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Roy Glashan's Library
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Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1947, with "The Cup That Kills"
"You fool," Martin Stroh said. "You've ruined everything."
Far down, deep in the dank stone vaults of Gothic Strohdene, three desperate people waited for the creeping death that would soon come flooding in.... Bringing with it the oblivion that was their only escape from the strange horrors which stalked invisibly through that Satan's castle.
THE CAB rocked to a halt in a tree-shadowed dank hollow, but the driver made no move to get down and open the high double doors, grey wood strapped with rusted iron, that closed the gap in the moss-splotched brick wall. He half-turned to Jennifer and grunted,
"Okay, miss. Fare's a dollar and a half."
"So you told me when we started out from Norville," she said. "I'll pay you when I get out."
"You get out here." A long arm reached back to the latch of the door beside her, opened it. "This here's Strohdene."
"The entrance to its grounds, you mean." As they had breasted the hilltop she had glimpsed dark turrets thrusting up out of the dark sea of foliage that seethed behind this wall. "It's at least a quarter-mile more to the house."
"Correct, but this is as far's I go."
Easy, Jenny, she told herself. Take it easy. No sense getting sore because this yokel's too dumb to explain that the private road's washed out or something and he can't get his cab past. "All right then. Please carry my bag up there for me." It crowded her feet, a bulging pack of green canvas that still bore the faded stencil: Lt. J. Lane, W.A.C., U.S. Army. "You don't expect me to lug it myself, do you?"
"That's none of my business, miss. Me, I don't go through that gate."
It seemed to her, almost, that he was about to add, "And you're a fool if you do," but the temper that matched her red hair flared as he growled instead, "Step on it. I got the four twenty-three to meet." Snatching a bill from her purse she slapped it into a calloused paw, heaved the pack out, grabbed up her typewriter-case and was down in the road beside it.
Almost before her feet were firm on the highway, the cab had reared into a U-turn and was racketing up the steep, woods-bordered slope down which it had brought her. "I hope you get three flats," she flung after it, small fist clenched against the blue-grey suit it was so wonderful to be wearing after three years of khaki. "I hope your rattletrap falls to pieces!"
"You shouldn't say that, miss." Jennifer whirled to the drawled reproof, stared at the young man who'd appeared out of the thicket across from Strohdene's wall; tall, gaunt in a shaggy maroon sweater and corduroy slacks, his brown shock of hair rumpled. "Sam Rollins has a wife and six children and he needs that jalopy to make a living for them."
"Six or sixty sniveling brats," she snapped, "he's got no right to dump out a passenger in the middle of nowhere."
"And such a passenger. Ginger-haired—"
"Auburn!"
"Ginger," he insisted.
"Look here, you. I don't intend to stand here—"
"Uh-huh." He shook a chiding finger. "You really must control your temper, J. Lane. Remember that you're an officer and—"
"I am not! I've been a civilian for a week and four—but that's none of your business, you—you—"
"Insolent lout," he supplied. "Or maybe you'd rather call me what the rest of my beloved relatives do: thankless ingrate. Myself, I prefer plain Hal." His look dropped to her bag. "What does the 'J' stand for? Jezebel?"
"Of course not. It's Jennifer." She snatched at the shreds of her shattered dignity. "But that's no concern of yours. If you'll just tell me how I'm going to—"
She didn't finish. Startlingly, the youth had whirled and dived into the thicket out of which he'd appeared, and behind Jennifer unoiled metal screeched. She turned, saw that one of the great doors was swinging inward.
The little old man who'd made the arrangements for her to come to Strohdene appeared in the opening and came toward her. Instead of the ancient suit he had worn in the office he had on rough tweeds, a shade greyer than his sparse hair, and a grey scarf was wrapped around the loose chicken-skin that had showed in the V of his starched wing collar. But his voice was the same, like a rustle of dry leaves. "You took an earlier train than we agreed, Miss Lane." It was faintly disapproving. "You should have wired me so that I could have met you in Norville."
"I intended to call you from the station," Jennifer explained, "but I discovered you have no phone." In these shadows heavy with the odor of wet loam, the gaunt face—ashen skin stretched tight and unwrinkled over bone—discomfortingly resembled a death mask. "I didn't fee! like waiting two hours so I took a taxi. The taxi." She grimaced wryly. "That seems to have been a mistake."
"Yes." The nostrils of Stroh's patricianly thin nose pinched. "I am surprised that Rollins brought you even this far. He had a dispute with one of the family some years ago and since then has refused to have anything to do with Strohdene." That's an explanation which doesn't explain, Jennifer thought. "Luckily," he went on, "I guessed that you must be aboard this cab when I happened to catch sight of it coming over the top of the hill. So I came down...."
The sere voice trailed away as its owner's pale eyes found the green pack in the road. "It's even heavier than it looks," Jennifer said. "Can't we leave it inside the gate till you can send someone down for it?"
"There is no one to send." The old man lifted the bag with surprising ease. Jennifer preceded him through the gate, saw that the rutted driveway ran across a narrow clearing and was swallowed almost at once by a gloomy tangle of woods as uncared for as the wildland across the road. The thud of the door behind her, then a click of metal on metal, turned her to her host. He had set down her bag and was snapping a padlock on the gate.
Breath caught in Jennifer's throat.
The rusted spikes with which the top of the wall and the doors bristled were to be expected but not the closely set row of sharp, cruel points, brightly new, that curved down from the upper edge of the wall. They were not meant to keep anyone out. They were meant to keep someone in.
It occurred to Jennifer that she might too hastily have accepted Martin Stroh's proposition in the office at the Veterans' Center.
SHE had noticed him the first time she had gone there. He had seemed so out of place among the bronzed young men, so alone and lost among them, that Jennifer had forgotten her own impatience wondering what possible business he could have there.
Was he looking for a son—more likely a grandson—long since reported as "missing in action?" Hardly. He neither looked with eager eyes at each new entering face nor questioned anyone. He merely sat in the corner near the door, holding a square-sided grey derby on black knees, silent, surrounded in the buzz and bustle of this big room by an infrangible silence.
"Lane!" Her name, gruffly called, broke in on Jennifer's speculations. She jumped up and hurried to the blue-uniformed guard at the opening in the low barricade beyond which stretched the rows of desks. "You Lieutenant Lane?" he demanded.
"Not lieutenant," she corrected, as if the title would fasten on her again the discipline of which she'd been free for two glorious days. "Miss Lane, please," but the burly guard was unimpressed. "Third desk on the right," he directed.
The sign on it said R. Mason, Housing Counsellor, and the middle-aged man who sat behind it seemed weighed down by frustration. He gestured Jennifer to the chair at the end of the desk. "This," he said, indicating the form she'd filled out at the reception counter downstairs, "is refreshingly different. You're not sharing three rooms with fourteen other people. Your wife isn't battling with your mother. In fact, you couldn't possibly have a wife."
"No," Jennifer said, "that's hardly possible."
"But there's one thing that is possible—why don't you go home to your folks in Indiana?"
"Because I haven't any folks in Indiana any more. My father died while I was in service and that's all there was." She swallowed the lump the reminder of her year-old bereavement still brought to her throat. "I'm not going back there, Mr. Mason. Not to that stuffy, smug little town. I do need a rest, though, some quiet room of my own with a bed, a chair and a table for my typewriter."
"Your typewriter? Thought you wanted to rest."
"Yes, but the little money I have will run out sometime and I'll have to look for a job. I must get back my speed on the machine." Jennifer leaned forward, her eyes pleading. "Surely there must be something like that, somewhere in this big city."
"This big city," Mason said unhappily, "is packed tight and bursting at the seams." His fingertips drummed on the desk edge. "Is there any reason why a place in the suburbs wouldn't do?"
"Why, no. Not as long as it's near enough that I can get in to the theaters and concerts and things like that."
The drumming stopped. "In that case, I may be able to help you. But I'll have to—you see, we have no listings like that in this office. I'll have to make some inquiries. Suppose you go home now and have fun for a week and come back here a week from today, at eleven sharp."
The good old G.I. runaround, Jennifer had thought, but she'd thanked him and gone back to her hotel heavy-hearted. She'd bought clothes in that week, all the frilly furbelows of which she'd been deprived so long, and a portable typewriter, and had done some room-hunting on her own without result. When she returned to keep the appointment she was convinced would be as fruitless, a second chair stood beside R. Mason's desk and in it had sat the old man who had so intrigued her on her first visit.
