Classic Audiobook Collection - Sinister House by Leland Hall ~ Full Audiobook [horror]

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Sinister House by Leland Hall audiobook. Genre: horror In an ordinary American suburb, Pierre and his practical wife, Annette, try to welcome new neighbors, Eric and Julia Grier, into the community. But the Griers' home is anything but ordinary: an aging, unfashionable house that seems to drink in light and warmth, leaving behind a chill that Pierre cannot explain. Julia insists the place comforts her, yet bruises and strange injuries begin to appear on her body, and Eric starts to change in ways that unsettle everyone who meets him. When a stormy night forces Pierre's family to seek shelter under the Griers' roof, a child's terror and a series of small, impossible incidents push neighborly concern into outright dread. Annette's cousin Giles, a determined skeptic, digs into the house's earlier owners and the pious reputation that may hide something far darker, while Pierre struggles to protect his family from an influence that feels both intimate and inhuman. As whispers of a locked, forbidden room grow louder, Sinister House builds a slow, psychological haunt in which comfort curdles into suspicion, and the safest place in town becomes the one doorway you should never enter. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:12:51) Chapter 02 (00:22:53) Chapter 03 (00:33:50) Chapter 04 (00:56:51) Chapter 05 (01:19:44) Chapter 06 (01:44:17) Chapter 07 (02:10:18) Chapter 08 (02:41:20) Chapter 09 (03:08:02) Chapter 10 (03:32:41) Chapter 11 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapter 1 of Sinister House by Leland Hall Chapter 1 We hit upon the same thought at precisely the same instant, my wife and I, as we started home from Julia's. Coming out from the gloomy driveway and turning to the ride along the main road, the night a bit wild with wind and the moonlight hitting the earth hard through riffs in the racing cloud. My wife spoke the words with me. How gay she was after all! Such little happenings are not always so mysterious as they seem. In this case, there was cause enough for us to hit upon the same thought at the same moment,

a mournful spirit always walking in the driveway to the house, in which Julia and Eric lived. And that night, Eric was away and Julia was alone in the place. Many a time before, having left them together in the dark house behind, my wife and I half-side with relief as we came up from the blackness under the hemlocks that roofed the driveway and gained the flat high road, bear of trees and blessedly free under sun, stars or cloud from lugubrious shadows. We had often spoken of the melancholy that breathed around the house and grounds,

puzzled to explain it since Eric was warm-hearted and cordial, and Julia had a way with her that put guests at their ease, and they adored each other. Perhaps he loved her too intensely. I have since thought of that. His very ardor of attention, maybe, put it into our subconsciousness that he was protecting her against. Well, anything. You see, it was easy enough to fill the black shadows under those old hemlocks with menaces to the welfare of Eric and Julia. And since many others felt as we felt about the place, though not so keenly, I suppose,

the stimulus to the imagination must have been something that was evident to all the friends who visited the house. Nothing therein was so evident as Eric's restless and forever protecting love of his wife. After spending an evening with him and her, one might well shiver with fear lest something, harm her and hence drive him mad. The black shadows under those trees could easily secrete wickedness. To those who knew Eric and Julia less intimately than we, I am aware that this will appear a little far-fetched. There was a very noticeable element of tenderness in him which might belie what,

for the sake of my argument, I must call his alertness, as against an inexorable hostility. Then, too, wives who attracted jealous watchfulness from their husbands, usually suggest the possibility of evasion, a fling over the traces. But Julia loved Eric with a love that would, and did, go through hellfire, unchanged. He was wholly sure of her love. We all were. I think no one lost sight of that, even when, to some, it could not but seem that his presence was to her a source of— Well, let that go for the present.

It was natural enough for my wife and me to ejaculate at the same moment the surprising fact that Julia, alone in the gloomy house, save for a grouchy servant, and with Eric gone from her for the first time since they had been married, had seemed unusually gay. Perhaps I should say gay as she used to be in the first days when we knew her. We had feared that she might be sadly depressed by his absence. As we drove home that night, we recalled to each other in phrases snatched from our lips by the gale, Eric's sorrow at being forced to leave her, even for the brief space of two weeks. Lately she had not been well. Her delicately colored face had slowly been losing its color, and its delicate lines were being drawn, especially about the eyes, in which both

Annette and I had observed from time to time a look of apprehension. Sleeplessness might have made her look so. Just before Eric went away, she had come to walk with a certain weariness, and Annette, naturally a keener observer than I, had declared to me that Julia struck her as a woman beset by nervousness at night and exhausted by day. While all this was slighter than my words about it, it was real enough for Eric to feel that Julia should not accompany him on a tiresome business trip. And though Julia dreaded being separated from him, she evidently recognized the wisdom of her staying quietly at home while he was gone.

I cannot bear the thought of his leaving me, and I want most dreadfully to go with him, she told Annette, but, well, I am a little run down and we both think I had better not try to. it. After all, she went on with a half-sad smile. We simply are two persons, and we can't always be with each other. And then she added with a surprisingly different tone, which Annette could neither describe nor reproduce. We must be sensible, yes, sensible, reasonable. When we got home that night, when I had filled my pipe, and Annette, plumber than the berry since the baby was born, had kicked off her slippers, and we sat down for a little chat together before going upstairs to bed. It was the very

reasonableness of Eric and Julia that we agreed upon. Though, I remarked judicially, I should think Eric would have sent her to pass the time of his absence in some more cheerful place. That would have been the wholly sensible thing to do. What more have you ever learned of that house pier? My wife asked me by way of rejoinder. She had set me once to find out something. We felt the place had almost a personality, not as you will have gleaned one wholly pleasant to us. But that may not have been entirely because of its spookiness. I am an American, and I am a chauvinist enough. Is that the word?

To be prejudiced in favor of a new concrete house. As for Annette, with two children to safeguard, she's all for the up-to-date in ventilation, plumbing, and orientation. Forsby, where we lived, was being built of houses of the kind that are put up quickly and that last, theoretically, should last, long. Most of them had not been built long enough as yet to test the boast of architects and promoters that they had called for next to no repairs. While they were cheap, they were good, and they were blessedly clean and full of sun and air.

Foresby was a settlement of commuters, most of them well enough off to own an automobile, few of them rich enough to hire a chauffeur. There were perhaps twenty young married couples bringing up their infants there. We hadn't yet much of a community spirit, but such a thing was beginning to crystallize around the general need. We all had babies growing rapidly in the way of nature for schools. You see, there had never been a village of Foresby. The common-sense realty company, specially incorporated under the laws of New York, had bought up some ten square miles of land on the high plateau above the river,

had drained the swampy places, laid out a few rods, cut down the moth-eaten trees, and marked off the terrain into generous house-lots. The name Foresby had come from the maternal grandfather of the up-and-coming young man whose brain had engendered the common-sense realty company. He was Bob Planter. We had him to dinner once, Annette and I, and took to him wholeheartedly. Like all young American businessman, he had an eye out for the money in the scheme. But equally like them, let me say like us, he had a sort of glorious inspiration and dreamed of the future of the place, and loved planning for it, saw it all in the rosy light of enthusiastic. yet common-sense youth. After all, the United States of America were born in a clearing, and they've cleared the way before them as they've grown. If to me there's a romance about a brand-new cement house and a bare-flat plot of land,

it's because I've inherited the forward-looking temperament from my grandfathers. I write this by way of gentle protest, because I remember that Annette's second cousin, Giles Farrow, a gifted but temperamental artist, was staying with us the night young planter came to dinner, and that he called Foresby hopeless, naked, new, and American. Why, of course American, but that was the very reason it wasn't hopeless. Nothing could down planters' enthusiasm, but on the other hand, nothing could soften my wife's cousin's resentment. Meadow grasses were beautiful. Find a way to kill off mosquitoes, but keep your meadows. You can restore moth-eaten trees and protect them from pests in the future. But drain your meadows and cut down all your trees. You take all

natural charm and individuality from the place. Well, replied Planter with unperturbed good humor, the sun still sets in the west, over the river, and we have grand sunsets, my friend. Giles paid no more attention to him than if he had not spoken. Take that old place behind the hemlocks. Back in on the river three miles or so up, he went on. That has charm, softness, atmosphere.

Atmosphere. I shudder now when I think of that place, but I remember that then Planter laughed heartily at picking as a model for the common-sense realty company such a broken-down old wooden house all squat and dark on the edge of a precipice down to the river one way and shut off from the sun and the rest of the world by a bunch of damp and half-rotten old evergreens the other. It was that same night I learned my first about the house. I myself had never laid eyes on it, but my wife's cousin, walking in a fever of wounded susceptibilities and dragging my wife along with him,

had made a beeline out of the squarely planned and flat Foresby on across the fields towards a clump of trees on a distant headland that jutted out into the river. Having reached these, they pushed their way through and came upon the wooden house. It was, as Planter said, built on the very edge of the cliff. On all but the river side, it was surrounded by a thicket of hemlocks, which had been set out not more than fifty feet from the house itself.

Planter had penetrated the thicket in the early days of the forsby survey, and had found the narrow bit of land between the house and the trees overgrown with tall grass, weeds, and thistles. He had found the house broken down, sashes without glass, shutters dangling from one hinge, sections of the gutters fall in askew, and the paint peeled off. But my wife and her cousin had found a smooth lawn, a house which seemed to be in good repair, and a charming lady and a lanky, low-voiced gentleman evidently living there, tying up foxgloves and bloom along the southern wall. Since the afternoon of that chance encounter, both my wife and I had become intimate with Eric and Julia Greer,

and had grown really to love them. But to both of this, the house had remained rather antipathetic. Greer himself, in answer to my direct inquiries, had told me that Julia and he had stumbled on it during their honeymoon, and Julia had fallen in love with it. Had felt drawn to it at once, which was singular enough since, as perhaps you know, the old house was all a ruin, and to me at least, depressing. Julia, in her own sweet way, so bright and vivacious in the early days of our acquaintance, told several of us one night at dinner there sometime before midsummer that when she first laid eyes on the house,

she had a queer feeling that all the doors and windows opened to her, and that something really called to her from within to come and live and be happy there. Yes, she went on, her bright eyes glowing, be happy there. Why, it sang to me, really sang as I went towards it, like a... I forget her word, but I remember the radiance in her eyes as she looked towards her husband,

and how his eyes gave back her look. Later on, when, once more, not wholly casually, I asked him about the house. I remember, he said, to tell the truth, I didn't feel... I feel drawn to it, as Julia felt. But to be able to give my wife the one thing she desired, above all others. It really took hold of her, and to be able to give it to her and please her.

My God, Pierre, the joy of doing that, I say the strange, strange joy. There you have it. Why strange? I don't mean anything about the old house, but that intensity in his love for Julia, which, I say again, stimulated in the subconscious of their friends, the apprehension of menaces to their happiness in those black shadows under the hemlocks. I never bought but one house, and that we bought on paper. If, however, in the flush of our honeymoon, Annette and I had stumbled on one already made in the doors and windows, had flown open to her, and the sweet spirits had, as it were, sung her in.

Well, I suppose I should never have lost faith in my bride's reason. One can hardly imagine anything more dreadful than that for a honeymoon experience, but I'd have got her damned quick out of the sight of such a lunatic place, and I might have set fire to it into the bargain. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of Sinister House by Leland Hall. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 2

No, dear, I said to Annette that night we came from dining with a surprisingly happy bachelor, Julia. I found out nothing more about the house. Sometime before, I may add here, we had gleaned from an old son. storekeeper in Stanton, within the bounds of which it stood, that it had been built for a summer house by an eccentric old man, very religious, Morgan Snart by name. We thought the name had an evil sound, but the old fellow had been apparently more than respectable, and he had not been near the place for many years before he died, not at any rate since his daughter, Hilda, had married. Hilda was dead, too, had died just on top of her father, according to the old storekeeper. She

had taken to religion even more entirely than her father had, and he guessed from what he had heard the village people say she had seen the light powerful strong. Though the memory of them was rather drab, they were holy enough. As Annette said, they were too good to be denied heaven, and must have been wholly folded up in bliss, a conclusion disappointing to us who were given to thinking that the errant damned soul of at least a murderer must be haunting the place. I was rather puzzled to have my wife bring up the subject of the house again. We had come to accept the fact that Julia and Eric loved it, even though we didn't. And thinking of this, I asked Annette abruptly whatever had set her to suspecting the house again. Oh, nothing, she replied thoughtfully.

I wasn't suspecting. Julia's been so attached to it, and what you said about Eric's leaving her in such a gloomy place, I suppose. I wonder, Pierre, if you and I are... You remember cousin Giles thought it was a charming old place? Perhaps we're not educated to see in those old places what other people see. Let's get some books on architecture and read it up, and then our eyes will be opened. Of course, I shouldn't think for a moment of bringing up my children in such an unsanitary old shanty. I can't help it. I think it's damp and horrid and gloomy. There now. Heaven's Annette, I cried, turning to face her. What's the matter? I knew that she was quite stirred up about something. Usually she was gracious enough to refer to Nettie and little Bobby as our children. Oh, nothing, she said again with the airy

inflection women use when they think it hardly necessary to take their husbands into their confidence. Nonsense, I replied firmly but kindly. Some things made you mad. She turned surprised round eyes at me. It has, too, I went on. Why, Pierre, she said, innocent as a lamb, just because I suggest that we improve our minds? But what, I asked, sure than ever, made you think of such a thing? "'Well, it could be done, couldn't it? "'Do you think, dear, that I am not naturally ambitious?' "'This with supreme pity. "'Do you think that I do not want the best for my children and myself?

"'And you, dear, if there's something in architecture more than we think, "'we ought to get busy and learn about it.' "'Cousin Giles tells me that my sense of beauty is undeveloped. "'Haven knows what he'd say about yours, dear. "'But he's in the family, and I don't mind him.' "'Now we'll get to the heart of this,' I said smiling. "'It's nothing to get to the heart of,' Annette went on serenely. "'It's simply that old house,' I told Julia.

"'I thought it a horrid old place. "'Anet? "'Well, not baldy like that, of course. "'It was when we came. "'I—well, I invited Julia to come and stay with us while Eric's away. "'You know,' I said, "'we have a nice sunny spare room, "'and I think it would do you much more good

"'than to stay shut up in a gloomy old house like this.' "'Well, that was going some, and then.' "'She was going some. very top lofty. No, I interrupted. Not top lofty, not Julia. Yes, Pierre, will you let me finish? I tell you, she was very top lofty.

Oh, she said, just like that. So you find this house a gloomy, shut-up old place? And since I had gone that far, I wasn't going to take anything back, and I came out flat and told her I thought it was horrid. Then she said, but I love it. Thank you a thousand times for asking me to stay with you while Eric's gone. You mustn't think, though, that this house is lonesome.

She gave quite a queer little laugh, and then she told me that it was a sweet old place. And, she said, you don't think, after all, that Eric and I've done with it, that I want to leave it for a single night, do you? I know some of the rooms are shady, but you wouldn't have me drive from our nest by a shadow, would you? She got quite excited, so I said I only thought our house would be more cheerful for her in Eric's absence, and I admitted that I didn't see in her old place what she saw in it, and she just turned her back on me and said, I suppose not. "'Not like that,' I cried, "'for Annette had given the little remark a most disagreeable, "'almost an insolent ring.

"'Yes, Pierre,' Annette replied with something like indignation. "'She was very sharp and rather snommish. "'I know Julia's artistic and all that, "'but goodness knows, though I may be only a plain practical woman, "'I'm not a country know-nothing, "'and she has no right to put on airs with me "'just because I don't happen to see in her old house "'what she sees in it.

I say frankly that little else could have made me sorrier than to have my wife fall out with Julia Greer. I've never met two persons to whom I have been so drawn as to Eric and Julia Greer. And I've heard Annette say the same thing for her part. They were so good-looking and so generous, and they had such warm voices. While I felt much the same as Annette about their house, I could not help confessing that, compared with them, Annette and I were, well, not ordinary, but not extraordinary either. It is, of course, only fair to Annette to remind you that the distinguished artist,

Giles Farrow, was her cousin, not mine. For my part, I could name perhaps half a dozen colors and could recognize the names of twice as many more. But tones, shades, and tints? Not that Julia and Eric ever talked of such details with me, but Giles used to talk such stuff with them, and they used to be very much interested in it. So I told Annette that Julia had meant nothing,

that the tone might easily be misunderstood while the words in themselves were entirely innocent. After all, no one but Julia could be expected to see in that house just what Julia saw. Annette let me rave on a while about beauty, and then she asked me if I too found beauty in that old house. Yes, I said valiantly. A certain beauty. Yes, I do. But I blushed as I said it, and it was so holy sham, so holy manly, Annette said, that we both burst out laughing.

Suddenly Annette stopped, poised a second, and then fled upstairs in her stocking feet, shouting down at me. It's raining great guns, and all the windows are open. Go out and bring in the baby carriage. It was raining hard, and the wind was blowing a gale. I got pretty wet hauling the baby carriage backwards to the front porch, but once there with it, I was sheltered, and I stood there a few moments facing north. The night was absolutely black, for we had as yet no street lights in the outer parts of Forsby. The light from the bulb on the porch behind me, however, lit up the heavy drops of rain that fell from the coping, and down the granolithic pathways I saw long streaks of rain reflect it back now and then like steel. Through all the noise of rain and wind, I just barely heard the whistle of the last train from the city. The tracks were a couple of miles away.

Half past twelve! I went in and locked up the house for the night. Oh, serenity of the sound new house. At every stage of my toilet I thought of it. our neat square bedroom, with its window east and its two windows south, and all Julia's rooms were queer-shaped, our tiled bathroom, with its white enamel, its shining nickel, its open plumbing, and I don't believe Eric had a bit of shining nickel or open plumbing in his whole place.

Our electric light beside the beds and over the mirror and everywhere one might want it, and their dingy gas and flickering candles. My thoughts went on as I brushed my teeth over the bright nickel toothbrush basin, The sanitary equipment if our house was up to date and complete as it always should be in a house that shelters young children. If the Greer's had children, now, it wouldn't be so lonesome over there. But they'd have to clear the place up more, cut down those rotten old trees and let the sun in all day all round. Funny, Julia was as merry as a lark this evening, and looked as she looked the first day I saw her, before the summer had, well, pulled her down, I guess.

And she was as fresh and sparkling as the sun on a brook. "'Aren't you ever coming to bed?' Annette called to me. I snapped off the light and went into the bedroom. As I opened the window, the wind roared in, flapped my pajamas about my legs, and hurled the rain halfway across the floor. Say, Annette, I don't know about opening this window. Come along, the other will be just as bad,

and we'll mop up the floor in the morning. Roll the rug back, dear, and come to bed. That's for good tight floors. I got into bed and then snapped out the little tent. table lamp, with rose-colored shade, right beside me. The room was instantly in darkness, but I was safe in bed. Better than dingy gas and flaring candles, eh, old girl. I reached out my hand from the bed for hers that, sleepiest she might be, or dark the room, never failed to find mine, and bridge the little space between our beds in a good night clasp.

Just the same, she murmured sleepily. I'm going to study architecture till I see in that house what Julius sees. I chuckled, impressed her hand. That you'll never do, my love. Good night. I'll never forget how Annette pulled on my hand when, at that very moment, a banging on the front door resounded through the house.

End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of Sinister House by Leland Hall. This Librevox recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 3. As I have told you, our house has every modern convenience. We have electric doorbells at every door, but whoever gave those resounding thwax, they seemed resounding, I assure you, at that weird hour of the night and in that storm,

was probably unable in the dark to find the button. So my mind reasoned in a second or two. You know, pounding on a door is a very threatening noise, and I confess I was startled. Annette was really alarmed. For a long while, she would not loose my hand, but kept dragging at me. and I was very awkward trying to find the button of the lamp to my left. Once a little light in the room, however, she became cautious and alert. She would not let me leave my bed.

Both of us sat up and very strained we listened for the blows to come again. It seemed a long time that we waited. It was probably not more than a couple of minutes. At any rate, no sound but the roaring of the wind, the driving of the rain, and the flapping of the curtain by the open window assailed our ears. Suddenly I jumped out of bed and determined to find who had roused us so made my way without slippers or gown into the northeast room from the window of which I could lean out and spy. I didn't switch on any light because, as Annette said, that would have

made me too good a target for anyone below. As I stumbled along, I heard my little sun begin to cry, an unusual sound in our house and disconcerting at that hour. From the north window I could see nothing in the blackness of the night. I opened it cautiously without making a sound and leaned out. The very wall of the house beneath me was invisible. I might have been leaning over an unfathomable abyss. But through the noise of rain and wind, my ear caught the sound of footsteps, heavy and slow, on the granolithic walk. "'Who's there?' I challenged loudly. To my utter amazement the voice which answered me, hushed but audible from out of the storm, was familiar.

"'Ah, Pierre, I got you up. I'm sorry, I watched your light from half a mile down the road.' hoping it would not go out. I was just going on. For the love of heaven, Eric, I shouted back. I'll be down in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Darding back to my room for my slippers, I switched on the living room lights from upstairs,

and then I rushed down to let him in. He stepped over the threshold, dripping wet. I saw in a glance that his clothes were soaked through. They hung down heavily from his shoulders. I caught a glimpse, too, of a heavy dress suit case he left outside on the porch. What's the matter? I asked him, more than ever surprised to see standing before me a man I had thought was a thousand miles away. Nothing's the matter, he replied in his melodious and somewhat sad voice.

He took off his hat with an apologetic sidelong smile. The rain ran in streams from it. I didn't mean to rout you out, but somehow it's such a devilish night and I wanted to get home quickly. There's nothing the matter with Julia, is there? I asked suddenly and without thinking. With Julia, he cried, his look transfixing me, and his deep-set brown eyes terribly anxious and searching. I am an idiot. Of course not.

We left her not two hours ago. Never saw her looking so well. Never saw her livelier. That relieved him. He undid a button or two of his coat. I always noticed how lean and sensitive his hands were, and reached in for a handkerchief to mop his face. What an expressive wet face is.

it was. He cleared his throat, putting his fingers to his mouth as he did so in a gesture characteristically apologetic. He was a tall, wiery gaunt fellow, whose face fairly burned with eagerness at times, though he was a man a few words, rather mute. I suppose he was self-effacing, and extremely considerate of others rather than apologetic. Certainly there was no suggestion of weakness about him. He wasn't assertive or aggressive, but he had unusual power of endurance, both physical and, I found out later, mental. Weeks afterwards, Giles said of him that he was tempered in a white-hot resentment, but Giles was an incorrigible phrase-maker.

Eric seemed to me just an attractive, magnetic, dark-eyed fellow, taller and thinner than the average and a good deal more what the women call sympathetic. Resentment was the last thing in the world I should have associated with Eric Greer. Ah, well, I am rambling. Eric had never before been in our house without his wife. and I've felt as if he were lonesome. All the time my son upstairs kept yelling as if he were scared out of his life.

