The Gray Mask by Charles Wadsworth Camp (children's ebooks online .txt) 📕

She laughed and walked in. Shrugging his shoulders, he followed her, closed the door, and told her what had happened since he had telephoned the inspector. Her face, he noticed, had grown pale, and a troubled look had entered her eyes. She shivered.

"What an uncomfortable place! I can guess what Clara meant. Don't you get an impression of great suffering, Jim?"

He was familiar with her superstitious sensibility which at times seemed nearly psychic. It irritated him that to his own matter-of-fact mind the house had from the first conveyed a sense of unhealth. As he started to laugh at her, Nora with a quick movement shrank against the wall.

"What's that?" she whispered.

Garth strained forward, listening, too. He had heard what Clara had described, a crying, smothered and scarcely audible, and he knew what the girl had meant when she had spoken of a voice from the grave—a dead voice.

Across the moaning cut a shrill feminine scream.

"Stay here," Garth called to Nora as he started up the stairs.

He heard her voice, like an echo behind him, as full of misgivings as Clara's had been.

"I am afraid."

At the foot of the attic stairs he saw the white figure of Mrs. Taylor, staring upward, trembling, hysterical, a violent fear in her eyes.

"You heard it, too," she breathed. "It wasn't the wind."

With a shuddering gesture she indicated McDonald's still form.

"He isn't dead," Garth said.

While she relaxed a little the fear in her eyes didn't diminish.

"I—I heard her moan," she said. "I opened my door, and there she was—a black thing—bending over him like—like a vampire. I couldn't seem to see her face. She ran up these stairs, and I could see through the banisters that she went in the big attic room—the room they always talked about where the woman—"

She broke off, screaming sharply again.

"Look out! Back of you! There's something black creeping up the stairs—"

Garth had been aware of Nora's slow ascent. As he turned she reached the upper floor and the light from the well caught her face.

"A friend who has just come," Garth explained to Mrs. Taylor. "There is nothing to frighten you. The woman you saw is McDonald's daughter. I had satisfied myself she was in the house. We are pretty near our goal now."

"But why," Nora asked, "should McDonald's daughter cry through the house in this fashion? Why didn't Mrs. Taylor see her face?"

But Garth had started up the stairs. The two women followed, as if each was unwilling to be left alone. Garth snapped on his pocket lamp. The light shone on the only two doors on the attic floor. From behind the first keened once more that ghastly and smothered escape of suffering, scarcely audible. As Garth stepped towards the door Mrs. Taylor cried out again:

"Is it safe?"

"Don't go in there unprepared," Nora warned him.

"I want the woman in that room," Garth muttered. "I've heard her and I know she's there. The case is finished with her arrest."

He took out his revolver, flung open the door, and flashed his light about the interior of the room. He lowered his hand with the revolver. The lamp shook a little. There was no one in the room.

"You heard her, too," he said. "Look here."

The others followed him in. The light played on the usual attic chamber, common to old houses. The plaster was stained and cracked. The single window at the end was boarded over. An iron bed rested against the wall, and the customary conglomeration of old furniture cluttered the floor. But there was no possible hiding place or means of escape except a door in the side wall, and Garth found that locked, and when he had entered the other attic room to which it led he found that empty too except for dust and lumber. Yet, as he searched, that stifled and unearthly moaning reached him again.

Feeling himself caught in the sway of incomprehensible forces that mocked him, he sounded the walls and measured until he was convinced the two rooms could hold no secret place. Meantime the women watched with a deepening fear.

"Just the same, she's in this house," Garth said. "By every rule of logic she's in this attic. But I'll go through every nook and cranny. Nora, you and Mrs. Taylor take the bedrooms. I'll go through the cellar and try the lower floor again."

On his way down he saw the doctor, whom the policeman had brought, bending over McDonald.

"The wound is nothing," the doctor said in answer to his question, "but he's had a slight paralytic stroke from the shock."

"When," Garth asked eagerly, "will he be able to talk?"

"Certainly not for several days," the doctor answered. "I'll carry him to his room and make him as comfortable as possible."

As Garth went on down, helpless and bewildered, he heard again the old woman's jibing laugh. It assumed the quality of a threat as he searched unsuccessfully the cellar and the back part of the house. He met Nora in the library. Mrs. Taylor and she had found no more than Garth. As they talked, Reed's tall figure appeared in the doorway. Garth had supposed the man had gone home immediately after bringing Mrs. Taylor from the station.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

Reed yawned.

"Mrs. Taylor and this young lady woke me up searching through the spare bedroom in which I was resting. They were after a woman in black. That sounds rather silly, doesn't it? I've heard Taylor drool about his pet guest—lady in black, strangled in attic by jealous husband. I see you're surprised to find me still here. I thought it was understood I should stay and be of what help I could to Mrs. Taylor and her mother."

"Then I'm afraid you'll have to stay for some time," Garth answered dryly. "The house is guarded. No one will be permitted to leave until I have found or accounted for McDonald's daughter."

