The force of their laughter had to die. It did eventually, and both men, subsiding, their eyes almost filled with tears, gazed at each other across the room. Peter Cowles had sagged limply to the big bed, another four-poster, but along masculine lines.
“You had me going for a second there, scout,” Guy Warmsby chuckled, shaking his head. “I should have known better.”
“I did, huh?” Peter Cowles gasped for breath. “How?”
“Quite an act. All that guff about Kathy. And Anne Fenner. The outraged sibling. You should go on the stage. I know what was really bothering you now.”
“Tell me, Master,” Peter Cowles was grinning broadly. “What?”
“You were very much afraid,” Guy Warmsby said with sudden dead seriousness, “that I’d give up everything for Anne Fenner. The Caves, our hunt—the Dutch country—all the things so dear to your ghoulish heart. So stop worrying. I almost challenged you, you know.”
“Swords or pistols at dawn?”
“Something like that. Though a blunderbuss ought to be used on the likes of you. You don’t care a fig about Kathy. Or the ladybird from Boston, as you choose to call her.”
Peter Cowles stopped smiling. His face was now cast in a mold of utter solemnity. Grave earnestness. He almost reached out his hand as if he would touch Guy Warmsby, but he couldn’t. The bed was too far away. But then he smirked again, and the moment was lost. Guy Warmsby watched it disappear and had to wonder all over again about his closest friend. Yes, when you got right down to facts, Peter Cowles was his comrade. His buddy. His old schoolmate. Chum. Crony. What-have-you.
“No woman, Guy,” Peter Cowles said with more gravity than hilarity, “should ever come between us. They aren’t worth it. None of them are. Isn’t that right?”
“Check. It won’t happen, man. Put it out of your mind.”
“Then I’m glad to hear you say so. And what about ladybird from Boston?” Peter Cowles was strangely concerned on the subject of Anne Fenner and Guy Warmsby’s intentions for her.
“I do have some plans for her, Peter. But nothing that need bother you. After all, she’s a very pretty sparrow.”
“I like sparrows that fall,” Peter Cowles snorted.
“We are thinking along similar lines again,” Guy Warmsby smiled. “But remember what I said about that tree. Something could be going on around here, and we want to watch that, too. I’m still not too convinced it was an accident.”
“So talk to Carteret tonight when he returns. Then drop it all, okay? We want to get on with what we came for, don’t we?”
“That too.”
“Now you’re talking,” Peter Cowles chortled. His watery blue eyes lit up with happiness. “That’s the old Guy. You really had me worried, you know that?”
“You shouldn’t have. I always know what I’m doing.”
As he did, indeed.
Guy Warmsby had led a very successful life, up to this precise moment, by knowing what he wanted and going after it. And not letting anybody or anything come between himself and what he truly desired.
Peter Cowles did not have to know all there was to know, did he? There are some things one has to keep to himself. For the good of all concerned. As well as the more important good of one’s self.
It was the very first law of nature. Survival of the Fittest. Guy Warmsby had learned that lesson almost from the cradle, when he had instinctively known how to make his mother pick him up to comfort him by crying loud enough and long enough. After that, charming women had become second nature to him. No woman had ever beat him at his own game.
Katharine Cowles, for all her great weapons, couldn’t.
Nor would this Anne Fenner.
As delicious and womanly as she was.
“Peter,” Guy Warmsby said, yawning, “let’s have another drink and see about some lunch, eh?”
“Yes, sir.” Peter Cowles snapped with mock servility and sprang to do his bidding.
There was a good bottle of Scotch on the desk, complete with two glasses and a bucket of ice chips. Peter Cowles was very happy. It was going to be like old times again.
Him and Guy against the world.
Against all the witches and witchcraft—and women in all Creation. He was so delighted with the way things had turned out, after a very bad start this morning, he felt like singing out loud.
So he did.
The room filled with his badly-rendered but enthusiastically delivered choruses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.…”
Guy Warmsby, secure in his comfortable chair, laughed softly to himself. Every king has to have his court jester. His merrymaker.
As Peter Cowles was very certainly his.
Poor, laughable, predictable Peter Cowles.
And Katharine Cowles was his queen.
Even if in name only.
