10
Two more men had come into the courtyard, and stood staring. “Simmons,” said Dr. Jackman to one of them, “help Niven to get this body into the cellars, for the time being. Miss MacAskival, be so good as to go to your rooms and remain there until I send word. Well, Rab! Up and about? I take it that Donley here wasn’t on your heels last night? No, of course not. We haven’t yet found your friend Carruthers, but I trust that we will. Caggia, do get Anderson to his bed, for he’s sprinkling blood all over the flags, and there’s a lady present.”
The sight of blood seemed to put Edmund Jackman into excellent form. Shock-headed Rab gazed at him vacantly, as if still dazed by his last evening’s encounter with shadowy pursuers. “Well,” Jackman went on cheerfully, “poor Till—he’s lost the sight of one eye forever, I’m sure—is quits with Seamus Donley now. Go up and tell him the news, Tompkins.”
Mary, in the midst of this hard crew, was looking at Logan with dismay in her eyes. “Hugh,” she said, “Hugh ...” and stretched out a hand toward him. Jackman shot a malign glance at her.
“You’d best go, Mary,” Logan told her, with what assurance he could summon up. She turned and fled into the Old House.
Logan could conjecture the fate of Donley. Tired and wounded, the old terrorist must have been flung on the skerries by that cruel sea; the boat would have broken up; and his body, beaten against the rocks, had washed round to the harbor at the other end of Carnglass. In this grim moment, Logan had little time to pity Donley. It could not have been Donley, then, returned, who hunted Rab and Carruthers through the night. Rab might have fired only at imaginary stalkers, in this eerie island. But then what had become of Carruthers? Lagg had taken him, Rab had screamed in his hysteria last night. Was it possible that, after all, Lagg had not been killed? But if he had not, how could he have existed alone and invisible these several days; and how could a sly fat Galloway factor have made away with one seasoned ruffian and driven another out of his wits?
Except for Powert, standing sentry at the gate, Logan now was left alone in the courtyard with Jackman and Royall. “Well, Mr. Logan,” Jackman was saying to him, “there are few things in this vale of tears more interesting than an accomplished adversary. I prize you.” He was playing with that little pistol Meg. “Royall, we’ll take Mr. Logan up to my study, and there he’ll supply us with valuable information, I’m sure. He should be able to tell us, for instance, who disposed of Carruthers. He has done us one service already, in evening our score with the late lamented Seamus Donley; now we’ll discover just who sent Mr. Logan to us, and why.”
It might be folly to go on pretending he was an Edinburgh bank-clerk, Logan thought: Meg had given him away. Under the circumstances, and considering the habits of Jackman’s gang, naturally Dr. Jackman assumed that Logan had disposed of Donley. But what new role could Logan play? To have lapsed into his American speech would have suggested to the quick mind of Jackman that this young fellow had been sent to manage the purchase of Carnglass. And, having learnt too much about Jackman and Company, Logan then would be a candidate for extinction.
He dared not pretend to be an Englishman, for his mastery of English accents was not up to it, and Jackman would have detected him at once. Their French, too, might be better than his own. There seemed to be nothing for it but to keep speaking in a genteel Scots, though he might expand his vocabulary beyond the usual range of a fictitious junior clerk. “Well, Dr. Jackman,” Logan said—he made the word almost “weel”—“I confess I do find myself in a predicament.”
“Really,” said Jackman, “really now, my dear fellow, you needn’t continue to talk as a Lothians counter-jumper would. You didn’t ring quite true in that role, but yours was a valiant try. You’re a cut or two above that sort of thing, eh? I doubt whether you’re a Scot at all. An Englishman, possibly? Or even a German? A university man, probably. Just walk on the other side of our Mr. Logan, if you will be so good, Royall. We shall have Mr. Logan resident in Carnglass for some time now: permanently, perhaps, depending on his degree of co-operation with us. Among the many things about you which puzzle me, Logan, is how you contrived to become acquainted with Miss Mary MacAskival. We shall have to interrogate the young lady on that point, eh, Royall—unless Mr. Logan is so gallant as to save us the trouble? I hadn’t guessed that Miss MacAskival numbered among her friends any person formidable enough to do in Seamus Donley, late I.R.A. Well, up to my study, if you don’t mind. On the stair, Mr. Royall, pray walk directly behind Mr. Logan, with your gun at the ready. We mustn’t underestimate his talents a second time.”
