The Stone Image | Page 7

pink satin-shod foot on my knee.
I laced the ribbons about her trim ankles and kissed her left shoulder blade as I dropped her evening cloak over a party frock which, like Gungha Din's uniform, "wasn't nothing much before, and rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind."
Betty gone, I changed my coat for a house jacket and settled myself on the lounge before the fire to read, smoke, and treat my cold with copious drafts of the mixture I had prepared.
Efficacious as rock and rye is in the cure of a cold, it has one great disadvantage; it has a tendency to make a man lose count of the number of doses he's taken. After my seventh or ninth dose--I forget which--I ceased counting, and adhered to the simple formula of a dose to a sneeze--and sometimes I caught myself sneezing without legitimate excuse.
A couple of hours' course of this treatment, combined with the sizzle and crackling of the logs burning in the fireplace, set me nodding.
"Ol' stone image doesn't like it out there in the cold. Ol' image jealous 'cause I wouldn't let Betty worship it--wants to come back to house and get revenge on me," I mumbled, half maudlin, as I dropped my pipe and book and thrust my head deep into a sofa pillow.
How long I slept I do not know. Certainly it must have been several hours, for when I opened my eyes and sat up with a start the fire had burned itself to a bed of dull ashes on the hearth, and a chill had crept through the living room. My reading lamp, too, had burned itself out, and save for the fitful gleam of a nearby streetlight, shining through the window, the room was in darkness.
Lying there in that no man's land between sleep and waking, I heard the grandfather's clock in the hall strike off the half-hour, and put my feet to the floor sleepily. "Half past something or other," I yawned; "must be getting late. Wonder how soon Betty will be getting home?"
The crazy little French gilt clock that Betty keeps on the parlor mantel, and which is always half an hour slow, chimed twelve times nervously.
That meant we were in the middle of that eerie hour which belongs neither to the day which is gone nor the day which is to come, and which, for want of a better term, we call midnight.
The fumes of the rock and rye I had taken earlier in the evening still hung in my brain, dulling my perceptions and clouding my vision a little. In the uncertain light from the streetlamp it seemed to me I detected a movement among the inanimate objects in the room.
I opened my mouth in another prodigious yawn, and flung my arms wide in a mighty stretch, striving to shake off the remnants of my sleep.
Before either yawn or stretch were finished, however, I was sitting bolt upright on the couch, listening to the sound which came to me from the veranda. It was a slow, heavy, scraping, thumping sort of noise; the kind that would be produced by the dragging of a heavy weight across the floor, or the rolling of a ponderous chest, or the walking of some great-footed animal.
Thump, thump, thump, the footsteps--if they were footsteps--sounded on the planks of the porch, around the corner of the house, across the width of the piazza, up to the very door of the vestibule. Then a silence, ten times more ominous than the noise itself.
The breath in my lungs and throat seemed suddenly impregnated with nitrous fumes, strangling and burning me at once, and tiny globules of cold perspiration seeped out upon my scalp and the palms of my hands as I sat there in the dark, resolutely closing my mind against the thought of what waited outside the door.
"B-r-r-ring!" the shrill clamor of the doorbell cut in on my terrified vigil. I jumped up with a relieved grin. Doorbells are comforting things to have about at such times; there is something reassuringly modern and human about them.
I got to my feet almost cheerfully and reached for the electric switch. My groping fingers found it readily enough but no flood of warm, yellow light followed their pressure. As frequently happens, the current was off.
In darkness, then, I shuffled along the hall to the front door.
That vague, nameless horror we all feel at times when entering a dark room alone was on me as I fumbled with the knob. Very cautiously I put back the curtain from the glass panel in the door and peeped into the shadowy vestibule. There was nothing to be seen.
"Humph!" I grunted. "Nobody there. Ears must have been playing a trick on me; bell didn't ring at all." Emboldened by the emptiness of the vestibule,