he said, at last. “Charlie’s been on a few benders, lately. He’ll show up to be fired, tomorrow. What was he doing here?”
With this, he glanced up the stairs at the stepladder.
“Oh,” said Clara Peck, quickly, “he was just looking at—everything.”
“I’ll come, myself, tomorrow,” said the owner.
And as he drove away into the afternoon, Clara Peck slowly moved up the stairs to lift her face toward the ceiling and watch the trapdoor.
“He didn’t see you, either,” she whispered.
Not a beam stirred, not a mouse danced, in the attic.
She stood like a statue, feeling the sunlight shift and lean through the front door.
Why? she wondered. Why did I lie?
Well, for one thing, the trapdoor’s shut, isn’t it?
And, I don’t know why, she thought, but I won’t want anyone going up that ladder, ever again. Isn’t that silly? Isn’t that strange?
She ate dinner early, listening.
She washed the dishes, alert.
She put herself to bed at ten o’clock, but in the old downstairs maid’s room, for long years unused. Why she chose to lie in this downstairs room, she did not know, she simply did it, and lay there with aching ears, and the pulse moving in her neck and in her brow.
Rigid as a tomb carving under the sheet, she waited.
Around midnight, a wind passed, shook a pattern of leaves on her counterpane. Her eyes flicked wide.
The beams of the house trembled.
She lifted her head.
Something whispered ever so softly in the attic.
She sat up.
The sound grew louder, heavier, like a large but shapeless animal, prowling the attic dark.
She placed her feet on the floor and sat looking at them. The noise came again, far up, a scramble like rabbits’ feet here, a thump like a large heart there.
She stepped out into the downstairs hall and stood bathed in a moonlight that was like a pure cool dawn filling the windows.
Holding the banister, she moved stealthily up the stairs. Reaching the landing, she touched the stepladder, then raised her eyes.
She blinked. Her heart jumped, then held still.
For as she watched, very slowly the trapdoor above her sank away. It opened, to show her a waiting square of darkness like a mine shaft going up, without end.
“I’ve had just about enough!” she cried.
She rushed down to the kitchen and came storming back up with hammer and nails, to climb the ladder in furious leaps.
“I don’t believe any of this!” she cried. “No more, do you hear? Stop!”
At the top of the ladder she had to stretch up into the attic, into the solid darkness with one hand and arm. Which meant that her head had to poke halfway through.
“Now!” she said.
At that very instant, as her head shoved through and her fingers fumbled to find the trapdoor, a most startling, swift thing occurred.
As if something had seized her head, as if she were a cork pulled from a bottle, her entire body, her arms, her straight-down legs, were yanked up into the attic.
She vanished like a magician’s handkerchief. Like a marionette whose strings are grabbed by an unseen force, she whistled up.
So swift was the motion that her bedroom slippers were left standing on the stepladder rungs.
After that, there was no gasp, no scream. Just a long breathing silence for about ten seconds.
Then, for no seen reason, the trapdoor slammed flat down shut.
Because of the quality of silence in the old house, the trapdoor was not noticed again.…
Until the new tenants had been in the house for about ten years.
It was on the Orient Express heading north from Venice to Paris to Calais that the old woman noticed the ghastly passenger.
He was a traveler obviously dying of some dread disease.
He occupied compartment 22 on the third car back, and had his meals sent in and only at twilight did he rouse to come sit in the dining car surrounded by the false electric lights and the sound of crystal and women’s laughter.
He arrived this night, moving with a terrible slowness to sit across the aisle from this woman of some years, her bosom like a fortress, her brow serene, her eyes with a kindness that had mellowed with time.
There was a black medical bag at her side, and a thermometer tucked in her mannish lapel pocket.
The ghastly man’s paleness caused her left hand to crawl up along her lapel to touch the thermometer.
“Oh, dear,” whispered Miss Minerva Halliday.
The maître d’ was passing. She touched his elbow and nodded across the aisle.
“Pardon, but where is that poor man going?”
“Calais and London, madame. If God is willing.”
And he hurried off.
Minerva Halliday, her appetite gone, stared across at that skeleton made of snow.
The man and the cutlery laid before him seemed one. The knives, forks, and spoons jingled with a silvery cold sound. He listened, fascinated, as if to the sound of his inner soul as the cutlery crept, touched, chimed; a tintinnabulation from another sphere. His hands lay in his lap like lonely pets, and when the train swerved around a long curve his body, mindless, swayed now this way, now that, toppling.
At which moment the train took a greater curve and knocked the silverware, chittering. A woman at a far table, laughing, cried out:
“I don’t believe it!”
To which a man with a louder laugh shouted:
“Nor do I!”
This coincidence caused, in the ghastly passenger, a terrible melting. The doubting laughter had pierced his ears.
He visibly shrank. His eyes hollowed and one could almost imagine a cold vapor gasped from his mouth.
Miss Minerva Halliday, shocked, leaned forward and put out one hand. She heard herself whisper:
“I believe!”
The effect was instantaneous.
The ghastly passenger sat up. Color returned to his white cheeks. His eyes glowed with a rebirth of fire. His head swiveled and he stared across the aisle at this miraculous woman with words that cured.
Blushing furiously, the old nurse with the great warm bosom caught hold, rose, and hurried off.
Not five minutes later, Miss Minerva Halliday heard the maître d’ hurrying along the corridor, tapping on doors, whispering. As he passed her open door, he glanced at her.
“Could it be that you are—”
“No,” she guessed, “not a doctor. But a registered nurse. Is it that old man in the dining car?”
“Yes, yes! Please, madame, this way!”
The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.
Reaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.