“—The room is just one flight up. To the left of the stairs. You will find it quite easily.”
Carteret was saying good-night to her in his own effortless way. She shook off the lingering clutch of the past and smiled at him.
“Do I need a candle, Carteret?”
At that he smiled. His rapid, face-transforming smile.
“Our clientele prefers us to remain picturesque, you see. But there is electricity for illumination wherever you turn. Light switches and all that. Shall I walk you up, Miss Fenner?”
“No, thank you. I’ll manage.”
“I was certain you could.”
“Goodnight, Carteret. See you in the morning?”
“Perhaps. Who can really say?”
Again on an enigmatic note, she took her leave of him, going from the desk toward a landing and a balustrade which loomed before a dark mass that had to be a main room of some kind. Anne Fenner bundled her coat about her, found a light switch on the wall and thumbed it on. The effect was like magic. Carpeted stairs, a maroon swirl of Paisley pattern, bordered by a banister of the same kind of mahogany that made up the counter at the Registration Desk, rose up before her like a pathway leading to Infinity. It was a very long, very high and vaulted staircase. Holding back a smile, she began to ascend, careful of the pull of her boots against the fairly thick pile of carpeting. The bright, full glow of electric lighting seemed suddenly alien and out of place in such a house. Such a hotel. She could not have said why, but it was true—what Carteret had said—candles and candelabra were far more picturesque for such a setting.
Number Seventeen was a funny door. Not square, but rounded off in a dome at the top. There were eight matching panels set in a framework of more mahogany. The doorknob itself was a huge thing, embossed and filigreed with a design impossible to identify. But this was no time of night for inspections and investigations of any kind. It came to her, very suddenly, that she was tired. She was yawning, her bones ached, her limbs felt heavy, and it was an effort to keep from blinking her eyes. A trifle confused but glad to be settled down at last, she pushed into the room. The peculiar door thrust inward as easily as a leaf fluttering in a high wind.
There was no need to turn on another light.
For a long moment she paused on the threshold, her heart catching in her throat, her hands flying up to her face. The tableau before her was something that she might see only once in a lifetime.
Somewhere, somehow, the moon must have mysteriously reappeared in the darkened heavens over the land known as Kragmoor, for there could be no other possible explanation for the fantastic moonwash of silvery light into her room. Everything, even at a sweeping first glance—the four-postered bed, a vanity, chairs, walls, mirrors and other furnishings—were all bathed in a deathly grey halation of light, as if some fairy or specter with a magic wand had tripped about the room, tinselling and silvering everything the wand touched. Even her two suitcases, neatly stacked on the floor in the center of the room, seemed to glow incandescently, like a will o’ the wisp dancing and flickering over a gaseous marsh. The sight, so magical and yet so frightening, made Anne Fenner whirl as if to bolt from the dreaded room. But even as she turned, there came to her the finality of the click of the door lock catching as the portal slammed shut, as if by a vagrant breeze. Or as if someone in the hall had reached out to pull the door shut. For an awesome moment she stood just within the doorway, her back to the door, hypnotized by the staggering scene before her—a setting from either Heaven or Hell, depending on the point of view.
The silvery hues and glimmers seemed to transcend Reality, to go beyond the mere tricks of optical illusion. It was as if this were The Moon Room. There was something heart-stopping and surpassingly eerie in such sylvan splendor, limned and glorified in moonlight and moonbeams. No full moon, however powerful, could ever have fashioned such a phenomenon. An ethereal haze filtered over every object in the room, purifying it with stunning light.
Anne Fenner could bear to look no longer.
Blinded, frightened, she groped for the light-switch nearby, fumbled it on and blinked again.
It was magic.
