Kay pushed the door a little farther and listened. There wasn’t a sound of any sort or kind. The silence wasn’t an ordinary silence. It seemed to belong to the house and to be a part of it. She found herself wondering how long it was since anyone had made a sound there. Dreadful to be the person who broke a silence like that.
It came to her with the most complete conviction that the house was empty, and in the strength of that conviction she opened the door quite wide and stepped out upon the landing. She had not made the least sound. The carpet was soft and thick under her feet.
Who lived in this house? And why was there a door through the wall into No. 16?
She took a step forward and turned. And then she saw the stain. The carpet was good, and thick, and new, but there was a stain upon it just where she had been standing outside the cupboard door. It wasn’t a very large stain. It was about the size of her hand, and it had been rubbed and sponged, but it showed. The bright brown was discoloured, and the orange of the pattern had gone dull. She wondered what had been spilled there, and thought what a pity it was.
She crossed the landing and looked down over the stairs. There were six steps and a little bit of passage, and then a sharp turn, exactly like No. 16. Only the walls and the stair carpet were different—and the stains. As she stood looking down, she could see three or four more of those odd dull stains. If Flossie Palmer had seen them, she would have thought with a shudder of the head, and the clawing desperate hand which she had seen for a moment framed in the gilt acanthus leaves which ought to have been framing a mirror. Flossie was quick, and she did not lack imagination. She might have guessed at a wounded man crawling painfully—step by difficult step—half fainting—with the blood running down and making those stains which would never quite come out. Kay only thought how careless someone had been, and what a pity it was about the new carpet.
The sense of the house being empty grew stronger and stronger. She began to feel excited and adventurous. If the house was empty, why shouldn’t she explore it? The Kay who had been brought up by Aunt Rhoda and always made to do exactly what she was told gave a sort of gasp and said, “You can’t!” But another Kay who had been getting the upper hand more and more ever since Aunt Rhoda died said in tones of the most dreadful scorn, “Yes, that’s you all over, you horrid little coward! People who are afraid never get anywhere or do anything. You might just as well be dead and have done with it.” And with that a bright flaming colour came into Kay’s cheeks and she ran upstairs without giving herself time to think, because she knew she would despise herself for ever if she didn’t. The only way to keep Aunt Rhoda’s Kay in her proper place was instantly to do the thing which she said you couldn’t possibly do.
She ran without stopping round the bend and up the remaining steps to the bedroom landing. Her feet made no sound, because the carpet was so very soft and thick. She arrived a little breathless, not because she had run upstairs, but because of the struggle with the Kay who was a coward. She had downed her, and that gave her a pleasant don’t-careish sort of feeling.
She stood still and looked about her. Not that she needed to look, because she knew already that there would be two doors, and the stairs going on up to the top floor. The only thing she hadn’t known about was the cupboard. It was a twin cupboard to the one below, and it stood against the party wall in exactly the same position. Kay stared at it, and all sorts of thoughts came into her mind. Was it a real cupboard, or had it just been put there to hide a secret door like the one on the floor below? And if a door was a secret door, why didn’t they keep that cupboard locked? There was an easy answer to that. They wanted to be able to come and go from either side.
Kay didn’t like this answer very much. It gave her a most horrid creepy feeling all down the back of her neck. They—who were They? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. It came to her very quick and sudden that it would be dreadfully dangerous to know. And sharp on the heels of that she knew that it was very dangerous to be here in this empty, silent house.
She turned and put her hand on the balustrade, and as she did so, the house was empty and silent no more. Someone was coming up the stairs.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Kay’s heart gave such a frightful jump that she felt for a moment as if she were going to faint. It was only for a moment, but she hadn’t any moments to spare. She looked down over the banisters and saw a man’s black coat sleeve—just the bit of it between the shoulder and the elbow, foreshortened. And then she didn’t wait to see any more. She ran to the cupboard door and opened it, and stepped inside and shut it after her, and then with desperate fumbling fingers she began to feel for the knob which would be somewhere in the back panel if the cupboard was like the one on the floor below. It might be a real cupboard, and then she would be lost. This wasn’t reason; it was terrified conviction. If it was a real cupboard, why was it empty?
