“Never heard of him,” I said.
“He was notorious just the same. Morgan and Blackbeard and Kidd are about the only pirates who still rate press notices, but in his day José was spot news. Along with Billy Bowlegs and Gasparilla he was one of the last of the famous pirates, and he suddenly dropped out of sight along the Spanish Main just before Captain Skelton settled down in New York. Dame Rumor’s tongue has wagged ever since, and the Skeltons have never quite managed to live it down.”
“They don’t try to any more,” Watrous added. “They’re rather proud of him. Adds an interesting spot of color to the ancestral tree. About ten years after he came here, he outfitted a small schooner one day and left for parts unknown. He was thought to have turned pirate again, but he showed up six months later without telling anyone where he’d been. Both Burridge and Williams think his trip was for the purpose of retrieving a cache of hidden treasure. Soon after that he bought Skelton Island — it appears as West Brother Island on the old maps — and built this house. It’s quite possible that Ephraim’s original capital was in the form of pirate loot. Floyd has an interesting collection that bears on the subject.”
“Floyd?” Merlini asked.
“Floyd Skelton. He and his brother Arnold live here with Linda, her half brothers, I believe, by an earlier marriage. Floyd’s an amateur authority on pirates and buried—”
“So,” I broke in, “the Captain’s the resident ghost hereabouts. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“And why not?” Merlini asked. “He makes a lovely haunt. He even had the pirate’s traditional wooden leg. If the engraving Burridge reproduces is authentic, he was a big hairy Cro-Magnon with a dirty look in his eye that should have been able to sink a galleon as easily as any broadside of twelve-pounders. And his nonchalant disregard for human life would make a modern professional gunman look like a sissy. Dead men tell no tales was his strict policy. If all his victims came to haunt him in his last years, and are still around, then this is probably the best haunted house in Christendom.”
“Boo to you!” I said skeptically. “Are you two trying to get my wind up? I never saw a ghost, I never hope to see one, and so forth. But go on. What about his post-mortem history?”
“The Captain,” Watrous replied with a professorial accent, “has the reputation of being a rather noisy old apparition. Footsteps, back and forth, as if he were pacing his quarter-deck, were noted quite frequently in the old accounts. Dishes would pick themselves up and go smash, pictures fall off the walls for no apparent reason, the furniture move about and rearrange itself. Quite an interesting assortment of poltergeist phenomena. Though I think none has been reported in recent years because Miss Skelton would allow no investigation. Nevertheless the house has “an enviable reputation in psychic literature.”
“The sound effects department,” I said to Merlini, “should be able to manage—”
My skepticism took a sudden, unexpected smack on the jaw and nearly went down for the count. From the hall outside, at the top of the stairs came a solid thump. It was immediately followed by another and then another. A stately, remorseless procession of bumps, one to each step — down the stairs. My back was to the door; Watrous faced it. I saw his jaw drop. Merlini and I both whirled about.
The steady thump of the wooden leg — I was beginning to believe it could be that — came on down the stairs, a good six feet of which was visible through the door. All three flashlights were trained on the opening. The sounds continued on past the door, and I saw — exactly nothing. Then, at the foot of the stairs, they stopped.
“You asked for it,” Merlini said, striding for the door.
We were all there in another second, peering out. The hall was empty and the front door, as Merlini had left it when we came in, closed. He moved out to the foot of the stair and then, in the light of his torch, I saw the bright gleam of metal. A shiny flashlight that had not been there earlier lay on the floor a foot or two from the bottom step.
Merlini’s flash swung and pointed up the stairs.
“Someone up there.” Watrous’s voice was a thin, unsteady whisper.
“Yes. If the Captain carried a light it wouldn’t be an electric one.” Merlini raised his voice. “Hello! You dropped something.”
And this time we did hear footsteps, footsteps that were not made by a flashlight rolling down from step to step. They were soft furtive ones that creaked on another stairway above, and retreated, going higher.
“Got that gun handy, Ross?” Merlini said loudly, and started up.
I pulled it out, moved the safety catch, and went after him, Watrous close behind. We turned on the second floor and came back the length of the hall to face a second stairway. There was a small landing at its top and a single door. The irregular creaking and the intermittent thud of the swinging shutter as it banged against the house came louder. This room, I knew suddenly, must be the one from which the light had come. Merlini waited for us on the landing, one hand on the doorknob. He turned it and the door moved inward an inch or two.
“Well,” he said grimly, his words obviously directed beyond the door. “There are three of us and we’re armed; Let’s go.”
He gave the door a strong quick push. It swung in and around and banged solidly against the wall. Our three lights focused together on the inner darkness and pushed in to make a tunnel in the black. Nothing happened. No movement, no sound. Merlini took one quick, long stride across the threshold. Watrous and myself followed automatically and together.
Our lights probed the dark, three bright shafts that moved like swift rapiers around the room — finding no one, nothing but that same dreary abandonment. This room was like all the others except that the ceiling was lower and there were three pieces of furniture, a decrepit, leather-covered couch whose coiled entrails jutted out in places where the rats had gnawed, and, near the right-hand wall, a large trestle table with a mildew-spotted armchair drawn up before it. The chair’s high back cast a triple shadow on the wall that curved and moved as the beams from our lights turned and crossed. An empty kerosene lamp, without chimney, stood on the table, and its glass sent a flicker of reflected light back at us, the only bright gleam in the room.
Conscious of a fresher smell to the air, I swung my light on the windows. There were two in the wall facing us and two on both right and left, tall blank openings whose tightly closed shutters stopped the light abruptly a few inches beyond the dusty, nearly opaque glass. One window alone was open some three feet at the top, and outside it the shutter swung, filling the room with its harsh grating. I ran across, sprang up on the low window seat, and, holding one arm before my face to guard against the shutter’s swing, put my head out. The drop to the water below was sheer.
“No exit this way,” I began. “It’s—” I leaned farther out—40 feet below on the dark river I saw a faintly reflected reddish glow that seemed to be thrown out from the house, low near the water’s edge. I didn’t like the wavering way it moved. I turned. “Merlini—” I started.
He was standing near the armchair, on its other side, looking down into it. I saw Watrous take two hesitant steps toward him and then stop abruptly at his side. The light in his hand trembled. And I saw the rounded line of white along the arm of the chair — the white flesh of a woman’s arm.
I still don’t remember stepping down from the window seat and crossing the room. Suddenly I found myself there beside them, looking down at a woman who sat in an uncomfortably stiff attitude in the chair, and stared with wide eyes that did not move or blink, directly into the glare of our torches.