The silver, the moonwash, the glittering, jewel-like room vanished—to be replaced by a very sensible, homey, old-fashioned decor of woodsey furnishings, worn walls and floors and ceiling. The high, wide four-postered bed, brass-steaded and formidable, was no more unusual than the white pitcher of crockery and water glass standing solemnly on a night stand at the left corner of the bed. Anne Fenner took a deep breath, walked around her carefully arranged Tourister luggage—handsome, laminated grey necessities—and slowly drew up to the window of the room. It was a double-hung, casement-framed affair whose curtains were so gauzily thin as to be laughable. She peered out anxiously at the sky.
There was no moon.
Only dark, rolling clouds racing, threatening foul weather. A storm, perhaps. In truth, she was barely able to make out the surrounding landscape of the Craghold panorama.
Only the dark and thick wall of trees. Cypresses, she remembered, according to the Kragmoor brochure. Gnarled, ancient cypresses, some of them dating back to the last century, the Civil War and all that——She caught hold of herself, shaking her head. Perhaps she had been tired, too tired, and the sudden change of lighting had fooled her. Those things happened, didn’t they? Your eyes did lie now and then, especially when your mental faculties were uncoordinated, as hers now certainly were. But she couldn’t escape from the nagging fact that there was no moon at all—
Just like the first line of that very popular song of a few years back. No moon at all.…
As silly as it was, she didn’t dare turn off the light again to prove herself or her theory. She was far too upset and fatigued to play that sort of game with herself. Darn that Carteret anyway! With his smooth manner, that foreign look of his, that Old World charm. And little old Wentworth, who came and went like a ghost—how the devil did he manage to move around so much without being seen or heard? Just like the shoemaker’s elves or one of Santa’s Little Helpers! Craghold House!
Well, it certainly wasn’t proving to be just any old place, at that.
It certainly wasn’t dull.
Far from it.
It looked like it would prove to be a throwback all the way.
Picturesque was not the word.
Still, it was darn upsetting about that moonlight and silver and——Suddenly, she caught her breath again, aware of a faint, almost undetectable aroma of something in the room. Desperately, and frightened all over again in spite of herself, she flitted her eyes unhappily around the room, searching one corner, one nook, one dim recess after the other. She was quite certain that if she saw something—anything—she would scream at the very top of her lungs. And she wouldn’t care whom she disturbed or whom she aroused.
Finally she saw it.
Dumbfounded, she didn’t scream.
How could she?
The ubiquitous Wentworth had struck again. And vanished just as rapidly, like a thief in the night.
Oh, it was all so absurd! Like Alice In Wonderland, somehow.
Standing on a circular end-table, whose curved and carved base seemed to be fashioned in the shape of a griffin or gargoyle or some such monstrosity, stood a cocoa-colored teapot with a matching cup to one side, and a set of silverware.
Even as she giggled in sheer hysterical release from her terror, she could see the swirls of hot, steamy vapor rising spirally from the curved spout of the teapot.
Her tea was waiting for her.
The tea that Carteret had promised.
Sees A Ghost
Try as she might, she could not sleep.
For Anne Fenner, with all her weariness of body and soul, simply would not yield to the mercies of slumber. She had dismissed the fantastic silvery aspect of the bedroom by moonlight as “just one of those things.” The human mind can be like that. What it cannot readily explain, what seems to be a sight too impossible to credit, what go
es beyond the immutable laws of Reality and Belief, is argued away on the grounds that it did not happen. It never was. It was a mirage, a touch of indigestion and so forth.
Fortified with that female logic, Anne Fenner had gone to bed. Though she had locked the door securely on its inside latch, left the lights on, and quickly arranged herself for retiring, she had done so with a mindless habituality that precluded any further odd and frightening notions about what she had seen, the curious Carteret, or Craghold House itself. Time enough in the morning to arrange her clothes properly in the enormous closet to the left of the old-fashioned vanity with the three-sided mirror.
