“It frightened me,” Ann continued, “more than I would admit at the time, even to myself; and things that frighten me make me angry. Besides, I was told that it was some kind of spook, and I refuse to believe in spooks.”
THE CASTLE CHASERS
“ARE WE really going to see the castle?” Mercedes asked.
“Maybe,” Seth said. “You never can tell. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes you never see it at all. The best time’s when there’s lots of stars and no moon. Rain like this is the worst, or fog. But the rain’s letting up, and when you do see it in rain or fog, it’s up really close, and that’s a trip. You can practically always see it if you go up to the scenic view after one and really look hard, but sometimes it’s way far away. You know those pictures they have?”
Mercedes sipped her Coke. She had asked for the Super Size to see whether Seth would object, and had more than half of it left. “You mean like your grandmother painted? That’s the only one I’ve seen.”
A black on yellow sign displayed a sharply curved arrow and warned: 40 MPH. Seth took it at sixty. “No, that’s people who just happened to catch it and drew it from what they remembered. Like, Grandma Roberts was pulling weeds and looked up, and there it was, sticking right up out of the trees on the other side of the cornfield. So she watched till it was gone—she says maybe ten minutes, but I think more like a minute—then she set up her art stuff and started the picture.”
“You mean she saw it in the daylight?”
“Damn straight. That happens sometimes too. I saw it like
that when I was a little kid. Take it from me, that’s something you remember. But the photos—”
“I didn’t know they had any.”
“Sure they do,” Seth told her. “Look, we’re going up there right now—suppose we see it. Okay, if we had a camera we could take a picture, but it probably wouldn’t be a very good picture.”
“I’ve got a pretty good camera,” Mercedes said, “only it’s back home. We haven’t moved our stuff yet.”
“What kind? An Instamatic?”
“An Olympus. You know, the clamshell?”
“Sure, I know them. It’s not a bad little camera, but it’s got almost a wide-angle lens. Say you want to get a picture, so you buy some really fast film and take your little Olympus up to the scenic view on a good clear night, around one or one-thirty. There’s the castle, ten or fifteen miles away.
Snap!
Back home you turn in your film at the drugstore, and you get back this little thirty-five neg, and the castle’s a tiny little speck in the middle of it. Then you get somebody to blow it up to some humongous size and cut off all the stuff around it, and there’s a lot of shimmer anyway from the distance. That’s if you were smart and set your camera on the stone railing they’ve got. If you held it in your hands, forget it.”
Mercedes took another sip. “You really do know a lot about photography, don’t you?”
“Sure. I worked in Burke’s Photo Supply this summer. Mr. Burke says he’s going to get me to come in after school whenever he needs me. He’s thinking about staying open evenings one day a week during the winter, just to try it out. The deal would be that I’d come in after, so he could go home and eat dinner. It would be Friday night, if he does it. I’ve got a camera with me right now, a Pentax. I took it in on trade, and he let me keep it. It’s an old model, but it’s got damn good glass.”
“Can I see it?”
Seth nodded. “I’ll get it out as soon as we stop. It’s in the
trunk.” He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed. “Listen, you don’t have to get out to look if you don’t want to. I mean, if it’s still raining. You can stay in the car.”
“I want to. I’ve got a plastic thing to put over my hair. Is that where we’re going? The scenic view?”
“That’s the best, you can see three counties. Not tonight, but on a clear day. Sometimes you can see the river, and into Iowa. I thought this rain was going to stop, you know?”
“It’s not raining as hard as it was.”
“Sure. But it’s still raining.”
“That’s all right,” Mercedes said.
She was watching the black, wooded hillside reel past; it seemed to her that the road they drove was an intruder in the same way that the blade of a saw would have been an intruder, vulgarly revealing the secret, almost silent life of the trees. You were supposed to see things in dark woods like this: bears, wolves, or witches. For the first time it occurred to her that people talked about such things to end the awful stillness, the age-old quiet of wood and stone. A wolf or a witch would be one heck of a relief, she thought.
She said, “It’s not one o’clock now—it’s not even anywhere near midnight. It’s only six-fifteen. At seven-thirty, my mom and I are supposed to meet Dad for dinner at the Golden Dragon.”
“That’s the good thing about a night like this. It doesn’t have to be after one. You might see it anytime. They come in a lot closer in weather like this, right? They think we won’t see them.”
“Who comes in closer?”
