Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  “No doubt, no doubt, old chap.” Here Logan took a knight from Jackman. “I have limitless confidence in their aptitude for such work, if for no other. But the powers that be still would tend to hold you personally responsible, wouldn’t they, now? And suppose the interrogation should all be in vain – why, however could you explain? Nothing does a diligent man’s reputation more serious damage than an unauthorized and unnecessary atrocity. You ought to know that by this time, Jackman.”

  “The things I did, others told me to do, Logan.” Jackman’s lips worked. He lost another pawn.

  “Quite. But you went rather beyond specific instructions, didn’t you? I don’t advise you to exceed instructions here in Carnglass.”

  Jackman ran a hand lightly across his forehead, distractedly touching the little round soft patch in the middle with a forefinger. He ventured out a rook too far, and lost it to Logan. Then he looked, silent, into Logan’s eyes. The gaze of those great glowing pupils of Jackman’s was hard to bear. Into Logan’s mind came the sentence, “And if thy light be dark ness, how great shall be that darkness.” It was just possible that he might prove a match of Edmund Jackman now, though the odds were against him. The man’s brain must be damaged, and under Jackman’s outward imperiousness, Logan suspected, vacillation was gnawing away. Logan thought also that had he encountered Jackman at the height of the man’s powers, Mary would have had a sorry knight-errant. But now the merciless energy and talent which had been Jackman’s were flickering in the socket, like enough, and Logan had to deal only with the remnant of a bad man. In Jackman’s ears sounded the wings of the Furies, and his mind sank further into doubt and dread. Or so Logan surmised, looking into those splendid, troubling eyes. It was just barely conceivable that Logan might defeat this failing master of deceit.

  Logan started, and shook his head to rouse his consciousness. Had Jackman been attempting to mesmerize him? If so, the attempted paralysis of will had not succeeded, what with Logan’s own mind being full of plots and stratagems. Yet Jackman might have come near successful hypnosis; Logan had a feeling that the man had been asking him questions, in a low, almost friendly voice, to which Logan had given no answers as yet.

  Just now Jackman was saying, ever so softly, “Who are your friends outside the Old House, out there in the wet and the dark?”

  “Friends?” Logan spoke shrilly, alarmed at his own nearslip into reverie or trance. “Friends? Whose friends? If anyone’s outside, they’re no people of mine.” Logan regretted this admission as soon as he had made it; it would have done no harm to keep Jackman wondering whether he had an accomplice or two hidden in the bracken. Indeed, perhaps Jackman had begun to extract the truth from him by hypnosis, and Logan had escaped from the domination of those black eyes only in the nick of time.

  But Jackman shook his head slowly, in disbelief; and his eyes went to the window of that room high in the tower, almost as if he feared to see some face pressed against the pane, far above the living rock of the Old House’s foundation. It was borne in upon Logan that Jackman’s unease was greater than his own fears.

  Jackman licked his thin lips. “Why, Logan, who do you expect me to believe they are?” If the mystery back there behind the bracken had shaken Jackman this much, the panic must be worse among the men below stairs, with Rab’s hysteria to work upon them. “If they were police or intelligence people,” Jackman said, almost as if he expected to be overheard by some presence in that dusky painted chamber, “they would have swooped upon us long ago; they wouldn’t skulk about, picking off first one man and another.”

  “Rab told you that it was Tam Lagg: old Lagg, Dr. Jackman, that you sent over the cliffs a thousand feet down to the rocks and the sea, while he screamed of his wife and his bairns.”

  Jackman looked at Logan astonished. “You, Logan – were you watching then? But no, you’ll have had that from Don-ley, before you finished with him. Lagg? What are you talking of? I saw him strike a crag halfway down, and bounce off like a ball, and then fall to the sea. Such a thing doesn’t walk again.”

  “Not alive,” Logan replied. “No, not alive.” Jackman’s eyes dilated. Yes, he could sound this note, Logan decided: the black beast was upon Jackman’s shoulders, and the conjuror was bewitched. If ever a man was haunted, it was Jackman, stalked by Spanish victims and Roumanian spectres, and now with the wraith of Lagg at his heels. “See here, Jackman: you raise sham bogles to frighten old women, and you laugh up your sleeve. But when you play with things from the abyss, you run risks. In this dead island of Carnglass, all round us things are ready to stir, if they’re called. I felt them in Dalcruach clachan. In Carnglass the dead are more than the living. And why shouldn’t Tam Lagg rise? You gave him the death that he feared most to die. If ever you set a spirit to walk the night, it was when you tossed that screaming man from the headland at the back of St. Merin’s Chapel.”

