Footprints on the Ceiling Page 3

  “Watrous,” Merlini said quietly, his mouth close to my ear, “says that Miss Skelton won’t let anyone in the old place. Keeps it locked up tight. If so, perhaps we do meet a ghost.”

  “Why? What did you see?”

  “A light. Up high, in the little top room. There!”

  I saw it that time, a taint ghostly flicker that moved for an instant and was gone.

  I looked at my wrist watch. It was just 9:40.

  Chapter Three:

  THE GHOST OF CAPTAIN SKELTON

  THE ISLAND ON THIS side rose abruptly from the water, and the old house sat shakily out on the very edge as if its builder had almost hated to build on land at all. The windows were all tightly shuttered and boarded over, except for one, high up in the Captain’s room. There a single shutter swung on rusty hinges as if in ill-tempered protest at our approach.

  As our boat moved slowly in, the driver spoke over his shoulder. “I can’t put you in here. No place to—”

  Merlini, leaning forward, pointed to the right toward a black square shadow that lay against the foundation stones at water level. “Put your searchlight on that,” he directed.

  The white beam shot out, ate into the shadow, and we saw that the river ran in under one corner of the house to a small boat-landing nearly concealed and protected beneath the first floor. We moved slowly toward it.

  “Flashlight,” Merlini said, and I tore open the paper parcel that contained the two I had purchased.

  The boat, silent now, floated in under the house and bumped against the landing. Merlini and I scrambled out. The damp green of the stone floor was slippery underfoot. As Merlini stopped to speak to our ferryman, I moved my torch in an exploratory circle and discovered a low arched doorway above a short flight of stone steps. The heavy weatherbeaten door stood open, and a large, old fashioned padlock hung from an iron hasp, unlocked.

  I went up the steps and peered in. My light, cutting its long conical tunnel through the black, revealed an untidy litter on the floor: old bottles, a broken-down chair, a rust-eaten coal stove, the scattered pieces of a rowboat. I could hear the slow drip of water from the cold stone walls.

  Behind me the boat’s motor roared, loud within the small space. I turned to see it backing out.

  “What’s the idea of that?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we reserve a line of retreat?”

  “I don’t know how long we’ll be here,” Merlini said. “The island has a boat service of its own and there’s a phone—That door unlocked?”

  “Yes. Cellar,” I said. “Do we go in?”

  He moved to my side and examined the interior with his flash as I had done. I noticed another open doorway inside in the farther wall and on our right a stairway going up.

  Merlini glanced at his wrist watch. “Yes,” he said, “we’ve got a few minutes. Watrous said to wait out front until we should see the lights in the other house go out, and then come down to meet him. Perhaps we can go through. Odd about this door though. He said Miss Skelton was annoyed if anyone even suggested coming up here. She wouldn’t let him have the keys when he wanted to look the place over.”

  “Other house?”

  “Yes. At the foot of the island. We couldn’t see it as we came past. In behind those trees at the lower end.”

  I followed him in across the cellar and up the stairs.

  “Careful,” he said. “There’s a step or two missing.”

  He pushed against the door at the top and we found ourselves in a dark, barren room that had once been the kitchen. There was a sagging series of cupboards along one wall, and, in a corner, an antiquated, tin-lined sink topped by a rusty, iron hand pump that was shrouded in cobwebs. The air was dead and stale with the tired odor of decay.

  A connecting door hung slantingly from a single hinge and, when I pulled it aside, its lower edge scraped along the floor. We entered a long narrow hall where my light, shining upward, penetrated the tall spindles of a stair rail and projected a moving striped pattern of light and dark on the discolored walls. Long dependent strips of damply curling wallpaper hung down and cast strangely twisted shadows. I felt a faint stirring of the musty air against my face. The tall front door stood ajar, half open.

  “Looks as if Mr. Ghost had picked up his skirts and skedaddled,” I said, the forced cheerfulness of my tone made flat and hollow by the surrounding gloom.