Late afternoon daylight tinged the Kragmoor countryside with pale, almost lambent rays of grey. The dull sun rode uneasily behind an overcast sky whose intermittent clouds blocked its complete emergence into the sight of man. Craghold House, remote and bleak on its promontory of rock, stood in Gothic starkness and grandeur. There was a fierce bite and tang to the October air. The naked cypresses and oaks and elms were like a mammoth graveyard of sentinels—a wooden army of monoliths, ready to do battle against an unseen enemy.
Against all the hosts of Darkness.
And shrouded legend.
Hears A Warning
“Ah, Mr. Carteret at last.”
“Good evening, Mr. Warmsby. I trust you enjoyed your dinner. We don’t get as much variety in the menu as we would like to. But then, we can never always get what we want, can we?”
“Such as fresh eggs for breakfast. Anything new on the chicken crisis, Carteret? Or is it oatmeal again tomorrow?”
“Alas, I’m afraid it will take a day or two. You understand. But never fear. We will have eggs shortly.”
“Glad to hear it. Enjoy your trip to town?”
“Rather.”
“How do you get to town, Carteret? Fly? I haven’t seen any transportation around here other than the local taxi service and the Caddy I and my friends came in.”
“I—ah—manage, Mr. Warmsby. I manage.”
“I’m sure you do. Even if it is a five mile walk. You’re a rare bird, Carteret. I suppose you know that, too.”
“That is for you to say, Mr. Warmsby, not I.”
“So I’ve said it, haven’t I?”
“Yes, you have.”
Guy Warmsby had lingered in the lobby while Peter Cowles had escorted his sister and Anne Fenner into the main room. Dinner had been a pleasant enough affair. Anne Fenner seemed to have recovered from her bad time with the tree, and Guy was very pleased to see how Kathy was getting on with her. Also, Peter Cowles had been in splendid spirits, talking for once without a nasty edge to his words and even favoring Miss Fenner with his own clever parody of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game,” which he retitled “Take Me Out To The Hex Caves.” Yes, Peter could be great good fun when he stopped acting surly. Even Anne Fenner seemed more relaxed with him than she had been earlier that day. Lunch had been too brief a session even to recall. Sandwiches, a buffet, and urns of coffee and tea—a ridiculous amount for only four guests, but there it was. Guy Warmsby had every intention of making his eagerly-looked-forward-to trip to the Caves of Hex. Anne Fenner wanted to go along, too, which was fine with him. But once he had spotted the tall, gaunt figure of Carteret behind the Registration Desk counter, deeply immersed within the pages of a thin blue-leather tome with the title, Can This Be Lycanthropy?, it seemed as good a time as any to corner the man. Besides, he wanted to make some arrangements for a picnic basket or box lunches in case they should overstay themselves on the expedition.
Thanks to his little scene with Peter Cowles before lunch, Guy had no intention of discussing Anne Fenner’s misadventure, and his own suspicions, with Carteret. But he had not reckoned on Hilda’s efficiency, indicated to him by Carteret’s next few words. Kathari
ne Cowles had not as yet revealed the details of her intimate talk with Anne Fenner to either of her “two men.”
“Hilda informs me you wanted to see me, Mr. Warmsby? Some matter or other?”
“It was nothing that couldn’t wait.”
“Then—” Carteret’s smile was bemused, his eyes half-lidded, and Guy Warmsby experienced a sudden irritation with the man—with all his mysterious ways and manners, and Old World charm-school sort of courtesy. Rather peevishly, he snapped back at Carteret.
“I’ve decided tomorrow’s the day for the Caves. There’ll be the four of us; Miss Fenner is joining us. Set us up some box lunches or other, will you? No telling when we’ll get back.”
“No telling, indeed,” Carteret agreed with flat emphasis. “Anything can happen in this wilderness.”
“I suppose,” Guy Warmsby sighed, angry with himself for a show of temper. “We’ll leave right after breakfast, with or without eggs. Anybody find out what was really bothering those hens?”
Carteret shrugged. His expression was free of anything suggestive.
“I suppose not,” Warmsby concluded. “By the way, Mr. Carteret. I do feel it only fair to tell you that the cypress trees are falling a bit earlier than usual for this time of year.”