"Clever girl that!" Reed said indifferently. "Never heard her open her mouth."

He took a book from a shelf and seated himself in a comfortable chair by the lamp.

"If I can be of any use you'll find me here or in my room."

"I'm wondering," Garth answered, "if Clara knows anything about McDonald's daughter. For to-night the back part of the house interests me."

At his nod Nora followed him into the hall.

"Apparently Reed knows nothing," Nora said. "But the old woman—"

"I'm thinking about the room where Taylor's body lies," Garth replied. "From the first an attempt seems to have been made to color the case with the supernatural. The wording of Taylor's note, for instance. An illusion is furnished us that it was written after the man's death. That is followed by another illusion that his cold hand wounded McDonald with the knife. And this crying! The complete disappearance of the black figure almost under our eyes! I grant you it's a moldy, unhealthy house, but it can't shelter such miracles. These phases are clearly manifestations of some abnormal criminality. I have to work on physical lines. The black figure proves that the woman is actually hidden here. The knife on Taylor's bed means that the murderer was in the room this evening. McDonald's gesture, instead of accusing, probably tried to tell me that; tried to warn me, perhaps, that the murderer would return again to the body. I didn't tell Reed the truth. I am going to that room about which nearly everything centers. Before the night is over it may tell me what McDonald tried to say. There at any rate my mind should be more receptive to that flash of intuition I need to make some theory fit this mystery. Since the house is clearly dangerous, Nora, I want you to go home."

Her laugh was uncomfortable, but Garth recognized its determined quality.

"I'll see it through, thanks," she said. "I want this sense of suffering destroyed. I want—you don't know how anxious I am—to see the case put on a physical basis. So I'll watch with you."

Since he failed to alter her determination, he sent her upstairs to make sure no one was spying, for he wanted their entrance of the room of death to remain a secret. She beckoned him from the head of the stairs, and he went up, and they entered the black room.

Garth closed the door and snapped his light on. Immediately strange reflections played again over the face of the dead man. Its sneering expression seemed to follow Garth as he moved about, searching in the closets and the bath room, looking behind each piece of furniture. Meantime Nora waited, for the moment stripped of her familiar confidence. She watched the dead man rather than Garth. The knife and the revolver, close to the cold and motionless hand, appeared to fascinate her.

"No one," Garth whispered. "No evidence, beyond the knife, that any one has been here unlawfully."

He removed the cushions from a lounge and arranged them in a window recess. He seated himself with Nora there. He drew the curtains so that they would be thoroughly concealed from any one entering the room. Then he snapped off the light.

The vigil, Garth realized nearly at once, would not be comfortable. Nora's obvious tenseness encouraged him to morbid fancies, to formidable premonitions. The heavy black silence of the decaying house became more oppressive. The near presence of the soulless thing on the bed, which had yielded to him the puzzling note, seemed through the night capable of a malicious and unique activity. Garth, in spite of himself, became expectant of some abnormal and impossible movement in the room. Nora, he knew, listened with him. Once she whispered:

"Haven't you a feeling there is some one here who laughs at us?"

The old woman's atrocious mirth came back to him.

"Hush. It is better even not to whisper."

The minutes loitered. The silence grew thicker, the presence of Taylor's body more oppressive. Then suddenly through the night Garth became finally aware of a movement in the room, and at first it seemed to be in keeping with the supernatural fears Nora had imposed on him.

He aroused himself. He commenced to reason. He had not heard the door open or close, but the intruder must have entered that way. Again his ears caught a sly scraping sound as of one walking stealthily, and the sound was nearer the bed—between the window recess and the bed. Garth thrust his revolver and his lamp through the narrow opening between the curtains and pressed the control. There was no more shuffling. Nora swayed closer. The light revealed all of Garth's doubts. He became efficient again. For, while there was a ghoul-like quality about the picture his lamp had suddenly illuminated, the figure bending over the body was sufficiently human. In this position, however, because of the dressing gown and the slippers, its sex remained undefined, but Garth, remembering his examination of the housekeeper's room, thought he knew. Yet he couldn't understand what the creature was doing. One hand had partly drawn from beneath the mattress what appeared to be a long and wide piece of jet black cloth.

"Game's up!" Garth said. "I've got you. Turn around and let me have a look at your pretty face."

The bent shoulders twitched.

"Come!" Garth said harshly. "You're no ghost. You can't evaporate before our eyes again."

Then with a gesture of repulsion the hand let the piece of black cloth fall. It trailed across the floor, one end still caught beneath the mattress. Slowly the figure turned until a profile cut against the shaft of light. Nora cried out her surprise. Garth sprang erect, covering with his revolver, not McDonald's daughter, but the friend of Taylor and his wife, the man Reed.

The shock of discovery stripped Reed of his control. He glanced once at the dead man, then sank in a chair by the bed.

"Don't send me to the death house," he groaned. "I couldn't stand that. I won't stand that."

"You killed Taylor