"Mr. Martin Stroh," Mason introduced him, and then, "This—well, this is somewhat out of line with our usual procedure, Miss Lane, but you won't mind when I tell you that Mr. Stroh can offer exactly the sort of thing you're looking for."
"He can! I'm so glad."
"I thought you would be." The housing counsellor smiled, obviously pleased with himself. "His home is out in the country but there are frequent trains from Norville, six miles away, and it's less than an hour from the city. And wait till you hear what it'll cost you." Mason leaned forward. "Seven a week for room and board. What do you think of that?"
She thought it was absurdly low. Wasn't there some mistake?
"No, Miss Lane." She heard Stroh's dry, toneless voice for the first time. "We've no desire to make a profit on someone who's worn our country's uniform. But," bony fingers fumbled with the derby, "but we do feel we've a right to make certain conditions."
There would be a catch. "Conditions, Mr. Stroh?"
"Yes. You see, we—mother, my wife and I—live a somewhat solitary life. It would disturb us if you had visitors."
"Is that all?" Jennifer exclaimed, relaxing. "There's no one in the East here who'd possibly want to visit me and I've completely lost track of my old friends back home." She recalled the odd flicker that had showed in his sunken eyes and quickly been hidden. "And besides," she went on breathlessly, "I don't want to see people. I've had too many living in my hair too long not to want to be alone for a while."
"That's settled, then." Too quickly, Jennifer realized now as she watched the old man pick up her bag and come toward her. "Let's hurry," he said, putting his free hand on her arm. "They're waiting."
"Let them wait." She must get this straight now. "I want to know why you keep that gate locked and why you've got those spikes on the wall."
"Yes," he sighed. "Of course you do. I had meant to tell you as we drove up from the village but I still have time." Because he seemed quite unperturbed, Jennifer yielded to the gentle urging of his bony fingers. "It's mother, Miss Lane." The woods shadows closed about them and the driveway's gravel crunched under their heels. "She is well along in years and there are times when she is—shall I say difficult?"
"Oh...?"
"She is quite old and she sometimes confuses people with others out of her past. Also, it upsets her terribly when she is corrected. It—it may not happen, but if she should get some notion about you, I hope that you will be—er—kind enough not to correct her."
Jennifer stopped short, twisted to him. "You're not explaining those spikes. You're over sixty and that makes your mother eighty or more. It's scarcely probable that she'd be able to climb a ten-foot wall."
Stroh's face was startled. "Why—" His pupils widened, staring at something beyond Jennifer.
She whirled, saw only darkening shadows, the barrel-thick gnarled bole of a tree. Suddenly, then, a shaggy and incredible shape leaped at her!
Jennifer's last recollection was of a goat's head, horned and bearded but with human features, and fiery eyes that were neither a goat's nor a man's.
WHAT LIGHT there was seeped in through the leaded glass of two tall, deeply embrasured windows, and was swallowed by walls of some dark, glowing wood. The walls seemed immensely far away. The raftered ceiling which was the first thing Jennifer had seen on awakening was all of fifteen feet above her.
She had awakened in a bed so deep and soft it seemed almost to smother her with its feathery comfort. There was pain at the base of her skull, a dull, drawing ache like that which a bee's sting leaves after the first red-hot jab—but otherwise she appeared unharmed. A light blanket, the grey of a thundercloud, was thrown over her and beneath it, silk was cool against her skin.
It was the silk of her own pajamas, the extremely feminine pajamas for which she'd spent more than she should during her week's orgy of shopping in the big city.
Still somewhat dazedly, her eyes probed the dimness. They found an armchair, high-backed, upholstered in rich tapestry, in the far corner near the windows. They found the gloomy loom of a wooden wardrobe that faced the bed. In the wall, right-angled to that against which the wardrobe stood, was a closed door. Against that same wall, the mirror of a ponderous dresser reflected the windows. Nearer, another chair stood between her and a table of black teakwood, ornately carved.
Jennifer thrust up to a sitting position, curled fingers denting her breast.
On that table was her precious typewriter, open for work, and beside it lay erasers, pencils, the half-ream of yellow paper she'd found space for in its case.
The simple, matter-of-fact circumstance somehow was shattering. She'd been tensed for some fearful discovery, some dreadful menace. Here was only the quiet room for which she'd asked, so quiet that its only sound was the whisper of silk against the rise and fall of her own breathing. Here were the bed and chair and the table for her typewriter. Here was nothing to justify fear save the nightmare recollection of the monster that had leaped at her out of the dark of Strohdene's woods.
Had Martin Stroh fought it off and then carried her on up the hill to safety? He couldn't have. He couldn't possibly have the strength. And he'd said, she remembered, that there was no one else with strength enough even to carry her bag. How then...?
She was out of the bed then, running across deep-piled carpeting to the door. It would not have surprised her to find it locked, but it gave easily to her tug on its knob. She opened it cautiously, held it with only a narrow opening between its edge and jamb.
Peering through, she saw only another door across a wide, dim hall. Her straining ears made out only a distant murmur of voices; in the corridor itself there was sound of life. She widened the aperture, slid her head out far enough so that she could see all of the passage.
To her left it ran off, door-lined, into shadow. In the other direction, however, the opposite wall ended abruptly about twenty feet away and gave place to a stone railing that, sharply silhouetted by artificial light from below, curved to descend along a staircase of which Jennifer could make out only the two top marble steps.
Beyond the staircase there was another, matching rail and then the corridor began again.
She'd have to get into some clothes before she could investigate farther. She pulled back into the darkening room, shut the door carefully, held the knob so that it would not rattle as its spring turned it. A sturdy bolt was screwed to the wood, six inches above it! Wonderful. Jennifer thrust this into its socket, sighed with relief as she started for the dresser.
It did not occur to her to look for a light switch. There was still sufficient light to see by and she didn't want to waste time. Her hands closed on the brass handles of the dresser's middle drawer, pulled it open, and groping fingers identified possessions. Quickly, she stripped off the pajamas, slipped into underthings, a dress, turned to find a place to sit as she drew her stockings on. Then she froze, throat locked on breath.
Beyond the bed the windows were high oblongs set in the wall. On one pane lay the shadow of a man's torso grotesquely misshapen, of his hunched shoulders. And of a head knobbed by a goat's horns.
She was held in a numb paralysis of the kind she'd thought came to one only in dreams. She stood there, unable to move, unable to scream, her hands holding to the bed for support. Then there penetrated to her numbed brain the thud of knuckles on wood, on the wood of the door she herself had bolted.
She was there, somehow, making small, inarticulate noises as she jabbed the bolt out of its socket and twisted the knob. The door pushed in against her. "I—I—" Her tongue refused to form the words, but she could turn and point—
The window was blank. The terrible shadow had vanished from it.
"Why're you dressing in the dark, child? Couldn't you find the switch?" Sudden light clicked on, made of the window at which Jennifer stared a glitter of glass against which the empty night pressed. "Well? Cat got your tongue?"
The woman who had entered was hugely built, her great hips and bosom swathed in scarlet velvet, her bare arms almost as startlingly white as her hair. "I declare. You look frightened to death of me."
"Not of you, Mrs. Stroh. I—"
"Mrs. Stroh, indeed! I'm your Aunt Laura, my dear. Your grand-aunt, really. You were only a babe in arms when I saw you last, but that's no excuse for being shy with me."
"I'm not shy. And I'm not your—" Jennifer caught that back. Grand-aunt, she'd said. She must be Martin Stroh's mother. "I'm sorry. Aunt Laura. I—I'm still a little drowsy and mixed up." She got upset, he'd said, if you corrected her mistakes and Jennifer couldn't face that now. She couldn't face being left alone either. "Look, wouldn't you like to keep me company while I finish dressing?"
"I certainly would." A flabby hand patted the girl's shoulder. "You're sweet. Alma dear." So that's who she was supposed to be, Alma something. "And very pretty. That's what I told your Aunt Helen the minute I set eyes on you walking up the drive."
A TINY muscle knotted in Jennifer's cheek as she watched Laura Stroh lumber away to the tapestry-backed armchair and let herself down into it, sighing. Did that last remark mean that she'd walked to the house on her own power after she'd blacked out? That she'd been greeted by the two women, had come up here and unpacked, undressed, gotten into bed, all without recalling any of it? She shook her head. It was the old lady who was crazy, not she.
"Come, come, Alma," the latter exclaimed, a bit irritably. "Stop standing there gaping at nothing. Martin doesn't like to be kept waiting."
