The House of the Wolf

by Basil Copper

  ‘I am somewhat disappointed at the lack of response to my invitation tonight, Professor,’ he began hesitantly. ‘I had envisaged that most of your colleagues would have been here.’

  Coleridge gave his host a reassuring smile.

  ‘The majority of them are simply tired out with the strenuous day we have enjoyed. I am sure you will find no lack of enthusiasm in the morning.’

  The Count smiled too. Coleridge realised he had gone to immense trouble in his arrangements, and he wished above all to emphasise that everyone gathered at the Castle had come there simply because of their tremendous interest and application to their specialised subjects. They would hardly have travelled so far and in such bleak conditions had it been otherwise.

  The Count may have sensed this, because he became more animated as time went by and he presently rose courteously to pour his guests coffee. He was still over at the side-table when Abercrombie, who had been studying his companion closely, observed quietly, ‘You look rather pale, Professor.’

  ‘It is nothing,’ Coleridge replied carelessly. ‘I feel the cold a good deal, and, as I have just observed, it has been a tiring day.’

  Abercrombie shrugged.

  ‘Even so, Coleridge, I should not overdo it. I understand you drove yourself rather hard at the Congress.’

  It was true, Coleridge knew, and he was grateful for the big Scot’s consideration and concern. He was a medical man, of course, as well as a scholar, and it was obvious that the incident in the Weapons Hall a short while before had shaken Coleridge more than he cared to admit, though there might be a mundane explanation for what he had seen and heard.

  The heavy revolver made a strong pressure against his shoulder muscles as he turned in his chair, and he hoped it would not be too obvious to his companions.

  He was spared any further conversation on the subject of his health by the Count’s return with the coffee cups, and a few moments later there came the clattering of feet on the stairs and the door opened to admit the animated figures of Shaw, Sullivan, and Parker.

  ‘I understand we are to expect something special for the opening ceremony tomorrow, Professor.’

  It was Shaw, with his silver hair and drooping moustache shining like metal in the lamplight, who had propounded the question. He sat, coffee cup on the table in front of him, blinking in scholarly anticipation.

  ‘Things will hardly be that formal,’ said Coleridge modestly.

  He noticed his fingers were trembling slightly as he put his cup back in the saucer. He had not told his host or anyone else of the shadow at the Weapons Hall door or, even more unnerving, the faint clicking scratch as something went down the corridor.

  It was too reminiscent of what Nadia Homolky fancied she had heard outside her room. He wondered what could be keeping Menlow. Something that had started out as a comparatively trivial inquiry was beginning to nag at his nerves.

  He became aware that Sullivan, the middle-aged savant with the greying beard, was also looking at him critically. He still wore the suit of dark brown plus-fours he had affected at breakfast the previous day and which made him look as if he were bound for a Scottish grouse-moor.

  ‘Your opening lecture will be on lycanthropy, of course?’ the latter said.

  Coleridge forced a smile.

  ‘It is my specialised subject. And we all begin in those areas, do we not.’

  There was a chuckle of agreement from George Parker, the big black-bearded expert on witchcraft, among other things.

  ‘I shall certainly stick to my own brief in my initial talk,’ he told the company. ‘I am giving fair notice of that now.’

  The Count joined in the subdued amusement that ran round the table.

  ‘I do not think anyone here is likely to usurp another’s special preserve,’ Coleridge went on.

  He turned to the Count, aware that there was more than normal interest in their deliberations of the morrow. Unlike the highly publicised and extremely crowded Congress they had recently completed in Pest, this private gathering, in addition to being more informal, was also more interesting in some respects.

  It was an occasion – there had been others in America, England, and France during the past ten years – where more controversial topics were aired; sometimes, even outrageous hobby-horses ridden.

  It was a programme where daring ideas, outré theories, and bizarre conjectures could be expanded upon without ridicule and, usually, without prejudiced reaction from one’s colleagues.

  The Count, as Coleridge well knew, had done an enormous amount over the years in an amateur capacity to advance these highly specialised interests, and everyone gathered at the Castle for this specific purpose was in his debt.

  That reminded Coleridge of a promise made that morning and which now appeared so far distant. So much seemed to have happened to him since his arrival a bare twenty-four hours before, the days felt at least twice as long as they did anywhere else. It was something to do with their strange venue, more with the fresh impressions, new faces, and crowded itinerary; each experience pressed upon the last.

  The girl had a good deal to do with it, Coleridge thought, and not only because of her fears and suppositions: the fresh beauty of her face came between the professor and the pages of his books. His scholarship seemed to have lost something of its savour since he had met her.

  There was a deep silence in the room now as each man considered what he might be saying at their first session of the morning. Coleridge cleared his throat, aware that the eyes of everyone in the lecture room were turned upon him.

  ‘I asked you about the history of the Castle this morning, Count. You promised to tell me something of it.’

  He raked his glance about the room. Homolky came over from the fireplace and looked at Coleridge with hooded eyes.

  ‘So I did,’ he said softly.

  Coleridge felt a moment of quick discomfiture. He bit his lip.

