Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  And it seemed that the taking ways of the Daldour MacAskivals, in recent years, had been winked at by The MacAskival herself, Miss Mary. For she had been a little girl on a barren island croft, and knew the rigors of the Daldour life. Besides, she was adored by, and adored, old Malcolm Mor, the chief man in Daldour, who for some years turned from fishing and poaching to being the gardener at the Old House, until Lagg gave him the sack. Malcolm Mor told her tales of the vanished glories of the MacAskivals, and of the witcheries of Carnglass, and showed the schoolgirl, during her Carnglass summers, the secrets of the Old House and of the Carnglass caves. What Malcolm Mor’s kith and kin did, Mary MacAskival overlooked when overlooking was discreet. Now and again, on lonely rambles to the further reaches of the deserted island, Mary would meet with the furtive deerstalkers and sheep-stealers from Daldour, who blended with gorse and heather and bracken when anyone else showed his face; and they would tip their caps, and offer the girl strange things washed up from the sea, such as “Mary’s Nut,” a Molucca bean, come by the Gulf Stream all the way from the Caribbean – for it brought good fortune, if worn on a chain round the neck.

  As for Malcolm Mor, even after canny and tight-fisted Tam Lagg discharged the old pirate, Mary MacAskival kept in touch with him by a sepulchral line of communications. Their system was this: on her walks, Mary would slip a note into the receptacle in Sir Alastair’s tomb at the chapel, and Malcolm would pick it up when next he climbed over the cliff-head from his boat moored in the cave far below. Malcolm Mor, though he was ashamed of the accomplishment as a decadent concession to modern civilization, could write a primitive English, and he would scrawl in his crabbed hand brief and respectful replies to The MacAskival’s communications, giving news of his family to the lonely girl, and of how the fishing had gone. So long as she was permitted to ramble at will in Carnglass, Mary MacAskival could send letters to the outer world through this tomb postbox, for old Malcolm would post them in Loch Boisdale on the few occasions when the lobster boat crossed the rough waters to South Uist. Thus she had contrived to send her last message, the unsigned note, crumpled and water-stained, which reached Duncan MacAskival in Michigan. After that she had been too closely watched by Jackman and his men to make the attempt, and toward the end she had not been able to leave the Old House at all.

  Before the coming of Jackman, and while Lady MacAskival retained some vigor and Lagg had the management of the island in his hands, two or three reasonably zealous gamekeepers made the poaching by the Daldour men a career of danger and daring, which they dared not attempt more than once a month, at best. The keepers’ shotguns had wounded two or three of old Malcolm’s sons and grandsons, and once the keepers almost had seized the boat moored in the cave.

  But after Jackman’s men replaced the old servants, the people at the Old House scarcely visited the hinterland of Carnglass. Donley, nominally the new keeper, ordinarily stuck fairly close to his cottage near the Old House, and the regions round Dalcruach and St. Merin’s Chapel, especially, became safe ground for the poachers. More and more of the queer, long-legged, long-necked, soft-fleeced sheep of Carnglass, and now and then a deer, were borne off triumphantly in the lobster boat to hungry Daldour.

  Only one aspect of the new regime in Carnglass troubled the Daldour MacAskivals: Dr. Jackman and his ways. They spied upon him from the bracken, and sometimes crept close enough to perceive the curious spot in his forehead – which, among these misty folk who told legends over their peat fires and never saw the penny press and never heard a wireless, was at once recognized as the supernatural Third Eye of a Carnglass warlock. They saw the crew of town toughs he had gathered round him, too, and their suspicions grew. And Mary MacAskival rarely came forth from the Old House; at last she did not come at all, though they could glimpse her sometimes at the summit of the tower or in the little walled garden. For the people of Daldour, Miss Mary MacAskival was the symbol of their identity, and the hope of their salvation: for she had told old Malcolm, more than once that, when she was mistress in the island, she would bring back the MacAskivals to the farms and the crofts from which her aunt had expelled the last of them in 1914. The man with the third eye, they told one another, meant Mary MacAskival no good. They continued to watch. None of them were cowards, but they were shy of the law, for the law had expelled them from Carnglass; and besides, they were poachers, and in Daldour secret distillers of whiskey on which they paid no duty.