For all the gravity of this situation, Hugh Logan felt more confidence in himself than he had known since he landed in Carnglass. He had begun to understand matters, and to struggle against the tide of events; his ineffectuality of an hour ago had given way to action of a sort. And time was running out for Jackman. A few more days of silence from Carnglass, at most, and someone—the police, or a passing ship or plane—would suspect that things were amiss in the island, and there would be investigations highly embarrassing to Jackman. They would not be so embarrassing, however—sobering thought—if Hugh Logan somehow should have vanished from Carnglass before any official inquiries might be made. It was some comfort to reflect that Duncan MacAskival, if no one else, soon would begin to wonder where he was; and there was the faint possibility that the Glasgow police, desiring him for a witness in the affair of Mutto’s Wynd, might commence to look for him. Everything, conceivably, would depend upon how the next few minutes with Dr. Jackman happened to go.
In the study, Jackman indicated that, as on the first occasion, Logan was to sit at the chess-table. “I don’t think you’ll be needed, Royall,” Jackman said to that cadaverous secretary, “but you might look in within the hour. We have a very clever guest here: devilish clever. It’s as well I have Donley’s pistol in my pocket now.” Royall hesitated, as if to offer some objection; but, at a dark glance from Jackman, went out.
Once again Jackman poured sherry for Logan, and set out the Table-Men of Askival. “Really, Logan, I think you were pulling my leg at our last game of chess, as you were in so many other matters. I’ll not accept any handicap in this match. It’s rather pleasant to play during a casual discussion like ours, don’t you think? We never may have an opportunity for another match. That depends upon you, of course, Logan.” Jackman showed every sign of being in good spirits, as if he enjoyed this contest with an able adversary; but well below his urbane surface, Logan suspected, a gnawing disquietude was at work in Jackman. He knew the man much better after Mary’s account of him.
As for Logan, he made his first move in the match with seeming indifference, smiling at Jackman. The only thing that could suffice to save him, Logan felt, was to dismay Jackman by a show of complacency and mysterious assurance. He had this sole advantage, that Jackman had not the faintest glimmer as to who Logan really was. “Oh, no, sir,” he said to Jackman, still with his assumed Scottish burr, “I fancy that the question of our future encounters, Dr. Jackman, already is settled by people from beyond Carnglass.”
Jackman scowled. “I told you you needn’t play at little games with me, Logan, or whatever your name is. It’s pointless now for you to talk like a smarmy bank-clerk that never existed. Why not out with it all? Who are you?” He advanced a rook.
“That, Dr. Jackman, you’ll learn in the fullness of time. Lest you grow rash, let me remind you of one thing: you may be sure that I’d not have come to Carnglass, knowing you and your men were here, without having taken precautions. There are a dozen people who know precisely where I am, and why, and who will come looking for me if I don’t return when I ought.” He let that observation sink in as he meditated his next move. He wished there were any truth in it; but Jackman could not know its hollowness.
“As for that, Logan”—here Jackman castled—“it would be entirely possible for you to be lost, accidentally, in these wild waters. No witnesses would swear to your having met with any harm in quiet old Carnglass. Not one. You might, for instance, have gone mackerel-fishing in a small boat with Lagg and Donley; and the three of you might have been caught in a squall—there are mishaps enough in these waters—and drowned; and two of the bodies might have been recovered, Donley’s and yours. A death by drowning is quite natural. A quarter of a mile off the western shore of Carnglass is a ragged reef that would offer a wholly convincing explanation.”
Logan extricated a bishop from a tight corner. “But suppose, Dr. Jackman, that my friends ashore are not the sort to be satisfied by the formalities of a coroner’s jury, or, indeed, by Scottish courts of law? Suppose they might hold you privately accountable, and presume you guilty until proved innocent?”
Jackman stared at him. “Logan, I put it to you bluntly now. Royall was sounding you out last night, of course, with his bits from Burns, and our other signals. You evaded him. Now tell me out and out, for I’ve no time to waste: are you one of us? If you are, why cannot you say so and have done with it, and transmit your instructions to me, if you’ve any to give? Perhaps you’re from London; perhaps from Paris; perhaps from further East. I’ve been expecting some such inquiry, of course. Why this cat-and-mouse rubbish, if you are one of us?”
