Castle of Horror Read online

  “Why would you want to do that?” inquired Alec, puzzled. “If all they do is scream…”

  “Not them, darling! Other spirits!”

  “The presence of one kind of spiritual manifestation,” said Tor eagerly, “means that the Universal Planes of the Spirit intersect there…”

  “And Tor can find out who’s going to win the Belmont Stakes next month!”

  Danny Cross sighed. “Oh, swell.”

  *

  Cornelius Blatt’s astonishing tribute to his own royal heritage wasn’t the only building in Reno to be patrolled at night by the spirits of the deceased. In the four days that various employees of Colossus Pictures had been putting up at Maisie Krause’s establishment on Virginia Street, Norah had been uneasily aware of odd noises in the night there, and of a cold sensation of being watched.

  She had never considered herself particularly “attuned” to “the Universal Planes of the Spirit”. But the unnerving run-in with an accursed necklace and a Manchurian rat-demon had convinced Norah that there were in fact more things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in her philosophy, and for four nights now, she had felt malice in the darkness of the big old boarding-house on Virginia Street.

  For four nights she had dreamed of waking to the sense of being watched. Had dreamed of sitting up in the iron-framed bed, cold to the marrow of her bones, seeing the unfamiliar furniture half-visible in the thinnest sliver of blue moonlight, and on the dresser, the vanity, the foot of the bed, the eyes of cats gleamed at her. Plump and gray with white mittens, or slender and black: once she’d seen a sinuous Siamese sitting on her papers, licking its dark paw. There was a smell, too – something she could neither identify nor define, but which terrified her. She’d heard footsteps in the hallway and all the cats had turned their heads, and from Christine’s bed beside hers she’d heard the Pekes growl. Waking with a start, she’d found herself actually sitting up in bed, with the prosaic reflection of the lights from Virginia Street glimmering in the window and the Pekes still growling, their gazes locked on the door. The smell was gone. So were the ghostly cats.

  After a moment Chang Ming – the largest of the dogs, rufous and fluffy as a little bear – had hopped down from the bed and trotted to the door, sniffed at the crack beneath it in a businesslike way, then returned to Christine’s bed. Only then did the other two – the tiny and ferocious Black Jasmine and shy Buttercreme – curl themselves up to sleep again. Christine, who had come in at an hour that would have gotten her thrown out of any boarding-house in any town except Reno and Los Angeles, didn’t even stir.

  Norah mentioned none of this to her.

  The boarding-house itself was typical of Reno, spacious and well-furnished, and inhabited by an assortment of women from all over the United States who had two things in common: a certain amount of money (though not nearly as much as the patrons of the Goldstrike), and husbands they wanted to get shut of. At supper, the talk in the dining-room was almost exclusively of progressive drunkenness or gambling patiently borne, of secretaries or chorus-girls discovered in downtown apartments by private detectives, or of outright abuse (“He’s always so sweet to me later – this last time he bought me a new car! – but I got so I can’t stand not knowing what I’ll come home to every time I go out…”).

  Having been raised with the dictum that a divorced woman was never received into the homes of the respectable, Norah had been at first disconcerted. But these ladies were very different from the several-times-wed denizens of Hollywood among whom she’d been bemusedly living since October.

  “Don’t pay any attention to us, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Latimer, a sleek Philadelphia matron, to Norah one evening as Norah descended to the parlor to meet Alec. “I see you with that nice young man and I think, Oh, dear, we’re putting that poor girl off men for good…”

  “It would take more than other peoples’ ill luck,” returned Norah with a smile, “to put me off Mr. Mindelbaum.”

  “Besides,” added Alec gallantly, emerging from the parlor to help Norah into her coat, “Norah tells me all about it and I take notes, to know what not to do.”

  Mrs. Latimer winked at him. “Fresh.”

  A few of the women staying at Mrs. Krause’s, like Christine, were in Reno to accompany men friends who were divorcing – misunderstood saints, every one of them, by what Norah could hear at dinner. “It’s a bit of a hot-house,” she admitted to Alec, later that night as he walked her back to the boarding-house – the men of the company were staying in a less stylish establishment a few blocks away. “If Mr. Westlake – and that frightful spiritualist he consults back in Los Angeles – are even a little bit correct about ‘psychic emanations,’ I can see why I’m hearing footsteps in the hall and seeing cats that aren’t there.”

