Read Ebook: Shuddering castle by Fauley Wilbur Finley

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Ebook has 1865 lines and 88912 words, and 38 pages

"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.

"I beg pardon, Livingston, if I disturb you," he interrupted in his meekest accents, and then went into his bathroom, and closed the door.

Determined to have my say, I followed him to the door, and knocked. The door opened, and his face, meek and anxious, looked out at me through a narrow crack.

"Henry!" I implored. "If I could only see you for a few minutes--"

"No!" he said, and shut the door. A second later, I heard the bar shoved into its slot.

There was nothing unusual in Henry locking himself in his bathroom, for he had the distressful habit of sitting in his bath-tub, by the hour, smoking and thinking. His bathroom seemed to be the only quiet retreat in the castle which afforded the complete solitude and privacy necessary for the employment of his brain cells. He felt that here he could relax, just as Napoleon did, after undue fatigue, dictating letters and giving important military orders from his steaming bath-tub.

I have often wondered where Sir Isaac Newton was sitting, at his home in Woolsthorpe, England, when the fall of an apple, so legend tells us, suggested the most magnificent of his discoveries, the law of universal gravitation. There is no evidence to refute that he was sitting in one of those queer, early English bath-tubs, looking out of the bathroom window, at his apple orchard.

I never see Rodin's famous sculpture, "The Thinker," but I am reminded of Henry, sitting in his bath-tub, thinking and thinking, especially during the early part of the eventful summer of which I write.

Evidently some fresh idea had come to him while in his bath on the evening I persisted in assailing his peace of mind. With startling suddenness he donned his bath-robe, rushed to the telephone, and communicated with Olinski. As quickly as possible, the next day, they got to work on Henry's idea. Then problems began to straighten themselves out. As to what they had discovered, they said nothing at the moment.

Soon after, however, an avalanche of adventure, mystery and excitement came thunderously down upon us, throwing our lives into chaos.

As I begin my narrative, my mind travels back for a moment to the days of my youth, and I am made more vividly aware of the changes that have taken place in the world. We are living in a new era now--a period marked by a series of strange occurrences, manifestations of the weird powers that lurk in outer space. The New Deal has passed into history. A strangely remote time ago, that was....

The laboratory has supplied us with the basic means of lifting the curtain of space from scenes and activities at a distance. A system of sight transmission and reception, comparable in coverage and service to the world-wide hook-up of sound broadcasting, has brought all nations closer together. In the friendly exchange of ideas and feelings through the medium of television and the radio, the whole civilized world enjoys common participation.

Nationalism no longer endangers the peace of the world. All war debts between nations have been settled, and tariff barriers laid low. Internationalism reigns supreme, to the spirit and benefits of which Henry contributed his share by engaging servants representing seven nationalities. Thus we harbored at the castle of Sands Cliff about every conceivable question of society, politics and religion.

Our summer castle is such a place as you read of, in romances of the Middle Ages. It was built more than half a century ago by a wealthy New York society woman who must have had a strain of poetic romanticism in her veins. When Henry purchased the place, it was almost in ruins.

It is perched on the summit of a precipitous sand cliff, commanding an excellent view of Long Island Sound. From its windows, on a bright day, the majestic towers of New York appear dimly etched against a mauve horizon like the spires of a magical city. There it stands, dark and foreboding, and ivy-clad, in its own grounds, surrounded by a high brick wall. The main entrance gate is approached by a dark avenue which winds through a heavily wooded park. There is no other dwelling within a mile.

There are many mullioned windows in its slim, peaked towers. Inside, a clutter of rooms--endless rooms--some of them in the upper floors unused and smelling dusty and dank. The front door opens on a brick terrace, which has a stone balustrade as a protective measure against a sheer drop of two hundred feet to the rocky base of the cliff. From the east end of the terrace, stone steps wind down to a private yacht landing and a long stretch of beach, fenced in with barbed wire.

An outstanding feature of the castle is its galleried entrance hall, with its darkly gleaming oak panelling and great, stone staircase; a hall so large that when one speaks, the sound is echoed like the whispering of ghosts from the high, oak-timbered ceiling.

There is a queer element of solitude and uncanniness that always cloaks the castle at the twilight hour, before Orkins, in his routine of duty, switches on the lights. I noticed it particularly, one summer evening, about the middle of August, as I walked up and down the terrace, dinner-jacketed and smoking, awaiting the arrival of our two dinner guests, Serge Olinski and His Highness Prince Dmitri Matani.

The sun had gone down in a cloudless, violet sky, and purplish twilight had settled on the Sound and the marshland, stretching westward to a cove, where the lights of the village of Sands Cliff were beginning to twinkle. The silence was more oppressive than the heat. Now and then it was broken by a distant tugboat whistle, like the hoarse croak of a frog, and the faint calling of a thrush for its mate in the thick shrubberies that fringed Jane's flower garden, on the north side of the castle.

Far out in the Sound, two sail-boats were drifting along like tired ghosts. Presently the fringe of the opposite shore became magically outlined by tiny strands of lights. As the gloom of night slowly enveloped the scene, an island lighthouse, a mile away, began to flash its beacon over the dark, graying water with clock-like regularity.

Against this flashing light, the ruins of our own lighthouse showed dark and jagged, on a small, rocky island, rising out of the Sound about a quarter of a mile off our shore, and within easy rowing distance from the yacht landing. Henry had recently purchased the island from the Government, and it was now a part of our Sands Cliff estate. The old beacon tower of stone was built in 1800. In oil-burning days, its light had counted for something, but now it was nothing but a picturesque ruin, and largely populated during the summer by bats.

