VI

I find that my notes of that last night in the house on Beauregard

Square are rather confused, some written at the time, some just before.

For instance, on the edge of a newspaper clipping I find this:

“Evidently this is the item. R—— went pale on reading it. Did not allow

wife to see paper.”

The clipping is an account of the sudden death of an elderly gentleman

named Smythe, one of the Beauregard families.

The next clipping is less hasty and is on a yellow symptom record. It

has been much folded—I believe I tucked it in my apron belt:

“If the rear staircase is bolted everywhere from the inside, how did the

person who locked it, either Mr. or Mrs. Reed, get back into the body of

the house again? Or did Mademoiselle do it? In that case she is no

longer a prisoner and the bolts outside her room are not fastened.

“At eleven o’clock tonight Harry wakened with earache. I went to the

kitchen to heat some mullein oil and laudanum. Mrs. Reed was with the

boy and Mr. Reed was not in sight. I slipped into the library and used

my skeleton keys on the locked door to the rear room. It was empty even

of furniture, but there is a huge box there, with a lid that fastens

down with steel hooks. The lid is full of small airholes. I had no time

to examine further.

“It is one o’clock. Harry is asleep and his mother is dozing across the

foot of his bed. I have found the way to get to the rear staircase.

There are outside steps from the basement to the garden. The staircase

goes down all the way to the cellar evidently. Then the lower door in

the cellar must be only locked, not bolted from the inside. I shall try

to get to the cellar.”

The next is a scrawl:

“Cannot get to the outside basement steps. Mr. Reed is wandering round

lower floor. I reported Harry’s condition and came up again. I must get

to the back staircase.”

I wonder if I have been able to convey, even faintly, the situation in

that highly respectable old house that night: The fear that hung over

it, a fear so great that even I, an outsider and stout of nerve, felt it

and grew cold; the unnatural brilliancy of light that bespoke dread of

the dark; the hushed voices, the locked doors and staring, peering eyes;

the babbling Frenchwoman on an upper floor, the dead fish, the dead dog.

And, always in my mind, that vision of dread on the back staircase and

the thing that slid over my foot.

At two o’clock I saw Mr. Patton, or whoever was on guard in the park

across the street, walk quickly toward the house and disappear round the

corner toward the gardens in the rear. There had been no signal, but I

felt sure that Mr. Reed had left the house. His wife was still asleep

across Harry’s bed. As I went out I locked the door behind me, and I

took also the key to the night nursery. I thought that something

disagreeable, to say the least, was inevitable, and why let her in for

it?

The lower hall was lighted as usual and empty. I listened, but there

were no restless footsteps. I did not like the lower hall. Only a thin

wooden door stood between me and the rear staircase, and any one who

thinks about the matter will realize that a door is no barrier to a head

that can move about without a body. I am afraid I looked over my

shoulder while I unlocked the front door, and I know I breathed better

when I was out in the air.

I wore my dark ulster over my uniform and I had my revolver and keys. My

flash, of course, was useless. I missed it horribly. But to get to the

staircase was an obsession by that time, in spite of my fear of it, to

find what it guarded, to solve its mystery. I worked round the house,

keeping close to the wall, until I reached the garden. The night was the

city night, never absolutely dark. As I hesitated at the top of the

basement steps it seemed to me that figures were moving about among the

trees.

The basement door was unlocked and open. I was not prepared for that,

and it made me, if anything, more uneasy. I had a box of matches with

me, and I wanted light as a starving man wants food. But I dared not

light them. I could only keep a tight grip on my courage and go on. A

small passage first, with whitewashed stone walls, cold and scaly under

my hand; then a large room, and still darkness. Worse than darkness,

something crawling and scratching round the floor.

I struck my match, then, and it seemed to me that something white

flashed into a corner and disappeared. My hands were shaking, but I

managed to light a gas jet and to see that I was in the laundry. The

staircase came down here, narrower than above, and closed off with a

door.

