“But where’s our evidence?” he asked. “We know that the Falworths dismantle their pumping equipment when they’re not using that cellar, and without it in full action and them with their gas masks on we have no real proof. We can take it for granted that they keep their sulphur water samples hidden, too. As for the ghost and evil presence, the police would either laugh or else see the ghost for themselves and swear it is a genuine psychic phenomenon.”
“Then we’ve come to a full stop!” Vera gave a disappointed sigh. “There’s nothing more we can do!”
“Not until we find the meaning of this ash,” Dick growled. “Oh, heck, if only I could remember...! My mind just won’t jump the gap to the answer. And it’s there—waiting!”
“But surely you have some idea where you saw this—answer?”
“Not the vaguest. We did so much at first it might have been anywhere. I can’t place it at all now, thought I did at the time for just a moment....” Dick raised his hands and let them fall back to his knees helplessly. “Well, Vera, we’re on the last lap and we can be sure that our enemies are going to move heaven and earth to be rid of us this time! Apart from that, Mrs. Falworth said at breakfast we can reckon with Carstairs speeding things up, too, now that he knows we’re on the track. And that bird-nosed vulture might do anything!”
Vera said: “And I suppose we try a little more ghost-laying tonight?”
“And the Falworths know we are going to do just that,” Dick said grimly. “They’ll turn the heat on good and proper...but I’m just wondering,” he finished, reflecting, “if there might not be a way to give them the shock of their lives.”
“What?”
“Well, we enter that room and close the door—close it, mind you. They’ll be watching our actions, obviously. One of them will, anyway, while the other is in the cellar, perhaps. Anyhow, after ten minutes in the room we’ll emerge again—unharmed! That ought to shake ’em! I’ve got a gas mask at home: one I had in the R.A.F. It should be proof against those fumes. Can you produce a mask?”
Vera gave a start. “Why, yes! I packed it along with my things when I left Manchester. I’ve quite a few odds and ends out of the A.T.S.—”
“Never mind the odds and ends; it’s the gas mask which counts. Dig it out while I slip home to get mine. We’ll have them concealed about us somewhere when we enter that room tonight.”
Vera got to her feet hastily. “Wait a minute! You’re not going to leave me along here while you go home. I’m coming with you.”
“All right, then—come on.”
They left the house hurriedly and saw no signs of the housekeeper as they departed. To their surprise they discovered that the weather had changed. The bright sunshine and blazing heat had given way to sullen stillness. In the far distance over the hot drowsy countryside, deep violet clouds were blowing up.
“Hmmm—thunder,” Dick sniffed. “Typical British summer, anyway!”
They managed to cover the distance to his home and back before the storm, threatening all the time, showed signs of breaking. It was as they got into Sunny Acres at 6:15 that the first atmospheric rumblings made themselves heard.
“This is going to be lovely,” Vera commented, as they ascended the gloomy staircase. “A thunderstorm and a ghost-hunt in gas masks, all in one evening— Whew! Give me the blitz! Incidentally, I’ll examine my mask before I come down to dinner.”
Dick nodded and left her at the door of her room. The first thing she did was rummage among her belongings and bring the service mask to light. The next thing she did was change into a frock roomy enough to conceal the mask when folded. Then she tidied her hair and tried to feel composed.
It was not easy. The brooding tension before the storm was in the air. Outside the daylight had faded to a dull yellow, and the motionless trees were a harsh, unnatural green in the diffused light. Again came the rumbling of thunder, much nearer this time.
When she got to the dining hall, Vera discovered that Mrs. Falworth had lighted the oil lamps. She was standing in the uncertain light—surveying the well-laid table, when Vera came in.
“Unpleasant weather, miss,” she commented calmly.
“Oh, normal enough for our sort of summer,” Vera shrugged; then she gave a little sigh of relief as Dick put in an appearance. He took his place at the table just as a blinding flash of lightning lit the dining room. The concussion of the thunderclap on top of it made the plates vibrate.