“The people in the castle. There have to be people, right? It figures. They’re watching us.”
“Why should people in a castle watch this one little town?”
“How should I know?” For an instant Seth seemed irritated, then he laughed. “If we meet some we’ll ask them, okay? Maybe there’s a weak spot right here where they can sneak through. Or maybe this reminds them of someplace else.”
“Aren’t there ever any other cars on this road?”
“Not this late,” Seth told her.
He had no sooner spoken than she saw one, not really on the road but pulled off onto the shoulder: an old rusted-out sedan, dark and silent. In a second it was past, no longer in their lights, lost, vanished, disappeared into the darkness, the mist, and the rain.
The road angled sharply to the left, and there were no more trees on her side, only unending empty night. Seth twisted the wheel again, more sharply still; the car slowed as he tapped the brakes. A low stone wall rose from the rain dead ahead. “Here we are,” he announced.
“Yeah. I don’t see how we can see anything out there.”
“After I turn off the lights and our eyes get used to it.”
The Olds crept toward the wall. Mercedes wondered how fast they would have to hit it to go right through and over the cliff she felt sure was on the other side. Hadn’t anybody ever done that? Seth wouldn’t, Seth was being careful—though not really as careful as she would have liked—but what if she came up here sometime with somebody else? Maybe with somebody who was drunk or something. She pictured herself in another car, the old dark car she had seen beside the road, plunging over the cliff, down, down, down, until at last it hit the rocks and burst into flame. Some guy was in that car right now making out with some chick, Mercedes thought. Bet on it.
They stopped; Seth put the car in Park and set the parking brake. Mercedes was glad he had done that; most guys, she knew, would not.
“Now,” he said. He switched off the headlights—two quick clicks—and turned off the ignition.
She edged nearer him. “You know, it’s kind of scary, way up here at night in the dark.” She put her Coke on the floor, between her feet.
“Not really,” Seth said. “It’s not like Chicago, where you have muggers and so on. Pretty safe here.”
“I don’t think it’s muggers I’m afraid of—mad slashers or something. I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t worry.” He put his arm around her shoulders, as she had hoped he would.
“I bet you’re on the football team.”
He nodded—she felt the motion of his head. “Wide receiver. But I was only second string last year. I still got to play a lot. I lettered.”
“Maybe they’ll want you where you’re going, too. Galena? Maybe they need a really good wide receiver, somebody with good hands who can run.” Mercedes did not know much about football, but she knew what a wide receiver did; she congratulated herself on that now.
“We’re not moving,” he said. “Not since my dad died.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, gosh.” She felt good, and she felt awful. What kind of a person was she, feeling good because his father was dead? Yet she did.
“I mean, there isn’t any reason to, any more. It was just because of his job. We might still sell the house. Grandpa and Grandma Sary, they’re here, so we might move in with them.”
“Would you mind?” She leaned against him.
“I guess not. Only Aunt Kate’s living with them already, with her little girl, Judy, and Judy’s rotten tomcat. It would be kind of crowded.”
They kissed, and it was not (as Mercedes had always heard it was supposed to be) before she knew what was happening. She knew perfectly well what was happening—that a whole world, new and strange, terrible yet wonderful, was unfolding for her. She understood, when their lips touched, exactly why Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had been awakened by a kiss, knew what those old grandmothers of eight hundred years ago had been trying to tell her, and knew that they
had
told her, their coded message coming clearly across the years, and that those dear old grandmothers—the bent crones at the firesides—had triumphed, their words not lost with the crackling of the sticks
in their fires. That she and Seth or some other like Seth would someday ride on one white horse, laughing in the sunshine.
After a very short interval during which whole ages of the world reeled past he muttered, “I guess our eyes are used to it now, and the rain’s let up a little. Maybe we ought to get out and take a look.”
She said, “Okay,” feeling warm and out of breath and badly in need of cold night air. She got out on her side, hitching up her strap without letting him see, and he got out on his. And the shutting of the car’s doors was not the noise of denial (as it usually is) but the sound of consent, like the note struck by the door of a room when two people go into that room and shut it behind them.
He was correct, the rain had stopped. They stood hand-in-hand at the wall and looked out across the countless hills and valleys spread before them, the hilltops at times nearly clear when they were touched by roving rays of starlight, the valleys drowned in mist from which each hill rose as if from an ocean.
“Maybe we won’t see it tonight,” Seth said. “Sometimes you don’t.”
