Within That Room! (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

THE LOCKED CELLAR

They went through the oil-lighted regions. Then they explored the rambling conservatories and broken-down stables which, after a bit of restoration, might hold a car. From here they descended into a dingy abyss of basements. The cold down here was a shock to Vera and she stood looking round on stony emptiness. There were gray walls with rings in them; a ceiling of granite with rusty hooks imbedded in the stone.

“What are the rings for?” Vera questioned.

“I believe, miss, that this was once a torture chamber. The prisoners were fastened to those rings in the wall, their arms outspread, and then they were ‘persuaded' with the help of the old forge there.”

The woman nodded to a corner where stood an ancient fireplace—similar to the type used by a blacksmith. The back had collapsed inward amidst a mass of bricks and oddly colored red-brown ash. At the back of it was a black square denoting the flue. Projecting from the side was the curved handle that had once worked the bellows.

“You will observe the branding irons,” the housekeeper said, indicating an array of differently shaped bars in a rack above the fireplace. “Irons for every type of persuasion. For burning of the skin, for obliteration of the eyes, for—”

“All right, all right,” Vera interrupted. “You needn't bother. What are the hooks for?”

She looked above her and the ghost of a sadistic smile crossed Mrs. Falworth's face.

“For hanging purposes purely, Miss. I have little doubt that victims were suspended up there in all manner of positions in the old days. Medieval, of course, but I am sure it must have been most effective.”

“Must have been,” Vera agreed. She looked around quickly for something to change the subject—and found it. “Is that another cellar there?” she asked. “That door?”

“That is an ancient wine cellar, miss—empty of wine, I regret to say. We use it now for the storage of disused articles.”

Vera's blue eyes moved again around the chasing shadows. The gloom, the silence, the spitting of the waxed torch: they were horrible things. Medieval, slinking unbidden into her soul. “Let's get back upstairs!” she said abruptly.

So they left the basement by the stone steps that led out at the side of the main staircase in the hall. From here the tour continued, covering Uncle Cyrus' library—remarkable for its many showcases containing dried plants and insects—the huge drawing-room; then up the stairs to each of the twelve bedrooms. Of them all, fully furnished, only two were in use—Vera's own, and the Falworths', two rooms removed from her. But there was yet one other room at the far end of the corridor, the edges of the door taped, and heavy screws driven through the door into the frame.

“What's in here?” Vera asked curiously, stopping beside it.

“That, miss, is
the
room,” the housekeeper answered, holding the torch high over their heads.

“Where the ghost walks, you mean?”

“Within that room is a core of evil manifestation—and I would warn you never to enter it if you value your life and reason.”

Vera's firm little chin began to set. She turned and looked at the housekeeper coldly.

“Look here, Mrs. Falworth, do you suggest that I own this house and yet have one room in it forever locked—always wondering what is inside it? I'm not that kind of a girl. It has got to be opened tomorrow. I intend to put an end to this phantom nonsense once and for all.”

The housekeeper stood erect, forbidding. “I do not wish to seem disrespectful, miss, but I must refuse to obey that order. I will not under any circumstances open that door!”

“Then your husband must.”

“I am sorry, but I shall not permit him to.”

A glint came in Vera's eyes. She said: “Maybe you have forgotten that it is I who give the orders here? You won't permit him, indeed! If I say this door is to be opened, it will be opened!”

Mrs. Falworth relaxed her frozen attitude suddenly. She caught hold of Vera's arm.

“Miss Grantham, won't you please see that I am trying to save you from an unimaginable disaster? I tell you—I swear to you—that if you go in that room your senses, your reason, will be blasted right out of you!”

Vera stared at her.

“But how do you know that such a horrible thing will happen?”

“Because it has happened before! Your uncle went into this room last year to lay the ghost, and he emerged just on the borderline of insanity! For many months he was raving and it took every bit of my nursing skill and Dr. Gillingham's medical knowledge—he is the village practitioner—to restore his health.

“Even then, we were not very successful, for his dreadful experience undoubtedly hastened his end. This room does not contain just a commonplace spirit or apparition—in fact, the ghost is only visible once a year—but an overwhelming sense of evil even though the room is empty. That evil can destroy you, mentally and bodily!”

