Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  More than all his other services, what made Dr. Jackman indispensable to Lady MacAskival was this: he kept Sir Alastair away from the door of her room. Lady MacAskival always had suspected that Alastair was lurking outside that door, even though she had buried him under the great stone in St. Merin’s Chapel so many years ago. Every day she sent the footman with a message for Alastair to be placed in the tomb at St. Merin’s Chapel, imploring Alastair to forgive her, and to stay up there at the top of Carnglass where he belonged. Yet twice she had glimpsed Alastair, unrelenting, in the narrow passages. He would come back, and gobble at her bedroom door on windy nights, and she lay in dread that one night he might cross the threshold.

  Dr. Jackman had saved her from that: he had bound Sir Alastair by a mystical chain, he told Lady MacAskival, and so long as she possessed the loyalty of Dr. Jackman, no tall stern old man, who ought to be in his tomb, would cross the threshold. Of course it was essential to retain the wholehearted loyalty of Dr. Jackman, and that could be secured by agreeing with him in all things. Once or twice, when she had demurred from some plan of his, Dr. Jackman had come to her bedside, with Mr. Royall beside him, and had described in awful detail what would be the consequences if Sir Alastair made his way in. She had fallen into a fit, and old Agnes had been too terrified to speak. At all costs, Dr. Edmund Jackman must be kept in a good humor; and sometimes the costs ran very high. It was a great pity that willful girl Mary did not take to Dr. Jackman.

  For months now, Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall had lived at the Old House all the time, except for brief cruises about the islands. Dr. Jackman demonstrated to Lady MacAskival his control over the risen dead by certain seances in her room. Tables rose, and chairs fell over, and horrid white shapes loomed up – but never, Dr. Jackman promised, the shape of Alastair. And presently Dr. Jackman revealed to her that he always had been in Carnglass; and had been there infinitely long before she, as Miss Ann Robertson, had been married to Colonel Sir Alastair MacAskival. For Dr. Jackman was not simply human. He was a part of Carnglass, and its master from time out of mind. He had been there before the Viking rovers came. He was the Firgower, the Goat-Man. And he saw all things, past, present, and future, through his Third Eye, which quivered in the middle of his forehead. By watching Lady MacAskival with his Third Eye, he could relieve her of all pain, and put her to sleep at will.

  Yet it did not seem quite right that Dr. Jackman should marry her niece. He had told Lady MacAskival many times that he must do so; that the thing was ordered by the Presences under the rocks of Carnglass; that thus Carnglass would be his in the eyes of the puny law of men, as well as by the decree of nature. Still, it did not seem right. Mary belonged to the living, not to be a being beyond good and evil. Lady MacAskival dared not deny Dr. Jackman, however; she said only, in great fear and pain, “Then you must ask Mary herself.”

  Dr. Jackman did not neglect Miss Mary MacAskival. Upon her he bestowed much valuable time endeavoring to instruct her in progressive social views and in a proper understanding of occult lore. He had compelled her to come to him in his study at least an hour a day, to listen to his peculiar talk. Almost always he had been quite civil but once or twice he had threatened her, and then he had been ghastly. He talked politics and necromancy to her, a queer mixture. The one, she thought, was as mad as the other, or perhaps the politics was a little the madder.

  “If I had known the least little bit about politics and economics and all that,” she said to Hugh, “Dr. Jackman would have converted me. But I was utterly ignorant, so he could make no impression. I was altogether too stupid.” The politics, so far as Logan could determine from Mary’s imperfect exposition, were Marxist, or a variant thereof. “He has been so eager to have me serve the Party,” she said. “But the Party, so far as I could make out, meant to destroy a great many people to bring about peace everywhere, and meant to make everybody precisely alike so everyone could be perfectly happy, forever and ever. That’s nonsense. You’re a solicitor – or is it a barrister, Hugh? – and you know. I don’t at all want to be like Dr. Jackman, or like Niven the tinker; and I don’t want them to be like me. So after a time I simply stared at Dr. Jackman, and said ‘Indeed?’ now and then, and he grew discouraged. My tactics worked like a bomb.”

  “Like a bomb?” asked Hugh Logan, startled.

