"Gee whiz! I feel like Jane Eyre!" whispered Dum.
"No; 'The Fall of the House of Usher'!" I gasped. "Just think of such a place as this being right here in sight of all those grand houses!"
"I know it's haunted! I feel a presence!" and Dee stopped suddenly on the landing.
"Who's a 'fraid cat now?" I taunted. "Let the would-be author go in front. 'Infirm of purpose, give me the dagger!'"
At that Dee ran lightly on ahead of us and disappeared in a room to the right. We followed in time to see her skirts vanishing through a door beyond.
"This must have been the bridal chamber, it is so grand. Just look at the view of the harbor through this window," said Dum, still whispering, as there was something about the place, a kind of gruesomeness, that made one feel rather solemn. I thought of Poe's "Haunted Palace" and whispered some of the stanzas to Dum, for the moment both of us forgetting Dee, who had rushed off so precipitately.
"'In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion,
It stood there;
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
"'But evil things in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
"'And travelers now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While like a ghastly, rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.'"
I had hardly finished the last stanza of what is to me the most ghastly poem in the English language, when a strange blood-curdling shriek was heard echoing through the rattle-trap old house.
"Dee!" we shouted together and started on a run through the door where we had last seen her new brown suit vanishing. It opened into a long corridor with doors all down the side, evidently bedrooms. Numbers were over the doors. All the doors were shut. Where was Dee? The wind had stopped as quickly as it had started and the old house was as quiet as the grave.
"Dee! Dee!" we called. "Where are you, Dee?"