“I’ll get flashlights,” he said huskily.
They went up the road through the snow in silence—three men, a boy and a dog. A pale quarter of moon had risen, and the world was all white silver, and even the trees seemed ghostlike and unreal. The artist dropped out at his house to write his letters, and the others went on to Farley’s. The place, Joe thought, did not look so forbidding under the softening touch of the moon. Frost had come with darkness, and the porch floor creaked under their feet. Mr. Sweetman thrust a key into a lock, the front door opened on complaining hinges, and they stepped into the damp, black, moldiness of a deserted, closed-up dwelling.
“The light!” the farmer cried. “Where is the light?”
Joe jumped, and switched on a flash. He had a momentary glimpse of his uncle, standing in the eternal darkness of the blind, serene and untroubled, and the sight gave him courage. The beam picked out faded walls, a chair, broken and discarded, the dusty floor, a doorway, a yawning staircase. Outside the yellow shaft of light there was naught but a blank, impenetrable, stealthy darkness. Darkness, and the hushed, unbroken silence.
“Well?” Dr. Stone asked.
There was a sound. At first it might have been the whimper of a wind around the eaves of the house. It rose, and fell away, and rose again. It fell away to a plaintive, worried whimper. And then, without warning, it became a human cry that filled the house with ghastly echoes. A voice—unmistakably a voice—sobbed wildly in writhing anguish. As abruptly as it had risen the cry was gone, and there was only a low, plaintive, heartbroken lamentation.
Mr. Sweetman’s teeth chattered. “You hear it, Doctor? From all over the house—upstairs, downstairs, everywhere.”
“Quiet,” said Dr. Stone.
There was a new sound. It seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. It was gone—it came again. A measured beat, a steady rhythm that hammered and throbbed like an unchanging pulse. Hammer and throb, hammer and throb! It beat upon the ears. Hammer and throb! All at once the sound stopped in the middle of a stroke and did not come again. The dark house lay in frozen silence.
“Doctor!” The farmer’s voice shook. “You know what that was?”