Something brushes against his leg. A gasp catches in his throat: he freezes in place. A minute, two minutes, he stands there.
Nothing. A cobweb. Even a place like this, with a hundred servants, can’t keep all the stairwells free of the little toilers, the spinners of webs. Softly he goes on up again, one step at a time, at the edges, with care.
The remaining fifteen steps are steep, but he is careful. At the door at the top he halts and looks out of the crack in it where it has been left open. In the hallway onto which this stairway gives, next to a door with a gilded frame, is a chair under a single candle sconce with a dim electric bulb burning in it. There should be a footman in it, but there’s no sign of him. The chair is tilted back against the wall, and down by the foot of the chair is a stoneware mug: empty. The footman has gone to relieve himself. And the door in the gilded frame is slightly open.
Perfect. Down the hallway, now, in utmost silence.
Swiftly now, but also silently. Reach up and undo the bulb from its socket. No one will think a thing of it: these newfangled things burn out without warning all the time. Wait a few seconds for night vision to return. Then, silently, push the door open and step in.
The outer room is where the lady-in-waiting has a bed. She is not in it. Now the footman’s absence suddenly completely makes sense, and in the darkness, he smiles. The nightwalker makes his way toward what he cannot see yet in this more total darkness, the inner door. He feels for the handle: finds it.
Turns the handle. The door swings inward.
Darkness and silence. Not quite silence: a faint rustle of bedlinens, off to his left, and ahead. A little rasp of noise, soft. A snore? She will sleep more quietly in a moment…
Now, only now, the excitement strikes him, and his heart begins to pound. Ten steps, they told him. A rather wide bed. Her maids say she still favors the left side of it, leaving the right side open for someone who sleeps there no more.
Ten steps. He takes them. He listens for the sound of breathing…
…then reaches for the left side.
One muffled cry of surprise, as the knives pierce his hand, and other knives catch him from behind, on the neck and the back of the head, a flurry of abrupt, terrible, slicing pain. He staggers back, his arms windmilling, the knife trying to find a target in the darkness. Only the training of many years, the usual number of accidents—broken glass, banged shins—keeps him quiet now as he stumbles back to find his balance again. For just a moment his hand is free of the pain, but now the front of his neck is pierced by furious jaws that bite him in the throat, claws that seize and kick. He fumbles at his throat to grab something furry and throw it away with all his might—
—and suddenly he simply can’t move: he’s frozen, as if he were a stick of wood or one of the carved statues downstairs. Like a statue with its pedestal pulled out from under it, he topples, unable even to catch himself, or to turn so that he falls face down and not on his back.
Yet at the last minute he doesn’t fall. Some force far stronger than he is stops him, holds him suspended in air. He can’t breathe, can’t move, can only lie here gripped by something he can’t begin to understand, and by the terror that follows.
The pain, at least, drops away from the back of his head. But suddenly there is a pressure on his chest. His eyes, wide already in the dark, go as wide as they can with shock as a face, grinning, like the face of a demon, becomes just barely visible before him.
It is the face of a black-and-white cat. From the very end of its tail, held up behind it, comes the faintest glimmer of light, like a will-’o’-the-wisp. It looks at him with a face of unutterable evil, a devil come to claim him: and, impossibly, in a whisper, it speaks.
“Boy,” it says, “have you ever picked the wrong bedroom.”
It sits there on his chest while invisible hands lift him. A brief whirl of that ever-so-faint light surrounds him, going around the back of his field of vision, coming up to the front again, tying itself in a tidy bow-knot. For a second or so that light fills everything.
Then it is gone again, and he falls again, coming down on the floor with a thump. His head cracks down hard, and he almost swears, but restrains himself.
But there’s no carpet on this floor. This is hard stone. Slowly, when he discovers that he can sit up again, he feels the floor around him. Marble, and old smooth tile—Hesitantly he gets to his feet, begins to feel his way around.
What he feels makes no sense. A stone figure, lying on its back, raised above the floor—Much other carving reveals itself under his hands, but nothing else. He would swear out loud, except that he may still be able to get out, and someone might hear him.
It is a long while before the tarnished, waning Moon rises enough for its light to stream through the stained-glass windows surrounding him with their illustrations of Biblical texts, and for him to realize whose the reclining figure is. There, entombed in marble, Prince Albert lies in the moonlight, hands folded, at rest, on his face a slight grave smile which, in this lighting, takes on an unbearably sinister aspect.
The memory of the demon face comes back to him. He swallows, feels for his knife. It’s gone. Dropped upstairs in the bedroom. There’s nothing he can use on the locked, barred ornamental gate to get out. There’s no way he can get rid of the silken rope. They will find it on him in the morning, when they call the police. There is a specific name for the charge of being found with tools which might be used for burglary: it’s called “going forth equipped”. It’s good for about twenty years, these days, on a second offense.
This is his fifth.
He sits down on the green marble bench under the scriptural bas-reliefs with their thirty kinds of inlaid marble, and begins, very quietly, to weep.
Just outside the bars, the darkness smiles and walks away on little cat feet.
Out in the Home Park, a black brougham waits until two a.m. precisely: then, slowly, quietly, moves off into the night.
There was a tremendous fuss the next morning when the burglar was found downstairs. There was less certainty about his status as a burglar when the lady-in-waiting found, dropped next to the Queen’s bed, a switchblade knife of terrible length and keenness. The police came, and the police commissioner with them: he questioned the Queen with the utmost respect. No, she had seen nothing, heard nothing. Her dear little kitties had been sleeping with her all night: she woke up and went to her toilette … and then all these horrible discoveries began to make themselves plain. The policemen took time to stroke the cats, which lay about on the white linen coverlet with the greatest possible ease and indolence, and a fairly smug look on their faces. The cat scratches present on the burglar’s face and head made it fairly plain where he had been, and (probably) what he had been up to. As a result, all that morning, the cats were petted and fussed and made much of. Instead of running away, as anyone might have expected with such young creatures, they stood it with astonishing stolidity.
It was nearly ten in the morning before the Queen finally saw the final visitors out of her apartment, sent her lady-in-waiting away, and shut the door to have a few moments’ peace. She slipped back into her bedroom, where the two young black-and-white cats had been asleep on the bed. One of them was lying on her back with her feet in the air, utterly indolent: the other had rolled over on his side and was watching her come with an air of tremendous intelligence.
“Ah, my dears,” she said, and sat down on the bed beside them. “How I wish you could speak and tell me what it is that happened last night.”