"Sorry." Jennifer picked up the hose from where she'd dropped them, laid one on the bed, perched herself on the edge of a chair beside it and started drawing the other over curled-down toes. A shrill titter came from across the room. "You young people are all alike. Hal's wits used to go woolgathering just like that."
"Hal?" Jennifer contrived a passable imitation of offhandedness. "What Hal is that?"
"Your cousin Hal, naturally." The old woman sighed. "This used to be his room, Alma, till he died." Clenched nails started three ugly runs in the gossamer nylon.
"You never met him, did you, Alma?"
"No." Of course she hadn't, Jennifer told herself fiercely. He was dead, wasn't he? "What did he look like. Aunt Laura?"
"Tall, my dear, but too thin because he'd grown so fast. Handsome though. Chestnut hair that would never stay combed and beautiful grey eyes." Chestnut hair and grey eyes.... "I was terribly fond of him. Alma, till he turned out to be such a thankless ingrate. 'Or maybe,' he'd drawled, 'you'd rather call me what the rest of my beloved relatives do,' and the bushes hadn't rustled when he'd come out of them or when he'd vanished into them like a startled deer. Martin said you promised him that you wouldn't disappoint me the way he did, Alma. Did you dear?"
"Yes, Aunt Laura." Jennifer didn't know what she was saying yes to. She scarcely heard the old woman say, "I do hope you'll keep your promise, Alma dear, because I'd be desolate if you didn't and I had to do to you what I did to Hal."
In a white-faced calm that was next door to hysteria, Jennifer finished drawing on the other stocking. She tied the laces of the low-heeled, stub-toed shoes that had been WAC issue, and stood up. "I'm ready. Aunt Laura."
"Ready!" The heavy-lidded blue eyes glared. "Indeed you're not. You're not going down with your hair all a mare's nest like that."
"Hair, Oh, of course not. What I mean was that I'm ready to go and wash."
"With your dress on? Well, if that's the way you young girls do nowadays.... Your bathroom's right next door, on this side of the hall."
The corridor still was deserted. Jennifer locked herself into the lavatory. The brown-veined marble walling the room, the luxurious if quaintly old-fashioned fixtures, were brightly illumined by the moonlight that streamed in through an oval window above the claw-footed bathtub.
She had to know what was outside there. She ran to the tub, stepped into it, mounted its wallward rim.
Trembling hands clinging to the sill at the level of her ribs, Jennifer looked out and down—down along thirty sheer feet of granite, phantasmal in the moonglow and naked of any ledge, any irregularity that might offer a climber even fingerhold.
A human climber.
Strohdene's brooding and sinister woods crowded close to the house. Not everywhere. To the right they receded, leaving a large open space whose rectangular boundaries were sharply defined by the three-quarter moon's blue-silver brilliance. The floor of this clearing was a tangled mass of low shrubbery run wild, but Jennifer could make out a tilted stone bench, the flagstones of a meandering path, traces of a sunken garden's formal plantings.
And down at the far end, limned against the night, was a lifesize statue of some pale stone. So bright was the moonlight that its every detail was clear—the clumsy haunches, the hairy torso, the satyr's head goat-horned and goat-bearded, but with the face of a man.
Sudden, ironic laughter fluttered in Jennifer's breast.
Was this the source of all her terrors? Had some trick of afternoon sun and wind-moved foliage made it seem alive and leaping at her? Had a low moon rising behind it thrown its strange shadow on her window?
Could be, she told herself. She'd been over-wrought, imagining things.
Even the fact that the window was open a foot, when she returned to the room, no longer had significance. She must be mistaken in thinking it had been shut tight when she awoke here. "I'm ready, Aunt Laura."
The old woman switched out the light and closed the door. They went past the end of the wall and Jennifer looked down over the rail. What a setting, she thought, this would make for a Gothic mystery.
THE MARBLE staircase descended to a hall baronial in proportions, a vast space gloomily lit by a chandelier that dripped crystal pendants from its roof. Walls on either side were dark reaches of tapestry. Straight ahead, shadows filled the deep granite embrasure of a monumental doorway. The floor glowed dully with a magnificent Oriental rug. Midway in the hall stood a table, light gleaming brightly on its white napery.
Trailing the rail, Jennifer's fingers felt dust thick on it. The rasping beneath her feet was dust too, gritty on the marble treads. Martin Stroh came soundlessly out of the dimness to her left, the black suit in which she'd first seen him making him seem one of the shadows come alive. He looked up to the two women, his grey countenance anxious. "I'm sorry to have been so long with my primping. Uncle Martin," Jennifer called down, "but I did want to look especially nice my first evening with you and Aunt Laura and Aunt Helen."
His phantom smile thanked her for accepting the relationship thrust on her by his mother, but he said nothing, merely waited at the head of the table. Jennifer came off the stairs. "You sit there, Alma." Laura directed, gesturing to the chair that faced the door. "In Hal's old place."
In the place of the dead Hal..
The old woman seated herself at the table's narrow end, to Jennifer's right. Stroh sank into his own chair, unfolded his napkin. Imitating him, the girl felt the heavy, soft texture of fine old linen, noted that the china with which the table was set was fragile Limoges, and that the bread basket, the domes covering the two vegetable bowls and the cutlery were solid silver rubbed to a satin sheen.
Across from her was a fourth setting and a vacant chair, apparently for Alma's Aunt Helen. Weren't they going to wait for her?
Feet whispered behind Jennifer. A drably clad woman came past her carrying a heavy platter on which steamed a crisp roast of beef. "You've spoiled it," Laura Stroh snorted. "You've cooked it too long, Helen."
Helen? But not Helen Stroh, certainly. This dreary drudge couldn't possibly be—"I'm sorry, mother," she was murmuring, meekly. "I timed it for seven and we're so late that—"
"All right. All right. It can't be helped now. Sit down and let Martin get on with the grace."
Showing no resentment of the peremptory tone, no emotion of any kind, the woman took the vacant chair. Jennifer decided that she was much younger than her husband. No silver showed in her dark brown hair and the skin at her throat was firm and unwrinkled. The small, delicately formed head, the finely chiselled features hinted of beauty in youth. Even now she would still have been attractive had there been some color in her face.
And if her grey eyes were not so dreadfully tired.
"Hear us, Master," Stroh's dry voice rustled across Jennifer's thoughts. "For the food of which we are about to partake we are grateful to you." He didn't bow his head, but looked straight ahead of him, his gaze unfocused. "We are grateful for all you have done and will do for us, but most profoundly for your forbearance through the long months we have been unable to serve you in the ancient manner. For your patient understanding we thank you, and we thank you for chastising the ingrate who would have betrayed you and us to your enemies."
He means Hal. He's giving thanks for his son's death.
"But tonight," the sere voice went on, "our circle once more is complete. The place too long vacant is filled at long last and again we may fittingly worship you—"
"No!"
Jennifer's head jerked to her neighbor across the table. That gasped interjection could have come from no one else, but it couldn't have come from Helen either, motionless, her countenance blank and impassive....
"Keep us faithful unto you, Master, and reward us in the hour, which is close at hand, of your final triumph. Amen."
"Amen!" came lustily from the foot of the table but the colorless lips across from Jennifer, moved soundlessly and for some reason the word seemed to stick in her own throat.
No one seemed to notice. Metal clattered as Martin Stroh picked up a staghorn-handled carving knife and fork and went to work on the roast. "Pass your plate down to me, Alma," his mother directed, "so I can ladle out your vegetables."
The plates were filled, returned. It all was very homey and family-like, except that Stroh's wife should be sitting in the place of honor opposite him, not the white-haired beldame. It's a wonder they let her sit at the table at all, Jennifer thought. They've made her a servant in her own house. Indignant pity moved her to exclaim, "The roast's wonderful, Aunt Helen." She did her best to make it sound warmly enthusiastic. "Will you show me how you prepare it, some day soon?"
"I'd love to." The wistful smile that rewarded the girl's remark faded. "But—but won't it be an imposition?"
"Of course not! I have so little to do. And I'd love," the girl added impulsively, "to help you with your housework. And in return you could go to the city with me once in a while and show me which are the best shops and hairdressers and so on."
She'd been right. All the woman had needed to make her attractive was the light that was shining in her eyes. "That would be wonder—"
"Too bad that it's impossible," Stroh broke in on his wife. "Your Aunt Helen hates to admit it even to herself, but an expedition like that would lay her up in bed for weeks. Her heart, you know."
"Her heart," Jennifer flared hotly, "doesn't seem to hinder her from doing all the work around here."
