by M C Beaton
“I think Mr Trent’s rather an old duck,” said Melissa.
“Don’t say that,” said Paul. “Wait till he really gets started. He isn’t ill at all, you see. He must have been feeling lonely. Now he’s got a whole houseful of people to torment.”
“Can’t we just leave…in the morning?”
“It’s snowing a blizzard. Enrico says we’ll be trapped for days.” Melissa looked across the room. Mr Trent was watching her. He drooped one eyelid in a wink.
Melissa smiled. She thought he was sweet.
♦
The party broke up at eleven o’clock and they all went off to their respective rooms. Paul accompanied Melissa to her door. He stood for a moment moving from foot to foot and staring at her. Then he seized her hand and shook it. “Good night,” he said and scurried off to his own room. Melissa shrugged and pushed open her door, noticing as she did so that it was already a little ajar. A bag of flour, which had been balanced over the door and was intended to burst over her, fell instead in one piece, striking her a stunning blow. She clutched her head and reeled forward and sank to her knees on the carpet. “Ha! Ha! Ha! He! He! He! Haw! Haw! Haw!” cackled a voice. Still holding her head, she stumbled to her feet, looking around wildly as the hideous cackling went on and on. She found a joke machine, which was producing the hellish laughter, had been hidden behind the clock on the mantelpiece. She seized it and shook it but it went on laughing, so she wrenched open the window and threw the thing out into the white raging blizzard.
Paul Sinclair had been prepared for jokes, but came to the conclusion that he was to be left alone and began to relax. He opened his shirt drawer to take out a clean shirt for the morning and two clockwork paper bats flew up into his face. Nonetheless, he felt he had got off lightly.
Angela Trent found her father had sewn up the bottoms of her pyjamas. Betty, who was sharing a room with her sister, lay in bed giggling as Angela swore terrible oaths as she looked for her sewing scissors to cut the bottoms of the pyjama legs open. But as Betty lay laughing, she clutched her favourite hot-water bottle in the shape of a teddy bear to her bosom. It began to leak all over her and her laughter changed to squawks of outrage and dismay. Her father had punctured her hot-water bottle.
Charles lay stretched out on the top of the bed and watched Titchy Gold as, clad only in a brief nightie, she went to see if the housekeeper had hung away her clothes properly. Charles and Titchy were not sharing a bedroom, but Charles planned to enjoy a little love-making before retiring to his own room. Titchy opened the carved door of a massive Victorian wardrobe and a body with a knife thrust in its chest fell down on top of her. She screamed and screamed hysterically. The bedroom door opened and Andrew Trent stood there, leaning on his stick and laughing until the tears ran down his face. Behind him gathered the other guests.
“It’s a joke, Titchy. A dummy,” said Charles, taking the hysterical girl in his arms. “Come to bed. It’s too bad of you, Dad. Your jokes are over the top.” When Mr Trent and his guests went away, Titchy howled that she was leaving in the morning.
Charles soothed her down. “Look, I’ve been thinking, Titchy. Dad’s an old man. He’s enjoying himself and, yes, he tricked us all into coming here by saying he was at death’s door. Why don’t we just charm the old money-bags and pretend his jokes are funny? He can’t live for ever. If he drops off, then I inherit, and we’ll have loads of money.”
“Are you sure?” Titchy dried her eyes and gazed up at him.
“Sure as sure. He’s Trent Baby Foods, isn’t he? Worth millions. Come to bed.”
The fastidious Jeffrey Trent removed his contact lenses and said to his wife, “Well, at least he has had the decency not to play any tricks on me. But dying he most certainly is not. I will get out of here as soon as possible even if I have to charter a helicopter to do so.”
His wife held up the phone receiver of the extension in their room. “Dead,” she said. “We’re cut off.”
“Tcha!” said Jeffrey. He went into their bathroom to urinate before going to bed.
But he did not notice until it was too late that the practical joker had covered the top of the toilet with thin adhesive transparent plastic.
