House of Death

CHAPTER IX The House in the Sea

The island was nearly six miles off the Maine coast. It was fairly large — about twenty-five acres in extent. It was wooded, with a large cleared space in the center which rose a few feet above the rest of the terrain.

In the cleared space was a big house. And from a little distance, the house seemed to be rising from the sea itself, instead of having its foundations on dry land.

The place looked a little like an old-world castle.

It was of dark-red brick. There was a central turret, and then a slightly smaller turret at each end. They were flat-topped and looked like crenellated watch towers. There were few windows, and these were small and had heavy bars over them. Under the central turret was a big, blank door of ponderous oak.

The house must have been elaborately kept up at one time; the layout of the grounds suggested great wealth.

But now the grounds were overgrown with weeds and young brush, and the building itself was in bad repair.

It was late night, but the moon was bright and bathed clearly the stained, badly kept old building. Stretches of unhealthy ivy made splotches on the walls.

Into the moonlight, at intervals, from the wooded sections around the once-lovely formal gardens came animals that at first appeared to be calves or ponies — they seemed far too big to be dogs. However, that was what they were: the most ferocious mastiffs, trained in killing, that the present owner of the island could lay hands on.

These four-legged, fanged pets of the devil aided the six miles of open sea in keeping intruders off the place.

Perhaps the man steadily forging through the water in a slow, tireless crawl stroke from the mainland did not know of the existence of the dogs. At any rate, he kept coming on, with singularly little in the way of equipment to protect him from a dozen of the brutes if they ever winded him.

At the moment, whether or not he knew of the dogs, they did not know of him. Nor did the two men in the grim, eerie-looking house.

These two men were in the unkempt vastness of what had been a drawing room. They were the master of the island and his one servant.

The master was a huge man, over six feet and weighing well over three hundred pounds. He had small, rhinoceros eyes, a hide that looked as if borrowed from the same animal, and a small head half buried in his ponderous neck.

The servant was a wisp of a man, harassed-looking, meek, the type of human rabbit who would jump if a small boy looked angrily at him.

“Our visitors will be coming along sometime in the next twenty-four hours,” growled the master.

“Yes, Master Goram,” said the wisp of a servant. He had a high-arched nose, a long, narrow jaw speaking of feebleness of will, and a skin that was too white and too thin. He looked like a cartoon of an aristocrat gone to seed.

“Fix some of the bedrooms so they can at least be camped in,” grumbled the huge man. “Damn it! This house will fall down around our ears soon, if it keeps on going to pieces. But then, it’s only sharing the fate of all the other possessions of the Haygars.”

He picked up a cracking leather case with the initials G H on it and stared at it moodily. The G H stood for Goram Haygar, only living member of the American clan of Haygar.

Goram Haygar was the son of Wendell Haygar. Wendell, of the American branch, had, at one time perhaps, been the strongest and wealthiest of all the strong and wealthy clan. But that was long before this house had been built.

The house had been erected on the island when the family fortunes had almost sunk out of sight. Old Wendell must have designed it as a retreat in which to end his days in comfort, if not in luxury. But even the comfort had disappeared before his death, a few years ago.

In country after country, the Haygars had gotten into desperate circumstances because of things beyond their control. War and revolution had taken their estates.

To one after another old Wendell had poured out financial help, draining his own resources, vast as they were. Lower and lower had sunk his own reserve.

Then he had bought this island and built this home, a sort of castle to guard his old age. But hardly had it been built when he was forced to let servants go, one after another, and was forced to watch the building, still quite new, fall into disrepair because there wasn’t money to keep things up.

At the end, he had been absolutely alone, no servants at all, when death took him. Then the estranged son had come back. The huge man had come to the island announcing that he, Goram Haygar, would take over. And one old servant had come back — the wisp of a man with Goram, now — to help.

The servant didn’t look as though he got much fun out of working for the human elephant who stared at a cracked leather case and grumbled about the way things were going to pieces.

“Are all the dogs unchained?” asked the big man. His little eyes seemed never to blink, but to remain glassily open at all times.

“Yes, sir,” said the servant.

