The Yellow Phantom
Page 19
CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE TOWER WINDOW
Morning dawned cold and misty. Judy fumbled through the closet huntingfor an umbrella, and her trembling fingers touched Irene’s clothes.They lingered lovingly in the folds of each well remembered dress.
“Irene! Irene!” she thought. “I don’t care what you’ve done if only Ican bring you back.”
In the adjoining room Pauline was still asleep. How cruel of her tosleep! No one was up except Blackberry, out there on the roof garden.Feeling that she must say goodbye to somebody, Judy whispered it to him.
It was too early for the throng of office workers to be abroad whenJudy stepped out on the wet pavement and turned toward the subwayentrance. The tall buildings in lower New York were little more thanshadows, and the clock in the Metropolitan Tower was veiled in mist.Ghostly halos were around all the street lamps, and dampness seemed tohave settled heavily over everything.
Judy felt it. The only comforting thing about the trip was the factthat she would be riding on the subway alone for the first time. Shepaid her fare, asked a few directions, and soon was seated in anexpress train bound for Brooklyn.
She pressed her forehead against the window as the train came ontoManhattan Bridge and started its trip over the East River. Freighterssteamed down toward the ocean and up again. Everything looked gray.
As she watched, Judy’s hopes sank lower and lower. She began to realizethat it was not the part of wisdom to go on her dangerous errand to thepoet’s house alone. What would she say if Jasper Crosby opened thedoor? Would her experience with eccentric Emily Grimshaw help her tocope with the insane hallucinations of Sarah Glenn? Would she daredemand to know what had happened to Irene when a possibility existedthat they had never seen her? Suppose they asked for the missingpoetry. If she lied to defend Irene her nervousness might betray her.Judy knew that her chances of finding her chum were slim, very slim.Like the shining tracks behind her they seemed to lessen as the trainsped on.
At Ninth Avenue she changed to the Culver Line. Up came the train, outof the tunnel, and the wet gray walls at the side of the tracks grewlower and lower. Soon they were clear of the ground and Judy realizedthat this was the elevated. Only four more stations! She looked around,eager for her first glimpse of Brooklyn, but what she saw caused her toshudder.
“Ugh! A graveyard.”
It stretched on and on, a grim sight on that dreary morning. Even afterthe white stones were left behind vacant lots and empty buildings madethe scene look almost as cheerless.
At the fourth stop Judy got off and went down to the street. It wassilly, but the thought came to her that if ever spirits walked abroadthey would walk along Gravesend Avenue.
Consulting the slip of paper, she counted blocks as she passed them andwatched for Parkville Avenue. She knew the old-fashioned street at oncefrom the quaint houses that lined it. Then came the Long IslandRailroad cut with a long line of box cars passing under GravesendAvenue in a slow-moving procession.
She paused. Could the alley beyond be the street she sought? No wonderthey hadn’t named it anything. Why, it wasn’t even paved! It seemedlittle more than a trail through vacant lots. She hesitated, lookedahead and caught her breath in a quick, terrified gasp. Then shestared, open-mouthed. There was something sinister about the huge, grayframe building that loomed in her path. The gnarled old treessurrounding it seemed almost alive, and the wind whistling throughtheir branches sounded like a warning. But it was the tower, not thehouse itself, that caused Judy to gasp. The whole lower part of it wasburned away and in the tower window something thin and yellow movedback and forth behind the curtains. It looked like an elongated ghost!
Judy rubbed her eyes and looked again. This time the tower was darkwith the even blackness of drawn shades behind closed windows.
An unreasonable fear took possession of the watching girl. She feltthat she had seen something not there in material substance. Stanzaafter stanza of Sarah Glenn’s poetry forced itself upon herconsciousness, and it all fitted this house—the yellow ghost in thewindow, the crumbling tower.
Suddenly Judy realized that she was standing stock-still in the middleof the muddy unpaved street, moving her lips and making no sound. Shewas doing the same thing that Emily Grimshaw had done when DaleMeredith said she was crazy. Oh! She must get control of herself, takeherself in hand.
“If the house can frighten me like this,” she thought, “what wouldn’tit do to Irene?”
Bracing her slim shoulders and mustering all her courage, Judy marchedup on the porch and felt for the bell. Finding none, she rapped withher bare knuckles. The sound of her rap sent an echo reverberatingthrough the walls of the still house.
Judy waited. She waited a long time before she dared rap again. Thehouse seemed to be inhabited only by the echo she had heard and thephantom that had vanished from the tower window.
Still nobody answered. Judy tried the door and found it locked. Thenshe peered through the lower windows and saw at once that the house wasempty of furniture.
“Nobody lives here,” she told herself and then she told herself thesame thing all over again so that it would surely seem true. “Nobodyever does live in empty houses.”
And yet she had the strangest feeling that she was being watched!
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