The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes Page 2

  "James was there to meet me and I was shocked at his appearance. He was a big blond chap, like me in his late twenties, with a Guards mustache and normally a genial grin. Now, though, he looked both pale and harassed, as if some overpowering worry, some strain of overwhelming proportions were eating at his vitals. He tried to smile as he seized my bags, but it was a poor effort. Yet there was nothing in the least false about his relief at seeing me.

  " 'My dear man!' he said. 'This is really awfully good of you. I'm at my wit's end. I had heard ...' and here he paused in some confusion, 'not to put too fine a point of it ...

  "Lionel Penruddock, at this Juncture, was one of the most controversial members of the younger order. He was also, in the opinion of many, a complete swine. He used women as if they were candy, and at least one girl was known to have committed suicide over him. As a young man. he was asked to leave Italy, at roughly the same time as Aleister Crowley and his commune, and for the same reasons, or worse. He could now no longer dig in Egypt, even the easygoing Egyptians having had enough of his treatment of native labor, which had culminated in the deaths of three experienced men whom he had run afoul of, or the reverse. The verdict was 'loss of life due to a sandstorm,' but no one believed it. There was much more which I will not go into, and not all of it was this personal. The Foreign Office, as we knew, was beginning to take an interest in Lord Lionel, who had many strange and quite un-archaeological friends in many countries, including both Russia and Germany.

  "When all this has been said, it has to be added that he was also a master of his chosen profession. He was that rare thing, a truly, all-round expert. One year he was astonishing the world with the work he did at Gohklat, and its amazing revelations of the Sarmatian Migrations. The next, he discovered the Codex Panamensis, extending the Old Empire Maya hundreds of miles beyond their previously known southern boundaries. And his fantastic recovery of a Gokstad type of Viking ship from the Namib Desert of Southwest Africa made even his most bitter professional rivals admit that he had genius.

  "I had thought him to be in the Far East, but he was not. And as we drove, my poor friend attempted to tell me why his brother's appearance had so upset him and his household.

  " 'He simply popped up here, Donald, about a month ago. Had a couple of chaps, very rum ones, too, with him and asked if he could use the cliff cottage. Well, Isobel can't stand him, you know, and if he wanted to stay, this way he was at least out of the house. I've never got on with him, and he makes it plain he thinks, and always has, that I'm a complete ass. But, well, he is my only brother and he's never asked me for anything before. He's got his own money, you know, and lots of it. Mother left him a packet and he is no fool at business. So, the long and the short of it is ...'

  "The long and the short of it was, of course, that James, good fellow that he was, had told his brother to use the cliff cottage as long as he liked, assuming not unnaturally that Lord Lionel sought no more than a quiet vacation. This building was a comfortable house made of stone and perched on the edge of the cliffs not far from the ruined castle of the ancestral Penruddocks. They did not use it, and it was usually to let, often to artists of some means. It was a mile from Avalon House, and that was a million miles too close for my friend's wife. Lionel's wedding present (he did not attend at St Margarets, Westminster, needless to say) to James and Isobel had been a Tantric image of such startling and revolting obscenity that James, noting it to be covered with jewels of undoubted worth, instantly sent it under seal to the British Museum, where no doubt it still reposes in some obscure vault. It certainly could never be exhibited. That incident may give you all some small idea of Lionel, by the bye.

  "Lionel, however, reappeared at the house during breakfast the following day, making his brother and sister-in-law extremely nervous, since they had expected (and hoped) to see nothing further of him during his stay. But he was perfectly polite in his sardonic way, and he could be charming when he chose. What he wanted, it seemed, was something quite simple. He had a little time on his hands, and noting and remembering the old ruined pile of stone, the aforesaid 'castle,' he had come to ask his brother for permission to dig around and about it. His two 'assistants' would be all the help he needed. I'll have occasion to speak further of these two.

  "James could see no reason why his brother should not pursue his excavations if he wished. The castle was even further from Avalon than the cottage, which may have played some part in his decision. And the place was not much visited. It had an ill-omened name throughout the countryside, and the children did not play near it, while adults mumbled about 'pookahs' (the local 'good folk') if the site was mentioned. It crouched on a black fang of rock which thrust out into the ocean far below and was really nothing but a gigantic jumble of stones, some of them, including the foundation, of absolutely enormous size and all laid without mortar. It had not been occupied, so far as anyone could tell, since early Plantagenet times, and some said it was far older. No roads led to it, and it had escaped the attention of any serious researchers up to that point.

  "Lionel left with his brother's permission and did not reappear. He got his supplies sent in by truck, and one of the two assistants barrowed them over the hills on a cart to the cliff cottage. Lionel had a shooting brake, an early form of the American station wagon, but it was not much used, save for a rare trip to London once in a while.

  "At this point, my friend stopped the car, or rather pulled it off of the road to one side. His hands were actually shaking and frankly, I was just as happy he had them off the wheel. The road, as I have said, often ran very close to the cliff.

