Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  The cart would be set afire against the gate, and Logan and the two Malcolms would blaze away at the adjacent windows, as if the assault were to come there. That was, after all, a venerable Highland and Island military device, especially beloved by Rob Roy; and though if the cart burned well it might char through the gate, there was no danger of the great house, which was all stone, catching fire. But Logan did not intend really to rush the gate. The true attack would be on the flank, around the corner: while the attention of the defenders was concentrated on the gate, Logan and his men would carry the ladder to the windows of the landward side and break in, if they could. And then, presumably, there would be shooting within the house; and the odds were not in Logan’s favor. But this was the best he could do. It was all he could do for Mary MacAskival, and it might be too late.

  Now the cart had been pulled by the horses to the edge of the trees. Someone inside the house must have heard the jingle of harness and the whinnying of horses, for a shot fired at a venture passed through the branches above their heads. “Now, Kenneth MacAskival, Angus!” Logan said. They cut the horses out of the harness, and four men commenced, shoving with all their strength, to run with the cart across the little plateau of rock to the door of the Old House. As yet, the straw was not alight, for they would need the advantage of darkness so long as they could keep it.

  Into the quiet night came a hoarse shout of alarm from the house: Royall’s voice, Logan thought in that instant. Two rifles fired at the cart, and then a third. Logan and his companions fired as fast as they could into the windows above the gate, and Logan heard a man scream. Still the cart ran on, and then crashed into the gate itself. The riflemen in the house were firing straight down into the cart now, and three of the MacAskivals ran out from behind it, leaping and rolling for the shelter of the trees; Logan and the Malcolms covered them with the best barrage they could contrive. That left Dumb Angus under the cart. Logan had given Angus careful instructions, through Malcolm Mor. Angus had been handed a length of charred rope, and a supply of matches. Crouching under the cart, he was to light the frayed rope, throw it into the straw, and run for it. For Angus was very quick of body. Now Logan saw a tiny flame spring up beneath the cart; it grew; still Angus lingered. Next a flaming coil was flung upon the dry straw, which caught. Two or three minutes passed, the firing from the house – were there only two rifles now? – sporadic. Then a mass of flame roared up from the cart, kindling the lumber among the straw also, and the light from it shown fiercely across the empty windows of the façade. Angus scooted from under the cart and down across the rock, Logan and the others firing to cover him; but there was no answer from the windows by the gate.

  Now for the worst part. John MacAskival was useless, shot in one arm, and dazed with shock; Logan flung his gun to the boy, telling him to fire at will, for three minutes, into the windows by the gate; the boy was utterly delighted. The rest of them, seizing the ladder, swung out of the plantation toward the right, veered round the corner of the Victorian block, and set the ladder against a first-story window, Angus holding it firm at the bottom. Someone fired a shot from above them, but no one seemed to be hit.

  Logan leaped up, the others behind him, and in two seconds was smashing out of the window-frame the shattered remnants of the plate glass, using his gun-butt, and expecting any moment to get a bullet in his chest. But the room within was silent. He flung himself into that room, and the four MacAskivals were at his heels. And now, indeed, there were gunshots; but they came from deep within the house, and no one opposed Logan as they burst into the corridor.

  Chapter 15

  SOMEONE YELLED in the corridor as Logan entered. But it was only a little paper-white man, dragging a rifle feebly as if it were a ball and chain: Tompkins. At sight of Logan, the butler dropped the rifle altogether, falling to his knees, and cried, “O Gawd! Mr. Logan, sir, don’t ’urt me, don’t! I’m your slaive, Mr. Logan! O Gawd, Jackman’s mad, and they’re murderin’ heach hother below stairs.”

  Clutching at Logan’s legs, Tompkins babbled on as to how he was only an honest butler and part-time burglar, unaccustomed to killing. Logan jerked him to his feet and forced him in the direction of the gunfire within the house. “In the billiard room, Mr. Logan, sir!”

