IN THE TOWER WINDOW
Morning dawned cold and misty. Judy fumbled through the closet hunting
for an umbrella, and her trembling fingers touched Irene’s clothes.
They lingered lovingly in the folds of each well remembered dress.
“Irene! Irene!” she thought. “I don’t care what you’ve done if only I
can bring you back.”
In the adjoining room Pauline was still asleep. How cruel of her to
sleep! No one was up except Blackberry, out there on the roof garden.
Feeling that she must say goodbye to somebody, Judy whispered it to him.
It was too early for the throng of office workers to be abroad when
Judy stepped out on the wet pavement and turned toward the subway
entrance. The tall buildings in lower New York were little more than
shadows, and the clock in the Metropolitan Tower was veiled in mist.
Ghostly halos were around all the street lamps, and dampness seemed to
have settled heavily over everything.
Judy felt it. The only comforting thing about the trip was the fact
that she would be riding on the subway alone for the first time. She
paid her fare, asked a few directions, and soon was seated in an
express train bound for Brooklyn.
She pressed her forehead against the window as the train came onto
Manhattan Bridge and started its trip over the East River. Freighters
steamed down toward the ocean and up again. Everything looked gray.
As she watched, Judy’s hopes sank lower and lower. She began to realize
that it was not the part of wisdom to go on her dangerous errand to the
poet’s house alone. What would she say if Jasper Crosby opened the
door? Would her experience with eccentric Emily Grimshaw help her to
cope with the insane hallucinations of Sarah Glenn? Would she dare
demand to know what had happened to Irene when a possibility existed
that they had never seen her? Suppose they asked for the missing
poetry. If she lied to defend Irene her nervousness might betray her.
Judy knew that her chances of finding her chum were slim, very slim.
Like the shining tracks behind her they seemed to lessen as the train
sped on.
At Ninth Avenue she changed to the Culver Line. Up came the train, out
of the tunnel, and the wet gray walls at the side of the tracks grew
lower and lower. Soon they were clear of the ground and Judy realized
that this was the elevated. Only four more stations! She looked around,
eager for her first glimpse of Brooklyn, but what she saw caused her to
shudder.
“Ugh! A graveyard.”
It stretched on and on, a grim sight on that dreary morning. Even after
the white stones were left behind vacant lots and empty buildings made
the scene look almost as cheerless.
At the fourth stop Judy got off and went down to the street. It was
silly, but the thought came to her that if ever spirits walked abroad
they would walk along Gravesend Avenue.
Consulting the slip of paper, she counted blocks as she passed them and
watched for Parkville Avenue. She knew the old-fashioned street at once
from the quaint houses that lined it. Then came the Long Island
Railroad cut with a long line of box cars passing under Gravesend
Avenue in a slow-moving procession.
She paused. Could the alley beyond be the street she sought? No wonder
they hadn’t named it anything. Why, it wasn’t even paved! It seemed
little more than a trail through vacant lots. She hesitated, looked
ahead and caught her breath in a quick, terrified gasp. Then she
stared, open-mouthed. There was something sinister about the huge, gray
frame building that loomed in her path. The gnarled old trees
surrounding it seemed almost alive, and the wind whistling through
their branches sounded like a warning. But it was the tower, not the
house itself, that caused Judy to gasp. The whole lower part of it was
burned away and in the tower window something thin and yellow moved
back and forth behind the curtains. It looked like an elongated ghost!
Judy rubbed her eyes and looked again. This time the tower was dark
with the even blackness of drawn shades behind closed windows.
An unreasonable fear took possession of the watching girl. She felt
that she had seen something not there in material substance. Stanza
after stanza of Sarah Glenn’s poetry forced itself upon her
consciousness, and it all fitted this house—the yellow ghost in the
window, the crumbling tower.
Suddenly Judy realized that she was standing stock-still in the middle
of the muddy unpaved street, moving her lips and making no sound. She
was doing the same thing that Emily Grimshaw had done when Dale
Meredith said she was crazy. Oh! She must get control of herself, take
herself in hand.
“If the house can frighten me like this,” she thought, “what wouldn’t
it do to Irene?”
Bracing her slim shoulders and mustering all her courage, Judy marched
up on the porch and felt for the bell. Finding none, she rapped with
her bare knuckles. The sound of her rap sent an echo reverberating
through the walls of the still house.
Judy waited. She waited a long time before she dared rap again. The
house seemed to be inhabited only by the echo she had heard and the
phantom that had vanished from the tower window.
Still nobody answered. Judy tried the door and found it locked. Then
she peered through the lower windows and saw at once that the house was
empty of furniture.
“Nobody lives here,” she told herself and then she told herself the
same thing all over again so that it would surely seem true. “Nobody
ever does live in empty houses.”
And yet she had the strangest feeling that she was being watched!
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