She stared at me with foolish, puzzled, frightened eyes, in which, to my utter disgust a cunning light of feminine submission began to dawn. Then she nodded, seeming at last to comprehend, and I released her wrist. She raised her hand, let it fall downward along my arm, turned and ran out of the room. And at that moment, with the suddenness of eternity, a dog screamed beneath the window of the room and all hell broke loose among the rest of the savage pack. Gray had told me that she had kenneled them during the storm. Now they were abroad again.
I challenge any man, however steady and strong his nerves, to hear outside the house in which he is, at dead of night, the brutal noise of fighting or coursing dogs or wolves and not experience a shudder and a thrill of terror at the sound. It is not that we are not accustomed to such a noise. On the contrary, we are so well accustomed to it—we know it so very deep within us—that the emotion cannot be repressed. Thousands of generations of our ancestors heard it nightly, cowering the closer to their fires and huddling the farther into their sheltering caverns. Fear of the wolf is bred into the very fibres of our being. We have not been long enough away from him to have outgrown the terror of his voice. And those dogs of Ormesby, hunting in pack, were scarcely to be distinguished from wolves.
Suddenly the man Hobbs stood in the doorway, in his trousers and with his night-shirt tucked loosely and hastily into them. He said nothing, but stood staring at the unconscious woman. Then he shifted his narrow eyes and met mine for a moment. Not a muscle moved in his face.
“Do something!” I ordered. “Call a doctor. Fetch water and bandages. She’s been hurt.”
“Yes!”
He turned and vanished beyond the frame of the door. For all the astonishment betrayed by his manner and tone, this sort of thing might have happened many times at Ormesby during the course of his service there. The noise of the dogs outside came now from a point behind the house and farther away from it. I speculated on whether one of their number had been killed and torn to pieces by the others, with the pack now snarling and fighting over the bloody remnants of his carcass. A groan, louder than the rest, drew my attention back to the sufferer on that wretched bed. I knelt beside her, straightening her arms and smoothing the long hair from her pallid face. Presently she opened her eyes, staring at me with no sign of recognition in them, but also without sign of fear. She moved her jaw to speak. This hurt her, evidently, for she made a quick grimace and clutched involuntarily at her throat. I slipped one hand beneath her head, striving with the other to form a pillow of the tumbled blankets. And then she spoke.
“Gray’s . . .” she began, apparently unable to proceed at once.
I soothed her. Until some of the others came with bandages and ointment, I did not know what I ought to do. I could have lifted her and carried her to her own bed, but since she was not suffering great pain, I wanted witnesses to my actions. Too many unexplained things had happened, and continued to happen, in that house.
“She’s not here,” I said. “Don’t be afraid. We won’t let her hurt you again.”
Mumbling such comforts, I supported the woman’s head and stroked her brows, thinking that she, too, must have been abroad that night, else Hobbs could have saved her from this.
Hobbs came back, almost before I supposed he had had time to gather the things he brought. Quietly and efficiently he knelt beside me, then brushed me unceremoniously aside as he prepared to bathe the torn throat and give it a first-aid treatment. He had bottles of disinfectant, some of which he poured on cotton and swabbed with this the deeper gashes. Apparently my surmise had been correct: none of the wounds was of a serious nature, for the bleeding had already ceased of itself. Then he straightened.
“Help me carry her to our room,” he ordered. “We’ll bathe her throat again and dress it when she’s out of this.”
Obediently I took hold of her by the shoulders, while Hobbs lifted the feet. He nodded toward the door and I backed out of it and started along the hallway toward the front of the house.
“Not that way!” he barked.
I had not liked Hobbs’s face; his expression of crafty secretiveness and his nasal twang had alike made me distrust the fellow. But if a man must be a servant, then give me that servant who can, upon occasion, exercise the authority of a man who knows what ought to be done and how to do it. I began thinking that Hobbs might prove to be the Admirable Crichton of the difficult situation that was enfolding all of us.
“Where’s your room?” I asked.
“Quite at the back—over the kitchen.”
“Where is Miss Barbara’s room?”
“Just opposite your own.”
“Why, then, did Ormes tell me it lay toward the rear of the house?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Hobbs, drily.
“Who uses the room where I found your wife?”
“No one. It’s—it’s unoccupied.”
He was lying, and I knew it. Someone occupied the room we had quitted. The filthy pallet in the corner was used. It came to me that it was used by Gray during her frenzies. If Ormes had wanted me to keep away from that room, how could he have supposed that I should remain long in ignorance of his sister’s madness? I concluded that he had been ashamed to speak of it, leaving me to learn for myself such secrets as I might.
But we had come to Hobbs’s door and flung it open. I saw that the room we were entering was worthy of civilized occupancy. It was unquestionably a servant’s room, however, for the menial touch was everywhere. The deep bed under a window had been slept in that very night. We laid the patient upon it and I turned away toward another window, listening to the still-fighting dogs, though the noise was fainter now and came from a point well up the mountain side to the north. Hobbs again busied himself with the woman’s hurts, while I waited by the window, momentarily expecting him to ask or order me to help him in some particular. At last I heard someone approaching along the corridor.