  Urging Tompkins before them, Logan and the MacAskivals ran to the end of the passage, rounded the corner to the left, and came to the door of the billiard room. Dead or dying, Royall lay face down across the threshold. Reckless, Logan strode over him. The big room, with its long windows looking toward the harbor, had three more men in it. One was Anderson, shot through the belly, writhing with his back against a leg of the billiard table. One was Rab, sprawled in the middle of the red Victorian carpet, a bullet hole between his eyes. The third was a man Logan had not seen before, lying on a sofa, his eyes bandaged, sightless, moaning in fear – Till, of course, the burned boatman. Where was Jackman? Two or three more shots, in quick succession, sounded within the house, somewhere below.

  “Tompkins, tell me where Jackman’s gone, or I’ll finish you,” Logan said. The butler, stammering and choking, could only point toward the cellars below. Malcolm Mor ran in.

  “In the room above the gate,” Malcolm said – he slipped here into Gaelic, and with difficulty found his English again – “there is a man with long hair, like a gypsy, and he has been shot through the shoulder, and can do no harm.” That would be Niven; and that left Jackman and Simmons and Ferd Caggia. And Mary, Mary.

  “Tompkins,” Logan said, taking the man by the throat, “show me where the crypt with the explosives is.” The butler reeled in Logan’s grip along the passage, and down a flight of stairs, and then pointed to an open doorway, from which stone steps led into shadows. Angus was behind Logan; the other MacAskivals were poking into the rooms.

  Releasing Tompkins, Logan went down those steps to a little landing, and started to turn to the remaining flight that would take him to the crypt. A rifle cracked, and the bullet ricocheted from the wall. Logan flung himself back, nearly upsetting Angus.

  “Jackman,” Logan called down, “drop your gun and come up, and I’ll promise you a trial. Otherwise we’ll promise nothing.”

  But it was not Jackman that answered from the crypt. “Ah! Meester Logan, that is you?” The voice was rather faint.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Fernando Caggia, your fren’. Meester Logan, you owe me a pardon for what I do.”

  “Drop your gun, Caggia, and come up.”

  A rifle was flung to the foot of the stairs. “Meester Logan, I cannot come up, for Dr. Jackman, he shoot me twice. But I save you.”

  Logan leaped down those stairs. A barricade of boxes and chairs stood before a little iron door, and between door and barricade lay Caggia, covered with blood. “In this room,” Caggia said, trying to grin, “is the gelignite. Dr. Jackman, he try to reach it, but I, Fernando Caggia, do not let him. He shoot, I shoot, he shoot. I hit him once.”

  “Where is he?”

  Caggia gave a weak shrug. “One minute ago, he runs.”

  Leaving Angus to watch the iron door, Logan dashed back up the stairs, and at the top Malcolm met him. “We cannot find that man,” Malcolm said. “Will he be in the old tower?”

  “Mary?”

  “The door of the room of Lady MacAskival is locked, but there are people inside.”

  Now the boy had joined them, and as they ran into the Renaissance building, Kenneth and Robert came out of a passage and followed. They were at the door of the room which was hung with Spanish leather. Logan tried the knob fiercely; it would not turn. He smashed at the door with his rifle-butt, using all the strength that was in him, and it burst inward. Someone leaped for him. “Hugh, Hugh!” before them all, Mary MacAskival covered him with kisses.

  Later, from Mary and Tompkins and Till, Logan got an understanding of what had passed within the Old House since morning. Wild with fury and bewilderment, Jackman had dragged her back to the Old House from the chapel, the three men wit
h him as much afraid of their master as of the shadowy armed men whom Anderson had seen before the chapel. According to Anderson, there were twelve or fifteen of them, armed to the teeth. At the moment of his triumph, of his taking of Logan, suddenly Jackman had been undone. There was no way out.

  Like a man in the grip of a nightmare, Jackman scarcely could speak. For a few moments, just after they had got back within the shelter of the Old House, a flash of his old power returned to him. Seeing Jackman bemused, Anderson and Rab and Caggia and Simmons made for the girl: they would beat out of her the truth about those armed men by the chapel. But turning on them, “like Rumpelstiltskin again,” Jackman broke that mutiny, and hurried Mary MacAskival through the passages to her aunt’s room. Thrusting her inside, he gave her a long look. “Well,” Jackman said, passing his hand across his forehead, “I wish I had known you long ago. Now you are going to die. We all are about to die.” He went out, locking the door behind him.

