The Glendower Legacy

by Thomas Gifford

  He turned on his side and watched the moon shining on the clouds. He was tired and his eyes were bleary. But why was there a pink tinge to the night sky? Decidedly pink, blurring from the left, brightening the rectangles of night through the window. Northern lights? A shooting star? More likely a fire of some kind … As he watched the pink glow lightened, then faded. He was groggy but he wondered what the hell made the sky do that? Polly muttered something in her sleep and tugged the covers over herself, baring him. Finally he stood up and went to the window, looked out: he saw a fogbank resting lightly on the water beyond the hag’s teeth which were perfectly visible in the moonlight filtering through the lacework of clouds. The pinkness had come from the left but was almost gone now, a vague smudge that was gone as he watched. He lit a pipe of ashy, once-used tobacco and stared at the area where it had been until he was sure it was gone, that the night had returned to its normal color. He smoked, watching and thinking and worrying.

  To begin with he wasn’t aware of it at all, the movement below him, and then he thought it was a trick of his tired eyes, a bit of fog blowing or a shred of cloud crossing the moon, a symptom of his exhaustion and a bad case of nerves … then the shadows moved again, and again, and he felt his breath catching behind his breastbone, recognized the sickish feeling in his belly: it was the old fear, gnawing, turning his legs weak and his will to sweat and trembling.

  The shadows were coming up from the beach where he’d stood and looked back at the yellow blur of the seaplane … the shadows were coming from the direction of the pink glow. He watched, immobilized, as if he’d run utterly out of responses, as they came skittishly, jerkily, like beetles picking their way across the lawn.

  There were six of them, six clearly defined shadows—men—darting across the long spread of lawn toward the house. He was afraid all right, but his adrenalin was gone: how to escape? how to protect Polly? how to get help?

  The shadows moved into the trees and shrubbery near the house and the lawn was empty again: had he imagined it? Christ, talk about wishful thinking! No. While the experience had had a good many of the characteristics of a bad dream, there was no doubt, he hadn’t imagined it.

  Forgetting the shadows for a moment, since they had stealthily concealed themselves out of his angle of vision, he found his eyes drawn upward toward a light blinking in the inlet, inside the hag’s teeth, and he saw in a shaft of moonlight, what looked like a ramshackle fishing boat, a trawler, riding low in the backwater between the rocks and the shoreline. A fishing trawler?

  Suddenly the island was a hell of a popular spot. He watched intently as the light that had seemed to blink beforehand swung nervously along the shoreline: for God’s sake, it was a searchlight with a narrow, piercing beam, winking at him as it played along the sand and rocks. Perhaps Prosser had sent another Kendrick-type to stage yet another rescue? The idea flickered across his mind like the searchlight, went out. Beyond the trawler the fogbank persisted, motionless, providing a gray backdrop for the gateway of stones arcing across the bay. He smelled the sea on the wind which worked its way toward the house.

  He gently shook Polly’s arm, insistently, until she was awake and coherent.

  “My darling, it’s time to wake up. There are little men crawling all around our house and I’m not at all sure what to do.” He laughed nervously.

  “Try not laughing nervously and putting your pants on—”

  “But that’s two things at once,” he said.

  “Whose little men are they?”

  He told her what he’d seen while they were getting into their clothes, stopping every few moments to listen and look at the window. He swung the French window open and stepped out onto the balcony, leaned over the edge, and saw them again in the shadow of the house, by the porch railing, clustered around their leader. They were whispering. They seemed to be somewhat confused.

  “Well, Jesus,” the leader finally said impatiently and audibly, “we can’t just knock and go in the front door. You two move out along the porch and try those long windows. You two go find the back door-we’ll stay here and play with the front door. Now git!”

  Chandler watched from above as they scampered off, then went back into the bedroom, saw Polly standing in the doorway to the second-floor hallway, watching. A dim nightlight burned outside their door, casting shadows against the stags on the wallpaper.

