Free Castle on the Edge by Douglas Strang

calm, get a hold of yourself. Listen, go back in and rejoin the party…like nothing’s happened. We don’t want the residents, or guests for that matter, to know anything about this. We don’t want to cause a panic.
    “When you can, very discretely tell Mrs. Dudley and her husband and each of the staff personnel the latest events. Doctor Lederer and I will go out to the watchman’s booth and look around. We’ll get to the bottom of all this. There are more of us than whoever is responsible for the sabotage taking place here…I hope.”
    “Or whatever it is. Be careful, Alex,” Mary said as she looked at me with those intoxicating green eyes, and then turned back to enter the happy party recreation room.
    Doctor Lederer and I immediately went out to the watchman’s booth at the main gate. Mary’s assessment was right about the watchman not being at his post. As we looked around though, everything appeared to be normal. Neither one of us felt we were being watched. The only noises we heard were the rustling of tree boughs caused by wind and a hooting owl. We should have heard the fountain too. It was off. Normally Mister Dudley turned it off when it was dark, but he had instructions to leave it on tonight because of the party. We didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary either. There was only the pleasant odor of pine trees that blended with the salt air, blowing east from the Pacific Ocean to the west. After a closer examination of the watchman’s booth, I noticed that the connecting cord to the telephone box under the counter was cut, rendering it completely useless. Then I followed the cord up to the telephone itself. I felt a damp crusty substance on the speaker part of the receiver. As I was about to take a close look at that moisture, the light in the booth suddenly went out. Fortunately I had my small medical flashlight with me so I shone it on the speaker; it had the appearance and smell of blood.
    I looked at Doctor Lederer and said, “You’re right, some kind of an evil scheme is being perpetrated here…and it’s happening with deliberate increment. It all started last night when Doctor Calloway wasn’t here when we arrived from San Francisco. Then there was his strange behavior during breakfast this morning, and this business about a new patient he said he’d brought in some time last night. Someone none of us have been able to find. Then Doctor Calloway himself disappeared some time after ten o’clock this morning, and is still missing. There was the strange thumping-dragging sound that you and Mary heard inside the ‘locked’ green room door on the third floor.
    “Harper the handy man brought the car back from San Francisco, and he vanished; the outside telephone line is down so we can’t call out. The connecting wires to each of the automobiles have been severed so we can’t operate them. The in-house line is not working now, so we can’t call any of the stations or rooms in or around the Castle, and now the watchman at the gate has gone missing; and on top of that, the light in this booth suddenly, and rather conveniently, goes out. From the looks and smell of this phone receiver, he may have been hit over the head with it.”
    Were it not for the limited luminance of my small medical flashlight, we would have been completely swallowed up in the stark blackness of the night. Suddenly Doctor Lederer put his index finger across his mouth and whispered, “Listen, Alex, I think someone is approaching.”
    I turned toward the direction of the Castle and also heard, but could not see, what seemed like someone stumbling through the surrounding shrubbery in the pitch-blackness, and clumsily moving toward us at the watchman’s booth. My flashlight wasn’t powerful enough to cast a beam more than a couple of feet. I also noticed there was no light emitting from the Castle. In fact, there was no light anywhere. “Who’s out there?” I said as I pointed my light toward the awkward-sounding