  All that day, Mary knelt praying in the room hung with Spanish leather. Lady MacAskival, wasted beyond belief, lay motionless in her big bed, not seeming to hear the bullets striking the walls in the rooms across the gallery. Old Agnes sobbed in a corner. From the windows of this room, Mary could see only the harbor, with the burned yacht, and the empty sea beyond. And she prayed for Hugh Logan and for Carnglass.

  It was Tompkins who told Logan much of what followed. Jackman, uncertain in movements and speech, as if half paralyzed, stationed Anderson, Rab, and Caggia in rooms on the landward side of the Old House, to reply to the sniping from the bracken. Simmons he put into the study, guarding the door of the old tower. He ordered Niven and Tompkins to duty in the rooms above the gate. For a time he went himself to the roof of the old tower and fired at the riflemen slinking among the distant rocks and heather and bracken; but all this was done as if he were sleep-walking. Then he went down to the billiard room, which was safe from gunfire, and sat at a table with his head in his hands. Royall tried to talk with him, but Jackman would not reply. Thereafter Royall conducted the defense, so far as there was any organized resistance.

  Caggia, who had gone below stairs to get the men food, did not reappear. Rab and Anderson, driven from the landward rooms by the sniping, got at the rum. They drank it in the billiard room where Jackman sat, and cursed at Jackman, and Jackman did not answer. And the hours passed.

  Royall, left alone in the landward rooms, had his cheek laid open by a splinter of glass, but he kept on firing. When the sniping ceased on that side, he went to the billiard room and again tried to rouse Jackman. At gun-point, Royall ordered Rab up to the room over the gate, to reinforce Niven and Tompkins. Anderson went below stairs, and Tompkins heard him crying defiantly to Royall – something about explosives.

  When the attack on the gate came, and the cart was burning under the windows, Niven was hit by a bullet. In panic, Rab fled to the billiard room, screaming out, “The hoose! They’re burnin’ a’ the hoose!” Royall and Anderson hurried in. This was told to Logan by the blinded boatman Till, who had lain helpless during the billiard-room fight.

  “O aye, we’re done!” Anderson roared. “Gie it ower, Jackman, we’ve had it!”

  Then Jackman rose from his chair. “Royall,” Jackman said, “keep the men here.”

  “Gude God,” Till heard Anderson say, “the auld de’il’s for the explosives! Jackman, damn ye, dinna open that door.”

  “Rab,” cried Royall, “drop your gun.” Shooting began then, Till cowering on the sofa. There must have been four or five shots, and after them running steps. Till could hear Anderson groaning and cursing. After that, Logan and his men came.

  Edmund Jackman had made for the cellars and the gelignite. Down there, Ferd Caggia crouched behind a little barricade in front of the iron door; for Ferd had remembered Logan’s words about Jackman’s madness, and he, cat-like, had been watching Jackman. “Dr. Jackman,” Caggia had said, “you don’ blow me to hell.” Jackman had fired at him promptly, and had hit him, but Caggia had fired back. After a minute’s exchange of shots, the Maltese, wounded, still gripped his rifle behind the boxes and chairs. Jackman had leaped back up the stairs and was gone through the passages. Even his try for annihilation had failed.

  Simmons they found still in the study in the old tower, and took him without difficulty. But Dr. Edmund Jackman they did not find. The door to the garden was open, and Simmons said that from the window he had seen Jackman go over the garden wall, favoring one side as if he were slightly wounded.

  “I think, Mr. Logan,” Malcolm Mor said, “that because he is a clever man, he will have gone to look for our boat below the chapel.”

  Yes, he would have, Logan thought. In the course of the fight, Jackman must have recognized some of the attackers, perhaps old Malcolm; and, having seen them that morning near the chapel, he would guess that the boat was below those cliffs. That the wounded man could find his way down, Logan doubted. Yet so long as Jackman was at large, no one in Carnglass could be safe. The hound had become the fox now.

  “Mary,” Hugh Logan said, “I must be after him.” She had an arm around him.

  “I know the island best,” she told him, “and from this night I am going to stay with you always, Hugh.”

  He looked down at her. “And who would guard the Old House, then, and do something for the men who’ve been shot, and put out the embers at the gate, and give the MacAskivals something to eat?”

