The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror Read Online Free Page A

perhaps be “psychic, whatever that may mean”?) I began to feel closer to, and sorrier for, that lonely, visionary millionaire who bequeathed this house of horrors to an indifferent community.
    Suddenly, faint in the distance, I heard the muffled sound of a piano playing. It was not a radio, not a recording, but unmistakably an echo from the drafty rotunda downstairs where reposed the fragile, ornate instrument once reputedly owned by Liszt.
    I walked downstairs as if in a dream, hardly aware of what I was doing. I knew the piece: it was Liszt’s Campanella ; someone played it in a Hitchcock movie once, and it had stuck in my mind: fragile, elfin bells in a silver tintinnabulation of sound. As I entered the lofty rotunda the piano, deep in shadow, loomed across the room, stark Spanish cannon silhouetted incongruously against it as still deeper shadows.
    My eyes adjusted to the gloom and began to half-discern what appeared to be a dark, swaying, undefined shape hovering above the keyboard, moving in the circumscribed patterns a rapt player might follow. The music still had a distant, stifled quality, and I wondered if the ancient hammers and pedals were really moving: surely the instrument would not be in tune after so many years. But what had Ehlers written? “Objects… associated with passionate people and events soak up and retain an aura, and may produce a tangible emanation, even sensory stimuli…”
    Suddenly the racket of the Nightingale Floors erupted around me again, louder than ever before, deafening, from all over the house, so that the spell holding me broke and I felt terror, bewilderment; and turned to run, to flee this strange museum with its entombed but living sampling of the past.
    But the only way out lay through the unlit Remington gallery, that tomb-black trap I had always distrusted. And I had left both flashlight and weapons upstairs!
    There was no other choice, and as I blundered into the room of Wild West art I sensed that it was neither entirely dark nor entirely untenanted.
    Outlined in a light that was not light, since it did not diffuse, I saw the erect, majestic form of an Indian chief in full ceremonial regalia: feathered headdress, buckskin leggings, beaded belt, with a crude bow slung across one bare, muscular shoulder. (Could an artist’s intensification of reality also entrap an image from the past, even though the painting itself had never been in the physical presence of its subject?)
    The figure of the Indian moved lithely toward the centre of the chamber, but I was past it already, bounding through the archway opposite as if propelled by the crackling of the floors, now intensified to such a degree that it resembled a fireworks display.
    I staggered into the next gallery, but stopped short to locate and avoid any further unnatural phenomena there.
    This was one of the medieval rooms, and at first it seemed there was nothing unusual here except the frantic snapping of the flooring. Then my glance fell on an Elizabethan headsman’s axe mounted on the wall, faintly illuminated by one of the dim night lights several yards distant.
    Before my eyes, a wavering form shaped itself around the axe, stabilized, and came clear, lifelike: the black-hooded, swarthy figure of the executioner, both brawny fists grasping the haft of the immense, double-headed weapon, which hung at an angle as if to accommodate itself to the natural grip of the burly beadsman.
    I wheeled in panic and sprinted for the front door, threw back the night latch, and half-stumbled down the stairs and across the mangy lawn under the spectral benches of the great poplars, whose dry leaves rattled and chattered as if in derisive echo of the tumultuous uproar of the floorboards in the empty building behind me.
    I phoned in my resignation to Mr. Worthington next day (since, superstitious as my attitude might seem, I never wished to enter the Ehlers Museum again) and started the long comeback path to a normality in which I