were closed. The boys put
the dead fish in a box and made him promise a decent interment in the
garden. They called on me for an epitaph, and I scrawled on top of the
box:
_These fish are dead
Because a boy called Fred
Went out on a porch roof when he should
Have been in bed._
I was much pleased with it. It seemed to me that an epitaph, which can
do no good to the departed, should at least convey a moral. But to my
horror Freddie broke into loud wails and would not be comforted.
It was three o’clock, therefore, before they were both settled for their
afternoon naps and I was free. I had determined to do one thing, and to
do it in daylight—to examine the back staircase inch by inch. I knew I
would be courting discovery, but the thing had to be done, and no power
on earth would have made me essay such an investigation after dark.
It was all well enough for me to say to myself that there was a natural
explanation; that this had been a human head, of a certainty; that
something living and not spectral had slid over my foot in the darkness.
I would not have gone back there again at night for youth, love or
money. But I did not investigate the staircase that day, after all.
I made a curious discovery after the boys had settled down in their
small white beds. A venturesome fly had sailed in through an open
window, and I was immediately in pursuit of him with my paper bat.
Driven from the cornice to the chandelier, harried here, swatted there,
finally he took refuge inside the furnace register.
Perhaps it is my training—I used to know how many million germs a fly
packed about with it, and the generous benevolence with which it
distributed them; I’ve forgotten—but the sight of a single fly maddens
me. I said that to Mr. Patton once, and he asked what the sight of a
married one would do. So I sat down by the register and waited. It was
then that I made the curious discovery that the furnace belowstairs was
burning, and burning hard. A fierce heat assailed me as I opened the
grating. I drove the fly out of cover, but I had no time for him. The
furnace going full on a warm spring day! It was strange.
Perhaps I was stupid. Perhaps the whole thing should have been clear to
me. But it was not. I sat there bewildered and tried to figure it out. I
went over it point by point:
The carpets up all over the house, lights going full all night and doors
locked.
The cot at the top of the stairs and Mrs. Reed staring down.
The bolt outside my door to lock me in.
The death of Chang.
Mademoiselle locked in her room upstairs and begging for a priest.
The poison on the porch roof.
The head without a body on the staircase and the thing that slid over my
foot.
The furnace going, and the thing I recognized as I sat there beside the
register—the unmistakable odor of burning cloth.
Should I have known? I wonder. It looks so clear to me now.
I did not investigate the staircase, for the simple reason that my
skeleton key, which unfastened the lock of the door at the rear of the
second-floor hall, did not open the door. I did not understand at once
and stood stupidly working with the lock. The door was bolted on the
other side. I wandered as aimlessly as I could down the main staircase
and tried the corresponding door on the lower floor. It, too, was
locked. Here was an _impasse_ for sure. As far as I could discover the
only other entrance to the back staircase was through the window with
the iron grating.
As I turned to go back I saw my electric flash, badly broken, lying on a
table in the hall. I did not claim it.
The lower floor seemed entirely deserted. The drawing room and library
were in their usual disorder, undusted and bare of floor. The air
everywhere was close and heavy; there was not a window open. I sauntered
through the various rooms, picked up a book in the library as an excuse
and tried the door of the room behind. It was locked. I thought at first
that something moved behind it, but if anything lived there it did not
stir again. And yet I had a vivid impression that just on the other side
of the door ears as keen as mine were listening. It was broad day, but I
backed away from the door and out into the wide hall. My nerves were
still raw, no doubt, from the night before.
I was to meet Mr. Patton at half after seven that night, and when Mrs.
Reed relieved me at seven I had half an hour to myself. I spent it in
Beauregard Gardens, with the dry fountain in the center. The place
itself was charming, the trees still black but lightly fringed with new
green, early spring flowers in the borders, neat paths and, bordering it
all, the solid, dignified backs of the Beauregard houses. I sat down on
the coping of the fountain and surveyed the Reed house. Those windows
above were Mademoiselle’s. The shades were drawn, but no light came
through or round them. The prisoner—for prisoner she was by every rule
of bolt and lock—must be sitting in the dark. Was she still begging for
her priest? Had she had any food? Was she still listening inside her
door for whatever it was that was “coming up”?
In all the other houses windows were open; curtains waved gently in the
spring air; the cheerful signs of the dinner hour were evident near
by—moving servants, a gleam of stately shirt bosom as a butler mixed a
salad, a warm radiance of candle-light from dining room tables and the
reflected glow of flowers. Only the Reed house stood gloomy, unlighted,
almost sinister.
Beauregard Place dined early. It was one of the traditions, I believe.
It liked to get to the theater or the opera early, and it believed in
allowing the servants a little time in the evenings. So, although it was
only something after seven, the evening rite of the table crumbs began
to be observed. Came a colored butler, bowed to me with a word of
apology, and dumped the contents of a silver tray into the basin; came a
pretty mulatto, flung her crumbs gracefully and smiled with a flash of
teeth at the butler.
Then for five minutes I was alone.
It was Nora, the girl we had met on the street, who came next. She saw
me and came round to me with a little air of triumph.
“Well, I’m back in the square again, after all, miss,” she said. “And a
better place than the Reeds. I don’t have the doilies to do.”
“I’m very glad you are settled again, Nora.”
She lowered her voice.
“I’m just trying it out,” she observed. “The girl that left said I
wouldn’t stay. She was scared off. There have been some queer doings—not
that I believe in ghosts or anything like that. But my mother in the old
country had the second-sight, and if there’s anything going on I’ll be
right sure to see it.”
It took encouragement to get her story, and it was secondhand at that,
of course. But it appeared that a state of panic had seized the
Beauregard servants. The alarm was all belowstairs and had been started
by a cook who, coming in late and going to the basement to prepare
herself a cup of tea, had found her kitchen door locked and a light
going beyond. Suspecting another maid of violating the tea canister she
had gone soft-footed to the outside of the house and had distinctly seen
a gray figure crouching in a corner of the room. She had called the
butler, and they had made an examination of the entire basement without
result. Nothing was missing from the house.
“And that figure has been seen again and again, miss,” Nora finished.
“McKenna’s butler Joseph saw it in this very spot, walking without a
sound and the street light beyond there shining straight through it.
Over in the Smythe house the laundress, coming in late and going down to
the basement to soak her clothes for the morning, met the thing on the
basement staircase and fainted dead away.”