The Shadow - House Of Ghosts Part 2

Such was The Shadow's present objective. To attain it, he took to what seemed flight as he zigzagged to the s.p.a.ce beyond the graveyard and took an elusive course toward the crag above the Glen. Yet Herb and Luke persisted in keeping after him, though to them The Shadow had become no more than a streak of fleeting darkness.

Roger and the others had arrived beside the mausoleum. Staring through the clouding moonlight, they couldn't trace the living patch of blackness that still attracted the two yokels. Torrance was explaining who Herb and Luke were, at the same time attributing their mad dash to fright. Suddenly remembering that there was a third man in the local group, Torrance exclaimed: "Where is Zeph Blaine?"

"There was another man over there." With a long finger, Jennifer pointed off among the tombstones, marking the exact spot of Zeph's encounter with Dorthan. "But he was not the one who came here."

By "here" Jennifer meant the mausoleum, which she indicated with a back sweep of her hand. Roger turned to Torrance.

"Take a look in the crypt, doc," said Roger. "Borrow Gustave's shotgun before he gets excited and lets it pop. I'll take Wiggam with me and hunt forZeph. If you have any trouble, yell."

"But what about the others," queried Torrance. "If we don't stop them, they'll go off the edge of Lookout Rock."

"They'll stop soon enough," a.s.sured Roger. "They're just trying to get clear of ghosts."

Roger had it the wrong way about. The ghost that Herb and Luke were after was The Shadow and at that moment he was getting clear of them.

The Shadow had reached the crag termed Lookout Rock. There he was turning, intending to speed back toward the mansion and lose himself in the darkness of the graveyard while Herb and Luke would wonder where the black phantasm had gone.

Like something disgorged by the darkness of the trees, The Shadow formed a swirling patch upon the rock's gray surface. He seemed no more than the black streaks cast by high-weaving tree boughs as he poised to pick an opening between the blundering pursuers whom he had purposely led to this dead end.

The pause was just too long.

With a sudden gush, the moon poured its full glow through the s.p.a.ce between the trees. The cloud had pa.s.sed and the mighty orb was spotted straight on Lookout Rock. Where two men should have seen nothing, they spied a form as real as it was grotesque, the shape of The Shadow, as amazing as if it had sprung from the rock itself.

Savagely, Zeph's pals hurled themselves upon their fantastic prey. Rather than let their unwise fury carry them across the brink, The Shadow wheeled to meet them. They locked in a sudden grapple from which The Shadow writhed; then, with the moonlight still persisting, the cloaked grappler performed a singular ruse.

Dropping from the combined clutch of Herb and Luke, The Shadow twisted in the other direction. Like something dislodged from the crag, he slid over its k.n.o.bby edge, bound on a trip into the outer s.p.a.ce where he seemingly belonged!

THE SHADOW was sliding feet foremost. Face toward the rock, he dug his fingers hard as he went beyond its bulging surface. Legs and body dangling clear, he gave himself a pendulum swing back under the brow. Had his grip been firm, he would have pitched himself into the convenient s.p.a.ce below the crag, but his sliding fingers didn't quite suffice.

The Shadow's inward heave landed him just on the brink of the first sheer cliff. Down he went, unable to do more than slow his drop. He jolted as he struck the next stretch of the stone cascade and slid beyond, dropping down another of the giant steps.

Viewed from the Glen, The Shadow's spilling figure was a pygmy thing, descending the palisade in short, delayed drops, much like a beetle failing in its grip. He was still slipping when the trees of the gorge engulfed him, but as he left the moonlight, his forceful struggles were as evident as before.

Herb and Luke didn't view The Shadow's descent from that angle. In fact, they didn't see his drop at all. They were struggling on the top of Lookout Rock, each in the other's clutch. Simultaneously, they realized that the thing they fought was gone and they relaxed to stare in wonderment.

First they gazed at the rock itself; next they looked across the glade; finally, they craned from the brink and gazed below. They saw nothing; learned nothing.

The rock couldn't have swallowed The Shadow. There was no sign of him in midair. Nor was there any patch of blackness on the rocks below the greatstepped cliff. The two men finally decided that a thing that had vanished so completely must have been an illusion in the first place.