  ‘I take it you have no objection to speaking in front of my colleagues?’

  The Count shook his head. He was smiling now.

  ‘By no means. We are all folklorists here, are we not.’

  He went to sit in a big carved chair at the head of the table. The room was very quiet apart from the crackling of the fire, and the rest of the Castle seemed to be lapped in a profound sleep.

  Homolky shrugged.

  ‘My home is known among the people of Lugos as The House of the Wolf. As some of you may have noticed, a wolf’s head is the motif of some of the furnishings, notably the large and elaborate firedogs which embellish a number of the great fireplaces in the main rooms. It is also part of my ancient family coat of arms.’

  He had his eyes fixed on a fragment of blazing log which had fallen from the firebasket and smouldered smokily on the hearth, away from the main mass of the fire.

  ‘The association relates not only, as might be supposed, to the native Eastern European wolf, our old friend Canis lupus. The derivation comes also from a certain savage ancestor of mine, who enlarged the present building and had a somewhat fiendish reputation for cruelty, to put it mildly.’

  To Coleridge it seemed as though the faintest shiver ran through the Count’s tall frame.

  ‘He was an extraordinary man,’ the Count went on almost dreamily. ‘A genius in some ways, a degenerate monster in others. A man of great culture and artistic taste, a gifted amateur painter, an inventor of ingenious machinery that was long before his own time. But within the same envelope there resided a creature who could put his enemies to death with all the perverted refinement that only a sadist of the grand class could encompass.’

  There was a deep silence in the room now, broken only by the faint crackle of the fire. The Count’s voice was so low that Coleridge had to strain his ears.

  ‘He developed instruments i
n the dungeons below this Castle that were so delicately adjusted, so finely balanced, that his enemies took weeks to die.’

  Once again Coleridge had the vivid image of the mutilated majordomo who had greeted him on arrival at the Castle, and he was hard put to it to repress a tremor.

  ‘I could show you things . . .’ the Count went on absently, his eyes fixed as though on far distances.

  ‘Do you mean to say that all this . . . equipment . . . still exists?’ put in Abercrombie.

  The Count nodded.

  ‘My father showed it to me once. It is a sort of black museum where every horror known to man in the Middle Ages was practised unchecked. No-one knows how many men and women perished there.’

  He smiled faintly.

  ‘Of course, this is for your ears only. I never discuss the matter with the ladies of my family, though they know the general outlines of the story. My ancestor’s portrait hangs somewhere in the Castle. I will not specify where, as the picture still has an unnerving look to someone like me who knows the man’s history.’

  The Count hesitated a moment, then resumed his narrative.

  ‘Of course, I had the dungeon area bricked up when I succeeded to the title. It is below the modern cellars, and no-one has been there for the greater part of my lifetime. It is better so.’

  There was a faint stir among the guests, as though they had been held in some sort of spell.

  ‘Your ancestor would himself seem suitable for a learned paper,’ George Parker put in.

  He had intended only to be helpful, but Coleridge saw a wince of distaste pass across their host’s face. He shook his head sombrely.

  ‘I think not,’ he said softly. ‘Normally, I would say everything is a fit subject for research. But this history is too painful for me personally.’

  He seemed to recollect his wider audience and paused to glance at each face in turn as if he would imprint the details on his memory.

  ‘Anyone at the Congress is welcome to research the Count in my library,’ he said slowly. ‘But I would not advise it.’

  ‘Has this man a name?’ Abercrombie persisted.

  The Count nodded.

  ‘Ivan the Bold,’ he said simply. ‘He was known as the Wolf of the Mountains. He was a great wolf-hunter, and you may see many of his trophies of the chase which hang on the walls of this Castle. It was he who gave the Castle its name. In fact, my ancestor’s exploits malign a noble animal which is a good mate and parent, loyal to its tribe, and normally kills only to eat when it is hungry.’

  A genuine smile of pleasure passed across Homolky’s mobile features. He chuckled quietly. It was a startling sound in the context of his grim story, Coleridge thought.

  ‘There is an ironic and very satisfying ending to Ivan’s history,’ the Count said. ‘And one I particularly relish.’

  He swivelled in his chair, cupping his big hands round his right knee, rocking to and fro as he surveyed the company.

  ‘There is a large ravine not five miles from where we are sitting,’ he continued. ‘It is a wild and lonely place, with a grim reputation and always shunned by the locals. Appropriately, it is known as The Place of the Skull.’

  ‘A spot where Ivan massacred his enemies,’ put in Coleridge with a flash of intuition.

  The Count stared at him with bright eyes.

  ‘Correct, Professor. It has the same reputation in this province as that of Glencoe in Scotland. Though only some thirty or forty people died there. By contrast, my ancestor killed hundreds. He once drove the population of an entire village into the ravine and slaughtered them to the last man, woman, and child because they had fallen behind with their rents.’

  He smiled again as though he had been personally present at the massacre and had discovered something humorous beneath the horror.

  Then he went on quickly, as though not wishing his listeners to misunderstand.

