Both boys were whispering now, and Julian was wishing that they had chosen a room with a door that would close and preferably lock. This door had been wedged and warped ajar by time and weather. Nothing would ever close it now. An abandoned house takes the wind the way a ship takes heavy seas. It creaks throughout, seems to stretch and groan, then settle for a bit, then stretch and groan again. It does other things, too, or at least this one did: it had a constantly varying repertory of creaks, tap-taps, and sounds like the most hesitant of footsteps. When Julian had thought about this adventure, he had imagined that the scary thing would be the deadly silence of Judge Chater's midnight house. But now it was the sounds--all these different sounds--that were scaring him, and in his heart of hearts he was beginning to wish that he had never insisted on this idiotic undertaking: this "test!" The only good thing about it, at the moment, was that he felt too worried to be thirsty. Evidently Tom shared his attitude about the venture. "I don't know," he said. "I don't see what good it's going to do our characters just to sit here in a thunderstorm in a beat-up old house, feeling scared. I think it's going to be _bad_ for our characters. It is for mine." "Well, why don't you go on home, then? Go ahead." "And leave you here alone? You know I wouldn't. And anyhow, I'd probably get struck by lightning on my bike." As if its name had been a cue, a tongue of lightning flickered, bright and close. It lighted the room so that for a split second each boy saw the worried solemn look on the face of the other. Then it was dark again, and approaching thunder slammed in the sky. The broken shutter banged frantically; the old house strained and shook as if it were trying to tear itself loose from its foundations; and after a while the rain began all at once so that it fell on the roof like a solid thing. The storm went on and on; they could not guess how long, but they knew when it had reached its pitch. The lightning, blue and blinding, winked and winked and hardly stopped winking; it seemed to lick the house. And the thunder hardly stopped thundering; sometimes it rolled and grumbled, and sometimes it burst the air with a bang; but it, like the lightning, seemed to have singled out this house for its prey. "Hey, Jule! Listen!" shouted Tom. He had to shout above the uproar. "Anyone could be coming into this house, any_thing_ could be, and we'd never even hear it!" But he was wrong. In one of those instants of lull, when the rain left to itself sounds peaceful and industrious, they heard something else--another sound--and it was in the house with them, yes, in this very house: hard, brisk footsteps, then an old voice calling.... "Uncle Pin?" breathed Tom, moving closer to Julian. "Oh no, it's not him," whispered Julian, icy with the thought of Chinese ghosts. "Listen--listen! Something is coming up the stairs!"