Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  “It’s up yon hethery mountain,

  And down yon scroggy glen,

  We daur na gang a milking,

  For Charlie and his men.”

  To Logan, the girl’s relative composure was as strange as the dreadful yelling outside, but he played loyally on until “Charlie and his men” died away. Then Mary swept from the piano to the window, and Logan was right behind her. The laughter, if laughter it was, had ceased; and nothing at all was to be seen through the mist. But in a moment, a shot was fired; and then three more shots, in quick succession, seemingly not far outside the Old House. Jackman and Royall ran for the stairs, and Mary and Logan after them.

  Through that great chill hodgepodge old house, past Lady MacAskival’s room, through an interior courtyard that had been roofed over, into the enormous Victorian block, they ran, stumbling through passages and down flights of stairs, until at last the four of them burst into a big Victorian entrance-hall. About the closed door were clustered Tompkins and Ferd and Anderson and a fourth man whom Logan took to be Niven. They all had rifles at the ready, but no one had ventured to open the door. Jackman dashed among them and flung back the bolts: “See what it is, you fools.” None of the four seemed eager to investigate, but they followed Jackman and Royall a little way into the dark, and Mary MacAskival and Logan tagged after. A massive knob of the great rock on which the Old House stood jutted up close by the door, and Logan urged the girl toward it.

  “If anyone fires from out there,” he whispered to her, “we’ll be so many sitting ducks.”

  “No one will fire at us,” the girl said; but, obediently, she crouched behind the rock, peering round in the direction the men were looking.

  There came one more screech of hysterical laughter, and then a figure came into view, reeling, stumbling, slipping, but still holding a rifle. Only a few yards from the Old House, the man swung round to face the darkness from which he had emerged, brought his gun to his shoulder, and fired three more shots, wildly, toward nothing visible. There was as much chance of his hitting the moon, with the aim he took, as of winging any living thing in Carnglass. Then the man dropped his rifle altogether and came lurching on toward the entrance of the Old House, falling at last in a heap right at Jackman’s feet, giggling, moaning, choking.

  “Rab!” cried Jackman. “What the devil, Rab?” It was a very young man, thick-set and heavy-featured, with a great shock of hair. He was covered with little cuts, and his clothes were in rags. To judge by his gasping and gulping, he had run for miles. And he was quite out of his head. He squirmed at Jackman’s feet, and mumbled obscenities, and then burst once more into his screaming and terrified laugh.

  “Something has run him like a hare,” Royall said. “The wits are gone out of the man.” The four servants, hard cases though they looked, bunched together like so many rabbits. Stooping, Jackman took Rab by the shoulders and shook him mercilessly.

  “Rab!” Jackman hissed. “Rab! Speak, man, or I’ll give you worse than you’ve had already.” But Rab only sobbed for breath. “Pick up his rifle, Mr. Royall,” Jackman said, prodding Rab with his foot. Logan suspected that he gave the order to Royall for fear that none of the servants would obey it. Stooping, Royall slipped into the heather, groped for the gun, found it, and hurried back, glancing over his lean shoulder.

  “Anderson and Ferd, lift this lump,” Jackman called out, “and drag him inside.” The whole party retreated through the wide doorway into the Victorian courtyard, and then back into the formal entrance-hall, barring the gates behind them; Anderson was left as sentry inside the great door. “Now you, Niven and Ferd, hold up this thing before me.” They supported the muttering Rab between them. Jackman slapped Rab’s bleeding face with his open palm, terribly hard. The young man ceased to moan; his eyes rolled. “Rab,” said Jackman, slowly and distinctly, “where the devil is Carruthers?”

  “O, it took him, it took him!” cried Rab, and lapsed into incoherence.

  “I’ll have the heart out of you, Rab, if you don’t speak up. What took Carruthers?” Jackman slapped him again.

  Rab’s dull eyes widened. “It took Carruthers! Lagg took him, auld, wet Lagg! Lagg it was!” With that, Rab sank into a kind of fit, and Ferd and Niven pushed him down upon the floor.

