Then aunt told us to stay with Evelyn while she hunted the aromatic spirits of ammonia, and we settled down to listen to her gasp. We felt sorry, but it was sort of funny, and especially when she said: “Is nothing true, is nothing sacred?” And I suppose she meant that that basket should have been too hallowed to him to fill with flour paste. Amy giggled, and then said she felt nervous and that made it.
But Evelyn didn’t hear her, so it didn’t matter. She was too busy being dramatic. “To think,” she whispered, “that I believed him--thought it real!” And then, as they say in fiction, “she laughed hollowly.”
After this she calmed, and while we were waiting for Aunt Penelope’s return the noise came, a scratching noise on the window-sill in my room.
“What’s that?” Evelyn gasped, sitting up and quite forgetting to be limp.
“I don’t know,” I answered, but my heart began to pump, for I was afraid I did. I felt that it was connected with my bracelet, and I later found that I was right.
I stood up and tried to go to my room, but my knees didn’t work well. They seemed to think that they were castanets and that I wanted them to play a tune. I didn’t--but that didn’t influence them.
Amy began to cry.
“Hush!” said Evelyn, and she leaned forward, and in the stillness we listened. . . . There would be a scraping sound, then a lull, and then another long, grating, rasping sound. And on top of this suddenly there were two raps. . . . Somehow I reached the door which led to the small hall that connected the rooms, and from here I almost shouted: “What do you want?”
And then--after one rap and the splintering sound of wood--the noises stopped. I sank down in a chair by the door and bit my lips to steady them. When I looked at Amy she was biting too, but at her nails, and as if they must all be shortened just as far as possible in ten seconds. She looked terribly intent and funny. I saw that even then. Evelyn had got one foot out of the tub, and held it, dripping in mid-air. She had her left hand over her heart.
Then Aunt Penelope came back, looking as white as a sheet and carrying the bottle of ammonia upside down in one hand (uncorked too) and the ice-pick in the other.