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He lifted it up and turned it and deposited its end upon theground on theinside of the wall. Once his feet were on the rungs, be lifted up thetu
The darkness settled, but it did not seem to get any cooler. There was no air moving, no sound of bird or insect. The moon rose. A few minuteslater, ahowling jerked him to his feet. His scalp moved as if rubbed by acold hand. The howling, distant at first, came closer. Soon there was a snufflingand then a growling and gobbling. Childe waited and checked his Smith & WessonTerrier .32 revolver again. After five minutes by his wristwatch, he climbed overthe wall, pulling the tu
He did not find the wolves. Or he was not sure that what he did find were the wolves.
He stepped into a clearing and then sucked in his breath.
Two bodies lay in the moonlight. They were unconscious, whichstate he had expected from the eating of drugged meat. But these were not thehairy, four-legged, long-muzzled bodies he had thought to see. These werethe nude bodies of the young couple who had played billiards in the Igescuhouse. Vasili Chornkin and Mrs. Krautschner slept on the grass under the moon. Theboy was onhis face, his legs under him and his hands by his face. The girl wason her side, her legs drawn up and her arms folded beside her head. She hada beautiful body. It reminded him of one of the girls he had seen in the filmsand especially of the girl Budler had been fucking dog style.
He had to sit down for a while. He felt shaky. He did not thinkthat this was possible or impossible. It just was, and the 'was' threatenedhim. It threatened his belief in the order of the universe, which meant thatit threatened him.
After a while he was able to act. He used tape from his backpackto secure their hands behind them and their ankles together. Then he tapedtheir mouths tightly and placed them on their sides, facing each other and asclose togetheras possible and taped them together around the necks and the ankles. He was sweating by the time he had finished. He left them in the glade andhoped thatthey would be very happy together. (That he could think this showedhim that he was recovering swiftly.) They should be happy if they knew that hehad pla
He headed toward where the house should be and within five minutes saw its bulk on top of the hill and some rectangles of light. Approaching iton the left, he stopped suddenly and almost fired his revolver, he was soupset by theabrupt appearance of the figure. It flitted from moonlight intoshadow and back into shadow and was gone. It looked as if it were a woman wearing anankle-length dress with a bare back.
For the third time that night, he felt a chill. It must have beenDolores. Or a woman playing the ghost. And why should a fraud be out here whenthere was no need to play the fraud? They did not know that he was here. Atleast, hehoped not.
It was possible that the baron wanted to shock another guesttonight and sowas using this woman.
The driveway had five cars besides the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. There were two Cadillacs, a Lincoln, a Cord, and a 1929 Duesenberg. Neither wingshowed a light, but the central part was well-lit.
Childe looked for Glam, did not see him, and went around theside. There was a vine-covered trellis which afforded easy access to the second storybalcony. The window was closed but not locked. The room was dark and hot and musty. Hegroped along the wall until he found a door and slowly swung it out. It was a closet door in which hung dark musty clothes. He closed the door andfelt alongit until he discovered another door. This led to a hallway which wasdimly litby moonlight through a window. He used his pencil-thin flashlight nowand then to guide himself. He passed by a stairway leading to the story belowand the story above and pushed open a door to another hallway. This had noillumination at all; he fingered his way to the other end with his flashlight.
Sometimes he stopped to put his ear against a doorway. He hadthought he hadheard the murmurs of voices behind them. Intent listening convincedhim that nobody was there, that his imagination was tricking him.
At the end of this hallway, twice as long as the first, he founda locked door. A series of keys left the lock unturned. He used his pick and, after several minutes work, during which the sweat ran down his eyes andhis ribs and he had to stop several times because he thought he heard footstepsand, once, abreathing, he solved the puzzle of the tumblers.
The door opened to a shaft of light and a puff of cold air.
As he stepped through into the hallway, he caught a flash ofsomething onhis left at the far end. It had moved too swiftly for him to identifyit, but hethought that it was the tail end of Dolores skirt. He ran down thehallway asquietly as he could with his sneakers on the marble tile floor (thiswas done in much-marbled and ornate-woodworked Victorian style even if it was inthe Spanishpart). At the corner, he halted and stuck his head around.
The woman at the extreme end was facing him. By the light of afloor lampnear her, he could see that she was tall and black-haired andbeautiful--the woman in the portrait above the mantel in the drawing room.
She beckoned to him and turned and disappeared around the corner. He felt a little disoriented, not so much as if he were beingdisco
Just as he rounded the corner, he saw her skirt going into adoorway. Thisled to a room halfway down the hall. The only light was that from thelamp on astand in the hallway. He groped around until he felt the lightswitch. The response was the illumination of a small lamp at the other end on astand by ahuge bed with a canopy. He did not know much about furniture, but itlooked like a bed from one of the Louis series, Louis Quatorze, perhaps. The restof the expensive-looking furniture seemed to go with the bed. A largecrystalchandelier hung from the center of the ceiling.
The wall was white paneling, and one of the panels was justswinging shut.
Childe thought it was swinging shut. He had blinked, and then thewall seemed solid.
There was no other way for the woman to have gone. Do ghosts haveto opendoors, or panels, to go from one room to another?
Perhaps they did, if they existed. However, he had seen nothingto indicate that Dolores--or whoever the woman was--must be a ghost.
If she were a hoax set up by Baron Igescu for the benefit ofothers, andparticularly for Childe, she was leading him on for a reason that hecould onlybelieve was sinister. The panel led to a passage between the walls, and Igescumust want him to go through a panel.
The newspaper article had said that the original house hadcontained between-walls passages and underground passages, and several secrettu