The Watchers Out of Time (24 page)

I took up the lamp and stepped outside my room, determined to search the house. But at the moment of my entry into the hall I heard, drifting down as if from somewhere outside, high up over the house, the wailing and screaming of a woman’s voice, the voice of a woman being punished—only a drift of sound that grew more and more tenuous and was finally lost. It could not have lasted thirty seconds in all, but it was, in its way, as unmistakable as what I had felt beside me on my bed.

I stood, shaken—and in the end retreated to my bed and lay sleepless for over an hour, waiting for what might happen.

Nothing did, and when at last I slept again, I had begun to wonder whether I had not confused dream with reality.

But in the morning, the cloud on Rhoda’s face told me that something was wrong. She had got up to prepare breakfast for the two of us, and I came upon her in the kitchen.

Without a greeting, she turned and said, “There was a woman in the house last night!”

“Then it wasn’t a dream!” I cried.

“Who was she?” she demanded.

I shook my head. “I wish I could tell you.”

“It seems to me an extraordinary thing to have a cleaning woman in the middle of the night,” she went on.

“You saw her?”

“I saw her, yes. Why?”

“What did she look like?”

“She seemed to be a young woman—but I had a strange feeling that she wasn’t young at all. Her face was expressionless—fixed. Only her eyes seemed to be alive.”

“She saw you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“My great-uncle’s cleaning woman!” I cried. “That’s who it must have been. I found the house clean when I came. You see how clean it is. He must never have left orders for her not to come again. I remember seeing her once when I was a child. He always had her in at night….”

“How utterly ridiculous! Uriah Garrison died in March—over three months ago. Only a cretin couldn’t tell by this time that he was no longer alive. Who pays her?”

Who, indeed? I could not answer.

Furthermore, in the circumstances, I could not tell Rhoda of my experience in the night. I could only assure her that I had not seen a woman in the house since that night in my early years when I had inadvertently caught a glimpse of the cleaning woman at her work.

“I remember having the same impression, too—the expression-lessness of her face,” I said.

“Adam, that was twenty years ago—perhaps more,” Rhoda pointed out. “It couldn’t be the same woman.”

“I shouldn’t think so. Still, I suppose it isn’t impossible. And in spite of what Mr. Saltonstall said, she must have a key.”

“It simply doesn’t make sense. And you’ve hardly been here long enough to hire anyone yourself.”

“I didn’t.”

“I believe it. You wouldn’t lift a finger to dust even if you were drowning in it.” She shrugged. “You’ll have to find out who she is and put a stop to it. It won’t do to have people gossiping, you know.”

On this note we sat down to breakfast, after which, I knew, Rhoda intended to be on her way.

But the troubled frown remained on Rhoda’s forehead, and she said very little during the meal, responding to my comments with only the briefest of monosyllables, until at last she burst forth with, “Oh, Adam—can’t you
feel
it?”

“Feel what?”

“Something in this house wants you, Adam—I sense it. It’s you the house wants.”

After my initial astonishment, I pointed out soberly that the house was an inanimate object, I was to the best of my knowledge the only living creature in it, exclusive of mice I may not have seen or heard, and that the house could not want or not want anything.

She was not convinced, and when, an hour later, she was ready to leave, she said impulsively, “Adam come away with me—now.”

“It would be folly to surrender a valuable property we can both turn to good use simply to satisfy your whim, Rhoda,” I answered.

“It’s more than a whim. Take care, Adam.”

On this note we parted, Rhoda promising to come again later in the summer, and exacting my promise to write her faithfully.

III

The experience of that second night in the house stirred my memory to thoughts of the sinister gloom that had pervaded the house for me as a boy—gloom which radiated from my great-uncle Uriah’s forbidding countenance, and from the locked attic room which no one dared enter, however often my great-uncle went in and out of it. I suppose it was only natural that eventually I would think again of the challenge represented by the attic room and would respond to it.

