Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974

The mansion was quiet, but she felt the presence of someone else in the room — and then a bony hand reached out to touch her, as cold as the grave...

I

As Eleanor’s cream colored convertible emerged from the stand of pines she braked it to a halt.

There, silhouetted against the bright reds and yellows of the early autumn sunset, was the cross — just as Clara had foretold it earlier in the day.

For long seconds Eleanor sat frozen behind the wheel of her now stationary car, while waves of panic raced up her spine. There it was, the crucifix, with a human figure on it, set at a slightly drunken angle against the sky. Impossible, incredible, waiting there for her arrival at Birch Lake exactly as Clara had said it would be.

Not until a vagrant breeze caused limp coattails to flap lazily against the afterglow did understanding come to Eleanor. Understanding and with it relief that was almost more sickening than the terror it replaced. It was a crucifix, certainly, but it was also a scarecrow, arrayed in the battered top hat and tails of men’s evening regalia a generation ago.

Still, it had been a narrow-rattling experience, the more so because it had been so clearly predicted.

Eleanor mentally retracked the other predictions Clara had offered her over the creamy chicken hash with madeira at the fine old Boston restaurant.

Number one had been the cross, of course, and it was now fulfilled. What had been the others?

She recalled a tunnel of darkness, an image of evil in the night, and a dangerous visitor against which her weapons would prove useless.

It had always puzzled Eleanor that her former stepmother should have a firmly established reputation in Boston, of all places, as a foreteller of things to come. During the brief years of her marriage to Eleanor’s father, Clara had proved herself to be the epitome of the hard-headed, efficient, materialistic, well bred New England woman of sense.

Her invitation to lunch had come out of the blue. It had been months since they had more than conversed over the telephone, and then only over family matters, mostly concerned with the management of Eleanor’s father’s estate, of which they were co-trustees. Since Eleanor, despite the difference in their ages, was also — strong and hard-headed despite the disaster of her own brief marriage to Alan Herrick, a not unnatural coolness had sprung up between herself and her mother.

Not until the Turtle Soup Olerosa was finished and the chicken hash half consumed had Clara mentioned the matter of Eleanor’s projected trip to Birch Lake. Even then, it was to urge her strongly against going.

Eleanor, who was more than half minded to put off the drive to New Hampshire and the old summer estate she had inherited when Alan died, had been startled by Clara’s intensity. Not unnaturally, she had asked her former stepmother why she was so against it.

Clara, a handsome golf-tanned woman who wore her half century jauntily, looked long at Eleanor before replying. Then she said, “Eleanor, you know I have never troubled you with the professional side of my life. You have never indicated the slightest interest in the so-called supernatural.”

Eleanor shrugged, said, “I’ve never had a trace of a psychic experience in my life, Clara. How could I be interested?”

“Your father respected it, Ellie. I don’t know whether he ever told you, but he followed Gerard’s advice on his investments for the last five years of his life.”

Her stepmother’s “Gerard,” she well knew, was her regular communicant with what Clara invariably referred to as “the other side.” Eleanor had always suspected that the sizeable sum her father left in their charge would have increased with or without “Gerard’s” handling but had no desire to argue the matter.

Since Clara said nothing, Eleanor said, “I take it Gerard is against my going to Birch Lake.”

“Dear me, no!” The older woman laid down her fork. “Gerard is never for or against anything. He simply is as knowledgeable about time future as he is about time present and past and, through me, he communicates fragments of his knowledge.”

“Has he ever been wrong?” Eleanor asked.

“Never.” The reply was unequivocal.

“And what does he say is going to happen if I go?”

Almost matter of factly, Clara had told her of a crucifix, of a tunnel of darkness, of an image of evil in the night, and a dangerous visitor against which her weapons would prove useless.

Well, Eleanor had thought as Gerard’s warnings continued from Clara’s firm and well cut lips, she’s trying to scare me off!

From that moment of realization on, the proverbial wild horses could not have kept Eleanor from making the trip to Birch Lake. Nor was it mere Yankee mule-headedness that impelled her to defy all esoteric warnings. An aroused curiosity lay equally strong within her.

She had inherited the Lakeside property without strings of any kind when Alan disappeared, presumably drowned in the lake itself. The seven-year wait demanded by law had ended six months earlier, the demands of the probate court had long been cleared. No one — no one — had the slightest right to prevent her selling the ramshackle old mansion with its outbuildings and four hundred acres of surrounding farm and woodland if she chose to do so.

She had expected protest from her former father-in-law, Alan Herrick, Senior, when the resort development corporation first indicated interest in the Herrick property. She had sought to forestall his objections by making a rent and tax-free residence for the elder Herrick an integral part of the deal — and she had been scrupulous about keeping him fully informed as to what she was doing. She had even arranged quarters and employment for the Patons, the mother, father and daughter, who “did” for Alan, Senior as their fathers had “done” for an older generation of Herricks before them.

But no objections had come, nobody had tossed any sort of monkey wrench into the deal. Eleanor’s final trip to Birch Lake was more formality than necessity, an in-person check on the spot the attorneys of both sides insisted upon.

No motes, no beams, no hand-sized clouds on the clear horizon — until Clara and her unseen communicant sprang their bombshells over the chicken hash at Locke Ober’s...

