The room, Tom found on completing his survey, was without windows and possessed of only one door, a massive oaken affair with great strap iron hinges and set in a ponderous frame. From the slope of the ceiling at the sides, he judged the room was under the roof. Walls and ceiling were plastered.
Not a sound had penetrated into the room from the outside, or from the other parts of the house, and at this all had marveled earlier. Tom’s report of the survey supplied an answer to the mystery. There was little chance for sound to penetrate within.
“But a room without windows?” said Jack. “How, then, does it happen the air is fresh?”
“There’s a draught from up above,” answered Tom. “I cain’t see any skylight, but there may be an air port back in the angle of the roof tree. Say, Mister Jack, this room gives me the creeps,” he 108 added, his voice involuntarily taking on an awed tone. “A room without windows. An’ over in the far corner I found some rusted iron rings fastened to big staples set deep into a post in the wall.”
“What, Tom? You don’t say.”
“Yes, siree. Ol’ Brownell, the pirate whaler’s, been dead for a long time. But there’s queer stories still around these parts about him an’ his house; stories not only ’bout how he was killed finally by the men as he’d cheated, but also ’bout a mysterious figure in white that used to be seen on the roof, an’ yells heard comin’ from here. You know what?” He leaned closer, and still further lowered his voice. “I’ll bet this room was a cell fer some crazy body an’ ol’ Brownell kept him or her chained up when violent. Some people still say, you know, as how that white figure wa’n’t a ghost but the ol’ man’s crazy wife.”
“Brrr.”
Frank shivered in mock terror and grinned in the darkness. “Some place to be,” he added.
Nevertheless, light though he made of Tom’s story, the hour, the circumstances in which they found themselves, the mystery of the windowless room, all combined to inspire in him an uncanny feeling, as if unseen hands were reaching for him from the dark.
“Getting out is still our first consideration,” Captain Folsom said. “What Barnum reports makes it 109 look difficult, but let’s see. Have you tried the door? Is it locked?”