The Room Under the Stairs

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 856, 27 December 1929, Page 5

The Room Under the Stairs

The Baffling Story of a Man Who Read of His Own Murder.

By

Herman Landon

Copyright by G. Howard Watt. Serialised by Ledger Syndicate.

Silently he crept upward, unceasingly alert against a possible interruption. Now he was in the main vestibule, and diuectly overhead were the bedrooms, including the death chamber and probably also Littleby’s sleeping quarters. His conduct in prowling about a strange house at night was fantastic in the extreme, hut he was dealing with a wildly fantastic situation. In a moment he was ascending the main staircase, passing the turn where he had stood listening to the conversation between Ballinger and the lawyer. A dozen more steps, and he reached the landing, faintly illuminated by an electric candle in the hand of an obscure brass figure poised against the wall. In front of him were several doors, the one directly ahead communicating with the death chamber. Beneath one of the others, located a few steps to his left, was a slim pencil streak of light. “Littleby’s room?’’ he wondered, with eyes fixed on the narrow sliver of light that was the only sign of life in the surroundings. He drew a little closer, listened for a moment, then drew back with a start and bounded silently toward the stairs, crouching low in the shadows just as the door came open. From his position, sheltered by a massive pillar, he could see the tall and gaunt form of Littleby appearing in the doorway and looking suspiciously to right and left.

The sight, with its suggestion of stealth and an uneasy mind, accelerated his pulse beats. Evidently the lawyer wished to assure himself that he was unobserved before he proceeded with whatever undertaking he had in mind. It was only the dimness of the light and the sheltering pillar in front of him that saved Dean from discovery. After a brief wait the lawyer closed the door behind him, and stepped cautiously forward, pausing directly in front of the room Lamont had occupied. For a few moments his lean form stood silhouetted against the dusky background, in ail attitude of troubled brooding, then he jiushed the door open and entered. Dean, stretching forward in his hiding-place, saw him reach out an arm along the wall, and in the next moment, with a slight click, the light went on in the death-chamber. The watcher could scarcely restrain himself. His vision of the room encompassed only a side view of the bed, but he could see a lifeless arm drooping down over the edge, with fingers slightly spread out, just as he had seen it when he entered the room behind Littleby and the doctor a few hours earlier. The lawyer was standing a few feet inside the door, erect and motionless, his head turned toward the bed, seemingly absorbed in contemplation. As yet Dean was at a loss to know the purpose of his visit, nor could he determine whether the lawyer was moved by morbid curiosity or by a sentimental affection for the dead man, or something far stronger.

Presently Littleby moved again, disappearing from the watcher’s range of vision, but an occasional scraping sound suggested that the other man was down on his knees, and moving about on the floor as if searching for something. Dean wondered whether he should risk venturing forward to see better, but just then a faint metallic sound, like that produced when a telephone receiver is lifted from the hook, sent a reminiscent thrill down his back. Littleby was using the telephone—the same telephone that had been an object of dread with Lamont, and over which Dean himself had heard those appalling screams.

He strained his ears, but the lawyer was talking in tones so low that he could not distinguish a single word.

The conversation lasted only a minute or so, and then Littleby abruptly extinguished the light and stepped out of the room, leaving Dean a meagre moment in which to readjust himself in his position. For an instant he thought the other man had seen him, for he moved straight toward the point where he was crouching behind the pillar, but to his relief the lawyer turned within a few feet of him and swung up the stairs. Dean waited, consumed with curiosity concerning the man’s peculiar movements. Littleby was now prowling about the deserted rooms upstairs, with their shuttered windows and buriapped furniture, in one of which Dean had spent an hour in solid but unavailing think-

ing before he descended to become a chance eavesdropper upon the conversation on the balcony. What could Littleby be doing up there, in those dreary and mouldy smelling rooms?

