Castle of Horror Page 5

  Bebe gasped, “Oh, my God!” stepped back a pace… and bumped into the wall behind a rack of dresses beside the harpsichord. It gave back with a creak, and Norah stepped across quickly and pushed a third carved panel in further, raising her candle high. A narrow stairway ascended, between the brick walls of the music-room and the ballroom beside it, and on them, the light just touched a woman’s shoe.

  Norah plunged immediately up the steps. Behind her she heard Tor snap, “Let her go, this is no business—”

  “Don’t be such a baby!” retorted Christine, and Norah heard the clatter of those diamanté heels on the steps behind her, and the enthusiastic rattle of diminutive canine paws. Black Jasmine, too tiny to mount a flight of stairs, barked peremptorily, and Christine said, “Honestly—!” and went back for him, but Norah was already around two dark turns, panting a little as she climbed. Once he seized his victim the man must kill her, she thought, and kill her quickly, and then get the hell away from the castle to wherever he’d set up an alibi for himself—

  Suffocation… She could smell the sweet reek of chloroform mingled with the stinks of mold and dust in the stair, but knew he couldn’t hold the drug-soaked rag on the stand-in’s face too long. She’d seen chloroform burns, lingering as brown stains on the faces of some of the men who’d been brought in by the hospital ships in the War. Police would recognize it in an instant.

  No, this has to be mysterious: girl disappears during the filming in a haunted castle, her body turns up dead without a mark…

  Or maybe he’ll just throw her off one of the towers…

  Barking furiously, Chang Ming flung himself ahead of her up the steps, and lantern-light glowed on the brick of the wall before her. Christine called “Chang! Chang-ums, no—!” and Norah heard another sound, a woman’s muffled wail. The stair took an abrupt little turn and Norah found herself in front of a narrow door, the lantern-light within bright after the stair’s candle-touched blackness. A man sprang up from the floor beside a supine woman, moving with an athlete’s spring-steel speed, and caught up a piece of the construction debris that littered the tiny room. He aimed a crushing blow at the sturdy little dog as Chang attacked his ankle. Chang sprang back with a yelp of pain and lunged in again – behind her, Norah heard Christine scream “NO!” and Tor yell, “Dammit, Chris…!”

  Norah and Christine both flung themselves at the attacker, grabbing for his arms (…and I hope he hasn’t got a gun…). Christine caught a blow from the club and was knocked sprawling; Bebe Jolivet’s voice called out, “Stan!”

  The man kicked Chang Ming off his ankle, grabbed Norah by the wrists, and threw her into Bebe as the actress slithered past Tor (still in the doorway) and lunged for him. Norah and Bebe went down in a tangle, and only when she scrambled up again did Norah see that the little room – tucked away between the walls of the labyrinthine castle’s attics – had two other doors, pitch-black slits in its brick walls through which scrambling, scuffling footfalls were dying away.

  Norah darted straight to Sallie Collins, stretched out on the floor with one of the purple cushions from Queen Victoria’s Parlor over her face. Without her attacker’s weight leaning on it, however, the young woman was clearly able to breathe, and pushed feebly at the heavy velvet. Norah whipped the cushion away and turned immediately to Christine, lying in a little heap of black satin and garnet beading, with Chang Ming – bleeding himself – and the other two Pekes pawing anxiously at her and licking her face.

  Tor thrust Norah aside and scooped Christine into his arms. “Chris!” he cried. “My darling—”

  Christine sat up, slapped him with a violence that rang like a gunshot in the little attic, and turned to gather Chang Ming to her chest. “Oh, sweetness, you shouldn’t have done that! Are you all right, darling?” Whipping back around to Tor, she snapped, “You fucking coward, he could have been killed!”

  Norah had gone back to Sallie. Despite a massive bruise on her left shoulder, Christine was obviously fine.

  The young stand-in was clinging to Bebe, her own arm darkening where a man’s fingers had left livid bruises, sobbing hysterically. Bebe’s face was ashen in the lantern-light. “It was Stan,” she whispered, as if not able to believe it… or too able to do so. “My God, it was Stan…”

  Black Jasmine, who had run to one of the other doorways and barked furiously down into the darkness (And don’t ever let me catch you here again!), turned and trotted back to Christine, growling threateningly as Tor stormed, “You’re the one who could have been killed—!”

