Sinister Island - Charles Wadsworth Camp (7 ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Wadsworth Camp
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After a few hands, however, Anderson looked around.
“May in the South!” he said significantly. “All the windows closed and a blazing fire! Is any one too warm?”
They glanced at each other. Molly shivered.
“Good heavens, Andy!” Miller said with an effort. “I don’t know whether the blue ribbon belongs to you or Tony. Morgan’s the only man on the island you can talk to without hearing the rustle of spirit wings, and even he’s tainted. It’s your cut. Deal, Molly.”
They played late. Long after the cards had ceased to interest them they went on, cutting, dealing, bidding, making beginner’s mistakes.
Tony, on his chair in the kitchen doorway, had fallen asleep. The fire had died down. One of the lamps was out of oil. Its wick spluttered as the flame little by little expired.
Miller glanced at his watch. After eleven! He threw down his cards and arose.
“Molly!” he called sharply. “Keep your eyes from that door. There’s no use going on with this farce of cards. Reminds me of one stormy night my nurse filled my infant mind with banshees.”
He gripped the back of his chair.
“Children, I’m ready for whatever horrors the coquina house can afford.”
While Molly arose reluctantly Anderson remained in his chair, staring at the smouldering logs.
“Jim,” Molly pleaded,” don’t hear anything tonight. Don’t let your mind be filled with awful things. If only you could come down in the morning and look us in the eyes and say you had slept well.”
“I’ll do that,” he answered, “or if I’m disturbed I’ll disturb back as hard as I can.”
Anderson looked up, shaking his head.
“I’ve tried it. There’s nothing we can disturb. Perhaps tonight, though—There are nights when one sleeps peacefully.”
“If there weren’t,” Molly breathed.
“But you can’t tell,” Anderson went on. “One waits.”
“Doubtless a newcomer won’t fail of entertainment,” Miller said.
He walked over and shook Tony, who sprang to his feet.
“Start your fire again,” he suggested, “and draw that sofa over. You’ll be all right here. He can keep one of these good lamps, Molly?”
She nodded.
“Then, Andy, please take the other and show me to my room.”
Anderson obeyed slowly. With lagging steps he led them to the hall. The hall was cold after the heated diningroom. Anderson started up the steps. Molly followed him. Miller went last, curbing a strong desire to glance over his shoulder. At the landing he did look back. Tony had come to the door, where he stood staring after them hungrily.
The stairs swung back from the landing to a square hallway out of which four doors opened. Anderson walked to the one in the farther right hand corner. He put his hand on the knob, waited a moment, then pushed the door open and stepped in. Molly, grasping his arm, followed him. Miller entered after her.
Anderson set the lamp on a bureau which stood between the two windows in the front wall. While he lighted a sconce of candles there. Miller glanced around the apartment where he was to spend the night in an effort to prove to his friends that the supernatural is wholly subjective and chiefly neurasthenic. As he looked, he felt none too confident. The room was huge and dingy. It had an outworn air, the air of a thing past use, a thing dead and decayed. A massive walnut bed-stead stood beneath a canopy opposite the bureau. There was a fireplace set in the wall to its right. A washstand had been placed to its left, and carved chairs stood on either side at the head of the bed. The wall paper, ancient and stained broadly, had a pattern of tarnished bronze arabesques on a green background. Miller fancied it gave out an odour, acrid and unhealthy. In two or three places it had fallen away from the ceiling moulding and hung in pallid tatters. The room chilled him-He turned to the others. Molly had her hand on her husband’s arm. Anderson, ready to go, had taken up the lamp. The lamp shook.
“At least,” Miller said, “the summer heat can’t be blamed for the state of one’s nerves on Captain’s Island.”
He glanced around, again.
“Once this must have been very comfortable—for its period, even luxurious. Evidently Noyer humoured the fair lady. I assume you’ve honoured me. This is the room in which he cut her throat?”
“I don’t know,” Anderson said. “This is the largest room. It is a little harder to sleep here. It’s where the girls said they heard—”
“Jim, I begged Andy not to. There’s a smaller room in the back if you’d rather.”
“I choose to sleep here and remember I’m grown up,” Miller laughed.
His laughter stopped abruptly. In that room it had a hollow sound. It startled them all.
“You see!” Molly said.
Miller tried to hide his own shock.
“Merely disuse,” he answered. “The room is unaccustomed to good spirits.”
He laughed again challengingly.
“Tomorrow I’ll show you how to get rid of the bad ones. I’ll build a fire here and smoke them out. If that doesn’t work I’ll send up to Martinsburg for a vacuum cleaner. From the advertisements the tiniest, most immaterial wraith wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance.”
“No, Jim,” Molly whispered. “Don’t.”
She had assumed that air of strained expectancy. Leaning a little forward, her head to one side, she listened.
Anderson touched her timidly.
“Come, Molly. Let’s give Jim an opportunity to put his will on the firing line.”
