They say that Lord Mantling's mansion is haunted -- at least, one room
of it is. Known as the Red Widow's Chamber, the now-sealed quarters once
housed the wife of a guillotine operator in the French Revolution, and,
since her passing, have been host to a century of unsolved horrors,
including the death of a man in 1802, the death of a child in 1895, and
a number of mysterious mortalities in the years in between.
Now, in 1935, eight men and women join at the manor for a sinister
experiment to determine the truth behind the haunting once and for all:
they each draw a card, and whoever pulls the Ace of Spades must spend a
night in that terrifying room. But the challenge turns fatal when the
man selected for the task is found poisoned the next morning when the
doors are opened. The locked room was guarded all night, so nobody could
have entered or escaped; what's more, the deadly toxin could only have
entered through a break in the skin, but no wounds were discovered on
the body.
Is this evidence, at last, of a nefarious spirit at work, or of a
diabolical and ingenious killer? Only Sir Henry Merrivale, called in to
take note of the night's proceedings, will be able to examine the clues
and deduce the truth.