Now here was presage-fulfillment number one, the crucifix. Score openers for Gerard, she thought. She hoped the other things foretold proved as harmless. Still, as she took the winding, tree-framed turns that led to the old house itself, Eleanor continued to feel a faint stiffness in the hairs at the nape of her neck. It had been, for all of its inanity, an unnerving experience...

She emerged from the close binding of pines and birches into the large clearing at the far end of which Lakeside stood, its upper windows still lit with bright orange flame by the sunset. Actually, the house was an architectural Reign of Terror monstrosity dating from a century ago.

If it was cool in the summer heat, it was almost impossible to keep warm in wintertime. Its pale brown sandstone construction was lined with heavy wainscotting and brocaded wallpapers of an era mercifully long gone. Its many hallways, niches, oriels and windowseats, like its several pantries, were a monument to wasted space.

Yet, lit by the setting sun, it looked as properly in place as if it were a mezzotint structure of the Italian lake district in the brief twin flames of Shelley and Byron. Slowing her approach, Eleanor noted that the lawns were emerald green and smooth, the landscaped trees and hedges neatly pruned, the asters and other autumn blooms in their carefully nurtured beds as bright and orderly as greenhouse blossoms.

Although Eleanor had given virtually no notice of her arrival, she derived a definite impression that she had been expected and her arrival desired for months — although this was her first visit in more than four years.

The old house was in pie-á-la-mode order, the massive dining room silver brightly polished, the fine old Chinese and Persian rugs more lustrous than Eleanor remembered, the hundreds of windowpanes shining and spotless, the as-valuable-as-it-was-venerable furniture without a trace of the threadbare.

The unpleasant aftertaste of Eleanor’s tragic widowhood had caused her to forget the charms of the Herrick manor. It had caused her to forget the charm of the persons who served it as well...

The Patons were older of course wasn’t everybody? she thought with unseemly irreverence as Henry answered her ring at the doorbell. But they carried their years well and their warmth of greeting almost made Eleanor forget how horrid her life with Alan Herrick, Junior, had become before the storm driven night of disaster she had not the slightest wish to remember.

Henry Paton, old-fashioned Yankee straight-razor in shape and carriage, did not wear a butler’s uniform — yet in his short dark jacket and close-fitting grey slacks he somehow, perhaps through his unshakable inner dignity, conveyed the impression of wearing livery.

His wife, Verna, when she appeared beaming from the nether regions of the old mansion to greet her former chatelaine, was spotless and roly poly in starched white, the gold rims of her pince nez gleaming with hospitality. And little Angela, whom Eleanor remembered as a leggy, coltish sub-teenager, was still leggy but no longer coltish, a reserved, grey-eyed off-pretty young woman who performed her duties in assistance of her parents’ labors with effortless smoothness that verged on grace.

Eleanor’s father-in-law mixed the inevitable drinks as usual with the flair that had first attracted Eleanor. Her own upbringing had been straightforward upper-case New England, comfortable, disciplined, prosperous but never extravagant. If her father had a way with hot buttered rums, he could not tell one brand of champagne from another, while vintage remained as mysterious as Aramaic or Sanskrit.

Eleanor had attended good schools tailored to others like herself, had been expected to continue her studies (for what? she often wondered) in one of the Seven Sisters — and would have but for an August visit to a schoolmate whose family summered in Bar Harbor. There she had met and fallen in love with Alan Herrick, Junior.

It was her introduction to a new and fascinating world, a world where charm and beauty and the art of being interestingly attractive, as well as rich, were the gods at whose scented feet its devotees worshipped.

In Eleanor’s world, it was considered a major disgrace for a boy to flunk out of school or college. Alan had not merely flunked out of school — he had been fired for a series of hair-brained naughtinesses with girls and drink and explosive practical jokes from a full spectrum of America’s most expensive private educational institutions.

Yet, instead of feeling shame, he laughed at the experiences — as did his friends — and no one seemed to hold him in disrespect. Career? He wanted none but merely money to indulge his way of life — through an unending series of speculative deals, most of which, Eleanor suspected, would not have met the approval of the solemn faced State Street trustees who handled her own family affairs.

He captured Eleanor’s treasured virginity effortlessly on a moons wept beach, recaptured it as effortlessly two nights later on the Irish linen sheets of a guestroom bed. When he proposed marriage before the week was out, she listened to his proposal with disbelief.

“Why?” she asked him. “What have I left to give you?”

She still did not know the answer. It had not been money — there were scores of young women far richer than she who appeared quite willing to accept him on any terms. Nor could she believe that love had impelled him — love was far too simple an emotion for a young man like Alan Herrick, Junior.

His reply, typically, had been an embrace initiated in soft laughter and concluded with both of them in a condition beyond words. Perhaps, she thought, it had been love, at least in part — or something as near love as an Alan Herrick, Junior, was capable of feeling.

There had been a whirlwind wedding and honeymoon, and then Alan had brought her to Lakeside. There they lived the brief years of their marriage, Alan, Eleanor and Alan’s father, as well as occasional visitors. There they had lived and loved until the night young Alan vanished...

It was a fine old house, Eleanor thought as she moved along the carpeted upstairs hall. As she reached the head of the stairs, she stumbled over something soft and furry that emitted a furious screech. She felt herself falling as the big orange cat darted angrily away, felt herself heading out over the carpeted stairs in what had to be a disastrous crash dive.

Then she was caught by a strong pair of arms, caught and held and gently set down upright, on the top step. A pair of green eyes met hers evenly.

