The House of the Wolf (12 page)

‘I like to think so.’

The scraping of his boot on the parquet as Parker got to his feet was an intrusion in the thick, glutinous silence.

‘Very interesting, Count,’ he said blandly.

‘The very essence of folklore, if I may say so. And now, if you will excuse me, I will seek my bed. It has been a strenuous day, and we have much to do tomorrow.’

He went round the table, shaking hands formally as the others rose. The remainder of the company too made their excuses, and the staircase was loud with their departure. Soon only Coleridge and the Count were left. He waited politely at the head of the stair while his host put a guard over the fire and extinguished the lights.

He heard a faint noise in the gloom below him and, with a quickening of nerves, descended a flight. Menlow’s white face floated up toward him like some disembodied manifestation in the yellow lamplight. His lips were trembling as he caught Coleridge by the arm.

‘You did the tests?’

Menlow nodded.

‘Would that I hadn’t. The thing is manifestly impossible, Professor, but the hairs were those of a wolf and the particles of skin those of a human being!’

CHAPTER 16: FEAR IN THE NIGHT

Coleridge could not sleep. Menlow’s unexpectedly shattering news had momentarily deprived him of those faculties which controlled the mainsprings of action, his ability to think clearly, and the energy to formulate plans and carry them out. He had had time only for a brief conversation with his colleague. He had sworn him to secrecy; there was no point in alarming the household, though it was obvious that at some point the Count would have to be told.

Coleridge had hoped for a while that there was some possibility of error in Menlow’s analysis and calculations, but the latter had been vehement on that point. There was a mystery here which hovered at the edge of brooding horror and clouded Coleridge’s mind. He did not know what he was to tell the girl in the morning; he had been at pains to reassure her and to formulate a theory that postulated a perfectly normal explanation for what she had experienced the previous night.

Now that possibility lay in ruins, and Coleridge and Menlow were faced with a set of circumstances that led squarely to the conclusion that the thing which the girl heard had a supernatural origin. That there was a supreme irony in all this was not lost on Coleridge: here were professional savants, steeped in the traditions and study of folklore, who were recoiling from real-life evidence that such manifestations might be true.

Coleridge had not forgotten the sinister shadow he had seen at the entrance to the Weapons Hall and the clicking noise resembling that made by the claws of a four-footed animal which had faded down the corridor. It was the same sound that the girl had heard, though Coleridge had been at pains to avoid facing it in his own mind.

The thought of the Weapons Hall brought the comforting reality of the Count’s pistol to the forefront. He took it out now, made sure the safety-catch was on, and put it down on his bedside table, within easy reach together with the spare cartridges. He walked over to the stout oak door and made sure it was locked. It was past midnight and the Castle lay in an unbroken silence, as though everyone and everything in it were frozen like the bleak wastes of snow and ice outside.

Coleridge sat down in a big high-backed chair by the bed and poured himself a whisky from the bottle his host had thoughtfully left on the silver tray on the bedside table. He swilled the liquid round thoughtfully in the glass, watching the yellow lamplight strike glints from its dark surface.

Coleridge at first had a flicker of hope that Menlow might have been wrong; that the sample somehow may have become mixed with a fragment of flesh from his own finger, perhaps lodged there when he removed the wood splinter from the girl’s door. But Menlow, in their muttered conversation on the darkened staircase, had soon disabused him of that. The thing was an impossibility.

The animal fur had been growing
through
the human skin. Now Coleridge debated the problem further; he could not sleep when matters of such urgency were gnawing at his consciousness. The Count would have to be told, of course, but not necessarily at once. Coleridge needed time to think. He dare not elaborate to himself, even in the locked privacy of his own room, what such a beast as that roaming the corridors of the Castle might portend for its inhabitants.

For if the girl had been right – and there was no reason to doubt her – the wolf-thing had gained entry to the Castle by opening doors and turning handles, thus implying that it not only walked upright instead of on all fours, but also possessed human as well as bestial faculties. That conclusion led to gibbering madness, and Coleridge thrust the notion hastily from his mind; his lonely room and the lateness of the hour were neither the venue nor the time for such thoughts.

