by S. T. Joshi
The thought seemed to lead him into a different line of argument. “Come to think of it, why the hell isn’t she a suspect? God, if my mother was on the verge of solving the riddle, who but Alice had more reason to stop her? Have you thought of that, Mr. Detective?”
“Have you,” I said, “thought of the fact that she was sleeping in a room she shared with her husband Winthrop when Judith must have been . . . struck?”
Jacob almost collapsed in crestfallen disappointment. But he revived quickly:
“Maybe they were both in on it!” He made the utterance as if he had discovered the theory of relativity. “Of course . . . how diabolically clever! Each providing the other with an alibi! Think of that, Scintilla, think of that!”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said dryly . . . but wondered if in fact he was on to something.
I talked a little more with him, but didn’t seem to get anywhere. So after a time I got up, preparing to leave and let him go back to his books. But Jacob himself, once he knew the conversation was over, abruptly exited the room, as if my mere presence were a taint that he was desperate to avoid.
The library was, indeed, an impressive collection, both of general literature and of the books on magic, witchcraft, and less explicable subjects that the old brothers Sarsfield had found of such consuming interest. I doubted that there was anything here that would materially assist the inquiry, but I couldn’t help scanning the shelves and wondering what kind of resources it would take to assemble such a collection today.
It was by the luckiest of accidents that I stumbled upon the secret.
I had picked up a crumbling edition of Sidney’s Arcadia and thumbed through it idly. The archaic typeface was difficult to read, so I quickly tired of the book and put it back on the shelf.
As I did so, a curious resonance in the wood made me look up sharply and ponder deeply. I was at the extreme right of the shelf, and I began to check the edges and top of the shelf—which occupied the entire wall—for anything unusual.
For the sound made by that book falling back into place suggested a hollow area directly behind the shelf.
It was not long before I found it. I had rested my hand casually at the right edge of the shelf, somewhat above my knees. There, I encountered an all but imperceptible circle, about the size of my thumbprint, raised above the wood. Pressing it gently, I found that the entire shelf simply slid away to the left, revealing a shallow pit with a metal ladder attached to one side; this led to an underground tunnel that appeared to run under the foundations of the entire house.
I quickly wheeled and closed the library door. There was no lock in the key, so I had to hope that the lateness of the hour and the apparent lack of interest in the library by the other occupants—except, perhaps, the inscrutable Jacob—would prevent any disturbance. There was no better time to get to the bottom of this matter than now, so I began my descent on that rusty metal ladder.
I had a small flashlight with me—luckily so, since the tunnel in front of me at the foot of the ladder was pitch dark. As I began walking down the tunnel, I observed a single set of footprints heading down the tunnel and back again—and the small, pointed shoes that made those prints could, I suspected, have only been made by Judith Kellar. She had done more, it seems, than merely solve the riddle of John Kenneth Sarsfield’s will.
The way seemed phenomenally long, and after a time I began to walk more slowly. Looking behind, I could barely make out the thin pinhead of light from the single lamp I had left lit in the library. As the tunnel did not seem to bend or veer, I assumed that we were heading due east—to the right of the estate, as the library was situated on the right or east side of the house. As I progressed I began to detect a fetid odor whose source—in a tunnel lined on all sides by neutral gray stone and littered only with dust and cobwebs—was more than a little disturbing.
I sensed the end of the tunnel only when its walls, illuminated by my flickering flashlight, suddenly gave way to a larger expanse. I had noticed a slight but unmistakable declivity in the path of the tunnel, suggesting that it was leading inexorably downward to an area—presumably a room of some kind—somewhat farther underground. The tunnel had to end in a room, as there seemed no reason to construct such a channel merely to provide an exit to another part of the Sarsfields’ own estate.
I at last reached the threshold of the room, casting my flashlight quickly around it.
Oddly, the first thing I did was to count how many skeletons were hung upon the walls of the room, some by very curious clamps that caused the figures to be in highly peculiar positions. I thought there were sixteen of them—but then I realized that I had forgotten two more lying on a large oblong table of stone, one upon the other. The worst was the one figure on the wall that was not entirely a skeleton.
Only after that did I notice various metal utensils whose use required no explanation. Aside from these there were some old books lying around—one of them a battered Malleus Maleficarum, another a copy of Sade’s Juliette that bore John Kenneth Sarsfield’s inscription on the flyleaf. There was also a kind of leather notebook or ledger that, upon my brief examination of it in the near-dark, seemed to be a diary of some kind—relatively recent, if the clarity of the ink were any indication.
I would have explored it, and the room with its grisly trophies, more carefully if the world hadn’t suddenly exploded in a galaxy of stars.
Chapter Nine
The gargantuan pain in my head was augmented by what seemed to be a beacon shining directly into my eyes, and which I eventually figured out was a kerosene lamp being held aloft a few feet above my face. The glare, in the midst of the surrounding darkness, made it difficult to ascertain who the holder of the lamp was. Gradually, as my eyes adjusted, they were able to focus in on my presumed assailant.
It was old George Sarsfield.