It was like Eric to take upon himself the blame of this, but I deprecated his apologies. One was always doing that with Eric. He told me then that he had found himself in Buffalo with three days on his hands and had determined to take a flying trip to his home and his wife. I can't bear being away from her, he added, but with no trace of apology there. He burned when he spoke of his wife. And it's such a rotten night.

I just got into Foresby from New York. There was no cab at the station, and I started to walk it. When I saw the light in your window, I hoped I'd get to your house before you had gone to bed, and that, well, I have only 36 hours to spend with Julia at the best, and I thought you'd perhaps run me over in your car. He would have driven himself over, but I knew he couldn't manage a Ford very well. And besides, I was glad to do him a favor,

so I rushed upstairs to dress. There was something abroad in the night that took away all thought of sleep. Even Bobby kept up his whimpering, which was very unlike him. I stopped in his room a second to tell Annette, who was watching with him, that it was Eric who had roused us, and that I was going to run him over in the Ford. She had already assured herself of the nature of our midnight visitor. She thought I was a fool to drive him over in such a storm, that it would be much more sensible to keep him with us overnight.

As a matter of fact, she didn't want to be. to be left alone in the house. Bobby had had terrible nightmares. She couldn't wake him up. She thought he had a fever. You know how women are, even the best of them, like my wife. Just the same I got dressed, forced a dry coat on Eric, cranked up the Ford and started out in the storm. Eric paid no attention to the roughness of the way. While my mind was wholly intent upon steering the light car through the heavy mud and keeping her out of ruts, he asked me anxious questions about the condition of his wife. Now and then, when we came to a smooth stretch, I would say, you know how with my mind only half in it,

she's as bright as a cricket, she's improved wonderfully. Or as a joke, she seems to thrive on your absence, Eric. I wonder if that pleased him. Perhaps he didn't hear anything, I said, with the wind roaring about us. At any rate, he couldn't get enough out of me. He even asked me if she was sleeping better. What a question from one husband to another. I answered like a top.

I never knew she had slept in any other. way. All the way, the rain was bouncing and running all over the windshield and steaming on the engine hood. The wind was trying to tear the top off the car, and the whole shebang was rocking and pitching along the road like a bump the bumps at Coney Island. Even the lights got to playing tricks. From time to time, the rain or something reflected them in a queer way, so that it seemed to me as if a ball of light or a sort of thick string of it were flying along just ahead of us. Now, just over the engine. Now, right on the edge. of the windshield. It was so queer that it made me jumpy and nervous. I found the next morning that

the reflector in the right lamp was broken. That accounted for it simply enough, but I remember how I jumped when we turned down into Eric's driveway in that uncanny light. It was like an eel then, darted ahead of us and round the corner as if it were alive. At Eric's request, I stopped the car under the hemlocks some little way from the house, and as luck would have it, I stalled the engine doing so. That left us in absolute darkness, and it felt and sounded as if the wind and rain doubled their fury. What a friend to man is light. I don't know why I insisted on stumbling along with Eric towards where we knew the house must be if the storm hadn't blown it from the edge of the cliff into the river. We didn't know where to put our feet, and in the darkness the wind sounded like all sorts

of unearthly things. Once it was so like an anguished human cry that we both stopped, trembling. I'm not sure now that it wasn't. We kept on going trying to feel the edge of the driveway with our feet. Of course we couldn't see a sign of the house. Finally, I said to Eric, this is absurd. I'll go back and start the engine. That will give us some light, and you've got to wait Julia anyhow. Though he remonstrated, I had already turned when I heard the noise of bolts shot back with a loud click. We were much nearer the house than we knew. The front door was suddenly thrown open and I saw Julia standing in the doorway. She wore a long white nightgown, and she carried in her hand a lighted candle. She was the only visible thing in the night, save right before me the clear-cut but

lightless edge of Eric's face. Behind her there was a sort of rosy glow. She must have lighted a lamp back in the narrow hallway, one wall of which I remembered was hung with a damask of deep rose color. She cried out, "'Who's there?' And though she was not more than ten feet from us, I could hardly hear her voice over the noise of the storm. Eric answered her, almost with a sob, and sprang towards her across the lawn and up the steps. He had her caught up in his arms in a second, and she let the candle fall. In an instant the night was black again, save for that rosy glow, against which I saw their two figures almost as one, shapeless, yet strangely heroic, like two wanderers, standing

embraced on the edge of a cliff far above the fires of earth. slipping and almost falling in the mud I ran back to my fort. I bumped good and hard into a tree trunk before I got there, but I had her cranked and backing before they could have thought of me, and I doubt if even the glare of my lights over their lawn or the roar of the engine in reverse recalled to their minds that there was such a man as Pierre Smith living in the world. The house was still as death when I got back, and I tried to sneak into bed without a sound.

But the wife of my bosom was on a still watch, and in the dark she tried to pump me for all she could get. yet. And that being little for her pains, she fell to thinking that Eric and Julia were both crazy nuts. Not an elegant phrase, but expressive. It was after two before I fell asleep. Just drowsing away, I remembered to ask Annette how Bobby was. He had had terrible nightmares, but had dropped off to sleep again as soon as Eric and I had left the house. He had no fever. End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4

Sinister House by Leland Hall. The Slibervox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 4 All this happened early in September. The weather had been uncertain from the middle of August, and the day after Eric came home was furious with rain and wind. We hadn't a very cheerful breakfast, Annette and I and the children. Felicia had had nightmares, too, and had let the eggs burn. But I remember saying to my wife when I got home that night, very wet and tired,

that it was sure to blow and rain itself out at last in time for my vacation, which I always took in the fall and which was due to begin the next week. That's just what happened. After the 14th or 15th of September, we had a three-week spell of the loveliest weather you can imagine. I always have been lucky on my vacation. But it wasn't the spell of weather, but the visit of Giles to our house and what he brought with him or stirred up

that have made that epic a vivid memory to me, one which has stayed just behind my everyday sense for nearly four. years. At the time, none of that was so real to me as my enjoyment of the mild fall days. Sewing the lawn, setting out bulbs, Annette and I, crocuses, daffodils, squills. She can tell you what they were, though I think it was Giles that set us to doing it, tinkering with the ford and polishing it. Days of golf and picnics with the children up the river. It may be temperamental with me, and the word makes me laugh, but I've always found joy just as real as sorrow, more real indeed. Everything bad that comes to me seems like an unpleasant dream, from which I'm always

looking to wake up, whereas when I'm having a good time, I don't want to go to bed at all. Half our sorrows come from an overbalanced mind, and the other half are aggravated by too much thinking on oneself. I went on having a sensible, happy time, while two persons whom I knew intimately were being stretched tighter and tighter on a rack, and not until I was caught in the infernal thing myself had I the slightest suspicion of what was going on. Of course, I heard the gossip, but I didn't heed it, and, in our nightly counsels, I scolded Annette for listening to it and favoring it. As a matter of fact, she countenanced and no more of it than appeased her peak at Julia.

That was very slight, after all, and pardonable. If you confess with proper humility that you don't see something, and the one to whom you confess it replies with, No, I suppose not, in a tone you take to mean, poor thing you ought to see it but you haven't since enough, or you aren't refined enough, or you aren't made of the right stuff. Well, it puts you on the lookout for the beam in the other fellow's eye, no matter how much you may admire him. The trouble was we both see now that Annette misunderstood Julia's meaning entirely. The little remark, if it was anything but a blind,

rang with envy rather than with contempt. I used to laugh to see Annette trying to pump her cousin for the latest dope on the arts. All of Annette's family except Giles were good, sensible people like herself, and Giles always remained a freak to them, someone for whom an apology, or at least an explanation, was necessary. I dare say no one of them, save my wife ever thought to profit by his abilities, and take a little schooling at his hands. But she used in those days to ask him questions as if she were humoring him, and entirely nonchalantly, and she quite fooled me. Not until I began to hear queer words of his lingo, such as composition, values, Kiaroscura, fall from her own serene lips, did I realize what she was up to?

And he? He must have known it, too. And if he gave out anything at all to her, it must have been with utmost carelessness. He didn't care a snap of his finger about our sense of beauty. He knew us for just what we were, pitied us for that, liked us for that, and once confessed to me envied us for that. which last I take to mean that no one would be an artist if he could help it. But I must say Giles is a fine fellow and a gentleman.

He has since died fighting for France, which he was the first to make me understand would be fighting for the soul of the world. As for the gossip, I had rather pass over it, but since I am going to plunge into the heart of the affair, and must, perforce, confine myself to what either Annette or I actually saw or experienced, I'd better tell you some of the many yarns, so that you will have an idea of how the strange drama impressed the circle of Foresby's best. So far as I can remember, up to the time of Giles' long stay with us,

the only thing Foresby had against Eric and Julia, and gossip you know is always what you have against the other fellow, was the fact that they live in that gloomy old house. Julia was exceedingly charming. Eric was by contrast reserved. I've already told you that the house was uncanny to most of us, added to their choice of such dwelling, their dress, their independent manners, and their way of speech were enough to brand them as different. To be different is, I have observed, invariably blameworthy.

And in this case, Eric naturally, was held to blame. There was something queer about him. I mean, that was the gossip. It never got going very strong, to tell the truth, I think most of us stood a little in awe of him. But during the six weeks that followed his dramatic homecoming, it so happened that he was, now at home, now off on another trip. And Forsby noticed not only that in the periods of his being at home, Julia was pale and depressed and didn't appear often on the links of the Carroway Club in Stanton, but that when he was away, she brightened up in appearance and manners and played golf almost every day.

Well, Giles was with her a very great deal during the days and sometimes weeks that Eric was away. They used to play golf together and to take long walks together, and he was almost every afternoon at her house for tea, whether Eric was at home or not. It wasn't surprising that the ladies began to whisper among themselves, nor was it surprising that they came to the decision that Giles was in love with Julia, that Julia, glad of Giles' company, that everything wasn't peaches and cream in the Greer household. But let it go. The saddest part of it was that Eric at one time probably heard some of it. He was so sensitive that it didn't take much of a hint to make him worry. yet, as I've already told you, he could never have doubted Julia's love for him.

Now to go back to my story. It must have been a Friday night that Eric came home so unexpectedly from his first trip away. Though he told me that he had only 36 hours to pass at home with his wife, he did not leave until Monday morning. This, I remember, because early Monday morning, I telephoned Julia I was going down to the train station from New York to meet Giles, from whom we had received a telegram the night before. I wanted to see Julia, and I thought that perhaps. I might give her a lift along the road somewhere, or take some letter down to the station for her. Besides, the Ford was working wonderfully well that morning.

You understand we had seen nothing of Eric or Julia since that Friday night. They were at that time so wrapped up in each other that we should not have thought of breaking in on them. To my surprise, Eric answered the telephone, and it was he who was glad of a chance to be taken to the station. There was a train down to New York just before Giles' train up from there was due. Eric was leaving on that. so I hustled over for him in the Ford. It was a wonderful morning. The shadows under the hemlocks by Eric's house were the only dark things I saw,

and I always felt rather than saw them. Eric was waiting for me on the steps to the front door, with his bags at his feet. Julia was standing beside him, heavily veiled. Will you be good enough to take me along, too? She asked, in an unusually low voice. I want to go with Eric as far as I can. and Eric added with great tenderness,

I want her to have a lot of this sweet fresh air. Then for heaven's sake, take off that thick veil, Julia, I cried. It's a gorgeous day, don't shut it out. There's no dust. The roads are still wet. Do, my dear, Eric urged. No one will see that mark. All the black and blue spots in the world wouldn't make any difference to me or to anyone.

She stood beside him. I was going to say trembling. I never saw Julia tremble while she had strength enough to stand on her feet. But there was something about her that morning, suggestive of extreme weakness, and I had a feeling of uncertainty about her health. Have you had a fall, Julia? I asked anxiously. The silly girl walked in her sleep last night, Eric explained, and bumped her cheek. In the way of a joke, I shouted,

Oh, you Lady Macbeth! I had a moment's pride of my knowledge of Shakespeare. But Julia put her hand up in protest. Don't say that, she cried. I've done nothing, nothing I can think of. I could see that I had upset her. All right, Julia, I said. I'll take your word for it, only please take off that funeral crepe and enjoy the morning sunshine. There's nothing better than cool, fresh air for the black and blue spots.

That was a fatuous remark, but it pleased Eric. We could not persuade Julia to lift her veil, however. In her simple gray frock she looked like a girl but for the wretched black drapery about her head. a device which, in my eyes, always gives women the appearance of victims going to the block to have their heads cut off. Not one word did either of them say to or for me as I drove them through Flat Foresby to the station that morning. But I heard their low affectionate voices all the way. That was a pleasant sound, and together with the golden September weather, the early morning sun and the clean-washed air,

drove from my mind the thought it had harbored for a moment that this Julia was not the merry Julia of our little Friday night dinner. I remember a shock at the station, however. They were greatly upset at parting, much as they controlled themselves, and I left them standing on the platform and stepped to my car just alongside. As the train came in, she threw up her veil to take his kiss, and then I caught a glimpse of her face. Anguish at parting might have taken the blood from her cheeks, but when after the train had pulled out of the station, she came towards me,

her veil still lifted. I saw she was haggard as well as pale. Tears were in her eyes. Just a step or two, she appeared uncertain in her movement, and then she set her lips and came forward staunchly. She ignored the hand I offered to help her into the car, and without even looking at me, stepped in and took her seat calmly. I saw the mark, high on the right cheekbone, the discoloration spreading up under the outer corner of the eye. She had forgotten about her veils being lifted. Indeed, I now know that she wore it to hide her face from Eric only.

Up to the final scene It remained her greatest care to conceal from Eric As far as she could The signs of her suffering The nature of which she had determined He must not know After a while she blew her nose a little Coughed and then turned her moist grey eyes

To meet my too anxious look How foolish I am to love him so She said smiling a little In the few minutes we had to wait for Giles' train We said nothing She was completing the mastery over herself from time to time I stole a glance at her sweet, determined little face. After her tears had ceased to flow, she sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap,

and devoted herself more and more to her own thoughts, no detail of which was recorded on the sensitive white mask of her face. Under her breast and throat I saw waves of emotion rise and fall, but her firm lips were locked against the force of them. It was a relief to hear Giles's train come rumbling into the station. We were waiting on the inbound side, after the train had pulled out, I saw Giles on the other platform across the tracks. He had a couple of heavy bags at his feet, and he was looking irascibly up and down and all around,

shouting, Porter, at men on our side of the rails, pointing his cane at them, behaving as he usually behaves, as if the whole world were reprehensibly indifferent to him, and he wouldn't put up with it much longer. What I really envied in Giles was not his ability as an artist or his money or his swagger, English clothes, but his contemptuous indifference to making a scene. The two or three huskies on our side of the station merely gave him the once over and went on about their business. Oh, my beloved America, have we not much to learn about the treatment of artists? But believe me, I was tickled just the same. Of course, it was up to me to go get his bags.

He could not be expected to carry them himself. So I ran down through the tunnel under the tracks up to Cousin Giles, took his bags, heavy brutes, one in each hand, and started back again. again, and he followed me, roaring all the way about this damn deserted place. I knew I could have asked him what the blank he came for, but it was never any satisfaction to come back at Giles. Might as well ask old faithful what he spouts for, or Vesuvius why she smokes. He was a sort of short, thick-set volcano himself. He had a full face, not exactly sallow, but brownish, with rather protruding yellow-brown eyes, tremendously animated,

a ludicrously small nose and nervous full lips, not a bit concealed by his scant mustache, which was yellowish also. The line of his jaw and chin was overlaid with flesh and muscle, and he had the neck of a bull, though he wasn't what you'd call a beefy man. He was, I know, tremendously intelligent, intolerant, impatient, and more nervous than any lean man I've ever known. He was so full of energy that I often wondered if he ever slept at all.

Funny what things come back to me. I do remember one night. I heard him snoring when there was a horror stalking through the house. To many of us, he seemed all-fired important, and that's what he was, I now believe, to his country and to the world. As we approached the Ford that morning, and he saw that there was a woman in it, he all but balked. Probably he had had no sleep the night before, for he had come from somewhere down in Maine,

and the thought of having to ride so early in the morning, with a commonplace woman gave his nerves another twist of the screw. But I said, come on now, Giles, you've got to be civil, on such a fine morning. Besides, it's Mrs. Greer. Greer! Greer! he roared, making me hot all over. I don't know any greer! Why the devil should I be civil to Mrs. Greer? Because, I answered in a low but angry voice, she's a damn fine woman, whether you know her or not,

and she isn't very well. Huh, so you're going to give me a sick one on this fine morning, are you? Damned if I won't walk! We didn't often damn ourselves and each other so freely, and I was mortified at the thought that Julia might have heard. By the way, I have never heard Eric use an oath of any kind. But Julia was probably too much absorbed in her own thoughts to hear us. She started when I spoke to her.

"'Julia,' I said as cheerfully as I could, "'this is my cousin, Mr. Giles Farrow. "'He has just told me that he is going to walk to the house. "'We shan't have the pleasure of his company.' "'He raked off his hat in a boorish sort of way. "'His lank hair never seemed combed, "'and stooped to lift his dress suit-suit case. But at the sound of her voice, like a sweet silver bell always, with something courteous in the inflection,

he stood up quickly, gave her a keen, critical, almost arrogant look, and then plumped himself down beside her in the back seat. I don't know what it was always made Giles seem bigger than the place he was in, mopping his forehead and blowing a bit, he was like a steam engine in the back seat of my Ford. While I was laboring to lift his heavy bags to the front seat, and while I made sure that the doors were all fast and did the many little things one does so proudly about a for. I saw him dart-swift glances at Julia's face. She rather turned away from him, which I should judge was not what he was used to having women do. And we rode on in silence for a good while.

All of a sudden, he asked her if she lived in one of the new concrete stables they were putting up out here. She laughed and told him that she lived in the one old house that had been left standing. I knew it, he roared. You've got some since. I've seen you before, too. I stumbled on that old place when I was here in June. saw you and your husband setting out flowers, foxgloves, nispa? How did you happen to hit on that place? Look at all these other insufferable boxes of houses.

Look at that one over there like a county jail. No shade anywhere either. But I say you don't look so well as when I saw you before. What's the matter? Been ill? You don't think that old houses are healthy, do you, Giles? I threw back at him over my shoulder. To blazes with health, he cried incontinently. Always thinking of your bodies, you Americans.

If Giles was out of sorts, he always sailed into the Americans, just as if he weren't one himself. There's a spirit in a soul to consider. These things you call homes, look at them. Garages, jails, memorial bakes. Give me a house that has a spirit in it, like Mrs. Julia's laugh was a little strained, I thought. But the two of them fell into conversation. They'd both lived in Europe and all that sort of thing, so I, who had never been farther across the water than to Staten Island,

gave my thoughts to the smoothness of the Ford and the good September sunshine and air. It was Giles who did most of the talking, but now and then Julia asked a question, and once or twice she laughed. At last we reached our home. I got Giles's heavy luggage out on to the Granolithic walk. Annette came flying through the front door and down to the car to greet him.

My sensible wife was not insensible of the fact that her relationship to Giles gave her something of a standing in the community. This morning, largely for the sake of Julia, I imagine, she greeted him with more enthusiasm than the tie of second cousin usually prompts. Lord, how human that is! But Giles stuck fast in the car. He hardly acknowledged Annette's greeting at all, but tried to continue his conversation with Julia,

just as if Annette had not been there beside the car, looking right pretty, too, in the bright sunlight. You see, she has a good skin and pretty hair. Well, it was a little humiliating for Annette. Still, that was no excuse for her taking it out. on Julia. Julia was really very sweet to Annette that morning and thanked her especially for having been good to Eric Friday night. And what did Annette do but say something about having brought a couple of nightmares to the house with him? I only said it half jokingly, she explained to me later

when I took her task for it. You heard me, Pierre. I only said he had brought a couple of nightmares to Bobby and Felicia. How could she have taken it so? She knows that Bobby adores Eric. She knows old Felicia would lie down on the ground for Eric to walk over her. She shouldn't be so sensitive. At the time I felt that her wrong had been done, and I tried to relieve the situation by reminding Annette that Eric had been good enough to take the nightmares away with him. That didn't improve the situation, but it covered up the silence which had fallen upon Julia's strange, inarticulate distress. Her eyes looked quite horror-struck. I remember thinking, well, women beat the Dutch, and being glad that Annette couldn't see the mark on Julia's other cheek. When women get going, no mere man can tell where she'll.

they'll end. Jiles was determined not to get out of the car, but to go on with Julia and me to the old house. I don't think he cared a hang about seeing it, but he wanted to stay with Julia. How he puffed and roared along the way. In spite of him, however, there were silent spaces. Julia said absolutely nothing and laughed no more. The consciousness that Annette's brusqueness had pained her never left my mind. But I had little idea how nearly Julia was done for. To my utter dismay, she fainted as she stepped out of the car. Luckily Giles, who could be as courteous as a bear, had got round to the door on her side to help her out,

and he caught her in his powerful arms as she sank forward. My, he was strong. I think he could have carried a net, and he carried Julia into the house as if she were a feather. I ran ahead to open the door, fortunately, on the latch, and knowing the house, I piloted him down the narrow hallway, hung with that rosy stuff, into the sitting room, across the floor of which,

the sunlight, streaming between the rich curtains, lay in bright bars. It touched the pillow on the sofa, just the place for her head to rest. Her hat fell off as Giles laid her down, and the sunbeams glistened in her dark chestnut hair. No need to loosen anything round the slender white throat which rose spotless from the loose blouse she wore. Giles, the thick set, knelt down beside her and chafed her hands. For him at that moment there was but one person in the world besides himself. He was wholly absorbed in watching her face. But only for a moment or two.

He began shouting for someone, anyone, and ordering me not to stand like a blockhead but to fetch water, find the servant, do something. He himself rushed to part the curtains wider, and he nearly tore them down from their rods doing so, and to open the windows and let in more air. Before I left the room, I heard Julia say in a low voice, "'Keep that thing away from me. Don't let it touch me.

Oh, Eric!' How her whisper shook with horror. By the time I returned to the room with a carafe of water and word that the servant would follow me with Cologne, Giles had dragged the couch with Julia on it to the west windows, giving upon the veranda and overlooking the river. A cool breeze came up from the water and blew the curls around her pale face, and Giles was standing looking at her, his chin and his hand, his legs far apart, his whole body tense and motionless.

Is she better? I whispered. Yes, he growled. wet a handkerchief and put it on her forehead, you... You... I did so, and Julia opened her eyes. Dazed at first, she asked for Eric, and when I told her that he was gone, she said cryptically,

"'He must not come back yet. Not yet.' I was at a loss to understand this until, as she regained more of her strength, she repeated several times. "'He must not see me like this. He must not know.' He would indeed have been tortured.

At last the old servant came in, with the cologne and Julia held out a hand to me. She spoke a word of thanks to Giles, too, and said to both of us, It's a feminine absurdity. It means nothing except that, well, nothing. I trust you not to say a word to Eric about it. She closed her eyes. The tears came pushing out slowly from beneath her pallid lids.

