Date: 2016-04-18 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; 1920s movies; colossus films; magical pekingese
Description: A novelette of 15,000 words. It is April of 1924. Colossus Films (of the novel Bride of the Rat-God) is shooting in Reno, because their male star, Tor Westlake, is getting his fifth divorce in order to marry Chrysanda (Christine) Flamande, the studio's #1 starlet. They are filming at the supposedly-haunted castle on the outskirts of town, built by a Gold Rush millionaire, and sharing the sets with a black film company from Chicago, whose female star is also getting a divorce from her abusive husband. Tor wants to hold a séance in the haunted castle, but Norah - Christine's sister-in-law and do

CASTLE OF HORROR

by

Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Barbara Hambly

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Table of Contents

Castle of Horror

About The Author

Castle of Horror

“Darling—” Christine Flint – known to film-fans from Pasadena to Yokohama as the incomparable Chrysanda Flamande – rustled into her sister-in-law’s boarding-house bedroom in a firestorm of diamonds and a chinchilla coat so extravagant as to give the impression that she was being devoured by bears. “You’d be able to write another scenario this evening, wouldn’t you? Lenny’s being an absolute pill and says he won’t let you work on anything but Brooklyn Queen, like that’s the only film in Hollywood, but Danny Cross’s brother runs the best speakeasy in Reno, and he says he’ll let Tor drink and play blackjack there on the house if you’ll re-write Lost Lamb as a Western. Is there any of that gin left?”

She opened the nearest drawer in the dressing-table that Norah had, for most of the afternoon, been using as a desk. “Mrs. Krause’s regular bootlegger isn’t due in until tomorrow and Tor’s practically climbing up the walls and swearing he’ll drive back to Los Angeles if he can’t get a drink, and he isn’t supposed to leave Nevada or else his wife’s lawyer… No, sweetheart, Mama can’t pick you up—“ This to the smallest of her three Pekinese, who was insistently licking her silk-clad ankle. “Is this whiskey, darling? All the liquor in this town smells the same… Oh, and Lost Lamb has to take place in that Castle place because Centurion Pictures has already paid the rent on it for this week and next.”

“I thought we had Blatt’s Castle until the first.” Norah Blackstone turned from the yellow pile of foolscap – we meaning Colossus Pictures, the current employers of herself, Christine, and thirty other assorted stars, extras, electricians, wardrobe mistresses, Norah’s friend Alec Mindelbaum the cameraman, and Christine’s extra-special latest friend Tor Westlake, whose marital disentanglement (and upcoming marriage to Christine) was responsible for Brooklyn Queen being filmed in Reno rather than Hollywood. “And, no,” she added. “Since Mr. Palmer insists on changing the story every other day, it’s as much as I can do to keep up with him. I can’t possibly write the scenario of another film—”

“They’re filming at night,” explained Christine, digging another bottle from the back of the dresser-drawer and adding both it and the putative whiskey to a champagne-glass she fetched from her suitcase. “Using the same sets as we are. It’s Bebe Jolivet, you know – the star, I mean – and she’s in Reno, too, like Tor, getting a divorce… Bebe Jolivet,” she added, seeing Norah’s puzzled face. “She’s a tremendous star in the Negro pictures – she’s married to Stan Littlejohn. The baseball player?”

Norah shook her head. “I’ve never heard—”

“He’s in the Negro Leagues, darling. Where have you been?” She pulled up her skirt, extracted a thin silver flask from her garter, dribbled the last thimble-full from it into her ad hoc cocktail, drank it off, and made a face. “I swear if somebody doesn’t find a decent bootlegger in this town I’m going to have to go back to cocaine.”

“Where I have been,” said Norah, “is writing the scenarios for such epics as Hot Potato, Sparkin’ In The Dark, Week-End Wife, and King Lear… and re-writing other peoples’ scenarios for Corpus Delicti, Asking For It, and, currently, The Brooklyn Queen. And I shudder every time I contemplate the title-card that’s going to say, King Lear, by William Shakespeare with additional dialog by Norah Blackstone.”

“Yes, but darling…” Christine flounced down onto the corner of the nearer of the room’s two beds – which was so close to Norah’s dressing-table that her knees brushed Norah’s hip – and leaned across to take her hands. The largest of Christine’s three Pekinese, Chang Ming, leaped up onto the bed beside her and immediately tried to climb into her lap, while the other two, unable to make so colossal a spring as eighteen inches, stood on their hind legs with their paws on her knees and licked adoringly at her hands, her knees, and their own flat noses.

“I’m absolutely begging you.” Her huge dark eyes, like those of her pets, pleaded – an effect she used at least once in every one of the twenty or so films she’d been in over the course of the past four years.

It wasn’t that Norah feared that Christine would actually go back to cocaine, a drug which pretty much every movie-star in Hollywood resorted to in the course of grueling shooting-schedules and the even-more-demanding business of keeping one’s name in the limelight by assiduous attendance at all the “hot” parties. Two months ago – in February of 1924 – after the frightful affair of the accursed Chinese necklace which had surrounded the filming of She-Devil of Babylon*, when Christine had spoken of giving up the drug, Norah had enlisted the aid of Christine’s regular cameraman Alec Mindelbaum, the woman who did Christine’s make-up, and of one or two others at Colossus Studios. Every morning after Christine had used her “pick-me-up” thereafter, they had simply squinted hard at her, taken twice as long over her make-up, tsk’d over imaginary crows’-feet and lip-lines, and had taken it in turns to whisper to her, confidentially, What ARE you doing to yourself, darling? You look ten years older! Alec in particular had shown a genius for adjusting the camera on a number of takes which had horrified her. Christine’s monumental vanity had done the rest.

And it helped, Norah reflected, that Tor Westlake – breath-takingly handsome, stupid as a hammer, and born Theodore Whimple, with whom Christine had fallen insanely in love in March – was vain as a monkey about his own looks and eschewed the drug as well. They both still drank like fish and smoked like the dark satanic mills of Manchester – whence Norah had come, last October, to be Christine’s companion – but, reflected Norah, one thing at a time.

“We just can’t have Tor going back to Los Angeles when he’s supposed to be living in Nevada! Marissa Sherrod— ” That was Tor’s soon-to-be-ex-fifth wife “—doesn’t want this divorce because her career is going downhill and she’s using his money to finance her next picture, and she has her lawyers watching out for him to do anything that they could use to delay it until after it’s cut. And I’m told Ritchie Cross – Danny Cross’s brother, you know… Danny’s the director of Lost Lamb… Ritchie Cross at the Goldstrike gets absolutely the best booze in Nevada, from God only knows where! You know how Tor is, darling. He has to be doing things, he has to be moving; he’s a man of excitement, and action, and passion! Being stuck in a one-horse town like Reno is driving him cuckoo! Please, darling. It’s just a little script. And it’s all written. You just have to make it take place in the Wild West instead of Paris.”

Norah sighed. “All right. I’ll have a look at it.”

“Darling!” Christine sprang to her feet – scattering Pekinese in all directions – and rushed to the window that looked out onto Virginia Street. “It’s all right, darlings,” she cried, leaning out and waving. “She says she’ll do it!”

Norah, following her, saw the little gathering on the sidewalk – presumably the crew of Lost Lamb, as all of them were black and none of them except Deacon Barnes the extra looked handsome enough to be in front of the camera – as they burst into exuberant cheers.

*

In the final year of the war which had killed her husband and impoverished her family, Norah Blackstone had had the opportunity to observe what Americans called “segregation” in action. The tall young American soldier whom Norah had met, and loved, and married in an exquisite whirlwind of passion and soul-deep delight in the spring of 1918 had explained to her – when she’d asked why only the white soldiers came to the church and social-club dances – that it wasn’t because the men of the 92nd Division didn’t like Britons or didn’t like to dance. They were mostly worried about being jumped by gangs of their white comrades-in-arms for daring to participate.

“In the States it’s worse,” Jim Blackstone had said, walking Norah back to her parents’ house in the chilly Oxford night. “In most states it’s against the law for a colored man to marry a white woman, or vice versa. There are laws forbidding restaurants that serve whites to serve blacks. It’s worse than being a Jew, because at least nobody’s going to throw me out of my seat in the subway because of how I look.” He’d shrugged.

“In the States, the blacks form their own communities, the way we – the Jews – have done. Since the war started here in Europe, Negroes from the south have been flooding up to Harlem in New York City. They have their own clubs, their own restaurants, their own music. Good music… They have their own newspapers and their own theaters, not cheap minstrel-shows but real theater. I’ll have to take you up there sometime,” he’d added, a little shyly, and had tightened his elbow against his side to squeeze her hand. “If you’d like to go.”

But eight weeks later – six weeks after their marriage – Jim had died, riddled with German machine-gun bullets, in Belleau Wood, and it hadn’t been until Jim’s reprobate sister Christine had come to England to publicize one of her films that it had even occurred to Norah that she might one day view America for herself. And since coming to America – and falling in love, after nearly five years of widowhood, with the cameraman Alec Mindelbaum – Norah had observed that what Jim had told her was quite true. It was literally against the law, in pretty much the entire United States, for blacks to marry whites or for the colored to enter any restaurant, railroad car, public toilet (Well, REALLY! thought Norah, this is exactly like Uncle Sher’s descriptions of India!), nightclub, baseball diamond or theater designated as the territory of the “superior” race…

With the result, as Jim had said, that there was a flourishing culture of colored restaurants, colored night-clubs, “race” music, Negro cinema, and – it even appeared – Negro League Baseball (“Oh, gosh, yes,” enthused Alec when she mentioned it to him later. “Next time we’re in Chicago or anywhere in the South, I’ll take you to a game. You haven’t lived ‘til you’ve seen Bullet Rogan pitch!” For all Alec’s courtesy, wit, talent, and gentleness, he was an American and Norah supposed that his passion for baseball should be forgiven for the sake of all the rest.)

