The Light in the Cottage

The first time it happened, they thought nothing about it. Having returned after dark from a cocktail party, Carl and Pauline Bays left their car as usual in the circle where the road ended and climbed the winding steps that were cut into the rock. At the halfway point, the steps turned sharply and the cottage came into view above them. It was then that they saw the light in the kitchen.

At first they assumed that some friend had stopped by for a visit (they never locked the cottage, for it was only a summer place), but when they found no one waiting for them there, they concluded that one of them must have turned the light on by accident before they left for the party. It was still daylight then, so they wonldn't have noticed it. The second time was more puzzling. As usual, before they left, Carl turned on the little outside lamp down where the step's turned. (That was a safety precaution. Without the light, someone unfamiliar with the turning might take a nasty fall.) Then he made certain that all the inside lights were off, so that the cottage would be dark when they came back.

And yet on their return, they found that the bathroom light was burning. Again, the cottage was empty.

"No doubt about it this time." Carl said to Pauline. "Someone was here, all right." But a visiting friend would have left a note, and there was no note. "There may be something wrong with the electricity," Carl added. "That could be dangerous, if there's a short circuit or something. I'll have it checked."

The electrician came that same week (which in itself was a minor miracle), but the found the system in perfect order. "I had a cat once," the man said when Carl told him what had happened, "and this cat would turn on all the lights in the house by itself, jumping up and batting the switches with its paws, so when we'd come back at night, it looked like a party."

But Carl and Pauline Bays had no cat.

The third time--it was the light in their bedroom then--Pauline became upset. "I don't like it," she said. "Some-body's playing a joke on us, but it isn't funny."

Carl didn't like it, either. What troubled him most was the lack of an obvious explanation. The cottage was set high on a rocky spur overlooking the ocean, a location too remote to attract casual passersby. It couldn't be seen from the road, and besides, no one drove out that far at night. It hadn't been a burglar who had entered, for a burglar would have taken something--a bottle of liquor or the portable typewriter--and nothing was missing. A prankish child? But a child would have done more than just leave a light on, and anyway, the nearest family with children was three or four miles away. Carl couldn't imagine that any of their friends would be capable of such an odd joke. In any event, all the people they knew well had been at the same parties on all three occasions. Could it have been someone from the town? These Maine villagers were sometimes peculiar if they took a dislike to an out-sider. But that was very unlikely. Carl and Pauline were a proper Bostonian couple in their late 30s, spare and dry and unobtrusively elegant. They main-tained a crisp and quiet public discipline; it was almost inconceivable that they could offend anyone.

• • •

The next time they went out for the evening. Carl locked the cottage.

"That'll do it," he said briskly. "Whoever our little visitor may be, he obviously isn't the type who goes around breaking down doors. When he finds the place locked, he'll go away again. He--or she," he amended, for he was a lawyer and phrased even casual statements with care. "We've seen the last of it. I think."

"We haven't seen it at all," said Pauline. "That's the spooky part. Suppose it's someone who lived here while we were gone?"

"Don't be silly. That's impossible," Carl said, and with reason, for they had a caretaker who checked the cottage once a week during the winters. In the summers of their absence--they had not used the cottage themselves for seven years--they had rented the place to friends. "Forget this stupid business, Pauline," he said. For a few moments they stood at the top of the steps, watching the sunset fire the sky and tint the choppy little waves that slapped against the rocks far below. "Isn't that magnificent?" he said, smiling down at her. "I'm glad we decided to come back."

"You decided. I really didn't want to."

"But I wouln't have insisted if you hadn't agreed. And you're not sorry now, are you?"

"No, I suppose not," she said slowly. "It is a beautiful place. But sometimes I can't help remembering-----"

"Look, Pauline. We said we wouldn't talk about that," he said, and there was a sharp note in his voice. "That belongs to the past--and we're living in the present now."

"Yes, of course," she said. "You're right, Carl." She smiled at him and took his hand; together, they descended the steps.