“Mmmm—overture,” Dick commented. “Just the right start for a nice jolly evening!”
Mrs. Falworth glided forward with the first course, then—surprisingly—she leaned gently over the table and looked at the two in turn. An unholy light seemed to be flaming in her abysmal eyes.
“Do you imagine for one moment that this storm is normal?” she whispered, her voice quivering. “Are you such blind fools as to believe that? It is the power of evil abroad, I tell you, the power which so far I have held in check but which I have now released. It has full sway over this castle and over your unbelieving souls!”
A flash that seemed to crackle through the windows made Vera jump transiently. For a moment all three of them were compelled to keep quiet as the thunder cannonaded.
“We’re not such blind fools as you think!” Dick retorted. “You know the whole truth about this horror business and before we’re through you’re going to pay for it, too!”
“You think I don’t know what you have been doing?” the housekeeper snapped, straightening up again. “Do you think I don’t know that you have been running around with some ash, trying to find out if it creates horror?”
“Ah,” said Dick, “do I detect the voice of Henry Carstairs?”
“You do! He sent a messenger over here and told me that you had been to his home under a false name and asked him to analyze some ash. It was granite deposit, as it happened. That could only have come from one place—the room! I know that because I have seen that fine deposit on the ceiling in there myself.”
“Nice of Carstairs to tell you what we were doing!” Vera said, her cheeks red with anger.
“He did it to protect me!” Mrs. Falworth retorted, all signs of respect gone from her voice. “He is a great friend of mine and he knows that I have psychic powers. He guessed that you were trying to prove that the evil in that room is something other than natural force and so let me have a chance to protect myself. If it did nothing else it at least assured me that you two unbelievers will have to learn through experience. For all your efforts you have not proved the horror to be anything else but psychic power, have you? For all your efforts you have found no explanation of the demon phantom!”
“We shall—in time,” Dick said steadily.
“No!” Mrs. Falworth clenched her hands in front of her and waited for a road of thunder to die away. “No, you are too late! Tonight the powers of evil are abroad in the storm, in this castle—everywhere! It means...death.”
Dick shrugged as she turned away, then he looked at Vera rather uneasily as a truly appalling flash turned the windows to violet. The road and explosion of the clap seemed to shake the solid old place to its foundations.
“What’s she getting at?” Vera whispered. “Do you think she really is psychic?”
“No,” he answered curtly, slanting an eye at the woman as she busied herself at the sideboard. “She’s a clever actress, that’s all, knows we have solved most of her secret and is going all out to scare us to death.”
“But Dick, this storm! It’s dreadful!”
“Pretty violent, sure—but it’ll pass.”
They both ate for a moment or two in silence, then Vera glanced up again.
“She’s right about one thing, you know—we haven’t solved the mystery of the ash or the ghost.”
“But, dearest, we do know that the influence was not there last night when she didn’t know we were going in the room. That’s why she’s so nasty. She knows we’ve stolen a march on her with that sleeping draught. There’s a solution.
Sure as fate.”
Dick quietened again as Mrs. Falworth drifted back to the table. Far from seeming uneasy at the savagery of the storm, she appeared to be enjoying it, as if it has something in common with her own somber, inexplicable character.
To eat under such conditions was hard work, and finally both Dick and Vera gave it up. Instead, they lighted cigarettes and sat trying to compose themselves for the task now only one hour away. Perhaps the storm would clear a little in that time.
Thirty minutes later, though, the storm still raged. Mrs. Falworth had cleared the table and departed to her own regions. Dick and Vera still sat on, listening to the deluge of rain pelting on the windows and silently wishing the lightning were less vivid and the thunder less deafening.
Finally Dick got up and peered through the window. It was not a reassuring sight. The landscape was as dark as an hour after sunset with no sign of a break in the abysmal sky. Far away something red was pulsating—perhaps a building which had been struck by lightning. Then he jumped back at a sizzling flash, and a following roar exploding with it. The din ripped along and then cracked with an impact that made the deeply sunk windows rattle.