In any case, it appeared that black motion picture studios – most of which operated out of Chicago, it transpired – had the same problems that white ones did. To wit, Norah discovered when the crew of Centurion Pictures swept her and Christine (and Christine’s three Pekinese) away to the Goldstrike Ranch, where Ritchie Cross operated the speakeasy, they also had stars so desirous of shedding their spouses – Stan Littlejohn was evidently Bebe Jolivet’s third – that they would – and could – demand that their next picture be shot in Reno while they waited out the three month’s residency which were all that was required to obtain a divorce.

“Heck, no, we can’t shoot the picture with somebody else!” sighed Danny Cross, Lost Lamb’s director, lanky and grizzled and looking not in the slightest like his extremely handsome brother, the speakeasy’s manager. “It’d sure save us trouble if we could. But audiences can’t get enough of Bebe. Even if we could manage to get somebody like Julie Mason or Florence McClain at this late date, we’d lose our shirts, and Bebe’s manager would sue us.”

“We were lucky to get Blatt’s Castle for night shoots,” added Marty Peacock, a soft-handed, nervous little man with a Van Dyke beard. He perched on one of the several chairs on the rear porch of the Goldstrike Ranch’s “Bunkhouse Number Three” (as the speakeasy was officially known), a piece of furniture constructed entirely of cattle-horns, presumably to convince the Ranch’s wealthy patrons that they were indeed in the Wild West. “Have you been up to the Castle yet, Mrs. Blackstone? I don’t know who this Mr. Blatt was, or why anybody in his right mind would build something like that out in the middle of nowhere—”

“He made a fortune in the Comstock,” provided Deacon Barnes, the gorgeous and good-natured muscle-man who was playing the hero of Lost Lamb and a waiter in Brooklyn Queen. “I guess he was from someplace in Germany and thought he was descended from one of their kings. The castle is supposed to be an exact copy of the one near his home-town.” He poured two glasses of champagne and brought them over to the ladies. It was eleven o’clock in the morning but, sipping hers before setting it aside, Norah was surprised to discover that Christine had been perfectly right. It actually was champagne, and quite good champagne at that.

“Maybe it is,” retorted Christine. She drained her glass. “But I’ve seen better furniture in the Sears, Roebuck catalog,” a rather severe judgment, Norah reflected, coming from a woman seated on a chair made from moose-antlers. “And personally, I don’t see why Lenny is insisting that poor Norah re-write Brooklyn Queen so that it still takes place in England or someplace, instead of letting her re-write it as a Western like you want her to re-write Lost Lamb.”

“Brooklyn Queen is literally about a girl who becomes a queen in Central Europe, Chris,” pointed out Deacon, who had known Christine for years. “Lost Lamb is just Romeo and Juliet about rich people and poor.”

“Well, they have horses and cattle and things in Central Europe, don’t they?” argued Christine. “There, there, precious,” she added, as Buttercreme, the moonlight-pale Pekinese bitch, edged more deeply into the folds of her fur coat and produced a tiny soprano growl of disapproval as someone in the gambling-room behind them let out a whoop of triumph. “Don’t you worry about that nasty man. I’m sure he’s going to lose all that money in about ten minutes and shoot himself.”

In addition to the “best speakeasy in Reno,” the Goldstrike Ranch – one of the many “dude ranches” which dotted the arid countryside around that prosperous little Nevada city – boasted a handsome lodge and a dozen luxurious “cabins” for the benefit of those men and women who could afford three months of idleness while getting shut of their spouses. From the rear porch of “Bunkhouse Number Three,” Norah could see well-kept stables, a modern swimming pool, and a number of suspiciously decorative cowboys clothed in a fashion which would have embarrassed Tom Mix. While Christine sipped champagne and stroked Buttercreme and Black Jasmine – the third of her tiny guardians – and exchanged Hollywood gossip with Deacon (“…she was not only embezzling just everything the poor woman made, but sleeping with the chauffeur that her boss was going to divorce her husband to marry…”), Norah made notes on how best to transform a tale of the French Revolution into one about the Comstock Lode, and reflected again upon the educational experience her move to America had turned out to be.

Not entirely to Norah’s surprise, when Tor Westlake rode up, on a white horse and wearing a rhinestoned cowboy-shirt and the most extraordinary chaps Norah had ever seen, and swept Christine into his powerful arms, the second thing Christine said (after, “Oh, my darling!”) was, “Norah, darling, would you be a dear and take the dogs back to the boarding-house? I haven’t the faintest how long we’ll be here…”

“Of course.” Norah wondered what her feckless sister-in-law was going to do when she herself married Alec and resigned her post as dog-brusher and general factotum of Christine’s disordered affairs.

“We’ll give you a ride back to town,” offered Danny Cross, as Deacon helped Norah on with her coat. She, Christine, and the dogs had come out to the Goldstrike in Christine’s sleek yellow Packard and clearly Tor wasn’t going to transport his beloved back to town pillion on his milk-white steed.

But as they emerged down the back steps of the ranch-house, the men shaking hands repeatedly with Norah and thanking her for taking on the re-write (Centurion’s regular scenarist having been called unexpectedly away to deal with family illness in Atlanta), she saw – with the inevitable and always-marvelous exultation entirely out of proportion to its appearance – the familiar battered black Model T in the dusty yard in front of the main lodge, and Alec Mindelbaum leaning on its fender.

(Like to the lark at break of day arising/ from sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven’s gate…)

“We finished shooting down by the river,” said the cameraman, kissing Norah and taking the leashes of the ecstatic dogs. At least Chang Ming and Black Jasmine were ecstatic. Buttercreme, whom Norah carried cradled protectively in one arm, merely licked her nose in disapproval of the entire expedition. “Tor said he was coming here, so I thought I’d drive over and see if you needed a lift back to town. I hear you’re taking on the re-write?”

“News travels fast,” grimaced Norah. “Heaven forefend that Mr. Westlake should have to drive back to Los Angeles to get decent liquor.”

“It’s haunted you know.” Christine – still in Tor’s protective grip – emerged onto speakeasy’s porch again. “Blatt’s Castle. Mary DeNoux—“ She named the Colossus Pictures wardrobe mistress “—got her hair done yesterday and the woman at the beauty parlor told her that Cornelius Blatt’s first wife threw herself off the tower of the castle, and his second wife hanged herself from the top of the circular staircase in the library, and both of them now chase each other screaming up and down the halls at night. And Tor says that means that it’s the perfect place to hold a séance and contact the spirits of the departed!”

“Why would you want to do that?” inquired Alec, puzzled. “If all they do is scream…”

“Not them, darling! Other spirits!”

“The presence of one kind of spiritual manifestation,” said Tor eagerly, “means that the Universal Planes of the Spirit intersect there…”

“And Tor can find out who’s going to win the Belmont Stakes next month!”

Danny Cross sighed. “Oh, swell.”

*

Cornelius Blatt’s astonishing tribute to his own royal heritage wasn’t the only building in Reno to be patrolled at night by the spirits of the deceased. In the four days that various employees of Colossus Pictures had been putting up at Maisie Krause’s establishment on Virginia Street, Norah had been uneasily aware of odd noises in the night there, and of a cold sensation of being watched.

She had never considered herself particularly “attuned” to “the Universal Planes of the Spirit”. But the unnerving run-in with an accursed necklace and a Manchurian rat-demon had convinced Norah that there were in fact more things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in her philosophy, and for four nights now, she had felt malice in the darkness of the big old boarding-house on Virginia Street.

For four nights she had dreamed of waking to the sense of being watched. Had dreamed of sitting up in the iron-framed bed, cold to the marrow of her bones, seeing the unfamiliar furniture half-visible in the thinnest sliver of blue moonlight, and on the dresser, the vanity, the foot of the bed, the eyes of cats gleamed at her. Plump and gray with white mittens, or slender and black: once she’d seen a sinuous Siamese sitting on her papers, licking its dark paw. There was a smell, too – something she could neither identify nor define, but which terrified her. She’d heard footsteps in the hallway and all the cats had turned their heads, and from Christine’s bed beside hers she’d heard the Pekes growl. Waking with a start, she’d found herself actually sitting up in bed, with the prosaic reflection of the lights from Virginia Street glimmering in the window and the Pekes still growling, their gazes locked on the door. The smell was gone. So were the ghostly cats.

After a moment Chang Ming – the largest of the dogs, rufous and fluffy as a little bear – had hopped down from the bed and trotted to the door, sniffed at the crack beneath it in a businesslike way, then returned to Christine’s bed. Only then did the other two – the tiny and ferocious Black Jasmine and shy Buttercreme – curl themselves up to sleep again. Christine, who had come in at an hour that would have gotten her thrown out of any boarding-house in any town except Reno and Los Angeles, didn’t even stir.

Norah mentioned none of this to her.

The boarding-house itself was typical of Reno, spacious and well-furnished, and inhabited by an assortment of women from all over the United States who had two things in common: a certain amount of money (though not nearly as much as the patrons of the Goldstrike), and husbands they wanted to get shut of. At supper, the talk in the dining-room was almost exclusively of progressive drunkenness or gambling patiently borne, of secretaries or chorus-girls discovered in downtown apartments by private detectives, or of outright abuse (“He’s always so sweet to me later – this last time he bought me a new car! – but I got so I can’t stand not knowing what I’ll come home to every time I go out…”).