A flat young female voice said, “Careful, Mrs. Herrick. You have to watch your step with animals in the house. You could have had a bad fall.”

Eleanor barely suppressed a shudder. There had been an instant, while the girl held her bodily in mid-air, when Eleanor had thought that instead of saving her, Angela was going to hurl her over the banister to the hardwood floor fifteen feet beneath.

The cold green eyes that looked into hers were unreadable. Eleanor wondered what emotion they masked. Was it malevolence? If it were, she wondered why...

By the time she reached staircase bottom, Angela felt something close to relief. Clara’s Gerard had said nothing about tripping over an orange cat. The fact that he had missed this one took much of the portentiousness out of the scarecrow “crucifix.”

Composing herself, Eleanor went on to join Alan Herrick, Senior.

Seated across the table now from her father-in-law, Eleanor was seized with a sense of timelessness, a feeling that clock and calendar had rolled backward and that she and Alan were once again dining alone during one of his father’s infrequent absences.

She had not met Alan, Senior, until the day of her wedding. He had flown back from Nassau, where he was visiting, barely in time for the ceremony. Her first view of her father-in-law had been three-quarters rear one and she had thought him her fiancé. There were, to confound her, the same slim figures, the same neck and hairlines, the same typical trick of standing with one hand in a trousers pocket and the head cocked slightly the other way.

Nor, when Alan, Senior, turned to face her, had her confusion abated — for he looked far more like a twin than a father. When she remarked upon the father-son resemblance, he had smiled Alan’s dazzling smile and replied in Alan’s casual accents, “Ah, my dear, a good suntan hides a multitude of years — and sins.”

There was not, she found, a multitude of years between parent and child — a mere two decades. And when she perused the family album, she discovered that beneath bygone fashions in clothing and uniforms, behind walrus mustaches, mutton chops and dundreary whiskers, the likeness had persisted for generations in the family.

When she mentioned it to her Alan he had seemed to withdraw from her ever so slightly and had shrugged it off with, “A little likeness can be a dangerous thing, darling.”

Shortly afterward, Alan, Junior, had grown a mustache — and, returning from a trip to Philadelphia, his father had smiled at sight of it and congratulated him upon its trimness. Then Eleanor and Alan had gone to visit her family in Milton and, when they returned, Alan, Senior had been sporting a mustache that matched his son’s almost hair for hair.

This had triggered the first of the conflicts between them that had culminated in the still unexplained tragedy of Alan, Junior’s, death. But now, seated across the fine old mahogany table, Eleanor felt no wish to recall the bad times and the ultimate horror of the storm-tossed night that brought her three-year marriage to its abrupt and tragic end.

Rather, she wished to let the clock turn itself back to the only real time of happiness she had ever known, to let the past reclaim her, wrap her in the security blanket of warmer memories, to wish that events that had happened were still ahead and yet to occur.

She wished — what did she wish? Regarding the face of the man who so closely resembled the one man she had ever truly loved, she wished — for what?

And why, beneath the crust of comfort, did her diaphragm feel the unmistakeable tugging of gut terror?

II

The dinner, as always, was excellent — a tomato consommé lightly tinctured with tawny port, a rack of lamb roasted slowly in soy sauce and vin rosé with small parsley potatoes and incredibly fresh miniature green peas, a salad and a local pale cheddar cheese which Alan, Senior, claimed was unsurpassed by any of its more celebrated and more traveled cousins.

If there was one field of living in which Eleanor had benefitted from her association with the Herricks, it was in that of food. Her own family diet, like that of other old-line New England families, featured a “simplicity” that verged on total lack of flavor and imagination. The Herricks had been dining well since their New York ancestors imported their own wine in pipes from Funchal and yet remained lean and healthy as greyhounds.

Conversation was another art in which she had benefitted, though more in its enjoyment through listening than via her own voice. Throughout the meal, as during its preliminary daiquiri phase on the glassed-in porch overlooking the lake, Alan, Senior, conducted an easy monologue in which she was able to relax and enjoy without feeling forced to compete.

Although, by his own admission, he seldom strayed far from Lakeside, the incredibly young looking older man was astutely and well informed on subjects that ranged from inside Washington gossip to the condition of certain prized small vin-yards on the sun and rainsoaked hillsides of Burgundy. Furthermore, he had an instinct for the right moment to pause and let mutual enjoyment be relished in silences that were never embarrassing, merely restful.

His son, Eleanor recalled, had possessed this same gift although she, herself, had never been able to acquire either the knack or the self-confidence on which it was based.

The Patons, all three of them, served as silently and impeccably as ever.

So why, she wondered as they adjourned to the big living room where a fire crackled warmly in the great stone fireplace against the chill of the early autumn evening, did she feel uneasy, so close to the edge of fear?

Was it the turn-back-the-clock element, coupled with the still fantastic resemblance between live father and long-dead son? Was it her all too vivid remembrance of the daemonaic temper that lurked beneath the facade of easy amiability which had so enchanted her with both men? Was it the old house itself?

Early in their marriage, one wind-howling night, Alan had told her that Lakeside was haunted by the ghosts of more than one Herrick ancestor violently deceased... as it was of certain earlier colonists and Indians who had lived in the predecessors of the sandstone pseudo-Tuscan mansion — frame farmhouse, log cabin, wattle wickyup.

“I’ll take you to the family burial ground,” he had told her. “You can see for yourself.”

