Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1951

by The Haunts of Drowning Creek (v1. 1)

  Jebs passed this suggestion on to Driscoll. All three of them rose and moved forward out of the bushes. Their naked chests were smeared with wet mud, and the tip of Jebs’ stubby nose looked brown and shiny, as though he had dipped it into fresh melted chocolate. But they spared no glances and grins for each other’s ludicrous appearance. They were looking at the house again.

  “Now,” Jebs was chattering, “I know what a gar- dinel must look like.”

  “Gardinel?” repeated Randy. “What’s that?”

  “Shoo, haven’t you heard those old gardinel stories? They’re supposed to be something alive that makes itself look like a house, and when anybody thinks it’s a house and walks in, he never comes out. The gardinel digests him, like a pitcher plant when it traps a fly.”

  “Welcome home, Driscoll Jordan,” said Randy. “So this is your ancestral mansion, is it?”

  “I reckon it is.” Driscoll had tucked his machete under his arm and was fishing the map out of his hip pocket. He unfolded it, glanced at it, then at the house, and back at the map again. “I likewise reckon that, as I said, this proves Chimney Pot exists. But what do you think those two men were yelling about?”

  “Something about a haunt story being true,” said Jebs. “But they pulled foot away from here so quick I hardly got a good look at them. ’

  “I did, from ground level,” said Randy. “I saw the big farm shoes on Pullis, and the slack shoes on Ambrose, to fit the tracks we spotted back yonder on the bank of Drowning Creek. Maybe they figured we were spying around, and wanted to scare us. Maybe they weren’t really running away at all.”

  “If you think that,” said Driscoll, “maybe we ought to go and see what finally became of them.” All of a sudden Driscoll’s idea sounded like a good one. Pullis and Ambrose, shotgun and all, seemed almost welcome company compared to whatever might lurk in the silent ruin in front of them. The three friends turned back and carefully, slowly, worked their way once more through the dense thicket of bushes. They gained the water, stooping low, and saw at once that the gray dugout had vanished from where it had lain.

  “They went sailing off, just like Wynken, Blynken and Nod, declared Randy. “Or maybe it’s just a gag-”

  No it isn’t,” said Jebs, and stooped to pick up something. “Here’s that sun helmet your friend Ambrose was wearing, Driscoll. The bushes must have yanked it off his head when he came bucking through, and he sure didn’t tarry by the wayside to pick it up and put it on again.”

  “Maybe he figures to come back for it,” suggested Driscoll.

  “Hush that kind of talk,” gulped Jebs, and dropped the sun helmet back on the ground.

  “It’s about four o’clock,” Randy informed him consulting his wrist watch. “Whatever we’re going to do, we’d better get to doing it. Driscoll, this is still your expedition, and we’re still your volunteer assistants. Make some kind of suggestion.”

  Driscoll waded across, mounted the bank where their own boat was hidden, and brought out the package of food and the flashlight.

  “My hunch is that we’ll be eating supper before we get away from here tonight,” he said bleakly, “so grab hold of some of this stuff. That is, if you want to go through with it. If you don’t want to, back out, right now.”

  “Hey, who said anything about backing out?” flung back Jebs fiercely. “Lead on, MacDriscoll, as the fellow says in Shakespeare. Take the place of honor at the head of the approach march. Randy and I will stay a step behind, so’s to have that much head start if we have to run like Pullis and Ambrose.”

  “Don’t worry about him, Driscoll,” supplied Randy. “Jebs may try to act like the comic relief in this little drama, but he’s not really easy to scare.”

  Once again they shoved clear of the tangled brush and back to within sight of the house.

  It looked the same; or did it? Was it crouching, gardinel fashion, like a great wild monster waiting for its prey to come close enough to be grabbed and gulped down? They studied the house narrowly and breathlessly as they approached it in a close-grouped, tense trio. Driscoll poised his machete at the ready, and both Jebs and Randy wished they had weapons like it. But there was no sound except the swish of their feet in wet weeds as they came into what must have been a yard, in the long ago before it had grown up into a veritable jungle.