“It’s been there all along.” Miller answered.
Molly turned at the threshold.
“We’re just opposite. We’ll leave our door open a crack.”
“Mine, too,” Miller said. “It’s a custom Tony’s foisted upon me on the Dart! Good night, and go to sleep. Let them perform exclusively for me this once.”
As their steps died away across the wide hall the smile Miller had forced to his lips vanished. He turned slowly and, alone, faced the decayed room, again conscious of that disagreeable odour that seemed to come from the wall paper.
One thing admitted no question. THs cold was unnatural unless the state of one’s mind could affect the body so materially.
He strode to one of the windows. He flung it open. Leaning across the sill, he took deep breaths of the outside air. That, too, was cold, and a biting wind stole down from the north.
He drew his coat tighter. He tried to realise that a few hours ago he had perspired and gasped for breath in the dangerous forest. He looked at the sullen sky. A dim and formless moon was suspended above the dunes. It showed him a tiny patch of the inlet, but the water did not sparkle. From far across the inlet and the sands came the muffed pounding of the breakers.
Shivering, he faced the room again. The tarnished arabesques of the wall paper caught his eye. He leaned against the bureau with a sense of loathing. For in the flickering light of the candles the arabesques seemed to writhe and twine—like awakening snakes.
He slammed the window shut. The candles burned steadily. The arabesques were still. He crossed the room, and, conquering his distaste, ran his finger over the surface of the paper. It felt cold and damp. He confessed to no feeling of shame in doing this. As he had told Anderson, he acknowledged nothing, but he was prepared to let commonsense go by the board and to take experiences here at their face value until their causes materialised.
At present this attitude was, in a measure, defensive. At his first entrance in the room he had been aware of a stealthy sense of antagonism. He had felt that he could not find sleep between its tarnished, stained, and damp walls. Now he combated a strong desire to step out of it, to leave the house, to seek whatever there might be of contest in the open. Yet, he remembered, the only open spaces on the island were the clearings here and at the plantation house. Any struggle against the mysteries of Captain’s Island must probably take place beneath a roof of ugly memories or in the forest where an unaccountable force unleashed death on its helpless victims.
He turned from the wall. He opened the window again. Although the arabesques resumed their creeping illusion he strangled his revulsion. He placed his revolver beneath the pillow. When he was half undressed he blew out the candles. He climbed into the great bed. He surrendered himself to its soft, dank embrace.
He had only half undressed because he wished to be prepared for any eventuality. He had been sincere in telling Molly that if he was disturbed he would disturb back. Moreover, he anticipated four or five hours of wakefulness until daylight. Four or five hours of waiting. That was what Anderson had said. That was why he was so restless, why his depression had become reasonless, overwhelming. He waited. Yet for what? Anderson, it was clear, had meant apparently supernatural manifestations which came with the night and ceased at dawn.
In an undefined way Miller knew that he waited for more than that—anticipated, in fact, some exceptional adventure that would begin in this house and would end heaven knew where.
He strove uselessly to drive the premonition from his mind. Premonitions, he had always said, were an invention to annoy weak-minded people needlessly. He smiled. Had it come to the point where he was to be so classified? As a matter of fact it should be simple to go to sleep here. Determined to try, he rolled over.
He could not find a comfortable position. Always he combated a tingling desire to hurl the covers back and leap from the chilling depths of this huge bed. And when he closed his eyes the illusion of the arabesques writhed vaguely across the darkness—a circle of snakes, closing in with unsheathed tongues, ready to strike. He wished now that Anderson had never spoken of that fancy.
A sly whispering filled the room—or a hissing? It grew. It died away. It began again. Miller clenched his fists and forced himself to listen calmly, appraisingly. At last he relaxed. That at least was normally explained. The rising wind was setting the cedars in motion. Thus, he told himself, are supernatural stories bom and nourished. If he had been so easily moved, what could be expected of ignorant natives like Tony? No doubt it was the type of phenomena to which Anderson and Molly had bared their nerves.
He turned and tried again to sleep, but it was impossible. He had no idea how much time had passed. He had been foolish to blow out the candles. He might have looked at his watch—
All at once he was aware of another noise—a noise he could not mistake. Some one was walking softly, either in the hall, or—it was possible, the footsteps were so nearly inaudible—in his own room, within a few feet of his bed.
He flung back the covers. He sat upright. He listened intently, wishing to be sure, unwilling to make a ridiculous mistake. But there was no doubt. Some one was in his room approaching the bed.
“Who’s there?” he muttered.
No answer came. For a moment the sound ceased. Then he heard it again retreating. Outside the whispering of the wind increased. A casement rattled in a sharper gust.
He reasoned. Could these evident footsteps be the pallid tatters of the wall paper flapping in the wind? He remembered they were near the ceiling, while this sound had come from the floor. It appeared now to be in the hall. Then Anderson, Molly, or Tony—Yet none of them would have
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