The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (19 page)

“I think it's swell,” said Djuna craftily, glancing at Ellery.

“A mild word, Djun',” said Mr. Queen, wiping his neck again. The House of Darkness which lay across the thoroughfare did not look too diverting to a gentleman of even catholic tastes. It was a composite of all the haunted houses of fact and fiction. A diabolic imagination had planned its crazy walls and tumbledown roofs. It reminded Ellery—although he was tactful enough not to mention it to Monsieur Duval—of a set out of a German motion picture he had once seen,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
. It wound and leaned and stuck out fantastically and had broken false windows and doors and decrepit balconies. Nothing was normal or decent. Constructed in a huge rectangle, its three wings overlooked a court which had been fashioned into a nightmarish little street with broken cobbles and tired lampposts; and its fourth side was occupied by the ticket-booth and a railing. The street in the open court was atmosphere only; the real dirty work, thought Ellery disconsolately, went on behind those grim surrealistic walls.

“
Alors
,” said Monsieur Duval, rising, “if it is permitted that I excuse myself? For a moment only. I shall return. Then we shall visit …
Pardon
!” He bowed his trim little figure away and went quickly toward the booth, near which a young man in park uniform was haranguing a small group.

Mr. Queen sighed and closed his eyes. The park was never crowded; but on a hot summer's afternoon it was almost deserted, visitors preferring the adjoining bathhouses and beach. The camouflaged loud-speakers concealed all over the park played dance music to almost empty aisles and walks.

“That's funny,” remarked Djuna, crunching powerfully upon a pink, conic section of popcorn.

“Eh?” Ellery opened a bleary eye.

“I wonder where
he's
goin'. 'N awful hurry.”

“Who?” Ellery opened the other eye and followed the direction of Djuna's absent nod. A man with a massive body and thick gray hair was striding purposefully along up the walk. He wore a slouch hat pulled down over his eyes and dark clothes, and his heavy face was raw with perspiration. There was something savagely decisive in his bearing.

“Ouch,” murmured Ellery with a wince. “I sometimes wonder where people get the energy.”

“Funny, all right,” mumbled Djuna, munching.

“Most certainly is,” said Ellery sleepily, closing his eyes again. “You've put your finger on a nice point, my lad. Never occurred to me before, but it's true that there's something unnatural in a man's hurrying in an amusement park of a hot afternoon. Chap might be the White Rabbit, eh, Djuna? Running about so. But the
genus
Joylander is, like all such orders, a family of inveterate strollers. Well, well! A distressing problem.” He yawned.

“He must be crazy,” said Djuna.

“No, no, my son, that's the conclusion of a sloppy thinker. The proper deduction begins with the observation that Mr. Rabbit hasn't come to Joyland to dabble in the delights of Joyland
per se
, if you follow me. Joyland is, then, merely a means to an end. In a sense Mr. Rabbit—note the cut of his wrinkled clothes, Djuna; he's a distinguished bunny—is oblivious to Joyland. It doesn't exist for him. He barges past Dante's Inferno and the perilous Dragonfly and the popcorn and frozen custard as if he is blind or they're invisible.… The diagnosis? A date, I should say, with a lady. And the gentleman is late.
Quod erat demonstrandum.…
Now for heaven's sake, Djuna, eat your petrified shoddy and leave me in peace.”

“It's all gone,” said Djuna wistfully, looking at the empty bag.

“I am here!” cried a gay Gallic voice, and Ellery suppressed another groan at the vision of Monseiur Duval bouncing toward them. “Shall we go, my friends? I promise you entertainment of the most divine.…
Ouf
!” Monsieur Duval expelled his breath violently and staggered backward. Ellery sat up in alarm. But it was only the massive man with the slouch hat, who had collided with the dapper little Frenchman, almost upsetting him, muttered something meant to be conciliatory, and hurried on. “
Cochon
,” said Monsieur Duval softly, his black eyes glittering. Then he shrugged his slim shoulders and looked after the man.

“Apparently,” said Ellery dryly, “our White Rabbit can't resist the lure of your
chef-d'oeuvre
, Duval. I believe he's stopped to listen to the blandishments of your barker!”