The rain of yesterday had given way to bright sunlight which streamed into the house through the windows on the sunny side and gave to it an air of genteel and mellow age, one far removed from the sinister. It was such a day as to make all that was dark and ominous seem very far away, and I did not hesitate to light a lamp to dispel the darkness in the windowless attic and set out forthwith for the top of the old house, carrying along all the keys Mr. Saltonstall had surrendered to me.

None was necessary, however. The attic room was unlocked.

And empty, too, I thought, when I stepped into it. But not quite. A single chair stood in the middle of that gabled room, and on it lay a few prosaic objects and one which could not be so described—some woman’s clothing—and a rubber mask—one of that kind which moulds to the features of the wearer. I crossed to it, astonished, and put the lamp down on the floor the better to examine the things on the chair.

They were nothing more than what I had seen at a glance—a common cotton house dress in a very old-fashioned square print design, in various shades of grey—an apron—a pair of skin-tight rubber gloves—elastic stockings—house slippers—and then the mask, which, on examination, proved to be ordinary enough, save for having hair attached to it—however unusual it was to find it here. The clothing could very likely have belonged to Great-uncle Uriah’s cleaning woman—it would have been like him to let her use only the attic room in which to change. And yet, of course, this did not ring true, considering the care he had always taken to allow no one to enter that room but himself.

The mask could not be so readily explained. It was not at all hardening, betokening long disuse; it had the softness and flexibility of rubber that is being used, which was all the more mystifying. Moreover, in common with all the rest of the house, the attic was spotless.

Leaving the clothing undisturbed, I picked up the lamp again and held it high. It was then that I saw the shadow, which lay beyond my own, against the wall and sloping ceiling—a monstrous, misshapen, blackened area, as if some vast flame had flared forth and burnt its image into the wood there. I stared at it for some time before I realized that, however grotesque it was, it bore a resemblance to a distorted human figure, though its head—for it had a surmounting blob of shapelessness that served it as head—was horribly out of shape.

I walked over to examine it, but its outlines faded as I drew close. Yet, undeniably, it had the appearance of having been burned into the wood by some searing blast. I moved back again, toward the chair, and a trifle beyond it. The shadow bore the appearance of having come from a blast of flame virtually at floor level; its angle was odd and inexplicable. I turned, accordingly, and tried to find the possible point from which whatever had made this strange blemish on the wall and ceiling could have come.

As I turned, the light fell upon the opposite side of the attic room and disclosed, at the point I sought, an opening at the juncture of the roof and the floor—for there was along this side of the house no wall between floor and roof—an opening no larger than that for a mouse, and I assumed instantly that it was, indeed, a mouse-hole, and it did not attract my attention for more than a second, but what was painted in garish red chalk or oil around it did—a sequence of curious angular lines, which seemed to me completely unlike any geometrical designs with which I was familiar and which were arranged in such a fashion as to make the mouse-hole seem their precise center. I thought instantly of my great-uncle’s absorption in witchcraft, but no, these were not the familiar pentagrams and tetrahedrons and circles associated with sorcery—rather their opposite.

I carried the lamp toward the painted lines and examined them; up close, they were simply lines, no more—but from the middle of the attic they had a strange kind of design, essentially other-dimensional, I thought. There was no telling how long they had been there, but they did not seem to be of recent origin—that is, within the last three decades or so, and they might very well have been a century old.

It was while I was pondering the meaning of the strange shadow and the painted lines opposite it that I began to grow aware of a kind of tension in the attic; it was actually indescribable; it felt—how curious it is to put it into words—as if the attic
were holding its breath!
I began to grow uneasy, as if not the attic but I were under observation, and the flame on the wick wavered and began to smoke, and the room seemed to grow dark. There was a moment that was as if the earth had taken a half turn backward or something of that kind, and I had not gone along with it but were suspended somewhere far out in space at the instant before plunging into orbit of my own—and then the moment passed, the earth resumed its regularity of turning, the room lightened, the flame in the lamp steadied.