  As Logan spoke, a nasty change came over Jackman. His face went a sick white, and his eyes closed, and he slumped in his chair. The horror must be on him. His breath came hard. Logan began to think of closing with him as he sat motionless across the table. But after a moment, Jackman gasped, blinked, and fumbled for the pistol in his pocket; he drew the gun and laid it before him, beside the chessboard.

  “Then you feel it, too,” Jackman muttered, very low. “All about us, eh? Oh, this is a damned house, a place of dreams, horrid dreams. Listen: last night I walked the passages, for I didn’t dare to sleep, until I was worn out. In the end, I lay on my bed, not closing my eyes. And then it was not a bed, but a long, close tunnel or cave, and I was stumbling along it. Away at the end, I could see something standing. And it came to me that I myself was standing there, even though I walked toward the thing. The Edmund Jackman at the end of the cave was the Edmund Jackman that I might have been, if – if I had taken another turn at the beginning. And as I came up to myself, wanting to see the face, and the beauty of what I might have been, the thing turned, and looked at me. Its face was the face of a goat. Ah, the slit eyes! And I became one with it, and woke, and the horror still was on me.”

  Infected by the man’s loathing of himself, and his fright, Logan also lowered his voice to a whisper. “Would you rather have died in the cave than have become one with the goat?”

  “Yes,” said Jackman, “yes. It would be better to lie dead, dead like Lagg. I thought then of the gelignite, and I think of it every day and every night.” At this, Jackman shuddered, seemed to collect his wits, scowled at Logan, and glanced dully at the Table Men of Askival on the board before him.

  “Your move,” Logan reminded him. Edmund Jackman moved almost at random. “So!” Logan shifted his queen. “Checkmate, Dr. Jackman.”

  “Hell!” cried Jackman, reaching out his hand as if to sweep the pieces to the floor.

  “Easy!” Logan said, intercepting Jackman’s hand with his own. “There’s but this one set in the world, you know.”

  Once more their eyes met in a long, strange stare; then Jackman, to Logan’s surprise, glanced down at the table. “Logan, or whatever you are,” he said, almost pleadingly, “I don’t know whether you can understand me. You’re a Party intellectual, I think, and the Party believes it knows all things. Yet in some matters the Party is blind. Just now I said ‘Hell.’ In Carnglass, I have learned that Hell is real. That’s heresy in the Party; but I have looked on Hell. There is no Heaven, but there is Hell.”

  Jackman’s eyes were vacant now; he seemed to have forgotten to whom he spoke. “Hell endures,” he went on. “I have been in Hell always. This Carnglass is Hell. Don’t you know you were here in Carnglass before, infinitely long ago? We fought here then – and I lost. In Carnglass there is no time. Eternity is real here, and change is the delusion. I know this in the nights, when I walk the corridors. It is only in the day I can pretend that I am alive, or that what things I do can possibly save me from the torment. In the nights it is Hell that is real, and the Party is a sham. Do you understand that? And I know that you came here to s
end me to the torment, as you did before.”

  Many times, Logan had heard the phrase “possessed of a devil.” But not until this moment, as he sat opposite Jackman with the chessmen between them, had he perceived the full and dreadful meaning of the words. The dark powers had claimed Edmund Jackman long since, and what sat opposite him was only the husk of a human being. Even the husk was crumbling now. Yet out of that desiccated scrap of mortality, dry and empty as the armor of last summer’s locust, there echoed now and again cries of anguish, the vain contrition of the damned. Whatever traditionary spectres might throng round the Old House of Fear, here right before Logan sat the ghost of what once might have been a vessel for honor.

  Again Jackman’s eyes had closed, and the man or devil did not stir in the chair. What visions came and went behind those fallen eyelids, Logan preferred not to think. Jackman had drifted somewhere beyond this world of sense, for the moment. In the middle of that pallid forehead, the nasty round spot, the Third Eye, seemed to pulsate faintly, as if keeping night watch upon Logan.