  “They’re coming in,” he said. “Do you think if I ran screaming down the hallway I’d scare them off … no? Well, I can’t think of anything else—”

  “Just wait,” she said. “See what they do …”

  They heard an attempt to open the front door which was locked. An abrupt curse was followed by a throaty, muffled laugh. Footsteps moved along the porch. The silence was broken by the shattering of glass. They were coming in the French windows. The house creaked in the night wind. They heard the house filling with men, one noise after another now, coming fast: it was like floodwater rising in your own home. There was nothing to be done about it.

  They were in the hall below now, voices muffled, tread heavy. Chandler heard the metallic, oiled sound of guns being handled. The hair on the back of his neck crawled. A light flared on at the top of the stairway, at the end of the long hallway. Polly suddenly shook against him.

  “God,” she whispered, “this is like getting raped, they’ve penetrated us …”

  He heard them on the stair and pulled her back into the room. She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. He went back onto the balcony and looked back toward the spotlight. More shadows fanned out across the wide spread of the lawn coming from the direction of the fishing trawler, moving from the edge of the cliff with its black tree line. He counted seven moving figures and then heard a loud voice braying at him from the bedroom.

  “Professor Chandler, I presume,” the voice said, emanating from a large man in a dark blue sweater and trousers, with a matching stocking cap pulled down to the tops of his red ears. His face had been blackened with something greasy and his eyes shown brightly from the darkness. “Lieutenant Raines at your service, sir. My men and I are here to evacuate you from the island, sir.” He glanced at Polly who had herself back in hand and was sitting on the bed, propped against pillows, ankles crossed before her, watching the lieutenant with a bemused smile. The lieutenant was carrying a gun that looked as if it would keep on firing once you pulled the trigger.

  “Well, Lieutenant Raines,” Chandler said, clutching his pipe, “you sure scared hell out of me.”

  “I’m sure, sir. Nothing to be ashamed of, sir. There’s nobody on earth we can’t scare hell out of, I guess.” Raines appeared to be in his mid-twenties and reminded Chandler of a great many innocently pompous youths who had passed through his classes over the years. Behind him another, smaller boy, similarly dressed, appeared: “Everything as expected, sir?” His voice piped like a boy soprano.

  “Sure,” Raines said. “No sweat.” Raines smiled: “Miss Bishop, Professor? Shall we make ready to go?” He pointed the gun barrel at the duffel bag. “Stow your gear in there.” He stood watching as they did as they were told.

  “Who the hell are you?” Polly asked, beginning to fume. Chandler suppressed a smile. “Did Prosser send you?”

  “Special Operations Executive, Miss Bishop. I never heard of anyone called Prosser. We just do our job—”

  “I know, I know,” she snapped. “It’s a tough job and a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it—right, right. I’ve heard that before from people who love doing dirty jobs—”

  “—and we want to get off this island as soon as possible. So let’s step on it.” To the smaller fellow he said: “Form everybody up in the main room we came in.”

  The duffel bag was soon full and Raines made sure the windows were shut and locked; he turned the light off and followed them down the hallway, down the stairway to the front hallway. The last two men were just coming through the front door. They were all identically dressed, smeared with the blacking.

&nbs
p; Chandler whispered to Polly: “This is all right out of The Commandos Strike at Dawn. Brian Donlevy or Robert Montgomery is going to show up at any minute.” There was no time to tell Polly about the other figures he’d seen coming across the lawn. Raines was discussing matters with his men.

  “Professor,” Raines said quietly, turning a level glance at Chandler, “there is a package, I believe—our instructions are not to leave without it. May I have it, please?”

  Chandler laughed, shook his head: “Correction—there was a package. But not anymore. It’s nothing but a wad of newspapers in the kitchen wastebasket … We were stung—”

  “I don’t quite understand, sir. Our orders were to bring the two of you and a small package … without fail. They were most insistent about that package …” Youth was suddenly showing through the training, the hard cutting edge. “Now I must put it to you—”

  “Oh, come on, Lieutenant. Put it anywhere you like, search us, go check the wastebasket. There is no package—”

  “Then we’ve gone to a hell of a lot of trouble for nothing, sir.”