Feeling he had scored a point on Carteret, Guy Warmsby turned on his heel and stalked back into the main room to rejoin his friends.
Had he remained to look, he would have been surprised to see the new expression on Carteret’s face.
The manager’s wolfish smile lit up all of his features. For once, his teeth showed—long, white, very even teeth, teeth that made him look like a predator, a sleek beast.
Then the smile was gone, and blandly, untroubled, Carteret returned once more to the pages of his book. The subject matter was the most engrossing thing in the universe to him. On all this earth.
Lycanthropy—the study of werewolves and its accompanying legend, history and fact. There was only one other subject that embraced Carteret’s interest with nearly the same amount of zeal and fervor:
Vampirism.
For Carteret, it was as much fun as looking up one’s family tree.
“Oh, Anne. Can’t I tell them?”
“Please—not now. Not tonight. I’m sick of the whole subject today. Maybe tomorrow, when we’re off on that hike. All right?”
“All right. It’s your ghost story. But you are an idiot, you know. I’m prejudiced, of course, but those two Johnnies over there in the comer sipping brandy and telling dirty jokes are two very brilliant characters. I’m sure they could get to the bottom of all this. If there is a bottom.”
“I’m sure they could, too, but I don’t want to be the damsel in distress every second I’m with all of you. Please understand. You may know more about men than I do, Kathy, but I do know they prefer us strong and silent. My problem can keep another day.”
“Suits me—if that is how it must be. Look at them. Peter, with his wit and sarcasm. Guy, with his looks and his money.”
“Money?”
“Yes, money. Didn’t I mention it before? I see I didn’t. Well, since we’re going to be rivals apparently, let me put all the cards on the table. Guy Warmsby is the sole remaining heir to a fortune—silver mine, oil wells, or some such. Right now, he’s living off the monthly yield of some uncle of his who’s over ninety and slated to cash in his chips any old day now. Yes, the boy has everything.”
“But how fantastic.”
“Too true, nonetheless. You can’t afford a hobby like amateur archaeology unless you have the coin of the realm, my girl.”
“I suppose not.”
“You suppose right. Ah, me.”
Katharine Cowles peered across the top of the brandy snifter she was rotating between her slender fingers and sighed theatrically, her eyes filled with what she felt for Guy Warmsby, who was still engaged in a heated discussion with Peter Cowles about the merits of Parsee or some such. Peter was back in cutting form, ripping out the jibes and intellectual jeers. The big room rang with their voices, as it had that morning.
Anne Fenner could not look at Katharine Cowles. She was feeling a guilty flush. Guy Warmsby had become someone she liked more and more with each passing moment. Lunch and dinner, with the two seated across from each other, had been filled with all those intimate, fleeting little glances and nuances that tended to upset the balance of her thinking. It was much too soon after a George Twemble to meet a Guy Warmsby—especially when Katharine Cowles had turned out to be such a wonderful sport about everything.
On top of all the mystery in Craghold House, it was too much for her. Like now—this happy scene: the blazing fireplace, the warm and comfortable room, the dark night without. Who could believe in terror and horror in such a delightful atmosphere? She was hard put to do so—in spite of everything that had happened in almost twenty-four hours. Even the curious Hex symbol on the plaque over the merry brick hearth seemed no more than a very interesting objet d’art at this moment. This second. Or was it the warmth of the brandy in her hands and her stomach that was doing most of her thinking for her?
That, too, was hard to say.
A clock somewhere in the hotel struck the hour of ten.
The tones were hollow, rhythmic, and yet as clear as a bell.
Ten o’clock had come again to Craghold House.
Another night in another time.
Another place.
Anne Fenner, caught up in the pleasure of the present, forgot the past and contemplated the future.
The immediate past and immediate future.
Both those periods of time were on the verge of once again catapulting a young woman from Boston into a land of terror.
A land too close for comfort.
A land locked in nightmare.
And Death.