Having been raised with the dictum that a divorced woman was never received into the homes of the respectable, Norah had been at first disconcerted. But these ladies were very different from the several-times-wed denizens of Hollywood among whom she’d been bemusedly living since October.

“Don’t pay any attention to us, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Latimer, a sleek Philadelphia matron, to Norah one evening as Norah descended to the parlor to meet Alec. “I see you with that nice young man and I think, Oh, dear, we’re putting that poor girl off men for good…”

“It would take more than other peoples’ ill luck,” returned Norah with a smile, “to put me off Mr. Mindelbaum.”

“Besides,” added Alec gallantly, emerging from the parlor to help Norah into her coat, “Norah tells me all about it and I take notes, to know what not to do.”

Mrs. Latimer winked at him. “Fresh.”

A few of the women staying at Mrs. Krause’s, like Christine, were in Reno to accompany men friends who were divorcing – misunderstood saints, every one of them, by what Norah could hear at dinner. “It’s a bit of a hot-house,” she admitted to Alec, later that night as he walked her back to the boarding-house – the men of the company were staying in a less stylish establishment a few blocks away. “If Mr. Westlake – and that frightful spiritualist he consults back in Los Angeles – are even a little bit correct about ‘psychic emanations,’ I can see why I’m hearing footsteps in the hall and seeing cats that aren’t there.”

Only one light was on in the big green house when Alec walked Norah up to the door – young Mrs. Tarrant from Memphis, barely eighteen, had just got in from the restaurant where she was working while she waited out her three months – and by the time Norah had gone upstairs, ascertained Christine had not yet returned, and taken the dogs (with Alec’s company) for their before-bed constitutional down Virginia Street, that parlor light was turned out as well. Alec kissed her by the dim glow of the night-light that was now the only illumination in the downstairs hall: “Will you ride out with Chris to the Castle tomorrow morning, or do you want me to come by?”

Norah glanced at the clock, which stood at ten minutes to eleven. “Come by,” she sighed. “I’m sorry to do this to you—”

“I’m only down the street,” he pointed out cheerfully.

“It’s just that I have the awful feeling that Christine might be out all night with Tor and go straight on to the Castle from wherever it is they’re trysting. God knows how they make those early calls,” she added, exasperated. “Particularly… Well.”

Alec must have heard a note in her voice that she was trying to suppress, because he raised an eyebrow behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Yes?

She sighed again. “The first evening we got here, when Tor came to take Christine out to some restaurant or other – for what has to have been the world’s longest dinner, since she didn’t come back until nearly four the following morning – and he and I were down in the parlor here waiting for her, he tried to kiss me. Movie-star style: that smoky look and grabbing me by the arm. I pulled away and before I could say anything Chris came downstairs, and she’s kept him mostly busy since then, but that’s not the sort of behavior I’d wish to see in a man my friend is going to marry.”

She made a helpless gesture, understanding that the prevailing mores of Hollywood might consider Mr. Westlake’s attempt nothing out of the common. “I just wish she’d stayed with Mr. Conklin, that’s all.”

“Conklin is rich,” agreed Alec. “Which Tor won’t be, if he keeps on at the tables and the ponies the way he does—”

“It isn’t that. I think Mr. Conklin—“ She named the elderly millionaire who for the past six months had languished at her erratic sister-in-law’s feet, “—is a nicer person, for all that he’s twenty-five years older than she is and not… not breath-taking to look at.”

Alec laughed. “If I really thought there was a chance of Chris marrying Tor, I’d be more worried. But in the past three years I’ve seen Chris fall in love with four men – that’s not counting the mad passions for stuntmen and saxophone-players. And yes, this is the worst she’s been hit, maybe because she’s a little tired… maybe because she’s actually started looking towards her own future. But in addition to being breath-taking, Tor is jealous, Tor is dumb as a box of rocks, and Tor is a sponge. Chris may not know how to balance her own checkbook, but she makes damn sure to sock part of her money away from every picture she makes, and I’m guessing the first time Tor tries to borrow a hundred dollars off her to pay off his bookie, that’ll be the end of that.”

He kissed Norah’s hands again, then stood very slightly tip-toe – he was three inches shorter than she – to frame her face in his palms, and kiss her lips. “And if I don’t leave here now,” he added softly, “I’m going to drag you into the parlor and do something that’ll get you thrown out of this place.”

She chuckled, and for a long time they held one another tight.

When he was gone, and Norah closed the door, she reflected that he was right. For several months she had managed Christine’s chaotic household finances, but she had observed that for all her extravagance and generosity, her sister-in-law stayed out of debt. And it was true that she put money away, something she’d done even before she received some very good financial advice from the now-abandoned Ambrose Conklin.

She locked the outer door, and stood for a moment in the downstairs hall. Only the night-light burned at the top of the stairs, its dim pink reflection barely touching the dark oak paneling in the hall below. To her right the parlor was a velvety abyss; when Norah moved to pick up Black Jasmine – who was too little to manage stairs by himself – her heart lurched into her throat at the ghostly flicker of movement in that darkness.

My reflection in a mirror there…

Only she couldn’t remember whether there was a mirror in the parlor.

The night outside had been cold, but the chill in here was different, clammy and queerly personal. Something moved in the shadow again and both Chang Ming and Buttercreme moved closer to Norah’s ankles, surprisingly deep growls rumbling in their throats.

The night-light gleam touched, very briefly, the gold of cats’ eyes in the parlor, and for an instant Norah thought she saw a small Siamese cat whisk across the top of the shadowy stairs.

She gathered Buttercreme into her other arm, and ascended. The cold seemed to grow, and the silence to thicken. A smell, too, not quite like dust nor quite like decaying meat – it’s what I smelled in my dream, she thought. Her steps slowed as she reached the top of the stair and in her arms, both Buttercreme and Black Jasmine growled again, savage this time, the growl of dogs who are about to attack.

She set them down. The wide hall stretched away to her right, past the door of her own room, and that of the other first-class suite, to the bathroom at the end. The light was on there and Norah thought, Chris must have come in while I was walking the dogs, and started down the hall. But Chang Ming gave a sharp, gruff bark and pulled against his leash, and, when Norah stopped, the two smaller Pekes darted a few steps ahead of her, toward the light in the bathroom, barking furiously in their sharp, staccato quacks. Norah said, “Hush!” and took a step after them, and Chang Ming threw himself in front of her, barking also, feet braced and red-gold fur bristling up along his spine.

The night-light went out.

From the bathroom, Christine’s voice called, very clearly, “Norah, is that you? Come in here—”

Black Jasmine and Buttercreme stopped on the threshold of the open bathroom door, the light streaming out over them, barking furiously. Not the ecstatic yaps of dogs delighted to see their mistress, or even the excited clamor at seeing a cat, spectral or otherwise. This was anger, their hackles standing up on their backs, and there was nothing comical about it.

Downstairs a light blinked on in the hall. Christine’s voice cooed from below, “Thanks ever so… I know I’m supposed to say Buy yourself a drink when I give you this but in this town you’d probably end up poisoned… What on earth? Oh, Mrs. Krause will kill me if the dogs wake up the house…”

Her high heels clicked on the waxed boards of the hall. “Darlings, what is it? Mama’s home…”

When Norah looked back down the upstairs hall the bathroom light was out. Only the soft glow of the night-light there shone in the eyes of the dogs, as Black Jasmine and Buttercreme gave one last sniff at the threshold, then turned and scampered back down the hall to the head of the stairs, tails wagging furiously, to greet Christine as she ascended. Chang Ming dashed to join them. It was in Norah’s mind to go down the hall to the bathroom to see if anything was there but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.

She clicked the switch for the night-light at the top of the stairs, and it came on at once.

“Darling—“ Christine was halfway up the stairs, bending to pick up Chang Ming, who had bounded down to meet her while the other two – too small to easily descend – stood wriggling with joyous excitement at the top. “What on earth was that barking about? And after I swore to Mrs. Krause… Dearest, you really must make Alec take you to dinner at the Sugar Plum! Tor and I had the most amazing ravioli… Did my little creamcakes miss me while I was away?” (This to Black Jasmine). “Did Aunt Norah look after my tiny sweetnesses…?” She clattered into the bedroom in a trail of cigarette smoke and Trésor du Jasmine perfume.

Norah stood uncertainly in the hall, looking down toward the douce pink glow of the night-light that outlined the bathroom door.

Quietly behind her, the door of the other deluxe room opened, and Mrs. Latimer put her head out.

“I’m so sorry if the dogs woke you,” said Norah quickly. “I—”

“Was it the bathroom?”

Norah met the other woman’s eyes. Cleaned of cosmetics and under the light coating of cucumber emulsion, her hair neatly done in pin-curls, Mrs. Latimer looked older and rather tired, and for the first time Norah noticed she had a scar on her lip, the kind a woman gets when a man strikes her hard enough for her own teeth to cut the flesh.

She said, “Yes.”

“Did it call your name?”

Norah nodded. “Do you know what it is?”

Mrs. Latimer shook her head. “It only happens some nights,” she said. “It sounded like my daughter’s voice. I just went back into my room, and locked the door. An hour later I looked again and there was only the night-light on. One other night there was just the smell, and I waited til it was gone. I thought… I was half-afraid it was just something I’d dreamed, but I knew it wasn’t.”