Jackman’s nerves were wearing thin. To assume the new role of a member of Jackman’s conspiratorial circle would be much the safest dodge for him just now, of course—if only Logan knew how to play it. But, lacking knowledge of the ring, all he could undertake was to cast out dark hints from time to time. “Why, I’ll tell you merely this, Dr. Jackman: I am not authorized to make any regular communication to you until certain events have taken place, and until a certain time has elapsed. Until then, consider me simply as your casual guest.” He took a rook of Jackman’s.
“You are a cool chap, Logan. I needn’t tell you I have ways of extracting a statement from you. I know all the ways, Logan.”
“Of course you know them. But suppose I am the sort of person I may be: if you did me any hurt, it might be awkward for you afterward, eh? I have a long memory, Jackman.”
Jackman bit his lip, and lost another pawn. “There are other ways of getting round you, Logan. Have you ever heard a lady scream? A full-throated scream, from exquisite agony, I mean. It’s rather distressing for a gentleman who happens to like the lady in question. And it is the ladies, the gently-bred, soft-skinned ladies, who scream loudest, Logan, and talk soonest and most. Imagine a young lady accustomed all her life to deference, who hadn’t had a hand laid upon her in anger since she was a naughty small child; and then think of her, to her surprise and chagrin, abruptly treated to the worst that the human body can stand. How she would scream, Logan, and babble all she knew, and beg to be let off; and you would have the interesting experience of watching the process, though unable to intervene. Suppose Miss Mary MacAskival were the young lady? I’m sure she could tell us a great deal about you.” Jackman’s marvellous eyes glinted. “Torment is the great leveller, Logan: in torment, the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin. There are no class distinctions in agony; our Miss MacAskival would behave like the lowest trull from Piccadilly, except that she would scream louder and talk sooner.”
It required a considerable effort, but Logan kept a smiling countenance. If he protested, or showed any sign of weakness, Jackman would take precisely this course; he was being sounded. Indifference on his part, just now, was the chief hope for Mary.
“Ah, well, Dr. Jackman, you and I are playing for higher stakes than a slip of a girl, aren’t we? If you must, you must; but I may as well tell you that you’d be wasting the time of both of us. Miss MacAskival knows only just what I found necessary to tell her, which is precious little. As for my being racked vicariously by her discomforts—why, you and I got past that a good time ago, didn’t we, Jackman? ‘O had ye been where I ha’ been, and seen wha’ I ha’ seen....’ When fellows like us have supped long on horrors, another squeal or two doesn’t much matter. Besides, I doubt whether you have much taste for twisting ladies’ arms, Jackman. I know you did your share of the disagreeable business, that very sort of business, in Barcelona and Bucharest—oh, I know all about you, Jackman”—here Jackman grimaced, taken aback—“but really, though you make such operations sound jolly, they aren’t very good fun, are they, now? One never quite grows accustomed to them; they stick in the craw; and what’s worse, they stick at the back of the brain, don’t they? Even our friend Royall, I suspect, doesn’t relish that business as he should.”
“Even so, Logan, I wouldn’t have to turn my own hands to the work, you know. Those strapping fellows downstairs would jump at the chance. They’ve been somewhat inhibited from their accustomed earthy pleasures here in Carnglass, poor chaps, and some haven’t had their way with a woman for months. Your recent little contretemps with Anderson, for instance—I’m certain Anderson would perform the task with enthusiasm. They’re a trifle coarse-fibred, my men, and to apply the peine fort et dure to a young lady would be quite their cup of tea.”
“No doubt, no doubt, old chap.” Here Logan took a knight from Jackman. “I have limitless confidence in their aptitude for such work, if for no other. But the powers that be still would tend to hold you personally responsible, wouldn’t they, now? And suppose the interrogation should all be in vain—why, however could you explain? Nothing does a diligent man’s reputation more serious damage than an unauthorized and unnecessary atrocity. You ought to know that by this time, Jackman.”
“The things I did, others told me to do, Logan.” Jackman’s lips worked. He lost another pawn.
“Quite. But you went rather beyond specific instructions, didn’t you? I don’t advise you to exceed instructions here in Carnglass.”
