Beware, the Usurpers!

I stopped the black Jaguar beside the crumbling stone balustrade and swung my legs out. The drive was deep in rotted leaves and long-uncleared trash. Above me the ancient castle looked out across the groves of oak and elm and chestnut to the silent moors, like the veritable ghost of Old England itself: aloof, brooding, noble, withdrawn from this hectic modern age into its memories. Blind blank holes of windows stared over my head as I walked up the drive where in a more regal century the carriages of dukes and knights and princes of the blood must have rolled, the big horses of neighboring squires must have pawed impatiently before many a hunt, and lovers in satin and velvet and cascading lace must have strolled and dallied a thousand thousand times.

As I was hauling open the heavy iron-banded door, my foot trod upon something that squashed unpleasantly. I bent down, and in the sick yellow moonlight saw a newly-dead rook, its eyes already pecked out. I shivered, uncontrollably. Then I went in and pulled the door shut.

My electric torch stabbing the darkness before me, I crossed the empty hall and mounted the broad curving stairs. At the top I turned and glanced downward; the great hall was patterned with moonlight, and although there was no furniture of any sort, the whole vast place seemed to crawl and pulse with shapes of menace, of dead-yet-living evil. I shook myself angrily. My nerves were rotten, my mind was bursting with fear. That was the whole trouble—fear, fear and nerves. The only thing to do was act quickly.

I strode down the dank passageway, opened the third door on the left, went into the room and shut the door behind me.

Here the old stone walls were ashine with lights, the air was less musty and far less creepy. Six people were here, standing about or sitting on straight-backed chairs. They all turned to look at me. Nobody spoke. I nodded to each in turn.

There was an old army officer, leathered and permanently tanned by decades of the dreadful Indian sun; he wore a short grizzled mustache and a stern, rather stuffy expression. There was a man of about fifty who could not have been anything but a physician, so scrubbed and competent he seemed. There was a youngish fellow with only one arm, and another whose dark glasses sheltered sightless scar-pitted hollows. There was an antique of a man, poker-thin and poker-straight and poker-hard, with a pale face and keen, faded blue eyes. And there was a girl, who had sometimes been described as a summer sky, as a star, and as other things just as lovely and unbelievable.

"What ho," I said, with empty cheerfulness. "Sorry to be late. Let's get at it."

"Will," said the doctor abruptly, "I forbid it. It's madness, it's criminal lunacy."

"Sorry you feel that way, John. We've gone too far to stop here—and we've been all through this a hundred times." I went to the table and sat down briskly in the vacant chair beside it. Truth to tell, every muscle in my body was rebelling, was shrieking to me that John Baringer was right; only my mind still insisted that he was wrong, and I knew that if I dallied for an instant my body would conquer my brain....

I fitted my head snugly against the curious apparatus we had attached to the back of the chair. It was constructed along the lines of an old-fashioned photographer's head clamp. To the table were nailed a number of steel braces, which held a Tower musket, an obsolete firearm primed with black powder and aimed rigidly so that the load would pass within a hair's breadth of my eyes as I sat with my head pressed against the clamp. The musket was already cocked. "Let 'er go," I said, and felt glad that my voice had not cracked into falsetto.

"No!" said John Baringer. "No!"

None of them moved.

"Have I got to do it myself?" I asked, rather angrily.

The retired officer pushed the doctor aside, took two steps forward and laid his hand on the musket. "Ready?" he asked.

"I am."

"Hold hard," he said, and pulled the trigger.

The world seemed to lift up into the air all at once, its foundations tearing apart with a noise like all hell bursting in half; then it slowly toppled down again, and everything was blackness and hot, searing death.

The last thing I remember was the scream of the beautiful girl, she who was as lovely as a summer sky.