For Coleridge was an authority on the subject: the loup-garou, as the French called it; the werewolf as the English termed it; and the volkodlak as Eastern Europe had it. Lycanthropy was his special study, but there was a world between the scholarly examination of mediaeval legends and medical case-histories of persons who had believed themselves to be werewolves, and the apparent reality of what both the girl and now Menlow were telling him.

The irony was increased by the paper which Coleridge was due to deliver at the opening session of the Count’s private Congress tomorrow. Then he glanced at his silver-cased watch on the bedside table and mentally corrected himself: today, or to be absolutely precise, in some nine hours’ time.

Still fully dressed and with the whisky glass in his hand, Coleridge quietly paced the floor of his comfortable room. The fire had burned low, leaving the red glow of charred logs from the forests which surrounded the Castle and which still threw out an agreeable heat . . . a fact which was emphasised by the icy wind which whistled round the turrets and battlements of The House of the Wolf and occasionally stirred the thick curtains at the window, as though they had been disturbed by some spectral breath of a person long deceased.

Coleridge thought again of the Count’s sombre history of Ivan the Bold and his retributive death among the snapping fangs of the wolf-pack in the ravine known as The Place of the Skull. He was uncomfortably aware that some hundred and fifty feet or so below him, deep in the earth, lay that sealed and unspeakably vile torture chamber of which the Count had spoken, lapped in an unearthly silence which had not been disturbed for more than half a lifetime.

Unnerved, Coleridge stopped his pacing and again went to try the door of his room. It was securely locked, just as he had left it. This would never do; he found himself bent over, his ears straining for the slightest noise, his eyes fixed on the handle. A damp bead of sweat had formed on his forehead. With a grimace of disgust he turned from the door, drained his tumbler.

He dropped still fully dressed on the bed, pulling the coverlet over him, leaving the light burning. He knew he was in for an uncomfortable night. The last thing he remembered before falling into a fitful sleep was the comforting image of the shining barrel of the Count’s pistol on the bedside table.

Suddenly he was awake, all his nerves alert to danger. The fire was out, and there was a chill in the air. It may have been his imagination, but the lamp also seemed to have burned low. A glance at his watch at the base of the lamp showed him that it wanted but a few minutes to three o’clock. He felt untidy, ached in every limb, and was not at all refreshed by his two-hour rest. There was a stale, uncomfortable taste at the back of his throat, only partly overlaid by the cleansing flavour of the whisky.

He knew instinctively that some faint sound at the farthest edge of consciousness had awakened him. He pulled himself upright on the bed, levering his legs with difficulty to the floor. He felt stiff, his limbs sluggish and unwilling to do his bidding. His head ached too, and his heavy-lidded eyes seemed reluctant to stay open now that he was on his feet.

He groped for the revolver, his senses reviving at the chill touch of the walnut butt on his fingers.

At the same time he became aware of a furtive noise in the general direction of the door. He reached out with a none-too-steady hand and turned up the wick of the lamp. The intensity of brightness, which immediately flung the darkest shadows into the far corners of the chamber, seemed to renew his flagging spirits.

He was wide awake now, the revolver firmly held in his right hand. He walked over toward the door, his senses alert, the heavy pumping of his heart seeming inordinately loud, a pulse throbbing in his throat. The sound came again before he was halfway between the bed and the door.

There was something infinitely stealthy in it; he remembered then the girl’s vivid description of her own experience, and he realised she had not exaggerated. A slight scratching noise, as though heard at the far edge of silence; it was darker here than it had been in the area of the bed, of course, and he did not at first notice anything.

Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw the infinitely slow turning of the handle and realised the subtle pressure that was being put upon it. Coleridge did not reckon himself to be a man possessed of exceptional courage, but he was one of those individuals who prefer action rather than indecision.

There was something so furtive and sinister about the stealthy trying of his door in this dead hour of the night that he understood immediately the circumstances would sap his will if he delayed a moment longer.

No sooner had the resolve been formulated within his own mind than he started forward with a wild cry and reached for the handle, intending to unlock the door and throw it open in one movement.

Unfortunately, or fortunately – he could not afterward decide which – he had forgotten the revolver in his right hand. He intended to grasp the door-handle and at the same time with his left to throw over the key, so unlocking it.

Instead, the barrel of the pistol struck the panel of the door with a resounding crash. The noise had a heart-stopping quality in that deathly silence and was immediately answered by a low snarl in the corridor outside. This was something more definite, and, paradoxically, Coleridge’s energy revived. He shouted something incoherent and seized the door-handle firmly this time. The key grated in the lock as he turned it with his left hand.

