“What is that noise?”

I lay in bed in that curious condition which is between sleep and waking.  When, at last, I knew that I was awake, I asked myself what it was that had woke me.  Suddenly I became conscious that something was making itself audible in the silence of the night.  For some seconds I lay and listened.  Then I sat up in bed.

“What is that noise?”

It was like the tick, tick of some large and unusually clear-toned clock.  It might have been a clock, had it not been that the sound was varied, every half dozen ticks or so, by a sort of stifled screech, such as might have been uttered by some small creature in an extremity of anguish.  I got out of bed; it was ridiculous to think of sleep during the continuation of that uncanny shrieking.  I struck a light.  The sound seemed to come from the neighborhood of my dressing-table.  I went to the dressing-table, the lighted match in my hand, and, as I did so, my eyes fell on Pugh’s mysterious box.  That same instant there issued, from the bowels of the box, a more uncomfortable screech than any I had previously heard.  It took me so completely by surprise that I let the match fall from my hand to the floor.  The room was in darkness.  I stood, I will not say trembling, listening—­considering their volume—­to the eeriest shrieks I ever heard.  All at once they ceased.  Then came the tick, tick, tick again.  I struck another match and lit the gas.

Pugh had left his puzzle box behind him.  We had done all we could, together, to solve the puzzle.  He had left it behind to see what I could do with it alone.  So much had it engrossed my attention that I had even brought it into my bedroom, in order that I might, before retiring to rest, make a final attempt at the solution of the mystery. Now what possessed the thing?

As I stood, and looked, and listened, one thing began to be clear to me, that some sort of machinery had been set in motion inside the box.  How it had been set in motion was another matter.  But the box had been subjected to so much handling, to such pressing and such hammering, that it was not strange if, after all, Pugh or I had unconsciously hit upon the spring which set the whole thing going.  Possibly the mechanism had got so rusty that it had refused to act at once.  It had hung fire, and only after some hours had something or other set the imprisoned motive power free.

But what about the screeching?  Could there be some living creature concealed within the box?  Was I listening to the cries of some small animal in agony?  Momentary reflection suggested that the explanation of the one thing was the explanation of the other.  Rust!—­there was the mystery.  The same rust which had prevented the mechanism from acting at once was causing the screeching now.  The uncanny sounds were caused by nothing more nor less than the want of a drop or two of oil.  Such an explanation would not have satisfied Pugh, it satisfied me.