by James Wade
The second gallery was more interesting: armor and medieval armaments, most impressive under that dull brazen light and against that wine-dark wallpaper and hangings. I kept walking, but my attention had been tweaked.
The third room, a long and narrow one, held most of the Remington cowboy scenes, and a few sculptural casts of the Dying Gladiator school. For some reason, this was the darkest gallery in the whole place—you could hardly see to keep your footing; but the squeaky floor gave you a sort of sonar sense of the walls and furnishings, as if you were a bat or a dolphin or a blind man.
After that came the framed posters from World War I (“Uncle Sam Wants YOU!”) and the 19th century stage placards, well lit by individual lamps attached to their frames, though some of the bulbs had burned out. Next was a big, drafty central rotunda set about tastefully with cannon from Cortez’ conquests and a silver gilt grand piano, decorated with Fragonard cupids, which Liszt once played, or made a girl on top of, or something.
All this time no sight of a human being, nor any sound except the creaking floorboards under my feet. I was beginning to wonder whether the museum staff only came out of the woodwork after sunset.
But when I had made my way up a sagging ebon staircase to the second floor, and poked my nose into a narrow, boxlike hallway with small, bleary windows on both sides (which I figured must be the covered drawbridge to the donjon keep I’d glimpsed from outside), I did finally hear some tentative echoes of presumably human activity. What kind of activity it was hard to say, though.
First of all, it seemed a sort of distant, echoing mumble, like a giant groaning in his sleep. Granted the peculiar acoustics here, I could put this down to someone talking to himself—not hard to imagine, if he worked in this place. Next, from ahead, I caught further creaking, coming from the annex, that was analogous to the racket I had been stirring up myself all along from those Nightingale Floors. The sound advanced and I was almost startled when the thoroughly prosaic figure responsible hove into view at the end of the corridor—startled either because he was so prosaic, or because it didn’t seem right to meet any living, corporeal being in these surroundings; I couldn’t figure out which.
This old fellow was staff, all right: his casual shuffle and at-home attitude proclaimed it, even if he hadn’t been wearing a shiny blue uniform and cap that looked as if they’d been salvaged from some home for retired streetcar motormen.
“I saw the sign outside,” I said to the old man as he approached, without preliminaries, and rather to my own surprise. “Do you still have that night watchman job open?”
He looked me over carefully, eyes sharply assessing in that faded, wrinkled mask of age; then motioned me silendy to follow him back along the corridor to the keep and into the dilapidated, unutterably cluttered, smelly office from which, I learned, he operated as Day Custodian.
That was how I went to work for the Ehlers Museum.
III
My elderly friend, whose name was Mr. Worthington, himself comprised all die day staff there was, just as I constituted the entire night staff. A pair of cleaning ladies came in three days a week to wage an unusccessful war against dust and mildew, and a furnace man shared the night watch in winter; that was all. There was no longer a curator in residence, and the board of directors (all busy elderly men with little time to spend on the museum) were already seeking new homes for the collections, anticipating the rumored demolition of the neighborhood.
In effect, the place was almost closed now, though an occasional serious specialist or twittery ladies’ club group came through; like as not rubbing shoulders with snotnosed slum school kids on an outing, or some derelict drunk come in to get out of the cold, or heat.
Worthnigton told me all this, and also the salary for the night job, which wasn’t high because they had established the custom of hiring university students. I made a rapid mental calculation and determined that this amount would feed me, while my quarterly annuity payments went mostly to the monkey. So I told Worthington yes. He said something about references and bonding, but somehow we never actually got around to that.
I was relieved to learn that, since the public was not admitted during the twelve hours I was on duty, I would not be expected to wear one of the rusty uniforms.
I asked Worthington about the founder, but the old man hadn’t been on the staff long enough to remember Frederick Ehlers in person, who was rumored to be quite an eccentric. The Ehlers money had come from manipulation of stocks and bonds before the turn of the century, and most of his later years were spent traveling to build up the collections, which had become his only interest in life.
