The Spiral Staircase (24 page)

She rushed across the hall, her pale face suddenly vivid with color and glow.

“You were right, as usual,” she panted. “Dr. Parry wasn’t outside, for he’s ringing me now.”

She was so sure of hearing his voice, when she took up the receiver, that her disappointment was acute at the sound of mincing feminine accents.

“Is thet the Summet?”

“Summit speaking,” replied Helen dully.

The next minute, she spoke to Nurse Barker.

“The call’s for you.” Nurse Barker arose with an air of importance.

“Who is ringing me?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Unconscious of impending disaster, Helen watched Nurse Barker with none of her usual interest.

“Nurse Barker speaking. Who is it? … Oh, is it you, dear?”

The Secretary of the Nursing-Home explained the position.

“How nice to hear your voice, dear. I’m still on duty. We’ve a rush op., and I’m trying to get Blake. He’s on holiday, and I’m chasing him all over England. So, while I’m waiting I thought I’d ring you up, just in case you hadn’t gone to bed.”

“Not much chance of that,” said Nurse Barker.

“That doesn’t sound too bright. Isn’t the case comfortable?” “Most uncomfortable. In fact, it’s all most unpleasant and very peculiar.”

“I’m not surprised, dear. I think you ought to know that someone rang me up and asked me the most extraordinary questions about you.”

“About me?”

Helen caught the inflection of Nurse Barker’s voice.

With a sinking heart, she listened to half of the dialogue.

“Please repeat that… . Indeed. Anything else? … What? The insolence… . Who rang you up? … You are sure it was a girl’s voice? . .. When? Please try to remember, because I mean to trace this back to its source… . Are you sure it was that time? … Then I know which girl it was, for the other had left the house… . Not at all. You are quite right to let me know. Goodbye.”

Nurse Barker rang off, and looked at Helen.

“You wanted to prove yourself?” she asked. “Well, you’ve done it. Completely. You’re a liar and a sneak. If I could save your neck by lifting my little finger, I wouldn’t do it.”

Helen opened her lips dumbly, in an effort to explain. But her mind felt as incapable of coagulation as a lightly-boiled egg. She could only realize that she had alienated the defense, and that a man was prowling outside, in the streaming darkness.

The man. was still there, encircling the house. Lashed by the gale, twigs flogged his face, like wire whips, as he stooped over the sodden ground to examine each small basement window.

Once he thought he had found a vulnerable spot, for a casement shook before his pressure. Inserting his pen-knife inside the frame, he hacked away a makeshift fastening of a peg and some string, but only to meet the resistance of an inner shutter.

The house was armed to its teeth. It was blind and impregnable as an armored car.

Dr. Parry should have been pleased by this evidence of obedience to his orders. He had advised the most stringent precautions. Yet, as he looked upwards at the blank walls, seeking in vain a gleam of light from some upper window, he felt a chill.

He had always disliked the tree-muffled isolation of the Summit, although he was a lover of solitude.

Endowed with swift. intuitions-swayed by violent likes and dislikes, he recognized-and fought-a streak of superstition in his nature. At that moment he distrusted the exterior of the Victorian house, whose tall chimneys seemed to bore the ragged clouds..

Suddenly he thought of a simple way of getting into communication with Helen. Snapping on his lighter, he searched in his pockets to find a scrap of paper. When he had discovered an old envelope, he managed, with difficulty, to scrawl a message upon it. Then he slipped it into the letter-box and gave the postman’s traditional double-knock.

“That’ll bring her down, quicker than a stick of dynamite,” he thought, as he withdrew to a position on the gravel drive which commanded a view of the house.

As the minutes passed, however, and no signal-light gleamed from any of the upper windows, he grew apprehensive. The lack of response was not typical of Helen’s curious nature. With a memory of her sensational scampers up the stairs, he knew that it would not take her long to reach the second floor, even if she had followed his advice to sleep in the basement.

Presently he grew tired of standing in the rain, as though he were planted with the trees. It was evident that the Summit-following her character of respectable widow—was not at home to stray knocks, after dark.

He was on the point of turning away, when a light glowed in a bedroom on the second floor. The window was closed, but not shuttered, and screened by a light curtain of turquoise-blue.

