For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel very funny. And then Poppa Hanley said slowly and strangely quiet: “There’s death in this house. I can feel it as though I could see it.”
“I know,” I whispered, holding the Speed Graphic up in front of me, waiting for a picture of a ghost.
“I’ll find it,” Hanley said. “It’s here somewhere and I’ll find it.” And none of us knew what he meant just then.
None of us paid any attention to what he said at that particular moment, in fact. For Dinah interrupted him with a knife-like hiss, a gasp caught as it was born: “On the stair! Good!—”
It came from the top landing lightly, that ghost, skipping down sure-footed and nimble and low to the ground, a white cocker spaniel by slight stretch of the imagination. You could see through it — the stairs were suddenly visible behind it, and the hall seemed to glow a little bit in reflecting the whiteness of the beast.
I became aware that the hair on the back of my neck was standing out like quills on a porcupine’s spine, and I could hardly breathe. I was gripping the Graphic camera so damned hard that my knuckles were hurting.
The white shadow ran down the stairs to the intermediate landing and paused here. It seemed to turn and bark at the oaked panel behind the landing. It couldn’t be described: it was just there. A nucleus of lights and shadows which made a cocker, made dark spots in the shadow where there might have been eyes and a mouth and a nose. It had a flowing quality like liquid.
I snapped the plunger on the Graphic.
There was a blinding flash of light which illumined the entire place with startling clarity for one-fiftieth of a second, and I had a picture.
When the flash had faded and we could focus once more — a tough job after a photoflash — the ghost was gone, vanished completely.
“Lights!” Poppa Hanley roared.
“But it’ll return!” Nurbeck said.
“The hell with that!” said Hanley. “I want lights and let’s have ’em. That spook kept looking at that panel. Maybe it’s a hunch. Maybe Fate works it this way. Gimme lights!”
Nurbeck gave him lights. The moment they were on, Hanley dashed up the stairs to the intermediate landing and began to pound the oak panel there — the one the dog had looked at. It sounded solid enough but it was oak and you couldn’t tell.
“Come on up here,” Hanley said. “Everybody feel around and see if anything opens here — never mind! I’ve got it!”
We were all up on the landing in a flash. The panel had shot inward and Poppa Hanley had nearly catapulted in after it. He’d been leaning against it when he found the wood piece — a carved leaf in the border of the panel — which, when depressed, unlocked the panel. A concealed spring pulled it in. You had a good chance of diving in head first. Hanley darn near did.
“Take it easy,” Hanley said from where he stood beyond the panel. “There’s a stone stairway here. It leads down to a room. And there’s your organ down there. An electric light is on. There—” he paused.
“Let me in,” I said.
“You come, Daffy,” said Hanley. “Dinah, stay out of this. There’s something down here you won’t want to see. Nor you, Mr. Nurbeck. Stay up here and we’ll have a look and be right up.”
“You couldn’t get me down there,” Dinah said, “for a permanent wave with a million bucks thrown in.”
“I’ll... I’ll stay—” Nurbeck faltered.
He looked thin and gaunt and piqued suddenly. He knew what we would find.
We went down the stairs. There were fifteen of them and they led to a subcellar which had been cut out of the ground beneath the front of the house. The concrete room wasn’t large. Couldn’t have been more than six by six.
But there was a single bulb on and it showed four things in that six-by-six tomb. It showed an organ. It showed two bodies. It showed rats...
I took a couple of pictures for the paper while Poppa Hanley had a closer look. I finished when he did. “Do you get the lay of this thing?” he asked.
“You tell me,” I said. “I’m still shaky.”
“That’s Gloria Canova,” said Hanley. “And that’s the cocker dog you’ve heard so much about.”
She was in a silver fox collared coat, wrapped tightly around what was left of her body. The dampness of the cellar hadn’t been kind. There was only a skeleton left along with a fetid, heavy smell. I could see the fracture in front of the skull, and the right leg, snapped in two. She was lying face down on the concrete floor close to the organ and she had one hand extended up to the organ bench. The dog lay close beside her, skeletal in form, on its right side.
“When she left to go upstairs that night,” Hanley said, “she must’ve leaned against that panel and opened it when she reached the middle landing. She wasn’t prepared for it and she fell straight through and down these stairs. You can see: she busted a pin and cracked her skull. But that didn’t kill her.”
“No?”
“No,” said Hanley. “She must have regained consciousness at one time with just enough strength to turn the electric switch on the organ and push down some of the keys. Maybe she hoped some one would hear it and come looking for her. That switch has been left on for eight years from the night she died.”
“The motor for pumping couldn’t have lasted for eight years of constant turning over.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Hanley. “But the juice was all turned off when Nurbeck closed the house. So the organ motor hasn’t been running in eight years. It is now. It started running when Nurbeck had the electricity turned on again and opened up the house. Since then, at night, the rats come out and run across the keyboard and that’s why the damned spine-chilling sounds we heard.”
“What about the dog?”
“Died of starvation, I figure,” said Hanley. “There he is; he stuck to the last.”
“I mean the ghost!” I said.
“Let’s go downtown and develop that plate,” said Poppa, “and I’ll explain about the ghost.”
We went upstairs and told Dinah and Walter Nurbeck what had happened. It broke Nurbeck all up. We didn’t want to leave him alone there, so we took him along to headquarters.
Poppa Hanley had one of his police fotogs develop my plate and while he was doing it, I telephoned the Old Man at the Chronicle office and spilled the whole yarn to him. It was one I wasn’t pleased to call in. It was one which did not elate the Old Man. Somehow the picture of those bodies in that cellar was pathetic.
When the police fotog had the plates ready, he printed them and gave us a soaking wet job to look over. The shots I’d taken in the subcellar were all perfect. But it was the one of the ghost in the hall that knocked me on an ear.
There were the stairs, all in perfect focus. The walls with all their detail. The paneling. The bannisters. The rug.
But on the middle landing where the cocker had been when I snapped the picture — there was nothing!
“Uh-huh,” said Hanley.
“What do you mean ‘uh-huh’?” I demanded. “You saw the thing. We all saw the thing. I caught it with the flash. And there’s nothing there!”
Hanley smiled.
“What’d you expect? A ghost isn’t anything to begin with. This was just a regular ghost. That is to say: nothing. And that is what you took a picture of.”