The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (28 page)

Treganneth pulled up in front of the door. The place looked deserted; it was dusky in the court, and dark inside the donjon, and I didn’t like it a bit. People that write about sea monsters eating peasants are not what you want to spend the evening with. If it hadn’t been for seeing a chance to see a bit more of the blonde girl, I’d have said, “Here’s your twenty guineas, my lord, and nuts for you.”

I wanted to see more of that dame. She might be locked up, but I understand locks.

The door opened. A woman in a pink gingham house dress stood there with a kerosene lamp. The castle seemed not to be wired for lights, just for death and disappearance.

“Emily, take Mr. Dale’s luggage,” Treganneth said.

The dark woman set the lamp in a bracket. I said, “Steady, I can juggle it myself.”

She had smooth white skin, and black hair, and blue eyes that were almost black. Her thick lashes were a sooty smudge along the lids; the people of Cornwall were Kelts, ancient and unmixed. I knew why I grabbed that bag. Not because she was a woman, but because she made me feel like she owned the place; in the sense that any first inhabitant looks and acts that way.

The wind howled into the court, and pulled her dress tight. She had nice legs, a perfect thirty, speaking of age, not measure; ripe for the picking, and not picked over enough to be spoiled.

I followed her into the castle, and saw that some of the heap had been remodeled maybe a century ago. The panelling of the big living room was oak, all black with smoke. As I followed Emily to my room on the second floor, I shot a look up the staircase that went up into the turret, where the wind was howling, laughing, snarling at the blonde girl. I decided against asking questions about that angle.

Emily pussyfooted around the room, patting things into shape.

I asked, “What is your idea on this monoceros business? I guess you know why I’m here.”

She looked up, and from the corners of her eyes. “I can show you a few things he can’t. Late tonight, when no one else is awake.”

Anyway you took that, the girl was right. “Dinner will be served in an hour. You needn’t dress,” she added.

The way it turned out, Treganneth didn’t come to dinner. I ate alone in that acre of dark dining room; dark, except for the coals on the hearth, and the two candles which whipped and flickered in the drafts. The wind laughed and cried and booooed. Emily served the roast beef, which was perfect; everything else was cooked to death. But the wine was something to write a book about.

She poured some Burgundy, and said, “His lordship’s brother laid this down in 1914, years before he disappeared.”

“Huh? Disappeared?”

“Yes. Along with my late husband, Mr. Polgate. The steward.”

“The monoceros got ’em?”

“If you stay awake late enough, I’ll show you something that will amaze you.”

As it was, every time she bent over to fill that big glass she showed plenty. She was good enough for an earl, anywhere you looked.

It was after midnight when Emily tapped on my door. Her hair hung in two thick braids. She wore a nightgown with a low neck yoke, and lace panels on each side; it was trimmed with two rosettes placed just right, though what was beneath didn’t need markers. Even though she did wear a heavy robe over that gown, it was a treat. “Treganneth is dead drunk,” she said.

When I stepped into the hall, the wind sounded as if a woman were crying. Emily carried an old-fashioned lantern, which lighted our way down a murky corridor; then came a stairway that led down into the unmodernized part of the castle, the masonry that was a thousand years old, perhaps a lot more.

It was damp and creepy and there was a funny smell; the iodine odor of the waterfront, the rank salt-marsh smell of tidal flats. There was dust on the floor, except for a blurred trail, as if something had been dragged. I began to think of Harry Penfield, the last man to disappear. Then Emily led on into an alcove, and at the end she pointed to a ring in the floor.

It was like other rings I’d seen, heavy iron, rusty; anchored by an eye-bolt which was sunk in lead poured into a hole in the masonry. She said, “Pull hard, and lift it.”

I pulled. There was a screech, and a slab of masonry swung on pivots. Stairs led down, dark and narrow. And that sea smell, way too much of it. I hung back.

A gust of stale air came up, and played tricks with Emily’s robe. Holding the lantern up made the neck yoke pull tight, and the rose-colored silk shaped itself about her hips.

“Don’t you want to see more?”