Her fingers found the knob, and her heart gave another jump, but this time it was a jump of joy. But the knob wouldn’t slide. It wouldn’t slide. The knob downstairs slid sideways, and the glass of the mirror went into the wall. This knob wouldn’t move. It wouldn’t move at all.
And then all at once it moved a little. It didn’t slide, but it moved. It turned in her clutching fingers as a door-handle turns. That was it, it was a handle with a catch like the handle of an ordinary door. She turned it as far as it would go, and the panel at the back of the cupboard came swinging in. There was only just room for it. She had to squeeze against the side of the cupboard to let it pass her. And there wasn’t any light. There was an open door in front of her, but there wasn’t any light.
She felt with her foot and went forward, groping for the door and pulling it to behind her. It shut with the faintest little click, and there she was. Yes, but that was the trouble—where was she? She ought to be in Miss Rowland’s bedroom, but she was in something like another cupboard, dark, and close, and stuffy. That bewildered sense of not knowing where she was swept over her like a cloud racing before the wind. It was hardly there before it was gone again. She was in Miss Rowland’s bedroom, but she was inside the big dark wardrobe which faced the door. The wardrobe and the cupboard in the next-door house had only one back between them, and this back had hinges and opened like a door. She was inside Miss Rowland’s wardrobe, and these soft stuffy things which smothered her were Miss Rowland’s dresses.
What on earth was she going to do next? If Miss Rowland was asleep and she could creep out very, very quietly … If … Something in the back of her mind said with dreadful distinctness, “There’s someone on the landing behind you. Perhaps they’re coming through.”
Just half way through those dreadfully distinct words Kay had opened the wardrobe door. She only opened it an inch, and it encouraged her very much to find that her hand was steady. If Miss Rowland was asleep, she could get out of the room and no one would know. She put her eye to the crack and looked out.
Miss Rowland’s room was just like the drawing-room, and the wardrobe occupied exactly the same position as the mirror did in the room below. There were two doors, one of them in the front part of the room and the other immediately facing Kay as she looked through the crack. The bed stood between this second door and the back window. The head was away from Kay and the foot towards her. There was a light Japanese screen between the bed and the door.
Kay had forgotten the screen. She had only once been inside the room because Nurse Long kept it in order, and she had forgotten the screen. It almost hid the bed, and she couldn’t tell whether Miss Rowland was asleep or not. All that she could see was the brass foot-rail and a wedge-shaped piece of Miss Rowland’s crimson eiderdown. She could see about two feet of this on the far side of the bed, but on the near side it narrowed to a point and the screen interrupted her view. It was a red screen with golden storks and bullrushes. There was a crimson carpet on the floor, and crimson curtains were drawn quite across the windows in the front of the house and partly across the window by the bed, so that t
he room was not really light, but full of shadows and of an odd warm twilight.
Kay saw all this as one picture. She didn’t think about it or disentangle the details. It was just there in her mind as a picture, and there was nothing in the picture to tell her whether Miss Rowland was asleep or awake. The drawn curtains suggested that she was trying to sleep—but even Kay didn’t always go to sleep when she wanted to.
She got as far as that, and turned giddy with fright. Behind her, but not so very far behind her, a footfall sounded upon wood. She knew exactly what that meant. It meant that someone had just opened the cupboard door on the bedroom landing of the next-door house and, having opened it, had stepped inside. And that could only mean one dreadful, terrifying thing—the man she had seen on the stairs was coming through the wall after her. Miss Rowland, either asleep or awake, was nothing to this.