“That’s okay,” Mercedes told him. “Maybe we could come up here some other night and look.”
“Yeah. You’ll be at the motel?”
“For the next couple days, probably.”
“I could give you a call there.”
“Uh huh. This is pretty, even if you don’t see the castle—all those trees, and hardly any houses.”
Someone coughed some distance behind them, and both looked around. A tall, lean man was walking across the parking space. He coughed again, as if to make certain they had heard him, and said, “Pardon me, folks.”
Seth said, “Sure. You need a ride?”
“I guess I do. We were comin’ up here, but my car conked out. I saw you go past, so I got out and started walkin’ after you.
Hope you don’t mind too much. There wasn’t much else I could do.”
Mercedes said, “No, of course not.”
“If you could stop where my car is, and give me and my date a lift … ?”
Seth nodded. “We were going back to town now anyway, sir. She’s got to meet her folks at the Chinese place.”
Mercedes said, “I’ll ride in back. He can show you where his car is better that way.” For some reason she did not want the tall man sitting behind her; she opened the door and got into the car before Seth could protest.
“Goin’ to get your upholstery wet a little,” the tall man said. “Guess it can’t be helped.”
She studied him in the light from the dash as Seth backed and turned the car. He was as old as her father, she thought, and perhaps older; but a perfectly ordinary man until she shut her eyes. She kept them open, wide open, after she discovered that, staring sometimes at him, sometimes at Seth or the rain-wet trees.
It must have been a long walk for the tall man, Mercedes reflected, up the dark, steep road; but it was only a short way, less than a mile, for them. Seth stopped beside the rusted car, and the tall man got out and peered through the window. His car looked so ancient, so abandoned, that Mercedes was surprised to see the dome light come on when he opened the door. “She ain’t here,” the tall man said, looking surprised himself.
Seth nodded. “She probably got tired of waiting, sir, and started walking back to town.”
“Guess that’s right.” The tall man pushed his damp felt hat back on his head. “We ought to see her in a bit. But you don’t have to sir me, son. Name’s Jim.” He held out his hand.
Seth shook it through the window. “I’m Seth Howard. This is my friend Mercedes Schindler-Shields.”
“Pleased to meet you, Miss,” the tall man said, pulling down the brim of his hat once more. “I’m Jim Long.”
BROKEN GLASS
“THIS is Wrangler’s territory,” Sissy explained, flourishing her flashlight. “He doesn’t really like having us in here even when we come to help him. But we have to—how to take care of horses is one of the things they’re supposed to teach you here.”
Ann said, “I see.” The barn seemed huge, cavernous, in the darkness. Somewhere a horse stamped twice, its sleep disturbed by their voices.
“The main switch for the lights is in the tack room.”
It was full of bridles and saddles, mostly big comfortable-looking cowboy saddles. Until Sissy found the switch, it seemed cobwebby; when the overhead light came on, everything was clean and well oiled.
“What’s that, a pack saddle?” Ann pointed to a contraption that appeared utterly unsuited to human hips.
Sissy laughed. “No way—that’s an old U.S. Cavalry saddle, a McClellan saddle. If you really screw up, you have to use it on the ride next day.”
“My God!”
“It’s a real pain,” Sissy admitted, suddenly serious. “But it’s very easy on the horse—easier even than an English saddle. That was the idea. When the cavalry was chasing Indians, the horses wore out a long time before the men did. Besides, after
you’ve ridden that thing for a couple of hours, killing somebody looks like a whole lot of fun. That’s my own idea; the other I got from Wrangler.”
Ann was examining the McClellan saddle. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d know that sort of thing.”
“He does. He knows just about everything there is to know about horses. You wouldn’t think it, but he’s smart. You know what the conquistadors shoed their horses with?”
Ann shook her head. “I can’t imagine.”
“Solid silver, when they could get it. Rawhide when they couldn’t. Come on. Is there any particular horse you wanted to see?”
“The biggest,” Ann said.
They went out into the main bay of the barn, brilliant now with fluorescent lights. Sissy pointed. “Boomer’s the biggest. He’s a jumper, and a pretty good one. Lisa won on him this year at the state fair.”
“Can you handle him? I don’t understand horses.”
“Oh, sure.” Sissy opened the stall. “Hey, boy, did we wake you up?”
Ann looked in. Boomer was lying on clean straw, blinking sleepily up at Sissy; he did not look dangerous. “Can I touch him?” Ann asked.
