told me, in the fury of her hatred at my refusal to submit, that she had a worse fate in store for me than the whipping. Well, this time I would be prepared for her.
CHAPTER III
INVITATION TO DEATH
One morning I received a letter from Roland Cuyler, the author:
Dear Les:
A friend of mine, who has gone on a journey, has been good enough to allow me the use of his charming upstate place until he returns. I’ve been staying here with Clara and working my head off. I’ve completed my novel, and rather than send it down to you, how about you and Helen driving up here to spend a weekend or longer with us?
It’s an ideal place—swimming and tennis, and only a three hour drive from the city. Don’t bother to reply. I’m assuming that you and Helen will arrive some time Saturday.
It sounded good. The city was in the grip of one of those heat waves which made New York unbearable. When I told Helen about it, she was enthusiastic.
So that Saturday afternoon we started out in my car. After three hours we found ourselves in a rather wild and isolated valley. Following the directions which Cuyler had enclosed, we turned off to a dirt road which ran through a deep woods and was only wide enough for one car. Seven miles of bumping over ruts brought us there.
Frankly, the place surprised us. We had expected a fairly sumptuous cottage at the most, but this looked like a vast estate in the heart of the woods. A seven-foot fieldstone fence enclosed it entirely.
I drove up to the twin massive solid iron doors and got out of the car. There was a telephone on the wall. I lifted the receiver and spoke into the mouthpiece.
“Your name, please?” a man’s voice asked.
I told him, then returned to the car. The two doors swung open.
“Pretty swanky,” Helen commented as I drove through. The doors closed behind us. And thirty feet ahead of us, to our astonishment, was another stone wall, this one at least four feet higher than the first and rimmed for a couple of feet more with barbed-wire. A second pair of doors swung open at our approach.
Helen frowned uneasily. “This place looks like a fortress.”
“Millionaires go in for this sort of thing,” I said. “Probably there are armed guards about the place also. The rich are always afraid of kidnappings and intrusions on their privacy. The Cuylers certainly fell into something soft.”
The second pair of doors also shut behind us. As we drove along the gravel road toward the large stone house, I noticed that the grounds had been allowed to run pretty much to seed. The lawns which must once have been velvet smooth, were overgrown and the flower gardens were a chaos. We passed a tennis court which evidently hadn’t been cared for in years and then a swimming pool which was absolutely dry.
Queer. Was this what Cuyler had raved about? And where was everybody? No sign of guards or servants. Both doors had been opened by unseen electrical control.
Helen shifted closer to me. “This place gives me the creeps, Les.”
“They’re probably all in the house,” I said. “Ah, look, there are a number of parked cars, and there’s somebody on the side terrace.”
I stopped the car behind four or five others and Helen and I got out and walked to the stone terrace. Frank Bord, the publisher, and his exquisite little wife, Lillian, were lounging on easy chairs and sipping drinks.
Bord waved a hand toward us. “Hi, folks. So it’s going to be a party after all. The Rooneys are somewhere inside. Haven’t seen hide or hair of anybody else save a moody servant named Si who brought us drinks.”
“Where are the Cuylers?” I asked.
“Search me. All we could get out of the servant was that they’d be down eventually. Hell of a way to receive guests. Look for Si and you can get some drinks.”
Helen and I passed into the house. We found ourselves in an enormous drawing room. Sitting on a couch at the farther side were Victor Rooney, the Broadway producer, and Jane, his wife, a charming redhead.
As we entered, Jane was saying: “I don’t like it. There’s an atmosphere about this place which—well, makes me uncomfortable. There seems to be only one servant in this huge place and the Cuylers don’t seem to be about and we haven’t even been shown to our rooms.”
Victor Rooney saw us and stood up. “Greetings, folks. Looks like a gathering of the clan. Guess Roland wants us all in on the reading of his new book.” He raised his voice. “Hey, Si! Drinks for four.”
Several minutes later a squat man with shoulders the width of a barn door came in with a tray on which were four cocktail glasses. If the servant had mixed the drinks himself, he could have made a fortune as a bartender. It was the smoothest liquor I had ever tasted and had a curiously exotic flavor.
By the time we had finished the drinks, we heard another car pull up. The four of us went out to the terrace and joined the Bords. The latest arrivals were Rob and Inez Spaulding. He was also a producer, a friendly rival to Frank Bord. His wife had been a former showgirl—a statuesque blonde who made up in figure what she lacked in brains.
We called for eight more cocktails from Si and stood about drinking and raking the Cuylers over the coals for not having come down to receive us.
“Damn them, I’m going up to find them,” Bord announced.
“Let’s all go,” Inez Spaulding put in.
We started into the house. And as we entered the drawing room, we saw Roland and Clara Cuyler coming toward us.
“It’s about time you two paid some attention to us,” Victor Rooney growled.
Suddenly we all stopped dead, staring at Roland and Clara Cuyler. Something had happened to them—to their faces which seemed to have become lined and flabby with age within a couple of weeks; to their bodies which drooped in attitudes of utter hopelessness. And they stopped also and moved close together, each holding to the other as if in that way they found the courage necessary to face us.
“I couldn’t help it,” Roland Cuyler muttered across the room to us in a weak voice. “She made me write those letters to you and invite you to this hell. I held out as long as I could, but she—”
“Whom are you talking about?” I demanded, feeling my heart turn to stone.
“Haven’t you guessed?” a voice said softly. Yes, I had guessed at Cuyler’s first words; and now, turning my head toward another door at the side of the room, I saw that my worst fears were justified.
Tala Mag stood just inside of the doorway, a self-satisfied smile playing on her red lips. Her gold-flecked eyes glowed with an exalted sense of victory. She moved toward us a few steps, and her body was a glorious blue-and-gold flame. She was clad in a blue evening gown which was spun of incredibly delicate silk so that it covered her without hiding her voluptuously curved flesh.
I felt the pressure of Helen’s hand tightening on my arm. We all stared at Tala Mag with a kind of dreadful fascination, and I realized, somehow, that all the other men in the room had met her, and had had some sort of unpleasant experience with
