Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  This much, Logan recalled. And he could see that conceivably the pose of being one of Vlanarov’s people, at watch upon Jackman’s schemes, might save his neck. But the great difficulty was that he knew far too little of Party intrigues to play this role to the full. For that matter, he was not precisely sure that Vlanarov still was alive: Royall might be setting a trap for him.

  “Yes,” Royall was saying, “I fancy that he’s a Vlanarovite, sent over by Bruhl from Brussels, to report on our work. Only one of that sort could have made away with Donley so efficiently.”

  Jackman, now tense and erect in his chair, nodded. “Logan,” he said, “if you come from Bruhl or Vlanarov, with instructions for us or perhaps for a survey – why, tell me now. After all, you can’t expect to remain anonymous much longer, because tomorrow or next day I should receive word from Glasgow, and perhaps from Paris.”

  “No, Jackman, I don’t think you will.” Logan had resolved to sound as much like a Vlanarovite as possible, without being expected to furnish proof positive. “You’ve contrived to get your boats burnt for you by a stupid old Irishman. You’ve had part of your wireless stolen” – Jackman started at this – “and you’ve no way of sending word to shore. And you saddled yourself with the clumsiest of agents that ever I set eyes upon. Gare, that drunken incompetent; Dowie, who’s fit only for filching sixpences from slum boys; Jock Anderson, all swagger and no nerve. We gobbled the lot of them.” Logan opened his right hand wide and closed it hard, as if crushing something within. “They’re awa’ doon the water, Jackman. An old hand like you! One would think you had turned to drink. But you’ve turned to old wives’ tales, instead.”

  Jackman bit his lip. “Do you mean – do you mean they been taken?”

  “Liquidated is our word, Dr. Jackman. They were, after all, depreciated assets. And were I you, Jackman, I’d look sharp. What have you accomplished here in Carnglass? The rags and tags of information you’ve collected in foraging round the islands are next to worthless. We have better ways of mapping those missile sites. And playing with gelignite, like a boy with firecrackers! You’d never get the stuff past the guards at the installations, if you seriously tried: these hangdog fellows you’ve collected here in Carnglass haven’t the heart or the mind for it. You drove out your only experienced man, Donley, so that he had to be liquidated for fear he’d talk. Unauthorized enthusiasm! It will be your ruin, Jackman.”

  “But after all,” Royall put in eagerly, “Bruhl himself gave his consent to this project.”

  “Tentative consent is one thing,” Logan said; “approval of blunders in operation is another.”

  Jackman ran his fingers across his forehead in his old gesture of incertitude. “Logan,” he said, “I believe you really are from Vlanarov’s people. You’re a Party intellectual: you’ve the look and tone of it. In short, you’re a man we can talk with. You must know as well as we do what has gone wrong with this scheme. The people in the Continent want action from me, but they’ll take no risks nor spend any money. For that matter, they’ll give me no men. I am expected to extort the funds from old women, conscript a set of criminals and hold them together by blackmail and intimidation, and pay the penalty by myself, with my own neck, if everything falls in pieces.

  “For years those people have used Royall and me in this way. Edmund Jackman, who ought to be forming policy at the upper levels, set to leading a gang of banditti at the back of beyond! It’s enough to craze a man. As one intellectual to another, do you see any justice in that? Bureaucracy on the one hand, fanatic ideological rigidity on the other; and the best minds in the Party, like yours and mine, fallen between the stools. In my situation, what would you have done differently?” He was almost wheedling.

  “I’m not authorized to offer any opinion on that subject, as yet,” Logan said, with what he hoped was an enigmatic smile.

  “Perhaps I had better make it clear, Logan,” Royall put in, “that Dr. Jackman’s association with Beria arose solely from necessity, and from his obedience to Party discipline. We regret as much as anyone does what happened to Vlanarov’s father.”

  “Do you have a cigarette?” said Logan. “I suppose lunch will be ready soon.”

  “Logan,” Jackman demanded, intensely, “are you here to supplant me? If you are, why this shilly-shallying? Can’t you have the decency to present your instructions?”

