Sorcerer's House

by Gerald Verner

  SORCERER’S HOUSE

  Gerald Verner

  © Gerald Verner 1956, Chris Verner 2015

  Gerald Verner has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1956 by Hutchinson Ltd.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  The poplars at the end of the garden formed a line of dark spearheads against the deepening blue of the sky. Below them the shrubbery was brushed in with an almost solid black; a background for a bed of tobacco plants that stood out with startling clarity, as though their white, starry petals had caught and held all that remained of the fading light.

  The hot, airless night was thick and oppressive and heavy with scent. The faces of the group of people, sitting in deck-chairs on the small, oblong lawn, were pale, almost indistinguishable ovals; featureless as a gathering of ghosts. Even Flake’s scarlet dress, which earlier had made a splash of colour on the green of the grass, had changed to a blackish purple and become almost lost in the gloom.

  The American, Alan Boyce, had a sudden feeling that the garden had acquired a queerly spectral quality, with something that was vaguely sinister about it. The thickening dusk had, all at once, become tangible—something with weight and substance that was pressing in and down—and there was a deep stillness that was somehow disquieting

  A few seconds before—until, in fact, Avril Ferrall had made that extraordinary and disturbing remark—everything had seemed normal. She had said, in that rich and resonant contralto voice of hers, and without reference to anything that had gone before:

  “There was a light in the window last night. I wonder who is going to die this time?”

  And it was during the rather breathless hush which followed that Boyce experienced the odd sensation that something menacing had crept into the peace of the darkening garden…

  A chair creaked loudly. Henry Onslow-White was mopping at his face with a large silk handkerchief and breathing heavily. His daughter, Flake—her name was Joan, but everyone had called her ‘Flake’ since she was a child for an obvious reason—stopped her whispered conversation with Paul Meriton and turned her head sharply. Dr. Ferrall, sitting beside his sister, fingered the thin black line of his moustache nervously. Boyce, who had only arrived in Ferncross that morning, looked from one to the other, although he could not see them very distinctly, and wondered what in hell the woman was talking about. Only Mrs. Onslow-White, placid as usual, made neither sound nor movement. Her small, thin figure was almost lost in the deck-chair.

  “What do you mean by that, Avril?” Paul Meriton’s voice, usually pleasantly deep, but now suddenly sharp and metallic, came out of the gloom.

  “My dear Avril...” Henry Onslow-White's chair creaked again as he twisted his huge body round towards her. “You saw a light…? You actually saw a light…?”

  “Imagination!” snapped Meriton angrily. He had dropped in unexpectedly a few minutes before, and Boyce thought they had all been rather surprised to see him.

  “It must have been a trick of the moonlight, Avril,” said Dr. Ferrall.

  The pale glimmer of her face moved in the darkness as she looked up at him. She sounded acutely embarrassed as she said, hesitantly:

  “I—I don’t know... It wasn’t that kind of light...”

  Henry Onslow-White shifted uneasily and began mopping his face again, vigorously. A breeze, like a puff from a blast furnace, stirred the trees and died away. The heat was stifling. Alan Boyce’s thin shirt clung, damply and stickily, to his body and the palms of his hands were clammy. Flake snapped a lighter into flame and her face leapt out of the dark into momentary startling clearness, as she lit a cigarette.

  “What,” said Alan inquiringly, “is there so extraordinary about a light in this place?”

  “Threshold House is empty. It hasn’t been occupied for years.” Flake’s voice, cool and clear, answered him. It was, he thought, a very attractive voice.

  “But, surely—” he began.

  “Oh, of course that isn’t all,” she interrupted. “There’s a lot more to it than that...”

  “All nonsense,” said Henry Onslow-White. His thin tenor was jerky, as though he had been running. He suffered from shortness of breath due to his stoutness, but Alan wasn't sure that it was entirely the cause of his laboured diction. “Just a stupid superstition, that’s all… Lord, it’s like an oven! What about some more drinks, Flake?”

  She got up silently from beside Meriton, collected empty glasses, and went over to the veranda. A shaded light spread a soft amber glow over a table laden with bottles as she pressed a switch. There was a pleasant sound of ice tinkling and the cool splash of liquid...

  Alan rose lazily to his feet and strolled over to join her.

  “Let me help you,” he said.

  She thrust cold tumblers into his hands.

  “The left one’s Mother’s, the right one’s Avril's.” She looked at him and there was speculation in her dark eyes. “You’re curious, aren't you?” she said.

  “I guess I am,” he answered. “What did she mean by—people dying...?”

  Flake shook back her thick, glossy black hair.

  “It’s queer, you know,” she said seriously. “I don’t believe in it, but it’s queer... Hadn’t you better take those drinks before the ice melts?”

  He nodded. The light had almost completely gone now, and the tall poplars looked like funeral plumes. From where Meriton sat, a cigarette glowed redly in the dark, waxing and waning as he drew on it intermittently. A winged night thing bumped blindly into Boyce's face and he jerked his head aside with an exclamation of disgust.

