Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  “I’d pay whatever they might ask,” Logan told him.

  “It’s not wholly a matter of l.s.d., Mr. Logan. The swell round Carnglass and Daldour always is heavy. I had difficulty in getting ashore in Daldour, the day I visited, and I never have seen Carnglass, except from Daldour or a boat. Lady MacAskival does not let even the minister or the priest ashore. She has her own style of religion. And these trawlers from the mainland aren’t popular with the island folk. Once the keepers fired at an Oban boat that tried to put into Askival harbor; nor are the men in Daldour much more hospitable. No, I think you’d best take MacBrayne’s steamer to Loch Boisdale: the South Uist fishermen know the Carnglass waters. The reefs off Carnglass are murderous.”

  “Who lives in Daldour, Mr. Crawford?”

  “There is but one name in Daldour – MacAskival. An inbred folk. In Daldour there is a little machair – that’s the sandy land of the Island – and the island people fertilize it with seaweed, and grow potatoes. Also they gather seaweed and sell it; in the season, a drifter puts close into shore, and the Daldour men bring out the seaweed in their lobster-boats and load it aboard, and it is sold on the mainland. On the day I visited Daldour, all the folk were at the beach with their carts, running straight into the surf to gather the tangle. Theirs is a poor life. The Daldour women weave a few decent rugs and sweaters. They speak a strange Gaelic, with some Norse words in it. For a month, one of our missionaries lived in Daldour, but he was half daft when he left. ‘Mr. Crawford, I have served my time among the Mau Mau,’ he said to me. And that though he was a Highlander and a Gaelic speaker.”

  “Can you tell me anything about Lady MacAskival, Mr. Crawford?” Logan asked. But – after a slight discreet pause – Mr. Crawford could not. Logan, leaving him, went down to the North Pier to make inquiries after any boat that might carry him to Carnglass.

  He had no luck. It would have to be MacBrayne’s steamer to Loch Boisdale in the morning, he thought, for already it was late afternoon. If the sea should be calm tomorrow, even a big motor-launch ought to be able to carry him from South Uist to Carnglass. After a stroll along the esplanade to the cathedral, Logan went back to his hotel at the other end of the town and had dinner. The trawlers were in the harbor now, unloading their catch upon the quay. But the fishermen were too busy to be bothered with eccentric Americans that wanted passage to Ultima Thule, Logan suspected. A light rain was coming down. Despite that, after dinner Logan put his oilskin cape over his shoulders, took up his stock, and – for lack of anything better to do – climbed the hill behind the town.

  At the summit there was a strange building, Logan had noticed as soon as he had come out of Oban railway station: a circular roofless affair, like a ruined temple. This, according to the hotel people, was called McCaig’s Folly, and had been built long ago as an observation-tower, but never finished. Now, in the gloaming, Logan found himself close beside the Folly. The season being too early for tourists at Oban, the area round the Folly was deserted, so that Logan walked alone in the drizzle, thinking idly of the Old House of Fear and old Duncan MacAskival and his own solitary and work-laden life. A scrap from Scott came into his head:

  “Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!

  To all the sensual world proclaim

  One crowded hour of glorious life

  Is worth an age without a name.”

  Was that the way it went? Even leading his battalion, Logan never had known that crowded hour. And as he thought of how some men are drunken with drink, and others drunken with work, he heard steps in the darkness behind him.

  Looking over his shoulder, Logan made out a familiar figure, a few paces distant: the military gentleman. When Logan slackened pace, the military gentleman hesitated for a moment, and then strode on toward him. “Captain Gare!” the military gentleman called out, by way of introduction.

  “Good evening, sir,” Logan said. Captain Gare, coming very close up to him with a swagger of sorts, looked down from his stork-height upon Logan. Flickering from side to side, the disconcertingly mobile little black bird-eyes never paused for more than a fraction of a second to meet Logan’s stare. The man struck his long stick against his own trousersleg. He opened his mouth, paused, gripped his stick more firmly, and then spoke in a reedy educated voice.

  “Look here,” said Captain Gare. “I say – I … That is, cigarettes – yes, cigarettes …” There was an aroma of whiskey about Captain Gare, but Logan did not think he was drunk. Certainly Gare was exceedingly nervous, and he seemed disposed toward bullying.