Jackman ran a hand lightly across his forehead, distractedly touching the little round soft patch in the middle with a forefinger. He ventured out a rook too far, and lost it to Logan. Then he looked, silent, into Logan’s eyes. The gaze of those great glowing pupils of Jackman’s was hard to bear. Into Logan’s mind came the sentence, “And if thy light be darkness, how great shall be that darkness.” It was just possible that he might prove a match of Edmund Jackman now, though the odds were against him. The man’s brain must be damaged, and under Jackman’s outward imperiousness, Logan suspected, vacillation was gnawing away. Logan thought also that had he encountered Jackman at the height of the man’s powers, Mary would have had a sorry knight-errant. But now the merciless energy and talent which had been Jackman’s were flickering in the socket, like enough, and Logan had to deal only with the remnant of a bad man. In Jackman’s ears sounded the wings of the Furies, and his mind sank further into doubt and dread. Or so Logan surmised, looking into those splendid, troubling eyes. It was just barely conceivable that Logan might defeat this failing master of deceit.
Logan started, and shook his head to rouse his consciousness. Had Jackman been attempting to mesmerize him? If so, the attempted paralysis of will had not succeeded, what with Logan’s own mind being full of plots and stratagems. Yet Jackman might have come near successful hypnosis; Logan had a feeling that the man had been asking him questions, in a low, almost friendly voice, to which Logan had given no answers as yet.
Just now Jackman was saying, ever so softly, “Who are your friends outside the Old House, out there in the wet and the dark?”
“Friends?” Logan spoke shrilly, alarmed at his own near-slip into reverie or trance. “Friends? Whose friends? If anyone’s outside, they’re no people of mine.” Logan regretted this admission as soon as he had made it; it would have done no harm to keep Jackman wondering whether he had an accomplice or two hidden in the bracken. Indeed, perhaps Jackman had begun to extract the truth from him by hypnosis, and Logan had escaped from the domination of those black eyes only in the nick of time.
But Jackman shook his head slowly, in disbelief; and his eyes went to the window of that room high in the tower, almost as if he feared to see some face pressed against the pane, far above the living rock of the Old House’s foundation. It was borne in upon Logan that Jackman’s unease was greater than his own fears.
Jackman licked his thin lips. “Why, Logan, who do you expect me to believe they are?” If the mystery back there behind the bracken had shaken Jackman this much, the panic must be worse among the men below stairs, with Rab’s hysteria to work upon them. “If they were police or intelligence people,” Jackman said, almost as if he expected to be overheard by some presence in that dusky painted chamber, “they would have swooped upon us long ago; they wouldn’t skulk about, picking off first one man and then another.”
“Rab told you that it was Tam Lagg: old Lagg, Dr. Jackman, that you sent over the cliffs a thousand feet down to the rocks and the sea, while he screamed of his wife and his bairns.”
Jackman looked at Logan astonished. “You, Logan—were you watching then? But no, you’ll have had that from Donley, before you finished with him. Lagg? What are you talking of? I saw him strike a crag half way down, and bounce off like a ball, and then fall to the sea. Such a thing doesn’t walk again.”
“Not alive,” Logan replied. “No, not alive.” Jackman’s eyes dilated. Yes, he could sound this note, Logan decided: the black beast was upon Jackman’s shoulders, and the conjuror was bewitched. If ever a man was haunted, it was Jackman, stalked by Spanish victims and Roumanian spectres, and now with the wraith of Lagg at his heels. “See here, Jackman: you raise sham bogles to frighten old women, and you laugh up your sleeve. But when you play with things from the abyss, you run risks. In this dead island of Carnglass, all round us things are ready to stir, if they’re called. I felt them in Dalcruach clachan. In Carnglass the dead are more than the living. And why shouldn’t Tam Lagg rise? You gave him the death that he feared most to die. If ever you set a spirit to walk the night, it was when you tossed that screaming man from the headland at the back of St. Merin’s Chapel.”
As Logan spoke, a nasty change came over Jackman. His face went a sick white, and his eyes closed, and he slumped in his chair. The horror must be on him. His breath came hard. Logan began to think of closing with him as he sat motionless across the table. But after a moment, Jackman gasped, blinked, and fumbled for the pistol in his pocket; he drew the gun and laid it before him, beside the chessboard.