“The doors are all bolted?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. There is always the chance that someone other than the visitors we are expecting may come to see us. And in that case…”

The huge man chuckled, and it was not a humorous sound. In fact, the wisp of a servant shivered a bit.

The big fellow caught it.

“You’re a timid soul, Morgan,” he grinned. “I sometimes wonder why you work out here for me. Certainly, the pay is low.”

The servant shrugged deferentially.

“It is not too easy to get other places, sir. And this place, decayed as it now is, represents a lot to me. I have known the Haygar family since babyhood. Where they are, there is my home — all the home I can ever expect.”

“I sometimes wonder just how much of that is truth,” said the huge man phlegmatically. “You certainly didn’t remember me when I came home, Morgan.”

“You left home when you were a child, Master Goram, to live with your aunt in Hungary. The man is often so different from the child as to be quite unrecognizable—”

Morgan stopped. Both men lifted their heads suddenly. Then they stared at each other, the servant pallid, the master grim-faced.

“Sounds as if the dogs had found something, Morgan.”

The man swimming from mainland to island did not know of the dogs. That was apparent the moment he set foot on the shore. If he had known of them, he would have climbed a tree at once, or gone along a small stream flowing from a spring on the west slope to the sea.

At least he would have taken some precaution about his trail. And he took none.

He pulled from the water and lay in darkness on the handiest flat rock while he rested. The best of swimmers feel a six-mile drag.

After a moment he got up and dressed, taking clothes from a roll in a waterproof sheet that he had carried tied to his neck. Then he started toward the house.

He was a solidly built fellow, and the clothes he had put on were quite good. But there was a practiced furtiveness in his movements that hinted that he might not be unknown to the police.

He had gone a hundred yards toward the clearing in which the sinister-looking house squatted when there was a sound from the spot where he had come out of the water.

The howl of a big dog.

The man’s face whitened. He drew a gun, which had been in the waterproof roll along with the clothes. The gun had a silencer on it. While he had had no chance to case the island and didn’t know of the mastiffs, he had come quite prepared to meet a dog. Even two dogs.

There was a faint sound from behind. The man whirled. A huge brute was just taking off at him, seeming to soar rather than leap. Slavering fangs showed as he drove without a sound for the intruder’s throat!

The man gasped in fear and fired. The dog veered as the slug hit his massive shoulder, but kept coming on. The man fired again, and again whirled as behind him came the howl of the dog that had caught his scent on the flat rock.

Able to deal with a dog, or even two dogs. But the man hadn’t dreamed of the mad pack of brutes on this island.

Two more dogs closed suddenly in on him from the right, and there was an approaching howl from the left.

The man shot the one following him from the sea, then screamed as the two from the right got him and dragged him down. He had a chance to snap one more shot, which missed, and then paralyzing jaws closed on his gun wrist!

The screams that split the silent air were hardly human. They seemed as alien to human lips as the roaring snarls of the great dogs as they jammed together in a knot over a thing that finally was silent and finally became a welter of bone and flesh and shreds of cloth which the mastiffs were still worrying when the huge man and the wisp of a servant got there from the building.

“I don’t think we… we will ever know… who that was,” chattered the servant, pale as death, trembling all over, as he stared at the welter.

The big fellow nodded. He had a thick whip hooked over his heavy wrist by a thong. He cracked this once or twice, and the dogs, recognizing the vicious crack of it as well as the scent of the man, slunk back.

“See where he came ashore, Morgan. There may be a boat.”

The servant went toward the sea on spindly, tremulous legs. Soon he was back with the waterproof sheet in his hand.

“He must have swum out,” he said. “There is no boat, and there is this cloth in which his clothes were kept dry. That makes three that have swum out to only two who came in boats.”

The big man stared at the flattened heap that had been a human being. His cold little eyes did not blink.

“So many men loving the beauties of island scenery by night,” he chuckled, “that they will even face a six-mile swim to enjoy it. Put what’s left of the fellow in this nice waterproof sheet, Morgan.”

