The Masked Spankers Author:Jack Warren No light showed from the windows of the first and second floors of the stately Colonial-type house which stood virtually by itself on the corner of Macklin and Van Ness at the farthermost edge of Oakland. It looked like a ghost house, and the illusion was intensified by the dense fog which had come in at five this very evening from the Bay. It w... more »as on an April evening, yet the wind was still and bleak. The house seemed deserted, prey of the specters and the wraiths and phantoms of the night. But in the heavily fortified cellar, constructed underground so that absolutely no windows could be displayed to show light anywhere, there were blazing lights. In the middle of this immense cellar, a kind of auditorium had been constructed by the simple means of hanging purple drapes to shut off each side; the walls themselves acted as the other two boundaries. There was a platform against one wall, and in the middle was a cross-arm whipping post, which seemed out of medieval times with its heavy iron rings set into the wood at each end of the crosspiece.« less