He started in pursuit as he asked himself the question. Reaching the upper landing, he could detect neither sound or sign of his quarry. A long, black hall stretched before him, with doors on either side. Here the darkness was impenetrable, almost a palpable thing. Dean moved forward, constantly on his guard against an accidental encounter. The hall was wide enough to permit two persons to pass if one kept close to the wall. The slight sounds he made as he continued his difficult progress were instantly swallowed up in the clamour of wind and rain.

Suddenly he drew in his steps, then stepped into the shallow recess formed by a door. Toward the farther end of the corridor a slim wedge of light had suddenly appeared. The pale glow, evidently a small electric flashlight, jogged and skipped swiftly down the

length of the hall, as if to spy out a possible watcher lurking in the shadows. Dimly outlined in the wake of the darting beacon stood Littleby. THE SECRET ROOM Dean pressed close to the door, thankful that the narrow niche sheltered him against the prying eye of the flashlight.- Doubtless the lawyer wished to assure himself that he was unobserved before he proceeded. Now he turned and faced the blank wall that seemed to border the corridor at that end, and in a moment Dean saw his thin, claw-like hand crawling upward, moving toward a point level with his head. Though the light was dim, the picture of those slim, white talons creeping with a predacious touch over the wall held him fascinated, but he had little time to wonder what is signified. A click sounded faintly, then the light was blotted out.

Dean waited. The darkness, with Littleby’s clawing fingers flashing in his vision, had a choking quality. No sounds came from the farther end of the corridor; it was is if Littleby had vanished through the solid wall in front of him. After a bewildering interval Dean moved cautiously for-

ward, approaching the point where the lawyer had disappeared. The wall, as his hands groped over it, gave him an impression of baffling solidity. It was unthinkable that the lawyer had passed through such an obstruction, yet there seemed to be no other solution.

A warning signal flashed through his consciousness as he stood pondering the enigma. Instinctively he felt that the lawyer was about to return as mysteriously as he had disappeared. He had been gone about five minutes, perhaps a trifle longer. Dean slid back, hugged another sheltering doorway, waited in a tremor of suspense while something passed him in the blackness, moving in the direction of the stairs, until the opening and closing of a door on the floor below told him that Littleby had gone to his room. Then Dean stepped out of his shel-

ter and again approached the point of Littleby’s egress and ingress. He felt that the explanation of the lawyer’s movements would, if he could but find it, explain several other things as well. Absently he moved his hand toward the upper level of the wall where Littleby’s fingers had described that peculiar movement. Back and foi'th his hand slid, moving within a radius circumscribed by his recollection of the scene, and at length a slight protuberance, yielding elastically to a firm pressure, signified that he had discovered something. A sluggish current of air told that a door had glided silently back into its groove, opening an aperture in front of him.

Dean passed through, feeling an exultant throb of his pulses. Soon lie would know the secret of Littleby’s nocturnal venture. Evidently he was in a small hall or anteroom, for there were walls on either side as he moved forward guided by a slim streak of light a few feet ahead. * It was as if he had suddenly stepped into a sanctuary of silence. Not a sound was to be heard, not even the beat of rain or the claps of thunder that had broken the musty quietude in the outer hall. On all sides reigned the complete stillness that is afforded only by sound-proof wqlls. In a moment, his whole body atingle with suspense, he reached the faintly penciled streak of light. His fumbling fingers found a knob. He turned it, pulled gently, and a door came open. Before him was a large, well-lighted room, hexagonal in shape and having a domed ceiling. It was a curiously arranged room, and the strangeness of it made him stop and blink his eyes in wonder. But stranger still was the young woman who, with a look of dread in her eyes and a gasp of fright on her lips, sprang up to meet him as he entered. CHAPTER XVIII. SHIRLEY LAMONT “Good evening,” said Dean lamely, for it was one of those stultifying moments when the tongue finds only banalities to utter. “Hope I didn’t frighten you?” He stared at her—a bit rudely, he realised—and then an idea flashed like an inspiration through his mind. It came out of nowhere, as it seemed, but with a force that staggered him for a moment. “I suppose you are Miss Lamont—Shirley Lamont?” She did not answer, but merely looked at him in her frightened, palpitant way, but somehow Dean knew that his wild supposition had been right. After all, and in view of all the other astounding things that had already happened, it did not seem so strange that his prowling through the rambling house of Dennis Littleby should have brought him face to face with the young woman from the West, whose mystifying appearance and equally mystifying vanishing had been one of the multitudinous angles of the mystery. He searched her face, hut his analytical faculty failed him. One could no more analyse Shirley Lamont than one could analyse the fragrance of the cottonwoods or the exultant sweep of the prairies from which she hailed.