  Knowing that this was no moment for argument if Jackman were bound for the boat, Mary MacAskival looked proudly into Logan’s eyes. “Then take Malcolm Mor,” she said, “for he will know where to search, and I will send other men so soon as I can.” The MacAskivals, having locked Simmons and Tompkins in a cellar, crowded round her deferentially for instructions. “Dr. Jackman shot my dog, Hugh, to hurt me. But do you come back to me, forever.”

  One last kiss, and then he left her in her strength and beauty, as the tears were starting down her cheeks. “Before sunrise, Mary girl, I’ll be with you.” Logan and Malcolm Mor went through the garden – for the great gate still was a charred and smoking hulk – and over the garden dyke below the old tower, the way that Jackman had gone, and they strode toward St. Merin’s Chapel. Now and then Logan stumbled: he had been without sleep for twenty-four hours.

  “If he can go down the cliffs,” Malcolm Mor panted, “then the man with the third eye is more than man.” Malcolm was a wonder: he had been on his feet nearly as long as Logan, and he was past seventy.

  Beyond Cailleach, they flung themselves down for a brief rest. Their rifles seemed immensely heavy. Carnglass, in its nocturnal beauty, was at peace. The bleating of sheep, disturbed by the men, echoed from the heights where the chapel stood. “Malcolm Mor,” Logan said, “I believe you think Jackman really is something not human.”

  “It would be well to have silver bullets for our guns.” The old man muttered something in Gaelic. “But devil or not, he will have climbed up there.” Malcolm Mor gestured toward the headland. They took up their guns again, and in less than an hour made out the shape of St. Merin’s Chapel, and of the Pict’s House, the Firgower’s House, beyond it.

  “If he has tried the path here,” Malcolm said very low, “he will not reach the shore alive, not knowing the way, and having a bullet in him.” Both Logan and Malcolm Mor moved slowly now; Logan doubted whether even Malcolm, while so weary, could descend this precipice, and he was certain that he himself could not. They climbed over the ruinous drystone wall close by the broch; from the dyke to the crumbling cliff-edge was less than a yard. A thousand feet and more below, the ocean heaved northward to the pole.

  Then something rose from behind the dyke. Malcolm Mor tried to bring up his rifle, but a bullet struck the stock and sent the gun spinning from his hand. Logan had his rifle over his shoulder. He pulled at it desperately. And Jackman shot Hugh Logan.

  Logan fell backward, and his head struck nothing at all, for he lay right on the cliff’s edge, with only infinite space at the back of his
head. There was a fierce pain in his right thigh, where the bullet from the little pistol had caught him. Edmund Jackman stepped over the broken dyke and stood only seven or eight feet distant from them, his left arm pressed hard against his side. The moonlight was full on Jackman’s face, and the eyes were slits, and the face was that of a man lost in a nightmare, Malcolm Mor stood fixed by the spot where Logan lay.

  “Young Askival and Old Askival,” Jackman said. “I have the two of you.” He pointed the pistol at Malcolm. “Put him over the edge, Old Askival.”

  Malcolm Mor bent slowly over Logan. He took Logan by the shoulders, and drew him back from that terrible cliff-lip, and propped him against a stone fallen from the dyke. Silent, Malcolm stared at Jackman. I am done, Logan thought, but if I can catch his ankle, Jackman may go over the edge with me, and Mary will be safe.

  “Both of you at once, then,” Jackman said dismally. “Old Askival and Young Askival.” He took aim at Malcolm. Hugh Logan tried to hurl himself forward, but his smashed thighbone failed him.

  There came, at that instant, a kind of gurgling cry, and a sound of running, of something hurrying right along the cliff’s edge, at Jackman’s back. Edmund Jackman turned his head. Malcolm and Logan and Jackman saw all at once the thing that was coming.

  It was a burly man in tattered corduroy breeches, a long green jacket, and a yellow waistcoat, with a porkpie hat on his head, his arms flapping as he ran. He mouthed as he came, but what noise he uttered was not speech. And his face was a dead mask, and not human. The thing made straight for Jackman.

  Mary had sent Angus after Logan. And, with the heroism of children and simpletons, Angus sought to put his body between Logan and his enemy.