It was Agnes Ormes. She had accoutred herself in a nurse’s white apron and cap, and she now affected an air of quiet importance that did not blind me to her utter lack of any knowledge of what to do. She came into the room and moved about it, picking up articles and laying them in different places, making a pretense of bustle while accomplishing nothing. I was thoroughly disgusted. She went to the bed and bent over the sufferer, and I heard her mutter something like “down in a minute” to Hobbs.
“I’m going to call a doctor,” I announced. “Can you give me a name and telephone number?”
“You’d better call Doctor Barnes,” Agnes said, first looking at me with hostility in her eyes, then allowing her face to relax in such a smile as was a recurrence of her previous attitude of submission. “Tiltown 77.”
I nodded and left the room. It seemed to me that I must call Ormes himself on the telephone as soon as I had reason to think he might have reached his office. I did not know where he lived in town, and I did not want to ask that information of his wife. It was not that I thought his help necessary for Alice Hobbs, but that action must be immediately taken with regard to Gray. Intermittent though her fits of insanity might be, it seemed to me that they were becoming far too dangerous to permit of her being left at large. And I could scarcely order her into custody of the police or other authorities without her brother’s consent. I would as soon have depended upon a child’s judgment as upon that of Agnes Ormes.
It was nearly four o’clock. Dawn was in the eastern sky, though the house itself, hidden behind the surrounding hills, lay yet in a pool of deep darkness. The moon had set. I went to the telephone in the hall downstairs and called Doctor Barnes, telling him that Mrs. Hobbs had been bitten by one of the dogs. He responded sleepily, mumbled something about this being the second time that someone at Ormesby had been mauled by one of the brutes, and said he would drive up as soon as possible. Then I went into the dining room and poured myself
a stiff drink of whiskey.
I was turning over in mind the possibility that it might already be too late to call Ormond Ormes for advice in the matter of his sister’s confinement. She had not been seen about the house since I had encountered her, naked and bloodstained, in the library. What if she had rushed again out into the storm, had released the pack, and had been dragged down? It seemed to me that I must determine this matter before calling my employer.
I was still in the dining-room when Hobbs entered. Seeing me, he made as if to pass through and into the kitchen. But I had guessed his purpose there. His nerves were probably as much in need of sedatives as mine were.
“Come here, Hobbs,” I said to him. “Take a drink, man. You need it, by the look of you.”
He poured a drink, his hand shaking slightly, though he controlled his facial muscles as well as he had been able to control them in the room upstairs.
“How’s your wife?”
“Better, sir, I hope. She—she can’t stand the sight of suffering, sir.”
“The sight of it? But it’s she who——”
“I mean, sir, the sight of—of illness in others.”
Suddenly I understood that he referred to Gray’s malady.
“Then she ought not to live in such a house as this,” I said, sharply. “But why did she leave your room? To help . . . well, to help anyone?”
“She says she thought she heard Miss Barbara call. I was asleep, sir.”
“Barbara, eh? I wonder . . . But never mind now. I’m going to telephone Mr. Ormes, Hobbs, as soon as it’s possible. Meanwhile there’s a woman who may be inside this house, but I’ve reason to think she may be outside. You heard the dogs. You helped to pen them, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“Well, what do you think?”
“I’m afraid, sir, you may be right.”
His answer made no sense, strictly speaking, yet I understood him.
“Take another drink,” I directed, “and give me one.”
He did so. Not looking at me, he drank. I swallowed my portion, then set the glass down on the sideboard. At once he removed it, snatching up a napkin to wipe from the polished board such drops of liquor as might have been clinging to the bottom of the glass. It was apparent that he had laid aside his authority and resumed his servant’s coat. But I had somehow gained a feeling that, for all his evil squint, I could trust Hobbs rather further than many a man can be trusted; and I did not want him to be too servile. It would render difficult such questions as I meant later to put to him and such advice as I might wish to ask.
“Do you suppose, Hobbs,” I said, trying to catch his eyes, “that the . . . damned dogs out there were howling and fighting over . . . over anything . . . human?”
“I don’t know, sir,” he replied, after staring at me for a second. “I—I hope they weren’t, God knows!”
“Then I’ll go out and find out about it,” said I. “But those brutes will tear me to pieces if they can. Have you a good whip and a gun?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll fetch them to you, sir. You’ll need a torch, too.”
He went swiftly out of the room.
VIII
Before going outside, however, I intended retracing my way through the secret passages I had discovered, convinced that I ought to explore farther that one which ran back of the great bookcases in the library. It had appeared to end against the stone wall forming part of the chimney, but I had already discovered that these apparent endings resulted, after a turn at right angles, in a continuation of the mysterious way. I did not think the builder of it had wanted merely to construct a means of going unobserved from the library to the bedroom which now chanced to be occupied by myself.
