The woman had fallen on her back. Her face was upturned to him — wreathed with a horrible, fixed grin. He stared, fascinated, eying, too, greasy gray hair that seemed strangely familiar. For a full watch-tick he stared, rigid. The odor of gin — the gray hair — the gaunt face, painted with the ghastly moonglare. All at once knowledge flooded him.
Mrs. Garber wore the face of the Madame Sovio who had read the stars for him that afternoon in the Sixth Avenue room!
"Murder!" Carney whispered. "She had the right dope!"
Something, as he straightened up. stopped the flow of the incoming moonlight. He raised his eyes and turned them to the window. His gaze flashed and fell upon a helmeted head looking in over the lowered top of the translucent window. His right hand darted under his jacket and gripped his automatic. In some blind, dizzy fashion he managed to drag it out.
But before he could pull the trigger the yellow glare of an electric torch smote him directly between the eyes. A voice, curt and imperious, bade him throw up his hands. Carney, blinking like an owl drenched in sunshine, fell back. His weapon crept up to firing position.
Then the heavy silence was shattered by the sound of six shots, so rapidly fired that they merged as one.
The automatic fell from Carney's hand. He wondered vaguely if he had been shot — why his legs seemed to be melting away. Cursing again, his brain reeled and scintillated with sparks. He groaned and fell heavily across something softly yielding…
The clock that had ticked monotonously whirred and struck the hour of twelve.
Fingers from the grave
by Edwin Carty Ranck
I
Tom Grimstead was not looking for a "story" when he decided to spend a night in the haunted Carey house. As a newspaperman, he had frequently exposed many bogus mediums and spiritualists, but the accounts of those who had spent, or rather tried to spend, a night in the Carey house seemed so authentic and honest that Grimstead, who was enjoying his vacation in the quaint New England town of Sedley, longed to experience some of the thrills that had come to these narrators.
"There was a presence in the house," quavered Martin Stacy, who had once spent part of a night there. "I–I felt it!"
"Could you see it?" asked Grimstead. Martin shuddered.
"No," he whispered, "but I knew it was there — whatever it was. If anyone sneaked into your room when you were reading, without making any noise, you would feel they were there even if you hadn't seen 'em — wouldn't you?" Grimstead nodded. "Well, it was that same sort of feeling that came over me in Mrs. Carey's bedroom."
Martin Stacy's story was similar to the others. They had all felt a sinister presence in Mrs. Carey's room and the feeling had always been followed by senseless, unreasoning terror that made them flee into the night.
The Carey tragedy had been the grimmest that had ever occurred in the town of Sedley. Twenty years before, Weldon Carey had brought his bride to the old Carey house, which had been built by a colonial Carey and inhabited by Careys ever since. Selma Carey was beautiful and vivacious and she appeared to be as madly in love with the old house and its colonial traditions as she was with its master.
Then came the tragedy! Young Mrs. Carey was found murdered one morning — strangled to death — and her husband told incoherently how two burglars had broken into the place at midnight. One of them had throttled Mrs. Carey and the other was threatening him with a revolver, when some noise frightened them away. The countryside was searched for the two men, but they were never apprehended and the verdict of the coroner's jury was that Mrs. Carey had come to her death "at the hands of a person or persons unknown."
Carey seemed heart-broken after the tragedy, and finally, not succeeding in selling the old house, he left it in charge of a caretaker and went abroad to live. In all these intervening years he had never returned to his birthplace, nor could anyone be induced to rent the place.
Tom Grimstead thought as he stood in front of the Carey mansion at dusk one September afternoon that he had never seen a more repellent-looking house. There was something indescribably repugnant about it, as if one were contemplating the corpse of a house. Horror surrounded it like a nimbus, and Grimstead's first impulse was to walk hastily away. But shaking off the feeling of dread that had settled upon him like an incubus, he resolutely walked up the weed-encumbered" walk that led to the front door, armed with a key that he had experienced no difficulty in securing from a cynical real-estate agent, who promptly offered to wager that he would not stay the night out — a wager that Grimstead as promptly accepted. He carried a handbag that contained a supply of sandwiches, a small automatic, half a dozen fat candles, a flashlight and two volumes of Poe's grisliest short stories. He ironically thought of these as his "ghost props."
But, stout-nerved as he was, Grim-stead shrank back instinctively as the front door slammed shut, leaving him in impenetrable darkness. This instantaneous plunge into blackness was sudden enough to daunt anyone, and for a second time that afternoon Grimstead was tempted to abandon his ghost quest. Then he reflected that thrills were what he had come for, and lie was disgusted at the realization that he was allowing his subconscious self to be affected by the stories he had heard. If he were really a skeptic, as he had always prided himself on being, he was on the verge of the most interesting adventure of his none-too-dull life. So he opened his handbag by touch alone, turned on his flashlight and took stock of his surroundings.
He was in an old-fashioned living-room at the far end of which was a huge open fireplace. In front of him a fine specimen of colonial architecture in the shape of an imposing staircase pointed the way to adventure on the second floor. The large room was fully furnished, but a smell of decay and mildew assailed Grimstead's nostrils.
The atmosphere was heavy and fetid: odors of bygone days seemed to meet and commingle, and the air held a penetrating chill. Something soft brushed his face in the semi-gloom and he started back involuntarily and then laughed nervously. It was a death's-head moth and the creature settled upon the back of a large upholstered chair, its wings spread wide, shivering as the bright ray from the flashlight illumined its ghastly markings.
With a little shiver that was not entirely due to the chill of the place, Grimstead started up the stairs in search of Mrs. Carey's bedroom, which, he had been told, was the front room at the left of the upper hallway. But first he explored the other rooms, finding them all furnished but reeking with desolation and decay. Time had wrought sad havoc upon objects of inestimable value to the collector of colonial antiques.
Grimstead now turned the handle of the door that led into the dead woman's bedchamber and found himself in an ancient boudoir about which still clung an elusive odor of mignonette and lavender. Against one side of the wall was an antique dressing-table, but the surface of the long mirror which had in bygone days often reflected the fair image of Selma Carey was now opaque, blurred over by the film of years. Near the dresser was a four-poster bed covered with a yellowed counterpane, and two pillows were in place at its head. It was hard to believe that no one had slept there for twenty years.
With the exception of the dust that covered everything, and a dank smell, the room and its furnishings appeared to have been left as they were on the day of the tragedy and Grimstead found himself glancing from time to time at the door of the dressing-room, which was about ten feet from the bed, as if he expected a charming figure in deshabille to come romping into the room at any moment.