struck him that if everyone were really dressed in the style of six hundred years ago there might be problems in distinguishing fellow guest from worker. And he wasn’t really accustomed to dealing with servants anyway, he hadn’t had that many invitations to the homes of the really rich.
Anyway, outfit of towel and swimsuit would presumably signal guest. Arrayed in his own leisure-class uniform, Simon reached the broad curving stairs, and padded down them. The feel of their stones under his bare feet evoked memories again. But he’d had all he wanted of memories for now. But in a moment he was probably going to see Vivian…
The stair passed an intermediate floor, whose rooms Simon recalled only hazily, and of which he could see almost nothing now. The ground floor rose to him round the next curve of stair, the natural persistent coolness of its great rooms grateful today. Here were the candles he had seen from above, set about on tables and sideboards, in rooms so vast that almost any furniture would have left them feeling empty. Flame flickered also in the fireplace of the great hall, which he now entered. The roasting that he and Margie had observed from inside the secret passage had evidently been completed, though the rich odor of it still hung in the air, assuring him that he had not imagined everything. The motor-driven spit had been dismantled and except for a few tiny flames the logs had burned down to a bed of glowing charcoal.
The sound of the stringed instrument that he had heard upstairs was plainer now, coming from some room not far away. The effect was somehow distractingly beautiful.
Modernity intruded again, this time in the form of splashing sounds, from outside but not far away; the pool was in use as announced. Simon had just turned toward the wooden screenwork covering one end of the great hall, behind which the secret passage burrowed, and Margie presumably waited silently, when he was stopped by the sight of a painted portrait. The picture was mounted on the screen itself, and so of course had been invisible earlier when he had looked out from behind the screen. It showed a middle-aged, powerfully glaring man; and Simon was sure it hadn’t been there fifteen years ago, the last time he remembered entering this room.
It stopped him for a moment, but the need to contact Margie dominated. Still facing the screen, as if he were studying the portrait, he raised one hand, brushing momentarily at the hair behind his right ear—and saw at once the answering wink of Margie’s penlight through the screen.
Relief was intense. Being still alone in the room, Simon could allow himself a great unburdening sigh of it. Amnesia and hallucinations were bad, but not as bad as the fear that reality had turned treacherous on him. He allowed himself also a smile and wink toward Margie.
As he turned away, his eye was caught once more by the portrait. Its glaring subject was dressed stylishly in the fashion of the late nineteenth century. Simon had last seen him holding a dark sword in his hand, as he stood beside a bloody altar.
EIGHT
As soon as Simon had left her alone in the secret passage, a little after three o’clock, Margie put her shoulder bag down on the dusty floor, with the silent hope that nothing was going to crawl into it. Actually the risk didn’t seem great. The passage was basically free of vermin, as far as she had been able to see, except for those few spider webs near the entrance. It wasn’t really dirty except for the inevitable layer of floor dust. This dust was thin in most places, and had been untrodden everywhere until she and Simon had left their tracks in it.
A faint, unidentifiable sound was coming from somewhere now, doubtless from deep in the house. Margie reacted by looking through a spyhole again, into the nearest bedroom. The room was well furnished in a sort of pseudo-antique style, and there was no sign that anyone was currently using it. She guessed that a door in one wall, standing ajar, led to a private bath. It would be great to be able to nip in through the secret panel and use the can, but there was no evidence that the bedroom was going to remain unoccupied for the next two minutes. Things weren’t desperate yet.
Margie sighed, and removed her eye from the peephole, and looked up and down the dark passage as well as she could without using the flash. She wished for a chair. Somehow she felt reluctant to sit, even in her utilitarian jeans, on the old dust of this floor. She supposed that in a few hours she’d change her mind and stop being so finicky.
She wished she knew how she was going to spend the next four or five hours or more, until performance time. She wished there were a ladies’ room available.
Well, she might be able to do something about that difficulty, if she were to scout around a little. When people designed elaborate secret passages, it seemed possible that they might design some kind of secret comfort facilities in. If not she could always come back here and risk the secret panel. Margie really didn’t want to do that, though. She could imagine herself pushing the panel open, while unseeable against its inner surface there stood a little table holding a priceless something-or-other. Probably a vase. Crash, and then an interesting social situation. No, she would explore some other possibilities first.
In a moment Margie had shouldered her bag again, and was creeping as silently as possible back along the passage in the direction from which she and Simon had ascended. Simon had said there were panels opening into two of these bedrooms, and the others were open to hidden observation. She wondered if she and Si were going to be put up in any of these rooms. Yep, the old guy who had imported and rebuilt this place had been a little kinky, all right. At best, he’d nourished a fondness for a kind of humor Margie didn’t appreciate. She wondered how the heirs, when they learned about the secret passage, would take the revelation of the sort of guy Grandpa had been. Or, could she and Simon do the act so well that the existence of the passage still wouldn’t be suspected? That would be a real achievement. Possibly they could. They were good, as good as anyone, Margie thought, when things were going right.
Again there drifted muffled sound from somewhere. These were faint, but Margie got the impression that there was something spasmodic and desperate about them. Probably someone just horsing around. Or wrestling with some heavy furniture. Of course it could be people really fighting, dead serious about it. Even as Margie paused to listen, the noise ceased. She waited a little, but could hear nothing more, and moved along again. She wanted to get down to the lower passage, which she recalled was a little wider and ought to offer a more comfortable place to wait in.
It still didn’t really make sense, she thought, that Si knew about all these secret ways and peepholes, and the people who lived here didn’t. She wondered why he had seemed so shaken today, at a couple of places while they were climbing the hill through the woods. He’d said that someday he’d tell Margie the whole story, about his growing up in these parts; which meant, if Margie understood Simon as well as she thought she was beginning to understand him, that he would never tell her any more. Simon wasn’t a bad guy, and Margie liked working with him. He was all professionalism, as a rule, when it came to the act. As for the love life, well, he wouldn’t be her first choice for that. There was always the feeling that he was really thinking about something or someone else.
Margie was passing another peephole, and without much of a struggle she yielded to the temptation to pause and take a look. Another bedroom, with a suitcase on the floor. The spyhole gave a perfect view of the bed, which had two people sitting on it. A grossly heavy, swarthy man, just sitting there, turned so Margie couldn’t see his face, half dressed. Another half-dressed figure, facing the other way, a body so thin that Margie wasn’t sure for a moment that it was female, staring into space. Almost immediately Margie turned away. Ugh. There had been a wrongness in that room. She felt as if she had just spied on people laboriously inventing some new perversion. They looked as if they might have just finished such a task.
Now, if and when the secret passageway became general knowledge during the weekend, that couple, all the guests, would wonder who might have watched them doing what. Ugh. Complications.
Margie moved on, for the sake of silence scraping the walls as little as possible. She traversed what was left of the upper passage and then went down the long, steep stairs, using her light. When at last she reached the peephole giving a view of the great hall, nothing had changed. The great logs still crackled in the enormous fireplace, the pig or whatever it was continued roasting. The aroma made Margie hungry. In her shoulder bag were a couple of candy bars that she meant to eat later. Anyway she certainly wasn’t just going to camp in this spot waiting for Simon to appear. He’d need an hour, at the very least, to get back across the river and then drive round, by way of the bridge at Blackhawk, to approach the castle by road in the manner of an ordinary guest.
Using her flashlight sparingly, keeping its beam aimed low, Margie went on down, following the tunnel underground. A minute more, and she had passed the branching way—without giving it much thought—and was back in the cave, peering out into the now-gloomy daylight of the deserted grotto and its paved forecourt with the