The evening, however, did not turn out to be pleasant. They were dinner guests of Carl's law partner. George McKettrick, who had a rambling old summer place on the hill overlooking the village. George's brother, a professor of psychology, was visiting, with his wife and children. The brother, Ralph, was one of those talkative enthusiasts who dominate social gatherings, assuming that what interests them will also interest others. This was not to Pauline's liking, for parties stimulated her, too, to take a leading conversational role, and that evening Ralph McKettrick delivered what was almost a monolog on his research in child psychology (which was of no personal interest to Carl and Pauline, for they were childless).

Professor McKettrick's particular theme was the learning ability of very young children, which he expounded with the easy authority of a practiced lecturer, his nasal voice resounding in the night air. The table had been set out on the veranda, where the politely attentive faces of the other guests glowed in the light of candles. Down below were the lamps of the village and those of the boats anchored in the harbor.

"Children are incredible achievers," Professor McKettrick was saying, "but their capacity lessens each year. A child of four can do less than a two-year-old, and so it goes. An infant, by the same token, makes the two-year-old look like a dullard."

Carl, at the other end of the table, saw that Pauline was the only one not watching the speaker. She was looking down at her plate, a slight frown on her face.

"Recently we've been focusing our research on an even earlier period," Professor McKettrick continued. "The earliest possible period, in fact,"

"Life before conception?" someone asked jokingly.

"Not quite that. No, I mean the prenatal period."

From within the house, a baby cried. Pauline shivered and laid down her dessert fork.

"There's a real achiever for you--the unborn child," Professor McKettrick went on. "He has to cover eons of biological history in just nine months. the accomplishments of the baby and the toddler are nothing compared with what the fetus does!"

"So then it's the fetus who's the smartest of us all," said the man to his left.

"Well, of course we don't think in terms of conventional intelligence in this connection," replied Professor McKettrick tolerantly. "It's more a matter of sheer creative drive--the thrust of the instinct to live."

Carl cleared his throat and cast a swift warning glance at his host.

"Naturally, there are technical difficulties in studying the fetus." Professor McKettrick said. "Much of our attention is necessarily concentrated on the mother--and on that strange phenomenon, the marvelous calm and serenity of pregnant women. Nature seems to insist on it, to protect the emotional stability of the unborn child. I might note," he added, "that we've run up against certain puzzling cases of seriously disturbed children with no physical defects and an apparently tranquil infancy. It's these cases that lead us to suspect that the answer may lie in the prenatal period. The mother may have suffered severe emotional trauma during pregnancy. The question of miscarriage deserves further study from this standpoint, too, I might say."

Pauline pushed back her chair, her lips working. Carl, too, seemed upset. The other guests were aware of their reaction, but Professor McKettrick's professional zeal had immunized him against such perceptions.

"The unborn child draws life and love from the mother," he declared with an agreeable smile. "But the reverse can also be true. The fetus------"

His brother hastily interrupted him. "Ralph, if you don't mind------"

"The fetus," Professor McKettrick (continued on page 222) light in the cottage (continued from page 80) went on amiably, "can also absorb the mother's tensions, the mother's fears, the mother's rage------"

"Please excuse me," said Pauline, hurriedly rising. Her face was pale in the candlelight. For a moment she swayed, her finger tips pressed to the surface of the table. Carl got up quickly and went around to her. Then she left the veranda, going into the house, Carl following her.

The other guests stirred in sympathetic concern. Even Professor McKettrick seemed to divine that all was not well.

George McKettrick excused himself and sought Carl out, with apologies. "My God, Carl," he said. "I'm terribly sorry about this. I should have said something to Ralph beforehand, but I'd forgotten all about it. How is Pauline?"

"She's resting. Don't worry--she'll be all right in a few minutes." Carl's smile was wan and his narrow face was tightly drawn. "I don't think it was the subject itself George--not only that, anyway. It's mostly just being back here again. I thought that after all this time it would be all right, but. . . ." He made a despairing gesture. "If you wouldn't mind making our excuses. George, we'll just slip out the side way."

But Pauline regained her self-possession and insisted on making a reappearance. Poised and smiling, she made her goodbye rounds, explaining that she was subject to migraine headaches, which came on without any warning.

At the car, Carl told her: "We don't have to go back, you know." It was at the cottage that she had fallen and miscarried. "We can take at room at the inn right here in the village, and then tomorrow we can drive down to Boston."