At the sight his face lit up with welcome. Not until he was on the point of hearing her voice again, did he realize the strength of his feeling for Helen. The glow in his heart rose to his lips and flamed into a smile. His lover’s rapture made the subsequent disappointment the keener. With a shock of positive horror, he saw-thrown upon the light screen of the curtain-a furtive, crouching shadow.

It was the head and shoulders of a man.

SAILOR’S SENSE

Outside the Summit was elemental fury; inside, the clash of human passions. Terrified by Nurse Barker’s dark, swollen face, Helen grew almost frantic in her efforts to conciliate her.

“Oh, can’t you understand?” she implored. “It was after the murder. We were all worked up and jumpy. Honestly, I thought it would clear the air if I made certain we’d got the right nurse. You see, Mrs. Oates was sure you were an impostor.”

Her explanation only fed Nurse Barker’s anger. Encased in the frame of a giantess was a dwarfed nature, which made her morbidly sensitive of the impression she created on strangers.

“You tried to worm yourself into my confidence,” she declared vehemently. “You led me on to talk of—sacred things. And then, directly after, you rang up the Home. A dirty trick.”

“No,” protested Helen. “All this happened before our talk. I’ve been loyal to you, ever since my promise.”

“That’s a lie. I caught you at the telephone.” “I know. But I was ringing up Dr. Parry.”

Nurse Barker only sucked her lips together in a crooked line. She knew that silence was the best punishment she could administer, since it kept the girl on the prongs of suspense.

As Helen waited, fearfully expectant of the next attack, she started at the sound of a low thud.

Her thoughts flew to the Professor. In her ignorance of the effects of drugs, she still clung to the hope that he would become conscious in time to control the situation. But Nurse Barker shattered her illusion, as she broke her silence, to bark out a command.

“See if the old woman’s fallen out of bed.”

Glad to be of service, Helen obeyed-rushing up the staircase. When she reached the landing, she checked her headlong flight, and stole cautiously into the blue room.

Lady Warren lay huddled up in the big bed, fast asleep. Her mouth was open and her snores were of genuine origin.

Helen looked around her, noticing that the fire was burning low. As she carefully piled on some of the snowball coals, she was too engrossed to hear Dr. Parry’ double-knock on the front-door.

Nurse Barker, however, started up, at the sound. Peering suspiciously to right and left, she pushed open the swing door, and went into the lobby.

Her first glance showed her a white object, gleaming through the glass of the letter box. Pulling it out, she examined the note with contracted eyes. It was scrawled on the back of an envelope, which was addressed to “Dr. Parry,” and was signed with the initials, “D.P.”

Her heart was wrung with a spasm of jealousy at this proof that Helen’s instincts had been true. While they struggled together, Dr. Parry had actually been outside the door, insistent and eager.

“She knew,” she muttered. “How?”.

The girl’s familiarity with the windings of love’s labyrinth was a mystery to the thwarted woman, who, all her life, had hungered for a clue to help her to thread the tangle. Only once had she ventured a little way into the maze, but had never reached its heart.

But Helen knew how to draw the heart out of a man, and how to call to him, so that-at the end of a hard day-he lost his sleep, for her sake.

Nurse Barker could appreciate the extent of the sacrifice on the part of a general practitioner. Her eyes were like flints as she read the note, which was obviously meant for Helen.

“Have biked over, to see how things are, for myself. Been knocking like mad, but no luck. When you get this, open your bedroom window, and I’ll shout up to you, so that you’ll know it really is I, and not some trick. But, for Heaven’s sake, let me in. I’ll explain everything to the Professor, afterwards.”

From the moment she had first set eyes on Helen, Nurse Barker had been frantically envious of her. She was just the type which she, herself, would have chosen to be quick as a needle and smart as paint. While she was able to help herself, she was of fairy fragility, which appealed to the protective instincts of men.

She swallowed convulsively, as she tore the paper into tiny fragments and dropped them inside the drain-pipe unbrella-stand.

“Dead Letter Office,” she murmured grimly.

Meanwhile, Helen was busy in the blue room, unconscious of the destruction of her vital mail. She straightened disarranged furniture, shook up cushions, and put away articles of clothing; presently she came out on the landing laden with a big basin of soapy water and an armful of crumpled towels.