  Their bare feet felt gravel that probably was the last vestige of a path. A tufty clump of fat-leafed pitcher plants sprouted close to the bottom step - again Randy remembered Jebs’ legend of the gardinel. That step had been cut out of stone in the distant past, and now it was cracked across, with a tendrilly vine sprawling up and out through the crack, like a snake crawling from its hole. Two higher steps led up to what had been a porch, but was now only a rack of pulpy splinters, grown over with grass and fungi. Now that they stood under the lofty porch roof they saw that it had ceased to be a roof. Its sheathing of slates had dropped away years ago, like autumn leaves. The pillars, once straight and tall and gleaming white, seemed to quiver on the point of collapse, like so many dead trees.

  “Look there at the door,” volunteered Jebs. “They forced it open. There’s the axe.”

  It was true. The axe lay on the crumbling threshold. The wide, dark door sagged inward on big, rust-caked hinges. Beyond it showed a pool of dense darkness, just the sort of darkness in which ghosts and goblins might well flourish.

  “Whatever they saw must have met them as they opened the door,” said Randy.

  “And it must have looked too rugged to hit with an axe,” added Driscoll.

  “Well,” said Jebs, and rumpled his bright hair with a shaky hand. “Do we go in?”

  “What do you say we make a tour of the outside first?” was Driscoll’s suggestion, and again Jebs and Randy nodded eagerly, seizing upon the notion as something, anything, to postpone an exploration of that forbidding old house.

  They laid down the parcel of provisions. Then, still closely grouped, they moved around the house, circling to the right.

  They could see that it was large and square and lofty. Above the ancient flat roof showed the ruined cupola. The height of the structure, as they took time to judge, was perhaps twenty feet at the roof, with eight feet more for the cupola—twenty-eight feet in all. The house had had windows once, tall on the ground floor and smaller up above, but they were shattered. Not a single pane, so far as they could see, remained whole. Behind the house they found a smaller detached structure, also on the verge of collapse, and the wreckage of a tumbledown gallery connected it with the rear door of the main building.

  “That’s the old kitchen,” announced Jebs. “Old-timers used to build themselves separate kitchens like that, tacked on with a sort of dog-trot passage, so the house wouldn t get too hotted up in summertime.”

  ‘Yes, I know about those separate kitchens,” said Randy as they continued their circuit of inspection.

  Roots of the closely huddled trees had extended here and there to the foundations of the house, hoisting some of its stones out of their ancient bed of mortar. The upper branches jutted here and there above the roof, as though to screen it from the sky. Probably not even a low-flying airplane could be sure that a house stood there. Everywhere about the immemorial manor of Chimney Pot House hung an atmosphere of age, destruction and desertion.

  They came all the way around, to stand at the left front corner. Randy and Driscoll gazed up at the sagging mass that seemed to quiver on the point of collapse, while Jebs wandered a step or so away, his blue eyes on the bushes from which they had first sighted Chimney Pot.

  “It’s like the House of Usher in Edgar Allan Poe,” said Driscoll.

  You flatter the place,” replied Randy, wagging his dark head. “Compared to this, the House of Usher would be a fancy modern palace. Right, Jebs?”

  Jebs took another step away. “If you mean— YEEOW!!”

  Randy and Driscoll whirled around just in time to see the weedy earth of the yard swallow his stocky form from sight.

  Fo
r one breath’s space of stunned horror, both Randy and Driscoll strained their eyes after their vanished comrade, then they ran toward the spot at which he had seemed to whip out of existence.

  “Get me out of here!” They heard his spluttering voice from among the weeds, and, looking downward, they made out his square, fear-strained face looking up at them. He had sunk in the muddy soil up to his very chin. His hands, still thrust out, clung frantically to the roots of scrubby bushes.

  Dropping his machete, Driscoll caught Jebs by one wrist. Randy seized the other.

  “Heave,” said Randy, and with a strong wrenching effort they pulled Jebs back into view. Then they looked wonderingly into the black, irregular hole from which he had been rescued.

  “Even the ground gives way under you around here,” Jebs half moaned. “Shoo! I thought I was on a non-stop tumble through to China.”