I didn’t; not of the underground works, that is, but I felt foolish about backing down. “Go ahead,” I told her, and she led on, as if she owned the place. By now, I had a hunch that she did own it, and that Treganneth was just a stooge; the earl who could make her a lady if he wanted to.

We came out in a vault hewn from bedrock. In the center was a roughly circular pit perhaps twenty feet across. The coping along its edge was not more than halfway to Emily’s knees, and the runway between it and the wall was not over a yard wide. It gave me the creeps, getting so close to that hole in the rock.

Emily sat down on the damp rock, and caught her knees with her clasped hands. She’d given me the lantern; she said, “Sit down, and blow it out.” So I joined her, on the steps; they were so narrow I had to wedge close against her. This was once that getting a dame alone in the dark was no treat.

This place was so old I could taste the age. Emily’s people, the old people, the Druids that used to offer up human sacrifices at Easter, and burn prisoners in wicker cages, had built this. Emily was at home here.

I lifted the shade and blew the light out.

“We may have to wait,” she whispered, and leaned close; I could feel her breath in my ear, and her hair against my cheek. “That shaft reaches down to where the monoceros lived, and died, a thousand years ago. When the Treganneths were Cornish lords, pirates, raiders.”

“So it’s dead.”

“It died, but it is coming to life.”

The smell of iodine, of concentrated sea became stronger; the pit was breathing. A white mist was rising out of the blackness, it was twisting and writhing.

It took a shape the thickness of a hogshead, and Lord knows how long. The head was a dragon’s, a dragon with a yard-long spike growing out of its forehead. This was the monoceros engraved on Treganneth’s stationery, and on his carnelian ring of old, soft gold.

Up—up—up—reaching out of the pit. Two men were kicking and clawing in its coils. One looked like Treganneth. Emily yeeped and caught me with both arms. She poured herself over me. I sprawled back against the stairs. I tangled up with her bare legs, and then I made a dive for the treads. She went limp, and I caught her.

In the scramble, I got a look back. The thing was pulling back into the pit, and thinning out to a haze, ribbon-thin. Then it was gone. I was sweating, shaking till my teeth clicked. I grabbed Emily and headed up those stairs, and I didn’t stop for the lantern. I reached the head of the stairs long before I had any hope of getting there, and I took a header. Lucky for Emily I twisted as I flopped, or I’d have smashed her flat. As it was, the crash nearly laid me out. And she came to. She moaned, “It’s getting worse, it’s reaching further each time, it’s calling for its prey—get me out of here—”

I fairly dragged her. It’s funny, but I headed for my room, as if that were any safer than anywhere else. When I slammed the bolt, I turned around and saw Emily sag at the knees. She keeled over and flopped in the old lounge.

I stumbled after her. “If Treganneth thinks I am hunting that thing, he is nuts! It sounded like some kind of murder racket when he wrote me, someone giving him the run-around to get him out of his castle. But
that
—what’s he think I am?”

“He still thinks something human is tricking villagers into the caves under the castle, and killing them. He doesn’t know of this place. Promise me you won’t tell him, he’s so worried now, a shock would drive him mad.”

A fellow can’t believe everything he sees. Look at that Hindu rope trick. And the little green men a friend of mine used to see in his room. He threw things at them, only they just weren’t there. Neither was that monster.

“Okay, I won’t tell him. But how did you find that awful place?”

“My late husband, Mr. Polgate, was steward. He used to tell me things. About sub-cellars of this castle. Then he and the present earl’s brother vanished, and no one ever found their bodies. Seven years passed, they were declared legally dead, and I became a legal widow. Jasper—the present earl—came from Australia to take his heritage. And then things happened. Villagers disappeared. People whispered about the monoceros, and brought up that old legend of how the Treganneths traced their descent from it.”

What she meant was, it was a sort of totem, like the Indians have wolves, bears, and the like for clan ancestors. She went on, “The ancient Treganneths sacrificed captives to the monster, to keep their luck in war. It lived in that pit, it came in from the sea for its offerings. Then an earthquake blocked the passage, and the thing starved when the Treganneths could not find enough victims.”

“And now the ghost of the monoceros is eating?”

Now that I’d quieted down a bit, I began to think. “That was malarkey. I didn’t see it, it was hypnotism. Decaying sea stuff, phosphorescent vapors, and me thinking about the monoceros ever since I got the earl’s cockeyed letter.”

