“To be sure”—the attorney passed a box of cigars across the desk—“you’ll probably consider this a silly sort of case for a man of your talents but—well, to get down to brass tacks, I’ve a client who wants to sell a house.”
“Ah?” de Grandin murmured noncommittally. “And we are to become indomitably fearless real estate brokers, perhaps?”
“Not quite,” the lawyer laughed, “nothing quite as simple as that. You see, Redgables is one of the finest properties in the entire lake region. It lies in the very heart of the mountains, with a commanding view, contains nearly three thousand acres of good land, and, in fact, possesses nearly every requisite of an ideal country estate or a summer hotel or sanatarium. Normally, it’s worth between three and four hundred thousand dollars; but, unfortunately, it possesses one drawback—a drawback which makes its market value practically nil. It’s haunted.”
“Eh, do you say so?” De Grandin sat up very straight in his chair and fixed his unwinking stare on the attorney. “Parbleu, it will be a redoubtable ghost whom Jules de Grandin can not eject for a fee of two hundred thousand francs! Say on, my friend; I burn with curiosity.”
“The house was built some seventy-five years ago when that part of New York State was little better than a wilderness,” the attorney resumed. “John Aglinberry, son of Sir Rufus Aglinberry, and the great-uncle of my client, was the builder. He came to this country under something of a cloud—pretty well estranged from his family—and built that English manor house in the midst of our hills as a refuge from all mankind, it seems.
“As a young man he’d served with the British army in India, and got mixed up in rather a nasty scandal. Went ghazi—fell in love with a native girl and threatened to marry her. There was a devil of a row. His folks used influence to have him dismissed from the service and cut off his allowance to force him back to England. After that they must have made life pretty uncomfortable for him, for when he inherited a pile of money, from a spinster aunt, he packed up and came to America, building that beautiful house out there in the woods and living like a hermit the rest of his life.
“The girl’s family didn’t take matters much easier than Aglinberry’s, it seems. Something mysterious happened to her before he left India—I imagine he’d have stayed there in spite of hell and high water, if she’d lived.
“Somehow, the Aglinberry fortune petered out. John Aglinberry’s younger brothers both came to this country and settled in New York, working at one thing and another till he died. They inherited the property share and share alike under our law; but it never did them any good. Neither of them was ever able to live in it, and they never could sell it. Something—mind you, I’m not saying it was a ghost—but something damned unpleasant, nevertheless, has run off every tenant who’s ever attempted to occupy that place.
“My client is young John Aglinberry, great-nephew of the builder, and last of the family. He hasn’t a cent to bless himself with, except the potential value of Redgables.
“That’s the situation, gentlemen; a young man, heir to a baronetcy, if he wished to go to England to claim it, poorer than a church mouse, with a half-million dollar property eating itself up in taxes and no way to convert it into a dime in cash till he can find someone to demonstrate that the place isn’t devil-ridden. Do you understand why we’re willing to pay a ten thousand dollar fee—contingent on the success of re-establishing Redgables’ good name?”
“Tiens, Monsieur,” de Grandin exclaimed, grinding the fire from his half-smoked cigar, “we do waste the time. I am all impatience to try conclusions with this property-destroying ghost who keeps your so deserving client out of the negotiation of his land and me from a ten thousand dollar fee. Morbleu, this is a case after my own heart! When shall we start for this so charming estate which is to pay me ten thousand dollars for ridding it of its specter tenants?”
JOHN AGLINBERRY, CHIEFLY DISTINGUISHED by a wide, friendly grin, met us at the railway station which lay some five miles from Redgables, and extended a warm handclasp in greeting. “It’s mighty good of you gentlemen to come up here and give me a lift,” he exclaimed as he shepherded us along the platform and helped stow our traps into the unkempt tonneau of a Ford which might have seen better days, though not recently. “Mr. Selfridge ’phoned me yesterday morning, and I hustled up here to do what I could to make you comfortable. I doubt you’d have been able to get any of the village folks to drive you over to the place—they’re as frightened of it as they would be of a mad dog.”
“But, Monsieur,” de Grandin expostulated, “do you mean to say you have been in that house by yourself this morning?”