  “Oh, you know – that’s one of the things we said at school, ‘like a bomb.’ Everything good or successful is like a bomb. You know, don’t you?” Sometimes this astounding girl seemed old as the hills, and at other times younger than the fifteen years Jackman had assigned to her. She was a hoyden of sorts, but quite innocent. “Don’t you ever say ‘like a bomb,’ Hugh? But then, I suppose you never attended a girls’ school.”

  So Jackman had abandoned his endeavor to enlist Miss MacAskival in The Cause. Yet he had persisted in his instruction in the occult. “He really believes in it all, Hugh. Mr. Royall doesn’t believe, or believes only a little; but Dr. Jackman is stranger than my old aunt. He was shot in the head in Spain – oh, did he tell you that – and I think that he has been more clever and more dangerous in various ways since he came from the hospital; but also he sees things that no one else sees, and hears sounds that no one else hears. And he has become a part of Carnglass. I mean that. He has read everything that may be read concerning Carnglass; and all the old tales have got into his brain the way romances got into Don Quixote’s head: but so evilly, Hugh. He did not say he was the Firgower simply to frighten my aunt; he believes it. He frightens even Mr. Royall. And then, of a sudden, he will drop that weird talk and begin discussing politics. Or he may become quite sensible, and make plans to scout round the islands, and to keep in touch with people on the mainland, and to send messages to the Continent, and to set off gelignite when he’s ready.” “Explosives?”

  “Oh, yes, he has a crypt full of it; but I’ll tell you of that presently. He didn’t mean me to hear about the explosives, but there are places in my Old House where I can eavesdrop, if I must.” She seemed to take a schoolgirl satisfaction in that art.

  Royall, to judge by Mary MacAskival’s description, was what someone once called “the humanitarian with the guillotine.” Wholly devoted to Jackman, he was forever talking of the sufferings of the working classes. But he spoke of the men who served him and Jackman, and sometimes of people in general, as “that scum.” Systematic and humorless, once upon a time he had been a successful civil servant. Then, however, political fanaticism had swallowed him, and there remained of the man only an emaciated body and a hatred of life, which he disguised from himself as hatred of the “expropriating classes.” Mary MacAskival thought that Royall would have snuffed out her life, if it had served his interest – or the Party’s interest – with no more scruple than as if she had been a mouse.

  Edmund Jackman was more subtle and interesting. Possibly, Logan thought as he listened to the girl, Jackman once had known the good and had deliberately chosen the evil – and ever after had been haunted by that memory. “Evil, be thou my good.” Fearless and very clever, somewhere early in life he must have taken the sinister track. And never had he contrived to turn back.

  “When the horror is upon Dr. Jackman,” Mary was whispering, “I think I would faint, only that he reminds me of Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale, and that makes me laugh inside, even though the rest of me is shaking.” The horror came upon him once or twice nearly every day, and then he looked like a damned soul. “I think he is remembering the things he has done. Once, when he meant to break my will, he hinted at what he had to do in Spain. I think he killed patients in hospitals with doses of poison, so that they would not tell tales. Perhaps, in the beginning, the people who gave him his orders saw the streak of good in him, and so they hardened him by ordering him to do all the worst things that could be done.” The girl shivered.

  After the civil war in Spain, it seemed, Jackman had vanished into eastern Europe; and had reappeared in England for a time during the Second World War; and next had turned up in Ro
umania. There, somehow, he had fallen into disfavor with the people who gave him his orders. Possibly he had gone too far in his measures, having come to love terror for its own sake. Or perhaps he had been chosen as a scape-goat, during a period when there were official pretenses of moderation. In any event, he had fled out of Roumania, four years ago, returning to London; and then he had come to Carnglass. Royall, it seemed, had been with Jackman in Roumania, and the two of them had done things there of which they preferred not to speak even to each other. “Royall is like a ghost: I mean that he has no conscience left. But Jackman, I think, has memories of the difference between wrong and right, and so the horror comes upon him.”