It lay beyond a hedge, fenced in by cutback undergrowth less than seventy yards from the woven wood fence that guarded the kitchen area. There were some two-score headstones, ranging from the relatively new white granite pillar marking the grave of the woman who would have been Eleanor’s mother-in-law had she lived, to centuries-old incised grey tablets in which early settlers had carved hideous likenesses of those who lay beneath the marks of their primitive masonry.

Like everything else in and about Lakeside, the graveyard was kept scrupulously neat, yet even at first sight Eleanor had found it depressing. The thought that she, too, might someday lie there, far from her family and friends, had given her an odd and unpleasant sense of rootlessness and inevitability.

Thereafter, when the old house creaked or sighed at night, she listened. Despite her no-nonsense heritage and upbringing, there were times when she had lain awake, trembling, fearful of the spirits of the long dead that surrounded her, whose presence she felt for all of her inability to accept their existence — while Alan, who accepted them as old friends and family, slept undisturbed by her side.

She had told no one of her fears lest she invite ridicule. At the time, she feared derision from the living far more than she feared avowal of the spectral plane.

Now, sitting by the fire with Alan, Senior, sipping fine Armagnac and growing increasingly drowsy after her one-hundred and fifty mile drive from Boston, she was no longer sure which she feared the more. Yet she was definitely afraid.

She was almost relieved when Alan, Senior, finally brought up the matter that was on both their minds — the disposal of the house and grounds when the impending resort development deal went through.

He said, rotating his full bellied brandy inhaler slowly in his hands, “I shan’t deny the selfishness of my concern, Eleanor. I had fondly hoped and believed that you would insist upon the house and its immediate surrounding acres remaining as we have known it, at least until my death.”

Despairing of her ability to explain, she laid it out for him, saying, “Of course, I have tried — in fact, I am still trying. But the engineers and designers of the project insist that...” She went on to tell him of the engineering and projected cost-accounting demands of the huge promotion, which would turn this isolated area of New Hampshire into a super-exurbia, clear of all the growing horrors of city life yet with helicopter communication that would render daily travel to and from Boston and New York entirely feasible.

She explained what she had coaxed them to do in the way of supplying Alan Herrick and the Patons with comfortable, even luxurious, housing in lieu of their old estate.

She concluded, “The real nub of the problem, Alan, seems to be that this is the prize location of the entire area, one which must be turned to account as a sort of country-club marina-on-the-lake if the project is to succeed. Believe me, Alan, I have fought them to the last ditch.”

“But you didn’t need the money,” he told her. “All you have to do to stop the desecrators is to refuse your signature.”

“Once a thing like this is started,” she said, “it’s like trying to stop a bulldozer or a launched rocket.”

“I wish you’d consulted me,” he said, “before you let it get started. Perhaps then I could have persuaded you to put it off for a few years. After all, I am unlikely to be around forever.”

What could she tell him — that it had been launched without her knowledge? This was literally the truth, but to admit such would be to make herself look an utter incompetent — and that she was not prepared to do. She had come back from a long trip abroad to discover the wheels already turning.

To stop it now would be impossible. For one thing, it would put too many persons out of work, even though the development corporation could well afford the losses involved.

He said, looking weary and old for the second time in her memory — the first was after his son’s disappearance following the frantic fight of which she still knew next to nothing — “Well, sleep on it child. Perhaps, when you view Lakeside in the morning, you’ll feel differently about ordering its execution. You have never been a hardhearted girl. At least, never before...”

He stopped it there, letting it hang. Although his voice had not risen, Eleanor could sense the full-bodied fury gathering behind it, the fury she had experienced but once before. His neck seemed to have thickened and his eyes recessed into tunnels from whose bottoms they gleamed brightly, wickedly, in the firelight.

She promised to sleep upon it, said good night and left him sitting there. As she passed beyond the threshold of the fine old room, she heard the tinkle of glass behind her. Without looking, she knew Alan, Senior’s, anger had caused him to crush the crystal inhaler he held cupped in his hands.

Oh, dear! she thought. I hope he hasn’t cut himself.

Her human instinct was to turn back and offer help, but her experience of the Herrick temper was such that she knew it would be received as insult added to injury. Even her Alan reverted to such childishness when he lost his temper. Mercifully, he had never grown angry with her. But she had seen him explode twice in the brief course of their marriage — and both occasions were remembered with distaste.

The first such occasion had occured on the golf course. It had been the reaction to a succession of stupid mistakes by others, culminating when his caddy directed him to use a wrong club. This had resulted in his hitting an approach into a water hazard short of the green, which was masked by a rise in the ground from where Alan’s ball lay.

When he saw the result of the faulty instruction, he had not said a word... but his neck and thickened and his eyes sunk unnaturally deep in his head. He had stood looking at the small pond in which his ball had vanished — then had picked up the boy bodily and tossed him into the water.

There had been reimbursement — the fit of fury had vanished as quickly as it had come — and Alan had been sweetly apologetic to all concerned. But Eleanor had been disgusted by such childishness and had told him so when they reached the privacy of their room, concluding, “If you ever show violence again in my presence, I shall leave you — and that will break my heart, for I love you very much.”

The second occasion occurred on what was to be the last evening of her husband’s life. On that occasion, he had returned for dinner from a trip alone to the little town of Unity nearby. He had not stated the reason for his visit but, after dinner, father and son had retired to the study for what she presumed to be a private chat. Seated alone in front of the fireplace, she had heard the murmur of their conversation, lulling as the gentle flames in her ears.