The door was closed and there was a heavy bolt on it but no lock.

And now, with the staircase accessible and a gaslight to keep up my

courage, I grew brave, almost reckless. I would tell Mr. Patton all

about this cellar, which his best men had not been able to enter. I

would make a sketch for him—coal-bins, laundry tubs, everything.

Foolish, of course, but hold the gas jet responsible—the reckless

bravery of light after hideous darkness.

So I went on, forward. The glow from the laundry followed me. I struck

matches, found potatoes and cases of mineral water, bruised my knees on

a discarded bicycle, stumbled over a box of soap. Twice out of the

corner of my eye and never there when I looked I caught the white flash

that had frightened me before. Then at last I brought up before a door

and stopped. It was a curiously barricaded door, nailed against

disturbance by a plank fastened across, and, as if to make intrusion

without discovery impossible, pasted round every crack and over the

keyhole with strips of strong yellow paper. It was an ominous door. I

wanted to run away from it, and I wanted also desperately to stand and

look at it and imagine what might lie beyond. Here again was the

strange, spicy odor that I had noticed in the back staircase.

I think it is indicative of my state of mind that I backed away from the

door. I did not turn and run. Nothing in the world would have made me

turn my back to it.

Somehow or other I got back into the laundry and jerked myself together.

It was ten minutes after two. I had been just ten minutes in the

basement!

The staircase daunted me in my shaken condition. I made excuses for

delaying my venture, looked for another box of matches, listened at the

end of the passage, finally slid the bolts and opened the door. The

silence was impressive. In the laundry there were small, familiar

sounds—the dripping of water from a faucet, the muffled measure of a gas

meter, the ticking of a clock on the shelf. To leave it all, to climb

into that silence——

Lying on the lower step was a curious instrument. It was a sort of tongs

made of steel, about two feet long, and fastened together like a pair of

scissors, the joint about five inches from the flattened ends. I carried

it to the light and examined it. One end was smeared with blood and

short, brownish hairs. It made me shudder, but—from that time on I think

I knew. Not the whole story, of course, but somewhere in the back of my

head, as I climbed in that hideous quiet, the explanation was developing

itself. I did not think it out. It worked itself out as, step after

step, match after match, I climbed the staircase.

Up to the first floor there was nothing. The landing was bare of carpet.

I was on the first floor now. On each side, doors, carefully bolted, led

into the house. I opened the one into the hall and listened. I had been

gone from the children fifteen minutes and they were on my mind. But

everything was quiet.

The sight of the lights and the familiar hall gave me courage. After

all, if I was right, what could the head on the staircase have been but

an optical delusion? And I was right. The evidence—the tongs—was in my

hand. I closed and bolted the door and felt my way back to the stairs. I

lighted no matches this time. I had only a few, and on this landing

there was a little light from the grated window, although the staircase

above was in black shadow.

I had one foot on the lowest stair, when suddenly overhead came the

thudding of hands on a closed door. It broke the silence like an

explosion. It sent chills up and down my spine. I could not move for a

moment. It was the Frenchwoman!

I believe I thought of fire. The idea had obsessed me in that house of

locked doors. I remember a strangling weight of fright on my chest and

of trying to breathe. Then I started up the staircase, running as fast

as I could lift my weighted feet, I remember that, and getting up

perhaps a third of the way. Then there came a plunging forward into

space, my hands out, a shriek frozen on my lips, and——quiet.

I do not think I fainted. I know I was always conscious of my arm

doubled under me, a pain and darkness. I could hear myself moaning, but

almost as if it were some one else. There were other sounds, but they

did not concern me much. I was not even curious about my location. I

seemed to be a very small consciousness surrounded by a great deal of

pain.

Several centuries later a light came and leaned over me from somewhere

above. Then the light said:

“Here she is!”

“Alive?” I knew that voice, but I could not think whose it was.

