The Man Who Couldn't Sleep

by Arthur Stringer

My rather peremptory advent into the coal-bin resulted in a startling amount of noise, noise enough to wake the soundest of sleepers. So I crouched there for several seconds, inhaling dust, and listening and wondering whether or not the walls above me harbored a caretaker. Then I took out the pocket searchlight, and, with the pressure of a finger, directed my ray of illumination against a wooden partition bisected by a painted wooden door.

A distinct sense of disappointment swept through me as I stooped down to examine this door and found that it had already been forced open. I knew, however, that I was following in the footsteps of my more experienced predecessor. Then came a storeroom, and then a laundry-room, with another jimmied door at the head of the stairway leading to the first floor.

Here I stood waiting and listening for some time. But still again nothing but darkness and silence and that musty aroma peculiar to unoccupied houses surrounded me. I felt more at home by this time, and was more leisurely in my survey of the passage upward. I was, of course, confronted by nothing more disturbing than ghost-like furniture covered with ticking and crystal-hung chandeliers encased in cheesecloth. I began to admire my friend the burglar's astuteness in choosing so circuitous and yet so protected a path. There was almost genius in it. His advance, I felt sure, was toward the roof. As I had expected, I found the scuttle open. The lock, I could see, had been quite cleverly picked. And, so far, there had not been a mishap.

Once out on the housetop, however, I foresaw that I would have to be more careful. As I clambered up to the higher coping-tiles that marked the line of the next roof, I knew that I had actually broken into the enemy's lines. Yet the way still seemed clear enough. For, as I came to the roof-scuttle of the second house I found that it, too, remained unlocked. My predecessor had made things almost disappointingly easy for me. Yet, in another way, he had left things doubly dangerous. I had to bear the brunt of any mis-step he may have made. I was being called to face the responsibility of both his intrusion and my own.

So it was with infinite precaution that I lifted the scuttle and leaned over that little well of darkness, inhaling the warmer air that seeped up in my face. With it came an odor quite different to that of the house I had just left. There was something expository in it, something more vital and electric, eloquent of a place inhabited, of human beings and their lairs and trails, of movement and life and vaguely defined menaces. It was, I fancied, a good deal like that man-smell which comes down-wind to a stalked and wary elk.

I stepped down on the iron ladder that led into the uncertain darkness, covering the trap after me. I began to feel, as I groped my way downward, that the whole thing was becoming more than a game. I was disturbed by the thought of how deep I had ventured into an uncertainty. I began to be oppressed by the thought of how complicated my path was proving. I felt intimidated by the undetermined intricacies that still awaited me. A new anxiety was taking possession of me, a sort of low fever of fear, an increasing impatience to replace my precious porcelain, end my mission, and make my escape to the open.

It began to dawn on me, as I groped lower and lower down through the darkness, that a burglar's calling was not all beer and skittles. I began to feel a little ashamed of my heroics of an hour before.

Then I drew up, suddenly, for a sound had crept to my ears. The tingle that ran through my body was not wholly one of fright. Yet, as I stood there in the darkness with one hand against the wall, I caught the rhythm of a slow and muffled snoring. There was something oddly reassuring in that reiterated vibration, even though it served to emphasize the dangers that surrounded me. It was not unlike the sound of a bell-buoy floating up to a fog-wrapped liner's bridge.

I was no longer a prey to any feeling of hesitancy. I was already too deep in the woods to think of turning back. My one passion now was to complete the circuit, to emerge on the other side.

I began to wonder, as I felt for the stair banister and groped my cautious way down the treads, just how the burglar himself had effected that final exit from the house. And the sooner I got away from the sleeping quarters, I felt, the safer I would be. Every bedroom was a shoal of dangers, and not all of them, I very well knew, would be equipped with the same generous whistling-buoy as that I had just left behind me. There was, too, something satisfying in the knowledge that I was at least getting nearer and nearer the ground-floor. This was due, not so much to the fact that I was approaching a part of the house with which I was more or less familiar, but more to the fact that my descent marked an approach to some possible pathway of escape. For that idea was now uppermost in my mind, and no aviator with a balky motor ever ached to get back to earth more eagerly than I.