Across the street, a helmeted bobby was taking no interest in a girl and boy with nowhere to go. But he might at any moment. These were not true slums, not, by far, the worst part of London. Still, here and there, in out-of-the-way corners, a derelict or two lay drunk or dying.
Carrie went briskly up the steps to the front door, while her brother, following some impulse of his own, slipped down into the areaway where he was for the moment concealed from the street. Glancing quickly down at Christopher from the high steps, Carrie thought he was doing something to one of the cellar windows.
Giving a long pull on the bell, she heard a distant ringing somewhere inside. And at the same moment, she saw to her dismay that what she had thought was a modest light somewhere in the interior of the house was really only a reflection in one of the front windows. There were curtains inside, but other than that the place had an uninhabited look and feel about it.
“Not a-goin’ ter let yer in?” One of the youths following her had now stopped on the pavement at the foot of the steps, where he stood grinning up at her, while his fellow stood beside him, equally delighted.
“I know a house where you’d be welcome, dear,” called the second one. He was older, meaner-looking. “I know some good girls who live there.”
Turning her back on them both, she tried to project an air of confidence and respectability, as she persisted in pulling at the bell.
“My name’s Vincent,” came the deeper voice from behind her. “If maybe you need a friend, dearie, a little help—”
Carrie caught her breath at the sound of an answering fumble in the darkness on the other side of the barrier—and was mightily relieved a moment later when her brother opened the door from inside. In a moment she was in, and had closed and latched the door behind her.
She could picture the pair who had been heckling her from the pavement, balked for the moment, turning away.
It was so dark in the house that she could barely see Christopher’s pale face at an arm’s-length distance, but at least they were no longer standing in the rain.
“How’d you get in?” she whispered at him fiercely. Then, “Whose house is this?”
“Broken latch on a window down there,” he whispered back. Then he added in a more normal voice, “It was awful dark in the cellar; I barked my shin on something trying to find the stair.”
It was a good thing, Carrie congratulated herself in passing, that neither of them had ever been especially afraid of the dark. Already her eyes were growing accustomed to the deep gloom; enough light strayed in from the street, around the fringes of curtain, to reveal the fact that the front hall where they were standing was hardly furnished at all, nor was the parlor, just beyond a broad archway. More clearly than ever, the house said empty.
“Let’s try the gas,” she whispered. Chris, fumbling in the drawer of a built-in sideboard, soon came up with some matches. Carrie, standing on tiptoe, was tall enough to reach a fixture projecting from the wall. In a moment more she had one of the gaslights lit.
“Is anyone here?” Now her voice too was up to normal; the answer seemed to be no. The sideboard drawer also contained a couple of short scraps of candle, and soon they had lights in hand to go exploring.
Front hall, with an old abandoned mirror still fastened to the wall beside a hat rack and a shelf. Just in from the hall, a wooden stair, handrail carved with a touch of elegance, went straight up to the next floor. Not even a mouse stirred in the barren parlor. The dining room was a desert also, no furniture at all. And so, farther back, was the kitchen, except for a great black stove and a sink whose bright new length of metal pipe promised running water. An interior cellar door had been left open by Chris in his hurried ascent, and next to it a recently walled-off cubicle contained a water closet. A kitchen window looked out on what was no doubt a back garden, now invisible in gloom and rain.
Carrie was ready to explore upstairs, but Christopher insisted on seeing the cellar first, curious as to what object he had stumbled over. The culprit proved to be a cheaply constructed crate, not quite wide or long enough to be a coffin, containing only some scraps of kindling wood. Otherwise the cellar—damp brick walls; floor part pavement, part dry earth—was as empty as the house above.
Now for the upstairs. Holding the candle tremulously high ahead of her, while dancing shadows beat a wavering retreat, Carrie returned to the front hall, and thence up the carved wooden stair. Two bedrooms, as unused as the lower level of the house and as scantily furnished. The rear windows looked out over darkness, the front ones over the street—side walls were windowless, crammed as they were against the neighbors on either side.
From an angle in the hallway on the upper floor, a narrow service stair, white-painted, went up straight and steep to a trapdoor in the ceiling.
“What’s up there?” she wondered aloud.
“Couldn’t be nothin’ but an attic.” Only a short time on the street had begun to have a serious effect on Christopher’s English, of which a certain Canadian schoolmaster had once been proud.
Carrie spotted fresh footprints in the thin layer of dust and soot that had accumulated on the white-painted stairs. A clear image of the heel of a man’s boot. Only one set of footprints, coming down.
The trapdoor pushed up easily. The space above was more garret than attic; it might once have been furnished, maybe servants’ quarters. The floor entirely solid, no rafters exposed, though now there were dust and spiderwebs in plenty. The broad panes of glass in the angled skylight, washed by rain on the outside, were still intact, and it was bolted firmly shut on the inside; if you stood tall enough inside, you could look out over a hilly range of slate roofs and chimney pots, with the towering dome of St. Paul’s visible more than a mile to the east.
On one side of the gloomy space rested an old wardrobe, door slightly ajar to reveal a few hanging garments. But the most interesting object by far was a great wooden box, somewhat battered by much use or travel, which had been shoved against the north wall.
Chris thought it looked like a coffin, and said so.
“No. Built too strong for a poor man’s coffin, not elegant enough for a rich man’s.” What was it, though? There were two strong rope handles on each side, and a plain wooden lid, tightly fitted by some competent woodworker.
Christopher, ever curious, approached the box and tried the lid. To his surprise, and Carrie’s, it slid back at once.
“Look here, Sis!”
“Why, it’s full of dirt.” She was aware of a vague disappointment in her observation, and not sure why. Only about half-full, actually, but that was no less odd. Stranger still was the fact that the neat joinings of the interior seemed to have been tarred with pitch, as if to make them waterproof. Of course so tight a seal would also serve to keep the soil from leaking out. But why would anyone—?
The earth was dry. When Carrie picked up a small handful and sifted it through her fingers, it gave off a faintly musty, almost spicy smell, with a suggestion of the alien about it.
Christopher was downstairs again, moving so silently on his bare feet that Carrie had not realized he was gone, until she heard him faintly calling her to come down. She slid the lid back onto the box, and carefully lowered the trapdoor into place behind her.
Her brother had turned on the gaslight in the kitchen and discovered some tins of sardines abandoned in the pantry. Presently they remembered the box of kindling in the cellar, and it was possible to get a wood fire started in the kitchen stove.