We knew it was time for us to go. I left the motor running. There's extravagance for you with gasoline mounting towards the sky. But I didn't care. Giles got up in the front seat beside me, and we started off without a word. At last I said, That for your old houses,

I don't believe that one's healthy. I'll bet it's haunted, too. But Giles never opened his lips, except to put a cigarette between them, which he did not try to light. We must have gone a mile before he shot out at me. Her husband? What about him?

I gasped, startled. Her husband? He roared again. Look here, Giles, I said, feeling pretty serious. He's a fine fellow. and she adores him. End of chapter four.

Chapter 5. Of Sinister House by Leland Hall. This Librovoc's recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 5. My temper was harrowed, the picture I carried in my mind of Julia, pale and exhausted, lying on the couch before the open window over the river, away from the sunbeams and with no glittering response in her hair to the blue western light of early morning.

was one to stir in a man more nervous than I, that rising of feeling as against something wrong. Indeed, I was so upset that I managed to put one over on my wife, whom I found pairing cucumbers in the kitchen and whom I treated with great firmness, ending all resistance with the flat statement that Julia was all in, and no fit subject to be told that her husband carried nightmares round with him. As for Giles, he kept to his room all the morning, but at lunch he fairly put us through an inquisition. He wanted to know about Eric, who he was, where he came from, and what he did.

We couldn't tell him much. In fact, we didn't know anything about Eric, and that way. Eric appeared to have a little money. He had spoken to me of real estate in Chicago once, and I always supposed his income came from that. And I supposed likewise that he had just been to Chicago to see about it. I don't know how it was that Giles put the little we knew and the much we did not know about Eric in an unpleasant

light. He did just that in a rather nasty way. That is, he made Eric out a man of mystery. Furthermore, Giles's sympathy for Julia was very intense, and that too somehow deepened the shadow on Eric. About her, he apparently knew far more than we had ever known, though he utterly ignored our questions. Annette was pleased to frame up a little mystery around Julia then. It was rather in the way of a joke, and chiefly to protect Eric, who, after all, if his wife was going to be sickly and nervous, had a claim on us for sympathy, too. Giles's aspersions on the character of Eric seemed to me quite unjustified. I brought to his attention the evidence of Julia's own behavior and condition, which still I took to have their main cause in her grief at parting from Eric.

But Giles scoffed at that, and in my own heart I had already begun to feel a restless doubt. I was glad that afternoon to make a bluff of having to go over the fort again and to get away from Giles' pestiferous questions about my friend. But at the table he had, as it were, stuck us with a poison point, and the venom made me uncomfortable with the thought that all might not be right and natural in the house where Eric and Julia lived. I saw Giles go banging off by himself. At night he told us that he had called at Mrs. Greer's late in the afternoon

and had been informed by the servant that Mrs. Greer had gone at once to bed after her ill turn of the morning, and that she had fallen into a deep sleep, from which she had not then wait. Later in the evening I telephoned, even then she had not stirred in her bed. Giles called hers the sleep of a ghastly exhaustion. Hard-headed as he remained all through the affair, and often as he reprimanded me for imagining things about the house, strangely enough it was he who first suggested to me that there was something uncanny in this business of Julia's ill turns. It was amazing how Julia was herself again the very next day.

Yet I saw a new look in her face. It wasn't only a look. There was a slight drawing of the lips you see on the faces of persons who are concentrating all their energies to meet a prolonged strain on their nervous force. Her manner changed, too. She was not standoffish, but a little on her guard. As for Eric, during the next six weeks, he became more and more reserved. He grew thinner, too, and his face, too, had a whole.

holy somber expression. I noticed that he was reserved even with Julia, and while his attentions to her seemed no less actuated by an unusually passionate and devoted love, they were more controlled and perhaps more formal. His hair, already touched with gray when I first saw him, became almost white at the temples and over the ears. I took it he was worrying over Julia's health. There was no doubt that she fell off when he was around,

and each time he went away she regained a little less before he came back. Whatever was going on between them, Annette and I knew it was none of our business. So long as the weather stayed fine, we had our own happy outdoor lives to lead. We had our children, the Ford, and my vacation. It was nothing to either of us what Giles did with himself. We thought it very odd that he tolerated for his be so long. We more than tolerated him. We learned to put up with his tempers to take him at his best.

We should have been glad to take Julia with us on our outings now and then, but I can't remember that she ever made one with us at that time. I wonder why. I know she needed company. Though our children are a bit noisy, she loved them and they would have done her good. I remember thinking that they would be better company for a woman in her state than Giles could be.

But though Giles was nervous and restless, there was something resolute and straightforward about him, which may have been, I used to think, what helped her best to pass the hours of her separation from Eric. I let it go at that, failing utterly to realize how, at that time she needed for a friend just such a man as Giles, one who would keep her mind busy and vary her thoughts. The house, which most of Forsby considered an unwholesome place, fell under a deeper

shadow. Julia entertained fewer and fewer guests there and towards the end. Before she and Eric left it for good and all, Giles and my wife and I were almost the only neighbors who went there. Nothing could throw Giles into a more furious tantrum than Annette's antipathy to the house. He liked the house himself, but in his self-assumed role of detective in regard to Eric, he was always seeking to know what had brought Eric to it. That used to irritate me. I thought it unfair to Eric. I said to him again and again, he took it because Julia liked it at first sight. Invariably, he would reply that that didn't explain what had brought Eric to this godforsaken part of the world in the first place. On one occasion, Annette, stung by his ungracious allusions to Forsby, gave him back an unusually vivid

account of Julia's spooky reception by the house in question. A house which had a spirit in it, maybe two or three, that flung open the windows and sang to unsuspecting victims to tempt them into it. "'Tumbled down old haunted shanty,' she said, fit for an insane asylum, or for the company of artists, of course, dear Giles and artistic people. Eric must have been crazy to get it for her. Giles grew very icy. "'You cannot be expected to see the spiritual charm in such places.

Annette. Yes, said Annette with a little toss of her head. So Julia once told me, and no house ever sing to me either, and if one did, I hope I'd have sense enough to stay out of it. Giles pounded on the table. We were still at lunch. But what I want to know, he roared in his best style, is why he brought her here in the first place.

Where does he come from? What brought a man like him down to this flat, deadly part of God's earth? Maybe he too heard the singing over the long-distance wire to New York, I answered, trying to smooth things out. Our little Bobby was at the table. He adored Eric and Julia, and he seemed to have caught the idea of the conversation as children will, and to have taken an interest in it. Childlike, too, he began softly at first, but with increasing clamor and violent approaches to his mother's face to ask over and over again, "'Ma, ma, what brought Uncle Eric to the singing house?' "'Ma, ma, what brought Uncle Eric to the singing house?' It got fearfully on Giles's nerves.

"'Hush,' said his mother, hush, hush, and then unwinding his two arms with impatience. "'If you don't stop your noise this minute, Robert, you shall go to bed without any supper tonight.' He got down from his mother's lap then and crawled under the table. We tried to regain our composure, but, unobserved, that lad of mine got round to John Giles and tugging at his coat for attention, I wonder how malicious children are, demanded his answer. Cousin Giles, what brought Uncle Eric to the singing house? Giles sprang up in a fury. Nothing, you good pest! Nothing good! he shouted, and went raging out of the room.

I think that at first, singing house, suggested to Bobby merely his cuckoo clock. He had always been enchanted and a bit frightened by the flying open of the little door, the inexplicably sudden apparition of the wooden songster, its song and its equally sudden silence and disappearance. Many children tire of this regular, self-performing miracle, and most boys will sooner or later half the thing apart. Bobby, on the contrary, would have been aghast at the mere thought of dismembering even a wooden bird.

He was a sensitive, little fellow. He feared the clock at first, and his curiosity never got liberated from his fear sufficiently for him to venture a finger into the black hole from out of which the bird sprang to sing. As for what went on behind that door, after it had had... closed the poor bird in. I am sure he had lurid imaginings. How deep an impression the idea of a whole singing house made on the child we did not suspect. I do not know what his mind peopled it with besides his uncle Eric and his aunt Julia. Anyhow, the place began to be somewhat fearful for him. Whenever we drove past it in the Ford, he drew up closer to me. He always sat on the front seat

unless we were out after dark, and there was, I felt, something communicative in his fear. At one time, Manette, and I, too, used to tell the little boy's spooky stories just to make his eyes grow big and round. It is an unwise and a cruel practice with children like him, and we don't do it anymore. Besides, we know too well ourselves now how much torture lurks in a dim and inconceivable thing of terror. But at that time we were both capable of adding touches of gruesome horrors to the stories we told him. We had no premonition of the lesson we were to learn, and that very soon. Late one afternoon we were in a field, the three of us. us well up the river. It was still warm, though, the sun was dropping low. It had been hazy all day,

and we had been at peace, untroubled by worry of any sort. Annette had taken along with her a book of myths and folklore, and had read one or two of them to Bobby, who would sit and raptured as long as she would read them. Just before it was time for us to be starting back home, she finished that rather revolting one of the Lorelei. It was Psalm Lorelei in that version of the story, one with a hearty appetite for human flesh. see the little boy now snuggled very close under his mother's arm. He was looking at the pages as she read them, though he hadn't begun to learn his letters. Facing the last page of the story, there was a crude engraving of the fascinating man-eating lady. Maybe you have seen it. She sits alone

on the top of a high rock above the river, clothed only in her long bright hair in a very scanty smock, which Bobby probably thought was her bib. She had horrid, bold eyes and her mouth looks well fed. The narrow plateau on which she sit has encumbered all around her with thigh bones, presumably human, and skulls undoubtedly so. Bobby just stared at that. He had had his finger on every bone and on every one of the five strings in the harp she held in her hand. I picked up the rugs in the lunch basket and went up to the car to make all ready for the ride home, but when I came back down through the tall dry grass of the field to summon a net and the boy to the car, I found that they had not moved to prepare themselves for the start, that Bobby was really afraid to make a move

in the twilight that had already fallen upon the disappearance of the sun. I had to pick him up in my arms and carry him to the car. The night air was already cool. I felt then that it was wrong to read the little fellow such horrible stuff and to let him see such pictures. I spanked him in a friendly way and promised him he should ride home on the front seat. But that didn't work. He wanted to be close to someone, and I had scolded him so often for getting in my way when he was riding beside me that he knew well his only hope for snuggling lay in the back seat. His mother laughed at him, but she took him under her wing, wrapped him war him against the cold breeze,

and in the dark we started off. We had ten miles to go down along the river, from which before long the mists began to rise, spreading eerily over the marshes and settling into the hollows of the road. Silly boy, I heard his mother say, Silly boy, to be afraid. Did she sing when she was hungry? I heard him asking his high tense voice.

voice. You are thinking of little Tommy Tucker, who sang for his supper, I heard her answer. But what was the Lorelei's supper, Mama? Did she eat little boys and girls? And so on, until Annette, to get the horrid idea out of his head, resorted to that reprehensible mixture of terrorism with morality, which many mothers administer to their children. As, for example, her telling Bobby that only naughty people heard the Lorelei sing at all, and all naughty people ought to be eaten if they weren't. how careful we both are now to keep the conceptions of horror from taking root in the minds of our children. The night settled darker and darker and colder and colder.

Here and there we passed through a queer warm streak in the air. I finally told Bobby over my shoulder that there was no such things as Laurelise anyhow, that the whole thing was nonsense. But in a few moments I heard him again. Aren't there any Lorelise on the Hudson, Mama? No, dear, there aren't any, anywhere. But Uncle Eric heard the singing house. Was there a Lorelei in the singing house?

Was Uncle Eric a bad man and heard her sing? Come, come, my boy. He didn't hear anyone sing. But who did? Aunt Julia just played she did. Then there isn't any Lorelei in the singing house? No, darling, and there wasn't any singing in it. Then it won't eat Aunt Julia?

Come on, my son. I broke in. I'm so hungry that if you keep on talking this way, I'll eat you. And Papa can't sing, said my wife, seizing as she always seized, the chance to give me a playful jive. Bang! A blowout, and we were four miles from home, and the night already heavy upon us.

A forlorn predicament. I got out, and by the light of a miserable Kendall stub began my repairs. While I was working, Annette Heard, faint in the distance, the whistle of the 7.30 train from New York, due in Forsby at 8.30. I wonder if Eric's coming back on that train. She murmured with a yawn, and I wonder where Giles is getting his supper. Supper, is there a more maddening word to distract the mind of a fellow in my fix? We stayed by the roadside a good half hour, and by the time we started on again, the night was thick.

We were savagely hungry, and our nerves were on edge. Fortunately, Bobby soon fell asleep. We rode on in silence, my mind on the road before me, often shrouded in the night mist, which took strange shapes before our lamps, and my whole body crying out for something warm to eat. But even against Ford's fate sometimes sets herself. Just by the gloomy hemlocks that bordered the highway when it runs by Eric's house, we suffered another blowout. I swore and stopped the engine. Immediately the night was black about us. For a moment I thought it was silent too, but then my ears caught the sound of a woman's voice, singing. It came from somewhere behind those hemlocks,

round which the mist was in a strange and sinuous movement, without any other sound to accompany it, without any gleam of light, a voice in the blackness, so disassociated from human life as to suggest something unearthly. To make matters worse, Bobby, half-wakened by the stopping of the car, began to scream in terror. I hear the singing house! I hear the singing house! Oh, Mama, it is going to eat me! It's going to eat me! It got terribly on my nerves,

not only the nerve-wracking, yelling, but the association of the faint thread of song with the hideous story of sorcery and inhuman cruelty, "'Oh, shut up!' I shouted at my son, and a temper as I got myself stiffly out of the car. His screaming subsided at once into a sort of frightened whimpering, through which I could still hear, though very faintly, a note or two of the song. But he let loose again and clutched frantically at his mother, when she had to move herself and him in order to let me get at the necessary implements in the chest under the back seat.

By the certain light of matches I struck one after the other. I found my jack, my tire irons, and my amending tissues, but no trace of the candle stub. I must have left it at the place where we had been held up before. Well, I tried to light one of the kerosene lamps. As luck would have it, it was empty of oil. I tried all the kerosene lamps. They were all empty, even the taillight, which I seldom troubled the light in this remote part of the world. My cursing was ardent, but low.

There was something in the blackness of the night. The stars were all obscured by the haze. There was something in the blackness, I repeat, in the damp, heavy, clinging of the mist, extra chill by those forever sunless trees, and in the mysterious and only half-audible sound of singing coming to us through the fear-haunted thicket, which cast a spell over me and mind. One, I was not venturesome enough to shatter with a loud ringing oath. And there was Bobby's incessant and agitating whimpering, too, a sort of cold rill of fear. It was impossible to do my work in the darkness,

and I made up my mind to go to the house and ask for a light, rather than to burn gasoline for half an hour or more and keep the engine running just for the front lamps. Well, hurry then, Annette said to me, half-whispering herself, Don't leave me alone in this black hole. I thought you had some sense, Annette, I growled crossly. Taking a long breath as if I were going to plunge into a cold bath, I stumbled down into the dark driveway.

I hadn't felt my way more than a few steps, however, before such a heavy feeling as if peril were closing in round us settled on me that I turned and went back to the car. I meant only to reassure it net. As a matter of fact, I made her scream. A second time I braved the clammy darkness of the driveway, and this time I came inside of the house. I say in sight because at last my eyes had definite perception. Through one of the south windows, against which the curtains had not been drawn, the uncertain and not very penetrating, light from a branch of candles was streaming. At first this was heartening, but almost before I had taken another step, I stopped short in my tracks. Against that bar of light, I saw distinctly the silhouetted head and shoulders of a man.

Had he not moved, I certainly should have taken the bulk which revealed him as a protuberance from the dark mass of shrugs along that wall of the house, the outline of which was only half distinct against the light. He was standing some four or five feet from the window, evidently looking in, It was a movement nearer that had arrested my attention. One thinks only of wickedness in such moments. It never occurred to me that the fellow, whoever he was, might have been drawn towards the window by the sound of singing,

faint but sweet, that came from the house, recently as I had been reminded of the drawing power of the hungry and destructive Lorelei. I thought only that Julia was in danger of insult, of shock, or even of some bodily harm. Instantly, my heart beating faster, I confess, I began to steal up on the villain. I stood low over the ground. I myself must have become invisible in the darkness,

while to my eyes he stood a little more clearly outlined against the night. Nearer and nearer I crept over the damp grass with not a sound to betray me. His ears must have been filled with the music, however, black the thoughts that filled his heart. He must have been a careless brute, too. For an edging ever nearer to the window, he put himself more and more into the light, and into full view of anyone within the room who might chance to look out through the window. He rustled the bushes as well.

Several times I heard them snap with a sharp, clear sound. As I approached, the feeling that there was evil about him in danger for Julia grew so intense in my breast that I made up my mind I would strike him from behind with all my strength, without any preliminary questions. He was, I could see a taller man than I, and probably much stronger. Since I had only my bare fist to fell him with,

I must spring upon him and take him utterly by surprise. I knew I must leap when I reached the bushes, for I could not hope to creep nearer to him through them without much crackling, to which not even the sweet singing could have made the prowler deaf. That singing kept smoothly on. I had a feeling that the fellow was really listening to it, and I was glad for it served my purpose. Just before I decided it was time for me to make the leap,

I prayed for a more ringing note. My prayer was not granted. Instead I heard the singing shiver to a moment. was sort of sob. I jumped, nevertheless, for even at that moment I heard my prey lurch forward. He was actually rattling the window, which was low and made in the French fashion, to open like a door. What my half-blinded eyes saw through that window when I leapt up I shall never forget. First, let me say, I recognized the man who was rattling it to get in. It was Eric. Then within the room I saw Julia still sitting at the piano, but with her face turned towards her husband,

and on it a look of unspeakable horror. I saw Giles his back to me, half risen from his chair, and as if turned to stone by the expression he saw on Julia's face. It must have been only for a second or two, this frozen and horrible fixedness within the room. As for Julia, it might have been the shock of seeing a face peering in at her, even her husbands, so sudden and like an apparition in the night. But it wasn't that.

I saw her move, or force herself to move, and rise from the piano. Slowly, step by step, she made her way towards the window. And on her face I saw, meanwhile, revealed her indomitable spirit, fighting to bring a light of recognition to her eyes and outshine the lurid horror there. I saw her hands before her, not as a blind person's low and searching,

but rigidly straight out before her, hardened and sharpened to beat and tear a ghastly invisible medium through which it cost of an enormous effort, she slowly forced herself to make way. Yet, they only twitched in small weak movements like hands locked in a rigor of all but death. How terribly slow her steps were. And all the while I heard Eric rattling the window to get in.

He did get in, but even then she could not propel herself towards him. It was he who rushed towards her, and he hid her from me in his embrace. I felt almost sick. Just before I hurried away, my eyes saw Giles, risen to his feet. His face turned into the light, amazed and horror-struck, even as my own must have been. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of Sinister House by Leland Hall.

The Slibervox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Almost staggering through the darkness, I made my way back to the Ford. Annette was nervous and shaky. I startled her, coming up out of the darkness without any light. I hemmed and hawed for I could not speak and cranked the car, making up my mind to get the thing the three miles home on a flat tire. But Annette rebelled at that. Why didn't you get a light from the house as you started out to do? She asked me with unmistakable irritation.

You're crazy to think of going home on a flat tire. I can't stand it. Why didn't you get the light? What's the matter with you? And then leaning closer to me in the darkness and almost whispering, What's the matter in the house? Eric's come home, I replied. Well, what if that? What's the matter with him?

It's Julia. For heaven's sake, say something. What's wrong with Julia? But I couldn't explain. I hadn't the courage. The engine was running with a great racket and the front lights shone far down the road, making bright whatever they touched upon, but leaving all else doubly black by contrast. A fitful wind was blowing and I was more depressed in spirits than I had ever been, before. Somehow, though, I had climbed into the seat and had grasped the safety lever. I could not bring myself to start the car. It was altogether a horrid couple of minutes. Naturally, Annette was

mystified, but when I swore I would not go back to that house tonight, she almost lost her temper. What nonsense, she exclaimed. I won't ride home with you on a flat tire. If you can't mend it in the dark, I'll go and get a light myself. You might be a little more considerate, Pierre. Here I am shivering with the cold. Bobby needs his supper. I'm hungry, too, and yet you won't make a move to get us home. Well, I'll catch our deaths sitting here in this cold fog. It did seem foolish, after all. And finally, I went up the driveway again, stumbled along to the house and knocked on the door. I heard a scream, faint and quickly choked, but nonetheless real. It was probably Julia, startled out of her self-control. To my surprise, Giles opened the door,

prompted by an instinctive feeling that I must bring cheerfulness into that house. I hail him in a hearty voice, then called down anathema on tires, and demanded a light in tones that filled up the long rose-colored shadowy hallway, and must have struck the ears of Eric and his bride pleasantly. Eric came out from the living room, and Julia followed him. He had honest, cordial words of welcome for me, but it was Julia who almost hysterically commanded me to stay and sup with them. I was taken off my guard. Through the door, whence they had both issued, I caught a glimpse of the candle-lit living-room, of its odd, old-fashioned furniture. its small, deep-colored rugs, its dark hangings, and just a yellow flame or two of the fire,

burning in the little grate. But I was ill at ease. My nerves were shaking. I didn't like the house, warm as it felt, and picturesque and cozy as it looked to my eyes. Yet, before I knew it, Julia had me by the arm, and was leading me back down the driveway, pulling me along, in a great hurry to get to the Ford out in the blackness and commandeer Annette and Bobby. All the way, she kept up a chattering about how cold it was, how hungry we must be, and how, in celebration of Eric's homecoming, we must stay and help them make merry. Under the run of this somewhat too urgent hospitality, I felt the strain of despair.

I knew that Julia actually had need of us in that house tonight, for some terrible reason I could not hope to fathom. I made up my mind that as much as we should be acting our parts and ignorance, we would not go back on her. We could at least stand by, so I was cheerful with Annette, and enthusiastic for a good warm supper there and then, and Annette could not but accept. this odd turn. We roused Bobby and went back to the house, Julia keeping up with my wife, the nervous talk that, on the way out, she had loosened on me. As we approached the door, left open, through which the faint rosy light came out into the dark, my boy began to twist and turn in my arms. Without his supper, he was fretful and nervous, and he was frightened by the night, too.

Indeed, as I carried him up the two steps of the porch, he began to kick me and to pound my shoulder with tightly clenched little fists. As yet he made no outcry, but I felt the wind gathering force in his little chest. And when we got inside the house and I set him down in the hall, there was something in the way he grabbed my legs and hid his face against them that made me fear for the worst. This was received in full measure when Eric, always up to that time, a great favorite with him,

tried playfully to catch him up in his arms. Bobby let out shriek after shriek, a sound too much of terror for me to think at an outburst of temper. Papa, Papa! he screamed. Take me away from him! Take me away! Eric was naturally amazed and hurt, and I was at a loss as to how to make things more pleasant. Nothing can make a child courteous if his instinct sets in the other direction. Bobby had no idea of concealing his sudden aversion to his beloved Uncle Eric.

