Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

The tide had turned, and from my window at the big desk in the lower room I watched the lines of foaming spray licking up the beach. There was no longer any horizon between sea and sky. All was one blur of moving gray water, picked out with breaking white-caps and roaring as it fought to engulf the land. I thought, as I often had before: suppose the tide does not pause at the crest and retreat into the ocean, but keeps on creeping up and over, over the bank and over the road, over the hedge and over the house. However, as always, it halted in its race, pawed upon the stone breakwater, and I knew that by morning it would have slunk out again, and that children would be wading where waves had been, and Caleb Snow would be picking up winkles. Living was like that; the tide of our passions turns. The New Captain had built this double room for the great storm that had swept through his life, bearing away the barricades of his traditions; but its force was spent now, and the skeleton laid as bare as a fish-bone on the sandy flats where strangers walked.

As I sat at the desk I smelled coffee cooking. The impression was so strong that I went into the kitchen and walked over to the stove to shove back the coffee-pot that I fancied had been left there since morning. The fire must have caught on a smoldering coal and the grounds were boiling up. But the coffee-pot was not on the stove. I found it still on the shelf, and the coffee was safe in the can. The odor must have come from out-of-doors.

I was too tired to figure the matter out, and ended by making some for myself, and going to bed. This was my third night at the House of the Five Pines, and I retired peacefully, in confidence, without any disturbing inhibitions. Everything had been solved.

I had shut the door in the secret stairs in the study-closet and fastened it with a piece of wire. In Mattie’s room I dropped down on the bed where I had shoved it across the floor that afternoon. Afterward I rose and pushed the bureau in front of the little door. I do not know what subconscious motive impelled this, but a woman who is living alone in a house with nine known rooms, none of which are in their right places, and three stairs, front, back, and secret, ought to be forgiven for locking up what she can.

Rain fell in wearied gusts; the worst was over. The wind, still high, blew dense clouds across the face of the moon and carried them on again over the sea, so that the waste was momentarily illumined. Whenever the veils of mist were torn aside the oval mirror in its frame above my bureau reflected the moonlight. I watched it for a long time on my way to sleep.

At exactly twelve o’clock I found myself sitting up in bed.

There was moonlight in the room, that fell in quivering patches on the bed-quilt and lightened up the dark walls, throwing into relief all the five white doors. But there was also another light, on the ceiling, that moved steadily up and down. Forcing my hypnotized glance away from it, I turned to the haunted door and the bureau that I had placed in front of it, and saw with sickening understanding that the mirror above it was swaying on its hinges, swinging back and forth. This caused the moonlight reflected from the water to dance like a sun-spot. The glass turned as if it were being pushed and could not keep its balance. I crawled over to it and put my hand out to steady it, and the whole thing turned.

As I drew back, the pressure on the other side of the wall withdrew. I could hear footsteps receding until they fell away down what I now knew was the stairway at the other end of the secret room. I had heard them the night before and I was sure. Whatever was in there had given up trying to get out at this side and was going back to try and get out of the door in the study-closet. I had wired that; the footsteps would return.

There was no use in trying to convince myself for the third time that this phenomenon was caused by the cat. I had put her out in the rain. And if I were mistaken, if after all, I had locked her up in the loft, could the weight of a cat shake a wall so that a mirror would swing on its hinges? This was the footstep of something larger than a cat and, Heaven help me, smaller than a man!

I heard it coming back, stealthily, walking softly, picking a barefooted course across the upper chamber toward the thin partitions that separated its room from mine. I knew that in a second more it would try one door and then the other, and that the whole wall would shake and give and the mirror I was clutching would tip again and throw fantastic lights. I heard it lift the latch.