by Otto Penzler
Other workmen began to emerge from Troon. They mounted a fleet of bicycles leaning up against the iron railing and made for home and tea. Doctor Dick frowned. Surely the Kinlochs wouldn’t—yes. There they were.
“Good afternoon, Doctor Thornton. Oh, I mean Doctor Dick—it’s so difficult to bring myself to say that. In town, of course, one’s so much more formal. D’you remember Doctor de Tourville, Alice? Imagine if we’d called him Doctor Henry! Of course he was really a consultant. A very big man. A personal friend of ours.”
Doctor Dick let Edith’s flow gush right over his head. She’d thought out her speech carefully in order to make two distinct impressions; first as to his regrettable lack of professional dignity, second as to the standing she and Alec had enjoyed in Liverpool. She saw him turn to Lynneth. His rising color she attributed to having got home with her two little stabs. It was always inconceivable to Edith that anyone could just ignore her. She gave them credit for ordinary intelligence.
“You’re not—not going over the house so late?”
Doctor Dick had eyes and ears for Lynneth only. Alec, on his way to the front door, turned back and surveyed the doctor with a dull eye of one whose liver is perpetually ill-treated.
“So late!” he echoed. “Late for what? Was old Werne expecting us earlier?”
He burst into a high-pitched laugh, disconcerting in a man of his size. Doctor Dick’s glance went to the windows of the house before which they stood. He thought he heard a louder, gruffer laugh within—a workman, perhaps. Yes, something dark passed one of the bedroom windows at that moment.
Edith ran forward to the front door, all girlish abandon to take up her husband’s witty remark. She lifted the knocker and gave a smart rat-tat-tat.
“We’ll ask him if he’ll give us tea.”
She cast a glassy brown look over the shoulder of her ponyskin coat. Alec, fumbling for his key, laughed again, louder and longer. Edith gave vent to a selection of well-rehearsed “outbursts of merriment.” Doctor Dick, alert and listening with painful intentness now, was convinced he heard a hoarse, coarse echo within the walls of Troon. It must be a workman—and—yet—. As he stood there, wondering how on earth he was going to prevent Lynneth from following the two Kinlochs inside, a further shock assaulted his nerves. Alec was still clumsily rooting for his mislaid key.
The heavy front door swung silently, widely open without a touch.
Edith blinked, frowned, assumed a bright tone of playfulness.
“We are invited for tea!” she laughed. “I suppose the men didn’t pull the door to. How careless! I shall report it tomorrow to the foreman. These country yokels! Oh, well, one must be patient, I suppose.”
Alec followed his wife inside. Doctor Dick drew Lynneth back.
“Look here—no right to interfere with you and all that—but don’t go in!”
Her eyes were fathomless, shining. In the golden dusk her vivid eager face had a transparent look, as if it were wrought glass, goldentinted, exquisite, through which rare wine sparkled and bubbled and gleamed.
“I—but why do you ask that?”
“Because it’s dangerous. It’s deadly. Your cousins don’t or won’t believe anything against Troon. But I tell you the truth. The place is haunted. There’s a devil in it.”
She looked at him very straightly under the fine beautiful arch of her brows. She knew truth when she heard it. She trusted this man. More than trusted—much, much more than that. For a moment her whole heart responded. Her hands were gripped in his.
“Lynneth! Oh, my dear!” he breathed.
“But—but—” she stammered in surprise. “Is it like this—like this? To feel so sure, when only yesterday—”
The front door banged violently. For a second their startled eyes questioned each other. Then they rushed forward. They had no key. Doctor Dick plied the knocker. Lynneth ran back to the front of the house to peer through the long windows. She returned to Doctor Dick.
“It’s all right. Alec’s there. He’s talking to Edith from the hall. She must be upstairs.”
They looked together. Yes, Alec was there safe and sound. He seemed annoyed. Under the hanging unshaded light his face was unhealthily sallow and fretful. His head was flung back. He was talking to someone above, but no sound was audible to the watchers.
They felt a queer chill of apprehension. His side of the conversation seemed acrimonious, to judge by his expression. His frown became a sullen scowl. He turned from the stairway up which he’d been looking, jammed his hat down, stalked away. Next moment he came outside, leaving the front door open behind him.