As she did so, she was vaguely aware of some stir in the atmosphere, as though someone had come that way, a few seconds before her. The door leading to the back-stairs, quivered faintly, as though it would swing open, at a touch.

Her small white face swam up in the dim depths of the mirror in the old familiar way; but, as she drew nearer, she noticed something which was both mysterious and disturbing. A faint mist blurred the glass, about the height of a man’s mouth..

“Someone stood here, a few seconds ago,” she thought fearfully, as she watched the patch become bright again. Gripping her basin with stiff fingers, she stared at the closed doors. She was afraid to take her eyes off them, lest .one should open-afraid to move, lest she precipitated the attack.

Suddenly her nerve crashed. Putting her basin down on the carpet, she turned, and hurled herself down the stairs. Nurse Barker watched her as she sank down, panting, on the lowest step.

“Well?” she asked with cool unconcern.

Ashamed of her unfounded terror, Helen rapidly became composed.

“Lady Warren is asleep,” she said. “We didn’t hear her.”

“Then where have you been all this time?”

“Tidying the room.”

“You’ve not been up in your own room?” Nurse Barker asked.

“No.”

“Well, I wouldn’t, if I was you. It’s a long way up, in case you met someone.”

Again the dull thud banged in the distance.

“There it is again,” said Nurse Barker. “I wish it would stop. It gets on my nerves.”

As she listened, Helen suddenly located the sound.

“It’s down in the basement. It must be the window I tied up. It’s blown open again.”

She hastened to add quickly, “It’s all right. There’s a shutter up, so no one can get in.”

“It’s criminal carelessness, all the same,” declared Nurse Barker, with an elaborate yawn.

“Are you sleepy?” asked Helen sharply.

“My eyes are just dropping,” declared Nurse Barker, with another yawn. “It’s all I can do to keep them open. I came straight off night-duty I ought to have had a night in bed, between my cases.”

With a chill at her heart, Helen recognized the toofamiliar signals of the landslide. While she had been afraid of Nurse Barker succumbing to some treacherously-administered drug, she was, in reality, nearly overpowered by natural sleep.

As she watched her, Helen realized that her failure to stay awake was inevitable. Nurse Barker was due for a good night’s rest. She had made a journey in an open car; … since then she had eaten and smoked heavily, and had taken a fair quantity of brandy. The air, of the shuttered house, too, was close.

There seemed no connection between this latest example of cause and effect, and the mysterious conspiracy which threatened Helen’s safety; yet her fear of being left alone, to watch, was real, because the incident was timed with such horrible accuracy.

Suddenly, Nurse Barker’s head dropped forward with a jerk, which awakened her. She staggered as she rose slowly to her feet.

“Where are you going?” asked Helen anxiously.

“Bed.”

“Where?”

“Patient’s room.”

“But you can’t do that. You can’t leave me here, alone.”

“The house is locked up,” Nurse Barker said. “You’re safe, as long as you remember not to open the door. If you, forget again it’s your own funeral.”

“But it’s worse than that,” wailed Helen. “I wouldn’t tell you before, because I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure of what?” repeated Nurse Barker.

“I’ve a terrible fear that someone is in the house, locked in with us.”

Nurse Barker listened skeptically to the story of the rustle on the back stairs and the blur of breath on the mirror.

“Wind,” she said. “Or mice. I’m going to bed. You can come up too, if you’re going to throw a fit.”

Helen hesitated, swayed by temptation to accept the offer. If they locked the Professor’s door, as well as the blue room, they would be secured in an inner citadel, together with the vulnerable members of the household.

But Mrs. Oates would be left outside, in the trenches. In spite of the special Providence which was supposedly detailed, to guard her, Helen felt she could not risk leaving her there. “Could we, possibly get Mrs. Oates up to the blue room?” she asked.

“Drag a drunken log up two flights of stairs?” Nurse Barker shook her head. “I’m not taking any.”

“But we can’t leave her there. Remember, we should be held responsible, tomorrow morning.” Fortunately Helen struck the right note, for Nurse Barker was caught by the argument.

“Oh, well, I’ll have to make do with a lay-down in the drawingroom.”