Sorcerer's House

by Gerald Verner

  The heat was stifling. It was a moist and clammy heat, like the heart of a tropical jungle, and there were night insects which flew, blindly, flicking their faces.

  The sweat was pouring down Alan’s face when they reached the end of the drive, and the palms of his hands were wet.

  Before them, starkly black against a moon now hazy with cloud, reared the ruined hulk of Sorcerer’s House.

  Gale led the way over to the massive door. It was unlocked and partly ajar. Pushing it open, they stepped into the cavernous hall.

  The smell of the old house rushed to meet them, and there was a sudden scurry and squeaking of rats. In the dim light from the staircase windows it looked very much the same as it had done on that other night, when they had found the Locked Room.

  The Locked Room?

  Was it there that they were going to await the coming of the murderer?

  It was deadly still in the old house. Even when they mounted the stairs there was scarcely a creak from the ancient woodwork. They had been built in the days when workmanship was solid and lasting.

  The American’s heart began to beat faster as they passed the landing from which the corridor led to the Long Room. The Long Room where the spatters of blood on the dusty floor still showed where Paul Meriton had died.

  With a hand that shook, in spite of his efforts to keep it steady, Alan took out his handkerchief and wiped his streaming face, before he followed Simon Gale up the next flight.

  Without pause, Gale continued on until, at last, they came to the attic floor—the floor with the room in which Fay Meriton had escaped from a world of reality into a dream world of her own creation.

  And there was a light under the door!

  Alan felt Gale grip his arm and lead him away from that closed door, behind which lurked—what?

  Silently, with that restraining hold on his arm, Alan was guided towards the next room, the door of which stood partly open. Simon Gale pushed him gently inside and followed. The grimy window scarcely admitted any light, and the empty room, with its broken ceiling, was almost in darkness. Over the broken roof, which when they had come here before had been open to the sky, someone had draped a tarpaulin.

  Gale’s shadowy figure beside him made a warning gesture, the grip on his arm relaxed, and Gale went, noiselessly, across the floor to one of the walls—the wall that divided this room from that other room where someone waited.

  Alan watched him press his face close to the wall and stand there for a moment, motionless. Then he turned and beckoned.

  With his heart thumping so that its beats sounded loudly in his ears, Alan went over to him.

  And then he saw that two small, round holes had been bored through the plaster and the lath beneath. He caught the faint glint of a light.

  At a motion from Gale, he applied his eyes to the holes and found that he was looking into the Locked Room.

  And it was all he could do to suppress the startled exclamation that almost forced its way from his lips.

  The room was exactly as he had last seen it, except that there were fresh candles burning in the wall-sconces. The picture hung over the mantelpiece in its tarnished gilt frame; there were the chairs and the table and the cushioned divan.

  And sitting on the divan, reading a magazine, was Fay Meriton!

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Fay Meriton!

  But Fay Meriton was dead!

  Alan felt a creeping of the flesh and a stirring of the hair on his scalp.

  She was dressed in the black frock of angora wool, with white at the neck and wrists, which she had worn when he had seen her at Shilford. The yellow light from the flickering candles, scarcely enough to drive away the thick shadows, glinted faintly on the heavy, dark red hair.

  ‘Whatever you see or hear, keep quiet.’ Alan remembered Simon Gale’s whispered warning as they entered the drive. Gale, then, had expected this. He had known that Fay Meriton would be here—in the Locked Room. The holes had been made in the wall so that they could see. There must have been a mistake, somewhere. She had not died from eating those chocolates, after all.

  ‘You and I are going on a little excursion. And, at the end of it, we’re going to meet the murderer.’

  But Fay Meriton couldn’t be the murderer. She had been in the mental home at Shilford when Meriton had been killed.

  The whole thing was mad and impossible. The American felt his brain reeling with the confusion of his thoughts.

  The woman on the divan was nervous. He could see, now that he had partially recovered from the first shock of surprise, that her hands, holding the magazine, were trembling. Her eyes kept shifting from the printed page towards the door.