Pauline shook her head. "No," she said quietly. "That would be cowardly. Of course we'll go back to the cottage."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely sure," she said, entering the car. "You did lock both doors, didn't you?"

"Of course. Front and back. Don't worry, Pauline. It's locked tight."

But when they returned to the cottage, they saw that the light in the spare bedroom was on.

Pauline sucked in her breath and clutched Carl's sleeve. He tested the front door. "It's still locked," he muttered. "Wait here a minute." He went around to the back, glancing in at the windows as he passed them. "The back door's locked, too," he told her when he returned. "And nobody's inside. It's empty." He unlocked the front door and entered. Pauline waited in the living room, twisting her handkerchief in her fingers, while he made a careful examination of the windows and the two doors. There was no evidence of a forced entry. All the windowpanes were intact. The locks and doorjambs were unmarked.

"All right," Carl said finally. "There are only two ways of getting into this cottage when it's locked without breaking in." Pauline looked at him questioningly. "First, with a key." he said. "No." he added, "I don't suspect Mr. Fowles." Mr. Fowles, the caretaker, was the only other person who had a key. "But someone might have taken his key without his knowledge and had it copied," Carl said. "The answer to that is to have the locks changed."

"You said there were two ways of getting in."

Carl smiled wryly. "Well . . . there's the chimney." He went to the hearth and squatted, peering up the opening. "The flue is open. It's pretty narrow, though. The only thing that could get down that way would be a squirrel or a bird . . . a bat, maybe."

Pauline shuddered, thinking of a bat fluttering about the darkened cottage, seeking a way out, and brushing against a light switch.

"Of course, a bat or a bird would leave excrement." Carl went on thoughtfully. "So would a squirrel, probably, and we haven't found any. But the thing to do is block the flue the way Mr. Fowles does at the end of the season. There's a board behind the wood box for that. First I'll build a fire, to smoke out anything that's up there."

"Oh, God, don't do that," said Pauline. She had a vision of some scorched thing writhing in the embers.

"Well, all right. I'll just block it," Carl said. "No time like the present," he added, going over to the wood box and lifting the board. "And then tomorrow I'll get busy arranging for the locks to be changed."

• • •

By the time they next went out for the evening, there were new locks on the doors. The window latches had been checked, too, and new hooks put on the shutters.

Carl closed the shutters and the windows, fastening them securely, and locked the doors. He also put tiny slips of paper low down in the doorjambs. If a door were opened, the paper would fall out or slide down to the hinge, providing a telltale sign. In addition, he smoothed some sand on the doorsteps, to obtain footprints. Straightening, he examined his handiwork with satisfaction. "Beyond this, criminal science cannot go," he remarked cheerfully.

Pauline was already starting down the rocky steps. "You won't find any footprints," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"It's inside. It's already inside."

"What are you saying?" He caught up with her and took her arm, annoyed.

She shook off his hand and went silently down the rest of the way. "I'm sorry, Carl," she said as he opened the car door for her. "It's just nerves. Please don't mind what I say." She looked back up the rise. The cottage was hidden, but the jagged curve of steps showed dark against the sunset sky. "Let's go back and throw the main power switch," she said.

"Then we'd lose the light out on the steps," he objected, starting the engine. "Besides, it's simply a matter of taking precautions. I've covered every possibility this time."

She made no reply but sat brooding by his side as he drove into the village.

It was midnight when they returned. Carl hurried up the steps.

"I don't want to see it." Pauline said suddenly. She stopped before reaching the turning and sat down on one of the steps.

Carl went on without her. "Look," he called down to her exultantly, "the cottage is dark! What did I tell you?"

She got to her feet and slowly mounted the steps while he inspected the sanded doorsteps with his pocket flashlight and verified the unchanged positions of the slips of paper.

"It worked, all right," he announced, returning from the back of the house. "Both doors are the same. Nobody went inside. I can guarantee that, Pauline. Come on." She joined him at the front door as he put the key in the lock, turned it and opened the door.

This time the light in the living room was on.

