The Craghold Legacy

by Michael Avallone

  The red light, the swirling phantasmagora vanished—like the winking of an eye. And in a flashing unreality more incredible than anything that had gone before, all was darkness again. Once more unutterable night and darkness blotted out the scene. Waves of darkness rolled in, rushing over her, engulfing her, carrying her to the floor of the room, washing over her in a whirlpool of crashing sound and dizzying, heaving cataracts of confusion and sheer horror. The night had conquered all.

  Driving Anne Fenner to the floor of her bedroom at Craghold House in a dead faint.

  The ghost of Craghold House had walked again.

  Not even the tumultuous October weather had kept it from its sojourn in the night.

  Not even a clear-eyed young modern like Anne Fenner had been able to deny it its sovereignty over the Darkness.

  And the human mind.

  In another part of Craghold House, somewhere in the lower regions of the ancient pile of stone and wood, someone else was awake that night. By the unwavering light of a steadily-burning taper on a brass tray, the man known as Carteret was reading a book.

  It was impossible to tell at a glance the nature of the room in which Carteret sat. The candle glare formed a burning halo of light just to the right of his long, lean and aristocratically-modeled face. Carteret still wore the solemn suit of dark color that had caused Anne Fenner to note the fastidious quality of the man himself. His long, spatulate fingers, as slender and perfect as ivory, held a paperback book upright while his keen, unblinking eyes roved the printed lines before him. The glare of candle revealed other such reading matter, as well as several thick-spined hardcover tomes, all placed in a neat pile to his left. The paperback in his hands, to which Carteret was giving unequivocal attention, was a copy of Steiger’s very popular Strange Guests. The table at which he sat was plain and bare, an unvarnished affair of clap-wood and nails. Beyond the perimeter of candlelight it was not possible to distinguish any of the furnishings in the little room. Clearly visible were only the glow of candle, Careteret’s saturnine, sleekly-scalped head, his hands, and the books. Yet it was possible, if one strained one’s eyes fairly hard, to make out the dim outline of a long, rather gloomy-appearing crate of some kind, reposing against one wall of the room. The crate lay on its back and was easily a full ten feet in length. It seemed to resemble a casket or coffin more than anything else.

  Carteret was indulging himself in one of his greatest pleasures—he would never call it a vice. For what harm is there in a man who finds the reading of anything occult and mysterious one of the greatest joys of education? Self-education, that is. To Carteret, the reading of his books and his scholarship in the field of the Unknown was all. Managing Craghold House was merely an end to a means. Or a means to an end? Either way, the maxim held truth.

  This night, Carteret had been reading with more interest and attention than ever. The candle had already burned halfway down its original fifteen-inch length. The paperback in his hands was his second full-length reading accomplishment of the evening.

  Having finished, he closed it carefully and placed it atop the pile of books near his elbow. His imposingly handsome face was icy.

  At that moment there was a muffled knock on the door. Carteret frowned, rose to his great height and stalked to the door, which was no more than five feet from his chair.

  “Yes?” he whispered—a loud, sibilant hiss that seemed to have the whisper of the wind in it, a hint of something reptilian.

  From behind the door, a low, solemn, almost benevolent-sounding voice intoned a reply. It might have been the voice of a priest. Or a happy, laughing ghost. There was the hint of a giggle in the voice.

  “Six o’clock and all is well.”

  “Good,” Carteret replied.

  “There is no one abroad but the wind. And the Lake is still and untroubled. Surely, goodness and mercy will follow us wherever we go.” The priestly voice seemed to drone the words like a litany.

  “The Lord is our shepherd,” Carteret whispered back fiercely, his dark eyes two glints of light in his aristocratic face. “We shall not want, shall we?”

  “No. Yea, though I walk—”

  “Go to bed, Wentworth,” Carteret commanded in a calm and deadly voice that brooked no denial or argument. “There is nothing more to do until tonight.”

  “Till tonight, then. Parting is such sweet sorrow, my friend.”

  “Go.”

  “I am gone.”

  In a fresh silence, footsteps, rapid and scurrying, could be heard racing down the corridor beyond the door. Carteret smiled—a bleak smile. Turning and folding his arms, he walked to the table where the candle still glowed even as it waned down. Barely stooping, Carteret leaned forward, pursed his lips and blew out the candle, his face very nearly satanic, limned as it was in the roseate flame of the taper. In an instant, the room plunged into darkness.