  Mrs. Onslow-White took the glass he held out to her and thanked him. Avril Ferrall was leaning sideways, talking in an undertone to her brother, and barely acknowledged the drink he gave her. Two words of what she was saying came to him clearly “…it’s dangerous...”

  He wondered, as he went back to Flake, what the rest of the sentence was from which those two words had detached themselves. What was dangerous, and had it any connection with that other remark Avril Ferrall had made? ‘There was a light in the window last night. I wonder who is going to die this time?’

  Flake had mixed the other drinks when he joined her.

  “You take Paul's and your own,” she said. “I'll bring Daddy’s and Dr. Ferrall’s…”

  “What about yours?” he asked.

  “I’m not having another,” she said, switching out the veranda light.

  A flicker of lightning whitened the sky briefly as they walked back across the grass side by side, and a hot breath of wind rustled the dry leaves of the trees. The white blossoms of the tobacco plants danced wildly for an instant and were still.

  “I think,” said the placid voice of Mrs. Onslow-White, “there’s going to be a storm.”

  “Good thing,” grunted her husband. “Break up this infernal heat…”

  “We ought to be making a move,” said Ferrall, getting up abruptly. “It’s nearly eleven...”

  “I've just brought you a drink, Dr. Ferrall,” said Flake.

  �
�I won't refuse that,” he said, taking the glass from her, “but I think we ought to go just the same, don’t you, Avril?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” she answered undecidedly. “Yes, perhaps we had—”

  “Care to drop me at my place?” asked Meriton. He stood up and drained the glass which Alan had just given him.

  “Yes...of course.” There was the faintest trace of irritation in Ferrall’s reply.

  “Then I’ll say good night, too,” said Meriton. “Don't bother to get up, Henry…” A battery of protesting creaks heralded Henry Onslow-White's laboured efforts to heave himself out of his chair.

  “Come and...see you...to the gate,” he panted. “If you...must go....”

  They said good night all round, Avril with a curious reluctance, the American thought, and Onslow-White escorted them to the gate.

  “I think I’ll go inside, dear,” said Mrs. Onslow-White as soon as they had gone. “There are one or two things I want to do before I go to bed…”

  “Do you want any help, Mother?” asked Flake.

  “No, dear, thank you,” replied her mother. “You stay and look after Mr. Boyce.” She got up, tripped daintily away and was lost in the shadows of the house. Flake collected the empty glasses, took them over to the veranda, and came back and sat down in the chair her mother had vacated. After a moment, Alan dragged up another chair and sat down beside her. A little gust of wind went whispering through the tree tops, and low down on the distant horizon a stealthy rumble of thunder grumbled in silence. Alan gave Flake a cigarette, took one himself, and lit them both.

  “Now,” he said. “What is the story about this place what-do-you-call-it…Threshold House?”

  There was quite an appreciable lapse of time before she answered his question, and then she said:

  “Have you ever heard of Cagliostro?”

  “Cagliostro?”

  “He was quite a famous late eighteenth century character,” she said. “Among other things, he claimed to be two thousand years old, from drinking his own elixir of life. He was a wizard—or said he was...”

  “Oh, that guy!” his brow cleared. “I remember something about him...”

  “Well, he's the beginning of the story,” she said. “He was fat little Italian charlatan and pretended that he was possessed of magical powers. He postured his way successfully from Paris to St. Petersburg, prophesying the future, making gold, and founding his cult of Egyptian Masonry... He must have been clever because he was never exposed as a fake. It was the affair of Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace, with which he had nothing really to do, that ruined him...”

  “You seem to have made a pretty close study of him,” remarked Alan as she paused.

  “I've read nearly everything that’s ever been written about him,” she answered surprisingly. “The most intriguing thing he’s alleged to have done was the famous Banquet of the Dead in that mysterious house in the Rue St. Claude.”

  Another mutter of thunder went rumbling round the sky, and the trees whispered again uneasily in each other. There was a tension in the air, and the heat was getting thicker and more oppressive. Alan felt the perspiration trickling down his face. He sensed rather than saw a movement beside him and looked up to find Henry Onslow-White mopping his face as usual.

  “You’re telling him the story, eh?” he grunted. “There’s nothing in at all. Just a fable like vampires, and werewolves and witches—children’s fairy tales.”

  “What,” said the American, “was the Banquet of the Dead?”

  “He is supposed to have summoned the ghosts of six great men to dine with six living people,” answered Flake. “Rather an embarrassing situation for all concerned—”

  “And what happened?”

  “One biographer—I forget which—writes ‘at first conversation did not flow freely’.” She laughed, but he thought it was rather forced.. “I don’t think my conversation would have flowed at all—”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” commented Henry Onslow-White. He lowered his huge bulk cautiously into a creaking chair. “Sheer unadulterated rubbish...” He was breathing heavily and unevenly.

  “He’s supposed to have attempted something of the same sort at...Threshold House,” said Flake. She drew quickly on her cigarette and her face showed up dimly red in the dark. “He came to England twice, you know. On the second occasion he rented Threshold House—”

  “It’s a queer name,” said Alan.

