THE date was the fifth of November, a date easy to remember; not that I could ever fail to recall it, even without the aid of the associations which cluster round Guy Fawkes. It was a Friday—and yet there are people who affect to believe that Friday is not a day singled out from its six companions for mystery, strangeness, and disaster! The number of the room was 222, as easy to remember as the date; not that I could ever fail to recall the number also. Every circumstance in the affair is fixed in my mind immovably and for ever. The hotel I shall call by the name of the Grand Junction Terminus Hotel. If this tale were not a simple and undecorated record of fact, I might with impunity choose for its scene any one of the big London hotels in order by such a detail to give a semblance of veracity to my invention; but the story happens to be absolutely true, and I must therefore, for obvious reasons, disguise the identity of the place where it occurred. I would only say that the Grand Junction Railway is one of the largest and one of the best-managed systems in England, or in the world: and that these qualities of vastness and of good management extend also to its immense Terminus Hotel in the North of Central London. The caravanserai (I have observed that professional writers invariably refer to a hotel as a caravanserai) is full every night in the week except Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; and every commercial traveller knows that, except on these nights, if he wishes to secure a room at the Grand Junction he must write or telegraph for it in advance. And there are four hundred bedrooms.

It was somewhat late in the evening when I arrived in London. I had meant to sleep at a large new hotel in the Strand, but I felt tired, and I suddenly, on the spur of the moment, decided to stay at the Grand Junction, if there was space for me. It is thus that Fate works.

I walked into the hall, followed by a platform porter with my bag. The place seemed just as usual, the perfection of the commonplace, the business-like, and the unspiritual.

“Have you a room?” I asked the young lady in black, whose yellow hair shone gaily at the office window under the electric light.

She glanced at her ledgers in the impassive and detached manner which hotel young ladies with yellow hair invariably affect, and ejaculated:

“No. 221.”“Pity you couldn’t make it all twos,” I ventured, with timid jocularity. (How could I guess the import of what I was saying?)

She smiled very slightly, with a distant condescension. It is astonishing the skill with which a feminine hotel clerk can make a masculine guest feel small and self-conscious.

“Name?” she demanded.

“Edge.”

“Fourth floor,” she said, writing out the room-ticket and handing it to me.

In another moment I was in the lift.

No. 221 was the last door but one at the end of the eastern corridor of the fourth floor. It proved to be a double-bedded room, large, exquisitely ugly, but perfectly appointed in all matters of comfort; in short, it was characteristic of the hotel. I knew that every bedroom in that corridor, and every bedroom in every corridor, presented exactly the same aspect. One instinctively felt the impossibility of anything weird, anything bizarre, anything terrible, entering the precincts of an abode so solid, cheerful, orderly, and middle-class. And yet—but I shall come to that presently.

It will be well for me to relate all that I did that evening. I washed, and then took some valuables out of my bag and put them in my pocket. Then I glanced round the chamber, and amongst other satisfactory details noticed that the electric lights were so fixed that I could read in bed without distressing my eyes. I then went downstairs, by the lift, and into the smoke-room. I had dined on board the express, and so I ordered nothing but a cafÉ noir and a packet of Virginian cigarettes. After finishing the coffee I passed into the billiard-room, and played a hundred up with the marker. To show that my nerves were at least as steady as usual that night, I may mention that, although the marker gave me fifty and beat me, I made a break of twenty odd which won his generous approval. The game concluded, I went into the hall and asked the porter if there were any telegrams for me. There were not. I noticed that the porter—it was the night-porter, and he had just come on duty—seemed to have a peculiarly honest and attractive face. Wishing him good-night, I retired to bed. It was something after eleven. I read a chapter of Mr. Walter Crane’s “The Bases of Design,” and having turned off the light, sank into the righteous slumber of a man who has made a pretty break of 20 odd and drunk nothing but coffee. At three o’clock I awoke—not with a start, but rather gradually. I know it was exactly three o’clock because the striking of a notoriously noisy church clock in the neighbourhood was the first thing I heard. But the clock had not wakened me. I felt sure that something else, something far more sinister than a church clock, had been the origin of disturbance.

I listened. Then I heard it again—It. It was the sound of a groan in the next room.

“Someone indisposed, either in body or mind,” I thought lightly, and I tried to go to sleep again. But I could not sleep. The groans continued, and grew more poignant, more fearsome. At last I jumped out of bed and turned on the light—I felt easier when I had turned on the light.

“That man, whoever he is, is dying.” The idea, as it were, sprang at my throat. “He is dying. Only a dying man, only a man who saw Death by his side and trembled before the apparition, could groan like that.”

I put on some clothes, and went into the corridor. The corridor seemed to stretch away into illimitable distance; and far off, miles off, a solitary electric light glimmered. My end of the corridor was a haunt of gloomy shadows, except where the open door allowed the light from my bedroom to illuminate the long monotonous pattern of the carpet. I proceeded to the door next my own—the door of No. 222, and put my ear against the panel. The sound of groans was now much more distinct and more terrifying. Yes. I admit that I was frightened. I called. No answer. “What’s the matter?” I inquired. No answer. “Are you ill, or are you doing this for your own amusement?” It was with a sort of bravado that I threw this last query at the unknown occupant of the room. No answer. Then I tried to open the door, but it was fast.

