I took a bath, changed again, and went down to dinner. The lady of the house was seated next to me, in a magnificent gown. I cannot have amused her greatly. I was too nervous and feeling sorry for myself, and with good reason.
On the other hand, she was very good-looking. But even if she had not been so very pretty, she was also the Lady of the Castle, the descendent of Pendragons, and I felt too unworthy to do so much as open my mouth. The reader might think me a snob: let him think so. I admit that I do privately believe that an Earl is different from other men.
The things she was telling Maloney intimidated me even more. Two years earlier she had been presented at court; she spent the London season with her aunt, the Duchess of Warwick, who lived in Belgravia in a street so superbly exclusive that tears came to my eyes whenever I walked down it. And garden parties with Lady This, and evening parties with Lady That, and bazaars with someone else … The names of her girl friends, all resonantly historic names that tripped so lightly off her tongue, fell on my head like hammer blows.
If every meal is to be taken in such an aristocratic milieu, I thought, I shall waste away. I should mention that during my time in England I had quite often been in ‘good society’, but almost invariably as a hired secretary, not as a guest. But these Pendragons were something above ‘good society’. And, last but not least, a distinguished young woman was in my eyes even more exalted and formidable than, for example, a distinguished old gentleman.
To all this was added the oppressive sense that, through Eileen St Claire’s intrigues, I had permanently forfeited the right ever to be made a welcome guest at Llanvygan. In my misery I drank a great deal of the full-bodied wine of the house, hoping it might help me sleep. Such was the introduction to my first night at Llanvygan, the start of my supernatural and inexplicable adventures.
I was lying in my oppressively historic bed (no doubt dating back to Queen Anne), reading and reading. It was a philosophical work. Philosophy nearly always calms my mind and sends me quickly to sleep, perhaps as a refuge from boredom. The subjective and the objective, whose particular mutual relationship had been the topic in question, began to take on human characteristics in my half-waking, half-dreaming state.
“What a wind!” said Subject to Object.
“Don’t worry about it, it’s blowing from windward,” replied Object to Subject, the way the left half of the brain will chat to the right half when one is half-asleep … Then I found myself most thoroughly awake.
What was that?
I became aware that I had been hearing the noise for quite some time — that human-inhuman, indefinable something of a noise. Now, in the darkness, nothing else seemed to exist. First it went tap, tap; then something like tree-ee; and then came something that could never be recorded in writing — a long drawn-out sigh, like a terrified gasping for air. It was deeply unnerving.
And the whole sequence was repeating itself at intervals of about three minutes, though the timing cannot have been entirely regular — it was more a question of when I noticed it.
Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine — Napoleon strutting back and forth with his hands behind his back, or a slender woman seated at her spinning wheel. But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions … And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. Not a pleasant sensation.
I lit a cigarette. The dance of smoke from my Gold Flake drifted across the room but failed to make it any more congenial. I was desperately tired. The wind was howling down the open fireplace like an uncontrolled blast of interference on the radio. And, time and time again, tap, tree-ee, and the inexpressible sigh.
Of course I realised it must be a window, or something of that kind, producing the noise. On many a windy night the same battle had been waged between an unsecured window and my fevered imagination.
I knew that, whether I wanted to or not, I would have to go and investigate. I knew my habits of mind: until I did that, I would have no rest.
I got out of bed, donned my dressing gown and quietly drew back the door.
It opened on to a corridor. The corridor was in pitch-black darkness, draughty and thoroughly unfriendly. Like a man who has tested the icy water and drawn back his foot, I went back into my room.
At times like this I arm myself with a revolver: they are what I keep one for. It might seem a little too much like something in a film, that a man should sleep with a loaded revolver, especially one like me, living such a peaceable life, but I had no choice: it was a long-established habit.
I pulled out the drawer of my bedside table — and thought my eyes must be playing tricks on me. If in place of the revolver I had found a tortoise, I could not have been more amazed. It was no longer in the right-hand corner, where I had put it, but in the left. There could be no question of error. I had even counted my cigarettes as I put them in, one by one.
No cinema fantasy was required for the next step. I opened the cylinder. It was empty. Someone had removed the cartridges.
As a general rule, only three things are stolen from me: cigarettes, razor blades and handkerchiefs. Never before a revolver cartridge. The distressing thing was that I now had none left. I had loaded it with six when I bought it ten years earlier and it had carried five ever since, after I fired one off to test it. I reckoned they would last me a lifetime. I never seriously thought I might use a single one in anger.
If I tell you I was not enjoying the situation, I am using a degree of understatement.
Meanwhile the noises off were rising in crescendo, as was my nervousness. It was as if loudspeakers were booming away in all sixty rooms of the house: tap, tree-ee, ahh … h … hh. Charming hospitality, when your windows roar like this. No — it couldn’t be a window. Here at last was the great and terrible adventure my anxieties had been leading me towards for ten long years.
In place of my revolver I took a torch. I drew a deep breath and leapt out into the corridor.
The window facing my bedroom door was shut. The sound seemed to be coming more from the left, so I headed in that direction. The next window was over ten paces away, and before it the corridor made a slight bend. The ancients hadn’t bothered much about lighting.
And then, to my immeasurable satisfaction, I came face to face with the culprit. Of course it was a window. It wasn’t properly shut. It swung to and fro like a corpse on the gallows. I immediately set about trying to close it.
I say trying, because this was no simple task. The window had a fiendishly historic lock. It now dawned on me how very clever I was to have once perused an excellent standard work on old English locksmithery. This was one of those very rare occasions, crosswords apart, when the knowledge I had acquired would be put to some use. I slammed it shut with a flourish that no Shakespearean chambermaid could have bettered.
The tension in my nerves eased. Wearily, but immensely reassured, I staggered back to my room. Through a combination of sheer courage and technical skill I had seen off my major fear. I would take a sedative and at last get some sleep. The business of the revolver could wait till the morning.
But fate willed otherwise. The window was merely a gentle prelude.