by T E. D Klein
"You seem to know the place pretty well," said Philip.
A shadow crossed the other's face. "I used to live there," he said softly.
"You mean you once owned it?"
"No, not at all. I merely worked there. I was young when I started, and new to this area, but by the time I was twenty I was Mr. Hagendorn's personal aide. Wine for the cellar, an antique painting, a new maid — whatever he required, I obtained. I served him well for many years, and we remain in close touch. He asks me often to his home. I'm always welcome there." He sighed. "So while I'm not a rich man, I suppose you'd have to say I'm well-connected."
"It sounds," said Margaret, "like a fabulous place."
The old man brightened. "Would you care to see it? I'm sure Mr. Hagendorn would love to have you as his guests. You could come for a swim, say tomorrow afternoon. Stay for an early dinner, and I'd have you back here just after dark. I know the trail by heart." Leaning toward them as if afraid the other guests would hear, he added, "You've never had dinner till you've had it in the great hall, overlooking the valley. The new people who've taken over this place —" His hand swept the room. "— they cook a meal fit for a peasant like me. But Mr. Hagendorn has employed the finest chefs in Europe."
"But why," said Philip, "would this fellow want to put himself out for two complete strangers?"
"The truth is, my friend, he's somewhat lonely. He doesn't get many visitors these days, and I know he'd want to make the acquaintance of two young people like you."
"But we didn't bring bathing suits," said Philip, hoping, somehow, that the matter might rest there.
"Speak for yourself," said Margaret brightly. "I brought mine."
The man turned to Philip with what looked disconcertingly like a wink, but it may just have been smoke in his eyes. "I assure you Mr. Hagendorn has plenty — for men, omen, boys, girls. Though you may find them a little out of style!"
Margaret clasped her hands. "Oh, I love old-fashioned things. It sounds like fun." She turned to Philip. "Can we go, honey?"
He swallowed. "Well, I still don't like just barging in on the man. I mean, what if he's not in the mood for visitors?"
The older man stood, a surprisingly rapid movement for one so large and so seemingly advanced in years. "No need to worry," he said. "I'll simply ask him. I'll be speaking with him tonight anyway." Excusing himself with a courtly bow, he made his way from the room, picking his way among the other guests.
It was only after he'd left that Philip realized they had failed to exchange names, and that their entire conversation had been watched — with, it appeared, an almost indecent curiosity — by the wizened old lady of the dining room, who now sat regarding him and Margaret from the depths of a wing-back chair in the corner, dark eyes glittering.
"Maybe she's just got a crush on him," said Margaret later, as they moved about the little room preparing for bed. "He looks like he's nearly as old as she is, and men that age are scarce."
"I'll bet that by tomorrow he changes his mind about the pool," said Philip, with a curious feeling of hope. "I'll bet he was talking through his hat about how chummy he is with his boss. He probably won't even bother to phone the guy."
But shortly afterward, when Margaret returned from the bathroom at the end of the hall, she closed the door behind her and whispered, "You're wrong, honey. He's telling him about us right now — about how he met us in the lounge tonight."
"How do you know?"
"I heard him," said Margaret. "He has the room across from us."
Gathering his toothbrush and towel, Philip stepped gingerly into the hall. Sure enough, he could hear a man's low voice coming from the room opposite theirs, and recognized it now as belonging to their companion from the lounge. Still half turned toward the bathroom as if that innocent goal were all he had in mind, he tiptoed closer.
"Yes, they're both coming . . . What's that?" There was a pause. "No, not at all. They both seem quite well-bred. . . . Yes, she's charming. You're going to like her." Another pause. "It's agreed, then. Tomorrow, by three."
A door rattled somewhere down the hall. Philip whirled and hurried to the bathroom. By the time he emerged, the hall was silent. He thought he could hear, faintly, a snoring from the old man's room.
Margaret was already in bed when he returned. She looked up expectantly. "So? Hear anything?"
He planted a kiss on her lips. "He says you're charming."
