Night Two: Rule Four

By daylight the House was only a house. That was the trick of it, Wren decided on the morning of the second day, standing in the Gallery with a cloth in her hand and the long room full of grey light. The Gallery was the second degree, and in the daytime the second degree was a corridor of oil paintings and a smell of linseed.

The painting at the far end was the one Rule Five meant. A woman in black, three-quarter length, seated with her hands folded, a ring of keys in her lap. The brass plate on the frame said only the warden, lower case, no artist, no year. The cloth that covered it at night was folded on a chair beside it.

"She looks like Mrs. Varga," said Nora Finch, who had followed Wren up with her camera. "Doesn't she? The mouth."

"It's the keys," Wren said. "Anyone with keys in their lap would look like Mrs. Varga."

"It isn't the keys." Nora Finch raised the camera, then lowered it. "May I? Rule Five says covered after dark. It doesn't say anything about photographs."

"Nothing in the Rules says anything about photographs."

"Then I'll take one and we'll find out what the Rules think of it." The shutter clicked. The painted woman went on looking at the door.

Nora Fitch came up the stair behind them with a cup of tea in each hand, which she distributed as though they had been promised. "Miss Finch," she said, "I have been asked twice this morning whether I took a photograph of the Cellar door, and I have had to explain twice that I do not own a camera and that I am the other one."

"Sorry," said Nora Finch, and did not look it.

"I am used to it. In thirty years of teaching I was called the wrong name every single September." Nora Fitch studied the painting over the rim of her cup. "Mr. Finch is in the drawing room with Dr. Roux. They are arguing about the paperwork. Your brother believes the Trust has not told us the half of it."

"Callum believes that about everything," said his sister. "It's usually true."

Wren went down to find them. Callum Finch had the Trust papers spread on the table, and Dr. Roux was standing over them with the air of a man who had read them first.

"The residency clause," Callum said, when he saw her. "Five nights. Payment on the sixth morning. But there's a sub-clause. Payment is to be made to each guest whose mark stands on the Tally at dawn of the sixth day. Not each guest who is alive. Each guest with a mark."

"It is an old form of words," said Dr. Roux. "The Trust is old. I am a member of it, Mr. Finch, not the author of it. If the wording troubles you, take it up with the Warden."

"The Warden being Mrs. Varga," said Callum, "and not you."

"The Warden being Mrs. Varga." Dr. Roux's smile was thin. "I am a trustee. I have never been anything else."

Mireille Dunne was at the window with her arms folded, watching the fog not lift. "Howard's gone to find my shawl," she said, when Wren came to stand beside her. "I left it somewhere last night. He won't sit still until it's found. He's never been able to sit still in a strange house." She said it fondly, and then, less fondly, "I wish he would."

Howard came back without it at lunch and without it at dinner. "It's in this House somewhere," he told the table, "and I'll find it if I have to take the place apart."

"Not after one o'clock, you won't," said Agatha Pell, without looking up from her knitting. Her son, Simon, sitting on the hard stool beside her again, said, "Mum," in the tone of a man who has said it many times.

"I'm only telling him what the Warden told all of us. Rule Four, Mr. Dunne. Nobody speaks and nobody opens a door. Shawls can wait until morning."

"Shawls can wait," Howard agreed, and Wren would remember later that he had agreed, and that he had been smiling when he did.

At eleven Mrs. Varga covered the warden. At a quarter to midnight Wren stood at the slate and counted. Eight. She made eight marks under last night's eight, two neat rows of white, and Mrs. Varga nodded once and went up.

Wren lay down in her clothes. The clock struck one. The Hour of Silence settled over the House like snow.

She heard the door at eighteen minutes past.

It was not her door. It was somewhere along the Ground Floor corridor, a latch lifting and a hinge giving its small complaint, and then a voice, low and ordinary and completely wrong, saying, "Mireille? It was on the chair in the hall, I'm sure of it. I'll just..."

Wren was on her feet before she had decided to be. She did not open her own door. Rule Four. She put her ear to it instead and heard Howard Dunne's slippers on the boards, going toward the hall, and heard him say, cheerfully, "There you are," to something that was not his wife's shawl.

The sound that followed was not loud. It was a long wet exhalation, like a bellows emptying, and then a weight going down onto the floor in two separate parts.

Then nothing, until two o'clock, when the clock struck and the House let out its breath and every door on the Ground Floor opened at once.

Howard Dunne lay in the hall beneath the slate. He was on his back with his eyes open and his mouth open and his hands open, as though all of him had been asked a question at the same moment. There was no blood. There was, instead, a film on the floorboards around him, white and faintly greasy, like the fat that rises on cooled broth, and it had the shape of something that had stood over him and then stepped away. A long shape. Narrow feet.

Mireille Dunne did not scream. She knelt and put her hand on her husband's chest and left it there, and after a while she took his brass lighter from the pocket of his dressing gown, the one he had used at the fire the night before, and closed her fingers round it. "It's the only thing of his I can carry," she said, to no one. "I'm keeping it."

Dr. Roux knelt on the other side and did what doctors do and then stopped doing it. "He's gone," he said. "He has been gone for some time. There is nothing to be done and no telephone to do it with." He looked at the white film and did not touch it.

"The Pale Lodger," said Mrs. Varga from the stairs.

Every head turned.

"That is what Edmund Hale called it, in the one letter he ever sent the Trust. The Pale Lodger. It lodges in the House between the Cellar and the Attic and it keeps to the Rules better than any of us. Mr. Dunne spoke during the Hour of Silence and opened a door during the Hour of Silence, and the Lodger came to see who had spoken." She came down one step. "The film on the floor is its residue. Do not touch the Pale Lodger's residue with bare skin. Do not clean it until the sun is up. Miss Calloway, you will clean it. That is also what the Caretaker is for."

"What is it," said Callum Finch. His voice cracked. "What is it."

"I have been the Warden for thirty-one years," said Mrs. Varga, "and I have never seen it, and I do not know. I know the Rules, and I know that the Rules are enough." She looked at the slate. "Tomorrow at midnight you will count seven."

Simon Pell helped Wren carry Howard Dunne to the cold room off the kitchen, and Agatha Pell held her son's coat while he did it and did not say a word. Nora Fitch made tea nobody drank. Nora Finch stood in the hall doorway with her camera hanging dead against her chest and did not raise it.

When the sun came up Wren scrubbed the Pale Lodger's residue off the boards with a brush and gloves, and it came away in long white curls that did not smell of anything, and she thought: it stood here. It counted him. Whatever it is, it counts. And she found she did not know which was worse, that something in the House could kill a man for speaking, or that nobody, in a hundred and thirty-three years, had worked out what it was.