“Too damned cold in there to hang about. Edith’s as obstinate as—”
He scowled at them, pulled out a pipe, clamped strong yellow teeth on its stem, and began to fill the bowl. After a few puffs he relaxed. Recent and surprising discomfort urged him to speech.
“Chill on my liver or something,” he vouchsafed, “Edith insisted—well, you know what she is!” He turned to the girl. “Today’s plans included a visitation here,” he jerked a thumb inelegantly. “No consideration for my health—must go over the place. Doesn’t matter that the house reeks of gas or something. And colder than a tomb. Damn it all, if she must see it, she’ll see it without my company!”
Lynneth stared. Never, no, never had she heard him come so near a criticism of his wife. Even when absent in the flesh, her mind ruled his, subjugated it to her opinions. He must be extraordinarily upset.
Inside Troon’s heavy old walls, Edith went confidently to and fro, snapping on lights, snapping off lights, rubbing a finger on surfaces of wood, raising an eyebrow at a pile of tools and shavings in the middle of a bathroom floor, opening every door in order that air should circulate. The house seemed strangely stuffy, although windows and ventilators were all opened this mild day to dry up paint and varnish and new plaster. And how much colder it was indoors than out! A great golden sun flung a path of light across five miles of sea and sand. Its clear shining reached Troon’s gray western face. Six tall west windows met the golden light—and repelled it.
“But how absurd!”
Edith stared about with indignation. Her high heels clicked smartly on woodblock floors as she tried another room. Her room, the room she meant to call her boudoir. The most perfectly preserved in the whole lovely house with its south and west windows, its beams, its old, old corner fireplace so laboriously restored.
“What have they been doing—idiots!” The toffee-brown eyes took on a glaze of anger. “I told them vita-glass in this room. Do they think they can fob off this gray clouded stuff on me? I’d make them come back and change it right away if I were in charge. I shall ring up the contractor tonight. The very idea! These country bumpkins—tiresome things!”
The windows darkened and darkened as she glared about her. So angry was she that a voice from the doorway behind did not startle her at all; it merely represented a person on whom she could vent her vicious mood.
At sight of the big hulking weatherbeaten figure in stained ragged jersey and sea-boots, she let fly:
“You’re not a workman here?”
The grizzled ugly head made a gesture of denial.
“I’m Mrs. Kinloch.”
The man stared, unenlightened by the great news. He was like some great dark bull with his lowered head and bloodshot savage eyes. Edith caught sight of the trail of leaf-mold, mud, and dust that marked the intruder’s path across polished flooring beyond the doorway.
“Look at the mess you’ve made. How dare you come tramping about here? Who are you?”
“Thomas Werne.”
“Werne! Werne! Why, that’s the same name as some unpleasant old man who’s supposed to have lived here centuries ago! The one there’s such a silly fuss about.”
The man appeared uninterested.
“Well! You can go away—at once! D’you hear? Don’t imagine because you’ve the same name as that creature that you’ve a right of entry to these premises. Be off at once.”
He regarded her with a fixed glare. Abruptly he burst into a loud long hoarse laugh. It echoed and reechoed through the hollow rooms.
Edith drew up her thin person in disgust.
“Really!” She soliloquized without troubling to lower her voice. “Must be a half-wit. These fisherman are the limit. Unpleasant dirty animals. Phew! How dark it’s getting. I wish I hadn’t stayed after all.”
Her glance took in the blank windows, frowned at them. It was almost like an eclipse of the sun, something so queer and sudden and unnatural was in the gloom that spread … and spread.
She looked beyond the burly figure in the doorway. An immense skylight was set in the roof above the staircase. When she’d come up only ten minutes ago, clear strong light had shone down. She remembered thinking how well the oak-grain of the steep old stairs showed up after treatment. Now, a wall of impenetrable darkness lay behind the intruder.
Secret inadmissable fear lent a barb to her tongue. Baffled, furious, uncertain, she tried to assume the glacial manner of an aristocrat as she conceived one.
