Skeleton Key Read Online Free Page B

“He’s quite mad on the subject of science, but harmless every other way. We’ve known him for years, long before he resigned from the Faculty.” From such a respectable source, this should be completely reassuring; but the words mad professor carried inescapable overtones: that laboratory in the basement, walled in glass brick, probably full of evil vapors and steaming flasks, and long tubes glimmering with unearthly lights… A death ray, indeed. The old gentleman’s jokes were ponderous, he looked odd when he smiled, as if it didn’t suit his face… And he’d wanted someone who knew nothing about science, so she was actually sitting here in a hot little south room on the top floor, with one window that looked off into space across the deep canyon, picking away letter by letter, figure by figure, at a seemingly endless stack of work.
    Culture medium Penicillium (spp.) , she wrote, adsorbed by norite. Elute with chloroform, distil, take up in ethyl alcohol and reppt .
    Oh, DEAR , Georgine thought; I can’t do this… Yes, I can. I’ve got to .
    Ten or twelve days of it…the bill, Barby’s coat…something to take up the slack of her loneliness while Barby was away. The stubborn insistence that it still came under the head of mental adventure…and the pay to be counted not in nickels and dimes, but in dollars; a hundred dollars to come… At five minutes after five it came, in a lump. The Professor tapped on the door, whisked in and inspected the three pages she had laboriously finished, nodded and got out a check book.
    â€œNot all at once?” Georgine said, frowning at the check.
    â€œAll at once. Postdated, you will observe,” said Mr. Paev.
    She raised grave blue eyes to his. “You’re convinced that I’m honest, or will be three days from now?” The long bald head nodded. “And you want to make sure I’ll keep coming back until the job’s finished?”
    â€œI believe I’ve read you correctly, Mrs. Wyeth,” said the Professor, his gaze doing its best to penetrate her skull.
    â€œI think it’s goofy,” said Georgine, reaching for the typewriter cover, “but I’m game.” The last words fell on empty air. The Professor was already halfway downstairs.
    She had to stop work, but she couldn’t go home yet. At four o’clock the African Queen had brought up a message; the block air-raid warden was to hold a meeting for all the residents of Grettry Road, even the temporary ones, at five-fifteen, at his home. Would Mrs. Wyeth be good enough to join them?
    Mrs. Wyeth supposed she would. After the illogical sensations and unexpected developments of the last two hours, she felt that she could be neither surprised, irritated nor alarmed.
    Having got her hands thoroughly inked in the struggle with an unfamiliar typewriter, she now went in search of a bathroom, without bothering Mrs. Blake for directions. There was one on the southwest corner of the house. It was obviously the Professor’s own, but he could scarcely object to her drying her hands on one of his paper towels.
    How like a lone man immersed in science to build such a house; all the furniture drab, hideous and far from inexpensive, most of the rooms an inconvenient shape, and the best view in the place from an upstairs bathroom! She raised the window and leaned her arms on the sill. You could see all of Oakland, shimmering under the heat-haze of late afternoon; you could see the lion-colored flanks of the bare hills to the south, and the plantations of trees nearer to Grettry Road, and the canyon that fell sheer from the fence at the end, and grew shallower as it swept around to the north past the back yards of the Road, dark with manzanita bushes, blue-green with bay and young gum trees.
    And just below the window, you could see a thicket of flowering shrubs, and a spot right up against the house wall where, it seemed, the