Mrs. Gentrie awakened sometime during the night with the vague feeling that she had heard a door open and close, and steps on the stairs — the cautious steps of someone trying to be quiet and succeeding only in being furtive.
It was that time of the night when weary muscles and tired nerves wrap themselves in the mantle of slumber as in a protective cloak, drugging the senses into an oblivion so deep that sounds, penetrating through to the consciousness, are robbed of significance.
Mrs. Gentrie felt no apprehension, only a mild irritation. Her sleep-numbed senses struggled with her uneasiness and won the argument. As soon as the sounds themselves ceased to register, she slipped tranquilly back into a deeper slumber, from which she was aroused abruptly by some sound so sinister that she found herself sitting bolt upright in bed, trying to call back a noise which had already become an echo in her ears.
At her side, Arthur Gentrie said sleepily, “Whatsmatter?”
“I thought I heard something, Arthur.”
“Goschleep.”
“Arthur it sounded like — like a door banging or — or — or a shot.”
Arthur Gentrie rolled over, said, “ ’Sall right,” and almost immediately settled down into a rhythm of breathing which soon deepened into a gentle snore.
Mrs. Gentrie could hear sounds on the stairs again, the steps of someone trying to be quiet, yet someone who was in a hurry. A board creaked.
Mrs. Gentrie switched on the light over her bed. She looked at the sleeping form of her husband; then realized that before she could waken him to a realization of the emergency, it would be too late to do anything about it. She slid out of bed, flung her robe around her, kicked her feet into slippers, and opened the door which led to the hallway.
Down at the far end of the corridor, by the bathroom door, a dim night light furnished a vague sort of illumination which was hardly brilliant enough to penetrate the shadows near the doorways.
Mrs. Gentrie rubbed sleep from her eyes, walked over toward the head of the stairs. She paused to listen, and could hear nothing. The insidious chill of the night air stole the warmth from her body, and Mrs. Gentrie wrapped the robe more tightly around her. She shivered nervously. She knew that an ominous noise had wakened her yet her mind could conjure up only an uncertain memory of that sound. It might have been a slamming door. It might have been that someone had fallen over a chair, or... well, it might have been the sound of a backfire from a truck somewhere. Mrs. Gentrie, sufficiently wide awake now to be more matter-of-fact, refused to consider the possibility of a shot.
Then from the dark bowels of the house there came another sound, a dull, muffled, thudding noise as though someone had struck against something in the dark, or knocked something down. This noise came very definitely from the lower floor. That called for activity on the part of her husband.
Mrs. Gentrie hurried back to the bedroom. She was shivering now, and abruptly conscious of the fact that a night wind was blowing the lace curtains, billowing them into miniature balloons that remained distended for a while, then collapsed, letting the curtains fall against the screen with an audible slapping noise.
Mrs. Gentrie had been the first to bed. Her husband had been puttering around with painting in the cellar. That was what came of trusting Arthur to open the windows. He’d neglected to pull back the curtains. There might be an intruder on the lower floor, but Mrs. Gentrie considered the curtains to be the matter of paramount importance just then. Slapping against that dusty screen, they’d get themselves filled with dirt... “Arthur,” she called as she crossed the room and looped back the curtains.
Her husband failed to respond. She had to shake him awake, impressing upon him the fact that there’d been a series of noises.
“Junior coming in,” he said.
Mrs. Gentrie looked at the clock. It was thirty-five minutes past midnight. “He’ll have been in long before this,” she said.
“Look in his room?”
“No. I tell you it was someone running, stumbling over something.”
“It was Junior coming in and the wind blowing a door shut.”
“But I heard some other noises from down on the lower floor.”
“Wind,” he said, then as her very silence became sufficiently pronounced to constitute a contradiction, “Well, I’ll go take a look.”
She knew that Arthur’s look would be perfunctory. She could hear him moving around on the lower floor, switching on lights. She wondered about Junior. Once more she walked down the corridor toward the head of the stairs. Junior’s room was the first on the right as you came up the stairs. His door was closed. She opened it gently, looked inside.
“Junior.”
There was no answer.
Somehow, the dark interior of the room indicated that it was empty. She clicked on a light switch. Junior wasn’t in his room. The unwrinkled, smooth, white counterpane seemed to Mrs. Gentrie a fresh cause for alarm. But the plodding steps of her husband, climbing wearily back up the staircase, seemed, somehow, reassuring in a matter-of-fact sort of way. And suddenly, she wanted to shield Junior — didn’t want her husband to know he wasn’t in.
“Was anyone down there?” she asked, moving away from the door of Junior’s room.
“Of course not,” he said. “You heard the cellar door bang shut. The wind blew it shut, and Mephisto jumped...”
“The cellar door!”
“Yes, going down from the kitchen.”
“Why, it’s always kept closed. It...”
“No. I left it open tonight. I did some painting down there, and wanted to let the air circulate. The wind blew it shut, that’s all.”
Mrs. Gentrie felt sheepish. The very weariness in her husband’s voice, the dejected slump of his shoulders as he walked down the corridor, carried conviction to her mind. She had become nervous, permitted herself to magnify and distort noises of the night. Arthur, plodding down the corridor, had the attitude of a man who has learned from twenty-one years of married life that women will get those ideas and send men prowling around on nocturnal investigations. Nothing can be done about it, so there’s no need to remonstrate after it’s all over; just get back into bed, try to get warm again, and back to sleep.
Mrs. Gentrie, feeling apologetic, followed her husband to bed. She snuggled close to him, heard once more the gentle rhythm of his breathing, felt the delicious warmth of drowsiness stealing over her like some powerful drug dragging her into the welcome oblivion of sleep.
The alarm wakened her in the morning. She shut it off and pulled down the window. Putting on her robe, she moved around the upper floor, pressing the controls which turned on the gas furnace in the cellar. In the dim light of early morning, her fears of the night before seemed rather ludicrous. But she couldn’t resist looking into Junior’s room.
His clothes were piled in a careless heap on a chair by the window. He lay wrapped in the blankets, deep in slumber.
It was only after she had seen him that Mrs. Gentrie realized how much she had feared that when she opened the door the unwrinkled counterpane and smooth white of the pillowcases would greet her once more, just as they had done at thirty-five minutes past midnight.
Mrs. Gentrie closed the door quietly. Junior didn’t need to get up for an hour yet.
So the big house took up once more the burden of its daily routine — a routine which differed no whit from that of any other day until the sound of screaming sirens tore the silence of the neighborhood into shreds, and completely disrupted the smooth functioning of Mrs. Gentrie’s domestic machinery.