“I’m not—— Yes, she’s moaning.”

They got me out somewhere and I believe I still clung to the tongs. I

had fallen on them and had a cut on my chin. I could stand, I found,

although I swayed. There was plenty of light now in the back hallway,

and a man I had never seen was investigating the staircase.

“Four steps off,” he said. “Risers and treads gone and the supports

sawed away. It’s a trap of some sort.”

Mr. Patton was examining my broken arm and paid no attention. The man

let himself down into the pit under the staircase. When he straightened,

only his head rose above the steps. Although I was white with pain to

the very lips I laughed hysterically.

“The head!” I cried. Mr. Patton swore under his breath.

They half led, half carried me into the library. Mr. Reed was there,

with a detective on guard over him. He was sitting in his old position,

bent forward, chin in palms. In the blaze of light he was a pitiable

figure, smeared with dust, disheveled from what had evidently been a

struggle. Mr. Patton put me in a chair and dispatched one of the two men

for the nearest doctor.

“This young lady,” he said curtly to Mr. Reed, “fell into that damnable

trap you made in the rear staircase.”

“I locked off the staircase—but I am sorry she is hurt. My—my wife will

be shocked. Only I wish you’d tell me what all this is about. You can’t

arrest me for going into a friend’s house.”

“If I send for some member of the Smythe family will they acquit you?”

“Certainly they will,” he said. “I—I’ve been raised with the Smythes.

You can send for any one you like.” But his tone lacked conviction.

Mr. Patton made me as comfortable as possible, and then, sending the

remaining detective out into the hall, he turned to his prisoner.

“Now, Mr. Reed,” he said. “I want you to be sensible. For some days a

figure has been seen in the basements of the various Beauregard houses.

Your friends, the Smythes, reported it. Tonight we are on watch, and we

see you breaking into the basement of the Smythe house. We already know

some curious things about you, such as dismissing all the servants on

half an hour’s notice and the disappearance of the French governess.”

“Mademoiselle! Why, she——” He checked himself.

“When we bring you here tonight, and you ask to be allowed to go

upstairs and prepare your wife, she is locked in. The nurse is missing.

We find her at last, also locked away and badly hurt, lying in a

staircase trap, where some one, probably yourself, has removed the

steps. I do not want to arrest you, but, now I’ve started, I’m going to

get to the bottom of all this.”

Mr. Reed was ghastly, but he straightened in his chair.

“The Smythes reported this thing, did they?” he asked. “Well, tell me

one thing. What killed the old gentleman—old Smythe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, go a little further.” His cunning was boyish, pitiful. “How did

he die? Or don’t you know that either?”

Up to this point I had been rather a detached part of the scene, but now

my eyes fell on the tongs beside me.

“Mr. Reed,” I said, “isn’t this thing too big for you to handle by

yourself?”

“What thing?”

“You know what I mean. You’ve protected yourself well enough, but even

if the—the thing you know of did not kill old Mr. Smythe you cannot tell

what will happen next.”

“I’ve got almost all of them,” he muttered sullenly. “Another night or

two and I’d have had the lot.”

“But even then the mischief may go on. It means a crusade; it means

rousing the city. Isn’t it the square thing now to spread the alarm?”

Mr. Patton could stand the suspense no longer.

“Perhaps, Miss Adams,” he said, “you will be good enough to let me know

what you are talking about.”

Mr. Reed looked up at him with heavy eyes.

“Rats,” he said. “They got away, twenty of them, loaded with bubonic

plague.”

I went to the hospital the next morning. Mr. Patton thought it best.

There was no one in my little flat to look after me, and although the

pain in my arm subsided after the fracture was set I was still shaken.

He came the next afternoon to see me. I was propped up in bed, with my

hair braided down in two pigtails and great hollows under my eyes.

“I’m comfortable enough,” I said, in response to his inquiry; “but I’m

feeling all of my years. This is my birthday. I am thirty today.”