Then there had been silence — a silence that for some reason disturbed her — and she had risen to seek its cause. In the study door, she had hesitated. Father and son were facing one another, glaring at one another with what she knew instinctively was mutual fury.

In choked, barely audible tones, she heard Alan, Senior, say, “So you see, you don’t know what you’ve done, you fool.”

In almost the same conversational tone, her Alan had replied, “You should have told me. Now there is something I must do.”

“I must warn you... you idiot — that—” The father spoke to empty air as his son pivoted and left the room, walking blindly past Eleanor without seeing her and on out into the night.

It was the last she had ever seen of him, living or dead. The earth might have swallowed him up — or, as a coroner’s jury had tentatively decided, the dangerous currents and bottomless holes of Birch Lake, just beyond the brim of the lawn.

Shortly after that, a lawyer from Unity had summoned her to tell her that, on the afternoon proceeding his disappearance, Alan Herrick, Junior, had willed all his earthly goods, including Lakeside and all it contained, to her. It was, she thought, almost as if he had known he was going to die, bad known it in advance...

Oh, she — and they — had searched endlessly, had advertised, had hired tracers in a vain effort to discover what had become of Eleanor’s husband. Finally convinced of his fate, Eleanor had removed herself from the house of so many now useless memories after a discreet interval during which she and Alan Herrick, Senior, remained the polite strangers that, in actuality, they had always been.

As Eleanor reached the hall, she was moved by a sudden desire to step outside, to get a whiff of fresh air. The dinner sat heavy on her stomach, the airy old house seemed suddenly to close in on her. The need to fill her lungs with fresh country night air, untainted by smog or gasoline fumes, was urgent.

Instead of stepping out the front door, she chose the other route, around and under the staircase to the French windows that led to the flagged terrace overlooking the lake beyond the bluff.

The moon, near full, was ringed with clouds rendered white by its glow, but the light it gave enabled her to see where she was going.

As if directed by some unseen guide, she moved off the terrace, past the trellis that screened off the kitchen yard, to the gap in the row of tall slender trees that guarded the family burial ground.

She felt drawn by some unseen lodestone whose pull she could no more have resisted than she could have checked her own near-fall down the stairs unaided.

Thanks to the night darkness, she was unable to view the hideous caricatures on the older headstones, those grotesque incisions that made horror masks of what were presumably intended to be likenesses of the departed.

But the moonlight enabled her to see the white granite shaft that marked the final resting place of Alan’s mother — and the new matching shaft that, she realized, must symbolize the grave of Alan, Junior — her Alan, whose body had never been recovered.

Confronting the fact of his death in such fashion, Eleanor felt its reality for the first time, like a sudden hard blow to the diaphragm. For long moments, she stood there breathless, mindless, aware only of the hard fact of his death, of the glossed over loneliness with which she had lived ever since.

When other awareness slowly returned, she felt that she was not alone — not physically alone, there in the graveyard. Some other presence had made itself felt through the numbness that had seized her senses.

Since she was not aware of having heard any actual sounds, she felt a sudden rush of hope — or was it fear? — that her husband’s spirit had come back to join her from wherever it now was...

She stood there, still as a statue, holding her breath, waiting for some further evidence of the existence of the other. When none came, she inhaled deeply, carefully, and slowly turned her head in the direction in which her instincts told her the presence lay.

The evidence she sought came swiftly with a rush of soft sounds beyond the barrier of trees that separated the graveyard from the immediate neighborhood of the old house. Whatever this was, Eleanor realized, it was no spirit, and she strode toward it. When she reached the gap in the trees, she was in time to see an orange and furry tail disappear around a corner of the woven wood trellis.

She wondered if the cat had it in for her — and why. And then, in the dew-damp grass just in front of her and to her left, she saw the faint imprint of a human shoe, limned indistinctly by the moonlight’s angle.

Even as she looked, it faded as the moon itself slid behind a growing mass of clouds. Eleanor shivered and hastily retraced her steps back to the house...

In the upstairs hallway outside her room, Mrs. Paton, plump and matronly, was waiting for her. She was no longer smiling as she opened the bedroom door and stood back for Eleanor to enter. She stood on the threshold, apparently unable either to speak or to take her leave.

Wishing to be alone with her own thoughts, Eleanor said, “What is it, Verna? I promise I won’t bite.”

Verna Paton shuffled her feet, a ridiculous jiggle for a woman so butterball round. She gulped nervously, then said rapidly, “I just want you to be careful, Miss Eleanor. If you need help, it’s in the drawer in the bedside table.”

Then she was gone, after peering in both directions along the hall outside to make sure she had not been overheard. Eleanor stood looking after her, seeking an explanation of the absurd performance.

Since the solution, if indeed there was a solution, lay in the drawer of the fine old cherry-wood bedside table, she went to it, pulled the drawer open. There, lying on its side, was a small, snub-nosed revolver with every visible chamber loaded?

Although she had been bone-tired before her encounter with Mrs. Paton, Eleanor discovered, once she lay down, that all trace of sleepiness had vanished. In place of a comfortably filled stomach and the added sleep-inducement of good brandy after dinner, she felt a nausea in the pit of her stomach and an unpleasant metallic taste at the base of her tongue.