All in all, it was a very nice room, even allowing for the fact that all of the furnishings and decor might have been something out of an 1890’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Never had she seen such antique furniture. The bed itself, for all its solidity and comfortable crazy-quilt bedding, was a brass monstrosity from the past. The chairs were stiff-backed Morris nightmares. The vanity might have been plucked from the set of Gone With The Wind, Scarlett O’Hara’s very own looking-glass. The floorboards were planks, concealed at random points by several throw rugs of such faded grandeur that they seemed to reek of historicity and another age. The wall paper pattern was a pale yellow, very busy, with fleur-de-lis numbering in the hundreds crowding the design—and the eye. The ceiling was a pale yellow expanse of nothingness, with faint cracks here and there suggesting another design of sorts. Still, for all the mustiness and the tenor of the Long Ago and Yesterdays, it was a comfortable room for a young woman to be in. It was a feminine room altogether, and in that plain fact Anne Fenner found much to like and even admire.
And whatever old Wentworth might eventually prove to be, the man was an absolute wizard at brewing a pot of tea. The strong and lemonish tang of the beverage lifted Anne Fenner’s spirits to the skies. If Wentworth also made the tea—as well as delivered it!
In bed, with the electric light illuminating everything and no dark comers to trouble her, Anne Fenner closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep.
It was not possible.
Readily, the image of George Twemble posed in her mind’s eye. Big, broad-shouldered George and how his hands had felt as they touched her at their last meeting. And George saying in that pitched and oddly trembling voice of his: “Come on, Annie. Don’t be a fool. Let’s take what we have while we can—” That was precisely when she had slapped him, her face on fire, her heart ready to break. She had wanted marriage to be followed with Love. George had obviously wanted it the other way around. She could still see herself, blinded with tears, rushing down the badly lighted stairway of that sordid little furnished-room building on Kendall Street. After that it had been easy to fly from Boston, to get out of town and find this place—this Craghold House—away from all the lies, all the hurts, all the Georges. She had wanted George very badly, but despite the modernity of the times, Anne Fenner counted herself as virginal. Premarital relations had never been her idea of what Love was all about. Perhaps she had been forced into this frame of mind after her parents died—perhaps not. But in her formative teens there had been only the piano and a whole-hearted plunge into school studies, and attending to the wise counsel of Professor Aleski. For some reason impossible to define, Freudian or otherwise, Anne Fenner had always found it easier to relate to older men—not the wise-cracking, flip freshmen, undergraduates and seniors of her own age.
She ousted George Twemble’s image from her mind.
Craghold House and its environs—this room itself—seemed as quiet and still as a graveyard at midnight. There was no creak of an ancient eave, not the groan of a worn rafter, or even the voice of the night wind on the outside shutters. Odd, that, and in reality, not quite natural. For a moment she tensed against her pillow, eyes still shut, and strained her ears to hear something. Anything. After all, it was late October, Indian Summer almost gone, and the skies that evening had been tormented and angry. Ugly, too. Surely an old room such as this couldn’t be sound-proofed. She ought to be hearing the wind howl, or sweep into the cracks and crevices of the house itself, or at the very least, whistle and tear through the thick branches of all those tall trees outside surrounding the place. But no. The night was silent. If a mouse had walked across the floor of the room, she was certain she would have heard the slithery patter of its clawed, tiny feet. The idea was unnerving. Sighing a bit helplessly, she opened her eyes and looked about the room again.
All was as it had been.
The vanity, the chairs, the rugs, the wallpaper, the closet, the two Tourister suitcases, the door—nothing had changed. There was nothing to be alarmed about. Yet, as tired and worn to the bone as she had been, she could not sleep. For a long second she strained to listen again. She heard nothing. Beyond her locked door there was only a mammoth vacuum of silence. And quietude. It was as if this little room was a world unto itself, an isolated planet in an orbit of Nothingness. It was a very disconcerting feeling to have.
And suddenly very unbearable.
Determinedly, she climbed out of bed, throwing the heavy quilt aside, and reached for her robe which was folded over the chair at bedside. It was a silken Japanese garment with a flowered pattern, which George Twemble had given her on her twenty-first birthday. The great love affair with George had ended, but Anne Fenner’s Scotch-Irish heritage was far too strong and practical to make her discard the robe because things with George had gone sour. One thing was not another!
