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Ebook has 1865 lines and 88912 words, and 38 pages

Release date: October 4, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Green Circle Books, 1936

SHUDDERING CASTLE

SHUDDERING CASTLE

SHUDDERING CASTLE is not a mystery novel in the generally accepted sense. It is a novel with a mystery; a highly imaginative story, with revelations in the field of radio and short-wave broadcasting. None of the strange events recorded oversteps the boundaries of accepted natural laws.

In this novel of exciting action, radio communication is established between Earth and Mars, with a world-girdling hook-up from Radio Center, in New York City, and the reader will be amazed to find that the Martians are human beings like ourselves, subject to the same laws, the same temptations and passions which affect humanity. Into this pulsating picture of tensed American life of the near future, comes another revelation from the sky. This brings the reader to the drama of a frightening but plausible visitor from the jungles of Mars to this world, whose presence in the old spooky castle of an eccentric millionaire-scientist on Long Island causes great fear to its inmates when night falls.

But there is thrilling romance to warm your hearts, the infatuation of a young newspaperman for the alluring debutante niece of the old scientist; a humanly drawn boy and girl who are caught in the violent web of mystery and sudden death. SHUDDERING CASTLE is a unique study in the mysterious recesses of the universe.

SHUDDERING CASTLE

As a staid and wealthy New York family, of distinguished but remote English ancestry, we moved formally and rather arrogantly within our small, exclusive circle, holding on grimly to the traditions and elegancies of the past. During the winter season, we viewed the outside world placidly, and with the respectful composure of middle-age, from the dignified privacy of our red brick mansion in Washington Square.

On May first, as regular as clockwork, year in and year out, and with all the solemnity of a ritual, we put our elaborate upholstered furniture in linen shrouds, veiled the somber, scowling family portraits in their dull gold frames with fly-netting, boarded up the windows and doors, and went to the country. Our summer home is called The Castle, and it is situated at Sands Cliff, Long Island. As a family we resembled nothing so much as this embattled stone fortress, of old-world design, in which we spent more than half the year.

As long back as I can remember, we had successfully preserved the family's seclusion from the living world. Wherever we happened to be, in town or country, we had protected our privacy with shuttered windows, and massive iron gates that were secured both day and night with heavy chains. Numerous signs of "Private" and "No Trespassing Allowed" dotted our grounds like grave markers.

And then, quite suddenly, our lives became incredibly transformed. A series of weird events brought us out of our privacy and seclusion--brought us plenty of excitement and trouble and even horror.

But that was not to be wondered at, with Henry, my elder brother, suddenly developing a mania for research in scientific matters, especially the science of heavenly bodies and the phenomena of radio. He did not pretend to be a scholar, although he had cultivated scholarly habits most of his life. Inexplicably, this mania had seized him late in life; a sort of bursting out of the abnormal repression which held us all in thrall, no doubt as the result of our long seclusion from the outside world and following the drab and barren routine of our lives with such punctilious rigidity.

Ample means had enabled him to completely outfit an observatory, with a powerful telescope, at our summer residence. Here he would spend hours gazing into the abyss of space. He saw things up there the trained, professional astronomer never saw, or ever hoped to see--colliding suns, formation of temporary stars, the rejuvenescence of dying worlds, and gaseous explosions in the Milky Way.

One of his pet theories was that the planet Mars was inhabited by a race of people like ourselves, and that their men of science had long been trying to establish radio communication with the earth. The static on our radio set which annoyed me intensely, would galvanize Henry with delight and hope, and his eyes would glisten almost frenziedly behind their horn-rimmed spectacles.

"Those are distinctly electro-magnetic waves," he would say, "that come from some point far off in space, and they are not due to any terrestrial disturbance like thunderstorms, local or distant."

There was no opening, no escape, from Henry once he got started on the galactic radio waves as differing from the cosmic rays and from the phenomenon of cosmic radiation.

"I'm telling you, Livingston," he once declared in an excited, high-pitched voice, "that man has only begun his conquest of time and space. There are no limitations to human achievement. The world is on the threshold of things unheard of, undreamed of. I have no doubt that we will soon be able to establish radio communication with Mars, and with my leisure, money and the required taste for science, I feel that I am admirably fitted to make it come true."

And from that day he was changed, secretive. He refused to tell me what he had discovered. Again and again I begged him to explain and always it was the same vague answer, the same shake of the head, and tightened lips.

