Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  “I’ve only time for a Carnglass trip.”

  “Rabbie Burns’ country is Alloway and Ayr, ye ken, Mr. Logan. A braw poet, Rabbie Burns. ‘A mon’s a mon for a’ that’ – eh, Mr. Logan?” An unconvincing smile came suddenly over Dowie’s sodden face, and he clapped a dirty hand on Logan’s shoulder, in token of comradeship. Logan did not move or smile.

  “I suppose what Burns meant, Mr. Dowie, is that worth and genius matter more than rank – or as much, anyway. I don’t know that he had Glasgow bookies in mind.”

  “O aye,” Dowie muttered, removing his hand. He scowled uneasily, and then brightened artificially again. “O aye. I see ye’re a card, Mr. Logan. Aye, a poet o’ the first water, Rabbie Burns. But ye’ve fine writers in the States, too. Political writers. Ye’ll ken ane or twa o’ them?”

  Logan shook his head. “I don’t know a single political writer, Mr. Dowie.”

  “And ye’ll no ken Dr. Jackman?”

  “This literary conversation is very pleasant, Mr. Dowie,” Logan said. “But do you know of a ship or a launch that will take me to Carnglass?”

  Dowie sat down at the desk and pulled open a drawer. “Noo your principal, Mr. Logan – he’ll be Mr. Duncan MacAskival?”

  Over the edge of the open drawer, a cablegram form was just visible. “Then you’re the agent for forwarding the post to Carnglass, Mr. Dowie.”

  “Wha’ loon told ye that?”

  “Has Lady MacAskival received our cables?”

  “Wud I be a miracle-man, Mr. Logan? I canna send word tae Carnglass by Tellie – by TV, ye Yanks say. And wha’ wi’ the high seas, there’s no boat that wud put oot for Daldour nor Carnglass these three days syne.”

  “Then I suppose Lady MacAskival’s not expecting me?”

  “Ye can suppose wha’ ye like, Mr. Logan.”

  “When can I get passage from Glasgow to Carnglass?”

  “Na, na, mon, I’m thinkin’ there’ll be no boat for Carnglass.” Dowie rested his chin in his pudgy hand. His eyes swept over Logan with that look of low cunning Logan had seen, so often, in malingering or thieving soldiers. “But bide a wee, Mr. Logan: we’ll fetch a cup o’ tea for ye while ye’re here. Jeanie! Jeanie!” He shouted toward a back room. “Dinna fret, Mr. Logan: Jeanie’s my auld wifie. Jeanie! A cup o’ tea for a Yank gentleman!”

  Around a door-jamb peered a worn face. Logan rose. “Na, na, Mr. Logan, sit ye doon: it’s but Jeanie. Jeanie, chat wi’ the Yank gentleman while I see wha’ can be done to obleege him.” Dowie slipped into the back room at the moment Jeanie entered. Taking a chair, she sat staring dully at the grimy floor, quite silent.

  “Rather a clammy day, Mrs. Dowie.” Mrs. Dowie, who had a scarf tied round her head, said nothing at all. Dowie seemed to be telephoning from the back room; and Logan, an old hand at snapping up scraps of whispered evidence, contrived to make out a few words:

  “Aye, Jock, a Yank, but no in Yank’s clothes. Quick, noo.” The phone was hung up, and Dowie returned, that fixed smile across his face. “Jeanie! Hae ye no been entertainin’the gentleman? Fetch the tea, lass.”

  Jeanie went. “Well, now, Mr. Dowie,” Logan said, “have you found something for me?”

  “Ye wudna wish to go where they’ll no be expectin’ye, wud ye, sir? And Lady MacAskival’s ower auld for company. Tak’ the plane home, Mr. Logan. Ye’ll do no business in Carnglass.”

  “If you’ll do nothing for me, Dowie, I’ll go elsewhere. It’s getting late.”

  The look of triumphant cunning was back in Dowie’s eyes. “Aye, but the tea, Mr. Logan; bide for the tea.” Jeanie returned with a wooden tray, a teapot under a cozy, and three cups. Logan stood up.

  “I’m always in a hurry, Dowie. Thank you, Mrs. Dowie, but I haven’t time for tea.” There seemed to be voices raised outside in the wynd, now, and a heavy thud, rather as if someone had kicked the side of an automobile. “Good day to you.”

