Deadlight-Hall(36)

‘Are you sure she was all she appeared?’

‘For pity’s sake, you aren’t telling me she might have been a German agent? Or working for Mengele?’

‘I’ll admit it’s unlikely,’ he said. ‘But we trust no one. You’ll have to square the deceit with your conscience as well as you can.’

‘I shall have my just deserts one day,’ I said, resignedly. ‘And when I die, I shall very likely be cast into Gehenna.’

‘What—?’

‘The place of fiery torment.’

‘I know what Gehenna is,’ said Sch?nbrunn. ‘I was going to say what did we do with the road map, because if we’re going to find Deadlight Hall before it gets dark, we should start looking out for it.’

It was then that we rounded a bend in the road, and saw it across the fields. The house with the bad history. Deadlight Hall. I stared at it with a feeling of cold dread gathering at the pit of my stomach. If ever the Jewish Gehenna existed – if ever there really is a place of torment for sinners and non-believers, a place where the worshippers of Moloch burned their sons and daughters in fires – then it would look exactly like this grim dereliction.

And now, of course, as you read this, you’ll be saying, ‘Oh, dear me, here’s old Maurice Bensimon being dramatic again,’ but I promise you, my friend, this place was as menacing and as forbidding as anything that ever came out of the Torah’s darker pages, or, indeed, out of a Gothic tale of horror. (No, I do not read such books, but I have eyes, also ears, and I know about such things.)

Sch?nbrunn stopped the car and we both sat looking at the Hall for several moments. Then he said, ‘I think we had better go inside.’

I had never felt less inclined to enter any building, but he said, ‘This is where the twins vanished from, remember. There could be all kinds of clues.’

‘That ward sister.’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘At least the place is empty,’ I said, but Sch?nbrunn pointed to a long window on the side of the main doors.

‘It isn’t empty,’ he said.

The window, like all the windows, was almost glassless, but jagged shards still clung to the stone lintels. Framed in the opening, its outline distorted by the broken glass and blurred by the dying afternoon light, was the shape of a figure. Its head was tilted away from us, as if it was looking for something within the house. Then, as we stared, it turned and looked outwards, as if watching our approach.

Sch?nbrunn restarted the car and drove it on to a small patch of grass near the front of the house.

‘Are we still going in?’ I said, and saw the gleam in Sch?nbrunn’s eyes I had once seen in the shadow of Buchenwald, when he faced a dozen Nazi guards and shot most of them.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, softly. ‘We’re going in.’





TEN


The lock was broken on Deadlight Hall’s massive doors – not just rusted away, but clearly torn from the frame, splintering the wood in the process. There could have been a perfectly innocent explanation for this – a tramp wanting to break in for a night’s shelter – but there could also be several less innocent explanations.

There was no particular need for stealth – if challenged, we had only to say we were strangers to the area and curious about a local landmark – but we both moved quietly and cautiously. Sch?nbrunn and I have been in some strange places and menacing situations during the last two or three years, but I don’t think either of us had ever encountered anywhere as eerie as Deadlight Hall.

As we paused in the doorway, I said, very softly, ‘There’s no sign of the figure we saw. It was at that window by the door, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ Sch?nbrunn produced a torch and shone it warily. ‘There’s thick dust on the floor,’ he said. ‘But it’s undisturbed, as if no one has walked in this hall for a very long time.’

‘No footprints,’ I said, and as I spoke, I felt as if something cold and unpleasant twisted at my stomach. ‘And yet to get to that window a person would have to cross the floor.’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Perhaps we didn’t see anyone after all. Perhaps it was a trick of the light.’

‘I think there was someone there,’ said Sch?nbrunn. ‘He – it could even have been a she – was standing in that window recess, looking out.’ He frowned, then said, with decision, ‘We mustn’t become distracted. We’re here to search the house, nothing more. Because if we’re believing that woman’s story, it’s from here that the twins vanished that night. So we need to find out if there are any clues.’