  Randy caught up a fragment of a fallen branch and tossed it into the hole. He heard it rattle as if on stone, then splash softly below.

  “That’s an old well,” said Driscoll, edging cautiously closer and prodding with the point of the machete. More of the weedy soil fell away in big chunks, exposing a larger cavity.

  Jebs and Randy peered down. They could see a section of rough, damp wall, made of rough stones, and a flaked-away matting of rotten trash that apparently had supported a deceitful layer of dirt and weeds.

  “It’s a well, all right,” repeated Driscoll. “Abandoned and forgotten.”

  “And I thought I was abandoned and forgotten, too,” said Jebs, recovering some of the natural gaiety that could never desert him for more than moments. “If I hadn’t managed to jam my toe in between a couple of those stones, and grab a handful of brush as I went down, I’d be taking a bath down at the bottom right now. You’d have had to let a rope down after me, and we don’t have any rope. Great day in the morning! It felt colder than a deep freeze down there.”

  “Let’s get away from it and stay away,” said Randy. “What do you say, Driscoll?”

  “I say it’s high time we took a look inside the house. We’ve been putting it off, and we nearly wound up one short. Come on.”

  They went back to the porch steps where their supplies lay in the coarse weeds. Carefully they picked their way across the fallen debris of what had been porch timbers so many years ago, and climbed upon a heap of ancient debris immediately in front of the big door. Jebs took the axe that had been dropped there. He used it to push against the door, and slowly, unwillingly, it moved the rest of the way inward. The huge, rusty hinges emitted a growling, grinding complaint as they yielded to the pressure.

  “Just like one of those plays on the radio, about werewolves and vampires,” commented Randy.

  “Well, as the fellow said, it would have been ten dollars in my pocket if I’d stayed home,” said Jebs. “But I’m in this thing over my shoes now, and I’m going in.” He craned his neck to look inside. “Darker in there than the bottom side of a ton of coal.”

  “That’s why I brought this,” announced Driscoll, and switched on the flashlight.

  He let its ray of radiance stab into the interior gloom. Then he raised one foot to the threshold and hoisted himself up and inside. Randy scrambled after him, and Jebs brought up the rear, the axe in his hands.

  They found themselves standing in a huge, crumbling hallway, that apparently ran all the way from front to back of the house. At the right, an arched opening led into a room from which crept dim, green- tinted light. At the left and immediately in front of them, a wide and ruinous stairway climbed to a landing above. The stair railing had fallen away in a heap, and the wood of the stair treads and risers looked ready to collapse into powder. Under their feet crunched the shattered plaster that had dropped in great patches from walls and ceiling. Randy prodded the door jamb. The wood felt spongy, as though decay had reigned in Chimney Pot House for eight centuries instead of eight decades.

  “The floor’s sound, anyway,” reported Jebs, stamping his sturdy foot. A hollow booming responded, with no creak in it, and Driscoll turned his flash beam down. The floor looked black, solid and level.

  It s made of tile, said Randy. “Tile, put together with plaster or good old-fashioned concrete of some sort. Steady as the rock of Gibraltar.”

  Driscoll directed his flash up the stairway. “Anybody want to visit the upstairs?” he invited.

  “Not me,” Jebs vowed hastily. “I did more than my duty, falling halfway down that old well outside. Upstairs rooms are where ghosts are likely to hang out. And ghosts hop around here in the daytime, according to what Pullis and his friend yapped out as they went zooming past us.”

  “Even owls would hoot in the daytime here,” supplemented Randy. “But I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts, Jebs.”

  “You ask me about ghosts some time when we’re back in civilization, with lots of folks around, talking and laughing and playing brass bands,” said Jebs. “Talk about something else right now.”

  “You two quit knocking the ancestral mansion of the Jordans,” begged Driscoll. “You’d be old and shaky yourselves if you’d stood out here in the swamp since about 1866. Let’s go into this next room.”

  Again he led the way across the tiled floor, and through the archway.

  The chamber beyond was a big one, almost big enough for a ball room. The shattered windows to front and side gave light, filtered through the many layers of green leaves on the closely pressing trees, vines and bushes. It was like being in a room of a lost city sunken at the bottom of the green sea.

