"I am sorry, my lad, it is out of the question."
"We don"t want any money, sir," Jupiter said. "But all famous detectives have someone write up their cases for people to read Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen, Hercule Poirot, all of them. I have deduced that that is how they become famous. In order to get potential customers to know about The Three Investigators, we will have our cases written up by the father of our other partner, Bob Andrews. He works for a newspaper."
"Well?" Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k looked at his watch.
"Well, Mr. Hitchc.o.c.k, I thought if you could just introduce our first case "
"Quite impossible. Please ask Miss Larson to come in on your way out."
"Yes, sir." Jupiter looked depressed as he and Pete turned towards the door. They had almost reached it when Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k spoke.
"One moment, lads."
"Yes, sir?" They turned. Mr. Hitchc.o.c.k was looking at them with a frown.
"It occurs to me that you have not been entirely frank. What exactly was it that Miss Larson thought I should see? Not your business card, I"m sure."
"Well, sir," Jupiter said reluctantly, "I can do various impersonations, and she thought you would want to see my impersonation of you as a boy."
"Impersonation of me as a boy?" The famous director"s voice grew deeper. His features clouded. "Just what do you mean?"
"This, sir." And once again Jupiter"s face seemed to change shape. His voice deepened and took on an English accent, and he became a different individual.
"It occurred to me, Mr. Hitchc.o.c.k," he said, in a voice entirely different from his own, "that some day you might wish to have someone portray you as a boy in a motion picture, and if you did "
Mr. Hitchc.o.c.k"s brow had wrinkled. His face was dark with displeasure.
"Monstrous!" he said. "Stop it at once!"
Jupiter resumed his own ident.i.ty. "You don"t think ifs a good likeness?" he asked.
"I mean, of you when you were a boy?"
"Certainly not. In any case, I was a fine, upstanding lad, not at all like that gross caricature you just attempted."
"Then I guess I"ll have to practice some more," Jupiter sighed. "My friends thought it was very good."
"I forbid it!" Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k thundered. "I absolutely forbid it! Give me your promise never again to do that particular impersonation and I ... confound it, I"ll introduce whatever you write about your case."
"Thank you, Mr. Hitchc.o.c.k!" Jupiter said. "Then you want us to investigate the haunted house situation for you?"
"Oh, yes, yes, I suppose so. I don"t promise to use it even if you find it, but investigate by all means. Now get out of here before I lose my last vestige of self-control. I take a very dim view of lads such as you. You are entirely too clever for your own good, young man."
Jupiter and Pete raced out towards the car, leaving Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k looking darkly thoughtful as they went.
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 t.i.tus 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 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." 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" licenses 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," Jupiter 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 n.o.body 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 hors.e.m.e.n, 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 is finished. I don"t care to hear any more." 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 m.u.f.fled 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. Hitchc.o.c.k"s next picture."
Chapter 4.
Into Terror Castle BOB HAD a good deal more information in his notes about Terror Castle, and Jupiter read it all carefully. Pete kept saying wild horses couldn"t drag him near the place, but when the time came to set out he was ready. Dressed in some old clothes, he was carrying the portable tape recorder he had got from a boy in school by trading his stamp collection for it.
Bob had a notebook and a couple of sharp pencils. Jupiter had his camera with the built-in flash. Both Pete and Bob had told their families they were going driving with Jupiter in the car he had won for thirty days. Their parents seemed to feel that as long as Jupiter was with them everything would be fine. And then, of course, they knew that Worthington, the chauffeur, went with the car.
The big Rolls-Royce with the huge old headlights came easing up to The Jones Salvage Yard as soon as it was dark, and they piled in. Jupiter had a map showing the location of Black Canyon. Worthington looked at it, said, "Very good, Master Jones,"
and started off.
As they were rolling along through the hills, round all the twists and turns, Jupiter gave final instructions.