  “Why, I’m in no position as yet to give definite orders, Jackman. The decisions must be yours; I decline any responsibility. But this I will suggest: disarm your men, lock up the guns, and give me the keys to the gunroom and the cellars where you keep the gelignite. Send all the men down to the New House except Tompkins and Royall. Light a beacon, or send up flares, and put Carnglass in communication with the mainland through ordinary channels. Leave me in charge of the Old House. Then wait the turn of events. If you do this, I’ll put in my good word for you with my superiors.”

  This was spreading it perilously thick, Logan thought, but one might as well be taken for a tiger as for an alley-cat.

  Jackman sucked in his breath. “You ask too much, Logan, whoever or whatever you are. Is this some plan to make Royall and me the scapegoats? To hand us over to the police or intelligence, possibly, by way of covering someone else’s blunders? I’ve been treated that way before, Logan, and I’ll not endure it again. Sooner than that – sooner than the gaol or the gallows – I’d walk into the cellars and detonate the gelignite. I’d rather blow Carnglass into pebbles than be the dupe once more.”

  “You asked for suggestions, Jackman. I told you I’d assume no responsibilities.” Logan had not dared to hope that Jackman actually would fall into his impromptu snare; but at least it served to bewilder Jackman and Royall.

  “And if we did disarm the men,” Royall thrust at him, “who would keep off your friends outside? The ones that made away with Carruthers, and sent Rab mad? What’s your scheme, Logan – to liquidate all of us in Carnglass? To send us to join Gare and Dowie and Jock Anderson and Donley? To make sure that no one here ever has an opportunity to furnish evidence to the government?”

  Inadvertently, he might have carried the game too far, Logan saw: he might get himself drowned for a commissar instead of a police-agent.

  “Damn it,” Jackman almost shouted, the patch in the middle of his forehead twitching, “are you really from Vlanarov? Do you have another name?”

  “I’ll tell you when there’s need for it,” was all Logan answered him. For Jackman was losing control of himself, and it was conceivable that he might shoot Logan where he stood.

  “Now, now, Dr. Jackman,” Royall murmured, “if he is from Vlanarov, we’d best not…”

  “No!” Jackman cried, his air of power returning to him. “No, you’ll tell me soon enough. If you’re sent by that mutual-admiration circle in the Continent, I’ll have that news out of you, and make you pay for it. And if you’re something worse, I’ll twist that truth from you. I know your medicine, Logan. You’re going into the Whiskey Bottle; there’s no man who can endure that place long. You’ll talk with me, and thank me for the chance.”

  “Dr. Jackman, I really do think…” Royall began, uneasily. But Jackman cut him off.

  “Mr. Royall, get Anderson and Caggia. We’ll put our friend Logan away below stairs. The responsibility is mine. And while I’m at the Whiskey Bottle, you make the rounds of the house, Royall, and make sure all the men have ammunition enough.”

  It never would do to let Jackman see any sign of weakness in him, for the man subsisted on others’ dread, and was most merciless, Logan guessed, when they were most piteous. Deliberately Logan gathered up the Table Men and set them in their casket. “I thought you had a taste for sherry, Jackman,” he said, “but you seem to have whiskey in mind for me.” Jackman answered nothing. Then Anderson and Ferd entered. Anderson’s jaw was bound up in a bloody handkerchief, and the man looked murder at Logan.

  In silence, Jackman and Anderson and Ferd Caggia took Logan down the worn stair in the thic
kness of the wall. They took him to the ground floor of the old tower, where first he had met Mary MacAskival only yesterday about this hour, though it seemed an age ago. And they shoved him toward one corner of that great vaulted empty room. In that corner, flush with the flagstones, a small stair twisted downward, below the level of the rock on which the Old House stood. Anderson thrust him forward with a curse, so that Logan staggered down the short flight, the three men behind him.

  The place below was wholly dark. Caggia carried a petrol lantern, and he lit it and swung it round. This crypt, hollowed from the rock, apparently contained nothing but what looked like a broken windlass in a far corner, and what seemed to be a coil or heap of rope in a near corner. And in the middle of the floor was a circular lid or cover of stone, with an iron ring set into it. Caggia and Anderson commenced to drag back this lid.