  Suddenly the girl leaned closer to Logan, who had been about to speak, and put her little hand upon his mouth. “Hush!” – this scarcely more than a hiss. Her ears, attuned to the creaks and echoes of the place, had detected something his had not. Yes: now there were stealthy, footfalls in the passage. Someone moved outside the door of the room; seemed to hesitate there; passed on. The girl’s fingers were gripping Logan’s shoulder, and his hand shook as he held his pistol ready. But whatever had been outside was gone elsewhere in the labyrinth of the Old House.

  How ever had Mary MacAskival endured, in her solitude, the dread strain of this perilous ordeal, month on month? “I say,” she asked him, abruptly, as if she had read his mind, “do you think I’m mad myself?” He squeezed her little hand for answer. “Sometimes I wonder if I am,” she went on, “for it seems like one unending nightmare: until you came, that is.”

  Once Jackman had said to her, “Miss MacAskival, felicitate you on your strength of mind.” Considering what the man was, he had been almost gentle with her; probably his admiration was genuine. He tolerated no rudeness toward her from any of his rough men.

  “I don’t think he is interested in women as most men are,” Mary MacAskival went on. Did she blush in the darkness? “He is in love with power and terror. He wants me only because with me he could have Carnglass a while longer, and because I have money. And, I suppose, because he enjoys crushing other people’s minds. He has tried to crush mine. Had he not been so busy with other things, I believe he would have defeated me long ago.”

  So long as her aunt continued to live, Jackman had no urgent motive to compel the girl to marry him: his ascendancy over Lady MacAskival gave him Carnglass and enough money. But as Lady MacAskival sank, now rarely rising from her bed, the day grew near when Jackman must marry the girl, or else run the danger of exposure and ruin.

  “Once I was rash,” Mary said. “I told him and Royall that I had tolerated them only because they held my aunt’s life as security. I said that when she was gone, I’d tell everything I knew to the police.

  “Dr. Jackman smiled a horrid smile. ‘Who would believe a mad girl?’ was what he said. And then he told me that if he should fail to persuade me to remain loyal to him, he and Royall might do things to me – ‘painful measures, Miss MacAskival, painful for all of us’ – that would make me into a different person, so that I could never be the same again. There were ‘special mental disciplines,’ he told me, and ‘certain shock treatments.’ It would be ever so much pleasanter if I simply did as he told me to. And he could be sure that I would do as he wished if I were to marry him. That was once when the horror came upon him.”

  Here, at last, the girl burst into suppressed sobs. Logan’s arm went round her shoulders. “Sometimes I have thought,” she mumbled, “that I ought to give way. So much easier! But I suppose I was too proud.”

  The fierce old blood of the chieftains of MacAskival, Logan thought, was strong in her; she was a sport in more ways than one. It would be a pleasure for him, if ever he got the chance – which, at the moment, seemed slim – to settle accounts on her behalf with Edmund Jackman.

  Why, until she wrote to Duncan MacAskival, had she made no attempt to expose Jackman, or to escape? Because it was only gradually she had come to understand what Jackman and Royall were after; and she had known, too, that her aunt’s life was in their hands, and that they would not hesitate to snuff it out if they were pushed. From the moment Jackman established himself in the Old House, it had become increasingly difficult to send any message out of the island; a fortnight ago, it had become virtually impossible; and since Donley’s flight, she had not been permitted even to leave the house.

  And there was another reason: that room in the cellars full of explosives. She thought that Jackman was eager to use them, if there were any chance for it, to destroy certain mysterious things that the government was building in the Outer Isles; but Royall was trying to restrain him. “Dr. Jackman,” she had overheard him say once, “you know what exceeding instructions has brought us already. Until word comes from Bruhl…” Royall was willing, she suspected, to rest content with gathering what information they could about those mysterious projects, and transmitting it to someone in London. But in Jackman there was some terrible compulsion to blow everything apart. “If he could, I do believe, he would explode all the world into little bits.”

  So there was this: if Jackman were brought to bay, and had the opportunity, very probably he would set off the gel ignite in the crypt. The Old House would go, and everyone in it; and for Mary MacAskival, the Old House and Carnglass were the center of the universe. “I know nothing about politics,” she told Logan, rather apologetically. “I suppose Jackman and Royall are traitors, and might do terrible harm to the country. But Carnglass is my country. I think of the Old House first.” Jackman would destroy himself and everyone in the Old House, almost certainly, if he despaired. “What was it the old Greek said: ‘When I am dead, let earth be mixed with fire’? I learnt that at school. Well, that is how Dr. Jackman thinks.”