“No,” said Norah. The terrifying darkness when the light on the stair had gone out. The sense, not only of malice, but of actual danger… “But I heard footsteps in the hall one night that I don’t think were yours. I suppose one could go downtown and look in the newspapers…”

“I’ll do that one of these afternoons.” The older woman tugged her wrapper of velvet and swansdown closer about her throat. “But honestly, what purpose would it serve? Poor Mrs. Krause sank every penny her husband left her with into buying this place, so of course she’s not going to admit it’s haunted. And all her guests are like us: here for three months and gone. There doesn’t seem to be anything… strange… on the upper floors, except the cats… Have you seen the cats?”

“Only sometimes. Sometimes I’ll just feel them, leaping up onto the bed, or brushing against my legs. The dogs always do, I think.”

“Well, bless them for not barking.” Mrs. Latimer smiled. “There’s a tremendous gray Persian with white mittens who’ll sit on the end of my bed each night – some nights I’ll only see his eyes. I call him Jeeves. I find if I give them names they don’t frighten me so much. And for creatures that have been dead for God knows how long, they still do a good job; I’ve never seen a mouse in the place. It should be all right now.” She glanced down the hall at the bathroom door. “I know it sounds very silly and childish, dear, but if you’d like me to stand here ‘til you come out I will.”

“Thank you,” said Norah. “That’s very good of you.”

*

By contrast, Blatt’s Castle – legends of screaming ex-wives notwithstanding – proved to be completely mundane, or at least as mundane as a full-scale replica of a Rhineland castle perched on a sagebrush mountainside could be. Despite Christine’s aesthetic judgments regarding the furniture, several of its rooms were actually decorated in more-or-less Louis XV, making it an acceptable stand-in for the Brooklyn Queen’s Ruritanian digs as well as the palatial residence of the Lost Lamb’s prospective in-laws. While Lenny Palmer wrestled with the task of getting his male and female leads to look as if they were madly in love (Darlene Golden, Tor’s leading lady, was not only deeply suspicious that he was getting more camera time and better angles than she, but was best friends with Tor’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Marissa Sherrod), Norah prowled the numerous ballrooms, parlors, reception-rooms and balconies in search of chambers that would fit Lost Lamb’s new Western scenario.

In this, the long-deceased castle’s builder proved surprisingly helpful.

“I gather Cornelius Blatt considered himself to be something of an amateur architect,” she said, coming upon Alec – sandwich in hand – during a break in the shooting on Tuesday afternoon. “That gallery up there—” They were in the castle’s baronial hall, “—is a complete dummy: there’s no way up to it that I can find, and those stained-glass windows look onto a light-well. And two of the doors leading out of the library just go into a hallway that only connects them with each other…”

“The place has a library?” Alec perked up. His cottage down on the Venice canals back in Los Angeles was jammed with books.

“An enormous one – all gothic carving and gargoyles. But don’t get excited. As far as I can tell every book in the place, and there must be thousands, is blank.”

“Blank?” Deacon Barnes, handsome even in eighteenth-century livery with knee-breeches, came in from the ballroom, where most of the cast and crew were consuming what should have been their lunch three hours ago while Darlene Golden reclined on a sofa having her feet rubbed by her dresser.

Alec laughed with delight. “So he could impress the his guests?”

“One can only suppose. One whole section of book-cases swings open to a secret passageway down to the conservatory. There’s another secret passageway that leads to the music room—”

“I’ll bet he never tuned his piano in there, either.”

“Two pianos, a harp, and a harpsichord,” Norah corrected him. “And not a sheet of music in the place. And there’s yet another secret passage behind that parlor where there’s that big carved mirror. It’s one-way glass. I discovered that one by accident because there’s a draft in there…”

“And all the secret passages are to make up for the doorways that open onto blank walls and the stairways that just go up to the ceiling and stop?” Alec nodded toward the most prominent example of the latter – carved, gilded, and adorned with marble nymphs – at the far end of the tapestried parlor in which they stood.

“Tor says it’s perfect,” declared Christine, coming in and looking around her in deep satisfaction.

“For finding out the winner of the Belmont Stakes?”

“Well, that’s what I thought. But Tor is really Attuned to the Higher Planes. He’s so spiritual! And he’s positive he and I were united in another lifetime, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to find out where and when? He brought his Ouija board with him – he never does anything without spirit guidance— and he’s going to talk to Marty Peacock and ask him to delay filming for a couple of days so that we can have the silence that spirits need to manifest themselves—Yes, dearest, Mama will put you down but you must be a good boy…” She had Black Jasmine cradled in her arms; Chang Ming was already flouncing all over the room sniffing at the base-boards. “Will Marty be here today?”

Norah said she thought so, and reflected that the Centurion producer might have some reservations about losing a night of his expensive and limited shooting-time at the Castle so that Tor Westlake could find out from the spirits if he and Christine had been wed in a former life – not to mention the prospects of a horse called You Betcha in the Belmont – and moreover, wondered if it was such a good idea to be calling on spirits with a Ouija board in a place that was supposedly haunted.

“At least she’s not trying to do it at your boarding-house,” pointed out Alec, as he returned to the ballroom, where Tor’s stand-in waited to sweat through the lighting set-up in a copy of Tor’s ostentatiously American-looking suit.

“Well,” agreed Norah, “there is that.”

Trailed by the helpful Pekinese, she proceeded with her task of listing of all rooms which could convincingly represent the home of a wealthy mine-owner – dining-room, three bedchambers, the Gothic Staircase (the house had four major stairways and two minor ones, only two of which actually communicated with the second floor), and the chamber which Alec referred to as Queen Victoria’s Drawing Room, crammed with heavy carved furniture and swagged velvet curtains – and built her story around those. The stables and coach-house were also useful, horribly weathered on the outside, but within, a cathedral of multi-colored woods, carved rafters, wrought-iron mangers and elaborately-laid brickwork floors.

Because no stable scenes were required of the Brooklyn Queen, the Lost Lamb’s meeting with the wealthy young gentleman who would become (over the horrified protests of his parents) her True Love could be filmed in daylight, and over the course of the next three days Deacon Barnes swapped coats and pulled boots on over his silk stockings half a dozen times a day, alternately romancing Bebe Jolivet in the corral and then running back up to serve coffee on a silver tray to the Ruritanian royalty in the Louis XV Parlor.

“I honestly feel terrible doin’ this to everyone,” sighed Miss Jolivet, when Norah came down from the Castle to let Deacon know he was needed for another drawing-room scene. “Draggin’ everybody up to Reno, and shootin’ in this Godforsaken place. But if I stayed in Chicago any longer…” She sighed, and lifted Chang Ming up onto the bench by the stable door where she sat, waiting for the Centurion “gaffer” Ti-Jo Girod to finish setting reflectors. “…Stan woulda talked me into goin’ back to him.”

She turned her lovely face aside, while the golden Peke licked her fingers happily. Unlike Christine, who for all her dazzling beauty could not have acted to save her own life, Bebe Jolivet was a restrained and convincing performer. After the histrionics going on up in the Castle (neither Darlene Golden nor Tor Westlake were up to the standards of a Christmas pantomime either, in Norah’s opinion), it was a relief to see intense emotions subtly under-played, and gesture carry what words could not.

A crying shame, thought Norah, that no Hollywood studio would hire this slim young woman, with her café-crème complexion like the most delicate ivory, and her features as European as Norah’s own.

“That’s hard,” she said, thinking of Mrs. Latimer and the other women at the boarding-house. Miss Jolivet’s breath whispered in the tiniest sigh, before she stood and looked again at Norah with a rueful half-grin.

“I have to keep tellin’ myself it’s like my daddy and liquor. He must have tried a thousand times to quit, knowin’ what it was doin’ to him – to me, to Mama, to my sisters… And in the end he couldn’t. It took all the help my friends could give me, to get me to pack my things and come here. I get telegrams from Stan every night.” She shook her head, stooping a little to run Chang Ming’s silky ear between her fingers. “And flowers – roses and orchids, and lily of the valley, which is my favorite…” Her hand moved for a moment toward her hair, as if to adjust some customary decoration. “He can be so sweet. But I just… I can’t.”

Over by the stable doorway Danny Cross and Ti-Jo Girod fussed with the reflectors, while Sallie Collins, Bebe’s stand-in, held her pose with lips tight and eyes narrowed against the harsh glare. Sallie, Norah noticed, though her skin-tone was identical to Miss Jolivet’s (High yeller, was what Tor called them), was of distinctly African features, and her hair, despite evidence of rigorous straightening, still held traces of the soft scrunchiness of its original texture. Miss Jolivet, needless to say, had what the wardrobe-mistress called “good hair”: silky curls like a white woman’s, and curious gray-turquoise eyes.

“Have you thought of going to Europe?” Norah asked. “Any French or Italian director would be insane not to hire you.”

“Maybe.” Miss Jolivet looked rueful again, “I ain’t really thought what I’m gonna do. I got two more films yet for Centurion, an’ I sort of dread goin’ back to Chicago, knowin’ Stan’ll be there. But I can’t run away forever—”

“That’s good!” yelled Danny. “Thank you, Sallie… Let’s get Miss Jolivet over here…”

The actress gave each of the dogs a fond pat (Buttercreme was back in the castle hiding under a couch), and smiled at Norah. “Thanks for listenin’, m’am.” As she crossed the corral Norah heard her say, “Thank you, Sallie,” to the stand-in as they passed one another, but the younger girl only muttered and held up her head, giving her principal only the barest of glances before going to sit in the stable out of the chill.

The following night – Friday – Centurion started filming in the Castle itself.