“I don’t wish to get you into trouble, my good man, but unless you go—at once—I shall feel it my duty to report you to the police.”
A noisy bellow answered her. “Report old Tom Werne, eh! Thot’s a good ’un—a reet down dom good ’un!”
His great bulk shook like a jelly. Walls and floor and windows—the whole structure of old Troon seemed to strain and shake and quiver with its uncontrollable amusement.
She stamped her high-heeled shoe, so neat and polished.
“Oh, how dare you! Impertinent—I shall send Mr. Kinloch back to speak to you.”
She took a few steps in the gray gloom toward the darker gloom outside, and stopped short. Raging inwardly, she was forced to realize that she couldn’t, she positively couldn’t make up her mind to go nearer that unpleasant filthy chuckling old beast in the doorway. Should she throw up a window and call to Alec? It would put her in a perfectly idiotic light. Infuriating impasse! She hesitated, summoned her reserves.
“I shall certainly give you in charge,” she began. “The moment I—I—”
She blinked, stuttered. Was she mad, or blind, or ill?
Through the windows, golden sun streamed in across the floor, long gleaming ladders of light upon the beautiful wood. The landing outside shone in a yellow haze of cross-lights from open doors on every side. The doorway was empty before her. Empty! The flooring beyond was bare of every trace of dust or leaves.
She stood shivering, spellbound in the quiet sunset glow. Downstairs a door banged like a gun going off. Heavy feet resounded on the red-brick yard at the side of the house. They echoed, died away, swallowed up in the green shadowy depths of the long garden beyond.
Released from a spell, she ran downstairs, out the front door, and pulled it after her with an angry bang. She poured out to the waiting three her recent experience. Gesture and phrasing harked back to pre-Lady Bountiful days. Doctor Dick recognized hysteria. Lynneth recognized that sub-Edith she’d always felt but never heard before. Alec did not recognize anything. He regarded her with mulish lack-luster eye.
“You would go over the house! You are so damned obstinate! Must have been old Werne himself you were up there chatting to.”
Edith’s laugh rose shrill in the cool winter dusk.
“I can believe the doctor might say a thing like that. But you, Alec! Really! What are we coming to!”
“That’s what I think. Old Werne himself. I’ve changed my mind since I went in just now. Not been in such a funk since I was a kid.”
“So you left me to face it!”
“I did not. You did all the leaving part. Skipped up the stairs and left me cold. And cold’s the word, too. I told you not to go. I knew something beastly was prowling around. Damn it all, you’ve got nerves of chromium-plated steel.”
“Alec! How can you be so silly and so vulgar! Actually using language—in the public street—and to your own wife!”
The shock of it pulled her together quite effectually. She shot across the wide road and began to canter homeward. Alec turned to the doctor and grinned, a shamefaced but quite a human friendly grin.
“See you again, my boy. Looks as if you’d be needed at Troon to give us all nerve tonics and soothing-powders. Well—so long!”
He looked down at Lynneth. One of his more perceptive moments dawned.
“Better get a spot of walk after that scene, my child. I’ll toddle home and see to Edith.”
He lumbered off, a burly blot of all-British respectability against a sheet of silver water. Doctor Dick turned, eager, ready to make the most of every precious moment. The girl was standing with flower-like face entranced, lips parted, her whole attention absorbed.
“Lynneth! Lynneth darling! What are you looking at inside that horrible old house?”
She did not reply, did not seem to hear. She stood as in a dream, her hands gripping the pointed arrowheads that tipped the iron railing.
“What on earth—?”
He went to her side and peered in through dark blank panes of glass to Troon’s lower floor. Darkness. Shadowy darkness.
Chill touched the leaping flame of joy in his heart. He put a hand on hers. She did not move.
“Lynneth! Lynneth!”
The shining of a street lamp showed her face clearly. It was smiling in happy wonder. She seemed intent on some marvel, some vision beyond the big blank windowpanes.
He hesitated. Short of force he couldn’t wrench away those small hands that clutched the iron railing. He put an arm about her shoulders, tried to draw her to him, but she did not yield an inch. Her slim soft body might have been one of the iron uprights of the railing. Her eyes didn’t flicker from their rapt gaze.
