“Oh,” said Clara Peck, quickly, “he was just looking at—everything.”
“I’ll come, myself, tomorrow,” said the owner. And as he drove away into the afternoon, Clara Peck slowly moved up the stairs to lift her face toward the ceiling and watch the trapdoor.
“He didn’t see you, either,” she whispered.
Not a beam stirred, not a mouse danced, in the attic.
She stood like a statue, feeling the sunlight shift and lean through the front door. Why? she wondered. Why did I lie? Well, for one thing, the trapdoor’s shut, isn’t it? And, I don’t know why, she thought, but I won’t want anyone going up that ladder, ever again. Isn’t that silly? Isn’t that strange?
She ate dinner early, listening.
She washed the dishes, alert.
She put herself to bed at ten o’clock, but in the old downstairs maid’s room, for long years unused. Why she chose to lie in this downstairs room, she did not know, she simply did it, and lay there with aching ears, and the pulse moving in her neck and in her brow.
Rigid as a tomb carving under the sheet, she waited.
Around midnight, a wind passed, shook a pattern of leaves on her counterpane. Her eyes flicked wide.
The beams of the house trembled.
She lifted her head.
Something whispered ever so softly in the attic.
She sat up.
The sound grew louder, heavier, like a large but shapeless animal, prowling the attic dark.
She placed her feet on the floor and sat looking at them. The noise came again, for up, a scramble like rabbits’ feet here, a thump Wee a large heart there.
She stepped out into the downstairs hall and stood bathed in a moonlight that was like a pure cool dawn filling the windows.
Holding the banister, she moved stealthily up the stairs. Reaching the landing, she touched the stepladder, then raised her eyes.
She blinked. Her heart jumped, then held still.
For as she watched, very slowly the trapdoor above her sank away. It opened, to show her a waiting square of darkness like a mine shaft going up, without end.
“I’ve had just about enough!” she cried. She rushed down to the kitchen and came storming back up with hammer and nails, to climb the ladder in furious leaps.
“I don’t believe any of dust” she cried. “No more, do you hear? Stop!”
At the top of the ladder she had to stretch up into the attic, into the solid darkness with one hand and arm. Which meant that her head had to poke halfway through.
“Now!” she said. At that very instant, as her head shoved through and her fingers fumbled to find the trapdoor, a most startling, swift thing occurred. As if something had seized her head, as if she were a cork pulled from a bottle, her entire body, her arms, her straight-down legs, were yanked up into the attic.
She vanished like a magician’s handkerchief. Like a marionette whose strings are grabbed by an unseen force, she whistled up.
So swift was the motion that her bedroom slippers were left standing on the stepladder rungs. After that, there was no gasp, no scream. Just a long breathing silence for about ten seconds. Then, for no seen reason, the trapdoor slammed flat down shut.
Because of the quality of silence in the old house, the trapdoor was not noticed again . . . .
Until the new tenants had been in the house for about ten years.
On the Orient, North
It was on the Orient Express heading north from Venice to Paris to Calais that the old woman noticed the ghastly passenger.