Come into my Parlour

by Dennis Wheatley

  Yet, she still hesitated. The tree-tops seemed so far away. Their upper branches were too slender for there to be any hope that if she leapt and caught at one of them it would bear her weight.

  Suddenly she caught the sound of heavy footsteps behind her. Einholtz was running across the room to grab at her skirt and pull her down. She swayed again with terrible uncertainty, trying to nerve herself for the jump, but funking it at the last moment.

  “Come down!” he bellowed as he ran. “Come down, or I’ll shoot you as you jump.”

  She swayed once more. Her knees seemed to be giving under her. She let them go, slipping down to a crouch instinctively to avoid his threatened shot. Then, thrusting herself forward with every ounce of her strength, she launched herself out of the window.

  As she hurtled through space she heard a sharp report and the tinkle of glass behind her. Einholtz had fired too late and too high; his bullet had shattered two of the overlapping panes that a moment before had been just above her head.

  Next second the nearest tree-top brushed her arm; another instant and pine-needles pricked and stung her face. Then she was falling … falling … falling. On every side of her branches rustled, bent and snapped, as she plunged downward among them. Frantically she tried to grab at them as they flew past, but only succeeded in tearing away a few handfuls of foliage. A bigger branch hit her behind the neck, jerking her upright, another caught her under the legs, and for a moment she hung there suspended from it, upside down. Then her feet flew up and she slipped from it to continue her terrifying descent head down. A moment later a blow on the shoulder knocked her half unconscious, her body was twisted as it fell and a frightful jolt in the ribs drove the breath out of it. For a count of twenty she gasped agonisingly as she strove to get her breath back, no longer realising where she was or what had happened; then her mind cleared and she found that she was doubled up with her head and arms dangling over one side of a big branch and her feet and legs on the other.

  In the stillness of the night she could clearly hear Einholtz cursing somewhere high above her. Furious at having been baulked, he suddenly let fly a spate of bullets from his automatic, firing downward through the lower branches of the trees. One of his bullets struck a chip out of the bough upon which she was hanging, then whined shrilly as it ricocheted away into the darkness.

  Still struggling to get her breath, Erika wriggled into a slightly more comfortable position and peered downwards. The branch on which she hung was only about ten feet from the ground. Adjusting her grip, she lowered herself cautiously to swing and then drop from it. As she took her whole weight on her hands a stab of pain went through her right shoulder, and she realised that she must have wrenched it in her fall. The pain made her let go sooner than she had intended and she dropped sideways to land with a thud on the ground.

  Hitting the thick carpet of pine-needles gave her another agonising twinge. For a moment she lay there, bruised, sore and still breathless, her heart pounding heavily and her dyed hair hanging in a tangled mass over her badly scratched face; then she started to pick herself up.

  Only then did she realise that luck had been with her. Not only had she escaped serious injury but her bag which held her money and little pistol was still dangling by its straps from the crook of her arm. In order to conceal the gun she had specially chosen a good stout leather one which had a safety device to prevent it from flying open inadvertently. She was thankful now that she had forgotten all about the gun and not attempted to get it out, as, had she done so, Einholtz would as like as not have shot her before she could have shot him. As it was, she had simply thrust her arm through the straps of the bag while running to the window and, by the mercy of God, the clasp had held.

  On getting to her feet she found it difficult to stand upright owing to the slope of the ground; and her instinct urging her to put as great a distance as possible between herself and the castle she at once began to stumble downhill towards the valley.

  The moon gave little light under the thick branches, the carpet of pine-needles was soft but treacherous, being undermined here and there by rabbit-holes and concealing partially decayed logs beneath its undulating surface. Slipping and slithering, she made her way downwards, often having to grab at a low bough or tree-trunk to stop herself from falling. After about ten minutes she paused, and feeling that she was now safe for the moment, sat down to rest. It was the first chance she had had to wonder what her chances were of retaining her hard-won freedom and to endeavour to formulate some definite plan of action.

  About her chances of ultimate escape she was far from sanguine. Einholtz was probably already busy on the telephone, arranging for a special announcement to be made which, within a few hours, would result in every policeman in Württemberg being on the look-out for her. The pains at which she had been to have her hair dyed and her eyebrows altered would now go for nothing, since her description, as given by him, would be an up-to-date one. Her quickest way out of Germany lay in a return across Lake Constance, but even that was sixty miles distant and she had no means of transport.

  It occurred to her that she might work her way round to the village, break into some garage and steal a car, but she abandoned the thought almost as soon as it came to her. The village was on the other side of the castle and at least three miles away. Long before she could reach it people there would have been warned to keep watch for her and for the next twenty-four hours every vehicle on the roads for miles around would be pulled up and searched whenever it passed a police post.

  If she stuck to the forest it might take them days to find her, but the Gestapo were tenacious people and they would use troops or the local peasantry to beat the woods acre by acre until they ran her to earth in some ditch or tangle of brambles; or, more probably, the fact that she had no means of procuring food would starve her into raiding isolated farmsteads until she was caught and given up.

