by Jack Mann
“Coffee, please, the way you know how to make it,” Gees answered, without waiting for Kyrle to speak. When she had disappeared, he said: “It must have been that French invasion in the time of Mary Stuart that taught these people how to make coffee — if they had coffee then.”
“To the best of my knowledge, they hadn’t,” Kyrle snapped.
“I’ll look it up when I get back,” Gees promised. “Probably they hadn’t. If Mary and John Knox had drunk coffee together — the sort of coffee Elizabeth makes — history might have been different — ”
“Do you realize why we took that drive?” Kyrle interrupted, angrily.
“Why I drove like that, you mean,” Gees reminded him. “To beat MacMorn to it — yes. But we didn’t beat him. Hence the fog — if you look out, you’ll find there isn’t any fog, now. I realize that since he beat us to it, there’s nothing to be done until — The new moon is nineteen hours away, and we’ve got to be on hand for it, fresh and fit. That’s why I’m all for eggs and bacon, and a sleep.”
Kyrle got up, went to the window, and drew a curtain back. He pulled it over the window again, and said: “You’re right. No fog at all.”
“It was his fog,” Gees said. “It didn’t stop us, so why keep it on?” He lifted his tumbler, and put it down empty.
“And Helen?”
“I don’t even know that Helen is anywhere near here,” Gees said.
“You mean — ” Kyrle stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I was a fool. I took the number of that car, mentally, and I’ve still got it in my mind. But I didn’t stop the driver and ask him whether he brought one passenger or two to Brachmornalachan.”
“But — good Lord, man!” Kyrle began, and stopped.
“Not that it matters much,” Gees said. “Fill me another, till she gets here with those eggs,” he asked, and held out his glass. “I tell you, Kyrle, we’re all in, or next to it, after that drive, and we’ll render thanks to all the gods there are that new moon is tomorrow night instead of tonight.”
Kyrle was at the sideboard with Gees’ glass and his own. Elizabeth appeared with a tray.
“I suppose you haven’t seen anything of Miss Helen Aylener today, Elizabeth?” Gees asked.
“Miss Margaret sent a telegram,” she answered. “It’s the morrow they come back. Callum’s to go to rail with the car.”
“They?” Kyrle put down the decanter and faced about.
“She’d no leave Miss Helen ahint,” Elizabeth told him, ironically.
“Did the woman Gralloch from the post office bring the telegram?” Gees persisted, as she seemed about to retire.
“Nay, she sent a laddie,” she answered, bristling. “She’d no show her face at this door while I’m here and Miss Margaret awa’.”
“And this fog — have you had it here all day?” he asked.
“Fog?” she echoed, with a hint of incredulity. “Nay, I’ve seen no fog. ’Twas a clear night when I went to bed.”
“Ah! Only a night mist, I expect. Thank you, Elizabeth.”
She got as far as the door of the room, and then flung over her shoulder: “That de’il beyond the loch needed it, maybe.”
“Just a minute, Elizabeth,” Gees asked, and she faced about and waited. “Why should he need a fog, and what makes you think he could raise one if he did?”
“I maun mak’ beds for ye an’ Mr. Kyrle,” she answered uneasily.
“Miss Helen has disappeared,” he said bluntly. “I think — I believe MacMorn has got her, brought her here tonight.”
“Ye think? Ye believe?”
“We’ve driven here from London today because of it,” Kyrle put in.
“Aye? Trouble for naught. I was fey to his hold on her, long syne. Ye’ll no brak’ the hold. No man nor wumman can fecht MacMorn and win.”
“A cheerful outlook,” Gees said. “But you may be wrong, Elizabeth. What’s your feud with Bathsheba Gralloch, by the way?”
“Nay, there’s no feud,” she answered somberly, “but I’m fey to her compact, and she knows it, and keeps awa’ from the paths I walk.”
“That’s talking in riddles,” Gees reproved her, and eyed the bacon fat coagulating in the dish. “What compact, and with whom?”
“Wi’ the Unseen, to the which she sold her ain blood kin,” she answered, broadening her dialect. “I’ll say nae mair. I kenned weel, when ye turned yer back on Miss Margaret, ye had sicht o’ a’ that yon de’il i’ his hoose o’ sin is maister to, an’ that y’d kenned the shadows i’ the mirk. I maun mak’ beds — I’ll say nae mair.”
