Tragedy at Sarsfield Manor

by S. T. Joshi

  My voice had unwittingly risen to a thundering boom, and my words did not fail to rouse the cheerless prisoner.

  “What can you expect, Scintilla?” Charles Jameson spat back, with a sneer. “Think of yourself as an impressionable teenager, always taught to revere your family line . . . and then coming upon horrors that no human being ought ever to see! God, I thought I’d fallen into some horror out of the French Revolution!—something that Sade or Robespierre had crafted out of their perverse minds and souls . . . or something that Tiberius or Caligula had done for their amusement! Is it any wonder that I thought my entire universe had collapsed around me?

  “I don’t know what my uncle had written . . . but yes, I did stumble upon that horrible chamber. I remember knocking against that bookshelf by accident—I must have activated that hidden switch without intending to. . . . It was a bright summer day in 1918, but I plunged into that abyss of moral and spiritual darkness without a thought . . . tramped to that grisly stone room with those skeletons hanging in the most bizarre postures”—he rubbed his eyes as if to wipe out the memory from his sight and mind—“and a dreadful fresh one on that long table . . . the work of my own uncle. Who knows if it was the first, or the last? I have no idea what you saw there, but it couldn’t have been any worse than what I glimpsed in that cataclysmic moment. . . .

  “And the worst part of it was that I had to remain at Sarsfield Manor for weeks thereafter. I myself had insisted on spending the summer there . . . I wanted, God help me, to know my uncle better! . . . Well, I got to know him all too well! And the hideous part is that I had come to like him . . . and he liked me.

  “Of course he knew something was up . . . I could hardly look him in the face, almost screamed when he touched me, could hardly eat or sleep . . . I saw him peer at me out of the corner of his eye . . . . He was thinking: What does that boy know? And who will he tell? But he must have known I wouldn’t tell anyone—it was too shameful and revolting. . . .

  “Why did I even agree to go to Sarsfield Manor now, knowing what I knew? I dawdled in that library precisely to steer others away from the appalling secret . . . the secret that would reveal my family as a race of sadists and murderers . . . the secret that would bring shame and degradation upon everyone associated with that clan . . . .”

  “But someone did find out,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, of course someone found out,” he snapped. “That Judith . . . a shrew, but a smart, clever, resourceful woman. She didn’t tell me, but I could tell from her smirk of triumph, and the way she bearded Uncle George that evening . . . . She may have been a Sarsfield, but she always scorned the line—always wished she were rid of the taint of her own heritage. . . .”

  “And so you killed her,” I concluded heavily.

  Charles’s reaction was nothing like what I expected.

  He had been speaking more to the circumambient air than to me; but at my remark, he turned sharply to face me.

  “I did . . . what?” he said in utter incredulity.

  “Oh, come on, Charles,” I said in exasperation. “You must have killed her to shut her up. You knew she would spill the beans about the horrors at Sarsfield Manor, and you thought you could keep the matter quiet by silencing her permanently.”

  He looked at me with a kind of wonder as if I were an alien from another planet who had just appeared out of nowhere in front of him.

  “You . . . you think I killed her?” he whispered in a tone of awe. “Are you insane? I knew the secret would come out eventually . . . whether from her or from someone else. Why, I could have predicted that you would have found it—and I sure as hell wasn’t going to kill you! No, Joe, the damage—for me—had already been done. I was already scarred . . . and shutting someone else up wouldn’t have done a thing for me.”

  “Then, if not you . . . ,” I said, more to myself than to him, “then who?”

  Charles gazed down at me with an expression that could almost pass for wry humor.

  “So, Mister Detective, you’re stumped!” He snorted in mirthless humor. “You’ve solved so much . . . but you still haven’t solved the case you were brought in to solve! Back to the drawing board, eh?”

  I rubbed my face hard with my hands.

  “Wait, Charles,” I said, a bit harriedly. “There’s something I don’t understand . . . a number of things I don’t understand. Let’s go back to the scene of the crime. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t kill Judith—”

  “Thanks,” he said dryly.