Brushing back her long, dark hair with both hands, Anne tied the robe about her slender middle and glided to the window. Darkness loomed beyond the panes of glass. A night darker than any she remembered. But it didn’t matter. She stationed herself at the sill and peered out into the night. All was still as soundless as Death, but she found herself fighting against the darkness without, trying to see something. Somebody, perhaps. This quiet, this oasis of silence and solitude, was just a trifle unearthly.
There was very little to see.
The night was as thick and heavy as a fog. Even the high wall of trees was now nothing more than a solid mass of inky blackness closing out the rest of the world. She could not see down to the ground from her window because a slope of roofing ran diagonally from beneath where she stood, jutting out to a length of nearly thirty feet. Try as she might, she could distinguish nothing beyond that point. Craghold House was enveloped in darkness. A dark ship stationary on a sea of night. Unmoving, deathly still, a painted silhouette against a frozen canvas. A Flying Dutchman of a house—
But—
Just as she was about to turn from the window in despair and uneasy apprehension, she saw it.
It.
A something, a movement, a faint sign—no, a light!
For a mad second she thought her eyes were playing tricks with her, games again, like the moon-washed scene of the room upon her first entrance. But no!
There was a light out there somewhere, down there in the darkness. A flickering, yet glowing, rapidly moving light which was dancing and bobbing like a buoy on a stormy sea. She leaned against the glass of the window, pressing her face to the pane, trying to see more, to make out what it was that was causing the light. It was incredible to see. A teetering, reeling wink of light, no larger than an orange it seemed, bouncing along in the night, leaping and bridging the darkness. Anne Fenner strove desperately to fathom what it was. And then, so suddenly that it was like a blow to her mid-section, the light halted, loomed larger, and changed direction. No longer did it travel across the vision of her sight, from left to right; now—it came toward her—directly, on a straight, true course—an unwavering, steadily moving circle of illumination. And it seemed to her, in her monumental fear and terror, that the light was already above the rim of the sloped roofing, climbing up toward her and the window like some magnetized force of power, targeting in on her as she stood in trembling amazement at her bedroom window.
She never for a moment considered that it should have been—or could have been—some person or
other stalking about the Craghold premises with a mere flashlight. She never even thought of the possibility of some strange alchemy of the night and weather combining for another incredible optical illusion. All she did know and believe with her heart and soul was that some midnight monster was coming for her with its ghoulish talons outspread, ready to devour her or carry her off into the darkness.
And she was unable to cry out, or move, or turn. Unable to run from her fate. The winking, dancing circle of light, now larger than an orange, was bobbing upwards, coming toward her, glowing ever more brightly in the Stygian darkness of night. Craghold House and its aura and legendary history had entrapped her in shrouds of horror from which she found it impossible to escape.
The light careened, tilted, floated and then settled down before her, just beyond the glass of the window, and Anne Fenner stared into the very face of Hell. For one tiny tick-tock of Time and all the clocks of reason and sanity, she saw what she could not see—not by any yardstick of sobriety, common sense or plain truths.
There was a coalescence, a shimmering, a hazy spinning of the light in all its yellowish and amber fantasy. The mad light whirled, coruscated, rotated, and seemed to expand before her very eyes.
With the blackness on all sides, with madness at hand, Anne Fenner looked into the depths of the Pit.
And saw a face.
The face of a man.
The countenance of a demon.
The visage of a phantom.
Flaming red eyes, hollowed and bubbling with insanity; haunted, hollow cheekbones; a savage, swirling swath of grey-black beard; a bleeding wound which trailed flowing blood from the bridge of a hawklike promontory of a nose. All larger than life-size. A great blue hat, brim caved to the center, a crown of battered dusty elegance, a gleam of crossed cavalry swords—shoulders so barely visible that for one heart-stopping second she saw the still-bright shoulder patches—and then there was no more to see. No more to torment her sanity with.
The Craghold Legacy Page 2