The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

No answer.
Once again he hammered his summons on the white door, then seized the
handle with a savage wrench and bore his weight against it. The door swung
open readily, and he half ran, half stumbled, into his ward’s room.
Every electric bulb in the apartment was aglow. Not a corner of the place but
was flooded with sharp, brilliant light. In the glass ash tray on the bureau lay a
long Philippine cigarette, half consumed, a thin spiral of smoke slowly
ascending from its glowing tip. Forrester knew the speed with which the dry,
black Island tobacco burned. The cigarette could not have been lighted more
than two minutes before. Rosalie must have been here then. Where was she
now? Across the foot of the bed hung a bright orange and blue coolie coat;
beneath its trailing hem, toes inward, stood a pair of blue and yellow satin
Chinese slippers. But Rosalie was nowhere in sight.
“Rosalie,” the Professor called softly, gazing wildly about the room. “Rosalie
—ha?” The exclamation was fairly jerked from him as his eye fell on a long,
vertical crack in the wall. Half an inch wide it was, running from baseboard to
cornice, and showing behind the black, impenetrable background of utter
darkness.
One long stride carried the frenzied Professor across the room, one furious tug
swung back a section of the wall like a door, and left him gazing down a flight of
narrow, winding stairs, tunnel-like and unlighted, and leading, apparently, to the
very nadir of the earth.
As he stared horrified down the twisting spiral of the stairway, he felt a tug at
his hand. Operated by some cunningly hidden spring, the secret door he had
wrenched open was closing slowly, resistlessly. In a moment, despite his utmost
efforts to hold it open, it would be shut.
The Professor gave one desperate look about the deserted room, searching for
something which might serve as a weapon, found nothing suitable, drew one
quick, sharp breath and squeezed through the rapidly narrowing opening of the
secret panel. The door shut behind him with a sharp click, latching firmly with a
snap-lock, and he was sealed in total darkness at the stairhead as securely as a
corpse desposited in the crypt of a mausoleum.
V
Professor Forrester paused a moment on the topmost of the stone steps, seeking
vainly to pierce the Stygian darkness of the downward-spiraling passage.