  There were not many of them in Daldour, and few of the men were young. Of the men who should have been in their thirties, several had died during the war as naval or merchant seamen; and nearly all the rest, acquiring new tastes during their military service or unable to find places for themselves in the island, had gone off to Glasgow or America. The old and middle-aged MacAskival men in Daldour, for lack of young blood, withdrew more and more from the modern world, so far as modernity ever had touched them at all. They were shy of the law, shy of people from the mainland, shy of townsfolk, shy even of crofters and fishermen from the other islands.

  A week ago, four MacAskivals, Malcolm Mor leading them, had put out in their boat, cloaked by fog and the setting of the sun, to land again at the foot of the cliffs below St. Merin’s Chapel. Only the MacAskivals of Daldour could sail those treacherous waters in such weather. As they had been about to moor the boat in the cave under the cliff, Dumb Angus had taken Malcolm by the shoulder and pointed excitedly. Caught between two rocks near the cave’s mouth, and awash in the ebbing tide, was the body of a man. They drew the corpse into their boat. It was Tam Lagg, who had been factor of Carnglass, and his corpse was terribly battered; he must have fallen from the cliffs. His hat they found a little later, lodged in a clump of ferns a few yards up the cliff.

  “The sea casts its dead upon Carnglass,” a proverb of the Island runs. Many men have drowned on the reefs in those waters, or have been caught in the currents and hurled against the cliffs in their boats; but it is a strange truth that the whirlpools and eddies in that merciless sea seem to bring up drowned men from miles round, and lodge what is left of them among the rocks or on the narrow beaches of the island called the Heap of Stones. The four men in the Daldour lobster boat had looked often upon drowned corpses; and they never failed to give those derelicts decent burial, that they themselves might one day need in their turn. The graveyard round the chapel in Carnglass, and the smaller graveyard by the bare beach in Daldour, were dotted with little wooden crosses marking the graves of seamen and soldiers from torpedoed transports that had gone down between Uist and Carnglass.

  Bury Tam Lagg, then, the MacAskivals must. But they were afraid of the man with the third eye, at the Old House of Fear, who might lay the blame of this strange death upon them, since they had enjoyed an old vendetta with the factor of Carnglass; so they made no attempt to report the discovery of the body to the people in the Old House. They thought it best not to bury Lagg in Daldour, lest the body be found by strangers there and the MacAskivals be accused of foul play. So they wrapped Lagg in an old piece of canvas and, with great difficulty, got the body to the top of the cliffs, where they buried it in St. Merin’s Chapel. On the grave they left a saucer of salt and nails, with a rowan twig atop it, to keep Lagg’s wraith from wandering, should it be restless; for they thought it strange that a man so long familiar with Carnglass should fall to his death.

  They were not sorry that Lagg was dead: they had detested him. And Dumb Angus, who dug the grave, took Lagg’s clothes by way of compensation, and put them on, so that he looked for all the world like a stout scarecrow in those torn and stained garments. Malcolm Mor feared that this act might bring ill luck, but did not interfere, for they were accustomed to let poor Angus have his way in all rea sonable things. And besides, Angus looked wonderfully comic in Lagg’s clothes, and made the MacAskivals laugh, and so was happy. Many of the jokes of Dumb Angus were no stranger than this.

  Logan learned these matters from Malcolm Mor there on the edge of the New House plantation of firs and aspens,
while every ten minutes or so a rifle went off on the landward side of the Old House: Kenneth and John firing at the windows. Logan’s men had no great supply of ammunition, but it was necessary to keep Jackman’s people in constant uneasiness, so that the final rush on the Old House might have some chance for success. As Logan and Malcolm lay talking, Dumb Angus crawled up to join them, having finished his work of loading the farm cart and getting it into the New House plantations.

  “Dumb Angus is simple,” Malcolm Mor said, smiling at the burly man, “but also he is clever. He made the joke better by a doing all his own. Show Mr. Logan what it was you made, Angus.”

  Very cheerfully, Angus took off the injured green porkpie hat he had inherited from Thomas Lagg. Then he reached into a little leather bag that hung suspended from one of his shoulders, and drew out a thing seemingly shapeless. He pulled the thing all the way over his head, as if it had been a rubber mask, and clapped his hat back on. Then, gobbling unintelligibly, he looked Logan full in the face.