While Eric knelt down beside him to question the cause of this painful manifestation, Bobby only screamed louder to Papa to keep Uncle Eric away. Keep him away from me. Keep him away. It hurts. Is something hurting him? Eric asked me quietly. I guess he's just a tired, hungry boy, I answered. What hurt you, my son? What hurt you? Eric stood back against the wall, a tall, somber figure.

As soon as he did this, the tension of Bobby's nerves seemed to be relaxed, though he gave me no answer to my question, but with a little shudder hugged my knees tighter. When I tried to take off my coat, we had another scene. Then Eric said in a low troubled voice, He seems to be frightened of me. For heaven's sake, Pierre, is there anything wrong about me, tonight. I frighten Julia terribly. I can't get over it. No wonder, I said without thinking of my words, you came sneaking up to the window out of the dark.

Julia told you? He asked, suggesting by his manner that Julia and I had a secret understanding out of which he was left. Julia had not, as you know, said a word of it to me. I am glad I told him frankly I had seen him myself and that I had taken him for a prowler bent on mischief. On mischief, he cried, on mischief, to Julia. Oh my God. I heard her singing, and I wanted to feast my eyes on her without her knowing. But it wasn't that. For a long time after she recognized me, it was worse with her. A blind man could have felt it. She shuddered in my arms as if I were a thing of terror to her. She tried not to push me away. I had altogether too vivid an impression of what my own eyes had seen to enjoy this personal revelation. It was hard to give my voice an encouraging ring when I tried to assure him that he imagined. too much. That's nonsense, I said. You're trying to tell me Julia was trying not to push you away. She must have been fooling. Fooling, he groaned. But I didn't let him go on. And as for my son here, I added, Annette's just read him that gruesome story about the Lorelai and has got him plumb scared.

He's heard of the singing, you know, Julia's phrase, about the singing house. And when he heard Julius' voice out there in the dark, he probably thought there was a spellbinder here that wants to eat him. He does not know, Eric, old man, that only the ladies do such horrid things. Eric muttered and then cleared his throat. There's something about me, Pierre. I know it. There's something about me. I used to think that Julia... I can feel it. Look at the child here, and has been trying to push Julia away. Though I laughed loudly at this notion, later when we were all in the warm living room awaiting supper. I could see that it had got a hold on him. It must have been his own thought that held us also strangely aloof from him. He might as well have stood within a ring of malevolence.

His isolation was all but palpable, and in the midst of those who loved him too. Everybody in the room but Giles seemed screwed up to a high pitch, and laughed and talked with an unnatural animation, directing questions at Eric as if consciously trying to pierce whatever it was ringing him off from us. He habitually, so courteous, tried to send his answers back to us through the evil thing that set him apart. He tried at first, too, to walk among us. But whenever he came into our midst, Bobby's aversion broke out in frightened whimperings

and agitation so that, to smooth things over, Eric was compelled to stand outside the group. I can see him now, leaning against the frame of the window through which he had made his way in from the garden, his face taking on a serious set look, quite different for him. from the mobile sadness of his natural expression. The uneven light from the branch of candles over by that window now deepening, now relieving the shadows round his eyes, and, as his eyes grew hard, glinting back from them.

It was with the expression of a man setting himself to make a bitter, deadly struggle that he watched Julia, playing like a gentle lunatic, with little Bobby standing between my knees. Poor Julia, slender and like a girl in her white dress, flitting through the warm room from one to the other of him. I could not bear to look at that delicate gentle face or into those clear gray eyes in which I had so lately seen the shadow of an unspeakable horror. My heart ached for her, though I hardly knew why. Bobby's behavior to her husband must have been like a knife thrust in her breast, and she set

herself to winning the little fellow from his fear, for her husband's sake I do not doubt. Laughing with unnatural eagerness, trembling and nervous, always playing bravely to simulate gaiety, though she could not hide her agitation. She threw herself lightly on the floor beside me and began quizzing him, patting his hands, mocking him, challenging him, until she brought a smile to his little face. Annette, who I could see, was made very uncomfortable

by the rudeness of her only son, stood over the three of us and laughed and coaxed with us. Well, it may have been a pretty scene to one looking in from the outside, but I was anything but happy. Julius Tenseness was harrowing, and her determination to win Bobby over and walk him right up Eric somehow threw me into the state of a too anxious onlooker at a desperately vital game. I found myself, as it were, pressing my little son away from me to her, and holding my breath

over every inch she drew him from the protection of my knees. It was a slow and nerve-wracking business. She drew him truly only an inch or two at a time, and always he would have fallen back against me had I not kept my hands ready to block the way of his retreat. Was it cruel to the child? we did not then know what evil Julia single-handed was fighting. One look at her face would have aroused your sympathy. We did not mean to offer my boy as a... The thought is too terrible. I happened to glance towards Eric.

God knows he was susceptible. Unable to bear the sight of this wrestle of wills to force away to him, he had turned his face from us, and still by the window, was looking fixedly out upon the lawn. Suddenly, and I know of no reason why it should have been, so, at that moment it flashed. upon me that he was the goat in all this. He was the unfortunate object of the malevolence I had felt about the place. This came to me very clearly. Whatever the evil was, it was attempting

to blockade him, to shut him from his wife, his friends, from the tenderness on which alone he could thrive. Here in his own house just returned from an absence, he stood isolated. The beings who loved him fended from him by a virulent, powerful evil spirit. I had seen inflexible and bitter determination on his face. He could fight for himself, could protect himself. But this thing was trying to attack us. Julia, Bobby, me, even Annette. It was jabbing us, thrusting us back from him.

And he had just begun to know it or to feel it. I had a fit of almost fury. I jumped from my chair. Julia lost her balance and fell on her side away from me. I strode towards Eric, grabbing my boy by the arm and dragging him along with me clear of the floor. I said to him sharply, No more of this nonsense. You shall kiss your uncle Eric and tell him you are sorry for making such a rumpus.

Stop your yelling. Heaven's how he yelled, not a scene to sue the mother's heart. Eric turned suddenly towards us and raised his clenched fists above his head. His face was distorted, but it was neither his gesture, which, God knows, was of desperate rage against some evil thing, not against Bobby and me, nor the frightful look on his face which stopped me dead short. I saw. Wait a moment.

my blood turns cold as I write. I wish to set down precisely every detail as I can remember. I must have been holding Bobby well off the ground, for as my hand that held him went suddenly powerless, I heard him fall in a heap on the floor, heard the thwack of his little boots, his yelling was hushed to silence, and then I heard, no, that thing was... I was standing in the middle of the room, about seven feet from Eric. He was still over against the curtains by the window, the kindles at his right, casting a dancing light upon his ashen distorted face and his wild arms. Mind you, this was all in a second or two. Bobby lay crumpled at my feet. The two women were behind me and Giles,

in an attitude of lounging from which my extraordinary behavior was to make him spring, was on a sofa pulled out about three feet from the wall to my left, leaving a freeway along that wall. Stepping from in front of Eric, against whom it must have been invisible, a vague shape passed like a blur across the candlelight, and then transported. yet visible in its whole length against the dark hangings of the wall. It walked along the side of the room, behind Giles, and out the door into the dim rose-colored hallway. I say it walked, but really it moved in some half-human, half-feindish gate. Slowly, yet in springs, it was the shape of a tall woman.

Though its eyes had no substance, they had form, dreadfully flat, and color, a washed-out chalky blue. They were of the kind that in a living warm body never revolve in their sockets, the gaze of which is directed by a turn of the whole head. And as this thing passed along the wall, its insubstantial head was turned at me, so that I was subjected to a lidless stare of incredibly sinister malice. I felt frozen. I believe I saw this thing. I believe that in a horrible amazement I watched it every inch of its way

till it turned down the hall corridor in the direction of the dining room. It made absolutely no sound in its passage. But what should have been its feet, I saw movement under its skirt-like draperies, touched the floor in time with the beat of Julia's hands. I could not see Julia, but I believed that at that moment she was lying prone on the floor, slowly beating her hands on the rug,

each hand alternately. I cannot remember more details. Giles sprang up and put an end to what I am willing you should call my fit by roaring at, What the devil are you looking at? There was something in his voice that stilled every movement in the room. My hand which I had raised to brush a dank mist from before my eyes was arrested halfway my face.

I believe the candle flames burned suddenly straight into the air without a tremor. But that must have been because the uneasy wind had ceased for an instant to blow in through the window, still ajar behind Eric. There was a complete silence, too. My extraordinary seizure and Giles' sharp cry probably frightened everybody. I know Bobby made not even a whimper. And Julia's monotonous drumming ceased. We were all spellbound and diverse, strained attitudes.

There came an answer to Giles' imperious question. I can't tell you how or whence it came. Giles had asked me what I was looking at, in the silence which followed his sharp question, a name echoed in my brain. Probably I did not hear it. I dare say whatever vibration made the impression of that name in my brain had not rattled the little bones in my inner ear.

And that is the way they tell us we receive impressions of sound. Maybe it wasn't earthly sound. At any rate, the name was distinct. It was snart. And it was followed by a disagreeable sound between a chuckle and a wine. I think my son received the same impression, for through his body huddled against my feet, I felt a shutter pass.

But I never spoke to him about that night. I've protected him from any mention of it, and I faithfully, and seriously tried to protect his mind from every hint of weirdness and horror whatsoever. Call it the rattle of leaves on the stark bushes outside the window. Call it the moan of the wind, the grating of a hinge somewhere in the remoter quarters of the house. Whatever it was, I was so conscious of its meaning that I asked. Annette told me afterwards that I spoke like a man in a dream, but I know I had not been dreaming.

Who said that? Who said what? Giles' word at me. Who said that name? Who said what name? Are you crazy? Crazy. Was I crazy?

I was to be assured later by the one other person in the room who was aware of what I had passed through that I was not crazy. However, I should have come out with the name I had heard had not Annette cried passionately. Mr. Greer, don't look like that. Then it was I realized that I had been staring at the wall. say, and that there were other human beings in the room beside me. I turned to look at Eric, and I shall never forget the sight of his face. Wider than death, and gnarled and twisted. His pose was inhuman like that of a savage beast.

One after the other of us, he fixed with his eyes. If one can call eyes the deep black holes beneath his brows behind which, I now know, there must at that moment when he was so beset have burned a feeling too terribly profound to show the faintest glow. I wonder would it have been best. for that unhappy man had I come out with the ghastly name as I'd been on the point of doing. Annette touched me on the arm. Neither she nor I can remember whether she said anything to me or not. I stooped down and picked up my son. Giles was lending a hand to Julia, and for an instant it struck

me as funny, this restoration, this setting up of what had been knocked down by some unnatural passerby. Maybe I should have laughed aloud but for Eric's face. Aet's cry had not changed it. For months she had called him Eric. Tonight, she had called out to Mr. Greer. Was he then a stranger to us all at once? I never felt closer to him. I never before wished so ardently to befriend a fellow being. You see, it was that sudden inspiration I had had. The sudden revelation that had set me to go up to Eric with my boy, just before the ghostwoman had appeared. A flash of understanding that all the evil about. the place was directed at him. While it attacked Julia, Bobby, and me, who were most fond of him, and that mysterious way, the effect of which was to keep us from him, I knew that its ultimate victim was Eric himself. I have since reasoned about what I felt vaguely that night, that Eric, of all men, was most sensitive to such a form of persecution. Not only that, but also that he was impregnable to every other sort of malevolent attack. That's what Giles meant by

tempered and white-hot resentment, I now know. Meanwhile, with my boy held tightly in my arms and my anxious wife at my elbow, I had Eric's face always before me. The uneasy wind came in through the window again and bent the candle flames. I could not bear it any longer. I handed my son to his mother. The little fellow at first would not let me go, clung tightly to me, and hid his face against my coat.

But when I said, Mother wants you? He turned quickly to her. where she stood close beside me, reached out his arms, locked them round her neck like a trap, and thus the transfer was done. Then I walked up to Eric and clapped him on the shoulder. Automatically, like all healthy, normal beings, I deny the existence of horror. I said the thing most natural for me to say. Eric, my friend, I said, Brace up, you look as if you'd seen a ghost.

The impression in my mind of what I had myself seen and heard was already laid over with my restored habit of thought. Eric replied to me in a low voice. I saw nothing, Pierre. Not I, but... You heard a name. What was it? As automatically as a swimmer throws out his arms when he finds himself in deep water. I said,

Nonsense, it was my kid's whimpering. Why did I do that? Why? You know I believe I heard a name. I could never forget how I heard that name, or what it was. I had already made a scene in the drawing room about it. Yet to Eric I denied that I had heard it, denied there was a name, said, "'Nonsense, it was my kid's whimpering.'

"'Oh, no,' Eric said. "'Oh, no.' "'What would that name have meant to Eric? "'It was just that I feared, yes, instinctively feared to know.' "'His jaw was set and his lips so tightly closed that all the red had gone out of them. "'Yet I could not help feeling that his will was engaged with some purpose other than self-control or self-adjustment, because I never stood by a man so rigidly under-discipline of himself.

Though my hand was on his shoulder, I was as remote from him as one is from a lion at the zoo, whose terrible fixed eyes and stare cannot be diverted or altered by any human trick to catch attention. If Eric had seen nothing and had heard nothing, then he scented something, had a sense of it somehow, and he had become entirely concentrated, entirely insolently. instinct. Giles once said to me as we were talking over this affair later that hate is the most absorbing passion. He went on at a great rate about man's reactions to things that hurt him mortally,

that threatened to spoil what is dear to him, or to take something away from him that is necessary, not only to his body, but to what Giles called his soul as well. The instinct for self-preservation, he said, is the seat of hatred. But you should have heard Giles' defined self. I myself have never felt malignant hatred. I suppose I have never been threatened. That nothing has ever attacked with intent to murder, the core of me, my heart of hearts or what is dear and necessary to it. I could not, if I would, crank up an essay on hatred.

To hate entirely, instinctively, and with perfect concentration. Not even Giles had known what it was to do that. But Eric had. There's Giles's white-hot resentment for you in stronger words. That's what I began to feel in Eric as I stood beside him that night, a hatred within him, distorting his face and screwing him up into a state of concentrated attention. You remember, I've told you, that he always had seemed alert as against an inexorable hostility, making him to my imagination like lions I'd clapped my hands at in the Bronx,

and never made wink an eyelid. Just that. A terrific and an undying hatred. Well, I went on saying nonsense with a more and more absurdly, nice kitty air. Twice he started to speak, but he only opened his lips enough to take in a breath through his teeth. His jaw remained set. When he did speak at last, I know he did not think of my being near to hear him, but I heard. I begin to suspect, he said. She said she would always. It's fiendish, but she would if she could. Then he darted a look at me, and I just babbled something as if I

I had not heard him at all. Suddenly the whole expression of his face changed to one of what the novelists call infinite longing. I did not need to turn round to know that Julia was coming up to him. Her eyes were shining and I thought she was laughing happily. It made me feel good, just as if nothing had happened. She reached one hand up to Eric's shoulder and took me with the other and then said, What are you two men talking about so seriously here by yourselves? Supper is ready. You Pierre must be starved. She looked at me perfectly frankly I was astounded

In spite of myself I began to feel that my mind was queer That I had imagined the whole thing I felt dazed And also Silly End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Of Sinister House

By Leland Hall This Libervox recording is in the public domain Read by Ben Tucker Chapter 7 Thoroughly ashamed to That's the word Books which teach etiquette of the drawing-room Had better put in a special clause

To warn students against Behaving before their hosts As if they were seeing the hideous family specter Pass along the wall of the dwellings In which they are being entertained My behavior could hardly have been courteous In a look I caught in Giles' eye once or twice Made me fairly cringe with shame

I dared not look at Julia Not once during supper did I catch her eye. As for Eric, he was quiet, but no more so than usual, yet I think his smiles were only a subdued reflection of Julia's excessive merriment. Giles was, of course, the life of the table, life with a good deal of stinging snap in it. If only I could have consoled myself with conviction that there was an undercurrent of something mysterious.

But I assure you there was not the slightest sign of such a thing. Annette thought I wasn't very well, that's all. My sudden understandings and my horrid vision, I might as well have had a stomach ache. Just the same, deep down in my heart, or stomach, if you will, I knew I had not been dreaming and also that I had suffered from no ordinary ill turn. My weird experience was, I knew, overlaid with my usual habits of thought and expression.

I had been the first to deny them, too. yet that experience had startled into shivering sensitiveness an unfamiliar nerve within me, one of which I had not learned control. Thanks to my own rational way of living and to the conduct of those about me at table, the thrill of it was subsiding. But it had been laid bare. It had been awakened. It was tuned to respond to the slightest vibrations,

and it was not to leave me long and quiet. On the wall of the dining room opposite me there hung a long, rich curtain. I think I knew there was a door behind it, though how I knew I cannot say. At any rate, I am not by nature inquisitive, and I have never wondered into what passage, closet, or room it gave access. I found during supper that if I looked at that curtain, the new nerve trembled within me. This was inexplicable. There was little enough design on the cloth, no shape I could recognize, faded, heavy, gold embroidery that stood out only faintly from the deep blue velvet, yet I found I could not look at that curtain for long without beginning to shiver inside.

Mind you, I was crushed enough. I controlled myself. I did not tell anybody what I felt. Heaven forbid. I didn't even let anyone catch me looking at it. But once or twice I caught Eric looking very sharply at it, and very intently, as if he were trying to place a noise that came from behind it. That made me feel queer, too.

Now, when we rose from the table, Eric went straight to that curtain. I began to shudder as within a gue. Bobby began to whimper, though he had been well-behaved throughout the meal. Eric drew the curtain a little to one side. I saw the doorknob, and I saw Eric put his hand on it and turn it. He bent his head to the panel of the door as if listening. He pushed the door gently, but it did not open. Suddenly, like a flash, Julia rushed up to him, put a small hand over his on the knob,

and laughing but quite pale, said, Now, my dear, remember what you promised me about that room. She couldn't have moved his hand from the knob, however. Was it because of that she began backing slowly from him? Was it because of that her face took on the haggard look I'd seen on it before? For my own part, I began to feel cold again, and in spite of all my efforts to control myself, I shivered so that my teeth chattered. I could have jumped at Eric and thrown him from that door.

At that moment Giles caught sight of Eric. Where does that door lead to, Greer? He called out, going over to stand beside him. him. I've often been curious about it." Julius stamped her foot and gave a shrill laugh. "'I will not have you men fooling round that horrid place,' she said. And then she told us that the shape of the room was so ugly that she could not bear it, that from the first she had made up her mind never to have it opened, that she had thrown a lot of their useless and broken down furniture into it and locked it up.

"'It hasn't been cleaned for ages,' she said to Giles, "'and you would hate it as much as I do.' Then to Eric, Why do you think of opening that place tonight, dear? Let us all go into the other room and have our coffee. Well, said Eric, I thought I heard something in there. It was a great relief to me to see him take his hand from the knob. Yet, in spite of my own sensations, I couldn't help wondering

why he should grant Julia's request with such reluctance. For he was reluctant. He let go the knob very slowly. And even after he had done so, he still held the curtain from the door and stood looking very hard at the panels. Why? said Julia. It's probably a squirrel. He won't do any harm in there.

Let him run around a bit. Come away now into the front room, all of you. She was actually trying to coax him. Never before had I seen him tarry an instant to grant the least of her requests. He turned to Giles and said to him with a laugh that had a note of grimness in it. Well, I can't get into it anyhow, so we might as well go on. Then it came out, Julia, snatching the story from her husband. lips and laughing over it, that she had not found a bolt on this side of the door safeguard enough

against someone's opening it, perhaps quite innocently, and she had sent to New York for a locksmith to come and set a Yale lock on it. And she promptly mislaid the key, Eric concluded. All this was, in itself, innocent enough, but that new nerve of mine wouldn't cease shivering until they had all stepped away from the door, and then I almost jumped a foot into the air when Giles roared out the name of Bluebeard. There's another fearful story. story for you. Of course we had told it to Bobby many times. He was familiar with all the details of it. I think to my stars that Annette had already made off with him down the corridor towards the living room. Julia darted ahead of us men and joined my wife. We followed them down the narrow

rosy way. Eric was half smiling again, but there wasn't much light in his face. I remember he told Giles as we went along that the only irrational thing he had ever discovered in Julia was her attitude towards that room. Against it, she had taken a sudden and inflexible aversion, for which he could conceive of no reason. It wasn't a hideous room, and it gave on the river, too, but she had even exacted from him a promise never to open the door of it while she was in the house. When we were all in the living room, Giles began to tease Julia a little bit about such things as forbidden rooms.

Julia was very smart and quick with him, and Giles was splendid at raillery. While they were at it I slipped out quietly into the hall, took a big candle and went out to put a patch into the blown-out shoe of my Ford. I made no noise for I did not wish to interrupt the others. The front door closed behind me without a sound, and I was greatly relieved to be alone, even in the dark night. I was glad there was the patchwork to be done. There's nothing like a familiar, unpleasant job to keep the mind from brooding. The little light from the candle I carried went with me through the black archway of hemlocks like a warm. though feeble friend.

I laughed to hear myself talk to it when I set it down on the running board of the car. I did my work carefully, and well, I put my mind wholly on it. I knew just what I was up against, and that was a comfort. Yet I couldn't have been myself, because when, just as I was making ready to pump up the mended tire, I thought I heard the sound of footsteps coming up from under the hemlocks. The cold sweat broke out all over me. I listened and strained my eyes.

For a hundred dollars I could not have picked up the candle and walk, to the place where I fancied the sound had come. I just stood still, thoroughly scared. In a moment or two I heard the same sound again. It's a wonder to me I didn't turn and run. Something white was moving up towards me from the driveway. The sight of it took all power of motion from my legs. It took the strength from under my stomach, and that organ felt as if it had dropped a foot inside me. When the thing came nearer, and I recognized Julia, I could not speak for the huskiness in my throat. There I stood beside the ford in my shirt-sleeves, the pump dangling from one hand, and there she stood beside me, in her white evening dress, and the only light in all the

world to shine on us, too, was from the candle on the running board. Pierre, she said, without waiting for me to speak, do you think I'm crazy? I tried to call her name, but a queer noise came out of my restricted throat. Do you think I'm crazy? she repeated. What a question, said at last. We were both hardly more than whispering. Never mind, do you? Answer me for heaven's sake. Of course not, Julia, dear. Good, she said.

Then she came very close to me and whispered, Neither do I think you are. I know you saw something in my house tonight. She took my sleeve and looked up at me, but her face was not more than a deep shadow. I was afraid her skirt would catch fire. It was very near the candle flame. I bent down and moved the candle in our shadows,

vague and enormous on the mass of foliage behind us, made a gigantic swing. Tell me, she went on, still whispering. How many did you see? One, I answered feeling. I don't know why, shame-faced. I thought so. The woman?