As usual when they were “on location,” Norah assisted Alec while he developed test-strips of that day’s work in various levels of light – in this case, using the upstairs bathroom at the men’s boarding-house as a dark-room, though she’d performed the same duties in sheds, tents, and the kitchen of a ski-lodge at Big Bear Lake. Afterwards they went to the Sugar Plum with an assortment of lighting-men and props-managers; she returned to her own boarding-house to work on the next few scenes of Lost Lamb until midnight. Christine didn’t return until three. Though the Pekes patrolled the room, and the hallway outside, and growled at the spectral white-footed gray cat when it appeared, briefly, on the corner of the dresser, nothing untoward occurred.

Saturday morning Christine (when she finally awoke) drove out to the Castle to watch Tor work, full of indignation that Marty Peacock wouldn’t let Tor (and Margaret Mackenzie, who was playing the Dowager monarch to the Brooklyn Queen) hold a séance in Queen Victoria’s so-called Drawing Room: “Surely he could have filmed someplace else last night.” She withdrew a cigarette and her long amber holder from her handbag, fitting the one into the other while maintaining control of the Packard with one elbow on the steering-wheel.

“I’ll do that, dear,” said Norah, and added, “Nobody will be filming in there today, though.”

“Don’t be silly, darling, ghosts aren’t going to show up in the daytime.”

When Christine scurried off to flirt with Tor between takes Norah retreated – with the dogs, who had a tendency to wrap their leashes around the light-stands – to the music-room, to wrestle with the problem of how Mr. and Mrs. Grandison (the cinematic parents of Deacon Barnes) could be leaders of colored society if they lived clear out in the Wild West, castle or no castle. Ghosts might not show up in the daytime, she reflected, the third time she looked around at the faint whisper of noise behind her, but there was certainly something off-kilter about the elegant little room, with its two pianos (one of which was a dummy), harp, and harpsichord.

Possibly, she reflected, it was only sounds from the filming in the ballroom echoing in one of the secret-passages. Or drafts from the same source stirring the curtains. The dogs didn’t seem to be troubled, anyway, but snored happily at her feet. At least there’s no spectral cat sitting on my papers.

She was still glad when the Colossus crew packed up for the day.

On the following morning (she’d long ago learned there was no Sabbath in Hollywood) the crew found clear signs that the furniture in the Grand Staircase (the one with the marble statues) and in one corner of the Louis XV parlor had been moved around. Norah, who was also in charge of continuity (with the assistance of the stills Alec took of the sets every afternoon), found minute spots of adhesive tape – such as cameramen and gaffers used to keep lights in position – on the carpets, approximately where the original furniture had been and also in places where it would be logical to put other chairs, tables, etc. A quick visit to the Gothic Staircase (the one with the gargoyles) confirmed her suspicion: the two Victorian chairs and the monumental hall stand had been moved from their places and now stood grouped in the middle of the hall like nervous water-buffalo.

“Maybe they couldn’t get the lighting right,” surmised Alec, when Norah returned with the odd information that the crew of Centurion had evidently lugged all the gilt Louis XV furniture out of the Grand Staircase Hall, replaced it with the ponderous contents of the Gothic Staircase Hall, and then lugged it back again.

“Why wouldn’t they? All their shooting was being done under artificial lighting anyway.”

“If it was Darlene starring—“ Alec nodded in the direction of Brooklyn Queen’s leading lady, currently making an uproar over which doorway the script required her to stand in when first beholding her American beloved, “—I’d guess she thought the Gothic Staircase wasn’t grand enough. But from everything I’ve heard about Bebe, she’s easy to work with. Deacon—?”

“Oh, don’t be such a goop, Darlene,” Christine was saying, on the other side of the marble-floored hall. “Nobody’s going to be looking at you in that scene anyway…”

Deacon backed hastily from that exchange of opinions, and set his silver tray on a spindly-legged stand. “I don’t want to be the one to say it,” he murmured, “but they’re right about this place being haunted. We tried all Friday night to film that scene between Bebe and her sweetheart’s mama, and we couldn’t get one take Danny could use.”

Norah and Alec traded a glance. There were locations in Los Angeles like that, and Norah had been on a shoot in one of them – an experience she didn’t care to repeat.

“Sometimes it was just knocking.” Deacon shook his head. “You’d think, Hey, it’s no different than the music some stars have played while they’re doing a scene. But you try hearing it in the middle of the night in a creepy place like this. Bebe’s a trooper, but you see her flinch in just about every take. And twice, light-stands came down – stands I saw Ti-Jo put up myself, and he’s one of the best in the business. Last night it was the same thing, both here and in the yellow bedroom: knocking, and what sounded like footsteps. We all heard it, footsteps coming down the Gothic stairway, which as you know doesn’t go anywhere. It just ends at the ceiling.”

(“Well, if you’re such a great star,” Darlene sniped, “why did they ask me to do this picture and not you? Oh, wait, it’s because the script calls for a ‘fresh-faced young girl’ instead of a ‘spooky old hag’…”)

(“Ladies… ladies…”)

“Sallie said she saw something in that parlor with the carved furniture, like flakes of fire, she said, moving just above the floor. She came running out of there shaking like a leaf, and wouldn’t go back, and I’ve got to say, when Danny and I went in to check, I kept… I don’t know, thinking I heard something.”

Something like Christine’s voice in the bathroom, Norah wondered with a shiver, calling for you to come in…?

(“Just because Tor doesn’t go for little girls with little curls like yours…”)

(“Oh, he went for them all right,” shrilled Darlene. “Didn’t you, Tor? Mine, and Mary Minter’s, and Alice White’s, and Clara Bow’s, and—”)

(“Ladies—!”)

Alec asked, “You haven’t heard or seen anything here, have you, Norah?” and Norah shook her head.

“What are you going to do?”

“Probably what we did last night.” Deacon didn’t look happy about it. Considering the fact that there was no electricity in the castle, and that outside the range of whatever lighting the Centurion group brought themselves the place would be pitch dark, Norah couldn’t blame him. “Film in here, or in the Purple Parlor. It’s definitely worse in some rooms than it is in others. There was no problem at all in the ballroom. But the thing is…”

Deacon hesitated, not wanting to say it.

Particularly, reflected Norah, not wanting to say it in here.

“The thing is,” finished Alec, “there’s no telling what else is going to happen next.”

*

What happened next – inevitably – was that Danny Cross arrived in his beat-up Chevy with a request that Norah re-write the dining-room scenes to take place in a parlor. “This is givin’ me the willies,” he said, as Norah looked over the pages and Lenny Palmer finally achieved a set-up that pleased Darlene – whose unfortunate stand-in had, during the entire argument between Chris and Darlene, remained like patience on a monument in the rejected doorway under the grilling heat of the Klieg lights in a copy of Darlene’s gossamer evening-gown. “If it was down South I’d wonder if it was the KKK pullin’ one of their, ‘Let’s dress up in sheets and scare the dumb niggers.’ But the Klan usually lets you know beforehand what they want. And if they didn’t want us filmin’ up here, they’d have gone first after the lawyer that owns this place, and far as I could tell he was pleased as punch to rent to us.”

“Have you had any other trouble in town?” inquired Norah. In India – according to Uncle Sher – native Indians were forbidden to enter any number of ‘sahib’ buildings and facilities, but she’d never heard of gangs of white toughs getting together to beat up those who challenged the system. They simply called the police – usually Indians themselves – and had the offenders put out.

Danny shook his head. “’Course,” he added, “we know to keep our heads down. Stay in the back-end of town, eat at Jimmy’s Diner – which I must say is a damn sight better than half the white restaurants in Reno – don’t go around sayin’ Boo to anybody’s geese. We just want to get in, shoot our picture, and get out. So far, we haven’t heard of anybody who has a problem with that.”

“Besides,” added Deacon, coming over to them after serving tea to Their Majesties yet again, “I don’t think anybody but red-neck country-boys actually believe that ‘all dem black folk is a-scaired o’ ghosts.’ They could do it, sure – this place has about twenty outside doors and anybody could sneak in and make noises and tamper with the light-stands without being seen – but that kind of thing went out with buggy-whips. This is… different.”

While Deacon went back for another take (“It’s tea, for Chrissake,” sighed Christine, “not a Masonic Ritual!”), Norah went with Danny to Queen Victoria’s Parlor, and stood looking around uneasily at the shadowy room. It felt no different from any other room of the house: by far the most handsome of the parlors, with its black-walnut furniture and elaborately-carved paneling, and portraits of two regal-looking ladies staring haughtily down from opposite walls (Mr. Blatt’s screaming ex-wives?). Yet Norah felt deeply uneasy, picturing in her mind what it would have been like shrouded in darkness, with “flakes of fire” darting a few inches above the floor like swarming insects.

Christine, however, was ecstatic. “That’s where we’ve got to hold our séance!” she cried, and Tor – who’d once again left his poor stand-in sweating under the hissing Kliegs – made a clench-fisted salute of delight.

“Sure enough, this is where the vibrations will be strongest! Will you join us, Mrs. Blackstone? There should be at least five – with Chris and me, and Margaret, and maybe Lenny… Or would Alec sit in, do you think?”

“I thought you needed a medium.”

“Not with a Ouija board. The Ouija board is the medium. It allows direct communication with the spirits.”

“Oh, Alec’s a complete unbeliever,” Christine protested, completely forgetting the fact that Alec had risked his life for them against an undeniably believable Manchurian Rat-God. “Please say yes, darling,” she added, taking Norah affectionately by the arm as they walked to the castle gates. “I just have to know about me and Tor! And You Betcha is at twenty to one in the Belmont now, but everybody’s saying he’ll take everything in sight so he wants to get his bets in…”

Around them, Alec, Doc Larousse – the Colossus gaffer – and prop-men Ned Bergen and Ned Devine were loading light-stands, reflectors, and Doc’s portable generator into the studio truck amid clouds of dust while their opposite numbers at Centurion drove up through the thickening gloom.