I turned to Emily. “Why don’t you check out?”

“I belong to the place.”

“I don’t. I’m a detective. I brought embezzlers from Algiers. From Honduras. But a monoceros is something else, you can keep it.”

As a matter of fact, I was getting sore at myself for having gone hog wild down there, but I was giving Emily a line to see what she’d do. There was a trick somewhere.

Emily jumped up, and before I could get a lamplight view of this and that, she had me with both arms. She squeezed close, and not just with her arms, either. “You must stay—you’ve got to—for
my
sake!”

I was getting high blood from that armful of woman, but I could still add things up. Emily’s gown had store folds in it. I noticed that when the robe fell from one shoulder. A brand new gown like that cost a couple guineas; a damn funny expenditure when the earl drove his own fifteen-year-old bus. And she’d lied when she said she and the earl were alone here. How about the blonde gal in the tower?

I played the sap on purpose. I nudged her toward the door. “You’re too scared to know what you’re talking about. Come back when the monoceros business is settled, and see if I head you for the door.”

The smile over her shoulder was one of those promises only a chump expects a dame to keep.

The more I thought about the monoceros, as I sat there by the grate, the more I said, “Hell, you do it with mirrors.”

An hour passed. Then another. I dug up my flashlight and I put on some felt slippers. It was dark as a squaw’s pocket, out in that hall. The wind made dirty sounds and ghastly sounds, and then it laughed whenever I jerked back, figuring something was prowling around in the dark. But I got to the stairs that reached up into the hell-blackness of that turret.

By the time I had convinced myself that the monoceros was something I had eaten, I was up as far as the second narrow slot in the two-foot-thick masonry. The moon was full. The crags were shining from spray, and spray jumped up from the roaring sea. If anything was creeping over those hills, it was belly flat.

Then I looked toward the sea again. Something was moving, something white against the dark crags. I knew it was a woman before I could see the curves that made everything certain except her face.

If she wore anything, it wasn’t enough to register at night. She was white and shining, and her golden hair rippled in the wind. A man was stumbling over the rocks, waving his arms.

He was gaining. Then she danced ahead, and won a length. Then they both were blotted out by a black tongue.

To think that I could dash down stairs, and over wet rocks in time to keep the guy from overtaking the girl was crazy, but I was on the way. There is something about a scenario like that that makes a fellow want to keep the other fellow from getting familiar with the girl in question, even if she is a stranger.

When I got there, I saw neither girl nor man. Just wet rocks. Cornwall was where King Arthur got his start, where Merlin did his stuff, where the Lady of the Lake used to hang out. The whole Cornish coast is wacky. The only way to keep from going nuts is not to believe anything you see. But even so, I went back to the turret to find out if there really was a blonde there.

I got my kit of lock picks to work. I’d become handy that way because it simplifies the business of snooping on embezzlers. The door opened easy.

The girl wasn’t asleep. She was so scared when the door opened that she couldn’t yeep. Moonlight reached into the turret and picked out her beautiful legs, the fine curve of throat and cheek.

I said, “It’s all right. If you’re a prisoner, maybe I can help you.”

“Why didn’t you knock, warn me—who are you—?”

I could see her knees shaking, where they peeped out from the grey woolen blanket she clutched to her breast. “I’m Jim Dale, monoceros hunter, and I saw you through the window this afternoon, looking out.”

She gasped.

“With glasses. What is the idea, no clothes?”

The flashlight made it clear she didn’t have a stitch in the whole turret; just the cot, and the blankets.

“I’m Jasper Treganneth’s secretary—I mean, I was, when he was in Perth. I followed him when he came to the title. Just imagine, came to this ruin. I was stranded. When my funds were gone, I came to the castle.”

“After you’d sold your shoes and clothing, for subsistence while job hunting,” I cracked, “you came to hide in Treganneth Castle. What was the name, please?”

She flared. “I’m Diane Rolley!”

Then she doubled up and began crying. I sat down on the cot beside her and slipped an arm about her. “Buck up, Diane. I’m a detective, trying to settle this monoceros business. How did you get up here?”