Along the darkened shores of Craghold Lake, with the sun long since gone and a thick curtain of night lying over the earth, an observer or a solitary stroller would have been hard put to see his hand in front of his face. Yet, curiously enough, there was a moon. A full one, whose magnificent dimensions and clarity were extremely visible when it rode past a bank of racing dark clouds. When it did so, an incredibly shimmering moon-wash bathed the land in an almost celestial light. No, an unholy one. For such depths and extremes of illumination did not seem normal or natural in the brooding precincts of Craghold Lake. The tall, gnarled cypress which had fallen that morning still lay like a fallen giant across the bank on the shoreline closest to Craghold House. It seemed more than ever like a creature from another time, another period in history. A dinosaur of wood—immobile and mute. One that might never rise again. Not to grow—or to kill.
The woods were still, the trees shadowy and vaguely massed, like some hidden army ready to spring with the next appearance of the moon. Nowhere in the thickets or the surrounding terrain could be heard so much as a cricket or a night hawk. Or anything four-legged that used the earth for burrows and holes. It was as if this land was dead—eternally so—something that not even the coming of a new Spring would ever change. It was quite as if nothing would ever grow in Kragmoor country. Not this section of it, at any rate.
Nothing, that is, except terror and horror and the great unknown that had spawned this land in the long ago, making it accursed and legendary and altogether inexplicable to strangers.
The moon reappeared suddenly, beaming down, a great orifice of light, washing the earth with grey, grisly shafts of silvery illumination. In its brief passage from one wall of clouds to another, something was revealed along the cragged shoreline of Craghold Lake. Only momentarily, only briefly—then the moon vanished again. Had anyone been watching they would have seen the tall and solitary figure of a man, caped and somehow awesome, stalking like a specter among the rocky boundaries on the northern perimeter of the lake. The figure was somehow obscene, ugly, its very presence suggestive of something evil and Godless. The entire aspect of the caped silhouette, stark against the greyness of the rocky bank of the
lake, was like something from another world.
When the moon once again broke free of the clouds, flooding the ground as before, the spectral figure was gone.
The landscape was empty and desolate as lifelessness itself.
The man—or whatever it was—had disappeared completely.
Any of the current guests at Craghold House, had they been present to catch that flashing glimpse of the strange figure, might have convinced themselves that what they had seen was Carteret. Carteret, that mysterious fellow, out on one of his solitary rambles in the night. Perhaps so. The man was exactly the sort to fancy such a nocturnal pastime as being normal enough under any circumstances. After all, what’s in a walk along Craghold Lake after dark?
Any of the denizens of Craghold and its Environs, particularly the Dutch farmers in the valley beyond Goblin Wood, would have shaken their heads, utterly certain that the tall and gaunt figure could only be one man. One thing. One apparition.
Colonel Hendrik Van Ruys.
The Craghold Ghost.
The specter that had stalked the land since the date of the Colonel’s mysterious and violent death within the very walls of Craghold House itself. Nothing could have dissuaded them from such an opinion. No one who had lived in Kragmoor country long enough had ever had to read Shakespeare to sincerely approve of Hamlet’s warning to Horatio. One did not need fancy books or higher learning to understand the impact and common sense of such good words.
There surely were more things in Heaven and Earth than were ever dreamed of in any man’s philosophy.
Anne Fenner had retired for the evening.
The pleasant gathering in the main room had broken up for the night; around eleven o’clock, everyone had repaired to their rooms, filled with friendship for each other, possibly romance, and a note of high anticipation over the outing to The Caves of Hex the next morning. Guy Warmsby had entered Number Twenty-Four, Peter Cowles had reeled in a rather tipsy fashion into Number Nineteen, and Katharine Cowles had majestically vanished behind the portal of Number Twenty. But before Guy Warmsby had popped into his own room, he had seen Anne Fenner to her door and, without even leading up to it, had quite suddenly folded her in his arms and kissed her very thoroughly. Then he had released her, turned, and gone on down the hall. Out of breath, momentarily thrilled and stunned, Anne Fenner had entered her room in a daze. But she did remember to lock the door of Number Seventeen. With Guy Warmsby’s touch still very hot and memorable on her lips, Anne had been further delighted to note, before she snapped the lights on, that there was nothing untoward about the appearance of the room. All things were as they should be—naturally dark and silhouetted from the brief light at the big window. There was no suggestion of the silvery, glazed and glittering phenomenon of the night before.
The Craghold Legacy Page 7
