From the Improvement Era, August 1943 –

That Dark Room

By Claude T. Barnes

It was a double note at midnight on a rickety, dust-laden piano in a cabin’s inner, deserted room; but it was enough to creep our hair in startled apprehension. Even now the recollection of it incites rather weird qualms.

We were sojourning in that delightful region where the Smith and Morehouse wends its crystal lane down into the cobblestoned Weber, a portion of the Uinta Mountains unexcelled for loveliness of evergreen landscape and purity of mossy brooks. We were, in fact, cabined amid spruces on the steep-walled embankment of the upper Weber, a turbulent, rod-wide stream named after a trapper who a century ago there trailed his lonely mountainous way.

Our cabin was a strange affair: its central portion was the original one-roomed habitation, built of logs and floored with rough lumber, and rendezvous, we take it, of the hunter of deer and the trapper of bear; but in recent years sleeping porches had been constructed all around it in such manner as to leave the inner, one-paned room dark, unfrequented, indeed, almost uncanny. This seldom-opened room sheltered on one side a tune-warped piano, grayed with the dust of years; in one corner, a tall grimy phonograph still able to scratch out the ghost of Caruso; and on a side wall, a mounted antelope head, glaring down with hard, cold eyes upon its companions of dark solitude, for even at noon one lighted a candle to enter this spectral room. It was creaky of floor, and, save for its one porch-smothered pane, utterly windowless; nevertheless, we have it on good authority that once on a time, with horses blanketed outside and babes snuggled in corners they actually danced there on occasion the Roger de Coverley and the Horseless Four, hobnails, denims and all. Such, however, is history. Why the room creeped us with the feeling of a sepulchre, we do not know, for though no hunter had died by accident there, it was dust-laden, cloistered, and dismal, as if at last the piano responded only to the voices of memory.

That then, was the situation, when to our astonished ears came from that inner mystic room a double note of the piano, a note full, rich, and resonant, as if a black, and a white key on the base side had been pressed almost together. There was only one door to that eerie room, a heavy door, padlocked, as we had seen. In an instant we both sat up with whispered queries: “Did you hear that?”; then listened with awe; but finally decided to investigate.

One of the keys that had been lent us fitted the inner lock, so we cautiously opened the door, one of us holding a candle, the other, a revolver. What use could be made of a revolver against such an enemy, did not occur to us at the time.

As we slowly entered, the first thing that drew our attention was the eyes of the antelope from the further wall, reflecting our candle and glaring at us. Shadows darted across the floor, behind the old corner stove and under the tall-legged phonograph, as our light sputtered or moved; but there was nothing on the piano, no sitting marks on its dust-shrouded stool. We examined nook and cranny, even gazing with disturbed query into the antelope’s motionless eyes, involuntarily ascribing to them a harmful potency; but we gave up the search, repadlocked the door, and went back to our beds, where without further disturbance we got at least the form of sleep.

At sunrise we reconnoitered the shrubby outskirts of the cabin, but met no signs of life except the persistent “chips” of long-tailed squirrels — Citellus grammurus utah, we call it — which scampered about spruce limbs, and the plaintive “zwee” of a trail flycatcher, issued in monotonous regularity every ten seconds as it walked about tree trunks in search of bugs. There were deer tracks in the damp, cabin pathway, but nothing more.

That day the memory of the piano-note really troubled us, though we tried to belittle it. Trout-fishing was poor, so we diverted ourselves with a search for flowers. But it was of little use — that solitary piano note lingered like an imp of the brain.

The second night was even more awesome than the first, for, though no wraith pressed with invisible fingers upon that uncanny piano, we heard from that padlocked inner room — a groan!

The silent hour of clear and moonlit night Imbues the mind with apprehension keen, For nothing bodes more and fills with fright than voices there of beings yet unseen.

It was a groan, the groan of an old, old man! We looked at each other in the soft rays of the moon, which shone beside a huge Engelmann spruce and sifted through the porch screen upon us. As if with one thought we both sprang from our beds, and pressed our ears against the lower logs of that fiendish inner room. It came again — a grunt and then a groan! But it seemed to issue from the very base of the piano, or, strangely, even from below.

We pride ourselves on being neither superstitious nor skittish, yet there we were, two strong men concerned over the noises of a weird, deserted room. Once more we lighted a candle, once again we unlocked and essayed that mystic interior.

As we cautiously pushed the door ajar, this time the reflection came not so much from the antelope’s eyes as from the glass-covered lithograph of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” a picture that before had scarcely won our notice. But in it was the reflection of the piano!

We could see our bare footprints in the dust of the preceding night, but in all the room there was no living thing besides ourselves.

Nothing is so formidable as the undefined, nothing so dreadful as the unexplained. In this game of investigation we had been stalemated. Again we locked the portentous room; again we sought our beds, there to converse in the moonlight and wonder until the dim hours of the dawn.

The next morning it was my turn to fry bacon and eggs on the twig-laid fire of the outside stones. Our eating table on the sleeping porch was directly in front of the door to that inner room, and by now it was my custom to sit and eat with my back towards it, my companion occupying the other side of the table.

I forgot to mention that this door had before it a screened door, which we always had to open before unlocking the padlock. This particular morning, in my determination to solve the mystery, I had unlocked the inner door and swung it inward, leaving only the wire-screen between the alarming interior and our eating table.

We were enjoying our breakfast when my companion’s gaze fixed upon the screen of that inner door. I believe I shall never forget that look. Instantly I turned; and there it was — a gray bushy-tailed wood rat, standing nearly a foot high against the door screen. Quickly it occurred to me that these pack rats are nocturnal in their activity; they climb with great agility; hence the solitary but accidental note of the piano.

That, however, did not explain the groan; so, upon further investigation that day we found a well-defined burrow leading to the floor beneath that unused room; and this burrow or retreat was the nest of a yellow-haired porcupine, an animal, which when we have shot it, has groaned and grunted exactly like an old, old man.

Nevertheless, if perchance you should meander the upper Weber and pass the Smith and Morehouse, tarry an hour to see for yourself that old cabined darksome room, for, when last we heard, it still sheltered the weird glaring of antelope-eyes.