  She had lived with the terror, hoping vaguely that Jackman’s plans might alter and he and his men go away; that the authorities in London or Glasgow might discover the scheme and descend before Jackman could act. It was only as her aunt had sunk toward her end that the girl had been roused to some plan of action, what with her own imminent danger. And so she had got off the note to Duncan Mac-Askival, a schoolgirl’s design; yet it had succeeded so far as to bring Logan to her. “Until you came, I had no one at all to talk with.” Her sobbing broke out again.

  Jackman and Royall, she was convinced, had no notion of what she had done or of Logan’s real identity. Once Logan had told her of his encounters with Dowie and Gare, she said that Duncan MacAskival’s cablegrams could not have reached Carnglass. The storms, and the fortunate burning of the boats, had prevented that. There was a wireless in Old House and Jackman sometimes used it, cautiously, in sending messages in code to people on the mainland; but some ten days before Lagg and Donley disappeared, part of the wireless set had slipped out of sight. “They thought Lagg, who was acting strangely, must have stolen it,” she said. “He didn’t. I did.” This girl was a paragon. “I do believe that if they knew who you are,” she went on, “they would make away with you, just as they did with Mr. Lagg” – for Logan had told her, hurriedly, what Donley had said of Lagg’s end.

  In a very little while, Logan realized of a sudden, it would be dawn; and Mary MacAskival must be gone from his room before then. “Mary,” he said, “what is this about Lagg? Could he be alive? Could that fellow Rab really have seen him? Who is outside this house? Is it Donley, or is it only these fellows’ imagination?”

  She hesitated. “I do not know,” she said. Was she concealing something? “Perhaps I ought to – but there isn’t time now. Listen: someone’s stirring already, somewhere below. There’s so much more to tell you, but it must wait. Jackman will keep us apart if he can, but perhaps he’ll be out with the men today, hunting for Donley. Now I must run.” There were, indeed, the first faint flushes of the Hebridean spring dawn visible through the windows. She leaned toward Logan. “You may kiss my cheek, if you like, for being a brave man.” Logan did that, but he said, “You seemed to be friendlier yesterday.” She sprang up, averting her face, and went to the door, and p
ressed an ear against it; then she opened it a crack, and peered out; then waved a little hand, and slipped through, and was gone. With this sudden vanishing, Logan almost doubted that the strange little creature ever had crouched sobbing beside him.

  Logan lay awake on his bed after that, as the sun came up, full of dreads – more, perhaps, for the girl than for himself, but sufficiently concerned for Number One. About seven, there was a rap at his door, and Tompkins, that pillar of varnished iniquity, brought him morning tea. Logan would not have been surprised to be knifed as he took the tray, but Tompkins said only, “Foggy again today, sir,” and closed the door behind him. Leaving the tea untasted, Logan shaved with the hot water Tompkins had brought, hurriedly dressed, and found his way downstairs to the booklined corridor, where for a few minutes he idled about, with a feeling of complete helplessness. Then Royall appeared from somewhere, glancing at him suspiciously; but Royall was civil enough, in his deathly way, and told him that he could breakfast in the study in the tower.

  He breakfasted alone. Of Mary, there was no sign; and Tompkins told him that “Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall and some of the men have gone out, sir, hunting that Donley person.” The breakfast was meagre, porridge and a scrambled egg of sorts – powdered egg, Logan thought. In a besieged house, supplies soon ran low. Outside the small windows, the mist clung to the gray stone. He would have liked to pry into the drawers of desk and table, but Tompkins or someone else might enter at any moment. His pistol was invisible under his heavy tweed jacket; that was something. How would it all end? He was a pawn in this deep game, and presently someone would sweep him off the board, unless Donley had got to the mainland and delivered his note to the police. And even if a police launch should put in at Askival harbor, could that devil Jackman be prevented from sending everyone in the house up in smoke? To ponder these things, in a deceptive calm, really was the strangest part of the nightmare into which he had got himself.