  Yet she was certain that any attempt to reach the frontier while the hue-and-cry was at its height was foredoomed to failure. In a few days the excitement would die down, and as other matters arose to occupy the police their net would slacken. If only she could find a secure hiding-place and enough food to sustain her strength for a week, as a German in Germany with ample money, she should stand a fair chance of reaching the frontier and slipping across it undetected.

  She searched her mind for anyone in the neighbourhood who might give her shelter but, apart from the village people, she knew no one who lived within the radius of a night’s tramp through the woods and along by-lanes. She had never lived for any great length of time at the castle, either, so the village folk were more acquaintances than friends. There were several couples who she felt sure would give her a bed for the night, but the trouble was that they all either had children or were old people. And it was perhaps the most terrible of all the evils Hitler had brought upon the German race that the minds of its children had been deliberately perverted to such an extent that they formed a vast legion of spies for the Nazis and were ready to betray even their own parents. The presence of a visitor in the house would undoubtedly be reported to the Nazi schoolteacher or youth leader first thing in the morning. As for the old people who lived alone, Erika could not bring herself to take advantage of any of them. She knew too well the terrible price they would have to pay if the Nazis learnt later that they had harboured a fugitive.

  The trees were slightly less dense at the spot where she had stumbled to a halt and, on glancing over her shoulder at the sound of some small animal scurrying through the undergrowth, she caught a glimpse of the moonlit tower of the castle piercing the sky between two tree-tops. If only she were inside it she knew a score of good places in which she could have hidden for a month without being discovered. The huge, rambling pile was full of disused rooms, lofts, garrets and secret stairways; and now that the war was within a few days of two years old the staff must be so reduced it was doubtful if the curtains were pulled back each morning to let the sunlight into even a tenth of
its many chambers.

  The idea of hiding there gave her mind a sudden access of new energy. There was something both bold and shrewd about seeking refuge from the lion in the lion’s den which she knew would have appealed to Gregory. But, even as she made up her mind to attempt it, two knotty problems still faced her. First, she had to find a way in unobserved and, secondly, when she had selected her hiding-place how was she going to get on for food?

  She thought that she would manage to get in all right. She was now to the west of the castle and for the whole of its length on that side it rose in a sheer wall of stone; but to its south, in the early eighteenth century, by which time castles had outworn their usefulness as strongholds, a von Osterberg had broken down part of the great rampart and made a garden on a succession of terraces that ran down to meet the woods. Above them lay most of the rooms that had been modernised, and Erika felt fairly confident that she would find a way in through one of them.

  But the question of securing enough food to feed herself for a week was a much more difficult one. If she sneaked down to the larder each night and raided it for supplies, now that the household was so greatly reduced it was certain that her thefts would soon be discovered, and if Einholtz used the place as his headquarters while the search was being conducted for her he would soon tumble to it that she must be the thief. Even if he left the castle the servants would miss the food and one night lay in wait for her. She would be caught in the act and her fate would then lay in their hands. It was one thing to rely on their loyalty when descending on them out of the blue for a visit of a few hours, but quite another to rely on their protection when they knew that the Nazis were scouring the whole countryside for her.

  She wondered then if there was one among them that she could really trust; someone to whom she could tell the truth; who would bring her food each night in secret. But her marriage to von Osterberg had been one of convenience and they must be aware of that. She had always preferred her own lovely house outside Munich and her apartment overlooking the Tiergarten in Berlin, so, on her brief summer visits to the castle, although they had accepted her as its mistress they had always really remained Kurt’s servants.

  Her pity for Kurt was mingled with contempt and anger. Even if he did not love her she had always been a good and generous friend to him. His weak and futile attempts to warn her counted for nothing since he had actually let her walk into the trap. Surely, by the use of a little imagination he could have found a way to open her eyes before allowing her to set foot on German soil, or at least found some remnant of manly chivalry to help her in her bid to escape, instead of obeying Einholtz’s orders and attempting to stop her.

  She was glad that she had struck him. He had deserved it. A German nobleman who deliberately betrayed his wife to a bestial gang of torturers was less worthy of respect than his meanest churl. She wondered, almost, that the ghosts of the past von Osterbergs had not materialised in that old hall and risen up to slay him where he stood. If dead men’s bones could move, theirs, at this moment, must still be rattling with fury and disgust under the great stone slabs in the castle vault. What, she wondered, would his old mother say to him, if she ever learned of the depths of palsied cowardice to which her son had sank?

  At that thought Erika stood up. A new idea had suddenly occurred to her. The von Osterbergs had got her into this frightful situation and, if it were humanly possible, they should get her out of it.

  It took her twenty minutes of hard going to climb the uneven slope that she had plunged down in ten. On reaching the edge of the trees below the window from which she had jumped she craned her neck back to see if she could discern any signs of life in the banqueting hall. Evidently the fire had been got under control soon after it had started, but it had perhaps delayed them from coming out to search for her for a few moments. They would certainly have done that, believing her to be either dead or injured, but the fire had probably given her enough time to get out of earshot before they arrived on the scene; so they probably believed that she was either lying there with a broken neck and they had failed to find her in the darkness, or that she had been stunned by a bough and was still caught up in one of the trees. If so, that was all to the good.