Now, the rest of my story is where the plausibility gap, as they say nowadays, comes in. I’ve already told you I was a junkie in those days, so you can assume if you please that whatever I say happened from then on was simply hallucination. And I can’t claim with any assurance or proof that you’re not right.
Against that, put the fact that my habit was a very moderate one, and I was a gingerly, cautious, unconvinced sort of dope-taker. I shot just enough of the stuff to keep cheerful, if you know what I mean: dope picked me up, made the world look implausibly bright and optimistic; but not enough to give me any visions or ecstatic trances, which I wasn’t looking for anyway. I was always a reality man, strange as that may sound coming from me. Only once in a while reality got a bit too abrasive, and the need arose to lubricate the outer surfaces in contact with my personality, by means of a little of that soothing white powder. Dope was my escape, like TV or booze or women serve with others.
The moderation of my habit enabled me to kick it cold turkey on my own after I left the museum job. But that’s another story.
Very well, then: before I started this night watchman job (and for that matter afterwards) I had never had any experiences with far-out fancies or waking nightmares or sensoiy aberrations. All during the time I worked there (it wasn’t long) I did have such experiences. Either that, or the things really happened that I thought were happening.
You be the judge.
IV
It started my very first night on the job. I checked in at 6 p.m., by which time Worthington had had an hour since closing time to batten down the hatches and lock up. He was to turn the keys over to me, and I would lock the big, ornate door, as broad as a raft, behind him. From that time I was on my own until he came back at 6 a.m. I could make the rounds when, as and if I saw fit; or simply doze, read, or cut out paper dolls.
I had asked old Worthington about the incidence of trouble at night, and he answered that there wasn’t much.
I mentioned the j.d. gangs that could be expected in such a neighborhood, but he insisted there was hardly I any difficulty with kids, except sometimes around Hallowe’en, when the smaller ones might dare each other to try to break in through the windows on the lower floors. That wouldn’t be for a while yet.
Anyway, I was all fitted out with a .45, a night stick, and a powerful flash, and the precinct police station was only a block or so away. Accordingly, I anticipated a boring stint, so started from the first shooting my daily ration of junk just before coming on duty, to keep my thinking positive. It crossed my mind once or twice that this was a pretty spooky place to hang out in overnight, but I was a rationalist then, with no discernible superstitions, and thus didn’t dwell on the idea.
The first evening when I came on, feeling no pain, it was already almost dark. Worthington left me with a few casual words of admonition, and I and my monkey were alone in the shadowy museum.
The lights in the entry hall were always kept on, plus the ones in the second fioor office across the way in the keep; and of course there were night lights at set intervals, though they didn’t do much to relieve the gloom. Especially in that badly-lit gallery of Wild West art you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and I always had to use the flash.
The first time I made the rounds took me more than an hour, since I stopped to look over any exhibits that attracted my attenti
on. As I passed the cases of stuffed alligators, Etruscan jewelry, and Civil War battle flags, I found myself wondering what sort of guy Frederick Ehlers could have been to devote so much of his time and fortune to such random purchases. Maybe things out of the past simply fascinated him, no matter what they were, the way they do some kids and professional historians.
By the time I ended up in the keep, it was pitch dark outside.
I’d noticed as I sauntered along that those musical floorboards sounded twice as loud at night as they did in the daytime, and reflected that this made it virtually impossible for a thief or prowler to escape detection—and also impossible for me to sneak up on any such intruder. The place had two-way, built-in radar.
I spent maybe half an hour in the keep, flashing my light over a really fascinating array of medieval artifacts, including some of those ingenious torture instruments that seem so to obsess the modern mind. This gallery was arranged a little more logically than most of the displays, and held the interest better.