It didn't occur to that pair that The Shadow's lingering fall had kept him so close to the bottom of the lowest step that he was short of the angle at which they gazed. To these observers, the cliff looked sheer. They couldn't imagine anyone descending it by degrees.

BACK at the mausoleum, Dr. Torrance was standing with the leveled shotgun while Gustave turned a flashlight within the white-walled building. The glare showed vacancy; nothing more. The inner walls were the same stone as the outer.

The floor consisted of solid granite, two feet thick.

Stamping about the place, Torrance was soon convinced that the foundations were permanent. Even the mortar between the granite blocks was as solid as the stonework. Suspiciously, Torrance looked upward, telling Gustave to raise the flashlight. The flat ceiling of the mausoleum was quite as convincing as the floor and walls.

A light was bobbing toward the mausoleum. Turning, Torrance lowered the shotgun as he saw Wiggam stumbling toward him.

"Over there, doctor!" panted Wiggam, gesturing, across his shoulder.

"That man of yours - Zeph Blaine - he's dead. Mr. Roger will show you."

Old Jennifer supplied a cloak.

"The ghost in the tower!" she reminded. "When it appears, it means death.

Never has the omen failed!"

Giving Wiggam the shotgun, Torrance told him to guard the mausoleum.

Beckoned by Roger's flashlight, the doctor reached the spot where Zeph had struggled with Dorthan. Roger focused the light on a sight that wasn't pleasant.

p.r.o.ne on the ground, Zeph was partly obscured by an overturned tombstone.

Toppled from its base, the bulky block had landed on the man's head and shoulders, crus.h.i.+ng his skull. Poked from beneath the stone was Zeph's hand, loosely clutching a revolver. Picking up the gun, Torrance cracked it open; found that two shots had been fired.

"So the shots were Zeph's," mused Torrance. "He must have seen something or imagined it."

Roger pointed to Zeph's left hand which was tightly clutched upon the side of the fallen tombstone.

"He must have grabbed the stone," observed Roger. "A bad thing to do when off balance. Most of these stones are wobbly."

He turned the light on another and Torrance thrust his hand against the upright specimen to find that the tombstone did tilt under pressure. Pocketing Zeph's revolver, Torrance told Roger to accompany him into the house. When they arrived there, the doctor went up to the second floor, where they found Hector at his window.

From the window, they could see the top of the mausoleum. No one was lying upon it, hence Torrance decided that no ghost could have disappeared in that vicinity. So Torrance decided to have a look at the tower. They went to the doorway leading to its stairs.

The door was not only nailed shut; it had a padlock so rusty that it couldn't have been unlocked in years. Smas.h.i.+ng the lock with the b.u.t.t of Zeph's gun, Torrance pulled the door wide and threw a flashlight up the stairs. Atthe top of the steep steps was another door also padlocked.

The upper door wasn't nailed. because it opened inward. Breaking the lock, Torrance pushed the barrier open, to disclose a small landing only a few feet square. The only thing ghostly was the grating of the door hinges, which ended suddenly as the door jammed to a halt against the warped floor, a few inches short of the side wall.

The floor of the tower formed a five-foot square above the landing.

Access could be gained there by a ladder up the far wall of the landing. Gun in hand, Torrance boldly climbed the ladder, gave a quick thrust to the hinged boards of the tower floor and turned his head and arms about as he pressed through the opened s.p.a.ce. Roger and Hector were watching tensely, until they saw Torrance reach down and beckon.

They joined the doctor in the tower. There, all three stared about the open s.p.a.ce, their eyes wandering, puzzled, to the gable roof that had no rafters, but which was amply supplied with cracks and holes from years of disrepair.

Again the question of a phantasm remained unsolved. Whatever the thing that had been seen in the tower, ghost or human, it had disappeared as completely as the cloaked creature that had vanished from the brink of Lookout Rock.

Weird were the visitants seen at Stanbridge Manor and The Shadow held no monopoly to that claim!

CHAPTER V.

THE GHOST HUNT.

STANBRIDGE Manor had become famous.

The weird house gained that status almost overnight, thanks to Dr.

Torrance.

As county coroner, Torrance was forced to deliver a verdict in the death of Zeph Blaine. After all the evidence was weighed and considered, Torrance p.r.o.nounced it death through misadventure.