"Oh, God," Carl muttered. The shutters had blocked the light from the outside. He'd forgotten about that. Pauline, behind him in the doorway, had made a choked little cry. "Anybody here?" Carl called out, his voice brittle. He made a hurried search of the place, but, as usual, he found nothing out of place and no sign of entry.

"Let's go away from here," she said, her voice trembling, her eyes wide. "We know what it is now. Let that be enough."

"We don't know," Carl snapped. "You're talking nonsense, Pauline." He paced about the room, trying to master his agitation. Then he turned to her more calmly. "There's no reason for you to stay here. I'll put you on the noon train tomorrow."

She looked at him with vague alarm. "Me? What about you?"

"I'm going to get to the bottom of this," he said. "There's one answer left and I intend to prove it out. It's the lights. There's got to be something wrong with the lights. That fellow from the village didn't find it--but that just means he wasn't competent. Tomorrow I'm going to phone Boston and get an absolutely first-rate electrician to come up here, and then we'll see--or I will, anyway. You'll be back home tomorrow night."

"No," she said dully. "If you're staying. I'll stay, too. It was more my fault than yours."

He frowned at her. "That has nothing to do with it. You know that."

She was still standing in the doorway, refusing to enter the room. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth was drawn tight in a strange little smile. "Neither of us wanted it," she said, and she shuddered. "We wanted it dead. We both did."

"Stop this, Pauline."

"We murdered it. And now------"

"You've got to stop!" He strode across to her, seized her wrist and pulled her into the room. He slammed the door. "What's past is past!"

"You heard what George's brother said, didn't you?" She let him guide her to a chair. "It's smarter than we are, Carl." She giggled. "What's the old saying? The one about the wise child?"

He looked at her coldly. "Don't you remember?" he said slowly. "'It's a wise child that knows its own father."'

"Oh--I'd forgotten. I didn't mean that." She slumped in the chair, pressing her hands to her face. "I'm . . . I'm sorry, Carl."

"Never mind." He turned abruptly away, went to a window and opened it, flinging the shutters wide. They could hear the wind in the pines on the north side of the cottage and the rhythmic slapping of the waves down below. From far away came the cry of an owl, hunting.

"We've got to pull ourselves together," he said in an unsteady voice. He didn't look at her. "It's an electrical problem. That's all it is. An electrical problem."

"And if it isn't?" she said softly.

He made no answer.

• • •

The Boston electrician arrived two afternoons later. Carl followed him around as he inspected the wiring and the switches.

"Nothing wrong with any of it, Mr. Bays," the man said finally.

"There must be. I told you what happened. You must have missed something."

"Look," the man said. "A switch is a switch, and when it's off, it's off. It don't go on by itself. These switches are good switches, understand? And the wiring is OK. The guy who put it in, he knew his stuff."

"If you went back over it------"

"I could check it a hundred times, it wouldn't make no difference, but I'll do it once more just to satisfy you."

The electrcian's second complete check of the system finished with the same conclusion. There was nothing whatever wrong with the electrical system.

Carl kept roaming about the cottage, fuming. "The only thing that could have gotten in would be a mouse," he muttered, stooping to inspect the baseboard along the kitchen wall. "But mice don't turn on lights. A snake, maybe. Or a cat. There must be wild cats around here." He approached Pauline, who was sitting listlessly on the sofa. "You go into the village tonight, Panline. You can stay with George and Susan. I'm going to find out what does it, once and for all. There's some rational explanation. Probably a simple one." There was a roll of thunder in the distance, far out at sea. "It's going to storm," he said, resuming his restless pacing. "I'll drive you in to George's. Then I'll come back and wait. There's nothing to be afraid of," he added, glancing at her defensively, "but you'll be better off in the village."

"No," she said. "I'll stay, too." He protested this, but she wouldn't change her mind. "I'll stay," she kept saying. Her manner was apathetic and resigned and she seemed withdrawn. Only when the thunder boomed closer and the lightning flashed did she raise her eyes.

"We'll make it look as though we've gone." Carl said. "We'll drive the car up the road a hundred yards or so and park it among the trees. Then we'll walk back here and wait. All right?"

She made no response.

"We'll sit here--right here--with the lights off," he said. "Except for the one down the steps."