For an instant, visions of Borgias danced in her head and she wondered fearfully if she might not have been poisoned. Certainly, she felt all the classic symptoms. By a great effort, she dragged herself out of the covers, across the well rugged floor, through the passage lined with clothes closets with sliding doors, to the old fashioned big bathroom beyond. There, she stuck a finger down her throat and made every effort to eliminate the toxic material she must have swallowed.

But she couldn’t throw up. The food remained stubbornly in her stomach, try as she would to get rid of it. At length, having developed the added symptoms of trembling, weakness and intense cold sweats, she was forced to take the walk back to the bedroom and lie once more between the fine muslin sheets, now drenched with her perspiration.

Somewhere outside, beyond the open window, a loon uttered its jarring call. Eleanor jumped and trembled helplessly at the familiar noise before she recognized it — and, with recognition, devastating realization of what was wrong with her. For the first time in her usually sheltered life Eleanor Worden Herrick was feeling fear.

Apart from the inevitable minor panics of growing up and the nagging frights of adulthood, she had never before made the acquaintance of what Alan called the brass chills.

Having recognized the nature of her malaise, like any basically sensible person, she set about analyzing its origins to determine its proper treatment.

Its roots probably lay years back in the events proceeding Alan’s disappearance from this very house — events alarming enough to have given rise to terror in a person more sensitive than herself.

Undoubtedly, Clara’s behavior at luncheon and the unexpected appearance of the scarecrow “crucifix” had further primed her. Her former father-in-law’s inexplicable cold rage had added its fuel and the final touches had been given by Verna Paton’s curious warning and the revolver in her bedside table drawer.

Thus analyzed, her fear seemed foolish and she waited for it to evaporate so that she could get some much needed sleep. She lay down and composed herself and, in her mind’s eye, retraced a much loved woodland walk, a trick of recall that almost invariably left her in slumberland.

But this time, it didn’t work — not quite. Just as she began to drift off, the loon uttered its cry again, and a hoot owl made a jarring chorus of it. Eleanor came instantly awake but tried again, resolutely determined to shut out all natural noises from her consciousness.

This time, however, it was the noises of the old house that caused her to forfeit slumber. Nor was it merely the usual nocturnal complaints of rheumatic joists and floorboards. Rather, it was a sense of living creatures rustling about, somehow always just out of earshot, or, worse, the rustling of creatures that lived no more. The graveyard ghost stories Alan had told her returned to the forefront of her memory with a rush.

Tired or not, Eleanor realized that she had had it where sleep was concerned, at least for the time being. She decided the only thing to do was to take a hot bath in the hope that a prolonged soak in the tub might relax her sufficiently to make a return to bed worth while. But as the creakings and rustlings continued around her, she wondered if bed were not the safest place for her to remain against the faceless mindless menaces her imagination had conjured up.

No, she decided, she was not going to be deterred. She set her chin and spirit resolutely against the idiocy of panic and, sliding her pajama clad legs over the edge of the big bed, took a deep breath.

Yet, when she walked toward the closet lined passage, the loaded pistol was in her right hand — and, when she reached the passage, all light was suddenly cut off as the door behind her was silently and swiftly closed...

III

Even in that moment of ultimate terror, a thought of Clara and her lunch table premonitions flashed through Eleanor’s mind. With a grim gallows humor she had never suspected she possessed, she thought, Gerard, you’re back on the beam...

First the “crucifix”, now the “tunnel of darkness” — one, two, button my shoe...

Somebody had turned off the lights and closed the door behind her. Somebody — or something. With that, the revolver in her hand felt as useless as Clara had predicted it would feel.

Strangely, the chill weakness of panic that had gripped her on the bed had faded before an adrenal surge that gave her a grip on herself. She thought, I have this gun, and she sensed that, sooner or later, her assailant, whatever its nature, must show itself.

Then she would shoot — or would she? And, if she shot, would she hit the target?

Eleanor was proficient at skeet shooting, but she had never in her life fired a hand gun. She had been told it was a lot more difficult to hit anything with a pistol, thanks to the shortness of its barrel and its lack of recoil mechanism.

Well, she thought, I’ll soon find out...

She had been standing perfectly still, holding her breath, utterly undecided as to what to do.

There were three ways she could go, none of them exactly promising. She could feel her way back the way she had come, try to open the closed door and face her antagonist if it were still there. She could work her way onward through the “tunnel of darkness” until she reached the bathroom and there try the light switch. Or she could slide open one of the wardrobe closet doors and hide inside.

Eleanor decided upon the second course as the one her enemy would least expect her to follow. Moving slowly, carefully, silently, she took long seconds to cover the six feet that separated her from her goal. As she felt the door in front of her and found the knob and opened it, she welcomed the light that flowed dimly through the room’s small, pebbled window.

After the Calcutta-hole darkness of the passage, it was like sunlight at high noon. Thanks to the adjustment of her eyes, she could make out the bowl, the toilet seat, the long rectangle of the tub and the stall shower beyond it without difficulty. She could even see the switch, within easy reach on the wall to her right.

Again, she hesitated. If she turned it on, she would become an easy target for anyone within range and armed. This, she told herself, was nonsense. If anyone were within range, he was in a position to dispose of her in such light as there was.

Taking another deep breath, she pressed the switch button — and the bathroom was flooded with light and utterly empty save for herself.

