“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three——”
Then for a terrible minute there was silence; Mimi’s heart was thumping loud enough to be mistaken for death bells.
“I’ll never forget the first time I heard them. We were at Granny’s because Grandpa was sick. Mother and I were sleeping upstairs in the room Mother had when she was a girl. We were so tired I couldn’t go to sleep. I tried counting sheep but it didn’t help. Soon I heard this dull tapping, so I began to count just for something to do. After I counted seventy-nine, they ceased. Not another one sounded. Next morning Grandpa was dead and he was seventy-nine years old!”
“Two years ago at school, I had a headache, so I leaned my head over on my desk. I had no more than settled down when a thump-thump-thumping began. I shook my head but I could still hear it. They were the clearest I ever heard. Sounded like someone was tapping on your desk with a ruler. I counted forty-three. That afternoon we had a telegram that my uncle had been killed in an automobile wreck and he was forty-three years old.”
“Don’t ever count fourteen!” Mimi giggled. She was so scared she was getting silly. Ridiculous, all of it, she kept telling herself, but every time she said ridiculous she believed Madge’s story truer and truer.
“I’d be afraid to make fun of it,” Betsy said so seriously Mimi knew she believed Madge, too.
“I used to not hear them for anyone but my family, but I get more and more of them all the time. In the last year I have counted them three different times and the next day found in the paper that a person as old as I had counted, was dead. Gee! My head aches.”
Mimi’s common sense was returning by degrees.
“I’ll get you an aspirin and then we’ll go to sleep.”
She hoped she would. Right now she was more wide awake than ever she had been since the wild cat screamed at camp.