An adventure novel by H. C. McNeile (Sapper) from the Bulldog Drummond series. It follows a secret group opposing a revolutionary conspiracy in post-war Britain, opening with a sinister house. Suspenseful action and a dark atmosphere make it worth listening to.
The wind howled dismally round a house standing by itself almost on the shores of Barking Creek. It was the grey dusk of an early autumn day, and the occasional harsh cry of a seagull rising discordantly above the wind alone broke the silence of the flat, desolate waste.
The house seemed deserted. Every window was shuttered; the garden was uncared for and a mass of weeds; the gate leading on to the road, apparently feeling the need of a deficient top hinge, propped itself drunkenly on what had once been a flowerbed. A few gloomy trees swaying dismally in the wind surrounded the house and completed the picture —one that would have caused even the least imaginative of men to draw his coat a little tighter round him, and feel thankful that it was not his fate to live in such a place.
But then few people ever came near enough to the house to realize its sinister appearance. The road —it was little better than a cart track —which passed the gate, was out of the beaten way; only an occasional fisherman or farm labourer ever used it, and that generally by day when things assumed their proper proportion, and it was merely an empty house gradually falling to pieces through lack of attention. At night they avoided it if possible; folks did say that twelve years ago some prying explorer had found the bones of a skeleton lying on the floor in one of the upstairs rooms with a mildewed rope fixed to one of the beams in the ceiling. And then it had been empty for twenty years.
Even now when the wind lay in the east or northeast and the tide was setting in, there were those who said that you could see a light shining through the cracks in the shutters in that room upstairs, and that, should a man climb up and look in, he’d see no skeleton, but a body with purple face and staring eyes swinging gently to and fro, and tied by the neck to a beam with a rope which showed no trace
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