  Gale’s hand, light but reassuring, pressed his shoulder, and he turned away from the spy-holes in the wall. He wanted to demand an explanation for the apparently impossible presence of the woman in the other room, but he had been warned to keep quiet. What else was it that Gale had said? ‘We may have a long wait.’ What were they waiting for?

  Up here, under the roof, the room was heavy with heat. It pressed down until the stale air seemed to have acquired a weight and substance. The dim figure of Simon Gale had moved, soundlessly, over to the window. He was standing motionless, a dim silhouette, his fingers twisted in his beard, his head bent slightly forward as though he were listening. But there was dead silence both here and in the house below.

  Vividly there rose in Alan’s mind a picture of the empty cavernous hall and the wide staircase. The staircase from which the murderer had snatched his weapon.

  The murderer?

  Was someone, in the vast desolation of the ruined house creeping stealthily nearer?

  Nearer to the woman sitting, alone, in the adjoining room?

  Was that the explanation for her presence here? Was she the tethered kid, waiting for the lion’s spring?

  But, surely, there could have been no doubt that Fay Meriton had died. Dr. Preston couldn’t have made a mistake—the local police couldn’t have made a mistake. It was impossible! But not more impossible than that she was sitting on that divan, only few yards away.

  Never, in his life, had Alan experienced such a longing to talk. Questions, that he dared not put into words, clamoured for utterance. But the ban of silence, which Gale had imposed, could not be broken.

  With the slowness of a snail, dragging itself along a garden path, the time moved on. When Alan looked at the luminous dial of his watch, convinced that it must be nearly midnight, he was surprised to find that it was barely ten o’clock.

  The atmosphere of the room was getting thicker and heavier. There was, now, scarcely any glimmer of light from the grim window. Those stormy clouds on the horizon must have spread and obscured the moon.

  A quarter past ten…half past ten.

  Alan felt the tension becoming unbearable. This long wait in enforced silence, in that dark, hot room, was playing havoc with nerves already keyed to breaking point.

  Eleven…

  If something, anything, didn’t happen soon...

  And then it did!

  In the silence of the room, with a loudness that seemed startling, but was in reality scarcely audible, the soft note of a buzzer sounded twice.

  From where Simon Gale was standing, almost invisible in the darkness, came the sharp hiss of suddenly indrawn breath. He moved quickly to Alan’s side, and his beard brushed the American’s cheek as he whispered, close to his ear:

  “The killer’s in the house now...”

  There was a tightening in Alan’s chest. He sensed, rather than saw, Gale go swiftly and noiselessly to the partly open door, and followed him. Peering out into the dark landing, he could just make out the head of the staircase, looming up from the blackness below. On the floor to his left was the faint gleam of yellow light, fanning from under the door of the room in which Fay Meriton sat—waiting.

  Alan held his breath and listened.

  Dead silence!

  Beside him, so close that he could feel
the tense rigidity of his body, Simon Gale was listening, too.

  It was a very faint sound that first reached their straining ears, but it was unmistakable.

  Someone had begun to mount the stairs!

  Alan found himself staring at the outline of the stairhead with a horrible anticipation. Who would presently emerge from that well of darkness?

  But Simon Gale was pulling him back into the room and closing the door. He drew Alan quickly over to the wall and rapped sharply on it with his knuckles.

  “Watch from here,” he whispered.

  Once more Alan looked through the spy-holes into the adjoining room. Fay Meriton was no longer reading, or pretending to read. The magazine lay on the floor at her feet. Half-turned, she was watching the closed door with an expression that was a mixture of fear and expectancy. One of her hands had closed, tightly, on one of the cushions.

  Footsteps became audible, first on the staircase and then on the landing outside. They hesitated, stopped, and then went on again. With a sudden, swift movement, the woman on the divan rose to her feet, and the hand that had been gripping the cushion went up to her throat.

  The door began to open, slowly...