  “But first, man,” said Dowie, sidling between Logan and the street door, “we’ll shake hands a’ roun’, should auld acquaintance be forgot.” Logan briefly took Dowie’s hand, and then Jeanie’s. “And ye’ll confess, Mr. Logan, that ye came here o’ your ain free will, an’ no invitation.” Logan agreed. “Ye heard, Jeanie,” Dowie muttered. “Ye’re a witness.” In the street beyond the mouth of the wynd, a motor started, and Logan thought he heard a car drive away.

  “That may be my taxi leaving,” Logan said. He had his stick in his hand.

  “Weel, noo, Mr. American,” Dowie told him, with what possibly was intended for a convivial smile, “I’m sorry I couldna serve ye. Cheerio the noo. I’ll open the door for ye.” He did. And the second Logan stepped out, the door was slammed behind him and bolted.

  Mutto’s Wynd was shadowy. Yes, the taxi had gone; and lounging against the wall of No. 5 were four men. Logan faced them. They were very young roughs, three of them, with the greasy sideburns and the pimpled faces that went, in their sort, with a diet of fish and chips. The fourth man, a big lank fellow, older, wore a wide leather belt round his waist, and he had a very nasty smirk. By way of obstacle, the lank man thrust out a long leg.

  “Hello, Yank,” the lank man said. The other three came slowly round Logan.

  “Good evening, friend,” Logan answered. No one else was in the wynd.

  “This is the auld Gallowgate, Yank,” the lank man went on. “This was where they hangit the gallows-craws. We’re gallows-craws, Yank.” He gave a short, harsh whiskey-laugh, and the three young roughs cackled in echo. “Ye’ll stand us a dram at the Dun Stirk, Yank?”

  “I’m sorry, friend, but I’m in a hurry.” It was quiet and dark in Mutto’s Wynd.

  The lank man smirked. “Damn ye, Yank, ye’ll no be in sic a hurry noo!” He flung himself toward Logan, one foot going out to trip him.

  Logan was ready. He thrust the point of the thorn stick into the lank man’s belly, and the lank man screamed and stumbled back. But one of the greasy youngsters had his arm round Logan’s throat, from behind. Taking the boy’s fingers, Logan bent them backward: the rough yelled and let go. And now they were on him, all four.

  Someone had a long razor. Logan caught the wrist that held it, striking with the point of his stick at the face behind; the razor dropped to the cobblestones, but someone else got Logan’s legs out from under him. He fell heavily on the wet stones, and took a kick in the ribs. Another razor flashed. Someone had a hand inside Logan’s coat. The mackintosh he wore hampered him. There came a kick at his head, though a glancing blow. He had hold at last of someone’s thighs, and was struggling upward. A kick in the back; and a razor slashed one sleeve of the mackintosh. All that saved him for the second, Logan knew, was that they were so close about him as to get in one another’s way.

  This was no simple robbery: they meant to slash or cripple him, or something worse. Another fierce kick in his ribs. The man he had got by the thighs slipped and fell upon him. And as Logan fought clear, he heard steel-plated heels running over the cobbles. Someone was helping him up: a tall policeman. Another policeman was chasing four dim figures down the wynd.

  The policeman who had lifted Logan had a bruise over one eye. “That was Jock Anderson’s lads, Donald,” he panted to the other policeman, returned from the unsuccessful chase. “Jock gie me the bash over the eye.” Logan was getting his breath back. “If ye’ll prefer charges, sir,” the policeman said to him, “we’ll have warrants out for these chaps; we know them.”

  “There’s small harm done, constable, and I’m leaving Glasgow tomorrow.”

  “Did they not take your money, sir?”

  Logan felt inside his coat and discovered no billfold. “Yes, but I hadn’t much with me.”

  If the gentleman would come to the station and swear to a complaint, the second constable told him, they might not have to trouble him further. “Your cabbie found us, sir; they forced him awa’.” Logan left a five-pound note with the policeman for the driver. “Were ye in No. 5 yonder, sir?”

  Though
the constable named Donald knocked hard at the door of No. 5, no one answered, and the building showed no light. “By this time,” Donald said, “Jim Dowie’s flitted, and his wife Jeanie with him. And I dinna think we could charge them. But we’re keepin’ watch on Dowie, sir: a slippery one.”

  Then, in the Gallowgate, they found him another taxi to take him back to the hotel. And in India Street, Logan washed the grime of Mutto’s Wynd from himself. Stiff and bruised: but no ribs broken, and the razor had slashed only the mackintosh. There still was time to go down to dinner. Afterward, Logan had promised, he would go round to the station and swear to a statement.