As I was starting back across the drawbridge-like corridor, I noticed that my footsteps as magnified by the squeaky flooring seemed to echo back at me from ahead even louder than I had noticed on the way over. Alerted by the narcotic I had taken, my subconscious must have noticed some inconsistency of rhythm or phasing in that echoed sound, for I found myself, for no discernible reason, stopping stock still.
From far ahead, the rhythmic squeaking continued!
Sweat popped out on me, though the evening was chilly. An intruder? Or had old Worthington returned? But he surely would have hailed me to avoid being shot at, in case I turned out to be a trigger-happy type. No, it must be a prowler, someone who had either broken in or secreted himself before the museum closed.
I broke into a trot, heedless of noise, since stealth was impossible anyway. Once across the drawbridge, I stopped again to listen, and thought I had gained on the sound, which seemed to be coming from below. I fumbled my way down the stairs to the first floor and dashed ahead, using my flash discreetly where needed. As I paused outside the pitch-dark Remington gallery, I realized the sound was coming from just inside.
I plunged into the gallery and swept my flash over the wine-red draperies, over the Indian paintings and bronzes of horses and cowboys. My ears told me the creaking was now at the opposite side of the narrow room and moving toward the arched exit. I ran on, directing the light through the archway; then, once more involuntarily, I halted.
The squeaking of the floor progressed deliberately past the exit and into the gallery beyond, but my light revealed nothing visible to cause the sound!
Now the sweat that had broken out on my body turned cold.
Suddenly, the sound ceased entirely; but even as I moved forward to investigate, I heard it start again upstairs.
Doggedly, I turned in my tracks, recrossed the dark gallery, and puffed my way back up the stairs.
The creaking now seemed diffused, echoing from a dozen ambiguous sources—as fast as I would track one down, it would evaporate and others cut in, some upstairs others again below.
Finally my uncanny sensation dissolved before the ludicrousness of the situation. Here I was chasing noises all over a haunted house, stirring up more echoes with my clumsy footfalls than I could ever succeed in running down. I leaned against a display case, winded, and laughed out loud. As I did so, the crackling and creaking noises all over the building reached a peak, dwindled, and gradually ceased.
I began to consider what might have caused this disconcerting visitation. The most logical answer was probably the cooling and shrinkage of the floorboards in the chilly night air. This could occur in random patterns of self-activating sound. Added to this, perhaps, might be the factor of my own weight traversing the floor, depressing certain boards which, as they cooled and shrank, sprang back in sequence, creating the effect of ghostly footsteps.
Still in a moderate state of euphoria, I convinced myself that this was certainly the case, and began to feel ashamed of my initial panicky reactions.
I went back to the little office, brewed some coffee on the hot-plate, and ate a sandwich I had brought with me. After a while, I made the rounds of the museum again, stepping lightly and gingerly, as if my care could exorcise the sinister eruption of sounds that had beset me earlier.
This time, outside of a few odd groanings and shiftings normal in an old building, there were no noises. Once in a while during the night there came brief flurries of distant squeaking, but I finally gave up attempts to locate them through sheer boredom. It was too monotonous trying to creep up and surprise a mere nervous chunk of wood suffering from hot and cold flashes.
I even napped for a while in the office toward dawn.
At six a.m., shortly after daybreak, I went down to answer Mr. Worthington’s bell. As he entered, stoopshouldered and rather pathetic in his threadbare day- shift uniform, he asked in a disinterested tone, “All quiet?”
I wondered if he was joking. “I wouldn’t call it that, exactly,” I answered. “The place was creaking and crackling half the night. Sounded as if all the ghost legions of Crusaders who owned that armor had come back to claim it.”
“Oh, the floors. Yes, most of our night men mention that at first. Scares some of them out of a year’s growth. I forgot to tell you about it.”
I stared at Mr. Worthington’s inoffensive form with a feeling of fierce contempt I hope my expression concealed. The warmth of my reaction surprised me; I must have been more rattled last night than I realized.
I went home and went to bed.