  Only one light was on in the big green house when Alec walked Norah up to the door – young Mrs. Tarrant from Memphis, barely eighteen, had just got in from the restaurant where she was working while she waited out her three months – and by the time Norah had gone upstairs, ascertained Christine had not yet returned, and taken the dogs (with Alec’s company) for their before-bed constitutional down Virginia Street, that parlor light was turned out as well. Alec kissed her by the dim glow of the night-light that was now the only illumination in the downstairs hall: “Will you ride out with Chris to the Castle tomorrow morning, or do you want me to come by?”

  Norah glanced at the clock, which stood at ten minutes to eleven. “Come by,” she sighed. “I’m sorry to do this to you—”

  “I’m only down the street,” he pointed out cheerfully.

  “It’s just that I have the awful feeling that Christine might be out all night with Tor and go straight on to the Castle from wherever it is they’re trysting. God knows how they make those early calls,” she added, exasperated. “Particularly… Well.”

  Alec must have heard a note in her voice that she was trying to suppress, because he raised an eyebrow behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Yes?

  She sighed again. “The first evening we got here, when Tor came to take Christine out to some restaurant or other – for what has to have been the world’s longest dinner, since she didn’t come back until nearly four the following morning – and he and I were down in the parlor here waiting for her, he tried to kiss me. Movie-star style: that smoky look and grabbing me by the arm. I pulled away and before I could say anything Chris came downstairs, and she’s kept him mostly busy since then, but that’s not the sort of behavior I’d wish to see in a man my friend is going to marry.”

  She made a helpless gesture, understanding that the prevailing mores of Hollywood might consider Mr. Westlake’s attempt nothing out of the common. “I just wish she’d stayed with Mr. Conklin, that’s all.”

  “Conklin is rich,” agreed Alec. “Which Tor won’t be, if he keeps on at the tables and the ponies the way he does—”

  “It isn’t that. I think Mr. Conklin—“ She named the elderly millionaire who for the past six months had languished at her erratic sister-in-law’s feet, “—is a nicer person, for all that he’s twenty-five years older than she is and not… not breath-taking to look at.”

  Alec laughed. “If I really thought there was a chance of Chris marrying Tor, I’d be more worried. But in the past three years I’ve seen Chris fall in love with four men – that’s not counting the mad passions for stuntmen and saxophone-players. And yes, this is the worst she’s been hit, maybe because she’s a little tired… maybe because she’s actually started looking towards her own future. But in addition to being breath-taking, Tor is jealous, Tor is dumb as a box of rocks, and Tor is a sponge. Chris may not know how to balance her own checkbook, but she makes damn sure to sock part of her money away from every picture she makes, and I’m guessing the first time Tor tries to borrow a hundred dollars off her to pay off his bookie, that’ll be the end of that.”

  He kissed Norah’s hands again, then stood very slightly tip-toe – he was three inches shorter than she – to frame he
r face in his palms, and kiss her lips. “And if I don’t leave here now,” he added softly, “I’m going to drag you into the parlor and do something that’ll get you thrown out of this place.”

  She chuckled, and for a long time they held one another tight.

  When he was gone, and Norah closed the door, she reflected that he was right. For several months she had managed Christine’s chaotic household finances, but she had observed that for all her extravagance and generosity, her sister-in-law stayed out of debt. And it was true that she put money away, something she’d done even before she received some very good financial advice from the now-abandoned Ambrose Conklin.

  She locked the outer door, and stood for a moment in the downstairs hall. Only the night-light burned at the top of the stairs, its dim pink reflection barely touching the dark oak paneling in the hall below. To her right the parlor was a velvety abyss; when Norah moved to pick up Black Jasmine – who was too little to manage stairs by himself – her heart lurched into her throat at the ghostly flicker of movement in that darkness.