In itself, there wasn't much mysterious about a man clutching a tombstone in the dark and having it topple on him. Even the fact that the victim mistook the falling stone for something else and fired a few frantic shots, was understandable, considering Zeph's limited mental caliber and the fears that the cemetery had stimulated in his rustic mind.

What rendered it all so weird were further factors as witnessed by other persons. A stickler for detail, Dr. Torrance had included every ounce of data in his report and the whole summed to one simple answer: Stanbridge Manor was haunted!

Reliable witnesses could testify regarding the manifestations in the strange old mansion. Things that had bothered the Stanbridge family for quite some time, had been repeated in the presence of other persons.

First: such things as footsteps and ghostly whispers heard from quarters where no person could possibly have been. Second: the crash of dishes in the empty kitchen. Like the Stanbridge brothers, Dr. Torrance and Wiggam were ready to swear that the phenomena had occurred under impossible conditions. As a visible manifestation, the ghost in the watchtower rated tops.

Torrance was willing to take oath that he had seen something up there after Jennifer pointed, though it was too vague to be defined. The term "a figure in white" about described it. Roger had caught a fleeting glimpse of the thing, as had Wiggam, though Gustave wasn't ready to admit the presence of the phantom.

Indeed, a controversy was on between two members of the Stanbridge family: Gustave and Jennifer. As owner of the manor, Gustave was ready to deny that it ever had been haunted, though he did admit to certain happenings that he couldn't personally explain. Jennifer contrarily claimed that ghosts had always been around and always would be. She included her planchette writing as evidence in favor of the spirits.

As a comparative newcomer, Roger was quite at sea. The same applied to Wiggam, who seldom visited the manor at night, living as he did in the old gatekeeper's cottage. Neutral in the controversy was Hector, the house servant.

Being hard of hearing, short of sight, he wasn't the sort to be annoyed by wandering ghosts.

As for happenings outdoors, those were charged largely to local imagination, as with Zeph's death. For years the villagers of Coledale had shunned the Stanbridge burying ground on the score that it was bewitched, if not actually haunted. Torrance conceded that he had made a bad mistake in sending three ghost-fearing natives to patrol the tabooed area.

The lights seen around the cemetery were probably those of the three men.

The figure that Torrance saw when it ducked around the corner of the mausoleum, could have been either Herb or Luke, since it happened after Zeph's fatal accident with the tombstone. Supporting such an opinion was the fact that Herb and Luke had both gone chasing after an imaginary wanderer, only to find themselves locked in each other's grip on Lookout Rock.

At risk of his neck, The Shadow had won his point. He'd gone completely out of the picture, so completely that he wasn't supposed to have been around at all, which was exactly the impression that he wanted to produce.

But along with the elimination of The Shadow as a factor, human or ghostly, another person had totally slipped the scene. There wasn't the slightest hint that Carl Dorthan, embezzler wanted by the law, had come to Stanbridge Manor, there to join in the ghostly gambols and vanish with the stolen funds he brought.

This was something that only The Shadow knew!

THE newspapers went to town with the Stanbridge Manor story. Ghost stuff was always good "copy" and this exceeded all expectations. Famed cases of the past dwindled into oblivion, compared to this instance where an avenging ghost had lived up to its reputation of manifesting itself at a time of sudden death.

Lamont Cranston found the newspapers very interesting reading, as he sat in the library of New York's exclusive Cobalt Club, with one leg propped on another chair beside which leaned a cane. Cranston had wrenched his knee in a fall from a polo pony, which was one of his favorite habits.

That pony business often came in handy. It frequently happened after TheShadow had fared severely during one of his daring exploits. For the quiet, calm-mannered club man who called himself Lamont Cranston was actually The Shadow. His wrenched knee represented a cascading fall of a hundred feet and more, down the step-cliff below Lookout Rock.

And now, in armchair style, the taciturn Mr. Cranston was learning a lot of facts that he hadn't gathered during his excursion to Stanbridge Manor.

There was a legend, of course, to account for the Stanbridge ghost. The house itself dated back before the Revolution and had figured in feuds of that day. The Coledale area had then been disputed territory, claimed by two different groups of settlers, each from a separate colony.

When the colonies became states, the situation had not changed. There had been pitched battles, even ma.s.sacres, on the part of the warring factions. The original Stanbridge had played a large share in such strife, showing himself a very clever warrior.