  “It was originally called Meriton Manor. Cagliostro renamed it Threshold House...They call it—Sorcerer’s House in the village.”

  “Meriton Manor?” said Alan. “That's the name of the guy—”

  “Paul Meriton?” she interrupted. “Yes, that’s right. Threshold House belonged to his family. It still does for that matter.”

  “But he doesn’t live there!”

  “Nobody lives there,” she answered. “The place is a ruin... I’ll show it to you tomorrow. You can see part of it from here—from the room we’ve given you—”

  “The famous window,” said Henry Onslow-White thickly. “You can see that—”

  There was a pause. The sky lit up brightly for a second, and the thunder, when it came, was louder and nearer. Flake threw away her cigarette and it hit the grass with a little shower of reddish sparks.

  “Is that the window,” said Alan, “where you see the light?”

  “According to the local superstition, legend, or whatever you like to call it,” answered Onslow-White. “It's the window of the Long Room. Cagliostro used it as a kind of wizard’s den. The villagers say he still uses it…”

  “Do you mean that his ghost is supposed to haunt the place?” asked the American sceptically.

  “No,” replied Flake slowly. “Only the ghost of... a light.”

  Another gust of wind hissed through the trees. The garden was swept by a thick, hot breeze. Alan took out his handkerchief and wiped his wet face and the palms of his hands.

  “Ridiculous, isn't it?” growled Henry Onslow-White with a sudden expulsion of breath. “But they nearly all believe in it round here.”

  “What sort of a light?” asked Alan. He remembered Avril’s reply to her brother’s suggestion that it had been a trick of the moonlight. ‘…it wasn’t that kind of light...'

  “A dim, bluish glow,” said Flake. “It’s supposed to come from the lamps of the Magic Circle used by Cagliostro to invoke the spirits of the dead...”

  “And when this light is seen, it's taken to be a sign that somebody is going to die?” said Alan.

  “Only that somebody is going to die…violently,” she answered. “Not otherwise...”

  “I don’t quite get that,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t signify an ordinary death,” she explained. “Like old age or ...or pneumonia or anything like that. It would have to be an accident or...murder...”

  “Like that chap on the motor-cycle who smashed himself to pieces against the parapet of the bridge over the Dark Water,” said Onslow-White. “Several people swore they’d seen a light the window the night that happened—”

  “They said the same thing when that tramp was found dead in the grounds of Threshold House two years ago,” said Flake.

  “I’ve never seen a light,” grunted Onslow-White.

  “How did he die?” asked Alan curiously. “The tramp?”

  “His head was crushed in,” she answered. “Dr. Ferrall thought he must have fallen from...” She paused.

  “They found him under the window of the Long Room,” remarked Onslow-White.

  “Maybe he thought the place was a good spot to sleep in,” said Alan. “If anybody saw a light that night, I guess it was easy to explain...”

  “They did,” said Flake. “Two people—”

  “Well, if they’d investigated they’d have found it was only this poor devil of a tramp trying to make himself comfortable with an end of candle, or a fire...”

  “Investigate!” echoed Onslow-White. He uttered a short laugh. “
You wouldn’t get anybody from the village to go near Threshold House after dark—not for all the money in the Bank of England...”

  “There was no trace of a candle-end, or of a fire,” broke in Flake quietly. “I thought the same as you, and I asked Inspector Hatchard.”

  The sky flared whitely, and there was a deafening crash of thunder. Big, oily drops of rain began to fall spasmodically.

  “Here it comes,” said Henry Onslow-White. “We'd better be getting in...”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alan Boyce sat on the side of the bed in the room which had been given him at Bryony Cottage, smoking a cigarette. Outside the rain was sheeting down into the dark garden and drumming steadily on the roof. Through the wide-open casement window came waves of coolness, mercifully driving away the thick, heavy, oppressive heat. Thunder was still rumbling and muttering in the distance but the violence of the storm had passed.

  He was thinking about Flake’s story, It was curious, he thought, how it had gripped his imagination. In the noisy bustle of America with its broad highways, rashed with filling stations: its neon signs, and its general air of practical efficiency, he would hardly have given it a second thought, except, maybe, to deride. Here, in the deep hushed greenness of the English countryside, it was different. Such a tale seemed to fit, somehow, in this land of legend and tradition where the real and the unreal walk hand in hand and the earth is still old and enchanted. He had got the same impression in London during the two days he had spent there—that the famous figures of history and literature might step at any moment from the dark courts and alleys.

  When this trip to England had first been mooted, his father had said:

  “I’ll write to Onslow-White. You’ve never seen an English village and it would do you good to spend a week or two in Ferncross. It’s got everything.”

  And back had come the reply inviting him to stay at Bryony Cottage. Henry Onslow-White and Halliwell Boyce were friends of long standing though they seldom saw each other. Business had first brought them together, for Onslow-White, now retired, had been a literary agent, and Boyce was still an active member of the firm of Boyce and Wade, the New York publishing house. It was partly business that had brought Alan to England, but before attending to the business side of his trip he had arranged to spend a month’s holiday with the Onslow-Whites. And here he was.