V
Well, like the other night men at the museum, I got used to the noise after a while. (Or maybe they didn’t; maybe that was why the job was open so often.) After all, I was on an especially potent kind of tranquillizer. The work was easy, the pay and the hours were steady, and I had no kicks—outside of the kind I sought myself at the tip of a needle.
I wasn’t getting anywhere; but, as I’ve intimated, I was never sure just where it was I might want to get anyway.
The second phase of the business started when I commenced to see things as well as hear them. Almost to see things, that is, which was the maddening part of it. Actually I would never cacth a straight glimpse of anything odd: just flickers out of the corner of my eye, a fugitive flurry of barely-sensed movement that disappeared no matter how quickly I turned to confront it; furtive shift- ings in the mass of solid objects as I passed by. It’s not an experience I can describe very clearly, nor one that I would wish to repeat.
This kind of visual impression might or might not be synchronized with the creaking of the floors, nearby or distant. The coinciding of the two phenomena occurred so much at random, in fact, that I somehow sensed there was no connection, at least no causative connection, between them.
I wondered whether Old Man Ehlers had seen and heard things here too, and whether that might have had anything to do with his being found dead of a heart attack in the medieval gallery one morning during the winter of 1927, as Mr. Worthington had told me.
Now I really began to get concerned. Other people had heard the noises, or so I’d been told, and there were conceivable natural explanations for them. But nobody at the museum, as far as I knew, had ever mentioned seeing things, and I couldn’t bring myself to mention the matter to old Worthington. I wasn’t yearning for a padded cell, or Lewisburg, at this juncture.
I drew the natural conclusion and knocked off on dope for a few days. But it made no difference, except then I was so nervous and shaky that my delusions (if that’s what they were) might have been withdrawal symptoms as easily as narcotic hallucinations. They had me, coming and going.
It was about this time that I found Old Man Ehlers’ journal.
VI
You see, these delusions of sound and sight, whatever they were, didn’t afflict me all the time. (That would have sent me starko, despite my alleged skepticism.) They went on for maybe ten or fifteen minutes once or twice or even half a dozen times a night; th
ere was never any way to predict. The rest of the time I used to occupy with reading, to fill up the gaps between my increasingly infrequent rounds.
This particular night I’d forgotten to bring a book, so I rummaged around the cluttered office in the keep for something to browse through while I consumed my sandwich and coffee.
I located some moldy old volumes sagging abandoned in a decrepit breakfront pushed back in one corner; they seemed mostly antiquarian guides, but my eye fell on a thin book with no title on the spine. I pulled it out and discovered it was a daily journal, dated 1925 and stamped with the name Frederick Ehlers. It was dusty enough that it might not have been opened in the 30-odd years since Ehlers died, but I cleaned it up a bit and began to page through it.
At first I was disappointed, although the human fascination with sticking one’s nose into someone else’s private business kept me reading.
It was neither a diary nor a business journal, but seemed to consist mostly of accounts of dreams the old boy had had, plus speculations on their meaning, with occasionally a few rather visionary philosophical jottings thrown in.
Some of the dreams were dillies. I remember one that went something like this: “Dreamed I was shut inside the new Iron Maiden from Diisseldorf. A noisy crowd outside was laughing, jeering, and hammering on it; and gradually it became red hot. Feeling of terror, not at the pain, but because I was certain those outside were not human. Meaning: birth trauma, or perhaps some ritual of spiritual purification?”
There was a lot of stuff like that, not very reassuring as to the inner psychic life of Our Founder, and I had begun to tire of deciphering the jagged, fading ink strokes, when suddenly an extended passage caught my attention. I copied it down and still have it, so I can quote it accurately:
“That objects with a long history, particularly those associated with passionate or violent people and events, soak up and retain an aura or atmosphere of their own I have no doubt. And that under certain conditions they may produce a tangible emanation, even sensory stimuli, is proved by my experiences as a collector. Perhaps one must be psychic, whatever that may mean, to receive these impressions, which would explain why not all collectors have had such experiences.
