Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/223

 With an effort he threw off the feeling of oppression. A quick glance around the bare living room convinced him that, with the massive fireplace, the interior of the piano, the old fashioned mantel, and all the various other natural hiding places, it would take quite a while to go over this room as thoroughly as he should have liked. He resolved, then, to leave it for the last, in the meantime examining the rest of the house swiftly, and coming back to this room later. He had no great hope of discovering anything this night, yet he thought that, perhaps, he might have a stroke of luck; he might, in a flash, be drawn to investigate something that might otherwise take months of searching for. Anyway, he was spying out the lay of the land; he would come again, of course, and when he did he would have more than a vague notion of where to look.

He wished now he had brought Eddie Hughes with him; it would have made him feel more comfortable. That was too late, however, so with a shrug of his shoulder that was meant to be philosophical and that turned out to be a cold shiver, he went out into the entrance hall again, where he had noted the stairs that led to the upper part of the deserted house.

It was a rickety old winding staircase that led upstairs, giving off the dust in clouds as Val’s feet fell on the steps; each stair creaked loudly, as though in protest at this unwarranted intrusion of an age-long privacy. Mice and rats scurried away at his approach, and the spiders in the comers of the stairs moved warningly as his shadow fell upon them.

He found nothing of any assistance to him in the upper part of the house, though he went over the empty rooms carefully. Great cracks were opened in the ceiling over his head, and in the floors under