He was obviously finding the conversation very uncomfortable.
'But you must explain yourself, Herr Debec,' Harry demanded. 'You've got us completely fascinated.'
'There is ... a dweller,' the man finally answered. 'An old man - a holy man, some say, but I don't believe it - who looks after... things.'
'A caretaker, you mean?' Julia asked.
'A keeper, madam, yes. He terms himself a "monk", I think, the last of his sect. I have my doubts.'
'Doubts?' Harry repeated, becoming exasperated. 'But what about?'
'Herr, I cannot explain,' Debec fluttered his hands.
'But still I advise you, do not go there. It is not a good place.'
'Now wait a min-' Harry began, but Debec cut him off.
'If you insist on going, then at least be warned: do not touch ... anything. Now I have many duties.
Please to excuse me.' He hurried from the room.
Left alone they gazed silently at each other for a moment. Then Harry cocked an eyebrow and said:
'Well?'
'Well, we have nothing else to do this afternoon, have we?' she asked.
'No, but - oh, I don't know,' he faltered, frowning. 'I'm half inclined to heed his warning.' 'But why?
Don't tell me you're superstitious, Harry?' 'No, not at all. It's just that - oh, I have this feeling, that's all.'
She looked astounded. 'Why, Harry, ! really don't know which one of you is trying hardest to have me on: you or Debrec? She tightened her mouth and nodded determinedly. 'That settles it then. We will go and have a look at the ruins, and damnation to all these old wives' tales!'
Suddenly he laughed. 'You know, Julia, there might just be some truth in what you say - about someone having us on, I mean. It's just struck me: you know this old monk Debrec was going on about? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be his uncle or something! All these hints of spooky goings-on could be just some sort of put-on, a con game, a tourist trap. And here we've fallen right into it! I'll give you odds it costs us five pounds a head just to get inside the place!' And at that they both burst out laughing.
The sky was overcast and it had started to rain when they drove away from the inn. By the time they reached the track that led off from the road and through the grey woods in the direction of the ruined church, a ground mist was curling up from the earth in white drifting tendrils.
'How's this for sinister?' Harry asked, and Julia shivered again and snuggled closer to him. 'Oh?' he said, glancing at her and smiling. 'Are you sorry we came after all, then?'
'No, but it is eerie driving through this mist. It's like floating on milk! ... Look, there's our ruined church directly ahead.'
The woods had thinned out and now high walls rose up before them, walls broken in places and tumbled into heaps of rough moss-grown masonry. Within these walls, in grounds of perhaps half an acre, the gaunt shell of a great Gothic structure reared up like the tombstone of some primordial giant. Harry drove the car through open iron gates long since rusted solid with their massive hinges.
He pulled up before a huge wooden door in that part of the building which still supported its lead-covered roof.
They left the car to rest on huge slick centuried cobbles, where the mist cast languorous tentacles about their ankles. Low over distant peaks the sun struggled bravely, trying to break through drifting layers of cloud.
Harry climbed the high stone steps to the great door and stood uncertainly before it. Julia followed him and said, with a shiver in her voice: 'Still think it's a tourist trap?'
'Uh? Oh! No, I suppose not. But I'm interested anyway. There's something about this place. A feeling almost of-'
'As if you'd been here before?'
'Yes, exactly! You feel it too?'
'No,' she answered, in fine contrary fashion. 'I just find it very drab. And I think my headache is coming back.'
For a moment or two they were silent, staring at the huge door.
'Well,' Harry finally offered, 'nothing ventured, nothing gained.' He lifted the massive iron knocker, shaped like the top half of a dog's muzzle, and let it fall heavily against the grinning metal teeth of the lower jaw. The clang of the knocker was loud in the misty stillness.
'Door creaks open,' Julia intoned, 'revealing Bela Lugosi in a black high-collared cloak. In a sepulchral voice he says: "Good evening..."' For all her apparent levity, half of the words trembled from her mouth.
Wondering how, at her age, she could act so stupidly girlish, Harry came close then to telling her to shut up. Instead he forced a grin, reflecting that it had always been one of her failings to wax witty at the wrong time. Perhaps she sensed his momentary annoyance, however, for she frowned and drew back from him fractionally. He opened his mouth to explain himself but started violently instead as, quite silently, the great door swung smoothly inward.
The opening of the door seemed almost to pull them in, as if a vacuum had been created ... the sucking rush of an express train through a station. And as they stumbled forward they saw in the gloom, the shrunken, flame-eyed ancient framed against a dim, mustysmelling background of shadows and lofty ceilings.
The first thing they really noticed of him when their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness was his filthy appearance. Dirt seemed ingrained in him! His coat, a black full-length affair with threadbare sleeves, was buttoned up to his neck where the ends of a grey tattered scarf protruded. Thin grimy wrists stood out from the coat's sleeves, blue veins showing through the dirt. A few sparse wisps of yellowish hair, thick with dandruff and probably worse, lay limp on the pale bulbous dome of his head. He could have been no more than sixty-two inches in height, but the fire that burned behind yellow eyes, and the vicious hook of a nose that followed their movements like the beak of some bird of prey, seemed to give the old man more than his share of strength, easily compensating for his lack of stature.
'I... that is, we...' Harry began.
'Ah! - English! You are English, yes? Or perhaps American?' His heavily accented voice, clotted and guttural, sounded like the gurgling sound of a black subterranean stream. Julia thought that his throat must be full of phlegm, as she clutched at Harry's arm.
'Tourists, eh?' the ancient continued. 'Come to see old M/~hrsen's books? Or perhaps you don't know why you've come?' He clasped his hands tightly together, threw back his head, and gave a short coughing laugh.
'Why, we ... that is ...' Harry stumbled again, feeling foolish, wondering just why they had come.
'Please enter,' said the old man, standing aside and ushering them deeper, irresistibly in. 'It is the books, of course it is. They all come to see M/~hrsen's books sooner or later. And of course there is the view from the tower. And the catacombs...'
'It was the ruins,' Harry finally found his voice. 'We saw the old building from the road, and -'
'Picturesque, eh. The ruins in the trees... Ah! - but there are other things here. You will see.'
'Actually,' Julia choked it out, fighting with a sudden attack of nausea engendered by the noisome aspect of their host, 'we don't have much time...'
The old man caught at their elbows, yellow eyes flashing in the gloomy interior. 'Time? No time?'
his hideous voice grew intense in a moment. 'True, how true. Time is running out for all of us!'
It seemed then that a draft, coming from nowhere, caught at the great door and eased it shut. As the gloom deepened Julia held all the more tightly to Harry's arm, but the shrunken custodian of the place had turned his back to guide them on with an almost peremptory: 'Follow me.'
And follow him they did.
Drawn silently along in his wake, like seabirds following an ocean liner through the night, they climbed stone steps, entered a wide corridor with an arched ceiling, finally arrived at a room with a padlocked door. M~hrsen unlocked the door, turned, bowed, and ushered them through.