It all seemed fantastic and visionary then, Henry's theories about Mars and interstellar communication, but when unusual things began to happen and our peaceful and ordered living was suddenly and violently disturbed, I realized, as never before, that visions often come to reality in an unbelievable way.

At the time we were thrown into such turmoil, and the dread spotlight of publicity centered upon us, our family consisted of Henry and myself, both bachelors; Jane, our spinster sister, and Patricia Royce Preston--Pat for short--a very fascinating young person, who had come to live with us at the tender age of fourteen, after the shocking death of her parents, our youngish sister, Virginia Royce Preston, and her husband, Allston, who were killed in an air-liner crash near Paris.

There is something strangely lovable about a young girl in the process of growing up. The advent of Pat meant, of course, less privacy and the trampling down of staid personal habits and family customs which we held virtually sacred. The fact that we were old and queer and our household drab and rather grotesque, in comparison to the modernistic and rather barbaric splendor of our more fashionable friends, scarcely troubled her. Nothing seemed to matter but that this bright-eyed, brown-haired girl should concentrate all her love and devotion on a trio of old fossils. A warm affection grew between us and our pretty niece. As she blossomed into young womanhood our lives became centered in her. She was now eighteen.

Although we were born rich, and received a huge income from the heritage of vast and various real estate holdings on Manhattan Island, both Henry and myself, strangely enough, had never splurged, and never married. I am sure the thought of matrimony never entered Jane's mind. Our natural emotions seemed to be stirred and exalted only by the importance of our family name and our wealth. Romantically, we were strangely neutral, as though, in the pursuit of riches, the family stock had been sort of washed out.

After our college days, Henry and I grew into old-fashioned, mellow bachelorhood, aloof from the world and very self-sufficient, and glad to have it so. Henry had just observed his sixty-fifth birthday when our lives became so tempestuous and convulsed. I was two years his junior. Jane had just turned sixty. As progeny, we seemed to have come into this world in swift successiveness, as though the marriage of our revered parents had fulfilled its promise in a bunch.

For an entire summer Henry lived virtually in seclusion in his observatory without any tangible result. Sweeping the sky with his telescope for anything that might happen. But nothing transpired. Yet he persisted. Finally, he detected a tiny comet, apparently on its way to the earth. At first it appeared no larger than a pin-prick of light, with a small, meteoric tail.

The night he made the discovery, he got me out of bed to see it, but I was in no mood or condition for sky gazing. In addition, looking into the eye-piece of the telescope made me a little sick and dizzy. I couldn't see a thing. Deciding that he was suffering from a delusion, I went back to bed.

The odd thing was that Henry was right. He had actually witnessed the phenomenon of impact of two small planets which produced the comet. As he explained it afterwards to a group of eminent scientists, this collision of two celestial bodies had produced a distinct flash of light, out of which had grown a spiral swarm of very brilliant particles, and he had watched them as they took on orbital motion.

The comet soon became the most impressive and magnificent sight I have ever seen, stretching its scimitar-like form half across the heavens. Its wonder and beauty dragged New Yorkers up in the small hours, to gaze at it with fascinating awe. Many regarded it with terror, others with superstitious dread. In churches throughout the land, the people prayed: "Lord save us from the devil, and Royce's comet!"

The comet was not only named after Henry but his discovery was acclaimed by scientists the world over, and he was chosen a fellow of the two leading scientific bodies of America and England. While still rated as an amateur in science, nevertheless, many learned men began to look upon him as the depository of authority and authenticity in matters relating to the mysteries of the solar system.

Having disclosed something to the world in the order of creation, Henry became imbued with an overpowering sense of his own importance as a man of science; his ambitions soared to unsurmountable heights. The discovery of the comet having been far easier than he had dared dream, he now turned with profound intentness to establish radio communication with Mars. He began talking in a familiar and chatty way about the people on Mars, and to hear him talk one would think that he was going there for a week-end of golf.

In this project, he had enlisted the able assistance of Serge Olinski, assistant research engineer of the National Radio Corporation, whose unexceptional qualifications included an honor degree in cosmic ray research, with distinction in astronomy. Their experimental activities, in trying to pick up and decode the galactic radio waves, which both believed constituted some kind of interstellar signaling, were carried on behind locked doors, either at Henry's observatory in the country, or in Olinski's laboratory in the NRC Building, in the new Radio Center Annex.

