Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 18

half past two o'clock on the following night, Mrs. Forrester came broad awake in her bedroom on the third floor of the old mansion on Beacon Street. Something—a subconscious intuition, perhaps—warned her of peril, of some black deed even now in process of consummation.

All was silent, however. No sound came from the housekeeper's room, below stairs, at the rear; none from Disney's, next her own. None could come from that room; for the girl had that afternoon gone to Worcester to play accompaniments for a Conservatory friend of hers, who was giving a recital there.

Very plainly Mrs. Forrester heard the tall old clock on the lower stairway measuring out its tiny segments of eternity. From the library, on the second floor, she heard nothing. When she had gone to bed, at eleven, she had left old Lockwood playing chess there with Dr. Mayhew, his most intimate friend. No voices reached her now. Yes, surely the doctor was gone; and Lockwood, as his habit was, had probably remained awake to read and smoke and ponder on many things. Sometimes, she knew, the old man stayed there in this fashion till three or four of the morning.

“Nerves!” thought Mrs. Forrester, trying to let the silence calm her; but still she tingled with a consciousness that something ominous and terrible was taking place.

Then, all at once, something became audible.

The woman heard what seemed a stifled outcry, a gasp, in the library. There followed a peculiar and dull sound, as of a thing that heavily fell.

Silence again, for a moment; then a slight grating noise; and after that, stillness more profound than ever.

Mrs. Forrester sat up in her big walnut bed, listening acutely, her eyes wide with consuming terror, her heart throbbing painfully. For a few seconds she remained there, every sense on the stretch. Then, constrained by a force more compelling than her own panic, she got out of bed. She slipped on a blue kimono, kicked her feet into slippers, and, with her hair tumbling all about her shoulders, stepped noiselessly out into the hall.

At the stairhead she stood motionless, listening, peering in the vague light from the open library door, a prey to nameless and quivering fear. Outwardly, all yet seemed well. No untoward sound or sight marred the peace of the ancient dwelling. Calm silence possessed it. Still from the lower hall she could hear the clock on the landing as it kept its unhurried rhythm—tic-tac, tic-tac—marking off the seconds irretrievably for good or evil.

Down Beacon Street, a belated taxi purred along. From indefinite distances, out in the harbor, blurred the vague rumor of a steamer's whistle. An alley cat miauled [sic], after the manner of its kind. Mantles of night obscurely held old Boston town.

The woman's racing pulses quieted a little.

“I must have been dreaming,” she thought.

But still she did not turn back to her own room. Something deeper than her conscious reasoning told her that this was no dream, convinced her that the sounds in the library had been real, that they portended some catastrophe which she trembled to ascertain, yet was constrained to investigate.

With more courage than it seemed possible to muster in those shaken nerves, the frightened woman crept on down the stairs, silently, in slippered feet. Still no motion, no sound save the creak of the ancient stair tread and the tic-tac, tic-tac of the clock, whose tone now bore an ominous quality of warning.

All at once, in a voice that seemed not hers at all, Mrs. Forrester exclaimed:

“Hello! Who's there? What was that?”

There was no answer—only a leaden cope of silence.

“Father! Are you there?”

The utter stillness terrified her more than any outcry. Old Lockwood, of course, might have fallen asleep over his books; but in her heart of hearts Mrs. Forrester seemed to know that worse, infinitely worse, than that had befallen.

She gripped her courage and went on down the last of the stairs. She reached the hallway; advanced, a bluish wraith in the vague adumbration of light from the library door.

At that door she paused and peered through.

“Father!”

No answer coming, she forced herself to enter. Then, of a sudden, she became aware of a dimly outlined something, a formless body, that lay in a huddled heap—lay by the fireplace, under the light of the reading lamp, half hidden by Lockwood's huge armchair.

She caught a gasp of breath, and crept a little onward.

“What's that?” she whispered tensely.

Staring, dazed, and with a chill terribly shaking her, she trembled forward. She saw the flick of a bright metallic gleam on the rug. Beyond it, something protruded from behind the chair. It was a hand, lax and inert—a hand unspeakably horrible in its pale, motionless passivity.