He was glaring at me with something approaching maniacal hatred. His breathing was stertorous, his eyes blazing, and his mouth muttering nameless obscenities to himself.
Groaning heavily, I sought to reach my hand up to my head to massage the area where I had been struck. But my hand moved only a few inches before its motion was abruptly halted.
I quickly realized that my hands and my feet were locked within four manacles at the corners of the long table in the center of the room. The rotting remains of the two bodies that had been there before had been unceremoniously dumped on the floor nearby. In a note of abstract wonder, I found myself impressed with George’s strength in lifting me bodily onto this torture platform during my lapse of consciousness. I had no idea how long I had been out, nor how long George had been standing over me glaring and seething.
It was only after some moments that I saw that he had a dagger—curiously similar to the weapon that had dispatched Judith Kellar—clutched spasmodically in his hand.
George had seen my eyes open, but failed to address any words in my direction—all he did was continue to mumble incoherently to himself. Groggy and nauseous, I nevertheless made the attempt to speak.
“George, what do you think you’re doing?”
For several moments he merely breathed heavily. Then:
“Mr. Joe Scintilla, you’ll pay for your inquisitiveness. Do you hear me?” His voice was suddenly to a booming resonance. “You’ve chosen the wrong family to meddle with.”
“What’s your idea, George?” I said quietly. “You want to slit my throat? to torture me the way your ancestors did? to cut out my tongue so that I can’t tell the world of the horrors in your family line?”
My taunt brought George—and, more pertinently—his weapon—dangerously close to my throat. “I warn you, Scintilla . . .” he hissed venomously.
“So these are your Sarsfields,” I went on with muted venom of my own, “these your misunderstood geniuses. No: they were only sadists who chose this way to signify a rebellion against a society that had left them behind. They were too smart to believe in the occult—that was only another symbol of their defia
nce. Perhaps they found it too tame, too weak; so they resorted to...other means. It wasn’t their cruelty, George, that was tragic; it was their puerility. They hated being ignored, and chose this way to assert their power.”
It was more than reckless to talk this way to a man who was manifestly on the brink of losing total control of himself, but I felt I had little to lose. My life was hanging by a thread, but I had no inclination to descend into the humiliation of begging for it. George Sarsfield had devoted his life, and a large part of his sense of self, to championing his family line; and now he was brought face to face with the worst nightmare he could imagine. His ancestors were not shining beacons of civilization, but merely childish hoodlums.
My speech had a predictable effect.
“Shut up!” George barked in a voice raw with emotion. “Who are you to speak of my family that way?”
I paid him little heed in resuming.
“So what happened, George? Why had they had all killed themselves so many years ago? Was it because their servant found out, or they themselves had had enough of this horror? Then the later Sarsfields settled into their Victorian mediocrity, and all this”—I took in the loathsome scene with my eyes, as that was all I could do—“would have been forgotten but for that antiquarian, John Kenneth Sarsfield—your own brother. Perhaps he was horrified at first; but the more he thought about it, and the more he studied the Sarsfields’ journals, which must have gone into great detail about their picturesque rituals, the more he may have realized that what was done in the eighteenth century could as well be done in the twentieth.
“And so he had begun the horrors anew—only to be caught when he was sixty. They locked him up and destroyed all the papers they could readily find. But John Kenneth Sarsfield would have a posthumous jest if nothing else: he had dreamed up the riddle-will, and perhaps even expected one of you to stumble across these atrocities. And it happened just as he thought—Judith was here before you. Isn’t that why she dragged you away after dinner the night of her death? Isn’t that what she told you?”
My voice had grown stronger and stronger with each sentence I spoke, until it resounded against these stone walls that had borne so much horror.
George had mutated from rage to an overwhelming sadness. He began to weep quietly, muttering more to himself than to me:
“Stop it, damn you, stop it! . . . They were geniuses . . . they were . . . .”
“So is Hitler.”
That remark was unwise, for it suddenly unleashed a torrent of anger that led George to brandish the knife in my face.
“You hold your tongue, Scintilla . . . I’ll cut you! I swear I will!”
“Will you, George?” I said softly and evenly. “Is this how you pay your respects to your ancestors? By mimicking the worst of their behavior?”
George seemed racked by a conflicting medley of emotions—anger, horror, loathing, confusion, disillusion. Almost without being aware of it, he brought the weapon close to my eyes and mouth, as if yearning to wipe the vision of this torture chamber from my sight and still the tongue that had shattered his dreams. Almost without realizing it, he sliced a long swath of red down my shoulder and forearm.
The curious thing was that I hardly felt the incision. It bled freely, but I was more surprised than pained by the injury.
“George,” I said, “what are you going to do? Do you really want to follow in your ancestors’—and your brother’s—footsteps? Am I going to be your next victim? Haven’t you done enough harm by killing your own sister and thereby causing the death of your brother-in-law?”
He looked at me with genuine puzzlement.
“Wh-what are you saying?” he said, in a tone that suggested I had accused him of snatching the Lindbergh baby. Then a look of almost awed comprehension swept over him, and he whispered plangently:
“You think I killed Judith? Is that what you think? You...you believe that, just because she told me about this horrible place, I wanted to shut her up, and murdered her using one of the Sarsfields’ own weapons? You must be insane . . . .”