  The effect was the more horrid because at first Logan could not recognize the origin of this dreadful mask Dumb Angus had assumed. It was not human, and yet had a semblance of humanity. It hung loosely on the head. It had nostrils, but no true nose, and a drooping dreadful mouth, and holes where its eye-sockets should be, with Dumb Angus’s eyes glowing behind them. Angus wriggled with happiness at the effect he produced upon Logan. It was the face of one of the peculiar sheep of Carnglass, painstakingly skinned from the whole skull of the beast and made a loathsome mask by Angus MacAskival.

  If this was what Rab had seen in the gloaming, with the dead Lagg’s clothing on the heavy body below it, it was no wonder that dull-witted Rab had gone frantic with dread. “Poor Angus makes this on every Hallowe’en,” Malcolm Mor was saying, “but this time he made it in the spring, because he had taken Mr. Lagg’s clothes, and wished to make us laugh.”

  On the same evening that the MacAskivals buried Lagg, they had caught a glimpse of Donley skulking among boulders near Dalcruach, and they had hurried back to their boat and returned to Daldour, thinking that Donley might have seen them as well. But they had found they could not restrain their curiosity, and so sailed to Carnglass early the following morning, and from the bracken had seen Donley pursued by men from the Old House. They had debated among themselves whether they ought to reveal themselves to Donley and carry him off safely to Daldour; but they did not know the right and wrong of the feud between Donley and his pursuers, and also they had an ancient grudge against all gamekeepers; so they let the chase continue, only watching it from a fairly safe distance. Two or three times both Donley and the men from the Old House seemed to suspect that they were being tracked and watched, and to be correspondingly nervous. This tickled the fancy of the MacAskivals, especially Dumb Angus, and, without showing themselves distinctly, they dogged the Carnglass men like bogles.

  These MacAskivals had seen Donley and Logan together on the shore, the night Donley had taken the dinghy. They had watched Logan for a part of the way as he followed the line of cliffs to the Old House. They had lingered near the searching parties that went out of the Old House in pursuit of Donley while Logan had been inside. And on one of these occasions, three of the MacAskivals – Robert, John, and Dumb Angus – had been imprudent. Carruthers and Rab, cautiously poking through the bracken near the ruined farmhouse where Lagg had been caught, had stumbled upon the Daldour men. Carruthers, in the lead a few yards, had found himself right in the midst of the three MacAskivals, and had shouted in astonishment to Rab. Instantly, Malcolm’s two sons had dragged him down and begun to bind him, snatching away his gun; they were old hands at such fights with keepers. Rab had come running up, and Dumb Angus, wearing his sheepmask and Lagg’s clothes, had risen out of the bracken to confront him. Turning tail, the shocked and screaming Rab had run all the way back to the Old House, now and then firing into the bracken, but never hitting the delighted Angus, who had followed at a prudent distance. Logan knew the rest.

  By this time, Malcolm Mor had become convinced that something was gravely wrong at the Old House, and was bent on helping Mary MacAskival if only he could determine what to do. He and the others took Carruthers back to Daldour in their boat, at the risk of a prosecution for kidnapping, and locked him in a byre, where they fed him well and asked him questions quite civilly; but the man was so terror-stricken that they could get nothing sensible from him. The day after the capture, the MacAskivals spent in Daldour asking these fruitless questions of their prisoner. Three hours before dawn on the present day, they had sailed once more toward Carnglass, with the intention of going straight up to the Old House, if necessary, and demanding to see Miss MacAskival.

  Then, when almost under the northern headland of Carnglass, the MacAskivals had seen flaming against the night sky the fire which Logan and the girl had kindled. That beacon must be close by St. Merin’s Chapel; and at the chapel Malcolm Mor had collected Mary MacAskival’s let ters, and the Cross of Carnglass had been the point of rendezvous when Malcolm, now and then, had met with the girl face to face. The odds were that this fire was a sign from Mary herself. Mooring the boat, the MacAskivals went warily up the cliff, reaching the summit just after dawn.