  “Thanks very much. Polly, you and I are nothing in the lieutenant’s eyes. Look, try to understand, we were taken—we got a dummy package, not the real thing, see, and now you’re going to have to lump it. So, what are you going to do? Leave us here in a fit of pique?”

  “All right,” Raines said, not liking it a damn bit. “We haven’t got time to search a house the size of this one. But God help you if you’re lying to me.” He wheeled on his expectant cadre: “Back to the beach. We’re taking them out, as scheduled, minus the goddamned package. Now haul ass.”

  Raines made sure all the lights were out, leaving the house as they’d found it but for some broken glass on the carpet.

  The first man through the door bearing the brass plate marked Stronghold took a brief burst of silenced automatic rifle fire, slammed backwards into the second man who fell heavily against the others. The first man was dead, died with a brutal gurgle which was intended as a scream. Everyone in the hallway was jumbled together on the floor, eyes not yet accustomed to the dark.

  “What the fuck’s going on here?” Raines whispered sharply, having sat down with a thud as the single file went down like dominoes. “Who’s out there?”

  “Christ, Lieutenant, I can smell blood, it’s all over me!” A strangled cry, terror-stricken, went up from a disembodied voice.

  “Get him off me, shit, he’s dying … he’s dead.” Groans, oaths, shouts filled the hallway, fear coloring each voice as they all lay in the tangle of arms and legs on the floor, in the pitchy darkness which somehow made it all the worse. Incredibly there was no follow-up, no pounding footsteps and racketing guns and dying. “Do any of you see anybody out there?” Raines whispered, his voice coming from the foot of the stairs. The heavy door, scarred by gunfire, stood open. “Shit no,” came the answer, “and I sure as hell ain’t gonna look right now …”

  The soprano said: “What should we do, Lieutenant?”

  “Shut up, for starters,” the lieutenant said.

  Chandler found Polly’s hand, tugged at it, pulled her toward the room from which they’d just come. He scrunched up onto all fours, crawled ahead of her, hearing her behind him, going as quietly as possible. The beginnings of a plan—the response which he’d believed himself beyond—were taking shape at the edges of his mind, fragments which might be worked out as he went along. From the hallway the whispers grew in urgency. He could still smell the blood and the mess made by the dying commando, the specific smell of death, sickly sweet.

  The long, heavy draperies on the French windows had been pushed back when Raines’s men had broken the glass and entered: now a luminescent gray stripe of moonlight bisected the floor, streaking the carpet. Polly and Chandler crouched behind a massive desk.

  “I don’t know who they are,” he whispered against her ear, “but I saw them coming up the lawn when I went out on the balcony … I think they came from a boat down by those rocks, where we were this afternoon—I saw it, too, sort of.” He grabbed the desk to stop his hands from shaking: cramps raced along his legs. “We’ve got to get out of here—I don’t know who we’re safer with …”

  “We’re safer by ourselves,” Polly said.

  A burst of gunfire came from the hallway, followed by a low moaning sound, muffled whispers. Scurrying sounds moving along the porch beyond the drapes; heavy breathing in the hall. Someone dashed up the stairs to the second floor: a door slammed above them.

  “They’re putting someone on the balcony,” Chandler said, voice trembling, trying to hold his breath. “Raines may be down to three men … Come on.”

  He crawled slowly onward, keeping to the perimeter of the room, staying well clear of the moonlight. At last, keeping track of the odd sound, aware of the waiting game going on around them, they reached the row of French windows and huddled in the corner, melting into the draperies which felt as if they were fashioned from chain mail.

  “Chandler!” Raines hissed from the hallway. “Chandler—where are you, you bastard?” Not so much in anger as in frustration. Silence: he felt Polly’s fingers squeezing his.

