civilly enough that my name was not Bishop, that I was not a relative, that I had only rented the house for the summer and perhaps a month or two in the fall.
"My name's Perkins," he said. "Bud Perkins. From up yonder." He gestured toward the ridge to the south.
"Glad to know you."
"You been here a week," Bud continued, offering proof that my arrival had not gone unnoticed in the valley. "You're still here."
There was a note of surprise in his voice, as if the fact of my being in the Bishop house after a week was strange of itself.
"I mean," he went on, "nothing's happened to you. What with all the goin's-on in this house, it's a wonder."
"What goings-on?" I asked bluntly.
"Don't you know?" he asked, open-mouthed.
"I know about Seth Bishop."
He shook his head vigorously. "That ain't near the all of it, Mister. I wouldn't set foot in that house if I was paid for it—and paid good. Makes my spine prickle jest to be standing this near to it." He frowned darkly. "It's a place should-a been burned down long ago. What were them Bishops doing all hours of the night?"
"Looks clean," I said. "It's comfortable enough. Not even a mouse in it."
"Hah! If 'twas only mice! You wait."
With that he turned and plunged back into the woods.
I realized, of course, that many local superstitions must have arisen about the abandoned Bishop house; what more natural than that it should be haunted? Nevertheless, Bud Perkins' visit left a disagreeable impression with me. Clearly, I had been under secret observation ever since my arrival; I understood that new neighbors are always of interest to people, but I also perceived that the interest of my neighbors in this isolated spot was not of quite that nature. They expected something to happen; they were waiting for it to take place; and only the fact that nothing had as yet occurred had brought Bud Perkins within range.
That night the first untoward "incident" took place. Quite possibly Bud Perkins' oblique comments had set the stage by preparing me for something to happen. In any case, the incident was so nebulous as to be almost negative, and there were a dozen explanations for it; it is only in the light of later events that I remember it at all. It happened perhaps two hours after midnight.
I was awakened from sleep by an unusual sound. Now, anyone sleeping in a new place grows accustomed to the sounds of the night in that region, and, once accustomed to them, accepts them in sleep; but any new sound is apt to obtrude. Just as a city-dweller spending several nights on a farm may accustom himself to the noises of chickens, birds, the wind, frogs, may be awakened by the new note of a toad trilling because it is strange to the chorus to which he has become accustomed, so I was aware of a new sound in the chorus of whippoorwills, owls, and nocturnal insects which invaded the night.
The new sound was a subterranean one; that is, it seemed to come from far below the house, deep down under the surface of the earth. It might have been earth settling, it might have been a fissure opening and closing, it might readily have been a fugitive temblor, except that it came and went with a certain regularity, as if it were made by some very large thing moving along a colossal cavern far beneath the house. It lasted perhaps half an hour; it seemed to approach from the east and diminish in the same direction in a fairly even progression of sounds. I could not be sure, but I had the uncertain impression that the house trembled faintly under these subterranean sounds.
Perhaps it was this which impelled me on the following day to poke about in the storeroom in an effort to find out for myself what my inquisitive neighbor had meant by his questions and hints about the Bishops. What had they been doing that their neighbors thought so bad?
The storeroom, however, was less crammed than I had expected it to be, perhaps largely because so many things had been put out on the veranda. Indeed, the only unusual aspect of it that I could find was a shelf of books which had evidently