Kay did not hesitate at all. The instant she heard the sound she was out of the wardrobe and running for the door. She had enough presence of mind to shut the wardrobe door behind her. She gave it a back-handed push as she jumped out. She had only to run a few steps and she would be safe. She would be safe if she could get out of the room without being seen.
And then she was at the door, and the door wouldn’t open. It wouldn’t open. Kay had a sick moment of terror. The door was locked, and the key wasn’t there. She threw a desperate glance over her shoulder and saw the closed wardrobe in all its Victorian respectability. But as she looked, she saw something else. The screen didn’t meet the wall by a foot, and what she saw was the bed head, and the crimson eiderdown drawn neatly up to meet the untumbled pillows. And the bed was empty.
This too was a picture. At the moment it meant nothing, because her mind had stopped working. She was dominated by the primitive instinct of the hunted. Escape—she must escape before the wardrobe door opened.
She ran into the front part of the room and round to the other door. It was locked, but the key was in the lock. She heard a sound behind her. She turned the key and opened the door, and ran as Flossie Palmer had run, taking the stairs at a flying break-neck speed and never stopping until she was safe in the basement. She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and felt the kitchen heave and rock.
Mrs Green was standing over the range with her back to her, stirring something in a saucepan. Her hand went round and round, and the kitchen went round and round, and Kay’s thoughts went round and round.…
Presently the kitchen stopped. Mrs Green went on stirring. And Kay tried to order her thoughts. As far as she could make out, Mrs Green was telling her all about a proposal she had once had from a fishmonger in a very good way of business—“And only two things against it, and maybe I was a fool not to know which side my bread was buttered, but if there’s a thing I can’t abide it’s raw fish, and thank goodness they’re not much struck on fish here, though cooking a nice bit of sole now and again is one thing, and living with marble slabs and blocks of ice and cold dead fish all around is another and what I didn’t feel as I could put up with, let alone that I ’ated the man with all ’atred.”
It seemed quite a good reason for not having married him. Kay made the sort of vague acquiescent sound which you make when you can’t think of anything to say. She was too busy with those pictures in her mind to have anything to say to Mrs Green.
The bed was empty.
As she turned her head to look at the wardrobe, she had seen round the screen, and the bed was empty. It wasn’t only the bed that was empty. The room was empty too. Miss Rowland wasn’t there. She wasn’t in her bed, and she wasn’t anywhere else. Kay had seen the whole room as she ran to the other door, and Miss Rowland wasn’t there.
These were her first conscious thoughts about the pictures in her mind. There had been two pictures, a picture of Miss Rowland’s room as she had seen it from the wardrobe, and a picture of Miss Rowland’s room as she had seen it from the door. In this second picture the bed was empty and the room was empty. But now the two pictures slid together in her mind and became one picture, so that when she looked at it she could see the whole room at once. She could see the bed with the eiderdown drawn up to meet the unruffled pillows. She could see a chair with a chintz cover and crimson cushions, and the washstand, and a little table with books on it, and in the front part of the room an old-fashioned couch, and a desk, and the drawn curtains with the light coming through them in a red glow. She could see a dozen details that she hadn’t consciously seen at the time. The picture showed her the room and all its furnishings. But it didn’t show her Miss Rowland, because Miss Rowland wasn’t there.
CHAPTER XXIX
“And my advice to you,” said Mrs Green, “or to any other young girl for the matter of that, is don’t you be too picksome, or you may find you’ve got left. Not but what there’s worse things than living single. If it’s for the name of the thing, you can clap on a Mrs as soon as not and keep yourself to yourself and not have the clutter and upsettingness of a man about the place, which if he doesn’t drink you’re lucky, and if he does your life is ’ell. So when I turned forty-five I called myself Mrs Green and ’ad done with it, and nobody’s business but my own that I could see. It wasn’t only the forty-five, you know, but when you come to fifteen stone and over, Mrs do seem more suitable like, as you may say.”