  My reflection in a mirror there…

  Only she couldn’t remember whether there was a mirror in the parlor.

  The night outside had been cold, but the chill in here was different, clammy and queerly personal. Something moved in the shadow again and both Chang Ming and Buttercreme moved closer to Norah’s ankles, surprisingly deep growls rumbling in their throats.

  The night-light gleam touched, very briefly, the gold of cats’ eyes in the parlor, and for an instant Norah thought she saw a small Siamese cat whisk across the top of the shadowy stairs.

  She gathered Buttercreme into her other arm, and ascended. The cold seemed to grow, and the silence to thicken. A smell, too, not quite like dust nor quite like decaying meat – it’s what I smelled in my dream, she thought. Her steps slowed as she reached the top of the stair and in her arms, both Buttercreme and Black Jasmine growled again, savage this time, the growl of dogs who are about to attack.

  She set them down. The wide hall stretched away to her right, past the door of her own room, and that of the other first-class suite, to the bathroom at the end. The light was on there and Norah thought, Chris must have come in while I was walking the dogs, and started down the hall. But Chang Ming gave a sharp, gruff bark and pulled against his leash, and, when Norah stopped, the two smaller Pekes darted a few steps ahead of her, toward the light in the bathroom, barking furiously in their sharp, staccato quacks. Norah said, “Hush!” and took a step after them, and Chang Ming threw himself in front of her, barking also, feet braced and red-gold fur bristling up along his spine.

  The night-light went out.

  From the bathroom, Christine’s voice called, very clearly, “Norah, is that you? Come in here—”

  Black Jasmine and Buttercreme stopped on the threshold of the open bathroom door, the light streaming out over them, barking furiously. Not the ecstatic yaps of dogs delighted to see their mistress, or even the excited clamor at seeing a cat, spectral or otherwise. This was anger, their hackles standing up on their backs, and there was nothing comical about it.

  Downstairs a light blinked on in the hall. Christine’s voice cooed from below, “Thanks ever so… I know I’m supposed to say Buy yourself a drink when I give you this but in this town you’d probably end up poisoned… What on earth? Oh, Mrs. Krause will kill me if the dogs wake up the house…”

  Her high heels clicked on the waxed boards of the hall. “Darlings, what is it? Mama’s home…”

  When Norah looked back down the upstairs hall the bathroom light was out. Only the soft glow of the night-light there shone in the eyes of the dogs, as Black Jasmine and Buttercreme gave one last sniff at the threshold, then turned and scampered back down the hall to the head of the stairs, tails wagging furiously, to greet Christine as she ascended. Chang Ming dashed to join them. It was in Norah’s mind to go down the hall to the bathroom to see if anything was there but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.

  She clicked the switch for the night-light at the top of the stairs, and it came on at once.

  “Darling—“ Christine was halfway up the stairs, bending to pick up Chang Ming, who had bounded down to meet her while the other two – too small to easily descend – stood wriggling with joyous excitement at the top. “What on earth was that barking about? And after I swore to Mrs. Krause… Dearest, you really must make Alec take you to dinner at the Sugar Plum! Tor and I had the most amazing ravioli… Did my little creamcakes miss me while I was away?” (This to Black Jasmine). “Did Aunt Norah look after my tiny sweetnesses…?” She clattered into the bedroom in a trail of cigarette smoke and Trésor du Jasmine perfume.

  Norah stood uncertainly in the hall, looking down toward the douce pink glow of the night-light that outlined the bathroom door.

  Quietly behind her, the door of the other deluxe room opened, and Mrs. Latimer put her head out.

  “I’m so sorry if the dogs woke you,” said Norah quickly. “I—”

  “Was it the bathroom?”

  Norah met the other woman’s eyes. Cleaned of cosmetics and under the light coating of cucumber emulsion, her hair neatly done in pin-curls, Mrs. Latimer looked older and rather tired, and for the first time Norah noticed she had a scar on her lip, the kind a woman gets when a man strikes her hard enough for her own teeth to cut the flesh.

  She said, “Yes.”

  “Did it call your name?”

  Norah nodded. “Do you know what it is?”

