by Orrin Grey
“I’m sorry,” he said. “My nerves, you know?” Both Kirby and Drake assured him that they understood, and the Professor excused himself, demuring Drake’s offer to see him back to his rooms in the carriage house.
“So, he seems damn creepy,” Kirby said, when he was confident that the old man was out of earshot.
“The Professor? I guess so, though I never really thought of it before. He’s been around for as long as I can remember, and I always thought of him as sort of like an uncle. Though now that you mention it, I remember something from when I was a kid. I couldn’t have been more than a few years old, it was right after he and my father got back from the war. They had this crate with them, something that they must have brought back from that island. It couldn’t have been more than this big,” and Drake held his hands up a couple of feet apart, “but the Professor and my dad were both really excited about it. They wouldn’t let me see what was inside, but I saw the crate. It smelled old and stale, like how I imagine a mummy would smell, and I’m sure it was just my imagination, but I swear to god that I heard a scratching sound from inside, like rats were in there scurrying around.”
“Has he always been so jumpy?”
“Pretty much. He’s always been very secretive—I was never allowed to go into his rooms when I was a kid, they told me that there were delicate artifacts that weren’t safe for little hands, you know—but he’s gotten worse since Dad died. He says he’s preparing a monograph on those natives to present before the Board of the British Museum.”
“And he’s worried that someone’s going to get the scoop on him?”
“I guess so. I’ll tell you another one, Kirby, because it seems like something from one of your pictures, but this is just between you and me, right? I had a dream, right after my father died. We had laid him to rest in the crypt earlier that day, and that night I had this dream that the Professor went out to the crypt in the middle of the night. In the dream, he had this thing with him that looked like a spider, but it was as big as a horse. Gave me a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, I don’t mind admitting.”
Kirby shook his head. “You’ve been watching too many of my movies, old sport. Still, those headless fellows of his wouldn’t be too hard to do on film, I wouldn’t think. Maybe we can even get the Professor to do an introduction, after he’s published his monograph of course. One of those things where he assures everyone that our stupid rubber monster is really very scientific, he swears.”
The next few days were a flurry of very dull parties—if dull things can, indeed, happen in flurries—which was just fine with Kirby. In his experience, there were two kinds of parties: the kind where you had any fun, and the kind where you got anything accomplished. Right now, he was much more in need of the latter than the former. That there was a third kind of party, the kind that was no fun and didn’t get you anywhere in business, he didn’t care to contemplate.
Over the course of them, he met piles of old British gentlemen and ladies, with Sirs and Madams and Lords in front of just about all of their names. He shook lots of clammy, pale hands, and decided that maybe seeming a bit like a walking corpse just came with the territory on these usually very overcast British Isles. Ultimately, though, he and Drake were able to convince a handful of landed gentry to invest the capital that they would need to get at least three productions up and running almost simultaneously, all of them using Whitley Manor as their primary setting.
Kirby hired a young playwright that he knew in London. The kid’s name was Irving Drayvon, so he at least had that going for him, and he was all-too-happy to trade some of his pay for free room and board at Whitley while he worked on the screenplays, since he was just about to get kicked out of his flat or garret or wherever he lived on account of being four months behind on the rent.
They gave Irving a room down the hall from Kirby’s, and before long several other key members of cast and crew were also holed up at the manor, though the majority of the crew didn’t stay on-site but were, instead, occupying all the available beds in the nearby village. Kirby’s room was at the back of the house, shielding him somewhat from the comings-and-goings that now took place at all hours of the day and night, and looking out over the graveyard and the carriage house where, Kirby noticed, the Professor also tended to come and go at odd hours. Looking out his window, he sometimes noticed lights on in the carriage house late into the night, and he could imagine the Professor in there, bent over his desk, hard at work on that monograph.
Most of the time, Kirby didn’t pay much mind to the Professor’s activities. He had his own things to worry about, rounding up cast and crew and getting production underway. The first event which really drew his attention happened when they were already into post on Beneath the Blighted Moors (working title) and about two weeks out from wrapping Vampires of the Scarlet Coven. The third film was having problems, though. The title had changed three times already and it hadn’t even so much as gone in front of cameras yet. The various delays were tying most of the crew in knots, and Kirby found himself staying awake long into the night, reading over Irving’s latest draft of what they were currently calling The Chiselhurst Conundrum.
Kirby had pushed his desk up against one of the leaded windows so he could glance out at the moonlight on the headstones when he looked up from the screenplay, which he did from time to time to take a drink of coffee or of Scotch. One of those times, he saw a black sedan pull up in front of the carriage house, and saw the Professor get out. Kirby hadn’t even realized that the old man had left, but now he was getting out of the sedan and unloading what looked like a heavy steamer trunk from the back, handling it like it was filled with batting.
“I wonder if he’s got a mummy in there,” Kirby said aloud, and jotted a note about it—“mummy in a steamer trunk”—into the margins of the script. It wouldn’t fit into this picture, necessarily, but he was sure that he could put it in something.