  "One week after permission had been given to dig, the phenomena, for want of a better word, commenced. And they began, appropriately, at night"

  Ffellowes put his cigar out and rang the bell for another brandy. He stared at the books opposite him, but no one spoke, and the crackle of dying coals in the fireplace was quite audible. Then he went on.

  "Now what I am going to tell you next is not my own information, but second-hand. Nor was it as clear and sorted out as you chaps will hear it James was a fine fellow, but a good specimen of Anglensus inarticulatis. I had to keep making him stop and go back over things, and also to keep him from interrupting himself or simply mumbling. The fact was, he was so terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, even with me, and also so frightened (and ashamed of that) that he simply couldn't tell a coherent story. But what I heard finally was roughly this:

  "On the night I mentioned, everyone had gone to bed early, as country folk tend to. Around two in the morning, James was awakened by a sound, or rather, two sounds. The first was the sound of a horn, a brassy, echoing bawl, not the clear note of a hunting horn. As he sat up in bed, the horn fell silent, and the night was broken by a hideous screaming, as if, as he put it, 'a thousand pigs were being killed all at once!' Then, there was silence, except that all the dogs on the place, a half dozen setters, retrievers, and such, all started to howl in unison. These in turn fell silent, but a great wind began to sweep in from the Atlantic, and all the house shutters and doors rattled while slates were dislodged from the roof. This sudden gale lasted about fifteen minutes and then died away as suddenly as it had started.

  "That was the first incident. Of course the whole household was roused at this one, maids scurrying about and squawking, grooms rushing about, gardeners in an uproar, lights blazing and general confusion. James took over with a few Guards bellows and managed to restore something like order, but it wasn't easy. Those screams particularly, had been appalling. Isobel got the house staff in shape finally, while James led a force of the younger men out with lights and shotguns to see what they could find.

  "They found nothing, I may say, either then or the next day, nothing at all. And when they got to the cliff cottage, Lionel appeared and, on being questioned, denied hearing a sound. James informed the police, and a local bobby came out, poked about and went away, managing to convey without words that the gentry should have better things to do
than bother the police with utter nonsense.

  "For three days nothing further occurred. That is, nothing tangible. Yet, there was a feeling of oppression in the atmosphere, very odd in March, to be sure. The servants were nervous, and one London maid gave notice and left at once. On the third night, James was roused from an uneasy sleep by more screams, but this time plainly human and emanating from his own house, from the servants' wing in fact. Rushing to investigate, he found the butler trying to control the cook and the maids, one of whom had fainted while the others were simply hysterical. When the unconscious one was revived and the others quietened, the girl told the following story:

  "She had been sewing in her bedroom when she happened to look at her window, which incidently was shut. Pressed against the glass was a face, and she almost fainted again attempting to describe it. It was very pale, she said, and the eyes were black and burning. The hair was long and black also, and so were the beard and mustache. A great weal or scar ran across the forehead. She had screamed and her friends had run in from their adjoining rooms. The first in had seen movement at the window also, though no more than that, just as the room's occupant had fainted. Now even as they all stood in the girl's room, they were all suddenly aware that the wind had risen again from out of the west and was roaring at full blast about the house. And James felt a strange tingling of his skin, as if, he put it, he were somehow in the center of an electric discharge. He did then not ask if the others felt anything, not wishing to add to the panic, but he did ask the butler alone the following day, and the man, an old soldier, said that he at least had not noticed it.

  "The wind dropped again and they all got back to bed, all the servants now sleeping two to a room." Ffellowes smiled at us as he continued.

  "What I have omitted from my account is that the servant in question, the maid, lived on the third floor. When James examined the room both from the inside and from the lawn on the following morning, he grew very upset indeed. The house, you see, was covered with an immense and hoary canopy of ivy, and it was clear that this had been disturbed in more than one place. Some of the stems of this plant were over two inches thick, you know. Whatever the girl had seen, and she was a local lass of an unimaginative nature, it was clearly material.

  "My friend and his wife decided to face the matter in the open. They called in all the staff, from outside as well as the house people, and told them they could leave, that they were not expected to face whatever was going on, and that the Penruddocks would think none the less of them if they did, though they themselves would stay. It was their home and their responsibility. And here, I may say, James interjected something that interested me greatly. 'I felt somehow. Donald, that whatever happened. I had to stay, was compelled to stay, what?' he told me.

  "Well, he and his wife had a surprise coming, and a very pleasant one. The staff had had its own conference earlier, and they were not leaving, not even the girl who had fainted. They were all Cornish men and women, and the Penruddocks were their responsibility, as well as the other way, you see? Remember the loyalty of Cornwall to Charles the First when all else was lost—' Under the sometimes stolid Saxon exterior, there burns often the ancient stubborness of the Celt.'

  "This display of loyalty heartened Isobel and James immensely, and Isobel even wept. Then they all got down to business. No one, when asked, thought that calling the police again would serve any purpose save to embarrass all concerned. On this they were all agreed. James issued all the shotguns and sporting rifles that he owned, and most of the men were veterans of the Great War. They arranged watches and made sure all doors and windows were locked after dark. Then they waited.