Kay made that vague sound again. Mrs Green’s soft throaty voice was like running water. It made a background for her thoughts. It went on and on, and it made her feel safe enough to think about the things that she had got to think about.
The picture in her mind was fading. She couldn’t see the details any more. And with this fading there came a reaction, and the whole experience took on a dream-like quality. It was a most horrid dream, but she was waking up. It couldn’t really have happened. She hadn’t really gone through the drawing-room mirror like Alice through the Looking-glass and come back by way of Miss Rowland’s wardrobe. Put like that, it was the sort of thing you couldn’t possibly believe. But it had happened.… It couldn’t have happened. And if it had happened, she had frightened herself for nothing. If someone had walked upstairs in No. 18, that wasn’t anything to be frightened about. People could walk upstairs in their own house, couldn’t they? And as for Miss Rowland not being in her room, that was just nonsense. The curtains were drawn and the room was nearly dark.
All at once Kay over-reached herself. The picture she was calling up was more terrifying than the picture she was trying to destroy. It was less frightening to think that the room was empty than to believe that Miss Rowland had been there all the time watching her from the red shadows.
Mrs Green turned round from the fire.
“Aren’t you doing no work this morning, Kay?” she inquired. “Somebody left you a fortune or something? You can’t have finished upstairs in this short time you can’t. And Nurse called down the stairs afore she went out, wanting to know where you was, so I said you’d just stepped out into the yard, and she says ‘All right.’ What you been up to?”
Kay’s cheeks burned.
“Nothing, Mrs Green.”
“Then suppose you do get up to something and get on with your work, my girl!” said Mrs Green.
Kay went out of the kitchen and stood on the steps leading up from the basement. It was no good having cold feet and wobbly knees. She had got to finish her work. She had got to finish dusting the drawing-room, or at the very least she must fetch away her dust-pan and brush. If she didn’t it was as good as a confession that she had seen what she hadn’t been meant to see, and that—yes that—would be dangerous. She was sure that she had got out of Miss Rowland’s room without being seen. She told herself very firmly about this. But she had had to unlock the bedroom door and leave it open. They couldn’t be sure about the door being locked. They might have forgotten to lock it. They hadn’t seen her. They couldn’t have seen her. They—who were They? … She mustn’t think about that. It was much too frightening. She must just go on as if nothing had happened, and in less than three hours Miles wo
uld come and call for her, and she would let him take her away. She wasn’t going to be proud about it any more. They would tell Nurse Long that she was going to leave at once, and Miles would take her away.
She went upstairs to the drawing-room feeling a good deal fortified. She wasn’t going into the back part of the room where the mirror was except to pick up her cleaning things and her dust-pan and brush. After that she would finish dusting, but with one eye on the mirror, so that if the glass began to move, she could run helter-skelter downstairs to Mrs Green.
She finished her dusting, and did a little more polishing too: The glass behaved as a looking-glass should. It reflected what was there for it to reflect, and seemed to be as incapable of movement as the solid wall.
When she had finished the drawing-room she went downstairs and did the dining-room. Every single minute was bringing Miles nearer, and as soon as he came she would ask him to take her away.
Nurse Long came back at one o’clock. She was in her nurse’s dress—Kay had never seen her without it—and she came and stood at the dining-room door and looked coldly in.
“You are going out this afternoon,” she said.
“I’m going away,” said Kay to herself, but she hadn’t the courage to say it out loud. She simply must wait for Miles, and Miles would be here in an hour and a half. So she coloured a little and didn’t speak.
Nurse Long didn’t seem to expect her to say anything, for she went straight on.
“I met Mr Harris when I was out. He tells me he is very kindly taking you out this afternoon. He seems to have known your aunt rather well. And by the way, he asked me to tell you that he would call for you at two o’clock, so you’d better hurry up and get Miss Rowland’s tray.”
Kay’s colour fairly flamed.
“I’m not going out with Mr Harris!” she said.
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