My investigation of the upper premises over, I descended into the basement, which, like all basements that have remained disused for any length of time, was excessively cold and damp.
There were two cellars, the one opening into the other, both pitch dark and streaming with moisture, and as I groped my way down into them by the spasmodic aid of my pocket search-light, I could not help thinking of the recent gruesome discoveries in Hilldrop Crescent.
In nine cases out of ten the origin of hauntings may be looked for in basements, the gloomy, depressing nature of which seem to have a special attraction for those Elementals that suggest crime.
And here, in the cellars, far removed from prying eyes and sunlight, here, under the clammy, broken cement floor, here was an ideal sepulchre ready for the use of any murderer. He had only to poke his nose half-way down the steps to be struck with the excellence of the idea, and to hurry back for pick and shovel to make the job complete.
The longer I lingered in the cellars, the more firmly I became convinced that they had at one time or another witnessed some secret burial. Dare I remain down there and wait for the phenomena? The heavy, fœtid atmosphere of the place hung round me like a wet rag, while the chill fumes, rising from between the crevices in the cement, ascended my nostrils and made me sneeze. If I stayed in this charnel house, I must certainly risk rheumatic fever. Then a brilliant thought struck me—I would cover the floor of the innermost cellar with cocoanut matting; there were several loose stacks of it lying in the scullery.
I did so, and the result, though not, perhaps, quite as satisfactory as I had anticipated, for the dampness was still abominable, made it at least possible for me to remain there. I accordingly perched myself on a table I had also brought from the scullery, and waited.
Minute after minute passed and nothing happened, nothing beyond a few isolated noises, such as the slamming of some far-distant door—which slamming, as I tried to reassure myself, momentarily forgetting that the house I was in was detached, might be in the next house—and the creaking of boards, those creakings that one so seldom seems to hear in the daytime, but which one laughingly tells oneself are due to natural causes—though what those causes are is apparently inexplicable.
The wind does not blow every night, neither can it perform half of that for which it is often held responsible, neither does every house swarm with rats. Still, I do not say that what I then heard could not have been accounted for naturally—I daresay it might have been—only I was not clever enough to do it. Sceptics are usually so brilliant that one often wonders how it is they do not occupy all the foremost places in literature, science, and art—why, in fact, the smart, shrewd man, who scoffs at ghosts, is so often unheard of, whilst the poor silly believer in the superphysical is so often eminent as a scientist or author. Can it be that it is, after all, the little learning that makes the man the fool?
But to continue. The hour of midnight—that hour erroneously supposed to be the one when psychic phenomena usually show themselves—passed, and I anxiously awaited for what I felt every moment might now produce.
About one o'clock the temperature in the cellars suddenly grew so cold that my teeth chattered, and I then heard, as I thought, in the front hall, a tremendous crash as if all the crockery in the house had been dashed from some prodigious height in one big pile on the floor. Then there was a death-like hush, and then a jabber, jabber, jabber—apparently in the kitchen overhead—as of someone talking very fast, and very incoherently, to themselves; then silence, and then, what made me feel sick with terror, the sound of shuffling footsteps slowly approaching the head of the steps confronting me. Nearer and nearer they came, until they suddenly paused, and I saw the blurred outlines of the luminous figure of something stunted, something hardly human, and something inconceivably nasty.