  “I’m sorry,” Logan told him mildly, “but I don’t have any cigarettes about me.”

  “No, no.” Captain Gare, scowling, paused afresh, perhaps trying to take a new tack. “No, I don’t require cigarettes, not really. I don’t smoke – nor drink, either. I say: you’re an American, are you not?”

  “Why should you think so, sir?”

  “Don’t take offense,” said Captain Gare. “Are you ashamed of being an American? I’m not a chap people can take liberties with. You’re an American chap, I know. Your name is Logan.”

  “I saw you at Todd’s Hotel,” Logan observed.

  “Did you? Did you really? I travel a great deal, Mr. Logan: private means, you know. Yes, that’s it: I saw your name in the hotel register, and thought we might have something in common.”

  “What might we have in common, Captain Gare?” Logan spoke evenly. Captain Gare swept his bird-eyes across Logan’s face again, seeming to gain heart. He slapped the stick against his leg, below the short mackintosh he wore.

  “I say – don’t know India, I suppose? Never tried pigsticking? No, I suppose not; not you American chaps. True sport, you know. I was rather good.” He towered belligerently above Logan. “There’s nothing like steel. See here.” Captain Gare tugged at the head of his stick, and it came way from the wood. It was a sword-stick, two or three inches of blade showing above the cane. Logan had an amusing momentary vision of a fencing-match there in the rain, complete with cries of “touché!” Captain Gare, glowering upon him, rammed the blade back into its stick-scabbard.

  “I take it that you know the world, Captain Gare,” Logan said, smiling slightly.

  “Rather better than you do, I fancy, Logan.” It was clear that Captain Gare now felt himself master of the situation. “I say, we needn’t beat about the bush, eh? I’m told you’ve been at the pier inquiring after passage to Carnglass.”

  “You’re an astute man, Captain Gare.”

  “That’s as it may be.” Captain Gare’s swollen features bent toward Logan. “Look here: it’s quite pointless for you to go to Carnglass, you know – quite. I suppose you’re a solicitorchap, are you not?”

  “That’s as it may be,” said Logan. “My father and grandfather were Writers to the Signet. You have an interest in Carnglass, Mr. – that is, Captain – Gare?”

  “One of my friends has an interest there, sir. He knows Lady MacAskival very well. Handles her affairs, as a matter of fact. Saves her annoyance. She never welcomes callers, you understand.”

  “I’m afraid my business is with Lady MacAskival herself.” Captain Gare edged still closer. “Lady MacAskival is not competent to transact business, Mr. Logan. I mean to say that she’s infirm. Quite old, you know. No taste for American trippers.”

  “She has been in correspondence with my principal.”

  “Nonsense!” Captain Gare brandished his stick. “Mean to say, that’s rubbish, you know. Lady MacAskival never writes. Infirm, a very elderly party. Come, now, Logan: I dare say you’ve gone to moderate expense in this fool’s errand. You’ll never see Carnglass. My friend is a liberal man, and very close to Lady MacAskival. Money’s little object to him or her. Suppose, now, on their behalf, I give you three hundred pounds, if you like? Simply by way of reimbursement, we may put it, Logan. Fair enough, eh? And then back to Brooklyn with you, eh?”

  “You have the money in your pocket?” Logan inquired.

  “Of course not.” Captain
Gare gave him a supercilious smile. “A man doesn’t carry such sums on his person, you know. Come back into town with me, like a good chap, and I’ll write a cheque in your favor.”

  “I do happen to carry such sums on my person, Captain Gare,” Logan told him.

  The military gentleman’s little eyes widened and flickered. His left hand stole nervously along the sword-stick. “Not really? Hundreds of pounds in notes in your pocket? I say …”

  “Not in notes, Captain Gare: in traveller’s cheques.” Here Captain Gare sighed slightly, and his grip on the stick slackened. “Now could you be interested, Captain Gare, in some such sum as six hundred pounds?”

  “Six hundred pounds?” Captain Gare drew a sudden breath. “Really, my dear fellow, are you suggesting that you might pay me six hundred pounds? Whatever for?”

  “For certain information.”

  “What manner of information, my dear sir?” Captain Gare turned slightly, there in the dark, as if to make sure no one was at hand.

