Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 4 (1925-10).djvu/32

Wilde sat up in his bed and peered into the velvet blackness around him. Chills crawled up and down his spine; his skin tingled as if the tense pressing atmosphere of the room was electrically charged.

The scream was not repeated, and for several minutes he sat rigid, held so by his demoralizing uncertainty of its source, whether it had come from his own lips or from the room next door.

He was in a small, weather-scarred hotel on the precipitous shore of one of the purple inlets that fret the iron-bound British Columbia coast from Vancouver to Alaska, where he had come to report on a copper property for the Continental Company. His report—an unfavorable one—was ready; he intended to leave the next day.

Quite suddenly, and for no explainable reason, Wilde knew instinctively that he had not uttered the cry, and that it had come from the room next door. A flow of warmth poured through him; his sun-browned face, with its suggestiveness of high adventure eagerly sought and recklessly encountered, glowed again beneath its tan. He leaped out of bed and lit the lamp. Listening intently, with his head inclined toward the north wall, he heard a faint pattering in the next room, as if someone was moving softly and quickly upon the floor.

Wilde went into the corridor. A lamp set in a bracket at the end of the passage shed a fitful light upon the gaunt, shabby interior. There was no sound whatever, now. But the horrible cry still rang in his ears. It had been short and clear; then it had terminated abruptly. Wilde knew instinctively that the one who had uttered it would never utter another.

The door of the room next to his was shut; no light showed beneath it, and for several moments Wilde stood before it indecisively. Believing as he did that someone had been killed in the room, he yet hesitated to try the door. One has that feeling about breaking into another man's room at dead of night.

His indecision vanished, however, when a light shone suddenly from beneath the door, then flashed out again. He turned the handle. The door was locked as he had expected. He stepped back and flung his great body at it, shoulder first. The lock snapped and the door shivered, but held its place. A second and a third time he had to fling himself upon it before the