Читать книгу Midnight House - Ethel Lina White - Страница 4

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THE house had been barred, locked and shuttered for over eleven years. Thousands of days had dawned without a ray of sunlight striking through its windows. Thousands of nights had fallen with no flicker of a match within its walls.

Lying awake in the next house, Elizabeth Featherstonhaugh—aged nineteen and possessed of a fertile imagination—used to shudder at the thought of black emptiness pressing on the other side of her room. Herself a child of loneliness and twilight—she believed that the darkness must be in absolute possession of the deserted mansion. She imagined it clotted to material strength and shredded with solid cores of density—so that if an intruder dared to force a passage through it, he would be drawn in and crushed between rollers of atmospheric pressure.

Occasionally, as she listened, she thought she heard strange noises in the empty house. There were sounds of tapping, creaking, rumbling. Footsteps walked where there were no feet. Drawers seemed to be pulled open where there were no hands. When the furniture appeared to thud from spot to spot, she knew that it was time to switch on her bed-light.

The reassurance of her own cheerful room, with its comfort and fine proportions, reminded her that she was in charge of Captain Pewter's two children and that it was more than a job.

"This family belongs to my caste," she told herself. "The Captain comes from my wonderful India. I like Geraldine. I'm fond of dear little Philippa. And I love Barnaby... I won't be frightened."

When she was small, she had been so terrified of the dread "Black Man in the cellar" that she petitioned the angels to protect her. Now, as she sat up in bed, with her short fair hair ruffled from the pillow and her white pyjama-jacket open to reveal a thin neck, she looked almost a child again.

Her eyes were wide with fear as she stared at her bedroom wall, as though she were actually threatened by the crowding darkness. At such moments she pictured a sudden burst and bulge of masonry displaced by the encroachment of the evil force which had choked the light.

"There's someone—or something—in the empty house," she whispered before, once again, she prayed for protection.

"Deliver me from the Powers of Darkness."