“Then you feel it, too,” Jackman muttered, very low. “All about us, eh? Oh, this is a damned house, a place of dreams, horrid dreams. Listen: last night I walked the passages, for I didn’t dare to sleep, until I was worn out. In the end, I lay on my bed, not closing my eyes. And then it was not a bed, but a long, close tunnel or cave, and I was stumbling along it. Away at the end, I could see something standing. And it came to me that I myself was standing there, even though I walked toward the thing. The Edmund Jackman at the end of the cave was the Edmund Jackman that I might have been, if—if I had taken another turn at the beginning. And as I came up to myself, wanting to see the face, and the beauty of what I might have been, the thing turned, and looked at me. Its face was the face of a goat. Ah, the slit eyes! And I became one with it, and woke, and the horror still was on me.”
Infected by the man’s loathing of himself, and his fright, Logan also lowered his voice to a whisper. “Would you rather have died in the cave than have become one with the goat?”
“Yes,” said Jackman, “yes. It would be better to lie dead, dead like Lagg. I thought then of the gelignite, and I think of it every day and every night.” At this, Jackman shuddered, seemed to collect his wits, scowled at Logan, and glanced dully at the Table-Men of Askival on the board before him.
“Your move,” Logan reminded him. Edmund Jackman moved almost at random. “So!” Logan shifted his queen. “Checkmate, Dr. Jackman.”
“Hell!” cried Jackman, reaching out his hand as if to sweep the pieces to the floor.
“Easy!” Logan said, intercepting Jackman’s hand with his own. “There’s but this one set in the world, you know.”
Once more their eyes met in a long, strange stare; then Jackman, to Logan’s surprise, glanced down at the table. “Logan, or whatever you are,” he said, almost pleadingly, “I don’t know whether you can understand me. You’re a Party intellectual, I think, and the Party believes it knows all things. Yet in some matters the Party is blind. Just now I said ‘Hell.’ In Carnglass, I have learned that Hell is real. That’s heresy in the Party; but I have looked on Hell. There is no Heaven, but there is Hell.”
Jackman’s eyes were vacant now; he seemed to have forgotten to whom he spoke. “Hell endures,” he went on. “I have been in Hell always. This Carnglass is Hell. Don’t you know you were here in Carnglass before, infinitely long ago? We fought here then—and I lost. In Carnglass there is no time. Eternity is real here, and change is the delusion. I know this in the nights, when I walk the corridors. It is only in the day I can pretend that I am alive, or that what things I do can possibly save me from the torment. In the nights it is Hell that is real, and the Party is a sham. Do you understand that? And I know that you came here to send me to the torment, as you did before.”
Many times, Logan had heard the phrase “possessed of a devil.” But not until this moment, as he sat opposite Jackman with the chessmen between them, had he perceived the full and dreadful meaning of the words. The dark powers had claimed Edmund Jackman long since, and what sat opposite him was only the husk of a human being. Even the husk was crumbling now. Yet out of that desiccated scrap of mortality, dry and empty as the armor of last summer’s locust, there echoed now and again cries of anguish, the vain contrition of the damned. Whatever traditionary spectres might throng round the Old House of Fear, here right before Logan sat the ghost of what once might have been a vessel for honor.
Again Jackman’s eyes had closed, and the man or devil did not stir in the chair. What visions came and went behind those fallen eyelids, Logan preferred not to think. Jackman had drifted somewhere beyond this world of sense, for the moment. In the middle of that pallid forehead, the nasty round spot, the Third Eye, seemed to pulsate faintly, as if keeping night watch upon Logan.
Hugh Logan fought clear of the contagion of madness. Minutes, precious minutes, were slipping away. By a heap of chessmen lay the little pistol. Should he make a try for it? Or was this some sort of trap that Jackman had set? No, the damned man’s trance was genuine. If he chose, Logan could leap up, snatch the pistol, and make for the stairs. But that gang of murderers was below. And where might Mary and he run to? Well, let him get his hands on a rifle, and he might hold the old tower against them for a time. It might be possible to keep Jackman a hostage. The scheme was fantastic, but the only probable alternative was torture and death for Mary MacAskival and himself. Rising silent from his chair, Logan stretched out a hand toward the gun.
“As you were!” It was Royall’s harsh voice, at Logan’s back. A revolver-muzzle pressed into his spine. Royall’s long, almost skeletal arm reached past him and snatched up the little pistol by the chessmen. “Over to the wall,” Royall said, “and stand there till I tell you to turn round. I’ve been behind the screen these ten minutes past, Logan.”