  That moment, while the door swung back on its hinges, seemed to extend into eternity. There was a nightmarish quality about it. The furnished room in the old, ruined house, lit so dimly by the flickering candlelight; the woman, standing, still as a waxwork figure, in the shadows by the divan. And that slowly opening door, through which would come the murderer. It was grotesque, unreal; a picture that was to linger in Alan’s memory long after it was all over...

  And then Flake entered the room.

  The blood drained from Alan’s brain and a misty blackness swirled before his eyes. He couldn’t have said whom he had expected to see come in through that door, but his wildest imaginings hadn’t prepared him for Flake.

  Something must have gone wrong somewhere. She couldn’t be the murderer.

  Gale’s voice, so soft as to be nearly inaudible, whispered in his ear:

  “Steady, young feller.”

  The dizzy haze of that first shock cleared. Flake was standing just within the doorway, facing the woman by the divan. She was dressed in a simple summer frock. Over the glossy black of her hair she wore a scarf of some flimsy material, and her face was dead white. Her dark eyes, by contrast, looked darker—and larger. She said:

  “Well, I’m here, Fay…”

  “I thought you’d come.” Fay Meriton’s voice was very low—so low and with a faint huskiness that it barely carried through the spy-holes in the wall.

  “I had to, didn’t I?” said Flake. “After the letter you wrote? She took a step forward. “It gave me rather a shock. How did you know it was me, Fay? I mean, about the tramp and the girl?”

  The woman by the divan moved a little further away from her. But her eyes never left her face.

  “You’ve always hated me, haven’t you?” she said, still in the voice that was almost a whisper.

  Flake laughed. Alan had never heard her laugh like that and, in spite of the heat, he felt a sudden chill.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve always hated you, Fay. Even when we were at school. You always got the things I wanted. At last you got Paul! I’ve always hated you, but I never thought you knew it.” She took another step forward. “You know a lot of things, now, don’t you, Fay? I don’t know how you found them out, but you have. You told me what you knew in that letter.”

  “You killed that girl and the tramp,” said Fay. “You wanted people to think I’d done it. You hoped there’d be a scandal and I’d be arrested and tried and either hanged or sent to Broadmoor. And then, with me out of the way, you might stand a chance with Paul.” The hand at her throat plucked nervously at her dress. “But it all went wrong. You never expected that Paul would save me from that, did you? In the way he did. You must have wondered when that poor girl’s body wasn’t found.”

  Flake was breathing a little faster. Alan could see the quickened rise and fall of her breast under the thin dress. But she was quite cool. She said:

  “I did. I couldn’t understand what had happened.”

  “And in your anxiety to find out you gave yourself away to Paul.” Never once did that low voice rise above a husky whisper. Alan had to strain his ears to hear all that she said. “That’s why you had to kill him.”

  For the first time emotion showed in Flake’s white face. Her eyes clouded and her mouth twisted as though in pain. Her voice, clear before, was husky when she spoke.

  “I had to kill him,” she said. “Oh, God...I had to kill him ... Paul!” For a moment the tears gathered in her eyes, but she choked them back.

  “And so all that you’d done was for nothing,” said Fay. “You still didn’t get what you wanted.”

  A change came over Flake. Her face distorted into such a look of sheer, black hatred that Alan, watching, was appalled. She took a third step forward so that, now, she was quite close to the woman by the divan.

  “Not entirely for nothing, Fay,” she said. “There’s still one thing I want that I am going to get. I thought I’d got it when I heard you were dead. I still don’t know how it is you’re not. You should be after those chocolates I sent you. Everybody thinks you are. And you’re going to die, Fay—now—like Paul died...”

  She had kept one hand behind her, hidden by her frock. Now she brought it out, gripping a short piece of iron bar—that strong right hand that could send tennis balls over a net with the force of a cannon shot.

  “Sorcerer’s House has got a bad reputation,” she said. “Three people have died here. Now there’s going to be a fourth!”

