I could hear a faint breathing in the dark. It was not more than two feet away from me. It seemed to my straining eyeballs that I could make out the lines of a body standing there, its blank face turned in my direction. Then—my heart leaped with the terror of it—the invisible being laughed.
“You have n't gone,” said the low, sweet, horrible voice; “I can smell the candle, so you must have put it out when you heard me. If I had n't struck my foot against a board, I'd have come upon you in the midst of your interesting work. There's no place to hide here. You've either run back to the end of the passage and crept in under my bedclothes, or you're flattened up against the wall. I think you're near me. I think I hear your heart...” No doubt, she did; it was laboring like a ship in a storm. She paused probably to listen to my pounding blood, then she laughed again. “You're badly scared, aren't you? It's a feeling of security, my girl, compared to the fright you'll get later. Why don't you scream? Too scared? Or are you afraid you'll kill somebody else, besides Robbie, of fright. A ghost screaming in the wall! Grrrrrr!”
I can give no idea of the terrible sound she made in her throat. And the truth was I could n't scream. I was pinned there against the wall as though there were hands around my neck.
She made a step forward—it was like a ghastly game of Blind Man's Buff; most of those games must be based on fearful race-memories of outgrown terrors; then she gave a sudden spring to one side, an instinctive, beastlike movement, and her hand struck my face. Instantly she had flung herself upon me. I let fall my booty and fought with all my strength. I might as well have struggled with a tigress. She was made of strings of steel. Her arms and legs twisted about me like serpents, her furious strength was disgusting, loathsome, her breath beat upon my face. I fell under her, and she turned up my skirt over my head, fastening it in the darkness with such devilish quick skill that I could not move my arms. Also she crammed fold after fold into my mouth till I was gagged, my jaws forced open till they ached. The pain in my throat and neck was intolerable.
Then, groping about, she found the candle and I heard her strike a match. Afterwards she inspected the treasure, drawing deep sighs of satisfaction and murmuring to herself. After a long time of enjoyment, she sat down beside me, placing the candle so that it shone upon me. I could see the light through the thinnish stuff over my face.
“Now, Janice,” she said, “I shall make you more comfortable, and then I shall afford you some of the most excellent entertainment you can well imagine. There are people all over the world who would give ten years of their lives to hear what you are going to hear to-night. I have some interesting stories to tell. There is plenty of time before us. I shall not have to leave you till just before daybreak, and we might as well have a pleasant time together. I was too busy the other afternoon in the woods and too hurried to give you any real attention. This time I shall do my duty by you. You are really rather a remarkable girl, and I am proud of you. That beating I gave you would have laid up most young women for a fortnight. But you are made of adventurous stuff.” She sighed, a strange sound to come from her lips; then, skillfully, she drew the skirt partially from my face, possessed herself of my hands which she bound securely with a string she took from her pocket—a piece of twine which, if I stirred a finger, cut into my wrists like a knife. She gradually drew the gag out of my mouth, keeping a strangling hold on my throat as she did so, and when my jaw snapped back in place—it had been almost out of its socket—still keeping that grip on my wind-pipe, she tied a silk handkerchief over my mouth, knotting it tightly behind my head. Then she released me and moved a little away. I looked at her, no doubt, with the eyes of a trapped animal, so that, bending down to inspect me, she laughed again.
“I'm not going to kill you, you know,” she said sweetly,—“not yet. I could have killed you the other day if it had n't been more to my purpose to let you live. I could have killed you any time these past few weeks. Don't you know that, you silly, reckless child? All of you here in this absurd house lay in the hollow of my hand.” She held out one of her very long, slender hands, so like my own, as she spoke, and slowly, tensely, drew her fingers together as though she were crushing some small live thing to death. “I did n't really mean to kill Robbie. But I did mean to get him out of that room, alive or dead. He killed himself, which saved me the trouble. I don't like killing children—it's quite untrue what they say of me in that respect—though I've been driven to it once or twice. It's being too squeamish about babies' lives that's put an end to most careers of burglary. That's the God's truth, Janice. You're shaking, are n't you? How queer it must be to have nerves like that—young, innocent, ignorant nerves! Poor Janice! Poor little red-haired facsimile of myself! What explanation did you find for that resemblance? I fancied you'd frighten yourself into a superstitious spasm over it, and stop your night-meddling for good. But you didn't. I'll be bound, though, that the true explanation never occurred to you.”
I had been staring up into her beautiful, ghastly face, but now I closed my eyes. A most intolerable thought had come to me. It came slowly, gropingly, out of the remote past, and it turned my heart into a heavy gray stone.
“Are you remembering, Janice? No, that's not possible. You were too young.” She leaned over me again, and pushed back a lock of hair that had been troubling my eyes. “You've grown to be a very beautiful girl.”
I groaned aloud, and writhed there. I knew the truth now. There was a mother from whom I had been taken when I was a few months old—a mother of whom my father would never let me speak, a mother I had been told to forget, to blot out of my imagination as though she had never been. What dreadful reason my father must have had for his secret, sordid manner of living! What a shadow had lain on my childhood with its drab wanderings, its homelessness, its disgraceful shifts and pitiful poverty! All that far-off misery, which I had tried so hard to forget in the new land, came back upon me now with an added, crushing weight. I lay there and longed to die.