“Uh-huh, and last night, too,” our host replied. “Came up here on the afternoon train yesterday and tidied things up a bit.”
“And you saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing?” de Grandin persisted.
“Of course not,” the young man answered impatiently. “There isn’t anything to see, or feel, or hear, either, if you except the usual noises that go with a country place in springtime. There’s nothing wrong with the property, gentlemen. Just a lot of silly gossip which has made one of the finest potential summer resorts in the county a drug on the market. That’s why Mr. Selfridge and I are so anxious to get the statement of gentlemen of your caliber behind us. One word from you will outweigh all the silly talk these yokels can blab in the next ten years.”
De Grandin cast me a quick smile. “He acknowledges our importance, my friend,” he whispered. “Truly, we shall have to walk fast to live up to such a reputation.”
Further conversation was cut short by our arrival at the gates of our future home. The elder Aglinberry had spared no expense to reproduce a bit of England in the Adirondacks. Tall posts of stone flanked the high iron gate which pierced the ivy-mantled wall surrounding the park, and a wide graveled driveway, bordered on each side by a wall of cedars, led to the house, which was a two-story Tudor structure with shingles of natural red cedar from which the place derived its name. Inside, the house bore out the promise of its exterior. The hall was wide and stone-paved, wainscoted with panels of walnut and with a beamed ceiling of adz-hewn cedar logs and slabs. A field-stone fireplace, almost as large as the average suburban cottage’s garage, pierced the north wall, and the curving stairs were built with wide treads and balustraded with hand-carved walnut. A single oil painting, that of the elder John Aglinberry, relieved the darkness of the wall facing the stairway.
“But, Monsieur, this is remarkable,” de Grandin asserted as he gazed upon the portrait. “From the resemblance you bear your late kinsman you might easily be taken for his son—yes pardieu, were you dressed in the archaic clothes of his period, you might be himself!”
“I’ve noticed the resemblance, too,” young Aglinberry smiled. “Poor old Uncle John, gloomy-looking cove, wasn’t he! Anyone would think all his friends were dead and he was making plans to visit the village undertaker himself.”
The Frenchman shook his head reprovingly at the younger man’s facetiousness. “Poor gentleman,” he murmured, “he had cause to look sad. When you, too, have experienced the sacrifice of love, you may look saddened, my friend.”
We spent the remainder of the afternoon surveying the house and surrounding grounds. Dinner was cooked on a portable camp outfit over blazing logs in the hall fireplace, and about nine o’clock all three of us mounted the stairs to bed. “Remember,” de Grandin warned, “if you hear or see the slightest intimation of anything which is not as it should be, you are to ring the bell beside your bed, my friend. Dr. Trowbridge and I shall sleep like the cat, with one eye open, and claws alert.”
“Not a chance,” our host scoffed. “I slept here last night and never saw or heard anything more supernatural than a stray rat, and mighty few of those.”
I MIGHT HAVE SLEPT HALF an hour or twice that long when a gentle nudge brought me wide awake and sitting bolt upright in bed. “Trowbridge, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin’s voice came through the darkness from across the room,
“rise and follow; I think I hear Monsieur Aglinberry’s alarm bell!”
I slipped a bathrobe over my pyjamas and took the loaded automatic and flashlight from under my pillow. “All right,” I whispered, “I’m ready.”
We stole down the hall toward our host’s room, and de Grandin paused beside the door. Clearly we made out the sound of an untroubled sleeper’s heavy breathing. “Guess you’ve been hearing things, de Grandin,” I chuckled in a low voice, but he held up one slender hand in warning.
“P-s-st, be still!” he commanded. “Do not you hear it, too, my friend? Hark!”
I listened with bated breath, but no sound save the occasional ghostly creak of a floor-board came to my ears, then—
Faint, so faint it might have been mistaken for the echo of an imagined sound, had it not been for its insistence, I heard the light, far-away-sounding tinkle-tinkle of bells. “Tink-a-tink, a-tink-a-tink; tink-a-tink, a-tink-a-tink” they sounded, scarcely louder than the swishing of silk, every third and fifth beat accentuated in an endless “circular” rhythm; but their music did not emanate from the room beyond the door. Rather, it seemed to me, the tiny, fairylike ringing came up the stairway from the hall below.
