Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 19: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

er 4 , ~ - ~ te « * » ‘ ~% a a -* J ’ re =) # a ~ 7 ° Pee a Fe OE Be Ee ee & ' + = AS Fa es en ® x by aS =? %, = ey nA _ HA Z ge . . rr ; ~ < es = ye! -," ale fy OS eis <— gp air Ber Ps : rae - 2 UNTED SUMMER the study door and crawled onto the study desk where the man who was writing the story used to sit. It was during this story, fittingly enough; that my Aunt Sophia opened the door slowly, softly, in the quiet of the “4 afternoon, and caught me at my grandmother’s magazines. I was so scared by her that I didn’t even feel the whipping. The angular, railed stairs, climbing the sides of the square hall-well all the way from the bottom of the house to the attic, were the next most scaring part of the house. Each step towards the attic was more frightening than the one before, so frightening that I, certainly, and most of my cousins used to shirk going up them alone towards evening, and if we had to, to bed or to fetch my aunt’s glasses, we used to run up as fast as we could. My Aunt Melissa used to get sick headaches, and when we would pound up the stairs she would call out from behind the door of the front big bedroom, where you could hear her pacing up and down, “Ill declare, you kids are trying to set me crazy. Stop that everlasting noise.”’ There were nineteen of us—all first cousins. My Aunt Prissy said it was ‘“‘ youthful spirits.”’ We all knew it was a Something, a something that stayed in the attic; at least I knew it was that kind of spirit and not youthful spirits. I couldn’t have said what the thing looked like. But I suspected that It had a long arm that could reach all the way down the stairwell. : But It wasn’t the first bad thing about the stairs. At the first landing, staring sternly straight down the stairs, was a sepia enlargement from a daguerreotype of my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother would fasten her eyes right on mine and she would watch me steadily as I came towards her, and as I would turn the corner of the stair so that my back was half to her, she would drill her eyes right through my back, and as I would walk along the upstairs hall she would follow me with her disapproving, know-it-all eyes, and she would never take her eyes off me. Once I thought I imagined it and turned around, but sure enough, there she was, staring straight at me. I was sure there wasn’t a thing my great-grandmother, who had died about 1870, didn’t know about me. She used to come and stand over my bed at night, and just as she was ready to say something, I would wake up and yell, “‘ Mamma! Mamma! ” There was a strong family resemblance between my mother COMICOOKS.COMD, ~ what I could see I didn’t fear so much, and I would read from > the dusky pulp magazines about the ever-recurring spot on the floor, made by the drowned sailor, or stories about Things that — weren't anything but seemed made of flesh and slithered under — ‘- if aay é