"Nonsense, Mrs. Muzzard. You mustn't let all this newspaper talk get the better of your good, Irish common sense!"
"I know what I know, Mr. Scrimgeour, him with his wide-brimmed hats and his shaded lamps! Skulking around like an old mole afraid to show his face in the light o' day! That man has a guilty secret!" she whispered melodramatically into my ear.
"Oh, I see!" I laughed. "That explains it! Nathaniel Broome is a mysterious bandit — cut-throat — murderer, masquerading incognito."
"I don't know what he's in, Mr. Scrimgeour, and I don't say he's no murderer nor nothing. All I got to say, and if it was over me dead body I'd say it — that man's hiding from the police!"
I laughed aloud as much at the absurd melodramatics as at the idea of my old friend having so lugubrious a history.
"Well, let's knock at the terrible bandit's portals, Mrs. Muzzard," I said mockingly, "and see if we can persuade him to show himself."
I pulled the cord of my dressing-gown tightly about my waist, and the action as I did so seemed whimsically like that of an ancient warrior "girding up his loins."
"Come," I said, "I shall do the bearding of the Hon. You may shelter yourself behind me. Surely if there are any evil spirits to confront they will have to tackle me first!"
We crossed the dark hallway and stopped in the shadows at the closed door of the mysterious room.
I tapped gently upon the panel.
There was no answer.
Again I rapped upon the door.
"He must be out, after all," I muttered, as there came no reply, and, to my own amazement, I breathed a sigh of relief!
"I swear to God, Mr. Scrimgeour," exclaimed Mrs. Muzzard in a hoarse whisper, "I swear to God he ain't set foot outside this door today!"
She crouched close behind me, her whole body shaking with excitement, her breath coming in sharp gasps through her set teeth. Unaccountably I thought of a terrier bristling with fear at something it cannot understand.
As we listened, something of her perturbation communicated itself to me.
"Can it be," I thought, "that the woman has some reason for her fantastic premonitions?" Then, "Preposterous! Incredible!"
"He may not have come in at all last night," I ventured, trying now to reassure myself as well as my frightened companion.
"You must have heard him as plain as I did, Mr. Scrimgeour." she replied with startling vehemence. "He's so heavy on the stairs."
I remembered now that I had heard.
"Surely, then, he is asleep. We had better not wake him."
"Knock again, Mr. Scrimgeour, for God's sake knock again!"
Seized by a sudden excitement I rapped heavily, frantically upon the panel of the door. So hard did I use my knuckles that a sharp pain shot through them, and, glancing down at my fingers, I saw that I had broken the skin.
IV
Tense now with inexplicable excitement we both stood listening, our heads bent toward the closed door.
"Good God, what was that!" sobbed Mrs. Muzzard hysterically, as I fancied that I could hear a low groan.
"Broome! Broome!" I called, all my eerie apprehension vanished. The man was sick, perhaps dying—
"Broome!" I called again, jerking at the handle of the door.
Again we heard the groan, this time louder than before.
"For God's sake, Broome, open the door, man!" I called.
"You — must — not — come — in—!"
The words were spoken with very great difficulty, as if the unfortunate man were suffering in intense agony.
"Are you ill?" I called. "It is I, Scrimgeour! Don't be afraid, but tell me, Broome. If you are ill we must help you. You have locked the door."
"I am — not — ill." Again the same tortured voice, forcing itself to speak through an ecstasy of pain. "You — must — not — come — in!"
"Oh, God! — God! — God!" shrieked Mrs. Muzzard in terror. "I tell you that man's a devil. He's at some of his ghost tricks now. He'll have all the powers of hell down on us! Jesus. Mary and Joseph, may me sins be forgiven! Oh, Blessed Mary, stand betune us and harm!"
"Shut up, you idiot!" I cried. "Can't you realize that the man's been taken suddenly ill! He naturally locked the door last night, when he went to bed, and he's too sick to get up and open it for us!"
"Then what are we to do?" she moaned, making ineffectual gestures in the air with her hands.
"We'll have to break open the door. Get me a hammer, or, if you have an axe or something heavy…"
"I'll run right away and get Mrs. Seagle's next door."
"You — must not — open — the — door!" came again slowly, ominously from the inner room.
During several moments — moments that were age-long — I stood still, rooted to the floor, unable to move my limbs; utterly powerless to cry out.
At my sharp command Mrs. Muzzard had disappeared, more than eagerly I fancied, in search of a battering implement.
She returned, a few minutes later, with an axe, which she had succeeded in borrowing from her neighbor.
There seemed such a feeling of actuality in the stout wooden handle of the axe that, as I gripped it in my hands, I felt my courage returning.
"Look out, Broome!" I shouted. "If you're up keep away from the door! I'm going to break it in!" And with that I dealt a heavy blow upon the upper panel.
The voice inside became a strangled, inarticulate scream.
Behind me Mrs. Muzzard cowered, a heap of jabbering fear, upon the floor.
Seized in a sort of panic, I rained blow after blow with my stout axe upon the door. I remember, even in my excitement, comparing the scene with a similar one as it would be staged in moving pictures. How quickly upon the screen the door would have been burst open, and how, in actuality, it was so difficult to split such resisting wood.
At last I managed to make an opening through which I might insert my hand and turn the key in the lock.
Then the door swung open.
The window shades had been drawn closely, so that the place was in darkness. I groped my way to the bed.
"Broome!" I cried, still breathless from the unusual exertion, "what's the matter?" And I leaned over the blurred form that lay crouched in an unnatural attitude upon the bed.
"A little light, Mrs. Muzzard," I said over my shoulder, as the landlady xrept shuddering into the room.
She-walked obediently to the window.
The dark form seemed to writhe in agony. Then the shade was lifted and the late morning light poured into the room.
V
What I saw there will remain a fearful image in my memory until the day I die.
As I looked at that face upon the pillow the cold chill of horror pricked at the roots of my hair. Clammy drops of perspiration stood out upon my forehead. I could feel the skin drawing into gooseflesh over my spine.
Nathaniel Broome, fully dressed, his body twisted unnaturally in the grip of some strange paralytic seizure, lay huddled upon the bed, his knees drawn up until they touched his chin.
I called that creature by the name of my old friend, but the distorted mask which I saw upon the pillow bore no resemblance to that placid face. It was the face of the fiend which media?val sculptors have carved with Gothic monstrousness in imperishable stone.
There was no nose; only two terrible holes where the flesh had been eaten away.