self, chose that room
out of all the big old house as the scene of her midnight
perambulations. When, therefore, on one or two subsequent occasions, I
was disturbed in a similar way, I was no longer frightened, but only
rendered sleepless and uncomfortable for the time being. I felt at such
times, so profound was the surrounding silence, as if every living
creature in the world, save Lady Chillington and myself, were asleep.

But before long that room over mine acquired for itself in my mind a new
and dread significance. A consciousness gradually grew upon me that
there was about it something quite out of the common way; that its four
walls held within themselves some grim secret, the rites appertaining to
which were gone through when I and the rest of the uninitiated were
supposed to be in bed and asleep. I cannot tell what it was that first
made me suspect the existence of this secret. Certainly not the midnight
walks of Lady Chillington. Perhaps a certain impalpable atmosphere of
mystery, which, striking keenly on the sensitive nerves of a child,
strung by recent events to a higher pitch than usual, broke down the
first fine barrier that separates things common and of the earth earthy,
from those dim intuitions which even the dullest of us feel at times of
things spiritual and unseen. But however that may be, it so fell out
that I, who at school had been one of the soundest of sleepers, had now
become one of the worst. It often happened that I would awake in the
middle of the night, even when there was no Lady Chillington to disturb
me, and would so lie, sleepless, with wide-staring eyes, for hours,
while all sorts of weird pictures would paint themselves idly in the
waste nooks and corners of my brain. One fancy I had, and for many
nights I thought it nothing more than fancy, that I could hear soft and
muffled footsteps passing up and down the staircase just outside my
door; and that at times I could even faintly distinguish them in the
room over mine, where, however, they never stayed for more than a few
minutes at any one time.

In one of my daylight explorations about the old house I ventured up the
flight of stairs that led from the landing outside my door to the upper
rooms. At the top of these stairs I found a door that differed from
every other door I had seen at Deepley Walls. In colour it was a dull
dead black, and it was studded with large square-headed nails. It was
without a handle of any kind, but was