  They saw no furniture anywhere in the chamber. Overhead hung what must have been an elaborate chandelier in the days of Chimney Pot’s glory. A few tags of cut glass still hung to its metal work. Into one wall opened a fireplace, broad, high and deep, its hearth covered thickly with dirt and dust.

  “That fireplace is big enough to barbecue a whole hog,” pointed out Jebs, and he sounded hungry.

  “Well, we don’t have any tables or chairs,” said Driscoll, “but here’s a window seat where we can relax and hold a council. Help me brush these hunks of plaster away from it.”

  The broad ledge at the window proved big enough to accommodate all three, and they sat down. Driscoll, in the middle, once more produced his faded map. He spread it out on his knees.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s see what’s the quickest and easiest way to dig up that hundred and twenty pounds of gold coin my great-grandfather tucked away here.”

  NINE

  THE MONSTER IN THE CELLAR

  “YOU NEEDN’T go straining your eyes to read that little jingle in this light,” said Randy. “I’ve got it committed to memory.”

  HIGH AND LOW AND HOT AND COLD, SET THE CROSS AND DIG THE GOLD.

  “Correct down to the very syllable,” applauded Driscoll. “Now, all we need to do is find out just what it happens to mean.”

  “Why!” said Jebs at once. “It means to dig the gold up. All we have to figure out is how to set up the cross, and the cross has to be both high and low and hot and cold. Simple, huh?”

  “A heap too simple for me,” said Driscoll, “and I ve been studying it over for years, without ever making anything out of it.”

  That s because you never had us geniuses to help you, Jebs told him comfortingly. “I tell you, what we ve got to do first is find a cross. Look here, isn’t it usual for a cross to be set up over a grave? And didn’t ig old family places like this one generally run their own burying grounds? Well, maybe if we get out there and poke around in the bushes ”

  “And go falling down into another ice-cold well is that the idea?” broke in Randy. “No, Jebs. I vote against your idea; you’re off the beam by a country mile. If there was a cross already in existence around here, it would say something like, ‘Find the cross.’ But what it says is, ‘Set the cross.’ I think that means we have to fix on the place where the cross must be and set it there ourselves.”

  “You’re only being brilliant,” sniffed Jebs.

&
nbsp; Driscoll backed up Randy. “It’s a brilliant idea, at that. We ve got the job of setting up a cross. Now then, what did they mean by a cross? I’ve studied that over, too, ever since I could spell out the words.”

  “Crosses can mean a right much of different things,” Jebs agreed.

  “I realized that long ago,” continued Driscoll, “and I used to make lists of different meanings. For instance, a cross on a map generally means a church.”

  “But we don’t have any cross on this map,” said Randy, looking at it.

  “No, we don’t. Maybe it makes sense what Randy says; we have to set up the cross ourselves. Well, a cross may also mean the number ten—an X.”

  “When it comes to that, a cross generally marks the spot where the murder was committed,” said Jebs. “Look here, folks, I don’t relish this kind of talk one little bit.”

  “You’re the one that mentioned murder,” Driscoll reminded him.

  “I keep thinking of the one good look I got at the face on that Pullis man,” Jebs confessed. “He looked as full of poison as a drug store. Looked like a real upper-class crook.”

  “We’re still a long way from figuring out what the cross means,” resumed Driscoll. “And the rest of it. ‘High and low and hot and cold’—all those words make out to say is a bunch of opposites.” He scowled down at the map, which was growing harder to see as the afternoon light became dimmer outside “All we know,” he said, “is that there’s gold somewhere near us at this moment. The gold is the only thing that s clearly mentioned in that riddle rhyme.” Treasure maps are always rough and rugged for oiks to make out,” Jebs reminded solemnly. “I reckon there’s something or other about hiding a big slug of treasure that makes a fellow think up all kinds of cute dodges and gags about where he hides it. Remember the map in Treasure Island, you two? Ever read that?”

  “Everybody’s read Treasure Island ,” said Driscoll impatiently, “but that’s about a story somewhere in the West Indies. Where do we get action on it in North Carolina?”