Page:Weird Tales v41n04 (1949-05).djvu/64

 BY GREYE LA SPINA

HE didn’t last very long,” said Mrs. Renner’s resentful voice.

Lucy Butterfield turned her head on the pillow so that she might hear better the whisperings outside her bedroom door. She was not loath to eavesdrop in that house of secret happenings, if by listening she might find some clue to Cora Kent’s mysterious disappearance.

"Because she was not a well woman, missus. It was just too much for her. You should’ve knowed it, if Kathy didn’t.”

That, Lucy knew, was the voice of Aaron Gross, the ancient pauper whom her landlady explained she had taken from the county poor-farm to do her outdoor chores. It was a high, cackling voice quite in character with the dried-up little man to whom it belonged.

"Sh-sh-sh! Want to wake her up?”

Lucy sat upright in bed, by now keenly attuned to those low voices in the corridor outside her room. The knowledge that she was not supposed to hear what her landlady and the hired man were discussing lent a certain allure—half mischievous, half serious—to her almost involuntary eavesdropping.

"Kathy had to be fed,” said Mrs. Renner’s sharp whisper. "Listen at her now! How’m I going to put her off? Tell me that!”

Lucy, too, listened. From one of the locked rooms along the corridor she heard a soft moaning and knew that what she had been hearing for several nights was not a dream. Twelve-year-old Kathy Renner, confined to her bed with rheumatic fever and denied the solace of sympathetic company for fear the excitement might bring on a heart attack, was wailing softly.

"Mom! I’m hungry! Mom! I’m hungry!" A house of secret happenings, a night of creeping horror.

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