“White Rabbit?” echoed the Frenchman, puzzled. “But yes, he is a customer.
Voil
à! One does not fight with such,
hein
? Come, my friends!”

The massive man had halted abruptly in his tracks and pushed into the thick of the group listening to the attendant. Ellery sighed, and rose, and they strolled across the walk.

The young man was saying confidentially: “Ladies and gentlemen, you haven't visited Joyland if you haven't visited The House of Darkness. There's never been a thrill like it! It's new, different. Nothing like it in any amusement park in the
world
! It's grim. It's shivery. It's terrifying.…”

A tall young woman in front of them laughed and said to the old gentleman leaning on her arm: “Oh, Daddy, let's try it! It's sure to be loads of fun.” Ellery saw the white head under its leghorn nod with something like amusement, and the young woman edged forward through the crowd, eagerly. The old man did not release her arm. There was a curious stiffness in his carriage, a slow shuffle in his walk, that puzzled Ellery. The young woman purchased two tickets at the booth and led the old man along a fenced lane inside.

“The House of Darkness,” the young orator was declaiming in a dramatic whisper, “is … just … that. There's not a light you can see by in the whole place! You have to feel your way, and if you aren't
feeling
well … ha, ha! Pitch dark. Ab-so-lutely
black
… I see the gentleman in the brown tweeds is a little frightened. Don't be afraid. We've taken care of even the faintest hearted—”

“Ain't no sech thing,” boomed an indignant bass voice from somewhere in the van of the crowd. There was a mild titter. The faintheart addressed by the attendant was a powerful young Negro, attired immaculately in symphonic brown, his straw hat dazzling against the sooty carbon of his skin. A pretty colored girl giggled on his arm. “C'mon, honey, we'll show 'em! Heah—two o' them theah tickets, mistuh!” The pair beamed as they hurried after the tall young woman and her father.

“You could wander around in the dark inside,” cried the young man enthusiastically, “for
hours
, looking for the way out. But if you can't stand the suspense there's a little green arrow, every so often along the route, that points to an invisible door, and you just go through that door and you'll find yourself in a dark passage that runs
all
around the house in the back and leads to the—uh—ghostly cellar, the assembly room, downstairs there. Only
don't
go out any of those green-arrow doors unless you want to
stay
out, because they open only one way—into the hall, ha, ha! You can't get back into The House of Darkness proper again, you see. But nobody uses that
easy
way out. Everybody follows the little
red
arrows.…”

A man with a full, rather untidy black beard, shabby broad-brimmed hat, a soft limp tie, and carrying a flat case which looked like an artist's box, purchased a ticket and hastened down the lane. His cheekbones were flushed with self-consciousness as he ran the gantlet of curious eyes.

“Now what,” demanded Ellery, “is the idea of
that
, Duval?”

“The arrows?” Monsieur Duval smiled apologetically. “A concession to the old, the infirm, and the apprehensive. It is really of the most blood-curdling, my masterpiece, Mr. Queen. So—” He shrugged. “I have planned a passage to permit of exit at any time. Without it one could, as the admirable young man so truly says, wander about for hours. The little green and red arrows are nonluminous; they do not disturb the blackness.”

The young man asserted: “But if you follow the red arrows you are bound to come out. Some of them go the right way, others don't. But eventually … After exciting adventures on the way … Now, ladies and gentlemen, for the price of—”

“Come
on
,” panted Djuna, overwhelmed by this salesmanship. “Boy, I bet that's
fun
.”

“I bet,” said Ellery gloomily as the crowd began to shuffle and mill about. Monsieur Duval smiled with delight and with a gallant bow presented two tickets.

“I shall await you, my friends, here,” he announced. “I am most curious to hear of your reactions to my little
maison des t
é
n
è
bres
. Go,” he chuckled, “with God.”

As Ellery grunted, Djuna led the way in prancing haste down the fenced lane to a door set at an insane angle. An attendant took the tickets and pointed a solemn thumb over his shoulder. The light of day struggled down a flight of tumbledown steps. “Into the crypt, eh?” muttered Ellery. “Ah, the young man's ‘ghostly cellar.' Dieudonné, I could cheerfully strangle you!”