  Dr. Jackman stood rigid. “No,” he said, perhaps to Royall, perhaps to himself. “No. Not Lagg.” Then he looked round, his face stiff and white, upon the little ring of men, and upon Logan and Mary MacAskival beyond them. “Get this creature to bed,” he said to Niven and Ferd. “Tie him in, if you must. Ignore his ravings. The fellow’s lost his nerve; Donley must have been after him. Royall, post someone atop the tower, and tell him to fire at anything that moves. Miss MacAskival, this is no scene for you. See if your aunt has been disturbed, and then get to your room. Logan, Tompkins will show you up. Stay in your rooms until I have you called for breakfast.” Then Jackman went out into the courtyard again, calling to Anderson.

  Tompkins, carrying a petrol lantern, led the girl and Logan through the passages toward the Renaissance block. Outside Lady MacAskival’s room, Mary paused. “I’d best look in here, Hugh,” she said, “so I tell you good-night now.” Tomp-kins moved discreetly a few feet further down the passage, but Logan only pressed the girl’s hand. She contrived to smile at him. “Do you recollect that last stanza I sang?” she asked:

  “‘It’s up yon hethery mountain,

  And down yon scroggy glen,

  We daur na gang a milking,

  For Charlie and his men.’

  Take care this night, Hugh.” Then she was gone into the bedroom hung with Spanish leather.

  Tompkins led him to a decent smallish chamber on the floor above Lady MacAskival’s room, wished Logan a civil goodnight, and slid away. There was no key in the lock upon the door, and no bolt. To shove furniture against the door, Logan felt, might seem unduly suspicious to Dr. Jackman; but he did it, all the same, jamming a chair-back under the doorknob, and reinforcing it by a small chest. He looked out his two windows; they were high and small, and almost impossible for anyone to reach even with very long ladders, for the rock fell sheer away below this portion of the Old House. The bed, if rather damp, was tolerable. He slid his pistol Meg under the pillow, and was dozing off in short order, with only the wind at the panes to break the stillness, and the distant growl of the combers. Logan was too tired to think of Rab, or Lagg, or Jackman, or Royall, or even of the green-eyed girl – to whom, in a fit of sympathy at the dinner-table, he had promised that she need fear neither ghost nor bogle while he was near. It was an unsecured pledge of questionable validity to an insecure girl of questionable antecedents.

  Chapter 9

  MUCH LATER – it must have been past three in the morning – Logan was waked from his troubled sleep by a curious sound. His nerves on edge, he sat up in bed, scarcely knowing where he was, and befuddled by finding himself tangled in an old-fangled nightshirt, until he remembered that Tompkins had laid out for him this antique garment. The only source of light in the room was the extinguished candle, of course; and Logan reached for the candlestick, thought better of it, and listened.

  The noise was the sound of slow sliding. Blinking, he looked toward the door. So far as he could see anything at all, it seemed to him that the door was very slightly ajar. And then he knew the source of the sliding-sound: someone must have dislodged slightly the chair he had used as barrier, must have got a hand round the edge of the door, and must be quietly shoving chair and reinforcing chest inward, so that whoever was outside might squeeze within.

  Logan snatched his pistol from under the pillow. It wouldn’t do to use the gun except in the last extremity, though. He slid silently out of bed to the floor, and rolled under the bedstead. If someone meant to cut his throat, there in the blackness, whoever it was would stab an empty bed.

  That sliding-noise had ceased now; what had wanted to enter presumably had glided in. To Logan, taut on the floor under the bed, came the thought of Old Askival, who was s
upposed to walk the narrow passages of the Old House, and had driven the wastrel Donald to the New House. Whatever had entered surely made no noise at all: a thrill ran through Logan’s body. Holding his breath and straining his sight, after what seemed like a quarter of an hour – really some five seconds, probably – he made out the dimmest of dim shapes bending over the bed, its legs right before Logan’s nose. Gripping the pistol in his left hand, Logan seized an ankle of the intruder and gave a mighty tug.

  A stifled cry, and the thing was on the floor beside him, and Logan flung himself upon it in a tangle of arms and legs, thrusting the pistol against the thing’s head. The shape made very little resistance. Shape? The body under Logan was not a man’s shape. And most certainly it was not Lady MacAskival or old Agnes. “You’ve hurt my head,” the shape murmured, resentful and panting. In the faintest of whispers – “Really! Are men always so violent when they’re waked in the middle of the night?”