She laughed and pulled him down beside her. "How in the world did he find out?"
Later, as they lay beside one another in the darkness, she stirred and said sleepily, "I hope I don't dream again tonight."
"Had a bad one last night? You didn't tell me."
"I can't remember it." She pressed her face deeper into the pillow. "All I know is, it was scary. Leave your arm around me, will you?"
"It'll fall asleep in three minutes."
"Leave it around me for three minutes."
He himself was asleep in less than that. Some time later — it must have been near dawn, for beyond the lace curtains the sky had grown pale — he felt himself awakened by a tugging at his arm, and heard Margaret whisper his name.
"Whatsamatter?" he mumbled.
"Is it really you?"
The idiocy of her question seemed, to his sleep-befogged brain, too enormous to contemplate. "Yes," he said, "it is." In a moment he was once again asleep.
"I got frightened," she explained the next morning, sunlight flooding the room. "I somehow got it into my head that there was someone else in bed with us."
"You mean, like threezies?"
"Like another man lying between us, pressing up against us both. And you know, I think he was black — a little black man."
"Maybe it was that guy from the mailroom."
She seemed not to hear. "What's so weird is, I'm sure it's the same dream I had the night before."
Philip yawned and rubbed his eyes. "Well, you know what they say about dreams. Wish-fulfillment."
She poked him in the ribs. "Honestly, Philip, you're so trite!" Frowning, she looked about the room — the cloud pattern in the wallpaper, a spiderlike crack in the ceiling, a row of dark pines in the painting above the dresser. "You don't suppose this place is haunted, do you?"
"Talk about trite . .."
"I mean," she went on, "inns have been known to be haunted."
"Sure," he said, "they all are. Or claim to be. The ghost of some long-lost sea captain comes back every hundred and twelve years, or a serving wench who hanged herself appears at each full moon. Here it's probably Daniel Webster's brother-in-law. All part of the charm."
"Just the same, will you ask the Hartleys? Ask them if there's a ghost."
"Why don't you?"
"I'm too embarrassed."
Embarrassed himself, Philip asked Mr. Hartley in the office downstairs while Margaret finished getting dressed.
"No ghosts that I know of," the man said, scratching his thinning hair. Suddenly he grinned. "But golly, I sure would like to have one. It'd help business."
Their stout companion was waiting for them in the lounge by the time they had finished breakfast. "It's all agreed," he said genially. "Mr. Hagendorn would love to meet you both."
"It certainly looks like a beautiful day," said Margaret.
He nodded, beaming. "Magnificent. You'll be able to see clear to the Mon-adnocks." He seemed, on this sunny morning, the soul of jollity. "By the way, I didn't introduce myself last night. My name is Laszlo." His grip was like iron as they shook hands and arranged to leave after lunch.
When lunchtime arrived, however, a call came for Philip on the phone by the bar. "Sorry, Dad," said Tony, with a babble of youthful voices in the background. "I got it wrong. The track meet's tomorrow. Can you come see me today?"
"Hell," said Philip, "we've already made plans. I can't just —" He caught himself. "Yeah, sure, I guess. No problem. What time's good?"
"That's just it. I don't know yet. Jimmy and I are getting a lift into to
wn, and we need you to pick us up." There followed a dismayingly complicated series of adolescent proposals and provisos, the upshot of which was that Philip was to wait for Tony's call "sometime in the early afternoon," whereupon further directions would be supplied.
Dinner with the reclusive Mr. Hag-endorn was clearly out of the question. Laszlo, waiting for them at the bottom of the garden where the trail began, agreed to take Margaret up to the villa for a swim alone, and promised he would have her back by nightfall, in time for Philip's return. Far from being put out, he seemed to take the last-minute change of plans with surprising nonchalance.
"Mr. Hagendorn will of course be disappointed," he said. "He told me how much he looked forward to meeting you both. But at least I am bringing the young lady."
