Silence, utter silence! Absolutely nothing to be seen or heard. He thinks of going to bed. He always said the whole thing was "tommy rot." The deathly silence is suddenly rent by a piercing scream at his very elbow, and he leaps to his feet, growling out an oath below his breath. He looks wildly round on every side of him. Nothing! Something strange is happening to his head. He passes his hand over his hair. It seems to be creeping along his scalp, and he thinks of the quills of a porcupine. "What the devil is he to do?" "Go to bed," answers inclination, "you're doing no good here. Yes! Go to bed; that's the sensible thing to do."
The next morning every one asks him if he heard "it." He acknowledges to himself that his temper is becoming vile.
The day comes when he is left alone with his family. The staff has fled and he feels rather broken.
At last he gives in, and agrees to seek another home, but it is not to the ghosts he gives in, but to the nervous fancies of a pack of silly women. He feels wonderfully light-hearted, however, now that his mind is made up, and a glow of magnanimity pervades him. "If you do a thing at all do it well and _at once_," he tells himself, and promptly hires another house in another neighborhood.
When questioned by his men friends he laughs. The man in the street might understand certain things that he could tell, but the man in the club, never! "All tommy rot, my dear chap, but my wife got nervous, and the servants! You know what they are. Scared by the scratch of a mouse. For the women's sake I thought it best to quit. You know what women are, when they once get an idea into their heads!"
In 1917 a friend rang me up and asked me if I would form one of a party of investigation at "Castel a Mare." The services of a medium had been secured, and a soldier on leave, who was deeply immersed in psychic research, was in high hopes of getting some genuine results.
I accepted the invitation because a certain incident had once more roused my curiosity in the haunted house.
During our investigations I had been disappointed at not hearing the much-talked-of scream, the more so after learning from the former tenants how very often they had heard it. When I did at last hear it I was walking past the house on a very hot summer morning, about eleven o'clock. I was not thinking of the house, and had just passed it on my way home, when a piercing scream arrested my attention. I wheeled round instantly; there was not a doubt as to where the scream came from, but unfortunately, though there were people on the road, there was no one near enough to bear witness. The scream appeared to come from some one in abject terror, and would have arrested the attention of any one who happened to be passing. I mean that had no haunted house stood there, had the scream proceeded from any other villa, I am sure that any passer-by would have halted wonderingly, and awaited further developments.