Yes. I began to be calmed by her matter. perfectness. While I could not but feel she was highly wrought, her voice, her manner, and her quiet actions assured me that she faced whatever the situation was without dismay. It was a business to make the heart sick, but, in the certainty that it existed, I found something soothing. After a moment or two of silence, I asked, is there more than one? Two, she answered. An old man besides. He isn't so, so vile. but he makes it all the harder for me.

She comes first. He comes later. She shan't do it alone, ever. Do what, Julia, alone? I asked, the words catching in my throat and almost strangling me. Kill me, Julia replied quietly. I thought she might be going to faint. Her voice was so low, but I had better have worried about myself.

It was I who was nearest quaking. My blood was like ice water in my veins. I longed to run with her back to the warm house, haunted though I believed it to be, to sit near warm fire, to escape from our cold loneliness and our soundless, grotesque, vast black shadows. But when she next spoke, her words stiffened me with the thought that ever again to escape from this horror must be at the price of quitting her. They have nearly done for me, she said. You have come in the nick of time.

For God's sake then, I cried out. out. Leave this dreadful house. It is not the house, Pierre. I don't know what I was thinking of. I had perhaps no connected thoughts and no suspicion. I just spoke. I just said, Eric. Eric, Julia repeated after me, and I felt as if my mind had been split from my body. So instantly did a million terrible and vague thoughts spring up and multiply in it. Julia was shivering against me and I said, You're cold. Then I put my coat round her.

For ten minutes she talked to me, not rapidly and consecutively, but in sentences or even fragments of sentences, some of which were like sparks to the tinder of my imagination, while others left me still in the dark. Julia was proud and high-spirited. It was not easy for her to ask help of me in her more than distressful situation.

I think, however, she wanted me to understand. She needed, let us say, my comradeship and what might lie ahead of her. As to her own conduct up to the present, that I could see had been governed by her entire and unquestioning love of Eric, which was also the source of that strength of hers, more valiant and enduring than I or anyone else can appreciate. For instance, she and her husband had not been settled in the house a week before she acknowledged to herself that there was an influence in the place,

not natural and not good, which was trying to alienate her from her husband's companionship. It was insidious, but it was real. She had had even a vague suspicion that the evil something emanated from Eric, but this was so intolerable that by sheer force of will, she banished it utterly from her mind. She faced the possibility that the house was haunted. This was, she thought at the time, a grotesque and an...

unsubstantiated fear. She fancied she felt things, that was all. She had bad dreams. She was in danger of letting her imagination run away with her. Up to the time that Eric first went away, she could not say that she had really seen anything, just once or twice the outline perhaps of a woman. No body, no substance. But this had appeared in the middle of the night while Eric slept peacefully at her side. She held his evidence against the soundness of her own mind. the feebly restraining touch of cold fingertips on her face when she turned towards her husband she took as a symptom of slightly disordered circulation. Never then had she thought of telling Eric.

She should have been ashamed for one thing, after urging him to take that particular house. Then too there was, it was, something was vile. She should have suffered almost anything rather than let Eric even hear of it. I knew, we all knew, that Eric, was to be protected, and I used to think that he was protecting her. When Eric went away the first time, she meant to stay alone in that house and defeat whatever haunted it. She had already begun to suspect that the secret ghost of evil had decoyed her into it in the first place. Decoid was Annette's word, I remembered.

She was not then afraid. But the ghost had left her alone. During the time of his absence, she had not once felt the pressure of the evil thing. only when Eric came back. The thought of this unnerved her somewhat. She apprehended that what she said might make me think evil of Eric, whereas there was nothing evil in Eric. He was entirely without blame.

He was entirely innocent. One of the most terrible things she had had to bear was his misunderstanding of her behavior. She had had to protect herself against violent onslaught. The thing that had been most vicious when she tried to approach her husband had been violent too when her husband approached her. She had to acknowledge she had become afraid that the nearness of her husband

was becoming more and more dreadful to her. She had fought, fought with all her strength to keep beside him, to preserve their intimacy. She couldn't explain to Eric. It was all unbelievable. She could substantiate nothing. Eric saw nothing.

The greater the effort she made to draw near him, on the other hand, the more that malevolent thing became incandescent. She was terrified by the visible appearance She was losing her strength Eric was in an anguish of mind He said little But she knew that he could explain her conduct only one way

He thought that she was losing her love for him That he was unpleasant to her And she could do nothing but protest in words Her will to act Her insatiable desire to act Aborted through fear She simply was powerless to explain to Eric There was something so loathsome

In the malice of that fiend that she could not speak of it to Eric, whose ultra-sensitive nature would have been sickened and revolted beyond endurance. Once, she had tried. I knew the name. She had heard it, too. Yes.

Once she had mentioned it to Eric. The effect upon him was indescribable. She would not speak of it to him again. No, she would not leave the house. It was plain to her that the house was not infected. The source of the evil was in... She couldn't utter that, but I guessed what she had in mind. Undoubtedly, the evil was, for some unknown and unimaginable reason,

strongest in that house. But what a veil to go elsewhere with Eric? The secret ghost would follow him. Did I not remember Annette had said that Eric had brought nightmares to my son? There would be nightmares everywhere for Julia. If the horror were to be utterly routed, then it must be overcome in its stronghold. What? she cried out in torment.

Has this spectre to do with Eric? And what has Eric to do with this house? She made a movement of despair with her arms, grotesquely and furtively imitated by the huge black shadows on the foliage of the hemlocks. I believe, Julia, I replied trying to speak calmly, that Eric is the final object of its malevolence, that Eric is the marked victim. I believe that it is pursuing the only course

that can end in mortal torture to him. I know it, she said with a sob. Me principally, but everyone who loves him, he has so few friends, only you. She took me by the arm and leaned close to whisper in my ear. Children, they all used to love, Eric. I am insane with fear for them. You must not bring Bobby to the house again.

I shuddered. In a moment's revulsion of feeling I swore to myself I would see Eric dead on the granulithic walk to my house rather than let him cross the threshold again. What terrible knowledge and experience had not these few weeks brought to Julia and to me? Great heavens! There was the hellish mockery of our furtive black shadows,

a devilish, soundless, lightless burlesque of our gestures before the candle. But what a reality in our fear and despair. The feeble restraining drawing of clammy fingers over Julia's cheek had become the clutch of cold ghost hands, at her throat. They had been at my boy, those hands, and the suspicion of the source of that evil, once banished, intolerable to the mind, had become. Eric must speak, I called out.

Julia laid her hand over my mouth that blasphemed the man who, in spite of all, she had undergone, remained to her dearest of all things upon the earth. Don't, she whispered. Oh, don't. Perhaps something in his life. You don't know him as I know him. too terrible for i cannot dig him open like a grave we cannot rifle him say nothing say nothing to eric and due time he is great souled and due time his time there was an end to our talk we started back to the house but i had the tire still to pump i begged her to go on without me for the wind was cold and she was most thinly clad but she insisted upon standing by while i had to stop i begged her to go on without me for the wind was cold and she was most thinly clad but she insisted upon standing by while i

pumped. The exercise brought up my spirits a little. I asked her to try a hand, not wholly jokingly, but knowing the exercise would warm her as it had warmed me, yet she hardly heard me. She did not speak again until we went together up the steps to the front door, and then it was to implore me to respect Eric's dumb grief. We entered the rose-colored hallway. Before we reached the door to the living room, Eric had come out to meet us. He looked anxiously at Julia. My dearest girl, He said reproachfully. Out of doors this cold night without a wrap? Never mind, Eric, dear.

I have been helping Pierre min the tire. She went gaily into the living room, an eye rubbing my hands. Eric's touch affectionately upon my shoulder, followed her. It was late, and when Annette saw me come in, she immediately stood up and prepared to go home. Julia would have had us all stay.

She wanted company. Giles, too, feeling, I dare say, that he had been cheated of Julia's society, was all for settling down into another hour's talk. But Annette was right. She's always right. We had to go on, for Bobby's sake, if for nothing else. All right, dear, I called out cheerfully,

and for a second I could not believe that the cheerful voice and the homely words were my own. I had been out in another world. So we left Julia alone with her husband. What else we left with her? Only I could imagine. And I carried into our living room that night for the first time a worry that, as I took my easy chair grew heavier, not lighter. Annette betook herself at once upstairs with Bobby.

Giles began walking up and down, his chin and his hand. Automatically I filled my pipe, and I didn't know whether I was an idiot, a good fellow, or a conspirator. I'd left behind me more than a vivid picture. I'd left a shocking reality. I'd left a delicate, charming woman, defenseless, against powers bent on doing her mischief. perhaps the one irremediable mischief that very night. You will understand that I was unpleasantly nervous. Well, just as if nothing had happened, Annette came down, lit the fire on the hearth for us,

and brought in some beer from the kitchen. Then she sat down and said quite calmly, I will never take my boy into that dreadful house again. Huh? Giles grunted scornfully. Are you crazy, too? No, I said emphatically. She isn't.

She's perfectly right. But Giles went on as if I had said nothing. That boy of yours should be spanked for behaving as he did. A good whipping now and then would take such nonsense out of him. So that was all it meant to Giles, a fit of unruly temper and a spoiled child. I started to give him a call down. Giles, you think you're darn smart. That word tripped me up.

Well, go on. What have you got to say? Nothing. Out with it. Annette looked at me anxiously. Once or twice already she had laid her hand on my forehead to find if I had a fever. She could see that I wasn't myself. She tried to change the drift of our talk. I don't think, she said, that Robert is the only one who was rude there tonight.

It was hardly courteous of Julia to run off and leave me alone as she did, and after her urging me to stay, too. Don't, Annette, I cried. For heaven's sake, don't. I got up and paced the room a couple of times. and I guess Annette didn't know what to make of me. Finally, sitting down again, I said to Giles as calmly and impressively as I could. That house is haunted.

He merely laughed loudly and called me a poor simpleton. And, I added, the ghosts that haunted are trying to murder Julia Greer. That at last impressed him, but not as I had thought it would do. His face became hard and fixing me with his eyes. he said in a cynical tone the one word, Ghosts? He put a world of meaning into his tone. It was not ghosts in that house that were hurting, Julia.

The fear that I might have betrayed Eric made me lightheaded. I loved that man, and pitied him. Ghosts, I affirmed. Who are they? Tonight, I said, I heard the name snart. At that, Annette leaned forward and whispered, "'Not really.' "'So,' cried Giles in a flash,

"'you've heard that unsavory name before.' "'A man named Morgan Snart built the house,' "'Annet explained with a troubled look at me. "'Good,' said Giles. "'I've tried to find out from Greer who built that house. "'He is not the man to ask. "'Morgan Snart. I mustn't forget that.' "'He took a little book from his pocket

"'and wrote the name down in it, "'talking to me sarcastically all the time. "'And of course he was insane, in this Morgan snart, a murderer, a suicide, or something. It's only such unfortunates that come back to earth, isn't it, Pierre? Nothing else would do. He scribbled away. I don't know anything about him, I grumbled, except that he's dead.

Yes, of course, dead, too. That's the perfect idea of a ghost, isn't it, Pierre? And then closing the little book with a slap, he said cuttingly, I tell you, my idea of a ghost is something quite different. Dead men rise up never. "'Read even your poets. "'Ghosts breed in the living. "'That's where we'll catch them.'

"'He stood up and started for the little room under the stair, "'looking at his watch. "'What are you going to do, Giles?' I asked. "'It's only eleven. "'I'm going to telephone to a friend of mine in New York. "'A lawyer. "'I don't suppose your ghosts ever walk much before midnight, do they? "'Maybe we'll lay this one before the witching hour strikes.'

"'I sprang up. "'For the love of Mike Giles!' I cried. "'Stop this damn mockery! "'You think I'm nuts, all right? "'But I tell you there's a woman in that rotten old house "'that I have entire confidence in Julia,' he said coolly. "'She is a rational and an invincible woman.' "'You're sure of that, are you?' I asked equally calm.

"'Perfectly.' "'Well, then, Julia may have something to say that will change your opinions.' "'I shall have something to say,' he answers. scornfully, that will change yours. End of chapter 7. Chapter 8. Of Sinister House by Leland Hall. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker.

Chapter 8. Change my opinions? As if I wouldn't have been glad enough to change them. Heaven knows I wasn't set up about having seen a ghost. Why, if only his telephoning to New York could have laid it and have averted the suffering and tormented the suffering and torment of the next two nights. I'd have recanted, I'd have denied myself, I'd have said my name is Jones while all the time at Smith.

But of course, I did not know what was in store for all of us, and it wouldn't have done any good even if I'd said I was Jesse James. Believe me, I was miserable, that's all. Just plain miserable. And sort of loco with it. However, I won't hold up the rest of the story telling you what a rotten night I had. The next two were to make it look like, I was going to say 30 cents, but I guess I mean like a $10 gold piece.

I do remember, though, that Annette was awfully anxious about me. And since the more I tried to explain, the more anxious she grew, I just subsided. But we kept the lights going until after two. I liked the lights, because while they were going, I didn't have such terrible pictures of what Julia might be going through. It must have had its comical side, Annette stealing an anxious look. look at me every two or three minutes, I, looking mournfully at her, and neither of us saying much. After we put out the lights, we both lay in our beds without moving. Until about four, I heard Annette get up and go to the window.

Haven't you been asleep, dear? I whispered. What's the matter? I can't sleep for worrying. You've frightened the life out of me, Pierre. I don't know whether your mind's all right or not. You sound crazy. You looked wild tonight. You ought to see a doctor. And Julia, maybe she's crazy, too. I don't think. think you ought to go there anymore. But she needs me, and you too. She and Eric are desperately afflicted. We mustn't go back on them. We mustn't withhold anything of comfort or strength to her. Don't be afraid. Let me remind you that it wasn't pleasant. I cannot remember much that happened the next day. I remember that it was fair, that the sun shone with a golden radiance in which no ghost could

survive. Giles was at breakfast with us, though I found out later that he had not gone to bed at all. I tried to get him to come with my wife, the children, and me, but he would not be prevailed upon, and I dare say we had a jollier time without him. We had a picnic somewhere, and away from the river. We did not take the highway that ran past Eric's house. It was near a haymo, I think, against the side of which I slept in the warm sun for a couple of hours. If Annette read to Bobby at all, it was from little men or it may have been little women. Though I passed a not too melancholy day, as we started home before sundown,

I began to feel depressed. We picked up Dr. Gresham by the roadside on the way back. He was the only physician in Forsby, and his car had broken down out in the country. I remember we went a mile out of our way to take him to his house, and one or the other of us said half seriously that he hoped there'd be no sickness in the outlying parts of the community that night. Arrived home, Felicia told us that Mrs. Greer had telephoned in the afternoon to ask us over for dinner that evening. It was a trial. I did not want to go, and my wife was all for telephoning a flat refusal, but

remembering the straits Julia was in, I felt it would be nothing short of treachery to go back on her. So Annette and I bathed, kissed the children good night, and ran over in the Ford. The night was unseasonably cold, and clear as crystal, but with no moon and only a few stars a real darkness lay over the land. We had nothing to say to each other as we spun

along the flat highway. Eric greeted us, and we found Giles seated before the grate in the living room, in which there was a bright yellow fire of kennel hole, the only light in the room. We asked him how he had spent the day, but he preferred not to tell us until later. And while we were waiting for Julia to come down, Eric led me out on the veranda over the cliff, just to see how black and mysterious the river looked down in its bed. There was no trace of twilight in the western sky, but there was a single bright star there, and looking far below,

I could see its reflection in the invisible water. My foot kicked against a stone on the veranda floor. absent-mindedly I picked it up and leaned over the veranda rail, let it drop from loosened fingers. The ping of its hitting the boulders below and a faint splash were just audible in the otherwise holy silent night. Why was it that in the midst of such tranquility I had a sudden sense of evils being done? I straightened and turned round sharply, man's natural physical reaction to the spur of a sudden unpleasant thought. Eric was just on the point of speaking. He had actually said a word or two, which I missed. I think he meant to unburden himself of... Let it go. I have no proof. My sudden movement put an end to it, anyhow.

What's the matter, Pierre? He asked me quietly. Nothing, I responded. The side of the house was almost blotted out in the darkness, but looking restlessly toward the north, I saw a faint colorless glow. It seemed to come from a window in a bow that was built out from the side. The veranda did not run that far. Against the uncertain light I saw something moving, swinging slowly. It was a shudder, and as there was hardly a breath of air stirring, the movement struck me as queer and mysterious. I called Eric's attention to it. He started towards it, and I followed his vague form. I wonder, he said, what has loosened to that shutter? That is a window in the room to which Julia has taken her strange aversion. We went to the end of the veranda, and he leaned. He leaned. He

leaned out trying to touch the shutter, but could not reach it. There's someone in the room, I suggested. That cannot be, he replied. The door is always locked, you know, you heard. No one is allowed to go into that room. But the light, I said, there's no light. Look for yourself. True enough, there was no longer any light.

Eric lit a match or two, which he held out as far towards the window as he could reach. And in the feeble glove, which he made out to his, his own satisfaction that the bolt on the shutter had not broken or rusted away. Julia must have sent someone in there today, he concluded. At that moment, someone stepped out on the veranda from the living room. It was Julia herself. Turning, we saw her, one side all white and bright, the other black and invisible. She hesitated a moment and then came quickly towards us.

Eric, she cried, what are you doing? She had a fit of coughing. Eric took her by the shoulders and marched her back, wince she had hum. I'm doing nothing, he replied, to alarm you. You are not to come out of doors without a wrap, my dear. You will have pneumonia. Pierre discovered that the shutter to the forbidden room is open, and I was looking at it and wondering who could have opened it. By that time we were going into the house again. Julia had lighted all the candles in the living room. It was warm and pleasant, and should have been cheerful, but turning around from latching the window through which we had come in,

I caught a look of mingled incredulity and fear on Julia's face. "'No one has been in that room,' she was whispering to her husband. "'The bolt must have rusted away.' "'The bolt's all right,' he said. "'But you'll have to let me in to the place, dear. "'Eryk, I beg of you not to-night, not to-night. "'I don't feel well, you know. "'Humor me dearest.

"'Promise not to-night.' "'Silly girl. "'Not to-night, then, or any night till you wish it.' "'He stooped as if to kiss her, "'but she turned abruptly from him and went to chat with my wife. and I saw his arms fall to his side in a gesture of hopelessness. Later, while we were at dinner, I could not keep my eyes from the blue velvet curtain on the wall opposite me. It hung motionless and obscure in the candlelight,

apparently without significance to, at least apart from the consciousness of the others in the room. Only when the old servant passed it on her rounds of service at the table did I see it stir, but I knew there was a doubly locked door behind it, and that in the room behind the door there was something Julia had caused a fear. I could not but ask myself again and again who or what had opened the shutter. I could not but wonder if the swaying of that thing I had so dimly perceived in the outdoor darkness

were not an evil omen. In spite of my uneasiness, the dinner progressed smoothly. I dare say I ate my share of the good hot food too, no matter what my apprehensions. Well, we left the dining room, five of us, and made our ceremonious way down the narrow rose-colored hall corridor and turned into the living room. Julia was keen on ventilation, and she had left one of the windows open during dinner,

so that the room was fresh and cool. I can see her now as she went to close it, and as she came back to take her seat on a cricket by the fire of Cannell Cull. It was a pretty scene, what with the candlelight, the dancing yellow flames and the little grate, and the dancing sideshow and miniature shining from the polished rosewood of the piano across the room. The comfortable chairs and sofways. with their bright cushions, the subdued colors of the hangings, through many of which there

ran dull threads of gold that glimmered with reflected light. It was a long narrow room of knick-knacks and luxury, of beauty and shadow, of softness and glow, and above all, of comfort awaiting. I say we left the dining-room, five of us, and came to this living room, Giles holding aside the portier for us to pass in, but he had no sooner let it drop behind himself, the last to enter, then I knew there were six persons in that room. I felt it, as you count on your fingers, five, as you feel in every nerve in your body, six. Perhaps I shouldn't imply six persons, five persons, and the specter, invisible until later in the evening, but present all the time. I did not need to look over my shoulder for it. I knew when it changed its place.

I knew that for some time it paid no attention to us, but wandered aimlessly along the shadowy walls and across the space behind us. Then it began to disturb Julia and me, though still invisible. First I felt a fine but penetrating draught of cold air upon the back of my neck. Searching the inlet, I left my seat and went to the window that gave on the veranda over the river. It was tightly fastened, and the curtains before it did not sway a hair's breath. No air blew in there from the outside. Besides, there was no wind, anyhow.

As I came back to my place on the sofa, Julia glanced up at me, and her look told me that it would be useless to try to shut off that discomforting draft. It came through no window. It had no direction. Yet when I settled down on the sofa, my neck below the back of it, from time to time the hair on my head was slightly moved, not by such a disturbance of air as would be created by the passage of a person behind it. me, but as if a mischievous sprite were blowing on it. Nothing could have been slighter or more swiftly passing, yet nothing, in that warm, fire-lit room and in the midst of a company apparently absorbed in intercourse,

could have been more unnaturally and more insistently tormenting or more chilling. Over our coffee we talked of nothing at all. If I was ill at ease, then it was only from vague forebodings or troubled imaginings of what Julia might be dreading or even already suffering. I knew the specter was in our midst. I had not begun to suffer from it. For a minute or two after the old servant had taken our cups away, too, the thing refrained from actual contact with me.

Julia knocked the black lumps of coal into smaller pieces from which bright yellow flames burst out, illuminating our faces oddly. Annette took up her knitting. Giles lit a cigar. It was all peaceful enough. I remember that Eric said, sat behind us all, farthest from the fire, into which he gazed meditatively most of the evening,

Annette tells me. Only she and Giles could watch his face. But Annette asked Giles quietly to tell us now how he had passed the day, and it was then I got up and went to the window to see if it was open. It was then I first felt that draft. I think it must have been the touch of icy spectral fingers. I was able to listen to Giles' tale until this touch became something worse. I made the greatest effort of will I was capable of to follow him all along. I suspected that he was putting Eric through an inquisition, but later... Later, I both heard and did not hear. In response to Annette, Giles said he had a very interesting day,

but before recounting it, he began to praise Julia for the charm of her house. What she had been able to make out of such a freakish old summer cottage built by a man who, he had learned, had been noted for a cold sense of piety rather than a warm sense of beauty, and had certainly bequeathed her little to work on. I recall his accent on the word. It was a good thing for the commuters who lived in Foresby that Julia had come among them. Her influence would not be wholly lost. By the way, and he spoke to Eric, not Julia.

How did you ever happen to come to this part of the world, Greer? You can imagine that Annette and I pricked up our ears at that. As for Eric, Annette told me afterwards that he never moved a muscle, except to raise his eyebrows, as if surprised that Giles should suddenly drag him thus into a conversation in which he had had but a drowsy interest. He answered lazily, clearing his throat a little. I don't remember Pharaoh just how it was, ask Julia. Do you, dear? Truly, I believe that the past was dead for him. By force of his will to live he had made it.

as if it had never been. He denied it to himself. And if he denied it to himself, it was no lie for him to deny it to others. But Giles kept prodding and prodding into it, and was to do even more. I know that it's sudden coming to life again drove Eric for the time being mad.