  Merlini’s forward progress stopped abruptly and I stumbled against him. “Pipe down, Ross,” he whispered. “Thought I heard something.”

  From far above there came the faint protest of the creaking shutter. But that was all.

  There were large double sliding doors on our left, one of them pushed back into the wall. Within, low near the floor, I caught a glimpse of small bright eyes that turned and vanished with a rustle of scratchy movement. “Rats.” I said, quietly.

  Merlini nodded, still listening, his gaze directed upward where the stair curved away into the dark. After a moment he stepped quietly, forward, following the beam of his flash toward the open door, and stood there in the opening, looking out. I grasped the large, wrought-iron handle and pulled the heavy door toward me a foot or so, shivering along my spine as the ancient hinges cried out painfully with a harsh, rusty rasp.

  “I should have brought a brass band,” Merlini commented acidly. “They’d be quieter. You make enough noise to wake—” His flash blinked out. “Douse your light!”

  Outside, down at the far end of the island I could see the dim white shape of a house in among the trees, one lighted window on the ground floor. But nearer, perhaps halfway between us and the house, was another light, a moving point that bobbed up and down and grew larger. It winked like an uncertain will-o’-the-wisp as it moved behind and was eclipsed by the intervening trees.

  We watched it silently as it drew closer, until, finally, just as it came from under the trees into the open space before the house and began to shine steadily, it blinked out. Where the light had been I could see faintly a darker splotch against the shadow of the wood, the figure of a man standing very still, looking up at the house. After a long moment he moved and came slowly toward us walking with an alert, stealthy tread. Merlini’s light stabbed at the figure and robbed it instantly of all motion.

  I recognized at once the short broad-shouldered figure, the cropped military mustache, the black-rimmed pince-nez, and the round, fat face. It was Colonel Watrous, his customary, dignified and pompous manner completely effaced by the startled expression and the blank fright in his eyes. His arm jerked up and a yellow beam of light jumped from his flash.

  Merlini stepped out into the light. “Sorry, Colonel,” he said reassuringly, “we weren’t too sure it was you.”

  The Colonel’s sigh of relief was audible 15 feet away. Shakily he said, “I saw your light from the house, but what—were you doing upstairs and how did you get in?”

  “The place is wide open. Everything but a welcome mat at the door. Only—that wasn’t our light you saw upstairs.”

  Watrous, who had moved to meet us, stopped again. The light in his hand wavered unsteadily. “Not yours? But—”

  “No,” Merlini said. “We saw that too, before we landed.”

  “Ghosts,” I suggested. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, hello, Ross.” The Colonel gave me a nervous half-smile. “This ghost doesn’t run to lights.”

  “And,” Merlini added calmly, “no ghost ever has to smash a lock. You know that.” He had turned his light on the door jamb, centering it on fresh splintered scars where the lock’s bolt had fitted. Then he turned to the Colonel. “How much time do we have before the curtain goes up on that séance? Time to give this place the once-over?”

  Watrous’s head nodded emphatically. “Yes, I think we’d better. I don’t like it. I don’t understand. …”

  He threw a quick glance back at the light from the other house and led the way in, slowly, his flash making rapid darting movements, as if he were trying to see everything at once
. He went toward the wide double door on the right and looked in. I followed. Over his shoulder I saw a large spacious room with high ceilings, empty and deserted. There was a large fireplace in the farther wall and on the right, between two high windows with cracked and broken panes, a tall mirror was set into the wall. It reflected dimly and unevenly “from its dusty surface, and the ornately carved, once-white frame that surrounded it was cracked and yellow.

  Close against the nearest window was the room’s single piece of furniture, a forlorn-looking ladder-back chair with its rungs askew and only a few straggling pieces of twisted cane still projecting around the rim of its seat. The Colonel went into the room and walked toward the chair.

  I stood in the doorway. Merlini had stopped just inside the front door by the foot of the stairs. His light played on the floor and moved up the steps, examining the treads.

