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The Woman in Black Chapter 9 Summary

In the Nursery

  • Arthur gets a phone call from Mr. Bentley, who okays the plan to stay longer at Eel Marsh House.
  • With Spider by his side, he sets off to Eel Marsh House, where he busies himself with looking through all the papers.
  • Then he goes out and looks at the graves, because he's some sort of masochistic dummy, apparently.
  • After a long, hard day of work, he nods off to a restful night's sleep.
  • Not.
  • Instead, he wakes in the middle of the night to see Spider standing at the bedroom door and growling.
  • Uh-oh. This is about the last thing you want to see when you're alone in a big scary house.
  • He follows Spider down the hallway to the locked room, and then hears a sound behind him.
  • But when he rushes back to his room, it's empty and Spider has calmed down.
  • The next morning, he goes back to town and grabs a bunch of food before bicycling back. He also has a letter from Stella.
  • Back to Eel Marsh House it is, and back to more organizing.
  • Hope there's a Container Store somewhere nearby...
  • As he's sorting, he finds a packet of letters to Alice Drablow from someone named Jennet. Hm. It seems she's a relative of Mrs.Drablow who had a child out of wedlock and gave him up to the Drablows to raise.
  • Arthur starts to get a real bad feeling about this whole thing.
  • Apparently Spider does too, because he starts to growl again. They run outside, where Arthur again hears the horrifying sound of a pony and trap getting stuck and a child drowning.
  • But this time, he realizes that the sound isn't real. It's a ghost sound.
  • We're not sure if this is better or worse ...
  • They scamper back inside. Spider growls and runs off, leading Arthur up the stairs and to the locked room.
  • The formerly locked room.
  • Now, the door is wide open.
  • He realizes that the sound he was hearing was the rocking chair. Because the chair is rocking by itself, but there's no one else in the room.
  • Arthur looks at the toys and contents of the room for a while, trying to figure out a rational explanation—but there isn't one.
  • Giving up, he returns to his room and goes to sleep.
  • Yeah, that was the part we couldn't believe either.