Merlini glanced at his wrist watch. “Yes,” he said, “we’ve got a few minutes. Watrous said to wait out front until we should see the lights in the other house go out, and then come down to meet him. Perhaps we can go through. Odd about this door though. He said Miss Skelton was annoyed if anyone even suggested coming up here. She wouldn’t let him have the keys when he wanted to look the place over.”
“Other house?”
“Yes. At the foot of the island. We couldn’t see it as we came past. In behind those trees at the lower end.”
I followed him in across the cellar and up the stairs.
“Careful,” he said. “There’s a step or two missing.”
He pushed against the door at the top and we found ourselves in a dark, barren room that had once been the kitchen. There was a sagging series of cupboards along one wall, and, in a corner, an antiquated, tin-lined sink topped by a rusty, iron hand pump that was shrouded in cobwebs. The air was dead and stale with the tired odor of decay.
A connecting door hung slantingly from a single hinge and, when I pulled it aside, its lower edge scraped along the floor. We entered a long narrow hall where my light, shining upward, penetrated the tall spindles of a stair rail and projected a moving striped pattern of light and dark on the discolored walls. Long dependent strips of damply curling wallpaper hung down and cast strangely twisted shadows. I felt a faint stirring of the musty air against my face. The tall front door stood ajar, half open.
“Looks as if Mr. Ghost had picked up his skirts and skedaddled,” I said, the forced cheerfulness of my tone made flat and hollow by the surrounding gloom.
Merlini’s forward progress stopped abruptly and I stumbled against him. “Pipe down, Ross,” he whispered. “Thought I heard something.”
From far above there came the faint protest of the creaking shutter. But that was all.
There were large double sliding doors on our left, one of them pushed back into the wall. Within, low near the floor, I caught a glimpse of small bright eyes that turned and vanished with a rustle of scratchy movement. “Rats.” I said, quietly.
Merlini nodded, still listening, his gaze directed upward where the stair curved away into the dark. After a moment he stepped quietly, forward, following the beam of his flash toward the open door, and stood there in the opening, looking out. I grasped the large, wrought-iron handle and pulled the heavy door toward me a foot or so, shivering along my spine as the ancient hinges cried out painfully with a harsh, rusty rasp.
“I should have brought a brass band,” Merlini commented acidly. “They’d be quieter. You make enough noise to wake—” His flash blinked out. “Douse your light!”
Outside, down at the far end of the island I could see the dim white shape of a house in among the trees, one lighted window on the ground floor. But nearer, perhaps halfway between us and the house, was another light, a moving point that bobbed up and down and grew larger. It winked like an uncertain will-o’-the-wisp as it moved behind and was eclipsed by the intervening trees.
We watched it silently as it drew closer, until, finally, just as it came from under the trees into the open space before the house and began to shine steadily, it blinked out. Where the light had been I could see faintly a darker splotch against the shadow of the wood, the figure of a man standing very still, looking up at the house. After a long moment he moved and came slowly toward us walking with an alert, stealthy tread. Merlini’s light stabbed at the figure and robbed it instantly of all motion.
I recognized at once the short broad-shouldered figure, the cropped military mustache, the black-rimmed pince-nez, and the round, fat face. It was Colonel Watrous, his customary, dignified and pompous manner completely effaced by the startled expression and the blank fright in his eyes. His arm jerked up and a yellow beam of light jumped from his flash.
Merlini stepped out into the light. “Sorry, Colonel,” he said reassuringly, “we weren’t too sure it was you.”
The Colonel’s sigh of relief was audible 15 feet away. Shakily he said, “I saw your light from the house, but what — were you doing upstairs and how did you get in?”
“The place is wide open. Everything but a welcome mat at the door. Only — that wasn’t our light you saw upstairs.”
Watrous, who had moved to meet us, stopped again. The light in his hand wavered unsteadily. “Not yours? But—”
“No,” Merlini said. “We saw that too, before we landed.”
“Ghosts,” I suggested. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, hello, Ross.” The Colonel gave me a nervous half-smile. “This ghost doesn’t run to lights.”
“And,” Merlini added calmly, “no ghost ever has to smash a lock. You know that.” He had turned his light on the door jamb, centering it on fresh splintered scars where the lock’s bolt had fitted. Then he turned to the Colonel. “How much time do we have before the curtain goes up on that séance? Time to give this place the once-over?”
Watrous’s head nodded emphatically. “Yes, I think we’d better. I don’t like it. I don’t understand. … ”
He threw a quick glance back at the light from the other house and led the way in, slowly, his flash making rapid darting movements, as if he were trying to see everything at once. He went toward the wide double door on the right and looked in. I followed. Over his shoulder I saw a large spacious room with high ceilings, empty and deserted. There was a large fireplace in the farther wall and on the right, between two high windows with cracked and broken panes, a tall mirror was set into the wall. It reflected dimly and unevenly “from its dusty surface, and the ornately carved, once-white frame that surrounded it was cracked and yellow.
Close against the nearest window was the room’s single piece of furniture, a forlorn-looking ladder-back chair with its rungs askew and only a few straggling pieces of twisted cane still projecting around the rim of its seat. The Colonel went into the room and walked toward the chair.
I stood in the doorway. Merlini had stopped just inside the front door by the foot of the stairs. His light played on the floor and moved up the steps, examining the treads.
The Colonel pulled the chair out away from the wall a foot or two with a slow, careful motion as if afraid it would fall apart in his hands. “Not much left of the Captain’s regal appointments,” he said. “Rather disappointing. I’d hoped the old place was better preserved than this.”
“ ‘Regal appointments’?” Merlini observed from over my shoulder. “I see you’ve read the Williams account too.”
“Yes,” Watrous admitted. “The history of this place has always fascinated me. That’s why I checked it on that list I submitted to NBC. The broadcast plan intrigued me because it offered such an excellent excuse for a first-hand investigation of this house. That was why I came out here originally.”
I put in a plea for information. “Will one of you antiquarians please tell me what it’s all about? Just what sort of three-headed djinn haunts this place and why? What’s this fascinating, not to say exasperating, history that it has?”
“It’s more than fascinating. It’s positively lurid,” Merlini said. “Ever hear of Ephraim Skelton?”
“Vaguely,” I answered. “A big bad wolf of finance in Grandpa’s day, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. He cleaned up in railroads just prior to the turn of the century. The present Linda Skelton’s grandfather. They called him, to mention only the printable epithets, the Scourge of Wall Street and the Buccaneer of Finance. The piratical terms were an allusion not only to his methods but to his grandfather, Captain Arnold Skelton. The Captain was an eccentric, fiery-tempered old boy who appeared rather mysteriously out of nowhere in 1830 and whose description tallied rather too closely with that of the notorious José Boutell.”