  “Don’t be a yutz, even if he’d had a gun—“ There was one lying beside Sallie on the floor among a rubbish of old nails and plaster-dust, “—he wouldn’t have used it! This was supposed to be mysterious!”

  Alec, Deacon, and Ti-Jo Girod barged in then – from the third door, the one Black Jasmine hadn’t barked into – making everyone jump. “I’m sorry,” Sallie gasped, still shuddering in Bebe’s arms. “I’m so sorry—“ There was something eerie about the two women in the lantern-light, with their identical build and coloring, in their identical Victorian underwear; Bebe had wrapped Sallie in her own velvet robe and Alec shucked off his corduroy jacket to drape around the actress’ bronze shoulders.

  “He said it was just to scare you,” sobbed the girl. “To get even with you for divorcing him. I told him what nights we’d be filming up here, I pretended I’d seen and heard things, and made noises thumpin’ on the walls. He seemed to know all about the castle—”

  “You bet he did.” Alec helped Christine to her feet, after she’d angrily slapped Tor’s effort to do so aside. “He’s been staying at the same boarding-house as us – as the guys from Colossus, I mean.” And, to the startled looks of everybody in the room: “He’s white enough to pass. The only reason I recognized him is ‘cause I follow Negro League ball. I sure wasn’t about to rat him out for staying in a white boarding-house. I just thought he was in town to keep an eye on Bebe.”

  “He’s been in Reno before.” Bebe’s hands shook as she brushed back her hair. “When his team played an exhibition game in Los Angeles, against the Royal Giants… He was always telling people he was Cuban, or Italian.”

  “I told him he had to marry me.” Sallie’s voice cracked a little, and she wiped her eyes. “I told him – He wanted me to get rid of my baby.” Her glance ducked away from Bebe’s, in shame. “I told him I wouldn’t… and then he cheered up and picked out a name for the baby and… and…”

  “Said he loved you,” Bebe finished for her, with a tiny, bitter sigh.

  Sallie began to weep again.

  “And meanwhile,” said Norah, “he was plotting how to make your disappearance and death just one more mysterious happening in a house that’s got a reputation for spookiness… though in fact the dogs didn’t seem to notice anything at all.” She nodded at the three Pekinese, clustered adoringly around Christine while Tor sulked by the doorway. “Have there been any mysterious deaths here? Other than Mr. Blatt’s ex-wives…?”

  “The newspapers are always saying how haunted the place is,” remarked Alec. “But Mr. Blatt’s ex-wives – he had about five of them, by the way – all took him for a half-million apiece in railroad and mining stock, and ran off to places like Havana or the south of France. Not one of them died here, or anywhere near here.”

  “Well, of all the cheats—!”

  “As for Stan Littlejohn,” he went on, gently lifting Sallie, then Bebe, to their feet, “the fact that you saw him, Miss Jolivet – and can identify him – pretty much closes the door on his being able to go back to playing baseball. I’m guessing he had some kind of getaway and alibi planned – he can make it to Los Angeles by morning – but if he lives in Chicago and owes money for gambling, I’ve got a good idea who he owes that money to. If he’s smart he’s halfway to Mexico by this time. I doubt they’re going to catch him, at the rate he’ll be driving.”

  “Not so terrible a rate.” Ambrose Conklin sidled through the doorway, making the tiny, na
rrow room even more crowded: If the place was properly lit, reflected Norah, instead of only this spooky lantern-light, it would be a French farce…

  “When you said the whole thing was a hoax to cover up a murder, Mrs. Blackstone—” The millionaire bowed in her direction, “—I’m afraid the only useful thing I could think of to do was tell Otis– my chauffeur – to go around the outside of the castle and disconnect the starter-switches of every car he came to, and then drive back to town as fast as he could and fetch the police. Not very heroic, I’m afraid…”

  Christine beamed upon him, like Aphrodite rising from the waves. “Oh, Ambrose, that was oodles better than heroic! That was smart!” She handed off Chang Ming to Norah, and took her elderly beau’s arm, like a gorgeously plumed bird of paradise returning to its home perch to rest.