  There was nothing to be seen or heard after that.

  Except the rasping squeak and squeal of metal.

  A sound one might hear when the hinge on a large box is suddenly raised. A noise that accompanies the lifting of a lid.

  The sound of that lid closing could not be heard in the funereal stillness of the room.

  Beyond the shadowed room, beyond the Gothic outlines and ramparts of Craghold House, the first faint fingers of dawn had begun to rove through the treetops, poking among the heavily leaden skies, stretching their grey shapes over the dull, grassless landscape which encroached upon nearby Shanokin Range and the pale, cold, still waters of Craghold Lake. Nowhere could be heard so much as a bird twittering in the trees or a swamp creature stirring. The bullfrogs, the toads, the night creatures were all strangely silent. It was as if Mother Nature herself had quit the terrain for greener, pleasanter fields. The Craghold panorama lay mute and bloodless beneath the dawning sky. A sense of lifelessness and rigid petrification clung to all things. The mountains, the rocks, the trees, the grass—the grounds and the House itself.

  Another day had come to Craghold House.

  Upstairs in her room, still locked fast in nightmare, fatigue and a state of shock, Anne Fenner lay unmoving on the floor near the window. It was barely possible to see the vague rise and fall of her breathing. Her dark hair trailed along the floor, her lithe figure all crumpled and indescribable, such as a rag doll’s might be.

  The Japanese robe clung to her curved figure like some peculiar banner, unfurled in victory or defeat.

  George Twemble would not have liked to see her so—for all his normal arid healthy passion for her.

  At no single point in her life had Anne Fenner ever been so completely helpless and at the mercy of whatever the Fates might have had in store for her. Never had she been so vulnerable.

  She was no longer an adult, no longer a modem American woman, liberated, very well able to take charge of herself, her affairs, her own life.

  For the moment, she was like any small child caught up in a nightmare, which has cried itself to sleep.

  A child who is afraid of the dark.

  And all things that go bump in the night.

  The lights of her room blazed on, even as she remained unconscious.

  Boston had never held the terrors—no, not even George Twemble’s ugly proposition—that Craghold House had shown her in one night alone.

  However it was, whatever it might prove to be, she had stumbled—by accident, chance or design—into a tapestry of terror, which was to snarl her up in this crazy house of fear and trembling horror.

  Like Alice, she had blundered into the land beyond the Looking-Glass, into a newer and more frightening world—one not of her own making, not of her own choosing. And like all unwary travelers and explorers, she was going to have to pay the price of curiosity.

  The land of Kragmoor, with its Craghold House, was going to be an inner circle of Hades, from which she would be God-blessed if she ever got out alive.

  Or still in possession of her sanity.

  Anne Fenner had always contended that if
you believed there was a God, you had to believe there was a Devil, too.

  It had to be that way. Evil had to co-exist with Goodness. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  So, Lucifer—to battle with a God.

  And if there is a Heaven, then certainly there has to be a Hell—a location as fixed as any geographical certitude, a sphere of influence where torment and awfulness and horrible things happened to you. Where Horror walked.

  When Anne Fenner came awake at last, in the light of morning washing in through her bedroom, and remembered all that had led up to her fainting dead away at the window, she was convinced where a kind of Hades might be located. There was no doubt in her mind as she struggled erect and made some attempt at pulling her body, her soul and spirit together. Her awed senses were numbed.

  Kragmoor was Hell.

  Craghold House was Limbo.

  And she was determined to clear out of the wretched place before another night came on, before a newer and fresher horror could visit her. It was one thing to be civilized and clear-headed, but now she knew she had seen what she had seen. Let some scientist or voodoo doctor explain it all away as witchcraft, or too much veal at dinner, or mumbo-jumbo altogether. She wanted no part of the affair.

  A mad room that looked like frozen silver and crystalized moonlight when the lights were out.

  A traveling light that turned into the face of some specter leftover from a Civil War battlefield.

  And Carteret—with that—that Dracula kind of personality! Yes, of course! That’s who he had reminded her of, now that she thought of it.