“Well!” Vera looked at the door and then folded her arms. “To think of that! A piece of screwed-up wood between me and the booby hatch! Who fastened the door like this anyway?”

“It was done at your uncle's order last year, after he had entered here. He had the key thrown away and the room has never been entered since.”

Vera considered for a while, then she gave a shrug.

“Well, for the moment I'll leave the matter alone, but I intend to have this room opened finally, so you may as well make up your mind to it. At the moment I am rather too sleepy to care about anything, ghosts included. Does this end the tour?”

“Unless you wish to see the closed wing?”

“Not tonight.”

“Then you have seen everything, miss.”

“Not quite everything, Mrs. Falworth,” Vera said. “Anyway, thank you for showing me round. I'll go on to bed, I think, while I am upstairs.”

The housekeeper nodded. She was her tall, impassive self again with that strange light shining in her dark eyes.

* * * * * * *

To Vera, despite her trying day with its unexpected excitements, there came little desire for sleep. She was overtired and could not compose herself as she lay awake in the big, old-fashioned bedroom thinking over all she had seen and done. Once or twice she must have dozed, but only briefly. Then toward three in the morning, according to the big grandfather clock in the hall, which seemed to chime with needless somberness, she heard a sound in the corridor—the softest of footsteps.

For a time she lay listening intently, half expecting to see the knob on her locked door move back and forth in the moonlight. But nothing happened and the sound presently died away. The huge residence was deathly still again.

The only explanation for the sound seemed to be that the Falworths were on the prowl. Vera got out of bed and into her dressing gown and slippers. Picking up the old poker from the fireplace, she tiptoed to the door and unlocked it. Opening it an inch she listened. There was no sound save the
tick-tock
of the grandfather clock below.

“Well, come what may, here I go,” she said to herself, and went into the corridor.

It was deserted—with the moon casting a faint tracery of colored beams through the stained glass window. Feeling none too sure of herself, Vera crept to the staircase and then went down it silently, pausing to listen at every five steps.

She had gained the bottom when the first sounds reached her—curious sounds, like the clanking of two pieces of metal on each other.

She frowned in bewilderment and looked over the staircase's stone rail at the dim, shadowy outline of the door leading into the basement. It was from that spot that the sounds had come. She took a firmer grip of the poker and went to the cellar door and opened it. Down below everything was dark but there were sounds, the unmistakable clink of metal and an odd swishing sound as though somebody were having a bath.

For quite a while Vera hesitated, then clinging to the basement stair-rail with her free hand she felt her way down into the darkness. But she only got halfway down before her nerve began to fail her. Alone here in this strange old house, facing a doubtful old man and an icily respectful housekeeper— It was no place to be at three in the morning.

Then there came to her an awful smell. It surged up in waves as she went lower. It seemed to be drifting from the direction of a thin bar of light low down in the gloom. Holding her nose and staring fixedly, Vera saw that it was leaking from under the door of the cellar Mrs. Falworth had said was full of disused articles.

Vera realized it required no genius to judge that all was not as it should be in Sunny Acres. Quite the opposite, in fact. Finally, though, curiosity overrode fears and she crept down the remaining steps. When she reached the door she looked at the bar of light showing below it and then listened to the clanking and swishing sounds beyond it.

Finally she lay flat and put her eye to the narrow crack. In the wavering glow of an oil lamp she could see something metallic and the feet of a man and a woman—presumably the Falworths—as they moved about. Nothing more.

Worried, Vera stood up again, debating. Then as there came the sound of a latch moving on the door's other side she whisked up the flowing skirt of her gown and fled for the steps, blundering up them as best she could in the dark and emerging breathlessly in the hall. As fast as possible she got back in her bedroom and locked the door, her brain whirling.

“A phantom, people who work in the cellar at dead of night, a smell like the drains gone wrong! What sort of place did Uncle Cyrus wish on to me, anyhow?”

Since she could not answer her own question, she forced herself to give up thinking about the matter and instead went to bed to try to catch up on some much needed sleep. And she succeeded—for it was dawn when she awoke and one thought was clear in her mind as she opened her eyes lazily.

She had got to have help—and quickly.

CHAPTER SIX

FOR BUSINESS ONLY

Dick Wilmott was busy in his little radio shop in Godalming next morning when Vera walked in.

He turned from the bench where he was working, preparing his best smile for approaching business—then his eyebrows rose.

