The Mansion in the Mist (3 page)

Anthony shook his head to clear it of the dangerous
ideas that were floating around inside. "I won't go into that room," he said through gritted teeth. "Besides, the chest is gone."

Wearily, Anthony stripped off his clothes and put on his pajamas. He yawned, blew out his candle, stretched, and threw himself into bed. But he lay there wide-eyed, listening to the rumbling of the storm that was getting closer. With a sudden jerk, Anthony hauled himself to his feet and fumbled for the matchbox on the window-sill. With trembling hands he tried to light the candle, but it took him three matches to do it. Then, with the candleholder gripped tightly in his fist, he padded out into the hall and moved stealthily toward the room that had once held the mysterious chest. The door was closed, and it took Anthony a long time to get up the courage to grip the knob. Finally he did, and with a sudden lunge he pushed the door inward. Then he gasped. By the trembling yellow light of the candle, he saw that the chest was there. Had it come because he wanted it to?

Slowly Anthony moved to the side of the chest and knelt down. He pushed the lid up and propped it open with the piece of wood that he had found on the win-dowsill. Holding the candle down inside the chest, he saw nothing but raw splintery wood. Gripping the edge of the chest with his hands, he stared and stared, but the chest did not change. Now, as he knelt there, Anthony began to feel the horrible urging that he had felt before:
Climb in. Lie down.
For a long time he resisted, while thunder rumbled outside and rain rattled on the
window. Finally he clambered over the side of the huge chest and knelt on the bottom. From his shirt pocket he took the card he had found in the vase, and by candlelight he read aloud:
"Auro est locus in quo conflatur."

At first nothing happened. Then, with a sudden rush of wind, the bottom dropped out of the chest, and Anthony fell downward into darkness.

For a terrifying minute Anthony plummeted into the dark. Then his speed slowed and he was floating, until at last he landed gently on a hard surface. Blackness still surrounded him, so he had no idea where he was. Then he reached out and touched rough, splintery wood. He was still inside the chest! Reaching up he pushed at the lid, and with a groaning of rusty hinges it swung open. Anthony gasped—he was not in the dusty room any longer. The chest stood at the edge of a grove of enormous trees. Off to the right loomed a huge mansion of black stone. Gargoyles and other strange decorations sprouted from its clifflike sides. The windows were narrow and set deep into the walls, and thick tangles of bush and weed hid the foundations. The mansion was
topped by a steep slate roof with round dormer windows set into it. Anthony could see tall shadowy chimneys capped by elaborate iron covers that reminded him of Chinese pagodas. Near the mansion was a large garden full of twisted weeds and vines, and statues stood here and there amid the growths. A strange shining wall of mist hung at the far end of the garden, and from it came the faint moonlight that lay over this odd nighttime world.

Fear gripped Anthony's heart. Where—on or off the earth—was he? One light burned in a second story window of the mansion, so maybe there was someone here who could help him. But the old house looked so gloomy and forbidding that Anthony was not in any hurry to meet the owner. Carefully he raised himself up and stepped over the side of the chest. The ground was covered by soft, springy beds of gray moss, and Anthony made no noise as he padded toward the mansion. Passing the edge of the garden, he heard a dry, rustling sound. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared toward a dark snarl of vines that were writhing and twisting like a mass of snakes. The vines lay still again, and for some reason Anthony felt very relieved. On he plodded, till he came to a winding flagstone path that led up to a low arched doorway set into the side of the house. But when he got nearer Anthony groaned in disappointment. The doorway was a fake! The elaborately carved arch was blocked by a heavy blank slab of stone.

