A second more, and Shorthouse was out in the passage with his hand on the door of the next room.  It was locked.  He plunged forward with all his weight against it, and, the lock giving way, he fell headlong into a room that was pitch dark and very cold.  In a moment he was on his feet again and trying to penetrate the blackness.  Not a sound, not a movement.  Not even the sense of a presence.  It was empty, miserably empty!

Across the room he could trace the outline of a window with rain streaming down the outside, and the blurred lights of the city beyond.  But the room was empty, appallingly empty; and so still.  He stood there, cold as ice, staring, shivering listening.  Suddenly there was a step behind him and a light flashed into the room, and when he turned quickly with his arm up as if to ward off a terrific blow he found himself face to face with the landlady.  Instantly the reaction began to set in.

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, and he was standing there with bare feet and striped pyjamas in a small room, which in the merciful light he perceived to be absolutely empty, carpetless, and without a stick of furniture, or even a window-blind.  There he stood staring at the disagreeable landlady.  And there she stood too, staring and silent, in a black wrapper, her head almost bald, her face white as chalk, shading a sputtering candle with one bony hand and peering over it at him with her blinking green eyes.  She looked positively hideous.

“Waal?” she drawled at length, “I heard yer right enough.  Guess you couldn’t sleep!  Or just prowlin’ round a bit—­is that it?”

The empty room, the absence of all traces of the recent tragedy, the silence, the hour, his striped pyjamas and bare feet—­everything together combined to deprive him momentarily of speech.  He stared at her blankly without a word.

“Waal?” clanked the awful voice.

“My dear woman,” he burst out finally, “there’s been something awful—­” So far his desperation took him, but no farther.  He positively stuck at the substantive.

“Oh! there hasn’t been nothin’,” she said slowly still peering at him.  “I reckon you’ve only seen and heard what the others did.  I never can keep folks on this floor long.  Most of ’em catch on sooner or later—­that is, the ones that’s kind of quick and sensitive.  Only you being an Englishman I thought you wouldn’t mind.  Nothin’ really happens; it’s only thinkin’ like.”

Shorthouse was beside himself.  He felt ready to pick her up and drop her over the banisters, candle and all.

“Look there,” he said, pointing at her within an inch of her blinking eyes with the fingers that had touched the oozing blood; “look there, my good woman.  Is that only thinking?”

She stared a minute, as if not knowing what he meant.

“I guess so,” she said at length.