  “But who did? Who could have? . . . Tell me again what you did. You heard footsteps—Judith’s, I figure. You heard a scream. Then what?”

  “Then,” said Charles, as if speaking to a slow-witted toddler, “I went out into the hallway, saw the light streaming from Judith and Edward’s bedroom, saw Judith lying on the floor with that dagger—”

  “Hold it right there,” I interrupted harshly. “Say that again: You saw the light streaming from Judith and Edward’s bedroom. Are you absolutely sure of that?”

  Charles gazed at me with puzzlement, as if I were trying to trip him up by some logical sleight-of-hand. “Of course the light was on. How else could I have seen anything? The hallway itself was pitch dark, and if the light hadn’t been on in their bedroom, it would have been next to impossible to make out anything. Yes, there were large French windows at the end of the hall leading to the balcony, but there was not much of a moon that night—”

  I waved him to silence.

  “That’s not important,” I snapped. “There is only one thing that I need to know. Where is the light switch in that bedroom?”

  Again that look of puzzlement and suspicion.

  “I figure it must be right inside the door. The whole house was wired for electricity . . . had been done even before I’d gotten there in 1918. I know my room’s switch is there, so theirs must be also.”

  I again put my face in my hands. I sat there for what seemed like minutes before Charles, apparently alarmed at my reaction—I may also have been trembling—said tentatively:

  “Joe, what is it? What have you found? What possible difference . . . .”

  I raised my face to look up at him. My expression led him to trail off into silence.

  “Charles, the murderer of Judith Kellar was her own husband, Edward Keller.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Charles gave me a look that mingled incredulity, astonishment, and dubiety—a sense that I was pulling his leg and that my humor was in very poor taste.

  “Joe, that’s not possible. Edward was—”

  I cut him off. “Charles, it is the only thing possible. He was the only one who had both motive and opportunity. It was just too horrible that the whole effort backfired on him . . . .

  “Think of the motive, Charles. The idea that any of you—Alice, Winthrop, of you yourself—could have killed Judith to keep her from winning the three million dollars from the riddle-will was never plausible. People don’t do things like that. It is evident that you all entered into the contest in a spirit of fun, and none of you were so desperate for money that you would kill one of your own relatives for it. Anyway, the time factor is all wrong. She discovered the secret of the riddle only moments before her death: who could have known about it in time to act upon it?

  “And as for you or George silencing Judith because of what she had discovered about the Sarsfields . . . even that seems a stretch. George, the custodian of the family history, is an upright, decent man—he wasn’t about to kill his own sister to prevent her from revealing what she knew. Like you, I suspect that George also realized that the secret would come out someday anyway. He may have tried to use persuasion, but he would never have stabbed his own sister in the back.

  “No,” I continued heavily, “it was only Edward . . . the long-suffering Edward, who had endured decades of living with what everyone called a shrew . . . it was only he who could have developed enough hatred and rage to kill a wife he should never have married.
Probably he had been seeking an opportunity for years . . . and this summons to Sarsfield Manor was a godsend to him, for he could, he thought, choose an opportunity where any one of you would be suspected of the crime, and it could never be pinned on him. It was a brilliant ploy—but it backfired.”

  “But Joe,” Charles said, “listen to reason. Edward was lying in bed when Judith came in. Someone must have stabbed her then. It was the horror of seeing her dead that killed him.”

  “Charles,” I replied, “you’re wrong on nearly everything. Let me explain.

  “Remember the nature of that wound. That dagger was razor-thin . . . there was almost no bleeding at the site of the wound—she died of internal bleeding. The blow was such that she must not even have felt it—especially if she was intent on other matters, as she obviously was. I well know”—I looked quickly down at my own shoulder, to Charles’s puzzlement—“that a cut like that is scarcely noticeable.”

  I caught my breath for a moment.

  “Let me tell you what must have happened. Edward had gone to bed early—or at least wished to create the illusion that he had. But Judith didn’t turn in so soon: she was too concerned with what she had discovered earlier that afternoon. Edward saw a golden opportunity to commit the crime under everyone’s nose . . . and he almost pulled it off.