  Chandler noticed a slight movement, a flutter, in the draperies, a pushing-out from the glass side. He held his breath mightily, stilled Polly’s hand: someone was coming in from the porch, moving slowly, carefully in the dark … There was no way to warn Raines and he was not absolutely sure he wanted to. Special Operations Executive … assassins, for all he knew. The drapery bulged, he felt it move against his leg, saw the shadow flitting in the moonlight not five feet from where he stood: the sense of someone struck him forcibly, the smell of a human being and the smell, incredibly unique, of oiled weaponry …

  “Chandler?” Raines called more loudly. “You there?”

  Gunfire rattled, loud and harsh, beside him, squirted across the room, deafening, like an explosion inside your head: the room lit up like a show window, for only an instant: Raines was seen in the flash, ducking back out of the doorway as it splintered and the hallway beyond filled with plaster dust from the slugs stitching their jagged way along the wall. The man firing the gun was only a black shadow ten feet in front of Chandler and Polly who wrapped themselves in drapery.

  With the flash of gunfire abruptly extinguished, Chandler felt the weight and pull of the drapery moving as several more men bulled their way through the French windows: three or four had joined the original intruder in the dark room and Chandler heard them bumping into one another. Raines, he knew, could have made hamburger out of them then and there but for one consideration … he was afraid that Chandler and Polly might be in the way. Chandler heard them puffing, heard a click. “Grenade,” someone said softly.

  Chandler grabbed Polly and with his free hand found the handle of a window: they were now entirely behind the long drapery, smelling the tobacco smell trapped in the fabric for so many years. The handle wouldn’t move: he felt with his fingertips for the button or lever to disengage the lock … finally found it, switched it, muffling any sound with the flat of his thumb, and moved the door open an inch. He wished there was a way to communicate with Polly but hand pressure had to suffice: he waited …

  Then came a grunt followed by the sound of something heavy bouncing on the carpet, rolling: the grenade … he was sure that everyone else was crouching behind the desk and the heavy chairs, but nothing other than the draperies protected him and Polly from the coming blast.

  Now! and he swung the door open and pulled Polly after him, onto the long porch …

  They had taken no more than three long strides across the stones toward the railing when the room exploded, the windows all shattered and flew outward, passed over and through and around them, glittering like clockwork silver birds in the moonlight …

  Chandler felt himself propelled forward by the blast, as if a large hand had been placed in the small of his back, slamming him against and then toppling him over the porch railing. They landed in the shrubbery, sprawled
half across one another, scratched and nicked but intact.

  Shouts echoed in the night: the grenade had apparently not made it through the doorway into the hall, but had hit the wall and bounced back into the room … screams of agony came from the room, a fire burned against an inside wall, the rattle of gunfire came: Chandler saw it in his mind, Raines leaping into the doorway, raking the wounded and dying with automatic rifle fire.

  He turned to Polly: “Can you make a run for it?” He felt mud clinging to the side of his face.

  She brushed dirt and leaves from her own face, looked up: “Sure, boss—I think we got ’em right where we want ’em.”

  He craned his neck, peered up at the balcony: the man was leaning over the railing, trying to see what had happened below. Polly reached through their railing and Chandler heard the clatter of a gun being drawn across the stones. The man on the balcony heard, too, and immediately loosed a fusillade of fire at the sound, chipping the cement as they ducked.

  “Can you use one of these?”

  “Is the Pope a Catholic?” he said. “Does a bear—sure, all the time … machine guns? Don’t be silly, almost never without one …”

  He took it and was surprised by how heavy it was, began crawling along the bottom of the porch, through shrubs and mud and the odd bit of broken glass. His back stung where he knew broken glass had chewed through his heavy sweater. The gunfire from the roof was not repeated. The flames in the room were flickering higher, shadows moved erratically: looking back into the house was like peering into a woodburning stove. Intermittently a gun went off. There was just no way of telling what the hell was actually going on.

  “Chandler?” a voice cried tiredly.

  “Christ, if they were in there, good luck to them,” came a faint reply. The voice sounded vaguely familiar, weary. But the conversation was cut short by another explosion.