Dick said: “It will be a bit damp for the ghost tonight, unless he wears galoshes.”
“Never in my life before have I felt so much like running for it!” Vera declared. “Half the time I’m pretty sure that some malignant evil is abroad tonight, unless this storm happened along as a most convenient coincidence.”
Dick didn’t answer for a moment. He was looking out of the window again, from where he stood. Then he shrugged.
“Lightning, I suppose. Thought I saw the headlights of a car, for a moment, coming up the drive.... Of course the storm is a coincidence!” Dick added. “It’s the hot weather going up in noise and sizzles before a cold air current. That’s all a thunderstorm is. Naturally, though, Mrs. Falworth is playing it up for all she’s worth. For her it is the chance of a lifetime.”
Vera relaxed again as well as she felt able, still nursing the secret hope of an abatement in the storm. But none came. By 8:30 the onslaught seemed to have reached its peak.
“Time’s up,” Dick announced, grim faced. “Let’s be off—though whether there will be ghost manifestations in this confusion I don’t know.”
They went out into the hall together, their way lighted partly by the oil lamps and partly by the bewildering flashes through the windows. The great place was a bedlam of noise from swishing rain and exploding thunderclaps. The wind, too, seemed to have risen and was whistling along the upper corridor when they reached it.
Then a voice called from below. It was Mrs. Falworth’s.
“For the last time, will you not be warned?”
“For the last time, no!” Dick shouted back. “We’re going in that room, and we don’t believe in ghosts either!”
He caught Vera’s arm and hurried her along the corridor.
“That should convince the dragon that we mean to do it,” he murmured. “I’ve got my gas mask under my jacket. How about you?”
“Shan’t be a moment,” Vera dodged into her room and blinked in the flashings filling the place. She was conscious of her heart racing with both excitement and alarm. She found her mask and rejoined Dick.
“Got it,” she murmured. “Pretty bulky, I’m afraid. But she won’t see anything—if she’s watching—in this flickering light.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OUTSIDE INSPECTION
They stopped outside the room and Dick quickly turned the solitary screw. Glancing sideways they saw, for a split second, the watching face of somebody at the top of the stairs—then the room was wide open before them.
“On with ’em!” Dick snapped, and they slipped the masks into place before he closed the door.
In this chamber now it was more visual terror than anything. Naked to the storm, reputed to be haunted, it presented a strain on the nerves that was well nigh unbearable. Though there was no sign of the ghost itself, and even less sign of that deadly corroding of reason, there was fear in the lightning that blazed against the mighty stained glass window, agonizing suspense in the frightful concussion of the thunderclaps.
“No ghost!” Dick mumbled behind his mask. “I thought it would be too wet—”
Then he stopped as Vera gripped his arm. Just for an instant as the lightning flashed the ghost was there! Close to them, grinning demoniac—then it vanished again into the welter of thundering darkness. Again it hovered back as lightning ripped over the sky—and yet again—each time swimming back into blackness.
“It’s there—trying to appear!” Vera’s voice was hardly audible in the imprisoning rubber. “Dick, let’s get out; I can’t stand any more of this—”
He turned with her to the door and for a moment raised his mask slightly. He dropped it again instantly as a wave of revulsion swept over him—but at least he had satisfied himself. The air was thickly laden with that ghastly sense of evil.
Dazzled, deafened with the thunder, they stumbled out of the room into the corridor and pulled off their masks hurriedly.
“It was there!” Vera insisted, her voice shaking. “Momentarily, every time the lightning flashed—just as though it were struggling up out of the evil realms—”
Dick interrupted: “It came and went with the lightning for one reason only—because it can only be seen in the light. And that,” he finished sombrely “wants thinking about. For the moment the best thing we can do is go downstairs and see what those two are up to. They won’t expect us this time.”
