Yet in an instant I was wide awake. In the silent hall the footfall was perfectly distinct, carrying through the walls of my room, and echoing somewhere in the wall behind me. In any quiet home, in any land, it would have been impossible to disregard those footsteps. There was a distinct tone of urgency behind them that simply could not be denied. In this dark house of mystery the senses rallied, quickened, and seemed to lie waiting to contend with any emergency.
The steps were not only hurried and urgent. They were frenzied—although they were not running footsteps. At the same time they gave the image of some one trying to hurry, some one trying to conquer himself, and yet not move too loudly. It was as if he was some way fearful to waken the poignant silence of that shadowed corridor.
“He is coming to my door,” I told myself. It was wholly likely that I spoke the words aloud; at least, I believed them as unwaveringly as if the man outside had thus announced his intentions. No man can ever tell how such knowledge comes to him. Perhaps it is coincidence—that he expects such a summons on a hundred different occasions before it ever comes to him in reality. Yet many things already proven true are a thousand times harder to believe than telepathy—the transmission of messages according to no known laws of matter and space.
The tread itself was peculiar. It had an odd, shuffling quality that was hard to analyze. Then some one rapped excitedly on my door.
“What is it?” I asked.
I was already out of bed, groping for my light switch.
“It’s me—Wilkson,” was the reply. “Boss, will ye open de do’?”
I knew Nealman’s colored janitor—a middle-aged servant of an old-fashioned, almost departed glory—but for an instant I found it almost incredible that this was his voice. The tones were blurred, lifeless, spoken as if from drawn lips. There was only one thing to believe, and I fought it off as long as I could: that the man outside my door was simply stricken and almost dead with fear.
It wasn’t easy to open the door to hear what he had to tell. A scream in the night is one thing; a chattering fellow man, just on the other side of a pine door, is quite another. But I took away the chair and turned the knob.