Julia could have had no suspicion of what Giles was doing. She remembered how Eric and she had been led into this part of the world, when, towards the end of their honeymoon, they were wondering where to settle. down. Dear me, there was no talk this night as there used once to be a building a nest and being so full of happy hopes that even the houses sang to them, the song in this house had been abominable. But someone had told them about Stanton, so we just came down to have a look around

and stumbled on this house. Fancy that, said Giles, perhaps not heeding the weary tone of Julia's voice. I never heard of Stanton until I came to Forsby, though I had seen the Forsby scheme more or less advertised. Someone in New York told you, I suppose, it is hard to think that it would occur to a New Yorker to recommend such a sleepy, out-of-the-way village. I don't remember who it was, Julia returned without much interest. As a matter of fact, someone told Eric and he told me. She had a fit of painful coughing. Eric started from his chair and left the room to fetch her a warmer shawl. By the time he had come back, I had changed the conversation. He laid the shawl he brought with him tenderly about his wife's shoulders, and then took his seat again quietly. Giles began then to talk to us about religious mania.

Judging by Eric's face, Annette told me, his thoughts might have been far away from the talk. He didn't move in his chair and continued to look meditatively into the fire. It seemed to me a silly thing for Giles to begin holding forth upon, but he was leading up to his interesting experience of the afternoon. I heard only a little of it. The intruder was beginning to bother me. In Stanton, that very afternoon, Giles had come across an extraordinary human creature, whom, for lack of any other word, he must call a girl. Though her face was not without a regularity of form and feature, she had appeared to him not more than half human. She was abnormally blonde, that struck one first, that in the peculiar, somewhat hypnotic stare of her eyes. He had heard, and

seen her speaking in the village store, and when she had opened her thin lips he saw that her teeth were white and small, but widely separated from each other. He got a most disagreeable impression of cruelty and wickedness under anemic but constant sanctimony. My recollections beyond this point are uncertain and intolerable to me. All the time I was listening to Giles, it seemed to me that the room grew darker and darker, and that the sixth presence materialized, yet took on no substance, became visible, remained transparent, and if I had any sensation but that of horror, it was a longing in some way to stand by Julia. Annette tells me that the room certainly was shadowy. Some of the candles had burned out, but it was very warm, not cold.

Giles talked in his usual voice, and vividly, not as I thought in whispers and suggestively. She couldn't see his face very well in the firelight, but she remembers how the blue smoke from his cigar showed up, and she thinks maybe that was the ghost, in my mind. Julia turned round towards him once or twice. Yes, but she couldn't then see the expression of her face, for it was in shadow. She shouldn't have said it was horror-struck anyhow. It couldn't have been, for there was nothing horrible in what Giles said. No, Julia certainly did not fall in trying to get to Eric.

Once, she half lost her balance on the cricket. Maybe Annette thinks she was trying to change her position and her dress caught her. And then she put a hand down on the floor to keep from falling off. No, the room was certainly warm and very comfortable. What Giles said was very interesting, yes, but not very pleasant, not very nice. I looked half asleep in a position that you might think, Annette granted, a little stiff if your attention were called to it, but not enough to notice otherwise. I tell you, my recollections of the rest of that evening.

at Erics are intolerable to me. I will not put myself even in imagination back in that room, warm and charming as it was. One night, last winter, Annette and I went to visit some ancient relatives of mine, who lived in an old house near Boston. It was a cold night, and we sat with the other guests before the great, hung in under an old-fashioned white marble half-moon chimney-piece. The fire was of kennel-coal, and there was no other light in the room.

I stood it as long as I could, and then, knowing well, I should be branded as a harsh and crude New Yorker by the sentimental, or was it thrifty, gathering, I demanded gaslight of my ancients. I would not sit, no matter what the cost to my reputation, in a circle of faces distorted and made luridly strange by the dancing light of candle coal. Even in that room, where sanctimony masked nothing more hateful than complacency, I had already begun to feel that, deadly, icy malice was taking the shape of a woman, loping from corner to corner, and stealthily along the shadowy walls. Ten minutes more of that uncertain light, and I should have felt hands about my person, or should have seen them at the throat of my wife. No, not even in my imagination will I put myself back in the living room of Eric's sinister house for those few hours, warm and cozy as they say it was that night, when without the air was sharp and still and frosty.

I drove a net and Giles home in the Ford. They were tired. I was exhausted. None of us had slept the night before, yet Giles would have some beer and a cigarette. He struck me as boisterous and obtrusive. Well, he said to me, what did you think of my story? I didn't hear what you said. I replied, yawning.

I know nevertheless I am on the track. "'Of what?' "'Of what is back of Eric Greer?' "'Look here,' I said, but without much fire. "'If there's wrong about Eric, he's been the victim, "'and God knows still is the victim, "'not the wrongdoer. "'I don't want to hear any more about it.

"'It's too horrible. "'What I know. "'I'm going to bed. "'To bed. "'I walked the floor for a couple of hours. "'Annet brought me some whiskey. "'Much whiskey. "'She was as calm and as patient as a one.

woman well can be. She undressed and got into bed and went on with her knitting. Her eyes grew more and were anxious till at last I caught a look in them which made me ashamed of my frenzy. Yet, all by my inner self, so to speak, I was shocked and desperate. I never have been able to see animals or persons suffer, and the thought of the hideous torture Julia might be undergoing, even as I paced up and down the room, all but unmanned me. I had seen them. Yes, both. the woman and the little old man, trying to strangle her, and Annette thought she had tried merely to change her position on the cricket. You must imagine, the horrible picture came back before me again and again.

I knew how those hands could clutch and pinch. They had been on me, but I give you my word I was nothing. Nothing. It was Julia, high-spirited, frail little thing, sick too, passionately in love with her husband, her heart crying out for him in her mortal need, yet wrenched, twisted, and beaten back by unutterably malevolent fiends that loped about him. She was so terribly alone. Eric, who would have given his lifeblood drop by drop for her,

was sitting in the dark, wounded himself by her dumb actions, which he could only misunderstand, helpless to protect, even had he known, himself the instrument for her torture whenever he moved. But for my wife's look, I would have dashed my head against the wall. Instead, I threw myself on the floor beside her and hid my face on her bed. She kept on knitting. I heard the low sound of her needles, but I began after a few moments to feel the beneficence of her look. We waited a long time in silence.

Then I said to her, Are our children all right? Yes, dear, she replied softly. They are sleeping peacefully, as you and I should be. We must never take them over there again. We shall not need to. What do you mean? This cannot go on much longer, Pierre.

Julia is going away. She told me in confidence tonight. They're going to give up the old house at once. And Eric? He will go with her, I presume. No, no, no, that cannot be. Again there was a long silence between us. The clock downstairs struck too.

Very faint through walls and closed door as I heard the regular, comical sound of Giles' snoring. An errant breeze came in through the window of our chamber. Even at this mysterious hour there was movement over the darkened face of the earth. Annette, I asked, what was Giles talking about? About horrid, abnormal in secret people? You know who? The father and the daughter. Insane, I guess, though very pious.

The girl Giles saw in Stanton, You heard that, didn't you? Is the cousin and spit image of the other girl. Morgan Snart and his daughter. They were there tonight. What do you mean? Oh, Annette, you must believe what I say. When Giles began to speak, the woman stood behind Eric's chair.

I didn't look, but I felt and I know she was there. And that she kept watching Julia and me. The little old man came in later and took his place behind Giles, He rubbed his hands all the time and looked down at Julia often, ready to grab her if she tried to get to Eric. Think how terrible for a sensitive man like Eric if he ever had to be with things like them when they were alive. Annette said nothing. Indeed, what could she say? Except for the faint regular sound of Giles' snoring, the house was silent as death. But after a while, Annette spoke again.

Eric didn't seem very much interested, she said. He was rather cynical. He was nervous about Julia. She had a bad cold, and Giles bored him, I guess. He got restless after a while and began to clasp and unclasp his hands. No wonder, Giles told some gruesome things, how they starved themselves and their animals, and how, though they were pillars of the church in that neighborhood,

there was some horrid, secret stories about the girls being cruel. Someone had seen her, Annette. I whispered. That's when they moved, when Giles told about her beating the dog to death. That's when the old man made a sign to the woman, and they got ready to leap at Julia. Did they? asked Annette, as if sickened at all this. Eric hated it. Did you see them attack Julia? Before heaven, I did, Annette.

They sprang when Giles said their name was snart. "'No, dear,' said my wife soothingly. "'That's when Eric jumped up out of his chair "'to put an end to Giles's talk. "'Oh, my Peter, dear, let us not talk any more about it. "'Eric wouldn't like it. He hated it. "'Come, you will only make yourself sick. "'They're going away in a day or two.

"'You've been thinking so much about that old house "'that you've got a kink in your brain. "'Julius's all right. "'She's got a heavy cold, that's all. "'And what could she expect from living in such a damp old place?' "'Annet,' I said looking up. at her. I have seen what I have seen. Do not talk about it. Do not mention any more horrors. I can't bear it. And I have heard what I have heard. Annette, Julia, is in the most deadly and unnatural peril.

She is sick and weak besides. There may be a fiendish death in that house. But they are going away, I tell you, day after tomorrow. If Eric goes too with her, "'Good God, Pierre, you don't mean that he will murder her.' She leaned forward over me and I reached up for her hands. There was a moment's hush. And then, heaven save us, we heard the terrified screams of our son. Stardled, Annette clutched me and almost stifled me. Then as I broke away and got to my feet, her mother's instinct rose up within her

and she sprang out of bed and ran barefooted into the children's bedroom. I was hardly behind her. Bobby's screams had waken the baby and she too began to cry. All in the dark my wife tore the little boy from his bed and hugged him to her breast. She could not wake him. He yelled the louder and beat at her with his fists. I switched on the lights. Annette was walking up and down like a wild, fierce woman, my buxom merry wife. Her hair flying about her, her bare feet falling soundless like the pads of a lioness's feet. Go away, bad dream, boo, boo, go away, bad wicked dream, boo!

There, there, my darling boy, mother's here. Mother will kill the bad dream, mother will. something, as it were, flashed in my brain. I knew, saying that the boy might be in pain, and that I would get hot water. I went out of the room. But I had no sooner closed the door behind me, as if to keep the sound of the screaming from Giles, that I darted into the northeast room,

ripped off the shade from the window, and looked out. A waning moon shed light upon the highway. And on the highway I saw a man, hatless, running towards our house. He was almost here. If ever he got to my house, I knew my son might not survive the force of the evil that hounded him. I raced downstairs. The bolt on the front door stuck.

My fingers were all thumbs. I thought I heard his steps on the Granolithic walk, and I think I cried out in an anguish of fear. Keep away! Keep away! I swung the door open so that it crashed back against the wall. I rushed out and down the walk to the road. Eric ran into my arms. He struggled to get by me into the house, but I held him. Be quiet, I whispered.

You can't go in there. there. For God's sake, what's the matter? He was horribly out of breath. His face had the look of a man mortally stricken. In the wan moonlight, I saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. It's Julia. She's sick. Our telephone. Out of order. Let me use yours. I was terribly alert. I pushed Eric away from our house and led him in a wide circle round to the garage and back, telling him the doctor's car was broken down, that he must go himself in my Ford. We pushed the Ford to the store. We pushed the Ford to the street along the smooth cement driveway. I didn't want Annette to know. The noise of the engine in the backyard. I cranked it. I shoved Eric into the front seat. I pushed the car off. And when I saw him

well down the road, I went back into the house. Upstairs in the children's room, there was my son, laughing in his mother's arms. I had saved him. But it was almost the last straw for me that night. Annette said almost nothing to me until we were returned to our own room. And then, seeing that my face was terribly pale, she was frightened. At her words of solicitude, I sat down on my bed and broke down. Whereupon, treating me as if I, too, had had a bad dream, she patted my bent shoulders, caressed me, knelt down and took off my shoes and stockings, and I, a grown man, let her do it. She all but undressed me, and then she made me get into the bathtub, which she had filled with hot water,

just hot enough, because Annette always does things just right. When she tucked me into bed and gave me some hot whiskey and lemon, I didn't know whether I was laughing or crying. Nothing up to that stage in the affair had made me feel so bad as barring Eric from my house had made me feel. I would not have told my wife of it for anything. I did not wish her to turn against the unfortunate fellow. But she found out. She looked out the window and saw the garage door open. Then I had to tell her, for she would have gone down to close it,

and would then have found the car gone. She hid her feelings. I did not know whether she associated Eric's Cummings with Bobby's bad dream. She would not let me talk at all, I remember, though the last thing I said to her before I went to sleep. I said to her, squeezing her hand, Well, my dear, you don't see what Julia sees in that house after all. End of Chapter 8.

Chapter 9 of Sinister House by Leland Hall. This Libervox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 9 It was with mixed feelings of fear and love that I started out with Giles early the next afternoon to walk over to Erick's. I had slept until nearly noon and felt, if not refreshed, at least calm. I realized instinctively that I had need to be calm. I felt that we were walking on to the conclusion of the drama. Annette had telephoned to Dr. Gresham, Eric's line being still out of

order. I guess the poor fellow hadn't thought to do anything about it, and had learned that Julia was suffering only from a heavy cold. The doctor wouldn't say much, but he hinted that Julia's nerves were highly wrought up, that she ought to have a change. The sky was overcast, it was cold and the wind was rising. Giles and I swung along the road against it, silent for a good quarter of an hour, during which, thanks to the healthy exercise and the buffeting wind, I straightened out my mind and arrived at a rational decision as to my stand and conduct in this affair. Believe me, there was one stark fact I could not but face. I had turned Eric away from my house as I would have turned a carrier of pestilence. I felt for Eric as keenly as I had ever felt,

but with a difference. Much as I knew he was suffering, I tried to harden my mind to believe that it was his own fault. Yet, it really wasn't. I mean, he was not entirely blameworthy. He was not entirely blameworthy. He was acting almost as an animal would act because something in his life had beaten him down to just that. He was determined to shun what had wickedly maltreated him. But by Gemini, a man hasn't a right to his own life, not even to his own past. If he wishes to live wholly alone, that's different, but there's hardly a man who can do that. Life does not let him. You know that my sympathies are easily aroused.

They had been greatly excited by the suffering, visible acutely only to me, of my two friends. recent events, however, had shown me that sympathy, all in the guise of understanding, may be absurdly and dangerously blind. I was beginning to understand that afternoon what more thoughtful natures than mine understand in early manhood, what certain temperaments are aware of instinctively from the first. The conventions of society and the activities of business all point to the fact that a man is only a piece in a machine, really not self-important, but important only in his relations. to others. Oh, I thought many things that are probably old and stale to the world, no matter how new to what Annette calls my simple nature. It isn't worthwhile recounting them, but I wasn't wholly

converted. I could not turn Eric away from my house when he was in trouble. I had to turn him away, or my own flesh and blood my son would suffer cruelly, just the same I resented Giles prodding into Eric's past life. As if Giles and I had been thinking along the same line, he He turned to me after we had gone a mile or so and said, I'm sorry, Pierre. You didn't hear the story of the snarts as I told it last night. Greer has been mixed up with them in the past. It's a remarkable—

Don't, for heaven's sake, tell it to me. I cried. It's an evil-sounding name, and I'm sure it was an evil family. It was, said Giles laconically. Then it's rotten luck that Julia and Errik, who are the salt of the earth, should have come to a house they had anything to do with. with.

Luck? Oh, no, not luck. There's a queer streak in human natures. Men come back to places for secret reasons, for feelings they cannot resist. More than men come back, I said. Look here, Pierre. Giles began sharply. You know that simple-minded as you are.

You indulge yourself too much in the luxury of the dramatic, of the melodramatic, indeed. You'll pass for a gentle soul not too fiery, content with what the French call, the menue's Pleasure. You're honest and kind and trustworthy, but upon my soul sometimes I think you're a good deal of a damned fool. I cannot keep from smiling, partly because it was so like Giles, so true to type, as he would say, to pitch into me with interpretations of myself, partly because to be called a damned fool on that afternoon was strangely comforting. But I didn't say anything. I think that perhaps it's because I held my mouth shut so much during these horrid days that I ever wrote this story at all.

I used to feel ashamed then. Now I don't. Well, Giles went on. In regard to this affair between Mr. and Mrs. Greer, they're nervous, sensitive, and highly strung, not the sort of people you have seen much of or can be expected to understand. Therefore, they take on in your mind an heroic shape

and trail you along into a world of myths and goblins. The house they live in, which I, Grant, is not up to date, gives you the creeps. The figures of speech they use assume in your imagination a grotesque reality. On such things your simple mind loves to dwell, and you think them over and over, until your too easily stimulated imagination jumps out of your control, and you're no longer responsible for what you claim to see and hear. You must control your mind and use it.

You must take facts for what they are. He would have gone on and on, but I said, Giles, you are a wiser man than I, and for these few remarks on myself, many things. I suppose experience teaches us to know ourselves, and I am learning in this, which will always remain one of the most horrible in my life. I know that Annette thinks my mind is diseased. You think that it is unexercised, uncontrolled? Strangely enough, I think that my wits are about me. Now, let me talk a little more.

There are what you call facts, well and good. You can say that in French for me if you want to, I will grant that my keen sympathy for Julia and for Eric too may have made me a little blind. But they like me. There's one fact, and neither an unexercised mind nor a too keen sympathy can do away with the fact that Julia and I, too, have... You know, I could not say it. The great fact, Child's broke in, is that Eric Greer has kept to himself something

that by praying on him has begun to pray on his wife. And on his friends. True. Crime or misadventure. and I am inclined to think there are both, the one perhaps paliated by the other, something in his past life which demands an accounting or a confession. There's my explanation. What's yours? Remember, I can substantiate what I claim.

I preferred to keep silent, and we walked on without a word, tramp, tramp against the wind, along the flat highway, until the hemlocks by Eric's house hove in view. Then Giles turned suddenly to me and said, When there's a rotten thing in a man, the surgeon must cut it out. Watch Eric, whatever happens this afternoon. I am glad Julia will not be present.

That took the wind out of me. I could not imagine what Giles had arranged for. My dear little Fliver was standing in the driveway by the door, and just as we came up, Eric stepped from the house, evidently about to drive it back to me. When he saw us, however, he stood waiting, a finger on his lips. How, I whispered, is Julia? She's asleep just now.

he whispered back. The doctor judges that her cold is not serious, but I think we will go away for a change in a day or two. He looked pale and haggard, and his hand as I took it felt cold. Giles had little to say. I cannot fancy that Eric and Giles could ever have had much to say to each other, the one visionary and reserved,

the other rather cynical and very outspoken. There was a pause of a minute or so, embarrassing to all of us. but though Eric was preoccupied, I think he did not want us to jump into the Ford and go back at once. After a while, he collected himself enough to invite us to be seated on the little veranda to the left of the front door. There happened to be three old chairs there. Giles looked at his watch. It's about four, he said to me.

I say, Greer, could you give us a drop of tea? I've told you that such bluntness was what I envied in, Giles. Pharaoh, Eric responded. I'm sorry, I think the help. household is a little disorganized. And since Julia's asleep now, perhaps we'd better stay out of doors. You'll have to indulge me anyhow. I've got a hundred things to do about shutting up the house. My mind's disturbed, too, but we can sit here a little while if you like, though we'd better talk quietly. Julia's right up there. And he pointed to the corner room.

Have a cigar then, Eric, I offered forgetting that he did not smoke. He declined it and tipped his chair back against the wall. Giles and I were both facing him. From the way he pulled his cap down over his eyes and rested his head against the wall, I thought he must be tired, and his face, what I could see of it, was hollow and lined. So you're going to leave us, I began. Where are you going? Julia will go to stay with her cousin in a little town upstate. You are not going with her?

No, Eric replied in a very low voice. It sounded as if he had made up his mind to say, He had to go elsewhere for reasons of business, but he broke off. I wondered if Julia and he had come to an understanding. I saw Giles look at his watch again, and it struck me as queer because not five minutes could have passed since he had looked at it before. Alongside the veranda, the dead leaves on the bushes were rattling in the cold wind,

which tore round the corner of the house. I fancied I heard a sort of banging in the distance, as of a loosened shutter. Everything was restless, gray and chill, and we three men alone on the bleak veranda must have looked forlorn. Eric, pulling his cap yet lower over his face, so that all I could see of it was his mouth and chin, said to me, I suppose, Pierre, you don't know of anyone who would hire this house. Burnished? Why, perhaps, that depends.

The thought of Eric's leaving the neighborhood, together with the cold dreariness of the day, the knowledge that the sprightly Julia, who used to enlist, livenous, so was lying sick in one of the gloomy rooms above us, and the premonition that something disagreeable was going to happen, made an ordinary business conversation strange indeed. No, I thought the chances very unfavorable. Tenets for that sort of house would be rare in these days, anyhow, and at this time of the year, et cetera, et cetera. If I felt like selling Pierre, Eric went on in a dreary voice, how much would the place bring? How much land do you own?

what you see here within the trees and perhaps out to the road well it wouldn't bring very much I'm afraid Eric perhaps 2,500 possibly 3,000 so little I saw a bitter smile twist his lips so little he repeated and the cold wind swept his words away it was hardly worth it I turned round to size up the land to do anything rather than submit to the spirit of desolation that was moaning about us. There it was, the short empty driveway, curving from under the hemlocks as from a tunnel, the half-moon of land within it, the little bit of lawn on either side where the grass was already dead and brownish.

"'Arayed not more, Eric,' I sighed, and turned back to face him. "'I'm afraid not more.' Though I could not see his eyes, I knew that he had suddenly fixed them upon something behind me, something that must have come into the driveway in the last second. So sure was I of this that out of curiosity I should have turned round again, but for the amazing transformation which came over him, and which held me fixed in my chair and powerless to move. His jaw dropped so that his mouth hung open.

He put up a trembling hand to cover his eyes, pushing back the cap from his brow as he did so. Then, very slowly, as if, at the cost of great effort over himself, he brought that hand back to the arm of his chair. I saw his eyes, dilated, horrified, starting out of their sockets. Still, with a slowness that to me was excruciating, he lowered one foot from the rung of the chair, feeling for the floor of the veranda, finding it.

And then he let the chair, which had been tilted back against the wall of the house, come forward on its four legs. Slowly, terribly slowly, he regained control of himself, closed his mouth, set his jaw. Behind me I heard the crunching of steps on the gravel. Someone was approaching, more or less hesitatingly, but steadily. Someone whose appearance must have been to Eric as unspeakably, what shall I say, blasting as the apparition of the female specter of malice had been to me.

Even Giles groaned, overcome by the look on Eric's face, that ever find handsome features so often a glow, with ardor and love, could become such a mask of hateful tragedy. He was getting to his feet, his loose raincoat fastened by only one button, flapping and almost tearing in the wind. Instinctively, I put out a hand towards him. He did not see it. He saw nothing but what was approaching him with steps that were beginning to falter.