He was dressed in the same loose-fitting white pants, like some ancient man of medicine — they even had a drawstring, Philip noticed — but he'd added, over his white shirt, a warm alpine jacket, and his bald head was covered by an old-fashioned homburg. Far from being unfit for a protracted uphill walk, he looked younger and more powerful than he had by the fireside last night. It was clear he belonged on the mountain.
Margaret carried her bathing suit wrapped in a towel. A camera dangled from a strap around her neck. "I'll bet the view's wonderful from up there," she said, kissing Philip goodbye. She blew him a second goodbye kiss as she and her companion started gaily up the trail.
The air had grown chillier as they climbed, but their exertions kept them warm. The walk was proving more arduous than Margaret had expected. "How in the world did your boss ever manage to build a house up here?" she had asked half an hour ago, as they'd pushed their way up a steep section of path near the foot of the mountain.
"There's a narrow road that winds around the other side," Laszlo had said, pausing to tilt back his hat and wipe the sweat from his bald head. "We're going up the back way. You'll find, however, that it's faster."
He had sounded friendly enough, but since then they'd exchanged barely a word. As the day had grown colder, so had his mood; he'd become silent, preoccupied, as if listening for voices from the mountain, and when she'd asked him how much farther it was, he'd simply nodded toward the north and said, "Soon."
They had been on the trail for nearly an hour, following a zigzag course up the densely wooded slope. It was plain that Laszlo had misled her — or perhaps he had misled himself as well: though he continued, even now, to walk steadily and purposefully, with no sign of hesitation, she was beginning to wonder if he really knew the way as well as he'd claimed.
By the time the trail grew level, the trees had begun to thin out, and when she turned to look behind her she could see, in the spaces between them, the distance they had come. Below them spread the undulating green of the valley, though the inn and its grounds were lost from sight around the other side of the mountain. They were midway up the slope now, following a circular route toward the northern face. Ahead of her Laszlo paused, staring uphill past a faraway outcropping of rocks, and said, "We're nearly there. It's just past that curve of land."
Shielding her eyes, she searched the horizon for a glimpse of rooftops. Suddenly she squinted. "Who's that?"
"Where?"
"Up among those rocks." She pointed, then felt foolish; for a second she'd thought she'd seen a small black figure merge with the shadow of a boulder as it fell upon the uneven ground. But now, as she looked more closely, she could see that the ground lay covered in ragged clumps of undergrowth, and that it was this, tossed by the wind, that had moved.
"Come," said Laszlo, "the house is just ahead, and we will want to be back down before dark."
Philip sat impatiently on the back porch, leafing through one of the previous winter's ski magazines while waiting for the phone inside to ring. The potted geraniums blew softly in the breeze from off the mountain. He found it absurdly unnecessary to keep assuring himself that Margaret would be all right with Laszlo, but he continued to assure himself of that just the same.
He looked up to find himself no longer alone. The elderly woman from last night had seated herself in a chair nearby and had taken out some knitting. She nodded to him. "First time here?"
"Yes," he said, automatically raising his voice on the assumption that she might be hard of hearing. "Just a weekend vacation."
"I've been coming here for more than fifty years," she said. "My husband and I first came here in the summer of 1935. He passed on in '64, but I keep coming back. I've seen this inn change hands seven times." She gave a little cackle. "Seven times!"
Philip laid aside the magazine. "And does the place look different now?" he asked politely.
"The inn, no. The area is different. There've been a lot of new people coming in, and a lot of the old ones gone." She looked as if she were about to enumerate them, but at that moment the screen door opened and Mrs. Hartley emerged, an account book in her hand. She saw Philip and smiled.
"Still waiting for your call?"
"Yes," he said. "I don't know what's keeping that kid. I'll hear the phone out here, won't I?"
"Sure, but somebody's on it now, and it looks like they may take a while. I'll try to hurry 'em up."
Philip frowned. "How about the phone in the office?"
"Well, my husband's using it right now. He's going over the orders with our supplier down in Concord. But don't worry, it won't take long."