It was a foolhardy, even suicidal, thing to do, as he did not know what it was that stood there, but even as he opened the door he heard the sharp scraping of claws on the corridor parquet. There was the dim lamp burning near the bathroom door farther down, which was the only illumination.

By its light Coleridge saw the elongated shadow of the furry shape which fled down the corridor in front of him. He stepped out, excitement making his hand tremble. Again the horrific snarl which had all the savage quality designed to strike fear into human prey. The corridor light was distorting and exaggerating the size of the thing, Coleridge knew.

He did not pause to think how it might have come there, but he could see clearly now. It was undoubtedly a wolf, moreover one of the biggest he had ever seen. It had greyish hair on its back, and as it ran, its claws making that extraordinary sharp, clicking noise on the wooden floor, it looked back at him over its shoulder. Coleridge was left with the impression of jagged white teeth and the burning redness of its eyes.

He squeezed the trigger, realised too late that he had forgotten, in the agitation of the moment, to throw off the safety-catch. The beast seemed to sense this, for it had at first jinked aside, as it was still some way from the turn in the corridor. Coleridge knew stark fear then, for it was coming back at incredible speed, its head growing quickly in size as it accelerated from the darkness into the light.

But Coleridge had the safety-catch off now. The explosion of the pistol seemed unaccountably loud. Flame split the darkness, and powder-smoke stung his cheek. The wolf seemed flattened and somehow deflated by the explosion, but he saw it had turned with fantastic agility and was going back, very fast, down the corridor. The air was full of smoke, and Coleridge was conscious of sweat running down into his eyes.

The entire encounter had lasted only split-seconds, and now he ran forward, bringing the pistol up. Perhaps he had grazed the beast, for it seemed to limp on its off hindpaw. It was almost at the end of the corridor when Coleridge was struck a paralysing blow; the pistol fell to the floor with a thump and he groped, searing pain suffusing him.

He was aware that in the gloom he had not noticed a wooden buttress protruding from the wall at shoulder height. He had run straight onto it in his pursuit, momentarily paralysing a nerve.

He had fallen to the parquet now, groping for the pistol which lay a foot or two from his nerveless hand. Again came the chilling snarl from the end of the corridor.

Coleridge felt his senses swimming. As he pitched forward into unconsciousness he was left with one final image on his retina: that of naked human feet rounding the end of the passage. The right leg was limping. Then the darkness reached out and enveloped him.

CHAPTER 17: CONVERSATION PIECE

Coleridge became aware that the Count’s face was coming into focus. He looked concerned and moved forward to press his guest back onto the pillow as he tried to struggle upright.

‘Rest. You have had a bad shock, my friend.’

Coleridge was aware of a throbbing in his arm. He cautiously flexed his muscles, felt the pain receding.

‘I am sorry to put you to so much trouble.’

The sentence sounded fatuous even as he enunciated it. His eyes were normal now, and he took in the pistol lying on the bedside table. He was back in his own room again.

‘I must apologise,’ he told the Count. ‘I borrowed your pistol without permission. I took it from the Weapons Hall.’

The Count smiled faintly.

‘That is perfectly all right, Professor. You must have had a good reason.’

Coleridge nodded. He decided to take his host into his confidence. It was the most sensible course. Things had taken too serious a turn for prevarication.

He glanced at his watch face, clear and sharp beneath the lamp. It had just turned half-past three. So he had been unconscious only a short time. Probably the shock and the pain. Recollection flooded back; he remembered the feet he had seen running away.

He got up, felt a little weak. The Count held him firmly by the arm and helped him to sit. His head was clearing. His host had enormous strength; Coleridge could feel that, though the steel-like fingers were amazingly gentle.

A shadow moved in the room. The bearded servant looked at Coleridge impassively. The Count was already pouring him a drink. He put the glass into his hand. Coleridge caught the taste of cognac, raw and strong on his tongue. Strength flooded back in. He rose, flexing his left arm gingerly. The feeling was returning now. He had probably merely bruised his shoulder.

‘Would you like a doctor?’ the Count said solicitously.

