Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,43

he finally dozed off it was already dawn. Consequently, he overslept and came down to breakfast last. His state of excitement immediately drew the attention of the count and his fellow officers. “You won’t believe this,” he began and told them what had happened to him.

He was right. Nobody believed him.

But his insistence that he was telling the truth was so convincing that the count finally agreed, more to humor him than because he believed him, to follow the young officer to the library to look for the alleged trap door.

“But,” he added, “I must tell you that on top of that carpet are some heavy bookshelves filled with books which have not been moved or touched in over a hundred years. It is quite impossible for any one man to flip back that carpet.”

They went to the library, and just as the count had said, the carpet could not be moved. But Grandfather Bux-hoeveden decided to follow through anyway and called in some of his men. Together, ten men were able to move the shelves and turn the carpet back. Underneath the carpet was a dust layer an inch thick, but it did not stop the intrepid young officer from looking for the ring of the trap door. After a long search for it, he finally located it. A hush fell over the group when he pulled the trap door open. There was the secret passage and the iron gate. And there, next to it, was a rusty iron key. The key fit the lock. The gate, which had not moved for centuries perhaps, slowly and painfully swung open, and the little group continued its exploration of the musty passages. With the officer leading, the men went through the corridors and came out in the tower room, just as the officer had done during the night.

But what did it mean? Everyone knew there were secret passages—lots of old castles had them as a hedge in times of war.

The matter gradually faded from memory, and life at Lode went on. The iron key, however, was preserved and remained in the Buxhoeveden family until some years ago, when it was stolen from Count Alexander’s Paris apartment.

Ten years went by, until, after a small fire in the castle, Count Buxhoeveden decided to combine the necessary repairs with the useful installation of central heating, something old castles always need. The contractor doing the job brought in twenty men who worked hard to restore and improve the appointments at Lode. Then one day, the entire crew vanished—like ghosts. Count Buxhoeveden reported this to the police, who were already besieged by the wives and families of the men who had disappeared without leaving a trace.

Newspapers of the period had a field day with the case of the vanishing workmen, but the publicity did not help to bring them back, and the puzzle remained.

Then came the revolution and the Buxhoevedens lost their ancestral home, Count Alexander and the present Count Anatol, my brother-in-law, went to live in Switzerland. The year was 1923. One day the two men were walking down a street in Lausanne when a stranger approached them, calling Count Alexander by name.

“I am the brother of the major domo of your castle,” the man explained. “I was a plumber on that job of restoring it after the fire.”

So much time had passed and so many political events had changed the map of Europe that the man was ready at last to lift the veil of secrecy from the case of the vanishing workmen.

This is the story he told: when the men were digging trenches for the central heating system, they accidentally came across an iron kettle of the kind used in the Middle Ages to pour boiling oil or water on the enemies besieging a castle. Yet this pot was not full of water, but rather of gold. They had stumbled onto the long-missing Buxhoeveden treasure, a hoard reputed to have existed for centuries, which never had been found. Now, with this stroke of good fortune, the workmen became larcenous. They opted for distributing the find among themselves, even though it meant leaving everything behind—their families, their homes, their work—and striking out fresh somewhere else. But the treasure was large enough to make this a pleasure rather than a problem, and they never missed their wives, it would seem, finding ample replacements in the gentler climes of western Europe, where most of them went to live under assumed names.

At last the apparition that had