Hobbs, the efficient one, returned to me after a minute or two. He carried a flashlight, a revolver of thirty-two calibre, and a dog whip. I made sure that the revolver was fully loaded.
“I’ve telephoned for Doctor Barnes,” I told him. “Perhaps you’d better complete your dressing. I don’t think there’ll be any sleep for anyone in this house the rest of the night. Also, I’ve told the doctor that your wife was hurt by one of the dogs. Maybe you’d better post her, so she’ll be able to confirm that story.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll go to her at once, sir.”
“Now I’m going out. If you hear firing, you’d better look around for me. Those dogs may get me treed, and there are only six bullets in this thing. I’m sure to waste five of ’em. I’m not a dead shot.”
“Yes, sir. Very well, sir.”
I left the fellow standing there. He had seemed to be human enough while working with me over the wounded woman upstairs. Later, when drinking with me to steady our nerves, he had shown an ability to assume equality in rank. Now he had relapsed into the automaton, seeing nothing and everything, hearing naught save all matters and things he might later be called upon to remember, and speaking nothing not set down in the book from which he had learned his servant’s etiquette.
I went back to my own room, since I did not possess the secret of opening the panel from the library side. Passing Agnes’s door, I saw that it was fast closed. I heard someone moving within the room, concluding that Agnes was probably trying, in her futile way, to find accessories to her nurse’s uniform. She was the kind to suppose that nothing could be done without the proper dress. Then I heard voices in the room farther back, that opposite my own, from which I judged that Barbara was awake and being put in possession of the events of the night, probably by Gray. I could do nothing to help, so I did not disturb them. Doctor Barnes ought to be arriving very shortly. Through the windows of my own room I saw that the mountain tops were burning with liquid gold.
It was but the work of a minute or two to follow the passages to the point where the panel gave into the library. I resolutely endeavored to keep my eyes from those of the portrait, as I passed it, but I was obliged to glance into them, nevertheless; and in the beam of my torch I fancied they were not less malevolent than when I had first discovered them following me about the room. But I tore my gaze away and descended the winding stairs. I came to the chimney and, as I had supposed would be the case, found there a turn to the right. Moreover, there were more iron steps before me, and I say that they wound about the great chimney and led downward into the earth. Was the mad woman I sought crouching somewhere below me?
Holding the flashlight in my left hand and the whip ready in my right, I descended the flight, which wound to my right as I went. When I had counted twenty-one steps, I had come to a point directly under the topmost tread. But the stairs continued downward around the chimney. I waited, listening, but heard nothing. Cautiously I advanced my foot and began this further descent.
The foundations of the big chimney must have been sunk very deep into the detritus on which this house was built, or so I was thinking at the moment. I had descended a total of thirty-eight steps. There were no more. I found myself in a little space of perhaps five feet by ten, with a cement ceiling about five feet from the floor. The room, or area, had been dug out of the clay or gravel composing the surrounding earth, and it had been walled on all sides with cut granite. And into the rounded wall of masonry which made up the foundation of the chimney, I saw that through the angle formed by the ceiling and one of the walls of this room plunged a great pipe of wrought iron, at least two feet in diameter, cutting diagonally across and into the masonry of the well. That well might have been a huge cistern. I reasoned that it must once have been a cistern, constructed for the retention of rain water. The iron pipe must have been the conduit which drained water from the roofs into the well. Later, with the erection of the chimney above it, consequent upon construction of the library, use of the cistern had been discontinued—probably—and its walls utilized for the chimney’s foundations. It subsequently developed that my surmise was a good one. But why had the staircase been twi
sted about the well? What was the purpose of this little room at the bottom? Why should expensive iron steps have been installed to let members of the household reach so insignificant a room as I now stood in? I threw the light of my torch over all surfaces without discovering anything to serve me as a clew for the answering of those questions. Yet I was convinced that the answer had a very definite bearing on more than one of the mysterious happenings in the house above.
It was plain that the woman I sought was not here. I must go outside to find her, after all.
But she had been here!
Just as I was about to begin my ascent of the stairs, I saw on the wall to my left, that is, on a wall of the well, a mark which caused me to train the beam of my flashlight directly upon it. It stood at a height of about five feet from the ground. It was a mere smudge on the gray stone. Perhaps, after all, it was nothing.
But when I had examined it with more care, I made out that it was the mark of a human mouth. And that mouth had been wet with blood when the lips had been crushed against this wall!
All the more, now, I wanted to find Gray Ormes. In the first place, the scream I had heard just before the dogs raised their hellish clamor outside had come to my ears as the cry of a beast in pain; but it might very well have sprung in that bestial manner from some tortured human throat. If it had, then I did not suppose that the insane creature I hunted was still a living being. It might very well have been her scream. Yet, on the other hand, if it had been a beast’s cry, she must have set the ferocious dogs on to the attack of one of their own number, or of some other helpless animal. Even (it was possible) to the dragging down of another human being. In any event, I told myself, the woman was crazy and at large; and she must be found and confined before she could do more evil.
Fingers of Fear Page 9
