The Red Room | Page 5

I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit
corridor, and with my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a
stumbling run for the door.
But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and I struck myself

heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was
either struck or struck myself against some other bulky furnishing. I
have a vague memory of battering myself thus to and fro in the
darkness, of a heavy blow at last upon my forehead, of a horrible
sensation of falling that lasted an age, of my last frantic effort to keep
my footing, and then I remember no more.
I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the
man with the withered hand was watching my face. I looked about me
trying to remember what had happened, and for a space I could not
recollect. I rolled my eyes into the corner and saw the old woman, no
longer abstracted, no longer terrible, pouring out some drops of
medicine from a little blue phial into a glass. "Where am I?" I said. "I
seem to remember you, and yet I can not remember who you are."
They told me then, and I heard of the haunted Red Room as one who
bears a tale. "We found you at dawn," said he, "and there was blood on
your forehead and lips."
I wondered that I had ever disliked him. The three of them in the
daylight seemed commonplace old folk enough. The man with the
green shade had his head bent as one who sleeps.
It was very slowly I recovered the memory of my experience. "You
believe now," said the old man with the withered hand, "that the room
is haunted?" He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but as
one who condoles with a friend.
"Yes," said I, "the room is haunted."
"And you have seen it. And we who have been here all our lives have
never set eyes upon it. Because we have never dared. Tell us, is it truly
the old earl who--"
"No," said I, "it is not."
"I told you so," said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. "It is his
poor young countess who was frightened--"

"It is not," I said. "There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess
in that room; there is no ghost there at all, but worse, far worse,
something impalpable--"
"Well?" they said.
"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal men," said I; "and
that is, in all its nakedness--'Fear!' Fear that will not have light nor
sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and
overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me
in the room--"
I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up
to my bandages. "The candles went out one after another, and I fled--"
Then the man with the shade lifted his face sideways to see me and
spoke.
"That is it," said he. "I knew that was it. A Power of Darkness. To put
such a curse upon a home! It lurks there always. You can feel it even in
the daytime, even of a bright summer's day, in the hangings, in the
curtains, keeping behind you however you face about. In the dusk it
creeps in the corridor and follows you, so that you dare not turn. It is
even as you say. Fear itself is in that room. Black Fear.... And there it
will be... so long as this house of sin endures."

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