CHAPTER 3 : Report On Terror Castle
IT WAS RATHER LATE in the afternoon, and Bob
Andrews was puffing as he pushed his bike up to
Green Gate One. What a time to have a flat tyre!
He rolled the bike inside the salvage yard and
parked it. Over in the main part of the yard he could
hear the voice of Mrs. Jones, giving orders to Hans
and Konrad, her husband’s two helpers. But Jupiter
and Pete were not in their workshop.
Bob had expected that. He went behind the little
printing press and moved aside a section of old iron
grating that seemed merely to be leaning against the
bottom of a work-bench. Behind the grating lay a very
long, large galvanised pipe. He ducked into the open
end of the pipe, pulled the grating back into place,
then crawled as fast as his brace would let him
through the pipe. This was “Tunnel Two,” one of
several secret entrances the boys could use to enter
“Headquarters.” It ended at a wooden panel. He
pushed on the panel and it swung up. He was inside
Headquarters.
Headquarters was a thirty-foot mobile home trailer
that Titus Jones had bought for junk a year earlier. It
had been badly damaged in a crash, and he hadn’t
been able to sell it because of the great dents in the
frame. So he had allowed Jupiter to use it for a kind
of office.
In the course of the year, the three boys, with the
help of Hans and Konrad, had gradually piled heaps
of junk all round the outside of the trailer. Now, from
the outside, it was entirely hidden by piles of steel
bars, a section of a dilapidated fire escape, and some
stacks of wood and other material.
Mr. Jones had apparently forgotten all about its
existence. And no one but the boys themselves knew
that they had equipped the now well-hidden trailer as
an office, laboratory and photographic darkroom,
with several hidden entrances.
When Bob crawled out of the pipe, Jupiter was
sitting in a rebuilt swivel chair behind a desk that had
had one end scorched in a fire.(All the equipment in
Headquarters had been rebuilt from junk.) Pete
Crenshaw was sitting on the other side of the desk.
“You’re late,” Jupiter said as if Bob didn’t know it.
“I had a flat tyre.” Bob was panting.“I ran over a
big nail right outside the library.”
“Did you find out anything?”
“I certainly did. I found out more than I want to
know about Terror Castle.”
“Terror Castle!” Pete exclaimed.“That’s a name I
don’t like!”
“Wait until you hear about it,” Bob told him.
“About the family of five who tried to spend a night
in it and were never――”
“Begin at the beginning,” Jupiter requested.“Give
us the facts in sequence.”
“Okay.” Bob started to open the large brown
envelope he had brought with him.“But first I ought
to tell you that Skinny Norris kept hanging over my
shoulder all morning, trying to snoop into what I was
doing.”
“I hope you didn’t let that goop know anything!”
Pete exclaimed.“He’s always trying to poke his nose
into everything we’re doing.”
“I certainly didn’t tell him anything. But he was
awfully persistent. When I arrived at the library, he
stopped me to talk about Jupe’s winning the car for
thirty days. He asked me how I thought he was going
to use it.”
“Skinny is just annoyed because he wants to be the
only one in school who has his own car,” Jupiter said.
“If his father wasn’t a legal resident of a state where
they give out drivers’ licences practically to infants,
Skinny wouldn’t be able to drive any more than we
can. Well, he can’t lord it over us now.”
“Anyway, while I was working in the library,” Bob
went on, frowning.“he kept watching me draw out all
the old magazines and newspapers I needed to get the
information for you, Jupe. I didn’t let him get a look
at what I was reading but――”
“Yes?” the First Investigator asked.
“You know our business card, on which you wrote
‘Terror Castle’ when you asked me to find out
anything I could about the place?”
“I suppose you put it down while you were looking
in the card catalogue, and couldn’t find it again,”
Jupited said.
Bob blinked.“How did you know?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t lost
it,” Jupiter said.“And the most natural place to lose
it would be in the library while you were examining
the card catalogue.”
“Well, that’s what happened,” Bob said.“I guess I
must have left it on the table. I can’t be sure Skinny
Norris took it, but when he went away he was looking
awfully pleased with himself.”
“We can’t concern ourselves with Skinny Norris
now,” Jupiter said.“We have an important case to
proceed upon. Tell us what you learned.”
“Sure.” Bob took a number of papers from the
envelope.
“To begin with,” he said,“Terror Castle is located
in a narrow little canyon up above Hollywood, called
Black Canyon. It was originally called Terrill’s Castle,
because it was built by a movie actor named Stephen
Terrill. He was a big star back in the silent-film days
before talking pictures were invented.
“He used to play in all kinds of scary pictures about
vampires and werewolves and stuff like that. He built
his house to look like the haunted castle set used in
one of his pictures, and filled it full of old suits of
armour and Egyptian mummy cases and other weird
things that came from the different pictures he’d acted
in.”
“Very promising,” Jupiter said.
“That depends on what you’re promising!” Pete
yipped.“What became of this Stephen Terrill?”
“I’m coming to that,” Bob said.“Stephen Terrill
was known all over the world as ‘The Man with a
Million Faces’. Then talking pictures were invented.