The old man's fork stopped short above his plate, his eyes suddenly pale marbles. "Look here, young lady—"
"Stop it!" Knives rattled as the old lady's hand pounded on the table. "Stop it this instant, you two! I won't have that sort of thing start all over again!"
Spots of color flamed in his cheeks but he said nothing. Not until his fork had slowly lowered itself to his plate. Then, "I'm sorry." He's mad as blue blazes, Jennifer thought, but he's afraid of her. "I was merely going to explain—"
"Alma isn't any more interested in your explanations than Hal was." So that was the meaning of her, 'that sort of thing.' Father and son must have quarreled continually over the way mother was treated. "I've been thinking about the boy, Martin." An ominous note came into Laura Stroh's voice. "I've been wondering if the fault mightn't have been less his than yours."
Stroh gasped, the pulse of his Adam's apple, the V of his wing collar making visible his struggle for words.
"You're right, mother." That was Helen, hands flat on the table to push her erect. "But the blame's mine, too, because I—"
She broke off in a thin squeal of pure terror. She was staring at something behind Jennifer, her face ghastly, her eyes wide with terror.
Stiff with the contagion of that mindless fear, the girl forced herself to turn.
Nothing was there. She saw only the marble staircase, the marks of her own feet and Laura Stroh's in the thick dust filming its treads—then she saw it. Footprints were appearing on the stairs, one by one, as though someone invisible were walking slowly down into the hall!
VAGUELY she was aware that the old woman at the foot of the table was mumbling what might be a prayer, that at its head the old man whispered, "His wrath, Helen. The face of the Master's wrath." The sere sound merged with the dry rustle of tapestries stirring in a sourceless, chill wind that brought to Jennifer's nostrils the same fetid, animal odor that had once assailed her nostrils when, the road from Nuernberg to Neuschatz, in Germany, her jeep had been blocked by a herd of goats.
It was the print of a goat's hoof that was appearing in the dust of the steps,—of something that descended slowly towards Jennifer, walking erect on small, cloven hooves.
Dust swirled on the eighth step, halfway down, and a hoof-print appeared there. "No-o-o," Helen moaned. "I was wrong. I didn't mean it. I take it back."
The dust on the ninth tread remained undisturbed. The chill wind died. Jennifer heard a chair scrape, turned back to Helen in time to see her sink into her seat, limply as a rag doll out of which the sawdust runs. The woman shuddered, buried her drained face in her hands. At the foot of the table, Laura Stroh watched, expressionless save for the blue glitter in the slits between her narrowed lids. Martin drummed with bony fingers on the cloth before him, then leaned forward to his wife.
"That was wise, Helen," he murmured. "You've set yourself right."
"Yes." The word came bitterly. "I don't feel well. May I go upstairs, Martin, and lie down?"
"You would disturb our plans for the evening." The devil! The heartless devil! "You've already upset our visitor with your attack."
"Attack!" Jennifer exploded. "Is that what you call it?" Her mouth twisted. "A heart attack, I suppose."
Stroh's blank countenance turned to her. "Precisely. As I was about to explain when I was interrupted, your Aunt Helen's heart condition is not so much physical as mental." The words "heart" and "mental" were lightly but meaningfully stressed. "That is why I felt it would be unwise to expose her to the excitement of a trip to the city." His smile was a thing of lips only. "You understand, I'm sure."
"Yes." Faint but undeniable, the goat-smell still tainted the air Jennifer inhaled with a long breath and let slowly seep out again. "I understand that something's going on in this house that I want no part of. I'm leaving."
She heard a hoarse, inarticulate ejaculation from Laura Stroh and out of the corner of her eye saw Helen stiffen, but it was the old man she watched. There was the barest possible pinching of his thin nostrils but his voice betrayed no emotion at all. "That would be regrettable but we cannot keep you here against your will." He wants me to go. Why did he bring me here in the first place? "If you still feel the same way in the morning—"
"Not in the morning, Mr. Stroh. I'm going tonight." Jennifer pushed up to her feet. "Right now."
"No!" the old woman sobbed. "No, Alma, I won't have it." Her quivering cheeks suddenly were wet with the ready tears of the very old. "Now that Hal's gone you're my last living kin and if you too—Martin!" She twisted to him. "Don't let her. Please don't let her go."
Cruel to have fooled the old woman. Tell her, Jenny. Tell her that you're not her niece. But as Jennifer's lips parted, Stroh already was talking. "She's as headstrong as the boy, mother. I couldn't save him and I can't save her." His glance returned to Jennifer. "All I can do is warn you not to attempt to leave Strohdene tonight."
"Warn?" Jennifer's hot temper was one thing, the cold rage that now frosted her voice another. "Would you care to try and stop me?"
"Nothing could be further from my thoughts. Here." Something small skittered along the tablecloth, clinked against her plate. "That's the key to the gate."
"Meaning that if I leave tonight, I walk the six miles to town? I'll do just that but I don't think you'll like what I'll have to say to the authorities when I get to the city." R. Mason, veterans' counsellor, will like it even less. "Suppose you think that over while I go upstairs and pack my bag."
Jennifer snatched up the key and stalked stiff-kneed away toward the staircase.
"Don't go up there," Helen's anguished cry followed her. "Alma! Don't—" But wrath made Jennifer impervious to the new note of terror in the poor woman's voice, to the weird hoof-prints still plain in the dust.
She mounted, straight-backed, defiant, but when she had passed the railing and was screened from below, pent-up breath left her lungs in a great, sobbing gust and she fairly ran down the wall to her room, slammed the door shut and clawed the bolt into its socket.
And stayed there, her shoulder and the side of her head pressed against the hard wood, her heart pounding its cage of ribs, panic dancing in her veins.
This was not reaction. It had come to Jennifer why Stroh had so blithely tossed to her the key she clutched in her hand. To use it she would have to walk through Strohdene's black woods, and it had come to her that the stone-framed front door was on the opposite side of the house from the garden she'd glimpsed out of the bathroom window. She could not possibly have seen its statue down there near the entrance.
The Thing, the horned and hoofed horror with the face of a man that had leaped at her, actually existed and Stroh had almost tricked her into going out to meet it alone.
"Jennifer."
The whisper hung sourceless in the empty room. The window that had been open only a foot when she'd left it was wide open now to the menacing night, to the moonlight in which something was moving. The girl's frightened eyes were drawn to the wardrobe's black loom to a shadow unfolding out of the armchair beyond it. The shadow came into the lunar glow and was tall, gaunt, in a dark sweater and slacks.
"Hal." The name came unwilled from Jennifer's cold lips. She heard herself ask inanely, "What are you doing in my room?"
"Your room? It used to be mine."
"This used to be his room, Alma, till he died."
AS SOUNDLESSLY as it had fled into the thicket, the apparition came toward Jennifer. She shrank before it, hands up and open in front of her, to fend it off.
"What's the matter, J. Lane?" the low voice asked. "You look like you see a ghost."
"Aren't—you are one, aren't you?"
"A ghost?" Eye corners crinkled. "Now that's an interesting notion. Where on earth did you get it from?"
"You're dead, aren't you? She told me you were dead."
"She!" Startled, he stopped short. "Who?"
"Sarah Stroh."
"Oh, her." Relief was obvious in his tone. "She would." Bitterness now, and contempt. "She meant that I'm dead to her; she disowned me months ago." The hand whose edge he pulled across his forehead seemed to tremble a little. "For a second I thought you meant—How is my mother. Jennifer? Is she all right?"
"I—I think she is."
"But you're not sure?"
"I'm not sure of anything. What's going on in this house, Hal? Is everyone in it crazy, or am I?"
"You're crazy to be in it, I'll tell you that." Small muscles crawled along the bony ridge of his jaw. "And so am I. Just what are they up to now?"
"I'm not even sure of that." Jennifer could smile now, even if tremulously. "None of it seems to make sense."
"That I can believe. You—hello! You're scared to death aren't you? You're so scared you can hardly stand." In another lithe step he reached her, slid his arm around her shoulders. "Take it easy, kid." It felt good there. "Come over here and sit down." He urged her, very gently, toward the chair by the table and she was glad to go. "Okay. Now, what's it all about?"
"I—I don't know." She wanted to talk to him, tell him everything. Maybe if she talked about it, it would take on some semblance of reason. "It's all so—so screwy."
"Yes? For instance?"
