Anne Fenner’s gift, too?
That remained to be seen.
It was a continual source of amazement to her that when she was with Guy Warmsby, all thoughts of ghosts, vampires and glittering terrors in the night seemed like trifles, and perhaps—things that had never even happened. The idea of packing her bags and quitting Craghold House had become intolerable for her almost from the moment she had first laid eyes on him.
The Caves of Hex!
She was also sure that, if he had asked her, she would have accompanied him to the North Pole. Yes, Love was a powerful potion, as potent as anything like this so-called Hex.
“Guy?”
He turned, casting a glance at her, but kept on moving at a brisk pace. His eyes were slitted, thoughtful, and when he answered her, he sounded abstract and vague, as if his thoughts had been a million miles away. They had, but she could not know that.
“Yes, Anne?”
“Is it very far?”
“The Caves?”
She nodded, almost stumbling on a clod of shrub, but she caught herself, grinning like a tenderfoot.
“A good hour’s walk. We ought to get there long before noon. We’re lucky; it’s a good day for a hike. No rain, not too cold. Perfect expedition weather.”
“You really are looking forward to this, aren’t you?”
His chuckle was not self-conscious.
“You would too. We’re going to stumble into history, turn a page back to the past—when people in ancient times gathered in these rocky hideaways to burn incense and candles and make unholy devotionals to nameless gods. Or just to the Devil. Well—you’ll see—you may become so engrossed in the subject, you’ll get as hooked as I am. It’s like Craghold House itself. That place is a museum. I’d love to dig under its floorboards, excavate all the way down about fifty feet. Who knows what’s under that spot? The old Colonel made it a Gothic house after it had been a Victorian beauty, but the rumor remains that our mysterious hotel is standing exactly over a site that was once an ancient Indian burial ground. Did you know that?”
She shook her head. They were progressing rapidly now, having detoured around Craghold Lake, striking out toward a dun-colored, low-lying bank of rising earth. She could see an immense grandeur of grey-green foliage and shrubbery—Goblin Wood. It seemed only several hundred yards ahead, but she was sure it was much farther than that. One could see very far on a clear day, and she was certain this was the case now, just as the distant smoke-hazed Shanokin Range looked close enough to hit with a thrown rock. Actually, it was many miles away.
Behind them, further back than Anne would have thought, Peter Cowles suddenly bellowed in a loud, annoyed voice.
“Hey, Guy! Slow down, you two! This isn’t the Olympics, you know! Have a heart—”
“Roger!” Katharine Cowles called out in her clear and ringing soprano. She too sounded faintly irritated. A danger sign, Anne thought quickly. Deliberately, she slowed her pace.
Guy Warmsby chuckled again and turned to wave a hand at his two friends, with a gesture that had “slowpokes!” written all over it. But he too broke stride and shortened his step. There was no rush, really. The Caves of Hex had been discovered at their present location in something like 1802, and they would remain there until the next Atom Bomb, probably. And perhaps, long after that.
“That’s what I don’t understand, Guy,” Anne Fenner suddenly said as if she had read his mind. “If the Caves are such a big thing, why aren’t they a tourist come-on? You know, with the buying of tickets, souvenirs, people on duty in uniforms or costumes?”
“Anne, you are naive.” His tone was suddenly superior.
They were lingering now as the Cowles scrambled to catch up with them. Guy Warmsby indolently plucked a sapling from a long branch extending before his face, dangling over the pathway.
“I don’t understand,” Anne said, stifling her sudden anger.
“Nobody wants to pay to be frightened, Anne. This country isn’t proud of its Caves. It’s an unholy blight. An eye-sore, even. Certain historical societies have wanted to buy up the place, all rights, but the local authorities don’t want any publicity paid to a shameful chapter in Kragmoor history. You can see that, can’t you?”
