Edward Corrigan is captured and tortured by a sinister figure claiming to be from purgatory. Bound and in agony, he uses his wits and painful ingenuity to break free just in time to save his beloved Alice from a horrific death by acid. The villain is revealed to be Locke, the castle keeper, who sought to eliminate the Corrigans to keep a secret treasure hidden. Together, they survive the horrors of the Castle of Shadows and lay the past to rest.
“Fool!” screeched the Thing. “Do you think to save one who must die? Back, so that you may have a better look at her writhings and listen the better to her cries when she dies.”
As yet, the girl had not stirred to consciousness, and of this I was tremendously thankful. Best that she was not aware of the death in store for her—slow and agonizing dissolution under the creeping mist of that devil’s brew—a brew I recognized as sulphuric acid.
It had pooled there in a depression in the stone, an oily, sinister blotch of it shining under the flares. And alongside it, rilling along the sand to disappear where the rocky floor of the place gave way to earth, was that stream of water, collected from the rain pounding overhead. I stared, and wild hope grew within me. Not an instant did I hesitate. I gritted my teeth, for what I meant to do was agony, yet no agony such as that in store for my beloved.
“You fiend,” I gritted at the Thing, “I’ll be a match for you yet.”
I rolled over, and deliberately placed my bound wrists in the pool of sulphuric acid. Pain bit through me, into my brain until my senses reeled. But resolutely I kept to the course I was determined to follow. For a full half minute, I held my wrists there. Then I jerked them away, to dig them into the stream of running water, I took care that the thong which bound them did not get wet. The water laved away most of the acid from my flesh, but the terror-brew clung there, on the hemp of the thongs, burning away slowly.
The Thing returned with another bottle of the brew. But before those dead eyes set in flaming sockets stared at me, I dipped my wrists once more into the acid and washed my flesh, as far as I was able, with water.
“So you are afraid to see her die?” the Thing jeered. “But die she will, for I must rid the world of the Corrigans.”
I gritted no answer. Behind my back, where the awful eyes of the Thing could not probe, I strained my wrists apart, hoping, praying that the acid would so weaken the cords that I could wrench my hands free.
“This time I shall take care of the mate of Edward Corrigan,” gibbered the Thing as he tilted the opened jug above the white, still body. “This time she shall die. And then, Edward Corrigan, you die the same death. Then, the world will have been purged of the black blood of the Corrigans, and I shall return whence I came.”
And then Alice stirred. I could see the gleam of the flares on her black eyes as she opened them and consciousness came into her. I could see the comprehension in them, followed by the terror that seared through me and forced my wrists apart harder and harder until sweat ran from my face and it seemed that the fibers of the hemp must surely burst.
My beloved’s white body tensed like a spring, tore against the straps about wrists and ankles, lifted a little way from that peacock-hued plate and held there momentarily, and then slumped back again. The Thing’s wild gibberish gurgled out.
“You shall not escape. You shall die, dissolved into nothingness—as Edward Corrigan shall die, leaving no trace behind.”
The mouth of the jug was dipping closer and closer to the top of the rocker. And now a thin, oily trickle dropped forth, upon the top of the peacock-hued plate, to roll with slow speed down the metal expanse toward Alice.
The Thing, laughing wildly from the mouth that was not a mouth. He touched the curved pieces of the wood on which the rocker stood, and thus imparted to the whole machine a slow, back-and-forth motion that washed the acid from side to side but at the same time speeding up its course toward the girl.
A thin, hellish mist, so choking that it made my senses reel, lifted from the acid. There was a thin hiss of sound. And where the liquid had passed, on the metal behind, there was no longer a peacock-hue that glittered to terrible beauty in the flame of the flares. There was only a brassy expanse of copper sheet, burned clean of life and beauty. It was a change from life to death—such a change as that in store for Alice.
“She will die!” the Thing gloated as if reading my thoughts. “She will die. She will dissolve into nothing. But slowly, slowly, so that your ears may be filled with her cries, and you may feel a little of what is in store for you, yourself. She will die. Slowly, slowly—first her hair eaten away, then the flesh of her face, then her shoulders—those soft, white shoulders…”
His gap of a mouth gurgling to eerie mirth. He tilted the jug and sent a fresh flood of acid down the metal sheet, while his foot on the rocker kept the whole infernal cradle in a slow, sideways motion that wept the acid forward in tiny waves. Another instant now…
The ropes around my wrist parted. I rolled over again, as if in great excitement, and thus concealed myself partially below the lowered end of the cradle.