For a long time Anthony stood there with his arms
folded, staring at the false door. He glanced around and examined the leering monster faces and flowers that were carved on the veined marble. Next to the door stood a headless statue of a woman in a toga. She held a cup in one hand, and it was full of black dirt. Near her shoulder a gas bracket sprouted from the dark stone wall. Anthony knew about gas brackets—he had read about them in books. Before the electric light was invented, people's homes were lit by gas, the same kind of gas that is used in stoves and ovens today. In order to get the gas in the pipe to come on, you had to pull on a chain with a ring on the end and light the gas with a candle or a match. Sure enough, there was the chain dangling from the bronze neck of the bracket.
What if I pull at it?
thought Anthony.
What do you think will happen?
Anthony was deathly afraid of escaping gas, and every night before he went to bed he checked the burners on the range in his family's kitchen to make sure that everything was shut off. But out here in the open, gas might escape, and yet nothing bad would happen. Fumbling in his pocket, Anthony brought out a book of matches. He reached up past the shoulder of the statue and pulled at the ring on the end of the chain. Then he quickly opened the matchbook and ripped out a paper match, but he never got the chance to light it. With a deep grinding sound, the heavy stone slab swung inward, revealing a dark shadowy passageway.

Anthony was stunned. He stood staring with his mouth open in utter, total amazement. He had never
seen a secret passageway, except in old movies on television. Well, here was one, waiting for him to enter it. But should he go in? As he stood pondering, a greenish flame popped out of the nozzle of the gas bracket and began to dance in the breeze, casting a faint flickering light. Anthony laughed—he didn't know why, but he did. And, for some reason, he felt less afraid. After taking a deep breath and clenching his fists, he plunged into the gaping blackness.

As he stumbled on, feeling his way cautiously, Anthony smelled raw wood, plaster, and dust. The passageway was narrow and wound on in total darkness until Anthony saw a thin shaft of light that fell across the carpeted path on which he was treading. He noticed that the light was coming from a little peephole that was about the size of a half-dollar. Bending over, Anthony peered through the hole and saw an elaborately furnished room. A thick red Oriental carpet lay on the floor, and fancy old-fashioned couches upholstered in red velvet stood near polished Victorian tables and marble busts perched on tall fluted columns. On the walls were dusky paintings in heavy gilt frames, and a strange hovering light filled the room, though Anthony could not figure out where it was coming from. A paneled door was set in the far wall, and at any minute Anthony expected someone to come through it, but no one did.

After peering through the peephole for a few minutes, Anthony moved on. The carpeted floor squeaked under his feet as he tiptoed along, and every noise seemed
loud, but no one rushed in to grab him, so he kept going. After several twists and turns, the passage led past three or four more peepholes, but they also peered into empty rooms. On Anthony crept till he came to an opening that seemed a bit larger than the others. It was set very low in the wall, so he had to kneel down to see through it. What Anthony saw made him clamp his hand over his mouth so that his excited gasps would not attract the attention of the people in the room.

Through the tiny opening Anthony saw a strange and frightening scene. In a room that was as richly furnished as any of the others, a meeting was taking place. Grouped around a long polished table were twelve elderly men and women. They all wore black robes, and they looked like creatures from a bad dream. The faces of some of them were sagging and rubbery, as if they were wearing Halloween masks. Other faces were extremely wrinkled and pitted and had eyes that stared weirdly out of deep hollows. At the head of the table sat a tall, gaunt old man with arched black eyebrows. A long mane of white hair hung to his shoulders, and he wore half-moon glasses on his long, ridged nose. His red-rimmed eyes were cold and cruel, and he looked like some evil bird of prey. A jeweled gold star shone on the black velvet robe—it looked like some important military medal from the past or the star of some secret order. Clearly this was the leader of the group, and he spoke in a harsh, grating voice as Anthony listened.

"...and so, my dear friends, we must find the Lo
gos Cube. It is the key to the world we have built here, and without it this house and the garden outside and the forest and everything would dissolve into mist. It has got to be here somewhere, or we would not be alive. The traitor Nathaniel has hidden it, because he cannot possibly destroy it. And I have an odd feeling that it is very near us—under the floorboards of a room, perhaps, or in a cubbyhole in the attic. We must have it if we are to finish our grand design, our plan."

"But why not leave well enough alone?" wailed a small wizened old woman. "We are all here, and the mansion stands. Perhaps we should abandon our plan and settle for what we have."