“Then you’re saying,” she said very slowly, her heart suddenly bumping with apprehension, “that the Caves of Hex are dangerous—”
“Exactly. We enter at our own risk. It’s unhallowed ground. It could topple anytime at all. The walls buckle and fall in. And nobody will take any of the responsibility for what might happen if anyone who enters the cave does get a hex put on them—” He broke off and stared down at her, suddenly surprised. “You aren’t afraid to go in, are you? I know you’ve had a bad time but—the choice is yours.”
She tilted her chin.
“What can happen to me if I’m with you, Guy Warmsby?”
“Nothing,” he smiled. “And that’s a fact. The only danger you run with me is that I continually have this urge to take you in my arms and smother your lips with kisses.”
Anne Fenner blushed, the crimson shooting all through her, and she averted her face—just in time to keep Katharine Cowles from seeing the tell-tale flush. Kathy and Peter Cowles had finally come puffing up from the rear, and Guy Warmsby once more stalked ahead to set the pace. Anne’s ears rang with his words, and her heart was beating more from that than the exertions of the hike. Katharine Cowles flung a sharp glance at her, then smiled, and Peter snorted another remark to the effect that long-legged people were always taking unfair advantage of their less fortunate fellow men. Anne stumbled on ahead to trail close to Guy Warmsby. His tall impressive figure was moving as gracefully and surely as ever toward the distant mass of Goblin Wood. The Caves of Hex seemed to lie somewhere near or beyond that fixed point of Kragmoor terrain.
Overhead, leaden skies showed dully. The sun moved as they walked. Pale amber rays tinted the topmost pinnacles of trees and foliage. Off toward the horizon, a jet trail lay across the heavens like a ribbon uncurled. The unheard plane could not be seen, either.
Peter Cowles grunted, squinting in the pale sunlight.
“Maybe Carteret was on the level about sonic booms. There’s a jet. Maybe those chickens were startled out of doing what comes naturally. Huh?”
Guy Warmsby shrugged from his position ahead of Peter.
“Very doubtful, old son.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning dear Carteret tells us exactly what makes good listening. If what he said were true, the entire Eastern seaboard, not to mention the whole country, would have an eggless diet. Sonic booms, my foot.”
Peter Cowles laughed, his blue eyes shining.
“Old Carteret is a fox, eh?”
“Something like that,” Guy Warmsby agreed. Katharine Cowles muttered, “Or a vampire” and immediately regretted it, because Anne Fenner, directly in front of her, heard the remark. “Oh, I’m sorry, Anne! What a dumb thing to say—”
“Forget it,” Anne Fenner said, putting a smile on her face.
But it was easier said than done, unfortunately.
As they pushed into the woods still farther, with the sun gradually warming up the morning, she couldn’t push the phantoms that Kathy’s careless remark had evoked out of her mind. Now it all came back to her. Last night—that awful moment in the room; the night before, with its terrible apparition of a man long dead; the incident of the tree falling—all of it came back with a rush. Suddenly the day wasn’t cheerful any more. The sun had lost whatever brightness it possessed. Suddenly she felt cold all over.
Carteret. What was he really? Man or ghoul?
Wentworth. Was there really a Wentworth, or was he a creation of Carteret’s? For some foul, unearthly, evil purpose?
Hilda (whom she had at last seen that very morning)—what was Hilda? Who was Hilda? Why would any father let his young daughter work in a place like Craghold House? Unchaperoned—with a man like Carteret as her superior. Or—Lord knew what else!
And the ghastly moon-washed room.
What had that truly been?
Anne Fenner fought against the powers of darkness and fear, trying to gain a foothold in her logic, and her plain common sense.
No!
Such things as she was thinking could not be.
There had to be some other, some simpler explanation.
But what?
Guy Warmsby forged ahead of her and she followed, her inner thoughts and emotions all aflame and uneasy. Behind her, Katharine and Peter Cowles trailed, keeping pace now.
The sun continued to move. Slowly.
Never in all her life had Anne Fenner wanted anything more than to be back in Boston, studying piano under the tutelage of Professor Aleski. Music had filled her life once. It ought to again.
Not even a Guy Warmsby seemed able to eradicate the terror and horror that was filling her mind and soul at this moment.