  In his hot tub, Logan tried to make sense of what had happened. The policemen took it for a simple case of pocket-picking, perhaps abetted by Jim Dowie, Commission Agent. But Logan thought that Dowie had meant to keep him out of Carnglass – possibly. Who was this Jackman that Dowie had mentioned? Lady MacAskival’s private physician, or merely some crony or invention of Dowie’s? And what interest had Dowie, or anyone else, in keeping him out of Carnglass? And why should Thomas Lagg the factor have a friend, and mail-forwarder, like J. Dowie? Logan felt full of fight. He would take the morning train to Oban, and there, no matter what the price, he’d find passage to Carnglass.

  On going down to dinner, Logan stopped at the reception-desk to see if there might be a message from Carnglass. There was none. Presumably Dowie really had Duncan MacAskival’s cables in his desk. But also it was likely that Dowie, during this weather, had no way of getting word to Carnglass. If so, Logan would be quite unexpected when he landed. That might be just as well, supposing that Lagg had some connection with the queer business in Mutto’s Wynd.

  As he turned away from the reception-counter, Logan felt himself being watched. Or were his nerves on edge? He glanced to the right, and a man’s eyes met his, but dropped away hastily. It was like looking into the eyes of a bird: little black eyes, darting and quick to flee. The man, he thought, had been looking at the top leaf of the open hotel register. As Logan went into the dining room, he looked back: the man was going out into the street. But he had a good view of him.

  Birdlike? The man’s body was anything but birdlike, unless one thought of a stork. Tall, with shoulders thrown back; a heavy, rather clumsy torso, protruding in front; but the legs extremely thin. The man wore a bowler and a good worsted town-suit, dark gray; he was getting into a raincoat as he passed out of Logan’s sight into India Street. He carried a long malacca stick. Even in these brief glimpses, Logan had the impression that this fellow meant to be taken for a country gentleman or a retired officer. Yet somehow the effect did not quite come off. Logan told himself not to be edgy: it wouldn’t do to suspect every hotelguest of dark designs. Perhaps the man had only been glancing at a raw spot on Logan’s cheek, where Jock Anderson’s boot had scraped.

  Yet after dinner, and just before he took a cab to the police station, the receptionist with the taffy hair spoke to Logan. “Did the gentleman find you, sir?”

  “What gentleman?”

  “He didn’t leave his name, sir; he only asked after you – if you were staying in the hotel – and waited a moment by the counter. I thought he would have seen you when you went into dinner. A military gentleman, perhaps.”

  Yes, that would have been the man with the bird’s eyes: a military, or pseudo-military, gentleman. Logan made up his mind to remember that gentleman.

  Of that gentleman, and of his business in Carnglass, however, Logan said nothing to the Glasgow police, who took his deposition and promised action. Already they had been looking for Jock and his lads, but with no luck. It was odd, the constable named Donald said: to get out of town, or to find some snug hidie-hole, Jock and his gang would have required more money than they took from the gentleman. Yet somehow they had gone to earth, and so had Dowie.

  Logan told the sergeant that he was touring Scotland, and would be in Oban a few days, at the Station Hotel. “Never place money with lads like Jim Dowie,” they told him.

  An hour later, in bed at Todd’s Hotel, and tired though he was, Logan took up “A Summary History of Carnglass and Daldour.” Balmullo, the old minister, might have been a bigot; yet he had a keen eye and ear. There was a page of description of the New House of Fear, built down by the harbor by Donald MacAskival – one of the extravagances that had ruined him – in 1777.

  “It had been the MacAskivals’ design,” Balmullo wrote, “to have demolished in toto the Old House. But the chieftain’s means did not permit of this undertaking. Accordingly, – and to the chagrin of every connoisseur of the arts who sets foot upon the mole of Askival harbour, – the rude Gothic construction has been permitted to loom intact upon its ruder eminence, denuded of its plenishing save for the gigantic carven chimney pieces. There remains also, above the principal entrance to the Old House, a tremendous escutcheon, its bearings in some part defaced, but yet displaying the graceless figure of a Wild Man, armed with a dirk, which Wild Man the vulgar name Askival, the reputed founder of the fortress; and beside the Wild Man a female figure in a state of undress, whom, with still less authority, the folk of the island call Marin or Merin. Below these sculptures, in the letters of a later period, is inscribed the legend, ‘They have said and they will saye. Let them be saying.’

