bare as the palm of my hand, mark you – something chuckled!’
Jim Rutland grinned. ‘You bet it did!’
Elizabeth wheeled on him, but Evan Lambert cut in quickly. ‘Tell me, Elizabeth – was there any special reason why you should accompany Sally down to that room?’
‘Yes, I had to shoot the bolts on the door.’
‘But,’ persisted Lambert, ‘if the object was to scare us, why bolt the door at all? That wasn’t necessary.’
Jeffery nodded. ‘Good point Lambert.’ He turned to his wife. ‘Is your face red?’
‘Should it be?’ asked Elizabeth acidly.
‘Magenta,’ Jeffery assured her. ‘Don’t you see, darling? Sally’s real intention was not to scare us, but you! She concocted the other story just to get you down there.’ He blew a smoke ring. ‘No wonder she chuckled!’
‘But -,’ then Mrs Blackburn stopped. Her pretty face was such a study in conflicting emotions that Wilkins, watching her, spoke for the second time, spoke carefully, precisely, with a cold authority that stripped the discussion of all nonsense, reducing it to blueprint saneness.
‘All this doesn’t explain one very essential point.’ His eyes, piercing blue, close set, moved from one face to another. ‘Where, when Mrs Blackburn returned, was the lady hidden?’
Jeffery said ‘It’s possible, of course, that my wife had such a shock she didn’t trouble to look very closely.’
‘Perhaps,’ Wilkins smiled. ‘Yet Mrs Blackburn strikes me as being an extremely thorough young woman. Out of fairness to her, I suggest we four men should go down and search the room for ourselves.’
He paused. Elizabeth beamed on him. Jim Rutland shrugged. ‘We’re merely playing into Sally’s hands by keeping the joke going like this,’ he pointed out.
But Evan Lambert made the decision for them all. ‘Does that matter?’ he asked. ‘You were going to show us this room, anyway.’
Five minutes later, the little party met at the head of the stone steps. Rutland had a lighted candle, Elizabeth clung to her torch. They started downward. Where the stairs began to widen into the passage, Jeffery stopped and gestured to a slit-like aperture in the wall.
‘What’s this?’
Rutland explained it was a passage leading out to the summer-house in the garden. As they walked forward, his eye lighted on the stone door, still ajar. He turned to Elizabeth.
‘Didn’t you bolt that door after you?’
The girl shook her head. ‘My one thought was to get back to sanity.’
‘Then,’ announced Rutland, ‘we’re wasting our time searching for Sally in that room. The moment your back was turned, she was out of that room and into the summerhouse passage. I’ll wager we’ll find her back in the library, helpless with mirth over all this fuss.’
‘Let’s see inside the room,’ said Jeffery.
But even as their host had warned, they might have saved themselves the trouble. In the flickering light, the room looked just as bare and just as sinister. Lambert, his professional imagination piqued, moved around giving perfunctory taps on the walls, but their solidness precluded any suggestion of secret passages. Jeffery, who had taken the torch, was poking the light into shadowed corners, achieving nothing more than the startled rout of generations of spiders. Wilkins stood watching the other men, his face frowning and mouth petulant, as though, in his opinion at least, this absurd business had gone on long enough.
Mrs Blackburn suddenly gave an exclamation of disgust and irritation.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Come on – let’s get out of this.’
She made a movement towards the door and as if by mutual consent, all activity within that room stopped. They filed through, one after the other. Without a world, Rutland pushed home the stone door and thrust the bolts into place.
They began to walk towards the steps when:
‘Where’s Wilkins?’
It was Jeffery, bringing up the rear of the party, who spoke. The others – Elizabeth, Lambert, Rutland – halted and looked around in surprise.
The stifled scream and the muffled pounding came almost simultaneously. ‘Oh, my stars,’ cried Rutland. ‘I’ve locked the poor blighter inside!’ And in a body, they leapt for the door.
To Elizabeth, tired, slightly hazy from the brandy, shaken by her previous experience, what happened next was vague but terrifying like a nightmare which keeps recurring even after dawn. She remembered the bolts yielding under Rutland ’s scrabbling fingers, the door being heaved back violently, Lambert shouting out Wilkin’s name. Jeffery taking a half-step forward, flashing his torch into the darkness – and then, clearly, more vividly than anything, the grotesque thunder-struck, stupefied expressions on the faces of the three men.
And standing there in that silent corridor, Mrs Blackburn knew it had happened again; that something had occurred that was against all natural, accepted laws; that within half an hour, a woman and a man, solid, matter- of-fact figures of flesh, bone and blood, had stepped into the haunted room at Kettering Old House and had disappeared – vanished – almost in the twinkling of an eye.
‘Now are you satisfied?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘No,’ replied Mr Blackburn, ‘far from satisfied.’
‘I should say not,’ grunted his host. Jim Rutland’s face was pale; on his upper lip were tiny beads of perspiration and Jeffery realised that of them all, this man seemed the most scared. Suddenly, as though conscious of Blackburn’s eyes on him, Rutland turned toward the fireplace and made a little helpless gesture. ‘What happens now? What should we do?’
‘We must,’ said Florence Rountree firmly, ‘remain very calm.’ A thin wisp of grey hair streaked across her forehead and she pushed it back, only to have it fall again. ‘We must remain perfectly tranquil in mind. Thoughts are things – tangible things.’ And she fixed her pale eyes on Elizabeth as if daring her to debate the point.
Half an hour had passed since the disappearance of John Wilkins and the return of the slightly dazed party to the reception room. But not before both Jeffery and Lambert had insisted on a thorough examination of that exasperating chamber. Each man, with the help of Rutland, had taken a section of the wall and sounded it with the thoroughness bred of savage bewilderment. This was no haphazard examination as before; now no single foot of wall escaped their scrutiny.
With absolutely no result!
Elizabeth rose abruptly. ‘I’m going to ‘phone the police.’
But Jeffery put out a restraining hand.
‘What are you going to tell them?’ he asked.
‘That two people in this house walked into a certain room and faded like a dream?’
‘At least they’d do something.’
‘Something is right.’ It was Evan Lambert. ‘They’d probably cart us all off to the asylum!’
‘That,’ said Elizabeth firmly, ‘would be a rest-cure compared to what’s been happening here.’ Evading Jeffery’s hand, she crossed to the hall and they heard the flicking of the pages of a telephone book. Then came the whirr of a number being dialled.
Florence Rountree broke the silence. ‘All this,’ she announced, ‘would be quite unnecessary if you’d only listen to me.’
‘I know,’ snapped Rutland, ‘those people didn’t really disappear. We just imagined it!’
Miss Rountree’s small mouth set. ‘There is no occasion to be rude, James -’
From where the lady sat, she could not perceive the mocking curve of Lambert’s mouth as he said ‘You mean. Miss Rountree, that our minds, conditioned by the legend of the room, were already expecting it to be empty?’
She beamed on him, nodding triumphantly. ‘Exactly, Mr Lambert. You saw not with the eye, but with the brain.’
‘Oh, fiddle-faddle,’ snapped Rutland.
‘James!’ squeaked Miss Rountree.
There was tension in the air and nerves were stretched to breakingpoint. All the material for a first-class row was mounting. Then Lambert, with an almost sadistic satisfaction, chuckled in his corner.
‘Then, madam, according to your reasoning, Mrs Rutland and Wilkins are still down in that room, playing handy-pandies! Just wait until the local police hear that!’