  “Imagine him listening in the dark for the approach of his wife. Perhaps he was planning to kill her as she entered; but when he heard her walk by his room, on the way to the balcony, he quietly opened the door—and stabbed her. But she never felt it.

  “Judith walked right past his door—never knowing that she had been dealt a mortal injury. The rest is worse. Edward went back to bed, thinking he had finally rid himself of a hated wife; Judith kept right on walking. She went to the baclony, looked into the forest, and saw the four skulls. She had solved the riddle—with a dagger in her back.

  “Your cousin Winthrop saw her there—but it was dark, and he couldn’t see the dagger sticking out of her back. And what did she do then? She quickly turned around, eager to tell her husband of the find. She opened the door of the room, turned on the light, and finally realized that she was dead.

  “And Edward—poor Edward—do you wonder that he screamed like a madman? Do you wonder that he died of fright on the spot? You just said that the horror of seeing her dead killed him. No—it was the horror of seeing her alive.

  “Think of the loathsomeness of it! Edward had killed his wife; he felt he was free. But no—several minutes later she walks in and turns on the light. She was the only one who could have done so: if anyone else had done the murder, that person would surely not have turned on the light so that Edward might wake up and see the perpetrator. No: Edward never knew what had happened to her—he had just stabbed her in the back, shut the door at once, and gone back to bed. But now—here was his wife walking around as if nothing had happened. Did he think her a ghost? an apparition? a vengeful corpse reanimated by hatred? Who knows? But it was too much for him—and he screamed his life away.”

  It was Charles’s turn to collapse on the bed of his cell and cover his face in his hands.

  “God, what an awful fate!” he said, his words muffled by his hands. “He didn’t deserve it . . . . Yes, he may have been a murderer, but he didn’t deserve to die that way. It was all a horrible tragedy . . . and somehow a weirdly fitting way to end the occupancy of Sarsfield Manor.

  “That place ought to be torn down,” Charles said grimly. “Or, at least, certain sections ought to be . . . sealed up for the good of the world. The taint, the curse, whatever it is, has gone far enough.”

  I didn’t believe in taints or curses, but at the moment I wasn’t about to dispute him.

  I managed to persuade Police Chief Frank Powers that my reconstruction of the case was the only logical one. I was not entirely sure he believed me, but he was coming to recognize that the case against Charles Jameson was not as unshakeable as he had once thought, and that a clever defense attorney might easily secure an acquittal on the basis of reasonable doubt. Rather than face that humiliation, he released Charles and declared the case closed.

  As for the riddle-will, it was determined to divide up John Kenneth Sarsfield’s assets equally among the surviving heirs. I made it clear that I wanted no part of the legacy as the actual solver of the puzzle, and there was not the slightest hint that anything would come my way.

  Charles’s fleeting hope that Sarsfield Manor would be bulldozed was wisely discarded. True, none of the remaining clan wished to occupy it, even though George and Charles did take quiet measures to seal up certain passages that ought to have been sealed up generations ago. It remains a monument to family pride and family tragedy, and perhaps one day the passage of time will have rendered it a harmless antique. But that time would be long in coming.

  About the Author

  S. T. Joshi is a widely published critic and editor. He is the author of such critical studies as The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). For Penguin Classics, he has prepared three annotated editions of Lovecraft’s tales, as well as editions of the works of Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James, and the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007). His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), won the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. He is coeditor of Ambrose Bierce’s Collected Short Fiction (2006; 3 vols.), and has edited several editions of the work of H. L. Mencken. He is coeditor of Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (2005; 3 vols.) and the editor of Documents of American Prejudice (1999), Atheism: A Reader (2000), In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women (2006), Icons of Horror and the Supernatural (2006; 2 vols.), The Agnostic Reader (2007), and other volumes. Among his writings on politics and religion are God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003) and The Angry Right (2006). He has compiled bibliographies of H. P. Lovecraft (1981; rev. 2009), Ambrose Bierce (1999), Gore Vidal (2007), H. L. Mencken (2009), and other authors. He lives with his numerous cats in Seattle, Washington.