Carmella hesitated, then got her golden disk from its hiding place next to her skin. It was warm from her body as Nellie took it.
Nellie examined it.
Same on both sides. Part of a wall, that now could be identified as the wall of this very house. The letters F H. And the figures 19 33.
“The letters, of course,” said Nellie, still in that musing tone and still watching Carmella out of the corners of her eyes, “must be the initials of your father, Francisco Haygar. But what do the figures mean?”
“They could be a date,” murmured Carmella.
“Sure, they could be. They could be just what they seem, and indicate the year 1933. But if that is so, why is there a gap between them—19, space, then 33?”
Whether or not Carmella might have answered the direct question will never be known. Because it was at that moment that the tap sounded at the door.
It was a very light tap, hardly to be heard. Indeed, it was more of a scratching noise than a tap, as if perhaps a dog were sniffing around the door out in the hall.
Nellie went to the door, gun in hand. And she saw the dim light under the door suddenly vanish. The light in the hall had been turned out.
“Don’t open it!” whispered Carmella frantically, hand on Nellie’s arm.
Nellie considered. She had given her promise.
“Who’s there?” she asked in a low tone.
In an even lower tone came a muffled answer. In fact, it was so muffled that you couldn’t understand it at all. At least, Nellie was sure she hadn’t understood it. For the sound she had thought to hear was, of course, fantastic.
She thought she had heard the name, Wendell Haygar!
She smiled at that one. How silly! Wendell Haygar was a corpse, four years dead, lying in a coffin under their feet, according to what Smitty had told her.
Wendell Haygar, indeed!
“Who did you say you were?” she asked.
There was no answer at all this time.
“Don’t open it!” pleaded Carmella.
But Nellie, gun alert in her hand, snapped back the lock and opened the door a few inches. No one could shoot her or otherwise try to murder her without rousing the giant next door and getting nailed for it.
She looked into darkness that was only intermittently broken by lightning, playing in the window at the end of the hall. An empty darkness. There was not a soul out there.
Then another of the lightning flashes occurred, and she changed her mind. And behind her, peering fearfully over her shoulder, Carmella moaned in superstitious horror.
There was a vague white figure in the darkness. It looked almost like mist. It was about the size and shape of a small human being. A man.
“It’s a ghost!” moaned Carmella. “Back! Lock the door — quick!”
“If it’s a ghost,” said Nellie reasonably, “it could come through a closed door.” And she stood her ground, even when the wavering white shape came closer.
The white mist had a voice, it seemed. Low words came, muffled, that could barely be heard.
“Follow me. I will show you that which you seek.”
Nellie heard Carmella say, quaveringly, “If it’s me you are talking to — I know what I seek.”
Nellie reached back and grabbed Carmella’s wrist till the tall brunette gasped.
“I don’t know what you seek,” she said, lips to Carmella’s ear. “And, anyhow, I want to nose into this a little. Shut up!”
The figure was slowly fading down the hall. Nellie took a step after it.
“You are going to follow?” panted Carmella.
“Bet your life!” said Nellie. “I might find out something important.”
“You told your big friend you wouldn’t leave the room.”
“I said I wouldn’t for anything human,” Nellie pointed out. “This is a ghost. It practically says so, itself. So I can follow it and still keep my promise. It may be twisting a promise a little, but you couldn’t sue me for it.”
“How can you be so frivolous at such a time?”
“I’m doing it to keep my knees from knocking together,” Nellie said, starting on tiptoe down the hall after the ghostly shape. “You stay in the room.”
“Alone?” whispered Carmella. “Oh, no!”
She came with Nellie down the hall, staring with wide, terrified eyes at the weird white shape, ever-receding before them.
Down the hall to the stairs. Up these to a third-floor corridor that was dusty and never used. Toward the front of the house, to the left—
“He’s taking us to the turret on the opposite wing of the house from the one you were held in,” Nellie whispered to Carmella.
The Spanish girl only trembled and hung on to Nellie’s left arm; the blonde still had her gun in her right hand.
There was one more short staircase, ending in the door to the little room in the left-hand turret, four stories up from the ground.
It was too bad Smitty had been so brief in mentioning the “accidents” occurring to Shan and Sharnoff. He had done so only to spare Nellie’s feelings. But he had unwittingly failed to give information that might have helped her now.
Had Nellie known that the accident that took Shan’s life was a fall from the other turret and that he had died mumbling of something leading him to that which he desired, she might have been more cautious now.
But she did not know, so she followed the white wraith up the stairs.
During the whole follow-the-leader game, the wraith had periodically disappeared. Then it would appear again, as if it had trouble in keeping materialized, only to fade back into the land of the spirits now and then.
At the door of the turret room, it disappeared once more.
But this time it stayed that way.
The two girls went on up the last few steps in total darkness, with Nellie cursing the fact that she had no flashlight. They halted in front of the door, which was closed.
Nellie was waiting for the wraith to appear once more. Carmella, meanwhile, was tugging at her to get her back down the stairs.
The wraith refused to lead any more, and Nellie refused to heed Carmella.
“Whatever this is all about,” she said to Carmella in a low tone, “the answer must be behind that door.”
“You’re not going in?” gasped Carmella.
In answer, Nellie tried the doorknob, found that it was open, and swung the door back.
Lightning flashed and revealed the small room. It was about ten feet square, and it seemed to be absolutely bare. No furnishings in it, no people, nothing. The floor was not dusty, however, as the stairs and third-floor corridor had been.
“You see?” chattered Carmella. “There is nothing in there, no reason for going into the room.”
Nellie gripped her gun tight and went through the doorway; Carmella, fearing nothing so much as being left alone in that storm-tensed, frightening darkness, crowded close on her heels.
It was Carmella who screamed!
Her cry ripped through the night, echoing through the big house over a sudden, grinding crash.
There wasn’t any floor where a floor had just been!
It had collapsed under their feet and taken the floor beneath in its fall and the one beneath that. In a thundering pile of wreckage, all plunged into the basement fifty feet below, with Carmella’s screams sounding over all!
CHAPTER XVII
Hell’s Host
Carmella’s screams kept sounding because she and Nellie had not plunged down with the rest of the stuff. And that was due to Nellie’s almost superhuman agility.
As had been demonstrated when she outwitted the mastiff, she was trained in traveling high among branches of trees. The cardinal principle of such training is this: if a branch cracks or sags beneath you, get to another one fast.
That training had developed into an automatic instinct with the high-powered little blonde.