Coleridge shook his head. His host was incredibly patient. He must have a dozen questions as to why his guest had been running about the corridor in the middle of the night, firing a revolver; but he merely waited, nothing but compassion in his eyes. Coleridge knew then that the wolf-thing had disappeared, that he was probably the only person who had seen it. Otherwise the whole Castle would have been aroused.

‘My man was passing the stairs,’ Homolky volunteered as Coleridge sat down on the edge of the bed and again sipped at the cognac. ‘His wife is sick, and he had been to collect something from the doctor in Lugos. He heard the shot and came to investigate. He found you lying unconscious. He came straight to me without arousing the household.’

‘He is very discreet,’ said Coleridge.

The Count smiled again.

‘All my servants are discreet,’ he said.

Coleridge had been listening to his host almost without understanding the purport of his words. Now came their sense. He looked at his host incredulously.

‘Do you mean to say your man was the only person who heard?’

The Count shrugged.

‘Apparently. It is the middle of the night. My guests would be sound asleep. And these walls are enormously thick. Perhaps it is better so.’

His eyes held the guest’s until they seemed to grow inordinately large.

‘You are a man of great courage and discretion, Professor. A savant and a scholar. If you discharge a pistol in the corridor of my Castle in the dead hours of the night, you must have had a very good reason for doing so.’

‘Indeed,’ Coleridge said.

The Count inclined his head.

‘You were firing at something dangerous?’

Coleridge nodded.

‘Very dangerous. You may be sure I would have come to you immediately had I not foolishly struck against a protruding beam.’

He looked uncertainly from the manservant to his master.

‘But I would prefer to speak to you in private about it.’

The Count made a subtle gesture to the bearded man, who mumbled something in return and seemed to melt back into the shadows. Coleridge heard the faint click of the bedroom door closing to behind him.

The Count drew over a bedside chair and sat down facing Coleridge, pouring himself a liberal measure of cognac. He sipped it appreciatively, raising it in a silent toast to the guest.

‘Now, Professor,’ he said gently. ‘Had you not better tell me everything?’

‘It is absolutely incredible! We have searched but found no trace of the animal.’

Homolky stroked his chin with a strong hand, but there was the very faintest tremor in his voice. He poured himself a little more cognac, concentrating on the task with great deliberation as though striving to preserve the normalities. Coleridge’s throat felt dry with talking, and he held out his own glass as the Count advanced the bottle to him. The two men sipped silently, each occupied with his own heavy thoughts.

‘What you are telling me, then,’ the Count said eventually, ‘is that you fired at a wolf in the corridor outside here, in the midst of my sleeping guests.’

Coleridge felt suddenly tired.

‘I tried to put the matter as unsensationally as possible, Count. A wolf, moreover, which had apparently just tried the door-handle of my room. A beast which can reason like a man and which has apparently disappeared like a puff of smoke.’

He held out his hand as the Count started up as though in expostulation.

‘I think there is deadly danger here. Your daughter is involved also. That is why we were examining the broken wall of your outer courtyard.’

The Count stared at Coleridge for a long moment, his face draining of blood. He held the stem of his fragile cognac glass as though he would crush it in his massive fingers.

‘And why did my daughter confide in you instead of her own father?’ he said very gently and deliberately.

Coleridge felt the uneasiness and embarrassment return, but this was the time for truth.

‘Because she loves you and her mother very much,’ he said steadily. ‘She did not wish either of you worried at that stage. Tonight’s incident changes things.’

Little sparks were glinting in Homolky’s eyes beneath the thatch of white hair. But he looked at his guest with approval and nodded once or twice as though he had come to a decision.

‘Your words do you credit, Professor. But I find this very alarming.’

He paused, fixing Coleridge with burning eyes.

‘I shall have to ask you to be absolutely frank and precise in your answers to my questions.’

Coleridge got up and took a turn around the room. He was still fully clothed, and his arm and shoulder felt less painful with every minute that passed.

‘You will not need to ask questions, Count. I intend to be most comprehensive in my facts as well as my theories.’

Coleridge paused again, looking round the ancient chamber in the golden lamplight. He was suddenly conscious of the hundreds of years of history, mostly barbaric history, that Castle Homolky represented.

And somewhere out there in the darkened corridors and shadowy hallways was the answer to a mystery that was assuming baffling proportions. He came back toward the bed quickly, sensing the Count’s barely hidden impatience.

