Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974

“And that’s all the story you want to tell?”

“That’s the truth, whether you or the company you’re doing this favor for like it or not,” Ewa Crop said.

“Okay. Now you two. You came out here and what? Chain on?”

“No,” Randolf-Wilson said. “It was not.”

“What time was it?”

“Approximately four-thirty in the afternoon of December third. Ewa had asked us in the morning but we’d both not gathered our courage, we were suffering the after effects of a little party we’d held on the second and we were delayed by our having to wait for a repairman. That was a cold year, last year. While we were away they even had flurries of snow. It was quite bitter. The heating units weren’t functioning.”

“But finally you did get here. You went to the gate house, knocked and got no answer.”

“That’s correct. The assumption was that he was sleeping off a bout with the bottle and not wanting to have to come back or having any real expectation that there was any hour with a greater probability of finding him sober, we pushed in. The door was unlocked. We looked through the house, calling Stanley, and we got no answer and found that though clearly he was using the house, he wasn’t in it.”

“The what?”

“Then we came back out to the cold and called. His new 124 Sport was parked right there. Stanley was rarely in any condition to drive a car, but he was never sober enough to walk anywhere. We assumed that he had to be near. Much as we disliked it, Scape, when our calling him found no response, we approached the Monasteria. It was bitter cold, dark, very grey and overcast. Night was near. We approached the Monasteria, still calling for him, hoping he would hear us.

“The door was locked. We hammered on it, shouted for him. Nothing. Stephanie then had the idea of trying to look into the Windows. She went around to the side of the house, the side facing west. I continued pounding on the door. I wanted to find him and be done with it. I’m not a superstitious man but I frankly do not like the Monasteria and I had no wish to return, even as a favor to Ewa.

“At that point, Scape, as I hammered on the door and called Stanley’s name repeatedly, hoping to arouse him from his stupor, Stephanie let out her shriek.

“Frankly, sir, in that situation, at the house, the weather cold and the dark descending, it sent shivers up my spine. In a moment I controlled those and I hurried around the house to her. She was standing, frozen, at the window. The drapes were open. The view was of the old bed, Stanley in it, his head broken and staining the linen with its blood.

“For some reason it wasn’t acceptable to me that he was dead. My first thought was that drunk he’d somehow fallen and then crawled to the bed. I took off my shoe and smashed the window. There are bars there, but I was able to call through to him. I called and called and only then did I realize his eyes were opened and frozen.”

“Lights on?”

“No, the electricity wasn’t on in the house. But there was enough natural light to just see. I backed away, taking Stephanie with me, and then we hurried to the village where I called the police.

“When they arrived we returned. The door was still well locked. The windows were all locked and barred, the bars so close that not even a midget could pass. No one could have gone in but when we went in with the police Stanley had been moved. He was on the floor in the living room. He was dead, he had been dead since the twenty eighth or twenty ninth.”

“So the ghosts moved him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Scape said. He looked over at the modem, California-like gate house and frowned at it and then he searched for the muddy first gear and drove in and on to the massive, handsome old house, the Monasteria. He stopped right at the entrance and cut the little sewing machine engine. “Let’s take a look.”

“Must we?” Ewa Crop asked.

“If you feel that strongly about it, just you, Mike, though I’d be happier if you’d all come.”

The house was massive. It was formidable, very rectangular, solid looking. The architecture was a combination of medieval castle and religious fortress. They walked to the door, two great slabs of iron studded wood, a golden fist probing out of the door as a knocker.

“Authentic?”

“No need to restore these old places, Scape,” Randolf-Wilson said. “The better people lived in homes built to last. We have unlearned the art.”

“Yeah, but our poor don’t live in caves, hovels or chains.”

“A republican, are you?”

“What is the history of the place?”

They’d all gotten out of the car, it was too hot to stay in it.

“There has been a house on this land for at least two thousand years,” Randolf-Wilson said. “The Roman maps, even the copies they sell in Palma have it listed. But this building is 13th or 14th Century, they think. The Moors were thrown out of Spain in the 15th Century, but they were thrown out of here much earlier. Anyway, it’s not clear what the Monasteria was first built for or as. But, most people think that about 1390 it was given to one of the religious orders and opened as a convent.”

“Convent is Monasteria.”

“No. Monasteria is just a joke, it’s not a Spanish word, as far as I know.”

“It may be Mallorquin,” Randolf-Wilson said.

“No. It’s just a joke,” Ewa Crop told them.

“The story goes on that during the Inquisition,” Michael had moved forward and was opening the big doors, “the house was used by the defenders of the faith. Whether that’s true or not, they say in the village that hundreds of men, women and even children were tortured to death here. They were carried up the road we’ve just come, bundled in horse drawn carts or they were marched up it with men on horseback prodding them on. They walked through the gate through which we came. It was a gate then. And then across the yards, up these steps and inside.”

“And they’re the ghosts?”

“Oh, no. Not according to the locals. The victims are in heaven. The ones who did the torturing are condemned to everlasting purgatory. They’re being beaten and tortured through all eternity.”

“Sounds like fun,” Scape said.

“You just wait. If you’re at all honest, you’ll at least feel something inside. There’s a presence there.”

“I’ll hear their screams?”

“They do scream, horribly; and things fall and there are noises. If you’re so very brave, Mister Scape, you really must be my guest alone here for a night. At the first thumping sounds, you tell the hairs rising at the back of your neck that there’s just some rational explanation.”

“And you should hear,” Stephanie said, “sometimes on real bad nights when they start shrieking. You can hear them crying and screaming even at the gate house.”

Scape smiled and then turned from the women and walked through the opened doors where Mike Randolf-Wilson had already gone. Scape looked at the large room, noticed that the walls were stone and that the doors were almost four feet thick. The room itself was normal, ordinary, reasonably modem. “Where was Stanley?”

“When the police came? Here,” Mike said. “Right here.”

Scape opened the folder he had with him and took out a police photograph. It showed the murdered man on the floor. The rest of the room had been undisturbed and looked unlived in. The photograph and the room, except for the missing body, looked identical, everything in place.

“Want to show me the bedroom where you first saw him?”

“Right this way,” Randolf-Wilson said, walking to the left and then into a corridor.

Scape followed, impressed with the incredibly thick walls, the marble floors, the ornate ceilings.