"For instance, almost the screwiest thing of all happened right after I started up the driveway with your father—"
"Whoa!" he interrupted. "Let's get that straight right off. That mummy's no relation of mine! But go on. You started up the driveway, and—"
"And he told me about his mother's sometimes mixing people up in her mind, was asking me to promise that I'd be whoever she thought I was, when all of a sudden he stopped, frightened by something behind me. I turned—"
Jennifer couldn't tell from Hal's expression whether or not he believed her tale of the monster that had leaped from behind a tree. But he listened carefully as she went on, telling of her blackout and of her strange awakening in this room. When she came to the shadow on the window-pane he grinned. "Scared you half out of your wits, did I?"
"You!"
"None other. What you two said there in the road tipped me off you weren't who I'd thought you were, and I took a long chance to try and get word to you of what you were walking into." The girl's heart thudded again, but not with fright. "I learned in the Army how to scale walls lots tougher than that one, and there's a drainpipe at the corner of the house from which I could climb along window sills to here."
"But the horns. I saw them distinctly."
"The shadow of my cowlick, I guess." He shoved fingers through disordered hair. "Aunt Laura used to pester the life out of me about it. Called it a mare's nest."
"Yes," Jennifer nodded. "She pulled that on me too." She thought of something. "I suppose you were also responsible for the hoof-prints on the stairs."
His bent leg shot down to the floor and he straightened, suddenly taut. "The what on the stairs?"
Her spine prickling again with the recollection, she explained. "I was terrified, of course, but you should have seen how your mother looked."
"I can guess," Hal growled. "I've seen her before when he was working on her." He stood up and started prowling the carpet, taut with some dark and terrible emotion. "If only I dared smash him," he muttered to himself, "but I'm stymied. He's dug himself in too deep. I tried," he groaned. "By all the powers of darkness, I tried and all it got me was that I almost lost her altogether."
There was nothing boyish about him now. His face was haggard. Tortured. "I almost pushed her all the way over the line. And it would be unthinkable to call in help from outside. I can't—"
He twisted to Jennifer, cheekbones etched sharply against tight skin. "I've got to talk to my mother without Martin's knowing it. You'll have to get her up here. Pretend you need something or just want to chat—"
"No good, Hal. The old man won't allow it. He hit the ceiling when I proposed that she visit the city with me, and I lost my temper, told him I intend leaving Strohdene tonight? He'll be certain I want to get her to come with me."
"So what? She can't go anywhere from up here and he'll figure he can stop her when she comes down again. Please, Jennifer. Try it."
"All right," she yielded. "I'll try." But out in the corridor again, the door shut on his pleading eyes, she paused, her hands pressed against her aching head.
It had come to her that he hadn't explained anything. He'd gotten her to talk, plenty, but he'd told her nothing except that what she'd seen on the window had been his shadow....
His shadow with horns, Jenny. Remember his boast about how easily he can scale the wall. Remember how closely the woods hug the wall both sides of the clearing around the gate and how silently he can slip through underbrush.
HELEN would know who—or what—he was, and whether he was to be trusted. If he'd set a trap for the two of them, Helen might even know what they could do about it.
All this ran through Jennifer's mind as she moved across the passage. She reached the corner where the railing began, stopped there to reconnoiter.
More time than she thought must have elapsed since she'd left the hall below, or perhaps her departure had brought the meal to a sudden end. At any rate, the table had been cleared, the white cloth removed and a scarlet one of heavy velvet spread in its place. The chairs no longer stood around it. Three of them were aligned midway in the space between the doorway and the table, facing the latter. In the middle one Laura Stroh sat dozing, but neither the old man nor the younger woman were in sight.
One of the pair was in the hall, though, on the other side of the staircase and hidden from Jennifer by its slant. She could hear metallic clinkings, then the gurgle of poured liquid. Was it Helen? Alone? To find out, Jennifer would have to cross the top of the stairs in full view from below.
She glanced down there again. Laura Stroh's head was bowed forward and her hands clasped, in her lap, a small black book. Thick, gold-edged, it looked like a prayer book.
It was, for all the world, as if the old woman had slipped into the easy sleep of the aged while waiting in church for the service to begin.
But the aged wake easily too.
Jennifer hesitated, decided to risk it—too late! For Helen came out in the open now, walking wearily toward the red-clothed table.
Jennifer might even then have tried somehow to signal her if it had not been for what she saw on the round gold tray the woman carried. Not the three gold cups nor the gold decanter against which they tinkled. It was the fifth object that sheathed the girl's body with ice.
Erect in a golden base, this was a foot-tall cross of ebony so artfully polished that it seemed to burn with an inward fire of its own. A black and unholy fire, for the shorter, horizontal arm was low on the vertical shaft, two-third the distance down from the top.
Jennifer knew now to what deity Martin Stroh had addressed his strange grace, knew for what awful rite the scarlet altar was being prepared. Browsing once in a bomb-shattered German library, she'd read in an ancient volume the meaning of the symbol before which, having set it in the center of the table, Helen was arranging the decanter and the cups.
The last cup skidded across the tray and clanked against its rim. Laura, jerked, came awake. Her small eyes peered at what her daughter-in-law was doing and she snorted as she had when the roast had appeared. "Can't you do anything right, you fool? There should be four cups."
Helen turned to her. "No, mother. Only three." Light shimmered on the empty tray.
"Four," the old woman insisted. "You've forgotten Alma."
Jennifer didn't notice where Stroh had come from but he was down there at the farther end of the table, listening silently as the tray shook more violently in his wife's hands. "Alma's gone, mother."
"Is she?" A triumphant smile was growing on the round, flabby face. "That's what you would like. You would like for her to have disappointed me the way your apostate son did, but she promised she wouldn't and she hasn't. Look, Helen. Look up there." And Laura Stroh pointed straight up at Jennifer who, absorbed in the scene below, had taken a single catastrophic step out beyond the wall-corner behind which she'd thought herself safely hidden.
"You can come down now, dear," the old woman called up to her. "We're almost ready to begin."
You can't run back to your room, Jenny. If he is Helen's son, you'll betray him. If he's not.... The front door! Go down to them and watch for your chance to slip out through it.
"Coming, Aunt Laura."
Going along the rail toward the staircase, Jennifer seemed to wade through invisible waters that resisted every step she forced her strengthless legs to take. She was tired, tired as if she'd walked miles by the time she reached the top of the stairs but she made herself turn and start down.
Below her the upturned faces waited: Laura's with that moist-lipped, triumphant smile on it; Helen's haggard, defeated; Martin Stroh's expressionless as death itself. But as Jennifer descended they retreated out of her field of vision. All she saw was the scarlet cloth and a gleam of gold, and rising from it, the blasphemous symbol of the Antichrist.
It seemed to her that the great hall darkened, that the inverted cross drew all the light into itself to feed its black, inner flame. And now it seemed to Jennifer that she felt that flame's radiance, though—strangely—not on her face and bare arms. It was within her, deep within her body, it was an almost pleasurable warmth at first but as she halted on the midway tread it grew swiftly hotter. Unendurable heat spread through her organs, her flesh. It ran, liquid fire, through her veins.
There was no light or smoke, no smell of burning, no flame. Jennifer herself was the flame and it was contained within her for even the flimsy rayon of her dress did not char, was cool to the frantic hands that tore at it. "Help!" she heard her parched throat moan. "Save me."
And she heard, as from a far distance, the rustle of Martin Stroh's answer: "No one can help you who planned to deceive the Master. No one can save you from the nameless fire of his wrath."
The voice faded. Jennifer stared sightlessly into a blood-red haze within which a shapeless something moved and suddenly had hold of her and fell with her, bumping down the remaining treads. It hauled at her, made tiny, mewling noises as it tugged, batted, shoved her away from the stairs.
The fire that in another instant would have destroyed her was out of her.
SHE LAY moaning, a single mass of pain, every nerve, every cell blistered with recollection of searing heat. Sight filtered back into her eyes and she was aware of a blurred dark shape swaying low above her, of a pale blob topping it that took on the outline, the features of Helen Stroh's face.
It dawned on Jennifer that Helen had dared the staircase's terrible fire and dragged her down from it to safety. In her throat a grateful phrase struggled with a sob but new terror flared as Helen cringed now like a cur under its owner's whip.
The lash that cut at her was only a choked whisper. "You fool!" From Martin Stroh, staring down, his grey face livid. "You've ruined—"
He cut short. His mother's scarlet bulk swam into view, and he was saying to her, suave again. "The Master is more forbearing than even I knew. It must be because Alma has not yet been confirmed to him that he permitted Helen to save her from punishment for her sin."
"What sin, Martin?" The resonance was gone from Laura Stroh's voice. It was thin, childishly plaintive. "What did she do?"