“Go ahead. As long as you’re not rough with him, he won’t mind.”
Ann edged cautiously into the stall, and Boomer extended his muzzle toward her.
“He wants you to pat his nose. That means you’re friends—gently, just like you’d pet a cat.”
Ann did, surprised to find it clean and velvet soft.
“I’ve got three cats at home,” Sissy told her, “and horses are a lot more like cats than you’d expect.”
“I never thought of them that way.” Ann shifted her hands timidly to Boomer’s neck. It too was clean and smooth—and dry. Completely dry. “It wasn’t this horse,” she said. “Not unless he’s been blow-dried. Is there another big one?”
They looked at eight horses in all, progressively smaller horses, as well as Ann could judge. None of them were damp.
“Where’s Buck?” she asked at last.
“I thought you’d already seen Buck, and it wasn’t him.”
Ann nodded. “I have, and it wasn’t, but Wrangler said he was going to take the saddle off Buck and bed him down. Where is he? Where’s Wrangler, as far as that goes?”
Sissy appeared startled. “Gosh, I don’t know. He probably thought he ought to make another circle—riding fence is what he calls it. I mean, really, he’s up half the night.”
Ann relaxed and glanced at her watch. “And I ought to get going myself—I have to meet my husband. Thanks for showing me around, Sissy.”
Together they went out to the Buick. The rain had stopped. Ann got in and started the engine, waving to Sissy before making a slow turn in front of the barn and heading back up the gravel road.
It’s been quite an afternoon, she thought, and a very, very large day. Should she tell Willie about Wrangler and his rifle? To get her thoughts in order, she began to review Emily’s recipe for pear jelly: “Let your pears ripen right on the tree, not on the windowsill; and don’t pull leaves off, it don’t do any good. Wash them in soap and water—use a brush. Blanch them and skin them …”
The road took an ugly hook to the left, so that she had to apply the brakes harder than she liked; it had seemed straighter when Wrangler had been driving, but of course he had known every inch of it. She slowed down, and switched on the brights just in time to see a riderless horse gallop out of the darkness and disappear into the dark once more. The Buick skidded a little as she stabbed automatically at the brake pedal.
A soft voice behind her said, “I should not give attention to that, madame. Certainly you will embroil yourself in so many difficulties.”
“The diary!” Shields exclaimed. Afterward, he did not know why he had thought it was the display case containing the diary that had been broken—perhaps it was simply because he had been reading it a few minutes before. Whatever the reason, he dashed into the music room. Behind him he heard Roberts’s feet on the stairs.
The glass was unbroken. The tattered diary lay beneath it exactly as it had before, open to the same page.
Shields stared down at it; around him, the museum waited in silence. It seemed to him that he should have been able to hear Roberts, hear him walking upstairs. It seemed plain Roberts had gone upstairs, believing it had been from there that the crash of breaking glass had come, just as he himself had run into this room.
There were no such sounds, no footsteps—only the pattering of the rain. “Bob!” Shields called. “You okay?”
The telephone rang. He returned to the desk and picked up the handset. “County Museum.”
“Hello? Dad?”
Not Mercedes’s voice. He said, “This is Will E. Shields. Can I help you?”
“Oh. This is Sally Howard, Mr. Shields. Is my father with you? Robert Roberts?”
Shields hesitated, listening to the silence. At length he said, “I think so, Mrs. Howard. Mrs. Howard, I was sorry, very sorry, to hear about your husband.”
“Thank you.”
There was another long pause, a hesitation so long that it seemed that time was one thing to him, another to Sally Howard, for whom minutes were now but seconds, hours merely minutes.
At last Shields said, “Would you like me to try to locate him for you, Mrs. Howard? He’s probably around somewhere.”
“Oh. I thought you were going to. I’ll wait—I’ll hold.”
“It might take five or ten minutes, Mrs. Howard. Why don’t I have him call you? I’m sure he will.”
“All right.”
There was a click, and Sally Howard was gone. Shields hung up his own instrument, and stood listening; the old house was as quiet as before.
Teddy told her, Shields reflected. She’d called for Bob, and Teddy told her we’d come here. No, her mother told her, of course. Bob spoke with her over this very phone—but possibly Teddy had told someone else, possibly that was why someone had broken a glass case or a window, the reason for the silence now.
He dialed the dealership. “This is Shields, Teddy. How’s business?”
“I wish I could say good, Mr. Shields.”