“Did they actually hear Mr. Blatt’s ex-wives screaming?” Christine demanded eagerly, as Tor hurried away to relay the glad news to Miss Mackenzie, a plump and kind-hearted Scotswoman with a gift for looking steely-eyed and formidable on film.

“Not exactly,” said Norah. “But evidently Sallie Collins – Miss Jolivet’s stand-in, you know – heard whispering and saw something that looked like bits of fire moving in the air in the Queen’s Parlor… Which could explain,” she added, glancing at the cast disembarking from Marty Peacock’s sleek blue DeSoto, “why I don’t see her this evening—”

Christine rolled her eyes. “I’d say it has a lot more to do with her being preggers than with the castle being haunted. Darling,” she added, to Norah’s startled expression, “where have you been? Zena tells me—“ She nodded toward her hairdresser, trading gossip with Miss Jolivet’s maid, “—the poor girl fainted dead away the other night during filming…”

“That could have been the lights,” pointed out Norah. “It seems like the stand-ins are stuck under them for hours while they set up the shots. Or seeing whatever it was she saw in the parlor—”

“Dearest, even if she’d run into Count Dracula in that parlor it wouldn’t make her spew her guts out behind the corrals. There, there,” she added, bending to pick up Buttercreme in her arms, “we’re going home, now, sweetheart, and Aunt Norah will get you dinner… Tor’s taking me to the Goldstrike this evening, dearest. They have the most adorable singing cowboys in the dining-room… Oh!” Her expression changed as a very long, very stylish gray-and-white Hispano-Suiza maneuvered its way up the rutted drive.

Norah recognized the car, and turning her head, saw her sister-in-law’s eyes flood with tears.

“Mr. Conklin!” Norah threaded her way through the confusion as the chauffeur opened the vehicle’s rear door and handed out Ambrose Conklin (of Conklin Oil, three New York hotels, Elmira Chemicals, the Consolidated Land and Cattle Company of Texas, the North Star copper mine in Arizona, a hundred thousand acres of Florida real estate and substantial holdings in Standard Oil and the Union Pacific Railroad), a slender, silver-haired gentleman dressed with the neat formality of a British Lord about to meet the Prime Minister for tea.

“Mrs. Blackstone.” He took her hand and bowed over it, his smile shy and slightly self-deprecating. “They told me I might find Christine here… I promise I haven’t come to make a scene.”

Norah pressed his fingers in response. “Mr. Conklin, I am ready to slap her! Honestly, I…”

He lifted one hand, and shook his head. “In truth, Mrs. Blackstone, who could blame her, for being drawn to a younger man than I? And I expect seven-eighths of the world consists of younger men than I. Truly,” he added, when Norah would have protested. “Her passion is a part of her nature. One can’t blame fire for burning one’s fingers.” He bent, to pat the Pekes who had dashed, leashes trailing, to greet him. Even shy Buttercreme, who liked practically nobody, was flirting with him: advancing almost to his hand and then retreating, with coy glances over her shoulder, as if she were doing a fan-dance with her tail. “I only want to make sure that she’s—”

He looked up and turned as all three dogs darted back toward Christine, who had started in their direction. Tor, returning from his conference with Margaret Mackenzie, caught her by the elbow, but she slipped free of him and walked with surprising dignity to take her former lover’s hand.

Conklin raised her fingers to his lips. “I was telling Mrs. Blackstone,” he said quietly, “that I haven’t come to make a scene, my dear, and I won’t. I’d have sent word to your hotel if I’d known where you were staying.”

Christine ducked her head, looking confused. Norah caught up the trailing leashes and stepped away, as the old man spoke quietly to Christine, and Christine’s face flooded with emotion. She made a quick move, as if she would have embraced him, then caught herself. Seeing Tor still bearing down on them Norah headed him off.

“Please,” she said. “He isn’t here to make trouble…”

“Then what is he here for?” His boyish face creased in a scowl, and Norah bit back the comment that everybody wasn’t like Tor himself. “And what’s Chris doing practically hanging on his arm?”

She wasn’t, but she must have heard the scrunch of Tor’s strides as he shoved past Norah, for she turned as Conklin stepped back with another bow. Adeptly dodging another attempt to seize her by the arm, Christine followed Mr. Conklin, shook his hand and said – in a clear voice obviously intended to carry to her fuming lover – “Thank you, Mr. Conklin; you’re always so considerate. Maybe you’d like to join us tomorrow night for a séance up here at the castle? It’s frightfully haunted, so we’re sure to make contact with the Other World…”

Conklin glanced from Christine’s brightly-smiling face to Tor’s scowling one, bowed deeply, and said with great gravity, “Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Miss Flamande.” His glance touched Norah, who nodded.

As the chauffeur handed him into his car again, Christine whispered to Norah, “Darling, I feel just terrible! Ambrose was so sweet! He said he understands my leaving him for Tor, and he wanted to tell me that he’s made an appointment with me with his own attorney, to settle some stock on me as a wedding-present, so I’d never have to worry… Isn’t that precious of him? So thoughtful…”

“And what’d he want?” Tor came up and wrapped his arms around Christine from behind. “Does he think he can get you to come back to him?”

“He just wanted to talk to me about giving me a wedding-present,” protested Christine, as they walked away to Tor’s car. “Honestly, darling, the least I could do was invite him to the séance. He’s being so good about this…about you and me…”

“A good loser is still a loser,” retorted the actor, and pulled her into a vigorous kiss. “And you’re such a prize I can’t bear to see you even look at another man.”

“Oh, darling!” She melted into his grip.

“Stan’s like that,” murmured a soft contralto at Norah’s elbow. It was Bebe Jolivet, a sable coat wrapped over the old-fashioned corset and “frillies” of the previous century that were demanded for her next scene. Her hair hung in a mahogany-dark ocean among the fur, and her turquoise-gray eyes had a look in them of hungry longing as they followed the entwined forms to Tor’s car. “I see them like that and I remember what that was like, that warmth… even though I knew he was sleepin’ with every woman at Centurion. I just…”

She shook her head.

You just don’t want to know that it isn’t real. Norah recalled the son of the woman who’d hired her as a companion back in Manchester, after her parents had died. Remembered the constant hectic atmosphere among his obnoxious “set,” the shouted arguments and gin-laced bouts of his lady-friends’ hysterical tears. At least Christine – the minx! – despite her infatuation, was giving him as good as she got.

“Is he still sending you tear-stained telegrams?”

The actress’ beautiful mouth quirked at Norah’s tone, and she put aside her dreaming. “Every day. I got to practically stab myself with a hat-pin, to remind myself it’s just ‘cause he needs money. If black folks could come to Miss Flamande’s séance – although Stan’s lighter than I am! – he’d be there, askin’ the ‘Spirit World’ about horses just like Mr. Westlake’s doin’. I paid his debts before this, an’ it wasn’t til he’d got himself in trouble again that he suddenly realized he couldn’t live without me. I feel like such an idiot.”

“Be brave,” said Norah, her tone humorous but her slight grip on the other woman’s hand a clasp of encouragement. Miss Jolivet sighed.

“A whole lot braver than it takes, just to film in a creepy old castle full of spooks.”

Watching Tor Westlake’s red roadster zoom down the trail toward the tawdry glitter that was Reno, Norah thought, I’ll have to ask Alec if he knows anything about Ouija boards. Or Mrs. Latimer. Because when Christine asks the Spirits Beyond who she was loved by in a former life, if I have anything to do with touching the planchette, it’s going to point straight to Mr. Conklin.

Yet the chill remained on her heart. We have no business, she thought, calling on spirits in that parlor, no matter how much Christine needs to be convinced that Mr. Conklin is a better match for her…

And yet it wasn’t that.

It was something else. Something that caught at the back of her mind.

Something that didn’t fit.

Something amiss, and dangerous…

But before she could trace her uneasy sense of peril to its source, Alec and the other Colossians called to her from the now-loaded truck, with promises of the best (and only) chow mein in the state of Nevada to be had in Carson City, and the dogs were circling her ankles and tangling in their leashes in their eagerness to be gone.

*

Danny Cross whispered, “Damn it!”

Far off in the lightless mazes of the castle, Norah could hear the knocking, like a reverberant echo on a sealed door.

We shouldn’t be doing this…

Seated in front of a makeup mirror in the hall of the Great Stairway, Bebe Jolivet, in corset and frilled under-drawers, flinched at the sound, then whispered an apology to the girl who was applying the now-smudged lip-rouge. Sallie Collins, wrapped in a quilted bath-robe over an identical corset and under-drawers, shuddered and cried hysterically, “We can’t go in that room! Something terrible’s going to happen! That blood…”

“We’re not going to,” responded Danny, with a calm that Norah was pretty certain he didn’t feel. “We’re shooting in the ballroom again. Nothing’s ever happened and nobody’s ever heard anything in there…”

“What blood?” Norah whispered to Deacon.

“Last night when we came in to shoot in the yellow bedroom there was… there was blood splattered on the walls, on the bed and on Bebe’s costumes. That room opens off the upstairs hall, and we’d been up there all evening, nobody could have got in…”

“Of course they could, there’s secret passages all over this house.” Norah frowned. “Still…”

“All set up in here.” Alec – who had come with Norah, but was always willing to help – and Ti-Jo Girod emerged from the ballroom, where, Norah saw, one of the beds had been lugged down from upstairs and set up in another corner, which was roughly dressed to resemble a bedroom. Another corner had been transformed into a Victorian parlor again – per her alterations to the script earlier that day – and a third corner contained what could have been a dining-table and chairs, though Norah suspected it would be painfully obvious to viewers that most of Lost Lamb had been shot on the same set.