“Will you tell me why Bathsheba Gralloch sold her own blood kin, as you put it?” he asked.
“Nay,” she answered, stubbornly, “for ye’ll find it a’ i’ the hoose o’ sin. I’m fey tae ye, and the path ye baith must tread leads there.”
She went out, then, and closed the door noisily.
Gees helped himself to the rest of the eggs. “I guess the oracle at Eleusis was about as enlightening,” he observed. “Don’t mind me, Kyrle — I’ve gone primitive, and I’m eating all there is, manners or no manners. And according to the oracle, we’re booked for an early visit to MacMorn — there can’t be more than one ‘hoose o’ sin’ in a place this size. But I wish she’d been more explicit.”
“To let you in on a bit of family history,” Kyrle said, “Elizabeth has always had a grudge against Helen. She was devoted to Helen’s mother, and Helen’s mother died in childbirth. So in her stubborn way Elizabeth blames Helen for her mother’s death. That’s the trouble.”
Without replying, Gees ate steadily.
“I shall be most interested to find out what price Bathsheba Gralloch got for her sister,” he said. “According to Elizabeth, we shall be able to inspect the invoice in the ‘hoose o’ sin,’ when we get there.”
“Aren’t you rather making light comedy out of it?” Kyrle demanded, sharp anger in his voice. “If what you believe about Helen is true, the situation we’ve got to face hardly calls for funny remarks, surely?”
“The situation,” Gees answered soberly, “is as vague as all the rest of this business, and if my remarks sound funny, then your ear’s out. And, now, having eaten, I think a sleep’s indicated.”
“Do you mean to say we’ve damned near broken our necks to get here, only to go to sleep?” Kyrle barked out.
“If I weren’t so sleepy” — Gees broke off to give a stupendous yawn a fair chance — “I’d damned near break your neck in the hope of lamming some sense into you. I underrated MacMorn — he got here first, in spite of my magnificent driving. You can go and call on him in the middle of the night if you like. I won’t. I’m for a sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” Kyrle said frankly. “I just don’t understand — any of it. I feel as if I were blanketed away from reality.”
“You are,” Gees told him. “There’s no reality in it, from start to finish. It’s all mad. And it’s only the heroes of romance who go twenty-four hours and then turn up fresh. I can’t — I’m human. Me for the hay, and maybe I’ll break records and MacMorn too, tomorrow.”
“Today, you mean,” Kyrle amended. “It’s past midnight. She hasn’t told us which rooms. I suppose I take the one I usually have, and you see whether she’s got the one you had last time ready for you.”
He pushed his chair back from the table and got up, just as Elizabeth entered again. Gees too stood up and faced her.
“Wull I call ye?” she asked.
“I shall waken,” Gees answered. “I always do, if I set myself a time. Do I go to the room I had before?”
“Aye,” she assented, “and Mr. Kyrle knows his. Ye’ll need breakfast afore ye go?” This last as if she knew their errand.
“We’ve given you trouble enough tonight,” Gees said.
She smiled, wintrily. “Aye, but ’twill be Callum’ll sairve it.” She looked at Kyrle, and her lips worked oddly. Then: “Dinna go,” she broke out, with harsh forbidding. “Yon warl
ock’s ower strong. Dinna go. The day’s nigh when his de’ils’ll drag him doun.”
“Maybe” — Gees hid the yawn — “I’m one of those devils. And the longer we stay talking, the less sleep we get. I wish there were time to hear all you know, Elizabeth, but there isn’t. If you’ll show me your room, Kyrle, I’ll give you a call when it’s time to go.”
“And what time will Callum make breakfast?” Elizabeth asked.
“About six, please,” Gees answered. “That gives us twelve hours.”
They went up to their rooms, while Elizabeth set about clearing the table as if meals in the middle of the night were commonplace at The Rowans.
Callum’s sedately respectful “Good morning, sir,” when Gees appeared in the dining room just before six o’clock was that of the perfectly trained serving man whom nothing could surprise. He drew out a chair but, waiting for Kyrle, Gees did not immediately take it.