♦
Melissa slept heavily and awoke to the sound of a gong beating on the air. The door opened and Paul walked in. “Aren’t you dressed yet?” he exclaimed. “We’re all expected at the breakfast table at nine. House rules.”
“I haven’t telepathic powers,” groaned Melissa. “Why didn’t you tell me last night? God, I feel sick. That old bastard put a bag of flour over the door and it hit me a stunning blow on the head. He should be certified. Did anything happen to you? And poor Titchy.”
“I got clockwork bats in the shirt drawer. I’ll see you downstairs.”
“No, you don’t!” Melissa scrambled out of bed. “I’m not facing that lot on my own. What’s the weather like?”
Paul pulled aside the curtains. Together they looked out at the bleak whiteness of driving snow. “Damn!” muttered Melissa. “Trapped. Wait here, Paul. I won’t be a minute.”
She grabbed some clothes and went into the bathroom. She stripped off her transparent pink nightie – Paul hadn’t even noticed it – and pulled on her underwear and an old pair of jeans and a ‘Ban the Bomb’ sweater.
“I wouldn’t wear that,” said Paul firmly. “Not the sweater. We’re working on nuclear power, remember?”
“But not bombs. Wait! I’ll put on a blouse instead. This place is too hot for a sweater anyway.” She stripped off the sweater. Would Paul notice the fetching lacy bra? No, Paul was staring in an unseeing way out of the window. She put on a man’s white shirt and tied the ends at her waist.
The dining room was in an uproar when they entered. Betty was sitting with yellow egg yolk streaming down her face. Charles and Titchy were laughing in a forced way. Andrew Trent was laughing so hard he looked as if he might have a seizure, and Jeffrey, Jan and Angela were in states of suppressed rage. It transpired that the old practical joker had put a device under the tablecloth and under Betty’s breakfast. He had then pressed a connecting lever and some wire spring had hurled the contents of Betty’s plate straight into her face.
“You old fool,” growled Angela. “One day someone will throttle the life out of you and it might be me.”
“Did you cut the phones off?” demanded Jeffrey.
“Not I,” said his brother, wiping his streaming eyes with his napkin. “Snow’s brought the lines down.”
Enrico’s wife, who, it transpired, was called Maria, quietly came in with a basin of water and a face towel, which she presented to Betty before taking her ruined breakfast away. Enrico then came in with another plate of bacon and eggs. The Spanish servants glided noiselessly to and fro as if nothing out of the way had happened. What brought them to the far north of Scotland, to bleak Sutherland? wondered Melissa. Possibly the pay was good.
Jan made an effort to be polite to Melissa, as did everyone else. But then, they were drawing together against the menace that was Andrew Trent. Melissa wondered how they were all going to pass the time, but there was an extensive library, a conservatory, and a games room in the basement, with billiards and table tennis. She joined Paul in the library, where they read until lunch. Lunch was a quiet affair. Andrew Trent seemed abstracted. In the afternoon the old man went up to bed. Melissa and Paul and Titchy and Charles played a noisy game of table tennis. Melissa began to think she might enjoy her stay after all.
After dinner, instead of retiring to the drawing room, they were invited to assemble in the hall. The fire was burning low and the hall was lit by candle-light. Extra chairs had been brought in and they all sat in a circle round the fire.
“How old is this house?” asked Melissa. “I mean, it’s all been modernized with central heating and that, but the walls look old.”
“Oh, it’s very old,” said Mr Trent. He leaned forward in his chair, his hands folded on the handle of his stick and his chin resti
ng on them. “About the fourteenth century. As a matter of fact, it’s haunted.”
“Rubbish, Andrew,” said Jeffrey.
“I believe in ghosts,” said Titchy suddenly.
“There’s one here, all right,” said Mr Trent. “It’s the ghost of an English knight.”
“Tell us,” squealed Titchy, clapping her hands.
“Yes, do tell us what an English knight was doing in Scotland in the fourteenth century,” sneered Jeffrey.
“His name was Sir Guy Montfour,” said Mr Trent dreamily. “He had returned from a crusade. On his way back through France he met Mary Mackay, the daughter of the chieftain of the Clan Mackay. He fell in love with her. But the Mackays left during the night. He decided to pursue them to Scotland – ” his voice sank eerily – “to this very house.”