Almost blindly, unseeing now, she strode the trail that led to The Caves of Hex, somehow convinced that she was keeping a rendezvous with a destiny she would just as soon have avoided.
One careless remark had dropped her down to the basest of all human levels—the plateau that made of anyone an animal:
Fear.
Fear, the Great Equalizer among kings and slaves, nations and hamlets, intellects and morons—men and women. No matter what class, what color, what creed.
What courage.
Anne Fenner was a thoroughly frightened young lady.
The great Unknown had closed in on her, surrounding her on all sides, driving her into the darkest corners of her mind.
In Craghold House, Hilda Warnsdorf was in a quandary.
At least she had gotten the guests off on their proposed hike, as according to Mr. Carteret’s instructions for the lunches—she had found his message on her desk in the office, a terse note in his flowing script suggesting the need for same—but now she didn’t know what to do. She had wanted to telephone her parents about her intentions to return to town that night before going home to the farm, but as soon as she picked up the black instrument on Carteret’s desk, it became rapidly obvious that the line was dead. Not so much as a hum or buzz could she hear. Not only could she not call Mamma and Pappa, she would also be unable to contact the phone company to fix the thing!
What to do?
Hilda had had her heart set on stopping in Heimsohn’s to talk to Wilhemina Wragge about taking a weekend trip to New York on the coming Thanksgiving Day holiday, but now it would have to be delayed. But a girl had to plan those things well ahead, or all was usually not possible. Heimsohn’s was a drug store in which Wilhemina worked as a salesgirl, and tomorrow was Saturday, her day off. Hilda sighed unhappily as she riffled some index cards in a file tray. Hilda did not like to change her plans.
Several facts were very obvious to Hilda Warnsdorf.
Mr. Carteret was away from the hotel and she had no idea when he would return. She never did, alas.
Since there was only one telephone in the hotel, she was cut off from contact with the outside world and could not leave her desk, come what may. No matter what.
It was useless to try and find Wentworth, as she had never had any luck in spotting the fellow in all her six months at the job. Still, the luggage was always taken care of somehow, the rooms got done, and even some meals got prepared. Hilda was somehow certain that, once she had left Carteret’s note in the heated Dutch kitchen, Wentworth had popped up to prepare the big box lunches. It was all so queer, you know? But Hilda Warnsdorf never bothered her pretty head about such things. It wasn’t her place to do so, and that was that. She had counted herself very lucky when Mr. Carteret had accepted her for the position of bookkeeper upon her graduation from Kragmoor Central High School. That had been an honor.
Hilda was very impressed with Mr. Carteret.
She was a little afraid of him, too.
But since he never bothered her, always treated her with kindness and respect, her fear of him resided in that neighborhood in which a young impressionable girl finds a dark and sinister-seeming man very romantically attractive. So Hilda stayed on at Craghold, with all its queerness and mysteries, and loved every minute of it. In fact, she was the envy of all her girlfriends. Ja, ja!
Still, such a peculiar hotel, Craghold House!
Around noon, a Western Union telegram was delivered by automobile. Hilda Warnsdorf signed for it, instructed the messenger to please call the phone company for her when he got back to town, and placed the square yellow envelope in Guy Warmsby’s Number Twenty-Four pigeonhole in the rack behind the Registration Desk. Hilda thought nothing more of the telegram. She was still wondering if the phone would be repaired in time for her to call her parents so that she could arrange to talk to Wilhemina Wragge that night. She also hoped that Mr. Carteret might return earlier than usual. Perhaps he would be nice enough to let her off a little sooner that day. That would be nice. Very nice.
The afternoon dragged on—quietly—the silence of the big hotel broken only by the tolling of the Grandfather’s Clock in the little alcove as it signalled the passing hours.
Hilda remained at her desk in the office, with the door open, while she fixed up Mr. Carteret’s desk, sharpened some pencils and generally kept herself busy. It was when the clock struck two that she became suddenly aware of something and looked up from the desk. A long dark shadow filled the threshold of the doorway.