“We’re down to shooting in the ballroom and this stair hall.” Danny scrubbed a weary hand over his face. “Whether you believe in ghosts or not – and I’ve never made up my mind about some of the things I’ve seen here – we just can’t afford any more accidents. And if I was you, I’d – What’s that?” He swung around as a sound came from somewhere out of the darkness, something that could have been a human voice, or an animal, or a bird… something. Alec moved toward the door that led into the library corridor, and both Danny and Norah caught his arms.

For a long moment they stood listening. The glare of the Klieg lights in the ballroom transformed the hall of the Grand Staircase into an eerie chiaroscuro of reflection and shadow. Beyond, the blackness was like the abyss at the heart of the world. Silence only walked in that darkness, brooding. Watching.

Waiting.

A moment later it was broken by the scrunch of wheels on the driveway outside, and Christine’s voice wailed: “Well, I don’t care what Alec says, a castle should have a moat, even if it is on a hillside! Besides, if it had a moat you could have a scene where you sprang off the wall and swam to safety…”

“Tor’s never in the slightest danger, lamb,” Margaret Mackenzie reminded her, as they crossed the threshold, the Pekes flurrying around Christine’s feet. “We’re not making Robin Hood here.”

Tor followed them in, carrying a Ouija board – a flat, varnished rectangle of wood on which the alphabet was inscribed (in two curving rows) along with numbers from one to ten, and the words Yes, No, and Good-Bye. Margaret, just behind him, bore a lantern, and a sack containing a roughly heart-shaped, wheeled planchette, three silver candlesticks, and three white candles. Christine greeted Alec’s uneasy warning about noises with an exclamation of joy (“Now I know the spirits are active! I wonder if you died for me in our previous life, Tor?”), and fairly skipped down the hall to Queen Victoria’s Parlor, where Tor and Margaret began to set up chairs around the marble-topped table.

When Ambrose Conklin made his appearance Tor glowered, Christine beamed – clearly reveling in the chance to discomfit her lover – and Margaret Mackenzie preached them all a grave little sermon on how if there was any unbelief in any of their hearts they should get out right now. “For skepticism and disbelief set up barriers against those who’ve passed Beyond, and those of us who sincerely seek their advice can only ask the scoffers to take their scorn away, and leave us to our faith. And,” she added, snatching Christine’s amber cigarette holder from her hands, “the spirits are no’ very fond of tobacco either.”

“I’m sorry.” With surprising meekness Christine applied her cigarette-lighter to the wicks of the candles instead. “Down,” she added, to Black Jasmine, who was attempting to supervise the setting of the chairs. “Sit.”

Margaret blew out the lantern. Darkness crept closer around them, and far off, a distant footfall creaked on the gallery floor.

Tor made sure that Christine was between himself and Alec, with Norah on Alec’s right and Margaret between Tor and Mr. Conklin. This, however, put Christine opposite her former fiancé, so that their fingers touched when it came time for two people to guide the planchette. “Are the spirits present tonight?” whispered Margaret, and the planchette slithered and rolled over the board before it touched the word, Yes. Christine’s eyes widened, presumably as she felt the planchette pull and weave of its own (or Mr. Conklin’s) accord, but a cold touch, like the breath of chill wind, seemed to breathe on Norah’s nape. The thump of Chang Ming scratching himself nearly startled her out of her chair. “Have they a message for someone here?”

Yes.

“Mrs. Blackstone?” Tor pronounced Norah’s name warily, as if he guessed her intention to hijack the planchette. But she was opposite him, so he had little choice. “I have a question for the spirits,” he said, the moment her fingers touched the smooth wood. “Are there those among you who can see into the future?”

Norah let her fingers relax on the planchette, since her interest (and Christine’s) were in the past rather than the future. But before she and Tor had guided the little vehicle more than one or two looping circles around the board voices called in the staircase hall, and both Alec and Norah looked sharply around. Tor muttered, “Oh, for Chrissake, we should have cleared them out…”

But Norah stood up, Alec not far behind her, and the dogs sat up alertly at the sound.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Don’t touch the—“ began Tor, but Norah had already caught up one of the candles and hurried to the door.

The corridor outside was a hundred times as dark and frightening as the upstairs hall of the boarding-house, but Chang Ming and Black Jasmine trotted out beside her, and at the end of the hall, silhouetted against the glare of the Klieg-lights in the ballroom beyond, Danny Cross called out, “Is Sallie down there?”

“Are you kidding?” Alec was already striding up the black hallway, Norah (and the dogs) at his heels. “You couldn’t pay her to wander around this place by herself.”

“What happened?” asked Norah.

After the dimness of the parlor, even the reflected brilliance of the ballroom lights in the stair hall was shocking. Walking into the ballroom itself was like looking into the sun. “She went into the music room to change,” provided Danny. “It’s right off the ballroom, we’ve been using it—”

“She could have felt sick.” Christine trotted up in a glitter of diamonds out of the darkness. “I mean, she is pregnant—”

“By whom?” asked Norah suddenly. All eyes went to Bebe Jolivet, rising from the curliqueued sofa in the “parlor” set-up…

And all eyes dodged discreetly away as Miss Jolivet’s mouth tightened against humiliated tears.

“Where is your husband, Miss Jolivet?” Norah asked. “Where are all those telegrams coming from?”

Caught by surprise at the question, the actress stammered, “Chicago…”

“That doesn’t mean he’s in Chicago, darling,” piped up Christine, fishing in her handbag for a cigarette. “Christ knows I’d send my first husband telegrams from everyplace under the sun, when I was actually in New York with Roger… or was it Bill?” She counted quickly on her fingers, but Norah dodged past them and into the music room.

“There is no other door out of here,” she said. “But when I was sitting at that desk there was a draft on me, so there has to have been a panel—”

“Here it is.” Danny knocked on the wall beside a decorative niche, and just as he reached behind a marble bust and pressed the lever that released an opening in the lacquered boiserie, Alec said, “Here,” and opened another panel beside the fireplace.

Norah breathed, “Damn it,” and Christine said, “What’s Stan Littlejohn got to do with this?” She inhaled a grateful lung-full of smoke. “We all know he’s a weasel, but—”

“He has to kill her,” said Norah, suddenly understanding what was going on in Blatt’s Castle. What had been going on for a week. “She’s the only one who could prevent him from convincing Bebe to take him back.”

Both men had disappeared into their respective secret panels, followed by Deacon, Lou Arnaud (who played Deacon’s father, still in his evening-dress and make-up) and most of the camera and lights crew. Bebe – and everyone else in the house – crowded now around the music-room door, stared at her in shock.

“Stan—”

“That’s what was wrong,” said Norah simply. “I knew the Castle couldn’t really be haunted. The dogs would have reacted to real manifestations, as they reacted to the ghosts in the boarding-house. Someone had to have a good reason to set up this elaborate a hoax, to push the filming into one small, specific section of the castle… and I’m guessing,” she added, turning grimly to face the two open passageways, “that Sallie was Mr. Littlejohn’s accomplice, under the impression that Miss Jolivet was the target, and not herself.”

Bebe gasped, “Oh, my God!” stepped back a pace… and bumped into the wall behind a rack of dresses beside the harpsichord. It gave back with a creak, and Norah stepped across quickly and pushed a third carved panel in further, raising her candle high. A narrow stairway ascended, between the brick walls of the music-room and the ballroom beside it, and on them, the light just touched a woman’s shoe.

Norah plunged immediately up the steps. Behind her she heard Tor snap, “Let her go, this is no business—”

“Don’t be such a baby!” retorted Christine, and Norah heard the clatter of those diamanté heels on the steps behind her, and the enthusiastic rattle of diminutive canine paws. Black Jasmine, too tiny to mount a flight of stairs, barked peremptorily, and Christine said, “Honestly—!” and went back for him, but Norah was already around two dark turns, panting a little as she climbed. Once he seized his victim the man must kill her, she thought, and kill her quickly, and then get the hell away from the castle to wherever he’d set up an alibi for himself—

Suffocation… She could smell the sweet reek of chloroform mingled with the stinks of mold and dust in the stair, but knew he couldn’t hold the drug-soaked rag on the stand-in’s face too long. She’d seen chloroform burns, lingering as brown stains on the faces of some of the men who’d been brought in by the hospital ships in the War. Police would recognize it in an instant.

No, this has to be mysterious: girl disappears during the filming in a haunted castle, her body turns up dead without a mark…

Or maybe he’ll just throw her off one of the towers…

Barking furiously, Chang Ming flung himself ahead of her up the steps, and lantern-light glowed on the brick of the wall before her. Christine called “Chang! Chang-ums, no—!” and Norah heard another sound, a woman’s muffled wail. The stair took an abrupt little turn and Norah found herself in front of a narrow door, the lantern-light within bright after the stair’s candle-touched blackness. A man sprang up from the floor beside a supine woman, moving with an athlete’s spring-steel speed, and caught up a piece of the construction debris that littered the tiny room. He aimed a crushing blow at the sturdy little dog as Chang attacked his ankle. Chang sprang back with a yelp of pain and lunged in again – behind her, Norah heard Christine scream “NO!” and Tor yell, “Dammit, Chris…!”

Norah and Christine both flung themselves at the attacker, grabbing for his arms (…and I hope he hasn’t got a gun…). Christine caught a blow from the club and was knocked sprawling; Bebe Jolivet’s voice called out, “Stan!”