  Mrs. Latimer shook her head. “It only happens some nights,” she said. “It sounded like my daughter’s voice. I just went back into my room, and locked the door. An hour later I looked again and there was only the night-light on. One other night there was just the smell, and I waited til it was gone. I thought… I was half-afraid it was just something I’d dreamed, but I knew it wasn’t.”

  “No,” said Norah. The terrifying darkness when the light on the stair had gone out. The sense, not only of malice, but of actual danger… “But I heard footsteps in the hall one night that I don’t think were yours. I suppose one could go downtown and look in the newspapers…”

  “I’ll do that one of these afternoons.” The older woman tugged her wrapper of velvet and swansdown closer about her throat. “But honestly, what purpose would it serve? Poor Mrs. Krause sank every penny her husband left her with into buying this place, so of course she’s not going to admit it’s haunted. And all her guests are like us: here for three months and gone. There doesn’t seem to be anything… strange… on the upper floors, except the cats… Have you seen the cats?”

  “Only sometimes. Sometimes I’ll just feel them, leaping up onto the bed, or brushing against my legs. The dogs always do, I think.”

  “Well, bless them for not barking.” Mrs. Latimer smiled. “There’s a tremendous gray Persian with white mittens who’ll sit on the end of my bed each night – some nights I’ll only see his eyes. I call him Jeeves. I find if I give them names they don’t frighten me so much. And for creatures that have been dead for God knows how long, they still do a good job; I’ve never seen a mouse in the place. It should be all right now.” She glanced down the hall at the bathroom door. “I know it sounds very silly and childish, dear, but if you’d like me to stand here ‘til you come out I will.”

  “Thank you,” said Norah. “That’s very good of you.”

  *

  By contrast, Blatt’s Castle – legends of screaming ex-wives notwithstanding – proved to be completely mundane, or at least as mundane as a full-scale replica of a Rhineland castle perched on a sagebrush mountainside could be. Despite Christine’s aesthetic judgments regarding the furniture, several of its rooms were actually decorated in more-or-less Louis XV, making it an acceptable stand-in for the Brooklyn Queen’s Ruritanian digs as well as the palatial residence of the Lost Lamb’s prospective in-laws. While Lenny Palmer wrestled with the task of getting his male and female leads to look as if they were madly in love (Darlene Golden, Tor’s leading l
ady, was not only deeply suspicious that he was getting more camera time and better angles than she, but was best friends with Tor’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Marissa Sherrod), Norah prowled the numerous ballrooms, parlors, reception-rooms and balconies in search of chambers that would fit Lost Lamb’s new Western scenario.

  In this, the long-deceased castle’s builder proved surprisingly helpful.

  “I gather Cornelius Blatt considered himself to be something of an amateur architect,” she said, coming upon Alec – sandwich in hand – during a break in the shooting on Tuesday afternoon. “That gallery up there—” They were in the castle’s baronial hall, “—is a complete dummy: there’s no way up to it that I can find, and those stained-glass windows look onto a light-well. And two of the doors leading out of the library just go into a hallway that only connects them with each other…”

  “The place has a library?” Alec perked up. His cottage down on the Venice canals back in Los Angeles was jammed with books.

  “An enormous one – all gothic carving and gargoyles. But don’t get excited. As far as I can tell every book in the place, and there must be thousands, is blank.”

  “Blank?” Deacon Barnes, handsome even in eighteenth-century livery with knee-breeches, came in from the ballroom, where most of the cast and crew were consuming what should have been their lunch three hours ago while Darlene Golden reclined on a sofa having her feet rubbed by her dresser.

  Alec laughed with delight. “So he could impress the his guests?”

  “One can only suppose. One whole section of book-cases swings open to a secret passageway down to the conservatory. There’s another secret passageway that leads to the music room—”

  “I’ll bet he never tuned his piano in there, either.”

  “Two pianos, a harp, and a harpsichord,” Norah corrected him. “And not a sheet of music in the place. And there’s yet another secret passage behind that parlor where there’s that big carved mirror. It’s one-way glass. I discovered that one by accident because there’s a draft in there…”