"Nothing, mother. Nothing yet. It was what she had in her mind to do." Stroh said it smoothly enough but cords ridged his scrawny neck and his pupils were pinpointed. "Didn't you see her glance to the entrance as she started down to us? Didn't you see the look of hate that came into her eyes when they found the sacred symbol of our faith? She meant to spy on our rites and then betray us to our enemies."
"Like Hal?"
"Yes. Like Hal. She planned to do what he—"
"Only for a moment," Helen put in quickly. "Just a moment of weakness. As Martin said, she hasn't been confirmed yet so we can't really condemn her."
"Who are we to condemn her," the old woman asked, sighing, "when the Master has forgiven her?" Her tiny eyes peered down at Jennifer. "You've learned your lesson now, child, haven't you? You won't let wicked thoughts like that ever come into your pretty little head again, will you, dear?"
"No," Jennifer answered meekly. "I've learned my lesson." The lesson Helen had learned long ago, that there was no use trying to fight the forces of ancient evil Martin Stroh could call up at will. "I won't think wicked thoughts ever again."
"That's my own sweet girl. That's my pretty. Help her up, Martin." Laura Stroh was her imperious self again. "And you, Helen, go fetch the fourth cup so we can begin. We're late now. We're dreadfully late."
With the same dull and dreary resignation she'd so pitied in Stroh's other victim, Jennifer took the hand he held down to her, let it pull her to her feet, let it lead her to the right-hand chair of the three that were aligned across the center of the hall. She sank into it, was aware that Laura Stroh seated herself in the center one beside her, watched the old man return to the table and take up a position facing them, his grey hands on the scarlet cloth either side of the inverted cross.
Of Satan's cross.
She tried not to think but could not keep from thinking: It's Satan's mass he waiting to celebrate. A demonic, evil ceremony. She couldn't stop the dreadful thought from running through her head; Satan exists. Maybe not anywhere else in the world, any more, but in this house he still exists and is worshipped. She knew now that Strohdene's people were not mad, nor was she. She'd had proof. It was Satan's fires, the fires of Hell, that had burned her there on the staircase. They would burn her again, too, if she refused to join in worshipping him.
She could save herself by praying but she could not pray. Not here. The seal of the Antichrist was on Strohdene. She could not reach God from here. Not from between these walls.
Laura Stroh moved restively. "What's keeping Helen. Martin?"
"I don't know, mother. Shall I go see?"
"Yes. And hurry."
He was going away from the table. He was behind the staircase and Jennifer was alone in the hall with the old woman. This is your chance, Jenny!
She was up and running toward the stone-framed portal. "Come back," she heard the cry from behind. "Where are you going. Alma?"
"Outside." Jennifer flung back. "Out under the sky where I can pray." That was all that mattered. If she could pray just once more, commend her soul to God, it didn't matter what happened to her body.
She reached the towering door, clawed its huge bronze latch-handle. It refused to move. Locked? Or merely too ponderous for her strength? She got both hands on the handle, put all her strength into desperate effort. It was beginning to yield when fingers gripped her shoulders, twisted her around to Laura Stroh's furious eyes, to a moist mouth that spewed senseless words as Jennifer's frantic small fists flailed ineffectually.
"Let me go." she sobbed. "Please let me—"
Darkness swallowed the scarlet bulk and with it all of Strohdene's great hall, sudden darkness so black it seemed tangibly to thumb Jennifer's eyeballs. The clamping grip relaxed for a startled instant, long enough for her to wrench free of it. She stumbled, caught at rough stone and got feet under her again, was running once more, anywhere as long as it was away from the raddled beldame.
Somewhere in the darkness metal clinked, mellow as only gold can sound. The sightless cavern through which Jennifer ran seemed peopled by pursuing presences, silent and no more visible in the light than in this impenetrable dark. She flung out hands to ward them off, felt fabric that swirled around her abruptly, swathed her, tangled her in its musty folds.
She fought it and could not get free of it. A scream bubbled to her lips, was held there, soundless. She'd butted against vertical hardness. A wall. The tangling cloth was not something used to trap her. It was merely one of the tapestries that dressed Strohdene's hall.
A LONG finger of light reached through the darkness, probing for her. Jennifer was behind the tapestry before the light could find her. Flattened against the wall, she pulled dust into her lungs. The fabric muffled Laura Stroh's babbling, Martin's answering rustle, and she could not make out what they said but she could tell that they were moving from her right to her left and she remembered that her flight had diagonalled here from the right. Then they were going back across the hall away from the door.
The door wasn't locked. It had started to open to her desperate pull. If she could get back to it unheard, if the darkness lasted long enough for her to reach it unseen, she might still get out.
She could, Jennifer decided, lessen the risk of being betrayed by a sudden return of light if, instead of cutting across the way she'd come, she stayed behind the tapestries with which this wall was hung. She then would have only the comparatively short dash from the corner to make in the open.
But what if they've left someone else there to intercept you, Jenny? Something else?
It was a chance she'd have to take. Jennifer started, moving sidewise so that the hangings should billow as little as possible as she edged along behind them. The battered lining traced her face with ghostly ringers. She felt the shivery touch of cobwebs on her cheek. The arras ended but she groped for, found the edge of the next one and was behind that.
It seemed in better condition and there was more space behind it. She could turn—She collided with something yielding solid that moved, that covered her mouth with a muffling palm, clamped her arms to her sides and lifted her through the wall!
Jennifer could not see but she could feel through her frock's thin silk the harsh, shaggy hair of her captor. Panic screamed through her, gave place to fatalistic surrender. She was bone-weary of fighting, strengthless from fear as she was set on her feet again and heard a low murmur, "Okay, Jenny. Let's go." A recognized voice.
She could even extract grim, ironic satisfaction from this proof that she'd been right in mistrusting this being whose fingers on her elbow urged her into motion, checked her momentarily with the warning, "Watch it. Steps down here," and then urged again.
The steps were stone, descending endlessly. Her shoulder rubbed a rough stone wall and she had a sense of being enclosed in a narrow space, of abysmal space below. Reason stirred again and with it recollection that when she'd first looked down into Strohdene's hall she'd seen Martin Stroh enter from this direction. From a door, perhaps, behind the tapestries.
The musty air was threaded by the animal odor, the goat smell that had affronted her as she'd watched the hoof-marks form in the dust of the marble staircase. On these steps there was no click of hoofs, no sound of footfalls other than the tap of her own heels. The steps ended. The voice murmured, "Hold it." The fingers left her elbow. Jennifer stood alone in darkness so dense it seemed to thumb her eyeballs. She was alone and free to flee, but where could she flee? And why try? She'd learned by now that there was no possibility of escape for her.
Close ahead she heard a soft rhythmic pat as of fingertips on wood. Pat. Pat-pat. And now the rattle of a bolt in its socket.
Hinges squealed thinly. Light sliced the blackness, widened, blinded Jennifer. The goat smell suddenly was strong, and forms moved in the dazzle out of which the whisper came, imperative. "Get in here, Jennifer. Quick."
She went into the blinding light, heard the door thud behind her. A face formed out of the light.
Helen Stroh's face.
It was pallid but no longer haggard with anxiety. The drab shoulders no longer were stooped as though under an intolerable burden. The dreariness was gone from the voice that said, "You're safe now, dear. We're both safe, now that my son's here to look after us."
"Your—" Jennifer's dazed look found him, the corners of his grey eyes crinkled as he came from behind her. His sweater. Its wool, not a satyr's bristly hair, was what had rasped her. "He's really your son."
"You wouldn't think so, the way I've treated him." Helen's glowing eyes followed him as he prowled past them, cat-footed on rubber soles. "I've been terribly wrong." The light came from a single lantern hanging from a low rafter just within the door and beyond the constricted area of its illumination the cellar's dark reaches swallowed Hal. "I only realized how terribly tonight, when Martin made the hoof-prints appear on the staircase and you threatened—"
"How could he make those prints?" Jennifer cut in. "He wasn't anywhere near them."
"He—he didn't have to be. The dust on the stairs is mostly powdered iron and under each step there's a specially shaped electro-magnet connected by wires under the floor to one of a row of buttons under the edge of the table at the end where he always sits."
"I get it." Jennifer remembered from her high school science laboratory the intriguing behavior of iron filings on a paper held over a magnet. "When he presses a button the magnet to which its wire leads is activated and the iron dust on the marble above it swirls into the form of a hoof-print. By pressing one button after another he made it seem that something invisible was walking down. How simple." And how terrifying. "I suppose the wind's from a silent electric fan."
