The Open House Read Free

continuing to direct such engines upon intruders disposed to walk where they shouldn’t. Alternatively – and more prosaically – a dangerously excited proprietor, or even butler, might at any moment emerge from the alerted house with a loaded shotgun. It was with appropriate caution that Appleby peered out from his shelter now.
    The house perched, as such places do, upon a basement storey out of which alone a good many reasonably commodious dwellings might have been carved. There was a dominating central block with a Corinthian portico, and on each side of this quadrant corridors connected with substantial and symmetrical wings. It seemed probable that the same effect was repeated at the back – in which case what one would view from the air would be something like a giant crab or sprawled four-footed beast. The whole pile wasn’t all that vast; one might have called it – Appleby reflected – a Kedleston Hall cunningly miniaturized; but it was undeniably imposing, all the same. Whatever its present eonomic hinterland, it had been built for somebody who knew himself to be the person of principal consequence for a great many miles around. And here it was, consuming electricity at a prodigious rate for reasons which remained decidedly unclear.
    For the burglar-alarm theory didn’t at all explain all those uncurtained windows. The effect of sudden pervasive illumination would be quite adequately startling even through drawn curtains or lowered blinds, and that the whole mansion should be condemned to a kind of lidless vigil in order to produce a marginally more striking impact upon some hypothetical housebreaker made no sense at all. So Appleby tried another guess. Might the place be both untenanted and disfurnished – a mere empty shell in which some defective master-switch or the like intermittently produced this weird manifestation? Electrical contrivances did, after all, behave badly at times. His own torch had done so, only half an hour ago.
    This seemed excessively improbable, too. And certainly the house was not abandoned. The light pouring from it illuminated everything immediately round about, and the resulting suggestion was of a property in apple-pie order. The windows, moreover, could be distinguished as not mere bleak rectangles; one could discern the silhouette of curtains formally drawn back, blinds lowered by the prescriptive few inches of day-time use, and here and there what might be the looking-glass on a dressing-table. In one wing, furthermore, the ground-floor windows came down to the level of the terrace upon which they gave; and through these it was possible for Appleby to view the book-lined walls of a library.
    His gaze travelled up to the roof. He was too close to the house to command anything here except a long bold cornice and a crowning balustrade. Behind this there possibly lurked lines of attic windows. No chimneys were visible. But when he raised a hand to shade his eyes from the main glare he could just detect against the dark sky beyond a single faint column of smoke. For a moment he wondered whether the place was on fire. If the house was closed and untenanted, and a fire had broken out through some faulty electrical installation, it was conceivable that the untoward spectacle to which he was being treated was in some way a result.
    But this – Appleby told himself impatiently – really made no more sense than anything else that had so far come into his head. It required one to believe that the lights throughout the house had been turned on severally, that all had then been simultaneously extinguished at a main switch, and that now some accident had reversed the process. This just wouldn’t do. The spectacle before him was a spectacle deliberately contrived.
    Having arrived at this conclusion, Appleby decided he must investigate. Investigation had been his métier , after all.
     
    It would not have occurred to him to ascribe to himself anything that could be called a fanciful