I asked Worthington about the founder, but the old man hadn’t been on the staff long enough to remember Frederick Elhers in person, who was rumored to be quite an eccentric. The Ehlers money had come from manipulation of stocks and bonds before the turn of the century, and most of his later years were spent travelling to build up the collections, which had become his only interest in life.
Now, the rest of my story is where the plausibility gap, as they say nowadays, comes in. I’ve already told you I was a junkie in those days, so you can assume if you please that whatever I say happened from then on was simply hallucination. And I can’t claim with any assurance or proof that you’re not right.
Against that, put the fact that my habit was a very moderate one, and I was a gingerly, cautious, unconvinced sort of dope-taker. I shot just enough of the stuff to keep cheerful, if you know what I mean: dope picked me up, made the world look implausibly bright and optimistic; but not enough to give me any visions or ecstatic trances, which I wasn’t looking for anyway. I was always a reality man, strange as that may sound coming from me. Only once in a while reality got a bit too abrasive, and the need arose to lubricate the outer surfaces in contact with my personality, by means of a little of that soothing white powder. Dope was my escape, like TV or booze or women serve with others.
The moderation of my habit enabled me to kick it cold turkey on my own after I left the museum job. But that’s another story.
Very well, then: before I started this night watchman job (and for that matter afterwards) I had never had any experiences with far-out fancies or waking nightmares or sensory aberrations. All during the time I worked there (it wasn’t long) I did have such experiences. Either that, or the things really happened that I thought were happening.
You be the judge.
It started my very first night on the job. I checked in at six p.m., by which time Worthington had had an hour since closing time to batten down the hatches and lock up. He was to turn the keys over to me, and I would lock the big, ornate door, as broad as a raft, behind him. From that time I was on my own until he came back at six a.m. I could make the rounds when, as and if I saw fit; or simply doze, read, or cut out paper dolls.
I had asked old Worthington about the incidence of trouble at night, and he answered that there wasn’t much.
I mentioned the j.d. gangs that could be expected in such a neighborhood, but he insisted there was hardly any difficulty with kids, except sometimes around Hallowe’en, when the smaller ones might dare each other to try to break in through the windows on the lower floors. That wouldn’t be for a while yet. Anyway, I was all fitted out with a.45, a nightstick, and a powerful flash, and the precinct police station was only a block or so away. Accordingly, I anticipated a boring stint, so started from the first shooting my daily ration of junk just before coming on duty, to keep my thinking positive. It crossed my mind once or twice that this was a pretty spooky place to hang out in overnight, but I was a rationalist then, with no discernible superstitions, and thus didn’t dwell on the idea.
The first evening when I came on, feeling no pain, it was already almost dark. Worthington left me with a few casual words of admonition, and I and my monkey were alone in the shadowy museum.
The lights in the entry hall were always kept on, plus the ones in the second floor office across the way in the keep; and of course there were night lights at set intervals, though they didn’t do much to relieve the gloom. Especially in that badly-lit gallery of Wild West art you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and I always had to use the flash.
The first time I made the rounds took me more than an hour, since I stopped to look over any exhibits that attracted my attention. As I passed the cases of stuffed alligators, Etruscan jewelry, and Civil War battle flags, I found myself wondering what sort of guy Frederick Ehlers could have been to devote so much of his time and fortune to such random purchases. Maybe things out of the past simply fascinated him, no matter what they were, the way they do some kids and professional historians.
By the time I ended up in the keep, it was pitch dark outside.
I’d noticed as I sauntered along that those musical floorboards sounded twice as loud at night as they did in the daytime, and reflected that this made it virtually impossible for a thief or prowler to escape detection — and also impossible for me to sneak up on any such intruder. The place had two-way, built-in radar.
I spent maybe half an hour in the keep, flashing my light over a really fascinating array of medieval artifacts, including some of those ingenious torture instruments that seem so to obsess the modern mind. This gallery was arranged a little more logically than most of the displays, and held the interest better.
As I was starting back across the drawbridge-like corridor, I noticed that my footsteps as magnified by the squeaky flooring seemed to echo back at me from ahead even louder than I had noticed on the way over. Alerted by the narcotic I had taken, my subconscious must have noticed some inconsistency of rhythm or phasing in that echoed sound, for I found myself, for no discernible reason, stopping stock still.
From far ahead, the rhythmic squeaking continued!
Sweat popped out on me, though the evening was chilly. An intruder? Or had old Worthington returned? But he surely would have hailed me to avoid being shot at, in case I turned out to be a trigger-happy type. No, it must be a prowler, someone who had either broken in or secreted himself before the museum closed.
I broke into a trot, heedless of noise, since stealth was impossible anyway. Once across the drawbridge, I stopped again to listen, and thought I had gained on the sound, which seemed to be coming from below. I fumbled my way down the stairs to the first floor and dashed ahead, using my flash discreetly where needed. As I paused outside the pitch-dark Remington gallery, I realized the sound was coming from just inside.
I plunged into the gallery and swept my flash over the wine-red draperies, over the Indian paintings and bronzes of horses and cowboys. My ears told me the creaking was now at the opposite side of the narrow room and moving toward the arched exit. I ran on, directing the light through the archway; then, once more involuntarily, I halted.
The squeaking of the floor progressed deliberately past the exit and into the gallery beyond, but my light revealed nothing visible to cause the sound!
Now the sweat that had broken out on my body turned cold.
Suddenly, the sound ceased entirely; but even as I moved forward to investigate, I heard it start again upstairs.
Doggedly, I turned in my tracks, re-crossed the dark gallery, and puffed my way back up the stairs.
The creaking now seemed diffused, echoing from a dozen ambiguous sources — as fast as I would track one down, it would evaporate and others cut in, some upstairs others again below.
Finally my uncanny sensation dissolved before the ludicrousness of the situation. Here I was chasing noises all over a haunted house, stirring up more echoes with my clumsy footfalls than I could ever succeed in running down. I leaned against a display case, winded, and laughed out loud. As I did so, the crackling and creaking noises all over the building reached a peak, dwindled, and gradually ceased.
I began to consider what might have caused this disconcerting visitation. The most logical answer was probably the cooling and shrinkage of the floorboards in the chilly night air. This could occur in random patterns of self-activating sound. Added to this, perhaps, might be the factor of my own weight traversing the floor, depressing certain boards which, as they cooled and shrank, sprang back in sequence, creating the effect of ghostly footsteps.
Still in a moderate state of euphoria, I convinced myself that this was certainly the case, and began to feel ashamed of my initial panicky reactions.