“Mr. Kyrle will be down in a few minutes,” he explained. “I suppose you know where we’re going, Callum, and why?”
“Elizabeth told me of your arrival last night, sir,” Callum answered indirectly, “and the time at which you would want breakfast.”
“More than that, I want you to come with us,” Gees said.
“I am sorry, sir, but I have to take the car to meet Miss Aylener.”
“But you know what has happened to Miss Helen?” Gees asked, in surprise at the flat denial.
Callum looked straight at him. “Do you, sir?” he asked.
Gees had to own privately that he did not. If only he had stopped the car that had passed them the night before, and questioned the driver as to his passengers! He said: “We both know, man!”
“Excuse me, sir.” Callum spoke as the servant respectfully putting a guest of the house in his place. “I don’t know anything about her. Miss Aylener has wired me to meet a train today, and her orders come first. If anything out of the way had happened to Miss Helen, she would know, surely. I concluded I was to meet them both.”
The explanation set Gees thinking. “What time did you get the telegram?’ he asked.
“Between six and seven o’clock last night, sir.”
“Remember that talk we had at Miss Aylener’s request?” Gees demanded.
“It was some days ago, sir,” Callum answered, and the manner of the reply indicated that nothing Gees could say would make him change his attitude. “The conditions are quite different, now.”
At that moment Kyrle entered, and Gees said no more.
He realized that Margaret Aylener, at the time she sent the telegram, had known not only of Helen’s disappearance, but of his and Kyrle’s setting out in the hope of finding the girl and taking her back from MacMorn’s hold. He knew it was useless, trying to persuade Callum to ignore the telegram. That “conditions are quite different, now” had a sinister ring about it.
Elizabeth had openly warned Kyrle to leave MacMorn alone: Callum too appeared to think the quest was hopeless, or else felt that his duty consisted in obeying Margaret Aylener’s orders, whatever might happen to her niece.
But that reference to different conditions chilled Gees.
“I don’t like this time of day,” Kyrle observed. “Everything looks bleak at this hour of the morning. I didn’t sleep much, either.”
“I will leave you gentlemen to help yourselves,” Callum remarked, and went out, closing the door on himself.
Gees carved himself a Gargantuan slice of ham. Kyrle looked at the piled plate, and shuddered visibly.
“I couldn’t eat a breakfast like that,” he said.
“Then you can watch me,” Gees retorted and began to eat. “I don’t know when I shall eat again, so I’m laying in a stock.”
“What do you propose to do?” Kyrle asked, sitting with an empty plate before him, and making no move toward filling it.
Without abating any of his interest in ham and scrambled eggs, Gees eyed his companion, and saw dulled, uninterested eyes, and an air of slack inertness. This was a different man from the one who had come to Little Oakfield Street to report Helen’s disappearance.
“I propose,” Gees answered between mouthfuls, “to spoil MacMorn’s game and quite probably spoil him too, before new moon tonight. I propose also to get your Helen out of his house and back here.”
“Yes.” He sounded as if the statement had little interest for him, and with sudden dismay Gees remembered the incident of the crimson drink that Kyrle, together with Helen, had taken from MacMorn. For this was not the normal Kyrle: it was no more than the shell of him.
“Are you going to help?” Gees barked out the question, harshly.
“Yes. Yes, of course I’m going to help.”
A gleam of enthusiasm lighted Kyrle’s eyes momentarily, and faded out. Gees finished his breakfast in silence, while Kyrle drank coffee thirstily and ate nothing.
“Now look here, Kyrle.” Rising from his seat, Gees went to the younger man and put a hand on his shoulder. “Either you pit your soul as well as the rest of you against MacMorn, or else you don’t go. I’d sooner tackle it alone than have you as a drag on me. It’s your Helen who is in danger of death and worse, so what about it?”
“Yes, man — yes!” A brief enthusiasm again flamed in Kyrle’s expression. “I’ll go through Hell to save her. Do we go now?”
“We do. Have you got that gun ready to your hand?”
“All ready, and loaded. Only to pull the safety catch off.”