And people discovered he had a squeaky, high-pitched
voice and lisped.”
“Great!” Pete remarked.“A monster who lisped in
a squeaky voice. They must have laughed themselves
right off the seats.”
“That’s just what they did. And Stephen Terrill had
to stop making pictures. He sent away all his servants,
and then he sent away his best friend―his business
manager, a Mr. Jonathan Rex. And finally he stopped
answering the telephone or mail. He just shut himself
up in his castle and brooded. People gradually began
to forget about him.
“Then one day a wrecked car was discovered, about
twenty-five miles north of Hollywood. It had run off
the road and crashed down over the cliffs, almost into
the ocean.”
“Well, what did that have to do with Stephen
Terrill?” Pete interrupted.
“The police traced the licence number and learned
that the car belonged to Terrill,” Bob explained.
“They didn’t find his body, but that wasn’t surprising.
It would have washed away at high tide.”
“Gee!” Pete looked serious.“Do you think he
drove over the cliff on purpose?”
“They weren’t sure,” Bob answered.“But when the
police went out to Black Canyon to look round the
castle, the door was wide open. And there was
nobody about. While they were searching the place,
they found a note tacked to the library table. It said”
—Bob checked his notes―“‘Though the world will
never see me alive again, my spirit will never leave
this place. The castle will be for evermore accursed.’
And it was signed ‘Stephen Terrill’.”
“Wow!” Pete exclaimed.“The more I hear about
this place, the less I like it.”
“On the contrary,” Jupiter retorted,“it grows
steadily more promising. Continue, Bob.”
“Well, the police searched every nook and cranny
of the old castle, but they never found any more trace
of Terrill than the note. It turned out, though, that he
owed the bank a lot of money―they had a mortgage
on the place. They sent some men out to collect
Stephen Terrill’s possessions, but the men began to
grow more and more nervous-they couldn’t explain
why―and they refused to finish the job. They did say
they had heard and seen some very peculiar things,
but they couldn’t seem to describe them very clearly.
Finally the bank tried to sell the castle just at it was,
but they couldn’t find anybody who would even live in
it, much less buy it. Everybody who entered the place
found themselves getting extremely nervous after a
little while.
“One real estate agent went there to spend a whole
night just to prove it was all imagination. He ran out
at midnight, so frightened he ran all the way down the
canyon.”
Jupiter looked highly pleased. Pete gulped.
“Go on,” Jupiter said.“This is better than I hoped
for.”
“Several other people tried to spend the night,” Bob
told them.“A movie starlet did it for the publicity.
She ran out even before midnight, her teeth chattering
so hard she could hardly talk. All she could do was
whimper about a blue phantom and a fog of fear.”
“A blue phantom and a fog of fear?” Pete licked
his lips.“Nothing else, huh? No headless horsemen,
no ghosts with clanking chains, no――”
“If you would let Bob finish,” Jupiter interrupted,
“we would be able to proceed faster.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Pete muttered darkly,
“he is finished. I don’t care to hear any more.”
Jupiter ignored this.“Anything else, Bob?”
“Well,” Bob said,“just other incidents of the same
kind. In one case a family of five from the East moved
in―the bank offered them free rent for a year if they
could break the jinx. But they were never heard from
again. They just ... well ... disappeared the first
night.”
“Were there any manifestations?” Jupiter asked.
“Sighs, moans, groans, ghostly shapes, and the like?”
“Not at first,” Bob told him.“But later on there
were plenty―distant groans, occasionally a misty
figure walking up the stairs, and sometimes a sigh.
Once in a while a muffled scream seemed to come
from down underneath the castle. A lot of people
reported having heard weird music coming from the
ruined pipe organ in the music room. And several
actually saw a ghostly figure, just a sort of shimmery
blue blob, playing the organ. They named it the Blue
Phantom.”
“Surely these supernatural manifestations were
investigated?”
“A couple of professors did move in to check up,”
Bob said, referring to his notes.“They didn’t hear or
see much. They just felt very uneasy the whole time.
Worried. Upset. After they left, the bank decided it
would never be able to sell the place, so it just closed
off the road and let the castle sit there.
“For more than twenty years there’s no record that
anyone managed to spend a whole night there. One
article said that at first tramps tried to use it for a
headquarters, but they couldn’t stay there either. And
they spread such stories about it that no tramp would
go within a mile of the place.
“The last few years there aren’t any stories about
Terror Castle in the papers or magazines. As far as I
could learn,” Bob said,“Terror Castle is still just
sitting there, vacant and deserted. The bank never
could sell it, and no one ever goes near the place
because there isn’t any reason to.”
“I’ll say there isn’t,” Pete stated.“You couldn’t hire
me to go there.”
“Nevertheless,” Jupiter said,“we are going there―
tonight. You and I will pay a preliminary visit to
Terror Castle with camera and tape recorder, to see if
it is still haunted. What we learn will give us a basis
for a fuller investigation later. But I am most hopeful
that we will find the place is genuinely haunted. If it
is, it should be exactly right for Mr. Hitchcock’s next
picture.”
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