She was of medium height, with fluffy medium-brown hah-, a slightly uptilted nose which under ordinary circumstances would hav.e given her a provocative, inquisitive air, and large gentian eyes which, Dean felt, would in more tranquil moments be capable of a frank and friendly gaze. Her simple tailor-made suit of navy blue seemed so intimately a part of herself that Dean felt anything else would have been out of harmony. The pallor that lay like a withering film over her cheeks gave an incongruous touch to the picture. “What—what do you want here?” she demanded. Dean's eyes left her face while his mind fumbled for an answer. There were no windows in the room, but air seemed to find ingress through some hidden ventricle. Its large size, together with its meagre furnishings, gave it a cold and unfriendly air. With a start his eyes paused on a telephone, a common enough thing to find in a house equipped, as this one was, with an inter-communicating sys-

tem. By some untraceable process of thought his mind connected it with the instrument in the death chamber, a symbol of unfathomable dread. Suddenly he wondered whether Littlebv had told her of the murder. It was doubtful whether she had heard the shot, for no sounds from the outside seemed to penetrate to this cloistered room.

Miss Lamor.t’s shuddering gaze, reminiscent of some dreadful experience, made him raise his eyes to her face.

‘•Did Mr. Littleby send you here?” she asked suddenly. “Oh, no,” said Dean, hoping to win her confidence by frankness. “I am a trespasser. Littleby would throw me out or have me arrested if he found me here.” She looked at him as if uncertain whether to believe or doubt. He had an indefinable impression that all her instincts of faith and confidence had been shaken to the depths by some fearful ordeal. “How did you find me here?” she asked. “It was an accident. For reasons of my own I made it my business to watch Littleby tonight. Call it curiosity if you like. I followed him, and here I am. Of course, he didn't -know that I was on his trail. He might have been more cautious if he had known.” Her eyes, with a faint glimmer of awakening trust in them, searched his face intently. “You distrust Mr. Littleby then?” “Xot exactly. J am trying to keep

* i an open mind in regard to him, as well as a pair of open eyes. The two go '■ well together.” She seemed to ponder his statement for a moment. When she spoke again there was an aching throb in her voice. “You know what happened here tonight?” He nooded gravely; “Did Littleby tell you?” A trembling “yes” came on a long, despairing intake of breath.

For the moment she seemed so pathetically crushed and forlorn that Dean felt a powerful impulse to comfort her just as one would 9 griefstricken child. “Poor dad’.” she murmured brokenly. “I was prepared for the end, but I never imagined it would be anything so dreadful. And they wouldn't let me see him —not even for a moment. That’s what makes is so dreadfully hard. Oh !” He took her hand and pressed it gently, vaguely, wondering whom she meant by “they.” Her big blue eyes, downcast for the moment, burned with an anguish too great for tears, rousing within him a virile sympathy that swept away all the staggering complications that had piled up in the last

few days. Her cold little hand trembled iu his owe;, and the electric contact seemed to transmit a flood of turbulent emotions.

“You must go away from here,” he said, gently. “Will you come with me? Can you trust me enough for that?”

Her dry sobbing ceased. "Yes, take me away!” she cried, “I can't endure this dreadful place another hour. Such horrible things have happened here ” She lifted her head, and a fresh tremor shook her. “Have they taken—him away yet?” “Xot yet.” “I want to see him—just once—before we go. Will you take me to him?'’