"Yes. In a duct from that hot-air furnace." Helen pointed to the looming bulk near them, a metal hydra from whose head huge sheet-iron ducts squirmed away under the rafters. "Behind a register in the floor at the foot of the stairs."
"But that awful smell?"
"Is from a sponge soaked with oil of asafetida and hidden in the duct. That's why the odor's so strong down here." But Helen spoke absently as she peered into the darkness where her son had vanished. "I wonder what's keeping Hal," she fretted. "Now I've got him back I'm nervous when he's out of my sight."
JENNIFER prickled with returning fears. "What's he up to back there?"
"I don't know. He hasn't told me anything." There where the two women peered the blackness held vague and frightening shapes, vagrant glints of light on metal, but no sound, no hint of movement. "When I went into the pantry to get the fourth cup, he was there. He rushed me down the back stairs, snatched up that lantern and told me to light it and hang it up while he rushed off again and shut off the electricity at the big main switch."
"That's what saved me," Jennifer exclaimed. Then, "But he couldn't know what was happening to me. Why, Helen? Why did he switch off the current?"
"So I could get to you without being burned," Hal himself answered from the door behind them. "I couldn't be sure Martin didn't have more than just the staircase wired for heat."
"Wired? You mean that the invisible flame—"
"Is no more supernatural than the hoof-prints. Check." He grinned bleakly, skin tight over the sharp angles of his skull. "You've read about the new artificial-fever treatment for mental cases, using high-frequency radio waves to send the blood temperature way up and burn the bugs out of the brain. And that other stunt of the electronics, roasting a steak from the inside without even charring a paper plate on which it lies. Well, brother Martin combined those two gadgets into a sort of jumbo-sized radio oven that came within a couple of seconds of cooking you to death."
Jennifer shuddered, recalling her agony on the staircase.
"What makes it a particularly neat murder instrument," Hal continued, "is that it doesn't leave a mark. The life's fried out of the brain before flesh or skin's been cooked enough to be noticed by anyone making an autopsy. The coroner's verdict on you would have been, natural death from deterioration of the cerebral tissues."
"On me!"
"On you, J. Lane. You don't imagine, do you that he'd have turned it off till you were done for, if my mother hadn't dragged you down out of it? I'd looked out to see what was keeping you but by the time I could have reached you, you'd have been gone."
She'd been that close to extinction. Jennifer started to say something but Helen intervened. "You're holding something back, Hal. What is it?"
"You may as well know," he said. "Aside from taking a look at Martin's wireless oven and a couple of other quaint gadgets he installed down here since I left, I've just checked a notion that came to me a couple of weeks ago when I saw a truck from the city drive into the grounds with a couple of strangers in overalls and a load of Portland cement and shaped iron rods."
"The hooks for the wall!" Jennifer exclaimed.
"That was only part of it. He had them seal every opening to the outside from this cellar, every window and the two doors and even the coal-chute, with reinforced concrete."
Helen's hand went to her throat but her voice was steady. "He told us the Master had warned him that you meant to lead a raid of unbelievers against us some night when we were celebrating the Devil's Mass."
"He wasn't far wrong." Hal's face was grim, older-seeming than its years. "I would have done it but I couldn't chance it while he had mother in his clutches. With her out of the way I'd have been free to go to town against that madman and his dirty scheme."
Jennifer wanted to ask what that was, but this wasn't the time. "Why don't we just go up the same way you brought me down, and out the front door? Surely the three of us can easily handle that decrepit old man."
"I suppose we could if we could get at him."
"Why can't we?"
Hal pulled the edge of his hand across his forehead. "Because this door and the one to the stairs from the pantry are locked from the outside. Not only locked, but backed up by what feels like iron bars he put across them while I took the time to jam up his machinery so he couldn't use it again. This house was built when lumber was cheap and people built to last for centuries. The doors are solid oak two inches thick. It will take us hours to dig out."
"And you won't have hours," a voice said, a dry, rustling voice that seemed to come out of nothingness. "The decrepit old man still has a trick or two up his sleeve." Whirling, Jennifer could see only Helen but the voice went on, "You may have jammed up the instruments the Master taught me to build, but he has supplied me with another to destroy his enemies."
Jennifer stared into the starkly empty cellar where a disembodied laugh rustled, sere and sinister. Beneath that laugh, she felt, rather than heard, an ominous throb.
THE SUDDEN movement that pulled Jennifer's head around to Hal was his arm jerking up to point at the furnace. "That's where it comes from. He's talking into a register and his voice is coming down to us through one of the ducts. And he can hear us the same way."
"Very clever," Martin Stroh applauded. "You've always been too clever for your own good, my dear Hal. Are you smart enough to divine what else is coming down to you beside my voice?"
Jennifer saw little muscles clump at the angles of Hal's cheekbones. She saw his head cock sidewise as he listened to the throbbing, his nostrils widen as they tested the air and found the acrid taint of which she was herself becoming aware.
"Yes," he said tonelessly. "You've driven your car up in front of the doors, attached a hose to its exhaust pipe and run the other end of the hose down into that duct. What you're sending down to us is carbon monoxide."
"Very good." Knowing that they came from a human throat did not seem to make the apparently disembodied tones any less eerie. "And, since I've prepared it for an attack by your friends from the village, that cellar is hermetically sealed."
"But it's big, Martin." Jennifer realized that Hal was saying this more to hearten his mother and her than for Stroh's benefit. "It will take a long time for you to pump enough gas down here to kill us."
"I have all the time I need, my boy. None of us in Strohdene is apt to have visitors, not even our little boarder. I made sure of that by a week of careful investigation before I invited Miss Lane to join our happy—"
"Miss Lane!" Helen's exclamation was edged with alarm as Hal darted away towards the cellar's rear. "You would call her Alma if—What have you done to my mother, Martin?"
"Nothing, my dear Helen, to perturb you. I've merely put her quietly to sleep with a somewhat different injection than I used on the girl."
"What do you mean?" Jennifer was surprised she could speak at all but Hal had whispered to her, "Keep him talking," and she must. "When did you use an injection on me?" She knew. She recalled the sting that had puckered the nape of her neck when she had awakened in this house of terror. "I don't remember anything like that."
"You don't remember anything of your first two or three hours in Strohdene." The reply seemed to come from two directions at once and the chug-chug of the motor that poured lethal fumes down here abruptly was more distinct. "Have you ever heard of scopalamine. Miss Lane?"
"Scopalamine?" Jennifer saw the reason for the change in quality and apparent source of the sounds. "Why, yes." Hal had opened a large clean-out door in the side of one of the huge overhead ducts, was silently closing it again. "I remember some medical officers mentioning it at mess, when they were talking about painless childbirth." He vanished now in the lightless regions far back. "And someone remarked we ought to use it in screening out active Nazis who applied to us for jobs. He called it the 'truth drug.'"
"Very good, Miss Lane." Helen pressed a palm to her brow. Jennifer realized that her own head was beginning to throb with the ache that is monoxide's first warning as she heard, "Both those uses for scopalamine depend on its peculiar property of creating an artificial amnesia so that pain—or anything else experienced while under its influence—is instantly forgotten. Because of this, it also obliterates the will."
Hal appeared again, hurrying back to them. "When you began to ask embarrassing questions," the voice from the furnace continued, "I distracted your attention long enough to permit me to inject the drug into the nerve center at the base of your brain, where it would take instantaneous effect. Until it wore off, you obeyed me as implicitly as though you were under hypnosis, yet retained no recollection of what occurred."
"Okay, Martin." Hal growled. "So you're a holy roaring wonder." What in the world, Jennifer wondered, did he intend doing with that rusted elbow joint of iron pipe and the coil of insulated wire hanging from the crook of his arm? "Suppose you start figuring where you're headed." He threaded an end of the wire through the joint, started measuring off a four-foot loop of the doubled strand. "They hang murderers in this state, you know."
"Not if they are unaware a murder has been committed." Stroh chuckled. "It is getting rather chilly in this rambling old house tonight and so I shall start the furnace for the first time this season. Most unfortunately, I shall fail to inspect the system and so will not discover that during the summer one of the ducts, the one that opens into the rooms occupied by Helen and Miss Lane, has sprung a leak which will permit coal gas, almost pure carbon monoxide, to enter it. I shall be inconsolable when I find, tomorrow morning, that they've been asphyxiated while they slept."