“I wonder,” he said reflectively, “if I ever reach the mature age of one

hundred, if I will carry in my head as many odds and ends of information

as you have at thirty!”

“I?”

“You. How in the world did you know, for instance, about those tongs?”

“It was quite simple. I’d seen something like them in the laboratory

here. Of course I didn’t know what animals he’d used, but the grayish

brown hair looked like rats. The laboratory must be the cellar room. I

knew it had been fumigated—it was sealed with paper, even over the

keyhole.”

So, sitting there beside me, Mr. Patton told me the story as he had got

it from Mr. Reed—a tale of the offer in an English scientific journal of

a large reward from some plague-ridden country of the East for an

anti-plague serum. Mr. Reed had been working along bacteriological lines

in his basement laboratory, mostly with guinea pigs and tuberculosis. He

was in debt; the offer loomed large.

“He seems to think he was on the right track,” Mr. Patton said. “He had

twenty of the creatures in deep zinc cans with perforated lids. He says

the disease is spread by fleas that infest the rats. So he had muslin as

well over the lids. One can had infected rats, six of them. Then one day

the Frenchwoman tried to give the dog a bath in a laundry tub and the

dog bolted. The laboratory door was open in some way and he ran between

the cans, upsetting them. Every rat was out in an instant. The

Frenchwoman was frantic. She shut the door and tried to drive the things

back. One bit her on the foot. The dog was not bitten, but there was the

question of fleas.

“Well, the rats got away, and Mademoiselle retired to her room to die of

plague. She was a loyal old soul; she wouldn’t let them call a doctor.

It would mean exposure, and after all what could the doctors do? Reed

used his serum and she’s alive.

“Reed was frantic. His wife would not leave. There was the Frenchwoman

to look after, and I think she was afraid he would do something

desperate. They did the best they could, under the circumstances, for

the children. They burned most of the carpets for fear of fleas, and put

poison everywhere. Of course he had traps too.

“He had brass tags on the necks of the rats, and he got back a few—the

uninfected ones. The other ones were probably dead. But he couldn’t stop

at that. He had to be sure that the trouble had not spread. And to add

to their horror the sewer along the street was being relaid, and they

had an influx of rats into the house. They found them everywhere in the

lower floor. They even climbed the stairs. He says that the night you

came he caught a big fellow on the front staircase. There was always the

danger that the fleas that carry the trouble had deserted the dead

creatures for new fields. They took up all the rest of the carpets and

burned them. To add to the general misery the dog Chang developed

unmistakable symptoms and had to be killed.”

“But the broken staircase?” I asked. “And what was it that Mademoiselle

said was coming up?”

“The steps were up for two reasons: The rats could not climb up, and

beneath the steps Reed says he caught in a trap two of the tagged ones.

As for Mademoiselle the thing that was coming up was her

temperature—pure fright. The head you saw was poor Reed himself, wrapped

in gauze against trouble and baiting his traps. He caught a lot in the

neighbors’ cellars and some in the garden.”

“But why,” I demanded, “why didn’t he make it all known?”

Mr. Patton laughed while he shrugged his shoulders.

“A man hardly cares to announce that he has menaced the health of a

city.”

“But that night when I fell—was it only last night?—some one was

pounding above. I thought there was a fire.”

“The Frenchwoman had seen us waylay Reed from her window. She was

crazy.”

“And the trouble is over now?”

“Not at all,” he replied cheerfully. “The trouble may be only beginning.

We’re keeping Reed’s name out, but the Board of Health has issued a

general warning. Personally I think his six pets died without passing

anything along.”

“But there was a big box with a lid——”

“Ferrets,” he assured me. “Nice white ferrets with pink eyes and a taste

for rats.” He held out a thumb, carefully bandaged. “Reed had a couple

under his coat when we took him in the garden. Probably one ran over

your foot that night when you surprised him on the back staircase.”