  The curtain had been redrawn and the window was still open, but no sound came from it; only the little noises of the forest disturbed the stillness. Turning right, Erika made her way along the fringe of trees parallel to the wall until she reached a great square bastion which jutted out from the main block. Its base was gripped by arm-thick trunks of ivy and smothered in dense clusters of brambles, so she had to make a considerable detour, but ten minutes later she had made a half circle round the bastion and came out on its other side where the terrace garden began.

  The lowest terrace was formed by a stone balustrade set on a four-foot wall. Some distance away Erika could see the break in the middle of it where a flight of steps led down into the woods; but that was still in moonlight and she meant to keep in the shadows. She was already so dirty and bedraggled that her appearance could hardly be worsened so, heedless of her clothes, she forced the toe of her shoe into a cranny of the wall and, gripping one of the balusters round its middle, heaved herself up. Her right shoulder gave her another angry twinge, but biting her lip, she suppressed a cry of pain, threw a sadly laddered silk-stockinged leg over the coping and scrambled down the other side.

  For a moment she paused there to regain her breath, thinking as she did so of the parties she had known that in times past had lazed about this lower terrace on summer afternoons drinking Peach Bola and iced Hock. Little had she thought then that she would ever be called upon to scale it like a thief in the night, with her hair dyed, in clothes torn to ribbons and with the fear of death in her heart.

  This terrace garden consisted only of three shallow stages that did little more than replace the great rampart which had once stood there. Had it been made by a British nobleman of the eighteenth century the terraces would have been extended deep into the woods, so that fine lawns with herbaceous borders and ornamental trees might be planted upon them; but the German mind has always lacked both the craving to create beauty from a wilderness and sufficient appreciation of flowers to cultivate them in any but the crudest manner. The von Osterberg who had made the terraces had done so on returning from a campaign in Italy and, following the Italian fashion, had contented himself with laying out a few small formal beds on each with two fountains on the middle stage.

  Keeping well in the shadow, Erika went up a flight of side steps to the second terrace, passed one of the now silent fountains, and climbed over the balustrade to the third, which was merely a broad stone-flagged walk with neglected standard rose trees set in it at intervals.

  It was on to this that most of the modern living-rooms of the castle opened, and she crept cautiously along, examining every window as she went for any chinks of light which might show through the blackout curtains; but, as far as she could ascertain, every room was in darkness. On reaching the far end of the façade she tiptoed up a narrow stone stairway let into the great wall. It brought her out on to another smaller terrace, formed by the battlemented top of the southeastern bastion which lay at the opposite end of the garden to the one she had circumvented. At the inner side of the bastion the central block of the castle rose again and the storey she was now facing had five modern windows and a glass door looking out on to the leads. This, Erika knew, had always been the Gräfin Bertha’s suite, and there was small reason to suppose that in the past two years the old lady had changed it.

  The moon was now sinking towards the distant tree-tops, and Erika reckoned that about two hours must have elapsed since she had made her escape. As she had seen no lights she thought it a fair assumption that, after a quarter of an hour’s search for her and notifying the police of what had happened, Einholtz and Kurt had had their supper and gone to bed, so the odds were that they were asleep by now. All the same, if her mother-in-law was suddenly startled into wakefulness, by hearing someone
enter her room, her cries for help might quite well arouse them; so Erika decided to get in unheard if she could and wake the Countess very gently.

  Removing her high-heeled shoes, she stuffed them toes down into the pockets of her tweed jacket. The solid leads gave out not the faintest sound as she crossed them. Reaching the door, she grasped its handle and tried it very gingerly. Under the pressure it turned and with only the faintest creak the door opened outwards. Stepping inside, she found herself faced by a heavy curtain. Having paused there a moment to still her breathing she edged gently sideways to get out from behind the hangings but, as she did so, the brass curtain rings jingled a little.

  Instantly a light flicked on and a deep voice said angrily:

  “Come out from behind there, whoever you are.”

  Pulling the curtain back, Erika stepped into the room. For a moment she was dazzled by the light, then she saw the old lady sitting up in bed, staring at her. The Gräfin Bertha was a small, stout woman of over seventy, but still hale and hearty. Her grey hair had never gone white but always retained the black threads in it that it had had when Erika had first known her. She wore it in the severe German fashion, parted in the centre and plastered down each side with its ends twisted into a bun at the back. She had never used make-up in her life and her face was dry as parchment, having the slightly raddled appearance which often affects old ladies. Her sharp black eyes stared at the world aggressively from beneath heavy, arched unplucked brows, and her fleshy nose overhung a full, determined mouth.

  “So you’re a woman, eh?” she said sharply. “What do you mean by entering my room like this?”