The Red Lamp by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The Red Lamp by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Author:Mary Roberts Rinehart [Roberts Rinehart, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3655-8
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-07-16T19:58:00+00:00


July 30th.

I HAVE TODAY BORROWED some of Mrs. Livingstone’s books on psychic research, and intend to go into them thoroughly. If there is any proof in a mass of evidence, it is certainly here.

On the other hand, one must remember that the hope of survival is the strongest desire of the human heart. How many, if they felt that this life was all, would care to go on with it?

Analyzing my last night’s experience, however, I can find nothing in my mind before I went to sleep, to account for it. I ate a light dinner, and spent the evening after Jane retired, with this journal. The night was quiet, and my last waking thought was concerning the woodcutter across the road, who seems so singularly inactive except when someone leaves the Lodge, or appears at one of its windows.

One thing I have traced, however. It is distinctly possible that the herbal, aromatic odor I noticed at the end of the experience was due to the leaves he collected yesterday, and which I find have smoldered throughout the night. It was after midnight when, just as I was dozing off, Jane came to my door and asked me if I would mind sleeping in her room.

“I can fix you a bed on the couch,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I’m nervous tonight, for some reason.”

I went at once, trailing my bedding with me, and while she prepared the couch I observed her. She was very white, and I saw that her hands were shaking, but she refused my offer of some brandy with her usual evasive answer.

“I’m all right,” she said. “I just don’t like being alone.”

She fell asleep almost at once, like one exhausted, but the change of beds had fully roused me, and I lay for some time staring into the darkness. I do not know when it was that I began to have the feeling that we were not alone in the room, but I imagine fully half an hour had passed.

I saw nothing, but I had the sensation of being stealthily watched, and with it something of horror rather than of fear. I was rigid with it. Then something seemed to tug at my coverings, and the next moment they had slid to the floor. Almost immediately after that there came a rush of air through the room, a curtain billowed over my face, and the door into the hall swung open. Then all was silent, save for a low whine from Jock, outside in the hall.

How much of this today to allot to my nerves I do not know. Undoubtedly Jane’s nervousness had affected me; equally undoubtedly bedclothing has a tendency to slip from a couch. I have quietly experimented today. A gale of wind would blow out a curtain and open an unlatched door.

On the other hand, I am as certain today as I have been certain of anything recently, that I had bolted the door when I entered the room. But it was not bolted in the morning.



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