"And then?"

"Then we'll find out."

"Do you really want to know?" she said quietly.

"Of course I do."

"You know already."

He turned away from her impatiently. "Let's go," he said.

By the time they had hidden the car behind the screen of trees and were walking back, the sky was darkening rapidly and the first drops of rain were falling. A patch of sunset flared in the west, but it, too, was swiftly blocked out by the hurrying clouds.

"It stormed that night, too," she said. They were climbing the steps.

"No, it didn't," he said, and then he caught himself. "Don't talk about that," he told her.

"It rained, anyway. The steps were wet."

He unlocked the front door. The cottage was dark. He swung his flashlight beam about the living room. "You sit on the sofa. Pauline. I'll take this chair. And we'd better not talk. That might spoil things."

"It won't matter if we talk," she said.

"Be quiet," he told her, but his words were lost in a burst of thunder that broke above the cottage. In the lightning that flared through the unshuttered windows, he saw her face livid and distorted, her eyes staring.

"Tell me. Carl," she said. "When you struck me------"

"Don't," he said.

"When you struck me, which one did you want to kill?"

"Oh, God," he muttered.

"Was it me . . . or it ? Or both?"

"I didn't want to kill anything," he said savagely. "I didn't know what I was doing."

"If you hadn't hit me, I wouldn't have fallen."

"It wasn't my child," he shouted. Again the thunder exploded. Her white face leaped alive and swiftly faded, and they sat silently in the darkness as the rain beat hard on the roof and the shutters hummed in the wind.

Then the center of the storm passed and the rain slackened. "Listen," she whispered, but the only sound was the rain. Then that, too, died away. He could hear her breathing and his own. His chest was tight and he was perspiring, although the night was cool. "Listen," she whispered again. He swung his head about, straining to see. "It's here now," he heard her say in a shaking voice and he tensed, glaring about. "It's here," she repeated. He was aware of a shape in the darkness, something he sensed rather than saw--and he stood, gripping the flashlight tightly.

The front door opened.

"Stop," Carl said harshly. He flicked the flashlight on, aiming the beam that way.

It was Pauline. She had gotten to her feet and gone to the door, opening it.

"I can't stand it." she said wildly. "It's here in this room------"

"Don't be an idiot!"

"It's here right now!"

"There's nothing here," he shouted, flashing the beam around the empty room. When he swung it back to the doorway, she was gone.

He cursed and went to the doorway. She was hurrying down the steps. "Pauline!" He stared down the steps. Something was wrong. The lamp at the turning was off. Then he heard her cry out, and as he pointed his flashlight beam down the steps, he realized that she had missed her footing. She had vanished.

"Pauline!" He descended the steps quickly, sweeping the beam from side to side. "Pauline!" He stopped at the turning. For a few moments he listened, but all he could hear was the beating of the waves against the rocks. "Pauline!" he cried again, but there was no answer.

He went to the edge and pointed the flashlight down.

He saw her sprawled on the rocks, 30 feet below. Each breaking wave sent spray washing over her.

He ran back up to the cottage. The telephone was just inside the door, the list of emergency numbers tacked to the wall above it. A flick of the flashlight was enough to pick out the one he wanted. His voice, as he spoke, was racked by gasping sobs. "Hurry, hurry," he said. "And bring rope. For God's sake, don't forget the rope."

As he was starting down the steps again, he remembered the clothesline and ran around to the back to get it, frantically pulling it loose from its fastenings.

He hurried down to the turning and looped the line around the lamppost, knotting it again and again. He flashed the beam down. The free end of the line dangled near the rocks where she lay motionless beneath the driving spray.

Casting one last glance up at the dark cottage, he eased himself over the edge and started down. The line held. It was the slippery cliflside that betrayed him. His feet lost their purchase, then his hands slid scorchingly along the line and he fell.

• • •

The police had no difficulty in reconstructing the sequence of events in which Pauline and Carl Bays met their deaths. There was the telephone call, the clothesline tied to the lamppost and the two bodies close together on the rocks. The fact that the cottage was brightly, triumphantly illuminated--all the lights were on in every room--seemed of no particular significance and was not mentioned in the official report.