  The Colonel pulled the chair out away from the wall a foot or two with a slow, careful motion as if afraid it would fall apart in his hands. “Not much left of the Captain’s regal appointments,” he said. “Rather disappointing. I’d hoped the old place was better preserved than this.”

  “ ‘Regal appointments’?” Merlini observed from over my shoulder. “I see you’ve read the Williams account too.”

  “Yes,” Watrous admitted. “The history of this place has always fascinated me. That’s why I checked it on that list I submitted to NBC. The broadcast plan intrigued me because it offered such an excellent excuse for a first-hand investigation of this house. That was why I came out here originally.”

  I put in a plea for information. “Will one of you antiquarians please tell me what it’s all about? Just what sort of three-headed djinn haunts this place and why? What’s this fascinating, not to say exasperating, history that it has?”

  “It’s more than fascinating. It’s positively lurid,” Merlini said. “Ever hear of Ephraim Skelton?”

  “Vaguely,” I answered. “A big bad wolf of finance in Grandpa’s day, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. He cleaned up in railroads just prior to the turn of the century. The present Linda Skelton’s grandfather. They called him, to mention only the printable epithets, the Scourge of Wall Street and the Buccaneer of Finance. The piratical terms were an allusion not only to his methods but to his grandfather, Captain Arnold Skelton. The Captain was an eccentric, fiery-tempered old boy who appeared rather mysteriously out of nowhere in 1830 and whose description tallied rather too closely with that of the notorious José Boutell.”

  “Never heard of him,” I said.

  “He was notorious just the same. Morgan and Blackbeard and Kidd are about the only pirates who still rate press notices, but in his day José was spot news. Along with Billy Bowlegs and Gasparilla he was one of the last of the famous pirates, and he suddenly dropped out of sight along the Spanish Main just before Captain Skelton settled down in New York. Dame Rumor’s tongue has wagged ever since, and the Skeltons have never quite managed to live it down.”

  “They don’t try to any more,” Watrous added. “They’re rather proud of him. Adds an interesting spot of color to the ancestral tree. About ten years after he came here, he outfitted a small schooner one day and left for parts unknown. He was thought to have turned pirate again, but he showed up six months later without telling anyone where he’d been. Both Burridge and Williams think his trip was for the purpose of retrieving a cache of hidden treasure. Soon after that he bought Skelton Island—it appears as West Brother Island on the old maps—and built this house. It’s quite possible that Ephraim’s original capital was in the form of pirate loot. Floyd has an interesting collection that bears on the subject.”

  “Floyd?” Merlini asked.

  “Floyd Skelton. He and his brother Arnold live here with Linda, her half brothers, I believe, by an earlier marriage. Floyd’s an amateur authority on pirates and buried—”

  “So,” I broke in, “the Captain’s the resident ghost hereabouts. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “And why not?” Merlini asked. “He makes a lovely haunt. He even had the pirate’s traditional wooden leg. If the engraving Burridge reproduces is authentic, he was a big hairy Cro-Magnon with a dirty look in his eye that should have been able to sink a galleon as easily as any broadside of twelve-pounders. And his nonchalant disregard for human life would make a modern professional gunman look like a sissy. Dead men tell no tales was his strict policy. If all his victims came to haunt him in his last years, and are still around, then this is probably the best haunted house in Christendom.”

  “Boo to you!” I said skeptically. “Are you two trying to get my wind up? I never saw a ghost, I never hope to see one, and so forth. But go on. What about his post-mortem history?”

  “The Captain,” Watrous replied with a professorial accent, “has the reputation of being a rather noisy old apparition. Footsteps, back and forth, as if he were pacing his quarter-deck, were noted quite frequently in the old accounts. Dishes would pick themselves up and go smash, pictures fall off the walls for no apparent reason, the furniture move about and rearrange itself. Quite an interesting assortment of poltergeist phenomena. Though I think none has been reported in recent years because Miss Skelton would allow no investigation. Nevertheless the house has “an enviable reputation in psychic literature.”