All at once, she felt utterly idiotic standing there in her sweat-damp pajamas, holding the loaded pistol in her right hand. The whole evening became farcical rather than grisley. Squaring her shoulders, she marched back through the corridor, opened the bedroom door — and was greeted by the warm glow of the shaded lamp on the cherrywood bedside table.

She remembered, then, that Lakeside, like many another old dwelling built before electric lighting came into use, had frequent fusebox problems. Evidently, their condition had not been improved over the past seven years. As for the corridor door that had closed behind her, it could have resulted from a number of natural causes.

Yet not a trace of draft or breeze stirred the air of the room — nor could she remember feeling any since coming upstairs. Perhaps, she thought, the current of her own body passing through had made the door swing shut behind her. She retraced her steps, testing this hypothesis, but this time the door did not move.

Moving back into the bedroom, she finally decided that, if puzzling, it was not exactly grounds for renewed panic. She went back to the bed, realized that she was still holding the revolver, put it back in the night table drawer and closed it.

She told herself sharply that she had allowed herself to have a first class case of the old fashioned vapors, that she was going to take her bath and get back into bed and get the sleep she needed after a tiring day and evening. It was high time to set the spirits in the old house at rest — at least let them mind their own business.

Still, after closing the drawer upon the gun, she hesitated, again holding her breath, listening. She could have sworn she heard a noise. But, like the previous sounds she had heard, it remained tantalizingly out of earshot when she sought to fix it firmly.

I’m getting them again, she thought.

And then she heard them again...

This time, the sounds slowly became identifiable as human voices and movement. The voices grew louder, then ceased, but she heard definite sounds of footfalls in the hallway outside the room. They, too, grew louder as they approached the bedroom door, then halted, to be succeeded by a gentle knocking and her former father-in-law’s voice saying, “Eleanor, are you all right?”

She said, finding to her surprise that her voice was quite steady, “I’m all right, Alan. Why — is something the matter?”

“A little fusebox trouble,” he replied, “Henry has fixed it. These damnable antique circuits! May I come in?”

She was puzzled but replied in the affirmative after slipping into the bed and covering her sweat-dark pajamas with the sheet. He entered, wearing a dark blue flannel robe over blue-and-white-striped pajamas, and she was shocked again by his likeness to his son, especially with his usually perfectly groomed hair tousled.

He said, “I hate to disturb you further, my dear, but since we are both up...”

All trace of anger had left him. His manner could not have been more charming as he stood by the bedside, hands buried in the pockets of his robe, looking down at her with a faint hint of apology in his raised left eyebrow.

She knew what it was, tried to make it easy for him. After all...

“I suppose it’s the house,” she said.

“One final plea. It means more to me than you have any idea of to live out my days here at Lakeside. I have had a document drawn up. With your signature, it will give me and the house life tenure.”

“Alan,” she said, feeling dreadful about it, “I hate to sound like a heartless monster, but it’s too late. The contracts have already been signed and the parties concerned are merely awaiting word of my visit here to go ahead. What you ask is impossible.”

Very quietly, he said, “Eleanor, nothing is really impossible. You could stop them.”

“But I can’t!” She all but wailed it. “And it’s not my fault. It was Clara who got the whole thing launched while I was abroad. I didn’t really understand what was happening until it was too late.”

“Clara!” He all but spit the words.

“I don’t blame you for being angry,” she said, “and part of the responsibility is mine. I should have read the proposal more carefully. At the time, though, I was not too well.”

His hands stirred in his robe pockets. He sucked in his breath, then said, “Sleep on it, my dear. I’ll let you read the paper I have prepared in the morning. Perhaps by then you’ll feel differently about destroying this fine old place.”

“Perhaps.” It was the best she could do to reassure him, even though it meant little. A few hours would hardly alter the situation Clara had brought down upon the old man. Clara...

As Alan, Senior, closed the hall door quietly behind him, Eleanor hugged her knees and pondered the paradox of her stepmother — a woman as hard headed as a steel bit, yet sufficiently sensitive to be in great demand as a medium.

You and your Gerard! Eleanor thought, uncoiling and lying down, managing to turn out the light just before slumber overcame her and she fell into a sound sleep...

When she awoke, it was still pitch dark both outside and in the room. She lay there, while the tatters of sleep dissipated like shreds of cloud scattered by a sudden gust of wind. She had a distinct impression that someone — something — had awakened her and she lay perfectly still, waiting for some further sound.

It came, and this time there was no question but that it was I sound made by some alien agency — she heard the hall door shut softly and knew instantly that it was the sound of its being opened that had wakened her. Since her back was to the door, she could not try to see who the invader was without revealing herself to be awake... and she was not ready for that.

Mercifully, the bedside table with its loaded drawer was on her side of the bed, toward the tall windows that looked out at the night over the porch roof.

Then she heard the unmistakable creak of a floorboard complaining under the weight of a human foot. Then it came again and then was replaced by the softer sound of a footfall on the rug. Two more steps and whoever it was would be standing directly over the bed. It was time to do something...

Relying on speed and surprise rather than on stealth and concealment, Eleanor rolled from the window side of the bed and yanked the bedside table drawer open. Before she could clear the weapon, however, a tall dark form, shapeless in the darkness, dived across the bed toward her and a long bony hand reached for the weapon with long bony fingers.

For a long, agonized moment, she wrestled for the weapon against strength far greater than hers. At one instant she thought she was going to win as the opposing grip seemed to weaken — but then the hard edge of a hand came down on her wrists with sickening force and the revolver fell to the carpet.

