The longer I lingered in the cellars, the more firmly I became convinced that they had at one time or another witnessed some secret burial. Dare I remain down there and wait for the phenomena? The heavy, foetid atmosphere of the place hung round me like a wet rag, while the chill fumes, rising from between the crevices in the cement, ascended my nostrils and made me sneeze. If I stayed in this charnel house, I must certainly risk rheumatic fever. Then a brilliant thought struck me--I would cover the floor of the innermost cellar with cocoanut matting; there were several loose stacks of it lying in the scullery.
I did so, and the result, though not, perhaps, quite as satisfactory as I had anticipated, for the dampness was still abominable, made it at least possible for me to remain there. I accordingly perched myself on a table I had also brought from the scullery, and waited.
Minute after minute passed and nothing happened, nothing beyond a few isolated noises, such as the slamming of some far-distant door--which slamming, as I tried to reassure myself, momentarily forgetting that the house I was in was detached, might be in the next house--and the creaking of boards, those creakings that one so seldom seems to hear in the daytime, but which one laughingly tells oneself are due to natural causes--though what those causes are is apparently inexplicable.
The wind does not blow every night, neither can it perform half of that for which it is often held responsible, neither does every house swarm with rats. Still, I do not say that what I then heard could not have been accounted for naturally--I daresay it might have been--only I was not clever enough to do it. Sceptics are usually so brilliant that one often wonders how it is they do not occupy all the foremost places in literature, science, and art--why, in fact, the smart, shrewd man, who scoffs at ghosts, is so often unheard of, whilst the poor silly believer in the superphysical is so often eminent as a scientist or author. Can it be that it is, after all, the little learning that makes the man the fool?
But to continue. The hour of midnight--that hour erroneously supposed to be the one when psychic phenomena usually show themselves--passed, and I anxiously awaited for what I felt every moment might now produce.