There could be legitimate debate as to which one of us was more in control of his faculties at the moment, but I didn’t raise the point. His befuddlement seemed so genuine that I was momentarily silenced.
“But if not you, then who?” I said, almost to myself.
“Mr. Scintilla, I’m no murderer. . . . Yes, I caught sight of you descending that ladder, and I knew that you would be making your way here . . . Judith had told me the whole story, and I was dreading anyone else finding this . . . this place. . . . I refused to set foot here until I saw you going there. I had to stop you! I had to!”
His eyes were developing that maniacal glare again.
“George,” I said as soothingly as I could, “you’ve got to let me go. I’m only doing my job here. You don’t have to become what your ancestors and your brother became. You have it in yourself to be better than they. . . . There is no taint in your family—there is no such thing. If some people have turned out badly, it doesn’t mean everyone will. There has been enough horror and tragedy at Sarsfield Manor without you contributing to it. Let me go, and we’ll see that this place is never heard of again.”
He looked down at me, kerosene lamp in one hand and the now reddened dagger in the other. He looked at the latter with something akin to loathing before dropping it precipitately; its resounding clang on the stone floor startled the both of us. Turning ashen as he saw the wound in my shoulder, he dug deep into a pocket and got out a small key. With shaking hands he unlocked the manacles on my hands and feet.
I did not stand up immediately, as my head continued to throb. Slowly sliding my legs over the side of the grisly table, I rose gingerly to a sitting position. A wave of nausea nearly overwhelmed me, and the blood from my cut flowed down my arm.
To my momentary alarm, George bent down to pick up the dagger on the floor—but his only purpose was to rip some cloth off his own shirt to produce a makeshift bandage for me. I nodded to him in gratitude as he bound the wound crudely. When he finished, he flung the dagger as far from him as the narrow room would allow.
In silence, we trudged in unison down the long hallway back to the library. It was my fervent hope that we would be the last occupants of this chamber of horrors.
Chapter Ten
The cut in my shoulder required more stitches than I had ever had in me at one time, but the doctor who bound me up the next morning knew his business, and the wound was in any case not particularly deep; so I managed to get along without too much trouble. I wasn’t expecting any more gunplay or swordplay, so I figured a bum arm wouldn’t hold me back. The difficulties in this case were not physical but intellectual. I seemed to have all the pieces, but they weren’t fitting together. Something was out of place; I sensed that I had failed to understand the significance of the most basic facts of the case.
I had no option, therefore, but to return to the police station. I wanted to look over the report one more time. What’s more, there was one thing I had found that I needed to talk to Charles Jameson about, and urgently.
Before leaving the underground torture chamber at Sarsfield Manor, I had pocketed the notebook or diary of John Kenneth Sarsfield. George had momentarily looked askance at me, but said nothing and made no objection. So far, I had only had a chance to give it a cursory examination—but that was enough, at least on one point.
I once again sat down in front of Charles’s cell, the notebook in my hand. Charles initially seemed happy to see me, but as soon as he caught sight of the notebook he froze and backed away in alarm.
“Wh-what do you have there, Joe?” he asked in a trembling voice.
“You seem to know what it is,” I said mildly.
Rubbing a hand over his several-day-old stubble, he laughed nervously. “Looks . . . looks like some old ledger.”
“Not as old as all that,” I said.
Abruptly, he wheeled around so that his back was to me. It was as if I would disappe
ar if he could not see me.
I was getting tired—tired of him, tired of this case, tired of the horror and madness of Sarsfield Manor and its clan. “Charles, why don’t you face up to it?”
That made him spin around once more.
“What do you want me to say?” he almost shouted at me. Looking down quickly and harriedly at the notebook, he went on: “All right, I know what that is . . . of course I know. The question is: What do you know?”
“I know a lot of things,” I said wearily, “but not everything. I know about the tunnel from the library. I know about the room where both the old brothers Sarsfields and John Kenneth Sarsfield carried out their atrocities.
“And I know you were there.”
Strictly speaking, I didn’t know that. But I realized I had hit home.
“Are you . . . are you thinking that I . . . that I had anything to do with that business?” he said in a frenetic whisper. “Yes, I stumbled upon that secret passage . . . yes, I saw the horrors in that room . . . the horrors that my ancestors, and the horrors that my own uncle, committed. But that was the extent of it! I never let anyone know what I’d seen . . . not even John Kenneth Sarsfield himself . . . although I gather he suspected . . . .” He trailed off.
“It says here,” I said, tapping the notebook with my index finger, “that you were there in 1918 . . . just a year before you—and I—entered Johns Hopkins. Sarsfield says he thought you had found the passageway. No, of course you didn’t tell him . . . but he could sense it by your altered behavior. You were shocked, appalled, traumatized . . . you were humiliated by what your family had done . . . what your own uncle had done.... Is that why you think the world is an evil place?—why you feel you are uniquely victimized by fate?—why you are perennially on the threshold of lapsing into depression and madness?”