  All the time, then, Logan realized, the girl must have entertained hope of the MacAskivals’ coming. Why she had given him only hints, never speaking out, he could not say. In part, perhaps, she had hesitated to speak because she feared that, after all, nothing would come of this. And in part, likely enough, her pride as The MacAskival had prompted her to make the decision herself, without consulting even the man she loved. But most of all, Logan suspected, a certain lingering schoolgirl love of secrets had been at work. From the time Carruthers was missed and Rab ran shrieking into the Old House, Mary MacAskival must have been sure that the MacAskivals of Daldour were in the island. Her only chance of finding them hurriedly if they were in the island the next night, or of attracting their attention away in Daldour or out at sea, was to light the beacon, whatever the risk of attracting Jackman’s notice. That act had saved Logan, but not yet Mary herself.

  Well, Malcolm Mor and the others had got their heads over the summit of the sea-cliff just as Logan had been fighting with Jackman and his men at the door of the broch. The men of Daldour had crouched behind the tumbling drystone wall at the brink of the cliff, unnoticed by Jackman’s gang during the scuffle. In that moment, Malcolm had sent his nephew Kenneth scurrying stealthily round the kirkyard wall and down the brae, to create a diversion. And Kenneth, seeing two more of Jackman’s men in the valley below, had fired on them to draw Jackman’s party off at the time Logan and Mary MacAskival were held prisoners in the graveyard and the chapel. When Malcolm had watched the girl led away on a rope, he was ready to fight, law or no law. So he and the others had surrounded St. Merin’s Chapel, stunned Powert, and discovered, to their astonishment, the betrothed of Mary MacAskival.

  “Mr. Logan,” said old Malcolm Mor, apparently quite confident of the issue of the fight that was coming, “when Carnglass is the lady’s and yours to do with as you will, Dumb Angus would be a good gardener for you. It is a keeper that I myself would rather be. Dumb Angus is wise with animals and plants” – here he patted Angus approvingly on a burly shoulder – “and he would keep you always laughing.”

  Dumb Angus had put the animal-mask back into his bag. He also had slung over his shoulder, on a strap, the wooden spade that Logan had seen thrust into the earth in the chapel; Angus had forgotten it there when he dug Lagg’s grave, but now had retrieved it as the only weapon ready to his hand. The wearing of such masks, Malcolm had remarked, was common among the few remaining MacAskival children, in Daldour and formerly in Carnglass, about Hallowe’en. Covered by that dead animal face, Angus had looked mightily like the picture of the Firgower on the ceiling of Jackman’s study in the old tower. Whether this custom was some dim survival of a practice older than the Christian rites at the Cross of Carnglass, Logan could not tell. It might have been that th
e dead Pictish chiefs of Carnglass had worn such masks in heathen times, at ceremonies in the chamber within the rock beneath the Old House, or by the great broch on the cliff, the Pict’s House. Be this as it might, the horrid false face that was Angus’s delight, like so much else in Carnglass and Daldour, came as the last faint echo of an old Gaelic song.

  All that long afternoon Logan lay in wait hidden by the fir trees, outwardly calm to hearten the MacAskivals, in-wardly in torment at Mary MacAskival’s danger within the Old House. As the sun began to set, he dispatched the boy to Kenneth and John, still sniping on the landward side of the Old House, with the word that they were to join him under the trees close to the gate of the Victorian block, the moment it was fairly dark.

  When the light was almost gone, Malcolm and Angus harnessed the Barra horses – which had been tethered behind the New House – to the straw-loaded farm cart. The long ladder was carried to the edge of the plantation; the run with it to the first-story windows of the Victorian wing would be very risky, even if Logan’s whole plan went smoothly, but the thing was possible. Climbing up the straw, the boy poured the tins of paraffin over the loaded cart. Angus crept under the cart, to urge on the horses so far as they dared use them. Kenneth, John, and Robert were to be stationed behind the cart. When the cart had been drawn to the edge of the trees, the horses must be cut out of their harness, and the men, keeping their heads down, must push the cart the remaining distance across naked rock to the gate of the Old House.

  Malcolm Mor, Malcolm Gille, and Logan himself took position at the edge of the trees, prone, with guns ready to fire into the windows above the gate. These movements seem to have attracted attention from whomever was on duty at those windows, for one shot was fired from the Old House. But Logan’s men did not reply, and as the dark descended, the great gray bulk of the castle of the MacAskivals lay still and ominous, with not one light showing. Now, Mary, Hugh Logan thought, I’ll go to you. The MacAskivals beside him knew what they had to do, and none of them had shown much sign of fear.