  And Wentworth. Now-he’s-here, now-he-isn’t—a pixie on wheels!

  Good Lord, just what kind of a madhouse had she walked into with her eyes wide open and smiling?

  What kind of lunatic asylum?

  What sort of terrible place——

  Grimly, coldly, keeping her hands and knees from shaking too much, Anne Fenner dressed for the day, icily resolved to pack her bags, move out, and find something normal in the way of vacation quarters. George Twemble couldn’t drive her to this extreme. No, not even he.

  She dressed rapidly, in a pea-green skirt and matching jacket with a fluff of orange scarf for her throat, shamefully conscious all the while that she was shaking like a schoolgirl. She had to face up to the truth.

  And the truth was that she was thoroughly, and very completely and irrevocably, frightened.

  Just plain damn scared!

  If anyone had suddenly said “Boo!” behind her, she was sure she would have jumped five feet into the air.

  And died of fright.

  Craghold House had gained complete domination over her reason.

  And that was a fact.

  Stays To Tremble

  Downstairs, by daylight, the interior of Craghold House was something which, not even in her sudden and violent distaste for the place, she could ever have imagined. Early morning sunlight filtered through the high, arched windows of the central room. She saw a great earthern fireplace, red-bricked and formidable, in which already a cheery fire blazed. The brisk crackle of logs burning, the scent of wintry nostalgia in the very atmosphere itself, tended to give her pause. She had left her luggage in the bedroom, all set for the mysterious Wentworth to take care of once she informed Carteret of her change of plan. She’d have to drum up some sort of excuse for her sudden leaving; Carteret would probably make a fuss about her deposit of fifty dollars for the room, but she didn’t care. She wanted Out from this cursed hotel. The sooner the better.

  Still, as it always seemed to do, daylight made all the difference in the world. A curious transformation had taken place, both in her sense memories and her impressions.

  For one thing, she could now see the utter and almost bewitching interior decoration of the hotel. From the depth of the stairs, looking into that big main room with the roaring fireplace, she saw the stone and wooden inner face of Craghold. There was the beamed ceiling, its crossed timbers forming an inverted V of solid formation. There were window boxes along the rear wall of the room, facing the wide windows which looked out on the front grounds, obviously. The curtains were Damask, and lovely. Pewter mugs and wrought copper utensils of kitchen and general house usage formed an array of decorations and ornaments for a chest-high wooden shelf on one wall of the room, flanking either side of the great fireplace. The room contained comfortable sofas and deep chairs, all upholstered in a pale reddish-brown hue, nicely matching the oaken and mahogany wood surfaces which seemed to glow like bronze at random points in the room. There were enormous oval rugs, obviously hand-woven, placed decoratively in three positions on the planked floor. There was even an old-fashioned spinning wheel, complete with matching chair, holding a position of prominence at the left of the arched entranceway, just in from the threshold of the room. Added to this hominess and the picturesque setting was all that fresh sunlight flooding the room with a delightful, amber filter of gold.

  For a long moment it was very difficult for Anne Fenner to follow through on her resolution made so firmly upstairs in the bedroom. Surely she had been somewhat hasty—perhaps it had all been her imagination—she wavered between determination and uncertainty. There were those other guests Carteret had mentioned—young people. An archaeologist, he had said. And a poet, wasn’t it? And somebody’s sister—Cowles or something.

  Above the fireplace, as if drawn there by sheer suggestion, her eyes fell upon a curious circular plaque. Perhaps eight inches in diameter, it looked like a wheel design of nonsense, with an inner circle that seemed like a geometric pattern. From this rounded hairline, painted flowered arrows poked longer lines in another symbolic pattern of some sort. Momentarily, she thought the object might be a dart board but then dismissed the notion—the plaque was too high up on the wall. Still slightly confused, she turned away from the unique setting of the room, looking around toward the alcove across the wide floor, where Carteret and his Registration Desk would be. Also, she was hungry, and breakfast might not be such a bad idea before she pushed off into the Pennsylvanian wilderness to look for other accommodations. Her mind was a riot of conflicting ideas, a battleground for her will power. She was no longer sure of herself.