My companion seemed struck by the same thought, for he crept past me toward the stairhead, his soft-soled slippers making no more noise against the hardwood floor than the beating of a moth’s wings against the night air.
Close behind him I slipped, my gun and flashlight held in instant readiness, but at sight of his eager, strained face as he paused at the top of the stair I forgot my weapons and stole forward to peep over his shoulder.
A shutter must have come unfastened at one of the small, high windows in the hall, for a patch of dim moonlight, scarcely more than three feet in diameter, lay upon the floor directly beneath the portrait of the elder Aglinberry, and against the circle of luminance a thin, almost impalpable wreath of smoke seemed drifting before a draft of air from the fireplace. I looked again. No, it was not smoke, it was something with a defined outline. It was—it was a wisp of muslin, air-light and almost colorless in its sheerness, but cloth, nevertheless. And now, as I gazed unbelievingly, something else seemed slowly taking form in the moonlight. A pair of narrow, high-arched feet and tapering, slender ankles, unclothed except for a double loop of bell-studded chains, were mincing and gyrating on flexible toes, while, fainter than the feet, but still perceptible, the outline of a body as fair as any that ever swayed to the tempo of music showed against the black background of the darkened hall like a figure dimly suggested in an impressionistic painting. Round and round, in a dazing but incredibly graceful dance the vision whirled, the hem of the muslin skirt standing outward with the motion of the pirouetting feet, the tiny, golden bells on the chain anklets sending out their faerie music.
“Morbleu!” de Grandin whispered softly to himself. “Do you see it, also, Friend Trowbridge?”
“I—” I began in a muted voice, but stopped abruptly, for a puff of passing breeze must have closed the shutter, cutting off the moonbeam as a theatrical spotlight is shut off by a stage electrician. The illusion vanished instantly. There was no elfin, dancing form before the painted likeness of old John Aglinberry, no sound of clinking anklets in the old house. We were just a pair of sleep-disheveled men in bathrobes and pyjamas standing at a stairhead and staring foolishly into the darkness of a deserted hallway.
“I thought I saw—” I began again, but again I was interrupted, this time by the unmistakable clatter of the hand-bell in Aglinberry’s room.
We raced down the corridor to him and flung open the door. “Monsieur Aglinberry!” de Grandin gasped, “did it—did anything come into your room? Dr. Trowbridge and I—”
The young man sat up in bed, grinning sheepishly at us in the double beam of our flashlights. “I must be getting a case of nerves,” he confessed. “Never had the jumps like this before. Just a moment ago I fancied I felt something touch my lips—like the tip of a bat’s wing, it was, soft as velvet, and so light I could scarcely feel it; but it woke me up, and I grabbed the bell and began ringing, like a fool. Funny, too”—he glanced toward the window—“it couldn’t have been a bat, for I took particular pains to nail mosquito netting over that window this morning. It’s—why, it’s torn!”
Sure enough, the length of strong netting which our host had thoughtfully tacked across the windows of both our room and his as a precaution against early spring insects, was rent from top to bottom as though by a knife. “H’m,” he muttered, “it might have been a bat, at that.”
“To be sure,” de Grandin agreed, nodding so vigorously that he resembled a Chinese mandarin, “it might, as you say, Monsieur, have been a bat. But I think you would sleep more safely if you closed the window.” Crossing the room he drew the casement to and shot the forged iron bolt into place. “Bon soir, my friend”—he bowed formally at the doorway—“a good night, and be sure you leave your window closed.”
“WOULD YOU GENTLEMEN LIKE to look at the property down by the lake?” Aglinberry asked as we finished our breakfast of bacon and eggs, coffee and fried potatoes the following morning.
“Assuredly,” de Grandin replied as he donned topcoat and cap, slipping his ever-ready automatic pistol into his pocket, “a soldier’s first caution should be to familiarize himself with the terrain over which he is to fight.”
We marched down a wide, curving drive bordered by pollarded willows, toward the smooth sheet of water flashing in the early morning sunlight.