Under his breath, he said, Come on, I am not afraid of you, you rotting white devil. It was not more than a whisper, but it was terrible. Suddenly he stiffened to his full height. He snatched his cap from his head and flung it on the floor. Nostrils dilated and quivering, eyes blazing. He stamped on the floor. His hair blew like a wild man's in the strong cold wind.

He cried out with all the power of his full voice. Come on, I say, what do you want? There was about him at that moment in nobleness of rage, a majesty of defiance, something greatly heroic. I was fascinated by him. I could not take my eyes from him. and I only heard what went on. A rather lisping voice, a woman's, answered,

I want to see Mr. Greer. Mr. Greer, replied Eric still in that extraordinarily resonant trumpet-like voice, is not at home. He has gone away. Oh, said the woman, then I will come again. I heard her footsteps as she retreated, and when they had grown faint in my mind, mine told me that the woman had descended into the tunnel through the hemlocks and gone out of sight. Then I saw Eric lay a hand on the veranda rail, vault over it, and light on the brown grass just

beyond the bushes. He stumbled, but did not fall. Astounded, I turned to watch him, crouching like a tiger he darted across the lawn to the right, paused a second on a spot whence he could see that woman, now out of my sight, pursuing her way through the gloomily shadowed tunnel, darted a little farther, always to keep her in view across the lawn, down the driveway, into the tunnel. Maybe he stalked her thus as far as the road. I saw no more of him till he returned to us. Heaven save us, I groaned. What have you done, Giles? But all Giles would say, and he said it again and again, was, she must have been dreadful. She must have been dreadful. We waited without saying anything more, chilled by the comfortless, harsh wind, vague to each other in the failing

gray light. And then Eric came back to us. Think of it. He was dazed, and he mounted the veranda steps wearily. The force of the wind had torn the button from his coat so that the body of it flapped behind him. From his manner it was evident that he was quite unconscious of the staggering effect his dramatic lie had had upon us. And indeed, our amazement might well, from his point of view, have been quite negligible. Our moral sensibilities had been stunned, perhaps, but he... Well, he stopped and caught up his cap as the wind was blowing it away. Then he half sat on the rickety railing of the veranda,

looking down at his cap which he still held in his hands and slowly fingered. His face was relaxed. I thought, he said at last. It was a woman who I know is dead. He dropped his cap and he was a man. took hold of the railing. Holda snart, Giles asked, in a low, cold tone. I was shocked, but the effect of that name on Eric was like that of the touch of red-hot iron

on a maddened animal. He sprang to his feet, wrenching the rail with such force as to tear it from its standards. It was rotten, anyhow. But his wildness lasted only a few seconds. With what must have been a more-than-normally-human effort, he calmed himself. "'What makes you think that, Pharaoh?' "'He returned speaking quite evenly. "'Because this woman, who has given you such a start, is her cousin,

"'and is said to look astonishingly like her. "'There could never have been more than two such as they. "'Calm yourself, Greer.' "'I am calm,' said Eric. "'I took a long breath tentatively to make sure my lungs could function. "'Giles's temerity had knocked me breathless. It was a sanctimonious family, Giles remarked, apparently incongruously.

Was it? Yes, singularly colorless before the world, like that blanched fungus which grows in damp cellars. There was a sort of secret evil name in the neighborhood, though. That was colorless, too. They were cold-blooded, all abnormally blonde. I was going to tell you last night when you interrupted me that Morgan Snart built this house.

I'm surprised you are not more curious about it. "'Who? "'Me?' "'Yes, especially you. "'You bought the house, you know, I suppose, through Grimmer and strode.' "'Ery's reply was spoken quietly. "'But if the gale had burst into a hurricane, "'I could not have been more startled,

"'or our mask of tranquility more wildly swept away. "'None of your business.' "'That's what he said. "'For the first and only time I saw Giles flabbergasted. "'He paled with anger. He stood up and began speaking rapidly the words almost tumbling over each other. I happened to know that Grimmer and strode were Morgan Snart's executors. Through them I know that this house was never for sale.

I know that on the death of Morgan Snart this house passed to his daughter, and on the death of a few hours later of his daughter, it passed to— The name, if ever it was spoken, was drowned in Eric's loud, insane laughter. He threw back his head and laughed at the sky, peal after peel. It made me almost sick to hear him. I had not known laughter could be such a voice of anguish. All the time the wind was flapping his raincoat behind him, flattening his trousers against his thin legs.

His long black hair mixed with gray, tossed about his head and face. He laughed until I thought I must stuff my fingers in my ears. He lifted his hands high before him, and the section of the rotten railing he still held fell from them with a dull noise to the floor. Then he went slowly into the house, crying through his laughter. Oh, my wife, Julia! Oh, my wife, Julia!

His terrible laughter still came to us from within. I was speechless. Giles said, Damned, madman! Listen, Pierre! Shut up! I cried. Not a word.

You've driven him mad. Keep your facts to yourself. Presently, in not more than a minute, Eric came out again. His laughter had been in our ears, but at the sight of us whose presence he may have forgotten, and he ceased laughing suddenly. The sudden silence was in itself unnerving.

No, he said, eyeing us mournfully. I may not go to my wife, Julia. I am forbidden. He looked curiously at Giles and pointed a finger at him. In the silence before he spoke again, I heard the distant banging of the loosened shudder. I think you are a ghoul in a dead man's grave. He said in his habitual melancholy,

voice, but you have not learned all. Even you do not know who died first. Before Giles could make any reply to this crazy statement, Eric stepped from the porch and walked out of our sight into the blackness of the hemlocks. He did not leave us to silence. There was always the wind and the banging of that shutter, and then I heard a weak voice above my head calling, Eric, Eric! Oh, but it sounded miles away, over a wind-torn sea. Eric, Eric. I knew Eric was out of his head. I ran into the house.

Darkness was falling outside. Within was already deepest gloom. I rushed upstairs. Like a wanderer in a nightmare, I knew not where or which door for me to find. But I paused and listened and tried, and at last I opened a door and walked into a chamber where, almost invisible in the dusk.

Little Julia lay in a great bed. Julia? I said going softly to the bedside. Eric is away. I am Pierre. Stay with me a moment. I am frightened. I dreamed I heard Eric laughing like a man gone mad.

What a horrid dream, Julia. Where is Eric? I will find him. Yes, find me, Eric. He must not be alone with his black thoughts. I will find him, Julia, but is it best to bring him back to you? You're not strong. The night is here.

Though the whole house was trembling, in the force of the wind, cheerless, dark, and full of draughts, yet for the time being it was empty of evil. Never did those sinister spirits lurk in its corners or lope along its shadowy walls while the master was away. Only the memory of dread now haunted it.

For the present all was actually well, though dreary and under the spell of a foreboding. I should have been glad to prevail upon Julia not to call back Eric from wandering abroad with his black thoughts, with his malevolent familiars. If only he could have slipped them a mile or so away upon the road and left them bobbing and fluttering against the wind, powerless to follow him.

But that he could not do. They would come into the house with him. They were strong after sundown. Julia was weak. This night, the odds would be with them. Julia, I will find Eric, but let me take him away with me. I am afraid to be alone. I will fetch Annette.

She will stay with you tonight. Giles is downstairs too. "'Pierre,' she said calmly thinking for my boy, "'you cannot take Eric to your house, you know.' "'Yes, I know,' I repeated shuddering. "'If I am to die tonight, I want Eric with me.' "'You will not die tonight, Julia, not of your cold.' "'No, not of my cold,' she whispered hoarsely.

"'It was so dark I could hardly make out her form in the bed, but I knew she had relapsed into a state of exhaustion, so I went downstairs to the Ford. Giles was sitting where I had left him. He was still angry but puzzled more, to know what Eric's last cryptic words had meant. I requested him to stay at the house, at least until I returned with Annette. Then I started off, but I did not go at once to my own home. I drove a mile up to highway in the other direction, looking for Eric. The twilight had deepened into night. If Eric had left the road, I could not hoped to see him. But until I turned back towards my house, I thought my lights might pick him out ahead of me. Even after I turned, I rather thought I had guessed wrong on the direction he had taken,

and that I should discover him on the road the other way. But I didn't, though my eyes were strained for the sight of him. Where was he on this wild night? I will say that I'd never imagined him gone to the high cliffs over the river to make an end of himself. I apprehended nothing worse than roaming half the night in search of him and passing the other half beside him, still tramping perhaps, but perhaps before a fire at the caraway club. That could be arranged. As I drew near my home, having missed him so far on the way, I put on all speed. There was a chance that he had set out for my house. I meant that he should not enter it. He wasn't there. The children were in the kitchen with Annette having their supper. I kissed them good night there and called Annette into the living room.

A fire was blazing on the hearth, and the room was warm and cheerful. It was hard to tell my wife we must leave it. But I can't leave the children alone tonight, she cried. I can't do it. You know the telephone is out of order, too. Yet I persuaded her to come with me. She saw that I dreaded what was ahead of me that night. We hoped. I don't know what we hoped.

But I had a premonition that the matter was going to be settled one way or the other. It might be settled early. It might be settled. Late. I remember one poignant detail of our departure. That was the sound of the bolts shot too behind us. It seemed like a defiance to Eric. Why, Annette put the children to bed herself in our room.

She made Felicia promise to sleep on a couch in the same room and to lock the room door. She insisted upon Felicia's closing the front door behind us almost before we had crossed the threshold, and she would not leave the porch until she had heard the click of a door. the bolt shot home and sighed. All against Eric, who was wandering half crazed with some terrible secret grief through a cold, wild, and friendless night. I see Annette now making her way down the Granolithic walk, in the light of the Ford lamps, holding her hat on her head against the wind, her wide-mouthed knitting bag inflated and pulling at her arm, her skirts slashing like the canvas flap of a tent. She went first and I followed her. So we had often gone to the theater.

And now the curtain was about to rise on the last act of the strangest drama and the most terrible I have ever witnessed. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of Sinister House by Leland Hall. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 10 By the time we were back in the gloomy house behind the hemlocks, it was seven o'clock. Annette at once told Giles that if he meant to stay and watch, he had better make a fire in the living. room, and without stopping to think how difficult it might be for him to help himself. Thus,

we groped our way upstairs and into Julia's room. Julia was lonesome and very weak, but all was not abandoned in that house. The old servant downstairs in the kitchen was making a hot suit for Julia's supper, and Annette dispatched me to fetch it. Upon returning with it to the chamber I found that Annette had lighted a lamp by the bed, had smoothed out the pillows, and was talking quietly with her patient. The room was cold, of course, and still far from being cheerful, for the bright lamp was heavily shaded and the gas flickered in the drafts. I had no sooner given the soup over to my wife than Julia asked for news of Eric, and I must tell her that I had yet to find him. At that she tried to get out of bed, but Annette restrained her.

"'But you will find him, Pierre,' she begged me. He must not be left alone. I am not sick. That is only my body. His mind, his spirit. He will not tell me. I cannot help him because... Oh, you know why, Pierre.

But you... He cannot help you, Julia. All she said was... Together. She wasn't rambling, but she was terribly excited. I tried to convince her that it would be dangerous to her to bring him back to the house. She understood, but she had a secret faith of some sort

and Eric's being able to save her, even though his mere presence in her room that night might deliver her to death at the hands of his familiars. She was of two minds. I promised to find Eric, but I did not promise to bring him back to the house, and I am not sure that she exacted that definitely out of me. Annette followed me out into the hall and whispered to me to stop in the kitchen for something to eat, whether I felt hungry or not. Make Giles eat something, too, she added. When I was halfway downstairs, she leaned over from a above to ask me where I should take Eric if I found him. To the caraway club, I whispered back.

She had since told me that she felt better to know that I should not bring him back to the house. She both believed and did not believe. If you don't find him, come back here, sure, she said as she turned into the chamber. On my way to the kitchen, I glanced into the living room for Giles. There was no warmth or charm in the place. He had lit the gas and was sitting before the grate in which a miserable lightless. fire was smoldering. We couldn't eat much, but we found some wine in the kitchen and each drank a glassful. To tell the truth, I was glad to get away from my wife's cousin. He was depressed

and sullen as well he might be. I don't know what it was kept him in the house, unless he shared with the rest of us, the feeling that something unusual was going to happen there that night. I hunted high and low for Eric. In the ford, I went mile after mile along every road I thought he could have taken, and farther than I thought he could have progressed. I even went to the village of Stanton, but there I found the village store and the post office closed for the night, and the crossroads were deserted. I went to the caraway club, all dark and deserted. The caretaker looked at me as if I were Satan blowing in on the wind. He had not seen Eric. I told him I might be back later, and not to keep me waiting too long outside in the cold. Again and again, I stopped

the car and called as loudly as I could across the fields that lay invisible in the darkness, lonely and wind-swept on either side of the road. I left the car and felt my way through paths along the edge of the cliffs, even down by the riverbed, falling and hurting myself more than once. It was all of no avail. Near midnight I returned to the house, chilled to the bone, disheartened, and gloomy in my mind. I both hoped and feared to find Eric there. But he had not returned. Giles was still before the cold smoldering fire in the living room, to which the gaslight gave no look of charm. Nothing, Giles told me, had happened in the house. Annette had not come downstairs. No sound came from above. The silence in the desolate room was depressing. I heard only

the rattle of a dead branch against one of the windows now and then, the steady roar of the high wind in the chimney and about the house, and the continuous banging of that loosened and forgotten shutter. "'That thing,' said Giles, "'will drive me mad.' "'I made a move to go out on the veranda. "'No use, Pierre. "'I've been out there. "'You can't reach it from outside.

"'Got to get at it from inside, "'through the Bluebeard room.' "'He groaned. "'Ah, Giles,' I whispered, "'you too begin to feel something in this house. "'I feel death and desolation about it,' he muttered. "'I'm damn cold and I can't make this fire burn.' "'I made no move to help him.

Let the cold and the bleakness get in their work on him. For my part, though, I had yelled myself hoarse over all the countryside, and had returned forlorn and tired. I felt the house was harmless. Wharily, I sat on the sofa where the night before I had sat motionless with fear, under the rose-colored hanging in the hallway, yellowish and faded in the dingy gaslight that fell on it from the living room. I saw drafts of air pass like waves. I heard the roaring of the wind and the banging of that inaccessible shutter. I shivered with bodily cold.

But I knew there was nothing in the house at present to fear. The very desolation made me feel safe. Somewhere a clock struck one. Still, there was no sound from upstairs. Are we going to sit like this all night? Giles grumbled. Why don't you stretch out on this sofa and try to sleep? I can't sleep with that shutter banging.

"'Cover your head with sofa pillows.' He made no reply. The slow minutes dragged on. "'I would to heaven, I had some whiskey,' he said after a while. No use to hunt for it in this house. I'd been surprised enough to find even wine. Eric never drank, never smoked, never swore. Queer, queer, queer.

Not like the rest of us, I fell to thinking about him. I concluded he was something of an ascetic, made human and vulnerable by the one great love in his life. Yet I had to grant that I felt in him a great tenderness towards everything, ardent, visionary, too. Some thing, some one, had checked him, done him deep in all but mortal harm. Julia could heal, but she... I turned up my coat collar and shoved my stiff hands deeper into my pockets. Julia must be sleeping.

What should I say to her if she woke and asked for her husband? How could I reassure her? Where was he? had he fallen in the darkness and twisted his leg? The sound of the wind began to irritate me, and the banging of the shutter got on my nerves as it got on Giles's. What did Julia fear in that room, that she would not have it opened? In those dreary minutes, if ever my imagination, were it too wild,

would have evoked evil and unearthly things, might have pictured before me the dark gruesome interior of that room, perhaps a suicide hanging from the ceiling, vague in the darkness, yet visibly swaying on the cord. It was never my imagination that found evil in the house. Tonight, there was not the faintest thrill in that new nerve of mine. The house was not as it had been. The evil was gone from it.

The gentle, sensitive master was lost in the night, and had left his dwelling bleak, lonely, but safe. If only the wind would rest for a while in that nerve-wracking, banging cease. I jumped up and began pacing the floor. Giles poked at the fire. A longing to speak with my wife grew stronger and stronger in me. If I could talk only five minutes with a net, the remainder of the night would pass more cheerfully.

Had she heard me return in the car and had not called me? No, I had tried to make no noise. Maybe she was anxious about me. I started myself thinking that perhaps Eric's familiars had come back without him and had done mischief upstairs. No sound from up there for hours, not a step on the floor, not the creet or not the creet. of a door's opening, not the murmur of a voice. Maybe Annette was cold. I stood this as long as I could, and then I took off my boots, and stole up the stairs.

It was dark and drafty in the upper hallway. I went on tiptoe to the door of the room in which I knew Julia lay, and listened for some sound. Nothing. I started to go down again, but I couldn't. Annette, I whispered. Annette! I listened again. No response.

Slowly, and without a sound, I opened the door and looked into the chamber. In a big chair by the side of the bed away from the door sat my wife, bundled in her heavy coat. The bright light from the lamp streamed over her hands, which lay upturned upon the knitting in her lap. Her head had fallen back against the top of the chair, in shadow. She was fast asleep. Julia lay fast asleep in the bed, turned on her side away from Annette, her cheek resting on both her hands. I could hardly see their breathing. There was little movement in the room, the fluttering of the gas flame, the curtains blowing in from the window, which was open not more than an inch, the ruffling now and then of the triangular bit of sheet that hung over the edge of the bed.

That was all. It was no use to wake them. I closed the door as quietly as I could, but as I did so I had the feeling that I was closing it upon a scene set for a drama, ready and waiting, but not to be disturbed until they were. the acting should begin. And just then, for the first time in that long night, my nerve of horror shuddered within me. I was all but overcome with forebodings. I thought I heard a moan from the room of sleep on which I had closed the door. I paused.

I thought I heard a new strange sound. It was the beating of my own heart. As I stole downstairs again, like a murderer for stealth, the clock struck too. When I took my place again on the sofa, I felt the house was no longer safe. The banging of the shutter terrified me. I hid my face in my hands. Instantly I thought a voice rang shatteringly loud in my ears crying, We will kill her tonight!

I sprang to my feet, in the doorway stood Eric. He looked as if something in the night had wrung the blood out of him. His hair was wild about his pale face. His clothes were all deranged and in some places torn. My first thought was to throw him out of the house, his own house. The murderous cry I had heard told me that his familiars had come back with him. I had no doubt they were already above in the chamber of restful sleep. They had yelled out on their way up the stairs,

but as I looked at Eric, a mild gentleness in his face cast a spell over me and restrained me. He began to speak strange words in an extraordinarily subdued voice. I've been walking in the wind. Out of the whirlwind a voice spake unto me, saying, The law of man cannot lay a finger upon thee, Nor hast thou sinned against the law of God, And as much as thou wast patient in his sight, So will he care for thee.

Yet though thou carryest thy burden to a secret part of the earth, And there bury it, it shall not be forgotten. Giles and I looked at him in silence. You can hardly imagine the effect of his words and his manner upon us. While he went on talking like a prophet from an ancient time, I caught no sense in his words, which veiled rather than made clear something about his responsibilities under the just laws of heaven,

and about his wife Julia, who, as a human companion, remained more dear to him than the purest bliss and sanctimony he could dream of. And he talked as if this style of expression were the most familiar and the most natural to him. At last he must have read our bewilderment and our discomfiture in our eyes, which remained fastened upon his face. He broke off his rapt discourse, and stepping quietly into the room, begged us to excuse his diffuseness

and ask us if we had been sleeping. I could not but wonder if the night had changed him into a mild idiot. Damnation! Sleeping! cried the matter of fact, Giles. In this desolate house! Listen, that shutter's been banging without let up.

How can a man sleep in such a racket? Eric recognized the sound and looked at me. Can you not fasten it, Pierre? No, Eric, I answered, walking out of the spell his words had cast over me, and eyeing him curiously. We cannot reach it from the outside. Never mind the damn thing, child growled. Indeed, gentlemen, replied Eric. I would not have you disturbed thus. I regret that you have not been able to sleep, watching the house in my absence, too, but I think we can fasten it.

He went on from the inside. Quietly he fingered over the keys on a ring he had taken from his pocket. While he was doing so, I heard the dull sound of footfalls on the floor above my head. The planks creaked. My heart grew faint within me. But Eric went on quietly. This key. Selecting a bright Yale key that glistened even under the dingy gaslight.

I found by chance today. It will, I feel sure, open the door for you. you gentlemen. You know what door. I might say the door to your repose. The whole house seemed to me full of secret horrors. I heard the sound of voices above me. Terror invaded me, and I took a step forward. Eric, misinterpreting my action said courteously, no, not you, nor I either, for, as you know, I promised my wife, Julia, that while she is in the house, she is still here, is she not, but you, Mr. Farrow. He walked over to Giles and gave him the keys.

You, he went unkindly and without a trace of emotion, who are pleased to stir up the dead. This night they will come to you. Take the key. Do not be afraid. Let us go together and fasten the shutter. Then you will sleep soundly, and perhaps for a long time. I would, I could sleep. A blast of wind swept through the room

and nearly tore the straining, whistle. blue gas flame from the burner. Very distinctly, I heard a moan from upstairs. Giles got up and accepted the key. Upon my word, he said. Sleep or no sleep, we can have a look at that room. We all heard at that moment the sound of hysterical weeping. That, said Eric simply, is my wife, Julia.

She cannot sleep at night when I am in the house. She needs you, Eric, I cried out. He looked at me in mild surprise. "'Oh, no,' he answered gently. "'Not me. "'Come, Mr. Pharaoh. "'We shall need a light. "'There is a lamp in the dining-room.

"'Come. "'They went away together. "'I had been perhaps three or four minutes alone, "'somehow unable to move "'when I heard the rapid stamping "'of a foot on the floor of the room above me. "'I rushed to the stairway. "'Just as I reached the top,

"'Anette flung open the door of Julia's chamber "'and ran out into the hall, crying loudly, "'Help, Pierre, come quick!' Together we pushed back into the room where the scene had been made ready. The acting had begun. Julia lay rigid on the bed, her head bent back as if a heavy hand were at her throat. With her arms, she kept up a weak movement as if she were trying to repel something from before her face. Her gasping for breath was frightful to hear.

Annette went to one side of the bed, eye to the other. I could see that Julia's eyes were half opened, but they were glazed. Annette tried to lift her in hopes that would ease. her struggle for breath, but it did no good. We were powerless to help or relieve. Go for the doctor, quick, Annette called to me in anguish. As I started to go, Julia began trying to speak. I leaned over her and put my head close to her lips. I felt awful things crawling on my face like the feet of giant moths. What is it, Julia? I sobbed. She made a sound as of words, but I could not catch her meaning. She is trying to say something.

about a room, Annette whispered. She has been trying to say it for a long time. Oh, dear, what does the poor child mean? Go for the doctor, Pierre. Go for the doctor. She is dying. She cannot live like this. Again, I started, but Julia wrestled in Annette's arms

and my wife called to me, fearing she could not hold her. Suddenly, I guessed what Julia might mean by the room. I ran for the stairs. Halfway down, something caught me from behind around the neck and under the chin so that I lost my balance and fell forward to the lower floor. Hardly conscious of the sharp pain in my head and in my elbow, I struggled to my feet against something, beating the air about me, staggered on along the corridor and gained the dining room.