‘When I arrived at Lugos,’ he began, ‘I found a tragic situation in the village, as you well know. Several horrible deaths, the result of depredations by a band of wolves. I myself saw the mangled remains of a peasant brought in; one of the employees on your own estate, who had been a friend of your daughter as a child. There was a further attack yesterday and another villager injured.’

The Count’s eyes never left Coleridge’s face. His guest looked strained and haggard in the lamplight. He gave a heavy sigh at the professor’s words, but he did not interrupt the narrative.

‘Yesterday morning,’ Coleridge continued, ‘your daughter sought my help and advice. The previous night she had been disturbed by someone trying the handle of the door to her room. It was locked, fortunately. She was about to open it when she heard a snarling noise like an animal. She screamed and heard a clicking sound on the corridor floor as though the beast were running away.’

The Count shifted uneasily on his chair, holding his half-empty cognac glass in his listless hand, but still he did not interrupt.

‘After that she fainted,’ his guest went on. ‘The following morning, when she asked my help, I examined the door of her room and the corridor parquet. I found scratches which looked as though they had been made by an animal.’

His face now was grim.

‘I also found fragments of skin and fur in a splinter on the panel of the door. I asked my colleague, Dr. Menlow, to analyse it for me. First, he found his microscope and other instruments had disappeared. When your servants traced them, the box containing the lenses was not there, making the instruments useless.’

The Count’s face was grave.

‘You think this was deliberate?’

‘I do not know,’ Coleridge said heavily. ‘I am merely transmitting some relevant facts. Without going into wild theories, I was examining the broken snow in the area of the shattered wall which contains the outer courtyard of the Castle. I found tracks of a beast which could have been a wolf and which led toward the arcade of the inner court.’

The Count rose quickly, seeming to tower over Coleridge, his heavy shadow imprinted on the opposite wall.

‘This is fantastic, Professor. What animal can open or unlock doors to penetrate to my family and guests’ quarters?’

Coleridge shrugged.

‘A very strange animal, Count, evidently. I have not yet finished.’

The host laid his hand on the other’s arm. His voice sounded tired and dispirited.

‘I am sorry. This is an upsetting business.’

‘I will be brief. This morning’s incident was almost a repetition of your daughter’s experience. It was most alarming, I can assure you. It was because I was concerned, particularly for your daughter’s safety, that I took the liberty of purloining that pistol from your Weapons Hall. While I was in there I saw a strange shadow on the corridor wall and heard the clicking of what sounded like an animal’s paws along the passage.’

The Count drew in his breath with a quick rasping noise, but he still stood immobile, his shadow dark and distorted on the wall.

‘When I opened my door an hour or so ago I could not really believe what I saw. There was a great wolf in the corridor. It seemed to understand that the pistol spelt danger, and it made off very rapidly.’

Coleridge paused. He suddenly felt very tired, and his arm and shoulder were paining him again.

‘Its action reminded me of the beast Colonel Anton fired at without any seeming effect. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to throw off the safety-catch in the excitement of the moment, or it would have been a very different story.’

His eyes met the Count’s, and a strange, almost hostile, glance passed between the two.

‘The beast knew this also, Count, for it came back toward me as fast as it could, ready to tear my throat out. I had the safety free by this time, and the animal made off again. I cannot be certain, but I think I wounded it slightly in the off hindleg.’

The Count’s eyes were very bright now as he stared at Coleridge.

‘I went to follow, but unfortunately I had not noticed that projecting beam in the corridor and I ran headlong onto it. The pain was such that I dropped the revolver and lost consciousness.’

The Count could not keep the astonishment from his voice.

‘What are you telling me, Professor?’

Homolky’s pronunciation trembled very slightly despite his iron self-control.

‘That we have a bizarre situation here, Count,’ said Coleridge in a voice so low that the other had to strain to pick out the words.

There was shock in the big man’s eyes.

‘I must call in Colonel Anton. What does this all mean?’

‘I am not certain,’ Coleridge said. ‘There is a dark tangle and much danger overhanging your household.’

He cleared his throat with a low rasping noise in the silence of the shadowy room.

‘There are just two alternatives. A wolf. Or a werewolf. With the available evidence pointing to the latter.’