  Deacon picked up Black Jasmine – who couldn’t get down the stairs by himself – and Tor went to pick up Buttercreme, who barked at him disapprovingly and hid behind Alec’s legs. Alec tucked her under his arm, picked up the lantern, and followed the little procession down the stairs.

  *

  The Reno police, and the Washoe County sheriffs, were just arriving as everyone emerged from their various secret passageways, and Stan Littlejohn was arrested just after sunrise, on foot, disheveled, and very tired, lost in the wilds of the Carson Mountains. Ambrose Conklin offered to drive Christine back to Los Angeles that night (“I am so SICK of Reno I could just SCREAM!”) but Christine yielded to Norah’s argument that having agreed to re-write Lost Lamb (not to mention The Brooklyn Queen) she couldn’t very well go off and leave Centurion Films in the lurch, and the Pekes would be very lonely without her (not to speak of unbrushed, un-walked, and fed on the odd viands assembled by Christine’s Chinese gardener) – as Chris would be very lonely without them, if they stayed in Reno with her.

  Thus, Christine abandoned the cat-haunted boarding-house on Virginia Street (and whatever the hell that was in the bathroom) and repaired to the palatial accommodations of the Goldstrike Ranch, to enjoy a sagebrush idyll with Mr. Conklin while Norah, ensconced in one of the ranch’s smaller (but extremely pleasant) cabins, worked on her scripts, looked after the dogs, drank tea and went riding with Alec in the evenings.

  Over coffee one morning (at a “colored” diner on C Street) Bebe Jolivet told Norah that she’d offered to help Sallie Collins through the difficult months during which she would not be able to work; both Alec and Mary DeNoux agreed to help the young stand-in find work in the wardrobe department at Colossus back in Los Angeles.

  On the occasions upon which she went to script conferences at Blatt’s Castle (for one film or the other), Norah was inundated with Tor’s alternate sulks and entreaties for her to “Talk to Chris for me…” either to come back to his arms or at least to lend him five hundred dollars in case You Betcha did not, in fact, win the Belmont – not a plea likely to soften Chris’s heart.

  After he threatened to go back to Los Angeles and the arms of Marissa Sherrod – to which Lenny Palmer responded with, “You were the one who wanted to come out here, pal: we’ve rented this dump, now we’re gonna finish here!” –Tor went the length of renting a cabin at the Goldstrike Ranch himself, in the hopes of catching Christine alone under the romantic desert moon. He didn’t manage to do this in the ten days left of shooting, but he rode with such consummate grace, and looked so magnificent in his silk cowboy-shirts and fluffy white “buffalo” chaps, that the management asked him to stay on as a “riding instructor” for the wealthy ladies who patronized the resort.

  “And I shudder to think,” sighed Norah, as she helped Alec and the Colossus crew finally pack up the last of the cameras, props, film and light-stands for the drive back to Los Angeles, “what sort of ‘riding lessons’ he’s going to give.” She handed the dogs’ wicker baskets in last: Christine had gone on ahead of them in Mr. Conklin’s Hispano-Suiza, so Alec had been given the task of piloting the big yellow Packard back to Hollywood.

  “Exactly the lessons they’ll pay for,” returned Alec wisely, helped her into the car, and settled his precious camera (and Buttercreme) on her lap. “If they’re coming to Reno for a divorce, I’m guessing Tor’s going to make a lot more money here than he ever did in front of a camera. And he’ll probably end up marrying someone with more dough than Christine will ever dream of. Which just goes to show—”

  He pressed the self-starter, and put the car into gear, the Goldstrike Ranch – and the looming, spectral white shape of Blatt’s Castle on its sagebrush hillside – sliding away behind them, “—that in Hollywood, sometimes things do have a happy ending after all.”

  __________________________

  * See: The Bride of the Rat-God

  About the Author

  Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

  For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series - short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way - with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna - in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.

  She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

  Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

  Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

 

 

  Barbara Hambly, Castle of Horror

 

 

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