played over the door; it winked back the damp, the swellings in the oak, the cuts where people had hacked their initials in the senility and ruin of Plague Court....
'The door is open,' said Halliday.
Inside, somebody screamed.
We met many horrors in this mad business, but none, I think, that took us so off-balance. It was a real voice, a human voice;yet. it
was as though the old house itself had screamed, like a doddering hag, at Halliday's touch.
Masters, breathing hard, started to lunge past me. But it was Halliday who flung the door open.
In the big musty hall inside, light was coming out of a door to the left. I could see Halliday's face in that light; damp and set, and absolutely steady, as he stared into that room. He did not raise his voice.
'What the devil is going on here?' he demanded.
III THE FOUR ACOLYTES
What any of us expected to see, I do not know. Something diabolic; possibly the lean man with his face turned. But that was not to occur just yet.
Masters and I came round on either side of Halliday, so that we must have seemed absurdly like a guard. We saw a large, rather lofty room; a ruin of past splendor, that smelt like a cellar. Its wall-paneling had been ripped away, exposing the stone; above it rotted what might once have been white satin, sagging in black peelings, and puffy with spiders-webs. The mantelpiece alone remained: stained and chipped, a thin height of stone scrollwork. In the vast fireplace burnt a very small and smoky fire. Strung along, the hood of the mantelpiece were half-a-dozen candles burning in tall brass holders. They flickered in the damp, showing above the mantelpiece, decaying fragments of wallpaper that had once been purple and gold.
There were two occupants of the room both women. It added a sort of witchlike eeriness to the place. One of them sat near the fire, half risen out of the chair. The other, a young woman in her middle twenties, had turned round sharply to look at us; her hand was on the sill of one of the tall shuttered windows towards the front.
Halliday said: 'Good God! Marion
And then she spoke in a strained voice, very clear and pleasant, but only a note removed from hysteria. She said:
'So it's - it is you, Dean? I mean, it's really you?'
It struck me as a strange way of wording an obvious question, if that was what she really meant to imply. It meant something else to Halliday.
'Of course it is,' he said, in a sort of bark. 'What did you expect? I'm still me. I'm not Louis Playge. Not just yet.'
He stepped into the room, and we followed him. Now, it was a curious thing, but the moment we crossed that threshold I felt the lightening of a pressing, crowding, almost suffocating, feeling which was present in the air of the entrance-hall. We all went in quickly, and looked at the girl.
Marion Latimer stayed motionless, a tense figure in the candlelight; and the shadow seemed to tremble at her feet. She had that thin, classic, rather cold type of beauty which makes face and body seem almost angular. Her hair was set in dark-gold waves close to the somewhat long head; her eyes were dark blue, glazed now with a preoccupied and somehow disturbing quality; the nose short, the mouth sensitive and determined.... She stood there crookedly, almost as though she were lame. One hand was thrust deep into the pocket of the brown tweed coat wrapped about her thin body; as she watched us, the other hand left the window-sill and pulled the collar close round her neck. They were fine, thin, wiry hands.
'Yes. Yes, of course ...' she muttered. She essayed a smile. She raised a hand to brush her forehead, and then caught her coat close again. 'I-I thought I heard a noise in the yard. So I looked out through the shutter. There was a light on your face, just for a second. Absurd of me. But how did you come to be-how... ?'
Some influence was about the woman: an emotional repression, a straining after the immaterial, a baffled and baffling quality that sometimes makes spinsters and sometimes hellions. It was a quality of vividness, of the eyes or the body or the square line of the jaw. She disturbed you; that is the only word I can think of.
'But you shouldn't have come here,' she said. 'It is dangerous----tonight.'
A voice from the fireside spoke softly, without emotion. 'Yes. It is dangerous.'
We turned.... She was smiling, the little old lady who sat near the dull and smoky fire. She was very modish. Bond Street had coiffed her elaborate white hair; there was a black velvet band round her. throat, where the flesh had begun to darken and sag. But the small face, which suggested wax flowers, was unwrinkled except round the eyes, and it was highly painted. The eyes were gentle and hard. Though she smiled at us, her foot was tapping the floor slowly. She had obviously been shaken at our entrance; her jeweled hands, lying limp along the arms of the chair, were twisting and upturning as though to begin a gesture; and she was trying to control her breathing. You have read, doubtless, of people who are supposed to resemble eighteenth-century French marquises by Watteau. Lady Anne Benning looked like a thoroughly modern, sharp-witted old lady got up to resemble one. Besides, her nose was too large.
Again she spoke softly, without emotion.
'Why have you come here, Dean? And who are these men with you?'
The voice was thin. It seemed to explore and probe, despite its professional sweetness, and I almost shuddered. Her black eyes never left his face, and she retained that mechanical smile. There was a sickliness about her.
Halliday straightened up. He made an effort.
'I don't know whether you are aware of it,' he said, 'but this is my house.' (She had put him on the defensive, as, I imagined, she always had. At his remark she only smiled, dreamily). 'I hardly think, Aunt Anne, that I need your permission to come here. These gentlemen are my friends.'
'Present us.'
He did so, first to Lady Benning and then to Miss Latimer. It was a mad business, those formal introductions in the damp-smelling vault of a room, among the candle-flames and the spiders. Both of them-the cold, lovely girl standing against the mantelpiece, the reptilian pseudo-marquise nodding against her red silk cloak-were hostile. We were intruders in more senses than one. About them both was a kind of exaltation, which some might call self- hypnosis; a repressed and waiting eagerness, as at some tremendous spiritual experience they had once undergone and hoped to undergo again. I stole a sideways glance at Masters, but his face was as bland as ever. Lady Benning opened her eyes.
'Dear, dear,' she murmured to me, 'of course you are Agatha Blake's brother. Dear Agatha. And her canaries.' Her voice changed. 'The other gentleman I fear I have not the pleasure of recognizing.... Now, dear boy, perhaps you will tell me why you are here?'
'Why?' repeated Halliday. His voice cracked. He struggled with a baffled anger, and put out his hand towards Marion Latimer. 'Why? Look at you - look at both of you! I can't stand this fog. I'm a normal, sane human being, and you ask me what I want here and why I'm trying to stop this nonsense! I'll tell you why we came. We came to investigate your blasted haunted house. We came here to get hold of your blasted turnip-ghost and smash it in little bits for good and all; and, by God!'
The voice echoed and rang blatantly, and we all knew it. Marion Latimer's' face was white. Everything was very quiet again.
'Don't challenge them, Dean,' she said. 'Oh, my dear, don't challenge them.'
But the little old lady only twitched up her fingers again, from palms flat on the chair-arm, and half shut her eyes, and nodded.
'Do you mean that something impelled you to come here, dear boy?'
. 'I mean that I came here because I damned well chose.'
'And you want to exorcise this thing, dear boy?'
'If you want to call it that,' he said grimly; 'yes. Look here, don't tell me - don't tell me that's why you're all here?'
'We love you, dear boy.'
There was a silence, while the fire sputtered in small blue flames, and the rain ran soft-footed through the house; splashing and echoing in its mysterious places. Lady Benning went on in a voice of ineffable sweetness:
'You need not be afraid here, dear boy. They cannot come into this room. But elsewhere, what then? They can take possession. They took possession of your brother James. That was why he shot himself.'