  It had been a near thing; that little pistol, thrust against the girl’s temple, might have gone off. “Oh!” said Logan, shocked and embarrassed. “Did I cut you?” He ran his hand through the mass of her hair, searching for a wound.

  “I think not,” the girl said, brushing aside his hand. “You were good enough merely to stun me. Now do you mind sitting somewhere else than on me? I’m rather out of breath. Sit on the bed. How queer you look in that nightgown! It must have been one of Sir Alastair’s, who was twice your size; I wonder it hangs together still. And keep your voice low, for Dr. Jackman walks the passages at all hours, like a wraith, and he would put an end to Hugh Logan if he found me with you. I’m ever so sorry to put you in danger – or more danger – and to wake you from a sound sleep, and to invade your bedroom; but you and I must talk tonight. There, that’s much better! You do look silly, perched in that old nightgown on that old bed, but it can’t be helped. Oh, you have a little gun? That’s clever of you. I wish I had one of my own. I have keys – although Dr. Jackman doesn’t know it – to nearly every room in the house except the gunroom, and the cellars where they keep those explosives: Dr. Jackman put new locks on those. Do you mind if I sit on the other end of the bed? The floor’s rather hard. Thank you: now we can make matters clear.”

  The minx – Logan’s eyes, adjusted to the dark, could make her out vaguely – was fully dressed, except that she was barefoot, as usual. Either she was an idiot, which he doubted, or else she was the bravest woman he ever had come upon. “Miss MacAskival,” he said, “what is outside this house? What drove Rab out of his mind? It may be, I suppose, that Donley was forced back to land, after he took my boat; but he was a tired man when I saw him last, and I can’t imagine him knocking Carruthers on the head and chasing Rab right up to the door.”

  “Now that you have knocked me on the head,” said Mary MacAskival, “and have sat on me, you may as well commence calling me Mary, Hugh Logan. We’ve not time, just now, to talk of what may be outside; for I must tell you of what’s within. You have no faith in me, have you? You’ve been talking with Dr. Jackman. What did he tell you of me?”

  He had no faith in anyone in the Old House, Logan thought; indeed, he had begun to doubt his own sanity. But he would be blunt with this girl, and see if she could make a case for herself. “He told me, Mary MacAskival,” Logan said, “that you were eccentric.”

  There in the dark, the girl laughed softly; she was a cool one. “Why, that’s true enough, Hugh Logan: all the Mac-Askivals have their oddities. I fancy that old Mr. Duncan MacAskival, who sent you to me, has his peculiarities.”

  “That he has. But he’s no girl of fifteen.”

  “Fifteen?” She sounded startled. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “You are fifteen, aren’t you?”

  “Fifteen!” She stifled her merriment. “I’m past twenty, Hugh Logan, though it’s little I am. Whatever possessed Dr. Jackman to tell you such a thing?” Her voice rang true.

  “And he said you were too fond of men.”

  “Fond of men? I’m not fond of Dr. Jackman, I can tell you. I never see any men to be fond of, here in Carnglass. Dr. Jackman’s crew are half afraid of me – particularly Niven the tinker, who knows I am a witch – and I’m thoroughly afraid of them, although I never let them guess it. With whom am I supposed to be infatuated?” A tone of suppressed anger had come into her voice.

  “When you were thirteen, Jackman said, you – why, you loved a gardener here in Carnglass.”

  At first Logan thought she had begun to sob; but then he realized she was choking in an endeavor to keep from breaking into imprudent shrieks of laughter. “Malcolm Mor MacAskival,” she managed, at last. “Malcolm Mor! Of course I loved him. I do still. He carried messages for me and contrived to get them posted in Loch Boisdale, and so they discharged him. And he worships the ground I tread, because I am The MacAskival. He has a great white beard, and is upward of seventy. Are you jealous of him?”

  It was impossible not to believe her: Jackman was plausible, but Mary MacAskival was all candor. “What a consummate liar Jackman is!” Logan played with Donley’s little gun.

  “To be sure he is; didn’t I tell you so, Hugh? He lives by lies. But into nearly every lie he works a tiny grain of truth, for the sake of appearances. Well, then: what other mischief have I been working, according to your friend Dr. Jackman?”