  “Of baseless rumor and frantic conjecture, the island of Carnglass has no stint. In contempt, I must record that the natives of this island, blind to the perfections of the New House, continue to allege that Donald MacAskival built afresh not out of an elevated taste, but rather because, in the Old House, he had dwelt in dread of the wraiths of his fathers, said to have waxed wroth with their descendant for his prudent decision to expel from Carnglass the superfluous population. A gaunt and bearded spectre, to which is given the appellation of Old Askival, is reputed to stalk the empty corridors and chambers, in particular the subterranean portions of the oldest tower. An obscure tradition asseverates that a hidden passage leads from these cellars to a recess, and thence to the outer world. Yet the Old House having been builded upon the living rock, as has been observed elsewhere in these pages, this supposition can have no more substance than the Kingdom of the Fairies.”

  Here Logan turned out the light. For all his aches and pains, he never had slept sounder in his life.

  On his second Scottish morning, Hugh Logan took the train for Oban. The wind had gone down somewhat, and the rain was over, though grim gray clouds still lay to the west. Through Larbert and Stirling, past the Castle high on, its rock, the train puffed up to Callender. Logan sat in a compartment where two old ladies dozed over their knitting. Half the time he looked at the hills and villages, and half the time he read in Balmullo’s “Summary History.” And so the train swept into the West Highlands.

  As they approached Loch Awe, someone paused outside the glass door of Logan’s compartment. Looking up, Logan saw the man clear: the man in the bowler, the “military gentleman” with the little black birdeyes. That military gentleman was observing him; but the furtive look moved on to the two somnolent old ladies opposite. For a moment, Logan thought the man was about to pull back the door and enter. Yet the face turned away, and the military gentleman was gone from the corridor. Logan had enjoyed a thorough look at his face: the swollen long nose; the red and purple veins that bulged against the coarse skin; and those tiny, frightened, frightening black eyes, sunk into the skull. About fifty years old, Logan estimated, though seeming older. And a cashiered British officer, some intuition suggested.

  Cashiered, yes. Logan made almost a hobby of collecting clippings from newspapers about curious cases of criminal law, strange points of evidence, failures to convict despite strong testimony. It was power of memory, as much as anything else, that had brought Logan success at the bar while he still was young. Now he tried to dredge up from memory that repugnant face of the military gentleman. Cashiered, cashiered. Hadn’t he read of a captain or major cashiered in India, and subsequently tried by a criminal court for some separate, though related, of
fense – and got off by a very clever barrister? A barrister with somewhat unsavory politics connections? The case had been nasty, remarkably nasty – and the officer’s acts nastier still. Hadn’t some London friend, years ago, sent Logan the penny-press clippings about the case, with a picture or two of the accused? What had the fellow’s name been? Something short? Gale, or Hare? No, even Logan’s trained memory could not recall the details. Yet the face of the military gentleman at the hotel and in the corridor, Logan felt, was curiously like the nasty face he half-recollected from the smudgy newspaper photograph. Had there been espionage hinted at the military hearings? The man had been a bad lot in many ways. But Logan couldn’t feel quite sure he had not fancied the resemblance.

  By Ben Cruachan, through the Pass of Brander; across the river at Bridge of Awe; then Connel Ferry. The mountains loomed nobly as the train approached the coast. The military gentleman did not return. A few minutes more, and the train swung into the resort and fishing-port of Oban, on the Firth of Lorn. Now the Western Isles were in plain sight – Kerrera, at least, right opposite Oban. Logan could see its treeless bulk from the window of his hotel. Of the military gentleman, no trace. Logan looked for him in the railway station, but he must have got off hurriedly from a forward coach and have gone into the town. Not that Logan much desired to see the military gentleman again.

  Chapter 3

  “YOU MIGHT INQUIRE at the North Pier, Mr. Logan,” said the Reverend Andrew Crawford, “but I do not believe any fisherman will undertake to set you ashore in Carnglass. All the boats will be gone from the harbor until sunset: the storm kept them in port for three days, and they won’t wish to waste another day in carrying a passenger to Carnglass.”

  The Reverend Andrew Crawford, minister of St. Ninian’s Church, was a knowledgeable man. The people at the Station Hotel had sent Logan to him, not knowing themselves how he might get to Carnglass. Mr. Crawford had set foot in most of the Outer Isles that still were inhabited. Now he and Logan stood at the door of the manse, looking down the hill to Oban town and the piers, with the dim gray Hebrides far beyond the blue sea.