The High House by James Stoddard Read Free Book Online Page A

all black and white. Carter shivered. For a moment the darkness of the well, the darkness of the Room of Horrors, filled him, an unthinkable terror, like a great pit threatening to engulf him. He gave a sharp breath, almost a sob, and clutched his fist, infuriated by his own weakness. “I never should have returned,” he murmured. Then, “I never should have left!”
    He forced himself to close the curtains, climb into bed, and pull the comforter around him.
    * * *
    He awoke late in the night, filled with deep foreboding, uncertain for a moment where he was. Recalling himself, he peered out the window; the gas lamp cast its comforting glow across the yard and it had ceased raining, though lightning still flashed overhead. The Bobby was gone. Drawing the curtains, he lit the oil lamp beside his bed and watched its flickering flames cast shadows across the room. The mantel clock said quarter past two.
    Although the night was warm enough, he considered lighting a fire in the hearth for comfort, for he found little inclination to return to sleep. As he reached for a candle on the mantel, he pushed against one of the fireplace bricks, which slid in at his touch.
    A slow, scraping noise sent him scooting across the chamber and up against the bed, as the entire hearth swung slowly outward, revealing an opening three feet wide and tall enough for a man. Gathering his courage, he lifted the lamp and gazed into a small, dust-laden chamber, empty, with wooden floors and a narrow stair leading upward.
    He ran his hands over his face. Three things he feared most, feared them even though he called them childhood terrors not fit for a man: closed places, drowning in deep water, and darkness. Though he remembered little else about it, he knew the Room of Horrors had been filled with Things in the Dark.
    “Only a fool would go up there at night,” he muttered. But even as he said it, he knew he would do so, if only because he did fear it. After a moment’s debate, he put on his clothes, drew the saber from its sheath above the mantel, and mounted the thin steps, holding the lamp aloft.
    His shoes left tracks in the dust; the stair creaked; the paneled walls ran smooth on either side, unbroken by any design. He felt his heart pounding beneath his shirt, but as the stairs went on and on, the repetition calmed him. He wished, too late, that he had bothered to count the steps.
    Eventually, the stair opened directly onto the wooden floorboards of what felt like a vast, empty chamber. By holding his lamp high he could just see the center beam of the sloping roof of a great attic, its walls lying beyond the circle of his light. Boxes and trunks lay scattered across the floor with bits of forgotten finery and ceramic dolls.
    A cloud of small bats skittered away from the light, startling him, their soft cheeping loud in the silence, their flapping wings whirling like bolas. He crouched while they passed and waited till the stillness returned and his heart subsided before drawing a deep breath and rising again.
    Since he could not pierce the blackness on either side far enough to glimpse a wall, he proceeded straight ahead, the better to retrace his steps by his tracks in the dust. He passed old hats and kettles, brooms and wooden trunks, books written in strange, unrecognizable tongues, and flags from countries he did not know.
    He had not gone far before he found the dirt before him disturbed. At first he thought a wind sometimes blew through the attic, but closer inspection revealed an animal print many times greater than a man’s. He shivered, then chided himself on his fantasies; no brute so large could live in an attic. Still, it did resemble the four-clawed foot of some beast.
    He proceeded again, but halted abruptly, thinking he heard a soft, lowing moan. At the same time, he found another footprint, exactly as the first, spaced to indicate a creature capable of twenty-foot strides.
    The stillness of the place rushed into him all at once,