  This being, perhaps, his last appearance above ground, Logan thought he ought to improve the shining hour. “I do hope, Anderson,” he said, “that your jaw doesn’t pain you.” Anderson responded with an obscenity. “I am acquainted with your brother Jock in the Gallowgate,” Logan went on. “A lively man, Jock. He kicked me in the jaw not long ago.”

  “Gude for Jock,” growled Anderson. “I’ll soon gie ye anither.”

  “But we caught him, Davie Anderson,” Logan continued, “and put him where he’ll kick no more. We caught Jim Dowie and his wife Jeanie, too, and the others. And now all the world knows of the criminals of Carnglass.”

  “Enough of that, Logan,” Jackman put in. Anderson and Ferd were standing by the open mouth of a pit or cistern, staring attentively at Logan. Jackman pressed the muzzle of the little pistol into Logan’s back and urged him toward the gulf. This must be the pit, for dead herring or dead men, described in Balmullo’s account of the Old House.

  “Dr. Jackman,” Logan said in some haste, “I do trust that when, tomorrow or the next day, you decide in despair to blow up the Old House, yourself, and everyone round about, you will allow these two fine fellows to join me in this well of yours. It will probably be the safest place for some miles round. I doubt whether Anderson and Caggia are so ready to die as you are.”

  Ferd Caggia’s perpetual grin diminished. He glanced appraisingly at Dr. Jackman. “Ferd,” said Logan, “presumably you will be brought to trial for treason, at the least, if you escape Dr. Jackman’s gelignite. They tell me that you are an excellent shot. If I were you, I should endeavor to persuade Dr. Jackman to remain a comfortable distance from the crypt where he keeps the explosives.”

  “Logan,” Jackman muttered in his ear, “do you want a bullet in your spine?”

  “By no means, Dr. Jackman. And try not to forget that there will be people asking after me, very soon.” Would they try to throw him into the pit that stood open right by his feet?

  “Kneel down,” Jackman told him, “and you may have a glimpse of the Whiskey Bottle. Do you know the Mamertine prison in Rome? This is very like, Logan, but deeper.”

  Caggia had tied a long cord to the lantern, which now he lowered into the hole and swung in a circle, slowly, so as to show the interior of the place. Kneeling reluctantly, Logan made out an immense dry depth. The pit was shaped roughly like a bottle, narrow at the mouth and gradually widening, and going down, down. It was irregular, however, with bulges and depressions here and there in its sides, as if more the work of nature than of man. From the mouth, one could not get a clear view of the whole interior. The lantern sank lower and lower into the abyss, and still Logan could not perceive the bottom; then Caggia hauled it up. In this place, according to Balmullo’s history of Carnglass, had been found the deformed skeleton that the crofters had called the Firgower. If ever the pit had been filled with salt herring, it must have enabled the Old House to withstand a siege of months, supposing there was fresh water enough to drink.

  Logan stood firm upon the lip of the Whiskey Bottle. Nothing but audacity, he felt, would discourage Jackman from indulging in a new atrocity at this moment. “Look sharp that our friend Dr. Jackman doesn’t put you, too, down this well, Caggia,” he remarked. “It must tell on one’s nerves to have a lunatic bent upon self-destruction for an employer.”

  “There you’ll stay, Logan, until you feel inclined to talk with us,” Jackman said, rolling the words thickly. “If I don’t forget you. You’ll not eat or drink until we let you out – if we do. I won’t say when we’ll come back to inquire after you: it may be hours, or it may be days. A man does not stay sane very long in the Whiskey Bottle. If you come out in time, there’s not harm done. Scream when you wish to come out, and perhaps we will hear you. Better men than you have gone down and not come up alive. Down with you, now.”

  Anderson had dragged from the corner a long rope ladder. He made it fast to two iron rings sunk in the floor of the crypt, and let the rope fall into the pit. “There you go,” said Jackman. “Goodnight to you, Mr. Logan.”