  Not helping matters at all was the absence of Carteret or anyone else behind the wooden counter, set before the pigeon-holed rack with its hooks and keys. It shone emptily. And then she realized the hour of day; it was just going on eight o’clock. Perhaps it was too soon for Carteret to be at his desk, managing things.

  Suddenly she was aware of the low rumble of voices. Two voices, both male and engaged in something of an argument, the awareness coming to her when one of the men had abruptly blurted in a raw, very loud voice, hammering home some important fact that, to her now-attentive ears, smacked of Greek.

  “—Parsi, you idiot! Or Parsee—p-a-r-s-e-e, depending on which authority you accept. Honestly, Peter, if you’re going to discuss sun-worshippers, how can you ignore a sect in India that can trace its origins all the way back to the Persians who settled there in the early eighth century?”

  The voice, for all its edge of bitter rawness, was a deep and impressive baritone, and Anne Fenner experienced a curious thrill hearing it fill the interior of that cheery and homey main room. She had not seen either of the speakers in that first glance into the Dutch-styled core of Craghold House.

  “Applesauce! And you know it,” shot back the voice of the second man, sounding somehow younger and shrilly sarcastic. “Guy, when it comes to Sun Cults, I’ll take the ancient Mayans and good old American Indians. The trouble with you archaeologists is you’re always looking all over the rest of the world to dig up your damn finds. We have most of what you’re looking for right here on the continent of North America, and you know it!”

  There was a pause, and Anne Fenner found herself oddly waiting with expectancy for the man called Guy’s response. When it came, it was almost entirely what she expected—measured, well-thought-out, and completely intellectual. She almost felt like crying o
ut “Bravo!”

  “Chauvinism, old son? Waving a flag in my face while we try to talk facts? I’m surprised at you. When you close your mind, you can’t open anything, you know that, don’t you? But why, in the name of Time, am I talking shop with a lazy genius like you? Go write a poem or something, will you? Compose a sonnet to the Pennsylvania Dutch or the size of your Ego. You’re boring me, you know that?”

  There was a low, rasping chuckle from the man called Peter. The trace of nastiness and ill-temper was all too evident in his tone. Yet there was also a grudging concession to the obvious superiority of the man called Guy. That and something else.

  “Maybe I’m boring you, but Kathy doesn’t, does she? Tell the truth, man. You tolerate me because I’m blessed with a sister who is probably the most beautiful girl within a thousand square miles.”

  “That, too, you nut. And where is she? How long does it take a beautiful woman to improve on nature? I’m starved.”

  “Ask her yourself when she comes down. You know how she likes to wear something different for you everytime she sees you. Ah, the Warmsby charm—fatal to all dolls, including my dear sister Kathy.”

  “Peter, you really ought to talk to—”

  At that point of the conversation, Anne Fenner began to feel like an eavesdropper. And a cheat. Almost regretfully, she backed away from the arched entrance of the main room, her ears still filled with the sound of Guy Warmsby’s richly masculine voice.

  “Well, hello!” a new voice behind her suddenly trilled. “You must be the lady from Boston we heard tell about.”

  Surely this must be the awaited Kathy, the sister.

  Anne Fenner found herself confronted by a dazzling creation, gliding airily off the bottom step of the stairway, extending a slender, tapered hand in greeting. For a rapid moment, she was bewildered. Her first impression was of a glittering, splendid emerald set against an ebony velveteen backdrop—something unique and one-of-a-kind, which cast off blinding rays of gleaming, consummate regality. But it wasn’t that at all, of course. It was simply a tall and very beautiful woman, attired in jet-black rayon Jersey and matching culottes, with her gleaming raven-hued hair piled in a bun atop an oval of a face whose red lips, vaulted cheekbones and superlative flesh-tones had to have adorned a magazine like Vogue at one time or other. The woman’s entire facade fairly shouted of poise, culture and sophistication—the best kind that the best money can buy. Taking the warmly-extended hand, which felt like ivory and ice in her own uncertain fingers, Anne Fenner suddenly felt like the kitchen drab meeting the Queen. Cinderella and Snow White’s wicked stepmother. It wasn’t this Kathy’s fault, either. She presented nothing studied or rehearsed or condescending. It was simply that she oozed beauty and sovereignty with every gesture, every careless toss of her head, every nuance of her voice. In a phrase, to the manor born.