  “For instance,” Logan said, “detailed information concerning the past, present, and future of Jackman.”

  That bow, drawn at a venture, sent its arrow home. On Gare’s unpleasant face the mottled veins seemed to swell; the man stepped back. “Who the devil are you?” cried Captain Gare, with a quaver in the reedy voice.

  “I take it that you know now what I am,” said Logan, still quietly. “Whatever made you think I might accept money?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir; really, I …” Captain Gare was stumbling over his words. “That is, you did not seem precisely an American. All a pose, eh? I say, you don’t mean that you’re … that I’m …”

  “If you tell me about Jackman,” Logan went on, “we need say no more of all this, so far as you are concerned. We already know a great deal about Dr. Jackman, of course, but conceivably you might add something or other. You’re the fellow who was cashiered, I take it. We know enough about you.”

  “I swear it was a miscarriage of justice, Mr. Logan – or whatever your name is, sir. I mean that affair in Madras.” Gare was almost panting. “But Jackman – no, really, I can’t say anything, not for six thousand pounds. My life wouldn’t – but you know that quite as well as I do.”

  The swollen face had gone deathly pale. Even had he been able to probe deeper without giving away his game, Logan reflected, this man would have been too frightened to be of any real help. It had been a good random thrust, that mention of Jackman, whoever Jackman might be.

  “Very well, Gare,” Logan said. “If you don’t choose to clear yourself, that’s not my concern. Very likely you’d be of no use to us. We’ll have Dowie and Anderson any hour now.” Gare shivered. That shot, too, had gone home. “As for you, Gare, you understand that if you don’t sever all connection with this business, we’ll see that you’re taken into custody? Perhaps the Continent would be a safer place for you at present. And throw away that silly sword-stick: you couldn’t frighten babies with it.” Logan snatched the thing from Gare’s hand and flung it toward the lip of the hill; the steel flashed in the moonlight, and then blade and stick were lost in the gorse. “Be off, now; I’ve tired of you.”

  Gare, backing further away, muttered pitifully, “Then you’re … Then I’m not under…?” Logan gestured impatiently toward the town below.

  “You can go to the devil, Gare.”

  Captain Gare turned with clumsy haste, all his swagger gone, and scuttled heavily down the path toward town; after he had gone a few paces in the dark, Logan thought he heard him break into a run. Yes, it had been a thoroughly satisfying random shot. He did not think he would see Captain Gare again.

  Yet whoever thought it worthwhile to offer Logan three hundred pounds to steer clear of Carnglass? Gare had bungled the business badly; he must have been acting without instruction from his principal, Logan thought – whoever that principal might be. Dowie? Or Lagg? Or this fellow Jackman? There were depths in this business, surely, unplumbed by old Duncan MacAskival. Trying to piece the thing together, Logan walked slowly back to the Station Hotel. There the night porter gave him tea and biscuits, and afterwards Logan went up to his rather chilly high-ceilinged room, and stared at the plaster cornice for half an hour before he went to sleep. But he could form no clear picture of what he had begun to call to himself the Carnglass Case.

  As he dressed, next morning, Logan saw from his window the steamer “Lochness” at the pier: it would take him to Loch Boisdale, and he hurried into his clothes and gulped down tea at 5:45. This was Wednesday, his third morning in Scotland. Thus far, only frustration: and yet the sort of frustration which roused Logan’s energies. To judge from the impromptu and ineffectual measures that Dowie and Gare had adopted, he was dealing only with an ill-organized and eccentric opposition – though with adversaries sufficiently unscrupulous. And it seemed to be an ill-informed opposition. Either that, or else Dowie and Gare were out of touch with the real intelligence at work, for some reason, supposing that they had principals for whom they were acting. Certainly neither of those two had seemed quite the man to concoct a scheme to keep an American from his prospective purchase of Carnglass. If there were a principal, would he be in the island? Lagg, the factor? The storm of two days ago might have kept the people in Carnglass from communicating with the mainland; but presumably messages now could be sent and received by boat. Whatever messages might be sent, it scarcely was possible that he should receive in Carnglass the sort of rude welcome he had got in Mutto’s Wynd. Even if Carnglass was Ultima Thule, still it was part of Britain, the most law-abiding of nations; and, there would be Lady MacAskival for surety.