  ‘Forgive me, gentlemen. This is not an amusing story, I agree, but there is poetic justice in it. Ivan was out hunting one day, with only two retainers. A pack of ravening wolves appeared, some thirty in number, and cornered the Count and his two companions in the gorge. His household found only some shreds of clothing, their weapons, and a few pieces of splintered bone.’

  He was smiling openly now.

  ‘Some say that relatives of the dead villagers had gathered a band of peasants together and that they had driven the wolf-pack on to Ivan’s party.’

  He rubbed his hands together briskly.

  ‘I like to think so.’

  The scraping of his boot on the parquet as Parker got to his feet was an intrusion in the thick, glutinous silence.

  ‘Very interesting, Count,’ he said blandly.

  ‘The very essence of folklore, if I may say so. And now, if you will excuse me, I will seek my bed. It has been a strenuous day, and we have much to do tomorrow.’

  He went round the table, shaking hands formally as the others rose. The remainder of the company too made their excuses, and the staircase was loud with their departure. Soon only Coleridge and the Count were left. He waited politely at the head of the stair while his host put a guard over the fire and extinguished the lights.

  He heard a faint noise in the gloom below him and, with a quickening of nerves, descended a flight. Menlow’s white face floated up toward him like some disembodied manifestation in the yellow lamplight. His lips were trembling as he caught Coleridge by the arm.

  ‘You did the tests?’

  Menlow nodded.

  ‘Would that I hadn’t. The thing is manifestly impossible, Professor, but the hairs were those of a wolf and the particles of skin those of a human being!’

  CHAPTER 16: FEAR IN THE NIGHT

  Coleridge could not sleep. Menlow’s unexpectedly shattering news had momentarily deprived him of those faculties which controlled the mainsprings of action, his ability to think clearly, and the energy to formulate plans and carry them out. He had had time only for a brief conversation with his colleague. He had sworn him to secrecy; there was no point in alarming the household, though it was obvious that at some point the Count would have to be told.

  Coleridge had hoped for a while that there was some possibility of error in Menlow’s analysis and calculations, but the latter had been vehement on that point. There was a mystery here which hovered at the edge of brooding horror and clouded Coleridge’s mind. He did not know what he was to tell the girl in the morning; he had been at pains to reassure her and to formulate a theory that postulated a perfectly normal explanation for what she had experienced the previous night.

  Now that possibility lay in ruins, and Coleridge and Menlow were faced with a set of circumstances that led squarely to the conclusion that the thing which the girl heard had a supernatural origin. That there was a supreme irony in all this was not lost on Coleridge: here were professional savants, steeped in the traditions and study of folklore, who were recoiling from real-life evidence that such manifestations might be true.

  Coleridge had not forgotten the sinister shadow he had seen at the entrance to the Weapons Hall and the clicking noise resembling that made by the claws of a four-footed animal which had faded down the corridor. It was the same sound that the girl had heard, though Coleridge had been at pains to avoid facing it in his own mind.

  The thought of the Weapons Hall brought the comforting reality of the Count’s pistol to the forefront. He took it out now, made sure the safety-catch was on, and put it down on his bedside table, within easy reach together with the spare cartridges. He walked over to the stout oak door and made sure it was locked. It was past midnight and the Castle lay in an unbroken silence, as though everyone and everything in it were frozen like the bleak wastes of snow and ice outside.

  Coleridge sat down in a big high-backed chair by the bed and poured hi
mself a whisky from the bottle his host had thoughtfully left on the silver tray on the bedside table. He swilled the liquid round thoughtfully in the glass, watching the yellow lamplight strike glints from its dark surface.

  Coleridge at first had a flicker of hope that Menlow might have been wrong; that the sample somehow may have become mixed with a fragment of flesh from his own finger, perhaps lodged there when he removed the wood splinter from the girl’s door. But Menlow, in their muttered conversation on the darkened staircase, had soon disabused him of that. The thing was an impossibility.

  The animal fur had been growing through the human skin. Now Coleridge debated the problem further; he could not sleep when matters of such urgency were gnawing at his consciousness. The Count would have to be told, of course, but not necessarily at once. Coleridge needed time to think. He dare not elaborate to himself, even in the locked privacy of his own room, what such a beast as that roaming the corridors of the Castle might portend for its inhabitants.

  For if the girl had been right – and there was no reason to doubt her – the wolf-thing had gained entry to the Castle by opening doors and turning handles, thus implying that it not only walked upright instead of on all fours, but also possessed human as well as bestial faculties. That conclusion led to gibbering madness, and Coleridge thrust the notion hastily from his mind; his lonely room and the lateness of the hour were neither the venue nor the time for such thoughts.

  For Coleridge was an authority on the subject: the loup-garou, as the French called it; the werewolf as the English termed it; and the volkodlak as Eastern Europe had it. Lycanthropy was his special study, but there was a world between the scholarly examination of mediaeval legends and medical case-histories of persons who had believed themselves to be werewolves, and the apparent reality of what both the girl and now Menlow were telling him.