I had no sooner turned my gaze on the ruined lighthouse when a big bat swooped down at me out of the darkness. Only the night before, one of them had got into my bedroom. I've never been able to overcome my early fear of these nocturnal flying mammals. To my childish imagination, they were the very spirits of evil. I was in no mood this night to be pestered by them. A vague uneasiness possessed me, an uneasiness caused on one hand by Henry's strained and haggard look, and on the other, by his encouraging Prince Matani's attentions to Pat.

Perhaps at the moment, his crazy quest in interstellar communication annoyed me most. I had already suggested to Jane that we send him to a psychoanalyst to be overhauled. This delving into the unknown was too ponderable a matter for a man of his years. It had become fixed on his mind with all the power of an obsession. All that day he had not stirred from his observatory, and now Olinski was coming from town to give a verbal report of his own findings. Much cogitation, much secrecy was, in effect, nothing at all. Unless they now had found the key. Was it possible that Olinski might be bringing a transcribed cipher of a radio message from Mars? His eager acceptance of the invitation to dinner seemed to hold an important significance for Henry.

Desperately bothered by both problems which confronted me, the bats made things more annoying still. Then, sudden-like, in the haunting stillness, I saw something moving towards me from the blackish void of trees and shrubbery bordering the west end of the terrace. At first, I was conscious only of an oncoming shadow, advancing with a rapid, noiseless movement.

I could feel my pulse jumping. Whoever or whatever it was, there was a risk. Rather than face the risk, I moved quietly but swiftly across the terrace towards the front door. But that did not stop the oncoming something; it had suddenly changed its direction and was coming right at me.

Luckily at that moment, the lights were turned on in the lower part of the castle. Then Orkins opened the front door, and gave voice to a surprised exclamation as he saw me making hurriedly for the doorway.

Suddenly I stopped, and turned. The glow of a floor lamp in the entrance hall had spread fanwise across the terrace, and into this arc of light strode--Serge Olinski.

"Oh, hello, Olinski!" I exclaimed, with respectful familiarity, and very cordially, stretching out my hand, and smiling to myself at the start he had given me, coming like an abortive something out of the shadows of the terrace. "That you?"

"Yes; it is I," Olinski replied, shaking my proferred hand, and breathing rather heavily.

I faced a short, dumpy, middle-aged man, with a paunch, and a Russian cast of countenance. Small, intelligent black eyes gleamed through shell-rimmed glasses, from a round face fringed with a short, black beard. He carried his hat, and I observed that his primly sleeked hair was as black as his beard. I had a suspicion that he dyed them.

"I caught an early train from the city, in order to enjoy the benefit of a walk from the village to your beautiful castle," he explained, half breathlessly, "after a most exacting but successful day in the laboratory. A million apologies if I have delayed your dinner."

"Time is infinite in the country, especially on a fine night like this," I remarked lightly, as we entered the hall, and Orkins relieved him of his black top-coat and hat. His dinner jacket, I noticed, was much too small for him, and his waistcoat so short that it came perilously near revealing a section of his middle-age bulge. There were soup stains on his shirt-front, which indicated that his shirt had been out to dinner before.

As I waved him to a chair, I said: "You're really very punctual, even if you avoided our car which was sent to the station to meet you, and walked here. You can depend upon it, Prince Matani will not miss the chance to drive to the castle in state when he steps off the train."

Unconsciously my lips sneered as I spoke the young princeling's name. Olinski nodded and smiled understandingly. "Ah!" he said. "I take it that you do not look with favor on the match your scholarly brother is about to arrange between your charming niece and my noble countryman?"

"To be frank, no," I replied.

"So I gathered. And why?"

"I have very strong reasons for opposing their marriage," I said; "and my sister, Jane, is just as dead set against it as I am. Every one knows that the Prince came to America to make a rich and advantageous marriage. Pat will soon come into a large inheritance from her mother's estate, and we don't want her to throw her fortune and herself away on this--this penniless, titled gigolo."

Olinski chuckled. "Perhaps just a trifle over-perfumed for a man," he said, "and addicted to the habit of biting his fingernails, but such details cannot detract from his royalty. He dances divinely. He seems to be your niece's devoted slave."

"He's been camping on our door-step all summer," I retorted. "Why Henry favors such a nincompoop, I cannot imagine."

"But the charming Patricia seems to have lost her head over him," Olinski rejoined. "So what can you do?"

"It's up to you to do something," I answered, promptly. "You are in a position to know all the discreditable incidents in the Prince's past, and your word carries great weight with Henry. Surely you do not believe that he really loves Pat?"

"Only for her money," Olinski replied. "A make-believe of love. Froth in an empty glass. He needs the money to get his coronet out of pawn, and get the gas and water turned on at the seedy, shabby chateau in France he calls his castle."

"Then you will tell Henry the truth about this threadbare, titled foreigner?"

"Ah, my friend, that will be a great pleasure, although he is the genuine article, you know. I can't disprove his claim to the title."

"After all, I suppose you have a certain fondness for the Prince," I suggested.

"Not at all," Olinski replied, almost wrathfully. "He is the most impudent person I ever met. At the last dinner we attended together, what do you think he said to me? He accused me of smelling of garlic. Did you ever hear of anything quite so low? As God is my witness, I detest that evil-smelling plant, garlic."

He clicked his teeth, and went on with desperate finality.

"I will tell you one thing more, and then I shall have told you enough. Your niece and Prince Matani should never marry, for he has a hereditary malady--sudden and violent attacks which produce unconsciousness. Some great excitement, and, then--pst!--he falls unconscious. At Monte Carlo, he gambled all he had, and lost. Pst!"

"Shocking!" I murmured.

"No doubt about its being hereditary," Olinski continued. "When the Czar of Russia first bestowed the title of prince upon his great-grandfather, Carlos, for his war-like feats, what does his great-grandfather do but get so excited he falls in convulsions at the feet of the emperor."

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