“I don’t believe a word of this,” muttered Paul, but Melissa felt the spell the old man was casting on the group. The candles flickered in a slight draught and a log shifted in the hearth.
“The chieftain pretended to welcome Sir Guy. Mary was obviously in love with the knight. The very next day, Mary was seized by the clan servants and taken to the coast. She was put on a boat to Norway, where she spent the rest of her life in exile. But Sir Guy…ah…what a tragedy!”
The wind suddenly moaned around the house. Titchy searched for Charles’s hand and gripped it tightly.
“They took Sir Guy out on a stag hunt. He did not know that his Mary had gone. He shot a fine stag up on the mountain. When he was bending over the dead beast, the chieftain took his claymore and sliced the poor knight’s head from his body. They buried him on the mountain in an unmarked grave. But he comes back to this house. You can hear the sound of mailed feet in the passage above and then he descends the stairs.”
There was another great moaning of the wind…and then they all heard it, a heavy tread and the clink of armour.
“Behold!” cried Mr Trent suddenly. “Oh, God, he comes!”
The staircase was bathed in a greenish light. And down the stairs clanked a knight in black armour carrying his head under his arm.
Titchy screamed and screamed.
There was a sudden explosion and a great cloud of red smoke billowed about the room. Jeffrey was shouting, “It’s a trick!” Titchy was still screaming and screaming. She had leaped up and was drumming her feet on the floor in a sort of ecstasy of panic.
Paul rushed and opened the door and a great gale of wind blew into the hall, clearing the smoke. The knight had disappeared.
Everyone was shouting and exclaiming. Titchy had relapsed into sobs. Old Mr Trent was clapping his hands and laughing like mad. “You should see your faces,” he shouted when he could.
White-faced, Titchy stumbled from the room. She felt terribly ill. She just made it to her bathroom, bent over the toilet and was dreadfully sick.
But the toilet had been sealed with transparent plastic.
Titchy collapsed in a sobbing heap on the bathroom floor, gasping between sobs, “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him!”
∨ Death of a Prankster ∧
2
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
—George Eliot
What added to the tension in Arrat House in the next few days was not only that they were snowbound or the practical jokes, but the fact that the relatives had decided to pretend to be amused by them. Charles had started it by laughing every time Mr Trent laughed and that had set up a spirit of competition in the others.
And what an infinite capacity for practical jokes old Mr Trent seemed to have, from gorse bushes at the bottom of the bed to buckets of freezing water above the door. Cushions made rude noises, machines in corners emitted bursts of maniacal laughter. Melissa became used to holding down her plate of food firmly with her fork to make sure its contents didn’t fly up in her face. Melissa, like Paul, felt under no obligation to appear to be amused by Mr Trent’s merry japes and pranks but she did begin to feel as if she was incarcerated in a centrally heated loony-bin.
The snow had stopped, but Enrico remarked that all surrounding roads were blocked. “You will soon run out of food,” said Melissa, but Enrico shrugged and said he was always prepared for weather such as this and had plenty of stocks.
Melissa tried to sympathize with the servant, saying it must be a difficult job. Enrico merely froze her with a look and said he considered himself fortunate. He had a slight air of hauteur and carefully accented English. Melissa suspected that, like quite a number of Spaniards, Enrico considered himself a cut above the British and therefore tolerated the foibles of his employer as evidence of a more barbarous race. His small dark wife was even haughtier and more uncommunicative.
As far as Paul was concerned, Melissa wondered why he had invited her. He had not made a pass at her. He seemed to spend an awful lot of time in the library reading. Melissa put on her leather jacket and a pair of combat boots and ventured outside. Enrico had managed to clear some of the snow from the courtyard. The sky above was a bleak grey. The house, seen clearly from the outside, was a large square grey building with turrets on each corner in the French manner, rather like a miniature château. Arrat House lay at the foot of a mountain that reared its menacing bulk up to the sky. The house itself was on a rise, and below, on the right, she could make out the huddled houses of a village.