“We have one of the finest stands of native hardwood to be found anywhere in this part of the country,” Aglinberry began, waving his stick toward an imposing grove to our right. “Just the timber alone is worth—well, of all the copper-riveted nerve!” he broke off angrily, hastening his pace and waving his cane belligerently. “See there? Some fool camper has started a fire in those woods. Hi, there, you! Hi, there; what’re you doing?”
Hurrying through the trees we came upon a little clearing where a decrepit, weather-blistered van was drawn up beside a small spring, two moth-eaten-appearing horses tethered to a nearby tree and several incredibly dirty children wrestling and fighting on the short grass. A man in greasy corduroys lay full length on the ground, a black slouch hat pulled over his eyes, while another lounged in the doorway of the van. Two women in faded shawls and headkerchiefs and an amazing amount of pinchbeck jewelry were busily engaged, one in hewing down underbrush to replenish the camp fire, the other stirring some sort of savory mess in a large, smoke-blackened kettle which swung over the blazing sticks.
“What the devil do you mean by building a fire here?” Aglinberry demanded angrily as we came to a halt. “Don’t you know you’re likely to start a blaze in these woods? Go down to the lake if you want to camp; there’s no danger of burning things up there.”
The women looked at him in sullen silence, their fierce black eyes smoldering angrily under their straight black brows; but the man lying beside the fire was not minded to be hustled from his comfortable couch.
“Too mucha stone by da lake,” he informed Aglinberry lazily, raising the hat from his face, but making no other move toward obeying the summons to quit. “Too mucha stone an’ sand. I lika dissa grass to lay on. I stay here. See?”
“By George, we’ll see about that!” replied our irate host. “You’ll stay here, will you? Like hell you will!” Stepping quickly to the fire, he shouldered the crouching woman out of his path and scattered the blazing sticks from under the kettle with a vigorous kick of his heavy boot, stamping the flame from the brands and kicking earth over the embers. “Stay here, will you?” he repeated. “We’ll see about that. Pull your freight, and pull it in a hurry, or I’ll have the whole gang of you arrested for trespass.”
The reclining gipsy leaped to his feet as though propelled by a spring. “You tella me pulla da freight? You keek my fire out? You? Ha, I show you somet’ing!” His dirty hand flew to the girdle about his greasy trousers, and a knife’s evil flash showed in the su
nlight. “You t’ink you make da fool of Nikolai Brondovitch? I show you!”
Slowly, with a rolling tread which reminded me of a tiger preparing to leap, he advanced toward Aglinberry, his little, porcine eyes snapping vindictively, his bushy eyebrows bent into an almost straight line with the ferocity of his scowl.
“Eh, bien, Monsieur le Bohémien,” Jules de Grandin remarked pleasantly, “were I in your shoes—and very dirty shoes they are, too—I would consider what I did before I did it.” The gipsy turned a murderous scowl on him and stopped short in his tracks, his narrow eyes contracting to mere slits with apprehension. The Frenchman had slipped his pistol from his pocket and was pointing its uncompromising black muzzle straight at the center of the Romany’s checked shirt.
“Meester,” the fellow pleaded, sheathing his knife hurriedly and forcing his swarthy features into the semblance of a smile, “I maka da joke. I not mean to hurt your frand. I poor man, trying to make honest living by selling horses. I not mean to scare your frand. We taka da camp offa hees lan’ right away.”
“Pardieu, my friend, I think you will,” de Grandin agreed, nodding approvingly. “You will take your so filthy wagon, your horses, your women and your brats from off this property. You leave at once, immediately, right away!” He waved his blue steel pistol with an authoritative gesture. “Come; I have already waited too long; try not my patience, I beseech you.”
Muttering imprecations in their unintelligible tongue and showering us with looks as malignant as articulate curses, the gipsies broke camp, under our watchful supervision, and we followed them down the grass grown drive toward the lake front. We watched them off the land, then proceeded with our inspection of the estate.
REDGABLES WAS AN EXTENSIVE property and we spent the better part of the day exploring its farther corners. By nightfall all three of us were glad to smoke a sociable pipe and turn in shortly after dinner.
The Horror on the Links Page 19
