“Right first time,” he answered. “A dream—I think. Something left over from a nightmare. I haven’t been sleeping too well. The heat, I guess.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s too damned hot. Will you be doing any more tonight?”
He shook his head, his eyes still on the painting. “Not in this light. I don’t want to foul it up. No, I’m for bed. Besides, I have a headache.”
“What?” I said, glad now that I had made no wild accusation. “You?—a strapping great Viking like you, with a headache?”
“Viking?” he frowned. “You’ve called me that before. My looks must be deceptive. No, my ancestors came out of Hungary—a place called Stregoicavar. And I can tell you they burned more witches there than you ever did in Scotland!”
• • •
There was little sleep for me that night, though toward morning I did finally drop off, slumped across the great desk, drowsing fitfully in the soft glow of my desk light. Prior to that, however, in the silence of the night—driven on by a feeling of impending…something—I had delved deeper into the old books and documents amassed by my uncle, slowly but surely fitting together that great jigsaw whose pieces he had spent so many years collecting.
The work was more difficult now, his notes less coherent, his writing barely legible; but at least the material was or should be more familiar to me. Namely, I was studying the long line of McGilchrists gone before me, whose seat had been Temple House since its construction two hundred and forty years ago. And as I worked so my eyes would return again and again, almost involuntarily, to the dark pool with its ring of broken columns. Those stumps were white in the silver moonlight—as white as the columns in Carl’s picture—and so my thoughts returned to Carl.
By now he must be well asleep, but this new mystery filled my mind through the small hours. Carl Earlman…It certainly sounded Hungarian, German at any rate, and I wondered what the old family name had been. Ehrlichman, perhaps? Arlmann? And not Carl but Karl.
And his family hailed from Stregoicavar. That was a name I remembered from a glance into Von Junzt’s Unspeakable Cults, I was sure. Stregoicavar: it had stayed in my mind because of its meaning, which is “witch-town.” Certain of Chorazos’s order of pagan priests had been Hungarian. Was it possible that some dim ancestral memory lingered over in Carl’s mind, and that the pool with its quartz stumps had awakened that in his blood which harkened back to older times? And what of the gypsy music he had sworn to hearing on our first night in this old house? Young and strong he was certainly, but beneath an often brash exterior he had all the sensitivity of an artist born.
According to my uncle’s research my own great-grandfather, Robert Allan McGilchrist, had been just such a man. Sensitive, a dreamer, prone to hearing things in the dead of night which no one else could hear. Indeed, his wife had left him for his peculiar ways. She had taken her two sons with her; and so for many years the old man had lived here alone, writing and studying. He had been well known for his paper on the Lambton Worm legend of Northumberland: of a great worm or dragon that lived in a well and emerged at night to devour “bairns and beasties and foolhardy wanderers in the dark.” He had also published a pamphlet on the naiads of the lochs of Inverness; and his limited edition book, Notes on Nessie—the Secrets of Loch Ness had caused a minor sensation when first it saw print.
It was Robert Allan McGilchrist, too, who restored the old floodgate in the dam, so that the water level in the pool could be controlled; but that had been his last work. A shepherd had found him one morning slumped across the gate, one hand still grasping the wheel which controlled its elevation, his upper body floating face-down in the water. He must have slipped and fallen, and his heart had given out. But the look on his face had been a fearful thing; and since the embalmers had been unable to do anything with him, they had buried him immediately.
And as I studied this or that old record or consulted this or that musty book, so my eyes would return to the dam, the pool with its fanged columns, the old floodgate—rusted now and fixed firmly in place—and the growing sensation of an onrushing doom gnawed inside me until it became a knot of fear in my chest. If only the heat would let up, just for one day, and if only I could finish my research and solve the riddle once and for all.
It was then, as the first flush of dawn showed above the eastern hills, that I determined what I must do. The fact of the matter was that Temple House frightened me, as I suspected it had frightened many people before me. Well, I had neither the stamina nor the dedication of my uncle. He had resolved to track the thing down to the end, and something—sheer hard work, the “curse,” failing health, something—had killed him.
But his legacy to me had been a choice: continue his work or put an end to the puzzle for all time and blow Temple House to hell. So be it, that was what I would do. A day or two more—only a day or two, to let Carl finish his damnable painting—and then I would do what Gavin McGilchrist had ordered done. And with that resolution uppermost in my mind, relieved that at last I had made the decision, so I fell asleep where I sprawled at the desk.
The sound of splashing aroused me; that and my name called from below. The sun was just up and I felt dreadful, as if suffering from a hangover. For a long time I simply lay sprawled out. Then I stood up and eased my cramped limbs, and finally I turned to the open window. There was Carl, dressed only in his shorts, stretched out flat on a wide, thick plank, paddling out toward the middle of the pool!
“Carl!” I called down, my voice harsh with my own instinctive fear of the water. “Man, that’s dangerous—you can’t swim!”
He turned his head, craned his neck and grinned up at me. “Safe as houses,” he called, “so long as I hang on to the plank. And it’s cool, John, so wonderfully cool. This feels like the first time I’ve been cool in weeks!”
By now he had reached roughly the pool’s centre and there he stopped paddling and simply let his hands trail in green depths. The level of the water had gone down appreciably during the night and the streamlet which fed the pool was now quite dry. The plentiful weed of the pool, becoming concentrated as the water evaporated, seemed thicker than ever I remembered it. So void of life, that water, with never a fish or frog to cause a ripple on the morass-green of its surface.
And suddenly that tight knot of fear was back in my chest, making my voice a croak as I tried to call out: “Carl, get out of there!”
“What?” he faintly called back, but he didn’t turn his head. He was staring down into the water, staring intently at something he saw there. His hand brushed aside weed—
“Carl!” I found my voice. “For God’s sake get out of it!”
He started then, his head and limbs jerking as if scalded, setting the plank to rocking so that he half slid off it. Then—a scrambling back to safety and a frantic splashing and paddling; and galvanized into activity I sprang from the window and raced breakneck downstairs. And Carl laughing shakily as I stumbled knee-deep in hated water to drag him physically from the plank, both of us trembling despite the burning rays of the new-risen sun and the furnace heat of the air.
“What happened?” I finally asked.
“I thought I saw something,” he answered. “In the pool. A reflection, that’s all, but it startled me.”
“What did you see?” I demanded, my back damp with cold sweat.
“Why, what would I see?” he answered, but his voice trembled for all that he tried to grin. “A face, of course—my own face framed by the weeds. But it didn’t look like me, that’s all…”
8. The Dweller