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"I was also dih the ancient treesitself could not have remained free in any natural way The swao As it was the blackberries were eating at it, and the wicked, high-toned wisteria had a claiht of the house and to the back of it, coh two-story roof

"But so here Probably But then maybe not At the idea of squatters or trespassers I was incensed I regretted that I hadn't brought a handgun Should have And ht whenever I came back It all depended upon what I discovered in the house

"Meantily solid and massive, well behind the house The wisteria covered half of it The sun was strik

ing off the surface of the rest of it, positively sparkling on it and h the spindly trunks of the newborn trees

"It was to this structure that I went first, very reluctantly passing by the inviting front steps of the house but determined to discover what this massive shape was

"I could only explain it to myself as soular in shape and appeared to be ranite, except for panels set into it front and rear and each side, which were old

"I yanked off the nest of wisteria as best I could

"There were figures carved into this ed in a funeral procession, and the procession appeared continuous fro the structure to which there was no back or front or door

"Ithe finely carved profiles and folds of garures were s were not idealized as the Greeks would have made theroups At one point it occurred to n, but I wasn't sure of myself on that score

"Let ures were classical, and the procession was unending, and though so their hair, there was no corpse or bier

"After I'd surveyed it carefully I began to try to open the thing But it was no luck The gold panels -- and by noas convinced that they were gold -- seeranite pillars that ranite roof, peaked like those of so many New Orleans tombs, was very securely in place

"To old I chose a place on one of the panels very near the granite, and with the edge ofknife I scratched there and discovered that not only did no base old itself was soft Yes, it was gold It was lots and lots of gold

"I was totally baffled by this thing It was august, it was beautiful, it was quite literally monumental But to whom had this monument been made? Surely this wasn't Rebecca's tomb!

"Of course Mad Manfred had to be responsible for this thing It befitted his Byronic ie of the builder of Blackwood Manor, his fancy, his munificent dreaold tomb Yet how could it be Mad Manfred's mausoleum? How could his interment have been achieved?

"My brain was crazy with questions