"The problem is," said Philip, with growing impatience, "my son may be trying to reach me at this very moment. Couldn't you transfer his call to a phone upstairs? I could wait in one of the vacant rooms."
She shook her head. "There aren't any phones up there. The two down here are the only ones we've got."
"But that's impossible," said Philip. He could feel his heart beginning to beat faster. "Impossible! That big fellow, Laszlo, has a phone in his room. I heard him just last night, and the night before. He was talking with someone named Hagendorn. I heard him." Yet even as the words rushed from his lips, he knew that what he'd said was false; that it was not impossible at all; that the only voice he'd heard had been Laszlo's. For all he knew, the man might have been speaking to the walls, the air, the empty room.
They had a word for people like that, people who talked to themselves. Psychos.
"That's where I know him from!" the old woman was saying. "He was Hag-endorn's man. I knew I recognized him." She turned to Philip. "The person you were talking to last night, he used to be a kind of— oh, I don't know what you'd call him. A kind of valet. He worked for some dreadful man who lived up on the mountain. Bringing women up there for him, and I don't know what else. There were all kinds of stories."
"That's right," said Philip, eagerly grasping at any confirmation of the facts, however unsavory. "This guy Hagendorn. He's apparently got some sort of opulent villa up there."
The woman's eyes widened. "But that house burned down in 1939. I remember it — some kind of terrible explosion. Something to do with an oil tank. That man Hagendorn was burned to death, I remember distinctly, and everyone said it was just as well." She shook her head. "There's nothing up there now. There hasn't been a house there for years."
"Honestly, Laszlo," called Margaret, "are you sure we haven't come too far? This can't be the way."
They had passed the outcropping of rocks and had wandered out onto a narrow tableland overgrown by scrub pine and weeds. Ahead of them, curving against the mountain's face, stood what looked like a low broken-down stone wall half concealed by vegetation. Beyond it the pines appeared to be anchored in nothing but blue sky, for at their base the land dropped away into a haphazard tumble of boulders a thousand feet below, as if giant hands had sheared away part of the mountain.
Laszlo was well in front of her, his pace here grown more eager, while she, fearful of the drop, walked slowly now, eyes wary. With an impatient wave of his hand he motioned for her to join him.
"Laszlo," she said breathlessly, as she caught up with him, "where are we? Where is Mr. Hagendorn's house?"
/> "What's that? The house?" He pursed his lips and looked blank for a moment. Absently he gazed around him, like one seeing this place for the first time. Suddenly his gaze grew fixed; she noticed that he was staring past her feet. "Why, here's the house," he said in a small voice, as if explaining to a child. "It's right here."
She followed his gaze. He was pointing directly into the gorge.
She stepped back in confusion. He's only joking, she told herself, but her stomach refused to believe her. She felt his hand fall lightly on her shoulder.
"I suppose," he said, "that first you'll want to see the pool."
"Oh, yes," she said, trying vainly to twist away. "Yes, show me the pool, Laszlo."
For a moment his arm dropped from her shoulder and she was free; but already he had seized her hand and was dragging her implacably forward.
"Come," he said. "There's so much to see." Smiling, he gestured at what lay before them, a vast cavity in the rock, deep as a pit, cut sharply as the lip of a monstrous pitcher into the precipice's edge. Laszlo tugged her closer. With a gasp she realized that its three stony sides were squared off, as regular as the walls of some enormous dungeon, but cracked and weathered now, patch-worked with lichen and moss — ancient. The bottom was a mass of weed-grown rubble opening onto the sky.
"And here," he said, "we have the pool."
Her wrist ached as he urged her to its brink. The ground seemed to shift beneath her as an edge of cloud swept past the sun. She took an unsteady step backward.
"No," he said in a chiding voice, "you can't leave now. You'll have to stay the night."
Drawn forward, she peered into the shadowy depths. Within them, as the light changed, something stirred, black as soot, like a stick of charred wood.
"The tiles are imported," he was saying. "No expense was spared."