“Well, blow me down—the girl from Manchester!” he exclaimed. “This is a surprise and a grand one. Er—there's a chair here somewhere.”

Vera laughed as he looked anxiously round amidst a little of radio equipment, packing cases, shavings, and various odds and ends.

“Never mind,” she said, “I'm not a physical wreck just yet, though I have suspicions that I soon shall be if I don't watch out.”

Dick pushed back his tumbled dark hair. “Sorry—about the chair. You know how it is when you're setting up in business: everything gets cockeyed. Anyway, I'm darned glad to see you.” He smiled faintly.

“Feel like indulging in a radio set? Cost price to you, you know—”

“My housekeeper believes that I have come out for that very purpose,” Vera answered seriously. “But I haven't. It's something else.”

“Oh?” Dick tried not to show disappointment. “What then?”

“I don't quite know how you're going to take this, Mr. Wilmott....” Vera traced a meaningless design with her finger on the packing case beside her. “I'm in need of help. There is something very queer about Sunny Acres.”

“What's wrong with it? And do sit down,” Dick urged, dusting the top of a packing case vigorously with a sheet of soft paper. “I hate to see a girl standing. There! That's better!”

Vera settled daintily on the case's edge and put down her handbag beside her.

“Mr. Wilmott,” she said, her serious blue eyes fixing on him. “I'm facing a legend, a phantom, an aura of evil, and—I think—counterfeiters.”

Dick half smiled. “Quite a load for a girl on her own! Sure you haven't missed anything out?”

“Matter of fact, yes. There's the odd matter of an abominable smell.”

“Probably the old age of the place!”

“You don't believe me, do you?” Vera asked quietly.

“Oh, I don't say that exactly, but perhaps you've imagined part of it. For one thing, phantoms do not exist, and as for counterfeiters, they are more in the line of hoary melodrama than a country residence.”

He held out his cigarette case and then flicked his lighter into flame. Over the haze of smoke they considered each other—and both liked what they saw.

“Mr. Wilmott, would you call a room with a sealed and nailed door pure imagination? Would you call it imagination when my housekeeper swears that to enter that room will cause me to either die or lose my reason?”

Dick Wilmott's expression changed slightly. “And the counterfeiters and the smell?”

Vera outlined every incident as it had occurred. His levity had entirely gone when she had finished.

“You're not lacking in nerve, are you?” Dick asked.

“No,” Vera answered. “I got that way in the A.T.S.—but I feel sort of alone and hemmed in. I don't know a soul in the district except you. I can't talk to Mrs. Falworth and her husband, and so—well, it's mighty queer. Besides, the Falworths—Mrs. Falworth anyway—don't want wages. They had an annuity left them by my uncle. Did you ever hear of two people being willing to go on working, and in a haunted castle at that, just so that they can give service and have a roof over their heads? I'm quite sure housing shortage isn't the answer.... Taking it all round, Mr. Wilmott, what do you think is going on?”

“Offhand, I'd say something fishy. That castle is no place where I'd like my sister to live, or my wife—if I had either. Why don't you sell the place?”

“I have thought about it. According to my lawyer there is a prospective buyer who would pay £15,000 for it.”

“Then sell! Get out! Retire and live in comfort. I would.”

“Would you?” Vera asked. “Knowing things are not as they should be? Even knowing you have been too scared to probe into the mystery of a so-called evil presence?”

Dick dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it under his heel. He gave a rueful grin, then said:

“You don't want to feel that you ran out like a coward? You'd rather discover what's going on?”

“Much rather,” Vera acknowledged. “And I wondered if you would help me?”

There was silence in the little store for a moment. Dick Wilmott stood with his thumbs hooked on his belt, staring at the floor. From his pursed-up lips Vera judged that quite a few thoughts were passing through his mind.

“Naturally,” she added, “it would be quite ethical. Mr. and Mrs. Falworth are in themselves chaperones. But you see, I felt that if I could have somebody with me who is no more afraid of supernatural bunk than I am—and a man too—we could do such a lot. Even sort the whole thing out. After all, if there is something criminal going on, it is up to us as public-spirited citizens to stop it, isn't it?”

“What about getting the police?” Dick asked.

“Show me the police who believe in ghosts! And as for the counterfeiting—well, if I should be wrong, think of the mess I'd get myself into!”