The Professor’s surprising feats of strength, coupled with the fact that it was almost two in the morning, were enough to distract Kirby from the, he had to admit, somewhat grim task of reading through the latest draft of what was rapidly becoming a nightmare project. So he found himself staring out the window instead of reading, even going so far as to turn off the lamp at his desk, plunging his room into darkness, the better to see the goings-on outside.
He watched as one light and then another came on in the old carriage house, and he imagined, with a director’s eye, the old man shuffling about the rooms, unpacking shrunken heads and wooden masks, bone necklaces and fetish dolls pounded full of nails. Of course, in actuality Kirby had no clue what sorts of artifacts the Professor might have on hand, but he had made enough movies with tribal themes in his day to know what sold the notion to the people in Poughkeepsie.
It was because of this daydreaming—was it still daydreaming if it happened in the middle of the night?—that he remained sitting, staring out the window, when the Professor came back out of the carriage house. For a moment, Kirby expected him to head toward the manor, maybe for a bite of very late dinner. While there still weren’t really any servants to speak of, Kirby had used the need to cater the shoot as an excuse to bring in a couple of decent cooks from the city.
The Professor didn’t take the footpath that led from the carriage house to the manor, however. He walked about halfway and veered to his left, into the family cemetery where they were now letting the weeds grow rank because it added to the atmosphere, rather than because Drake couldn’t afford to hire a gardener. A bright moon that was occasionally occluded by drifting clouds let Kirby pick out the man’s bald head like a bright stone at the bottom of a stream as he made his way between the weathered monuments. Was he simply taking an evening constitutional, stretching his legs before turning in for the night? Perhaps, but midnight—or rather, two-in-the-morning—walks in the graveyard were Kirby’s stock in trade, so he paid attention.
The Professor didn’t dawdle, as a man might who had come out to enjoy the m
oonlight and the ambiance, and instead went straight to the door of the crypt. There, against the backdrop of the dark stone, the moon painted him in a starker silhouette, and Kirby was able to tell that he carried with him what looked like a burlap sack and, moreover, that the sack appeared to be wriggling. That was all he was able to tell, however, before the Professor had unlocked the door to the crypt—the one whose key, Drake had said, had gone missing some time back—and disappeared into the darkness beyond.
The scene reminded Kirby of the dream that Drake had recounted to him, the one of the Professor and the spider the size of a horse, and he firmly intended to keep watch until the Professor came back out, but at some point in his vigil the exhaustion of the past few days of long hours and late nights must have caught up with him, for suddenly the sun was coming up beyond the leaded glass and he saw that the crypt door was shut once again, the giant padlock securely in place.
The next morning, Kirby half-believed that he had dreamed the whole thing himself, prompted, perhaps, by the Gothic subject matter of his films and his recollections of Drake’s earlier dream story, and so he didn’t mention the incident to his host, though he did inquire casually after the Professor. “He’s been keeping to himself lately. I think the film crew may all be a bit much for him. Nerves, you understand,” Drake said, which Kirby already knew was the code that well-to-do British gentlemen used for everything from stress to alcoholism to stark, staring insanity. Kirby nodded his sympathy and didn’t press the matter further.
What he did do, perhaps somewhat perversely, was start subtly pressuring Drake to unlock the crypt so that they could use its interior for shooting. “From the way you described it,” he said, “there should be plenty of room in there to get cameras and lights and still have space for a couple of actors.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Drake replied. “It’s as big as a ballroom in there. I’ll talk to Abby, see if we can’t turn up the key.” Abby was the oldest of the housekeepers, one who had been there since Drake was an infant, and who stayed on through the financial straits of the family probably due to inertia, as much as loyalty. Kirby had his doubts about whether or not they would find the key, since a part of him wondered if maybe he already knew where it was, but for the moment he let the matter lie.
In the meantime, production on Vampires of the Scarlet Coven ran four days over schedule, and shooting started on what was now being called The Chiselhurst Experiment. Three days into that, when Vampires was now six days over, Chiselhurst’s lead actress, a curly-haired redhead with big eyes and bigger tits, left the set, saying that she wouldn’t spend another minute in “that godawful house.” It was Irving who told Kirby of her departure, and when he finally caught up with her just before she got into a waiting car in the front drive, all he could get out of her was that she had heard “strange noises” and “awful scratching” while walking the grounds.
So then it was a matter of trying to find a replacement actress, since Sophia Michaels, who had starred in both Beneath and Vampires, was already off filming something else at Pinewood or Ealing or somewhere. Kirby had to drive down to London to work that out, and also meet with some of the investors who, thank the great good Lord, seemed unfazed by the delays in production when he shook their cold hands, saying simply that they were happy to help, and that they knew the end result would be “a credit to us all.”
The drive gave him time to think, and when he was on his way back, he had decided that, upon returning to Whitley Manor, he would press a little harder to try to get Drake to open up the family crypt.