  “The sound effects department,” I said to Merlini, “should be able to manage—”

  My skepticism took a sudden, unexpected smack on the jaw and nearly went down for the count. From the hall outside, at the top of the stairs came a solid thump. It was immediately followed by another and then another. A stately, remorseless procession of bumps, one to each step—down the stairs. My back was to the door; Watrous faced it. I saw his jaw drop. Merlini and I both whirled about.

  The steady thump of the wooden leg—I was beginning to believe it could be that—came on down the stairs, a good six feet of which was visible through the door. All three flashlights were trained on the opening. The sounds continued on past the door, and I saw—exactly nothing. Then, at the foot of the stairs, they stopped.

  “You asked for it,” Merlini said, striding for the door.

  We were all there in another second, peering out. The hall was empty and the front door, as Merlini had left it when we came in, closed. He moved out to the foot of the stair and then, in the light of his torch, I saw the bright gleam of metal. A shiny flashlight that had not been there earlier lay on the floor a foot or two from the bottom step.

  Merlini’s flash swung and pointed up the stairs.

  “Someone up there.” Watrous’s voice was a thin, unsteady whisper.

  “Yes. If the Captain carried a light it wouldn’t be an electric one.” Merlini raised his voice. “Hello! You dropped something.”

  And this time we did hear footsteps, footsteps that were not made by a flashlight rolling down from step to step. They were soft furtive ones that creaked on another stairway above, and retreated, going higher.

  “Got that gun handy, Ross?” Merlini said loudly, and started up.

  I pulled it out, moved the safety catch, and went after him, Watrous close behind. We turned on the second floor and came back the length of the hall to face a second stairway. There was a small landing at its top and a single door. The irregular creaking and the intermittent thud of the swinging shutter as it banged against the house came louder. This room, I knew suddenly, must be the one from which the light had come. Merlini waited for us on the landing, one hand on the doorknob. He turned it and the door moved inward an inch or two.

  “Well,” he said grimly, his words obviously directed beyond the door. “There are three of us and we’re armed; Let’s go.”

  He gave the door a strong quick push. It swung in and around and banged solidly against the wall. Our three lights focused together on the inner darkness and pushed in to make a tunnel in the black. Nothing happened. No movement, no sound. Merlini took one quick, long stride across the threshold. Watrous and myself followed automatically and to
gether.

  Our lights probed the dark, three bright shafts that moved like swift rapiers around the room—finding no one, nothing but that same dreary abandonment. This room was like all the others except that the ceiling was lower and there were three pieces of furniture, a decrepit, leather-covered couch whose coiled entrails jutted out in places where the rats had gnawed, and, near the right-hand wall, a large trestle table with a mildew-spotted armchair drawn up before it. The chair’s high back cast a triple shadow on the wall that curved and moved as the beams from our lights turned and crossed. An empty kerosene lamp, without chimney, stood on the table, and its glass sent a flicker of reflected light back at us, the only bright gleam in the room.

  Conscious of a fresher smell to the air, I swung my light on the windows. There were two in the wall facing us and two on both right and left, tall blank openings whose tightly closed shutters stopped the light abruptly a few inches beyond the dusty, nearly opaque glass. One window alone was open some three feet at the top, and outside it the shutter swung, filling the room with its harsh grating. I ran across, sprang up on the low window seat, and, holding one arm before my face to guard against the shutter’s swing, put my head out. The drop to the water below was sheer.

  “No exit this way,” I began. “It’s—” I leaned farther out—40 feet below on the dark river I saw a faintly reflected reddish glow that seemed to be thrown out from the house, low near the water’s edge. I didn’t like the wavering way it moved. I turned. “Merlini—” I started.

  He was standing near the armchair, on its other side, looking down into it. I saw Watrous take two hesitant steps toward him and then stop abruptly at his side. The light in his hand trembled. And I saw the rounded line of white along the arm of the chair—the white flesh of a woman’s arm.