Dick began to smile slowly. “You know,” he said, cocking a merry blue eye upon her, “you're not fooling me a bit!”

“Meaning?” Vera asked coldly.

“That you're like all the rest of your sex—barring the man-eating, flat-shoed variety. You're enough of a woman to want a man to help you when things get alarming. Slang us all you like when things are okay, but at the least hint of the mysterious—wow!”

“You flatter yourself, Mr. Wilmott,” Vera kept her face perfectly straight. “It is simply that you are the only person I can turn to in this dilemma, and so—”

“Well, I'll see what I can do. And if it comes to that, why not? I didn't get half enough time last night to get acquainted anyway. Incidentally, why don't you call me Dick?”

“All right then, Dick—what are you going to do?”

“Go back with you and try to sort the thing out—”

“But what about your business? That's what worries me!”

“I can't open in real earnest until I get my trade license from the government. Until then I'm limited to repairs and one or two pre-war radios. And anyway, what sort of a chap do you think I am? Pass up the chance to help a blonde in distress? Not likely! I told you last night that there is a lot of Sir Galahad in me. But,” Dick finished, “there is something bothering me. How do you propose to explain me to that fire-eater of a housekeeper? It's going to look a bit odd—you coming to buy a radio and returning with me instead! You told her last night that I had merely given you a lift.”

Vera hesitated and wished that she could control the gentle wave of color she could feel stealing over her cheeks.

“I wondered if we might not pretend to—to be engaged? That would take care of a lot of proprieties. I would explain away your visit last night—somehow.”

Dick's eyebrows went up. “Gosh, you have thought of everything, haven't you? But why should we just pretend to be engaged?”

“Oh, really now, Mr. Wil— I mean, Dick! This is a sort of business arrangement—”

“Well, never mind. If you want a game of ‘let's pretend,' I'm willing. How about the ring?”

Vera pulled a small jewelled ring from a finger of her right hand and transferred it to the third on her left.

“That'll do,” she said, trying to appear unconcerned. “Now, to all intents and purposes, we are engaged.”

“Right! Vera, you have made yourself my wife to be!”

She looked at him rather blankly. His free use of her Christian name had sounded quite odd, but all the same—mmm—it had not sounded so bad, either.

In a few minutes he accompanied her outside and locked the door.

“I don't think Bertha is quite the right vehicle for a bride-to-be,” he decided. “All right for that lift last night, but that's about all. I think we'd better take a bus. Come on.”

Vera nodded. She did not quite like the indulgent way he kept smiling at her, as though she were a child who had done something silly and had been obliged to confess to the fact.

As they walked along the street, he asked, “Is there anything we should know about each other before we meet the dragon?”

“Nothing at all. Mrs. Falworth doesn't know a thing about me, except I am the niece of the late Cyrus Merriforth; and of course she doesn't know anything about you, either.”

“I shall be obliged, of course, to call you ‘dearest' and ‘darling' quite a lot,” Dick reflected. “You have realized that, I suppose?”

“Yes, but take care you don't overdo it. Just the normal endearments of an engaged couple will suffice.”

What his answer to this might have been Vera had no opportunity to find out, for their bus was coming in sight just as they emerged from the side street. Sprinting along, they caught it with no time to spare—and alighted again in the main street of Waylock Dean.

As they walked along the narrow road that led to Sunny Acres, Vera said: “Do you think a ghost is possible?”

“I suppose anything's possible,” Dick answered. “Even getting engaged to a pretty girl for business only is possible—”

“Dick, please be serious.”

“I think ghosts are the bunk. I have read of poltergeists and manifestations, of cheerful spooks which throw the furniture about, but I believe, seriously, that there is a mundane explanation for everything psychic.”

“That's what I think too. There must be an explanation for what is going on in Sunny Acres. The only thing that makes me lean towards the other side is the deadly fear people seem to have of the place. I couldn't get a man to drive me to it last night.”

“Thanks,” Dick said dryly.

“I mean from the station. Don't be so—so awkward.”

He grinned and patted her hand possessively as it lay on his forearm. Then he began singing as they walked along the lonely trail towards Sunny Acres. Vera did not sing. She had too many thoughts crowding her mind. She owned Sunny Acres, and that made all the difference.