Hal reached up and slipped the end of the loop over the nail from which the lantern swung, let the pipe-joint swing free as he knotted to the doubled wire, about halfway down, the single one trailing from the coil. "As for you, young man," the rustling voice continued, "No one knows you are anywhere inside Strohdene's walls, hence I shall not be called upon to account for your disappearance."
"Right," the youth agreed, almost pleasantly. "If I disappear. Which I've no intention of doing. You forget about this axe you left down here." He pulled on the line he'd attached to the loop, gave it slack. "Hear that." The elbow joint pendulumed, chunked into the door. "How long do you think it will take me to chop through with it?"
Forever, Jennifer thought. "How long?" the voice from the furnace chuckled. "Too long to save you, my friend." The joint completed another arc and chunked into wood again. "Much too long."
"Says you," Hal snarled. He turned to the women. "Mother. Jennifer. You two get to the back of the cellar. Climb up on something high, as high as you can get." Chunk. "Monoxide's heavier than air, it will be thickest near the floor." He gestured them towards the rear. "Go on now. I can handle this axe myself." Chunk. But as they obeyed he went with them, paying out the line pulling on it so that the iron kept swinging against the door and to the listener above it would sound as if he had never left it.
A paint-spattered crate blocked their path. Jennifer started to detour this, was halted by Hal's hand on her arm and thrust the wire's end into her fingers.
"Keep it swinging," he whispered. "And take care of my mother for me." He jumped on the crate, reached up and opened the clean-out door in the side of the duct beneath which it stood. Jennifer pulled the wire, heard the answering chunk. This was a different conduit from that down which poured the lethal fumes that were bringing stinging tears to her eyes. Chunk. There was a sudden, inarticulate sound in Helen's throat. She reached for her son, but his head and shoulders already were inside the big, square-sided conduit and his legs were swinging as he pulled them up into it.
The elbow joint pounded into the door, and above Jennifer blackened sheet-iron buckled. The straps holding the duct to the ceiling crackled. Would they hold his weight?
SHE PULLED on the wire, praying that the answering chunk would cover the scraping noises inside the duct that meant Hal was belly-crawling toward where it curved up out of the cellar. She heard Helen moan, whispered to her. "He's climbing up through it. He's going to jump your husband from behind."
"Husband? Martin isn't my husband." Jennifer blinked eyes now fiercely smarting from the burned gases but she did not forget to keep the elbow-joint making the sounds that she hoped would keep the killer thinking Hal still chopped at the door. "Get up on this box." With her free hand she helped Helen mount the crate, got up beside her. The air was a little fresher here close under the ceiling and she could think more clearly. It was no surprise that the evil old man had lied to her.
"But you cried out to him. 'What have you done to my mother?' Your mother. Martin Stroh is your brother."
"Not Martin Stroh, Jennifer." The woman's mouth twisted. "His name, the only name we know, is just plain Martin. He's no relation to any of us."
"But he kept calling your—He kept addressing Laura Stroh 'mother' and neither of you seemed to think it less queer."
"No." The momentary relief was ebbing. Light and dark were beginning to swing about Jennifer in dizzying circles. "It's the title he gave her. Mother in Satan. It's part of his terrible scheme."
"What scheme?" She had time now to ask it but she wasn't at all sure she'd have time to hear the answer. "What's he after?"
"Strohdene, of course, and the fortune my father left when he died." Helen swayed, would have fallen if Jennifer hadn't caught her with her free arm. If Hal didn't hurry....
Maybe he's stuck in the duct. Maybe Martin had outguessed him and was waiting at the outlet....
"Tell me," Jennifer urged. Hal had told her to take care of his mother but the only thing she could do was keep Helen's mind off the death welling invisibly up about them. "Tell me about Martin's scheme."
It was a strange tale listened to in the darkening cellar while an iron joint chunked on wood and a car engine chugged, while death crept up about teller and listener and somewhere above a grey-eyed, brown-haired youth struggled for his life and theirs.
A dozen years ago Helen's father and her husband had been drowned in the same fishing accident. Left alone with their grief, the rich widow and her daughter had been ripe prey for the first charlatan who could worm himself into their confidence.
"We heard about this wonderful medium who could bring back the dead. He did bring Dad and John back to us, Jennifer. I saw them, talked with them. They said things only they could know."
Martin had prepared himself well.
"They told us he had knowledge and powers no other man had. They said if we could get him to stay here with us he'd show us how to attain the only true happiness. We begged him to stay and he finally agreed."
The build-up was gradual. It was years before he had revealed that his powers came from Satan and by then he was master of Strohdene. Meantime Hal was away in boarding school and summer camp, college and, later, the Army. But Laura Stroh could not live forever. Martin determined that before she died she must leave her estate to his cult. To him, in other words.
Here he hit a snag. Laura was old and stubborn and she had a strong sense of family.
"Besides Hal," Jennifer heard Helen's faint voice through the pain that pounded at her own skull, "there was only her sister's granddaughter, Alma Chandler. We hadn't seen Alma for years but mother refused to make a will that would disinherit the two children. And then Hal came home."
Horrified by what he learned, he had tried to talk some sense into his mother's head but Martin, sensing this, countered with new proofs of his "supernatural powers." The only result of the conflict had been to drive Helen to the brink of madness. One night Hal had exploded, denounced the charlatan to his grandmother and threatened to have her declared legally incompetent if she did not turn him out. Laura flew into a rage and ordered him out of her house and her life.
Helen was deeply shaken torn as she was between love for a son of whom she'd seen little for years and love for the mother with whom she'd shared bereavement and the dark consolation of their blasphemous faith. She realized, moreover, that if Hal were right she dared not leave the old woman alone in the house with Satan's priest.
But Martin saw the solution to his problem. The grandson had eliminated himself, the grandniece could be eliminated in a similar manner. Alma, fortunately for her, was somewhere abroad with her engineer husband. Nevertheless he induced Laura to write and invite her to Strohdene, intercepted the letter and set out to find a substitute.
"Me," Jennifer gasped. "That's why he warned me she might mistake me for someone else." Light and dark wheeled dizzily. "He planned to—"
"Terrorize you into behaving so as to turn mother against Alma, too," Helen whispered as, almost blind, almost strengthless now. Jennifer clung to her. "But mother flared up at him and then I did. He got us under control with the hoofs on the stairs, and then you exploded and I knew he'd never dare let you out of here alive. I—"
"Shhh," Jennifer interrupted. "Listen."
They stared into lantern-light blurred by the acrid death-fog.
"I don't hear anything."
"That's just it. The chugging's stopped. Hal's won out. He's shut off the motor. Listen!"
There was sound again, a metallic rattling. The door rattling against its bolt! Jennifer let go of Helen, climbed down. She fell off the crate and pushed up to hands and knees and started crawling but down here the fumes were thicker and she had no strength. She forced herself on.
A pounding of iron on wood hammered the pain in her swirling head but it wasn't the elbow-iron; her numbed fingers had lost the wire long ago.
The door pulled open.
To Jennifer's bleared eyes it was only a shadow that blotted out the lantern's blurred glow and rushed toward her. Abruptly Hal's face was clear-etched, then was blotted out the darkness that swirled into Jennifer's brain and possessed her,,,,
SHE breathed cold air, crisp, clean of fumes. She drew it into her lungs and washed them with it, washed the sickness out of her. She had a dim recollection of being carried, up and up, interminably, of a far-away voice saying her name. Hal's voice. She opened her eyes and looked into Hal's face, drawn, anxious. She smiled wanly and whispered, "Okay, Hal."
Jennifer saw him against the pale loom of a tall, deeply embrasured window. It was the window in her room, the one against which she'd seen his frightening shadow and it was still open but that wasn't frightening now. Her eyes questioned him. "Your mother?"
"Inside with hers. She'll be all right They'll both be all right now that Martin's out of the picture."
"What—what are you going to do about him?"
"Nothing except report that he met with an accident."
"He—he's dead?"
"As Hitler. He heard me sneaking up on him and tried to jump me. I used some of my Army judo on him. He landed on the back of his head and I heard his spine snap. But how about you, Jennifer?"
She knew that he didn't mean how was she physically; she'd already told him she was all right. "What about me?"
"Will you stay, Jennifer?" He thrust fingers through the brown disorder of his hair. "Will you stay here at Strohdene?"
Her heart pounded. "I'd like to, Hal. I'd like very much to. Do you want me to?"
"Do I!" His eyes appealed to her. "I want you to stay here forever."
"That's queer. Hal. It's very queer, on account of that's exactly what I want too."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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