My fingers plucked frenziedly at the cords about my ankles, twisted and tore until blood spurted from my fingertips. Within the space of a few seconds, I had torn the hemp apart. Free, and with fury throbbing like a wave through me, I jerked to my feet.
“She shall die,” the Thing was intoning, when I came upright.
I seized the lowered end of the cradle, and with a terrific heave, lifted it higher than the other end. I kicked a rock under it, to block it permanently. The flood of acid halted only a fraction of an inch away from Alice’s head, rolled back towards the Thing in an oily flood, and spilled over the edge with a hiss like the sound of flames in the nether regions.
“She shall die, and I who am come from purgatory—” the Thing had been chanting.
“You’re a man, just as I am.” I gritted out. “And I can tear you to pieces, just as I’d tear any man to pieces!”
I stopped to lift a rock, and went at the Thing. The jug of acid, which it lifted to swing at me, dropped away when my hurled bit of granite smashed through the glass.
“If you’re from Hell, try to stop me now!” I taunted.
The Thing turned to run; fled out through a door in the foundation, and into a room dimly lighted by a candle thrust high in the wall. An infernal roar set up as I stumbled after him. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the hounds of purgatory leashed there against the wall. But their sinister import was gone. No longer was there anything in them to rouse terror, just as now I no longer feared their master—the being who ran from me, headed for a dim stairway.
I cut across in front of him. When he turned, cornered, I glimpsed the glint of candle light on steel. He had drawn a long knife from somewhere in those dark clothes of his. I hesitated no longer, but lifted a long billet of wood lying on the floor and charged him. He thrust at me, and steel ran along my chest, pricked through the skin.
The next instant I had beaten him to death and the knife dropped away from those gleaming hands of his.
It was only the work of a moment to free Alice, lift her off that rocker. We passed out through the room in which lay the Thing and in which were leashed the dogs of purgatory. Alice’s slim shoulders, hard against mine, quivered.
“What was—it?” she shuddered.
I leaned down, jerked away a phosphorus mask, grotesquely carved, and from beneath it there stared up at us the face of the keeper of the castle in the shadows. Locke!
“He discovered gold, or thought he had discovered gold.” I told Alice later, as we sat before a roaring fire in one of the upper rooms of the castle. “The gold would have belonged to Jonathan Corrigan, of course, since it was on Corrigan property. So Locke had to get rid of him. He knew the legend of how the Indian medicine men had cursed the Corrigans and this castle in the shadows. So he made up his story of the hounds of purgatory. The hounds were simply several dogs which he had painted with phosphorus.”
Rain still pounded far above us, and lightning still shook the castle. But now it was a comforting storm, one that seemed to bring Alice very close to me.
“I inspected this castle, of course, but I hadn’t had time to get down there in the foundation. And it was there that Locke thought he had discovered his gold. He’d built an aperjero—rocker affair covered with copper plate used to collect flower gold. He knew very little about metal, apparently, for he was experimenting. He had several different kinds of acids down there, and a lot of mercury which he used with the rocker, or cradle as it is also called. Evidently he was sure he had found gold, but did not know just how to get it.”
“And when you were ready to inspect the basement of the castle—”
“He’d built up the story of the hounds, and had even turned them loose to bay. But tonight he determined on his master stroke. He determined to deck himself out as a Master of the Hounds, in his mask and gloves, and confront us. He thought it would scare us away for good. When I attacked him, he knocked me out. And then—Well, his mind was a little distorted. He saw he couldn’t scare us away, so he had to get rid of us somehow. And he was taking the way that would leave no evidence.”
Alice shuddered, and I tightened my arm around her. In silence, we stared into the comforting fire for a long time. At last Alice spoke softly in the way that made my pulses pound and lifted me to the heights of ecstasy.
“The black blood Corrigans. But it’s run out, Edward. It vanished with the Corrigan who began it. To me—it’s not black blood. It never will be. I love you, Edward—and I want to stay here with you, here in this castle of the shadows, as we planned.”
“And with you loving me enough to do that, there will never be another ghost to stir in this land,” I said.
And suddenly the castle of shadows did not seem so dark, so gloomy, for I knew that so long as I had Alice, terror would never again walk through the badlands.
Originally Published: Ace Publishing, BEYOND #3, March 1951
Read by ElevenLabs (Daniel Voice)