The leader glared contemptuously at the woman. "That would be the cowardly way," he said, shaking his head. "No great work was ever done by people who just wanted to hang onto their little plot of ground. Besides, the Logos Cube needs to be controlled—by us. Even though we made it, there are many things about the cube that we do not understand. It has a life of its own, and that life goes on in some hiding place of this enchanted world. The other night, as I lay asleep, I felt the whole mansion tremble, from its chimneys to its foundations. Why did this happen? At another time I was walking along a hallway, and I noticed that a painting that hung on the wall had changed: It had been a landscape, but now it showed a stormy scene at sea. We are walking on brittle ice, my comrades."

"Do you mean that we are going to be destroyed?"
quavered a very frail little man at the far end of the table.

"No," snapped the leader. "I do not think that is likely. But if our world here can change without our permission, then we are in trouble. It might change into something unrecognizable, some world where we would not be happy. That is one good reason why we have to locate the cube."

"But how are we going to do that?" asked the woman who had spoken before. "We don't have a clue, do we?"

The leader smiled unpleasantly. "We have a very small and mysterious clue," he said, drumming his bony fingers on the tabletop. "After the cube was stolen, someone—Nathaniel, probably—carved a Latin phrase on a rock in the garden. As you may recall, it says
Auro est locus in quo conflatur.
There is a place for gold where it is gathered together. Now, this may or may not mean something. If Nathaniel is playing little riddle games with us, the phrase may mean that he has hidden some golden object somewhere, an object that is a clue leading to the discovery of the cube. I will admit that this phrase is not much to go on, but it is all we have."

There was a brief silence. Anthony could hear a gloomy black marble clock ticking on the mantelpiece. Then another old man spoke up. Mis face was withered and yellowish, and he wore large jeweled rings on his knobby fingers.

"My lord, Great Autarch," he began gravely, "do you think that the traitor Nathaniel still lives?"

The leader cocked his head to one side. Again he grinned, and his yellowish uneven teeth showed. "I suspect that he is still around," he said sourly. "Perhaps he is hiding in the forest or in the old hunting lodge on the far side of Ghost Lake. As you know, it is hard to kill an Autarch, and they can survive for a long time without food." Slowly the leader's face twisted into a mask of bitter hatred. "I wish I had guessed his plan in time," he said angrily, through clenched teeth. "He had doubts about our work from the beginning, and that should have convinced me that he was not to be trusted. If I ever catch him, he will wish that he had not been born."

On and on went this strange conference, while Anthony crouched by the peephole, listening breathlessly. What on earth was going on? What was this place? Who were these people, and what was their grand design? And what could the Logos Cube be? These questions went whirling around in Anthony's head, but he didn't have any answers. And now, as the speakers droned on, Anthony began to be afraid. What if he got caught? Slowly he turned himself around in the narrow passageway and began crawling along the uneven carpeted floor. Around one turn he went, and around another, as the voices faded into the background. Finally Anthony was back at the stone door, which still stood ajar. With a sigh of relief, he stepped out into the chilly night air. He had gotten away! Quickly Anthony glanced around. He half expected to see dark shapes rushing at him from behind bushes and trees. But no one came. Cautiously
Anthony began to move over the mossy ground. He noticed that the murky light had gotten brighter. What did this mean? Nothing, probably. He walked past the edge of the strange overgrown garden and began to hear rustling noises. Looking fearfully to his right, Anthony saw that the tangled vines were writhing and squirming again. And an awful high-pitched wailing sound began. Louder and louder it grew, and to his horror Anthony saw figures running toward him from the shadows near the mansion.

For an instant Anthony stood rooted to the spot, and then he ran. Faster and faster, feet slapping the ground, he pelted on till he reached the chest, which still stood at the edge of the forest. The wailing went on, and Anthony heard harsh barking shouts. By now Anthony was scared half out of his mind, and his fingers fumbled madly with the rough splintery lid. It seemed to take forever, but he finally got it open, and he clambered awkwardly inside. What was the phrase? What was the phrase? Running footsteps pounded closer as Anthony racked his brain. He had just heard the phrase a second or two ago. It was... it was...