  Hugh Logan fought clear of the contagion of madness. Minutes, precious minutes, were slipping away. By a heap of chessmen lay the little pistol. Should he make a try for it? Or was this some sort of trap that Jackman had set? No, the damned man’s trance was genuine. If he chose, Logan could leap up, snatch the pistol, and make for the stairs. But that gang of murderers was below. And where might Mary and he run to? Well, let him get his hands on a rifle, and he might hold the old tower against them for a time. It might be possible to keep Jackman a hostage. The scheme was fantastic, but the only probable alternative was torture and death for Mary MacAskival and himself. Rising silent from his chair, Logan stretched out a hand toward the gun.

  “As you were!” It was Royall’s harsh voice, at Logan’s back. A revolver-muzzle pressed into his spine. Royall’s long, almost skeletal arm reached past him and snatched up the little pistol by the chessmen. “Over to the wall,” Royall said, “and stand there till I tell you to turn round. I’ve been behind the screen these ten minutes past, Logan.”

  Chapter 11

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN a lunatic try anyhow, Logan thought as he faced the wall. Behind him, Royall was ministering to Dr. Jackman, but Logan felt sure that if he swung round, Royall would not miss.

  “Here, a little brandy,” Royall was saying, rather in the tone of a nurse. “Come round now, Dr. Jackman. It’s no time for fancies.” There was a sound as if Royall were gently slapping Jackman’s cheeks. “That’s it, sir: are you quite awake now, Dr. Jackman?”

  Jackman’s voice came choked and faint, but grew in power after the first few words. “Askival,” Jackman was saying. “Askival – where is he? And Lagg?”

  “Take hold of yourself, Dr. Jackman. We’ve this fellow Logan to deal with. Very well, Logan: come over here and sit down.”

  For the present, Royall had assumed command. With his revolver he gestured toward the chair in which Logan had sat during the chessmatch, and Logan took it without protest. Royall continued to stand. On the other side of the table, Jackman seemed in possession of his faculties again.

  “We’d best search this man,” Royall said. He slipped a hand inside Logan’s jacket, still standing at Logan’s back, and found his wallet. Logan did not move: Jackman was watching him keenly, his hand on the pistol. They would find no identification in the wallet, for Logan had put his passport and anything else with his name on it into the knapsack.

  “No, sir, there’s nothing with a name, worse luck,” Royall murmured. “Stand up and take off your jacket, Logan.” Logan did as he was told. In a moment Royall thrust the jacket back to him. “And no labels, Dr. Jackman. The man must be an old hand at his game.”

  “Tompkins searched his room this morning?” Jackman asked.

  “Yes; and he found nothing but a razor and the like. No papers – and not even the canvas sack this man brought with him. I suppose he burnt it in the fireplace, or else flung it out of the window and down the cliff to the sea.”

  “Have a man look along the rocks at low tide,” Jackman said. “Yes, our friend Logan undoubtedly has had experience as an agent of some sort.”

  “You needn’t bother to have a man risk his bones on those weedy ledges,” Logan told them. “I burnt the sack on the coals, last night.” He trusted that Mary had tucked away the pack in some really secure hidie-hole.

  “For your circumstances, Logan,” Royall muttered, “you seem unreasonably cheerful. I shouldn’t care to find myself in your present situation.” Royall ran his hands carefully along Logan’s trousers and into his pockets. “No, Dr. Jackman – no knife, and no papers stitched into the linings.”

  “Why,” said Logan, “I suppose a man might as well laugh as cry. And then, don’t you know, it’s not I who need to fash – as we true-born Scots say. It’s you gentlemen who will have to make your peace, if you can, with the men that will be here all too soon for your comfort.”

  “Sit down again, Logan,” Royall ordered. “You needn’t sing that tune for us. If you had any people at your back, we’d have seen them before this.”

  “Oh?” Logan answered, amicably. “And who do you suppose took Carruthers? Donley was dead hours before you missed Carruthers, remember.”

  Jackman and Royall stared at each other, silent. In that moment, Logan almost felt a touch of pity for them. Both must have been reared and educated well enough – very well, indeed. What flaws of character or intellectual false turnings had brought them into this ruthless business, he could not tell. They might have commenced, like others, full of humanitarian sentimentality. And then, perhaps, demon ideology, with its imperatives and its inexorable dogmas, its sobersided caricature of religion, had swept them on to horrors. Ideological fanaticism had made of Jackman the goat-man, mastered by lust: but not the lust for women’s bodies. Jackman’s was the libido dominandi, the tormented seeking after power that ceases not until death. And in the flame of that lust for power, Jackman and Royall would be burnt up, today or next week or next month: they were at the end of their devil’s bargain, and the fiend would claim his own.