The man kicked Chang Ming off his ankle, grabbed Norah by the wrists, and threw her into Bebe as the actress slithered past Tor (still in the doorway) and lunged for him. Norah and Bebe went down in a tangle, and only when she scrambled up again did Norah see that the little room – tucked away between the walls of the labyrinthine castle’s attics – had two other doors, pitch-black slits in its brick walls through which scrambling, scuffling footfalls were dying away.

Norah darted straight to Sallie Collins, stretched out on the floor with one of the purple cushions from Queen Victoria’s Parlor over her face. Without her attacker’s weight leaning on it, however, the young woman was clearly able to breathe, and pushed feebly at the heavy velvet. Norah whipped the cushion away and turned immediately to Christine, lying in a little heap of black satin and garnet beading, with Chang Ming – bleeding himself – and the other two Pekes pawing anxiously at her and licking her face.

Tor thrust Norah aside and scooped Christine into his arms. “Chris!” he cried. “My darling—”

Christine sat up, slapped him with a violence that rang like a gunshot in the little attic, and turned to gather Chang Ming to her chest. “Oh, sweetness, you shouldn’t have done that! Are you all right, darling?” Whipping back around to Tor, she snapped, “You fucking coward, he could have been killed!”

Norah had gone back to Sallie. Despite a massive bruise on her left shoulder, Christine was obviously fine.

The young stand-in was clinging to Bebe, her own arm darkening where a man’s fingers had left livid bruises, sobbing hysterically. Bebe’s face was ashen in the lantern-light. “It was Stan,” she whispered, as if not able to believe it… or too able to do so. “My God, it was Stan…”

Black Jasmine, who had run to one of the other doorways and barked furiously down into the darkness (And don’t ever let me catch you here again!), turned and trotted back to Christine, growling threateningly as Tor stormed, “You’re the one who could have been killed—!”

“Don’t be a yutz, even if he’d had a gun—“ There was one lying beside Sallie on the floor among a rubbish of old nails and plaster-dust, “—he wouldn’t have used it! This was supposed to be mysterious!”

Alec, Deacon, and Ti-Jo Girod barged in then – from the third door, the one Black Jasmine hadn’t barked into – making everyone jump. “I’m sorry,” Sallie gasped, still shuddering in Bebe’s arms. “I’m so sorry—“ There was something eerie about the two women in the lantern-light, with their identical build and coloring, in their identical Victorian underwear; Bebe had wrapped Sallie in her own velvet robe and Alec shucked off his corduroy jacket to drape around the actress’ bronze shoulders.

“He said it was just to scare you,” sobbed the girl. “To get even with you for divorcing him. I told him what nights we’d be filming up here, I pretended I’d seen and heard things, and made noises thumpin’ on the walls. He seemed to know all about the castle—”

“You bet he did.” Alec helped Christine to her feet, after she’d angrily slapped Tor’s effort to do so aside. “He’s been staying at the same boarding-house as us – as the guys from Colossus, I mean.” And, to the startled looks of everybody in the room: “He’s white enough to pass. The only reason I recognized him is ‘cause I follow Negro League ball. I sure wasn’t about to rat him out for staying in a white boarding-house. I just thought he was in town to keep an eye on Bebe.”

“He’s been in Reno before.” Bebe’s hands shook as she brushed back her hair. “When his team played an exhibition game in Los Angeles, against the Royal Giants… He was always telling people he was Cuban, or Italian.”

“I told him he had to marry me.” Sallie’s voice cracked a little, and she wiped her eyes. “I told him – He wanted me to get rid of my baby.” Her glance ducked away from Bebe’s, in shame. “I told him I wouldn’t… and then he cheered up and picked out a name for the baby and… and…”

“Said he loved you,” Bebe finished for her, with a tiny, bitter sigh.

Sallie began to weep again.

“And meanwhile,” said Norah, “he was plotting how to make your disappearance and death just one more mysterious happening in a house that’s got a reputation for spookiness… though in fact the dogs didn’t seem to notice anything at all.” She nodded at the three Pekinese, clustered adoringly around Christine while Tor sulked by the doorway. “Have there been any mysterious deaths here? Other than Mr. Blatt’s ex-wives…?”

“The newspapers are always saying how haunted the place is,” remarked Alec. “But Mr. Blatt’s ex-wives – he had about five of them, by the way – all took him for a half-million apiece in railroad and mining stock, and ran off to places like Havana or the south of France. Not one of them died here, or anywhere near here.”

“Well, of all the cheats—!”

“As for Stan Littlejohn,” he went on, gently lifting Sallie, then Bebe, to their feet, “the fact that you saw him, Miss Jolivet – and can identify him – pretty much closes the door on his being able to go back to playing baseball. I’m guessing he had some kind of getaway and alibi planned – he can make it to Los Angeles by morning – but if he lives in Chicago and owes money for gambling, I’ve got a good idea who he owes that money to. If he’s smart he’s halfway to Mexico by this time. I doubt they’re going to catch him, at the rate he’ll be driving.”

“Not so terrible a rate.” Ambrose Conklin sidled through the doorway, making the tiny, narrow room even more crowded: If the place was properly lit, reflected Norah, instead of only this spooky lantern-light, it would be a French farce…

“When you said the whole thing was a hoax to cover up a murder, Mrs. Blackstone—” The millionaire bowed in her direction, “—I’m afraid the only useful thing I could think of to do was tell Otis– my chauffeur – to go around the outside of the castle and disconnect the starter-switches of every car he came to, and then drive back to town as fast as he could and fetch the police. Not very heroic, I’m afraid…”

Christine beamed upon him, like Aphrodite rising from the waves. “Oh, Ambrose, that was oodles better than heroic! That was smart!” She handed off Chang Ming to Norah, and took her elderly beau’s arm, like a gorgeously plumed bird of paradise returning to its home perch to rest.

Deacon picked up Black Jasmine – who couldn’t get down the stairs by himself – and Tor went to pick up Buttercreme, who barked at him disapprovingly and hid behind Alec’s legs. Alec tucked her under his arm, picked up the lantern, and followed the little procession down the stairs.

*

The Reno police, and the Washoe County sheriffs, were just arriving as everyone emerged from their various secret passageways, and Stan Littlejohn was arrested just after sunrise, on foot, disheveled, and very tired, lost in the wilds of the Carson Mountains. Ambrose Conklin offered to drive Christine back to Los Angeles that night (“I am so SICK of Reno I could just SCREAM!”) but Christine yielded to Norah’s argument that having agreed to re-write Lost Lamb (not to mention The Brooklyn Queen) she couldn’t very well go off and leave Centurion Films in the lurch, and the Pekes would be very lonely without her (not to speak of unbrushed, un-walked, and fed on the odd viands assembled by Christine’s Chinese gardener) – as Chris would be very lonely without them, if they stayed in Reno with her.

Thus, Christine abandoned the cat-haunted boarding-house on Virginia Street (and whatever the hell that was in the bathroom) and repaired to the palatial accommodations of the Goldstrike Ranch, to enjoy a sagebrush idyll with Mr. Conklin while Norah, ensconced in one of the ranch’s smaller (but extremely pleasant) cabins, worked on her scripts, looked after the dogs, drank tea and went riding with Alec in the evenings.

Over coffee one morning (at a “colored” diner on C Street) Bebe Jolivet told Norah that she’d offered to help Sallie Collins through the difficult months during which she would not be able to work; both Alec and Mary DeNoux agreed to help the young stand-in find work in the wardrobe department at Colossus back in Los Angeles.

On the occasions upon which she went to script conferences at Blatt’s Castle (for one film or the other), Norah was inundated with Tor’s alternate sulks and entreaties for her to “Talk to Chris for me…” either to come back to his arms or at least to lend him five hundred dollars in case You Betcha did not, in fact, win the Belmont – not a plea likely to soften Chris’s heart.

After he threatened to go back to Los Angeles and the arms of Marissa Sherrod – to which Lenny Palmer responded with, “You were the one who wanted to come out here, pal: we’ve rented this dump, now we’re gonna finish here!” –Tor went the length of renting a cabin at the Goldstrike Ranch himself, in the hopes of catching Christine alone under the romantic desert moon. He didn’t manage to do this in the ten days left of shooting, but he rode with such consummate grace, and looked so magnificent in his silk cowboy-shirts and fluffy white “buffalo” chaps, that the management asked him to stay on as a “riding instructor” for the wealthy ladies who patronized the resort.

“And I shudder to think,” sighed Norah, as she helped Alec and the Colossus crew finally pack up the last of the cameras, props, film and light-stands for the drive back to Los Angeles, “what sort of ‘riding lessons’ he’s going to give.” She handed the dogs’ wicker baskets in last: Christine had gone on ahead of them in Mr. Conklin’s Hispano-Suiza, so Alec had been given the task of piloting the big yellow Packard back to Hollywood.

“Exactly the lessons they’ll pay for,” returned Alec wisely, helped her into the car, and settled his precious camera (and Buttercreme) on her lap. “If they’re coming to Reno for a divorce, I’m guessing Tor’s going to make a lot more money here than he ever did in front of a camera. And he’ll probably end up marrying someone with more dough than Christine will ever dream of. Which just goes to show—”

He pressed the self-starter, and put the car into gear, the Goldstrike Ranch – and the looming, spectral white shape of Blatt’s Castle on its sagebrush hillside – sliding away behind them, “—that in Hollywood, sometimes things do have a happy ending after all.”

__________________________

* See: The Bride of the Rat-God

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series - short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way - with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna - in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

Table of Contents

- Castle of Horror

- About The Author