The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories | Page 6

was murdered,
and the howl he 'ooted the while."
This very concise summary of the facts was all I could learn, except
that a young man, as hearty and likely a young man as ever I see, had
been took with fits and held down in 'em, after seeing the hooded
woman. Also, that a personage, dimly described as "a hold chap, a sort
of one-eyed tramp, answering to the name of Joby, unless you
challenged him as Greenwood, and then he said, 'Why not? and even if
so, mind your own business,'" had encountered the hooded woman, a
matter of five or six times. But, I was not materially assisted by these
witnesses: inasmuch as the first was in California, and the last was, as
Ikey said (and he was confirmed by the landlord), Anywheres.
Now, although I regard with a hushed and solemn fear, the mysteries,
between which and this state of existence is interposed the barrier of
the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live; and
although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of
them; I can no more reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of
bells, creaking of boards, and such- like insignificances, with the
majestic beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am
permitted to understand, than I had been able, a little while before, to
yoke the spiritual intercourse of my fellow- traveller to the chariot of
the rising sun. Moreover, I had lived in two haunted houses--both
abroad. In one of these, an old Italian palace, which bore the reputation

of being very badly haunted indeed, and which had recently been twice
abandoned on that account, I lived eight months, most tranquilly and
pleasantly: notwithstanding that the house had a score of mysterious
bedrooms, which were never used, and possessed, in one large room in
which I sat reading, times out of number at all hours, and next to which
I slept, a haunted chamber of the first pretensions. I gently hinted these
considerations to the landlord. And as to this particular house having a
bad name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names
undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not
think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any
weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself
to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial
venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I
am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I made in my
life.
To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted house,
and was already half resolved to take it. So, after breakfast, I got the
keys from Perkins's brother-in-law (a whip and harness maker, who
keeps the Post Office, and is under submission to a most rigorous wife
of the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel persuasion), and went up to
the house, attended by my landlord and by Ikey.
Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The slowly
changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the
last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and ill-fitted.
It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a flavor of rats in it,
and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable decay which settles
on all the work of man's hands whenever it's not turned to man's
account. The kitchens and offices were too large, and too remote from
each other. Above stairs and below, waste tracts of passage intervened
between patches of fertility represented by rooms; and there was a
mouldy old well with a green growth upon it, hiding like a murderous
trap, near the bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row of bells.
One of these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded white letters,
MASTER B. This, they told me, was the bell that rang the most.

"Who was Master B.?" I asked. "Is it known what he did while the owl
hooted?"
"Rang the bell," said Ikey.
I was rather struck by the prompt dexterity with which this young man
pitched his fur cap at the bell, and rang it himself. It was a loud,
unpleasant bell, and made a very disagreeable sound. The other bells
were inscribed according to the names of the rooms to which their
wires were conducted: as "Picture Room," "Double Room," "Clock
Room," and the like. Following Master B.'s bell to its source I found
that young gentleman to have had but indifferent third-class
accommodation in a triangular cabin under the cock- loft, with