So great was the pain, so helpless her condition, that for the first time in her adult life Eleanor screamed.

A hard thin hand gripped her shoulder, and she thought she was done for — but her pajama top tore and she broke away, with her pursuer coming after her. Just as he grabbed her again, she tripped over the leg of a chair and fell head-long beside the bed, her arms out-flung — to touch something hard and cold and of peculiar shape on the carpet under the edge of the bed.

It was the revolver Verna Paton had given her, and she gripped it like a drowning woman gripping an oar in the water. As she rolled over, holding it, her pursuer gave her a kick in the side that sent her tumbling and caused her shot to go wild. It also brought the one-sided contest to a brief halt in the very last possible instant.

Eleanor felt as if her right ribs had been stove in. She was sick to her stomach and her head was swimming. Only by the greatest of efforts was she able to retain consciousness. She could hear hoarse breathing close by and wondered if, by some miracle, she had actually hit her assailant.

No such luck. Instead, the revolver was snatched from her no-longer-resisting fingers by an accurate swoop of one bony hand, just as the other delivered a stunning blow to the side of the head that made the world scream like a police siren.

At that instant, the room seemed to blaze with light and, for an instant, Eleanor saw before her, in a long vertical rectangle of brightness, the image of her dead husband, standing upright and looking down at her with his handsome face suffused by anger and fear.

There was a hoarse cry from somewhere and the sound of a series of loud explosions as unconsciousness finally claimed her...

When she came to, she was lying in another bed, feeling battered, bruised and achingly sore all over. Sunlight streamed in through other windows in the old house, giving a magnificent view of the far shore of the lake in the full scarlet and yellow brilliance of its early autumn foliage.

She discovered that she was. naked from the waist up, with canons of modesty offered via the corset of plastic bandages that covered her chest and right side.

She also discovered that Clara was seated in a chair by the windows with a huge cup of coffee on a small table at her elbow, regarding her stepdaughter through a cloud of pale blue cigarette smoke. Eleanor was never quite so glad to see Clara in her life.

Noting that she was awake, the older woman said, “I won’t ask you how you feel if you won’t ask me what happened.”

Eleanor managed a sawdust smile and said, “I feel lousy, so do your stuff.”

“You took a hell of a beating,” said Clara.

“Who did it?” Eleanor asked and knew the answer even as she spoke.

“Henry Paton,” said Clara. “What a tough old buzzard! It took both policeman to get him in hand.”

“Alan,” said Eleanor as memory came flooding back. “Is he all right? I heard shots just after I saw him.”

“Whichever Alan you mean,” said Clara matter-of-factly. “I’m afraid they’re both dead. Your Alan seven years ago as we thought, old Alan last night. You mustn’t feel too badly, though. He died saving your life. If he hadn’t waded into Old Henry’s pistol, you’d have been dead before I could get up there with the cops.”

She paused, then continued. “Yesterday afternoon, I kept getting worse vibrations from Gerard, until finally he told me to come up here after you. Well, I had generator trouble outside of Portsmouth, and the communications got worse and worse. I got hold of the police, thanks to Gerard, and we only just made it.”

“Was Henry Paton insane?” Eleanor asked. She was still, mercifully, too numb to feel shock or grief over that Clara had just told her about her husband and about her former father-in-law. That would come later. For now, though, she had to know.

“Not so you’d notice it,” said Clara, “unless all murderers are lunatics. Incidentally, it was Henry who did your Alan in. You see, he helped cover up the fact that old Alan killed his wife in one of his famous rages — the last time he ever let go and got violent. That left the Patons with a nice cushy spot for life working the estate reinforced by the hold they had over the old man.”

Eleanor said, “Alan’s mother must have been afraid his father would kill her or something. That must have been why she left the estate to her son. It was the evening after he made a will leaving it to me that he disappeared.” A pause, then, “So Old Henry killed him then. How do you know all this?”

“Your father-in-law talked before he died — he left you his love and regrets by the way — and they dug up the bodies in the graveyard. Oh, it all checks out.”

“I suppose the bodies in the graveyard were the reason Alan, Senior, was so dead against the development project.”

“Right,” said Clara. “I thought their attitude was unreasonable from the start, so I’ve been doing a little research on the sly — and, may I add, not liking what I found. That was why I did my best to keep you from coming up here yesterday — not, at least, until we had proved out our suspicions about something being very rotten in this particular Denmark.”

“But Clara,” said Eleanor, “you must know you talked me right into it.”

“And into a couple of broken ribs, as well,” said Clara, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “I should have known better than to use that approach, but Gerard sometimes has ideas of his own. I know how stubborn you Wordens can be. I ought to. I was married to your father as you may recall now and then.”

“It’s all right, Clara.” In that moment, Eleanor felt a warmth toward her hard-headed stepmother she had never felt before — a warmth and some small understanding of the sensitivities and loyalties that underlay the walnut-hard shell of her personality.

“Tell me,” said Clara, “how did Gerard’s predictions pan out?”

“Don’t you know?” Eleanor countered.

The two women looked long into each other’s eyes and then Clara half-smiled and said, “Perhaps I do at that.” She rose, added, “It’s been a long hard night. I’m going downstairs and make some more coffee. How about you?”

“Sounds fine,” said Eleanor.

But when Clara returned with a laden tray, the young widow was fast asleep...