“Anybody been in?”
“Not a soul, Mr. Shields.”
“Any calls for me?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Shields.”
“What about calls for Bob?”
“That’s right, I should have told you. His wife phoned, looking for him—some kind of family matter, I believe. Is he still with you, Mr. Shields? Maybe he ought to call her.”
“Didn’t you tell her where we were?”
“I didn’t know,” Teddy said. “You and Bob just went off. Where are you?”
Shields nearly told him, biting back the words barely in time. “It doesn’t matter, Teddy. Lock up at nine and go home. If I see Bob, I’ll let him know.”
He hung up before Teddy could protest.
Upstairs next; there was nothing else to do. With no great hope he shouted,
“ROBERTS!”
and waited, listening. There was no reply, not even a whisper of sound.
He’s had a heart attack, Shields thought, sprinting up the steps. Why the hell didn’t I think of that? Bob’s an old man. Probably felt bad, sat down somewhere …
And died.
But maybe not. Maybe Bob’s still alive, and if I call for an ambulance in time—
The upper floor was dark. The switches Roberts had thrown when they came in obviously did not control the lights on this floor, so that was where Roberts would have gone first: to the upstairs switches, wherever they were.
He had not reached them. Whoever had broken the glass had reached him first.
And yet they’d be right here, Shields thought. Here at the head of the stairs. They’d have to be. He imagined the doctor and his wife returning from a late dinner party. Their children would be asleep; they would probably have given the housekeeper and the maid the evening off. They would unlock the front door and let themselves in, turn on a light in the foyer, climb these stairs, and turn on another light in this upstairs hall to find their bedroom.
His fingers groped along the wall, feeling only smooth oak paneling. The rain dripped from the eaves as before; but when a second or two had passed, the house was no longer weeping alone in the silence. An instrument with a voice as deep as an organ (though it was not really an organ) sobbed, too, its notes long and throbbing, reedy and infinitely sad. Hearing them, Shields froze. Seconds passed before he identified the melody. It was the “Valse Triste” from
Peer Gynt.
It’s recorded music, he thought, it has to be. There’s a speaker system, and I’m listening to a record or a tape.
Yet the wall he touched seemed to vibrate ever so slightly in sympathy with the deepest tones; it seemed that he could hear the squeak of the pedals.
There’s no switch here. So it must be—has to be—on the other side of the hall. Why would an intruder play music? To cover the sounds of his movements, of course, now that breaking the glass has given him away. Most burglars wouldn’t be that smart—this is no kid, a clever man, a dangerous man.
Shields’s fingertips swept the paneling to his left, found a switch plate, and pushed in the old-fashioned switch.
Light flooded the hall.
It was empty save for three ill-assorted occasional chairs. “Valse Triste” moaned on and on, seeming to gather strength from the light. He could no longer hear the rain.
He had not been frightened earlier in the dark. Or rather, he had been afraid only for Roberts, afraid that the older man was dead or dying. Now it seemed that the yellowish hall light must soon reveal some abomination, showing him the naked face of Hell, or revealing that his own hands were drenched with blood. Those hands shook; so that he would not see them, he jammed them into his pockets. Sick now with fear, stomach churning and legs shaking, he went slowly down the hall.
A doorway opened into a dark room on his right. He reached inside and found the switch; the room was empty except for five display cases pushed against its walls.
And yet something prowled the old house. He wanted to run, to climb into the rusty Cherokee outside and—
The keys!
The thought steadied him, giving him something to think about beyond his own terror. Bob had driven; no doubt Bob had the keys. If he ran now, he would have to run in actual fact, flee along the rain-swept sidewalks of Castleview. As he realized it, he realized too that he would not run; his fear was ebbing—he had not run when it had been worse.
He returned to the hall and strode to the next door; this time the doorway was on his left. When he pressed the switch, floodlights in the ceiling revealed a model town: red brick and shiny black asphalt streets, tiny red and white houses flanked by bright green trees, a town as charming as a child’s drawing. Castleview, of course. He chuckled softly at his own fears as he crouched to look beneath the big table that held the model. The shadowy space was empty of all but dust; and yet something stealthily walked, and there was a pervasive
animal reek, faint but distinct, throughout this upper floor.
As he straightened up, he felt illogically sure that Bob was no longer in the building. He would find Bob, dead, behind the wheel of the Cherokee, perhaps. Or never find him at all.
From the floor below came the sound of breaking glass.