  "James did one further thing. He went to call on Lord Lionel. He found him in the yard of the cliff cottage, issuing some instructions to one of his assistants, a short dark man with a most unpleasant face. As it happened, he approached without either of them seeing him at first and heard Lionel addressing the other in a foreign language, or rather, he thought, a very local one. Few in those days spoke Cornish, the original tongue of the land, which like Gaelic and Erse, was even then dying out, leaving only Welsh as the surviving British Celtic. But my friend had once had an old nanny who spoke it, and he thought he recognized it, though, as he put it to me, 'It didn't sound quite right, but foreign somehow.'

  "When Lionel saw his brother, he seemed irritated and waved his helper away. 'What now, noble Earl?' he said in an unpleasant manner, 'more of your bogles frightening the tweenies?'

  "James kept his temper and simply told his brother what had happened and asked him to keep his eyes open. The response was a jeering laugh. 'Good God, James, I think you've all gone round the bend up there. Faces at the window! I should think you would keep this to yourself. Well, I'll say nothing. I don't want to be known as the brother of a lunatic, infected by the hysterics of a still-room slut. But don't expect me to join your witch hunts. I have better things to do.' And with that he had stalked into the cottage. This was the help he offered his only brother, who had never done him anything but kindness.

  "James had expected little else. Lionel had been as hateful and unfriendly as a child as he was as a man. So this display was nothing new. But, as he told me about it, a thought began to stir in my own mind. All of this peculiar business had started when Lord Lionel appeared. Was there a direct connection?

  "My friend went on with his tale, less disjointed now and easier to follow as he became somewhat more relaxed. It appeared that he and his household were living under siege, in a way, and a strange siege it was. The apparition of the face had not reappeared, but other things had. For one there was the smell.

  "It had first been noticed in the cellars, by the butler, who was looking through the wine bins. It was a rank stench, which seemed to seep through the floor; and although they had bolted the cellar doors and stuffed rags around the cracks, it still got into the house, though far more faintly or the place would have been unlivable entirely. I smelled it myself later on, and I can assure you it was awful, a reek of graveyard mold, mixed with other, less describable things. Further, it seemed to ebb and flow, being weak at times and billowing up at others.

  "The house had always kept a few sheep in a paddock, and also a small herd of dairy cows. One night, two sheep and a cow were found slaughtered, and not simply slaughtered but frightfully mangled, as if by a pack of wolves. No one had heard a sound, but the wind had been going through one of its sudden western gales, and it would have taken an artillery discharge to penetrate that. Indeed, this strange new wind, which always blew from the west when it came, was another mystery. It came at the same time or sometimes a bit beyond one of the other outrageous happenings, as if they summoned it; and though it did not direct harm, the Avalon folk were learning to dread its coming, for it always seemed to presage some appalling happening, or at least the imminent discovery of one.

  "James had pulled the car back onto the road and we again resumed our slow way over the hills and gulleys. As he drove, he continued the sequence of events at what had once been the happiest of homes.

  "Thank God, Isobel and I have no kids yet," he went on. 'We were sorry before, but, by the Eternal, we're not now. They'd have gone off their chumps at half of what we've been through in the past fortnight.' And this remark also set me thinking, though in a quite other direction to his.

  "Now we were winding up the long drive to Avalon House, leaving the sea cliffs at our backs. As we pulled up to the entry, we saw two figures on the stairs. One was Isobel, whom I knew and loved, but with her face pallid and haunted-looking, and lines no woman her age should have possessed around her eyes and mouth. She seemed particularly glad to see us both.

  "There was no welcome in the eyes of the other figure, and I knew who he was long before James made the introduction. I had seen Lord Lionel's picture on many occasions, but I should have known him anywhere, I think.

  "He was middle-sized, far below his brother's blond bulk in height, and as dark and pale as James was fair and r
uddy. He was by no means ugly, his long black hair framing a white, clean-shaved face of considerable good looks. Nor was he a weakling, for his shoulders were immense for his stature, and his grip was that of an athlete. Yet I disliked him on sight, the instant I saw the cold jet eyes, and should have done so even had I not known of his past record.

  "His voice was rather high and strident as he turned to speak to his brother. 'You'll have to call off those peasants of yours, James,' he said in an arrogant way. 'Damned if I can afford to have these taradiddles of yours mucking up a site I am working on. That fool of a gardener was staring at my men the other day for an hour while they worked. They are highly trained and I can't afford to have them upset, d'you hear!'

  "His tone was quite insufferable, and his brother flushed to the eyebrows. I was expecting trouble right then and there, but James controlled himself admirably. I expect he had had plenty of practice in his youth.

  " 'I shall see no one bothers you,' he answered coldly. 'You know why the men are looking about even though you profess to believe none of it. Since you have neither help nor advice to offer, I suggest that you, in turn, stay out of my hair!'