Death in the dusk

by Virgil Markham

Quicker than I had expected, I was out of the toy wilderness into a clear space of thirty-odd yards (the dominant moon showed me this), and Aidenn Water was roaming close beside my path. A brook going to join the larger stream from some hill-recess on my left was crossed by an old stone bridge with urns at the ends of its stone balustrades, a ridiculously massive structure for so insignificant a watercourse. But a few seconds later I passed another object built with overplus of formality and ostentation, a semi-rustic house which could have been no more than a summer-house, quite unsuited for habitation but freaked and loaded with statuary and gewgaws.

“The eighteenth century!” I murmured. “What nightmares did they not have in the Age of Reason? Am I now to find a geometrical mansion of Georgian brick?”

I had entered a new zone of drizzle and mist when I had my first evidence of the house appertaining hereto. The fog thickened almost to the density of a wall, and when the well-ordered path ceased at the edge of the lawns, I blundered against a tree trunk, one of three standing alone in gloom and grandeur in the open space. I generously cursed the spirits, whose exhalation, as every Welsh peasant used to know, the mist is. By a flash of my torch I recognized the three tapering shapes as horizontal cypresses, and at once I felt relief, for I was sure that these none-too-hardy trees must be of a recent and venturesome planting. I was becoming convinced that human lives were not far from me.

A few steps more and I was standing on a pebble walk beneath the shorter northern wall of a definitely up-to-date structure. The stone may have been old stone, but it had been smoothed off within a generation, and the ivy had evidently been somewhat restricted in its rambling in order that the broad-spread glass of this storey might not be effaced from the light. Why all this glass? A conservatory? I stepped across the walk, flashed my torch, peered in, saw a glimmering galaxy of flowers, sniffed and detected a hint of their thick odour, was satisfied. A conservatory it was, extending from end to end of this northern wall, with unlit, wide-paned windows from end to end save where a steep outer stair led up to a small roofless platform and door in the first storey; and I perceived a vague second storey, above which chimneys sprouted.

Now, I should not have lingered here more than a few seconds, had not there burst forth a chill sound that actually took me out of myself for a moment, a caterwauling from somewhere behind me and further toward the mountain wall of the ravine. It seemed impossible that such a desecration of silence could proceed from a single throat. It was a sobbing cry full of hunger, but there was positive anger and direness in it. It had a quality, too, of immitigable anguish, as though all the hopelessness of dumb beasts were its burden. Once the throbbing cry subsided into a gruff growl, and then, strangely enough, was the first time that I recognized its clamour as that of a cat. “But,” I remembered thinking, “it must be a cat as big as a wolf.” And while the last throes of the savage wailing echoed back from the hill, I looked up to the gloomy heights of the mansion, as if I expected each dark window to flare with inquiring light.

In puzzlement and lively eagerness to discover more about this mansion, I turned to the right and followed the walk to the corner of the conservatory, where it joined a drive that wound out of the right-hand darkness. I discovered that the side of the house extended a hundred feet or more parallel to the course of Aidenn Water. Visible, too, on the broad lawn at four or five rods’ distance from the house was a tall, two-legged thing, fifty feet high by a rough judgment, an erection of twin towers with a passageway above and between, the whole standing lonely, dark and still.

The conservatory’s narrow side ended in the jutting of a tower, quite black. Between this and the next tower, its counterpart, I caught dim glimpses of modern french windows, a pair of them, evidently belonging to the same large room. There was a formal entrance between the second tower and the third, but since it was unlit, I decided to go further in hopes of finding the main portal. Yet I had a view of what was behind the door, and again I paused, fascinated.

Inside the third tower, the projecting half of an octagon studded with little windows, I saw a taper burning low in an old candlestick fastened like a bracket on the wall, a thing of fantastic crooks and curlicues. The light was blue and brittle, for the wick was surfeited with grease. But I was able to see three men in the panelled hallway, two of them standing, or perhaps leaning, against the wall. Of these I perceived no more than their dark featureless forms, and a marked stiffness in their attitudes. On the opposite side of the hall from the candle, they were too vague to be any more particularized than as human forms. The third man, save for his little tuft of white hair, had been no more than a smudge either.

For he was bent over, his back toward me, and he was picking the pockets of the other two men! I can describe his actions in no better way. They, seemingly stupefied, made no motion to prevent!