“Yes,” I said to myself; “either he’s dying or he’s committed a murder and is feeling sorry for it. I must fetch the night-porter.”

Now, hotel lifts are not in the habit of working at three a.m., and so I was compelled to find my way along endless corridors and down flights of stairs apparently innumerable. Here and there an electric light sought with its yellow eye to pierce the gloom. At length I reached the hall, and I well recollect that the tiled floor struck cold into my slippered but sockless feet.

“There’s a man either dying or very ill in No. 222,” I said to the night-porter. He was reading The Evening News, and appeared to be very snug in his basket chair.

“Is that so, sir?” he replied.

“Yes,” I insisted. “I think he’s dying. Hadn’t you better do something?”

“I’ll come upstairs with you,” he answered readily, and without further parley we began the ascent. At the first floor landing the night-porter stopped and faced me. He was a man about forty-five—every hall-porter seems to be that age—and he looked like the father of a family.

“If you think he’s dying, sir, I’ll call up the manager, Mr. Thom.”

“Do,” I said.

The manager slept on the first floor, and he soon appeared—a youngish man in a terra-cotta Jaeger dressing-gown, his eyes full of sleep, yet alert and anxious to do his duty. I had seen him previously in the billiard-room. We all three continued our progress to the fourth floor. Arrived in front of No. 222 we listened intently, but we could only hear a faint occasional groan.

“He’s nearly dead,” I said. The manager called aloud, but there was no answer. Then he vainly tried to open the door. The night-porter departed, and returned with a stout pair of steel tongs. With these, and the natural ingenuity peculiar to hotel-porters, he forced open the door, and we entered No. 222.

A stout, middle-aged man lay on the bed fully dressed in black. On the floor near the bed was a silk hat. As we approached the great body seemed to flutter, and then it lay profoundly and terribly still. The manager put his hand on the man’s head, and held the glass of his watch to the man’s parted grey lips.

“He is dead,” said the manager.

“H’m!” I said.“I’m sorry you’ve been put to any inconvenience,” said the manager, “and I’m much obliged to you.”

The cold but polite tone was a request to me to re-enter my own chamber, and leave the corpse to the manager and the night-porter. I obeyed.

“What about that man?” I asked the hall-porter early the next, or rather the same, morning. I had not slept a wink since three o’clock, nor had I heard a sound in the corridor.

“What man, sir?” the porter said.

“You know,” I returned, rather angrily. “The man who died in the night—No. 222.”

“I assure you, sir,” he said, “I haven’t the least notion what you mean.”

Yet his face seemed as honest and open as ever.

I inquired at the office for the manager, and after some difficulty saw him in his private room.

“I thought I’d just see about that man,” I began.

“What man?” the manager asked, exactly as the porter had asked.

“Look here,” I said, as I was now really annoyed, “it’s all very well giving instructions to the hall-porter, and I can quite understand you want the thing kept as quiet as possible. Of course I know that hotels have a violent objection to corpses. But as I saw the corpse, and was of some assistance to you——”

“Excuse me,” said the manager. “Either you or I must be completely mad. And,” he added, “I don’t think it is myself.”

“Do you mean to say,” I remarked with frosty sarcasm, “that you didn’t enter Room 222 with me this morning at three a.m. and find a dead man there?”

“I mean to say just that,” he answered.

“Well——.” I got no further. I paid my bill and left. But before leaving, I went and carefully examined the door of No. 222. The door plainly showed marks of some iron instrument.

“Here,” I said to the porter as I departed. “Accept this half-crown from me. I admire you.”

I had a serious illness extending over three months. I was frequently delirious, and nearly every day I saw the scene in Room No. 222. In the course of my subsequent travels, I once more found myself, late one night, at the Grand Junction Terminus Hotel.

“Mr. Edge,” said the night-porter, “I’ve been looking out for you for weeks and weeks. The manager’s compliments, and he would like to see you in his room.”

Again I saw the youngish, alert manager.“Mr. Edge,” he began at once, “it is probable that I owe you an apology. At any rate, I think it right to inform you that on the night of the fifth of November, the year before last, exactly twelve months before your last visit here, a stout man died in Room No. 222, at three a.m. I forgot the circumstance when you last came to see me in this room.”

“It seems queer,” I said coldly, “that you should have forgotten such a circumstance.”

“The fact is,” he replied, “I was not the manager at that time. My predecessor died two days after the discovery of the corpse in Room 222.”

“And the night-porter—is he, too, a new man?”

“Yes,” said the manager. “The porter who, with the late manager, found the corpse in Room 222, is now in Hanwell Lunatic Asylum.”

I paused, perhaps in awe.

“Then you think,” I said, “that I was the victim of a hallucination on my previous visit here? You think I had a glimpse of the world of spirits?”

“On these matters,” said the manager, “I prefer to think nothing.”