Frock coat, dark pants, black beard, rounded hat.
Hilda Warnsdorf’s initial reaction was one of relief, rather than shock at having someone enter the room so quietly—quieter than a ghost, on cat feet, with barely a ripple to mark the passage of booted feet across the carpeted lobby floor.
“Oh! Preacher. It is you—”
“Yes, Hilda Warnsdorf, it is I.”
Preacher Podney did not move from the threshold. He raised his long dark arm and extended it toward the girl behind the desk, a bony and prominent forefinger probing the space between door and desk.
“What can I do for you, Preacher? There is no one here, now. Mr. Carteret—”
“I know, my child. It is why I have come at this time. It would not do for outsiders and unbelievers to hear what I have to say to the daughter of Warnsdorf.”
Hilda blinked. She was a little taken aback, but also she had to try not to giggle. Preacher Podney was such a queer man, always talking as if he was reading from a book. Such a solemn man—who never smiled, who never joked, who never—
“Do not mock me, Hilda Warnsdorf. I have come to bestow on you the greatest honor and glory that can befall a woman of Kragmoor. Hear me well, child. Tonight, when the moon is full and the night is dark, you will go to your great reward!”
Hilda Warnsdorf got up from behind the desk. Sudden fear and uneasiness played leap-frog with her senses. The tall and gloomy man in the doorway no longer seemed so amusing. His words were thundering now. His manner was so—frightening.
“Preacher Podney, tell me what is it you have to say. I am busy with my work. There are things that must be done here—”
“Yes!” he rumbled, again slicing her speech in half as if with a knife. “Things must be done! But not here. Elsewhere. In Goblin Wood this night. Come, daughter of Warnsdorf—come with me. And take your proper place as Lucifer’s Bride of Darkness!”
Hilda did not have to hear any more. Long-forgotten, half-remembered things from her childhood came rushing out of the past, flood-tide. Suddenly the room was like a trap, a prison, a suffocating oven of grisly nightmare and death.
“Let me go—let me go—I will not go with you—”
She tried to push past him, go around him, hurl herself from the gaunt and terrifying spectacle of his darkness, his ancient evil. His tall statue of a figure was blocking her path, his gleaming eyes suddenly kindled with a passion she had never seen in them before. Desperately, she launched herself through the narrow opening his body left in the doorway. She screamed as she did so—a great, wrenching cry.
Hilda Warnsdorf was engulfed.
Tall shadows closed in on her, trapping her, enveloping her. Pressing her down in a world of darkness.
A universe of horror.
In which six pallbearers were carrying her off to her dark and dank and dismal grave in the wilderness.
Somewhat earlier that same day, four worn and weary hikers suddenly emerged from a forest of shrubbery and lurched to a gasping halt, trying to catch their breaths, to relieve the thickness and closeness that they had experienced while stumbling and pulling themselves through the mass of foliage that was known as Goblin Wood. Anne Fenner had hated the fact that they had to go through it to reach their destination. But Guy Warmsby had insisted that it would save them a full hour’s time if they did so instead of skirting the natural obstacle. Katharine Cowles had loathed it also, even to the extent of blurting an unladylike oath when a random sapling had struck her across the cheek and a bramble had rented the knee of her slacks. Peter Cowles had grumbled quite a bit, too.
Only Guy Warmsby had said nothing, pushing on.
In the clearing, his three friends eyed him with mingled expressions of mock scorn, weariness, and questioning amusement. Peter Cowles spoke for all of them when he barked at Guy Warmsby in his old, familiar, cutting way. Nothing was in view but more trees.
“Well, Daniel Boone? Where is it? Under a rock?”
Guy Warmsby laughed, but his expression was grim, his eyes staring upwards, past the top of Peter Cowles’ head.
“Turn around,” he said in a curious, awed voice. “See for yourselves. The Caves of Hex. As advertised by yours truly.”
They turned around.
The Craghold Legacy Page 10