  Now, in this oppressive silent moment, the conviction came to Logan that these two artists of disintegration were more frightened than he. He felt surprised to find himself thinking clearly enough, almost ruminating, in this tension that made electric the ancient room with the painted ceiling. Because frightened, Jackman and Royall were the more dangerous; but also their brains were stagnant with dread.

  Fear, it crossed Logan’s mind, is the normal condition of man, after all. Quiet ages and safe lands are the rare exceptions in history. Nowadays the tides of disorder were gnawing at whatever security and justice still stood in the world, quite as the swell round Carnglass sought to bring down that heap of gray stones to the mindless anonymity of the ocean. With growing speed, the brooding spectre of terror, almost palpable in Carnglass, was enveloping the world. This island was the microcosm of modern existence.

  And here in the haunted stronghold of the Old House of Fear, Jackman and Royall and their gang found themselves caught in their own snare. Even the dull criminals below stairs, huddled tipsily by the kitchen fire, were unmanned by a dim sense of catastrophe, caught up in a horror of the empty island, where mist and silence seemed to have made away with time, so that Glasgow and Liverpool and London were fancies out of an illusory past.

  Jackman himself, with his distraught imagination, his ruined talents once near to genius, fancied himself snared here by destiny, condemned to give reality to a myth. And was he wrong? In the Old House, Logan doubted where the realm of spirit ended and the realm of flesh began.

  In this dead island, all Jackman’s cleverness lay frustrated, and the strange chance or power that had brought Logan to Carnglass on this day seemed to fill the close air in that forgotten tower-room. For Edmund Jackman, Logan might be something not quite canny, at once a man and an occult agent. Even for Royall, Hugh Logan must seem a retributive figure, from Party or police, mercilessly
calm with the knowledge that others were not far behind him.

  For all their effort to behave as if they still were masters of the island, a tautness almost hysterical had crept into Jackman and Royall, and their voices were strained. What for years they had dealt out to others, now waited for them; and they had forgotten the meaning of mercy. There was no justice to which they could appeal. By fear they had lived; and now the fear which they and their sort had carried throughout the world was claiming them also. Having murdered order, these two at last were cast into the outer darkness.

  Jackman was speaking. Had something like a quaver crept into that urbane and sardonic voice? “Well, Royall,” he was saying, “what will we do with this Logan?”

  Royall shifted uncertainly behind Logan’s chair. This man, it occurred to Logan, saw the growing madness in his leader, and yet was loyal – his last link with old-fangled human affections.

  “Dr. Jackman,” Royall said, “I have a theory concerning our friend Logan. I believe he’s one of Vlanarov’s people.”

  Jackman now spoke with his old decisiveness, as if another spirit had entered into that sinister body, and as if what had happened during the preceding half hour had quite washed away from his memory. “Possibly,” Jackman commented. “Quite possibly. The thought had crossed my mind, too. If he should be, perhaps we can arrive at satisfactory terms. Well, Logan?”

  Logan devoutly wished, at this juncture, that he had studied more attentively the recent history of Eastern Europe. If he had fought in Europe, rather than in the Pacific, that might have been of some help; or had he been in intelligence, rather than the infantry. As it was, the name Vlanarov told him a little, but not enough. If memory served him aright, Vlanarov was such a one as Jackman, but a much bigger fish. Logan rather thought that Vlanarov had been at Bela Kun’s side in Hungary, a generation ago, and in Madrid during the Civil War, and after 1945 a terror in Poland. Through all the vicissitudes of Party feuds and all the eddies of ideology in the buffer states, the shadowy but formidable figure of Vlanarov had glided scatheless. No one ever saw a photograph of the man. It had been his peculiar talent to anticipate the triumph of particular factions within the Soviet states, and to shift masterfully in precisely the proper moment from one interpretation of Marxist doctrine to the corrected version. Whenever a vanquished clique fell to its ruin, Vlanarov sorted through the wreck for such survivors as might still do mischief to the new Party orthodoxy, and clipped their claws and their wings for them – or something worse. Certain Trotskyites called Vlanarov “The Vulture.”