  “He implied, Mary MacAskival, that you suffer from delusions of grandeur. He said you must have told me – by ‘me’ he means our fictitious bank-clerk, of course – that you were to inherit Carnglass and all the rest from your aunt, while in truth you are a pauper.”

  “Would it matter to you if I were a pauper?” She was serious now; he thought her firm chin went up. “Not in the least.”

  “Well, then, as a matter of fact, Hugh Logan, I have more money than has Lady MacAskival. She never has loved me, but she has no one else who signifies; and so, more than five years ago, she gifted Carnglass to me, and more than half her securities. She told me that would baffle the Exchequer; for in this country, you know, one can escape death-duties by giving away one’s property, so long as one does it five years before one’s death. Five years ago my aunt still had her wits about her – enough to make a lawful will, at any rate; and she put Carnglass and the rest into trust for me; and six months from now, when I am twenty-one, I can do what I like with my own.”

  This revelation reminded Logan of his proper business in Carnglass, which the troubles of the past few days had almost driven out of his head. “Then Lady MacAskival couldn’t sell Carnglass to my principal even if she chose? It’s yours? And will you sell?”

  “Hugh Logan! Here we sit whispering, with a gang of murderers and conspirators in the house, and The Mac-Askival honoring you with a call at four in the morning in your bedchamber, and you talk of title-deeds! You are a man of law. But no, I wouldn’t sell: Carnglass is my world. Yet Duncan MacAskival being an old man, and a kinsman, and having his heart set on the matter, I might arrange for him a life-tenure of the Old House. And I, and any husband I might choose to have, could live at the New House. When I wrote Duncan MacAskival that last letter – the note that brought you here, Hugh – I made up my mind that I would not bring him here upon a wild-goose chase altogether. If a lease of the Old House will satisfy him, he shall have it. But Dr. Jackman will be a nasty tenant for us to evict, Hugh Logan.”

  And then, in part volunteering the story and in part prompted by Logan’s questions, the girl gave him her account of Dr. Edmund Jackman. Three years before, when Mary still had been at school, old Lady MacAskival had gone to London for a month, in winter. For half a century, Lady MacAskival had been very odd; and now whatever rationality remained to her was giving way. On her infrequent London visits, she had tended more and more to surround herself with peculiar company: Indian pseudomystics, and fortune-tellers with pretensions to decent manners, and mediums of various sorts. Lady MacAskival detested anything resembling orthodox religion, but rejoiced in any oddity which flirted with faces that glowered up
from the abyss; and she believed, or half believed. She was ignorant, superstitious, vain, and rich – and she had a bad conscience. Moreover, she was extremely lonely. To her, in time, was presented a Dr. Edmund Jackman, “a scholar, my dear, and a progressive politician, and a diplomat, and a man who knows all about the occult. He has just come back from a trip to Roumania.” Dr. Edmund Jackman spent a great deal of time in Lady MacAskival’s London drawing-room, that winter three years gone. In the spring, he was invited to Carnglass, and came for a visit of two months. And then there was another visit, lengthier; and another.

  By the end of the year of lengthy visits, Edmund Jackman was wholly master of Lady MacAskival’s mind, or what remained of it; and master, too, of her money, and of Carnglass. Dr. Jackman was useful in many ways. He kept her avaricious London kinsfolk from troubling her. He took her affairs out of the hands of her ineffectual solicitors, and gave them his personal attention. Gradually he dismissed her feckless Island servants, even the farmhands, and reduced household costs, and brought in some hard-featured, but doubtless dependable, men from London and Glasgow, until only old Agnes remained of the former staff. He spent much of her income, too, on “schemes for political education.”

  This Mary MacAskival had learnt from the mumbling lips of her old aunt, in that darkened room hung with Spanish leather, listening to the ramblings of that stricken brain, convinced sometimes that she was near to madness herself. This she whispered to Hugh Logan, curled at the other end of the bed. And she had learnt other things from Dr. Jackman himself, and from Royall, and from scraps of servants’ conversation overheard in the passages.

  Her solitary years with Lady MacAskival had given the girl an insight into the old woman’s mind and soul, Logan perceived, so complete that she could speak almost for, rather than of, her dying aunt. She understood, and nearly shared, the terrors of that room hung with Spanish leather. And she knew what talents gave Jackman his power over the old woman.