“Plotting with whom?” I asked, astonished by the outburst.

“With the Hilliards, of course!”

“I haven’t been plotting with anyone!” I insisted, angry at this treatment in my own house.

“We’ve been watching you!” admitted Strange before Matthews could stop him.   “And we know they’ve visited you at least twice!”

“Yes, to introduce themselves as my neighbours,” I lied.   “Apparently they were both good friends of my Uncle Lindsay.”

“Then you aren’t planning to sell the Gables to them?” asked Matthews.

“Of course not!    In fact they haven’t even made an offer for it.”

“Then perhaps you have had time to consider our offer?”

“I’ve considered it,” I admitted, “and have decided not to sell the Gables.”

“But you must sell …!” insisted Strange, stopping as he received a withering glance from Matthews.

Obviously deciding that they could jeopardise their plans by being too aggressive, Matthews now apologised for their earlier rudeness.   “The Hilliards and we have long been vying for the opportunity to purchase the Gables.   Which is why we were upset about them calling on you.   At the time of his death, Lindsay Stafford had as good as promised to sell us the mansion, but of course the Hilliards are very unscrupulous people and would not feel honour bound to tell you that,” he explained.

“Well, as I said before, they have not even mentioned the subject to me,” I assured them truthfully.   Then, not wanting to stay talking to the pair any longer, I pointed out that I had been on the way to make my lunch when they had called.

To my surprise they left without further argument.

After supper that evening, I returned to the diaries, and had been reading again for hours, when I almost dropped the diary from terror as the static hiss started slithering along the air like some bizarre electric sea snake, swimming through the atmosphere, less than a metre away from where I lay on the bed.

I tried to ignore the static snake, however, almost immediately the snake vanished as a loud thump resounded upon the corrugated iron roof; followed again by the sound of some large animal scuttling around the rooftop.

“Not again!” I said getting up to go downstairs to investigate, taking with me a powerful flashlight to beam up toward the roof.

Shining the torch toward the roof, I finally saw the creature.   It was like an obscene caricature of a gargoyle: Jet black, basically human in shape, but more than five metres in height, with large membraned bat-wings extending from each of its six pairs of arms.   Beneath and around the arms writhed dozens of long snaking tentacles, attached to the ends of which were lethal, crab-like pincers which click-clicked continuously like bored castanet players.

As the torch light shone upon it, the creature turned round quickly and glared toward me with its snake-like slitted eyes.   Hissing more like a cat than a snake, the “gargoyle” extended itself to its full height, waved four arms above its head menacingly, flapping its heavy membranous wings wildly.

It suddenly let out a hellish shriek like nothing I had ever heard before, then leapt off the roof straight toward me!

Screaming from terror I turned and raced across the mount toward my car, only hoping that I still had the keys to my Mitsubishi in my cardigan pocket.

As I climbed into the car I looked back toward the Gables for an instant and saw the monster hovering in the air, flapping its wings furiously yet unable to fly more than a few metres away from the house.   As I located my car keys and placed them in the ignition I saw a small rectangle of blinding yellow light open in the sky above the mansion.   In seconds the rectangle expanded out above the monster and it began to shriek hellishly, flapping its great wings ever more wildly in a determined effort to break free from the rectangle of light, which I realised was the portal that my uncle’s diaries mentioned.

For just a moment, as the portal opened wider and wider, I caught a glimpse of an evil, nameless world on the other side.   A world whose monstrous structures defied all known laws of physics and seemed designed to send any Earth architect into fits of screaming insanity.   And just the hint of something vast, green and shaped vaguely like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Then slowly the “gargoyle” was sucked up into the portal of light, still shrieking its protest and struggling vainly.   Until it was pulled back into its own world.

As I started the car and headed down the mountain (with great difficulty), I remembered the words of Sebastian Hilliard a few days earlier, “Heaven help the world if anything does get through the portal between Earth and far off Zygony!”

Despite my panic I forced myself to drive into Glen Hartwell, where despite the late hour I managed to get a room at Bateman’s Hotel in Lawson Street.

Early the next morning I somehow summoned up the courage to return to Mount Peterson, after stopping at the nearest service station to buy two twenty-gallon jerry cans of gasoline.

I spent half an hour dousing the Gables inside and out, expecting at any moment to be stopped by Matthews and Strange.   As it was, there was no sign of them, until I had finished and was about to toss a flaming rag onto the mansion.

“No!” shrieked Matthews as they started racing across the mount toward me.   “You don’t know what you’re doing!”   But too late.   I had already tossed the rag onto the three storey building.

Doused in gasoline, the 160 year old house went up like a bomb.   It burnt furiously for fifteen minutes before the sky above the house began to crash with lightning and thunder.   The static hiss which I had seen many times inside the house now appeared outside, above the mansion.   But not a single snake, rather dozens, then hundreds of static snakes whiplashing above the mansion as thunder and lightning continued to rage.   After twenty minutes or so, there came a deafening roar, high above the Gables, like a great atomic blast in the sky throwing the three of us to the ground, clutching our ears in agony.

When I dared look up again I saw the rectangular portal of yellow light had opened wide above the mansion again, revealing the visages of myriads of indescribable tentacled, winged monstrosities, ranging in size from the gargoyle I had already seen, to great leviathans, many times larger than any whale.

Seeing the great, gaping portal, Matthews and Strange began to laugh from near hysterical joy, obviously thinking my plans to seal shut the portal had backfired.   But their laughter ended abruptly when there came another great explosion and the portal slammed tightly shut.

Instantly the roaring thunder, lightning and whiplashing static snakes above the mansion all vanished.   Leaving the mountain strangely silent ….

For only a few seconds, before the mansion began to creak and groan alarmingly.

“Noooooooo!” shrieked Morton Matthews, realising before I did what was about to happen.

“What …?” I started to ask, my words cut off as the three-storey building started to slip down the side of the mountain.   At first slowly, then quickly picking up speed, until it was racing down the slope like a roaring express train.

The three of us stood together watching in amazement as the mansion raced down the mount, only stopping as it reached the bottom ….

Where it crashed into the level ground with a sound like dynamite, collapsing into a great mound of firewood, unable to survive atop the mount away from its foundations, after gravity returned to normal, when the portal to the far off planet Zygony had slammed shut forever.

THE END