Olinski was a queer shrinking soul, and any sort of publicity to Henry was equally distasteful. They were two of a kind, in this respect. Notwithstanding all the praise and attention given to Henry by the press during the comet furore, he treated reporters with the utmost contempt, and accused them of being dishonest rogues. One reporter in particular he hated and feared. Just mention to him the name of Robert McGinity of the New York Daily Recorder, and his correctly chiselled and aristocratic features would crinkle up in rage and horrible chuckles would issue from his thin lips like unnamable profanities.

He had never forgotten his first encounter with McGinity on the telephone, nor had he ever forgiven the reporter for what he called an utterly disreputable transaction in news. But the business of reporting is at least an honorable one, and reporters have to get their stories, somehow.

This fellow, McGinity, published the first report of Henry's discovery of the comet, and scored a beat by calling him up and giving the impression that he was one of the assistant astronomers at Harvard University. I had no suspicions then how the information had trickled into the office of the Daily Recorder, but I believe now that our solemn-visaged butler, Orkins, who afterwards turned out to be so mercenary and treacherous, tipped off this morning paper, which paid liberally for exclusive stories.

It was the night following Henry's detection of the comet when he was aroused out of a sound sleep to answer an important telephone call. If I hadn't been up and overheard the conversation, I wouldn't have believed it possible for any man to be so easily deceived. But gullibility is one of Henry's weaknesses. I switched into the conversation from an extension on the second floor.

After he had answered heaps and heaps of questions, the voice at the other end said: "Thanks, Mr. Royce. Thanks a lot. Darned good of you to tell me all this."

"Who is this speaking?" he asked again. "Who the devil are you?"

"Bob McGinity of the Daily Recorder," came the prompt reply.

Henry gave a nervous jump. "What?" he gasped angrily. It was evident that he was utterly taken by surprise. "I--I find your action in calling me up quite incomprehensible, Mr. McGinity. I imagined that--that--"

"Pardon me," the reporter retorted with some dignity. "I never said I was an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard. I simply asked if you knew of such a person, and you said you did, and then you proceeded to tell me exactly what I wanted to know."

"But surely you're not going to publish this," Henry fumed. "It's too immature. You must keep it out of the newspaper."

"I'm sorry but I have no power to do so, Mr. Royce," the reporter replied. "And no inclination, Mr. Royce."

Henry clawed at the telephone instrument with trembling fingers. "If I had you here, young man," he shouted, "I'd break your damned neck."

He hung up with a bang, and I don't think he slept a wink the rest of the night. And it was entirely due to this experience that he and Olinski took every precaution that nothing should leak out concerning their research in interstellar signaling, which, as far as I could learn, at the time, had entered on the final and exciting stage of their experimental work.

Henry's actions indicated that his mind was still working feverishly on this subject; he even raved about it in his sleep, according to his Filipino valet, Niki. But about his and Olinski's doings, not a word to me. When I would ask him if they had found anything worth finding, he would reply: "Just you wait, and see;" a vague term which he refused to make more definite.

In the silent watches of the night, he would sit at his telescope, his eyes trained on that beautiful, reddish planet, Mars. One morning, at four o'clock, I found him there, clad only in his pajamas, and he strongly resented my intrusion. But I had a task to perform, and that was to see that he got his proper rest. I had no wish that any member of our family should become psychopathic.

"Henry!" I exclaimed, rather harshly; "you've only a few hours before breakfast-time. Go to bed and get a bit of sleep."

I think he realized, instinctively, that I was not in sympathy with this business of trying to pick up radio signals from Mars. It all seemed so useless and incredible. His secret experiments had been in progress now for about a year. The tumult aroused by the discovery of the comet seemed a thing long past and forgotten. The memory of the public is short. Newer sensations had taken its place.

In this latest mad, scientific quest, Henry reminded me of one of Jane's goldfish, which swims in its bowl, and swims and swims, thousands of miles, perhaps, and then finds itself a few inches from its starting point. So one day I resolved to bring the matter to an issue. I slipped into his room just after he had disrobed and donned a dressing-gown, preparatory to taking a bath and dressing for dinner.

"Henry," I began, rather abruptly, "study and action are worth while, only when they lead you some place." But I was not destined to finish what was in my mind to say.

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