Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

But no one entered my room.

At the foot of the stairs some one tried a door, rattled a latch, and went back up again. For a brave second I thought I would leap out of bed and run and push the bolt on the kitchen door, but before I managed to start I heard the footsteps coming down upon me. This time they would keep on, I thought; but again slowly, laboriously, they went back up, and every time they lost themselves upstairs it seemed as if I heard the weight of a person thrown against a door. Or did it go through the door and then throw its weight against it? I strained to listen. Then the steps would come down again. The inside door of the eaves closet upstairs was locked. I had left it the way I had found it, but the steps seemed not to be within that secret room to-night, but without, as if last night a presence had been struggling to get through the closet into my room and now was trying to get back. Tortured, restless footsteps going up and down the stairs, up and down, up and down.

Every time they reached the bottom and tried the kitchen door, I swooned with terror. When they rattled the latch and went back up again I clutched my knees and did not breathe till they returned.

At cockcrow they ceased of their own volition, and, my will released, my body fell exhausted.

CHAPTER X
THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN

WHEN I awoke the sun was shining in the windows on both sides of the study where I had gone to bed, the neighbor’s chickens were clucking through my back-yard, and the boats on the bay were putting up their sails. The past night seemed unreal.

The door at the foot of the kitchen companionway was not only wide open, but fastened back with a brick. I had forgotten that. Then how could I have heard some one trying the latch? And upstairs the little room was just as I had left it, not a thing disturbed. No one could have thrown himself against the small eaves-closet door from this side, because the bed was still in front of it, and no one could have been shut in on the other side and at the same time be pacing up and down steps. I went into the upper hall and looked at the big main stairs. Had any one been climbing them? But if any one had, I should have hardly been able to hear him, away off in the wing behind the kitchen. Perhaps I could persuade the judge to come to the house and practise going up and down the flight of stairs, while I listened from the study.

I had been reading too much last night in the old vellum-bound books of occult sciences. Without understanding the manner of doing so, I had evidently hypnotized myself into the condition in which the thing that I thought probable seemed to be true. I had made up my mind that Mattie was a clairvoyant and could materialize spirits and that those spirits might still linger in the house; thereupon I myself had materialized one, unconsciously. The first night I had half-expected to hear or see something uncanny, and it had followed that I had. These manifestations were due to the influence upon me of what I had heard about the House of the Five Pines, and to nothing else. Jasper had not known all the harrowing stories that were in circulation, and so he had not seen the moving headboard. If he had been with me on the second night he doubtless would not have heard footsteps. It was all perfectly simple when you understand psychology; that was it, to keep a firm hold on yourself, not to be carried away by imaginings.

And then I defended myself that any one left alone in a big house like that would be hearing things at night and that I was no more weak-minded than the rest.

After breakfast I began again upon the settling.