He made up his mind, put out his arms to exert full force, to drag her from Troon, from whatever she saw inside its haunted wall. Abruptly she sighed, loosed her grip, her eyes faded to disappointment, to sick misery.
“Oh, it’s gone! The lovely, lovely thing! I can’t tell you how lovely. But it’s gone. It won’t come back. Not now. But I’ll watch for it again. I must see it soon again.”
The man froze. His blood turned to ice. What deadly perilous thing had she seen? A trap—a snare had been set. For Lynneth—for Lynneth! Oh, God!
To all his anguished questioning she shook her head. Her eyes were sad, full of longing. Remote, distraught, she walked beside him.
“There are no words for it. I can’t tell, even if I would. Clouds … clouds … and a new lovely world. I must go back there—go back—”
He shivered. A devil’s trick. Old Werne had played a devil’s trick to get her fast. She’d been afraid before. She would have been on guard. Now she only longed to be inside that cursed place, dreamed of it as a wanderer dreams of home.
Their precious hour together was a grim ordeal to him. She, withdrawn and silent, he sick with fear for her. And the end of the nightmare walk was as strange as any of it.
At the black and white gate of Sandilands the two took formal farewell. A rising moon lighted the dark road. On one side of it crouched the little bungalow, looking like a child’s toy with its gables, and its fir-trees on either side of the straight formal garden-path. Opposite the odd little dwelling stretched a long meadow. Beyond lay half-drowned marshes—beyond them sand and shining pools left by the tide where seabirds clamored in the moonlight.
Doctor Dick strode away from the gate. He hadn’t dreamed such black despair was possible. A voice called him.
“Dick! Dick! I want you. Come back!”
Next moment he had her in his arms. So close, so safe against his heart, it seemed nothing could hurt her again. She put him away at last, laughing, tears gleaming in her eyes.
“What happened to you—darling—darling?” she whispered. “I feel as if I’d waked from a nightmare. Kiss me! Again! Oh, Dick, you do care after all!”
II
“There now, Doctor Dick! Sit down and make yourself at
home. It’s a week since you’ve been in. What’s worrying you, sir? Tom—a glass of sherry for the doctor.”
The host, in blue striped shirtsleeves, apron girt about his beaver waistcoat, clattered off across the red-tiled room. Mrs. Burden looked with keen old eyes at her guest’s shadowed face.
“Nothing wrong, so far?”
“No.”
His monosyllable dropped like a stone into a deep well. “Nothing. And it’s unbearable. The suspense. Waiting—waiting—”
He sprang up, paced to and fro in the leaping firelight, stopped before the quiet watchful old woman, his hands clasped behind his back, legs astride, head thrust forward. She met his searching look and answered his agonized unspoken question in her unhurried fashion.
“Aye. There is danger for the lass every hour she’s there. But there’s just a gleam of hope to my mind, too.”
“For Lynneth! You think so? Why, Mary?”
“That great dark Thing at Troon seems as if it settles on one at a time.”
He frowned, stared.
“Then, if so—if so it’s Mrs. Kinloch who’s in the line of fire. I told you that she saw him—old Werne—and insists he was a drunken fisherman.”
Old Mary was emphatic. “It was him. He came with the darkness that’s part of him.”
“Yes. Mrs. Kinloch admitted the darkness—at first. Went back on it later, though. Said she’d only imagined it got dark.”
“She saw Werne. It’s my belief she’ll go next. Then you can take your lass away.”
“But, good heavens! D’you mean I’m to wait until that devil murders Mrs. Kinloch?”
“What other way is there?”
Her calm matter-of-factness roused in him a sudden hysterical desire to roar with laughter. And after all, he had to wait! If that obstinate woman—
“I’ve asked her a dozen times to leave Troon. She’s on the point of forbidding me the house,” he admitted.
“Waste no more words,” advised the old woman. “They’ll take you nowhere. Your job is to save the lass. Never mind fretting over them as are blind and deaf as stones.”
Old Tom returned and poured the wine. Doctor Dick sat down, glass in hand.
