I went back to the little office, brewed some coffee on the hot-plate, and ate a sandwich I had brought with me. After a while, I made the rounds of the museum again, stepping lightly and gingerly, as if my care could exorcise the sinister eruption of sounds that had beset me earlier.
This time, outside of a few odd groanings and shiftings normal in an old building, there were no noises. Once in a while during the night there came brief flurries of distant squeaking, but I finally gave up attempts to locate them through sheer boredom. It was too monotonous trying to creep up and surprise a mere nervous chunk of wood suffering from hot and cold flashes.
I even napped for a while in the office toward dawn.
At six a.m., shortly after daybreak, I went down to answer Mr. Worthington’s bell. As he entered, stoop-shouldered and rather pathetic in his threadbare day-shift uniform, he asked in a disinterested tone, ‘All quiet?’
I wondered if he was joking. ‘I wouldn’t call it that, exactly,’ I answered. ‘The place was creaking and crackling half the night. Sounded as if all the ghost legions of Crusaders who owned that armour had come back to claim it.’
‘Oh, the floors. Yes, most of our night men mention that at first. Scares some of them out of a year’s growth. I forgot to tell you about it.’
I stared at Mr. Worthington’s inoffensive form with a feeling of fierce contempt I hope my expression concealed. The warmth of my reaction surprised me; I must have been more rattled last night than I realized.
I went home and went to bed
Well, like the other night men at the museum, I got used to the noise after a while. (Or maybe they didn’t; maybe that was why the job was open so often.) After all, I was on an especially potent kind of tranquilliser. The work was easy, the pay and the hours were steady, and I had no kicks — outside of the kind I sought myself at the tip of a needle.
I wasn’t getting anywhere; but, as I’ve intimated, I was never sure just where it was I might want to get anyway.
The second phase of the business started when I commenced to see things as well as hear them. Almost to see things, that is, which was the maddening part of it. Actually I would never catch a straight glimpse of anything odd: just flickers out of the corner of my eye, a fugitive flurry of barely-sensed movement that disappeared no matter how quickly I turned to confront it; furtive shiftings in the mass of solid objects as I passed by. It’s not an experience I can describe very clearly, nor one that I would wish to repeat.
This kind of visual impression might or might not be synchronized with the creaking of the floors, nearby or distant. The coinciding of the two phenomena occurred so much at random, in fact, that I somehow sensed there was no connection, at least no causative connection, between them.
I wondered whether Old Man Ehlers had seen and heard things here too, and whether that might have had anything to do with his being found dead of a heart attack in the medieval gallery one morning during the winter of 1927, as Mr. Worthington had told me.
Now I really began to get concerned. Other people had heard the noises, or so I’d been told, and there were conceivable natural explanations for them. But nobody at the museum, as far as I knew, had ever mentioned seeing things, and I couldn’t bring myself to mention the matter to old Worthington. I wasn’t yearning for a padded cell, or Lewisburg, at this juncture.
I drew the natural conclusion and knocked off on dope for a few days. But it made no difference, except then I was so nervous and shaky that my delusions (if that’s what they were) might have been withdrawal symptoms as easily as narcotic hallucinations. They had me, coming and going.
It was about this time that I found Old Man Ehlers’ journal.
You see, these delusions of sound and sight, whatever they were, didn’t afflict me all the time. (That would have sent me starko, despite my alleged skepticism.) They went on for maybe ten or fifteen minutes once or twice or even half a dozen times a night; there was never any way to predict. The rest of the time I used to occupy with reading, to fill up the gaps between my increasingly infrequent rounds.
This particular night I’d forgotten to bring a book, so I rummaged around the cluttered office in the keep for something to browse through while I consumed my sandwich and coffee.
I located some moldy old volumes sagging abandoned in a decrepit breakfront pushed back in one corner; they seemed mostly antiquarian guides, but my eye fell on a thin book with no title on the spine. I pulled it out and discovered it was a daily journal, dated 1925 and stamped with the name Frederick Ehlers. It was dusty enough that it might not have been opened in the thirty-odd years since Ehlers died, but I cleaned it up a bit and began to page through it.
At first I was disappointed, although the human fascination with sticking one’s nose into someone else’s private business kept me reading.
It was neither a diary nor a business journal, but seemed to consist mostly of accounts of dreams the old boy had had, plus speculations on their meaning, with occasionally a few rather visionary philosophical jottings thrown in.
Some of the dreams were dillies. I remember one that went something like this: "Dreamed I was shut inside the new Iron Maiden from Dusseldorf. A noisy crowd outside was laughing, jeering, and hammering on it; and gradually it became red hot. Feeling of terror, not at the pain, but because I was certain those outside were not human. Meaning: birth trauma, or perhaps some ritual of spiritual purification?"
There was a lot of stuff like that, not very reassuring as to the inner psychic life of Our Founder, and I had begun to tire of deciphering the jagged, fading ink strokes, when suddenly an extended passage caught my attention. I copied it down and still have it, so I can quote it accurately:
"That objects with a long history, particularly those associated with passionate or violent people and events, soak up and retain an aura or atmosphere of their own I have no doubt. And that under certain conditions they may produce a tangible emanation, even sensory stimuli, is proved by my experiences as a collector. Perhaps one must be psychic, whatever that may mean, to receive these impressions, which would explain why not all collectors have had such experiences.
"I don’t mean only manifestations like the squeaking of the ancient floorboards I brought over and installed from the wrecked Daimyo’s mansion after the Tokyo earthquake (though that is an especially unnerving instance), but also certain definite sights and emotional impressions, sounds, odours, etc. How otherwise explain the smell of blood, the feeling of horror surrounding most ancient torture instruments? It cannot be association, since the effects are felt even when the objects are hidden and unsuspected by the subjects in tests I have made.
"These phenomena, of course, are not ‘ghosts’ in any literal or personal sense, but more like the recordings impressed on a phonographic cylinder. Still, since I am unsure whether or not such emanations can affect matter physically, there is a chance they may be more powerful, and perhaps dangerous, than mere recordings could be."
That was all; next came another crazy dream, and nothing else in the book continued this train of thought, although there were some weird, rather theosophical speculations on spiritual life inhabiting inorganic matter.
Still, it meant that the man who had originally assembled this jumble-sale collection had himself heard, seen, and felt things here that he couldn’t explain, except through this fanciful theorising, over thirty years ago. And my guess about the Japanese origin of the Nightingale Floors was correct — an almost fantastic coincidence! (Could I myself perhaps be "psychic, whatever that may mean"?) I began to feel closer to, and sorrier for, that lonely, visionary millionaire who bequeathed this house of horrors to an indifferent community.