  “I think I’ll not go,” Logan told them. They scarcely could carry him down the swaying rope ladder.

  “In that event,” Jackman remarked – and Anderson sniggered – “we would have to pitch you in, and it’s nearly fifty feet to the bottom, so you would be broken. Or we would have to lower you in at a rope’s end, head first, with risk to your skull. I advise you to choose the ladder.”

  There was nothing else for it. Logan set his feet and hands on the swaying ladder, and began to descend. As he went down, the feet of the three men disappeared from view, and presently he was in blackness. After what seemed eternity, swinging and twisting about on the ropes, he felt no rung-slat under his foot, and halted, twirling back and forth like a top in space. Did they mean him to fall and break his legs or back? “It doesn’t reach,” he called up. The echo was melancholy.

  “Jump for it,” Jackman’s voice sounded ever so faintly above.

  “I’ll be damned if I do,” Logan roared back.

  “You’ll be damned if you don’t,” called Jackman, “for we’ll loose the ladder at this end, and you’ll fall anyhow, and there’ll be no way back.”

  Waiting was no comfort. Logan relinquished his hold on the ladder, expecting his end. But he fell only six or seven feet, bruising his back on the jagged stone floor, which was quite dry. He could hear the rustle of the ladder being hauled up. The light of the lantern glimmered at the top of the Bottle, and a head was thrust over the mouth of the shaft, silhouetted against the petrol glare.

  “Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” Jackman said, “shriek when you care for our company.” He laughed. Then he said something else, more faintly; but Logan thought it was, “Once you put me here, Askival.” There came a scraping sound from above, and the lid was dragged back over the Bottle’s mouth, cutting off Logan from the world. He was shut into the tomb now, as in his dream on the second night in Carnglass. As if the stone cover had not been coffin-lid enough, an iron door had stood ajar, Logan remembered, at the entrance to the crypt, a big key in lock. No doubt they would turn the key. Goodbye, Mary MacAskival.

  Chapter 12

  IN THE WHISKEY BOTTLE, it would not do to brood more than a man might help, for that way lay despair: especially when one thought of what might be done to Mary MacAskival, high above. So Logan busied himself, at first, in creeping round the circumference of the Bottle’s floor, feeling everywhere. There was nothing to feel but lumpy naked rock, everywhere gouged by ancient chisels.

  The batter of the circular sides made it impossible for him even to think of climbing, fly-like, toward the mouth. These pleasures soon were exhausted. His watch had not worked well since he splashed ashore in Carnglass, and perhaps that was to the good. Already he was hungry and thirsty; but this last must be chiefly a psychological oppression, as the damp air of Carnglass made it unnecessary for a man to drink much water a day.

  Although he had been in the place but a quarter of an hour, probably, the problem of fresh air began to worry Logan. It was silly to think about it so soon, of course: the immense cubic capacity of the Bottle would
give him oxygen enough for a long time, and conceivably enough to support life leaked beneath the rude stone at the mouth, anyway. But one thought about such things in the Bottle, for lack of aught else to do.

  In all that dead island, the Whiskey Bottle was the deadest place. Not even an insect could live here; and the place was so dry that, perhaps, not even a lichen could cling to the sloping walls. One could think only of dead things: of the deformed skeleton found on this floor, and the presences that drifted through Jackman’s guilty brain. It wouldn’t do for a man to think such thoughts: not for a man who meant to keep his wits about him. If ever they let him out of the Bottle, he would need all the wits and all the strength he could muster. The best thing to do, then, was to sleep. Luckily, Logan was very tired from the strain of the past several days, and from having had so little sleep last night, what with his colloquy with Mary MacAskival. And sleep never had come hard to him, in the worst of times and places. He groped about the rough floor until he found a tolerable area upon which to stretch himself, and there he lay down, his head on his arm, and soon drifted off. Dreams came, hideous dreams; but afterward they were all a blur to him. Now and then he tossed and woke imperfectly; then, like a sick man, he sank back into the sanctuary of the unconscious.