"I heard nothing, Frances. What is it?" I rubbed my eyes; I had been
very deeply asleep. "Listen!" she repeated very softly, holding up one finger and turning
her eyes towards the door she had left ajar. Her usual calmness had
deserted her. She was in the grip of some distressing terror. For a full minute we held our breath and listened. Then her eyes rolled
round again and met my own, and her skin went even whiter than before. "It woke me," she said beneath her breath, and moving a step nearer to
my bed. "It was the Noise." Even her whisper trembled. "The Noise!" The word repeated itself dully of its own accord. I would
rather it had been anything in the world but that--earthquake, foreign
cannon, collapse of the house above our heads! "The Noise, Frances! Are
you sure?" I was playing really for a little time. "It was like thunder. At first I thought it was thunder. But a minute
later it came again--from underground. It's appalling." She muttered the
words, her voice not properly under control. There was a pause of perhaps a minute, and then we both spoke at once. We said foolish, obvious things that neither of us believed in for a
second. The roof had fallen in, there were burglars downstairs, the
safes had been blown open. It was to comfort each other as children do
that we said these things; also it was to gain further time. "There's some one in the house, of course," I heard my voice say
finally, as I sprang out of bed and hurried into dressing gown and
slippers. "Don't be alarmed. I'll go down and see," and from the drawer
I took a pistol it was my habit to carry everywhere with me. I loaded it
carefully while Frances stood stock-still beside the bed and watched. I
moved towards the open door. "You stay here, Frances," I whispered, the beating of my heart making
the words uneven, "while I go down and make a search. Lock yourself in,
girl. Nothing can happen to you. It was downstairs, you said?" "Underneath," she answered faintly, pointing through the floor. She moved suddenly between me and the door. "Listen! Hark!" she said, the eyes in her face quite fixed; "it's coming
again," and she turned her head to catch the slightest sound. I stood
there watching her, and while I watched her, shook. But nothing stirred. From the halls below rose only the whirr and quiet
ticking of the numerous clocks. The blind by the open window behind us
flapped out a little into the room as the draught caught it. "I'll come with you, Bill--to the next floor," she broke the silence. "Then I'll stay with Mabel--till you come up again." The blind sank down
with a long sigh as she said it. The question jumped to my lips before I could repress it:

"Mabel is awake. She heard it too?" I hardly know why horror caught me at her answer. All was so vague and
terrible as we stood there playing the great game of this sinister house
where nothing ever happened. "We met in the passage. She was on her way to me." What shook in me, shook inwardly. Frances, I mean, did not see it. I had
the feeling just that the Noise was upon us, that any second it would
boom and roar about our ears. But the deep silence held. I only heard my
sister's little whisper coming across the room in answer to my question:

"Then what is Mabel doing now?" And her reply proved that she was yielding at last beneath the dreadful
tension, for she spoke at once, unable longer to keep up the pretence. With a kind of relief, as it were, she said it out, looking helplessly
at me like a child:

"She is weeping and gna--"

My expression must have stopped her. I believe I clapped both hands upon
her mouth, though when I realized things clearly again, I found they
were covering my own ears instead. It was a moment of unutterable
horror. The revulsion I felt was actually physical. It would have given
me pleasure to fire off all the five chambers of my pistol into the air
above my head; the sound--a definite, wholesome sound that explained
itself--would have been a positive relief. Other feelings, though, were
in me too, all over me, rushing to and fro. It was vain to seek their
disentanglement; it was impossible. I confess that I experienced, among
them, a touch of paralyzing fear--though for a moment only; it passed as
sharply as it came, leaving me with a violent flush of blood to the face
such as bursts of anger bring, followed abruptly by an icy perspiration
over the entire body. Yet I may honestly avow that it was not ordinary
personal fear I felt, nor any common dread of physical injury. It was,
rather, a vast, impersonal shrinking--a sympathetic shrinking--from the
agony and terror that countless others, somewhere, somehow, felt for
themselves. The first sensation of a prison overwhelmed me in that
instant, of bitter strife and frenzied suffering, and the fiery torture
of the yearning to escape that was yet hopelessly uttered.... It was of
incredible power. It was real. The vain, intolerable hope swept over me. I mastered myself, though hardly knowing how, and took my sister's hand. It was as cold as ice, as I led her firmly to the door and out into the
passage. Apparently she noticed nothing of my so near collapse, for I
caught her whisper as we went. "You are brave, Bill; splendidly brave." The upper corridors of the great sleeping house were brightly lit; on
her way to me she had turned on every electric switch her hand could
reach; and as we passed the final flight of stairs to the floor below, I
heard a door shut softly and knew that Mabel had been listening--waiting
for us. I led my sister up to it. She knocked, and the door was opened
cautiously an inch or so. The room was pitch black. I caught no glimpse
of Mabel standing there. Frances turned to me with a hurried whisper,
"Billy, you will be careful, won't you?" and went in. I just had time to
answer that I would not be long, and Frances to reply, "You'll find us
here" when the door closed and cut her sentence short before its end. But it was not alone the closing door that took the final words. Frances--by the way she disappeared I knew it--had made a swift and
violent movement into the darkness that was as though she sprang. She
leaped upon that other woman who stood back among the shadows, for,
simultaneously with the clipping of the sentence, another sound was also
stopped--stifled, smothered, choked back lest I should also hear it. Yet
not in time. I heard it--a hard and horrible sound that explained both
the leap and the abrupt cessation of the whispered words. I stood irresolute a moment. It was as though all the bones had been
withdrawn from my body, so that I must sink and fall. That sound plucked
them out, and plucked out my self-possession with them. I am not sure
that it was a sound I had ever heard before, though children, I half
remembered, made it sometimes in blind rages when they knew not what
they did. In a grown-up person certainly I had never known it. I
associated it with animals rather--horribly.