She peered up at the top of the house. There was no television aerial. Television would have whiled away some of the time, she thought dismally.
She shivered with cold and went back into the house, kicking the door open first with her boot and jumping back in case anything fell from the top of it.
Paul was in the library. She sat down on a chair opposite him and said, “Is there no way we can get out of here?”
He sighed impatiently and marked his place in the book with his finger. “I’m just settling down,” said Paul. “We can’t do anything else at the moment. Look, do you mind? This book’s very interesting.”
“Having brought me to this insane asylum, I think you might at least have some concern for my well-being,” said Melissa stiffly.
“What else can I do?” he asked edgily. “I mean, it’s hardly prison. The food’s good. As Mother said – ”
“I am not interested in anything your mother says,” snapped Melissa, suddenly furious. “I mean, you’re all poncing around as if you’re lords of the manor, and just look at this dump. It’s in the worst of taste. Ghastly tartan carpets and pink lamps. Yuk!”
“I would have thought,” said Paul in a thin voice, “that any female sporting pink hair and combat boots did not know the meaning of taste. Mother said…”
Melissa stood up. She told Paul and his mother to go and perform impossible anatomical acts on themselves and stormed out.
She went up to her room and sat on the end of the bed and stared bleakly about her. She had a longing for her mother, to put her head down on that aproned bosom which always seemed to smell of onions and cry her eyes out.
The door opened and Paul walked in. “What do you want?” demanded Melissa.
He sat down on the end of the bed next to her and blinked at her owlishly. “I just wanted to say I liked your hair,” he said, taking her hand. “You’ve washed all that gel out of it and now it looks like pink feathers.”
“Did your mother give you permission to say that?”
“Come off it, Melissa. I’m a bit on edge. This is all wrong, you know. I’d been working up courage to ask you out since I first saw you. It was your eyes, I think, so large and grey. We should have gone out for dinner and…and talked, but here we are. I don’t really want to talk about Mother. Except to point out that it’s easier to love than to be loved. She is very possessive. My father was a quiet, unambitious man. I think she divorced him to marry Jeffrey because she wanted nothing but the best for me – best school, best university. I…I’m glad I’m free in a way now and that I’ve got my own place and work I like. You wouldn’t know anything about that.
I mean, about being shy and burying yourself in your work. You’ve probably got lots of friends.”
“Not really,” said Melissa. With a burst of rare candour, she added, “I’m a terrible snob, really. I’m so ashamed of my working-class background that I adopt poses. I’m shy, too. I wasn’t even a good left-winger. I’m not really interested in any politics. I just went along with it at university because it gave me a role to play. So when I joined the atomic research centre, I dropped all my old acquaintances. They were very excited at first about me having the job and saying I could give them inside information and I got frightened and didn’t see them again. So we’re very alike in a way.”
He carefully removed his glasses and put them in his pocket. He took her by the shoulders and deposited a clumsy kiss on her lips. Melissa wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back.
“Wow,” he said shakily. He turned brick-red and fumbled in his pocket for his glasses and put them on. He walked to the window and looked out, and then he gave an exclamation. “Come here! Look at this!”
Melissa joined him. Down below, Enrico was making his way out of the courtyard on skis.
“Can you ski?” asked Paul. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I can.”
“Ever done any cross-country skiing?”
“Yes, I went on holiday once to a ski resort in the French Alps, one of these cheap student trips.”
Paul’s eyes blazed with excitement. “We could ask Enrico if he’s got another pair and if we can borrow them. Then we’ll pack up what we need. There’s a couple of old rucksacks in a cupboard in the games room. We’ll just take off. I’ll get a map. We could even go across country to Inverness if we start very early in the morning and the weather stays clear. What do you say?”
“You mean, get out of here? I’d love it.”
“We won’t tell anyone. We’ll just send the skis back when we get to Inverness with the British Rail door-to-door delivery service. Everyone will think we’re going off for a day’s skiing. Let them all stay here and suck up to the old man if they want!”