‘I’ll tell you later, okay?'
'It was that bad?' Edward asked me.
'It was worse.'
Edward came over and unexpectedly took hold of my hand. 'Tell us when you're ready to tell us,' he said. 'But just remember that you don't have to carry this thing on your own. You've got friends now, people who understand what's going on.'
'Thanks,' I said, and meant it. 'Let's see where we get with old man Evelith first. Then we'll go get drunk, and I'll tell you what happened.'
We waited for almost five minutes. Forrest got out of the car, too, and lit a cigarette. Edward rang the bell again, and the Doberman came a little closer, and yelped and yawned all in one breath.
'Maybe they're out,' suggested Forrest.
'The guy's a hermit, he never goes out,' said Edward. 'He's probably peering at us through a crack in one of the shutters, sizing us up.'
He was about to ring the bell for the third time when the front door of the house suddenly opened, and a tall broad-shouldered man in gray morning-dress appeared. He whistled sharply to the dog, which turned its head, hesitated, and then loped disconsolately away from the gates, as if it was deeply disappointed that it wouldn't get the chance to sink its teeth into our calf-muscles.
The broad-shouldered man approached the gates with the slightly-rolling walk of a 60-year-old body-builder. The same way that Charles Atlas used to walk. When he came close, I saw that he was an Indian; with a magnificent fleshy nose and a face as coppery and wrinkled as a fallen maple-leaf. Although he wore full morning-dress, with a high white collar and a bow-tie, he also wore a long necklace of painted nuts or beads, from which was suspended a silver medallion and a brush of wild turkey feathers. The shoulders of his jacket sparkled with rain.
'You must leave,' the Indian said. 'You are not welcome here.'
'Well, that's too bad,' I told him. 'The fact of the matter is, I have a little something that Mr Evelith may be interested in.'
'There is no-one of that name here. You must leave,' the Indian repeated.
'Would you just tell Mr Evelith that my name is John Trenton, that I am an antique dealer from Granitehead, and that I have with me a writing-case that used to belong to Henry Herrick, Sr., who was one of the jurors at the Salem Witch Trials.'
'There is no-one called Evelith here.'
'Come on, pal,' I coaxed him. 'All you have to do is say "Henry Herrick's writing case." If Mr Evelith still doesn't want to see us after you've said that, well, we'll call it quits. But at least give him the opportunity to take a look at it. It's a very rare antique, and I just knew that Mr Evelith would be interested.'
The Indian thought about this for so long that Edward and I started to look at each other worriedly. But at last he said, 'Stay here, please, gentlemen. I will confer with my superior.'
'Confer,' said Forrest, pretending to be impressed. They don't pow-wow any more. They confer. Next thing we know, they'll be using "aggressively-oriented cosmetics", instead of war-paint.'
'Can it, Forrest,' said Edward.
We waited outside the gates for a further five minutes, maybe longer. The rain had settled down to a fine drizzle by now, but it was still heavy enough to plaster our hair against our heads, and bedraggle Edward's beard. Every now and then, the Doberman, which was waiting for us just out of savaging range, gave itself a brisk and anticipatory shake.
Eventually, the tall Indian came out of the house again, and without a word, unlocked the gates and opened them up. I went to the back of the car, and took out the Herrick writing-case, tucking it under my raincoat so that it wouldn't get wet. The Indian waited until we were all inside the grounds, and then locked the gates behind us. The Doberman quivered as we passed, torn between the command it had been given and its natural bloodlust. Forrest said, 'Throw it a leg, Edward. It looks hungry.'
We climbed the stone steps to the front door, and the Indian ushered us inside. The hallway was panelled in dark oak; with a dark hand-carved staircase on the right-hand side, leading to a galleried landing. On the walls were oil paintings of all the Eveliths, from Josiah Evelith in 1665 to Duglass Evelith in 1947. They were serious, oval-faced, without a smile between them.
The Indian said, 'Upstairs. I will take your coats.'
We handed him our raincoats, and after he had hung them up on a huge and hideous hallstand, we followed him up the uncarpeted stairs. On the walls of the landing there were halberds and pikes, fowling-pieces and strange arrangements of metal that looked like instruments of torture. There was also a glass case, almost impenetrably dusty, which contained something that could have been a mummified human head.
Throughout the house, there was a smell of staleness and closeness, as if the windows hadn't been opened for twenty years. Yet there were always noises, squeaks and hangings, as if unseen people were moving from room to room, opening and closing doors. There may have been nobody here but old man Evelith, his alleged granddaughter, and his Indian man-servant, but it sounded as if there were a score of other people around. Once, I even thought I heard a man laughing.
The Indian took us along an uncarpeted corridor, with a polished boarded floor, and then into an ante-room, sparsely furnished with English-looking antiques and a broken celestial globe. Above the empty fireplace was an oddly incompetent painting of five or six cats, American shorthairs by the look of them.
'Mr Evelith will be with you by and by,' said the Indian, and left us.
'Well,' said Edward, 'we're in. That's an achievement in itself.'
'It doesn't mean to say that he's going to let us look at his library,' I said.
That Indian's kind of weird,' said Forrest. 'He looks so Indian. I haven't seen a face like that outside of an 1860s photograph album.'
We made nervous small talk for a while, and then the ante-room door opened, and a girl came in. We all stood up like hayseeds at a Wyoming wedding, and nodded our heads to her, and chorused, 'How do you do, miss.'
She stood by the door, one hand on the knob, and looked at us in remote and unfriendly appraisal. She was quite petite, no more than five-feet-two, with a thin, sharply-cut face, large dark eyes, and straight black hair that fell brushed and glossy halfway down her back. She wore a black linen day-dress, simply cut, and yet it appeared from where I was standing that she wore nothing underneath. Her shoes were black and shiny with dagger-like toes and extravagantly high heels.
'Mr Evelith has asked me to escort you into the library,' she said, in a clipped Bostonian accent. Edward raised an eyebrow in my direction. This was definitely class. But what was she doing here, shuttered up in Tewksbury with an eccentric old hermit and an Indian dressed like William Randolph Hearst? Especially if she wasn't Evelith's grand-daughter.
The girl disappeared, and we had to hurry to follow her through to the next room. She led us across a hallway, her heels clicking on the hardwood floors, and as she passed one of the unshuttered windows, and the gray afternoon light fell through the fine linen of her dress, I saw that I had been right. I could even see a mole on the right cheek of her bare bottom. I knew that Forrest had noticed, too, because he loudly cleared his throat.
At last we were shown into the library. It was a vast, long room, which must have taken up nearly half of the upper floor of the house. At the far end of it, there was an arched window of stained-glass, and the coloured light which strained through its amber-and-green panes illuminated the serried spines of thousands and thousands of leather-bound books, as well as huge bound volumes of prints and paintings.
Seated at a wide oak table in the centre of the library, with open books spread all around him, sat a white-haired old man, with a face that had shrunken like a monkey's from age and lack of sunlight. It was still possible to recognize him as an Evelith, however — he had the same oval features as his portrait downstairs, and the downward-drooping eyelids that had distinguished his forebears.