His voice had the effect of calming the others.
They stood hesitantly in the middle of the deserted parlor. Joe went over to the window and looked out, but the view from the front window of the Polucca place was so lonely and gruesome, in its aspect of tangled trees and weeds and undergrowth under the lowering darkness of the sky, that he came back.
“Where shall we go next?” said Chet.
“Nothing much to see around here,” said Frank, disappointed. “It’s just an ordinary, dirty, old, deserted house. Let’s explore upstairs, anyway—”
At that moment there was a startling interruption.
A weird shriek, quavering as if with terror, rang out from the upper part of the haunted house!
CHAPTER II
The Storm
That shriek was the most fearful and uncanny sound the boys had ever heard. There was a diabolical malignance about it, like the scream of some blood-thirsty animal, yet there was no mistaking the fact that it was uttered by a human being.
As the quavering notes died away, the bare walls of the old house flung back the echoes so that the shriek seemed to be repeated again and again, but on a smaller scale.