Walk with Care by Patricia Wentworth Read Free Book Online Page A

beyond it, and after that a quite impenetrable blackness. He could not see anything, and he could not hear anything. The house was as dead still as if no one had moved in it for hours.
    He looked down and saw something small lying to his right and a little in front of him. It lay just on the carpet’s edge. He picked it up, switched on a nearer light, and looked at it. It was a baby owl modelled in clay of a peculiar bluish green colour. The workmanship was extraordinarily good. The eyes blinked, the feathers had a look of downy softness. It was quite small, not more than two inches in height, but it was so life-like that he found himself half afraid to close his hand lest he should crush the feathers. The girl must have dropped it when he startled her.
    All this passed through his mind in a flash. Then he put the owl in his pocket, switched off the light he had just put on, and crossed the hall.
    He had the stairs in front of him now and, passing them on the right, the passage leading to the basement. Standing there, he thought he heard the baize door touch the jamb and come to a stop. When he opened it, there was the black passage beyond and the stairs going down. There were ten steps down, and then more passage, with the kitchen, pantry and store-room opening upon it.
    Once past the baize door, he could make use of a pocket torch. Kitchen, pantry, scullery, and larder were all empty under the dark. He began to wonder strangely what he had seen. Then as he came back into the passage from the kitchen and flashed his light to and fro, he saw a door opposite him but a little to the left, and it stood a hand’s breadth open.
    Jeremy whistled between his teeth. He could swear that the door had been shut when he came in this way, for he had flashed his light across it and wondered what door it was, It was shut then, and it was open now. He pushed it wide, and saw a black stair go steeply down.
    He turned the beam of his torch on the dark and went down. There were fifteen steps, and the last six turned at a sharp angle. They were of old worn stone, and they brought him into a stone chamber like a hall, very black and dark. He sent the beam of his torch travelling.
    The place seemed very old, a very great deal older than the house. Doors opened from it here and there. Old cellars, as he guessed, here long and long before the Georgian house was built. He tried some of the doors and found them locked. The air was still and rather warm. The air was very still. His feet rang on the flagstones. The stone roof was groined and vaulted overhead. The least sound came echoing back. At the far end the passage went off at right angles.
    He turned the corner and flashed his light ahead. It showed him four doors, three on the right, the other blocking the passage—four doors, three closed and the other closing. The doors on the right were shut, as all the other doors had been shut, but the door that spanned the passage moved in the beam of the torch.
    As he swung the torch, the light caught the top corner of the moving door and, sweeping down, flashed over three fingers of a moving hand. The door moved. The hand moved. The light flashed past. When he focused it again, the door was closed and the hand was gone.
    He was at a distance of perhaps five yards. For a moment he did not move, only kept the beam on the door. The hand had been there, and it was gone. It had been drawing the door to, and it was gone.
    He walked down the passage and pulled at the door. It opened quite easily. The torch showed an empty cellar some eight feet square with a beautifully vaulted roof. There was no cover at all; there was only a most stark, bare emptiness. Jeremy stood in the midst of the emptiness and thought. He had seen a hand, or to be exact, three fingers of a hand—small, smooth fingers with oval nails. He thought they belonged to the girl who had stood between the dark hall and the half lit library looking at him. When the torch flashed