They found themselves in a long narrow cellar-like chamber dimly illuminated by bulbs festooned with spurious spiderwebs. The chamber had a dank appearance and crumbly walls, and it was presided over by a courteous skeleton who took Ellery's hat, gave him a brass disc, and deposited the hat in one of the partitions of a long wooden rack. Most of the racks were empty, although Ellery noticed the artist's box in one of the partitions and the white-haired old man's leghorn in another. The rite was somehow ominous, and Djuna shivered with ecstatic anticipation. An iron grating divided the cellar in two, and Ellery reasoned that visitors to the place emerged after their adventures into the division beyond the grating, redeemed their checked belongings through the window in the grate, and climbed to blessed daylight through another stairway in the righthand wing.

“Come
on
,” said Djuna again, impatiently. “Gosh, you're slow. Here's the way in.” And he ran toward a crazy door on the left which announced
ENTRANCE
. Suddenly he halted and waited for Ellery, who was ambling reluctantly along behind. “I saw him,” he whispered.

“Eh? Whom?”

“
Him
. The Rabbit!”

Ellery started. “Where?”

“He just went inside there.” Djuna's passionate gamin-eyes narrowed. “Think he's got his date in
here
?”

“Pesky queer place to have one, I'll confess,” murmured Ellery, eyeing the crazy door with misgivings. “And yet logic … Now, Djuna, it's no concern of ours. Let's take our punishment like men and get the devil out of here. I'll go first.”

“I wanna go first!”

“Over my dead body. I promised Dad Queen I'd bring you back—er—alive. Hold on to my coat—tightly, now! Here we go.”

What followed is history. The Queen clan, as Inspector Richard Queen has often pointed out, is made of the stuff of heroes. And yet while Ellery was of the unpolluted and authentic blood, it was not long before he was feeling his way with quivering desperation and wishing himself at least a thousand light-years away.

The place was fiendish. From the moment they stepped through the crazy doorway to fall down a flight of padded stairs and land with a gentle bump on something which squealed hideously and fled from beneath them, they knew the tortures of the damned. There was no conceivable way of orienting themselves; they were in the deepest, thickest, blackest darkness Ellery had ever had the misfortune to encounter. All they could do was grope their way, one shrinking foot at a time, and pray for the best. It was literally impossible to see their hands before their faces.

They collided with walls which retaliated ungratefully with an electric shock. They ran into things which were all rattling bones and squeaks. Once they followed a tiny arrow of red light which had no sheen, and found a hole in a wall just large enough to admit a human form if its owner crawled like an animal. They were not quite prepared for what they encountered on the other side: a floor which tipped precariously under their weight and, to Ellery's horror, slid them gently downward toward the other side of the room—if it was a room—and through a gap to a padded floor three feet below.… Then there was the incident of the flight of steps which made you mount rapidly and get nowhere, since the steps were on a treadmill going the other way; the wall which fell on your head; the labyrinth where the passage was just wide enough for a broad man's shoulders and just high enough for a gnome walking erect; the grating which blew blasts of frigid air up your legs; the earthquake room; and such abodes of pleasantry. And, to frazzle already frayed nerves, the air was filled with rumbles, gratings, clankings, whistlings, crashes, and explosions in a symphony of noises which would have done credit to the inmates of Bedlam.

“Some fun eh, kid?” croaked Ellery feebly, landing on his tail after an unexpected slide. Then he said some unkind things about Monsieur Dieudonné Duval under his breath. “Where are we now?”

“Boy, is it
dark
,” said Djuna with satisfaction, clutching Ellery's arm. “I can't see a thing, can you?”

Ellery grunted and began to grope. “This looks promising.” His knuckles had rapped on a glassy surface. He felt it all over; it was a narrow panel, but taller than he. There were cracks along the sides which suggested that the panel was a door or window. But search as he might he could find no knob or latch. He bared a blade of his penknife and began to scratch away at the glass, which reason told him must have been smeared with thick opaque paint. But after several minutes of hot work he had uncovered only a faint and miserable sliver of light.

“That's not it,” he said wearily. “Glass door or window here, and that pinline of light suggests it opens onto a balcony or something, probably overlooking the court. We'll have to find—”