“Right. Keep your wits about you. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER XVI
blood-red nectar
“The path we both must tread leads there, according to Elizabeth,” Gees remarked to Kyrle standing in the doorway of The Rowans. The sun was still low in the east, and its rays slanted across his face. Quartering from behind the house, a wind with the tang of the sea in it bent the rowan branches so that they tossed like plumes on the heads of prancing horses.
Halfway up the slope out from the valley the abandoned Rolls-Bentley looked like a child’s toy with the sunrays glinting on its chromium. Gees pulled at the bell-handle, and took his ignition key from his pocket as Callum opened the door he had just closed on the pair of them.
“I don’t think it’s going to keep fine very long, and when we had to leave my car last night I didn’t stay to put the hood up,” Gees said. “We’ve no time to spare now, so I wonder if you’d be so good as to take this key and drive the car into the garage at the back?”
“Certainly, sir.” And Callum took the key.
With a word of thanks Gees led off along the drive, and Kyrle went with him, along the path Elizabeth had foretold they must tread toward MacMorn’s squat, gray house beyond the loch.
A vanguard of fleecy little clouds scurried eastward across the sky, and behind them came heavier masses, dark-bodied. The wind that struck on their backs and drove them on raised waves on the loch, and by the time they reached the soggy soil near its brink, heavy, fast-driving clouds had blotted out the sun, so that the water was gray and sullen-looking; Brachmornalachan lay in gloom.
Up on the hillsides the tortured firs bent in the suddenly risen gale, the sound of which was like the trampling feet of a distant army.
When they passed the lone monolith between the loch and MacMorn’s house, Gees looked up at the worn lines carved near its top, and the racing clouds gave an illusion that the pillar swayed against the sky, as the moon may seem to travel across the heavens when scud drives before its half-obscured face.
The prisonlike frontage of the house before them revealed no sign of life within. At its eastern end the thorn tree, sheltered from the main force of the wind, shivered ever and again as a curving blast struck on it, and the last of its crimson petals fluttered, faded, to add their substance to the red carpet that hid the ground under its branches.
“The hoose o’ sin,” Gees remarked. “The description fits it, I think.”
“What do you propose to do inside?” Kyrle asked.
“
Get your future wife out of his hold,” Gees answered. “We may have trouble over it, and in fact I think we shall. Trouble of some sort. Where are you carrying that automatic?”
“Right-hand trouser pocket. It sits flat against my leg.”
“Handy for a draw — yes. I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Abruptly he grasped Kyrle’s arm with his left hand, and, as Kyrle turned his head in surprise to ask his reason, laid the forefinger of his right hand against his lips.
Kyrle obeyed and kept silence. Gees, perhaps because he was more sensitive to the presence of such beings as MacMorn could control, or perhaps because he had not drunk of MacMorn’s crimson fluid, which Helen had admitted had affected her and which Kyrle too had tasted, had realized that they were no longer alone.
Things, not even tangible enough to be visible as shadows, eddied about them on the wind and became perceptible to his inner consciousness. Eaverdroppers for MacMorn?
He was over strong, Elizabeth had said. Within this circle, Gees knew, he was master as well as maker of shadows, and of strength to which they might even add by discussion of their purpose with him.
Here, with the bulk of the house to oppose its charge, the wind hummed a deep, angered protest. Before Gees and Kyrle gained the shelter of the deep doorway, a flurry of rain struck on them, and Gees looked back to see his car moving slowly toward The Rowans with its hood up.
Gees advanced to the door and struck twice with the bronze knocker.
With an upsetting promptness, MacMorn himself opened for them and stood back with a smile of invitation.
“Good morning,” he said cordially. “Not a very good one, I fear. Will you come in? I am glad to welcome you to my house.”
They entered, Kyrle with perceptible eagerness, and Gees, following him, taking in the character of the house, alive to the influence of immense age which it radiated as soon as he set foot inside.
They stood in a corridor not more than six feet in width, running transversely to the frontage.
MacMorn closed the outer door, and Gees saw that the inner side of the house wall was plain, bare stone, as was the outside. It looked as if this outer wall were a shell enclosing another building, and the wall that he faced on entering was of wood, shining and black with age.