The wispy servant looked as if actually about to defy his master at that dreadful order. But after staring at the fat, hard face, and seeing the bullet head sink down a bit farther into the ponderous neck as rebellion was sensed, he didn’t.

He edged the mess into the waterproof fabric, then tottered aside a few yards, and was sick. The big man chuckled. He picked up a dead dog by the hind legs and started toward the house.

“Bring our visitor,” he called back over his shoulder. “We’ll put him in the usual place.”

The servant could barely drag the body, but he managed it. He followed his master around the house to a stone enclosure in the rear. From this came grunting noises. It was, apparently, “the usual place” referred to as the destination of unwanted visitors.

The big man opened the stout oak door of the enclosure, threw the bundled waterproof cloth in, and quickly closed the door again. That was so the things in the enclosure couldn’t get out. They might raise hell if they did, killing even the great dogs.

They were pigs, giants of their kind, three years old and more. But they were not as fat as swine usually are. They were kept a little starved, for just such emergencies as this. Just pigs. But any farmer would rather face a mad bull than a dozen huge hogs in savage semi-starvation.

“You can take care of what is left later,” said the master of this house of terror.

“Yes, sir,” whispered Morgan, licking pale lips. In a little while he would have to fish over the enclosure wall for a few bones and then bury them.

The two went into the house.

“Anything else, M-Master Goram?” asked the servant.

The grim fat man shook his head.

“No! Good night.”

Morgan went to his room, to wait till he should go back out to the enclosure. But his master did not go upstairs.

He waddled downstairs to the moldering basement of the house, instead.

The cellar of this deathly place was almost as elaborate as the upstairs. There were wine cellars with vaulted roofs, with only a few bottles in them, now. There were crypts behind heavy metal doors, in which valuables had once been stored, but which now were empty.

The place was almost like a catacomb. As the fat man waddled, eyes unblinking, with a slow movement like that of a tank, his footsteps rang emptily from vault to vault of the dank and cobwebbed labyrinth.

Yes, like a catacomb, a place of death. So much like it, in fact, that it was only with a sense of horror, and with scarcely any surprise at all, that an observer would have followed the fat man to — an occupied coffin!

It was on ebony trestles in the farthest crypt from the stairs. It was quite an elaborate thing, of polished grayish metal with bronze, or gold, handles. At each end burned a taper nearly six feet tall and six inches through — the kind designed to burn uninterrupted for many months.

In this low but steady light could be seen, through the glass lid, the occupant of the thing.

It was an elderly man, small, delicate, with a skin even more wax-white than dead skin usually is. The eyes were closed and sunken deep; but otherwise, so perfect a preserving job had been done that the body looked more like that of a sleeping man than a dead one.

The heavy owner of the house waddled deliberately to the side of the coffin and stood staring down.

“Hello, father,” he said.

There was a faint, far echo: “. . lo f…”

It was almost as if the stony lips in the casket, four years dead, had really replied. And with callous humor the grim fat man played up to the fantasy.

“I trust you are well this evening?”

The far echo whispered, “. . well… eve…”

“That’s fine. Did you know we had another visitor?” The elephantine humorist waited an instant as if the corpse had spoken. Then he went on: “Well, we did. A fellow managed the swim from the mainland again. I guess you weren’t as smart as you thought, when you bought this island. It would have been better to get one twenty or thirty miles out, instead of six, in spite of the difficulty of getting monthly supplies.”

He paused again, quite as if carrying on a conversation with the corpse.

“I know,” he nodded gravely. “You thought you were acting for the best. But you weren’t. If you had been, you’d have left something better than those damned medallions. A fine heritage they are.”

He hesitated, then shrugged.

“Oh, you think they are a good heritage! You would, revered father. But then, you quite evidently had a screw loose. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have insisted on being put here in the vault in an open coffin instead of being decently cremated or buried. Did you think you’d come to life again, with about six quarts of embalming fluid in you?”

The gross figure laughed, then turned and waddled back toward the stairs, unblinking, phlegmatic, moving like a tank rather than a human being. He left behind him the unburied corpse of Wendell Haygar, once the greatest of them all, builder of this house, father of what, it would seem, was a most irreverent son.