ap,
its pretensions were immense. A tall, six-sided tower occupied
two-thirds of the front, an elaborate affair, crowned by rusty ironwork
in lieu of battlements. Windows were inserted at appropriate intervals,
suggesting a donjon keep or a page from Walter Scott. The heavy brown
shutters were never opened. There was a grim angularity to the deep
porch below, a military cut to the bare front door which added to the
forbidding character of the place. Behind this imposing front the rest
of the building lay like the parts of a castle, each portion a little
lower than the preceding. There were four of these sections, like four
platforms, their flat roofs crowned with further rusty ironwork. The
windows were infrequent and all barred, and a massive elm to the east of
the house threw over them a gloomy and impenetrable shade. Although the
whole building had been painted brown, time and the weather had combined
to make it almost black, the only patch of color being the rich green of
the mossy shingles on the roof of the porch.

I had first noticed the Drainger house because of its oddity. Then I was
impressed by its air of speechless and implacable resentment. So far as
I could observe it was empty; no foot disturbed the rank grass or
troubled the dismal porches. The windows were never thrown open to the
sunlight. The front door, in the month I had spent in Crosby, remained
locked. I had once observed a grocery wagon standing in front of the
house, but this, I assumed, was because the driver wished to leave his
horse in the shade.

Proceeding homeward one night to my cousin's, Mark Jedfrey, with whom I
was spending the summer, I was startled, when I came in front of the
Drainger place, to see a light in the front window of the tower on the
ground floor. It was moonlight, and the heavy shadows sculptured the old
mansion into fantastic shapes, revealing a barred window inscrutably
facing the moon, carving the top of the house into gargoyles of light
and throwing the porch into Egyptian darkness. The light through the
shutter of the window was therefore as unexpected as a stab. I paused
without knowing it. Apparently I was observed; there was a light sound
of footsteps from the invisible porch and the creaking, followed by the
shutting, of the front door. Immediately afterwards the light was
extinguished.

The person who had been on the porch had moved so quickly and so
quietly, and the street, drenched in the July moonlight,