Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/222

 in through the entrance door and through the windows in great splashes, as though someone outside were pouring it in in buckets. Val shivered slightly, and made his way into the living room, which opened into the entrance hall.

This was an immense room, and his little light could make but small headway against the encircling gloom that shrouded the walls and corners. He made out, in his first quick glance, that it seemed to be devoid of furniture, with the exception of a kitchen table and a pine chair that stood in the middle of the room. On the table was a tallow candle, half used. He moved forward to examine the table, for no other reason than because he was interested in these signs of recent human habitation.

The shadows danced strangely on the walls, and a spider shaded its way swiftly across the table, away from the candle, as his light fell upon it. Without warning, he heard something that momentarily turned the blood in his veins to ice.

There was the tinkling of piano keys in the room, the sound of notes as though a light finger had run rapidly up the scale. A shiver ran through him, and he whirled quickly. He saw something he had overlooked; in one of the corners was a dilapidated old square piano, of the oldest possible vintage, and a tiny shadow leaping off the brown case showed him that a rat had run across the keyboard.

He had to laugh at his attack of nerves; to think of Valentine Morley being afraid of an empty house at night, of his own shadow! Yet he realized, of course, that it was more than that; it was an atmosphere of the dark and the supernatural in which he had enveloped himself.