“What’s what?” Walter demanded.
“This is where the spirits came from—the spirits that have been having fun with the furniture,” Jack went on. “Don’t you see? They came up through this secret door, did what they pleased, and went down again, closing the door after them by means of some secret mechanism.”
“You’re not so far wrong at that,” remarked Paul, examining the queer sliding door in the floor with a mechanic’s eye. “This is a pretty piece of work. You seem to have smashed the operating part of it with your axe, Jack, or at least the part of it that opened the door from this side. It slides back and forth though,” and Paul rolled the section of the flooring to and fro.
“Don’t close it!” cried Walter. “You might shut it so we couldn’t get it open again. We want to explore that passage.”
“That’s what!” came from Jack. “This is where the furniture-movers came from all right.”
“Though why they should want to upset chairs is more than I can account for,” commented Walter.
“We’ll find out when we go down there,” suggested Paul. “Wait until I take a look at this apparatus. We don’t want it closing over our heads after we get down there.”
The sliding door, or rather the section of flooring, was comparatively simple in arrangement. It was made so that it could be dropped down two inches, and then it could be rolled under the floor on small steel wheels, which ran on projecting strips of wood.
As Paul had said, Jack, by a blow of his axe, had destroyed the spring that controlled the mechanism, but this very chance blow of the implement had revealed the secret. Probably there was one certain board which, when pressed on, or shifted, operated the sliding door. And so cleverly was it fitted into the floor, and so tight was the joining, that the presence of it would never have been seen. Only by chance had they happened upon it.
“Well, who’s going down?” asked Jack, as they stood looking into the opening. “We’ll need lights, though.”