As in a dream, hardly conscious, Mrs, Forrester gropingly went on. Two steps, three—on toward the metallic glitter. She made no outcry. Something had her by the throat, inhibiting even breath. Sick, faint with the thrashing of her heart, she stooped and picked up the metal thing that glinted.

Only when her shuddering fingers had closed upon it did she fully recognize it as one of Lockwood's paper knives—a curved steel blade with gold inlays in arabesque patterns. This knife, one of the old man's many foreign curios, was fashioned like a Moorish scimitar.

Bright metal—but not all bright. The point and part of the blade were darkened with something viscous, something that smeared her fingers—blood!

Then Mrs. Forrester's inhibition snapped. She burst into a horror-stricken, quivering shriek that penetrantly echoed through the silent house.

As that shriek died, and as Mrs. Forrester—the knife still in her hand—staggered back against the long table, suddenly she heard a voice:

“For Heaven's sake, what's goin' on here?”

It was Miss Grush, fully dressed, but with tag ends of gray hair absurdly sticking out, unconfined by the henna wig.

For the moment Mrs. Forrester felt no wonder at the housekeeper being up and about at that hour of the night. All that she realized was that Miss Grush meant help. Racked, riven with paralyzing terror, she pointed a shaking hand.

“Something—something terrible—has happened! Look there!”

The housekeeper advanced from the rear door of the library, keen-eyed, squinting through her heavy-lensed spectacles.

“What is it?” she demanded. “My soul and senses, what?”

“See there! Mr. Lockwood! He—”

Miss Grush scuttled forward with an odd, crablike motion. Ever since her last “stroke” she had always moved thus, when trying to run. She bent over in the light of the reading lamp, and touched the huddled thing behind the chair.

“Oh, my God!” she quavered. “Oh, my God!”

“Is he—” stammered Mrs. Forrester, with chattering teeth. “Is—”

“You're a fine one, you are!” the housekeeper suddenly snarled. She straightened up and faced the panic-stricken woman. “A fine daughter, I hope to tell you! Here's your father, dead—layin' here all in a gore o' blood—and you're afraid to touch him! You're afraid to even look at him! Daughter, huh! Like a bull's foot! You, standin' there, you faker—you an' that daughter o' yours, too—a fine pair you are!”

“What—what are you saying?” stammered Harriet Forrester, the knife falling from her hand to the rug.

Miss Grush hobbled to the hall door, shouting:

“Irene! Come quick!”

How swiftly her mind must have worked, in this appalling juncture, to have thought of a witness. The cook “slept out,” at her own home, and only Irene was to be depended on; but the old woman's shouts could never reach Irene now, for that high brown damsel, after the nature of her kind, had already changed her plans and departed, never to return.

“Where's that Irene?” vociferated Miss Grush, up the stairs. “Irene, you!” The housekeeper returned to the library, half distracted, half exultant with evil malice. “Drat her, why don't she come? Wait till she sees you! Faker! Rotten fakers, the both of you! And you with that old man's blood on your very hands! Faker! Murderer!”

The housekeeper, a very witch of Endor in her fury, advanced on Mrs. Forrester. Her clawlike hands grasped as a vulture's claws grasp. The other woman, quivering with blind horror, retreated as from a harpy of destruction.

“What are you saying?” she choked. “I—I killed him?”

“That's what!” the termagant slavered at her. “A woman that 'll put over a fake like you did—if she could see a dollar in his dyin', she'd do it, all right!”

Mrs. Forrester whitened to a color of pale leaden gray. Then, as she stared at the fist-shaking old creature, two pink spots began to burn in her cheeks. Her nostrils assumed an odd pinched look, and her lips twitched. Her voice was steadier, as she retorted:

“How about you?”

“Me, you fraud? What d'you mean by that?”

“How does it happen you're up and dressed, and right there at the library door when I came down and found him?”

“As if I had to give explanations to you! As if I couldn't fall asleep in my chair, be waked up by hearin' that poor old man call out for help, an' come runnin', to find him dead an' you over him with the very knife in your hand! But we'll soon see about this. I'll telephone! I'll get witnesses and help! I'll—”

Mrs. Forrester was too quick for her. Already at the telephone, she had the receiver off the hook.

“Yes, we will see!” she defied the venomous old creature. “That's one true word you've spoken. We'll soon see about this!”