The door to the forbidden room was open. I went in, and the harsh light of the unshaded lamp Eric held. I saw vaguely that it was a large room, the largest in the house, and that the walls were paneled in wood. Eric was standing by the fireplace. Giles was kneeling by the wall, fingering something in one of the panels. Waving my arms round my head To keep off the things that were bent upon strangling me I made my way towards the two men

I tried to call out to them But my voice was stifled in my throat Giles still unconscious of my approach said triumphantly Ah, there it is And just as I came up behind Eric A long panel in the wall swung open like a door We three men stood facing the full-size portrait of a woman It was physically repulsive

Morally odious I looked at little but the face, the lidless flat eyes, the cruel yet simpering malice. I recognized them. For a couple of seconds we stood without moving. Then Eric swung the lamp high above his shoulder and hurled it at the canvas. The chimney crashed. There was a spurt of brownish yellow flame, and as the instant darkness settled, a piercing scream behind us and the dull sound of a body fallen to the floor. My eyes were at first blind in the sudden gloom, but I saw the instant.

I smelt the oily smoke of the extinguished lamp, and I heard even above the roar of the wind Eric's loud and rapid breathing, like the panting of a dog. In a moment or two I felt him brush by me, and as I began to see again, I made him out, kneeling beside a white figure on the floor, vague and hardly distinguishable. I knew it was Julia. He picked her up in his arms and carried her towards the dining room door. I followed them as closely as I could, anxious and full of fear. For Julia was moaning, and I knew that the as-yet-invisible powers of malice had left me,

to fasten themselves once more on her. Eric carried her along the hallway and started up the stairs. Annette, who had run down into the lower hallway, went up backwards ahead of him, trying to pull him forward, while I followed just below him and supporting him, when, in the face of those malignant fiends that were opposing him, he all but fell back. I never knew whether he felt or saw them. He may have thought that Julia was struggling In his arms only in a delirium

He swayed from side to side Leaning now against the wall Now against the frail banister Which bent out perilously under his weight And threatened to give way Sometimes he had to fight half a minute To gain a step Though Annette was pulling him forward

And I was bracing him from behind Never have I been witness of such a struggle The invisible odds were all but too much for us It was like a man striving to swim against a powerful current, and how Eric, not a physically strong man, progressed against it, I cannot say. At the top of the stairs, he reeled and nearly fell, but Annette clutched him and managed to drag him into the chamber. He laid Julia down on the bed. She, poor victim, was almost exhausted. She put her hands weakly to her throat and her moans grew more feeble. A bright shaft

of light from the lamp fell across the sheet over her breast. The gas flame flickered in the draft. I stood close beside Eric, looking down at her while Annette, having found and folded a piece of paper, was fanning her. As if that would make her breathing easier, they were doing their utmost to strangle her. As yet I had not seen them, but I had felt their hands. I knew they were at their devilish work. Julia's weaker and weaker movements were too eloquent for me to be in doubt. But she was losing strength. At last she lay motionless in her bed. and then I thought I saw something. A spectral hand at her slender throat,

a faint point of light crossing and recrossing her breast as swiftly as a spider weaves about its prey. Eric said in a cold, strained voice, She is dying. And he threw himself on his knees beside the bed. No, Eric, God help you. She is being murdered by the evil that haunts you, I whispered, bending to his ear.

Julia lay so still I thought she was already gone, but no. At the doorway of death she turned, opened her eyes, and looked at her husband. She whispered, her lips hardly moving. I have loved you. I trust you, but... The two fiends became incandescent. I saw them try to throw themselves upon her. They got in each other's way, but Julia, with the last strength she had, swept them aside with her arm, sat up in bed, and cried out and allowed.

voice, Eric, tell me, who are they? You and I together, we shall defeat them. Her strength was then exhausted, and she fell over against him. He clasped her head to his breast as if he would save her merely by unfolding her in his arms. But I saw the malignant two-lope round the head of the bed and try to tear her from him. Could he see them? I do not know. Though he raised his head as if to face them, I think his eyes were sightless. "'Holda snart,' he said. And his voice was full of the bitterest hatred. "'You will burn in hell for this at last.'

A terrible burst of wind ripped out the gas, and in the darkened room the shapes of Hilda and Morgan's snart glowed cold like phosphorus. They desisted from their murderous work, cowled by his voice. They stood above him as he knelt by the bed with Julia in his arms, balked, on the verge of retreat, motionless save for the flickering of their outlines. The cold that touched me from them was like the cold of ether on the skin. I heard Julius faint voice. Who was that evil woman?

Eric took a deep breath, held it an instant. Then, still with his face upturned and his eyes like those of blind persons that look towards what they do not see, he said. She was. My wife. They stepped back from him. I know your wickedness hold a snart. You know my crime. I will lay both for judgment before my wife, Julia.

He half rose from his knees, lifting Julia with him and shouted, Get out of this cursed house! I know now that since a certain hour in the past, Eric had never feared them living. He did not fear them dead. but I, for an awful minute I held my breath. But they went away. As I've caught in a whirlwind, the door slammed behind them. I heard a hideous shrill whistle in the hallway.

I heard the crash of broken glass downstairs. A shriek of hatred died away in the night. Outside the wind made only a low moan. The house and the room were silent. A clock struck three. End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Of Sinister House by Leland Hall

This Librevox recording is in the public domain Read by Ben Tucker Chapter 11 In the room Annette was the first to move She turned off the gas which was escaping from the burner Then she came and took my arm Together we looked down at Eric Still kneeling bent over the head of his wife

A figure of unutterable woe Was Julia dead She did not move. She did not make a sound. Eric, too, was motionless and silent. We waited a long time, my wife and I. At last she went softly up to Eric and touched his shoulder. And when even then he did not notice us,

she raised his head and with calm tenderness asked, Is Julia living, Eric? He merely looked up at her dumbly, so she lifted Julia from his arms and let her down on the bed. She lay as wide and as peaceful as, marble, but she was not cold. She lived. After we had watched her for half an hour, and were assured that she slept tranquilly and unmolested, Annette directed my attention to Eric, who all that time had remained sitting cross-legged on the floor, his head dropped low over

his chest. I roused him from his profound absorption, made him understand that he too must go to bed and sleep, and gave him a hand to help him to his feet. He was dazed, and already a little out of his head again. I let him stand and look down at Julia a while, but he said nothing, and though his gaze was fixed upon her face, his look was vague. He followed me meekly enough into the next room, and without a murmur, let me undress him and get him to bed. But instead of falling into a reposeful sleep, he became more and more restless, his face flushed with fever, and his sunken eyes began to blaze with delirious excitement. Yet I felt strangely relieved. The instinct which had informed me that the happiness of Eric and Julia was menaced by a secret peril

now assured me, no less certainly, that that peril, the nature of which had been revealed to me, was exercised and banished. The time I spent at Eric's bedside seemed to me, for all the darkness, the cold, and the unelectric night wind of autumn, like the relaxed afternoon hours, which follow a heavy thunderstorm in midsummer. Between Julia and the sun, the jet black claspers, of Eric's past life had mounted. I had been beside her in the ever-deepening shadow,

had shared with her the dread of destructive wild forces, not knowing when they would be entirely loosened, or where or how they would strike. But we had withstood the worst, and now I felt as I have felt looking upon the rear of such storms, softened by the mists of recent rain in the air, majestic, yet no longer threatening, a jumbled and indistinct splendor.

Of course this was only a queer vision in my mind, which, while relieved of the worst anxiety, was tired and vaporish. Nothing I have since learned of Morgan Snart and his daughter could suggest a comparison with any of the magnificent aspects of nature, not even with the cruel beasts or with cold-blooded and repugnant creatures of what we call lower forms of life. They were a cold and an unkind pair. They remained unwarmed even by the suffering they inflicted upon others, which nonetheless apparently thrilled some secret nerve of voluptuousness within them. But there was a wild, and, for the moment, a ruined splendor about Eric. It was a strange waning of the night I passed through by his bed.

Not until just before dawn did his ravings become quite incoherent, and for more than an hour I answered his odd questions in hopes that he would quiet down. When he sat up in bed I pressed him back as gently as I could. I can see him well now as I write, tall and thin, his old-fashioned nightgown, I'd sought for pajamas but could find none, hanging loose and open from his shoulders, when, before I got him to lie down again, he would sit, leaning forward over his knees.

I remember clearly certain looks on his face, especially the sober thoughtfulness in his eyes, when for the first few times he mentioned the telegram. He spoke of this again and again, In the midst of a gentle discourse on the merits of Jonathan Edwards, or if something sentimental about the return of a lost lamb to the fold, he would say, I have always thought telegrams brought bad news, but it was good news. I must always be honest.

Of course, God knew that I was glad to hear that he too was dead. God sent the automobile against him, but I no longer believe he did that to please me. I did not think I could be so glad again. She must have been dead a long time She was stiff on the floor I would not touch her No

But the telegram with the glad tidings I laid it across her dead hand Oh no, that would not have killed her I closed her fingers with my foot But my shoe was on it I would not have touched her And I am sure I did not step on her hand Then when I thought he was about to lose

This train of thought he invariably went on You did not think that telegram killed her, did you? I assure you I did not kill her either. Her heart split with wickedness while I was out of doors. I ran very fast away from the house because I hated her so, and I walked very slowly back because I did not know what to do. Her heart split with wickedness while I was away, and she fell down dead on the floor.

That is why I put the telegram in her dead hand. It was a perfect vengeance. He would have died a second time to know that I got his money. So little, too. I have put this down more coherently than he said it. But even from his confused ramblings that night, I guessed what his crime had been. As I tell you, he went through this cycle of thought many times. And feverish as he was, he had a way of fastening his eyes on mine each time he went through it.

Always with the same sober thoughtfulness I have been. mentioned. I'm glad to say I never caught in them the faintest glimmer of craftiness or calculation. As he grew wilder, his repetitions of the story were less and less detailed, but he insisted with louder and firmer voice that she died before he did, and that he had punished them, just as if he took great pride in letting the world know that he alone had been able to execute a proper vengeance upon them. I shall never know precisely what was in his mind And when, by the mere act of laying the telegram in the dead, Holda's hand, he made it appear beyond question that the news of her father's sudden death had killed her.

That he did so deliberately, I did not doubt, with a wholly acute realization that his act would make him err to whatever Morgan Snart had willed to his daughter. But that he acted from covetousness, I will never believe. Some hardly more than instinctive demand for retribution, a cold passion for revenge, a single lust for triumph over them. Something of all those, I think, sprang into one swift, clear, and irrevocable act,

the revolt from their persistent and consciously refined cruelties. Subsequently, he could not have escaped the knowledge that he had committed an act that made him a criminal in the eyes of the law. But the small inheritance he had acquired, the old house in Stanton and some broken-down property in Buffalo, remained for him the hard and fast substance of his victory over Holda and Morgan Snart, and he would never relinquish it. He brought Julia to see the house behind the hemlocks. He had never been in it before, because he imagined that to be happy there with her would make that victory supreme.

Well, they had risen up to score on him again, and the second scoring was more terrible than the first. I assure you that I had no curiosity in regard to the details of what he had lived through with them. How or where he ever met the wicked woman who wore upon his early religious fervor, hypnotized him and finally married him, perhaps only to torture his fine sensibilities, I've never sought to learn. Of what seethed up out of the mutilated heart while I sat by his bed, I have only fragmentary recollections.

Much was too painful to bear repeating. None of us knows how sensitive the other fellow may be. Some things, such as the wanton uprooting of the few, flowers he had planted secretly, and the stripping of everything of beauty and comfort from the house wounded him deeply. One might be tempted to think him as softy for that. Others, the crude disfigurement of his mother's photograph and the cutting off by lies and malice of every soul disposed to be friendly to him, would have made most men entirely angry. But Eric, until he finally turned against him, suffered in heart, first surprised, later afraid and horrified.

when he did turn. It was over an unmentionable piece of cruelty to a bird. His revulsion of feeling was so fierce that he never got over it. More than, I imagine, the surface of the earth, rent by a volcanic eruption, ever becomes whole again as it was before. It was about half-past four when he began humming, and from then on he was hardly sane for a minute. He sang snatches of hymns,

not quiet old household favorites, but wild revival hymns, which, make the blood curdle. And though it was the rising fever that was overthrowing his reason, I think he maddened himself a good deal with his own singing, as I've been told, fanatical persons often do. Between the crazy strains of song, he would sometimes subside,

to say such things as, When I was a boy, I loved flowers, yet my mother was a Christian woman, or I loved animals and they are God's creatures like the rest of us. I liked the rest of us, all but that cursed pair that must have been weaned in a hell of ice before they ever came upon this earth. At the height of his frenzy he sprang out of bed and shouted, shaking his fist defiantly above his head. No, I was not created for suffering. With the help of Annette, who had been roused from her slumber at Julius' bed by his cry,

I got him back where he belonged. He had exhausted his strength and a wild reenactment of his great outburst upon Holda. Just before he relapsed into complete unconsciousness, he had a moment's calm, in which he looked up at Annette, mistaking her for Julia, and said tenderly, She will not dare haunt me, dear.

I frightened her to death, and she will be shut up fast in hell for her wickedness. There was something so childlike and pathetic and the way he said this, that the tears came into my eyes. It doesn't do any good at all to say boo at the past when you're afraid of it. I went over to the window and parted the curtains. The night was just beginning to give way. I couldn't see the river in the deep shadow of its gorge,

but to the right I could make out against the dim gray sky, the bowing and slipping of the hemlock tops, and the cold and steady wind. I don't know why I recalled the picture of my wife's walking up and down with her son in her arms shouting boo at the horrid dream. How they had dogged poor Eric. How terribly they had scored against him once more. But I had faith that against him and Julia united they should never hereafter prevail. Annette said I had better go for the doctor, so I stole out of the chamber.

But when I found myself in the dark upper hallway, the memory of how much. how earlier in the night we had struggled up the stairs against the nameless, and then invisible evil swept over me like a chill. For a moment I lost my nerve. I slunk back into Eric's room for another word with Annette. I didn't like to leave her and go down those stairs alone. I took a good long look at Eric's flushed face. Even in his ravings there had been something human, something warm.

What's the matter? My wife asked me. I don't know. I answered foolishly. I feel queer in that hallway. It's cold and ruined. I saw her turn pale. They will not come back again, she whispered.

It gives me the creeps. But I wasn't going to ask her to come downstairs with me. I returned to the hall alone and started down. The drafts were icy cold. I noticed with a sick feeling at my heart that the banister rails had been broken, and the rose to mask that had hung down from the upper wall had been pulled. from his fastenings and was all awry and torn. Halfway down I felt as if I could go no farther over the way those fiends had made off on. There was a sort of dim gray luminousness in the lower hallway,

the dawn stealing in through the front door in which the glass panels had been smashed. The curtains that used to cover them had been ripped from their rods and dangled in tatters to the floor from the edges of the broken panes. I think I was about to break into tears, but my strained eyes caught sight of something that stiffened me with horror. Prone on the floor at the foot of the stairs amid all the debris lay giles. I whispered his name, he did not answer. He lay still on the floor, vague and the gloomy and imperfect light of the early dawn. Screwing up the last poor shred of my nerve, I went down to him.

He was breathing. I was devoutly thankful for that. Yet another human life saved out of this night of wickedness. Gently as I could, I turned him on his back, and then I fetched water from the kitchen and sprinkled it on his face. I got a piece of glass stuck in my foot, too, for I had not put on my shoes since I'd gone up just before one o'clock to Julia's room.

Maybe it was partly the pain of that which made me feel like snickering, for that is how I did feel, even before I assured myself that Giles had been dazed by a heavy blow on the forehead and was not dying. When he opened his eyes and looked up at me, kneeling like a musselman behind him in the gloom,

I wanted more than anything in the world to gibber. After a minute or two he recognized me, and then between his groans he said, Something came down the stairs. It hid me. What the devil was it? And that was just too much for me. I sat back on my stockinged heels, hid my face in my hands, and laughed like a fool. Well, here's an end to the strange story.

You would not be interested in the convalescence of Eric and his wife. They were not your friends as they were mine. You never saw them. You never went into their queer house. What's more, you never will go into it because it was burned down the following Christmas. Neither Annette nor I ever entered it again after the doctor came and took charge of Eric, bound up Giles' head, pronounced Julia recovering from her cold, drew the glass from my foot, and told my wife she looked tired and better go home for a little sleep.

Julia was up the very next day and had Eric taken to New York. Later, while they were away, they hired men to move out their furniture and close up the house. It was presently for sale. No one knows how the fire that destroyed it started. By that time, the old place had been entirely deserted for more than six weeks. But, oh, my own house, our good-looking little cement house, nothing ever looked better to my eyes than that did the morning we returned to it. And it was still locked up tight, too.

Felicia had obeyed Annette to the letter. She would never have opened a door or a window until hunger drove her out. I must confess that when we scurried up the Granolithic walk, the little house did look like a county jail. You remember, that's how Giles thought most of the houses in Forsby looked. But poor Giles didn't get a glimpse of it that morning. His head was aching very painfully. He swore he'd been struck by lightning.

I remember I had to help him up to the front door, and I was limping at that. We must all have looked ridiculous. Little Bobby tumbled out on us like a puppy, and old Felicia mopped her eyes with the corner of her apron, muttering Christian thanks and glorifications. I don't suppose she knew just the nature of the peril which had threatened us, and which, glory be to God, we had escaped, but she had felt it. That is the infallible barometer.

Now when I feel the creeps, I know there's something doing whether I see it or not, which, God forbid, I should ever see again. Dear old Giles, he had the strength of a bull. It took more than the blow of a ghost to lay him low in a blood-soaked field. Sometimes I wonder if he didn't really save us. If it wasn't he that shocked out of Eric the words that did the trick. When he left us, he asked me to drive to the station by way of the old house. We went right up to the front door in the Ford.

Boards were nailed over the smashed glass panes in the door. Every window was shuttered. In perfect silence, we cast an eye over it all, each absorbed in his own thoughts. When we were back on the flat highway again, he said, turning away from me. She is a fine woman, Pierre. I hope they will be happy now. There's lightning and lightning, and still another lightning, after all. As for Annette, she will not voluntarily recall those dreadful nights to her mind.

In the three years that have passed, we have talked of them only once. I know she fears the effect of them upon me. That's all. She acknowledged, however, that there was something unusual in the house the night Julia was so sick and Eric went out of his head. Now if I try to talk of it again, she looks at me as if I were out of my mind. That worries her, for I'm the breadbread. winter. So I go on commuting and keep my mouth shut about the upper or nether spheres. To tell the truth, I shall be glad when the memory has faded. Take it all in all, there was nothing in it but terrible

suffering for Julia and Eric. You should see Foresby in the wintertime. There's a foot of snow on the ground, now in the middle of January, and the nights are very cold, but it's healthy for the children. And hard as it is sometimes to get to and from the station in the Ford, we wouldn't move into the city for anything. Think of giving up the spotless fields and roads of snow for the city's soot, or the silence of the nights for the racket and town, or the whole expanse of clear black sky with its brilliant independent stars for the streetlights and a rift between the rooftops. We have a blazing fire on the hearth every night, and we sit before it until it's time to go to bed, my wife and I, sometimes reading, sometimes talking, sometimes dreaming, but never haunted.

A day or two ago we had a letter from Julia, who, with Eric, has gone to France. They're going to devote themselves in what is theirs to the alleviation of the great suffering that has come upon the world. I mustn't forget to tell you that Julia's small fortune has recently been increased. As for what Eric inherited from Morgan Snart, I will never please heaven write that name again. They have made that over to some relief organization. They too have gone in the Red Cross. Last night I sat here before the fire with my pencil and my manuscript. Annette was reading one of the two new magazines to which we have subscribed,

either the house decorated or the home beautiful. Isn't that a funny trace of it all? I couldn't write anything. As you know, there's nothing more to write. My unguided pencil just went on scrawling over the paper, The Singing House. A piece of burning wood snapped and sent a big spark out on the rug. I got up to kick it back to the hearthstone,

and then I went over to the door and went out on the porch. It was cold and still. There was no moon, and the stars were like diamonds, just as the mighty things will always go on being to humans when the air is clear. I looked to the north, and in my mind I saw the black spread of charred embers on the snow where the old house had stood. I could not hear a sound, and with my eyes could see nothing but the expanse of white snow, and a long way down the road to the right,

a light in the window of our nearest neighbor's house. So I came back again to the fire, but not to try to write, just to think. Giles gone. Well, it will come to me, too, and before long. But what a life to look back on. What a memory always this house and this life of mine, and this wife and my children. That's the point. I've had it. Whereas, Eric.

They have gone, and we shall not see them again. at least not for a long time. Only a mass of charred embers marks the place where their house of horror stood. Here is my wife, training her mind to see in houses a beauty she thought she missed in theirs. Here am I, regarding still as a nightmare what entered into my flesh is a most terrible reality and has, I know, colored my outlook upon life for the rest of my mortal days. What does it all amount to if it isn't just a story to tell, first and last, like all stories not to be explained.

Like all stories, first and last, true. There, said Annette to me, handing me over a chromo from the Home Beautiful, is a hanging on that wall like the one Julia had in her house. I wonder how a curtain or something would look on the wall upstairs, but I guess not it would only catch the dust and things. Yes, I repeated, quite like a melancholy tragedy in of the hollow old school. Dust and things. things and dust

What's the matter with you, Pierre? You're talking nonsense. You've been getting up and sitting down and going to the door as if you expected somebody to come. I looked at her and grinned. Nobody would come so late as this, my love. You've been working too long on that book. You're tired out, and you'd better go to bed. Annette, I said laying my hand over hers.

There isn't any dust and things in this house. That's why we're so happy. let's be sure there never is any. She gave me a funny look with her shrewd blue eyes. You mind your business, Pierre, and I'll mind mine. Now run along to bed. It's late. So I locked the doors and windows, just as I always locked them, went upstairs after my wife,

put out the lights downstairs from the switch on the upper floor, and made ready for bed. But before I turned in, I had to look out the window a little while. There wasn't a thing to see except stars and snow. "'Lennett warned me that I should catch my death of cold. "'Well, after I'd put out the little light on the table by my bed, "'I strained my ears to hear something, "'and I heard the whistle of the last train from New York.

"'There was not a sound in our dark house. "'Surely,' I whispered to my wife, "'finding her hand and giving her a good-night squeeze. "'No one will come so late as this. "'Of course not. What are you thinking of?' "'Nothing.' Go to sleep, then. I did so, and met nothing on the way.

End of Chapter 11. End of Sinister House by Leeland Hall.