Holding on to each other, they sped down the lightning-drenched corridor, past the stained-glass window on which the rain was pelting in torrents, and so down the staircase. Then they came to a halt as they saw Mrs. Falworth awaiting them.
That she was shocked was plain to see. She had had the biggest surprise of her life at beholding them comparatively normal, but such was the command she held over her emotions she was impassive again almost instantly.
“Did you see the ghost?” she asked coldly.
Dick and Vera finished their descent of the stairs, the girl keeping her mask well out of sight behind her back. Dick’s jacket was bulging a little, thought it was unlikely Mrs. Falworth guessed the reason for it.
“Where’s your husband?” Dick demanded. “What are you waiting here for? To hear our death screams? Unlucky, aren’t you? And where’s your husband? Answer me!”
The woman hesitated, so Dick snapped back at her. “All right, don’t bother answering. Open that basement door!”
In silence the woman moved to it and obeyed the order.
“Get a torch and come back here—then lead the way below!”
Mrs. Falworth gave that faint, cold smile and then went into the kitchen and did exactly as she had been told. Coming back with torch in hand she led the way down the stairs. The big cellar was empty. Without hesitation Dick went over to the smashed fireplace and poked about among the broken brick-ends and discolored ashes. Then he plunged his hands into the ash and felt about.
“Cold!” he exclaimed. “Stone cold!”
“Might I ask, sir, what else you expected?” Mrs. Falworth inquired.
“Never mind what I expected. I was going to ask you a question upstairs—where your husband is—”
“He is in the kitchen, sir.”
“Got there by a second stairway, I suppose?” Dick flared.
“Had he been down here,” the woman answered, quite composed, “he would certainly have gone back that way. It is quicker, and the normal route for us.”
“Why did you never tell us there were two stairways down here?” Vera demanded. “You left us to find out for ourselves!”
“I should hardly have thought the matter was of interest to you, miss. I have no wish to make a secret of the fact. You can go up them now through the storage room if you wish.”
There was a grim silence for a moment, then thunder made the ground vibrate, Mrs. Falworth’s eyes narrowed a little.
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“I have the right to ask what you expected to find down here!”
“Hot ash!” Dick retorted. “Ash from the substance which creates fumes and which in turn give a feeling of horror.”
The housekeeper smiled coldly. “So you still believe in a mundane explanation for a psychic phenomenon?”
“And for this reason....” Dick faced her squarely. “We wore gas masks in that room tonight—here’s mine.” He pulled it into view and Vera revealed hers too. “Because of that safeguard no taint in the atmosphere affected us. Evil influences are not stopped by gas masks, Mrs. Falworth!”
She was silent, her lips compressed. Then she shrugged.
“I cannot influence your theories, of course—but neither can you gainsay facts. Nothing has been burned down here tonight; that is quite evident. As for the influence not affecting you through the mask, it perhaps is not present tonight—”
“But it is! I raised my mask for a moment to see!” Dick kept his eyes fixed on the woman as he realized she was squirming mentally. “You can’t get away with it, Mrs. Falworth! You said terror would burst loose tonight and would bring death—then you turn right around and say that perhaps the influence wasn’t present!”
Mrs. Falworth’s face set in hard lines. “Well, what are you going to do?”
They went up the staircase. The torch Mrs. Falworth still held sent their shadows bobbing grotesquely ahead of them. Without looking back at her, they went up to Vera’s room. To their surprise there were long spells now between the flashes of lightning and resultant thunder. Nor was it as heavy.
“Clearing up,” Dick said, hurrying across to the window. “Yes! There are breaks in the clouds to the west—even traces of sunset. I told you there was nothing psychic about it!”
Vera nodded in relief and they both sank into armchairs, visible to each other in the twilight as the storm began to clear as rapidly as it had developed.
“Well,” the girl said at least, “you mean to send for the police?”
“No.” Dick shook his head. “I said that because I couldn’t think of anything else to say at that moment. As I told you, we want proof first— But why on earth didn’t we find traces of something having been burned?”
Within That Room! Page 11