  At six o’clock the “Lochness” steamed away from the pier toward the Sound of Mull. They crossed the Firth of Lorne; and then, to the south, they skirted the great rocky mass of Mull, while the wild shores of Morven frowned upon them from the north. Several islanders were among the passengers, and for the first time in years Logan heard the Gaelic spoken naturally, that beautiful singing Gaelic of the Hebrides. It went with the cliffs, the sea-rocks, the ruined strongholds of Mull and Morven, the damp air, the whitewashed lonely cottages by the deep and smoothly sinister sea.

  As the hours passed, the steamer put into Tobermory, and later touched at the flat islands of Col and Tiree. It crossed the broad rough waters of the Little Minch, with the romantic line of the Outer Isles before them, and the round bulk of Barra drawing closer. After Castlebay, in Barra, the “Lochness” steamed north past Eriskay, and into the splendid dark anchorage of Loch Boisdale, in South Uist, that sprawling low island of peat.

  It was nearly midnight now. Going ashore, Logan got himself a room at the homely, cordial inn above the harbor. There was a schoolmaster in Loch Boisdale village, the hotelkeeper said, who might know of a drifter that could put Logan ashore in Carnglass.

  Once more alone in a rented room with only conjectures for company, Hugh Logan settled himself in bed and took up that battered pamphlet by the Reverend Samuel Balmullo. Mr. Balmullo’s taste certainly had run to old bones. Here was a tidbit:

  “Even in the fierce chronicles of the Western Isles, the chieftains of MacAskival are distinguished by a repute for deeds of blood and passion exceedingly disproportionate to the wealth and power of their sept. In the last century, upon the removal of the plenishing of the Old House to the New House of Fear, there were discovered in a curious pit or oubliette in the crypts the skeletal remains of a human being, still bearing the marks of violence. This pit long had been put to the office of a brinetub, and it is supposed, accordingly, that the bones had lain hid at the bottom for a great while, perhaps some centuries. By any person inured to the sorry superstitions of the people of Carnglass, it might have been anticipated – as, indeed, it befell – that the vulgar peasantry, upon the exhibition of these sad relics of mortality, would allege the bones – some of which were curiously injured or deformed – to be those of a Firgower, or Man-Goat. A legend less incredible, however, relates that the skeleton is that of an illicit love
r of a lady of MacAskival, seized by stealth at his abode in North Uist, transported to Carnglass, subjected to indescribable torments, and at length drowned in the brine of the oubliette. What the Duke of Clarence suffered in a butt of Malmsey, some obscure chieftain of the barbarous Hebrides, about the same period of antiquity, may have endured in a darksome pit filled to its brink with pickled herring.”

  At the close of this charming paragraph, Logan settled himself to sleep.

  In the morning, on his way to seek out the schoolmaster who might help him to a passage to Carnglass, Logan was surprised to find Loch Boisdale and its neighborhood bursting with activity. Navvies were unloading enormous crates from a freighter; two new bulldozers rumbled down the road toward the interior of the island; recently-built huts of corrugated iron, an age away from the primitive thatched Uist cottages of field-stone that stood scattered over the oozy plain, shouldered one another near the pier. The hotelkeeper had said briefly that something important, in a military way, was in progress in the heart of South Uist. A range for guided missiles, perhaps; and perhaps something even newer. Idle policemen, the hotelkeeper had said, lounged about the approaches to the construction-area. He did not like it. It would spoil the snipe-shooting, and also evict honest families from their crofts. “Those men in London are spoiling the best places and the best people.”

  About the middle of the morning, Logan plodded up the soggy road to the schoolhouse. The sky was very gray again, and a fairly heavy rain was falling; but even the guidebook confessed that the climate of South Uist was the worst in Britain. MacLean, the rawboned schoolmaster, would do what he could to assist the gentleman. Leaving the schoolroom in charge of a senior boy, he went back with Logan toward the harbor. Yes, Mr. MacLean knew the master of a drifter, now in Loch Boisdale, who might conceivably engage to land Mr. Logan in Carnglass. This fisherman, though akin to the schoolmaster, was a very remote cousin, mind, and in need of money, to pay a fine. A fine for what? For poaching. Logan wanted to know what sort of poaching – fishing in forbidden waters?