Skeleton Key by Lenore Glen Offord

had been like that at the very beginning of the war, long before the sound became familiar. Blackout—alert—this is it.
    What had Hollister said? “The next one may be real.”
    She flicked the switch of the desk lamp and felt her way to the window. If the sash were opened, it was supposed to minimize the danger of shattering glass. But, she thought suddenly, she needn’t stay in this room; the Professor’s refuge room was the downstairs hall, and those two small windows by its door had been permanently blacked out. Mrs. Blake had said that in case of a bombing, all those present in the house could crowd into the closet under the stairs. Georgine had had a vivid picture of herself, the Professor and the African Queen, all mashed together in the dark, and had quaked with inner laughter. She wasn’t laughing now.
    She might have thought of this; but there hadn’t been a blackout for months, you forgot between times… The next one will be the real thing. “Barby,” Georgine said, her lips barely moving. “Oh, God, I can’t die while she’s so little.” Oh, come, be sensible, who’s going to die?
    The fog over the cities had stayed faintly luminous for a few minutes; now that white glow had died slowly, and it seemed that everything else had died with it as the roar of trains and traffic slackened and disappeared. Georgine had never before been in the very heart of silence, as she was now, alone in this black house.
    She felt her way along the corridor wall to the upstairs window. In the stillness she could hear, very high and far away, a faint droning sound, and found herself peering upward desperately as if her eyes could pierce roof and fog and miles of night air. Then that sound was covered by a nearer, homelier one; Roy Hollister’s front door opened, and his feet clacked briskly along the cement walk.
    Almost at once there was a noise as if of stumbling, and the warden said “Damn!” loudly and heartily. Georgine ceased to shake, and found herself silently laughing. He must have tripped over one of the uneven places in the road’s paving, where it had buckled badly in the summer heat. The footsteps were muffled now, and she guessed that he had taken to the edge of pavement for safety. The tiny blob of light from his dimmed electric torch was visible in this blackness, as it would never have been in an ordinary half-luminous night.
    There was another minute glow, somewhere across the street; Georgine, straining her eyes, could almost make out numbers in its shape. Dear me , she thought, again grinning; the Carmichael sisters didn’t turn off their street-number light after all, and won’t Hollister be furious! He hadn’t seen it yet, for the Carmichael house was below his and faced southwest; and he had started methodically uphill toward the Devlins’.
    Georgine’s conscience smote her suddenly. People didn’t do much to coöperate with the poor man. She might as well obey orders and seek the refuge room.
    She got down the stairs deliberately, one at a time, and felt her way round the walls of the entry. Wooden panels, a space with woolly materials hanging: the coat closet, left open…more paneling, then rough paper over the windows that flanked the door; wood panels…the staircase.
    She went round once more. It was no use; she couldn’t find the light switch. “Don’t sit in the dark,” the authorities had counseled, “it’s bad for morale.” They didn’t know the half of it , Georgine thought, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering. She could feel morale draining out through the soles of her feet.
    There was no use in imagining the things that might be coming at her out of the dark house. She sat down on the bottom stair, hoping violently that the blackout wouldn’t last long. What time was it? Seemed as if she’d heard the Campanile strike ten, just before the