The Red Room | Page 3

its
germinating darknesses. My candle was a little tongue of light in the
vastness of the chamber; its rays failed to pierce to the opposite end of

the room, and left an ocean of dull red mystery and suggestion, sentinel
shadows and watching darknesses beyond its island of light. And the
stillness of desolation brooded over it all.
I must confess some impalpable quality of that ancient room disturbed
me. I tried to fight the feeling down. I resolved to make a systematic
examination of the place, and so, by leaving nothing to the imagination,
dispel the fanciful suggestions of the obscurity before they obtained a
hold upon me. After satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I
began to walk round the room, peering round each article of furniture,
tucking up the valances of the bed and opening its curtains wide. In one
place there was a distinct echo to my footsteps, the noises I made
seemed so little that they enhanced rather than broke the silence of the
place. I pulled up the blinds and examined the fastenings of the several
windows. Attracted by the fall of a particle of dust, I leaned forward
and looked up the blackness of the wide chimney. Then, trying to
preserve my scientific attitude of mind, I walked round and began
tapping the oak paneling for any secret opening, but I desisted before
reaching the alcove. I saw my face in a mirror--white.
There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of sconces
bearing candles, and on the mantelshelf, too, were candles in china
candle-sticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was laid--an
unexpected consideration from the old housekeeper--and I lit it, to keep
down any disposition to shiver, and when it was burning well I stood
round with my back to it and regarded the room again. I had pulled up a
chintz-covered armchair and a table to form a kind of barricade before
me. On this lay my revolver, ready to hand. My precise examination
had done me a little good, but J still found the remoter darkness of the
place and its perfect stillness too stimulating for the imagination. The
echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was * no sort of comfort to
me. The shadow in the alcove at the end of the room began to display
that undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking
living thing that comes so easily in silence and solitude. And to
reassure myself, I walked with a candle into it and satisfied myself that
there was nothing tangible there. I stood that candle upon the floor of
the alcove and left it in that position.

By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension, although
to my reason there was no adequate cause for my condition. My mind,
however, was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that
nothing supernatural could happen, and to pass the time I began
stringing some rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion, concerning the
original legend of the place. A few I spoke aloud, but the echoes were
not pleasant* For the same reason I also abandoned, after a time, a
conversation with myself upon the impossibility of ghosts and haunting.
My mind reverted to the three old and distorted people downstairs, and
I tried to keep it upon that topic.
The sombre reds and grays of the room troubled me; even with its
seven candles the place was merely dim. The light in the alcove flaring
in a draft, and the fire flickering, kept the shadows and penumbra
perpetually shifting and stirring in a noiseless flighty dance. Casting #
about for a remedy, I recalled the wax candles I had seen in the corridor,
and, with a slight effort, carrying a candle and leaving the door open, I
walked out into the moonlight, and presently returned with as many as
ten. These I put in the various knick-knacks of china with which the
room was sparsely adorned, and lit and placed them where the shadows
had lain deepest, some on the floor, some in the window recesses,
arranging and rearranging them until at last my seventeen candles were
so placed that not an inch of the room but had the direct light of at least
one of them. It occurred to me that when the ghost came I could warn
him not to trip over them. The room was now quite brightly illuminated.
There was something very cheering and reassuring in these little silent
streaming flames, and to notice their steady diminution of length
offered me an occupation and gave me a reassuring sense of the
passage of time.
Even with that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed
heavily enough