A Forced Entrance
Horace was right. There was no ring, no notch, nothing on the drain
cover except a few crisscross ridges and the name of the manufacturer
in an oblong box. It was what Judy used to call a skunk box when she
was a little girl in Roulsville before the flood. If you stepped on one
of them you were a skunk. But now the skunk box was no longer funny.
Someone, evidently, had stepped on the drain cover.
“Did you, Horace?” Judy asked.
“Did I what?”
“Step on that skunk box?”
He knew what she meant. “I guess I did,” he admitted. “I didn’t want
anyone else to trip over it the way you did. I guess I stepped on it
too hard. It would take a crowbar to pry it up.”
He tried working around the edge of it with his jackknife. The drain
cover was slippery now that it was wet. Judy helped, prying and pushing
as the water splashed down from the fountain above, getting deeper and
deeper all the time. It was up to her ankles before Horace remembered
having seen some lumber stacked up against the wall somewhere above the
tunnel.
“If we could work a plank under the edge of that drain cover to give us
leverage—” he began, but Judy had another idea.
“Why not the door? If we rammed the door to that locked room with a
beam we could get in there and turn off the water before it gets any
deeper. Then we could try opening the drain.”
“Good idea!” agreed Horace.
First they called to the prisoner. “The drain is covered! The tunnel
will be flooded if you don’t turn off the fountain.”
There was no answer.
Suddenly they both realized that they didn’t know for sure that the man
beyond the locked door had turned on the fountain. It had been a guess
and they could have guessed wrong. Why didn’t the man answer? Already
the water was seeping in under the door. Judy banged on it, calling and
shouting.
“Are you Dick Hartwell? Please, whoever you are, answer! We want to get
out of here and bring help. Do you know how to turn off the fountain?”
There was a little pause. Then came the answer.
“Outside ... the tower!”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Judy. “Then we are trapped unless— Is there some
way to get outside from in there?” she called.
“No ... no way.” The man was evidently growing weaker. “If you really
... want to ... help me,” he began and then broke off with a moan.
“We do want to help. Oh, Horace! We have to,” cried Judy. “All three of
us will be drowned if we don’t get out of here!”
Horace’s reply was reassuring. “Not if we succeed in opening that
drain.”
Another moan from behind the door spurred them to action. Horace
brought a beam to push against one side of the drain cover while Judy
pried up the other edge with a plank. At last it yielded to their
tugging, and the water rushed and gurgled down the open drain.
The sound cheered Judy less than she had thought it would. “We’re no
longer in immediate danger of being drowned,” she told Horace, “but you
can still hear that running water in the pipes overhead. What are we
supposed to do? Just wait here until they turn it off?”
“I don’t like waiting any better than you do,” her brother replied,
“but I don’t know what else we can do. It gives me the chills just to
listen to that water. I don’t trust those rusty pipes.”
“You mean they might leak?”
“Some of them are already leaking,” declared Horace. “But as long as
the drain is in good working order I guess we don’t have to worry too
much. The next thing to do is get dry. My feet are wet, and I’m cold
all over.”
“You are shivering. Come on back to that furnace,” Judy suggested,
“before you catch your death of cold.”
She knew, from experience, that Horace caught cold more easily than she
did. But her feet were wet, too. For a little while they stood close to
the heat of the furnace, drying themselves and wondering how long it
would be before anyone turned off the fountain.
“Maybe they leave it on all day and turn it off at night,” Horace
commented.
“No, they turn it on and off whenever they feel like it,” Judy said.
“When we were here yesterday it was off in the daytime and then went on
just when it began to get dark. There’s no rhyme or reason to it
unless—”
“Unless what?” asked Horace.
Judy had been afraid to say what she was thinking.
“Unless someone really _is_ trying to drown us. If the fountain is
controlled from the tower, that dark man who warned me to keep away
from here might be the one who turned it on. If he saw us he knows we
suspect something.”
“It’s news, too,” lamented Horace, “but now it’s too late for today’s
paper. It’ll be in tomorrow, though. You’ll see!”
“By tomorrow we’ll know a lot more than we do today,” Judy encouraged
him. “We’ll know who that prisoner is, and why he’s down here. Horace,
do you think he really is Dick Hartwell? Do you suppose he still wants
us to go away?”
“Ask him,” Horace suggested. “He should be willing to tell us who he
is.”
Again Judy rapped on the locked door only to hear nothing but the echo
of her tapping and that unearthly rushing sound overhead.
“There is a leak,” Horace told her, squinting upwards. “I knew there
must be. The water would be up to our necks by now if we hadn’t
succeeded in opening that drain.”
“Cheerful thought!” commented Judy.
She rapped on the door again—gently at first and then a little louder.
“Please answer us,” she and Horace both begged.
A long, gasping moan finally came from behind the locked door.
“Are you hurt?” asked Judy. “Are you Dick Hartwell, Roger Banning’s
friend?”
“He’s—no friend. He did it,” was the confused reply.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Horace whispered. “He is willing to
talk.”
Judy was not so sure. “Did what?” she asked. “Did Roger Banning hurt
you?”
“The time ... what time is it?”
“He must be delirious,” Horace whispered. “He doesn’t understand what
you said.”
“What time is it?” the voice from behind the door was asking again.
Horace told him the exact time, adding that his watch was accurate. “I
checked it with my car radio this morning.”
“What day?”
“It’s Tuesday, the third of December.”
This simple statement was greeted with a moan of despair. “Eleven
o’clock ... Tuesday ... the very day ... the very hour!”
“Is something timed?” asked Judy, thinking that the fountain might be
turned off and on by some sort of a timing device.
This sudden hope was soon dashed. The noise overhead continued the same
as before except that now there was added to it a steady dripping sound
from the leaky pipes. First it was in one place and then in another.
Judy tried not to listen to it, but she couldn’t help the feeling of
panic that was mounting inside her. Horace was outwardly calm.
“What difference does it make what time it is?” Horace called.
“Too late....” was the only reply.
“Too late for what?” asked Judy. “Surely we can still do something.”
“Report,” came the voice, fainter now. “Parole officer ... eleven
today. Now they’ll send me ... back....”
At last Judy understood.
“You _are_ Dick Hartwell, aren’t you?” she asked. “You wanted to report
to your parole officer, but someone shut you down here so you couldn’t.
Is that it?”
The answer was barely more than a sigh.
“Who did it?” asked Horace. “Was it the work of a gang of jewel
thieves? I suppose they were afraid that you would report their
activities, too?”
“No,” the prisoner said. “They wanted....”
“Yes?” Horace prompted him.
Judy heard a gasp as if the man had tried to say something but hadn’t
breath enough left to make himself heard. He moaned, but that was all.
“It’s no use, Horace,” she told her brother. “He’s too weak to talk.”
“What do you say, sis?” he asked. “Shall I bring that beam? The least
we can do is smash our way in there and make the poor guy comfortable.”
“You could try it,” agreed Judy. “But you’ll need a bigger beam than
the one we used to open the drain.”
“This will do.”
The beam Horace found was so big he could hardly lift it. But together
he and Judy managed to bring it. Holding the big beam between them,
they both shouted, “Keep back, Dick Hartwell! We’re coming through the
door!”
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