  She raised the bar of iron. Fay’s scream echoed through the old house, and she cowered back as Flake sprang forward.

  And then so many things happened that Alan, dazed and confused, could never, afterwards, remember exactly what toe place. Gale’s deep, bellowing roar... A rush of feet on the landing, and the excited shouting of men’s voices... The screaming curses of a woman...

  How, amid that babel of sound, he managed to get into the other room—that room with the flickering candles—he never knew, but he found himself there, with Gale and Hatchard an Major Chipingham. There were two other men holding Flake, who was struggling, between them.

  And sitting on the divan, with her dark red wig awry, fumbling with trembling fingers to light a cigarette, was a woman—not Fay Meriton, but a complete stranger.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Well, well,” said Simon Gale, filling four brimming tankards from the barrel beside the fireplace. “I don’t mind admitting that I’m glad it’s over.”

  “You did a very good job of work, sir,” said Inspector Hatchard, eyeing the tankards expectantly.

  “H’m... yes. Quite unorthodox, of course,” remarked Major Chipingham, frowning at the thought. “We couldn’t have done it.”

  Alan said nothing. He was still feeling dazed and shocked from what he had heard and seen.

  The sky was beginning to lighten in the east; pink shreds of cloud that heralded the coming sun, and they were sitting in Gale’s big, untidy studio. Flake, ice cool after her first paroxysm, had been taken in the police car to Barnsford with Inspector Hatchard, who had attended to such official formalities as were necessary and then returned, at Gale’s request, to join them.

  “You can’t realize it yet, eh, young feller?” said Gale, as he distributed the beer. “You thought she was a nice, simple kind of girl, didn’t you? Well, you heard her when she was off-guard. I couldn’t say anything to you, d’you see? I was afraid you’d give it away, even if you didn’t mean to.” He took a mighty swig from his tankard. “The beginning of all this goes back a long way. To the time when Flake Onslow-White and Fay Ayling were children. You’ve got to understand that, to get the hang of it. Flake was good at games, but Fay was just a little bit better. Flake was pretty bright at her lessons; but Fay was brighter. So it was in everything, d’you see? Fay first, Flake
a very close second, but second...

  “And the hatred began to build up.

  “But hatred—the real kind, the dangerous kind—is a deep and quiet thing. You’ve got to remember that, young feller, to understand Flake. She didn’t go around screaming with rage against Fay; it would have been better if she had. She kept it all bottled up inside her. Her vanity wouldn’t let her show it. And in that one word ‘Vanity’ you’ve got the whole thing. But she was practical and cool-headed, as well. Fay, on the other hand, was highly strung, sensitive, and hysterical. She was mentally unbalanced, a legacy from the grandmother who died in an asylum and she was cruel. She took a delight in showing off—in proving how clever she was, snatching things from her friends.” He paused to swallow the remainder of his beer. “She was given to bursts of hysterical rage if anything displeased her—yes, but it was out and over. But Flake... D’you remember telling me young feller, about Fay hitting one of her school friends over the head with a jagged stone?”

  Alan nodded. He remembered very vividly the day that Flake had told him that—and other things. He had sensed her hatred for Fay Meriton then.

  “I don’t believe she ever did,” declared Gale, going over to the barrel and refilling his tankard. “That was a little bit of Flake d’you see? Cool and calculating, even as a child. Can’t you see it? Fay in a rage with her school friend, and Flake, choosing her opportunity when neither could tell what was happening, creeping up behind the other child and—whack!” He made a sudden downward gesture with his hand. “And then accusing Fay. That was the start, d’you see? That’s what was later repeated in the case of the tramp and the girl.”

  “It’s appalling,” muttered the Chief Constable, shaking his bald head. “I would never have believed it possible.”

  “Didn’t I know that?” retorted Gale. “Isn’t that why I had to stage my bit of hocus-pocus at Sorcerer’s House? No one would have believed it, d’you see? The crowning thing, the thing that finished it, and turned Flake into a murderess, was Paul Meriton.