The Second Door

And now, a tale well calculated to keep you in, saucepence. Perhaps I'm a coward. I don't know. In the years that have passed, I've never told the story to anyone. I've tried to justify my silence by assuring myself that no one would believe me.

But sometimes I feel the guilt. Sometimes I feel it so strongly that I can run out into the streets, the first man I see and tell him everything about the White House with the yellow shutters and this small brown chimneys. But then I think why frighten him. Better than he go on believing that life is real. Life is earnest. It is not its goal.

The Second Door, starring and written the specially for suspense by Robert Some time ago, I made arrangements to rent a completely isolated house in the northwestern part of the country. The last leg of the journey there was made at an old station wagon.

It was very late at night when we arrived and I instructed the man who drove it to let me offer the entrance to the long driveway as I wanted to walk up to the house alone.

With a heavy suitcase in each hand, I started up the long gentle slope toward the house. At a point, perhaps 30 or 40 yards on the road turned sharply to the left, and up ahead it seemed there must have been a patch where the foliage of the overhanging trees grew less thickly together.

For amid the utter darkness, a thin, eerie beam of light filtered down, and in it there appeared to be some sort of a shape. I had the impression that what I saw up ahead in this driveway in the middle of nowhere was a woman in a bright red dress seated impoturbably in a chair. And suddenly after I'd taken but