Several times, the Stanbridge ancestor had been trapped in the manor, only to escape and return with members of his own faction, thus turning the tables on the invaders. He had personally slain a few of his archenemies when they entered the manor and there was a rumor that the ghosts might be theirs.

Another school of thought made the original Stanbridge the haunter of his own premises, there being good reason to consider him the one and only ghost.

First, the watchtower had been his favorite spot when he was on the alert for enemies; again, he had often sworn that he would protect all Stanbridges to come. Thus he had become a legendary figure in the minds of his descendants.

The original Stanbridge might even be expiating some of his own dark deeds, of which there had been many!

Still, no one knew exactly when the ghost had first appeared. A later legend involved another Stanbridge, grandson of the first, who had partic.i.p.ated in the famous "underground railway" that aided escaping slaves. This later Stanbridge had used the old watchtower, along with Lookout Rock, and had shown himself amazingly skillful at smuggling fugitives in and out of his premises, without a single capture. He was a more benign character than his grandfather; therefore better suited to rate as a ghostly protector of his clan, ready to warn them of approaching death whenever it was due.

The Stanbridges had a habit of dying suddenly, which was why they dreaded death. Generally heart failure was the cause, though some had recuperated from strokes that left them seemingly dead. There was a trace of insanity in the family; how serious, no one knew, for details had always been avoided, even by the Wiggams.

Always, there had been a Wiggam attached to the Stanbridge family and each current Wiggam was invariably loyal to the head of Stanbridge Manor. The present Wiggam was no exception; his purchase of his own cottage had been purely to aid the failing Stanbridge fortune and preserve some of the property.

HAVING brought the Stanbridge history up to date, Cranston began to study the status of the present dwellers in the manor. Gustave had inherited the hollow fortune after the death of his elder brother Donald, several years ago.

Long-ailing, weakened in mind and memory, Donald had gone out in typical Stanbridge style, from a stroke that totally paralyzed him.

Even since, Donald's sister Jennifer had been communicating with his spiritby means of the planchette. Always she hinted that Gustave was responsible for Donald's death, but there wasn't a shred of evidence to prove the claim.

Indeed, Gustave had called in some very fine physicians to study Donald's case.

The real reason for Jennifer's antagonism to Gustave could lie in the fact that the present owner of Stanbridge Manor was selling the premises piecemeal, something that no previous Stanbridge had done in half a dozen generations.

Perhaps Gustave needed money, but that didn't square it with Jennifer.

However, all that was over. Roger, the youngest brother, had returned after striking it rich in a Mexican mine. Having cash to spare, he was spending it to preserve the homestead that would some day be his. But much though he honored the family tradition, Roger was having a hard time with the ghosts.

Reporters cagily intimated that Gustave secretly believed in the ghosts and dreaded them, his argument to the contrary being to offset Jennifer's exaggerated faith in the family specters. As for Roger, he was admittedly puzzled, wishfully wanting the situation to be cleared.

There was to be a ghost hunt.

Reading that fact, Cranston laid the newspaper aside, picked up his cane and limped from the club to a waiting limousine. Riding to an apartment house, Cranston turned on the radio while the chauffeur was entering the building to ring a bell.

Soon a girl arrived. She was an attractive brunette, keen of eye and manner. Her name was Margo Lane and she had known Lamont Cranston long enough to understand his moods. Seeing him concerned with the radio news, Margo simply entered the car and listened as the chauffeur started to some destination.

Over the air came startling news.

Gustave Stanbridge had yielded to the combined persuasion of his brother Roger and Dr. Torrance. Stanbridge Manor was to become the ground for a ghost hunt, with reporters present during the weird quest. The hunt was to be handled by a psychic investigator named Dunninger, long famous as a ghost breaker.

Margo gave an exclamation as this word came through.

"I've heard of Dunninger!" expressed Margo. "Why, he's the man who has offered a huge award for any spirit phenomena that he cannot explain or duplicate!" (ED. NOTE: - This offer of Joe Dunninger's still stands. No one, to date, has been able to meet this challenge.) "An award that no one has ever collected," added Cranston with a calm smile, "and probably never will."

"You mean that the ghosts of Stanbridge Manor aren't real?"

"They could hardly be, Margo" - Cranston's smile had become cryptic - "because if they were, I would certainly not be sending you to visit them."

"Sending - me?"