Puzzled and deflated, Michael put the letter aside. Maybe Galen’s secretary had made a mistake, or else Galen had told her to include all the letters dated to a particular year. He could hardly quote specific identifying details over the telephone, especially when he hadn’t read the letters for over ten years.
Michael felt sure of this hypothesis when he started the next letter and found Randolph ’s name in the opening paragraph. The context was not precisely what he had come to expect of Gordon Randolph.
“These sporadic flashes of brilliance baffle me,” his father had written of the school’s star athlete and president of the student body. “I expected great things of the boy, he’s already a school legend, but he never happened to take any of my courses until this year-which is his last. I’d say that literature simply wasn’t his field, if it weren’t for that rare outstanding essay.”
The rest was inconsequential, for Michael’s purposes. There was another reference to the devil worshipers, whose existence was now a well-established rumor. His father found them exasperating, whoever they were: “They’ve been reading about the Hellfire Club and decided to imitate that bunch of nasty-minded little-”
The next word was indecipherable; which, Michael thought, with a reminiscent grin, was probably just as well. His father’s collection of epithets and expletives were drawn from the riper Restoration dramatists; some of them had curled his hair even in his supercilious high school days.
As he read on, his sentimental nostalgia increased; but so did his bewilderment. There were eight letters in all. One of them didn’t even mention Randolph, the others contained more references to his father’s pet student-what was the kid’s name?-Al Something-than to Gordon. Poor old Dad must have been losing his grip, Michael thought. Gordon was only a few years away from his great book; according to the publisher’s blurb, parts of it had actually been written while he was in college. If his father hadn’t spotted a talent of that magnitude…
The last letter was no more informative, but it was something of a shocker. His father’s handwriting was shakier than usual, and his sentences were so garbled by emotion as to be relatively incoherent in parts. The feeble idiocy of the campus Hellfire Club had exploded into scandal and disaster; one student was dead as a result of an occult experiment, which his father’s Victorian inhibitions had kept him from describing in detail. And that student was the boy for whom he had had such hopes-Alfred Green.
Large as the affair had been in the minuscule world of the university, it hadn’t made much of a splash in the press. Michael remembered hearing something about it, but the influential board of trustees had succeeded in suppressing the details. Still, reading between the lines, it must have been a nasty business. The word was his father’s. It kept recurring, through the scribbled agitation of the lines: nasty, foul, disgusting. It would seem that way to him, Michael thought. Then, at the end of the letter, came a hasty postscript.
“Young Randolph came by this evening, to express his regrets. Alfred was one of his closest friends. It was kind of the boy, and perceptive, to know that this has hurt me worse than an ordinary scandal would have done. Perhaps I haven’t been fair to him. Antipathy is an odd thing.”
Michael sat staring at the last page for a long time, while the cigarette burned down between his lax fingers and his second cup of coffee grew cold. He felt completely deflated. He had expected a complete, startling answer to the enigma that had begun as a simple problem of character, and which had now taken on such ominous outlines. But there was no answer in these letters, only new questions. In the back of his mind the mental call still pulled, confusing what wits he had left.
It was not until he was trudging through a blue twilight on his way to the place where he had left the car that he realized what the letters had told him. Another death. Randolph ’s triumphant career seemed to be unnecessarily littered with corpses.
He forgot this new piece of the puzzle, which was merely an addition to his list rather than a clue as to why the list existed, as he drove through the streets of the village near Randolph ’s estate. The street lights had come on and the houses looked peaceful and homey, with lights twinkling through the gathering darkness. The temperature had dropped, though; the wind that tossed the boughs was sharp. He rolled up the car window.
He hit a snag when he turned into the curving streets of the suburb. He had already observed that the inhabitants of Brentwood liked their privacy. There were no quaint mailboxes with names on them along the curving drives and walled estates. There weren’t many street lights, either. Maybe the rich didn’t need them. They had their own methods of guarding against crime-burglar alarms, dogs, even private guards.
Nor did Andrea court publicity. Michael found the house at last only because it was at the end of the sole road that was unpaved and unland-scaped. A survival from a simpler past, he thought, jouncing down the rutty lane. If there was a house down here, it was well hidden. Mud squelched under the tires, and he had visions of being thoroughly stuck, at the end of a road that petered out into forest.
As the thought formed, the road ended. The dark shapes of trees loomed up, and Michael jammed on the brakes, skidding. He saw the gate, and knew that he had arrived.
It was the sort of gate Andrea might have had constructed to her specifications if she had set up shop as a newly certified witch-wooden, rickety, sagging on rusted hinges. Thick, untrimmed shrubs concealed the path beyond and leaned out over the fence like watchful sentries. The house beyond was visible only as a crazy shape of roofs and chimneys that cut off a section of starry sky. There was no light, and no sign of human life.
Shapes other than man-made cut off the starlight. Half the sky was curtained by clouds. The wind lifted Michael’s hair from his forehead and turned the boughs of the tall shrubs into armed appendages, which thrust out in abrupt challenge. The clouds hung heaviest toward the east. As Michael watched, distracted from his search by the eerie movement of the night, a glow of light flickered above the tops of the pines, like the ghost of a sick sunset. It was followed by a slow, far-off roll of thunder.
Practical considerations intruded on the fascination of the approaching storm. This trek might turn out to be more disastrous than a plain old wild-goose chase. The road was already gluey with mud; another heavy rain could maroon him in this abandoned lane. He had better check the house and get out.
The mental call that had brought him a hundred miles was gone.
When it had left-if it had ever existed, save in his imagination-he could not remember. But its absence left him feeling blind or deaf, bereft of a sense that had, even in so short a time, become something he depended on as uncritically as he accepted the use of his eyes. For the first time in nearly twenty-four hours he examined his activities in the cold light of reason, and found them folly. Only his inborn stubbornness brought his hand to the latch of the gate.
It screeched rustily. He had half expected that it would, but the sound, shattering the quiet night, made him jump. As he took a tentative step forward, something streaked across the path in front of him. He grabbed instinctively at the branch of the shrub, stabbed his thumb on something sharp, and let out a yell. The shrub had thorns.
The darting streak that crossed his path hadn’t triggered any fantasies, though; he knew what it was-a cat, one of the dozen that Andrea was reputed to keep. He wondered where the others were, and what arrangements Andrea made for their comfort while she was off on her frequent trips. Then he realized that all the shrubbery was alive with movement. The action of the wind made the foliage mutter; but there were other sounds. Small, ground-level movements rustled branches and made leaves whisper. He saw something glow into life at the base of a bush near the house-two small round dots of red fire. The cats prowled.