I left the attic in unseemly haste, with all the whispered lore of my childhood pressing after me out of the store of memories. I wiped away from my temples the fine beading of perspiration which had gathered there, blew out the lamp, and started down the narrow stairs, considerably shaken, though, by time I reached the ground floor I had regained my composure. Nevertheless, I was now a little less ready than I had been to brush aside my fiancée’s perturbation about the house in which I had consented to spend the summer.

I pride myself on being a methodical man. In her lighter moments, Rhoda has referred to me as her “little pendant,”—referring strictly, of course, to my concern with books and writers and the circumstances of literature. Not that I mind. The truth, no matter how it is put, is no less truth. Once recovered from my momentarily frightening experience in the attic, following so hard upon the events of the night, I resolved to get to the bottom of the matter and uncover some tenable explanation for what had happened in both instances. Had I, in fact, been in an hallucinatory state on both occasions? Or had I not?

The cleaning woman obviously was the nearest point of departure.

An immediate telephone call to Mr. Saltonstall, however, only confirmed what he had said before—he knew of no cleaning woman, he had no knowledge that my great-uncle had ever employed a housekeeper of any kind, and to the best of his knowledge there was no other key to the house.

“But you do understand, Mr. Duncan,” finished Mr. Saltonstall, “that your great-uncle was a reclusive sort of man, secretive almost to the point of fanaticism. What he did not wish others to know, others did not know. But, if I may make a suggestion—why not make inquiry among the neighbors? I’ve set foot in the house only once or twice, and they’ve had it under daily observation for years. There isn’t much, you know, that neighbors don’t find out.”

I thanked him and rang off.

Approaching the neighbors, however, apart from a frontal attack, represented a problem, for most of the houses in the area were at more than lot-line distances from my great-uncle’s house. The nearest house was two lots away, off to the left of my great-uncle’s ancient house; I had noticed very little sign of life about it, but now that I peered from the windows, I saw someone in a rocking-chair taking the sun on the porch of that house.

I pondered for a few minutes about my best approach, but I could think of nothing but a direct question. So I walked out of the house and down the lane to the house next door. As I turned into the yard, I saw that the occupant of the chair was an old man.

“Good morning, sir,” I greeted him. “I wonder if you could help me.”

The old man stirred. “Who’re you?”

I identified myself, which aroused an immediate responsive interest. “Duncan, eh? Never heard the old man mention you. But then, I never spoke with him more’n a dozen times. What can I do for you?”

“I’m trying to find out how to reach my great-uncle’s cleaning woman.”

He gave me a sharp glance out of suddenly narrowed eyes. “Young fellow, I’d like to have known that myself—just out of curiosity,” he said. “I never knew her to have any other place.”

“You’ve seen her come?”

“Never. Saw her through the windows at night.”

“You’ve seen her leave, then?”

“Never saw her come, never saw her leave. Neither did anybody else. Never saw her by day, either. Maybe the old man kept her there—but I wouldn’t know where.”

I was baffled. I thought briefly that the old man was being deliberately obstructive, but no, his sincerity was self-evident. I hardly knew what to say.

“That’s not the only thing, Duncan. You seen the blue light yet?”

“No.”

“You heard anything you couldn’t explain?”

I hesitated.

The old man grinned. “I thought so. Old Garrison was up to something. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still at it.”

“My great-uncle died last March,” I reminded him.

“You can’t prove it by me,” he said. “Oh, I saw a coffin carried out of that house up to the cemetery on Hangman’s Hill—but that’s as much as I know about it. I don’t know who or what was in the coffin.”

The old fellow went on in this vein until it was clear to me that he knew nothing, no matter how much he suspected. He gave me hints and innuendos, but nothing tangible, and the sum of what he hinted was little more than what I had known myself—that my great-uncle kept to himself, that he was engaged in some “hellish business,” and that he was better dead than alive—if in fact he were dead. He had concluded also that there was something “wrong” with my great-uncle’s house. He did concede that, left alone, he did not trouble the neighbors. And he had been left strictly alone ever since old Mrs. Barton had gone to his house and upbraided him for keeping a woman there—and was found dead of a heart attack next morning at her home, “scared to death, they said.”