Before I had even begun to consider how we might make the ascent, Maloney had reached the top. He undid the rope he had around his waist and promptly pulled us up. Osborne went first, with no problem. I followed, with great difficulty.
“You’d make a pretty feeble monkey,” Maloney observed, contemptuously.
From the other side of the rock we looked down on to a small lake, glittering in the moonlight. I had never before seen anything quite so unearthly. Across the water, huge trees ringed the shore, watching over the stillness under the soaring peak of Pendragon. It was a lake from a fairytale, with the fairy’s coral castle sunk in its depths.
And there, in a strange little boat shaped like a tub, sat old Pierce Gwyn Mawr, quite motionless. With his flowing white beard draped over his folded arms, he stared straight ahead, through half-closed eyes. He might have been sleeping.
“What’s the old chap doing?” said Maloney, restless as always.
“I’ve no idea,” replied Osborne. “Perhaps he’s waiting for Tylwyth Teget — that’s the fairy who lives in the lake. He’s obviously waiting for something, or someone. Perhaps we should too.”
We waited a very long time, lying at full stretch up on the rock. Maloney became increasingly impatient. Finally he suggested we should either throw something into the water to wake the old boy up, or else go home. The eeriness of the place clearly had the same sort of effect on his highly instinctive nature as a ghost would on a dog.
But Osborne and I continued gazing, enraptured, at the fantastical scene. It was a Hans Christian Andersen illustration come to life, and my dormant child’s consciousness was stirring in me, like the soft strains of a distant violin.
Suddenly the prophet raised his arms and began to sing. His strange, senile, whistling voice entirely failed to string the notes together into a tune: each protracted utterance seemed to be individually torn out of him, to be followed by another quite disconnected from it. The overall effect was distinctly weird, not so much song as incantation. The words, being Welsh, were incomprehensible to me.
And then, no less suddenly, the bushes facing us on the far side of the lake parted, and someone came down to the water’s edge. The old man ended his incantation, turned towards him and, without getting up, made a profound bow.
By this time the newcomer was standing on a small rock, every contour of his face clearly visible in the moonlight.
He was a powerfully-built man, very old, of almost preternatural size and dressed in black, a close-fitting Spanish outfit of long ago, like those worn by the night guards at Llanvygan. Only the collar was different, an enormous white ruff the size of a millstone. And the face … was that of a statue, ancient, timeless, quite beautiful in its august dignity, without a trace of humanity: the bleak, unfeeling face of a Northern god.
He began to speak, in a low but penetrating voice. The language was again Welsh. Pierce seized his oars and rowed his coracle swiftly to the shore. He climbed out, secured it to a tree, kissed the stranger’s hand, then vanished into the thicket. The stranger remained standing where he was for a while longer.
Slowly but unmistakably he was turning in the direction of our rock. Then he stopped and glared pointedly in our direction, as if he could actually see us. With a face of terror, Maloney gripped my arm. The unwavering stare of those wolf-like eyes produced an unbearable tension in all of us. I was afraid I might leap up at any moment. Maloney was uttering strange, soft cries.
The stranger turned on his heel and vanished into the gloom of the huge trees.
“Time to go,” said Osborne.
He let himself speedily down the rock, and we followed him. We took a short cut through the thicket, then went out through the wall and back to the main road.
Maloney wasn’t too pleased with this.
“I say … let’s at least try and see where they went.”
But Osborne warned him against it.
We almost ran towards the Delage. Though we had so carelessly abandoned it, it was waiting for us amiably enough on the road. After the Castle Lake, the wall, and the ghostly old men, there was something very reassuring about the car — the triumph of technology and the comforting familiarity of the twentieth century.
We were driving home at considerable speed, when Osborne suddenly stopped the car on a bend.
“Take a look at that,” he said, and pointed to Pendragon, now clearly visible from where we were.
The old tower, without question or possibility of optical illusion, was filled with light.
“Who’s living there?” I asked.
“According to my information, no one has for two hundred years,” said Osborne. And he set the car moving again. He was clearly agitated, and unwilling to talk for fear of betraying the fact. We returned to Llanvygan in silence.
“Come to my room and have a drink,” he suggested.
After three large tumblers of strong whisky — which we reckoned we had thoroughly earned — Osborne’s tension began at last to ease.
“Do sit down,” he began. “So, what did you make of all that?”
“What do you make of it? — that’s the question,” said Maloney. “I can’t believe you don’t know the old gent. He even looks a bit like you. He must be your uncle, or the ghost of your late grandfather.”
“Call me Jack Robinson if I’ve ever seen him before.”
“But, somehow, he knew we were there. He was looking towards us as if he really could see us. I don’t know why, but it was a pretty nasty feeling.”
“Where could they possibly have gone?” Osborne wondered. “You can’t go anywhere from the far side of the lake. Twenty yards from the water the rock face starts, with Pendragon up on the peak. All I can think is that there must be some secret entrance to the castle. By the time we got to the bend in the road they had made it all the way to the top and put the light on in the tower.”
“It is possible,” I remarked. “I never yet read of an old castle that didn’t have a secret entrance. And that’s not just in books, but in actual reality. It’s one of those rare situations where literature shows some sort of connection with real life.”
“Then what we have to do is quite straightforward,” said Maloney. “Tomorrow, in daylight, we’ll take a look at the far end of the lake. Ten to one I’ll find you your secret entrance. We Connemarans are pretty good at that sort of thing.”
“In any case, we have to go back to Pendragon,” I added, “to see who’s living up there.”
“Well, well,” mused Osborne. “Something in me doesn’t like the idea at all. Because, you see: just suppose the man we saw is in fact living up there. Whether he’s human or a spirit, he’s obviously a gentleman. Have we the right to trouble him without an invitation?”
“I take your point,” I replied. “An Englishman’s home is his castle. All the more, if your home is a castle. On the other hand, to some extent Pendragon belongs to you, as heir apparent to the Earldom of Gwynedd. You’ve more right than anyone to be there — not counting the Earl himself, of course.”
“There’s something in that,” he said. “I’ll sleep on it.”
“One further question,” I went on. “What made you decide to visit the Castle Lake yesterday? You never mentioned that midnight jaunts were a favourite pastime.”
“I don’t go in for them at all. I like to sleep at night, however petty bourgeois that may sound. But why I went is a story in itself. Have a look at this.”
He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a slip of paper.
“Someone stuck this on the windscreen of the little Rover yesterday morning.”
I studied the paper. It was covered in a strange, archaic writing, of the sort you find in seventeenth-century manuscripts in the British Museum. No one nowadays writes with such a flourish. Our hands have altered their shape since then.