He told himself that it was out of some sort of civic spirit, or at least a sense of duty to his friend. After all, if something unsavory or illegal was going on in the place where his ancestors were laid to rest, it seemed that Drake should know what it was. But ultimately, really, if he had to be honest with himself at all, Kirby was just curious. Ever since he had seen or imagined the Professor skulking into the crypt with that wriggling bag, his fancy had peopled the dark space with all sorts of boogeymen and horrors, and now he had to know what was actually going on behind that heavy iron door.
That was his plan, anyway, but like so many plans, it never had a chance to come to fruition. When he returned to Whitley Manor, it was to a shambles. A corpse had been found, naked, stuffed into a disused linen closet. It took some time for Kirby to ascertain why it was just “a corpse,” and not Such-and-such Person’s corpse. It seemed that the head and hands had both been cut off, and were nowhere to be found. What’s more, as near as anyone in the house could tell, no one who should have been there was missing.
Of course, that stopped production dead on both Vampires—of which there was, at least, probably already enough usable footage from which to assemble an adequate cut, if it came to that—and The Chiselhurst Disaster, which, well, Kirby had to admit was probably just going to have to be a write-off. The police came out and questioned everyone what felt like half-a-dozen times—first the constables from the village, then actual inspectors from London—and most of the cast and crew got sent back to wherever they originally came from, with orders to make themselves available should they be needed.
The police took the body away for a post-mortem, but one of the inspectors confided in Kirby that a positive ID wasn’t terribly likely. “Mobsters an’ the like tend ta do this,” he said. “Over in your country, too. Chop off the ’ead ’n’ ’ands, an it’s damn difficult to figger who a fella was.”
Once the whole mess had cleared out, hardly anyone remained at Whitley Manor besides Kirby, Drake, the Professor, and a handful of help. Even the cooks had departed with the rest of the crew. Irving stayed on in his room down the hall, though, in spite of there not being any further need for script doctoring at the moment, because he said he didn’t have anywhere else to go, and Drake was too kind-hearted to kick him to the curb. Besides, the Professor, surprisingly, spoke up in his defense. It seemed that the two of them had managed to find the time to play some games of chess when Kirby wasn’t looking, and the old man apparently found the activity “soothing.”
What Kirby found less-than-soothing was the notion of rattling around the big empty house again with nothing now to occupy his mind except how he was going to salvage this latest disaster. Possibly, once the police got everything cleared away, he could actually spin this mess into some gold. After all, a grisly real-life murder case couldn’t possibly do anything but help the box office of a cheapie horror flick. He even considered working some details of the murder into another film, a crime picture that would cost even less to get rolling than the horror stuff they had been working on.
He spent his time making phone calls, but while the police investigation was still ongoing he found it impossible to get any wheels to turn, and he spent more sleepless nights than he would have liked staring out the window at the moonlight on the cemetery, the grass now turned brittle by frost. Several times he saw Irving walking out to the carriage house, his collar turned up against the growing cold. Out for some late-night games of chess, perhaps?
With little else to occupy his thoughts, he found himself obsessing about the Professor’s strange behavior, real or imagined. He developed a theory that the Professor’s unusual activities might be linked somehow to the murder. Perhaps the Professor had gotten involved in something illicit in order to fund his work when the elder Lord Whitley’s coffers dried up. Kirby resolved to take his hypothesis to Drake, and then maybe to the police, but as with his earlier plan, he never got the chance to put it into action.
He was awake when he heard the scream, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, exhausted but unable to drift off. The day before, for reasons that he himself didn’t completely understand, he had gone out to the crypt and listened at the big iron door. And had he heard something on the other side, the scratching that the departing actress had mentioned, like thousands of rats in the walls?
The scratching may have been his imagination—“nerves,” right, that’s what Drake would have cha
lked it up to—but the scream was definitely real. It came from the carriage house, rising high and fast and then choking off. As he sprang to the window, he saw Drake fleeing down the path that led from the carriage house to the manor, painted fitfully in the moonlight like the heroine on the cover of a Gothic novel.
He rushed down those wide stairs that had so attracted him when he first visited Whitley Manor, and was at the kitchen door by the time Drake arrived. His friend’s clothes were disheveled—maybe from the run, or maybe from some sort of altercation—his eyes wide and staring. When Kirby opened the door, Drake started back, then collapsed forward as he saw who it was that stood before him. He probably would have fallen straight to the tiled floor had Kirby not been there to catch him.
“It really is you, isn’t it, Kirby?” Drake asked, and his voice had the edge of a sob in it.
“Last time I looked,” Kirby replied, knowing even as he said it that his instinctive attempt at levity was out of place here, but unable to check it.
He guided Drake to the sitting room where his friend had first received him upon his arrival at Whitley Manor only a few short months ago. Drake collapsed into one of the scattered couches, and Kirby poured him a tumbler full of brandy. As Drake took a long drink of it, his hands shook such that he sloshed almost as much over the side of the glass as made it to his lips.
“Now what in the pluperfect hell is going on?” Kirby asked, then shook his head. “You know what, never mind. You take a couple more drinks, steady yourself a bit, and then we’ll go out together and get the car, head into the village. You can tell me all about it on the way.”